Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (84 page)

Legend had it that where her hairpin dropped, the river turned crystal clear, and became known as the Crystal River.  My fellow passenger told me this was the tributary we were passing.  With a grin, he declared:

"Ah, bad omen! You might end up living in a foreign land and marrying a barbarian!" 

I smiled faintly at the traditional Chinese obsession about other races being 'barbarians," and wondered whether this lady of antiquity might not actually have been better off marrying the 'barbarian' king.  She would at least be in daily contact with the grassland, the horses, and nature.  With the Chinese emperor, she was living in a luxurious prison, without even a proper tree, which might enable the concubines to climb a wall and escape.  I thought how we were like the frogs at the bottom of the well in the Chinese legend, who claimed that the sky was only as big as the round opening at the top of their well.  I felt an intense and urgent desire to see the world.

At the time I had never spoken with a foreigner, even though I was twenty-three, and had been an English language student for nearly two years.  The only foreigners I had ever even set eyes on had been in Peking in 1972.

A foreigner, one of the few 'friends of China," had come to my university once.  It was a hot summer day and I was having a nap when a fellow student burst into our room and woke us all by shrieking: "A foreigner is here!  Let's go and look at the foreigner!"  Some of the others went, but I decided to stay and continue my snooze.  I found the whole idea of gazing, zombie like rather ridiculous.  Anyway, what was the point of staring if we were forbidden to open our mouths to him, even though he was a 'friend of China'?

I had never even heard a foreigner speaking, except on one single Linguaphone record.  When I started learning the language, I had borrowed the record and a phonograph, and listened to it at home in Meteorite Street.  Some neighbors gathered in the courtyard, and said with their eyes wide open and their heads shaking, "What funny sounds!"

They asked me to play the record over and over again.

Speaking to a foreigner was the dream of every student, and my opportunity came at last.  When I got back from my trip down the Yangtze, I learned that my year was being sent in October to a port in the south called Zhanjiang to practice our English with foreign sailors.  I was thrilled.

Zhanjiang was about 75 miles from Chengdu, a journey of two days and two nights by rail.  It was the southernmost large port in China, and quite near the Vietnamese border.

It felt like a foreign country, with turn-of-the-century colonial-style buildings, pastiche Romanesque arches, rose windows, and large verandas with colorful parasols.  The local people spoke Cantonese, which was almost a foreign language.  The air smelled of the unfamiliar sea, exotic tropical vegetation, and an altogether bigger world.

But my excitement at being there was constantly doused by frustration. We were accompanied by a political supervisor and three lecturers, who decided that, although we were staying only a mile from the sea, we were not to be allowed anywhere near it.  The harbor itself was closed to outsiders, for fear of 'sabotage' or defection.  We were told that a student from Guangzhou had managed to stow away once in a cargo steamer, not realizing that the hold would be sealed for weeks, by which time he had perished.  We had to restrict our movements to a clearly defined area of a few blocks around our residence.

Regulations like these were part of our daily life, but they never failed to infuriate me.  One day I was seized by an absolute compulsion to get out.  I faked illness and got permission to go to a hospital in the middle of the city.  I wandered the streets desperately trying to spot the sea, without success.  The local people were unhelpful: they did not like non-Cantonese speakers, and refused to understand me.  We stayed in the port for three weeks, and only once were we allowed, as a special treat, to go to an island to see the ocean.

As the point of being there was to talk to the sailors, we were organized into small groups to take turns working in the two places they were allowed to frequent: the Friendship Store, which sold goods for hard currency, and the Sailors' Club, which had a bar, a restaurant, a billiards room, and a ping-pong room.

There were strict rules about how we could talk to the sailors.  We were not allowed to speak to them alone, except for brief exchanges over the counter of the Friendship Store.  If we were asked our names and addresses, under no circumstances were we to give our real ones. We all prepared a false name and a nonexistent address.  After every conversation, we had to write a detailed report of what had been said which was standard practice for anyone who had contact with foreigners. We were warned over and over again about the importance of observing 'discipline in foreign contacts' (she waifi-lu).  Otherwise, we were told, not only would we get into serious trouble, other students would be banned from coming.

Actually, our opportunities for practising English were few and far between.  The ships did not come every day, and not all sailors came on shore.  Most of the sailors were not native English speakers: there were Greeks, Japanese, Yugoslavs, Africans, and many Filipinos, most of whom spoke only a little English, although there was also a Scottish captain and his wife, as well as some Scandinavians whose English was excellent.

While we waited in the club for our precious sailors, I often sat on the veranda at the back, reading and gazing at the groves of coconut and palm trees, silhouetted against a sapphire-blue sky.  The moment the sailors sauntered in, we would leap up and virtually grab them, while trying to appear as dignified as possible, so eager were we to engage them in conversation.  I often saw a pn7~led look in their eyes when we declined their offers of a drink.  We were forbidden to accept drinks from them.  In fact, we were not allowed to drink at all: the fancy foreign bottles and cans

The Death of,~y leather 647 on display were exclusively for the foreigners.  We just sat there, four or five infimidatingly serious-looking young men and women.  I had no idea how odd it must have seemed to the sailors and how far from their expectations of port life.

When the first black sailors arrived, our teachers gently warned the women students to watch out: "They are less developed and haven't learned to control their instincts, so they are given to displaying their feelings whenever they like: touching, embracing, even kissing." To a roomful of shocked and disgusted faces, our teachers told us that one woman in the last group had burst out screaming in the middle of a conversation when a Gambian sailor had tried to hug her.  She thought she was going to be raped (in the middle of a crowd, a Chinese crowd!), and was so scared that she could not bring herself to talk to another foreigner for the rest of her stay.

The male students, particularly the student officials, assumed responsibility for safeguarding us women.  Whenever a black sailor started talking to one of us, they would eye each other and hurry to our rescue by taking over the conversation and positioning themselves between us and the sailors.  Their precautions may not have been noticed by the black sailors, especially as the students would immediately start talking about 'the friendship between China and the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America."

"China is a developing country," they would intone, reciting from our textbook, 'and will stand forever by the side of the oppressed and exploited masses in the third world in their struggle against the American imperialists and the Soviet revisionists."  The blacks would look baffled but touched.  Sometimes they embraced the Chinese men, who returned comradely hugs.

Much was being made by the regime about China being one of the developing countries, part of the third world, according to Mao's 'glorious theory."  But Mao made it sound as if this was not the acknowledgment of a fact, but that China was magnanimously lowering itself to their level.  The way he said it left no doubt that we had joined the ranks of the third world in order to lead it and protect it, and the world regarded our rightful place to be somewhat grander.

I was extremely irritated by this self-styled superiority.

What had we got to be superior about?  Our population?

Our size?  In Zhanjiang, I saw that the third world sailors, with their flashy watches, cameras, and drinks none of which we had ever seen before were immeasurably better off, and incomparably freer, than all but a very few Chinese.

I was terribly curious about foreigners, and was eager to discover what they were really like.  How similar to the Chinese were they, and how different?  But I had to try to conceal my inquisitiveness which, apart from being politically dangerous, would be regarded as losing face. Under Mao, as in the days of the Middle Kingdom, the Chinese placed great importance on holding themselves with 'dignity' in front of foreigners, by which was meant appearing aloof, or inscrutable.  A common form this took was to show no interest in the outside world, and many of my fellow students never asked any questions.

Perhaps partly due to my uncontrollable curiosity, and partly due to my better English, the sailors all seemed keen to talk to me in spite of the fact that I took care to speak as little as possible so that my fellow students had more chance to practice.  Some sailors would even refuse to talk to the other students.  I was also very popular with the director of the Sailors' Club, an enormous, burly man called Long. This aroused the ire of Ming and some of the minders.  Our political meetings now included an examination of how we were observing 'the disciplines in foreign contact."  It was stated that I had violated these because my eyes looked 'too interested," I 'smiled too often," and when I did so I opened my mouth 'too wide."  I was also criticized for using hand gestures:

we women students were supposed to keep our hands under the table and sit motionless.

Much of Chinese society still expected its women to hold themselves in a sedate manner, lower their eyelids in response to men's stares, and restrict their smile to a faint curve of the lips which did not expose their teeth.  They were not meant to use hand gestures at all.  If they contravened any of these canons of behavior they would be considered 'flirtatious."  Under Mao, flirting with foreigners was an unspeakable crime.

I was furious at the innuendo against me.  It had been my Communist parents who had given me a liberal upbringing.

They had regarded the restrictions on women as precisely the sort of thing a Communist revolution should put an end to.  But now oppression of women joined hands with political repression, and served resentment and petty jealousy.

One day, a Pakistani ship arrived.  The Pakistani military attache came down from Peking.  Long ordered us all to spring-clean the club from top to bottom, and laid on a banquet, for which he asked me to be his interpreter, which made some of the other students extremely envious. A few days later the Pakistanis gave a farewell dinner on their ship, and I was invited.  The military attache had been to Sichuan, and they had prepared a special Sichuan dish for me.  Long was delighted by the invitation, as was I. But despite a personal appeal from the captain and even a threat from Long to bar future students, my teachers said that no one was allowed on board a foreign ship.

"Who would take the responsibility if someone sailed away on the ship?" they asked.  I was told to say I was busy that evening.

As far as I knew, I was turning down the only chance I would ever have of a trip out to sea, a foreign meal, a proper conversation in English, and an experience of the outside world.

Even so, I could not silence the whispers.  Ming asked pointedly, "Why do foreigners like her so much?"  as though there was something suspicious in that.  The report filed on me at the end of the trip said my behavior was 'politically dubious."

In this lovely port, with its sunshine, sea breezes, and coconut trees, every occasion that should have been joyous was turned into misery.  I had a good friend in the group who tried to cheer me up by putting my distress into perspective.  Of course, what I encountered was no more than minor unpleasantness compared with what victims of jealousy suffered in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution.  But the thought that this was what my life at its best would be like depressed me even more.

This friend was the son of a colleague of my father's.

The other students from cities were also friendly to me.  It was easy to distinguish them from the students of peasant backgrounds, who provided most of the student officials.

The city students were much more secure and confident when confronted with the novel world of the port and they therefore did not feel the same anxiety and the urge to be aggressive toward me.  Zhanjiang was a severe culture shock to the former peasants, and their feelings of inferiority were at the core of their compulsion to make life a misery for others.

After three weeks, I was both sorry and relieved to say goodbye to Zhanjiang.  On the way back to Chengdu, some friends and I went to the legendary Guilin, where the mountains and waters looked as though they had sprung from a classical Chinese painting.  There were foreign tourists there, and we saw one couple with a baby in the man's arms. We smiled at each other, and said "Good morning' and "Goodbye."  As soon as they disappeared, a plainclothes policeman stopped us and questioned us.

I returned to Chengdu in December, to find the city seething with emotion against Mme Mao and three men from Shanghai, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen, who had banded together to hold the fort of the Cultural Revolution.  They had become so close that Mao had warned them against forming a "Gang of Four' in July 1974, although we did not know this at the time.