Audition (37 page)

I was introduced to my interpreter, Miss Tang, who I later learned was married, but like all Chinese women at that time, she wore no wedding ring and used her maiden name. Miss Tang was serious and sullen. She always called me “Miss Barbara Walters,” never “Miss Walters” or “Barbara.” She started every sentence like this, “And so, Miss Barbara Walters, today we will visit a factory.” She wore absolutely no makeup, was thirty-one, and looked at least forty.

Her very first question to me was: “How old are you?” I answered that we were around the same age. We talked briefly about children. I told her I had a little girl at home who was almost four. Miss Tang then told me that she had a daughter who was two and a half and lived at a day-care center; she saw her on weekends. After this brief exchange, Miss Tang never expressed any further curiosity about me or Americans in general. Instead she answered every question I asked, and you can imagine how many there were, as if they came from a political handbook. For example, when I asked her later if she could take me to a beauty salon, thinking that I might be able to find an interesting story there, she replied, “We have no need for beauty salons. We have loftier thoughts.” Take that, Miss Barbara Walters!

Even the arrival of the president of the United States attracted little curiosity—and gave me my first anxiety attack. I was reporting from a makeshift studio at the hastily constructed broadcast center at the airport. (All our live broadcasts by satellite would be made from there.) None of us had been given any advance information about who would be in the Chinese meet-and-greet party, or what ceremony there would be, if any. There we were, about to go on the air to report the historic moment to millions of Americans, without a clue as to what was happening.

The answer was: not much. Only a small, official delegation met President Nixon at the airport, one of whom was the seventy-three-year-old premier, Chou En-lai. (In contrast, four months before, the Chinese regime had rounded up more than 300,000 people to greet the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie.) Mrs. Nixon was wearing the bright red coat we would come to know so well, the same color, ironically, as the large signs all around the airport calling the “oppressed peoples of the world” to unite and pay tribute to Marxism-Leninism and the Chinese Communist Party. Her coat and the signs were the only bright spots in the whole scene.

The president’s arrival was indicative of the tightly controlled, doctrinaire atmosphere in China. After the brief welcoming ceremony at the airport, the Nixons got into a limousine with the Chinese premier and sped the forty minutes or so into Peking—along empty streets. There were no curious crowds along Peking’s “Street of Perpetual Peace” or in the vast, one-hundred-acre Tiananmen Square, the “Plaza of the Gate of Celestial Peace.” Seventeen years later hundreds of freedom-seeking students would be brutally put down by the government in Tiananmen Square, but when Nixon’s presidential motorcade swept through it in 1972, the square was nearly empty and silent. There were just people on bicycles going about their business without even looking up.

Some veteran China hands attributed the lack of public enthusiasm to the fact that America and the People’s Republic of China had no official diplomatic relations, but I think Bill Buckley got it right. During a roundtable interview I did later with a few of the print journalists, Buckley said he didn’t think the Chinese public knew who Nixon was. After all, he pointed out, they still didn’t know that we—or anyone—had landed on the moon a few years before. That’s how controlled the news was there.

My job in China was to cover the daytime activities of the Nixons, report on any stories I gathered myself, and to describe, live by satellite, the major evening activities, which I could not actually attend. Our cameras were in the Great Hall but I was almost an hour away at the broadcast center watching the banquets on a TV monitor. “On the menu tonight are Spongy Bamboo Shoots, Shark’s Fin in Three Shreds, Fried and Stewed Prawns,” I would report to the
Today
show audience. “Hear the music? Sound familiar? The large Chinese orchestra is playing ‘Home on the Range.’” I ad-libbed much of what I said, just as I had ad-libbed in Persepolis, but this time I didn’t have a friendly colleague talking into my ear on a headphone.

When I finished my banquet reporting for television, I was rushed by our radio producer to another makeshift studio to describe to listeners what had just been shown on television. One night about midnight, on my way home from the radio broadcast, I talked with Mr. Ching, one of the interpreters.

“How old are your children?” I asked. “I have three—eleven, seven, and three years old,” he replied. “But I have not seen my three-year-old since he was born.” Turned out the interpreter had been an office worker, as had his wife. During this decade of the Cultural Revolution, in which millions of Chinese teachers, educated office workers, and intellectuals were forced to live as peasants so as to toe the party line, Mr. Ching had been sent to an adult “reform school” and then to work in the fields. His wife was still working at a different farm. He had no idea when he would see her again. His children were living with their grandmother. He didn’t know when his wife would be back to care for them.

We heard similar stories throughout our trip, especially when we visited Peking University, which had been newly reopened after being forced to close during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. It had been one of the finest universities in Asia until it was shut down and its students disbanded. Some of the most prominent professors had been paraded down the street wearing dunce caps and jeered at by teenage members of the Red Guard. Like Mr. Ching, most of the teachers had been sent away to “reform” centers and were then imprisoned or sent to work in the fields. They were just now returning. With this kind of attitude against almost anyone who was educated, it is all the more astonishing to realize what the Chinese have accomplished in the thirty-odd years since the demise of the hated Cultural Revolution.

President Nixon’s attempt to bridge the philosophical gap between our two countries was challenging, to say the least, but he was certainly trying. During the days he and his entourage, for the most part, met privately with their Chinese counterparts. We followed Pat Nixon as she visited schools, day-care centers, factories, and communes, all carefully selected by her hosts.

Mrs. Nixon, who seemed shy and remote to most Americans, blossomed in China. She was having a wonderful time, gracious and smiling and particularly good with the children. The Chinese opened up to her as much as they could open up to anyone at that time. How sad that her life in the White House would end in grief and isolation two years later, when her husband was forced to resign his office over the Watergate scandal. I was reminded of the book
Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye
, written after President Kennedy’s assassination. There could easily have been another book called
Pat Nixon, We Hardly Knew You.

Traipsing around after the first lady, however, had more than its share of challenges for me. I was carrying my own camera and a tape recorder. They looked very much alike and, as I am the least handy person you could find, I often took out my camera when I wanted the tape recorder or the tape recorder when I wanted the camera. Even worse, at one point I found myself almost alone with Mrs. Nixon and, hoping to get a brief exclusive interview with her, I beckoned over the only camera crew I could see and asked if they would film it. They looked kind of startled but did the filming. Only later did I learn that they were a CBS crew, not NBC. CBS was furious that I got this scoop and at first wouldn’t release the film. NBC then became furious with CBS for not releasing the film, and it almost became an international incident until I apologized profusely and everyone cooled down. But that gaffe did not go over well with my fellow journalists in China. Instead of thinking of me as a klutz, which I was, they thought I was being a prima donna. It did not add to my popularity.

When I wasn’t following Mrs. Nixon or going out to find my own stories, always accompanied by Miss Tang, I repaired to the neat, sparse room I shared with Fay Wells at the hotel. There, waiting for me, was a most comfortable bed with a big puffy quilt. Also waiting, a comb, brush, toothpaste, shaving cream, pencils, pens, postcards with scenes from Chinese ballets, hard candies, hot water for tea, which I could also use to sterilize my contact lenses, and always tangerines. Thank God for the tangerines. On busy days, I lived on them. Herb Kaplow, one of my fellow NBC correspondents, joked that on his first day back home, he woke up, reached for a tangerine, and ate his lightbulb.

We also had big roomy bathtubs, no showers—and unexpected luxuries. One-day laundry service and one-hour pressing, a godsend since we were allowed to bring only one small suitcase, and floormen on each floor to wait on us and bring us food at any hour. Breakfast was the highlight. We could choose Western or Chinese and I chose Chinese, which included delicious chicken noodle soup, a selection of cold meats, vegetables, spring rolls, and, one lucky morning, spareribs with sweet and sour sauce. Who needed oatmeal anyway?

We certainly didn’t need a wastebasket. One of the most maddening Chinese habits to deal with made us unable to throw anything out. Whatever we tried to dispose of—a torn pair of stockings, a used Kleenex, an empty bottle of shampoo—was neatly wrapped up and returned to us.

Stories did not come so neatly wrapped. Though we were supposedly free to go wherever we wanted, there was no way to get there. There were no taxis, no private cars, no transportation whatsoever except for the official buses and cars which moved us from place to place. I had seen a department store within walking distance of the hotel, so I asked Miss Tang to take me and my cameraman to film what turned out to be called the Number One Department Store. (Stores had no names. They were numbered as they were built.) My theory has always been: show me a department store and I’ll show you how people live.

The Macy’s of China was large, crowded, and cold, heated by one coal stove near the entrance. Bicycles, the most prized possession—no one owned a car—cost about sixty dollars. The average factory worker made about twenty dollars a month. Denying himself all the extras, a worker could probably buy a bicycle at the end of the year…or maybe a sewing machine, the next most cherished item, which also cost about sixty dollars. Shoes cost a dollar fifty a pair, and face cream and shampoo were sold by the glob. I did a show-and-tell report on the store for broadcast later that evening.

Next door to the store was a pharmacy (the Number One Pharmacy?) that sold the prize souvenirs for foreigners—plastic acupuncture dolls. They were small, white, slimy-feeling dolls with innumerable markings for insertion of the needles. The needles themselves were from three to eight inches long, a sort of do-it-yourself acupuncture kit. The pharmacy also had white, slimy acupuncture ears (Chinese doctors thought that the ears contain most of the nerve endings of the body). The dolls and the ears turned out to be the most popular souvenirs I brought home, along with the large red buttons bearing the face of Chairman Mao that virtually all the Chinese wore.

Dr. Paul Marks, my friend at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, went crazy over the ear I brought him. Acupuncture techniques had barely reached this country, and the Chinese were boasting that they did operations with no anesthesia, only needles. One afternoon, before we left Peking, some of the reporters were treated to a view of an actual operation. The patient, I was told, was lying on an operating table, had his eyes open, and seemed totally relaxed. I, who can’t bear a pinprick, avoided this excursion and settled for bringing home a half a dozen plastic ears. What I didn’t bring home, which was also for sale—and would you believe it in that puritanical country where I was told no one married for love, but because they were “politically compatible”?—was a selection of aphrodisiacs.

I managed to get permission to film another story, this one at the Evergreen People’s Commune. The agricultural commune was just ten minutes from our hotel, where we enjoyed hot and cold running water and quite luxurious bathrooms. The commune had neither.

We visited the home of a farming family named Kong. It made the spare little coal miners’ houses I’d seen in Wales look like Trump Plaza. The Kongs’ two-room farmhouse had a mud floor, a brick-and-wood bed heated from beneath by a box of hot coals, an outhouse, and nothing else. Yet the Kongs, too, toed the Communist Party line. Yes, they had enough food to eat, and heat in the winter, and clean, warm clothing, all of which they owed to Chairman Mao, who had taken the farm away from a brutal landlord and given it to the peasants.

It was a good piece, I thought, because it was the only time we were invited into a real Chinese home and could show viewers at home not only how the Chinese lived but how they thought. I sent it off to New York, but somewhere between the Evergreen People’s Commune and Rockefeller Center it disappeared. For all I know it may still be en route.

The long days, often stretching from 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m., began to get to me as the week progressed. I realized then, as I do again now writing this, that I was depressed.

And this is the sour part.

All was not well between me and some of my male colleagues. The enmity had begun before we even got to China, when we made an overnight stop in Hawaii. Henry Kissinger and a few others from the White House staff, including Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, and speechwriter Pat Buchanan, were invited by Clare Boothe Luce, who was living in Honolulu, to a small dinner. (Mrs. Luce was the wife of the founder of Time Inc., and a formidable presence herself.) Dr. Kissinger and I had become off-camera friends following my far-ranging interview with him for
Today
, and he asked Mrs. Luce if I could be invited to the dinner, too. That’s what started the sour part.

I wasn’t the only reporter invited. John Chancellor was there, as was Theodore White, but being the only woman journalist made me stand out. The reporters who were not invited, and most were not, resented my access to Kissinger and White House staff. In their eyes I was the upstart, unseasoned and spoiled. It didn’t help when Kissinger drew me aside for a private chat. The consensus was that he was giving me some sort of advance scoop when in fact he was merely asking me, if I had the time and opportunity in China, to buy some souvenirs for him to take home to his family and friends. (But not for Nancy Maginnes, the woman he was seeing who would become his wife. At that time Nancy, who is quite conservative, wanted nothing to do with the Chinese Communists and had told Henry she wanted no presents from that country. She has since become very fond of China and many of its leaders.) This shopping aside with Kissinger just added fuel to the fire.