I<\/span> became what I am today at age ten, when domestic and international events first made me aware of my own peculiar position in this world. I also saw a masked man with engaging eyes sweeping the streets. Our communication was nonverbal, but everything seemed to have begun for me from that encounter.<\/p>\n

Kids my age would have been in school already had it not because China\u2019s political circumstances then at home and abroad. The Sino-Soviet border conflict and the death of Chairman Mao\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and designated successor Lin Biao meant that the beginning of our schooling was postponed. I taught myself to read The Liberation Daily and to write as many Chinese characters as possible. The Liberation Daily was the only official paper in Shanghai and every business entity had to subscribe to it even though it was not always read. I got my copies for free at the nearby wet market where I shopped daily for groceries. A stack of them was always there to be used to wrap food in.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n

Nineteen seventy-two itself was an eventful year.<\/p>\n

Three weeks into it, in the Micronesian U.S. Territory of Guam, Japanese soldier Shoichi Yokoi was discovered in the jungle where he had been hiding for twenty-eight years, pledging daily allegiance to Emperor Hirohito in the hope that the Empire of the Sun would win its Holy War and dominate the entire \u201cGreater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere\u201d.<\/p>\n

I heard this news from the transistor radio in the shop that sold bean paste and other condiments. The owner, whose salt and pepper hair never seemed to have been washed, would always flash a grin at me with his crooked brown teeth. \u201cPretty girl\u2019s shopping for her pretty mother again \u2013 she\u2019s certainly one baijiu drinker, that Russian lady,\u201d he would say with a chuckle. Baijiu <\/em>was a fiery sorghum liquor.<\/p>\n

The owner\u2019s only treasure was his son, also ten, like me. Whenever I shopped there, he would be gaping at me from a dim corner, the expression in his eyes alternating between fascination and resentment.<\/p>\n

To conserve the battery, the owner\u2019s transistor was on at noon for ten minutes only. Neighborhood men would gather to hear the news. That day, after the radio was switched off, one man said, \u201cThe Japanese can be really obsessive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s why they\u2019re known as the \u2018Eastern foreigners\u2019 and not \u2018Western foreigners\u2019 like some people,\u201d chimed in another, giving me a glance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Western foreigners are good-looking and smart — right, pretty girl?\u201d the owner said.<\/p>\n

I blushed and looked away, my eyes meeting those of the boy. He flashed me a grin. I snatched the refilled soy sauce bottle I had already paid for and ran out.<\/p>\n

The Japanese are known as the Eastern foreigners as opposed to Western foreigners like \u2026 me, a quarter-Russian three-quarters Shanghainese, I noted to myself. People automatically put me in a separate category.<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, I was introduced through the front page of the paper to a real Western foreigner. On February 21st, U.S. President and career Communist-prosecutor Richard Nixon landed in China to shake hands with careerist Communist leader Chairman Mao and to be seen photographed atop the Great Wall. This was no Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate on the merits of capitalism versus communism reenacted, I half-comprehendingly read from The Liberation Daily. Holding its breath, the West watched as \u201cTricky Dick\u201d Nixon posed toothily with a drooling Great Proletariat Leader, Great Teacher, Great Commander-in-Chief, and Great Helmsman. The panda-faced, German-accented mastermind Henry Kissinger and the Europe-trained Chinese Machiavellian Zhou Enlai, whom the West deemed charismatic despite his rusty English, \u201cagreed to disagree\u201d about the sovereignty of the island of Taiwan. A Sino-U.S. Communiqu\u00e9 was executed by the Secretary of State and the Premier. The setting for such an epoch-making event was, by no accident, Shanghai, the former \u201cwhore of Asia\u201d, the then boar of socialist Utopia. Make no mistake. Shanghai was credited for being the glorious birthplace of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution just six years earlier. But it was still the most international city within China and retained much of the pre-Liberation European hardware.<\/p>\n

In May, in the vast Eurasian landmass collectively known as the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics where part of my heritage could be traced, Secretary-General Leonid Brezhnev was determined not to be out staged by his Chinese archrival and signed with Nixon the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, SALT for short.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou learned about SALT from the radio or the wrapping paper?\u201d you, my Western journalist interviewer, interjected.<\/p>\n

Actually, neither.<\/p>\n

I had not yet come across any English word, nor would a Chinese broadcaster use an English acronym. The only salt I knew then was for cooking, an activity I was destined to be associated with.<\/p>\n

While SALT brought about an easing of relations between Washington and Moscow — the paper said, I was aware that the Sino-Soviet relationships remained icy cold.<\/p>\n

No salt to thaw.<\/p>\n

In the fall of 1972, I finally started school. Wang Hong and the condiments store boy were in my class. They both were Little Red Guards, the name for the Communist Young Pioneer since the Cultural Revolution. Deemed unfit for the f\u00eated ranks of the juvenile defenders of Chairman Mao, there was no school-issued red scarf for me. In my heart I prayed that my fellow pupils would not know the reason for my exclusion: I, the bourgeois adulterated versus them, the proletariat purebred.<\/p>\n

I knew from the men at the condiments store that our school was formerly The St. Emanuel Grammar School founded by the Jesuits in the French Concession and admitted children of both middleclass locals and Western expatriates. After Liberation, it was renamed The Shanghai Young Revolutionary School.<\/p>\n

China was run like the military, with Mao as our \u201cGreat Commander-in-Chief\u201d. Kids gathered in designated spots and marched through a rabbit warren of neighborhood alleys in \u201cMao Zedong Thought Revolutionary Propaganda Processions\u201d to reach school. From Monday through Saturday, six Little Red Guards took turns carrying a Mao portrait at the front of the line. That kid was the day\u2019s procession-leader, followed by the one immediately behind who led inspirational slogan-shouting:<\/p>\n

\u201cCarry the cause started by our revolutionary martyrs to the end!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDown with the U.S. imperialists and the Soviet revisionists!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHeighten our vigilance and defend our motherland against the two superpower hegemonists!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCurb the Soviet revisionists\u2019 ambitions to invade our motherland!\u201d<\/p>\n

The last slogan originated in 1969, when China and the Soviet Union fought over the island known to them as Damansky but to us as Zhenbaodou (Treasure Island), the newscasters had emphasized. Naturally, we kids had never heard of Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s namesake adventure story about some boy mingling with pirates. The young of Shanghai were never told fables such as Peter Pan and Neverland. Instead we were indoctrinated with tales like \u201cThe Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains\u201d in our first days of school. The old man, foolish only in the eyes of the unenlightened, removed three mountains blocking his front door by digging daily with a spade.<\/p>\n

As hard as it might be for you to picture Chairman Mao playing Dr. Seuss, our Great Teacher himself authored that story. This shouldn\u2019t come as a complete surprise given that Mao was a librarian at Peking University where he devoured the writings by Hegel and Marx with the same enthusiasm he consumed the spicy cuisine of his native Hunan. Always filled with a fiery revolutionary pungency, Mao\u2019s works were required to be read, recited, and even memorized by all Chinese. Mao taught us that we could overthrow the figurative three mountains of the imperialist, feudalist, and bureaucratic-capitalist oppressors by fighting persistently. I took it to mean that as long as I was persistent enough, I could survive in a hostile environment, overcome the difficulties, and triumph personally in the end.<\/p>\n

In any case, the anti-Soviet slogan got passed down to us. And believe me, you wouldn\u2019t want to be associated with the Soviets, or by analogy, the Russians. Our procession passed the site where a bronze bust statue of Alexander Pushkin once stood. In 1937, the White Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9s built the memorial on the centenary of Pushkin\u2019s death. The engraved text read: AU POETE RUSSE ALEXANDRE PUSHKIN (1799 \u2013 1837), fittingly in French, the lingua franca of the then French Concession administration.<\/p>\n

The monument was smashed in 1966, an incident Wang Hong told me she had eye-witnessed. The Red Guards regarded anything with a Caucasian face and European lettering as unsuitable for the cityscape of the heroic city of Shanghai, the birthplace of both the Chinese Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution. They prided themselves in daring to \u201cgo up mountains of knives and down into oceans of flames\u201d in defense of the proletariat cause.<\/p>\n

Guilty by association, the once manicured garden for the statue ceased to be maintained by the city\u2019s sanitation workforce and became an open-air garbage dump reeking of ammoniac odors of human urine, stray cat excrement and other offensive olfactory stimulants. As we passed the \u201cPushkin graveyard\u201d, my fellow pupils would cover their noses and stare at me in disgust as if I had personally defecated my twenty-five percent Russian feces on this otherwise holy soil. There was no doubt that my mixed-race status was now an open secret.<\/p>\n

Not everyone was involved in such folly. Wang Hong remained my friend even though her belonging to the celebrated class could have made her a Little Red Guard leader had she tried. But she told me that she was not interested in carrying a Mao portrait three quarters her size, nor in being tied down to a title with little tangible benefits. Paraphrasing a popular metaphor, she announced with a pouting mouth that \u201cI\u2019d rather be a petit bourgeois weed than a proletariat seed.\u201d<\/p>\n

When our Little Red Guard brigade leader offered to promote her to the front of the line, Wang Hong replied, \u201cI am perfectly fine staying where I am. And by the way, when will you give me that aluminum marching whistle of yours to play? Tell them you lost it and they\u2019ll issue you a new one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike me, who was uncertain of my personal identity, Wang Hong, at age ten, had already mastered the essence of Shanghai pragmatism.<\/p>\n

A bright spot in my life during this difficult time was the blue-capped and gauze-masked street sweeper with his empathetic eyes. The awkward way his hands applied the broom, the still visible creases on his khakis despite not having been ironed recently, and his high quality if unpolished shoes suggested that he must be a \u201cbourgeois element\u201d condemned to this job. Although keenly aware of this tall man\u2019s presence just several feet away, I only occasionally exchanged glances with him for fear of bringing on additional punishment to either of us. His intelligent eyes, however, always stayed with me.<\/p>\n

I was grateful to the man and to Wang Hong because let\u2019s face it, anyone possessing even a sliver of Caucasian flesh might just as well have been a leper. Relegated to the very end of the procession, I dragged my feet along without confronting anybody\u2019s stares and sneers, without covering my own nose, yet simultaneously trying not to inhale. Mechanically, one foot after the other, I went through the motions, lost in daydreams.<\/p>\n

I wondered about Pushkin\u2019s looks. Did he resemble my grandfather? Would I in any way look like Pushkin? It was simply not in my consciousness that three-dimensional beings with fair skin were capable of walking and talking, in English at that, a language I had never even heard spoken.<\/p>\n

White people like you, my Western friend, were conceptual and not perceptual to me then.<\/p>\n

Ironically, the only ones whose likeliness I\u2019d seen were perpetually saluted and kowtowed to. Papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 effigies these were not. They were in fact two-dimensional figures mounted on thick cardboards in the center of our school\u2019s assembly hall, a collective four known as our \u201cGreat Proletarian Revolutionary Teachers\u201d: Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Josef Stalin.<\/p>\n

To facilitate our becoming their disciples, we were to pronounce their names by using the first syllables of their respective Chinese translation, or Ma, En, Lie, and Si. Their huge faces were on display in gilded wooden frames in the most eye-catching places, their virtual presence dominating our consciousness.<\/p>\n

The cardboard Ma had a large beard which would have made him the perfect candidate for Santa Claus had he been a Christian and not an atheist. A bright red outfit would have matched his ideology perfectly as well. I, for one, would have chosen him out of all four dead white men to be my Santa Claus had I known the concept of Christmas presents for good children, not having received a single present in my life.<\/p>\n

The cardboard En came across as a scholar or a deep thinker of sorts, the type that would be condemned as a \u201ccounterrevolutionary academic authority\u201d had he been on the Conservatory faculty \u2013 another fanciful private thought of mine I was dying to share with Wang Hong but didn\u2019t dare to.<\/p>\n

The cardboard Lie\u2019s bald head appeared to be a shiny light bulb perhaps because of what our Chinese language teacher taught us that the revolutionary leaders were \u201clike beacons lighting up our revolutionary paths\u201d. She also said that \u201cMarxism, Leninism, and Mao Zedong Thought were truths universally acknowledged and applicable,\u201d adding that \u201ca truth universally acknowledged\u201d part was from an authoress of her favorite translated novel but she was forbidden to name which. Not until years later did I realize that she was referring to the opening aphorism of Pride and Prejudice that \u201cIt is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.\u201d You see, works from Jane Austin to \u00c9mile Zola alike were banned when we started school. Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover and Mother Goose Rhymes were considered equally degenerate.<\/p>\n

The cardboard Si was an army-uniformed man with handlebar moustache and gleaming starred epaulets, a marshal whose 2.5 million soldiers miraculously conquered Berlin in 1945 despite being mostly famished and inebriated. I read about it an old issue of the \u201cShanghai Film Studio Pictorial\u201d Wang Hong had dug out from under a stack of scores inside a piano bench compartment. Like most other magazines after the Cultural Revolution, this one was discontinued and the Conservatoire\u2019s library had been sealed, but Wang Hong still spent time on campus. The Russians beat up the Germans! The captions of a photograph attached to the article so read. The same photograph of Stalin as the school\u2019s Si cardboard was in that magazine. Never had I seen as many honorary decorations on one individual\u2019s chest as there were on Si\u2019s. Sometimes I thought that his sparkling sets of orders could have tilted a magnetic scale in his favor over a Mao tunic-clad, stick-thin Chinese man on a bicycle.<\/p>\n

Marx and Engels were German and Lenin and Stalin were Russian. Fifty-fifty. Strange, I thought that The Russians beat up the Germans! So I lucked out, having in me some Russian rather than German blood. My weirdest sense of ambiguity manifested itself when I realized that despite possessing the blood of the victors of the Second World War, I was treated with contempt when we traversed the site of the now smashed Pushkin statue, the burial ground of my supposed countryman.<\/p>\n

That morning, while immersed in such musings, I failed to join in shouting \u201cCurb the Soviet revisionists\u2019 ambitions to invade our motherland!\u201d This did not go unnoticed by the condiments boy who constantly cast fleeting looks at me and Wang Hong from the front of the line.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow dare you not shout that revolutionary slogan?\u201d he demanded. \u201cRepeat after me: \u2018I am a Soviet revisionist mutt with hair like the color of straws!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

I said nothing.<\/p>\n

All the others chanted in unison, \u201cSoviet mutt! Soviet mutt! Down with the Soviet revisionist mutt!\u201d<\/p>\n

Quick wits came in an emergency. \u201cI\u2019m sorry I didn\u2019t repeat the revolutionary slogan, but I\u2019m not a Soviet revisionist. My Russian grandfather was a follower of the proletariat cause pioneered by our Great Teachers Lie and Si! And their hair color was not completely black, either.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stumped, the condiments boy looked at Wang Hong as if for help. Wang Hong stuck out her tongue at him in return. The group began to laugh.<\/p>\n

A rush of pride propelled me to search for the street sweeper. I was greeted with scorching eyes and a subtle but unmistakable nod.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you looking at, you stinky bourgeois bad element?\u201d Having lost face and fuming with rage, the boy suddenly screamed in the man\u2019s direction. \u201cI\u2019ll have your bourgeois eyes poked out!\u201d<\/p>\n

The man resumed sweeping in a clumsy fashion, never to look up from the ground again.<\/p>\n

The procession went on. It was a few more minutes before the leader started the next slogan. From then on, student leaders would avoid shouting the slogan regarding the Soviets.<\/p>\n

Initially surprised by the courage I exhibited in front of my peers and its unexpected consequence, I grew to enjoy the surge of my self-confidence. I now no longer drag my feet, but put one foot in front of another with purpose and pride. I wished that the street sweeper could see me marching like this. I wanted him to know that he was responsible for changing me and I owed him all my gratitude.<\/p>\n

But the street sweeper was since replaced by a middle aged woman wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, blue uniform and mask, and black cloth shoes. Each time I saw her agile movements I was reminded of the affirming nod her predecessor had given me. The thought of him also left the sensation of a dagger churning in my underbelly. After all, he was the only adult besides Ah Bu who seemed to truly care about me.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you think Condiments could have turned him in?\u201d I couldn\u2019t help but ask Wang Hong a week later.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not sure about that. Condiments did this because he wanted your attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOr perhaps he wanted yours.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPerhaps, so stop worrying about a bourgeois element like him anymore. He\u2019s probably well taken care of at home in ways unimaginable to us — to me at least.\u201d<\/p>\n

Suddenly I had the strange thought that a bourgeois element like him would empathize with me as a Chinese with imagined European sentiments, that the man with the encouraging eyes could understand the private thoughts I had and appreciate the Russian meals I cooked.<\/p>\n

I prayed that he was not suffering somewhere as a result of his encouragement to me, that I would one day meet him, and that he would love me not because of my mixed-race but as a fellow member of the human race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The owner\u2019s only treasure was his son…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1939"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2166,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1939\/revisions\/2166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}