Book Smuggling
from COMING HOME CRAZY by Bill Holm
One of my highest functions as a Barbarian teacher in China was book smuggling. On a rest and recreation trip to Hong Kong, I took along a carefully disguised sheet of Chinese characters. I had no idea what they meant. They might have been a laundry list, or Deng Xiaoping’s address, or some old baseball scores. Their presence in my billfold gave it weight, and a sense of intrigue, as if I were smuggling letters from Jews out of Germany in the thirties.
I went to a Chinese bookstore in Hong Kong, smiled sweetly, and gave my list to a young girl on duty. Two minutes later, she handed me a red, hardbound book and said, “Forty Hong Kong dollars, please.” I gave her my American Express card, and within moments it was over. So easy! In my plastic carrying bag, those regime-toppling pages burned and vibrated between scarlet covers.
How to get it past customs? Easier than expected…walk past. The customs man smiled benignly, looked over my bottles of duty-free Irish whiskey and said some equivalent of “Have a nice day in China…”
A few days later, I passed the book on to its new owner. Resisting the impulse to draw drapes, lock doors and windows, start water running, play loud rock and roll, and converse only in Icelandic, or perhaps classical Greek, I asked simply, “What is this dangerous book I have risked my life for? An exposé of corruption, some Chinese Solzhenitzen?”
“It is a novel.”
“A new dissident novel by one of the Democracy Wall writers?”
“No, an old novel, Jin Ping Mei, from a couple of dynasties ago. I don’t know quite how to translate the title. Only a few high cadres and professors—big potatoes--can get this book. It is about a woman, a courtesan…”
“Good God, is it The Golden Lotus?”
“Yes, that would be right. Have you heard of it?”
“Heard of it? I read it when I was fourteen years old in the Grove Press translation I bought for $2.95 at Berge’s Book Land in Marshall, Minnesota. There are three copies on my shelves in Minnesota, one in Norwegian. Why have I just smuggled one of the three or four most famous Chinese novels into China? This is a little like smuggling Huckleberry Finn into Missouri, or Oliver Twist into London.”
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