A Chinese Reporter’S Journey to the West

By George Bao

George (Guangren) Baos journey to the West is different from that of the Chinese pioneers who came to San Francisco in the 1880s for the gold rush. As one of the 3.8 million Chinese Americans, George came to the United States in the 1980s when Chinas door to the United States was open and a generation of educated youth came to the United States to learn from the West. His story tells how the first generation of new immigrants from China came to live and work in the United States at a time when China was in its historical transitioning period.

George walked out of a small village in China to the suburbs in Los Angeles. The 6,685-mile journey is accompanied by hardships, struggles, good fortune, blessings, and opportunities. As a news reporter, his journey to the West comes step-by-step with the marks of the history China has gone through. To learn the history of New China is vague and somewhat boring, but to count his footsteps will be more specific, more interesting.

George recalled his visit to Beijing at age sixteen to see Chairman Mao, along with millions of Red Guards, at the start of the Cultural Revolution in China. He tells how he was selected to be a worker-peasant-soldier student to study English at Anhui University and how he became a graduate student at the Institute of Journalism at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His first assignment as Washington correspondent in 1984 enabled him to see the tremendous gap between China and the United States.

Georges second journey to the West in 1991 finally makes the United States as his second home country. He tells the differences in reporting for the Chinese state news agency and in reporting for the independent Chinese newspaper in the United States. As a Chinese American, his life is closely related with the ups and downs of both China, where he was born, and the United States, where he has been naturalized. Thats why he sincerely hopes that the United States will get along well with China and that the development of China is beneficial to the Chinese Americans like him, and he is willing to work toward that goal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503594838

Book preview

A Chinese Reporter’s Journey to the West

George Bao

Copyright © 2015 by George Bao.

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5035-9485-2

                Softcover        978-1-5035-9484-5

                 eBook            978-1-5035-9483-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 08/12/2015

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Contents

Prologue

Born in a Small Village

The Best Rice I Ever Ate

Black Red Guard

Worker-Peasant- Soldier Student

Learn English the Chinese Way

Yang Hanshan Returns

Dating—Chinese Style

Jumping over the Dragon Gate

English Newswriting Class, First Ever in China

First American to Teach Five Ws in China

Democracy Wall

A Small Free World

Objective Reporting

End of the Journalism Class

Ears, Eyes, and Tongue of the Party

Never Raise My Tail

Washington Correspondent

Report Anything Positive on China

Expose the Dark Side

First Portable Computer

File Stories over Cell Phone

Grilling the President

Getting My Wife to the United States

Surviving on Thirty-Nine Dollars a Month

Back to Beijing

Start from Scratch at Age Forty-One

The Death of Wei Guoqiang

Freelance for Xinhua

Set up CA Media Foundation

To my wife, Baiqing; my daughter, Helen;

and all who have helped me in my life.

Prologue

S itting on a swing chair in the backyard of my house surrounded by trees beside a swimming pool on South Hills, Covina, in California, I was thinking of a stone-paved path in front of my hometown, South Village in China, where I was born. From South Village in China to South Hills in the United States, it is a journey of about 6,685 miles—a long way. Each step requires an effort. Each step is accompanied by hardship, good fortune, blessing, and opportunity.

Born in 1950, the second year New China was established, the footsteps I have taken are marks of the history China has gone through. To learn the history of New China is vague and somewhat boring, but to count my footsteps will be more specific, more interesting.

To walk out of the small village in the deep mountains was the dream of the young people at my age and is still the dream of the younger generation at present. More people realized their dreams to find new homes at the nearby county town, Shexian or Huangshan City; some walked farther to Hefei, the provincial capital. A few of us succeeded in finding a place in Beijing, the capital of China. Only a small number of people have crossed the ocean to reach the other side of the world called a Beautiful Country (the translation of the United States).

I am the lucky one that has first walked out of my village to the county town of Shexian then to the provincial capital of Hefei then to the Chinese capital, Beijing, then to the US capital, Washington, DC, and finally to Los Angeles, the City of Angels.

I am thinking of all those people who have happened to show up at each crucial moment in my path from South Village to the South Hills to provide me with all the necessary help. Without their help, I might have stopped in where I was born.

I tried to recall the faces of all those who have helped me. I am thinking of Teacher Huang, a nice teacher at Dingqiao Elementary School; Teacher Liang Qihua at Su Village Elementary School; Wang Xiyou, my math teacher at Shexian High School; He Gongjie and Wang Huali, who taught me the ABC of English at Anhui University; Shen Xueer, who gave me so much care and help as his student; Huang Huizhi, who introduced me to my lovely wife, Baiqing; Zhao Yifan and Hong Zengliu, two of my close friends and classmates at Anhui University; James Aronson, Larry Pinkham, and Judy Polumbaum, three American professors who taught me journalism; Li Yannin and his wife, Sun Jian, who gave me the chance to work in Washington, DC, as Xinhua correspondent; Sarah Douglas, who assisted Baiqing in her pursuit to study in the United States; Bill Ringle, who became my first American friend in the United States; Jim Magee, who offered much help to me and treated me like his son; Sandra Ball-Rokeach, who helped me a lot at USC; Daniel Deng, who introduced me to World Journal; and James Guo, who admitted me to World Journal. And also David DeVoss, who helped me to be a freelance journalist and assisted me in CA Media Foundation, and Ma Shengrong, Yang Ming, Ding Zhe, and Jenny Chen, who provided timely help in CA Media Foundation and its programs in China.

Thanks to the inexpensive telephone bills, I can talk almost every day over the phone with my first younger brother, Guangyi, the only brother who works in my hometown, South Village. He and his wife, Lifang, took good care of my father, who died in 2003, and my mother, who died in 2010. I often call my second younger brother, Guangping, who works in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, and my third younger brother, Xuewei, in Hefei, Anhui Province. When he was fifteen, Xuewei went to Hefei to take care of my daughter, Helen, and then took care of Baiqing’s parents. I am the only one in my family who has the chance to go to the university. I owe much to them. Without their sacrifice and contribution, it is hard to imagine that I could walk out of my village and reach the other side of the ocean.

The list can go on and on, but most importantly, I should thank my wife, Baiqing, who has been my strongest and most determined backbone at all the crucial junctures of my life. She always encourages me to take a step forward when I am hesitating. She helps me to stand up again when I fall. She gives me strength when I feel weak. She is always with me when I am in need.

I also owe much to Baiqing’s elder sister, Zhang Songqing, and her husband, Yang Juzi. In about three years, when Baiqing came to the United States in 1986, my five-year-old daughter, Helen, was with them. To Helen, they were her mom and dad. When Baiqing left Hefei, her younger sister, Changqing, and her husband, Ni Shoubin, had to take care of Baiqing’s mother, who died in 1993, and her father, who died one year later.

I should thank my daughter, Helen, whose success in running the family business has enabled me to do what I like to do in my career as a journalist. She came to the United States at age eleven, but she has never given up her Chinese ways the Chinese culture. Her command of both English and Chinese and her familiarity with both American and Chinese culture has enabled her to serve as a good bridge between the United States and China and, thus, contribute her success in her business. She is the pride of the Bao family.

I grow up with the history of New China. In 1958, when I was at the age to go to school, China launched what it called the Great Leap Forward movement and started to set up the people’s commune in the countryside. Till now, I still can recall the scene when the whole village ate meals in a big commune canteen. Since the meals were free, the waste was serious. The better days were very brief. From 1959 to 1961, almost every Chinese citizen lived in hunger from the serious food shortage partly caused by the natural disaster, partly by the Big Leap Forward movement.

To revive the economy, China adopted a policy to lay off government employees in 1961. My father, who left my home village at age fourteen, lost his job as Party secretary of Tongyuan Intermediate School and went back home to learn to do farmwork. Without regular pay for my father, the family began to have financial problems. Life was hard.

Chinese historians called the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 as ten chaotic years, but personally, I was both a victim and beneficiary. When the Cultural Revolution first started in the fall of 1966, I was the lucky one to be one of the four students selected from my class to go to Beijing to see Mao Zedong on Tiananmen Square. At age sixteen, I had the honor to go to the Chinese capital, the first time I had traveled for so far.

But good times went by so soon. All the schools in China were closed since September 1966, and I had to go back to my hometown to do farmwork. I learned to work in the farmland. Even though I later got a job to teach at the village elementary school, I still had to do farmwork when there was no class.

In 1970, Chinese universities began to enroll the first group of students on the trial basis; I was lucky to be among them. That provided me the most important ticket to leave the country to work in the cities. While the whole country was shouting Down with US imperialism, a limited number of college students were allowed to learn English, the language used by imperialists, and I happened to be one of those students. As a student of English, I witnessed the visit of US president Richard Nixon to Beijing to knock open the door to China in 1972. Nixon’s visit made students of English extremely excited, because we saw sooner or later, what we had learned would be of great use.

Also in 1972, the death of Lin Biao, Mao’s successor, as it had been written into China’s constitution, shook the foundation of trust to Mao for millions of Chinese. Lin, Mao’s closest friend and best student, betrayed Mao. People began to think in private whether Mao was always correct and whether what Mao said was true.

In September 1973, I graduated from Anhui University. I got a job to teach at the university because Deng Xiaoping, the no. 2 capitalist roader during the Cultural Revolution, came to power again after the death of Lin Biao. Professionalism was again recognized under Deng, and that provided the basis for me to be enrolled as a college teacher.

The year 1976 witnessed tremendous changes in China. Mao died in September 9, and in less than a month, Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, was arrested, along with three other top leaders. China turned on a new page. The Mao era was over.

The impact of those events on me was that I had to show who I am. Am I a worker-peasant-soldier student who has no professional skill, a by-product of the Cultural Revolution as described by the new leadership—or a qualified, knowledgeable student of English who can teach at the university?

As China resumed graduate school education in 1978 since the Cultural Revolution, I applied for the Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, the highest learning institute in social sciences. I successfully passed the strict examination and got admitted by the graduate school to earn my MA degree, the first ever in China since 1966.

During my three years at the graduate school in Beijing, I witnessed the dismissal of all the people’s communes in China; farmers were no longer required to work on the collective farmland. Instead, the government distributed lands to the individual farmers to allow them to do farmwork individually. Free trade was no longer a crime. Small business began to sprout out. Under Deng Xiaoping’s theory, white cat or black cat, those that can catch mice are good cats; therefore, the capitalist marketing economy, long attacked as capitalist practice, started to prevail in China. Students were allowed to study in the United States or other countries. China’s door was gradually opened.

Under Deng, capitalism was not all bad. The United States was no longer the no. 1 enemy. Getting rich was not a crime but a glory. China had changed and is still changing.

It was this situation that made it possible for me to be sent to Washington, DC, as a Xinhua correspondent in 1984. During this period, KFC and McDonald’s began to open branches in Beijing and other