A hundred flowers
Deng said, Reform is China’s second revolution. And we believed him. All of us. Even me, the cynical American. ‘Now we are moving in the right direction,’ I told my husband, Jingyu. ‘Now things will change.’
Jingyu was just five years old when his father died in the Hundred Flowers Campaign. Let a hundred flowers bloom, Mao said. Let the hundred schools of thought contend. People were sceptical. They needed prodding. But in the end they did pour out their criticisms, my father-in-law included. Then the crackdown came.
Still, we were ready to be optimistic about Deng. Almost 30 years had passed since the Hundred Flowers Campaign. And Deng was Deng. I bought a chicken at the market and I roasted it on the fire. I served it with rice and bok choy – an attempt at a Western meal. I used the dollars my family had sent me to buy coffee and chocolate from the Friendship Store, and we had a celebration. Grandma Gao spat the coffee out, but she patted me on the arm as she pottered off on her tiny ruined feet to squat by the door and smoke the Kent cigarettes I’d given her. It was an acceptance of sorts. I looked at my children, their slanting blue eyes and spiky sandy-coloured hair, and I felt a new hope. Perhaps one day I would stop longing for winter when I could swaddle them up against the cries of lao-wai that marked them out as foreigners in their own country.
I learned to love Mandarin and Deng Xiaoping at the same time. Our teacher at Swarthmore College used Deng’s name to introduce us to tones. It was 1974 and Deng had just been rehabilitated for the first time. Mr Li, a visiting professor from Beijing Normal University who’d stayed on in the US when the Cultural Revolution started, adored Deng. In him he saw hope for his own return to China.
I used to love the shape of Deng’s name. Deng is fourth tone, falling sharply; xiao third, diving deep then rising back up; ping second, a steady climb. Together they looked like two hands holding a bowl of warming wonton soup.
I loved the sounds too: dung-sheeow-ping.
‘Xiao rhymes with meow,’ Mr Li told us, as we struggled with Pinyin, the new romanisation system. Mr Li spat on the old Wade-Giles system, which had given the world such woeful mispronunciations as Peking, and which he viewed as function of Western imperialism.
And I loved that Xiaoping meant Little Peace. How much better a name than Bill or Gerry or Fred is Little Peace? And how well it fitted brave little Deng, with his chubby face and his tiny hands, always holding a lit cigarette; little Deng who kept smiling when he was out of favour, who didn’t flinch even when the Red Guards pushed his son out a window and made him a paraplegic.
My own name is Camelia Mary Robertson. My mother was a fanciful woman and she pushed my father into second place in the naming game. I was born in Athens, Georgia, my mother’s home town, but when I was six years old we moved to Pennsylvania. My father disliked the south. He longed for the north, for industrial Pittsburgh where he’d worked shifts at the steelworks to pay his way through medical school when he first came to the US from Belfast. I grew up in Sewickley Heights, a wealthy borough in Allegheny County, in a large clapboard house painted the colour of pea soup.
My father had high expectations of his children and I’m never entirely sure if I left America to escape his immigrant hopes or to get away from my taut Southern mother. My mother was the kind of woman who wears peach and puts crocheted covers on spare toilet paper rolls.
They didn’t approve of my going to Swarthmore – the Kremlin on the Crum, as Spiro T. Agnew once dubbed it. They thought I’d get strange ideas and I did. I marched against the Vietnam War and was carted off by the cops, my hair trailing in the dirt. I joined a Maoist cell of the Communist Party USA. I gave up medicine to study Mandarin Chinese and Eastern Philosophy.
When I announced I was going to China, their disapproval reached a screeching crescendo. My father called me at all hours. ‘Your mother can’t eat,’ he said. Or, ‘Your mother’s eyes are red raw from crying.’ My mother herself called just once. I guessed she’d been down among the dry whites in my father’s wine cellar.
‘It’s shockin’,’ she said in her Heavens-to-Betsy accent. ‘Ma own daughter. Ah don’t deserve this. It’s– ’ she paused and snuffled loudly – ‘un-American!’
Un-American. It was 1978. Deng had just been named Man of the Year by Time magazine. And couldn’t she see? Un-American was exactly what I wanted to be.
I believe it’s all changed now, but in my day when Americans went to live in China, they travelled one of two routes: either they learned to despise Chinese culture or they learned to despise their own. I took Route 2, but being me, I did it with chutzpah. I wore Mao suits and took Chinese medicine. I practised Tai chi chuan and read The Little Red Book cover to cover. I excoriated Western critics of China, while excusing sexism and racism within China I’d have gone to the barricades over in my Crum Creek days. When I married Gao Jingyu, a fellow English teacher at the Tianjin Institute of Light Industry, many people were shocked, but I don’t believe anyone was surprised.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened to Jingyu if he hadn’t married me. I guess he might have applied to go back north to Harbin instead of bringing his mother and grandmother to Tianjin. And if he had moved to Harbin, had married a slender Chinese woman, lovely as a lotus blossom, he might not have gone to Beijing that day in 1989. If he hadn’t had a foreign wife, who in the end would not shut up, could not fit in, Jingyu might not have been in Tiananmen Square when Little Peace sent the tanks in.
By that time, of course, I knew that Little Peace wasn’t Deng’s real name. His birth name was Xiansheng, an ordinary name. He changed it to Xiaoping in 1924.
I’m back in the US now. Not in Pittsburgh – that would’ve been too much like coming home. I bought an apartment in San Francisco with the money my father left me.
I feel badly about it. When Jingyu was dying he took my hand and asked me to promise to stay in China, and I promised. Jingyu was a good husband. My life in China wasn’t easy, but he loved me. Not in a honey-I-love-you way, like in the movies. He never said: I love you. But he showed it. He showed it in many small ways. I wanted to keep my promise to him. But in the end I couldn’t. It didn’t work any more. I lived in Tianjin for 25 years and on my last day people stared at me in the street and shouted lao-wai.
My children are still in China, grown-up now. My son lives in Hong Kong, using his American passport. My daughter works for an investment firm in Shanghai. When they call me, they sound American, but they’re not. My daughter dyes her hair black and wears tinted contact lenses to make her blue eyes look brown. My genes, I sometimes feel, are a rogue element.
Last spring, I visited my daughter in Shanghai. My son came too. The changes were overwhelming, the glitz and the glare. I went into the Peace Hotel to drink tea and I wept. I felt Jingyu and his father had died for nothing. We wanted change. But did we want this?
Later, I tried to talk with my children about their ancestors. I told them they were heroes. They listened for a time, then they said, ‘Oh, Mom.’ They are proud of them, but they want to move on. And perhaps I don’t explain it too well. I’ve often felt sorry for those two great Chinamen with only an old foreigner to explain their achievements to their descendants.
I guess that's why I decided that when I returned to San Francisco I must do something to honour Jingyu and his father. What I did was this: I ordered a hundred rosebushes from an on-line garden store and I planted them in my allotment. I filled my allotment with rosebushes. When they bloomed, I took a picture of them and I sent it to my children. Let a hundred flowers bloom, I wrote on the back. Then, after I’d mailed the picture, I did something I almost never do: I went to Chinatown. There’s a café there that serves Goubuli Baozi, Tianjin’s famous steamed buns. I intended to eat and go, but as I was munching my way through the buns four crumpled old ladies came in to play Mahjong. It was their voices that caught my attention; they spoke the crystal clear Mandarin of educated Beijingese, every tone ringing clean like a bell.
It was beautiful and when I'd finished the buns, instead of signalling for the check as I’d intended, I asked the waitress to bring me some green tea. After all, I thought, why rush home? Why not sit a while and listen?
Published in: Let's Pretend - 37 stories about (in)fidelity