I Stand Corrected (28 page)

Beijing’s main streets are more like beltways. Called ring roads, they are designated numerically. Currently, there are six of them, with a possible seventh planned.

The origin of the ring roads was the result of the ring-shaped route of the tramlines operating in the 1920s. When the tramlines were removed in the 1950s, the area became a haphazard collection of surface streets, so there is no actual First Ring Road. Beijing’s innermost ring road is the Second Ring Road; built in the 1980s and expanded in the 1990s, it passes through the central parts of Beijing. The Third Ring
Road was completed in the 1990s, and the other three have been constructed in the last decade.

Trailing behind Gilliam and his friend on the crowded sidewalk of the Second Ring Road, I struggled to keep pace with their long-limbed strides and was unable to make out their conversation in French. When the three of us were funneled through a busy intersection, Gilliam glanced over his shoulder to make sure I was still there.

It was just then, crossing a Beijing intersection, that I realized that my son’s—some would say—nonconformist upbringing had imbued him with a sense of spirited travel, that it had taught him to negotiate the world’s cultural differences, and that—at some other moment, in some other place, when I wasn’t paying attention—he had charted his own course.

One cannot divine happiness or assign it a location. But as I get older, my own happiness is easier to recognize. It comes unguarded in fleeting, fungible moments when I feel absolutely sure that no other place could grant more happiness than exactly where I am. Seven thousand miles from New York and twelve hours ahead—thirty years after my mother stopped talking to me for reasons known only to her, and ten years after W. left never having said good-bye—I was happy on Christmas Day in China.

THE DAY AFTER Christmas was as bleak as the night before was festive.

Waiting for me at the hotel’s front desk was upsetting news. A message from my book editor informed me the censors—after a fine-tooth scrutiny of my book—were withholding permission to publish it. Gilliam stepped in as translator in my meeting with the publisher that afternoon. A single word had caught the eye of the censor: Muslim.

Religions migrate to foreign lands when business is to be found. Since the seventh century, Islam has expanded slowly but methodically across the maritime and inland silk routes.
Muslims have resided in China for fourteen hundred years but are nonetheless considered an ethnic minority. Much like the emotionally charged issue of Tibet, any written reference to Chinese Muslims raises the censor’s concern. I had inadvertently wandered into the censor’s no-go zone when I included the word in my lesson 25. My word “Muslim” referred not to Chinese Muslims but to Muslims in Arab countries and did not so much as brush up against political implication. It was, quite simply, attached to a friendly, outstretched hand.

But nothing is simple when it comes to the censors in China, and my publishing company had no intention of pushing the issue. They decided to wait it out.

I had no choice but to wait it out with them.

Gilliam returned to England for his next semester. I continued my biweekly trips to Guangzhou to work with Chairman. But circumstances had changed, and now phone calls were made at the security checkpoint in the Beijing airport before I was allowed to board the plane.

“We’re more comfortable with paranoia here in China,” a Western colleague in China told me, “because it usually turns out to be right.”

I didn’t know if I was being watched or not. Certainly, my comings and goings were being monitored, and while the authorities were not controlling my activities, my life in China was deliberately circumscribed.

Aware of my plight, Chairman reassured me that I would have no problems in Guangzhou; he proved it by assigning bodyguards to me while I was there. But, instead of reassuring me, Chairman’s gesture encouraged an anxious interplay between my imagination and reality. Did he know something I did not? Was I in so much danger while sequestered at Imperial Springs that the bodyguard felt the need to pace up and down the length of the swimming pool, mirroring my morning laps?

Chairman felt he would remove my concerns by suggesting that I work for him on a full-time basis. It was a generous offer, but I had no intention of living in Guangzhou. In fact, I was planning to return to the States after my book was published in China. That being the case, Chairman and I came to an
agreement that my consulting services would end no sooner than the Chinese New Year but no later than the Night of a Thousand Lanterns.

The Lantern Festival is celebrated on the fifteenth day of the first month of the traditional Chinese calendar. It is also marked by the first night of the full moon and the end of the two-week Chinese New Year holiday. Since the terms of my contract were pinned to it, I made a point of asking how the festival came to be.

Not unlike other Chinese folktales, this one included a beautiful crane, ignorant mortals, and the angered Jade Emperor—the same Jade Emperor that Monkey King failed to dethrone. It is told that the sacred crane flew from heaven to earth. Whether this was a navigational mistake or a joy-ride of sorts, I cannot say, but like many poorly planned road trips, it ended badly. The sacred crane—a favorite of the Jade Emperor—was hunted and killed by villagers. The Jade Emperor expressed his outrage by declaring his intention to level the village with a firestorm on the fifteenth lunar day. His daughter warned the inhabitants, and their ruse was to hang red lanterns throughout the village, which created—from the aerial perspective of the gods, one assumes—a false impression that the village was already ablaze.

It would have been easier to assign an end date to my contract with Chairman. But I was in China, after all, and so it would be a full moon that brought my consulting services on his behalf to an end.

PART THIRTEEN
How the Rest Ends

A good fortune may forebode a bad luck, which may, in turn, disguise a good fortune.
—
Chinese proverb

I
waited for the censor to release my book. Then I waited some more.

While I waited, I hired David, a young man recently returned to Beijing with a degree from MIT, who agreed to translate my weekly Weibo postings—postings that addressed deportment questions. I also began a series of lectures at Beijing universities on the subject of my book, staying clear of the notorious lesson.

From the lectern, I looked out at packed classrooms of students seated by gender. Many were wearing T-shirts with English slogans that were wrongly translated but, more important, signified modernity. All had in their possession the most recent technological devices so it followed that—with the exception of issues deemed disruptive by the censor—the students were well versed in current events. Leaning forward in their seats, they listened intently to what I had to say, exuding enthusiasm not necessarily for me but for what they imagined I represented.

The Western practice of a question-and-answer session was beached by a collective show of deference. My tactic was to ask the students questions of my own, carefully avoiding the seven banned topics of debate set forth by the state. Shyness gave way to an obvious delight that they were being asked what they thought, and the consensus was that they wanted to follow
in the contemporary footsteps of Western culture and to have access to Western branded products. They admired the idea of democracy but pointed out the gulf between democracy’s precept and its application. Not all were convinced popular elections would solve China’s problems.

If the students had been as free to express their political opinions as openly as they were to express their ambitions, I suspect they would have told me that China’s problems are primarily the result of corruption among China’s leaders. Since the government is tied closely to all aspects of life in China, and since all aspects of life in China rely to a large degree on
guanxi
, it is not difficult to understand why and how corruption comes into play.

At its worst,
guanxi
undermines the stability of China’s central government. That’s precisely what happened with Bo Xilai, a former member of the Politburo who is now serving a life sentence, along with his wife, for the poisoning of a British businessman who was once part of her orbit but had made himself into a problem.

In this particular case, there was no need for me to read between the lines of
China Daily
. The party moved into damage-control mode, and the press was swift to turn against Bo. But there was no mention of Chen Guangcheng, the blind civil rights activist known as the “barefoot lawyer,” who—while the country remained riveted by the Bo scandal—somehow managed to escape years of house arrest and was ensconced in the American Embassy a few blocks from the St. Regis Hotel.

My work with Chairman had come to an end, and I could do absolutely nothing about the frustrating fact that my book was being held hostage by the Chinese censors. So I decided to return briefly to New York to pay my taxes. That trip spanned less than a week, but that week’s events telescoped the issues of China’s censorship and illustrated how effectively the Chinese authorities are able to act.

On my way to New York, I stopped in London to see my literary agent, staying the night in Durrants, a hotel so small that there are only three tables in the tea area off its lobby.

I was sitting at one of those three tables during my one
afternoon in London. Seated at the next table, not more than a few feet away, was the artist Ai Weiwei, flanked by two assistants. All three of them were poring over a calendar full of commitments.

When, later, I inquired at the front desk, I was told Ai was in town to install his
Sunflower Seeds
at the Tate Modern. The piece’s hundred million life-size sunflower seed husks were handcrafted in porcelain and appear identical but are actually each unique. That night, I made a point of looking at the museum’s website. Given what I would soon learn, it would be difficult not to remember the last line of the exhibit’s description.

In New York the next day, I passed another of his pieces. This one—newly installed around the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel—was a series of sculptures, titled
Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads
, that formed an enormous centerpiece to a multiyear global tour of his work. It came on the heels of his own investigation into and subsequent artistic expression of the shoddy building construction that contributed to the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren during the Sichuan earthquake.

Not long after I had stopped to look at his installation in New York, Ai was surrounded by the Chinese authorities as he was coming through immigration at the Hong Kong airport and taken away.

The grounds for his arrest were never made clear. His own words managed to make themselves heard outside China: “They accused me of five crimes.” He was told about only two of them: “inciting subversion of state power” and “economic crimes,” which eventually emerged as the tax evasion for which he was publicly condemned and detained another eighty-one days.

This dispiriting news reached me at the airport shortly
before I boarded a plane back to Beijing. I would hear none of it once I arrived there the next day—news of Ai’s arrest had already been blocked by the Chinese censor.

Returning to China in its depressingly locked-down frame of mind made almost unbelievable what occurred next.

On June 15, 2011, the censor released my book. Two weeks later, it appeared in stores.

To say that I was incredulous doesn’t do justice to what followed. My Weibo account was besieged by comments. Within four weeks, the book became a bestseller in the largest state-owned chain store in mainland China.

The Tao of Improving Your Likability
was adopted as a textbook in Peking University’s MBA program, and I was asked to write a regular column for the state-sanctioned
China Trade Magazine
. Requests came to address the All-China Women’s Federation, to appear at China’s elite social clubs, and to lecture at yet more Chinese universities.

This was all happy news, but there was something else going on. In the Weibo offices sat a government official who was closely monitoring my web traffic; my ever-growing following prompted him to act.

David, by then acting as my translator, was notified by the authorities that I should expect a call from them. It was an ominous enough warning for me to contact a trusted Chinese colleague.

“Who is ‘them’?” I asked.

“ ‘Them’ is the government,” he told me.

Intimidating me further were his instructions: under no circumstances was I to ignore the call when it came.

“That will only make matters worse,” he explained.

Convinced I would pay the price for whatever I had done, but completely ignorant of my crime, I could think only of Gilliam’s mocking reference to Kafka months before. No longer was it funny.