Mandarins and Merchants: After Tiananmen

By Margaret Dickeman

Even as late as 1989, most young Chinese professionals believed they could predict their entire future lives. But when the Chinese government followed the Tiananmen killings with vigorous promotion of free enterprise, the rules began to change daily. The security of assigned jobs free housing and other benefits dwindled or disappeared as more initiative to get rich was encouraged. This account, based on personal observations during the two years after Tiananmen, follows a number of young Chinese as they struggle to invent individual strategies for coping with changes they could never have predicted.

The images and character sketches are forceful and succinct, and evoke a person, place or mood with apparent fidelity. --Jonathan Spence

Margaret Dickeman Datz makes the people, places and culture of China come alive better than any China book Ive read. Her book is a true human drama. --Arnold Hano

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 12, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462820924

Margaret Dickeman

Margaret Dickeman Datz holds degrees in linguistics and English literature and has taught in China on three occasions.

Book preview

GUNFIRE

It is August of 1989, only two months since the People’s Liberation Army shot down student protesters near Tiananmen Square, and I’m packing to go to China again.

During the summer of 1982 I taught English teachers in Shanghai. China had only recently opened to the west and memories of the Cultural Revolution were still fresh. Only my own students had permission to visit me, to practice English; no student ever came without a classmate, a witness to the non-political nature of our conversation. Once, naively, I asked an older student if he knew the International Herald Tribune and handed him a copy. It lay flat on his open palms as they rested on his knees, while he held his eyes straight ahead, never allowing himself a downward glance. He sat thus, faintly trembling-with effort or fear or both—until I finally had the sense to remove the forbidden paper.

During the school year of 1985-6 I taught graduate students at a new university in Henan Province. It was supposed to be a joint venture university, the first such in China, and my students were giddy with hope and endeavor. They came from all over the country, lured with the assurance that upon completion of a two-year master’s degree here, they would all go on for Ph. D.’s in the United States. My class asked for reading material beyond the heavy assignments I gave them, wrote extra critical papers and even, overcoming all previous training, learned to participate in class discussions where they occasionally managed to express disagreement with each others’ opinions. At night, I could see them studying in the classroom, each at his desk, bent silently over a book, until one or two a. m. Most evenings students would visit me, singly or in small groups, to sit in my room and talk until dawn, freely, on the topics that interested young people with futures: good fields of specialization in America, Chinese and American literary criticism, American society, Chinese development, women’s rights, and love affairs and marriages, both successful and tragic. I remember one night when a male student, a teacher at a nearby army college, sat alone with me until late. He had been full of questions about America, and finally I asked him one: what did he think was America’s most serious problem? He didn’t need to consider; at once he answered, The violence. Yet he was determined to go to America, if the army would allow it.

Throughout that year my students greedily absorbed works and ideas they had been allowed little contact with before. No one could quite believe in the new openness, but all took full advantage of it. The university president put up notices on the doors of the buildings where foreign teachers were housed, forbidding students to visit us; the students laughed and continued to appear. All the fears of 1982 were gone.

Yet while the students worked so steadily, the promise of American Ph. D. scholarships for all was fading to a rumor that half of each class would go, and this then became a rumor that just two students would be selected from each class. By the time I left, in June, 1986, we were not even hearing rumors, and the students felt betrayed. It appeared that corruption and misspending had eroded their scholarship funds.

By the end of 1986, only a few months later, Fang Lizhi, the physicist who had spoken to many student groups urging real steps toward democracy, and Liu Binyan, the journalist whose writings had exposed corruption in the government, had both been ousted from the Communist Party. New restrictions on free speech and inquiry as well as the corruption at all levels of the government brought hundreds of students out in demonstrations at several major universities. These demonstrations were quickly silenced.

Now, another generation of students has just received violent instruction in reality. Am I sure I want to go to China? If I go, am I lending myself to something I condemn? Will I be safe?

One of the students I had known in Henan Province left China just before the 1986 demonstrations, to study in America under the sponsorship of an American professor. Although Han is a dedicated Chinese citizen, he has in three years adjusted surprisingly well to American society. But his sponsor’s wife told me recently of an incident that took place when Han had been in America only two days. She had asked her husband to do some shopping for her and suggested he take Han along—Han hadn’t yet seen an American supermarket. Han dawdled and delayed until he was told to get into the car. There he hunched down in the front seat as if trying to hide from someone. In the parking lot he had to be urged to leave the car. It wasn’t until some months later that Han confessed to the Professor’s wife that America had been very new to him then. He had been sure that somewhere, on the streets or in the parking lot, they would encounter a shootout.

My knowledge of China is as half-true, half-false as was Han’s knowledge of the United States. Han overcame his fear—of physical danger, of political consequences—to try to satisfy his curiosity about the west. I too am nervous about the political implications of my actions, and especially about gunfire in Chinese streets. What should I expect? I have no idea. But by now, somehow, I am involved with China; my curiosity is too strong to be denied.

I wrote the dean of English at the school where, before the Tiananmen shootings, I had accepted a teaching position. I wrote, Unless I hear from you to the contrary, I will plan to come to China this fall.. I knew I wouldn’t hear from him; only the most urgent letters ever get answered in China, and he probably wouldn’t want to admit that anything was amiss, either. I wanted to be able to interpret his silence as a guarantee of my safety if I went—but of course it doesn’t mean that, or anything else. I realize now I worded the letter so it would be more difficult for him to tell me to stay away than simply to let me come. I knew I was going back to China. I must go, to see what happens next.

CONSUMERS

In China again after a three-year absence, I watch television, expecting secrets to be revealed. The commercials are still all bunched together between the programs—even the commercials for competing products, in what seems to be a Chinese obsession with classification. Programs here, commercials there . . . refrigerator commercials, then electric fan commercials . . . . Classification is the first step this society has taken towards scientific method, and there it seems to have stuck, as if classifying, in and of itself, says something profound about an item, a person. And maybe it does, in China. Classes, once assigned, are rigidly adhered to.

Among television commercials, refrigerators lead. Of course, it’s summer, and often muggy. An explorer crawls across a desert, tossing away his empty canteen, desperate. Just over the next ridge he finds a refrigerator that spews ice cubes onto the sand; he stands beside it gulping cold water.

Or two pilots, all in white, in a white plane, on a polar flight, show worry then fear as they’re drawn off course and towards a looming fridge, where they are sucked into the freezer compartment; the door shuts. A young wife in a print dress (no lumpy Mao suits in commercials!) opens the freezer door, takes out the small plane and sets it in front of her husband and his friends (who wear business suits). They all look at the plane, puzzled. As I look at this commercial.

Or a refrigerator door opens and a live fish glides inside and lies flapping on a shelf. Then I see rows and rows of refrigerators, and fish swimming past them, followed by one big languid skate. Fresh fish appear in many of these ads. Take alcohol with fish, in case the fish is not fresh: the alcohol will kill the germs, we were told at our welcoming banquet.

A refrigerator stands in one corner of a modern, sparkling apartment, where baba plays with his little daughter, helping her put together educational plastic pieces on the coffee table, while mama puts two whole fish, laid across a plate, into the empty refrigerator. Suddenly, there’s thunder, the lights go out. But the refrigerator continues to glow in the dark. The magic fridge.

My favorite is the lady in white: little white pickup truck, white pants suit, big mirror shades. She drives up and steps out onto the sidewalk, head high. Men turn to leer after her as I’ve never seen them do in China; a squatting boy looks up from his comic book . . . of course, you never see a lady in a white pants suit and mirror shades on China’s streets, either. At a store window she pulls off her sunglasses for a critical look at the refrigerators inside. In the last frames her little white pickup drives off, literally into the sunset, carrying a green fridge.

Television sets run a close second to refrigerators. The ball in a televised soccer game bounces right off the screen into a watching husband’s hands. His wife comes along, changes the channel and sits beside him, resting her head on his shoulder in a startling display of married affection. Now it’s a program of female disco dancers. The husband smiles—romantically, or erotically? A dancer reaches out of the screen and helps herself to an apple from a bowl in front of the set. She bites into it, eyeing the young husband coyly.

Washing machines agitate sudsily, then send forth the clothes, dry, pressed and folded neatly. Actually, ironing is still a relatively unknown art in China. There are many models of irons in the stores, but nothing, except a few men’s shirts on television, ever looks really crisp and smooth. Perhaps it has become fashionable to display the wrinkles these vigorous little Chinese and Japanese washers set into your clothes—a sign of luxury ownership.

Makeup is here. Three years ago it was just for the stage. Now rows and rows of lipsticks emerge magically from their tubes. A young woman with short hair chooses one and smears more and more onto her painted lips, drops the tube into her purse and swooshes out the door in her red strapless ball gown. An edge of white brassiere shows under one shoulder blade. We see her step into a waiting car—a shiny red compact. She’s sitting in the front seat, beside the driver. Whose car is this? A private car? Those are supposed to be forbidden. Going where? Little seems to happen after dark in China. The lipstick’s brand name is written Kiss Me, pronounced something like shishemay, shishemay in a whispery voice.

All these clean, colorful folks living in pale, gleaming apartments-what do my neighbors think of them? Spaced up the hill above my quarters are state-owned apartment buildings, six and seven stories high, all walkups. These buildings, I’ve been told, are new—but the faded aqua paint is streaked, and around the top of each are large horizontal seepage cracks which have been smeared with cement. In front of each building is an area of packed dirt, and down some stairs, beside the sloping road, is a shared garbage bin, always overflowing. I’ve seen decently-dressed people picking through the trash, pulling out bits of paper and plastic. No, they aren’t resentful, say my students, when I ask about the contrast between what I see on my television screen and what I see out the window. No, it gives them something to strive for.

Every morning, around seven-thirty, people begin to straggle down the steep street, towards the city: adults, children with bookbags on their backs, a couple carrying twin daughters in bright red coats, all barely moving aside for the trucks with groaning gears that lumber slowly uphill to building sites on the crest. All day the housing complexes are deserted, except for an occasional old man or woman tending a baby, and the passing trucks that continue to strain upwards with loads of sand and bricks.

During the long afternoons peddlers pass slowly from level to level, calling out to buy old bottles or cardboard or used clothes. Most dangle a brass cymbal on a string, letting it fall to clang upon the pavement between their weary calls. An old woman with chopped gray hair tucked behind her ears shakes and picks over grains of rice in a scoopshaped basket.

About four-thirty p. m. the procession uphill begins. Adults carrying bags of pears or Chinese chives or whatever they have found in the stalls below place each foot deliberately. At the end of this climb, up roads, paths and stairways, most face yet another climb of several flights inside their buildings. I wonder if their apartments bear any resemblance to those they see on television. It’s hard to believe so, judging from the exteriors. Yet the people who emerge from them are decently dressed, clean and fairly neat, if hardly glossy.

Schoolchildren in red-and-yellow safety hats run and shout, stopping to play at level terraces on their way up the hill, always in groups of one sex. Five little girls have gathered under my balcony on several recent afternoons to rehearse songs and a rather impressive dance routine. They organize themselves quickly, with no squabbling, and chant as they execute the steps in unison. Little boys crouch on the slopes, peering into the few patches of grass, catching bugs.

By eight-thirty at night everything is quiet, with dim lights showing in all the windows. My students and colleagues say there is nothing worth watching on television, but I imagine the people in those buildings are watching it, and watching the commercials as one refrigerator pitch follows another. By nine-thirty most lights are out.

No one drives off in a little red compact.

It’s the night of the Harvest Moon Festival, the night for family reunions and moon-viewing, and Wang and Li have made plans to meet me at the fountain in the central park. Wang was my student three years ago in another part of China and now teaches English in this city, her home town. Li is her boy friend, a teacher of computer science at a technical university here. The fountain is surrounded with families—a blur of white shirts and dark pants or skirts in the fading light—enjoying the mild evening air. Wang and Li find me in the crowd and lead me off down a wide avenue, past several new ultramodern buildings with glass walls, terrace bars, fountains and external elevators—foreigner hotels.

Amazing! I say —like some of the modern buildings in Denver or San Francisco! I’m noting their location; these hotels will be my refuges from China when I need them, later. I know I will.

Well, says Wang, I’m sure such buildings are common in America, but it’s surprising to see one sitting by itself here in China.

And each does sit by itself: elevators are rare in China, so most buildings do not exceed eight stories. These big new hotels tower alone in the sky. We pass three or four such hotels, most completed in the past year or two. Their rooftop restaurants are lit up; the glass doors to the lobby open electronically when we approach to peer inside. Japanese businessmen in elegantly tailored suits stand in clusters, holding good leather briefcases and agitating paper fans.

Farther down the avenue there is a glossy Friendship Store, full of embroidered jackets, jade necklaces, silk rugs. Wang and Li hesitate and murmur Can we enter? but no one stops them. Chinese used to be barred from these stores. The cases of jewelry make Wang uneasy.

I really don’t feel good, wearing a necklace like that, she says.

Li adds, A woman hung with all those jewels doesn’t increase in value.

We leave and walk on in the dark street. Li tells a story. "Margaret, do you know the Chinese word for ‘damn’? Tamade?"

Yes. Actually, it’s a good deal stronger than our word ‘damn’.

"Well, a group of American businessmen were visiting Chinese factories. One old leader at a factory showed them the machines, and he kept using this word . . . You know, he wasn’t very educated. He kept saying ‘this tamade machine’, and ‘that tamade machine’, and the Americans asked, ‘What is this tamade he keeps saying?’ ‘Oh,’ says the Chinese host, ‘it means magnificant, wonderful.’ So they leave the factory and go to look at some other big thing, some big installation, and the American leader says, ‘Oh, tamade!’ And all the Chinese hosts gasp—and then they burst out laughing, and the Americans laugh, and at each thing they are shown that day the American says ‘Oh, tamade!’ and the Chinese gasp and laugh, and they all have a fine time together. And I’m told this is a true story, but I don’t know."

We head up over a new, wide overpass. Li takes a walkman out of his daypack. «See, auto-reverse.» He grins at me.

«Now you’re showing off.» says Wang.

Li puts in a cassette, slips the machine into a pocket of his pack, and dangles two little speakers over his shoulder, watching my reaction out of the corner of his eye. We stroll along to «The Sound of Silence» and «Jet Plane». We all sing along . . . «I’m leaving, on a jet plane; don’t know when I’ll come back again. . . .»

«Some American teachers laugh at us,» says Wang. «They say no one listens to this music anymore, and John Denver is out of fashion.»

The avenue is dimly lit and few vehicles or people are out. The moon is bright and very large. «Where is everybody?» I ask. «Aren’t you supposed to go out and look at the moon on the night of the Harvest Moon?»

Li says, «Everyone’s home watching TV.»

He starts another story: «You know, once in middle school, in political study course, we had to write essays, The teacher allowed us to write on philosophy. I wrote my essay about whether monkey could become man. You see, now man has developed as a superior being, and my idea was that monkeys could evolve into man more quickly now, with man’s help. But my teacher didn’t like my essay and he gave me a very poor mark.»

«What didn’t he like about it?»

«It wasn’t based on Marxist doctrine.»

The big round moon seems to have stuck halfway up the sky. I lose it every time we walk past one of the tall new hotels.

EQUAL

The other night a student told me a joke: Three Chinese men had to cross a high wall, the first climbed up and over, but there was a deep puddle on the other side and he fell in, plop! Then the second man climbed up and he fell in, plop! Now the third man climbed up, and as he reached the top of the wall, the second man started to call out to warn him of the puddle. But before he could make a sound, the first man clapped his hand over the second man’s mouth. So the third man fell in, too—plop! ‘Why did you do that?’ asked the second man, and the first man answered, ‘All Chinese must be equal.’

In the school library I count fourteen copies of ]ane Eyre, twenty-two of The Forsyte Saga, Volume One, and seventeen of Lord ]im. Instead of buying one copy of Lord Jim and copies of sixteen other, different books, the library must give our Chinese students an equal opportunity to read the same thing. The library is mainly a repository of class texts in multiple copies. A collection of varied single copies does exist, but it is off limits to all but teachers and graduate students, thus preserving a sort of equality, I suppose: equality within ranks or classifications.

Today was the first day of classes of the new school year. My classroom was locked. I walked outside and down one level to the English building, then up a flight of stairs and down a hall past the Party Branch Office to the English office. In the halls women in white cotton caps were wielding twig brooms and dirty mops for the first time since last spring, sending spirals of dust flying up the stairwells. One wall was stamped with prints from the soles of sneakers, where bored students had competed in running up the walls.

The young English secretary sent for one of my students, who had the classroom key. I walked back to my classroom and the student came hurrying and opened the door. Inside were three small tables and two chairs, white with dust. The window panes were blurred with grime, and piles of last year’s dirt and paper wads lay in the corners. My student had come prepared with sheets of newspaper to lay on our seats. Classes have been delayed for one week of extra political study decreed suddenly by the leaders in Beijing. No doubt the cleaning women had been summoned to political study sessions like everyone else at the university; in any case, work starts for all Chinese, equally, on the same day.

I spent the afternoon in the upper reaches of the library with my Chinese-American colleague, trying to preview video cassettes for classes we must teach tomorrow and the next day. Our plan was to preview and select the videos we would need for at least the first half of the term. We had wanted to select and test all the videos for the term’s classes last week, but of course everyone in the video department had also been summoned to political study sessions. My colleague kindly left me in the video director’s office while he hiked up to the seventh floor, where the cassettes are stored. The library building, the pride of the institute, was finished last spring. I’ve been told an elevator was planned, but funds ran out. The stories are built very high to accomodate double floors of stacks on each, so a climb of five floors is really more like one of ten. I was happy to sit and wait for my colleague. I could see places where plaster had been knocked off doorways when furniture had been moved in, and already the edges of several of the stone steps had crumbled away.

I sat in the video director’s office and observed her domestic arrangements. She is a former English teacher who grew tired of teaching—she speaks almost no English, so I imagine it would be tiring—and managed to get herself appointed to head the video department. I guessed her age at around thirty-five, young for such a post, unless she has influence. The muddy shoes in which she walks to work lay under a cabinet; she had changed into a pair of white pumps with plastic bows. A mirror hung behind the door. A stained aluminum teakettle sat on a gas burner next to a plastic bag of cookies and buns. Standing with her back to me, the video director poured hot water into a bowl, shook in some sort of noodles or seaweed from a foil packet and covered the bowl. She pulled an enamel basin towards her and washed her hands. Her towels hung on a rack above the kettle. She took a noisy swig of tea from a full mug—still with her back turned to me, like one intent on her duties. These activities filled the half hour my colleague spent upstairs.

He returned with six cassettes. Two of these were mislabeled and proved to be unsuitable when we played them. A third jammed in the video player. We were led to another machine, in another room. Here we watched—and rejected—American Sports: a woman sat behind a desk, droning on and on about American football and tennis; not even her eyebrows moved. Next we looked at Patton; we are supposed to show American films in the video courses. George C. Scott strode back and forth moving his lips without a sound. Chinese workers walked in and out, shouting at each other, fiddling with knobs, disappearing.

Now only one set of two cassettes was left: The King and I. These cassettes were smaller. There was a long