“Mao red book?” street salesmen asked. Surely you, Lao Wai, needed a copy of Mao’s political manifesto. How had you made it so far without one?

Chairman Mao Zedong, father and architect of Communist China, was a politician-warrior who expelled both Chinese aristocrats and Japanese invaders. Mao was more than a statesman – he was a sex symbol. Many of my students carried baseball trading cards in their wallets: plump old Mao on one side, dashing 22-year-old Mao on the other.

“You really think he’s good looking?” I asked. My female students fanned themselves.

Twenty years deceased, Mao’s shadow lingered in everyday life. The elderly still wore Mao uniforms (plain blue trousers, plain blue jacket, plain blue hat) in public. They walked their birdcages to Beihai Park, hung them on treebranches and listened to the parakeets sing frenetically to one another.

Old or young, nearly all men smoked. To bolster the economy Mao had popularized smoking as something akin to a civic duty. He smoked; he told patriots to smoke. Instant tobacco industry.

Despite communism’s ideal of gender equity, women did not smoke. One of my female students was an exception. Whenever I spotted her smoking it was hard not to stare at so uncommon a sight. Why had Communists urged men to smoke but not women? For all its massive problems, Communism had improved women’s social status and prospects. Considering the benefit nicotine-addicted women would have brought to the economy, the double standard seemed uncharacteristic.

* * * * *

I wondered if those Mao red books were printed in English. Was selling them to foreign tourists a means of Communistic proselytizing? Or was it – ironically – simple capitalistic opportunism?

On Saturdays my students attended political class. I didn’t know where it was held or what it covered. One Saturday morning I noticed the staff within a restaurant listening to a stern voice speaking through a loudspeaker on one wall. Employees sat at tables, either taking notes, staring at their shoes or reading the newspaper. Was that political class? Piped lectures?

At the end of the semester my students told me they’d taken their political final exam. “Was it difficult?” I asked.

“No,” they laughed. “It was true/false.”

“All true/false?”

“Yes.”

A political exam of only true/false questions – the very definition of political correctness.

* * * * *

Mao grew fat – a sign of prosperity for the Chinese. Fat was good. One of my students continually bragged about his infant’s weight: “She is very beautiful, and very fat.” In a country of little means, fatness indicated vitality. Yet the hypocrisy of Mao’s fatness seemed lost on his own resource-strapped citizenry. Mao represented the nation, and if Mao was fat, the nation must be thriving (even if individuals were not). Such was Communism. Between the two, old Mao or young, it was the older, fatter portrait that hung at the Forbidden City gate.

Homes, stores, restaurants used to set up Mao shrines, small portraits attended by tassels and candles. I came across just a few such displays. Times were changing, the economy had begun to boom, and everyday life accelerated, leaving little time to dwell on the past.

I did visit Mao in his mausoleum. You can too. There was no missing it – large edifice flocked by steps and security, a final resting place that ate up a third of Tiananmen Square. Stand in line about an hour and you too can be ushered past the glass case of Mao’s preserved remains, paying hushed ten-second respect from fifteen feet away.

He looked like a wax dummy. No surprise there – he died in 1972. Still, if long-term preservation made a real body look artificial, why not stick with a dummy? I didn’t mention this thought to my students, but they addressed it anyway. “There are two bodies,” Carol explained. “One is real, one is not real. They are under the ground, perhaps one hundred of feet down. Each day they bring up one body for looking. You do not know whether it is the real body.”

If such were the case, of course, the government would have no motivation ever to display Mao’s real body. It was simply a myth to create an illusion of authenticity, the feeling that common citizens could connect with a leader who truly cared for each and every one of them … as he grew fat.

How very Communist.

How very Mao.

Enter any store and clerks would bombard me with insistent sales pitch (little of which I understood). I imagined the click in their eyes: “White guy = money.” To be sure, my Chinese salary was double what an average Beijing worker made (¥800 as opposed to ¥350), so by their standards I was well off. But that’s not how I felt. ¥800 was about $100/month, and with no savings plus college loans waiting back home, I felt downright poor.

So the sales talk persisted as long as I lingered in the store, and I persistently blocked it out.

This went on for six months of buying basic necessities.

Then: magic.

Sole customer in one store, I was being harangued by two clerks when a woman entered. They redirected their barrage at her, but the woman said something, four words at most, and they fell quiet.

Immediately I replayed her words in my mind, parsing them. Wo kan yi kan. What did it mean? Wo I knew – it meant “I.” Yi sounded like the word for “one.” Kan was unfamiliar to me. Still, the phrase was potent. I left that store and entered the very next one for no purpose other than to try out the phrase before I forgot it. As I crossed the threshold, the sales pitch commenced.

“Wo kan yi kan,” I said.

They stopped.

I used that phrase for weeks before remembering to ask Davy about it. Kan meant to look. Wo kan yi kan = “I look one look” = I’m just looking.

My Mandarin vocabulary was limited, but I learned many words the way babies do, absorbing them from real situations and using them to accomplish real things without fully understanding their meaning.

Fourteen years later, Mandarin phrases still creep into my dreams.

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Picture a map of the world. Americas on the left, Asia and Australia on the right, skinny Atlantic down the middle. Right?

Not in China.

They positioned their homeland almost in the middle – making the wide Pacific the most prominent feature, with Africa and the Americas shoved off to the side, distorted by edge curvature.

This double-poster size map hung on my apartment wall as a conversation tool. (The dark marks are tape residue that bled through in subsequent years.)

Such a map may look funny to us, but it matched China’s view of itself as center of the world. All nations indulge in a little solipsism, but for the Chinese it was embedded right in their nation’s name: Zhong Guo 中国, “Center Country.” Note the obvious symbolism of the character zhong: 中.

I dreaded looking up the Chinese name for America, Mei Guo 美国, expecting something degrading, like “Somewhere Over There Country.”

How pleasant, then, to discover that Mei meant Beautiful.

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My magnetic travel Chinese chess set.

Gathered on sidewalks near makeshift tables, men of mixed ages squatted near chessboards, slapping pieces down with kung fu flavor. Their spirited action reminded me of scenes from New York City parks, the speed of moves intended to intimidate an opponent into error.

Games were corporate affairs, less a contest between two minds and more a collaborative exploration of strategies. Spectators and combatants shared ideas for moves as long as words could keep up with fingers.

Chinese chess looked nothing like Chinese checkers, that farcical multicolor Star of David we know in America. Related to our chess (what they called “international chess”) in gameplay and strategy, Chinese chess used a few different pieces and movements. Beside each horse was an elephant. Each king had two close guards but no queen, and the kings were forbidden from facing one another without intervening pieces. The two cannons attacked only over another piece, never directly. All pieces were flat disks printed with Chinese characters. The board was 9×9, not 8×8, and a “river” ran sideways across the middle, affecting the movement of pawns and elephants.

More subtle differences existed; it took me a while to absorb them all. The gameplay I found fascinating, more intricate than international chess, with added variables and constraints to consider in both offense and defense. Early in the year I bought a set, asked my students to explain all the rules, and played a few games against them. Then I staged mock battles against myself until, weeks later, I felt ready to challenge my students again. I won a few games, lost several, and generally amazed the very men who’d taught me how to distinguish one piece from another. The two games, Chinese and international, were fundamentally the same, and I could hold my own on a chess board.

Or so I thought, until Xiao Gao stomped me.

Short, goofy, a natural comedian, Xiao Gao was a building superintendent for a reason: he was no scholar. Most of every day he either entertained friends in his efficiency near our apartment building entrance, or he watched TV. So when he noticed the Chinese chess set on my dining table and offered to play, I hemmed and hawed, declining for several weeks … until my winter alone, when I had nothing better to do. I didn’t expect much.

The table nullified our height differences, and as we focused on the miniature battlefield between us Xiao Gao’s demeanor chiseled into that of a grave and ancient Chinese general. Early on I captured a handful of pieces and placed him in some quick checks, but soon found myself reeling from relentless attacks. The game was entirely his, my moves chosen for me by the dwindling gaps in his offense.

“You played well,” he told me in Mandarin when it was over, lazy smile returning. He was being overly gracious. “Very good in the beginning. Play again?”

Sucker. The next game was abysmal from start to finish.

“Your first game was better,” he told me. Unaware of what I’d done differently between the two matches, I burned with shame. “You keep playing. You will get better.”

I’d seen a whole different side of Xiao Gao, a complexity I’d never suspected. How often did he play? When? I’d never seen him near a chess board, but he was obviously skilled – enough to make me realize the students I’d felt so proud about beating were only novices like me.

From time to time through the remainder of that year, Xiao Gao, vacuuming my apartment, would offer to play again. I always found some excuse to decline. I’m sure this amused him. He’d insist it was okay, we could just play a quick game for fun, but I’d insist right back that it wasn’t that at all, that I really was too busy or whatever.

Then in the evenings I’d play my students again.

I got a little better, I think. But never to the point I felt I could take on the general again.

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I knew China would give me another perspective on the world, on human beings, on myself.

But on the inside of my own mouth?

Take the letter J: jaguar, jelly, jump. Nothing to it — except in Mandarin, which had two forms of the J-sound, each a distinct consonant.

The jian in “zai jian (goodbye)” was pronounced with tongue tip against the back of the bottom teeth, its middle raised against the roof of the mouth. Try it until you make a J-type sound.

Now compare that to the zhong in “Zhong Guo (China),” spoken with the tip of the tongue curled up and back, toward the back of the mouth. The sound should be harsher, similar to an R.

Switch back and forth between these tongue positions, each time making a J sound. Hear the difference?

Other consonants differed in tongue placement. Try the SH sounds in shi (to be) and xie xie (thank you): SH with tongue up and back, X with tongue forward and down against bottom teeth. Or the CH sounds in Chang Cheng (Great Wall) and qing (please): CH back, Q forward.

Don’t think the Chinese won’t notice if you blur these consonants the American way. I tried that. It sounded as strange to them as las coming out as ras.

Speaking of ra, I’d never heard anything odder than the Chinese ri – again with tongue raised up and back, but spoken as though the R sound were being made backwards.

Toughest of all, apparently, was the letter C. Again with tongue forward and down, the middle brushed against the roof of the mouth, just behind the top teeth, to make a soft TH sound (as in thought). Not too difficult – except that every time I tried it, Davy corrected me.

“No no no, listen,” he’d say, and repeat the C sound several times, gesturing toward his mouth.

“C, C, C,” I’d repeat.

“No no, look this,” he’d say, “look my tongue.” Again he’d pronounce, “C, C, C.”

“C, C, C,” I’d repeat exactly.

“No no, not C, C. Like this: C, C, C.”

“C, C, C.”

“No, look close. C, C.”

“C, C.”

“No.”

And so on. Try as I could, I never made the C sound to his satisfaction. Nor did I have any clue as to how my C differed from his.

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