Paranoia?

Work unit card associating me with Beijing Forestry University. I had to produce this card each time I photocopied worksheets off campus.

Was a microphone hidden in my apartment? Was anyone listening?

This was Communist China after all, Tiananmen Square China. What better apartment to monitor than that of an American teacher sure to be a CIA operative?

Yes, I searched for surveillance bugs. No, I didn’t find any – only mild reassurance for an espionage moron with little chance of success. So the first few weeks I kept a tight rein on anything discussion related to politics, religion, and especially my Lin Da colleagues.

It took some getting used to, the constant concern about someone listening in. Talk about paranoia – except this was justified. Wasn’t it?

Occasionally fellow teachers and I staged mock conversations about how fabulously wealthy we were back home, about the dozens of countries we’d visited, about how our pet orangutans and giraffes were faring back home. Toying around with the idea of surveillance made it easier.

In reality my apartment building had a reputation among foreigners for being xue bien (casual). Most buildings required visitors to register in a log, but not at my building – so when friends, or even friends of friends, from other cities visited Beijing they usually stayed with us. We weren’t up to anything shady; the thought of being monitored was simply that uncomfortable.

Maybe we were making it all up.

Or maybe not. My friends who lived less than a mile away talked one night about wishing for an additional advance of ¥300 on their salaries. The very next morning their waiban knocked on their doors, delivering ¥300 each as if it were room service. Friends in another city went on a verbal tirade among themselves about the poor condition of their building, fixating on hallway lights that had been out for weeks. After hours that evening a custodian arrived to fix the lights. Coincidence? Perhaps – which illustrates how even the possibility of surveillance affects the psyche.

Some types of surveillance were matter of fact. Routinely I received my mail already opened. To make a long-distance call I had to register my name and the time, phone number, and name of the person I was calling in the lobby of the nearby hotel. I wasn’t allowed to use a photocopier; whenever I needed worksheets for my students I had to ask the department secretary, who always made two extra copies to keep. I supposed one stayed on file with the Foreign Language Department so they could monitor what I was teaching (and possibly reuse the materials I created); who got the other copy? This photocopying arrangement was so slow — usually I received copies days later, thwarting planned lessons — that I began frequenting the mom-and-pop “Kinko’s” I’d found my first day, paying for my own copies. Even there customers had to register and weren’t allowed to operate the machines … and the store filed an extra copy.

Some incidents were too uncomfortable to be accidents, like when I visited Tiananmen Square with a videocamera to send footage back home. In a massive square with a hundred feet between the few people walking across, a woman and her daughter flying a kite edged to within three feet behind me, within easy earshot of my commentary into the camera. I noticed her shadow next to mine and jolted.

Then I was a Rude American. I wheeled the camera on her and, in English, demanded to know what she wanted. She looked confused, started to slink away. “Don’t act like you don’t understand me,” I scolded, still in English. “I know you were listening.” She shook her head, protested in Chinese, continued backing away.

Plainclothes agent or paranoia?

In the Forbidden City I snapped a photo I shouldn’t have, and was quickly surprised by a plainclothes agent yelling in my face. (I won’t go into detail about the photo; suffice to say it required a disrespectful intrusion into a roped-off area, and to this day I’m ashamed.) I was certain no security guards were in sight — this was March, cold enough to be off-season; the Forbidden City was practically empty. I’d double-checked my surroundings, but the estimation that I was not being watched was dead wrong: within seconds my party was being escorted out of the Forbidden City.

It wasn’t farfetched to think some of my own students might have been informants. My rosters contained a number of card-carrying Communist Party members; tapping them for information about me would have been easy.

That possibility made me calculate the risk of every word I spoke.

Purchasing Certificate, required for exchanging money. Because I hadn’t received one on arrival, I wasn’t able to exchange money at the bank that first week.

Read Chapter 2 ->