Welcome to Peking...
Dorfman, Ron
Welcome to Peking... ... Where some are more equal than others Ron Dorfman Ihad been in China about six weeks when my interpreter, Liu Zon-gren, accompanied me to Sun Yat-sen Park for an open-air...
...The message is that everyone should be equal before the law...
...After a while, someone peeked around the screen and saw that only one party of foreigners was on the other side, dawdling over after-dinner coffee and conversation...
...It is, rather, divided into a bewildering array of categories of people...
...you can't move all these people just for us...
...Above the clerks, an unlit electric sign advertised that the upstairs room was for foreigners only...
...Some of them, however, might like to look at the stuff, if only to see how the State is managing this publicly owned enterprise...
...are still in evidence in China, although xenophobia is no longer official policy...
...We heard you were having a problem at the Friendship Hotel last night,' they said...
...Most Overseas Chinese emigrated from the southern coastal provinces, and Fong suspects that perhaps northerners haven't yet absorbed the notion of a Han person being a foreigner...
...They sing and dance a lot, have quaint festivals, and wear colorful costumes...
...In addition to the Chinese Chinese, there are the non-Chinese Chinese, citizens of the People's Republic who are not of the Han nationality, or ethnic group...
...But the ticket can be purchased only with foreign currency (the Chinese have two forms of currency, one of which represents foreign exchange holdings in the Bank of China) and before boarding your flight you must go through exit customs...
...3.50) each to enter, an outrageous ripoff...
...There are no drinking fountains on the Great Wall, or anywhere in Peking for that matter, the water being non-potable in the first place and the Chinese preferring hot water to cold in the second place...
...If I speak to them in English, they say, 'We don't understand...
...He said it was indeed a great wall...
...The soldiers of the People's Liberation Army, which guards us Bing-guanese day and night, are the least engaging of all the Chinese with whom we come in contact...
...After a while all the Chinese were outside the fence and the two lone foreigners were inside...
...Another variety of Chinese is composed of the worldwide millions of hua qiao, Overseas Chinese who have not become citizens of the countries in which they live (China does not countenance dual citizenship) and who are welcome to repatriate and/or buy apartments for their relatives in China...
...The room was decorated with less imagination than the average high school gym converted for a prom...
...The foreigners left hurriedly, but on their way out one of them was interviewed by a Chinese journalism student who happened to be there, and was asked his opinion of what had just transpired...
...Lee Feigon, a professor of Chinese history at Colby College in Maine, arrived as scheduled in Hong Kong en route to Peking, where he had arranged to do research on Chen Duxiu, one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party...
...There are the Chinese "compatriots" in Taiwan, Macao, and Hong Kong—places which are foreign or non-foreign, depending...
...On the other hand, two hours later Feigon had his visa...
...They don't know whether to give me the form for foreigners or the form for Chinese," she says...
...There are, of course, the Chinese Chinese, approximately 940 million of them...
...Such exclusions and prosecutions Ron Dorfman, a free-lance writer and editor based in Chicago, is on a one-year assignment in Peking as an adviser to the magazine China Reconstructs...
...One week later, on September 27,1 went to Wangfujing, Peking's main shopping drag...
...five yuan is three days' pay for most Peking workers...
...Guests at a government soiree marking National Day, according to Xinhua, included "Overseas Chinese, compatriots from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, foreigners of Chinese origin, and foreign experts working in Beijing [Peking...
...After dinner, the four of us walked back toward my apartment, engrossed in conversation, and were brought up sharp by a barked command: The PLA kid at the gate demanded to know the business of our Chinese friends who, with a show of annoyance, displayed their previously issued pass and explained that we had only gone as far as the restaurant...
...All three of China's major traditions, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, are concerned with harmony—right relations among people and between people and nature...
...Foreigners in China are officially welcomed and accorded many privileges...
...Many like her have now come to China temporarily to help in the modernization campaign as teachers, translators, and consultants, and have found themselves falling between the cracks of the Chinese classification system...
...The big handicrafts shop seemed relatively navigable, however, and I went in, hoping to be able to shop in peace, which is not the Chinese style...
...There are so many Chinese that if we were allowed in everywhere the foreigners would never be able to find a place to sit...
...But the China Travel Service could find no record of Feigon's application for or the Chinese government's approval of a visa...
...We must," said the guards...
...Even Premier Zhou Enlai used to come...
...The night of my shopping excursion, I went to the weekly dance in the ballroom at Youyi Bingguan, the Friendship Guest House...
...At the Bank of China, a clerk looked at the little blue book with the Great Seal of the United States in gold and said, "Oh, you're going abroad...
...In addition to the usual discourtesies that Chinese working in foreigners-only establishments visit upon their compatriots, Fong is also subjected to the special disdain that many Chinese have for young people who try to emulate foreign ways...
...Two officials of a Chinese cultural organization came to Youyi Bingguan to take me and another foreigner to dinner but had neglected to write themselves a letter of authorization, which would have enabled them to go through the gate without much bother...
...Again I say, 'That's garbage.' It burns me up having these inane arguments all the time...
...It takes the better part of a day to climb the mountain...
...It's a domestic flight," the clerks say, and the Airline Guide agrees with them...
...So they showed their identification, filled out the forms, and were given a pass to enter...
...What may take longer for tourists or business executives to perceive is that privilege granted to a foreigner is as often as not an opportunity denied to a Chinese...
...Going up the stairs to the second floor, I heard shouting...
...So you go to the domestic service desk and they do indeed have the information...
...The sacred mountain Taishan attracted pilgrims for at least 2,500 years until tourism was invented, and now communist restaurants, tea houses, and inns are dotted among the scores of temples and monuments that emperors and sages have strewn along the approaches to the 8,000-foot peak, highest in eastern China...
...About one-third of the dining room had been screened off for foreigners...
...Overseas Chinese fall between the cracks of the classification system ?our comrades from my office were escorting me on my quasi-obligatory trip to the Great Wall...
...Every five or ten minutes, reconnaissance parties from the Chinese side checked out the screened-off section but each time found the same party sitting and chatting, unaware of or unconcerned about the restiveness of the huddled masses...
...After a drink, we went to a restaurant which is attached to the Bingguan but must be entered from outside...
...It wouldn't occur to the hotel simply to open the door and allow Chinese who actually wanted to dance to come in and do so...
...But clerks are still stationed obtrusively at the entrance to the stairway, and there are still no Chinese customers upstairs...
...One of the comrades went over to an unobtrusive office of the Bureau of Public Security—I hadn't even noticed it was there—and conversed briefly with a couple of cops, all the while pointing at me...
...As a result of the local airing of the bombed-out American television series The Man from Atlantis, many young people, including police officers and army troops, have taken to wearing sunglasses, preferably with a foreign manufacturer's label still stuck in the middle of the lens, or of each lens—a hazardous practice in heavy bicycle traffic...
...There are only two of us," they said...
...It was at night and the guy I talked to sounded like he'd just gotten out of bed...
...After several weeks of fruitless visits to the CTS office that handles visas for foreigners, Feigon developed a hypothesis: Some bureaucrat, mistaking "Lee Feigon" for a Chinese name (the professor in fact transliterates it with the characters composing the name of Li Fei-kan, the anarchist novelist better known as Pa Chin), probably sent his file to the CTS office that deals with Overseas Chinese, where it had been filed under "Lee.' Feigon visited that office, but there too officials could find no trace of his file...
...Great harmony is said to result from contemplating the sunrise from the top of Taishan...
...There are such people in Peking, lots of them, but anyone who cared about his or her reputation would not dare go to a public place, assuming he or she could get in, and dance with a foreigner...
...There are some sixty million of these non-Han Chinese, grouped into more than fifty "national minorities...
...Awfully rude," he said...
...Now the only Chinese who do so are the determined young women who dress up in Hong Kong style and pass for hua qiao, Overseas Chinese, entering the hotels or the International Club with foreign students, embassy personnel, and businessmen...
...Official policy, as enunciated by Deng Xiaoping on Yugoslavian television last November, is that China, in pursuit of its goal of modernization by the turn of the millenium, will have more and more contact with foreigners...
...As we approached the dispatcher's office, just inside the front door of the east wing, two security guards were upon Liu Zongren: They wanted to know what he, a Chinese citizen, was doing in these precincts for foreigners...
...The kid was unimpressed: he made them show their residency cards as well...
...Where some are more equal than others Ron Dorfman Ihad been in China about six weeks when my interpreter, Liu Zon-gren, accompanied me to Sun Yat-sen Park for an open-air showing of the film version of The Little Official...
...So now on Saturday nights a bus pulls up with about twenty female students from a dance academy...
...Even her passport, Fong says, sometimes doesn't help much...
...The world is not divided simply into Chinese and foreigners...
...Crowded at best, the street and its stores were packed that day, the Saturday before National Day...
...Whenever foreign tourists arrive the Chinese tourists are shooed out of the enclosure and the foreigners are ushered in...
...If I say I'm a foreigner, they don't believe me...
...So then I have to go out to my bike and get my passport...
...The foreigners, of course, had rooms to go to but were in no hurry to get to them...
...At some point it must have occurred to the Bingguan management that more foreigners could be lured in to part with their foreign cash, and would stay longer and spend more foreign cash on the bar, if there were someone there they could dance with...
...speak Chinese.' So I speak Chinese and then they think I'm trying to pass...
...That's because they don't recognize you...
...Next morning, of course, it had been reported to my office...
...It operates for a few minutes four times a day, taking foreign workers to and from the umbilical bus that links Wai Wen Ju with Youyi Bingguan, where most of us live...
...A popular tourist spot in Datong, Shanxi Province, is the Nine-Dragon Screen, an early Ming Dynasty confection of colored tiles 147 feet long...
...Most of the business people and "delegation" members who stay at the Bingguan are men, of course, and American and European men, unlike Africans and Asians, will not dance with one another...
...I have to tell them whom I'm going to visit and why, what my relationship to that person is, and all kinds of crap...
...Climbing it involves a great deal of huffing and puffing, and when we'd finished we needed to sit down and have a beer...
...But he walked with me to the Peking Hotel, where I could get a cab (they don't cruise the streets here...
...A man we'll call Bai Mingzi is a native-born Chinese citizen one of whose parents is of European origin...
...Why do you stand for this...
...During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese were pilloried for having contact with foreigners, for having studied abroad, for having overseas relatives, for having foreign books in their homes...
...Although the Pekingese are fairly prosperous, it is highly unlikely that many of them have the money to buy the goods displayed on the third floor—jewelry, carved furniture, expensive rugs, and so on...
...And there are the further millions of ethnic Chinese who hold foreign citizenship...
...that, having disclosed their relationship to the authorities, she would be sent to jail and disgraced...
...At a recent exhibit, Mary Fong stood in line at the entrance for Chinese while Bai, who looks European, was ushered through the foreigners-only entrance without asking...
...In Peking last September, according to Xinhua dispatches, Vice Premier Yao Yilin "met and had a friendly conversation with a group of visiting foreign journalists from Hong Kong...
...Doesn't it make you angry that there are all these places you're not allowed into in your own country...
...If I say I'm Chinese they treat me contemptuously...
...In front of the screen is a kind of courtyard created by a picket fence...
...After the Russians left and before the Cultural Revolution," one woman said wistfully, "we used to go to Youyi Bingguan to dance all the time...
...A woman discovered to have a male foreign friend stands a good chance of being arrested as a prostitute, even when the pair want to marry...
...If I was blonde and had a big nose,' I say, 'you wouldn't stop me at all.' They say that's not true, that they stop everybody...
...But at the Peking office of ? A AC, the Chinese National airline, the international flights information and reservations desk has no information about flights to Hong Kong...
...A few months ago two foreigners came to look at the screen at a time when the courtyard was packed with Chinese...
...At Qinghua University in Peking in November, a Chinese student and her Yemeni fiance committed suicide...
...In The Little Official, a Henan comic opera set in the Sixteenth Century, aristocratic privilege and bureaucratic corruption are overcome by the title character, an honest magistrate...
...No amount of the smiling and nodding and ni-haoing that foreigners and Chinese exchange in the absence of substantive communication will get a response from a PLA soldier on or off duty at the Bingguan...
...It is the rule...
...I asked my comrades...
...On September 20, Xinhua news agency reported that nearly all the shops on Liulichang, where Peking's principal art and antique shops are located, had opened their doors to Chinese customers...
...All these categories come with privileges, immunities, and restrictions both official and unofficial...
...Only the mountain-god knows for certain what combination of common sense and foolhardiness he visited upon the Chinese that evening but, their patience exhausted, they invaded and occupied the foreigners-only section...
...The ladies must dance with anyone who asks them, but promptly at midnight they are loaded back on the bus and taken home...
...I say, 'That's garbage.' They say most foreigners don't obey the regulations and just walk in without registering and there's nothing they can do...
...In the old International Settlement at Shanghai, the entrance to the Bund carried the warning: "Chinese and dogs not allowed...
...Sometimes it gets confusing...
...Chinese, no matter how old or infirm, do not use the elevator...
...A few weeks later, the foreigners-only sign came down...
...A woman we'll call Mary Fong is a native-born American citizen both of whose parents are of Chinese ancestry...
...they had been refused permission to marry and the woman, according to her ^ : friends, feared .· ??-./1...
...The local guards started chasing the Chinese out, and the foreigners protested...
...Fong lives among Chinese in an apartment block attached to the Foreign Languages Press...
...We were then permitted to walk down a path at the end of which was a foreigners-only restaurant, with its attendant exorbitant prices...
...Chinese restaurants have three price scales, one for Chinese, one for Overseas Chinese, and one for foreigners...
...On National Day, October 1, the hotel was full up, and dozens of Chinese tourists faced the prospect of spending the night in dining-room chairs...
...near the peak is a hotel where one can have dinner and get some sleep before greeting the dawn and starting down...
...Xinhua said that delegates to the National People's Congress earlier in September had called for "equal treatment for foreigners and Chinese and a breaking down of the barriers" between them...
...There being very little else to do of a Saturday night in Peking, a good number of foreigners paid five yuan (U.S...
...In the midst of the shouting, a lone foreigner, European by appearance, obliviously pushed his way through the crowd and walked up the stairs...
...Wai Wen Ju, the Foreign Languages Press building, where I work, is five stories tall, about half a block long, and has one elevator...
...Han Suyin reports that both Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping opposed the bans on such marriages—there is no law against them, and the rule does not seem to apply as strictly to Chinese men and foreign women—to no apparent avail...
...It's just a courtesy to foreign guests," said the ever-placid Liu Zongren, putting the best face on it, or perhaps just forgetting for the moment how many times he himself had been a victim of that courtesy...
...When she visits her friends at Youyi Bingguan, the Friendship Guest House, she is invariably stopped at the gate and forced to go into the guardhouse to register...
...We're in No Man's Land," Fong says of resident foreigners of Chinese ancestry...
...If they knew you they'd treat you better.' I told them that was exactly the problem—the discrimination...
...A primitive bar (all Peking bars are primitive) and taped disco and waltz music completed the arrangements...
...Once I got so mad I complained to the hotel management...
...Tourists often remark on the ease and relative precision with which they are guided through special hotels and restaurants and are given immediate access to such places as Mao's mausoleum, which usually have long waiting lines...
...I thought there would be mayhem and momentarily feared for my own safety, but the Chinese, who after all have suffered for thousands of years, apparently concluded en masse that they could suffer a while longer, and the crowd disappeared...
...Two of them are members of the Politburo...
...As the evening wore on the Chinese section of the dining room became more and more crowded, with newcomers forced to sit on the cold stone floor...
...The Great Wall, I think, is probably the only thing Richard Nixon ever told the truth about...
...Chinese who don't deal with foreigners all the time may never have seen a passport...
...After the film, Liu Zongren declined my invitation to join me at the International Club where, I suggested, he could see the decadent West at its worst—disco dancing...
...About thirty Chinese were haranguing two clerks standing guard at the stairway to the third floor...
Vol. 45 • March 1981 • No. 3
