The Boundaries of TWILIGHT

Czechoslovak Writing from the New World
Edited by C. J. HRIBAL
Many Minnesotas Project Number 6
New Rivers Press 1991

Otto Ulc

CHINA'S SURPRISES

        "ONLY THE UNPREDICTABILITY!" insisted an old China hand in a Hong Kong bar of unexceptional repute.
       Well, yes - very probably. In the name of the Cultural Revolution culture was demolished, the educational system de-activated, thus netting one hundred million young illiterates. After various great leaps forward and especially backward, the implementors of scientific socialism finally managed to at­tain the average level of consumption of the late 1920s. The average per capita income is about twenty times lower than in Taiwan - a backward island itself at the end of the Second World War.  . .  .
       These blemishes notwithstanding, a large number of American academics continued to extol the allegedly monumental accomplishments and the inherently superior virtues of the communist regime. Not infrequently, the enthusiam of the fellow-traveling thinker, Shirley McLaine, was matched. That is, until the first weekend of June 1989.

       "What kind of letters do you get from home?" shortly after the massacre I asked a graduate student, on loan to our campus from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We first met in Beijing three years ago. His family lives some five-minute walk from Tiananmen Square, a place of great historical significance.
       "It was terrible, terrible, they write," he responded. In 1989, for the first time in almost four decades, the decorations for the May Day parade did not include likenesses of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Instead, a giant portrait of Sun Yat-sen, the pre-communist founder of the first Chinese republic, was hoisted.
Democracy movement. Euphoric students erected a thirty-foot-high Goddess of Democracy, a replica of the American Statue of Liberty. Peaceful protests, demands, hunger strikes - tele-events with global distribution. And the aftermath, thoroughly recorded by the noisy outsiders. Intrepid jour­nalists brought into our living room the events of the fateful Sunday, the assault of thirty thousand crack troops backed by forty tanks and armored personnel carriers. A deadly peace of hellish death was restored on the Square of the Heavenly Peace, the antique rulers with their equally anti­quated concepts of rule triumphed. Two thousand and six hundred fatalities were reported by the Chinese Red Cross.
       Dialectics, the mighty pillar of the Marxist-Leninist faith, commands that every reality is ever-changing and reinterpretation-prone. No surprise then over the subsequent official statements about zero losses among the students. Only the armed soldiers suffered. What the world saw on the television screen was an illusion, a chimera, a plot concocted by sworn enemies of socialism, of peace and progress.
       "Nothing has happened-absolutely nothing!" insisted our student's parents in their subsequent letter, echoing the party line about the foreign-inspired wild exaggeration, slander, and hysteria.
       Millions of ecstatic worshippers used to march in front of Chairman Mao, waving their little red books. "But do they believe it?" the Great Helmsman was reported expressing his worry to Chou En-lai.
On October 1, the fortieth anniversery of the People's Republic was celebrated in the presence of 100,000 very carefully screened citizens. In the place of the Goddess of Democracy a huge statue was erected - the traditional worker-peasant-intellectual-soldier quartet, united in a heroic revolutionary pose.
       No massacre ever happened.
       Tiananmen Square perhaps never existed. If the party so decrees, who will be foolish enough to challenge the new truth of the day?

       I was born and grew up in Bohemia, the country of Franz Kafka. My experience with Stalinism has infected me with a life-long interest in matters absurd. China provides for bountiful satisfaction in this respect. Where else but in the People's Republic would they name their most dreaded concentration camp "The Lake of Emergent Enthusiasm"? "Daddy, is it true you are a bloodsucking capitalist roader?" the son asks and the father whispers "You should always believe the Party and Chairman Mao," further admonishing his progeny "under no circumstances to forget class struggle." In case of fire in the foreigners' only compound in Beijing, the firefighters will be allowed on the premises only if invited in by the endangered foreigners who will vouch for their character. One should beware of the leftist as well as the rightist deviation, leftist at times being rightist and vice versa. Always obey, cognizant of the fact that "rebellion is legitimate".
       The truth is quite often the postion of minority though the minority must always submit to the decisions of the majority. Interested in the subtle intricacies of the Chinese language? Chen means "to stand still" but also "to gallop at full speed. Ch'he denotes a person, devoid of intelligence, an idiot, also a person borrowing and returning books. "To find bail for lighter sentences of females" is taken care of with the three-letter Hoo.
       Thank you, I'd rather preserve my pristine ignorance. Maou Tsaou denotes "A scholar not succeeding and giving himself over to liquor."

       In the early 1960s, I labored on a doctoral dissertation in political science - or pseudoscience, as the case may be - at Columbia University, a self-retired Czechoslovak judge who at the age of twenty-nine managed to flee to the west in a rather ridiculous disguise.
       At a crowded New Year party in the Manhattan apartment of a Czech-born psychiatrist I became mesmerized by an exotic looking creature - what was she doing at that particular ethnic jamboree? "A Slovak dish - second generation," volunteered a kibbitzer and I, equally inebriated, nodded.
       Priscilla is Swiss-Chinese, her mother Helvetian, her father from the Celestial Kingdom.
       We got married. Some time after the exchange of marital vows the bride blushingly revealed a secret - her aristocratic pedigree. Her grandfather Lim Nee Kar (so states Lloyd's Ports of China, 1908), was a mogul, one of the richest men in the country, founder of banks, insurance houses, railroads, granted a title equal to an ambassador by the Empress Dowager, he sent all his sons to study at Cambridge University. . . . Well, that explains it: one of them went frolicking to the Alps and I married the result.
       The in-laws resided in Taiwan, the family estates were not far away - in Amoy a port city of Fukien province, across the Formosa Straits. From the Quemoy Island (a big bone of international contention, in 1958 almost triggering the outbreak of World War III) we saw Amoy through binoculars. Propaganda outposts were pouring passionate exhortations into the windy salt-air. The theater of the absurd once again.
       The Museum of Psychological Warfare displayed a flock of rubber ducks carrying ideological statements in their bellies. Such a floating comman­do equipped with Sun Yat-sen quotations was then dispatched across the straits where it eventually met a competing commando rushing in the opposite direction with Mao Tse-tung's quotation. One spreading democracy, the best hope of mankind, the other inflated messenger carrying the torch of world revolution. How would a veteran of the Long March (a distance from Glasgow to Cape Town) react nursing his bruised aged body under the soothing sun, should he encounter such an ideologically subversive duck? To abandon his faith, to throw away the raison d'etre of his entire existence?
Quemoy we visited on an even day-on odd days the other side bombarded the place and I just had enough of this experience from the days of the big war (on the ground we were the subjects of the Third Reich, at school the officials of the Race Research Institute measured our Unter-menschen heads, comparing their shape to that of chimpanzees, whereas from the air the British and the American airforce worked on our liberation by bombarding us).
Next time we shall attempt to make the few extra miles and visit the ancestral in-law land.

       Chinese organized tourism - the pampered and at the same time isolated, shamelessly, without an apology, fleeced foreigners being herded to Potemkin sites-was not what we were looking for. Instead we became the so-called FIT (Foreign Individual Tourist), unchaperoned by the authorities and far less welcome.
       In 1982 — six years after the terrestial demise of Chairman Mao — in Hong Kong we obtained by somewhat irregular means the entry visa and by ship we reached Amoy overnight. The sea, during the typhoon season, was rough. However, we were even more shaken by forces of emotion: Priscilla returning to her birthplace where she had lived up to her teens. Will the place confirm the assertion of the ancient Greek, Herakleitos, the granddaddy of dialectics, that it is impossible to step twice into the same river? And what a torrent of tumultuous events had swept over China in the interim - the hundred flowers campaign, the great leap forward lunacy, the numerous rectification campaigns and one catastrophic cultural revolution on top of all that, followed by the healing process, the licking of the numerous self-inflicted wounds.
       I had to cope with a different kind of apprehension. All the refugees I have ever met have been tormented by an identical dream: They dream that they are back in their native land, do not know how they got there, they are becoming gradually recognized by the people around, there is no escape, no way out-sweat and anguish terminated only by a merciful awakening.
       After my treacherous vanishing act, a secret police officer made a bet with my brother that the comrades would succeed in snatching me in the West and bringing me back for swift punishment. It did not work, my brother won the bet (and subsequently removed himself from the joys of socialism to Carmel, CA), and now I was about to crawl voluntarily into the red realm. What if they extradite me to Czechosovakia for belated punishment, the Sino-Soviet split notwithstanding?
       The three of us - Priscilla, I, and Herakleitos - disembarked into the prewar days, Hollywoodish realism of shabby decaying China of the early 1930s. Did we catch a glimpse of Clark Gable leering in the direction of Carole Lombard, did we hear the whiningly innocent voice of Peter Lorre? This is supposed to be the spotlessly clean new China, didn't Mao order the extinction of all flies? They swarmed the smelly meat market, our fussy sanitation inspectors should pay a visit to get acquainted with the facts of real life. An almost silent movie it was, accompanied by the tingling bells of unhurried, methodically moving bicyclists.
       The entire Lim clan had removed itself a few steps ahead of the victorious communists, behind stayed only one family of distant (which for the Chinese means close) relatives. They were our welcoming committee and guides.
The ferry delivered us to a nearby island called Kulangsu (Gulangyu in the modernized spelling), once a rather luxurious enclave, the summer home of some of the wealthiest overseas Chinese and a dozen Western consulates. The Mediterranean architecture, falling apart due to both the lack of upkeep and excessive attention paid by the tropical climate, nibbling away the masonry, luxuriant green growth crawling up the steps through the blind windows.
       "A house whose number of rooms one can remember is not worthy of living in," was the article of faith of my eccentric father-in-law. I knew his primary residence only from the fading photos-part Grand Hotel Pupp in Karlsbad in my native country, part Taj Mahal.
       Not any more. The relatives were permitted to occupy the ground floor. In the former reception rooms the walls, once draped with red velvet, had turned into an abstract design on a mildewy canvas, with blueish varicose veins meandering in weird directions. Each piece of furniture seemed to be from a different garage sale. No lacquer, porcelain, statue or painting, nothing aesthetically pleasing- this being the abode of a retired professor of art.
       Easy to guess: the tornado of the cultural revolution had swept the premises.
       "They came and smashed everything - piece by piece," informed uncle, the art lover, adding that this was not the worst experience. That it had been his duty to join the ideologically imbued vandals - and thus to provehis political maturity-in visiting the neighbors and demolishing their treasured possessions.
       There followed an introduction to a man of significance - an apparatchik, an official of the Communist Party. Smiles, handshakes, a Niagara of platitudes.
       Despite my best intentions to preserve an absolute ignorance of this preposterously complicated Chinese tongue, through the years of listen­ing to it almost daily, I occasionally managed to decipher the topic of conversation.
       The Party official was to be used as a part of ban/a - a tool of shortcut arrangements without which absolutely nothing seems to be accomplished.
       "Why are you trying to be so nice to us-why don't you behead us, for example?" I queried. Fairly, substantially straight-forward, no beating around the bush. Priscilla interpreted, the functionary grinned pretending not to understand.
       So I obliged by elaborating on the fundamental Marxist-Leninist principle of class struggle, historically predetermined, inevitable and mercilessly to be pursued, no one to be spared. So much I remembered the hard-to-forget experience from my days in Europe.
       "Oh no, no!" protested the apparatchik and presented a predictable pirouette of dialectics: "The honorable grandfather was no feudal oppressor, no black demon at all - to the contrary, he was a modernizer - banks, railways, and according to our leader Deng Xiaoping, his four principles of modernization ..." and so the recital of the proper political message of the day proceeded.
       The friendly functionary arranged for us lodging in a spacious, i.e. luxurious mansion-space being the most treasured luxury in China. This former property of the Lim family was reserved for visting VIPS, State and Party potentates, what an honor.
       There was more to it: we entered the premises of nostalgic historical significance - this happened to be one of the last headquarters of Chiang Kaishek, before he ignominiously fled to Taiwan, a chapter in history thus closed.
       There we were sleeping in the same imperial-size bed, under the antimosquito canopy that protected the generalissimo from biting insects but not from more noxious communists. There I was, perhaps sitting at the same desk at which the generalissimo had formulated his final quixotic manifesto of resistance.
       The shower did not work, we, the sweaty smelly VIPS raised the point. The neither hostile nor friendly personnel agreed that indeed that particular contraption was out of order and due to shortage of manpower (in a country of one billion) it could not be fixed in the foreseeable future. We were advised to step outside - a vigorous post-typhoon downpour would surely provide a satisfactory substitute of desired ablution.
       Some parts of the island, including the mansion in which Priscilla was born, were off-limits. The People's Army preempted much of the housing space, often without making any discernible use of it. The public was also barred from what was reputedly the nicest beach on the island. There it was, I was informed, that people used to abandon their female offspring. Either by drowning them ("to give a bath" euphemism) or, in the case of more gentle souls, to leave them on an adjacent slope in the hope that some good Samaritan would commiserate and rescue the unworthy creature (girls being called "one thousand ounces of gold," baby boys, however, considered "ten thousand ounces").
       Nowadays, with the decreed one child per family policy, when a girl - a deficit of 9,000 ounces-is born, what then? Either to divorce the guilty spouse and try again - or to dispose of the daughter the old-fashioned way. The local media are not entirely reticent about the matter. A sack with eight suffocated female infants was reported found at the doorstep of a Party secretariat. Couples should beware of conception in the month of May - it augurs ill, it will be a girl.
       One child means not only the impoverishment of the family but also of the language — no need any more for words like "brother, sister, cousin," the uncles and aunties are also destined to die out. A Chinese-speaking family of an American academic was strolling with their two children. "Is this your mother?" asked a Chinese youngster. "And where is the mother of the other baby?"
       We were substantially taken by the demeanor of the children - how serious they were, rarely giggling or horsing around. They rather reminded us of somber Teutonic pensioneers on their methodical strolls in the Schwarzwald.
"       Something is missing here — I just can't put my finger on it," mumbled my expatriate spouse.
       Plenty of things were in short supply - laughter, relaxation, upkeep of houses — and yes, of course - no dogs, no howling mongrels, the standard tormenting feature in almost every Third World country. But not here. In 1950, a few months after the installation of Mao's rule, all dogs were ordered killed, many of them were eaten by the hungry people. This happened almost two generations ago. Today's youngsters have never seen a live canine creature as we have not come face-to-face with a live dinosaur.
       In the countryside some dogs do survive, we were told. We did however notice a few shy, pathetically emaciated cats, hiding in dark corners.
       What about the report card according to the teacher Herakleitos?
       Mores have surely changed - not for the better. Alienation may be the inevitable nemesis of a capitalist order/disorder as the Marxists never tire of reminding us. In China we did not detect much of comradely congeniality either. People rarely exchanged greetings, they pushed and shoved without apology. On a ferry, after having stepped on someone's toe, there was my automatic "sorry". Why did I do that-to a stranger? wondered my companion.
       The Chinese script was simplified, Priscilla had also some difficulty with the spoken language, peppered with various coded expressions such as the word "tiger" by which the natives meant our bedfellow Chiang Kai-shek.
       The wartime Japanese occupation worked as a radical social equalizer - everybody starved, regardless of pedigree. Priscilla recalled long lines, big crowds and fights over rare commodities. Somewhere here, this direction - here it must have been - a fisherman who started to disembowel a shark, and in the process from the belly of the beast retrieved a human arm that belonged to a combatant lost at sea. The fisherman swiftly removed a gold wedding ring, dropped the limb in the garbage pail and proceeded with his brisk business of parceling the man eater.
       Inspection of that particular market place shattered one of my carefully honed theories, namely the proposition, verified over and over in my native Czechoslovakia as well as on the troubled island of Sri Lanka (in the days of socialist experimentation of Mrs. Bandaranaike) that socialist programs and the availability of onion and garlic are mutually exclusive: either the nirvana of a classless society or healthy, vitamin rich vegetables-but one can't have both. The moment Marxism-Leninism enters, the salutary substances vanish overnight.
       Yet, at the former shark market, a cornucopia of onions dominated - no other vegetables but onions. Was there perhaps something wrong with my dogmatic equation or with the Chinese increasingly less dogmatic implementation of socialist recipes?
       "Somewhere here, it can't be far away, used to be a candy store, as children we used to come for absolutely superb coconut cookies, I still remember - on the top shelf, left side. ..."
       We walked in circles until we found: yes, there it was, the same store, shelf and place, the same cookies tasting as in the days immemorial. Despite the revolutionary decades, the succession of values, canonized and condemned in turn. How about that, my dear Herakleitos?
       As it is commonly known, whereas other people eat in order to keep alive, the Chinese seem to live in order to eat. Culinary goals are the alpha and, not infrequently, also the omega of their aspirations. We foreigners count heads, the Chinese count mouths. "How are you, take it easy," are the standard meaningless salutations among us, the neurotic Western barbarians. "Have you eaten?" will a Chinese greet another instead.
       Our brief stay had to be crowned by a farewell feast. After a lengthy family deliberation the choice fell on the People's First Eatery, the top place in town.
       Instead of Herakleitos we should have taken Dante along on this field trip. A gloomy, poorly lit place, a few morose, bone spitting patrons. A little boy with a remarkably rectangular head entered in order to urinate between the soiled tables.
       First we had to approach the box office and engage in lengthy negotiations with a thoroughly disinterested state employee. An agreement finally arrived at-a multi-course dinner for five, the price the equivalent of two weeks' wages.
       In front of bubbling kettles another state employee yawned semi-asleep pretending we were not there.
       By then we already shared that sentiment. Self-service (shortage of labor, once again), polishing greasy chopsticks with my Central European hand­kerchief. Foul smelling dishes, indigestible concoctions, a revenge for the Opium War, unequal treaties, lost territories to the Russians. One spoon of soup made me believe that this was a bouillon made out of the socks of the veterans of the Long March. A cat, one of the sturdy emaciated mohicans approached us. We offered to let it sample the delights but the experienced champion of survival would not touch it.
       Any souvenirs to bring home? In a special store for fleecing foreigners of their hard currency, cans of pickled mushrooms are the best bet. Priscilla selected a dozen fans, all with an identical design, no surprise in socialism.
       Since my childhood, preceding the tutorial of Hitler and Stalin, I have been craving for a gong - a big gong, if possible. And suddenly we stumbled upon a store with just such merchandise. We touched, sensitively tapped, fondled and finally chose two splendidly acoustic contraptions.
       The unexpected expenditure required a further exchange of then still-robust dollars into local currency The premises of the bank might have been designed by Charles Dickens - one room with forty scribes, silently,listlessly attending to their chores. We flashed VISA, the symbol of capitalist opulence, and the machinery started to move.
       During this lengthy process, one of the gongs slipped from under an arm and fell flat on the ground, shattering the tranquility of the premises. The laboring cadres froze without emitting a sound. Did we lose our face? Probably, most definitely I started to laugh, an uninhibited kind of roar.
       After a long while, the wall began cracking. First a solitary giggle, then another, an echo of Smetana's symphonic poem Vltava when the trickle of a river stream is on its way to grow and turns into a roaring Wagnerian finale. The Chinese, traumatized and anesthetized for so long, have not entirely lost their capacity for what we consider elementary, normal, and substantially preferable reactions.
       Fine. Not everything is lost, the situation is serious but not hopeless (and not the other way around, as Mussolini allegedly diagnosed the state of Italy of his days). On this optimistic note we left China just ahead of yet another pernicious typhoon.

       We returned to China in 1986 - after four years, time long enough to graduate from college, to finish a world war, and in the case of Deng the modernizer to implement substantial domestic changes. This time we were surely not stepping into the same river.
       In Hong Kong we boarded the very same Chinese ship and were put up in the same cabin. Behold, the reproduction of a standard traditional painting (steep mountain peaks, mist, wind-swept pines) was gone and instead we stared at a wall with a modernistic renditiion of a nude female with a luxuriant amount of pubic hair and one leg amputated.
       The cabin boys and girls were less aloof, in the dining hall chopsticks had been replaced by plastic forks and knives. The quality of the food had improved but because of the typhoon season and the substantially choppy voyage, not all the passengers retained it and the deck was slippery.
       Docking and far more efficient disembarkation this time. The waiting crowd shouted greetings and, above all, instructions on what further Western merchandise to acquire in the duty free shop. Our relatives had notified us urgently in Hong Kong to bring along a refrigerator. What about a concert piano? I grumbled. What happened to the restraint not to lean so obviously, to demand so crassly, a restraint that characterized the Chinese society for millenia and was still around a couple of years ago?
       Unlike the unchanged exterior of the port, still largely run down, with little color and still plenty of bicyclists, the interior of the people had changed - altered habits with a patina of capitalist temperament, individualistic greed. A brisk black market with foreign currencies, competition among the cabbies and tricycle rickshaws (not state employees anymore), and tipping, of course.
       Private shops and restaurants had sprung up, no danger of repeating the horror of the People's First Eatery. The military had surrendered the lackadaisically maintained properties, no more beaches off-limits. No more Mao jackets but men still dressed with monotonous uniformity (dark pants, light color short-sleeve shirts, plastic sandals, a watch with a metal band). The women were the trailblazers toward the antitotalitarian goal of variety and color. Some wore skirts. They handled this novelty with endearing innocence, blissfully oblivious of their providing an unimpeded view of their delicate parts. To cool themselves, they used their skirts as a fan, lifting and flapping, thus eventually raising the temperature of interested observers.
       Daring pioneers appeared in what resembled semi-hot pants. T-shirts with signs such as papillon or university of Kentucky, with statements misspelled (engertic people) or abandoned (home of stainless, made in ), worthless Taiwan or Hong Kong rejects that make some smart operators rich.
       Most importantly, the joyless, subdued people around us started open­ing up. Though not yet a merry wedding party, they did not resemble a funeral crowd anymore. During our first visit everybody seemed to stare at the visiting Lim princess but nobody would dare to make a step to shake her hand. This time we were swarmed. The same fellow who used to pretend blindness rushed to us announcing that his brother was about to give a piano recital at Carnegie Hall in New York. The fruits of one child policy: gone was the ideal and reality of an exemplarily behaving offspring (treasured in a society practicing collective responsibility, i.e. parents could be punished for the misdeeds of their young). Nowadays, the one and only treasure permitted is the treasure to be protected and pampered. Permissiveness is rampant among the young parents (largely a part of the "lost generation" of the Cultural Revolution), corporal punishment unknown, the little monsters are at the worst called taoqi - "the somewhat naughty ones."
       The media have come up with a more apt label: little emperors pampered, spoiled, lazy, and fat, so goes the ofrical lament.
       I made a fool of myself in a fiasco of an attempt to stand up against the tide at a concert of a celebrated youth orchestra from Shanghai. Chinese traditional music, Donizetti, Rossini, Gershwin-an exemplary performance, ruined by a pernicious force. Little emperors and empresses were crawling all over the place, yelling, chasing each other. My hisses, gestures, and overall expression of ferocious displeasure merely added further decibels to the reigning anarchy. When I switched my protestations to their parents, they just indicated there was nothing they could - or possibly would be inclined to - do.

       Four years ago, our son Ota stayed behind in Hong Kong, stricken with chicken pox of extravagant virulence. This time, at the age of sixteen, he was to be exposed to the ancestral terrain. Though American born, he speaks Chinese (its Fukien dialect). In the West he is taken for a diluted Oriental of sorts, in China he passed for a Long Nose, a Hwanna- a hairy barbarian, a savage intruder.

       "Those white people-how repulsive! Their little children, that is not that bad but once they grow up! And they all look so alike - how do they manage to see the difference and not get confused, that is beyond me", was a typical comment of local kibbitzers, happily passed on to me by my knowledgeable descendant.
       He acquired a dozen local girl friends, employees of the local tourist board, a carefree crowd, enjoying a pleasant tenured existence. A guest room may or may not be cleaned. The garbage may wait or it can be tossed out of the window. When told about the efficiency of services in Hong Kong, the jolly angels were shocked over such inhuman practices.
       Unauthorized contact with a foreigner used to be punished with a speedy dispatch to a reeducation camp. Not any more - Ota reported about his visit to a one room apartment: "In front of a televison sat a woman, middle age. My girl did not greet her and did not introduce me, and she ignored us all the time we were there chatting. After we left, I asked her who was that woman. It was my mother, she explained".
       Filial respect is definitely a matter of the past, buried during the cultural revolution. "What do you say to your parents in the morning, when you get up?" I interrogated one of our nephews. "Nothing", he responded.
"       I feel like a missionary", Ota complained about the deficient mores of his angels. They pick their noses. They spit around with the gust of a disgruntled sailor. In this, the missionary's rectification effort was partially succesful - the angels switched to spitting from the window. What if some­one happens to get in their way? Oh well, it will most likely be a stranger, so what.
       According to a governmental instructional booklet published in the days of Deng the modernizer, so-called music such as jazz with its abnormal rhythm resembles spasms and uncontrollable fits. Dancing continued to be viewed with disfavor as something unproductive, if not outright decadent.

       But even this Spartan wall seemed to be crumbling: We spent Saturday night at an open air restaurant adjacent to the People's Botanical Gardens, once again officially known as Lim Gardens, named after the original builder and owner, my grandfather-in-law The manager led us to the best table on which he placed Coca Cola, locally a rather expensive potion for which he refused to accept money.
       A tropical setting, whispering palms, the place was filling up, the gaudily lit dance floor quadrangle empty. Families, couples, girls holding hands in tense expectations. The solemn, subdued mood was broken by a little empress of preschool age who got up, lifted her luxuriously frilled mini-undies, squatted and relieved herself on the spot. Her initiative was closely, pensively observed and then imitated by a little emperor who managed to spurt his stream to an extraordinary distance.
       Some throaty messages over the public address system, an attempt made to use the microphone, or rather a macrophone. Something was about to begin-begin with what?
       "The Radetzky march!" was my correct guess. What seemed to be the most popular tune in the most populous country commenced. The touch of Austro-Hungarian monarchy was followed by a couple of Verdis (II Trovatore, Aida) and Bizet (Carmen, of course). Toreadors marching with shovels to build a dike, to divert the Yangtze river, 1 imagined. Still, progress-not any more ditties such as The East Is Red, or The Brigade of the Collectors of Night Soil Is Descending from the Mountain.
       Surreptitious looks around, concentration on one's straw in ones coke bottle. After much hesitation the first courageous ones entered the dance floor-boy with a boy, girl with a girl. Gay preference? No such thought. No gay liberation front on this land (such predilection being swiftly cured with a bullet, we were told) but shyness, pure and simple.
       After the William Tell Overture the functionary in charge of the record player switched to Argentinian tangos of the Thirties. And behold - a first couple emerged, with more confidence than skill, engaging in daring bends and ostentatious gestures, the gentleman firmly in control of the lady, music, and the gasping spectators. "Just like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers," an elderly native nodded appreciatively.
       Music of Hawaii followed.
       "Now, you try," I nudged Ota who objected that he did not know how to.
       "What a silly excuse - neither do they," I pointed to a trio of maidens, frozen in anticipation, firmly grasping their handkerchiefs.
       "Shall we dance?"
       "We do not dance."
       "To see those who dance."
       He then suggested that they ask him about the United States - anything. For the first time ever, they now had an opportunity to speak to a real American from mei-kuo, "Beautiful Country," as the U.S. is called in Chinese (unlike Africa - fei tziu, the "Bad, Ugly Continent").
       "What kind of weather is in America," they managed to utter after some hesitation.
       Still, this is progress. To repeat: not long ago, swift punishment threatened for a mere whisper to a foreign devil, be that an American imperialist or any of the numerous running dogs.
       Progress in the selection of music was also registered, reaching and soon exceeding my (low) level of tolerance - a local semblance of rock, the in­fatuation of the barbarians.
       "Grandfather must be turning in his grave and Mao in his mausoleum, on hearing this," I pointed an accusatory finger in the direction of the cacophony.
       Son pointed out that the grandfather was an enlightened modernizer who would not object to progress.
       As expected, the grandfather did not rise from the dead to solve this generational dispute.

       Asking a Chinese how far it was from place A to place B, I received the answer that it depended on how fast I would go.
       "The Aristotelean logic that plus and minus are natural opposites, that one plus one equals two, that logic you cannot apply in this country," warned a knowledgeable Viennese coed studying in Shanghai. "No, you have to be equally illogical and then you will reach a perfect understanding."
       I remain unconvinced - there is, for example, a system behind the in­furiating sequence of standard negative responses one gets: A nod, of course, must not be taken for a sign of consensus but merely an acknowledgment that the question, request, whatever, was heard and, hopefully, understood.
       This scenario develops:
       Reaction to an unwelcome question - to pretend the question was not heard and because of the non-response the questioner will get the point and forget the whole thing.
       In case the questioner did not get the point and will repeat the question, the Chinese party will pretend not to understand. In case of further perseverance, the Chinese will resort to profuse ex­planation that while he wholeheartedly agrees, unfortunately, it cannot be done — it is too complicated (the most favorite rationalization), it is beyond anybody's control, is ultra vires.
       As an advance party for our university, I was to look over some candidates for graduate studies and funding, and also to inspect the premises and to probe into some details with regard to a pending exchange program with a local institution. I wanted to see the dormitories-any room.
       "Sorry, it cannot be done, dormitories are closed. It's summer, you see."
       Well, I did not see-the summer session was in full swing. The point granted, the request not granted with the explanation that all dormitories in China were alike. After a few hours of less than fruitful communication, as lunchtime was approaching, I suggested to have something to eat in the student cafeteria.
       "Sorry, all cafeterias are closed-summer vacation. . .  ."
       "Summer session!"
       "True. But the best cooks are on vacation."
       "I don't need the best cook, an ordinary one will do."
       "Very sorry, it cannot be arranged because we did not make an advance reservation."
       One is likely to encounter this kind of discourse in various settings. As lamented earlier, the Chinese charge foreign devils for services (notably for accommodation) much more than what they charge the natives. The overseas Chinese are priced somewhere in between and that was the category we were aiming at, and whenever we did not succeed for the three of us, at least Priscilla should have been the beneficiary.
       "You are not an overseas Chinese," objected an official in charge of such matters.
       "Why not? Have a look at my passport-born in Amoy, China!"
       "You are not an overseas Chinese because this is an American but not Chinese passport."
       "Such passports do not exist, you foolish man!"
       The less than Aristotelean verbal duel continued, the official still probing to prove his point: "You are not an overseas Chinese because you are not registered in this hotel for the overseas Chinese."
       "But we want to get registered here, that is why, because. . . ." Catch 22, Joseph Heller. And Franz Kafka, my countryman, once again.

       The cultural revolution was already over for ten years. The final discouraging judgment as to the qualities of the human race was already in: the majority failed, people lost their sense of decency, caused much harm and pain, did beat up, torture, denounce enemies and friends, strangers and their own family members alike.
       When the nightmare was finally over, the tired, dizzy participants started to orient themselves in that multiple havoc and precious few penitents were to be found. As is usually the case, the responsibility for crimes and damages in general was shifted from specific individuals to the nebulous System, to Chairman Mao "whose thought was essentailly correct as can be clearly seen from his mistakes" (70 percent correct, 30 percent wrong, according to the current official calculus). How many thousands or millions did actually belong to the Gang of Four?
       When pressing the point, 1 would be told about a "few thousand" ultra-radicals shot, others put behind bars, yet still others escaped retribution altogether, some of them turning into opportunistic, prosperous entre­preneurs-red capitalists.
       In Fukien province the cultural revolution was almost a tranquil affair, I was told. True, plenty of property destruction but not more than twenty thousand killed. "Here - everything was smashed," informed a witness in the municipal park about the revolutionaries destroying gazebos, ripping apart benches, blowing up hunchbacked bridges across bubbling brooks. At the bottom of one such stream I noticed a cupid, a chubby angelic fellow, battered, drowned, not yet rehabilitated. Yet another distant relative was introduced to us: a shy girl, a half-orphan. Her father had been beaten to death by the advocates of a better future.
       At the local university I was introduced to a jolly, optimistic professor who offered his lefthand for a hearty handshake. His right arm was paralyzed, it withered away like a dead tree branch. Revolutionary students had broken the arm and prevented medical help.
       We were getting to the skeletons in local closets, step by step, as if peeling an onion: it did not produce tears but wonderment, bewilderment. An aunt of ours was paraded through the streets with a dunce cap. Her former husband, a party official and tyrant, was killed by the red guards - deservedly so, insisted some of the neighbors. The nephews, members of the lost generation, rather than victims of irrational times were among the energetic victimizers. They hounded their grandmother to death.
       Everyone has his or her own truth, Luigi Pirandello. Usually, after sunset, former employees of the long gone grandfather would visit Priscilla, presenting their mutually exclusive views of who behaved decently and who swinishly. A servant's daughter who claimed to be the savior of the grandmother, becomes accused as having been one of her prime tormentors. The widow of another ex-employee, while overtly an impertinent critic of all things communist, was in fact a ferocious radical who craved to be admitted to the ranks of the red guards despite her advanced age, and so on-who denounced whom, who harmed whom.
       Another visitor (a reputed former secret police informer) barged in, im­ploring Priscilla to file, on behalf of the Lim family, a restitution claim to the decaying, decrepit palaces. Why should she do so, why this interest in unmaking the revolutionary accomplishment of the people-a matter of bad conscience, perhaps?
       Yes, bad conscience towards the state. During the cultural revolution none of the tenants bothered to pay rent and no agency of the semi-defunct state bothered to collect. But now, as part of the non-ideological modernization drive, Deng insists on the payment retroactively, for all the many delinquent years. Each month the collector comes to the door, each month the indignant debtor throws him out. Communism is worse than feudalism, in those days the lodging was free-so goes the claim. (Still, communism is in this respect far more compassionate than capitalism - which capitalist landlord would tolerate such procrastination?)
       Therefore, the supplicant continued, if we reclaim the properties as other overseas Chinese have already done, and repair the properties, spruce them up, of course, we surely would also forgive and forget the debts, unlike the communist leeches.
       I wished to find out what other properties did the family own, in addition to the decrepit mansions packed with rent-resistant tenants.
       Land, some of it agricultural. A block of office buildings downtown. A brick factory, a sugar refinery. .  .  .
       What about a brewery, a distillery of some good alcohol - have we got? Just a factory producing soy sauce.
       The government already extended its apology for the destruction of grandfather's statue. A replacement was under construction. The court sculptor in charge was working with the help of faded photos and, according to Priscilla, the result thus far failed to resemble the honorable ancestor. To me it looked like Antonin Svehla, a pre-war Czechoslovak politician of rural orientation, certainly not honored in his native land.

       Nowadays in Eastern Europe socialism is being defined as an intermediate between capitalism and capitalism.
       Our junior reported that in his Chinese harem was one who claimed to be a communist. I deputized him to find out what she understood by that chiliastic creed. He returned with this definition: "She said that communism was a system in which we can make more money."
       It is also a system in which values tend to perish with distressing speed and regularity. This particular loyalist youngster was perhaps among those killed at the Square of Heavenly Peace. But, of course, we must never forget - there was no killing, there perhaps has never been a Tiananmen Square. Only the unpredictability of China is predictable, so the sage in the Hong Kong bar emphasized.