Red China Blues by Jan Wong, Doubleday, $195 For Jan Wong, student of Mao Zedong Thought, China in the 1970s was spellbinding. There were no pickpockets, no muggers, no rapists. The sky above Beijing, she noted in her diary, was always azure. 'I was in paradise. Or so I thought.' China? Paradise? Wong had not realised the sky was azure because of industrial production. For her, a Canadian whose emigre Chinese parents gave her a 'pretty damn spoiled' life in suburban Montreal, Beijing was a beacon of hope in a world that was otherwise a hopeless mess of racism, exploitation and shopping malls.
After being selected as one of her school's 'Freshette princesses', and being interviewed about her favourite flower and favourite colour, Wong became a feminist.
'From feminism, it was a natural step to Maoism,' she writes. 'Mao was mesmerising.' Red China Blues is the entrancing story of Wong's brief and sometimes dangerous flirtation with Maoism. In 1972, keen to discover her roots, she went to China, stepping off a train into the 'sleepy, border town of Shenzhen'.
She was accepted at Beijing University, on direct orders (although she didn't know it at the time) from Premier Zhou Enlai . It was an obvious sequel to the Nixon visit; if China was planning to resume student exchanges, what better way to start than with a friendly overseas Chinese? The experiment began well for Wong. She threw herself with revolutionary zeal into university life, dressing in a Mao suit, joining criticism sessions and learning the Great Helmsman's quotations by rote, even the pithier ones. 'Shit or get off the pot,' he told some dithering functionary at a meeting. China was under Mao's spell. On a tour to Dazhai, Wong met the local Communist Party Secretary, loyal author of articles with titles such as Study and Creatively Use Mao Zedong Thought to Achieve a Bumper Harvest.
Wong was also under Mao's spell. 'What is work?' asked Mao. 'Work is struggle.' So Wong did as any young zealot would and volunteered for hard labour at Big Joy Farm. This was the place she would milk every last ounce of capitalist fat from her body and replace it with good, communist sinew. Reveille was 6am, to the sound of The East is Red blasting from loudspeakers. Wong worked until she was sick, but it was all for the revolution.
So glorious was her cause, in fact, that Wong betrayed people for it. She recounts, with an honesty that must have taken courage, the time she told the authorities about a family who asked if she could help get their daughter to Canada to study. 'May God forgive me; I don't think they ever will.' She did the same for a fellow student. The latter was expelled and sent back to her home province in disgrace. 'I have no idea what happened to her.' So much for Mao the dictator, ruling China by fear. What of Mao the philanderer? Wong reveals that two of her classmates, Pearl Ying and Center Feng, were summoned by Mao to Zhongnanhai. Center performed the zither for him and Pearl posed for photographs. Mao, in a handwritten note now in the Communist Party Central Archives, promised to pay for Pearl to study at Beijing University.
Were Pearl and Center geishas in the classical Japanese sense - paid entertainers? Or were they geishas in the other sense; part of Mao's personal force of filles de joies ? Wong is not sure.