China's Brave New World by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

Author:Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253027764
Publisher: Indiana University Press

Note

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* This led me to quip, predictably, that the language of Lennon as well as that of Lenin seemed to shape political discourse in late twentieth-century China—a weak attempt at humor that was completely lost on the Chinese friend to whom I made it.

10. Karl Gets a New Cap: Budapest in 2000

“Do you need a McDonald’s,” my Hungarian colleague Maria asked, “or should we head straight out to Statue Park?” References to the Golden Arches had become a code word between us from the moment I had wondered, earlier in the day, what she thought of the appearance of local fast food chains and other signs of Americanization scattered throughout the city. She had pondered this for a moment, then replied pragmatically that she didn’t like Big Macs or fries, but she certainly appreciated the fact that the toilets were always clean wherever they were sold. “I’m fine,” I said, a bit impatiently, in response to her question, “let’s head straight to the park.” I added that seeing Szoborpark was my “main reason for coming to Budapest this time.”

I actually had other reasons as well for returning to the city, which I had first visited in the spring of 1999 to attend a conference held at Central European University. The day before the one we had set aside for sightseeing, for example, I had given a talk on human rights and the Chinese Revolution at CEU, and I had also delivered some Chinese political posters and other materials to the Open Society Archive, an affiliated institution, for use in a pair of upcoming exhibits they were planning.

Still, my statement had a kernel of truth to it. I had heard about Statue Park during my last stay but had not been able fit a visit into my schedule and had determined that seeing it would be a top priority if I ever returned. The notion of visiting this final resting place for “GIGANTIC MEMORIALS FROM THE COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP” (how a tourist map describes it) appealed to me a great deal from the start. And I was intrigued by the fact that, while statues from the Soviet era had been destroyed or sold to collectors in most other parts of central and eastern Europe, they had been theme-parked in Hungary. Surely, I thought, there was an important message here about intra-regional differences—differences that, growing up in America during the Cold War with only a casual interest in Soviet Bloc countries, I had hardly thought about or even realized existed.

The colleague who had offered to take me around town during my return visit to Budapest knew of my eagerness to get the “glance behind the Iron Curtain” offered by Statue Park (as the tourist map also put it). Maria insisted, though, that our first stop would not be there but rather the Parliament building, a beautifully appointed nineteenth-century edifice. Her idea was that we should do so simply to see when tours were available later in the day, buy a ticket for one of these, and then return at a pre-arranged time.

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