In Learn-From-the-People's-Liberation-Army Secondary School in Hangchow, kids were able to give pretty detailed accounts of the history of Bangladesh, say. But those answers about Cuba still came back to me a few times. Once when someone was explaining how the landlords had finally done an about-face and adopted Confucianism to safeguard their privileges, I asked why this hadn't happened sooner. "Well," the man explained, "they needed it to prevent revolts." Had there been a big wave of revolts? "There were constant revolts, all along." Then why just then? He gave me a pitying smile.
"The process of history," he explained.
Most of the students seemed pretty serious--particularly at Futan University in Shanghai, which accounts of the Cultural Revolution generally describe as a big leftist center. Of course, the students are older than Americans, and selected by their co-workers, and many of them know what they want to do afterwards and just why they're in school. But it's still a bit disconcerting to ask if Chinese students ever cram for exams and hear that though they're very dedicated, Futan University, "mindful of our health," sees that they go to bed at 10 p.m.
On the other hand, an English class at the same school was as lively as anyone could want. Students called out, interrupted one another, and laughed at one another's mistakes. Every now and then the teacher broke in to correct someone's pronunciation--like most Chinese English teachers', his own was a curious blend of BBC English and occasional misplaced stresses--or to beg that one person speak at a time.
And in Peking we met some young people in a more informal setting. Their parents included doctors, a colonel, and some middle-level government officials, but--perhaps because they're from the generation of the Cultural Revolution--they're all manual workers of one sort or another, except one teacher. The atmosphere was quite different from that of more official gatherings. For example, a young woman asked us what love meant to us, and admitted she couldn't answer her own question, and someone else said, half-seriously, that classical relations of love were simpler and better. "Which classical relations?" a third person asked innocently. "You mean like Confucius?" Everyone laughed--in fact, everyone laughed a lot, and in general, despite the language barrier, the atmosphere reminded me more of seeing old friends for the first time in a long time than of the other meetings we'd been having in China.
Some of the discussions' contents were a little different from those of more official gatherings, too. No one said it had been wrong for China to support Pakistan during Bangladesh's war of independence, for example, but no one said it had been right either. When I asked about the leading cadres we'd been meeting, someone said, "They are a phenomenon of China." Someone else said, "They probably feel that things are too complicated, this way they oversimplify." And a third said he was production leader on his commune and if we'd come to a formal meeting there he'd probably have limited what he said, just as the leading cadres did--"I wouldn't bring up the Seagull," he said.
The Seagull was Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and despite the production leader's disclaimer, people asked about him even in more formal meetings. Apparently the book's been translated into Chinese--maybe as an example of the decadence of contemporary American culture--and they all wanted to know how we accounted for its popularity. "It's very simple," the woman who'd asked about love admitted, though, when we asked about recently published Chinese novels, "We don't like anything." I guess it was one more bond of sorts--at any rate, I felt a solidarity with her and her friends that I wouldn't have predicted. It gave a meaning to the phrases about links among the peoples of the world.
This is the second article in a three-part series on China. The third will appear in The Crimson next Wednesday.