China of Yore

My Three Trips to China

   Like everyone else, I daily read about goings-on in China. Today it is the largest economy after that of the US and is predicted to become number one in 2018. That does not resemble the China I encountered on three separate occasions, none of them during the country’s ascent to be a mega-power. I’ll now provide brief glimpses into each of those quite different visits, wondering who in China, if anyone, thinks of some of those times as the Good Old Days.

   My first visit was in 1946  as a nineteen-year old enlisted seaman in the US Navy. An APA (a troop transport ship) had brought a great many of us from California to Shanghai to be replacements for enlisted men who had served long enough to be sent home and discharged from the Navy.

   I became a member of the crew of the LST 919 (Landing Ship Tank) and was assigned to duties in the wheelhouse, pleasantly above deck in the fresh air. The ship performed various tasks that took us to Shanghai and Hong Kong, among other cities. At this point I can’t really differentiate between my experiences in those two ports, though I think of the latter to have had a distinctive British feeling. In neither place did the LST (peacetime crew of around 70) have the rank to moor, so, when on liberty, one needed to be at the right time and the right place to catch the small boat that would take us to where our ship was anchored in the harbor.

   On shore, usually with a colleague, we would wonder around, in effect sight-seeing. While I very much wanted to buy one of those carved chess sets, I never had the money to do so, since the LST did not have a paymaster and was never in port long enough for us to be paid. Eating a good meal was a major feature of those few hours on shore.

   One of those Shanghai visits concluded with an uncomfortable adventure. My companion and I suddenly realized that we had wandered so far from the shore that it was questionable whether we could get to the designated pick-up spot in time to catch the boat back to our ship. We felt we had to accept rickshaw rides back to the water, since those fellows knew the way and were able to move much faster than we could. I cannot tell you how uncomfortable I was to be pulled by another human being, rather than by some beast or, better, a motor. It went against my American grain.

   I was one of the 919 crew who had a couple of days’ liberty in Tientsin, a more authentically Chinese a city than we had visited before. The most dramatic thing that happened to me there was not Chinese at all, but ur-Anerican. I had somehow given myself a quite trivial cut. But in addition to a band aid I was given a swift ride in a jeep across town to get a tetanus shot, for sure the second, maybe the third since I was in the navy.

   My second visit to China, in 1977, three decades later, was of course very different. I was then a dean at Northwestern, working in my office, when I got a phone call from my boss, President Robert Strotz. How would you and Fannia like to join a group of us in the coming summer for a trip to China? A number of Northwestern trustees wanted to explore business possibilities, now that it was no longer the land of Mao Zedong. They had found out that only “educational” groups were admitted. So we went, a small group of trustees and university officers and a few wives.

   It was immensely interesting¹ and just about completely controlled by our hosts. We were accompanied at all times by a guide, charming and speaking excellent English and every stop we made consisted mainly of the local hosts telling us about themselves. The culmination was a big banquet that, by the standards of the place and the times, was quite plush. When all kinds of essentially routine toasts were produced, I also decided to get up to propose a toast to the people in the kitchen who had produced all that good food. (After all, it was a communist state and they were the Workers.) That prompted a number of kitchen folks in their white working smocks to come out into our dining hall to acknowledge my toast. They were clearly not accustomed to being singled out in that way.

   My third visit to China, 1983. A dean I knew wanted to organize a group of US deans to make a trip to Taiwan and asked me to come. I agreed when I determined that after Taiwan I could visit the mainland, my real interest. So I secured an invitation from the president of Fudan University, Mme Xie Xide, with whom I had earlier worked out a Northwestern-Fudan student exchangeship.

   We saw a lot of Taiwan: interesting and pleasant. We also met with numerous groups from the world of education to whom we were supposed to impart some of our deanish wisdom. But of course that isn’t how it worked. For our host groups it was show and tell: they showed and told; we listened and, I hope, were successful in hiding that we were bored.  

   That visit to Fudan was very pleasant and basically uneventful. However, the people there facilitated Fannia’s and my visit to Xian.  We were connected with a mentor in that city, who picked us up at the airport: a young man who spoke excellent—indeed, colloquial—English, even though he had never been outside China. From around ten in the morning until four in the afternoon he was in charge of us. He took us to see the archeological sights of the ancient terra cotta armies: a pretty flamboyant vision!  

   After our mentor left us in the latter part of the afternoon, we drifted around town. I recall one occasion when, standing at an intersection, I took out my map to decide which way to go next. When I looked up, I found that we were surrounded by a great many locals looking at us, but obviously very friendly. From Xian we flew home.

   That third trip was my last to China. The period of rapid building of housing and skyscrapers had not yet begun and while there was plenty of automobile traffic, bicycles were still prevalently in use. Even if I were still traveling, I would not be anxious to see a China that is becoming like so much of the built-up developed world.
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1Fannia Weingartner, Sixteen Days in the People's Republic of China, 1977