In 1980 when I made up my mind to visit China, it was terra incognito in the West, a mysterious, vaguely threatening nation of close to a billion people, cut off from us by a nearly impenetrable wall of official mutual suspicion and in some respects, overt hostility. Memories of the Communist takeover, Chinese complicity in the Korean War and in Vietnam, and more recently the excesses and atrocities of the cultural revolution were still vivid. But the barriers had begun to break down. Ping-pong diplomacy and tentative cultural and academic exchanges had begun. In 1980, Carl Amberg, an internationally renowned scholar at Carleton University in Ottawa, husband of my colleague Anne Amberg, came back armed with names of a few possible contacts in my field. In the spirit of casting my bread upon the waters, I wrote to one of these possible contacts, the professor of public health at Shanghai First Medical University sending with my letter a copy of the big textbook of public health and preventive medicine that I had edited, which had come out to considerable acclaim a few months earlier. Armed with his friendly reply which had an open-ended invitation to visit his medical college if I came to China, I called at the Chinese Embassy. I had several meetings and conversations with the cultural attache, who, to my surprise, was sympathetic and understanding as I explained that despite a total lack of spoken and written Chinese, I wanted to go to China alone and unescorted. I wanted to repeat in reverse, so to say, the experience of Chiang Yee, the “Silent Traveler” who explored and wrote about London, New York, and Paris in the 1950s, apparently without being able to speak or read the languages. In the early 1980s, soon after the “bamboo curtain” had been lifted, I was one of the first people from the West to do this. Even now three decades later, it is rather unusual for solo travelers to visit China. By the time of my second visit to China in 1982 accompanied by Wendy I had met the Chinese epidemiologist Su De-long, and my path had been smoothed considerably, bureaucratic roadblocks greatly reduced.
The adventure began with a flight on China Airlines from Hong Kong to Guangzhou (Canton), a very short hop of not more than half an hour in a small, crowded airplane resembling a DC-3 but of Russian origin. It was not reassuring to see my fellow-passengers boarding the flight with huge, heavy carry-on duty-free goods. Television sets and stereo ghetto-blasters were popular items that would not fit on the overhead rack, and cluttered the aisles and the spaces between the seats. Somehow we managed to take off and land without mishap. At Guangzhou airport, an escort, a businesslike young woman from the People’s Republic equivalent of the USSR’s Intourist met my flight, took me by car direct to the railway station and gave me detailed instructions about when and where to proceed to a platform to get my train several hours later. She deposited me in the “soft class” waiting room, but it was boring all by myself so I moved out after a while into the bustle and hustle of the large, main station concourse. This was like large railway stations everywhere, crowded with a mixture of bewildered or weary travelers, parties in groups with leaders who addressed them through a microphone with a portable speaker on the platform, skylarking school children, soldiers in crumpled shabby-looking army uniforms. Almost all the men and many of the women wore navy-blue Mao jackets, and only a few women, mostly young, wore brightly colored dresses. The hubbub and constant movement were fascinating but I had to watch the time carefully, so I could move back to the “soft class” waiting room, where the tourist guide had told me a railway official would meet me half an hour before departure, to escort me to the right platform.
I had arranged to travel alone on the train from Guangzhou to Shanghai with an intermediate stop, urged on me by the cultural attache in Ottawa, at Hangzhou, a city of about a million at that time, located in the picturesque setting of West Lake. This was a journey of about 36 hours, from mid afternoon until early the following evening.
After a two or three hour wait, one of the station attendants escorted me from the soft class waiting room to the platform where my train was getting ready. It was a long train, perhaps 20 carriages but only one ‘soft class’ carriage with comfortable padded seats, and next to it, a dining car, which I was pleased to see because I was getting very hungry, and noticed that every one of my less fortunate fellow passengers in the hard class carriages held a large basket or package of provisions for the journey. For a while I thought I would be the only European on the train. My fellow passengers in the soft class carriage were all Chinese, presumably government officials and some uniformed military officers. Then a few minutes before we were due to leave, I heard someone speaking German, and saw a tall, middle-aged bearded man being escorted aboard and into the next compartment to me. He spoke only a few words of English so we conversed in a weird mixture of his poor English and my equally poor German. He was the son of former Lutheran missionaries, born in China but left when he was a child after the Communists took control. He was returning on a visit to the town where he had been born. Soon after dawn next morning at one of our many station stops, I saw him get off the train to be met by a small group carrying a large banner in German and Chinese characters. I could read one word, “Willkommen” and wondered if there would be one like it when we reached my first destination, Hangzhou. On that first day it got dark soon after the train entered what looked from the little I saw of if to be spectacular mountain pass up which the train labored slowly for many hours. I ate my dinner in a spotlessly clean dining saloon, a tasty meal of noodles and rice with chunks of spicy chicken which I managed to eat with chopsticks dextrously enough to satisfy pride and the attentive table waiter, followed by tinned fruit and a large pot of tea. I was offered a bottle of beer but declined because I was very tired and feared it would be enough to knock me out. After dinner, one of my fellow passengers managed to communicate to me the fact that he was from Hong Kong, not China, and that he was an opera singer, apparently a well known, even perhaps eminent performer of classical Chinese opera. He did this using a few words of Italian, French and German that he said he had picked up performing European opera. There are too few operas in English for him ever to have had any contact with English, of which he spoke not a single word, apparently. Next day he entertained me and several other passengers with a little impromptu concert of songs from Chinese opera. That wasn’t the only musical treat on the train. Several times, beginning late on the first afternoon, hauntingly beautiful Chinese music played on stringed instruments was piped over the excellent public address system in the carriage. That was the beginning of my affection for Chinese music.
The next day I had one of the most fascinating journeys of my life, all day long on the train as it made its way slowly across the lush paddy fields and agriculturally bountiful and beautiful countryside of south China, passing through many villages and large towns and cities. The country was very beautiful. Obviously it had been lovingly cared for during many past centuries, and virtually every square inch of it everywhere was productive. There were fat cattle and water buffaloes, goats, pigs and poultry. I saw sights that could have come straight out of mediaeval China, such as a lad herding a large flock of geese, steering them skillfully and nudging them back into line if they strayed, using a long bamboo pole to do so. It was a fine sunny day, quite warm by noon, and once I got accustomed to the routine, I joined other passengers who got off to stretch their legs on the platform when the train stopped for lengthy periods from time to time to allow another train going the other way to pass us (mostly it was a single track railroad). On several memorable occasions, our passing place was not at a station but somewhere in the heart of the country in cultivated fields or pasture on which cattle grazed. Whenever I alighted with everybody else I was immediately surrounded by a large crowd of curious locals, peasant farmers who had obviously never before seen a “round-eye” (European); and so I was able to practice my body language of smiles and gestures that had to substitute for spoken words as a way to communicate in a setting where no words existed in common between me and these obviously friendly and welcoming people. It was the same later in the cities. Whenever I walked about alone, I was approached, not accosted but addressed in a friendly manner and sometimes in what the speaker thought or hoped was English, and sometimes engaged in animated dialogues in a mixture of words and body language. It would have been impossible not to be moved by these displays of friendly curiosity.
Late in the afternoon we passed through several large cities, then soon after dark we arrived at Hangzhou, where sure enough a welcoming party equipped with a large banner was waiting to greet me. Among them was a very impressive authority on agricultural toxicology, Professor Huang Xi-men who would be my principal host and guide in the coming days. Others on the railway station platform were the dean of the medical school and two or three other dignitaries and a young woman interpreter. For a few hours before we arrived I had been increasingly aware of the onset of an acute upper respiratory infection – hot eyes, runny nose, rasping throat, dry cough, perhaps a fever – so I confided my concerns about this to the interpreter. She spoke for a few minutes to one of the dignitaries then left the room (by then we had reached the hotel where I was to stay) and returned a few minutes later with a cup containing a steaming infusion of tangy-tasting herbs that I was encouraged to drink, then go early to bed. I did so, and next morning, after a good night’s sleep I awoke with all traces of the respiratory infection completely, miraculously gone. I would like to import a supply of those herbs into Canada and go into business, marketing them as a new and effective cure for the common cold!
Next morning I began to get my first good look at a bustling Chinese city in an early phase of its transition to modernity. I was collected from my comfortable western-style hotel where I had eaten an excellent, appetizing western-style breakfast – the hotel was obviously set up to receive European tourists, although there were none to be seen during my visit. I soon saw, however, why Hangzhou was a desirable tourist stop. The car that collected me was an elderly Russian limousine with plush seats and curtained windows. I would have enjoyed sitting in the front seat with an unimpeded view but even from the rear seat all I saw fascinated me. The streets were thronged with thousands of men and women on bicycles on their way to work I suppose, as well as delivery vans, handcarts, occasional animals, but very few if any recognizably private cars. We drove across the city without passing through an identifiable city centre ( I saw that next day) and at one stage the road skirted West Lake, a prominent scenic attraction that I saw at leisure later. I had been invited to speak at the medical school, and soon after I was greeted at the steps of the faculty I was led into a rather spartan large lecture hall, crowded with a hundred or more young men and women and a few elderly people who were their teachers. I spoke on very basic epidemiological principles and methods, illustrating my remarks with overhead transparencies, speaking very slowly with frequent pauses so the translator could repeat what I said in Chinese. It was surprisingly easy and rather relaxing to speak in this style, and I found it enjoyable enough so I had no hesitation about repeating the experience (though not the same talk!) at every medical school I visited on this and the next visit to China the following year.
After my lecture and a ceremonial tea-drinking break with the medical school dean and other top people whose names and positions I have forgotten, Professor Huang became my companion and escort for the remainder of my stay in Hangzhou. He was an impressive man, about my own age, who spoke good English (as well as Russian, the language of his graduate experience in USSR in pharmacology and agricultural toxicology). He had very good comprehension of environmental epidemiology and the principles of public health. He and I soon established excellent rapport. He was a cultured man who read widely both in his scientific specialty and in English literature and good quality modern fiction, probably the most interesting man I ever met in China. He was investigating several of the chemicals then being used as fertilizers and as agricultural pesticides, had published papers in English as well as Chinese on the toxic effects of broad-leaf herbicides, insecticides and soil fumigating agents, and on the ecological effects on West Lake, a national beauty spot, of storm water runoff laced with pesticides and fertilizers. He eagerly read the chapters on these topics in the copy of my big public health textbook that I had brought with me to leave behind, and I hope he was able to keep that book in his departmental library after I left. Our conversations continued over the next two days and ranged widely over many aspects of environmental and public health as well as books we both had read and enjoyed. He was fond of the works of Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway. He and I corresponded for several years after my visit. Then he had a year as a visiting scholar in the USA and after his return to China he rose in the hierarchy, moved to Beijing, and I lost touch with him. He made sure that I had time for a good look at the beautiful West Lake, its picturesque islands decorated with some carefully tended ancient monuments; took me to a venerable Buddhist temple where I was interested to see many people praying and worshiping at the shrines in front of a huge statue of the Buddha; and also took me to his modest home so I could see how he and his wife and two teen-age children lived. I have a good photographic record of my visit to Hangzhou. Some time during my second day he took me shopping. I had mentioned my wish to get a few little things to take back to Canada so his driver took us into the business and commercial centre of the city, to a large department store. Immediately we entered, we were almost mobbed by a large crowd of curious shoppers, eager to get closer to us for their first sight of a European. I got some silk for Wendy to make a dress and a few trinkets. I vividly remember being surrounded by a large friendly crowd through which I had to make my way to the counter to pay for my modest purchases. There was nothing in the least intimidating about this, all were friendly and anxious to help me, for instance by offering other items they thought might appeal to me for me to select and add to my shopping list.
Professor Huang was as reluctant to part from me as I was to leave him. It was only about a two-hour train ride to Shanghai so we agreed to postpone my departure until dusk, and therefore I saw none of the country between Hangzhou and Shanghai. This was a local rather than a long-distance train, with a long, open carriage rather than compartments, and I was probably the only one who was not chain-smoking foul-smelling cigarettes, so I arrived in Shanghai reeking of tobacco smoke, with red and stinging eyes irritated by the formaldehyde in the smoke. Here too a welcoming party was waiting for me on the platform, complete with a large banner carrying my name. Next day I took a photograph of the same group of senior staff in front of a blackboard emblazoned with the same or a similar message.
My notes contain the names of the people I met in Shanghai during that visit in 1981 and in 1982 when I met many of the same people and a few others, notably Professor Su De-Long who was away when I was there in 1981. I gave my hosts in Shanghai a copy of the written text of one of my talks, “The nature and quality of epidemiological evidence” and to my surprise they published this in the Chinese Medical Journal! Ken Warren, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and one of his colleagues were also visiting Shanghai First Medical College during my visit, and as they were staying at the same hotel, we were able to compare notes. We wondered how on earth the staff stayed warm in the bone-chilling cold that week. There was no heating in the medical college. It was spring time but unusually cold weather, looked as if it might even snow, with a piercing north wind that went through our clothes. Like I, Ken and his colleague only had summer weight suits and pullovers to wear under their jackets, although unlike I they at least had winter storm linings in their raincoats. Our hotel was a little better, but not much. No escorted sightseeing in Shanghai – not that there were many spectacular sights to see – but I had some free time and wandered about by myself. I made my way from my hotel to the Bund, the old waterfront commercial district on the busy Wangpu River, and for a time got completely lost in a maze of streets on the way back to my hotel. It was there that I saw two kinds of people I had not expected to see, several beggars with bowls at their feet into which they clearly hoped and expected passers-by to drop small coins (as indeed some had); and on one street near the Bund, several heavily made up young women whose short skirts and behaviour strongly suggested that they were prostitutes. I had been told on more than one occasion that there were no beggars and no prostitutes in the People’s Republic. This was manifestly not so. Friendly locals with a smattering of English set me on the right road back to the hotel soon after that. What I saw of this huge city was attractive, a blend of quite handsome European “Victorian colonial” architecture of buildings that had been the Chinese headquarters of European banks and other financial and trading companies before the wars of the 1930s and 1940s, with older Chinese mansions and even palaces. Looking at TV images of modern Shanghai, the commercial capital of China, I wonder how much, if any of those graceful old buildings survives. The city obviously has been completely transformed. However, most of it, especially the central commercial and trading heart of the city, is at or near sea level, so even the half meter sea level rise of the most optimistic global warming scenario would submerge it, so the future of Shanghai could be equivocal.
In 1981 I flew home from Shanghai via Tokyo and Los Angeles. When I returned in 1982, it was towards the end of a round-the-world odyssey, that began with a flight from Mirabel Airport near Montreal, all the way to Calcutta. From Calcutta I had gone on to Singapore via an overnight station stop in Bangkok; I was external examiner for the qualifying examinations in epidemiology and preventive medicine at the National University of Singapore and spent a couple of weeks there before going on to Hong Kong, where Wendy joined me. We lived it up in Hong Kong, stayed at the posh Regent Hotel in a waterfront room with a superb view of Hong Kong harbour, and did much the same tourist trips that I had done on my own the previous year. We had several wonderful days there, then flew direct to Shanghai. That was the flight on which the door to the cockpit got stuck, and the cabin crew used an axe to break it open so they could get to the flight deck. Wendy found this more alarming than I did, having had some prior experiences of Chinese improvisations to cope with unexpected mechanical breakdowns.
This second visit to Shanghai was far better than the first for several reasons. To begin with, Wendy was with me, then as well as a slight familiarity with the country and its people there was an eminent host, Professor Su De-long to escort me in Shanghai. He was a distinguished and very gracious man, who took me into the field to see the results of the successful campaign to eliminate schistosomiasis which for centuries had killed and crippled countless thousands of children and young adults who worked in the paddy fields. The key to success was thorough understanding of the complex life cycle of the parasite and the ecosystems with which it interacted. The critical step was a concerted attack on the fresh-water snails that were the intermediate hosts, but in addition there were educational campaigns to eliminate defecating in the paddy fields, an anti-cercarial ointment to reduce the parasites’ chances of penetrating the skin, and effective medication for infected people. The fact that domestic animals, notably water buffaloes, and water rats and feral dogs were also infected made impossible any efforts to eradicate the disease completely, but it had been virtually eliminated from humans, especially children who were the most vulnerable. I saw and photographed children who were clearly in abounding good health, a living tribute to the dedicated work of Professor Su De-long and his teams of field workers.
Su De-long took Wendy and me to dinner, where a small crowd of nearby diners gathered around us to watch with great amusement the way she handled her chopsticks; and to a theatre, for a spectacular performance of acrobats and dancers. Even an occasional misstep did not detract from a most memorable performance, according to my notes at the time.
From Shanghai we went by train to Suzhou, reputedly the culinary capital of China in the same way as Lyon is the culinary capital of France. Our host was Dr Lee, director of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology. The medical school is a collection of picturesque old buildings and I delivered my talk in an ancient pavilion, not a lecture hall, but the acoustics were excellent. I spoke here (by request) on the desirability of diversity rather than uniformity in educational methods. There was some local resentment among both staff and students about the centrally imposed curriculum and teaching methods, dictated by authorities in Beijing, and my talk provoked animated discussion. The impressive fourteen-course banquet to which we were treated confirmed the city’s reputation for gastronomic excellence. It included several fish courses, shrimps, a local delicacy, 100-year old eggs (preserved underground for many years anyway) and the most challenging article I’ve ever had to pick up with chopsticks, slippery round translucent eggs about 1 cm in diameter, each containing an embryonic bird nearly ready to hatch. They tasted delicious, with a unique nutty flavor, but getting them to the mouth was difficult for me, impossible with chopsticks for Wendy, who had to use a spoon. There were many toasts with the local fire-water, fortified rice wine like neat vodka which we drank in tiny glasses, saying ‘Gambay’ (Mandarin for ‘Cheers’) and voicing sentiments like ‘Long live friendship between Canadian and Chinese people.’ Suzhow is famous also for canals connecting it to Shanghai and Hangzhou, for the beautiful arched bridges over the canals, and for enclosed decorative gardens. All these appear on willow pattern crockery. On our last afternoon in Suzhou we were taken to one such garden where our guide (one of the professors from the medical college) got us all lost, so we almost missed the train to our next destination, Nanjing.
With our hosts in Nanjing
At Nanjing railway station we were met by Dr Lee from the health department and Professor Ye, an environmental health scientist from the School of Public Health at Nanjing Medical College, who was my host and later our guide when we visited the tomb of Sun Yat-sen. When we reached the School of Public Health I met about a dozen of the academic and research staff and dutifully wrote their names in the stenographer’s pad that is the basis for these recollections. After more than a quarter of a century I could not put faces to any of the names but I do remember that I was very favorably impressed by their obvious competence, enthusiasm and dedication. This is a large and flourishing medical college and school of public health, set up by Dr Sun Yat-sen on a well laid-out campus with an impressive range and depth of research in progress, but like all the medical colleges I visited it was sparsely equipped with a good but limited library. After we returned to Canada I arranged for the Chinese Embassy to send them a copy of the big public health textbook, for which in due course I received an effusive letter of thanks. In 1998 I was visited in Ottawa by the current dean and one of his colleagues who remembered me as their first Canadian visitor since before the cultural revolution. They said they had happy memories of my visit in 1982, as did I. I gave them copies of the latest editions of the Dictionary of Epidemiology and the big public health textbook, now only 1400 pages instead of the 2000 in the earlier edition that had been the first one I edited, and pointed out that it was printed in much smaller fonts so now it had about 1500 words to the page instead of 900 as in the earlier edition. Nanjing Medical College and its School of Public Health were impressive enough for my copious notes to consume eight pages but there’s no need to repeat all that outdated technical information here. It was in the professional reports that I wrote. We were dined and wined like visiting royalty, and treated to a fairly comprehensive tour of this handsome city on the banks of the Yangzte River (although I don’t recall seeing the massive city walls that date from around 800-1000 of our era). The city was badly damaged during the Japanese invasion and had been the scene of horrific massacres and mass rapes, so much of it is modern postwar architecture, but happily it was spared too many of the soulless concrete blocks and towers that some Chinese cities were erecting in imitation of similar buildings in USSR. We visited the tomb of Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) the physician-statesman founder in 1912-13 of modern China, now rightly revered only slightly less than Mao Tze-tung, especially in Nanjing where he established the modern medical college. We saw an adjoining beautiful pagoda, a Ming emperor’s tomb dating from the 14th century, and the Divine Way, an avenue of beautifully carved stone animals (elephants, camels, lions, and mythical beasts) that dates from the Ming dynasty and was created in 1350-1400. It would have been good to spend longer in Nanjing, explore it more thoroughly, but our tight timetable did not permit this. Photos and video clips of the city in 2006-7 show many spectacular changes with exciting modern architecturally and aesthetically pleasing public and commercial buildings along and just behind the waterfront on the Yangzte River. It would be good to see it again now.
Stone animal (camel?) on the Divine Way, Nanjing, 1982
From Nanjing we went by overnight train to Beijing, sharing a four-berth sleeping compartment with two senior military officers, both of whom smoked heavily. Wendy made it emphatically clear with gestures and mime that she would be displeased if they smoked in the compartment, so they retreated to the corridor at frequent intervals. We were impressed by their politeness and their cheerfully willing compliance, and I wondered if anyone had ever stood up to them as she did.
In Beijing we were met at the railway station by Professor He, a distinguished elderly man who had been educated at Harvard and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the 1930s, and by several others including Mr Wang from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (obviously a Communist cadre man there to watch out for any subversive hanky-panky!) Ostensibly he was our translator, but he was unnecessary for much of the time because many staff members at the medical college spoke good English. This medical college had gone through several transitions. It had been set up with lavish financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1921 and was named Peking Union Medical College. After the Communist revolution it had become Capital Medical College. In 1967 it was closed by the cultural revolution, Mao’s most calamitous failure, then it reopened in 1979 as the Beijing First Medical College. It has now reverted to its original name. In Beijing, the authorities had laid on a full program for me at the medical college with visits also to the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and several research institutes including the Cancer Research Institute, the group responsible for the Atlas of Cancer Mortality and a team of neurophysiologists who were studying acupuncture, seeking to discover how and why this ancient therapeutic method worked. There had recently been widely publicized demonstrations of acupuncture anesthesia, showing empirically that it was effective for major thoracic and cranial surgery as well as for treatment of arthritis and various other chronic diseases. It did not work for upper abdominal surgery but could be used for appendectomy and repair of inguinal hernia. The prevailing view was that its efficacy was due to overload of pain receptors and release of massive amounts of endorphins under the stimulus of subcutaneous acupuncture needles. I made copious notes during a pressure-packed few days in Beijing and wrote several reports and short articles for medical readers that have been published or circulated elsewhere, so in this account I will focus on the non-professional aspects of the trip.
On our first afternoon in Beijing we were both a bit fragile after a near-sleepless night in an over heated, claustrophobic sleeping car compartment. Perhaps that’s why we did some sightseeing on our first afternoon. Professor Ho’s wife, almost as old as he, but very fit, took us to the Forbidden City, which far exceeded our expectations with its displays of priceless jade, gold and jewelry. We saw the emperor’s palace and walked on the squeaking floor – designed to squeak loudly at the lightest footfall, to warn those within that someone was approaching, perhaps with sinister intent. We walked into Tiananmen Square, bustling with people as it usually is, and also with traffic, mostly people on bicycles. We were astonished to see the enormous loads some people were carrying on their bicycles – large pieces of furniture such as chests of drawers, for instance. Beijing was afflicted at that season (spring time) with fine dust that blows with the prevailing wind from the Gobi Desert, so people who wanted to avoid inhaling this dust covered their nose and mouth, sometimes their whole face, with a fine diaphanous silk veil. Many children had been equipped with these by their caring mothers, and some young women, we suspected, were wearing these dust-resistant veils to make themselves look more alluring.
Everywhere we went in China we saw groups of beautifully dressed, attractive and very healthy-looking children, ranging from pre-school toddlers to 8 to 10 year old children in the care of (we presumed) school teachers. Less often a solitary child was in the company of parents. All these children were the products of the one-child policy, a necessary but emotionally demanding action forced on the People’s Republic of China by the relentless increase in numbers, then fast approaching a billion (about 1.2 billion by 2008, because of the demographic momentum of the younger generations that continue to enter the reproductive age groups of the population). Wendy had several sightseeing expeditions with Professor Ho’s wife Mrs (actually Dr) Ho. At one stage Mrs Ho took her into the new underground railway where she succeeded in getting them both briefly lost.
Professor Ho took Wendy and me to a Beijing restaurant famous for Peking duck, which we duly ate, but without much enthusiasm – like all duck, it was too greasy to please our palates. What did impress us about this place however was the astonishing variety of faces we saw there. This restaurant is very popular with visitors to Beijing from all over China. I don’t recall ever before seeing in the same room at the same time so many variations of facial bone structure, hair texture, skin color, body build, added to which were styles of clothing from the tropical south to the far north, to the outer reaches of Mongolia. The variation in that one room full of people was greater by far than on the New York subways I had seen and written about a few years earlier.
Wendy and John at the Great Wall
Wendy at the Great Wall of China, 1982
On a fine and sunny but cold spring day we went to the Great Wall, a couple hours’ drive away. It was well worth it of course, justifying its reputation as one of the greatest manmade wonders of the world. We had a very good look at it, climbed up and walked along it, took many photographs, and had lunch there. Wendy had to use a very public female toilet, where the other women were intensely curious to see if she was constructed as they were. I wasn’t able to be with her to offer my moral support but she did quite well without me.
We had the usual banquets in Beijing, and on our last night there I felt the need to repay the generous hospitality we had received everywhere, so rather unnecessarily and quixotically I took our hosts and their spouses to dinner. These were all late middle age or elderly people and most of them were distinguished leaders of the profession and of academia. All had horrific stories of their experiences during the cultural revolution when they had been uprooted from their academic roles, humiliated and abused in public, then put to hard manual labor in mines, paddy fields or, in one case, cleaning public toilets. That disastrous public policy which virtually shut down universities for over a decade accounts for the age distribution of university teachers, with large numbers of elderly and old men and women, a young generation just out of graduate training, and very few, in some fields virtually no one in middle years between these two groups. There was an urgent need to rebuild, and in Beijing we met Michelle Higginbothom, wife of the first secretary at the Canadian Embassy, who joined forces with me in Ottawa a few months later in one of several programs aimed at replenishing qualified staff in university departments as rapidly as possible. Wendy and I were both coopted to take part in this by hosting Chinese epidemiologists during their orientation, helping them to learn English as well as epidemiology. That’s a whole other story.
Housing: When we were in Beijing in the early 1980s there were a few high-rise apartment towers on the horizon. Now, more than 25 years later, Beijing looks as Hong Kong did then, according to pictures on TV screens. There are forests of high-rise apartment buildings everywhere one looks. In 1982, we looked down from our hotel room to a more traditional kind of dwelling. On most of the streets we could see there were quite large compounds with central courtyards, three or four stories tall, each containing multiple flats that in many cases seemed to be teeming with people. In Hanzhou in 1981, I had been in one such flat, the home of Professor Huang Xi-men. It was small but comfortable, two small bedrooms, a kitchen-dining-living room, a bathroom with a ‘squat’ toilet with a shower over it, similar to those I had seen and used in Greece and Italy in the early 1950s, and a small entrance hall with hooks to hang coats and a rack to place outdoor shoes. Access is along a balcony rather than through an indoor enclosed corridor. This multiple-unit style encourages interaction among neighbours and a communal way of life that fosters congeniality, friendships and mutual support, although of course it can lead to unpleasantness if people living at such close quarters don’t get along. Professor Huang lived in such a flat in a compound that probably comprised 16-20 similar flats, and the compounds we could see from our Beijing hotel room looked about the same size or perhaps a little larger.
Religions: The People’s Republic of China is a secular state and we have an image of a state that is hostile to religions. The teachings of Confucius may be more like a philosophy than a religion, but I had seen obviously devout Buddhists worshiping at a well-cared-for shrine in Hanzhou, and in Beijing, Professor Ho and his wife walked us past the Protestant church that they attended. They said there had been times in earlier years of the PRC when religious faiths had been driven underground but there had never been serious attempts to eliminate them altogether and at that time the authorities seemed to be turning a blind eye to the practices of most religious believers.
Postscript: For three years after our visit to China in 1982, about 12-15 Chinese epidemiologists in training came to Canada annually to get advanced postgraduate training. They came to Ottawa for about two months orientation and conversational English classes before scattering to centres across Canada for formal graduate studies leading to an MSc or for a few a PhD in epidemiology.
Michelle Higginbotham coopted Wendy and me to take part in these classes. We worked out a happy symbiotic arrangement for meals. We supplied the equipment, they went to the market to buy some of the raw materials (fish, salad, spices, etc), together we all prepared and cooked the meals, then we ate, washing the food down with liquid refreshments that I supplied. We had many happy gatherings, suitably recorded in our family photo albums. All these men and women were very good company, and all but one of them did well in their graduate studies (the exception was a plant, we think, a communist cadre man sent to keep an eye on the others). They went back to China, but several later returned to Canada and settled here. One very bright man, Gao Ru-nie, who got a PhD, moved out of epidemiology altogether soon after returning to Calgary to open and run a successful Chinese restaurant, but so far as I know all the others stayed in the profession. We are still in touch with several, including some in China and two who returned to Canada. One of them worked for over ten years on epidemiological research in cancer in Ottawa. Besides Yue Chen in our department in Ottawa, I know or know of about half a dozen Chinese physicians who specialize in public health sciences who have settled permanently Canada, and several others who have settled in the USA and the UK. I have an impression that the brain drain from China may be considerable, but the Chinese authorities appear to be relaxed about it. They warmly welcomed Yue Chen when he returned to Shanghai for a sabbatical year recently, and Yue says that he was encouraged to move to Canada, to help establish intellectual links between China and Canada.
The above is condensed from a longer account of my travels that is part of my memoirs. Among other deleted paragraphs is one with my impressions of the collective national mood, as observed from the facial expressions and body language of the people I saw on the streets, in shops, sight-seeing on the Great Wall, audiences at theatres. I was struck everywhere by the cheerfulness and sense of purpose that seemed to be the prevailing mood. There seemed to be a sense of optimism, that things on all sides were rapidly improving, life was manifestly getting better all the time. People on bikes in Tienanmen Square were whistling, laughing, greeting each other happily as they wheeled their incredibly heavy loads. I suppose propaganda spread the message that sacrifice and hard work now would pay off, and it's self-evident that it has. Life is getting better for most if not all people as modern China presses ahead with its combination of unbridled capitalism and totalitarian (but not Marxist communist) governance.
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