CHINA LIES TO THE WEST: TALES OF DISORIENTATION
by Judith Schenck Koffler
Copyright 2007 All Rights Reserved
Introduction
In 1998, I set off from St. Louis for China as a Fulbright lecturer in American law. As one who knew virtually no Chinese and almost nothing of Chinese culture and history, I was feeling both vastly incompetent and giddily excited. I was not sure how I would endure an entire academic year in Wuhan, a polluted, crowded metropolis thousands of miles from home. My career had taken me to several law schools, but the old plague of restlessness seduced me away from a tenured position into realms where I also did not fit: law practice, mediation, Classics, and teaching in an historically black law school. I knew I wanted to go abroad, far from Western culture and things that had grown, no matter where I turned, too familiar. I took to heart something ascribed to Chagall: “Things surely exist, but if we don’t see them they kill us.”
The fact that I was unprepared for China was not (or at least not alone) the fault of the Fulbright program. The entire purpose of my application had been to get to Cairo, a city I had visited the year before and where I felt some fierce destiny was calling to me. In anticipation, I had been studying Arabic, learning to read from right to left, and scribbling voluptuous Arabic words on walls, notebooks, and scraps of paper. One afternoon as I was painting Arabic script in hot pink on my filing cabinet, news arrived that Fulbright turned down my application for Cairo.
Fulbright officials suggested that I reapply for China, where law professors were much in demand. China – it felt like eating leftovers, and I sulked for a few days, angry not be reunited with my “destiny.” But feeling damned if I was going to stay home, I reapplied. In the late spring, Washington notified me that I would be posted at a prominent university in Wuhan, a central Chinese city on the Yangtze River where, I learned, Anheuser-Busch had its main China plant. Losing no time, I telephoned the brewery in St. Louis and talked my way to the office of International Operations. The Vice-President in that office warmly invited me to lunch, gave me a letter of introduction in Chinese for emergency purposes, and put into my hands a colorful map of Wuhan. It was a consolation that I would be able to drink Budweiser and look for an occasional fellow St. Louisan, since the Vice-President, her colleagues and even Mr. Busch visited Wuhan. It seemed now unlikely that I would disappear down the proverbial well.
Family and some friends, however, insisted that I would die, submit to some loathsome disease, or fall prey to the Communist Party. My sister offered to fly me to China for a week so that I could see first-hand the reportedly “abominable” conditions said to prevail in central China. A China legal expert and colleague who had taught sixteen years earlier in Wuhan assured me that it had been a horrible experience. My own doubts remained very deep ones. I was disturbed by the profoundly ridiculous prejudices that bedeviled my mind – most prominent among which was a childhood memory of my mother telling me that if I dug a hole deep enough in the earth, I would come out upside down in China.
That childhood memory began intensifying as the day for departure approached. I recalled summer mornings when I would dig with eager little friends, spurred on by the prospect of emerging feet first into a crowd of slant-eyed rickshaw drivers a million miles away. In my childhood, this image was reinforced by television stereotypes. To a child, it had the quality of an unshakeable truth. But even as I tried to resist this memory – preposterous for an educated professional woman – the image grew more animated. It seemed like a small lesson in my own persistent prejudices, how they gripped the mind in alliance with fear and in defiance of truth.
Later that spring, the returning China Fulbright professors met with the new recruits at dinner in Washington’s Dupont Circle. They were brimful of their adventures in China. If there were hardships, they reported them as fleeting moments blotted out by tales of travel in Tibet and in distant cities, of brilliant and affectionate students, of gourmandizing on Chinese delicacies, of hilarious scrapes with petty officials. The Fulbright professor who had been in Wuhan teaching English did not come to Washington, but he sent me many e-mail messages answering practical questions and assuring me of a rich experience. There seemed to be a consensus among the experienced Fulbrighters that language was not a serious obstacle. The ebullient, elderly wife of one returning China Fulbright scholar made the language barrier seem a door to daily comedy. Not till long afterward did I learn that she had suffered severe depression in China and that Fulbrighters often resisted telling the other side of the truth if they wanted another prestigious award. In that sense, my lack of preparation was both mitigated and intensified by meeting the homeward-bound Fulbrighters.
Not long afterwards, earlier Fulbrighters’ written reports, some quite negative, began arriving from Washington. Fulbright protocol adroitly timed these reports to be sent out after the charmed dinner in Dupont Circle. Reports on Wuhan ranged from “Never come here” to “adapt to discomforts and make the best of it.” Perhaps there would be a compromise: that spring had witnessed catastrophic Yangtze River floods, and secretly I was praying that washed-out roads in Wuhan would convince Washington to redirect me to Shanghai or Beijing. I wrote to Washington to seek a new post in China.
Although there was little time, I engaged a young Chinese tutor from Washington University, where I had been a Visiting Scholar, to give me some elementary verbal skills. My brain, however, was refractory, as if there were no room for yet another language, especially one that had no alphabet and no connection to any of the other Western languages that I had studied. I found myself writing out columns of numbers and basic vocabulary words in Chinese, next to which my hand scrawled Arabic involuntarily. The Chinese characters did not adhere; memory was fighting and surely trying to tell me something. What was it about the Chinese language that turned my brain to lifeless wood? This seemed ominous.
Once in China, however, I fell in love from the first week despite my illiteracy, ignorance, and paralyzing helplessness. From the first few days in Beijing, the sun blistering and the air unbreathable, my senses were nevertheless dancing. My optic, auditory and olfactory nerves felt stimulated to an unaccustomed level of intensity. My imagination released me into waking fantasies. My sense of time, space and reality both disoriented me and introduced me to what I would grow accustomed to calling the quotidian miraculous of China – the almost daily occurrence of some adventure, deed or event so startling, moving or poetic, that I found myself testing whether my senses would grow dull to the unexpected. A peasant carting a huge refrigerator — or a side of pork — on a rusty old bicycle, or a man who stopped time with his fingertips as he practiced Tai Chi, or an ancient hawker carting his wares along the lakeshore as if he were carrying the sun across the sky – these things seemed at the time the stuff of dreams.
Some experiences recur to mind often. I can feel the slippery sand worms slide over my tongue on Hainan Island, where American servicemen would be detained a year later; I hear the cries of butchered pigs puncture the dawn in a sacred mountain. I still see and hear a blind flute player in the forest of a Sichuan mountain, his eyes concave. The light on his face, the green clearing in the woods, the thin line of simple melody, the conflict of anguish and joy that possessed me — these recur regularly like phantoms. And as I write this, I wonder that I may be describing effects of a powerful drug, the felt alteration of the sensuous world, the release from ordinary experience, an easeful addiction.
There were compensating losses for these adventures of the senses. I began to lose the ability to spell English words that had never before troubled me. For weeks at a time I would forget my street address in St. Louis. Words would bubble up in my epiglottis but never make it to my tongue – not Chinese words, but English words. I was becoming analphabetic, doubting my mental powers, and enjoying it. As knowledgeable expatriates assured me, this was evidence of adaptation to China. For me, however, it seemed at times to spell destiny – that I might never leave China. For a while I lost my love of Western culture and turned from books entirely — except when the library was so bitterly cold that the only warmth I could find came from Henry Miller. I became certain that the moon appearing over the lake could not possibly be the same one that I knew from the other side of the world. Sometimes I fell into a lagoon of loneliness and depression, and much later of homesickness for a home that seemed to fade in my memory even as it became more painfully absent. Arrogant bureaucrats and freezing classrooms were nothing compared to an aggressive, smiling rat in my apartment one night. Several times I lost my temper. Sometimes I lost my health to pollution or to an acquired Chinese nicotine addiction. More than once I was sure I would die wheezing and feverish in my cold room, another time feeling drained and lifeless in a dirty hospital in Guangzhou..
But the most redeeming experiences were the loving, gentle hearts of my students, unparalleled in their intelligence and hunger for ideas, abundant in generosity and tolerant beyond my understanding under conditions that seemed unendurable They sustained me, enlivened me, and taught me a kind of reverence that eludes anything I’ve encountered in the West. They gave balance to days of relentless phone-tapping, superintended e-mails, and sanitizing of mail from the States.
Working largely without colleagues or a research library, I taught in an atmosphere of students’ giddy excitement over China’s expected entry into the WTO, their intellectual hunger for Western ideas, their courageous and sometimes disastrously outspoken political dissent. I met lawyers and judges and witnessed a homicide trial just a week before the government shut out the public from the trials of Chinese Democratic Party organizers in Wuhan. I was teaching Freedom of Speech to law students when NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
The present writing emerges out of notes, correspondence, e-mail messages, student papers, letters and photographs. As with most American writers of their China experiences, I have found it necessary to protect the identities of some students and have taken liberties of changing their names and, in a few cases, their identifying characteristics.
A cautionary note might be inserted here. As required by Chinese visa protocol, the medical form my doctor was to fill out had to certify that I was free of “hallucinatory psychosis” before I could enter China. And although certified reasonably sane when I left St. Louis, I wonder whether, for me, China may have been hallucinogenic.
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CHAPTER ONE
Wuhan, China. May 14, 2000.
Dear M.,
I’ve been in China for almost two years now, and I wonder if you would recognize me. I don’t know that I recognize myself. It shows in small things as well as large. Day by day I lose more of my English vocabulary, lose my once unquestioned ability to spell. It shocks me not to be able to answer: is it “week end” or “weekend” or “week-end”? There are days I do not remember my address in St. Louis. The name of my street eludes me, like a ghost, as does the number of the house. I scour and scour my memory and then let it go as if it were destiny.
Divorce proceedings now seem as if they were foreordained, even though D. and I are still deeply attached. When I visited my father last summer, I knew we would not see each other again. But I feel he is here, in Wuhan, where my students planted a graceful, six-foot snow-pine when he died. I go there often to arrange stones around the tree and talk to him, today in the company of an aging Japanese Buddhist who sang chants for my father’s soul.
I think I want to stay here for many years now. The grip of the culture is too powerful. Even though I am barely more than infantile in my speaking ability, I feel myself yielding, yielding. And I am happy living closer to the bone on my “Mother Theresa” wages as a university employee. Five hundred dollars a month, twice what my colleagues earn from their salaries.
This morning a grandmother put into my arms a little baby girl and asked me to raise hert; she can’t afford it. I didn’t know what to do. I miss my own children, but they have their own lives now. My Chinese undergraduates have become my children. They are abundant in their trust, their affection and their devotion to learning. We survived the winter, they shivering in their unheated concrete dormitories, afraid to fall asleep because rats may bite them in the night; and we shivering together in the dim classroom, where the dampness drains all warmth from your very marrow and your fingers are so stiff with cold that they can’t move the chalk across the blackboard. But the students are relentlessly cheerful, so furious in their studies that the hardships seem, even in the agony of the cold, bittersweet.
I keep reading your last message, “Dear Judith, You sound so happy that you’re scaring the hell out me. Could it be that I finally know someone who’s had a taste of true fulfillment?”
I only know that I couldn’t be so happy in the States. That life over there seems by contrast poor and brutish in its materialism and spiritual estrangement. And that unhappiness over here is acute but somehow more bearable. I can’t explain it. But let me share with you this diary entry:
“I think a lifetime passed yesterday. It was Saturday. I awoke at 4 AM in utter blackness, made even deeper by reading Li Lichun’s despondent messages on my computer screen about failing to get his visa approved for Wisconsin. I composed several letters on his behalf and then watched the darkness scatter and the dawn turn the distant lake a pale rose. But it had seemed that the darkness of the night was receding into my soul, and nothing was capable of lifting it. Part of it was helplessness and anger; the day before, a scholarly paper arrived in the mail, and the censors, goddamn them, had plucked out every other page. I was hating China, or hating the powers that tore at my mind’s freedom. That kind of impotence will drive you to despair. On top of that, my family seemed horribly beyond reach and my isolation impenetrable.
“I was in more dread because I could not face the day’s plan. Several undergraduates in my Contracts class would be arriving at 6:30 for an early morning bicycle ride along the lake and up to Moshan (Mo Mountain). I was convinced that my unhappiness would overwhelm them, try as I might to cover or choke it down. I looked in the mirror and saw fatigue and heavy eyes. Perhaps they would look at me and change their minds. Instead they startled me out of a paralyzing loneliness.
“Five of them arrived, bright-eyed and gleeful. I laughed when I saw them panting up the hill, full of their accustomed youthful enthusiasm. Carrena, Anna, Puff, Crow and Alyosha. They infected me at once. The morning was bright but still cool, and the breezes from the lake dimpled our skin and caressed our heads. We skidded down the back gate and cycled along the lakeshore for about forty minutes. No one had eaten anything, and I had promised them that we would stop at the park for some breakfast. We had planned to enter the botanical gardens at the back gate, which in fact was bricked up, and to avoid the admission fee by arriving so early in the morning. But the disheveled old gatekeeper (he must sleep on a tiny pallet in the guard house), hobbled out and wanted full payment, which I handed over.
“We were all desperately hungry, but there was nothing hot to eat except bowls of packaged noodles with boiled water. Poor Alyosha, who studies Russian and knows no English, devoured them as if he hadn’t eaten in days. The rest of us gnawed on spoiled cookies and crackers from a little stand in the park, tended by a one-eyed sly old veteran and his ragged grandson.
“With a little bit on our stomachs, we were in high spirits now and wandered past the fragrant gardens and down a big hill toward the lake, where the Moshan park begins. We found an inviting spot along the lakeshore. Crow, who has been stone-faced in class and who guarded me with his bicycle as if it were his solemn duty, came to life. He took out the badminton racquets stashed in his backpack, and we whacked merrily away while the others sat down and played cards. I was sure the students would be ready to go home. On less than three hours sleep, my eyes kept closing and my body threatened to collapse into a heap of fatigue and hunger.
“Instead, we encouraged each other to keep the plan and climb all the way to the top of the mountain, where a six-story pagoda offers a majestic view of the vast lakes and countryside. As we pushed on to the top of Moshan, surges of energy overtook us. Alyosha challenged me; I challenged him back, and we dashed uphill till we were out of breath. After half an hour of climbing, we passed a swath of destruction from last year’s mysterious “foggy tornado” that was said to rise up from the lake and devastate one side of the forested hill. People still think it was a landing from outer space. A plaque commemorates the mystery, which my students read to me. We climbed the steepest part of the hill, finally reached the pagoda at the top and locked up our bikes to trees.
“It was nearly 10:00 now, and the guard reminded us at the entrance that the musicians would be playing the ancient instruments and the famous bells at half-past ten. We climbed up six flights of stairs to the top of the pagoda, wandered in the halls and loitered at the top, surveying the hills and the far reaches of East Lake. Some of the students had never been here before and were very excited. Alyosha, who knows Pushkin and Dostoevsky and has more energy than a snowstorm, was beside himself. He’s not a law student, but the others clearly love him, and I was delighted to have his company. Puff, a quiet, gentle girl with a soft voice, short hair and responsive eyes, translated some of the ancient Chinese scripts on display in the vestibule. Carrena, buoyant and pleasingly rounded, is the one who has been teaching me Tai Chi. And the lovely Anna, one of my star students, kept a close watch on me. She has a generous heart and innocent judgment sure to mature very soon. She serves some important post in the students’ Communist Party, which seems to strain her loyalty. It would not surprise me that she had to write up a formal report of the day’s outing to her supervisor.
“It was time for the music to begin; the musicians, dressed in period costumes, were gathering in the central hall. One young woman played a zither-like stringed instrument. She wore an embroidered blue satin robe with Mandarin collar and long sleeves. A pearled headdress rested on her high-piled hair. I was sure she had descended from high heaven. Her face could have been the model for a feminine Buddha, composed and inwardly tender, high rounded eyebrows and flawless skin; a mouth such as a Botticelli might have imagined. A saffron-robed young man struck the bells with his long stick. He was so thin and moved so gracefully that he seemed to float around them. Two of the young women broke into tender songs that mingled with the pan pipes and strange moaning song of the wind instruments.
“I think we were all transported beyond hunger. After the concert, we jumped back on the bikes, cycled down the hill, along the lakeshore, back through campus, and then past the main gate into chaotic street traffic to Wind-Heaven (Feng Tian) Restaurant, where my students treated me to a huge meal of dumplings, beef, Chinese cabbage in hot sauce, lotus root, pork with ginger, and lots of beer. They sang Chinese karaoke with a video and a microphone till 2 PM.
“It was past the appointed hour of siesta when, well-fed but exhausted, we came back and said good-bye at the crossroad near the undergraduate dorms.
“I thought I could sleep for years. After a long nap, I awoke with anticipation. Four other students were coming over at sunset to go rowing on the lake. Daniel the wise, Yun the graceful, shy Thomas, and the robust, hilarious Robin accompanied me to the lake where we engaged a sampan from a handsome old oarsman. We rowed by twilight into the middle of the lake bantering and watching the stars grow bright and the moon pour down on us. We talked about Chinese mythology and politics, or listened for sounds from the far shore, or enjoyed our own laughter.
“At length the sky grew very dark. The moon had disappeared behind heavy clouds. The water seemed intent on pulling us farther away, and we were all so giddy that we made a game of getting the oars just right. You have to go hand over hand, or else you keep going in a circle. Suddenly we realized that a motor boat was headed toward us at full speed, and we were sure we would be split in two and killed instantly. It was the oarsman who had been concerned for our safety because we were now very far from shore, drifting to the dangerous middle of the lake where the winds were picking up. So he towed us back to the shore, where we gratefully disembarked, completely famished.
“We wandered to campus, to yet another little restaurant – one of many dingy, indistinguishable such places where the food was invariably delicious – and were the last ones there at 9 PM, ordering spicy chicken, steamed pork and fried eggplant with rice, all of which the students inhaled noisily to the last grain. They walked me to my apartment and came up briefly to inspect the newly arrived Monopoly game. But two hours later, near midnight, the boys and I were still playing (the girls had curfew and couldn’t climb into their windows as easily as the boys). Robin had accumulated most of the properties and was greedily gouging us with rents on his hotel spaces, while Daniel and Thomas had formed a joint venture to protect themselves from his depredations. I had liquidated my holdings to stave off bankruptcy. Good lessons for the commercial law class.
“It didn’t seem possible that I had awakened in such a black despair that morning. But it was another China day, a day when I dreaded the dawn and the day came nevertheless with joy overtaking. Even in my dread, I half suspected that some quotidian miracle might redeem my dark heart, just because this is China.”
Yes, M., that is a typical day in China. I am happy. And yet I am haunted. When I went back to St. Louis for a week last spring (Spring? I forget when to capitalize), the house had seemed so lovely, so fragile. The flowering trees in the yard, the little smiling Buddha I had placed beside the fish pond, the soft waterfall – these were content. Each room of the house exuded some memory of loving hands on its walls, some palpable traces of inner expression. The sunlight in the hall on golden oak woodwork, the quiet paintings I had put on the walls, the angle of a chair or the fall of a drape. Nothing pretentious or contrived; furnishings and books and bric-a-brac of two lives that came together after many years of wandering alone and somehow arranged a warm, inviting place. I had feared finding the house an emblem of neglect and disrepair, a tumble-down witness of the disintegration of our former relationship. But it was just as it had seemed when we had been happy.
But yet not so. And whether from memory or ignorance, I felt corrosive marks of suspicion and defensiveness, things I had not recognized before. The traces of these things tend to run like rats invading dark places where the rain and winds have entered. They spoiled the sweetness of return, and I realized I could not return. The whole image I described in the earlier paragraph is cracked. I thought of a line of the German poet Rilke, who describes a blind man disturbing the streets, “like a crack in a fine china” — something like that. The crack was visible, palpable, made everything utterly different. I recognized home, but in some ways it was unrecognizable. Perhaps it is I who am the blind man.
And maybe this feeling explains why I often don’t remember my address in St. Louis. D. is not there now. He has gone off to Spain, where the light drenches. He asks me to join him, and I sit or move with convulsive uncertainty over here, sometimes in wild regret and darkness, sometimes feeling blessed in all my senses at the simplest things.
And there is heartache, nevertheless, because the moon moves through perfumed trees on this voluptuous spring night in Wuhan, and the leaves cast trembling shadows on the dragon wall, like a mysterious language addressed to me. The breezes stroke the downy hairs on my arms like a lover, and I am breathless to find myself made still of pleasure and pain maddeningly inescapable. Middle-aged yet made of pleasures I had never imagined, of the mind and of the body.
In another letter, at another time, you will learn of these, or better, if you come to China, you will learn them for yourself.
Affectionately,
Judy
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CHAPTER TWO – ARRIVAL
Beijing
In the blazing heat of August, 1998, the new Fulbrighters arrived at a hotel in Beijing for a three-day Fulbright orientation with the director and staff.
Altogether, the China Fulbrighters numbered seventeen: fourteen men and two other women, one of whom was a nun. Not remarkably, the American officials were all men. Several Fulbrighters brought wives, the art historian brought her husband and adopted Chinese daughter, and a few other couples came with children. Some had come for one semester only, and four or five had held China Fulbright awards previously. Among the group were two law teachers who came for a semester only, a journalism professor, a couple of literature specialists (one of whom was the nun), a business school professor, an economist, an anthropologist, and a few historians.
For many of us, the orientation gave us our first experience in China and would serve as a short transition before we traveled onward to our respective host universities. Some did not travel far. Most of the Fulbrighters were posted at Beijing, Shanghai, or other east coast cities with fairly high living standards. Four of us would go off into the hinterland.
Together at the hotel, we met our individual university liaisons, generally very young and friendly officials from the university’s Foreign Affairs Office. Guo Liang, a long-haired, slender woman in her early twenties who sometimes called herself Lisa, was my FAO liaison from Wuhan University. She had bright eyes, perfect posture, and dressed impeccably in a short navy suit with new pumps. Her English was superb, her manner sympathetic and gentle. Repeatedly she punctuated her sentences with a childlike giggle that contradicted her sophisticated poise. Over the course of the next two years, Guo Liang would become a lifeline and a faithful friend, smoothing the path and extricating me from a string of embarrassments.
Many of the Fulbrighters, excited but severely jet-lagged, slipped into comas or snored off during what seemed like merciless hours of briefing in the hotel conference room. Later, bused over to the American Embassy, we woke up at the sight of a set of three big, brightly colored panic buttons that one of the officials pointed out, one of which was labeled “riot.” The following spring would furnish an occasion for U.S. officials to use them when NATO bombs mistakenly rained on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and angry Beijing crowds threw rocks at this American building. (We would then explain to our distraught students that our military must have used old AAA maps.)
Several officials from the Embassy lectured us on what we might expect in the next several months, including our personal security and dealings with the notoriously officious and sometimes rapacious Foreign Affairs Office of our universities. Their cautions seemed to contain insensitive slights to the generally very young Chinese hosts, as if they were invisible. Ill at ease, some of us shot disquieting glances at each other and apologized privately later to our liaisons.
The Embassy security officials looked unhealthy and pasty-looking, as if they had not been outside for several years. One monotone, balding official with a shiny face warned the newcomers about Chinese pick-pockets but assured us that China was reasonably safe.
For one session, we entered a darkened room without windows. Narrow, cylindrical overhead lights penetrated our individual heads, leading me to wonder if the room might double as an interrogation chamber. Episodically, the Beijing Fulbright director disappeared with a curious grin behind a smoky glass panel at the back of the room and fidgeted with equipment. I heard muffled whirrs and buzzing that made me uneasy. In the concentrated light, I felt as if I were being involuntarily brain-printed from the inside out. I attributed those feelings to jet lag and began to mistrust my perceptions, but something unsettling still sits poorly in my stomach.
From the outset, it seemed that my corpuscles felt more secure in the company of my Chinese liaison, Guo Liang, than in the American Embassy, and I wondered if I were already “going native.” The settled sense of cultural superiority that the American officials seemed to exude troubled me. I had not yet encountered the Chinese version of the arrogant bureaucrat, but the following months would provide many opportunities.
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The highlight of the Beijing orientation was a Saturday excursion to the Great Wall for the Fulbrighters and their families, together with their University liaisons. My husband and I would have a leisurely saunter up and along the Wall with Guo Liang as well as relief from the blinding heat, traffic and polluted air of Beijing. She was already proving to be a welcome companion, giving patient explanations, encouraging us to relax and enjoy the outing, and putting us at ease about the coming year.
After a slow climb up the wall, Guo Liang and David decided to get out of the heat and rested under an umbrella at a snack area with ice cream and cold drinks. I needed an outlet for a sudden burst of energy and arranged to climb on my own and meet up with them later for the descent back to the bus. I knew the climb was not easy for David, who was in his mid-sixties and not athletically inclined.
High up along the wall a cloud of white butterflies pulsated about the thick stones. The fresh air, the buoyancy of release from an unpleasant two days at the Embassy, the promise of the new semester filled me excitement and an almost infantile desire to test boundaries. I scampered past tourists till the crowds thinned to an occasional hiker. The intense heat finally slowed me down; the heavy din of cicadas reached my ears and gradually I fell into a dream world. My fevered imagination caught the sounds of Chinese armies clashing by night. Watch fires then lit up the crenellated wall as it snaked for miles and miles along distant mountain ridges. Then it was day again and the butterflies floated without attachment to time as if they might have been ancient witnesses of scenes then imagined.
I felt like a small child at play in a strange but not entirely unfamiliar world, as if I had emerged on the other side from digging that hole through the center of the earth. I climbed to a point far from other lonely walkers. It was high enough that not a soul was visible below me and there was silence except for insects buzzing among the weeds. Here, the wide stone wall disintegrated into a tumble of stones and debris. I was alone among ruins. My lungs inflated like sails and I felt very light.
By now the afternoon sun was falling aslant over the stones, whose irregularities made eye-catching patterns of light and shadow. A passing dark cloud covered the sun and brought a chill into the air. Suddenly a light, needle-fine rain fell on my skin and, after a few minutes, passed away. It seemed I was very far up.
It was then that I realized I had climbed far beyond my plan. I surveyed the area for a hidden place to pee, but quickly changed my mind. I was not alone. Crouched among the weeds, a young Chinese man, his eyes closed, was masturbating.
Hoping not to disturb his rapture, I hurried back down the Wall, fearing that I would no longer find Guo Liang and my husband or the other Fulbrighters among legions of descending foreign tourists and Chinese visitors, none of whose backs seemed familiar. In alarm and confusion I kept seeing before my eyes that vigorous man among the weeds. I wondered whether there was something in the ruined wall that occasioned need to release bodily energy. Perhaps it was the ghosts of the unlucky workers centuries ago who fell from exhaustion and whose bones were used as mortar. Perhaps they were transmitting their élan vital from another world.
Images from the Great Wall occupied my mind the next day on the plane from Beijing to Wuhan. Thereafter, nearly every time I saw a butterfly in China it seemed to cast a spell over me as if I were propelled back to the quiet place where the wall lay in ruins and where ancient armies were still clashing, the guard houses lit up against the dark night. An imagined, omnipresent world in parallel with the waking moment seemed to stalk my consciousness, and yet I felt like a spectator watching myself. This was more than day-dreaming or imagination, at least as I was used to their hold on me. The duality of experience, of dreaming and waking, taxed my understanding. I sometimes felt that my consciousness was like the two strands of DNA in a spiraling double helix. The longer I stayed in China, the experience of the present moment and its activities, whether eating, or teaching, or cooking, or strolling, felt connected by an invisible rung on a ladder to an ancient ritual world. I would exist in the moment and simultaneously outside of it. Again and again I would become conscious of this fluid helix, a dual dancing thread that spun my waking experiences. Perhaps here began the “hallucinatory psychosis” of which my doctor had certified me to be free (along with leprosy, AIDS and “toxicomania”) on the visa forms required by the Chinese government.
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Wuhan
Chicago, China. Triple city of Hankou, Wuchang and Hanyang. Dirty, choking city of 7 or 8 million souls on the muddy banks of the swollen Yangtze River.
In 1938, Auden and Isherwood crossed the Yangtze here in a driving blizzard. Chapter One of their book, Journey to a War, ends on this ominous note as the two of them slip down icy stone steps to the Wuhan ferry:
Coolies jostled blindly against us, with the averted, snot-smeared, animal faces of the very humble….. Slithering and cursing, we crowded into the hold of the listing steamer and stood, jammed too tight to move, amidst straw baskets, rifles, soldiers, peasants and sacks. This was not the moment to fuss about infection or lice. On the distant shore, the buildings of Hankow stood grim and black against the low clouds; before us swept the Yangtze, a terrible race of yellow waves and tearing snow. We had arrived, it seemed, at the very end of the world.
Not twenty-four hours later, they declare that they would rather be here “than anywhere else on earth.” And that was in bitter winter.
But it was late August when I arrived, and to quote General Stillwell, Wuhan was “hotter than the hinges of Hell.” I cursed myself, my fate and the Fulbright program to arrive at China’s infamously hot furnace. I had not heard of Journey to a War and had known nothing of Stillwell’s Wuhan adventures when I went to China. Wuhan was, for all I knew, one vast, amorphous, overcrowded, backward, God-forsaken inland river metropolis somewhere in central China. Few Westerners penetrated here except, I thought, to take a boat to the Three Gorges, adopt a Chinese orphan, or to do some unavoidable business. Guide books found hardly anything worth detaining tourists in Wuhan. In short, it felt like the end of the world that I was headed for. Little did I suspect that, like Auden and Isherwood, I would soon rather be in Wuhan than anywhere else on earth.
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If Beijing had felt like an in-between world, the plane’s noisy arrival at Wuhan Airport ruptured musings on yesterday’s visit to the Great Wall. The aircraft’s grating brakes signaled a terminus as well as departure from safety and familiarity — no American Embassy (however macabre it had seemed), and no exit. By Fulbright rules, Wuhan would be home for an entire academic year. Although our university liaison, Guo Liang, had kept us in high spirits during the past few days, my emotions were at war between anticipation and antipathy. As we disembarked in the torrid heat, a part of me yielded to fate, relieved in the way a convict is relieved to go at last to prison after a long, exhausting trial.
A confusing delegation from the University was on hand, among whom prominently figured Mr. Qi, (pronounced “Chee”) a humble, mousy but kindly official from the Foreign Affairs Office (the Waiban, as we would thenceforth call it). By his age and from her sudden silence, Mr. Qi was obviously superior in rank to Guo Liang. His English, however, was often barely understandable — as if he had sticky marshmallows or peanut butter — or both – in his mouth. He suffered from an inclination to stammer which intensified in attempts to speak a foreign tongue. Little did I suspect that Mr. Qi would be our official liaison, and that communicating with his gentle but insufferable stuttering and erratic English would be one of the major challenges of life at the University. It was easy to like him; he had a very tender mien and would repeatedly manifest concern (however impotent) for our welfare and immediate whereabouts.
After considerable delay, four wiry men, including our hosts, located several huge bags and hoisted them into a weathered mini-van. A thirty-something German scholar, tall and immensely attractive, had arrived by the same plane from Beijing and introduced himself as Joerg, the German teacher at the University. Joerg spoke with a great deal of gusto in superb English as well as Chinese. Enthusiastic and full of mirth despite fatigue, Joerg’s ready laughter coupled with his seemingly positive five years of experience teaching at Wuhan University lent relief to the suffocating heat.
We drove for about and hour and a half through very wet countryside. Here and there a solitary peasant in a pointed straw hat stood in a wide green field surveying the receding flood waters. The distant verdant scenes contrasted with thick banks of brown mud along the road. At length, we reached dense, maddening traffic in the city, where Chinese signs and billboards sank my spirits. It was like a forest of impenetrable symbols to which I had no access or hope of access. Joerg, who was fluent in Chinese, seemed happier and more voluble the closer we came to the University.
At last we arrived at the Foreign Experts Building (or, as others called it, the Barbarian Barracks), located at the farthest reach of the sprawling campus, at the back gate and just a few hundred meters from the edge of a vast lake. It dawned on me later that the location would aid our being promptly evacuated in case of incidents on campus, from which we were isolated by trees, iron gates, and a high hill.
The four-story building of washed concrete appeared from the outside as modest and reasonably acceptable. Inside behind a counter were a receptionist who ostensibly spoke no English and two female attendants chattering rapidly in Chinese while they busied themselves finding a key to the room. They seemed to regard me with the mild disdain one might show to a disabled animal that had strayed from the woods. I was feeling very undignified, ignorant of customs and language, my pink dress soaked from perspiration and my face surely revealing stunned bewilderment. The sounds of Chinese, the sing-song tones, flew in and out of my ears with no pattern of comprehension. I could not imagine replicating those sounds, and to my unaccustomed ears, they felt harsh and forbidding. My husband and I craved nothing more than to find a quiet bed to collapse into.
The heat was blinding outside. Inside the air did not move. We mounted the stairs in the company of Mr. Qi and two men bearing our luggage. Now my spirits, so buoyant from the Great Wall adventure, began to sink like lead in water. My gaze dropped to my feet, where ancient cheap red carpeting gave way to gaping holes over concrete floor. On the edges of the stairs, aluminum strips were twisting away. As we ascended and the heat grew more intense, I heard my husband panting in the noisome air. We grew more disheartened at each landing. It seemed as if we were on an inverse road to the Inferno, where each level showed increasingly punitive decay and mournful neglect: mildewed, dirty walls; lurid orange mock-velvet curtains that suggested cheap brothels; hall windows caked with dirt and thick dust; sullen, sour-smelling hallways. The air was stifling and immobile when we reached the fourth floor.
The attendants carried in the bags and left. Had I read Stilwell’s account of Wuhan before I left St. Louis, I might have been ready to meet what he had called “the bunghole of creation.”
Room 406, home. Inside was a floor covered in soiled brown carpet reeking of dynasties of dirty feet and lack of ventilation. Three square upholstered chairs covered in stained, unmatched green pseudo-velvet and cheesecloth backs were rolled into one apparent sofa, but drifted aimlessly across the room on casters when we sat in them. The dining furniture was a card-table of cheap, chipped veneer that had seen many years of abuse, four tiny imitations that served as stools, one pale ceiling fixture of a lonely light bulb that would give the nights a ghoulish look. Two bookcases matching in their level of abuse, a corner cabinet which fell over when its doors were pulled open, and a coat rack with broken metal hooks to tear at one’s clothes graced the living room. In the study was a tiny desk and chair crammed next to a guest bed.
The bedroom boasted two single beds, hard mattresses on platforms with plastic-covered headboards that collapsed on the floor when the bed was pulled away, a battered wardrobe and a fall-apart chest of drawers of the same splintered veneer. Filthy ochre ceilings and mildewed walls were blistered with old paint and here and there chunks of plaster had fallen out long ago. On the dirty windows were dingy orange curtains thick with black soot. Standing sentinel near the door was a dysfunctional bog-green refrigerator, which announced the narrow kitchen consisting of two filthy, encrusted gas burners and a stained old-fashioned sink. Touches of modernity in the bathroom, where old newspapers were stuffed into cracks in the ceiling, included an American Standard cranberry colored sink and matching tub and toilet – a welcome retreat were it not for the stench of stale urine and sewer gas that escaped from an open drain hole. The tub sported thick brown rot and water was running around the back of the sighing toilet.
My husband sat shell-shocked on one of the green sofa sections as it rolled slowly across the stained brown carpet to the middle of the room. I collapsed on the bed and sobbed. What had I done? Why had I left home? What had the experienced Fulbrighters been so cheerful about? Was Wuhan University, far from Beijing and Shanghai, so very different? How could the Fulbright office have betrayed me so?
But necessity – the lack of toilet paper and the want of soap and towels – drew us out of the apartment and into the marketplace in the company of the incomprehensible Mr. Qi, who was waiting for me downstairs. By now we were kicking at our own tempers, impatient, hungry and weary, and ticked off most of all by the lack of toilet paper and soap. Yet we took delight in finding abundant supplies of merchandise in the department store where Mr. Qi escorted us, and where the few Chinese customers awake during siesta hours had greeted the six-foot-four David and my lanky height with mouths agape. We returned to campus feeling a minor triumph with new towels in hand and began settling in, unpacking tea and coffee, always good for restoring the spirits. The bathroom tap yielded a narrow stream of brownish tepid water for bathing. After several minutes, it ran almost clear. We stopped complaining and nearly squealed to feel moderately clean again. Then we went out for a walk around the campus, which was boisterous with students and activity.
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CHAPTER THREE: AROUND CAMPUS
Wuhan University is made for walking. It seemed you could walk for hours and easily lose yourself in some undiscovered corner, even if you had been there for many months. In fine weather, the semi-tropical trees in the middle of campus were lush and dense. Even in the furnace temperatures of a Wuhan summer, you could stroll through densely shaded paths and seek relief in the wooded dells around campus.
The campus, like Wuhan itself, does not separate the urban and the rural. In China, or at least in the fertile Hubei province, the rural interpenetrates the urban wherever it can. Peasant families cultivated mere inches of dark green vegetables at the edge of campus. Everything seemed to grow boisterously verdant in these tiny patches, even if only a handful of spinach leaves.
Outside the campus, close by the lake were larger cultivated lands dotted with emerald clusters, their leaves fanning out above the dark soil. A combination of ample rain, a long growing season, and ladles of stinking human excrement gravy guaranteed harvests. Very often you would see a leathery-faced peasant in a bamboo hat stirring up human waste from a ceramic vat and carefully apportioning it over the hungry plants. A noisome odor of diarrhea clung to the air, gagging the throat and causing the head to turn and turn to relieve the nostrils. I realized then that my ideas of spinach had been impoverished, linked only to odor-free chilled vegetable bins in sterile supermarkets.
Within the confines of campus, Nature felt abundant. Flower gardens across the road from the law library building bloomed with colors, orange and yellow and red, in the summer heat. Roses grew red and pink against the wall of a derelict old classroom building or in a neglected courtyard. Tall sycamore trees (afterward decapitated en masse) created a green canopy over campus roads and along the lake shore.
Strolling without a destination would take me up and down steep hills past meadows and greenhouses, pots full of golden chrysanthemums in the fall, to a dark lagoon with fallen logs floating at the edges, through forest paths to faculty housing, past small canteens, and along the shores of the lake until I reached the adjoining campus of the Hydroelectric University.
Except for the lake shore and the main streets that bordered two sides of the university, it was difficult to determine where the campus ended. It stretched over hills, through woods and fields, beyond the old buildings with pagoda-style roofs, past half-hidden or overgrown villas that hinted at former luxury, new white concrete buildings under construction, concrete apartment blocks wearisome in their sameness. Behind our foreigners’ housing, broken cement stairs and rocks led to quiet woods where, in the fragrant morning air, old people would practice Tai Qi in silent grace. Once I came across an elderly couple bellowing their lungs out and quickly hid from their view. It struck me as something you would do to express impotent rage or save yourself from madness, but one of my Chinese students insisted that it was a healthy and common exercise deriving from antiquity.
My solitary expeditions in the woods would sometimes reveal a crude brick hovel where wet laundry seemed never to dry and then to a modern, gated building with a forbidding air – perhaps a research center or a Party retreat. Other paths through the woods led past a large, tumbledown structure that seemed to have comfortably housed, once upon a time, high-ranking scholars or officials, or perhaps the Japanese who had invaded this campus and planted the cherry trees. I imagined fixing up one of these houses and turning it into a center for American law and culture with a private library – and wrote up a grant proposal that met many a deaf ear.
With so much to discover, I found it often too tempting to go out rather than stay indoors and read. I think I read less during those two years in Wuhan than almost any period of my life, not only because there was little material in English in the law library and limited resources in the main libraries, but also no real opportunity to do research. And even if there had been, the lure of discovery outside was too strong to resist. It was as if even the semi-familiar scenes of campus life were a child’s kaleidoscope. A fraction of a turn and everything took on a new angle, new colors and configurations. The eyes took delight at the leaping young students on the basketball court, or the Africans darting through the air in their soccer game, or the lithe young women stretching their limbs and doing calisthenics, or the weightless dance of the Tai Qi master as he trained a dozen students on the playing grounds. Often it was enough simply to gaze at the hundreds of students moving, moving, moving in ceaseless progression, books in hand, packs on backs, chatting in lively fashion in the language I did not understand. The elemental energy of it all was addictive.
I knew it would be time to move on when I grew so accustomed to the scene that it ceased to make my blood pound, or startle my vision. It was that way with the sycamores at Wuhan University. I had grown so accustomed to their immense forms and generous shade on campus and around the lake that I had nearly ceased to notice them. But one day — overnight it seemed — the trees lost their green heads. All that was left were the leafless trunks, tragic and hideous, like guillotined bodies. Whose savagery could this be, to lop away all the beautiful, nourishing foliage? It resembled a mass murder. My blood pounded with lust for vengeance. Without the accustomed green shade, the sun beat down ruthlessly on the dirt roads. Dust and heat penetrated the skull; sweat poured out abundantly, the tongue swelled up like cotton in the mouth. The contrast was infernal.
The story was that this was an experiment. The sycamores gave off bad elements, allergens and other things, my students explained, and the botanists were going to graft new trees onto the trunks. Eventually, the trees sprouted green again as the transplanted twigs tapped into the life of the tree trunks. Would this also be an image of China, alien twigs grafted atop ancient trunks?
CHAPTER FOUR: A SPEECH CONTEST
