Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now by Jan Wong Read Free Book Online Page B

conduct electricity, the women were fine, just as birds and squirrels can land on high-voltage wires without getting fried.
    The Chinese were always searching for ways to impress gullible foreigners. They claimed that acupuncture, the ancient practice of inserting needles into various points of the body, could treat everything from paralysis to mental illness. Patients looked like voodoo dolls, but many swore by its results. I tried it for colds, and it seemed to work, but who really knew?
    Acupuncture anesthesia was an innovation of the Cultural Revolution. In one city, we watched doctors precede a cesarean section by inserting long thin needles into the patient’s ankles andswollen belly. As the patient waved and smiled to us up in the observation dome, the surgeon sliced her open. The woman showed no reaction, although some in my group nearly lost their lunch. It seemed miraculous when the doctors lifted out a baby girl, all wet and blue, from the red sludge below. We watched as doctors sewed the woman up. “I felt nothing at all,” the patient said afterwards. “Acupuncture anesthesia is marvelous.” Despite success stories like this, acupuncture anesthesia was in fact unreliable, and was largely abandoned by the 1990s.
    After several weeks, the non-stop rhetoric wore down even wannabe Maoists like us. The only acceptable way to let off steam in China was to roll stones up a hill, Sisyphean-style, when what we really needed was a Rolling Stones concert. When a guide droned on too long about how many slave days it took to construct the subterranean Ming Tombs in Beijing, I started tap-dancing on the marble floor, until Bai gave me the evil eye. Another time at dinner, someone in my tour group began parodying an acupuncture operation. We all joined in. Chopsticks twirled as mock needles over someone’s stomach. Leftover buns became tumors. The skit soon deteriorated into an all-American food fight — in a country where people had died of starvation not so long before. Our guides sat on the sidelines and looked grim.
    Because I had studied a little Mandarin, I was often designated the official thanker. Each time I got up to make a speech at the end of a visit, the Chinese beamed expectantly. Their smiles faded when they couldn’t understand a word. After several excruciating performances, I began to lobby for a chance to study Chinese. Bai told me most colleges were mothballed because of the Cultural Revolution, and assured me no one in China was interested in tutoring for money. Undeterred, I pestered officials and bureaucrats in every city. On July 18, 1972, Bai took me aside in Beijing and whispered that I had been granted permission to study. She wouldn’t say what school I would attend, when I would start or what it would cost, but if I accepted, I would have to drop out of my tour group at once. I asked for ten minutes, walked once around the block, took a deep breath, and said yes.

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Welcome You!

    Hamming it up with Erica Jen, right, at the Forbidden City
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    My first roommate, Scarlet Zhang
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A fter a week of suspense, an official told me I would begin studying at Beijing University in early August. I was thrilled and a bit in awe to learn that an American named Erica Jen and I would be the first students from the Western world to study in China since the Cultural Revolution. Although my visa was good for only three months, it appeared there would be no problem extending it for a year. With a few weeks to kill, I explored the capital. Almost every tourist attraction was closed, including the Fine Arts Museum, the imposing Beijing Library and the Temple to Confucius. At the Summer Palace, one of the few sites still open, Red Guards had daubed whitewash over thousands of decadent floral murals.
    For the first time in years, I felt safe walking the streets alone. Dark shadows didn’t scare me, the way they did at home. I never had to look behind me or quicken my pace. I knew no one would leap out at me and