Experiencing the Daily Life of Foreign Crowds

Paul was our national tour guide. Employed by the central state agency for tourism, he traveled around China with us, advising us on fair prices and playing shepherd to the inevitable two or three people who never seemed to find their way back to the tour bus. He wore bright-colored golf shirts and navy blue pants and carried an $800 camera from Hong Kong.

Paul seemed to me the epitome of the new China--he spoke English fluently, had been to college and, he told me proudly, had a library of over 500 American books. He was newly married and his wife was expecting a child in two months.

For almost three weeks, Paul led me and my 31 fellow travellers--Americans, though many of them were as different from me as the omnipresent Chinese grandmothers who lined the streets, selling fragrant buds of jasmine to tourists.

But Paul, as with most of the people I met on the 20-day tour of China in June, was far more complex than I had thought. One day, as we sat fanning ourselves in one of the dozens of "Friendship Stores" that cater to foreign visitors, Paul told me his story.

During the Cultural Revolution, the 10-year period when Mao Zedong made war on the intellectuals and reduced the country to a virtual standstill, Paul was forced to leave school and was sent to the country for two years. There he worked from 7 a.m. until 9 p.m. in the rice fields, receiving little or no wages and barely enough food for subsistence. His education was put on hold, and he was forced to concentrate on survival--his classmates in the city, members of the Red Guard, had labeled him a "reactionary," the gravest crime in Mao's China.

Paul's father was sent to jail for two years, after being denounced as an "imperialist" for actions he allegedly committed during the revolution. He had been a member of the party and a Communist activist, but was fed rice and water for two years in a jail cell. Paul's mother, a schoolteacher, also ran afoul of the authorities--she was denounced by her own students after mistakenly sitting on a newspaper which contained Chairman Mao's picture. She was sent to the country.

But Paul was ready to put his past behind him; he talked of economic changes, of traveling around the country, of free markets. His experience, as I slowly learned from encounters in the eight Chinese cities I visited, was far from unique--almost everyone I met had suffered the personal consequences of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

From local tour guides, from the owners of private stores, from everyone, it seemed, who spoke English, I heard the phrase "after the Cultural Revolution." The four most oft-repeated words of my stay in China became a metaphor for the vast changes the country is undergoing, for the experiences of suffering which bind the people together and for the limited extent to which I was capable of communicating with the Chinese people.

I came to China unprepared to understand the phenomenon of a 6000-year history--I had never studied the language, the culture, the history. Before the trip, "Cultural Revolution" was synonymous in my mind with a popular Core course--one that I hadn't taken.

I had read about the economic modernizations touted by Deng Xiopang--they were the subject of occassional newspaper stories and magazine articles, though they had never received the amount of media coverage accorded to glasnost in the Soviet Union or the new economic hegemony of Japan.

But for 20 days in China, traveling by bus and train and plane, I got a few tantalizing glimpses of the changes which are sweeping Chinese society. I was functionally illiterate in the country--even street signs were incomphrehensible--and I used special money for foreigners that insulated me yet further from the normal process of commercial intercourse in China.

But through conversations with tour guides such as Paul, through bargaining with street vendors--a mixture of broken English phrases and hand signals--and through interaction with the children who gathered curiously on the streets to greet Americans, I was able to take away a sense of the Chinese people.

They seemed to me extraordinarily driven, longing for economic improvements and intent on ignoring the painful memories of the not-so-recent past.

I asked one guide in Nanjing about World War II and the violent occupation of that city by the Japanese in 1937. "Don't the Chinese still have resentments towards the Japanense?" I asked.

"We just want their money," said the candid guide, who had announced to the tour group earlier that she did not belong to the Chinese Communist party and would be giving us "no propaganda."

"But where are the memorials to the war dead? Where is the museum about World War II?" I continued to press, perplexed that the Chinese seemed to have no interest in preserving the memory of what is known, even in America, as one of the bloodiest and most horrifying episodes of World War II.

"Do Your Job"

Finally Yuan, the guide, got frustrated with my lack of sophistication about the ways of the Chinese. "We've had other things to worry about," she said. "And besides, everything has changed since the Cultural Revolution."

Yuan has a husband who is studying for his master's at Princeton. She has a two-and-a-half year old son and must pay for a babysitter because she has no family members to look after the child-the custom in China. She cannot afford to come visit her husband in the United States, and does not have a phone with which to call him.

But Yuan, though she is open about the problems she faces, is reluctant to emphasize her hardships; like many of the people I met in China, she is absorbed in attaining the badges of economic success which attest to China's rising standard of living.

Yuan adeptly sidestepped a question about whether she was happy with her job and her family situation. "The Chinese have a saying 'Do your job, then love your job,'" she said.