Part Twenty Four

We worked hard during the week – and we partied hard on the days off.

Maybe it was all that sex and scandal airport fiction that we were picking up from the bus seats of American tourists (like Arthur Haley’s “Hotel”)– but for whatever reason, my group of friends, most of whom knew English, were much more like young Americans than like the Chinese of our parents generation.


(For so many years, ever since 1949, we had been forbidden to listen to BBC or Voice of America, all the shortwave frequencies had been blocked, and there was hardly any current event reading material to be found. We knew almost nothing about the rest of the world. The first time I saw a foreign product was in the early 1960’s when my father’s co-worker bought a transistor radio from Japan. I was amazed that you could hold it in your hand while listening to it. Foreigners were rarely seen on the streets of Beijing . In the early 1960s. we ran into a group of foreigners on the shopping street. I did not know where they were from, but a couple of them were black, and one of them was very tall and thin, with long fluffy hair. Now I realize that maybe they were black hippies, but it was very strange to us at that time. They must have been high status since there were some government officials with them.)



Both my husband and I were often on the road. As a journalist, he made several long trips every year (once he visited Peru – and brought me back an alpaca wool sweater) While working as a tour guide, I had to stay at the hotel with my groups – whether we were touring Beijing or Nanking.


When we had some time at home, we often threw big parties for our friends.

I did all the cooking – and then everyone did all the dancing, dancing, dancing --- sometimes all the way until daybreak, when we would cover the windows with blankets to keep out the daylight. Some people got tired and fell asleep on the bed, but when they woke up, they’d go back to dancing, and as you might imagine, alcohol would be involved.


We were some high-energy young Chinese ! We were party pioneers – and my husband and I served as “party central” for our group of friends – because we had our own apartment (many of them still lived with their family). We also didn’t have any children, and my income was sufficient to buy all the food (in China, the hostess provides everything – no such thing as “pot luck”)

Whenever we had too many people for our party room, we would take the bus or bicycle over to a friend’s place. He had a new, completely unfurnished apartment. (so there was no furniture to get in the way)

Regarding my income, it had started as only 43 yuan/month – like every other college graduate. But within a few years I was getting bonuses from the shops and restaurants where I took the tourists – and eventually I was making more money than even my high official father.

Regarding children, we finally tried to have one, but it ended in tragedy.

When my husband and I had first become lovers, we were eager but also very naive about sex. We didn’t want to have children right away, but we also didn’t know how to prevent that from happening. We had a “barefoot doctor” manual on birth control, but it turns out that it had the fertility cycles all wrong . We had condoms, but often they broke. So I ended up with two pregnancies – and two abortions. Abortions, even late term abortions, were easily available – but that didn’t make them any less painful and humiliating.

Then, later, when we were ready to have a child, I miscarried at 7 months. The doctor said that in America the child would have lived – but Beijing, at that time, had no facility to care for premature babies.

And that was the last time we tried. I was told by the doctor that we should wait for a couple of years before trying again, and being on the road all the time, I really did not have time to take care of children anyway ( meanwhile my sisters and brothers all had their baby girls between 1980 -1982, and I was just as happy to be an aunt instead of a mom.)


Instead of having children – we had parties.

For music, we had a small tape recorder – and cassettes of mostly Russian music – of the kind we could dance to – like waltzes.

For my thirtieth birthday party, we had 15- 20 guests, and we ate, drank, and danced.

Most of the party goers were my husband’s friends– while I had a few friends from the office and a few more from my student days – including that short, wild girl with whom I once broke into a movie theater back in high school.

Many of our partygoers were couples – but we had many singles as well –and sometimes singles would become couples. Over the course of many parties, one of my friends found a lover – broke up – found another lover – and later broke up with him as well.

Like me, all of my girl friends soon got married --- but within a few years, all of them got divorced as well – and as it turned out, none of them got remarried either. Why should they ?

And one of the couples that met each other at one of these parties --- was my own husband and the wife of another man !

Ever since we’d first met, I’d felt that he was never completely open with me – but now disturbing evidence began to appear that raised a lot of questions.

Since I was housecleaner and laundress (without the benefit of washing machines), nothing much happened in our apartment that could escape my attention.

One day, after I got home from a two week trip to somewhere, I found that something very odd had happened in our bedroom. The bed sheet had been washed, and was recovering the bed, but not in the way that I had always done it.

Why did I find black hairs on the pillow that were longer than mine? Why had the transom window above the door to our (office building) bedroom been covered in black paper ? Why was my husband receiving extra money from his mother – what was he spending it on ?

And it was very hard to hide anything from the neighbors, since we lived at the end of a long hallway and someone visiting us had to walk past every other single room. Plus, when you entered the courtyard, you had to pass the doorman. Strangers were not allowed to enter, unless they were visitors and then they had to mention who they were going to visit. There was almost no privacy at all.


I began talking with the doorman and my next door neighbor (a high school girl) – and I learned that everyone in our building (except me) knew that my husband was seeing another woman.

I confronted him – but he denied it – so I moved into our second room (our apartment had two rooms – but each was in a different part of the building) – and that’s how we lived for the next year. I told him that we could get back together, if only he would be open about what he had done – but he always denied it. He didn’t want a divorce – and I didn’t want to tell my parents about it – so we were in something of a stalemate.

Part Twenty Three

I began my first post-graduate job in late ‘79
- just as China was opening up for foreign tourists.

There was only one tourist company, the state run China International Travel Service and I worked in the Beijing branch as a local English speaking tour guide.

There were only three hotels for foreign tourists at that time, the Friendship Hotel (where we used to the live), the Front Gate Hotel on the south side the city, and the Beijing Hotel in Tiananmen Square – which was the preferred destination since it was in the center of the city and close to the Forbidden City.

The original Beijing Hotel was built in the early 1920’s and a new building was attached to its east side in the 1970’s. Originally, plans called for this new wing to reach taller than its current 17 stories. But according to rumor, the high officials who lived in Zhong Nan Hai were afraid that they might be seen from the top of the building, so the building had to be re-designed. ( For hundreds of years, ever since Ming dynasty, houses in Beijing were only allowed one story – since the emperors didn’t want ordinary people to see them.)

New tour guides, like myself, spent our first weeks memorizing the script and following the senior guides around until we had proven ourselves capable to take groups on our own (which were groups that the seasoned guides didn’t want.)

Some of the guides preferred large groups (so they would get larger commissions from restaurants and shops) – and some of them tried to avoid tourists from New York, since they were known to be more difficult and demanded more attention. The guides were the only English speakers the tourists would ever meet, and were available for complaints 24 hours a day.—even back at the hotel, where we would sleep in an adjacent room.

But I was just happy to be around American tourists , not only to improve my English but also to learn about that part of the world. I learned that American people were often kind, simple and honest. They believed what you told them.

I don’t like it, but in China, a person who tells 100% truth is known as “stupid” - and sometimes we had to lie to tourists about where they might stay that evening, because no place was available (the hotels had been overbooked) It was very hard for me to keep the truth from them.

Many times, their hotel rooms were not ready for them at the end of the day, so we’d have to keep them on the bus or take them somewhere else until the rooms had been vacated and cleaned.

Sometimes, we even had to put the tourists into ordinary Chinese hotels which must have been quite a culture shock . The tourists in those years were mostly quite prosperous, and they were not used to shabby accommodations.

In one instance, I had to separate husbands and wives into different rooms. One older couple came to me with very sad and angry tones --- telling me that they have been married 40 years and had never slept in a different room. But what could I do ? I felt very bad, but they still had to be separated.


We took them to the four major sites in Beijing: The Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and the Temple of Heaven.– and then we’d also take them to some special shopping districts. In the early days, the guides were not allowed to accept cash tips from the tourists or kick-backs from the shopkeepers –but over time, that changed. Tourists would often leave us small gifts, like perfume – and all these gifts were turned in to the agency and then equally distributed as gift packages to the guides at the end of the year.

On Chinese New Year, we drew lots , and that’s was how the gifts were distributed among us. Little by little, tour guides stopped handing the gifts in, and unofficially we were allowed to keep them. Over the years, I had kept some the novels that were either given to me or left on the bus. I read some of them, such as “Coma” by Robin Cook, and “Stranger in the mirror” by Sidney Sheldon.


As I gained seniority, I was allowed to pick the kind of tour groups that I wanted – which were small ones – because it’s so much easier to keep track of 6 people instead of 60 – and you had a chance to get better acquainted with the people, most of them Americans , and a few of them of Canada, England, or Australia.

Within the Beijing Branch, there were several offices. The Japanese office took care of Japanese tourists, The European office took care of all the Spanish and Italian as well as Australians. There were about 30 – 40 tour guides in each office, but later that number grew ( I was there from late 1979 through June 1986 ).

I liked the Canadians the best because they were very well disciplined and complained very little. No special requests, not a lot questions -- they were very quiet people and easily pleased. Australians were also good, but usually our office didn’t handle them. Over the years, I made a few close friends, a couple of them are still in touch with me.


We were only supposed to talk about the news or information that had been printed in the “Peoples’ Daily”.

If a group had more than 30 people, two local guides would be assigned to it, plus the one national tour guide who accompanied the group throughout their entire tour. So in that situation, you’d better not say anything politically. Who knows what would be reported after the tour?

Even though I was an outspoken person, I had to hold my tongue in the presence of other guides. Once, I was challenged by the American tour guide, who was trying to please his group to get bigger tips – and he asked me many questions on economy and politics which I had a hard time to answer.

Back then – and even now – I do not know how China’s economy works. We Chinese never paid taxes before the 1990’s, so I had no idea how the government got money.
And there were also certain things we just could not share with them even if we knew the answer. He made me feel so small and ignorant. That was one of tours I felt very bad about it.

But on the small tours, I would sometimes be the only guide present – so I could talk about my own life – and every time I talked about the Cultural Revolution, I cried.

Then, as now, my English was not perfect – but I have a talent for figuring out what people are trying to say, even if I can’t understand all the words – so I think I took good care of my tourists – and I was also popular with the tour bus drivers, making their jobs as easy as I could.

One time, a tourist asked to take my picture next to one of our buses – and then, the following year, one of the guides showed me a magazine article that included a picture of me standing next to the bus door – and describing one “Miss Wang” who was a “ pretty girl who spoke English very well”. I was very proud !

Since we accompanied the tourists all through their stay in Beijing, we also attended their banquets – and this was first time I had ever eaten like this in my life – Peking Duck every week ! But to tell the truth – I didn’t really appreciate it. I had grown up in boarding schools where you ate whatever was given – and it would be many years later until I learned how to take pleasure from good food.

Especially when I companied the tour to small cities, and the tour was served with 10 – 20 different dishes and delicacies The tourists were stunned with how they were treated, but sometimes they would not appreciate the food at all. For example, there is a famous dish served in the Summer Palace. I was told that it should only take 4 minutes from when the fish was caught in Kung Ming Lake until it appeared on a table in the Summer Palace. The fish was fully cooked, but the fish mouth was still moving, so it scared most of the Americans.
That dish always ended up at the bus drivers’ table.

But at least I was beginning to take pleasure from good clothes. Ever since I was a teenager, the approved clothing for women was shirt and slacks – but now I was discovering the world of long or short colorful, flowing dresses. But you could not find them in any of the department stores in Beijing. In order to have them, friends from the travel agency showed me where to shop for fabric and then take it to a good tailor.

The first time when I was visiting my new in-laws in Sheng Yang, a big city in Northeast of Beijing, I walked down the street dressed in my new long dresses, and I swear, everyone was looking at me. I felt like a beautiful peacock in the Zoo !

But makeup was an unknown concepts when I grew up, and
I still didn’t wear lipstick or eye shadow – does a pretty young girl really need to ?

One time, much later in my career, I even got a fur coat, thanks to some wealthy Americans who were connected to the Reagan administration. There were five of them – and unlike other small groups, each one had to have his own hotel room. One day, when I was taking them through a market, they stopped to look at some furs made from various exotic animals – and asked me whether I liked the one made from wildcat. I was polite, and agreed with them that it was beautiful –not knowing that when the tour was over, they would give it to me as a gift.

And now I must report that one time I did break the “law”.

As tour guides, we did not have access to the Friendship stores which were only for the foreigners. Unlike other Chinese, we could enter them, but we were still not allowed to buy anything. One time when I was in the Shanghai Friendship store, I really liked a pair of shoes on the shelf. A nice American tour leader offered to buy them for me and then I would pay her back later at the hotel. We did not want the store find out that it was for me, But I had to try them on to see if they fit. The store manager did not say anything at the time, but he sent a letter to my office, and my boss did not let it go easily. I had to write confession and apology to the entire department. I was so sad, and regret that over a pair of shoes, such a big deal had been made..


Fortunately, there were never any great disasters on any of my tours. Sometimes a person might lose track of time while shopping and miss the bus –or someone else might trip on the curb and break a bone – but at least none of my customers ever died ! (although I did hear of some who did – travelers who were ill to begin with – like one man who was dying from AIDS. (we had never heard about AIDS back then – and we certainly weren’t prepared. Chinese hospitals sterilized but they did not dispose of used needles)

Eventually, after working for a year in Beijing, I began to be offered positions on national tours – where I would accompany groups all over China. Local guides would give the tour, but I would serve as interpreter – and over the next five years, I got to visit every tourist destination (except for the Silk Road – which I’d like to see eventually, as a tourist myself)

I even traveled to Tibet – where the locals figured that I was just as foreign as the foreigners we were guiding.

During my six years as a tour guide, I was known for my straight forward and honest personality. Sometimes, I got into trouble for that, but I also made some good friends who could trust me. One day, one of the guides who was a party member approached me and closed the door behind him. He was a nice guy from worker’s family who had joined the party while at college. He had been one of my school mates. He sincerely asked me if I were interested in becoming a party member myself. I was surprised and then I laughed a little about it. He was puzzled, since usually people feel honored to be asked. Then I asked him if he really wanted to know what I was thinking at that moment. (I trusted him) and he said yes. My answer was even if the gate to the party membership was widely open, I would not step in. He was shocked and then scared, and he begged me not to mention it to anyone else: “ I am sure you would be in a big trouble if another person in this office heard you say that” . He never reported it to our boss, and he never approached me on that subject again.


Being a tour guide was great fun and these were some of the happiest years of my life – but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing it. I was beginning to have other plans for what to do next.

The following is the report of an American woman
who traveled to China during that time.

Let me say right off that this was the trip of a lifetime – way back in 1983 – soon after China had opened up, and it was my first trip to Asia. I was single, 38 years old, and had been working hard for several years as a sales rep in telecommunications (though I had a degree in Fine Arts) . I deserved a big, special treat - and this was it: a three week swing around China, organized by a San Francisco organization, the China-America Friendship Society.

First, we flew from Japan to Beijing – staying 5 days in a newly built hotel that was about a 25 minute ride from the center of the city. It didn’t really seem like a permanent structure –there were some design peculiarities – like unventilated restrooms in the center of the building . But clearly, great efforts had been made to accommodate us.

Our group had 16 people, and our guide was a very well educated young Chinese woman. Her English was impeccable, and with a troubled acceptance, she shared the story of her life during the Cultural Revolution – how family members had been arrested and how she had worked on a farm.

The food was terrible – but you know, that’s not why we were visiting China.

There was no shopping – except at the state run “Friendship shops” – where we paid with the scrip we’d been issued . We couldn’t purchase regular currency- so we couldn’t even walk down the street to buy a soda – which we could hardly do anyway since nobody spoke English and we couldn’t read street signs.

My main complaint was that other than tea, all we were offered to drink was Tsing Tsao beer and some kind of orange drink that seemed to be nothing more than orange colored sugar water. Beer gives me a headache – so I was always feeling thirsty. (and when we finally crossed the border into Hong Kong, my first purchase was a big bottle of tomato juice. Why tomato juice ? I don’t know – but for some reason it’s what I craved the most)

We did get a large, fancy banquet one night in Beijing – with a very impressive, colorful display -- but the food was much better seen than tasted. The Peking Duck, for example, was just bones – the bones of some poor duck whose flesh must have been eaten somewhere else. Mostly I remember eating rice – lots of rice mixed with some kind of very tough greens.

And I remember the kind of people we saw:

*the young and old factory workers hand knotting rugs, doing meticulous cloisonee work, or working the silk making machines. They were so focused ! … some were very young … and there was so little joy in the air. (All these products eventually went to the Chinese Friendship Shops where we tourists were herded in every city visited.)

*the men and women as they pulled those large, heavy wheel barrels down streets, whether paved or not. In the cities, bicycles were everywhere, hardly any cars, and people dressed in dark Mao pants and jackets. They just stared at us --- never a smile or wave.

*Grandmothers attending the children.; Pre-school children harnessed together in straight lines. (I think we have adopted that system here.)

* Old women standing very precariously on bound feet.


There were long, comfortable train rides, where tea was served, and the windows had crisp, white lacy curtains. And plane trips .........ooooh, … they could be scary and noisy,. It felt like the fog was blowing in from outside the plane.

Magnificent things: The Yang Tse River barge trip through the Three Gorges, ,The Great Wall, The terra cotta figures of Xian...being just a few yards and looking down on them. (Okay, awesome) And of course, the Winter Palace

I loved that trip ! It was a real adventure – and very affordable, too --- costing no more than what I might have expected to pay for a modestly priced Alaskan cruise.

I’ve taken a few other foreign trips in my life – and a few years later I went to Japan and Singapore – and especially enjoyed Autumn in Kyoto.

But this trip to China was special – like some kind of special moment in history – and I was there to share it.

Part Twenty Two

And now, within six months after graduation, I found myself a husband.

I was 26 years old then , and this was really the first time in my life I could be together openly with a man.

Graduation was in early Spring, - the new job began late in the Summer, --- and during the time in between, I was introduced to several young men by various mutual acquaintances.

I realize that in other countries, young, urban people may spend several years dating and playing the field in high school, college, and beyond – but I left the field almost as soon as I had entered upon it.

Once word got around that a young person was available for marriage , the volunteer matchmakers would get busy and eventually invite the lucky couple over for tea.

I remember meeting one young man that my sister had found for me – and I remember how he was not too tall, but also not too short. He sounded smart, he looked kind of handsome – and I would have liked to meet him again. But his call never came – which did not improve a self-confidence that was not so great to begin with. I just never felt myself to be especially attractive, even if people often told me otherwise.

(Believe or not, but many years later I met this guy again, on an outing organized by my husband’s work unit in a newspaper company called “China Daily” which was the only English news paper in China at that time. He and my husband were both journalists. He looked so surprised when our eyes met – and he was still single. I knew several people in the crowd, and I think my popularity and laughter that day put him in a very quiet mood. Or… at least I hope it did !)


Then my family was paid a visit by an “uncle” I had met when I was working as a nurse up north in the provincial hospital.

He was in my father’s generation, but not really related to us. ( He was a subordinate/friend of my mother’s uncle - the general who had helped me so much at the hospital). He knew the family of another high-level military officer who had a son about my age who was available for marriage and he jumped on the opportunity to do all these important people a favor.

So he invited me and the boy over to his place for a blind date, and the three of us spent 90 minutes making small talk.

My date had been late, and his appearance definitely did not impress me . He was short, average looking, overly casual, and wore a military green overcoat which may have been fashionable among the Red Guard ten years earlier, but was definitely backward in 1979.

But there was no question that he was smart, ambitious, and especially witty – and I guess that’s why I got interested in making a second date.

And of course, he came from a family background commensurate with my own. His father, like my father, came from a peasant family, and then joined the People’s Army in the late 1930’s, rising through the ranks to become an officer. But unlike my father, he stayed in the military after the revolution, and met his wife while serving in the Korean War. She had been one of the many teenage volunteers who were sent to the front to boost the morale of soldiers in those days.

By the late 70’s, his father was the #2 commander of Liaoning Province (bordering Korea) and he lived in Shengyang, its capital city of 7.2 million. Even though his rank was similar to my father’s, since they were in local government, they lived much more luxuriously in a single family, 10-room house. They had three sons and a bodyguard who lived with them and did all the household chores.

(One time, when I was visiting, the guard had just finished the dishes and was sitting down with the family, when all of sudden, it began to rain outside. Mother-in-law immediately ordered the guard to close all the windows, but there were so many , he could not close them all at once. The sons were doing nothing at the moment, but none would join me in getting up to help. There was a younger brother who lived at home. And I often saw him ordering this guard to do this or that for him. It seemed to me that the guard was serving the son more than the father, and I complained to my new husband who agreed that his younger brother was spoiled and abused his power.)

Being military, the family was untouched by the Cultural Revolution – except that since all the universities were closed, my boyfriend had to spend three years as a recruit in the People’s Army. But as soon as a few schools began to reopen in 1971, he enrolled in Shanghai University where he got a four-year degree in English language. He then spent another 18 months studying French at my school , Beijing Foreign Language Institute #2 ( but I don’t remember ever seeing him there.) He had also gone to the Foreign Language middle school before the Culture Revolution for two years. So his English was quite good by then.


When I met him, he worked as an interpreter for a manufacturing business – but he had many plans for further advancement –and unlike me and almost every other young person our age – he had his own apartment – which is where I was invited for our second date .

On that second date, he invited me to meet his two friends who lived in the same complex – and I really enjoyed their company. They had all grown up together, so their families knew each other. They were smart – high spirited – and we were all at the threshold of our new , exciting lives. What did young people like us talk about when we got together in those days ? Politics, of course ! Bemoaning the corruption everywhere in government – but certainly not as idealistic communists. Even though we were all the privileged children of high officials, we did not like our party and did not like our system. We were curious about the freedoms found in the West – especially those of us who had learned Western European languages.

Following that, I came over to visit every week, and eventually was given a key to the apartment.

Regarding my family, father, as usual, had no opinion about my new boyfriend, but mother was very opinionated – and she asserted strenuously that I “could have done much better” She thought he was too short (she and her siblings were all tall) – as well as ill-mannered and too full of himself. But as usual – the more I was told what to do – the stronger I felt the urge to do the opposite

I wanted to go ahead with a marriage – but it wasn’t as if I didn’t have some misgivings.

One day, I paid a surprise visit to his apartment – let myself in with the key – and waited all night for him to return. (note: there was no telephoning ahead for such visits – since telephones were still very rare – and the only phone in his entire building belonged to the doorman.)

Where had he spent the night ? Could I believe that it was “just with a few friends” ? I felt that I had been very open with him about my life – while he shared very little about his.

So, yes, I had some reservations – but I also had this feeling – I guess you’d call it traditional – that he was now my man, for better or worse.

I also badly needed to move out of my parents’ house. There were only two bedrooms for all six of us, and there was no privacy at all. And being so cramped, the conversation among us was always turning unpleasant. We endlessly talked about how to change our living conditions, but nobody could do anything. For 30 years, the Chinese government had not built any residential housing, so it was impossible to get a larger apartment. Even after dad’s name had been cleared and he was entitled to a bigger place, no such place was available. All we ever got were promises, and it wasn’t until 1986, that my parents finally moved into a 3-bedroom apartment. (My mom is still living there now, while they allowed us to keep the old two bedroom apartment, and eventually my older brother purchased it.)

Within six months of our first meeting, we applied for a marriage license, and six months later we got married.


The wedding itself was not big deal. It wasn’t that huge ceremony one associates with traditional weddings in the countryside. It was really just a big dinner. Stubborn until the end, my mother refused to contribute to the trousseau or other expenses – but that was OK – since his family could easily afford everything. She wouldn’t even contribute that kind of comforter/quilt that Chinese mothers usually give to daughters when they get married –so I had to grab the materials from her trunk and make the quilt myself.

After the wedding, we spent a week at a lakeside resort (with his two younger brothers !) and then moved into his apartment – to which another room had been added – only it was on a higher floor in the same building. It wasn’t much – but it was way more than almost any other newly wedded couple could expect in China at that time.

Part Twenty One

I graduated from Beijing Second Foreign Language School in 1979,

after 3 ½ years of study. (actually – much less – since almost a year was lost to political action and the aftermath of the Tangshan earthquake)

Back in the early sixties, university programs ran for a four full years, and the salary of graduates started at 56 yuan/month (while the salary of a new factory worker was at 18)

But after the Cultural Revolution, the time required for a college degree was trimmed by six months --- and the beginning salary of graduates was trimmed accordingly –down to 43 yuan/month.

Over the course of those years in college, I made several friends, and other than that trouble-maker that I hung out with in high school, everyone whom I still keep in touch with was met at college, and everyone whom I met at the big farm or at the hospital has drifted away.

(Sometime I regret that I never wrote a single letter to the hospital co-workers after I left there. I did promise them that I will keep in touch, but I broke my promise, and I felt bad about it for a long time. Those people elected and sent me to college, and changed my life forever. I was very graceful for that, but meanwhile I also wanted to leave my life in the country behind me. After I graduated from my college, there was a visitor from my hospital to my new home. I did not know how she got my address, but she managed to find me in Beijing. I was very happy to see her. She was a doctor with whom I had worked very closely, and sometimes she would ask me to sign her signature to prescribe medicine for patients when she was too busy to do so. We were good friends, but she was about 10 years older than me, so we did not share the same interests.)

And all of those friends, except one, came from the same high-official background that I did – i.e. one of their parents was at least a level-12 government official. (the single exception being a girl whose father only got to level 16)


But this is not to say that all of the students at the school came from our social class – many of them were workers or even peasants – and in some ways these peasants became better students because they couldn’t go home to visit their family over the weekends – they had to stay in the dormitory where there was nothing to do but study.

The smartest kid in the class turned out to be one of those peasants – with a very thick accent that came from someplace very far from Beijing. He had a big, ugly head (his nickname was “big head”!) and he liked to flirt with girls in a very obnoxious way. He never did master the sound of English – but his memory – and thus his vocabulary – was incredible. He went to hold a very high position in the foreign service.

My college friends ended up with various careers related to their language skills in English (but I was the only one who ended up living in an English speaking country )

One of them became a translator in the office of a large chemical facility in in Beijing. Then she managed to switch to the Finance Ministry which sent her to London to got a masters degree in finance. She eventually worked for the World Bank, as well as other big financial institutions. Obviously, she is a very smart and extremely capable person.

Another friend worked in the International Travel Agency, Beijing branch where I worked for 6 years. A few years ago, she retired from that company, and started working for an Import and Export Cargo business.

Another went back to work in Tien Jing at the company where she had come from. The last time I saw her was in 2004.


All of these friends are retired now- since government workers receive a pension after 30 years of service –and all them, like me, began working for the government as teenagers. The pension can be quite substantial, depending on whatever salary level you reached – and this, combined with a post-retirement occupation can lead to a very high standard of living (almost enough to pay for health care !)

By 1979, my siblings had also all left the countryside and were beginning their careers.

My older sister had gotten office work in a provincial police station. There she began to date another man who worked in the same office, and he eventually used his connections to get himself – and then her – transferred to Beijing. Getting to Beijing was not easy – because someone else from Beijing had to be found who was willing to transfer to their small, provincial township.

Their relationship was still not presented to our parents, when I happened to see them walking together on the street (young couples had nowhere else to go, since each one lived with the parents in small, crowded apartments)

I was happy to report to our mother that he was tall and nice looking – but there was something wrong with one of his eyes – he was just a little bit crosseyed. My mother was surprised, and actually, so was my sister who claimed that she had never noticed ! But by the time they got married, he had a successful operation on that eye, and he looks quite normal now. He is a very good, caring man, and my old sister is very lucky to be married to him.


Later, my sister’s boyfriend introduced my younger sister to one of his co-workers – and shortly thereafter my younger sister was also engaged to be married.

My younger sister, as you might recall, had worked as a gardener in the Fragrant Hills recreation area west of Beijing ,and some of early boyfriends had not worked out. But this young man, just like the eventual spouses of all of my siblings, was the child of high officials – so one and all (soon to include myself ) we married within our social class.

In 1979 my oldest brother was finally able to return to Beijing, after an incredible 10 years of living in a cave. My parents were able to get him a job an Agricultural Science Institute, where he repaired tractors – and everything else for that matter. He never ended up in college, but in some ways he was the best educated, since he had spent a lot of time in that cave reading – and he is the only sibling who can read traditional Chinese texts.

He had almost finished his senior year at high school when the Cultural Revolution interrupted his chance to go to college. Then when it was over, he was too old to be admitted (remember – I just barely got in under the wire). However, he did manage to get a college diploma through evening school many years later.


My second oldest brother had ended up working in a power plant in Shan Xi – and my parents worked hard to get him a slot at the university. He got accepted, but while he was visiting my parents in Beijng, and awaiting the official announcement, some local official’s son took his position at the engineering school.

In exchange, he was offered a slot in a school of Chinese herbal medicine – but he refused to go, since he had no interest in that subject. So despite his high intelligence, he was not going to have a university degree – and he even lost his membership in the Communist party when he lost all of his documents while moving back to Beijing.

Instead, he applied his abilities to private industry where he began several unsuccessful operations. The engineering ability and inventiveness was there – but the social skills and political connections to make things happen were not.

Now he is back at the power plant – just making a living.

Part Twenty

So then I spent the next three and half years
attending the Beijing #2 Language School,

which was something like an American undergraduate liberal arts program except that there were no classes in mathematics or any of the physical sciences.

Of course, the emphasis was on foreign languages – and there were about 400 students in my English department, (100 in each of the four graduating classes), while there were other, usually much smaller, departments for German, French, Cambodian etc.

But we also took classes in history and political science, writing, and physical training. and these classes were all taught in Chinese – so it really wasn’t an intense foreign language emersion.

There was only one native English speaker in the entire English department, a humorous, overweight fellow who presumably could not find better employment anywhere else (his salary and living conditions were not spectacular – and neither did he seem interested enough in Chinese civilization to learn the language - but he did end up marrying a Chinese girl and moving to Hong Kong)

Every morning we got up at 6:00 AM, and after washing up, everyone tried to find a spot outside to read aloud in English. We were told this was the only way we could master English pronunciation . So everywhere you looked, you would see students reciting – and it sounded like monks reading scripture in a monastery.

I wish I could say that my experience at this school, after all of my previous mishaps, had been a happy one – but this was not the case -- for once again, I just had a hard time fitting in.

To begin with, I had gotten a head start on the other students by following English lessons on the radio broadcasts for several years, so I started out at the head of my class, making me an object of jealousy.

This being a communist university, the idea was that students were supposed to learn as a class, not as individuals, so it was the job of the best students to help the worst., and I’m afraid that I did not appreciate being teamed up with a student who couldn’t speak any English at all.

Having spent so much time as a farm laborer and then as a low-level nurse, I wanted nothing other than to excel in English and begin a real career -- but this eagerness just made me enemies and the topic of malicious rumors.

Then, during our evening meetings, students would stand up and accuse me not helping others. At first, I could not understand why only I had been targeted, but soon one of the male students told me that they had talking about me all along, and that was why he could not study with me.
(I had wanted to study with him because he was a top student – not because I had romantic feelings about him or anyone else)

And then to compound the problem, the entire country was moving into another tumultuous period with the decline of the old guard, culminating in 1976, with the death of Zhao En-Lai in January, the horrific Tangshan earthquake in July, and finally the death of Mao in September.
There was much unrest concerning what would happen next – and our school was assigned to publicly denounce Deng Xiaoping on a daily basis.

(Note: regarding the Tanghan earthquake, perhaps readers in the West are not aware of just what a enormous catastrophe this was. Over a quarter of a million people died in Tangan, and since it wasn’t that far from Beijing, we felt the tremors ourselves. I remember how the doorway to our classroom began to weave back and forth, as we waited for it to quiet down so we could all run out of the building. Then, we spent the next three months living and studying in covered trenches dug into the earth near our buildings which we were afraid to enter)

Very little serious studying was done in that year – and much of our time was spent in political meetings and demonstrations in Tiananmen square.

Meanwhile, I had very little incentive to remain at the top of my class – it only got me into trouble – and I had already been criticized many times for being too self centered. So for better or worse – my grades began to decline, I became a mediocre student, and I did not care any more.

Being a bad student wasn’t all that serious – since almost nobody got thrown out school for test scores. But I do remember an attractive young woman being dismissed when she became pregnant (and her boyfriend was thrown out as well)

Still, it did sting when a special class was assembled of the best students, and I did not make the cut.

Fortunately, the rumors of my romantic entanglements were just that – rumors . Even though I had already broken up with my boyfriend from the farm, I had no interest in anyone else. There was one boy, from an older class, who was interested in me, and he asked an intermediary to arrange a date for us before he graduated. He was a smart, attractive young man whom I had noticed when he was playing action roles on a local stage. I would have loved to know him, but I politely refused his date. ( Believe it or not, but a year later, after my graduation, on the first day of my new job, I sat down at my desk and noticed a young man sitting across the room – and it was him. I didn’t know what to say so I pretended not to recognize him – for by then I had already begun dating someone else)

The Language Institute was a boarding school (like every other school I’ve ever attended) so I slept in a dormitory room with 6 or 7 other young women, and then went home to visit my parents on weekends, just like I’d been doing almost since I was born. During these years, my younger sister was the only sibling who was still living with them – but eventually, my older siblings were allowed to return fom the countryside and stay with my parents again, even my oldest brother who had spent 10 years living in a cave. He finally got back to Beijing in 1978, and then he then spent several years living in my parents’ apartment.

(perhaps this is a good place to talk about some unusual details of residential property ownership in the People’s Republic. Officials were assigned a certain square-footage of apartment space based on their official rank. My father qualified for enough space for two apartments – and that’s what he got before he was arrested. After my mother returned from the countryside, she was given a single apartment, then in the mid 80’s the family got a second apartment, but it still fell short of the square-footage to which we were entitled. Then, five years after my father’s death, the government paid my mother a lump sum of cash to make up the difference. So, in a way, the family now owns two apartments, but there's a 70-year limit regarding everyone’s property, and sometime around 2050 there are going to be a whole lot of people who lose ownership of their homes)

Meanwhile, my father had resumed his career, not at the Friendship hotel any more, but with a similar, high level job with the Beijing Foreign Language Institute (which, as already told, helped me get into language school)

When it came time for me to graduate, I was assigned a position as language teacher in Beijing People’s University, but I refused to go !

I had never wanted to be a teacher. In the distant past, teachers had been highly respected, but during the Culture Revolution, I had seen them get treated very badly.


In the final year of study, all students had done a residency at one of the various jobs for which graduates would be qualified, and I had done my residency at the foreign tourist bureau. Tour guides got to travel all over the country – they got to talk directly to foreigners – and so they also got a lot of extra experience in perfecting their language skills – and that was what I wanted to do. So I went to my father, and he helped me to get the assignment that I wanted.

I suppose that some readers may see me as a spoiled little girl who will never do what’s she's told (beginning with the time when I walked away from elementary school) and who relies on the indulgence and prestige of her parents to get what she wants.

But I’ve always just wanted to excel and enjoy doing whatever I can do best.

Who doesn’t ?

Part Nineteen

I spent two years as a nurse. I liked my job.

I liked all the doctors and nurses – and my head nurse was a very nice and patient woman. She taught me all her tricks and skills, like how to inject the needles without causing a lot of pain, and how to clean the wounds and sew them together without leaving a big scar.; I was even given some training in acupuncture,

But I didn’t really want to spend my entire life with sick or injured people and their distressed families – I just couldn’t handle all that suffering – especially with small children. When they were crying for mom, I was crying with them.

There’s plenty of sad stories, but one I remember most was the student worker who was injured while working on the railroad. He was carrying one end of a large wooden beam, when he fell and the heavy beam crushed his head against the steel tracks. When he was carried into the clinic, his head had swollen to twice its normal size and his face was blue. The doctors managed to save his life, but his mind never recovered.

And I wasn’t always proud of the job I was doing.

One of my patients was an infant – and every day his mother took him to clinic for his shots. The baby knew what was coming – he knew the shots were painful – and he was kicking and screaming all the time – making it a real challenge for the nurse (me) to administer his medication. I had to move quickly and firmly – and one time I may have moved too firmly –because the next day, when his mother brought him in, one of his legs was curled up and he refused to walk on it. Later, the nursing supervisor asked me quietly whether I had administered the shot – and I felt very bad. (but don’t worry – the little boy made a complete recovery)

So though I wanted an education and a professional career – I really didn’t want a career in medicine – and I talked about this with my mother’s distant uncle – the army general who was in charge of our area (including the hospital) – and the man who had gotten me the nursing job in the first place.
( I called him grandpa, but he was closer to my mom’s age which was about early 50’s)

In those days, entrance to university was no longer by competitive examination – but by popular election conducted by groups of workers all over the country. (all the universities had been closed in 1966. A few began to reopen in 1970 and most were reopened by 1975. The percentage of college students at that time was 3%.)


Each district or working unit was allotted a certain number of openings from each of the professional schools – and workers within each district would elect the student candidates from among themselves.

Since my workplace was a hospital – it was only reasonable that all of our student slots would be for a medical school – and everyone who worked at the hospital, from the janitors to the clerks to the nurses were eligible to run for election.

But I didn’t want to go to a medical school – I wanted to go to the language institute – to study English and enter the diplomatic corps.

I had wanted to study English ever since 1966. That’s when my second brother told mom that his teacher wanted him to go to Middle school of Foreign Language in Beijing which was very difficult to enter. You had to not only pass the normal high school exams but also pass the layers of oral exams and appearance tests. Only a few students were carefully selected from the entire school to enter that college, and usually only one would be chosen. Mom asked my brother what he wanted to do, and he replied that he did not want to be a “butt follower bug --- i.e. an interpreter who followed the VIPs and did not have an identity of his own. That was the image he had in his mind, so he refused the opportunity.

A few years later my younger sister applied for the position, and she passed all the tests except the last one. Later her teacher told mom that she did not fail that test either, but the school needed more boys than girls.

These two events stuck in my mind, and I wanted to take the challenge – so
I raised this issue with my mother’s uncle, the general.

I guess you might say that I had gone from the bottom of the social order (as the daughter of a “bad family” at the farm) to the very top – since now my father was out of prison – and I had family in many high positions. When the Cultural Revolution began, most of the country was placed under military control – so my mother’s uncle, the general, had complete authority over the district in which I was working – and I often visited him and his wife for dinner during the week. (his poor wife, by the way, was a terrible hypochondriac – to the point of nearly being an invalid – though as it turns out – she lived into her 70’s)

I told the general my dreams about going to language school and he promised me nothing – but later that year, when the student elections were announced for our district – the hospital was given four slots at the medical school – plus one slot at Beijing #2 Foreign Language Institute. Hurray !

This was very good news for me – but of course, I still had to get elected by my peers at the hospital – and I worked very, very hard to be a popular, model worker. For example, I dedicated myself to cleaning the floors of the clinic. Country people had been tramping muddy shoes over those wooden floors for so long that the wood was nowhere to be seen – but once I spent an entire evening digging them out – and everyone was quite surprised when they saw those wooden floors for the very first time the next morning.

I felt that my campaign was proceeding quite well – but the day before the election – a poster went up on the hospital bulletin board denouncing me as a “back door candidate” (i.e. everyone knew all about my uncle) – and I ended up being elected #6 for the 5 open student slots – which put my future in serious jeopardy – since the age limit to apply for university was 23 – and I was already 22.

Nobody signed this denunciation (nobody ever does) – but I’m sure it was a group of workers from Shanghai who were trying to improve the chances of their own candidate.

But as destiny would have it – one of the five elected candidates had second thoughts about leaving her family. She was a local girl who had never been out of the area, and she was a bit scared of moving to another city for school. So she resigned her election – leaving me with the #5 slot. Hurray again !

But I still had to win the approval of school representatives who had to interview and recommend each candidate. Since language school leads to a career in international relations, students must be able to speak and present themselves accordingly – and I managed to pass that qualification. But the news about my “back door connections” was attached to my file -- and this file was carried to Beijing by the person who had interviewed me and was hoping that I would be rejected by those ultimately in charge of education for the foreign ministry.

And this is where incredible fortune smiled on me yet again – for my father worked for the foreign ministry – and now that he was out of prison, he was temporarily assigned as a director at the Beiing Foreign Language Institute #1 – and my file ended up on his desk – where an associate showed him the negative report about me, and then tore it into little pieces.

So I guess “back door connections” really did have something to do with my career – but they had opened only a very brief window of opportunity – since my father was only working at the Foreign Language Institute for about 6 months – and the following year, civilian control was reinstated in our hospital district, and my mother’s uncle, the general, was no longer in charge.

So finally my dream was coming true !

Back during those first miserable weeks at the farm, I had promised myself to get out and get myself a real life in five years – and now, six years later, I was finally on a train going south to Beijing – ready to begin my new life – meeting both of my proud, happy parents at the train station – and riding home with them in a (very expensive) taxicab.

This was the first time in my life that I felt I was also important and paid attention by my parents. The next day, I had a high fever – coming from all the excitement and exhaustion of the previous few weeks.

(and I think I’m going to cry again)

Part Eighteen

Getting back to my own life, mother and I moved back to Beijing,

following my younger sister who had graduated from her rural high school and was allowed to return and take a job as gardener. Half a year later, toward the end of 1972, mother was allowed to join her, and she was given a two bedroom apartment in a building attached to the same complex from which we had come – i.e. the one built to accommodate the employees of the Friendship Hotel where my father had been a security director before his arrest.

Most of the hotel staff had been sent to the 5.7 cadre school for two years, and all their old apartments – including ours - had been reassigned. But since almost all the foreigners had fled China during the Cultural Revolution, the hotel itself was almost empty, and two of those Hotel buildings were converted into residential buildings for the returning former residents –
and a wall was built to separate our two buildings from the rest of the complex.


Our new apartment was not as spacious as the double-apartment that we used to have –but at least we had a kitchen, toilet, and bath – which was a dramatic improvement over the dirt-floor sheep barn where the three of us had been living for the past two years.

As she returned to Bejing, mother’s life was restored in many ways. She could finally visit our father in prison – she was living near her old friends and neighbors, and she was even given access to her bank account – although visiting the bank was, again, an event that caused much anxiety. She was afraid to go herself, so this time my aunt and I made the trip – handed the account book over to the teller – and waited nervously while the matter was discussed in a back room out of our hearing.

Finally, the account book was handed back, along with the several hundred Yuan we had requested, and we were no longer living hand to mouth. Actually, during his imprisonment, my father’s salary had continued to be credited to our account – after deducting the 24 Yuan/month that were given to sustain us in the interim.

My sister had been at the top of the class in her rural school ( it was a part-time school, with students working the fields in the morning and attending school in the afternoon) – but the best job she could get was as gardener in a recreational park west of Beijing. I think she enjoyed her job – she cultivated the flower beds – and it was certainly an enjoyable environment – but even a factory worker in the city had a higher status, and mother wished a better job had been offered to her.

The park was located near an army facility, and many soldiers visited it for relaxation or exercise – including one young lieutenant who noticed this pretty girl carrying a heavy pot of flowers up the hill everyday and soon fell in love with her. He was a tall, handsome, and very pleasant young man – and even though he came from only a workers’ family, my mother adored him --- we all liked him. But after they had been dating for about four years, and expecting to be married, my sister came home from the park one day and announced that their relationship was over.

No reason was given then – or ever – and everyone was disappointed – especially the young officer who came to us many times asking us for help to get her back. He was even given permission by the army to postpone his next assignment, so he could stay in our area to pursue his flagging courtship. I don’t know whether iron-willed stubbornness is unique to our family – but that’s often how we are – and my sister would simply not be moved – nor would she ever explain her decision --- and soon she declared her love to another man.

But now it was the rest of us who objected to the relationship – since the new boyfriend was nowhere near as handsome as the last one – and worst of all – his father had been convicted of political crimes back in the fifties.

Since our own father had spent many years in prison, maybe we should have been more open minded – and certainly this young man had had suffered a quit a bit in his life. He was very young when his father went to prison, and his mom had a very hard time making ends meet. Every day had been a struggle for them ever since he could remember.

My younger sister had pity on him. She knew that our family would never approve their relationship, so she never brought him to see us. It was her secret. Soon she was losing a lot of weight and started looking very fragile and pale.


But this time we dug in our heels – we had family meetings – and after many evening of tears and talks, she finally she gave up her second boyfriend. Soon thereafter, my old sister’s new husband introduced her to his co-worker, and soon after they met, they got married.

Perhaps the non-Chinese reader of my stories is wondering how China ever came to have a billion people – since sex outside of marriage is so discouraged – and marriages themselves seem almost impossible to accomplish – and yet, somehow new generations manage to be born.

So my mother and sister were beginning to lead something like normal lives – but I was still a displaced person – without a job – without an education – and not really supposed to be in Beijing. But I wasn’t completely indolent – for I had discovered the English language lessons given two hours daily on the government radio --- English was the ONLY foreign language being taught in this way – and I was a very eager student. The fact is – I love English ! I listened every day – and I did all the exercises.

But still – I was over 20 years old – I needed to have my own life – I needed a job – so my mother sent me to one of her old army comrades, now a general, to help get me into the People’s Army.

Unfortunately, the army was not accepting recruits at that time – so next my mother reached out to another contact – a second cousin who held a high position in that same far northern province where I had been sent four years before – and he found me a job as a nurse in a hospital.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Chinese medical industry –– there were no nursing schools during the Culture Revolution– so nurses received only on-the-job training. During those years, China produced a lot of “bare foot doctors” who worked side-by-side with farmers, but who were also functioning as “doctors”


I took that 1,000 mile train ride back up north – even further north (and west) of where I had been – and moved into a room above the hospital.

What an improvement over life at the farm !

Instead of 60 roommates – I had one – a very nice young woman from Shanghai who had been a nurse for many years. We became good friends, and she helped me learn the ropes of my new job.

First, I worked as a receptionist – getting the patients to sign in as they lined up outside our outpatient clinic. But after proving that I was a quick study, I was taught how to give shots (practicing on a pillow), to sew up wounds, and to sign the doctor’s name on prescriptions. Isn’t that all that nurses ever do ?

Actually, the physicians at our clinic were well trained –some of them had been sent to this location back in the late 1950’s. They had been accused of being rightist, but never denounced as criminals, and since our location was so remote – there hadn’t been pressure to turn our doctors into farmhands during the Cultural Revolution. But I’m sure they all wished that they could be living closer to civilization.

Perhaps this is a good place to talk about the Chinese medical system.

The only people who don’t have to pay for health care are government workers – and even back in the first decades of communism – 92% of the population were peasants and they were not included. In the 1980’s, as the government began to cut back, fewer and fewer people qualified for health benefits, and even those who could afford coverage still had to pay 20% out of pocket.

My father, for example, as a government employee, had complete health coverage – but this did not extend to his wife – so after she quit her ministry position, mother had to pay for her own healthcare. She has been very lucky and very healthy, but now that she is 88 years old, health insurance is big a problem for her. Government insurance will not cover her, and private health insurance is too expensive due to her advanced age. They may take her in, but it would cost her a fortune.

This is why so much of the Chinese economy goes into savings instead of consumer spending. Everyone needs to protect both themselves and their family.

When one of my uncles came down with a liver disease in the 1990’s – he had to come up with 18,000 Yuan for an operation. That’s a fortune ! His son told him that they did not have the money, and he would have to go home without an operation.

Only by pooling their resources could his siblings afford his health care. (he got the operation – but, unfortunately, died a year later).

(The last time I saw him was in 1992, during that year after his operation. When we visited his village, he was very thin and his back was bent low, but he was very happy to see us, and he made a great effort to put a smile on his face while bustling about trying to help his wife cook a meal for us. He showed us the flowers that mom had given him a few years earlier, and he told us that some of them had been stolen by villagers. He had such love for beautiful things. Before we left the village, he asked us to take at least five long strings of garlic with us. They almost filled the entire trunk of our car. He knew mom and dad would appreciate his garlic – and he also asked us to take a pair of Ming Dynasty tea pots with us to give to mom. They were very precious to him, and many years earlier, antique dealers had offered him 400 Yuan for them, but he had refused to sell. Then, while he was busy carefully wrapping them, I had a feeling I cannot describe. I knew it would be the last time I would ever see him. Now, whenever I make dumplings I remember him. He made most beautiful and fast dumplings I have ever seen. )