China On My Mind

Georgia's not on my mind. I went to Atlanta and then, like General Sherman marching to the sea, I was gone with the wind to Savannah where I ventured into the Garden of Good and Evil, but only during daylight hours. Nope, Georgia's not on my mind these days; but China is.
Last summer I met Chinese-American author Canyon Sam whose book Sky Train: Tibetan Women on the Edge of History recounts the changes that have come to pass in that mountainous country since the Chinese moved in and took control in 1959. Last October I heard travel writer Y.J. Zhu read from her story "Taklamakan Desert Moon Ride" chronicling her participation in a 1,550 mile motorcycle race through China. Last week I met Chinese-born writer Ying Chang Compestine whose novel Revolution Is Not A Dinner Party is required reading in California schools. And today I picked up the March issue of National Geographic and read "Shanghai Dreams." So China's been on my mind lately, but also for a long, long time.

In 1968 I went to school to learn the Chinese language. In heavily accented English, my teacher Chu Tai-Tai said that in order to master speaking the four-toned lingo: "You must practice your mouse." Baba Su, who was probably eighty years old if he was a day, simply rocked back and forth in his chair humming to himself while I attempted to stuff as many Chinese words as possible into the gray matter between my American ears. The school is still around and even has a Website, although the program in which I was enrolled has probably long since ended, and all of my instructors must now be the object of ancestor worship.

I wasn't sent to China after I completed my language training. That would have been far too dangerous in the era when Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book held sway over that vast Asian country. But I got close, quite close, although for reasons of "National Security" I can't name the location where I spent the better part of eighteen months using my Chinese language skills.

There is a famous line which Humphrey Bogart speaks in the movie Casablanca: "Mister, I met a man once when I was a kid." I wasn't really a kid anymore when I met the Man From Shanghai; I was almost twenty-three, it was 1969, and Neil Armstrong would soon be setting foot on the Moon.

The Man From Shanghai worked as a busboy in a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. At the end of the meal, he sat down at the table where I and my comrades had washed down pot stickers, bowls of rice, and several stir-fried dishes with cup after cup of strong tea.

We spoke Mandarin, the official language of the People's Republic of China; he talked in Shanghai-dialect (which National Geographic writer Brook Larmer describes as "rich and guttural [argot which] has been losing ground since the 1950s, when Beijing launched its campaign to unify the country with standardized Mandarin." It was difficult for us to recognize the words that came out of the mouth of The Man From Shanghai and the fact that he was missing half his teeth amplified the problem. Imagine a toothless Yorkshire yeoman conversing with a "public school" educated Londoner and you'll understand our predicament.

This chance encounter with The Man From Shanghai left me thinking about his hometown for over forty years. As Larmer points out in "Shanghai Dreams", in the early twentieth century the city was a vibrant place full of foreigners "creating an exotic stew of British bankers and Russian dancing girls, American missionaries and French socialites, Jewish refugees and turbaned Sikh security guards." Enter Mao, stage left; exit the foreigners, stage right. So when I met The Man From Shanghai, this Paris of The Orient was no more. But today, the seeds of Western Culture planted nearly a hundred years ago are bursting forth into a spreading wave of new growth. Two international airports flank the city, east and west, and the population now exceeds thirteen-million.

If I had lived in San Francisco a hundred and fifty years ago, I might have been "Shanghaied" and forced to sail before the mast across the Pacific Ocean to China. Now I can fly there from SFO for less than it would cost me to travel to London by air. But will I go, or will China simply remain on my mind, and Shanghai a place I visit only in my dreams?