I Stand Corrected Read online

  My mother was old-world European and a different kind of exile. Like her own mother, she was mentally ill. She was also impeccably mannered. I managed to hold these distinct and, at times, contradictory ideas in my head while sepia-toned propriety dispelled the larger disquiet of what became her progressively frequent stays in mental institutions. She would disappear and then reappear, as if nothing were out of place but time. The fact that she committed herself was never discussed or, indeed, acknowledged.

  If my professional career carries a credit balance, it can be found in my childhood. The intense ecosystem that was my family consisted of my parents, my two brothers, and me. But there was another, hidden member of our family: silence. And odd as it sounds, our implicit agreement to ignore that which was so obviously wrong enabled me, when it came time, to understand the Asian principle of saving face. It was also my childhood—with its forced introduction to the complexities of human nature—that would equip me, as an adult, to work with a disparate range of people, some considered completely impossible by most others.

  My father was a success in business. He was also an ethically exacting man. Believing that financial dependency wove a sticky web of complacency, he put my inherited privilege on a timer. Until twenty-one, I was safeguarded by advantages but expected to behave within the strict confines of a nonnegotiable correctness—one that forced my mother’s mental illness to hide beneath the surface. Given my remove from the wider world, the only opportunity to learn about the metaphorical scheme of things came from observing anything within my limited line of vision.

  Improbable as it may seem, that included Maria Callas.

  My father’s board meetings provided family forays from our home in Chicago to a hotel in New York where his company’s suite was directly across the hall from the one Aristotle Onassis kept for Callas during the better part of his marriage to Jackie Kennedy. Callas was my equivalent of what Flaubert must have encountered on his first trip to Egypt. Her physical being—splashed in bold, Picasso-like strokes—was wonderfully different from anything I had known. Having been confined to a life of nuance, I was fascinated by the theatrical exaggeration of hers. Never-ending activity swirled around her. A personal maid coordinated every form of room service. Floral deliveries arrived almost on the hour, and several times a day her white toy poodle—whose coat was trimmed like topiary—was handed to one of the bodyguards for its walk.

  There was a menacing kind of glamour to Onassis’s arrival, announced by the guttural sounds of armed security men who—my mother was quick to point out—didn’t know enough to remove their hats while in the elevator.

  “An ugly little man,” was her appraisal of Onassis. “Contemptuously unapologetic for the inconvenience he causes the other guests.”

  My mother’s observation was not incorrect. Onassis was a physically unattractive man. Far more interesting to me at thirteen was another fact, just as obvious: Onassis was a married man. That made Callas his mistress. At a time when that word had consequences, one might have thought the degree to which it was public would force a corresponding sense of embarrassment on her. That’s what should have happened according to the code of conduct by which I was brought up. But Maria Callas did not appear chastened. Quite the opposite. She was having an extremely good time, and that third irrefutable fact permitted me to consider that life need not be coded to what others believed to be proper behavior.

  Just as it was with my brothers, the vacuum sound of my father’s bank vault closing was heard as I was handed a college diploma. Having no choice in either matter, I had been raised to be—in equal parts—ladylike and employable. The former prepared me for who knows what; the latter provided a lifeline to self-reliance.

  At twenty-one, my ambitions were focused on New York, but dismal typing skills undermined my opportunities there. I took the only job available to me at the time: a substitute receptionist answering phones at the book publishing company Doubleday.

  Most callers don’t automatically announce themselves, so time after time I was forced to say, “May I ask who is calling?” The second day on the job, that straightforward question might have been reason enough for me to be told not to return for a third day.

  “Whoever you are, hang up the phone so I can call back and leave a message,” were the gruff instructions from an unannounced caller.

  “I think you’ll find me capable of taking a message,” I suggested glibly. “The first thing I would ask is the name of the person calling. Who may I ask is calling now?”

  The ominous silence that followed led me to believe I might have overstepped myself.

  The literary agent Candida Donadio was a maverick with no formal education but unerring instincts for identifying talent. She was born on October 22, 1929, a date, it is said, memorialized in Catch-22 and explained by the fact that Joseph Heller was her client. He was but one of them: Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip Roth, John Cheever, Peter Matthiessen, Nelson Algren, and Christopher Isherwood—all were, in some part, due to Candida.

  A botched phone ploy brought us together.

  Trying to avoid talking to the Doubleday editor to whom she owed a call, Candida had hoped that, by leaving a message on the machine, she would be relieved of any further obligation. Instead, she got me.

  Candida was known to like a drink, and the several that had preceded her call allowed the barriers to slip long enough for her to suggest not that she have me fired but that we should meet. The suggestion was out of character for her: Candida was a semirecluse. “To trust is good,” she would tell me, and then she would add, “Not to trust is better.” Ignoring the width of our age gap, we became close friends. It was she who persuaded me to stake a career in book publishing.

  Impossible to have imagined, but eight years after my first job as a receptionist—by way of a great deal of luck and relentlessly hard work—I became the head of another publishing company, Arbor House, which, at the time, was part of the Hearst Corporation. Despite my off-topic introduction to Chinese business practices in Shenzhen shortly after I was named publisher, China intrigued me enough to return a year later—by myself and without the intent of doing business.

  Lured by its 1920s glamour, I spent a week in Shanghai’s old Cathay Hotel, whose rooms—festooned with gold silk and lacquered in red—were suffused with an aura of the past. Each afternoon, I took tea in the lobby among the ghosts of courtesans and gangsters. And when it came time to return to New York, I was determined that—be it on business or for the sake of travel—I would come back.

  I did.

  Revisiting Shanghai several years later, I took a bullet train from the airport to the center of the city. What fueled my disbelief was not that I was being hurtled ahead at two hundred and sixty-eight miles an hour on the thin layer of air between the train and the magnetized narrow tracks; far more disconcerting was what I saw when we slowed down and I looked out the window: some of the peasants—knee-deep in rice paddies—were on cell phones.

  Entering the telecommunications market with satellite-based platforms, China managed to leapfrog over the first generation of cable-based systems in the West, and now over 75 percent of its 1.3 billion–plus people have at least one cell phone.

  It could be the sheer number of people in China trying to have their say, but shrill voices—often combined with spittle spray—come across several decimals higher than is comfortable to Westerners. Noise accompanies one everywhere in China; there is practicality to the customary phone greeting wei, which means “Can you hear me?” or “Is anyone there?”

  Even after my third trip to China, the country continued to baffle. Its social rules were puzzling. Its business agreements were revocable. Its people were accessible and, at the same time, unreachable. Whenever a Sinophile would explain Chinese culture, my response was always the same polite “I see,” although I didn’t quite. Chinese history was too full of incident for a tidy explanation. I wanted a better understanding, and my mind kept circling back.

&nb
sp; Like a complicated mathematical equation I was determined to solve, China called me back numerous times over the next twenty-five years. There came many adventures, but only one revelation: I would remain forever and beguilingly mystified by the Middle Kingdom.

  CHAPTER TWO

  China—or Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom—was designated in name during the Zhou dynasty in 1000 B.C. The early Chinese believed that they were living in the middle ground of the earth, surrounded by barbarians.

  When China’s flag was hoisted above Tiananmen Square in the fall of 1949, the Communist Party extended the country’s official name to its full reach: Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo, or the Middle Glorious People’s Republican Country. Plain English stripped away the self-promotional embellishment, reducing the nation’s identity to the People’s Republic of China.

  I first set my sights on China in the 1980s, some fifteen years after the Cultural Revolution had unleashed a decade of chaos. By then the Communist Party had abandoned Mao Zedong’s ideological zealotry and was marching in lockstep behind the ever-pragmatic Deng Xiaoping, who thought China’s future rested on its ability to build a middle class and whose campaign of radical transformation set the stage for the nation’s frenzied transition to state-sanctioned capitalism.

  The 1990s in China featured political leaders who proved remarkably skillful at appearing to adhere to the Maoist notion of learning from the people but who had no intention of giving them a collective voice. I watched as the one-party system managed political catastrophes that threatened to loosen the Communists’ tight grip on the levers of power, including a violent demonstration in Tiananmen Square that shook the pillars of the party’s legitimacy.

  Twenty-four years later, President Xi Jinping declared his admiration for Mao’s legacy by banning seven “subversive” topics of discussion in universities, including Western ideas of democracy, alternative judicial systems to those in China, the promotion of universal values of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media, civic participation, and ardently promarket neoliberalism.

  Some foreign observers speculate that Xi—the son of a revolutionary veteran—has made a strategic decision to preserve the nationalist base within the Communist Party and that, by consolidating his power, he has provided enough cover to implement China’s much-needed market reforms. That would be good for us all, since the future of the world is the future of a global economy, and no other nation will succeed fully if China is held back. More than ever before, economic outcomes are the result not just of markets but of global politics and policy.

  China—the world’s largest nation—is facing its own policy-related conundrum. In order for China to underwrite its political and social order, the Communist Party must continue to deliver growth. For growth to continue, two things must occur: the Chinese judicial system must find a way to guarantee the protection of private assets, and sooner rather than later, the Chinese financial system must accept further liberation.

  In 2013, President Xi signaled the party’s willingness to gradually wean its economy off state subsidies and to allow the market a greater hand in setting prices. But economic reform is a multifaceted process, and China’s internal challenges cannot be successfully addressed by preventing open dialogue at institutions of higher learning.

  The seventh forbidden topic of debate in universities is criticism of the party’s traumatic past—a more grievously shortsighted ban than the other six, it seems to me. By denying its past mistakes, China remains a poor student of its own lessons. I don’t claim the expertise to conjecture the future of China, but there is something to the idea that in order to move forward, it is often necessary to first look back.

  I have to believe that, at some point, the Chinese will find the wisdom to acknowledge the deep self-inflicted wounds of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Those human catastrophes gouged down to the bone of China’s identity, severing intellectual lifelines and denying the Confucian orthodoxy of family over state that had formed China’s cultural foundation for more than a millennium.

  Confucian principles stress the importance of hierarchical relationships in achieving a stable and harmonious society. These relationships are centered on deference to a dominant figure in a system of behaviors and ethical obligations that cascade down in order of priority: ruler and subject; husband and wife; parent and child; brother and sister; friend and friend. Each of these relationships requires an appropriate show of deference.

  Born in 551 B.C., Confucius was largely unknown during his lifetime. After his death, those of his disciples who had mastered his teachings compiled his reflections and sayings in the Analects. During the centuries that followed, Confucianism was both revered and vilified, depending on the political backdrop, but it found enough footing to form the philosophical foundation on which the reverence of education and leadership coexisted in China.

  “Aspire to the principle, behave with virtue, abide by benevolence, and immerse yourself in the arts”—these are the four tenets at the core of Confucius’s teachings. Whether any of them has a place in contemporary China—or, for that matter, the modern world—is difficult to know, but it cannot be disputed that Confucianism has had a long and penetrating influence in China. The Rites of Zhou, one of Confucianism’s three classic texts on ritual, names forbearance as the root of harmony and identifies deference as the cause of prosperity. Dating from the mid-second century B.C.—and enjoining the importance of family, a reverence for age, and kindness to strangers—it outlines moral principles that form the basis of Chinese law.

  Mao—obsessed with ridding China of what he named its bourgeois elements—force-marched the Chinese away from their cultural touchstones and ancestral bonds. The Cultural Revolution replaced the Confucian virtue of deference with the authority of the Red Guards, made up first of students, some still in elementary school, and then of workers; last to join the ranks were soldiers. Purged were the Four Olds: old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. Professors, teachers, students, writers, and scientists were targeted for reeducation, given no choice but to prove their allegiance through self-condemnation. One survivor described it as “the physical and mental liquidation of oneself.” Those identified as enemies of the regime faced firing squads. Those not killed—or who did not commit suicide—were dispersed to work on farms or in labor camps. Those unable to resist the pressure denounced their neighbors as enemies of the cause. No one dared trust anyone other than family—a mentality still apparent, particularly in the ways Chinese conduct their business affairs.

  Some of my colleagues in China were children at the time of the Cultural Revolution. How they survived its physical brutality and emotional deprivation I shall never know. Nor can I imagine the sacrifices of which they rarely speak—sacrifices rarely spoken of because enmeshed in the Chinese culture is an overriding sense of collective responsibility that prevents individual self-expression.

  It took nine years after meeting me for a friend to admit she had seen her father beaten to death. And a decade passed between us before a colleague, the CFO of a state-owned TV station, stoically described the afternoon he was robbed of his childhood. With words devoid of self-pity but in a voice that conveyed the ever-renewable sting of abandonment, he told me that, at the age of ten, he returned home from school one day to learn that his parents had been taken away to be reeducated. He was assigned the duty of smashing the heads off Buddha statues before he was assigned factory work in another province.

  Destroying any book, artifact, or scripture associated with China’s cultural past, the Cultural Revolution bled out the country’s history. Tombs were vandalized and temples were demolished. Much of China’s ancient heritage disappeared, along with the Chinese practices of etiquette. Unlike the French, who temporarily denounced the supremacy of manners during a violent but relatively short burst of revolution, the Chinese expunged theirs under Mao’s claim of progress.

  DONGZHIMEN IS THE location of what once was Beijing’s northeast city gat
e that led to the countryside. As proof of the city’s rapid transformation, the vicinity is now central Beijing. Housing there ranges from Soviet-style walk-ups to high-end luxury villas. In the morning, newly minted office workers wait for city buses, while impatient rich in their posh cars honk at migrant peasants in horse-drawn carts. By the late afternoon, trees are swollen with the hypnotic buzzing of cicadas, and sidewalks become littered with tradespeople napping on collapsed cardboard boxes. At night, those same sidewalks are lit by the slow glow of flame burners from the food stalls. Noodle soup bubbles in large vats, skewers of meat and chicken sizzle on grills, flaky pastries make an appearance, and Dongzhimen—seen under its hanging red lanterns—becomes a trove of dining possibilities.

  Determined to experience adventure at the ground level, Gilliam and I were foreigners, or laowai, among the locals in Dongzhimen the summer I decided to settle in Beijing. We moved into a middle-class Chinese compound, where our semi-Westernized apartment featured two small bedrooms, an equally small kitchen with a washing machine, an enclosed porch with a pulley system to hang clothes to dry, and two bathrooms with sitting toilets rather than the customary squatting facilities. Neighbors on our floor were three young Chinese couples, each with a single child and at least one set of live-in grandparents.

  In my previous travels, translators had shielded me from the fact that very little English is spoken in Beijing outside its universities and office buildings. With several years of Mandarin behind him, Gilliam was fairly fluent. I was proud of his achievement, but my dependency on it created an uncomfortable role reversal—beginning with our mandatory visit to the police station in Dongzhimen.