You do not need to be a Sinophile to enjoy Echoes from Wuhan.
Gretchen goes to Wuhan to teach English in 1979. She cannot speak Chinese and, even with an interpreter, it was a challenge. The cultural chasm was wide and she recounts frankly her mistakes and the tensions between her and “the leaders” who are all-important and rule the roost. But the kernel of her memoir is her relationship with her students. She makes friends, sometimes enemies and describes them with candour. She is a young Jean Brodie and her syllabus, if I remember Miss Jean B correctly, is as unorthodox. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Picasso’s pictures, advertisements in American magazines are astonishing for her pupils and of course she is snitched on to the leaders for this decadent material. She is in constant conflict with them, asking to be allowed to have a bicycle, for permission to leave the campus and to have lunch with the students in a fairly basic canteen rather than in her rooms where she has a cook. She often breaks the rules with insouciance; not so easy as she is under almost permanent surveillance. She is indomitable and this is what makes her story so compelling.
Although it is a true account, I read it as if it were a novel. I found it hard to put down and highly recommend it for its human interest as much as a travel book. It would spoil it to say more but there are some surprising twists at the end which takes her story and that of some of her Wuhan students up to 2020.
Now look at the book again. If I am not mistaken young Gretchen is the girl with long hair in the centre of the picture being stared at by the Chinese. She has done a lot since her time in Wuhan.
I’m also reading the book which I find fascinating. Gretchen’s engrossing story is of an independent and free spirited young woman from New York City trying to navigate her way inside the opaque strictures of a Wuhan academic setting suffused with the fervor of communist ideology and Chinese cultural authoritarianism. She is constantly challenged by the dichotomy of Western guilt versus Eastern shame as well as numerous occasions of cross-cultural misunderstandings. Echoes from Wuhan is an educational and enlightening “Good Read.”
Hand Grenade Practice in Peking: My Part in the Cultural Revolution by Frances Wood from 1975 is in the same genre and is a compelling read. Very funny and very scary in equal parts.
I ordered a copy a few days ago actually and glad it’s good. Another good book in the oeuvre is Tony Scotland’s The Last Emperor.
I was in Beijing and Shanghai in 1982, so the era resonates. My sister and I were with our parents on a business trip, back when there wasn’t really tourism and one had to be invited by the government. We had been warned that our room in the Peking Hotel would be bugged, so we whispered a lot, but once tested things by loudly commenting that we were out of jasmine tea. Several minutes later, there was a discreet knock and one of the valets stationed at the end of each corridor had left a new box of tea on the carpet outside our door.
Foreigners were still fairly rare in Beijing. One morning, we gave our government “guide” the slip and rented bicycles and rode around Tienanmen Square. Every time we stopped, a small crowd formed, and people wanted to touch us — our hair, especially. Though we were supposed to use only the pristine money reserved for foreigners (and exchanged at fixed rates), we managed to get some grubby local currency in a music store and saw how low both the stocks and the prices were in local shops.
There was a surprising amount of squalor visible even in the heart of Beijing, as Deng Xiaoping’s suggestion that it was glorious to get rich was still fairly new. Our interpreter, who was trained as an engineer, calmly explained that he had been forced to work in a mine for years during the Cultural Revolution, and was still suffering from injuries from the backbreaking work and random beatings. He came in for special targeting because, in addition to having a profession and speaking English, he was a Christian. (Many years later, I was pleased to be able to host his prosperous-looking son at my club in New York.) It is hard to imagine the whiplash the country must have been feeling.
Some of the best Chinese food I’ve had was served in the dining car on the grubby train from Beijing down to Shanghai (our government hosts thought we were mad for going by train, but my mother liked an adventure). The cooks had a space the size of a closet and a single grill, but managed to serve delicious and varied food. The berths, the toilets (bring your own paper), and the heating were rudimentary, and nobody on the train spoke English, but people were happy use gestures to show us how to manage. Shanghai was already (still?) much more cosmopolitan than Beijing, and people were allowed to wear a bit of color and something other than a Mao suit.
The sense of potential and excitement at the time was extraordinary, and we felt lucky to have seen a bit of the early days of the Chinese miracle of development. But I must confess my great joy when we flew a rickety state airlines plane with angry flight attendants from Shanghai to Hong Kong and were met by the Peninsula at the airport with two Silver Spurs.
I can only imagine what Wuhan would have been like in those years of transition, and look forward to reading the book.
Charles:
I loved your memories of the train and in particular the size of the galley! If you read Echoes from Wuhan let me know what resonates with you….I think you’ll get a kick out of my first domestic flight from Wuhan to Chengdu.
It sounds fascinating, and I am eager to begin soon