My orientation began on the flight from San Francisco to Shanghai. It was an overnight flight, and the plane was crammed to the rafters with tourists bringing home stuff of all kinds and sizes. About two o’clock, when all the stewardesses were snoozing, I decided to sneak up to the first class section. Amazingly,there was only one passenger there, a Mao-suited man who looked to be in his seventies. I asked him if I could sneak a look at the English language newspapers and magazines spread out for the non-existent first class business passengers. He urged me to make myself at home.
Having had a tacky supper back in economy served on plastic plates, I was envious of this Chinese man eating a fancy looking meal off of high class porcelain!.l made a snippy observation that the service up front was a long way from the Long March! He looked at me quizically, and finally reacted: “I was on that Long March, and I don’t find it odd that we eat better up front now than we did back then as colonial slaves. We actually marched so all the people could eat better.” He was not really hostile. I had aroused his curiosity, filling an empty evening.
He asked me where I was headed. 'The Shanghai Foreign Language Institute,” I replied. “For what?” he asked. “To study Mandarin”. “Really,” he smiled, “and how long will you Americans study our language”. “For six weeks,” I told him. He laughed uproariously, making me fear he would wake up some vigilant stewardess. And what will you learn? “Nii hau. Chi Chi.” I wish he could have heard my only Mandarin joke at the end of the course. I still tell Chinese about that episode in which I only learned three words. “Wo pu dong”. (I don’t understand.) Unfortunately the first time I tried my joke I was speaking to a couple from Guangzou. They didn’t get it. Because they spoke Cantonese.
I tried to change this portentiously painful subject by asking him how he learned English so well. He told me he had been on the Over the Hump brigade that flew DC 3’s through Burma during World War II. And he kept his English fresh dickering with Boeing salesmen in Seattle as he negotiated purchases for China Airlines, on which we were now flying. He turned out to the Veep in charge of fleet expansion. A nice serendipitous start to my six weeks. I snuck back to my peasant’s seat and slept fitfully until they announced our landing in Shanghai.
There was nothing unique about our six weeks of learning. The barracks were standard issue. The food was amazingly high class, as if they felt they had to make up for our grim surroundings with classy food. The thirty students were a strange mix of activist Christians and left wing hippies like me. The barracks talk was mostly over grappling with our truly difficult subject matter, for which all of us were very hard working students. The one thing that stands out in my mind was that broken umbrella I left outside our bedroom door with the trash—The next day it was back in front of the door, repaired!
Most of my memorable experiences lay outside the Institute. I eagerly started hoovering the museums scene. My first visit of course was to the Shanghai Art Museum which was hopefully to be the subject of my “cover story” in San Francisco “Focus”. It was in a recycled Art Deco bank! The curator showed me the artifacts he was considering sending to San Francisco. To my astonishment he seemed less interested in esthetic issues than in turnstiling! “Which things would turn the American visitors on?”
I had no idea. I could only tell him what turned me on. Incidentally, the day the class went to visit the Great Wall outside Beijing, I decided to visit the offices of “China Daily”. There was a small cadre of American ex-pats giving the locals an angle on American taste—they were about to expand their circulation in America. I soon discovered it was a Viewspaper not a Newspaper.
Party lines throughout the paper. Except when we got to the sports section. “How big should it be?” they asked me solicitously! (Me,who had lost interest in all sports coverage shortly after realizing at age 14 that my dream to replace Billy Rogell as Detroit Tiger's shortstop was a foolish fantasy.) What I was discovering was that beneath that spartan blue Mao tunic beat the heart of a Chinese businessman. Similarly, when I visited the Fine Arts Publishing House to see their new two volume collection of Long March woodcuts, there were no esthetic discussions. They wanted my advice on how to market the book in America. No idea. Sorry.
One museum I found that interested me was the Lu Xun museum. He was a physician trained in Sendai, Japan, where he picked up his first Marxist ideas. He was also a novelist, perhaps the first important writer to come out of the Chinese Communist movement which began in Shanghai in 1919. I was so taken by his biography that when asked to give a lecture to other foreign students at the Institute, I conceived of him as the Thomas Jefferson of Red China.
In retrospect I have a hunch both sides of the comparison would have been insulted by the comparison! But back in Honolulu where I had been first director of the American Studies Institute at the East West Center, I had a weekly radio interview over KAIM-FM called “Pacific Profile” (everybody interesting and his boring uncle eventually passed through Honolulu, just having finished a unique project or preparing to do one.)
One of my most interesting subjects was the editor of the leftwing daily in Kerala, the notorious Communist enclave in Southwest India. As I drove him to Honolulu International, we somehow got on the subject of Thomas Jefferson. He told me a story about TJ as an international spy. He always was looking out for ways to improved Virginia agriculture.
In Genoa, Italy he got wind of a new variety of rice that was so productive that the authorities put a death penalty on anyone attempting to secret samples out of the country. Jefferson sequestred some in a hollow cane. The story was beguiling, but the real issue was why I, the Jeff buff, had never heard of it. My Kerala man explained it simply: you find what you look for. As a Third World agriculture supporter, he clued in on a story that reflected his culture’s needs. First World scholars of Jefferson would find such an anecdote trivial. Seriousness is a function of agenda.
Shortly thereafter I was able to apply this First Principle of cross cultural interaction: You only get answers to the questions you find significant. We were asked to meet with a group of Indian journalists on a State Department press tour of the United States. (The East West Center was a concept of Phillip Coombs, a State Department policy planner.) We rehearsed the current situation in race relations and Communist power ploys, the two issues, national and international, which dominated the consciousness of liberal American college professors.
To our surprise, the visiting Indians didn’t seem at all interested in our formal presentations: they wanted to know why we slighted our old people! I had noticed, as I walked to the University from our rented house in the Manoa Valley, how many grandmas were herding small children off to elementary school. Our grandmas were mostly in senior homes, able to hug their grand children only on Holidays. We were learning more about America than were the Indians!
In Shanghai, most breakthroughs were similarly serendipitous. I hung out after classes mostly with a girls school headmistress from Portland, Maine. Ann and I were hanging out one Sunday at the so-called Hyde Park Corner, next to the race track. Chinese went there mostly to show off and polish their English, by practicing it. We were immediately struck by a handsome young man in his mid-twenties who turned out to be an middle school teacher. He asked us to dinner to meet his fiance.
We happily obliged, even though when we arrived at their crowded apartment, it appeared that all their kitchen equipment was jammed in the corridor. No matter, the meal was the best we had had in our six weeks in China—Shanghai, Beijing, Suzyou, Hangzhou-- (check spelling of last two places), wherever. But their stories were even more tasty. Both were victims of the Cultural Revolution, 1967-1976. Their fathers were both professionals, a doctor in the case of the girl, an accountant in the case of the boy.
Their professional lives had been trashed by the Red Guards. Both families were now safely abroad—one in Hong Kong, the other in Los Angeles. Towards the end of the meal, when they had heard enough of our political opinions to know we wouldn’t rat on them, they told us they were headed soon for a honeymoon in San Francisco—from which they planned not to return. It told us much more about the still totalitarian China than all the PR the Institute tried to lay on us.
One experience in Beijing still stands out in my memory. I.M.Pei, the Chinese American architect, had just designed a hotel outside Beijing, called Fragrant Hills. Phil Herrera, my editor at Connoisseur, thought there might be a good story there for the magazine, and gave me the name and address of another Conn writer who happened to be studying in Beijing. We gladly went on a larky trip, where we found that Pei, his wife and daughter had been reduced to their knees to redo the floors that the Chinese craftsmen had messed up.
Pei had just finished his glorious Louvre glass pyramid and he was full of comparisons between the highly competent French craftsmen and their slovenly counterparts in China. The hotel was in that highly amorphous state between a soft and a hard opening. We glowed at our first hand contact with a genius on his knees (but Phil couldn’t place such a sad story in his upbeat book!), practiced our Chinese on each other, and snoozed sweetly through the dark Pei night.
I still remember an afternoon cruising on the Whampoo River just off the Bund where the local band tried manfully to swing, but basically couldn’t! Heh, America may not be perfect, but its combos, great and ordinary, swing. The only other time I felt this Americanness of our indigenous music was on a pit stop visit to Linz, on my way to a long sweet visit to Vienna.
It turned out that in their new Gustav Mahler Hall, they were celebrating the 75th anniversary of George Gershwin’s birth with a two hour long tribute to his and Ira’s genius. The leading operatic soprano had bravely taken the responsibility of singing his standards. Oh me Oh my. It felt like four hours, that concert they had invited me off the street to witness as a visiting American journalist. A great voice. But no rhythm. Ira’s poetry never made it that night to Linz.
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