Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now by Jan Wong

Author:Jan Wong [Wong, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385674362
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2011-02-03T23:00:00+00:00

Part III

PARADISE LOST

12

Dancing With Dissidents

Interviewing a dissident, Gao Xin, in the Altar to the Sun park in Beijing. Imprisoned following the Tiananmen Massacre, he was never sentenced and eventually was released. He left for the United States where he attended Harvard University.

Photo: Mark Avery

Millionaire Zhao Zhangguang, holding a bottle of Formula 101, which he claims will cure baldness.

Photo: Jan Wong/Globe and Mail

The FBI was on the telephone. “Can I come over and talk to you?” a female asked politely. It was February 5, 1981. I covered the mouthpiece and whispered to Norman. He shrugged. “Sure,” I told her. “Why don’t you come tomorrow morning?” Our many years in China – six for me and fourteen for Norman – naturally aroused suspicions. We assumed that we had been under surveillance since our return. But I no longer viewed police as pigs. In fact, they seemed downright nice after Chinese State Security agents.

FBI Special Agent Barbara Ann Dennis arrived the next morning at our studio apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. She was in her late twenties, attractive and black. She showed us her badge.

“How many black female special agents are there?” I asked.

“Eight on the whole force.”

“Do you carry a gun?”

She laughed. “Yes.”

“Where?”

She laughed again, and didn’t say. She was wearing a navy blue pantsuit. Maybe her gun was strapped to her ankle, just like in the movies. Or perhaps it was inside her roomy handbag where, we assumed, a tape recorder was whirring.

Her questions about China were as naive as mine were about the FBI. She wanted to know our housing conditions. She asked about China Reconstructs and the Institute of Computing Technology. Then she asked us to write down our names, birthdates, birthplaces, the schools we had attended and where we had worked, none of which seemed like state secrets. She gave us her phone number and asked us to call if we remembered anything else.

Perhaps it was hard for the FBI to realize that people could successfully recover from the sixties. Jerry Rubin, the former yippie and wild-haired member of the Chicago Seven, became a yuppie Wall Street banker. PJ. O’Rourke, the acid-tongued humorist of the right, was once a member of a “collective” putting out an “underground” newspaper in Baltimore; he ducked the draft with a doctor’s note listing three and a half pages of drugs he had abused. Even Hanoi Jane was peddling exercise videos promising thinner thighs, and would eventually marry media mogul Ted Turner. If I was ever a security risk, I certainly wasn’t one any longer. At any rate, we never heard from Barbara Ann Dennis again.

The previous time I had come back from Beijing, I had run around in Mao suits. This time, I avoided anything to do with mainland China, especially the U.S.—China People’s Friendship Association. I couldn’t stand being among Maoists who reminded me of how dumb I once was. At Columbia, I honed my skills at investigative reporting (“Question authority”) and learned incisive interviewing techniques (“There is no such thing as a dumb question”).

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