An Intimate Portrait of Sadness
TUNG, TIMOTHY
An Intimate Portrait of Sadness Saturday Night in Baoding: A China Memoir By Richard Terrill University of Arkansas. 176 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Timothy Tung Research professor,...
...and he was a vigorous 32-year-old...
...I miss you very much...
...I wish I could be a teacher as good as you are...
...I see here a listless sadness, a sadness of having given up, a sadness that comes from outside the individual and that the individual can thus do nothing to alleviate...
...In America Terrill was unmarried and unemployed, a former college teacher who also had spent a year as a Fulbright lecturer in Korea...
...It was no accident that female students were particularly drawn to him and vice versa...
...He was smitten with everyone from his Chinese language tutor and dance instructor, Miss Guo ("First put your legs here, among my legs...
...There are many depressing stories here about futures being decided on the whim of the Party leader...
...A few chapters into this slim volume, however, I was hooked...
...With grace and at times devastatingly self-deprecating wit, Richard Terrill has vividly captured the aspirations and frustrations of China's young intellectuals today...
...Now free of sexual frustration, he could form friendships with the young Chinese women he met without fear of a troublesome entanglement...
...Few journalistic analyses done in the wake of last spring's events in Tiananmen Square can match this book—although I suspect that it would never have been published if that tragedy had not occurred...
...What a wonderful time we had in Baoding...
...as a teacher...
...From the Miss Jiang he almost kissed...
...She was, he says, "so bold as to tell me once that 'something was bothering' her...
...But that may not be the end of the story...
...His feelings for the women became so strong that to hear one of them exclaim, "I'm so happy...
...My previous boyfriend broke with me because I can't go back to my hometown___Now I'm make a new boyfriend...
...I'll be assigned a job...
...How true...
...I'msaving that for my lover someday," she answered...
...Indeed, the relationships he thus had with the female students he was attracted to are presented through a clinical analysis of their feelings about life in a severely constricted society...
...In the spring of 1986, the year Terrill was teaching English and dancing his Saturday nights away at Hebei University in Baoding, I spent six weeks on an exchange program at Shandong University in Jinan, a similar dusty city in a neighboring North China province...
...The Party hacks dispense favors to only "very political students...
...Finding himself in daily contact with so many "intelligent, beautiful, fun-loving...
...Months after he left China Terrill continued to receive letters from his former students...
...In fact, college life may very well be Chinese young people's happiest years...
...Overwhelmed with tenderness, he asked if he could kiss her...
...Miss Li wrote: "I'm still single now...
...Reviewed by Timothy Tung Research professor, China specialist, City College, City University of New York I wasn't prepared to like Saturday Night in Baoding...
...Perhaps you could send me some advice as you did when you were my teacher...
...And the homely Miss Wang confides: "I'minlovewithaboy....I don't know how to deal with this matter...
...Miss Li, one of Terrill's best students, was refused an assignment to her hometown, where her boyfriend worked, because a Party member wanted the job...
...Touched by a pretty student's sadness ("In China we have learned not to be hopeful, because then we'll be disappointed"), he mulled over the possibility of taking this Miss Ma out of her misery by marrying her...
...warm young women," he fantasized about love and sex in a strange land as would any lonely, healthy, virile young American...
...The youthful American teacher became a hit the moment he set foot on the dance floor in the shabby dining hall at the school's first Saturday night social...
...The book details how he became the confidant of a good number of the young Chinese intellectuals whose personal stories reveal some of the background to what happened in Beijing on June 4,1989...
...Now forward, together...
...Happily, Terrill's vow of celibacy was broken when he had an affair with a fellow American teaching in a nearby town...
...It is with this kind of intimacy that Terrill tells his story, which is full of details about the special conditions Chinese students must endure...
...The title suggested yet another bland China memoir, one more generic treatment of an American's experience in that exotic land...
...I think it's important...
...merely because she had received an application to graduate school made him heartsick...
...In the end, he did not "get involved" with any of the girls, but he did win the trust of many of them...
...Back, together...
...Students rushed over to practice thenEnglish with him, some to show him how to tango...
...I had read too many such accounts by temporary visitors-turned-experts...
...On another occasion, after he was the object of some teasing by Dean Liu ("I think you would have found that many of the girl students would have wanted to go home with you"), he thought about a radical step...
...Warnings from the exchange program before he left the United States ("Hands off the girls") and from Dean Liu on the train to Baoding ("Try not to get involved with them") only served to heighten the author's curiosity...
...His decision to go to China, he explains, was a sort of "selfimposed exile" intended to give him time to think...
...But it remained only a possibility...
...Terrill concludes Saturday Night in Baoding on a note of sorrow: "What I see is not American unhappiness, that born of loneliness or isolation...
...articulate...
...Here is a photo of mine...
...These young people expected so little from life...
...I returned with much the same observations of campus life...
...In one moving passage Terrill describes how he and a Miss Jiang confessed their loneliness to each other...
...I hope everything will go smoothly...
...We were able to talk about whatever we liked...
...to the rotund and crooked-toothed Miss Wang, whose gossip and lack of self-consciousness delighted him...
...But two apparent differences between the author and me accounted for his gaining an insight into the minds of the young that I—despite my ethnic affinity to the Chinese— was unable to achieve in my short stay: He was blond and bearded...
...Terrill fell a little in love with almost every female student he met...
...The Party, for example, decides what occupation they will have after graduation through a committee of three that includes the university dean, but he has the least influence...
Vol. 73 • March 1990 • No. 5
