First publication, San Francisco Examiner; national syndication, Newspaper
Enterprise Associates
On the eve of the Tienanmen Massacre: Chinese students' hunger for freedom
By George Jay Leonard
[This article by George Leonard , professor of interdisciplinary humanities
at SFSU, appeared in the editorial section of the May 26 San Francisco Examiner,
shortly before the Tienanmen Massacre of the Chinese students.]
We sit in front of the television set, watching the students in Tiananmen Square.
The media have found a boy to be their Mark Rudd (Columbia University strike
leader, 1968). He's a student at the Beijing Teacher's College where I taught
last summer.
I recognize a woman standing with him -- a plain woman, 30ish, shy, always smiling;
when she tried to talk to me another woman always cut her off. Now here she
is on network television.
Who are they? (Dan Rather is asking.) What do they want? Why are some students
carrying a six-foot Statue of Liberty? What do they think "democracy"
is? What do they think "America" is? President Bush has told them
to "Stand up for what they believe in," but what do they believe in?
I can answer in part. Some of the students in Tiananmen Square, and apparently
some of the leaders (if there really could be leaders in a situation like that)
were in my classes last summer. Less than a mile from Tiananmen, at Beijing
Advanced Teacher's College, I gave 120 to 140 of Beijing's working English teachers
(a ninth of the capital's total) the first lecture series on America by a foreigner
they had ever been permitted. Perhaps their last. My wife left Beijing only
three years ago, and I speak Mandarin, so that helped us communicate.
What did they know about America? Only that it's Paradise. Less than your great-grandfather
knew when he came over here to pick up gold off the street; less than any people
in the world. And mind you, I was teaching the teachers -- and this was the
heart of Beijing.
I brought slides with me because I knew they hadn't even seen images of America.
The Chinese still have not seen our movies or television. They're now, in 1989,
allowed Mi Lao Shu, Mickey Mouse, every Sunday at 6 for half an hour,
and about four weirdly assorted American movies a year. When I met my wife she
didn't know who John Wayne was, or Frank Sinatra --she didn't even know who
Elvis was. My students didn't either. Now, if they've never seen a picture of
Elvis, how much do you think they know about American culture?
The chairman of the English department, as we sat down to the obligatory Peking
duck dinner, told me confidently that he'd heard that in America the knife was
used only once, at the start of the meal, to cut the meat into bits, which were
then eaten with the fork. Was that true? When I ungraciously said no, he lost
face, and had to insist. Yes, he'd heard this from a very good source. I was
perhaps mistaken?
He was head of the department. The students in Tiananmen know less about us
than he does.
Democracy? Capitalism? None of my students were remotely interested in economics,
except for one question: "How much does a teacher make?" "I don't
know what democracy is," Newsweek quoted a student saying some weeks
back, "but we need more of it." "Democracy" fascinates them
in the abstract way "sex" fascinates virgins. Without experience,
they understand it only in the abstract. But everyone understands what a dishwasher
is, what food is, what it would be like not to have to ride a bike through sleet
to work.
I tried to give a balanced picture of America, tried to talk about social problems,
the inner city, the crack epidemic. My students seemed shocked to hear me say
it, since they had heard about that part from their government, and everything
their government tells them they assume is a lie. But they soon got back to
their real interest: "How much do teachers like us make?"
The most ambitious of these people, by the way, were Communist Party members.
It means nothing. Picture yourself trying to rise in a Ford plant without joining
the AFL-CIO.
I showed them pictures of the desert right outside Los Angeles, to suggest how
much open space there still was in America, but they were only interested in
the giant power lines marching across even this vacant space. Until a few years
ago much of Beijing only received electricity certain days of the week, and
even now, in 1989, it fails almost daily.
My wife kept telling me to drop the aesthetics and social theory and give them
what they wanted. In the last lecture I gave them what they'd been waiting for,
the American Dream, the same stuff that would have brought a tense, respectful
silence to my grandparents' shtetls back in Europe. A Party meeting had been
scheduled opposite this lecture, so only about 20 people could come, but we
had a good discussion. We saw "workers" driving cars they owned; shopping
malls ablaze with electric lights and filled with "workers"; the endless
dumbfounding Sizzler salad bar, surrounded by elderly people eating great plates
of food. My wife showed them slides she's taken in Safeway: ordinary people
buying hao chr-de, plentiful, inexpensive food.
You have to turn your mind back to your great-grandparents to remember that
America means food. During the early sixties, after Mao's disastrous
Great Leap Forward, all the leaves disappeared from the elm tree in my wife's
building courtyard; people had climbed up and eaten them. Food is still rationed
in Beijing: Every meal I had at my mother-in-law's was the same --- rice, eggplant,
peanuts, cucumber, tomato and sometimes an egg. S'may said Meiguoren
(Americans) needed meat, so her mom took two buses through the heat to a store
that had a backup generator for its refrigeration and paid a small ransom to
buy me a heavily salted chicken leg, which dissolved into a brown liquid somewhere
near the middle. The third time it was served to me I finished it.
When you eat, people politely ask, "Hao chr-ma?" Americans
always translate that as "Did it taste good?" but that's not really
what it means. If the food was hao - unspoiled, edible --it's assumed
it tasted good enough for you. When old people meet they still say, "Ni
chr-le-ma", "Did you eat?" An American friend once asked
his Cantonese father-in-law if this greeting was some sort of an implied invitation
to dine. The old gentlemen said that, no, it was more like, "Did you find
anything to eat?"
That is, as we say, where my old students in Tiananmen are coming from. By "democracy"
or "freedom" my students meant: whatever America was doing right which
was getting them electric power, refrigeration and hao chr-de, good food.
One final hunger I saw firsthand: the hunger with which they listended to an
American's lectures, which they knew were uncensored, "free." Imagine
being sealed in a time capsule --- and knowing it. If you can know something
by its absence, then indeed they know "freedom" --and perhaps, by
extension, can intuit "democracy."
Reprinted with permission from the San Francisco Examiner and NEA syndicate.
