Chairman Mao, Thriller…Killer
Reflects on Change in China 40-Years Hence
In 1968, I was 14 and thought Mao Zedong was cool. The Great Helmsman — avuncular, visionary, larger than life.
My parents were ideological New York lefties, the kind that eventually drift off to a cushier life in the suburbs. “Never anti-communists,” they used to say. “Just ex-communists.” They would never, however, get rid of their books and magazines.
At 14 years old, politics was not foremost on my mind. I remember leafing through my parents’ coffee-table books with a singularly developmental, rather than ideological, purpose. I was going searching for a painting I had seen on a trip with my parents to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York years earlier: Paul Gauguin’s “Two Tahitian Women” (1899). One woman is completely topless, carrying a bowl of red mango blossoms as if that’s what she always does, and the other with one breast exposed — both women serene and comfortable in their own skin. Clueless to any larger sense of how such a painting might objectify the “exotic” and “erotic” or, for that matter, any sense of nuance whatsoever. I can imagine that my mother must have grabbed my elbow and nudged me to move along.
Since I didn’t have the nerve to ask anyone in school for, say, an old Playboy and the local library did not let us check out National Geographics, modern art would have to do. Thumbing past Mondrian blotches and Picasso’s portraits of women with misplaced noses and eyes, I came up empty.
The bookshelves did not hold much promise either. Just a bunch of lefty novels and plays: Ring Lardner, Dalton Trumbo, Lillian Hellman, Howard Fast, Clifford Odets, and Albert Maltz. All the steamy stuff I was looking for may very well have been on those shelves — D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and John O’Hara — but would involve the imagination and attention to a storyline.
It dawned on me that the treasures I was looking for would not be in books, but perhaps behind them. On the outside chance I might stumble onto some bona fide pornography, I extracted a few pearly World Book volumes like a masochistic dentist, convinced I had struck paydirt, and — voilà! — I spied a bundle of rolled-up, outsized magazines. After all, leftists have libidos, too. Allow me to interject that Charles Fourier, the utopian socialist, claimed an intellectually flimsy connection between sex and progressive politics (social activism as turn-on?), but that’s not my point.
I untied the kite-string and struck out again. Just oversized copies of socialist magazines, hardly material for the tingling sensation I was seeking.
Nevertheless, they caught my eye. Why hide them? The answer to that question seemed equally enticing as smut.
It is impossible to remember which issue diverted my attention from the carnal to the political, but thanks to eBay and archive.org, I have picked an issue of China Reconstructs (July 1968), Vol. XVII. №7¹ by way of illustration. You’ll have to trust me on this one.
This particular issue even had a foldout, though the wrong kind, across two horizontal pages: a painting titled, “Advancing from Victory to Victory” (painter unknown, of course, because only masses mattered in China back then).
I see view this image as typical of a school of art I’ll call the Socialist Surrealism. The Chairman in his characteristic Zhongshan suit, red ribbons on each collar, stands erect…above the clouds. A dark winter coat is draped over his right arm. In his right hand, he holds his wool cap bearing an impeccably-stitched red star. He dangles a cigarette in his left hand. Apparently, China’s heavenly messenger was a smoker. Below those ethereal clouds, one can make out a green pagoda peeking out from rolling hills and vast farmland stretching to the horizon in various shades of red. You read that right. Even the sky takes on a pinkish color. In China’s version of heaven, one might surmise, the vegetables are red, too. Mao is not looking down, but across, this vista — surely contemplating yet another victory.
He looked confident, commanding, supra-corporeal.
China Reconstructs magazine was a propaganda goldmine. The articles left no room for doubt: “Chairman Mao Tse-Tung Celebrates May Day with the Capital’s Revolutionary Masses.” “Study Classes Prove Their Worth.” China would show the world they had inventions, big machines, big plans.
I loved the inventions. Each machine was oddly paired with a romantic quotation from Chairman Mao or excerpt from a party communiqué. In a section titled Machine Industry Progress, the “High-Precision Universal Cylindrical Grinder” was supposedly inspired by this call and response: “On what basis should our policy rest? It should rest on our own strength and that means regeneration through one’s efforts.” Surely! Maybe it’s just me, but after reading this, a high-precision universal cylindrical grinder is not the first image that comes to mind. Or the “Automatic Oil-fired Boiler” and its caption: “It is people, not things, that are decisive.” Frankly, I would think an oil-fired boiler epitomizes decisiveness, but who am I to argue?
Indulge me, dear reader, one last pairing (my personal favorite). The “New Electric Sheep-Shearer” sales pitch is a solemn, steely pep talk: “The Chinese people have high aspirations, they have ability, and they will certainly catch up with and surpass the advanced world in the not too distant future.” Perhaps the sheep-shearer ran into some wooly snags with this reminder that the Chinese people should not get overzealous: “It is sheer fantasy to imagine that the cause of socialism is all plain sailing and easy success…” Did you catch that? Sheer fantasy gets me every time. Could this be some kind of authorial wink and subterfuge that slipped past the hypervigilant, literally-minded, censorship police? I hope they didn’t catch it post production and send the writer to a re-education camp.
China was a perfect cocktail of adolescent angst, moral outrage, unimpeachable clarity, branding, and belonging. It sucked me right in.
Thousands and thousands of miles away from the San Fernando Valley, a modern workers’ revolution was unfolding. Underdogs rising up against oppressors and everyone on the same page. All that progress and breathtaking resilience in the face of war, famine, and disease. Ruddy workers and cheery children yearning and earning in the same direction, facing and warmed by the same eastern (reddish) sun.
China had the Yangtze River — that majestic, ancient scroll unfurling 6,418 kilometers from glaciers high in the Tibetan Plateau to the East China Sea in Shanghai, past spectacular gorges, feeding vast farmland producing a surfeit of wheat and rice along the way. What did I see outside my window? The Los Angeles river, once described in LA Magazine as a “post-apocalyptic concrete-lined ditch,”² chosen as a perfect location for All Quiet on the Western Front because it looked like a “no-man’s land.” And what could be better for a drag-racing scene from Grease than a dried-up river bed bounded by tract homes like mine, a few orange groves, and parking lots? Where I lived, nothing at all peaked above the clouds. In fact, we couldn’t tell the difference between clouds and smog.
Neither did we see the masses toiling with a sense that they were making a contribution to the state. In my state, California, Filipino farm workers were leading a resistance movement against modern-day serfdom, later adopted by Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers (UFW).. Earlier that year, Chavez had fasted for 25 days to show the world that brought iceberg lettuce, California table grapes, and Gallo wine to the local consumer: punishing child labor, unsanitary working conditions, substandard health care, below-subsistence pay, and toxic pesticides raining on laborers and sprayed on both Mexican and Filipino farm workers in the fields and on the picket line. To support the strikers, my parents and friends boycotted iceberg lettuce or table grapes. Decades later, long after the strike had been settled, I couldn’t get myself to buy them.
The contrast could not be more stark. At a smoky left-wing bookstore where employees and guest speakers looked as if they slept in their clothes, I bought a Mao button striated with sun rays and a pocket-sized, red-vinyl book of “Quotations from Chairman Mao.” If I had a lot of questions, these folks had quick answers. Mao had transformed the most populous country on earth from despair to happiness. I wanted to go from despair to happiness, too. There was a crowd of Los Angelenos that thought the same way.
I gobbled up pamphlets about Mao’s rise to power. How he formed separate columns to confuse his enemies and then appealed to youth to enlist in “The Long March” to save the country, and they did, traversing thousands of li over treacherous terrain, crossing river after river, enduring bombs and starvation, and fending off random attacks by both Nationalists and Japanese invaders from the north. “Revolution,” Mao Zedong wrote, “is not a dinner party.” Damn straight, I said to myself, unaware then that 7 of 10 soldiers were reported to have died in that struggle. I read Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China (an American!), a hagiographic ode to Chairman Mao’s march to reclaim the country. It sounds like a movie trailer voice over:
“Adventure, exploration, discovery, human courage and cowardice, ecstasy and triumph, suffering, sacrifice, and loyalty, and then through it all, like a flame, an undimmed ardor, and undying hope and amazing revolutionary optimism of those thousands of youths who would not admit defeat by man or nature or God or death — all this and more seemed embodied in the history of an odyssey unequaled in modern times.”³
Undying hope. Revolutionary optimism. An unequaled odyssey. Damn straight. I was in.
I read about how Mao introduced reforms regarding women’s rights and urged women to join the workforce on an equal basis with their male counterparts. It was Mao Zedong who coined the phrase: “Women hold up half the sky.” The Marriage Law outlawed prostitution and concubinage. Women could initiate a divorce. In an attempt to address tuberculosis, cholera, polio, malaria, hookworm, and smallpox, Mao initiated mass vaccination campaigns and sanitation projects. Barefoot doctors fanned out across the countryside, administering to the people and promoting proper hygiene techniques. Life-expectancy rose. The opium trade and addictions came to a screeching halt.
This was progress. The guy thought of everything.
From victory to victory, right?
In 1956, a few years after Josef Stalin died, Chairman Mao launched the “Hundred Flowers Campaign,” a policy designed to “let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” in order to stimulate creativity and constructive critique.
Open-minded, too!
New ideas (read: correct ideas) can only flourish, Mao maintained, when old ideas are exposed. This was to be a nation of whistleblowers. Look within (“self-criticism”); look around at friends, family, anyone acting, well, non-revolutionary (“criticism”). Examine your bourgeois impulses and report other “spiritually polluted” people that exhibited them. Purify the ranks, the playbook said. Tell us what we are doing wrong. Express your concerns. Hang your posters. Students and intellectuals were encouraged to criticize previous campaigns, counter-revolutionary actions, even party members who expected preferential treatment. Let the people smoke them out! So clever! So transparent and accountable! Did I read anywhere that this was a tactic of identifying enemies? No I did not. Would I believe it if I saw it in print? No, I would not.
Frustrated by the Soviet Union’s hubris, industrialist chest-thumping, elbowing out any nation in their way to assume the mantle of communist leadership, meddling in China’s affairs, cozying up to western nations, and disregarding China’s unique role as an emerging socialist power, Mao is convinced that Russia was not only ideologically flabby, but imperialist, even a military threat to China itself. While he would wait to 1961 to call the USSR a bunch of “revisionist traitors,” Mao seems to have already made up his mind. China may not have Russia’s resources, but they had an inexhaustible supply of cheap labor and a mobilization strategy. China would not just catch up to Russia. China would be a shining red star — USSR 2.0, their way…and better.
Everything I read affirmed my belief in Mao. “The Great Leap Forward” (1958–1962) was designed to accelerate China’s status from an agriculturally-based economy to one that could also be an industrial powerhouse. Nothing I chose to read would give me reason to think there was anything egregiously wrong about what unfolded. I was a history student unaware that I was trapped in an insidious red bubble.
“The Great Leap Forward” was an unmitigated economic and social development disaster. Irrigation projects lacked critical infrastructure and engineering, resulting in drastic water conservation programs. Failed crop experiments based upon a “new biology” developed in the Soviet Union rejected Mendelian genetics and natural selection in favor of exaggerated claims about seed growth, density, and yield. Its chief proponent, Trofim Lysenko, impressed Communist Party officials by denouncing biologists as “fly-lovers and people haters” who held conspiratorial theories about those who might question his motives. Backyard furnaces cobbled together from scrap metal and available wood produced meager outputs, even in the face of more efficient, coal-burning methods. More villagers were enlisted to work in industry, leaving fields untended, even during the harvest. Crops died of thirst.
What you don’t reap sows destruction. Distracted by its great leap into a wannabe industrial unknown, locusts swarmed. Meanwhile, people continued to succumb to tuberculosis, cholera, polio, malaria, hookworm, and smallpox. Vaccinations couldn’t possibly keep up. Leaders popularized the call to kill the carriers of disease: mosquitoes, rodents, flies, and, for good measure, the sparrows that feasted on grain and rice. One propaganda poster shows a knife from nowhere dissecting a mosquito that has landed on a fly, atop a sparrow ready to claw open a rat, belly up. In other posters, children wield fly swatters. Villagers clutch poison spray canisters and small pitchforks or gather around a tree aiming rifles at sparrows. The net result: a carnival for locusts, compounded by more famine and drought. The “Great Leap Forward” has been more accurately called “The Great Famine.” Recent declassified documents reveal Mao’s callous indifference to torture, execution, children buried alive, desperation, cannibalism. Some reports estimate casualties at 45 million.
In 1966, at 72, a photograph of Mao circulated widely — the Chairman, hale and hearty, swimming in the Yangtze River, ready to launch his new campaign, “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” Enter Chairman Mao’s little red book of quotations — compulsory reading. He purges rivals in the party or any conspiratorial agents who might threaten his place at the top and his campaign to rid the country of “capitalist influences and bourgeois thinking.”
The Cultural Revolution channels adolescent rebelliousness into rabid zealotry. Youth chapters of the Red Guards serve as paramilitary units charged with upholding “class struggle” and waging a crusade against counter revolutionaries or anything associated with the “Four Olds:” old ideas, old customs, old culture, and old habits. Cultural and religious sites are desecrated and decimated. Schools close. Teachers, intellectuals, and wearers of western clothes are beaten. Up to sixteen million youth are sent to “re-education” camps for hard labor and indoctrination. The Cultural Revolution, about which I was star-struck, was an occult attraction to an ideology responsible for the death of 1.5 million Chinese people until Mao Zedong’s own death in 1976.
I didn’t know about all that then. I didn’t want to know. I was a sucker for the double punch of a cult of personality and what Edward Said has called “the epidemic of Orientalism.”⁴
I have held onto my Mao tchotchkes, even though they haunt me.
But I digress.
By the 1980s, surely China had seen the light. Mao was gone. His horrors were exposed. Intellectuals were no longer subjects of ideological derision, but commendable “mental workers,” instrumental for China’s development. Educational institutions dismantled during the Cultural Revolution were reinstated and rebuilt. Perpetrators of the Cultural Revolution had been arrested. Political marketing consultants must have convinced Deng Xiaoping to position Mao as 70% good and 30% bad.
“The Four Modernizations” focused on agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defense. Originally conceived during the “Great Leap Forward,” the “Four Modernizations” had even been incorporated into the party constitution. The argument went something like this: we invented paper, gunpowder, the printing press, and the compass, so we’ve always been about modernization. Mao was about modernization, too…it just went astray 30% of the time.
But in the 1980s, they would surely get the balance right. Pictures and words would match. China would be counted in the family of nations. I had smartened up a bit. Could this new propaganda campaign mask more execrable horrors?
Why not experience China first hand and see for myself? The Ministry of Education had recently embarked upon a campaign to import English speakers. My wife and I signed up. My wife’s assignment was to teach a course for undergraduates entitled: English Speaking and Listening. My assignment: American and British Literature and Essays for graduate students of English, a required course in the teaching certificate program.
Our official job title could not be more flattering: “Foreign Expert.” To this day, this undeserved badge of honor remains on my résumé. We were experts simply because we were foreigners and fluent in our native tongue. To our students and the university administration, however, we were a walking, talking encyclopedia.
That perception was put to the test within weeks of our arrival when we were asked to “give a lecture.” I asked for a few more specifics. Our interpreter looked pained and answered curtly: “About American history and culture.”
I found my way to a library/storage room smelling of damp linen and cabbage and came across an American history textbook from the 1960s. There was no check-out system, so I jotted down the Table of Contents on index cards to get the chronology right. I hadn’t taken an American history course since eleventh grade. This book hadn’t reached the Vietnam war. I made a mental note to use the Vietnamese name: “The American war in Vietnam.” I would be friend, not foe.
We did not get clear answers about a focus time-frame, for whom, or the size of the audience. We had to be prepared for any eventuality. We were ushered into a cavernous auditorium filled to capacity. I imagined the invitation. “Come see the Americans talk.” Bats careened from rafter to rafter as if taking turns to test our powers of concentration. The audience did not notice. The settled in. Professors put out their cigarettes by wetting fingers with phlegm and punching them or grinding them with their standard-issue black shoes.
After introductions and polite applause, the Dean puffed and tapped the microphone, reached into his pocket to pull out his own index card to read the question aloud: “Could you describe American history?” Sure, I said to myself, mumbling under my breath: “How much time do you have?” I patted my jacket pocket to make sure the cards were there. My wife smiled, holding out her palm to indicate that it was my show.
I had been employing some mnemonic techniques to rely less on the cards. I started with Mount Rushmore just to impress them. Huge carving of notables into a mountain in South Dakota: We just love Rushmore: We (Washington) just (Jefferson) love (Lincoln) Rushmore (Roosevelt).
I peered out into the audience to check for understanding, as teachers naturally tend to do. So far so good. Lots of practice mumbling. What did it matter, in the end, what I said? paraded out more greatest hits, each one accompanied by a one-line description: The Louisiana Purchase: The United States buys a huge parcel of land from France, doubling our size. Some heads down — scribbling, scribbling, scribbling — others sounding out “Louisiana Purchase.”
I was way behind. Besides, I was parroting the same way I was taught). The room began to heat up. I started to race. Gold was discovered in California. One liner. The Civil War. One liner. The Emancipation Proclamation. One liner, and so forth, rattling off chapter headings: The 13th Amendment. The Klan. Jim Crow. Industrialization. Transportation: the Transcontinental Railroad, the Wright Brothers, the Model T. Communication: the telegraph, the telephone. I needed a teleprompter.
No human being can absorb this absurd parade of unfamiliar and decontextualized historical references about a country they’ll unlikely see. But I was in too deep, so on I went: World War I. The 19th Amendment and the right of women to vote. The Great Depression. World War II — one liners all. I hadn’t even caught up with the textbook and at least 20 minutes had passed. If this were the Academy Awards, the orchestra would have drowned out anything I might have been saying or long ago cut to a commercial.
I sidestepped the Korean War (or as the North Koreans call it, the “Fatherland Liberation War;” and South Koreans call “Six-Two-Five” or yook yee oh (육이오) representing June 25th — the day North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel dividing the country. Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas declaring segregation unconstitutional. Rosa Parks refusing to move from her place on the bus in 1955. Four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College attempting to order coffee at the “whites only” Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., 1960. Next, assassinations: John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King. I skipped the Cuban Missile crisis and caught up to “The American War in Vietnam.”
I was certain that the history part of this lecture was long gone, having drifted up toward those bats’ nests. This was history pronunciation. I slowed down, articulating each sound, exaggerating mouth movements, showing my teeth. Neeeeeeil Armstrong. Roe vs. Wade. Apple. Three Mile Island. I got as far as “ET. Extra Terrestrial.” My one liner: “It’s a movie about a nice alien and his human friend, Elliot.” I wanted to shout: “We are nice aliens, too!” This time, I gestured to the Dean to intervene.
It was easy to reduce history to events, not patterns or causes. America? 70% good? 30% bad? Hard to say.
“Thank you for your question,” I said, and then blurted out: “Congratulations to China and Hu Haifeng upon winning the gold medal in the 50-meter pistol event at the Olympics!” I walked off the stage to thunderous applause, clearly not for my reductive recitation, but for simply acknowledging China’s re-entry into the Olympics after a 32-year hiatus.
As if on cue, the bats whizzed about, acrobatic and eerie. I sat down and held out my hand, gesturing to my wife to take her turn.
Next question: “Why in America are poor people fat and rich people are thin?” The bats returned to their bat homes.
My wife responded succinctly and clearly. The poor lack access to fresh food, she said. Fatty, processed food is less expensive; the demands of work leave little time and money for exercise. The wealthy idolize thinness and have the time to work at it. The media glorifies a new American image of slimness as perfection while pushing a lower standard to the poor.
Imagine the tables turned and the Chinese were asked to describe their history. They had close to 3,000 years on us. The Song Dynasty would be a perfect Jeopardy theme. CITIES. For $200: From 960 AD to 1127 AD, the most important capital of the Song Dynasty (“What is Kaifeng?”). INVENTIONS. For $400: This Bi Sheng (990–1051) innovation used clay to revolutionize printing (“What is movable type?” For $600: Substance powering a fire-spurting lance (“What is gunpowder?”). For $800: Profitable china that revolutionized trade (“What is porcelain?”).
Paper money and banknotes. The teeth and gears for chain drives like those that power bicycles and distribute mechanical power from one place to another. The division of labor. Rice and sorghum variations and advanced irrigation technologies. Expanded canals and waterways. The compass. Building codes. Columbo owes a debt of gratitude to the Song Dynasty for having introduced forensic science. Though somewhat of a stretch, the Princeton Review is a modern version of the Chinese test-prep industry developed to prepare the elite for civil service exams. A thousand years ago, Kaifeng was one of the largest trading cities in the world.
We had several questions of our own, but were afraid to ask them. We had always been puzzled about the serendipity of the Ministry’s decision to place us, both Jews, in a city once the home to a small Jewish community, possibly of Persian origin. Jews had purportedly followed the Silk Road, offered the emperor uniquely dyed cotton fabrics (an early incarnation of the schmatte business), and were permitted to settle in Kaifeng and take on a choice of seven official family names. A small Jewish community built a kosher butchering facility, a synagogue, and a study hall. “Mullahs” managed the synagogue. Jews intermarried, wore pigtails, bound their daughters’ feet, circumcised their male children, observed the Sabbath, and carried on the tradition of not eating pork or shrimp — long known as staples of Chinese food. Did they expect us to live up to these traditions? We drummed up the courage to ask about the Jews of Kaifeng and were given an opportunity to meet a community of elders. Today, a tiny number of Chinese Jews remain in Kaifeng, several tracing their lineage to those same names. Did they know we were Jewish? We still don’t know.
The Dean was intent on impressing upon us that China was open now and culturally inclusive. One evening, he showed up at our apartment unannounced without knocking, opened the door (apparently he had a key), and ushered inside a group of Uyghur students from Ürümqi, a city in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region straddling Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. They were far from home (Ürümqi is also known as the world’s major inland city), but here they were, streaming in, hair expertly braided under feather caps, their wrists and dresses bejeweled, standing in formation. Three young men huddled near the door. The Dean broke an awkward silence by informing us that the car with instruments could not spin itself out of a snowbank. They would have to dance without music. Or try ours.
I chose Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” for the beat, over the Talking Heads “Speaking in Tongues” (too culturally obtuse), “Purple Rain” (not ready to explain), or “Born in the USA” (too patriotic). They listened stoically to the first verse (“It’s close to midnight, and something’s evil lurking from the dark. Under the moonlight…”). Their backs were rigid. Then, on cue, they began to nod their heads from side to side in sync with the music as if they had practiced it. A lead dancer twirled about, joined by the others who linked arms, threading themselves through a barn-dance figure-eight pattern — far east style.
That this is thriller, thriller night
’Cause I can thrill you more than any ghost would ever dare try
Thriller, thriller night
So let me hold you tight and share a
Killer, diller, chiller, thriller here tonight
I hoped they would not ask us to define a chiller, thriller night or about dead people dancing. I imagined a New York Times journalist taking a snapshot to be captioned: “Ürümqi Dancers Entertain Foreign Experts, 1984.” I was convinced. Change was afoot in China. They would never have allowed this music even a few years ago.
During our afternoon strolls in Kaifeng, the socialist billboards about the “Four Modernizations” and proper behavior had begun to peel and curl at the corners. Once determined soldiers and cheery workers painted with confident primary colors now looked afflicted with a kind of psoriatic pentimento — a shoulder missing here, a blue sky turned gray there, a rash where tractor wheels should be. In a poster titled: “I’m enthusiastic and fair…I hope to see you every day,” a restaurant worker held a plate of chicken in one hand, but her other hand was missing the thumb and two other fingers. In another poster titled: “I’m enthusiastic and fair, I hope to see you every day,” a woman balances one end of a scale with a string attached to a rod and a mesh bag of persimmons hanging from a hook. In the middle, another string connects to a weight. She balances the opposite side of the rod with her wrist, giving the whole transaction a feeling of suspended animation. Was she tipping the scales?
Change is a relative concept and we were not about to define it for them. Officials opened and read our incoming and outgoing mail and borrowed our cassette tapes “to practice English,” returning most in a manila folder, many without their cases. We caught on quickly (thank them, say nothing). Interact with “assigned” friends only (don’t get too chummy). Our letters? (no parody, no sarcasm). On field trips carefully orchestrated to show us what they wanted us to see — happy villagers, plump children, bountiful crops, we knew just what to do (smile, express gratitude, and amazement). Speak judiciously (there is no such thing as a secret here). It was change on their terms.
At 5:00 am each morning, loudspeakers squawked a scratched copy of “The East is Red” from a 45 rpm. I wondered what song was on the “B” side. The song was composed by a farmer about the glory of seeing a sunrise. Party officials later appropriated it as a kind of muezzin’s call extolling the glory and potential of a communist China. The song was followed by a volley of piercing commands: “Comrades, clear the snow from steps to avoid injury!” On cue, out came snow shovels. “Comrades, it is now time for exercise!” Outside our window, students stretched and marched in place to the soundtrack of “Chairman Mao’s Four-Minute Physical Fitness Plan,” then swarmed “en masse” around the track. Everything was a collective activity: exercising, reading, writing, studying, and — as I soon came to understand — urinating.
There was an order to the evening, too. Electricity to classrooms was shut off each evening at 10:00 pm. Not missing a beat, student monitors would distribute candles, and when those melted down to their waxy nubs, students swept the floor and huddled under streetlights, marching in place to keep warm. Well after midnight, they shuffled off to their dormitories for a few hours’ sleep before the loudspeakers woke them the following morning.
After having observed all this, along with constant reminders to rest, we were ready to teach.
The interpreter presented me with a textbook comprised of ripped-off and poorly duplicated stories, essays, or parts of manuals — basically, anything left behind by tourists in Beijing or Shanghai copied and scaled for the masses. Curation was another word for collecting what they could get. Perhaps we were hired to help students transition between rote, traditional learning and more interactive pedagogy. Maybe there was room for exceptions and the colloquial. Most people around the world pick up English from American or British radio and television. Our job would be to nudge it along just a bit.
There was no need to do the painstaking work of creating a lesson plan; the fun activity to get everyone ready and assess prior knowledge; setting learning objectives; creating activities that build upon prior learning; designing formative assessments; connecting lessons to future learning. Nah. All instructions were spelled out in the teacher’s guide. Just speak, correct students, and explain. This is not about creativity.
In a sobering orientation meeting, a Language Department official laid out appropriate “classroom protocols,” immediately deflating our “let-us-at-‘em-we-can-work-with-anything” spirit. Inspect the chalkboard to see if has been sponged clean and alert the classroom monitor should this chore not be completed before class. When we enter and step onto a raised platform, that same class monitor shall command the students to rise. The students are to sit down only when we grasp the lectern. Should we ask a question and single out a student to answer it, we are to expect that the student shall rise, respond, and be seated again only when told to do so. Students are to keep their questions to a minimum. We were the delivery mechanism for the teacher’s guide. Simply explain and sound out every word, parse and diagram every sentence, then ask individuals or the class in unison to do the same. Rinse and repeat. If there was time, perhaps a little dialogue might be in order. Any questions?
After several such meetings, my wife and I sagged back against our couch and brainstormed our vapid compromises. We would introduce innovation slowly, only after we toed the party line. Behave. Americans are too enamored by choice — the cereal aisle of the supermarket, the cineplex. paint color samples. Here, choice might be dangerous. We reminded ourselves that this was their culture and not ours. My wife admonished me to tone down my natural impulse to play. A lesson plan is not always what you want, but what these authorities think they need. Your job is not to entertain, but to teach. Forget games, field-trips, fun.
Yellowed and worn, my teacher’s guide was proof enough. Diagrams and arrows looked like a coach’s whiteboard. Pages dense with underlines for subjects, squiggly lines for action or linking verbs, circles for predicates, lines separating objects, boxes for subject complements, marginalia.
Chapter One
Chapter 1, “How to Paint a Room,” was evidence of the slog that lay ahead. I entered my classroom, glanced at the chalkboard — sponge marks drying, giving it a woody appearance — greeted the class, grasped the lectern, waited for students to settle onto benches, and glanced at the shade of pale institutional green I saw everywhere, somewhere between celery and pistachio. Yes — a paint job was in order, and yes — it would be that color, no other choice possible.
The explication of the title alone took at least fifteen minutes: interrogative adverb + transitive verb + noun. Party officials looked both pleased and bored. I sped things up. After an hour, I made it through two paragraphs. During breaks, two male students, one on each elbow, would inform me: “Laoshr (Old Teacher) Fred,” even though I was only thirty at the time, or “Tóngzhì (Comrade) Fred,” a wry implication that I was some kind of political fellow traveler, “it is time for us to urinate.” Peeing by the clock was a new one for me, but off we went like line dancers who’ve lost their way back from the hoedown, walking three across to the pissing trough. Urination, I learned, was a group exercise.
By the end of the third day, I was already behind schedule and did not see how to quicken the pace, except to keep recitations to a minimum. The students knew I had to follow the rules, but I sensed that they had hoped for something more…American. Could I experiment here and, in so doing, pick up the pace? After all, wasn’t the goal to reach their objectives? Yet again, I was losing my mind. Can’t I spice this up just a little? I urged students to work through the exercises faster because I had hinted about something special I had planned for them. The party officials did not seem to notice.
The students complied and I, in turn, took a leap of faith, tossing aside rules and classroom protocols, deciding instead to employ a technique about which I had no real experience other than my high-school Spanish II course in which the teacher used the Total Physical Response (TPR) system for teaching words, sounds, and images.
TPR connects language acquisition with gestures, props, and other physical movements so that commands are connected to an action. Movement and experience leave traces that associate objects or concepts with meaning. It is not a particularly new concept. The concept of “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand” is largely attributed to Xunzi, a Confucian who emphasized the transformative power of education to shape the self. In 1693, John Locke wrote: “Learning to read could be a more enjoyable experience if there were “dice and playthings with the letters on them, to teach children the alphabet by playing.” John Dewey is known best by his concept of “learning by doing.” Parents use TPR instinctively. They toss a ball to a child and say “ball,” expecting the child to mimic the action and toss the ball back.
TPR is a flexible and deliberate practice of synthesizing commands, actions, and associations until they become a habit, like muscle memory. This just might work! Students were accustomed to responding on cue, so we were half the way there. Every morning, the student monitors had been modeling the method right in front of me. “Stand up,” and students stood up. “Sit down” and they sat. I would give TPR a try. “How to Paint a Room” would be a group project. We would use whole sentences as prompts to move things along.
We would all be painters. I arrived at class before the students and labeled everything in the classroom I could connect with vocabulary in the chapter. When students entered, the classroom monitor saw a note tacked to the chalkboard, reading “chalkboard.” I told him not to remove it. At first, the students looked to the class monitor for instructions. His poker face was enough for me. I grasped the lectern. They sat down. Whatever happens, I am responsible.
“Dress prepared to work.” I stepped into imaginary overalls and fingered our way into invisible gloves, then gestured to them to do the same. So far, so good. “Protect the floor from paint with newspapers, tarps, or plastic sheeting, then tape the perimeter.” Plastic sheeting and perimeter needed work, and I realized that I could alternate between TPR and the method the Dean expected and no one would know I was plotting some kind of pedagogical insurgency. If they hired us to teach them how to speak English, surely they can might pick up some pointers about how Westerners teach.
I reached into my briefcase for a newspaper and spread out the front page of a two-week old copy of The China Daily on the floor. China’s thirty-two medals at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Economic reforms. Presidential visits to Beijing. The Politburo paint police in the back were craning their necks, watching the students ready themselves to spruce up the place. Down on their knees, students distributed more pages to cover the floor. ”Use painter’s tape to mask off areas that should not be painted, such as window and door frames.” Students responded by thumbing along the blackboard frame and windows.
Two students unfolded an imaginary ladder without waiting for a command, but at least they were reading ahead. “Unfold a ladder, making certain that the hinges are straight.” I added: “Like a capital letter A.”
I eyed the four communist party officials posted to the back of my class. They looked sullen. I lost my bearings for a moment. It is not easy to teach when you want to bolt. They might pounce at any moment, each one firmly grasping an elbow in a more aggressive way than my comrade urinators, sequester me in a little room, and — under the glare of a dangling light bulb — bark at me to “speak and teach English as instructed and nobody will get hurt.” I would apologize and explain that TPR has pedagogical value under the right circumstances, and that this was a one-time effort to catch up. In retrospect, they probably wanted to learn English themselves.
No rear-guard rush to the podium, so I continued. “Carefully open each paint can with the tool provided.” A small trash doubled as a paint can. One student rocked a pencil back and forth between the ring and lid but proclaimed it was stuck. Another came to her aid by mimicking the use of pliers to pry it open. Giggles. This improvisation could spiral out of control. I had to remind students to stick with the script.
“Stir the paint with a wooden stick until the binder and pigments are even and smooth and the color matches the dap on the lid of the can.” A lot of vocabulary there, so things slowed down.
“Fill your paint tray carefully.” Students looked around for a paint tray prop. One opened a book and placed it, pages down, on the floor. Chills went up my spine. I return to my nightmare tribunal for my unlawful act of permitting students to engage in bibliographic defilement, surely an egregious act of capitalist pedagogy. I picked up the book and placed it gingerly on a desk before a party official had a chance to rise, indignant, and order that I be taken from the room. A student picked up the cues to use a dustpan — one hand palm up, the other making a sweeping motion.
I continued: “Dip your rollers in the paint and use short back and forth motions to introduce paint to the roller.” I heard one student whisper to another: “Hello paint. My name is Zhang. I’d like to introduce you to my friend, the roller.”
I ignored the comment, fully aware that the act of not reinforcing certain behaviors in order to extinguish them never worked on me. I thought I had given the class a look that should be read as “cute, but cool it.” Clearly facial expressions are not universal. I had figuratively painted myself in a corner, but there was no turning back. Curiosity breeds curiosity.
“Roll back and forth so that the roller is saturated with paint, but not dripping.” Awkward sentence, I thought. What is doing the rolling? The students, however, understood. Pleased that we had caught up, I had more arrows in my quiver. We could keep going this way or pull back. I chose to keep going. “Use a brush to paint slightly up to half the width of the tape.” Students followed the instructions, squeezing out imaginary washcloths soaking in imaginary dank water, delicately wiping away imaginary excess paint perilously close to surfaces that should not be painted. The room was alive. A teacher walked by and peered inside, then scurried away.
An overzealous student moved a bench to reach the spot where the wall met the ceiling. The classroom monitor rose abruptly and motioned him to put it back. I sprang into action with a teacher’s best trick — distraction. “Reach as high as you can before using the ladder!” The students looked at me and then at their books to find the sentence I had just said and understood the sudden improvisation. I continued: “That spot is beyond my reach,” pointing my own imaginary roller to a spot on the wall. “I need help!” I said. Giggles. In the back, a party official nudged his comrade and reached toward the ceiling.
Body language might not be universal either. A party official reaching toward the ceiling might be about painting or hanging me from a fixture up there. This was getting out of hand and I decided to pull it back. “Everyone, sit down!” It was terse, peremptory, disciplinary. Satisfied that my experiment in Simon Says: The Painter’s Edition can speed things up, I would need to use it judiciously the following day when this insufferable chapter would be coming to a close: about checking our work by testing different surfaces to see if the paint had dried; closing paint cans with a rubber mallet; lifting the blue painter’s tape slowly to keep straight the line between painted and unpainted surfaces, and cleaning up.
TPR was fun, memorable, kinesthetic, but I had reservations. Had I been marginalizing the shy ones? What happens when we come to more abstract concepts? Can I keep getting away with this?
I flipped through the next chapter and noticed and noticed that the pages were slanted and the last word of each justified line was cut off like a particularly perverse and maddening form of Mad Libs, leaving it up to me to fill in the blanks. There were also no teacher notations, arrows, or private notes. Prepared for the slog ahead, I got out my dictionary and sharpened a pencil. I didn’t bother reading it through until the night before. Big mistake.
Chapter Two
Chapter Two was a selection from Jacqueline Susann’s debut blockbuster, “Valley of the Dolls.” No more TPR for damn sure. Far too many zippers unzipped, blouses unbuttoned, and bras released to act this out. To illustrate:
“A musical is like a sexual desert — unless you’re a fag. Dickie is having a ball with all those chorus boys — it’s like a smorgasbord. The leading man is straight — handsome, too — but he has a wife who looks like his mother, and she sits around and watches him every second. The guy who plays opposite Terry King is bald without his rug.”⁵
Sexual desert. Fag. Having a ball. Chorus boys. Smorgasbord. Rug. Put yourself in my shoes and teach this to English language learners in a country that installs thought cops in row 36. I could not exactly distribute speaking or acting parts. I explained something about how the chapter contained several American idioms with words that have many different meanings, and that “we don’t have time to explain each one.” The students shot each other puzzled looks. I was stern, cold, efficient. The back-row tribunal shifted in their seats. I provided vague definitions of “having a ball,” “smorgasbord,” and “rug.” I provided no context to the story. I skipped whole sentences. No one pointed out my omissions.
For four days, the air in the room felt unusually still, deflated, as if we were passengers on a bus with a flat tire. Determined to bury this chapter, it was back to drill and kill. I was not about to sacrifice my career or Sino-American relations by introducing bourgeois decadence to a culture that has demanded prudish subservience for millennia. Change suddenly screeched to a halt. With these odds, Chapter Three could be about playing cricket, Macbeth, cake-mixes, or swinging. It was a roll of the dice and I am not a gambling man.
The students, however, knew more than they let on. As they gathered their books and filed out on the day we concluded the chapter, a student waited until the party officials had left and were well out of earshot. With an unsettling confidence, she made certain I made eye contact and launched her question: “We heard about Michael Jackson in a soda commercial. Why did his hair catch fire?” Some students leaned in to hear my answer. I could only say, “It did?”
A cluster of students caught up as I picked up my pace and peppered me with more questions: “How do you get the virus that causes AIDS?” “What is AIDS?” “What is crack cocaine?” “How can there be famine in an African country less populated than China?” “Why did a musician write a song named ‘Psycho-Killer’?” “Why did a company [Apple] name itself after a fruit?” “Why are homosexuals called fags?” I thanked them for their questions and stepped inside our apartment. I hadn’t mentioned any of this in my talk about American history. Where was this coming from?
If I were to collude with them and provide answers, I would give them tacit permission to ask more questions. A snitch among them might report an overly inquisitive classmate or me. How long could I hold out? Would they attribute extra importance to those questions I avoided entirely? What other questions lay beneath these?
Chairman Mao had been gone only six years prior. I once asked about Chairman Mao’s legacy and got a somewhat steely, clinical answer. “Mao? A few years ago, he was 100% good. Now he’s 70% good, 30% bad.” Imagine if historical figures were seen in percentages, like Vegas odds.
Change was afoot, but what might it mean? Could they reconcile Jacqueline Susann and socialism? As far as we knew, we were an integral part of China’s momentous change enterprise. And they were only getting started. They wanted to show us what change really looked like.
On our first visit to Shanghai, the streets were thick with bicyclists trilling bells punctuated by buses, trucks, and official cars honking to part crowds. Traffic-controllers were sequestered in lighthouses, waving flags outside their tiny windows. Construction workers staggered under the weight of two baskets fastened to a bamboo pole — each basket filled with gravel and dirt to unload in front of a small army of men shoveling and raking. Precarious-looking scaffolding. Laundry still hung between trees, between stores, in alleys, across walkways, yet above them posters of plump, smiling children clutching their contented mothers gazing at a washing machine and dryer. Lines of preschoolers held each other’s hands, each with a slit in the bottom for timed bathroom breaks in the gutter. Little boys sported Red Army kerchiefs. Men in undershirts played cards, smoking.
At the Peace Hotel on Shanghai’s famous Bund, a wide commercial street following the curve of the Huangpu River, we found a quiet table to sip a drink with ice we could trust and inquire about its famous jazz band.
It has always been viewed as an emerging, cosmopolitan city. Today it is an unabashed glass and steel tribute to Ayn Rand. At the Lake of Illusions’ nighttime light-show extravaganza housed at the Happy Valley Amusement Park, industrial lasers and projectors beam an electric storm of dizzying geometric shapes, twisting and spinning to a score that sounded like a mashup of something Wagnerian and Star Wars. Scenes shift to constellations of dancers and gymnasts — holographic and expressionless. Fountains reflect colors careening from building to building. A multimedia tower rises above all of it, a giant phallus anchored cinematically by two eyeballs, an eerie nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s billboard advertising the oculist T.J. Eckleburg. Phones everywhere.
In 1984, meat hung from windows and chickens from handlebars. In China’s major cities and in malls today, bicycles hang in windows and chickens are raised, butchered, and wrapped up out of view. Back then, a nap was sacrosanct. Shopkeepers shuttered their metal gates and curled up in the bank or lay head back on a lawn chair. Today, the loss of revenue from such a custom would be unthinkable. China is open for business.
Orville Schell’s To Get Rich is Glorious: China in the 1980s was published a few months before we arrived. Schell explores a society that views its history in millennia, rather than decades, yet manages to build whole industries and mass transit systems in months. Where dung collectors once carried just enough to fuel a home, China was developing an insatiable appetite for oil to power the devices and appliances of well over a billion people. In 1984, an entire neighborhood might share a television. That was progress. Today, China cranks out iPads like candy from Pez dispensers, also made in China.
On a visit to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, we visited Tianfu Square and peered up at one of the largest Mao Zedong statues in the country. Atop a pedestal centered on an giant plinth, a 98-foot sculpture of the Chairman depicts him in his characteristic pose , waving to the masses with one arm, the other behind his back.
Today, the Chairman is still there, but no longer the center of attention. I wanted to pull a pedestrian aside and ask if Chairman Mao’s legacy was still measured in percentages. Chairman who? No one seems to notice. The masses are too busy shopping, studying their phones, or taking an escalator to metro lines fanning them out elsewhere. Some mght even be annoyed at the amount of space it occupies. This is prime real estate better used for retail or parking. Mao looks forlorn, as if he had been trying, without success, to hail a cab. In the distance at his eye level: McDonald’s, Gucci, and Starbucks. I was advancing from victory to victory for Big Macs, luxury accessories, and overpriced coffee?
In 1985, when we left Kaifeng, holding hands was no longer considered a capitulation to capitalist immorality. Even a reasonably form-fitting blouse was acceptable. Hems had risen. “The East is Red” still jolted us out of bed in the morning, but as we left the campus for the last time, those same speakers were playing a song from a poorly copied cassette of The Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited.” We imagined our students covering their mouths to suppress a laugh, trying to guess which unwitting party official chose the song and then cranked the microphone to the boombox. Out blared “I’m about to lose control and I think I like it!”
That trickle of change is today a torrent. In China, it is easy to find wildly creative art, fine universities, speedy trains. Industrialism did keep up with consumption. Four trillion dollars pass from cell phones to vendors. Who knew that China would become the world’s largest economy, outshine the United States on Fortune’s Global 500 list, engage in trade wars, become the go-to manufacturer for the world, and hold the keys to the world’s most critical supply chains?
Must change come at the expense of openness and human rights? What have we learned about Uyghurs today? As ethnically Turkic Muslims, Uyghurs have been labeled as separatists, terrorists, and enemies of the state — forced to speak Chinese, give up DNA samples, tortured, and “reeducated.” Documents leaked to The New York Times, along with satellite images, have exposed what appeared to be concentration camps. The Chinese government responded by calling them vocational training facilities. Sterilization numbers far exceed rates in the general population.
Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2022 suggests that China’s “zero-tolerance” policy toward COVID-19 may have been promoted as a public health initiative, but also served as an opening for strengthening China’s autocratic abuses: zero-tolerance for Uyghurs; for protesters in Hong Kong; for grassroots voices, for those turning in blank ballots in an act of dissent against the “electoral reform” of requiring allegiance to the Chinese communist party; for pro-democracy academics; for “freedoms of religion, expression, movement, and assembly” in Tibet; for “any online communications that ‘undermine national unity.’”⁶
What is the price of change?
24/7 surveillance? Blind faith in ideological purity? How does change square with mass detention? Plans made to take Taiwan? Political indoctrination? Forced cultural assimilation? Homosexuality described as a “psychological disorder” and bans on ‘sissy’ effeminate men and ‘abnormal esthetics’ in the entertainment sector? Pro-democracy speeches deemed “unpatriotic?” Bans on vigils commemorating the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989? And bans on freedom of the press and academic discourse? What is the price for flashing the three-finger salute, a la Hunger Games, to resist tyranny?
Who knew that Xi Jingpin would channel Mao, assume roles that would extend his term indefinitely, and find it too difficult to cut off his bromance with Putin over the invasion of Ukraine?
My wife and I miss our students — those tutoring sessions by candle-light and streetlight, their indefatigable efforts to memorize passages about drying paint, their unflagging interest in the sexy chapters. True, I was attracted to China because after an unsuccessful search for sexy pictures, but I digress. We both miss their attempts to work through the complex rules and exceptions that make the English language so confounding. Their difficult questions. Their sense that they can shape their future. Their belief in change. I knew then that people are not their governments, that learning is an aphrodisiac and a beacon of hope all in one.
Be a change agent. my family told me. But don’t be a chump. Hold onto the courage of your convictions, they said. My father would add, “But…caveat emptor… don’t take yourself too seriously. Remember to accept the courage of your contradictions, too.”
I say, beware of those so passionate that they are easily fooled.
Endnotes
¹ For the fellow curious and easily distractible, more Maophilia can be found at: https://massline.org/PekingReview. Who can resist pearls like: “Use Mao Tse-Tung’s Thought to Open the Gate to ‘The Enigma of Life’”? (#1, January 1, 1967) or the slightly confusing “Earnestly Implement the Principle of ‘Supporting the Left, but Not Any Particular Faction’” (#5, February 2, 1968). “On the Re-Education of Intellectuals” includes this chilling statement: “The great leader Chairman Mao teaches us throughout the whole course of the socialist revolution and socialist construction, the remolding of the intellectuals is a question of major significance” (#38, September 20).
² Harlander, H. (December 17, 2016). It’s the rainy days that remind us why the L.A. river is an ugly concrete channel. L.A Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/rainy-days-remind-us-l-river-ugly-concrete-channel/
³ Snow, E. (1968). Red star over China. Part five: The long march: a nation emigrates. New York, New York: Grove Press, pg. 303.
⁴ Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. New York, NY: Pantheon Books
⁵ Susann, J. (1966). Valley of the dolls. New York, NY: Grove Press
⁶ Human Rights Watch (2022). World report 2022: events of 2021. Retrieved from: https://bit.ly/hrw-2022report
⁷ Parker, D. In Drennan, R.E. (editor) and Hirscheld, A. (drawings). 1968. The Algonquin wits. Citadel Press.
