"If there hadn't been a revolution in China, your life would have been rather different."
"Maybe better, maybe worse," he said.
I said, "But can't you say that you've lived through an interesting period of history?"
"Just a little bit of it. Chinese history is enormous. The Cultural Revolution was hardly anything."
In The House of Exile, Nora Wain writes, "I asked what war this was. Shun-ko's husband answered, 'It is not a war. It is just a period. When you are adequately educated in Chinese history you will comprehend. We have these intervals of unrest, sixty to a hundred years in length, between dynasties, throughout the forty-six centuries of our history.'"
Mr. Peng had not been a Red Guard. He was in his early teens during the Cultural Revolution, but he had resisted joining the unit. It had not made him popular.
"To show that I loved Chairman Mao I had to engage in the demonstrations. But my heart wasn't in it. It was regarded as wonderful to wear an armband that showed you were a Red Guard. And the best thing was to be the leader of your Red Guard unit."
"Who was the leader at your school?"
"A boy called Wei Dong—he gave himself the name, because it's a way of saying 'Defender of Mao Zedong,' He was a very important boy. He knew all the slogans. He made us say them. It was a strange time. The whole country was in a state of revolution."
"What happened to Wei Dong?"
"I see him now and then. He is completely changed. He is a teacher. He has children. He's an ordinary worker. That's the worst thing to be—it's so hard. He has very little money and no respect. No more speeches or slogans. No one blames him for what happened, but no one is interested in him either."
"Don't you think anything was achieved in the Cultural Revolution?"
"No. And a lot was lost. We wasted time. Mao was muddled. His brain was tired. Zhou Enlai could have saved us from it, but he let Mao lead. We really trusted Zhou, and that was why the Qingming Festival in 1976 was a real event. Thousands of people showed up to mourn him. It was spontaneous. But we didn't know what to do. Tiananmen Square was full of people feeling very confused."
"When did you stop feeling confused?"
"When Deng took over and did away with portraits and opened China's doors," Mr. Peng said.
"Maybe this is just one of those short periods in Chinese history."
"I hope it's a long period," Mr. Peng said.
Bette Bao Lord, the wife of the American ambassador to China, is a great deal better known than her husband both in America (where her novel Spring Moon was a best-seller) and in China (where the book is being made into a movie). The name Winston Lord was so patrician that it seemed more that of a character in a certain kind of women's fiction; but not Bette Bao Lord's. Her novel was rightly praised as an accurate portrayal of a family caught in the crosswinds of Chinese history. It was set in a period that Mrs. Lord observed firsthand. It seemed wonderfully symmetrical that, having been born in China and educated and raised in the United States, she had recently returned to China as the ambassador's wife.
With less than a day's notice from me, she arranged a lunch-party for sixteen people. When I met her this seemed less surprising. She did not strike me as a person to whom anyone had ever said no.
She was slim and had the severe good looks of a Chinese beauty—skin like pale velvet and a lacquered elegance that fashion magazines call devastating. She had the alert and yet contented air of someone who has had everything she has ever wanted, and probably been given it lavishly rather than having had to demand it. Her jet-black hair was yanked back tightly into a knot and stabbed with a stiletto. She wore a stylish white jacket and skirt, a striped blouse and cruel shoes, and large white coral earrings were snapped against the sides of her head like earphones designed by Fabergé. She was so eager to put me at my ease that I immediately became tense.
In the steamy May heat of Peking, Mrs. Lord was uncommonly energetic. This was her way. Her gusto was a kind of confidence, and she could be hearty in two languages. She was brisk, she laughed loudly and deep in her throat, and she had the very un-Chinese habit of poking my arm, or rapping my knee or hitting my shoulder to get my attention or make a point. These would have been exhausting qualities in another person, but in Mrs. Lord they were stimulating. I liked being poked in the arm by this glamorous woman.
Once, tapping me, she said (speaking of the importance of planning), "It's like choosing the right husband or wife..."
I thought this was odd, because I had never regarded marriage as a conscious choice. It was something else: you fell in love and that was it, for better or worse. But she seemed very rational—that was certainly Chinese of her—and I guessed that she had spent her life making the right choices.
She told me she felt very lucky. I imagined that many women must hate her, since she was what most would want to be—a ravishing overachiever, a little empress in her own right. She told me she was forty-seven. She looked about thirty-five and, because some Chinese faces are unalterable even by time, would probably look that way for a long while.
We talked about publishing. Her career has been blessed—two books, both huge successes. She had been in Peking only six months and had planned to write a new novel. But running the embassy household, doing menus, dealing with servants and guests and family, had turned her into a sort of Victorian housemother. To give herself a sense of order, she said, she was keeping a diary—probably for publication.
"I find myself sitting next to Deng Xiaoping, or being introduced to a visiting head of state, and I think, 'I must write this down!' Don't you think that's important?"
"Yes, but people mainly read diaries to discover trivial things and indiscretions. My advice would be: put everything down, don't edit or censor it, and be as indiscreet as possible."
"Is that what you do?" she said, swiftly crossing her legs and wrapping herself into a querying posture.
"I only keep a diary when I travel," I said. I did not say that I think diaries are death to writing fiction—trying to remember all that stuff.
"Because traveling is so interesting?"
"No. Because travel writing is a minor form of autobiography."
And then a woman entered without knocking to say that the guests had arrived.
"They're all Party members!" Mrs. Lord said confidentially. She was pleased with herself, and who wouldn't be? Out of one billion people, only 44 million are members of the Chinese Communist Party—four and a half percent.
These guests were writers and scholars. Most of them had been abroad and nearly all of them spoke English perfectly. Nor were they daunted by the Western menu—the soup first, and then the prawns and meat loaf—or the knives and forks. Indeed, one of them told me that not long ago Hu Yaobang, the Party secretary, had advocated the use of knives and forks. Chopsticks were unsanitary, Mr. Hu maintained, and the Chinese habit of taking food from common dishes was a factor in the spread of germs. Mr. Hu frequently made mischievous remarks of this kind. He had also said that Marxism was outdated and that the Han Chinese should perhaps vacate Tibet.
I asked the woman next to me whether she agreed with Mr. Hu about chopsticks or anything else.
"I'd like to keep an open mind," she said. Her accent was extraordinary—not just English, but upper-class English, the intonation of a well-bred headmistress. She sounded like the head of Cheltenham Ladies College, and she seemed the sort of woman the English praise by calling her "a bluestocking." I was not surprised to hear that she taught at Peking University or that her chief subject was Henry James.
She said she was exasperated by the bad translations of James into Chinese.
"When Casper Goodwood says to Isabel, 'Just wait!' they translate it as 'Wait a minute'—as if he's going to pop right back, you see. It's very trying, but what can one do?"