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.
JOEL MCCORMICK is a senior editor of Red Herring and a former China-based journalist.
