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WHATEVER HAPPENED: Pomfret with Nanjing friends.
Courtesy Henry Holt & Company |
Chinese Lessons, John Pomfret’s engrossing memoir following the
lives of his former classmates at Nanjing University,
will jog memories of old China hands. Who among them,
for example, wouldn’t have come across someone
like Big Bluffer Ye?
Now the Washington Post’s Los Angeles
bureau chief and formerly its Beijing bureau chief,
Pomfret, ’81, MA ’84, recalls a rendezvous
in 2004 with the “Nanda” alum, by then a
noise in Nanjing communist circles. At the appointed
hour, an Audi 6 roars up to the main gate of the university,
and a back door flies open—sending a passing cyclist
flying.
As Pomfret hesitates, Ye barks, “Don’t
worry about him. Get in.” The American complies,
unwittingly offering an example of the compromising
he complains of in his classmates. They leave the elderly
cyclist to wobble to his feet and Ye’s driver
steps on it, heading for the Lion’s King Dainty
Community Restaurant, where Pomfret has his ears filled
with Bluffer bull while their table fills with dish
after dish no one seems to pay for.
A passage about People’s Liberation Army business
activities turned my mind back to a joint venture the
PLA launched with a foreign brewer in the early 1990s.
The military has since been ordered to wind up its many
businesses, but when I visited, its brewery project
had slid so far off the rails that imported beer was
being rushed in—fake evidence of the plant’s
first production run for the official opening. Expedience
ruled.
Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story
of the New China (Henry Holt) explores the tension
between right and wrong, between the individual and
the corrupt Communist machine that turns to capitalism
in the end to co-opt lingerers into compliance. Talk
about an axis of evil.
Pomfret took a leave from Stanford in 1980, having
finagled his way into the Beijing Languages Institute
with the help of a senior Chinese intelligence officer,
among other people. But it wasn’t till February
1981 that he would take the big prize—a place
at Nanda, then the only university allowing foreigners
to share dorms with Chinese students.
Here Pomfret met people who would engage, perplex,
thrill and disappoint him. Ever curious, he got his
fellow history students to reveal their stories, starting
with their experience during Mao Zedong’s insane
Great Leap Forward, blamed for the deaths of 30 million.
We meet Book Idiot (as in bookworm) Zhou, Little Guan,
Old Wu, Daybreak Song and the aforementioned Big Bluffer
Ye.
Zhou, who as a kid collected night soil to survive,
ends up going into business collecting urine for drug
companies developing enzymes. No surprise, he must keep
officials in bribes, for a failed payment can mean losing
public toilets to scoop from—not a prospect worth
considering as supplies shrink with the advance of indoor
plumbing.
Then there is Old Wu, who lost his parents in the bloodbath
of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. He ends up at Nanjing
Normal University, where his father taught before fate
put him on the Red Guard’s to-do list. One of
Wu’s assignments, which he doesn’t seem
especially fussed about, is to lead a history project
revisiting the Cultural Revolution—only to give
it a fresh whitewash.
There is no Chinese word for irony because, Pomfret
guesses, contradictions are too ingrained in people’s
lives for anyone to find them remarkable. He touches
on many: the soaring pollution generated by soaring
economic growth (paralleled by soaring unemployment
brought on by the collapse of the make-believe state
sector) and terribly skewed demographics in which males
far outnumber females, among other woes.
By 1989, Pomfret was a reporter attached to AP’s
Beijing bureau, and it is from this perspective that
we watch students at Tiananmen in May and June—flickering
moments when principle seems to rule before the bullets
fly and the tanks move in.
The memoir is as much about Pomfret’s own contradictions
as anyone else’s, and he has his own Tiananmen
story to tell, which I won’t spoil. The book moves
from one life to another and back again, bringing everyone
up to 2004, when capitalism is rampant, sponging up
anyone with enough time to wonder why the corrupt force
that kept everyone in misery for so long is still around.
One of the free enterprisers we meet is Zhang Mei, a
guide in Kunming in southwest Yunnan. She offers to
guide Pomfret and a Post editor through Tibet gratis
in hopes of getting free publicity. We never learn if
she got any ink, but she profited in other respects,
as readers will discover settling into this fine book.
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