Mao to Now

By the time I met him, Uncle had been politically rehabilitated once again. The authorities had pasted a bright red certificate on his front door declaring that his pension had been reinstated. A neighborhood public-health center had even offered him a job teaching hygiene classes. Uncle was glad Deng's reforms had come soon enough for him to offer the country his own skills and knowledge—unlike in Russia, where communist orthodoxy outlasted everyone who had any experience living in a capitalist society. "For years we've taken the wrong path," Uncle told me. "Now we must catch up. If the young ones cannot learn and manage by themselves, then we old ones must come back to help."

All the same, no one in those days could be blamed for being skeptical. Earlier moments of hope had ended in sudden crackdowns. In July 1982, Guangyuan and his family got U.S. visas permitting them to move to California, where our parents were now living. I flew to America with them, translating and trying to explain all the unfamiliar travel procedures, particularly the Customs routine: Are you carrying fruits or vegetables? Any animal or insect products? Have you been on a farm recently? Every question elicited a no. But after we got to my parents' house in Huntington Beach, I heard a strange trilling sound coming from Guangyuan's room. I asked him about it, and he pulled a tiny container from his pocket. It held two "golden bell" crickets, prized by the Chinese for their clean, clear music. Guangyuan had no idea of the trouble they would have caused at the airport. In the California night, the little insects trilled the soft, sweet song of a distant home.

II. The Square
China in the 1980s was a place of excitement and possibility. Everyone there was looking for angles, opportunities, connections, especially Chinese entrepreneurs from Hong Kong and Taiwan. In fact, prosperity was blooming not only in Deng's China but all across East Asia; so were new demands for more political freedoms. I would spend much of the decade racing from one pro-democracy uprising to the next. Although I didn't know it at the time, I got an early glimpse of things to come while on a dream vacation in Tibet in 1985, organized by a good friend from Hong Kong nicknamed Fifth Dragon. His late father had once been a Yunnan warlord, and Beijing was wooing Dragon to repatriate some of the family's exiled wealth by investing it on the mainland. One boozy evening in Lhasa, a senior party official in our group opened his jacket and pulled out a Makarov pistol. "I carry this for protection," he told us. "Protection from whom?" I asked, suddenly sobered. He smiled sadly at my ignorance but didn't answer. The following summer, independence riots erupted in Lhasa, and unrest has continued there ever since.

Events outside China might have convinced you that the march of democracy was inexorable. Asia's middle classes were growing, and so were their expectations and clout. In Manila, Asia's first "people power" revolution forced dictator Ferdinand Marcos into exile in Hawaii in 1986. (I just missed his exit, having been shot in the knee by jittery soldiers in front of the palace, and ended up in a Manila emergency room.) A year later in Seoul, student demonstrators forced another heavy-handed military regime to back down. The generals, eager to showcase their country's economic progress, had won their bid to host the 1988 Summer Olympics. Rather than risk the international disgrace of spoiling the Games with a shroud of tear gas or a bloody crackdown, the junta cleared the way for civilian rule.

But that summer, rather than covering the Games, I had to fly to Rangoon, where I was reminded that the people didn't always win. Riding in the back of a rattletrap pickup truck en route to the Strand Hotel, jittery Burmese acquaintances told how amid the chaos of ongoing and massive pro-democracy protests, demonstrators had seized rifles and ammunition from soldiers. I felt sick, knowing the junta would react violently. In the morning my photographer and I dodged potholes and bullets to visit an ancient city hospital, whose wards were like something out of Hieronymus Bosch. Piles of feces lay in the hallways. The worst part was counting mangled bodies in the morgue, including the corpse of a young teenager missing most of his head.

I flew to Beijing the next year thinking the biggest trouble I'd encounter would be staying awake through Foreign Ministry briefings. Mikhail Gorbachev was due in town on May 15, 1989, after 30 years of Sino-Soviet hostility. But as I neared Tiananmen Square in a taxi on May 3, I was startled to see a human chain of four or five bicyclists, some with white headbands across their foreheads, pedaling side by side, their arms linked. Their rolling protest blocked an entire lane of traffic. I marveled at their audacity. Student activists were still mourning one of their biggest heroes, Politburo member Hu Yaobang, more than two weeks after his death from a heart attack. He had earned their loyalty two years earlier, when Deng forced him to step down as Communist Party chief for being too soft on campus unrest.