The Smuggler of Banned Chinese Books
We landed in Beijing at dusk, descending through a thick winter smog that shrouded the airfield and the rest of this teeming metropolis.
In a misguided effort to save a few shekels, I’d booked a fare on discount carrier Hainan Airlines. The gambit started off well enough.
In Seattle, we lined up well before our legitimate boarding group and successfully got past the attendant, avoiding the dreaded “walk of shame” when you’re nabbed and sent back, an embarrassing defeat in full view of all your fellow passengers.
Things went south after that.
The plane’s legroom scarce and the choice of movies nonexistent.
The final blow came 12 hours later when our jumbo jet landed at Beijing's decrepit Terminal Two, parking far out on the tarmac, forcing its exhausted passengers to board a series of crowded buses for the slow ride to the terminal, like refugees from the inconvenient 1970s.
Big carriers like Air China and United, which pay the biggest airport fees and charge the highest fares, pull up to the gleaming new Terminal Three, while we were were relegated to the Stone Ages.
We produced our documents for Chinese customs agents and then grabbed luggage trollies to cart our four mammoth suitcases laden with chocolate, vitamins and who-knows-what my wife always mules back here on our annual trips home.
Each was as heavy and unwieldy as a corpse.
As we trundled toward the final arrival checkpoint, where the unlucky watch their bags torn apart, their contents scrutinized, their immediate futures in jeopardy, I'll admit that I was a wee bit more nervous than usual pulling such a political stunt in this tightly-controlled nation where any outside opinions are considered subversive.
Because I was a purveyor of the dangerous and taboo.
Not narcotics, but ideas.
I was a smuggler of banned Chinese books.
They were for my father-in-law, a retired military officer and amateur war historian whose shelves are full of books on combat theory, who subscribes to journals about battle tactics and controversial military maneuvers.
We have a good relationship and often talk politics.
I once asked him which Chinese leaders he respected. Back then, he said, Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping. Later, after discovering books with alternative theories and conclusions, he came to trust no leader.
Almost 25 years ago, I wrote a magazine essay about about the unlikely relationship between the American journalist and the Chinese general.
When my in-laws lived with us in Los Angeles in 1999, he and I disagreed over the motivation behind the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. I said it was a mistake by a teenage soldier. He called it a willful act. We still disagree.
He can be a shrewd debater. When I questioned him about the infamous Chinese occupation of Tibet, he offered his opinion before subtly shifting the conversation to the U.S. Government’s treatment of the American Indian.
Touche, good general.
Once, in LA, I took my in-laws to Universal City Walk just before Christmas and we were jostled by holiday crowds. When we got back to the car, we all sighed with relief.
I turned to my father-in-law, “General, you have just visited the dark heart of capitalism.”
“When I was a young revolutionary," he replied, "this is precisely the kind of place we wanted to topple.”
My father-in-law also has the heart of a poet. When my wife was an infant, he took her into his arms and gazed into the night skies (when you could still see the skies in smoggy Beijing, night or otherwise) and asked if she wanted the moon or the stars.
Later, when she left home for America, he wrote her a lovely poem etched on a scroll we still display in the living room of our home.
That autumn of 1999, I officially indoctrinated the general to life in America: I got him stoned.
It was Thanksgiving weekend and I'd offered him a hit. He refused.
Then I told him that it was good for his glaucoma.
He sat up on the couch in front of the fireplace.
"Yes, OK," he said.
I rolled a nice big fatty and handed it to him. He smoked it wrist up, like Errol Flynn, or a Russian spy. (He'd studied in Moscow as a young officer.)
He said he didn't feel anything at first, then later he was one with the couch.
His eyes felt better as well.
We were homeboys after that night.
On this most recent trip, as we arrived at my in-laws apartment not far from Tiananmen Square, I told him he looked good, joking that I saw a young Chinese hipster on our flight sporting the same haircut as he now wears.
I hugged my mother-in-law, insisting that she looked even younger than she did last year. When I am old and wielding a walking cane, I said, she’ll be a laughing young girl.
Then, one by one, we took them out and placed them on the table.
Our spoils, our plunder, our loot.
The books the Chinese government did not want them to read.
It was back in 1999, when my wife’s parents lived in the U.S. for nine months, that I first noticed my father-in-law’s appetite for reading the other side of the story.
Every Sunday morning after brunch, we’d buy the Taiwanese newspapers from the Chinese-speaking vendors in Monterrey Park, and he would spend the rest of the day pouring over a version of the day’s news with an entirely different spin than what he was used to back in the People’s Republic.
Over the years, as he has gotten older and less adventurous and has returned less often to the U.S., so we instead travel to Beijing.
A few weeks before this trip, we went shopping for books we thought my father-in-law might like. In the Bay Area, the only place to go for any kind of selection of Chinese-language literature is San Francisco’s Chinatown.
But even here, one store owner lamented, the choices are slim. That’s because brick-and-mortar bookstores are closing, with longtime customers now buying online, even among the Chinese.
We found the section on history and politics and began scouting. I can’t read Chinese script so was reduced to looking at book covers.
I trusted that my wife knew what she was doing, confidence I later found misplaced.
My father-in-law wanted a book called "Snow is White, Blood is Red" by Zhang Zhenglong, a former military propagandist who wrote about atrocities during China's war against Japan in the 1930s, a book that the Communist Party banned in 1999.
Nope, not in stock.
Maybe they had the sequel “Blood is Hot, Snow is Cold.” (I kid you not.)
Nope.
We eventually left with three books and a couple of news magazines.
All was set.
My father-in-law spent the night of our arrival perusing his new books. The next morning, we asked if he approved.
He picked up one with a likeness of Mao giving a speech on the cover.
“I like history, biographies, the truth, the real thing,” he said. “This isn’t what I normally read.”
“Why, what’s wrong?” my wife asked.
“This is fiction,” he said.
Not only was it fiction, but it was the second installment in a series of stories.
I sized up my wife with that look that said, “You had one job …”
The book told a story of land reforms that had taken place during the Communist revolution and afterwards, written in a voice that sounded unusual to this history buff.
The other two non-fiction books -- one that offered a new interpretation of the Cultural Revolution and the other about Chinese President Xi Jinping -- also had their faults. He didn't wholly believe them.
Later, when we spoke about China's modern day politics, I realized that my father-in-law’s views have become less strident.
He no longer seemed interested in breaking things down and paused when he saw me taking notes.
He said that no country is perfect, not even America.
With that I agreed.
Now long retired, he’s comfortable in the present political culture. He lives in a safe environment, he said. People mostly do as they please.
(As long as they keep their mouths shut, I thought.)
Life is good, he insisted.
But he’s still going to read those banned books.
You bet he is.
He still wants to know the other side of the story.