Sep 25: Mao again

I haven't gotten too much farther on my quest to understand the Mao thing, but Fang, a Z.U. fellow gave me an added piece for the puzzle.

He said two things of note. First that: "It was just too soon." He explained that after the revolution against Chiang Kai-shek Mao was considered such a hero that it was hard to tear him down now for the "mistakes" he'd made. There seems to be sort of a 60/40 thing going here, Mao is simultaneously considered 60% god -- note that every propaganda poster shows him with a halo behind his head --and 40% seriously-flawed human. I was going to write "40% devil" there for poetic symmetry, but I don't think its accurate. The negative feelings just don't seem that intense.

Fang explained this a bit by telling me about his father and grandfather. Both were professors, he said, and both sent to rural China to be "reeducated" by farmers during the cultural revolution. They spent ten years doing manual labor before returning home. Fang said clamly that his father now laughed about it more than anything, because what else could you do?

Acceptance doesn't explain the remaining pockets of downright reverence that still abound, but it's still a good clue. And one that has now been backed up by a second data point. I met a smiling man on the subway yesterday when I overheard him say the word "setenta" and focused in to see if it was a trick of my ears, or if he was indeed speaking Spanish. He was. He was explaining to an Italian, whose English was better than his Spanish, frankly, that he was sixty-years old, but didn't he still look young?

I jumped into the conversation, and in two metro stops I learned that he knew Spanish, Russian, English, Japanese, and French. When I asked if he had been to Spain, since his Spanish was so good, he said, no, he'd never left the country--and then, big smile never leaving his face, he said he'd been sent to the countryside for 25 years during the cultural revolution. He'd been a student in Nanjing, starting in 1965, and he had always loved languages. Five years later he was sent to be reeducated, and ten years ago he'd finally left the farms for Shanghai. Now he tutored English and Spanish, and taught foreigners Chinese. (If you need a tutor in Shanghai, I got his phone number.)

He was so joyful this man. He just switched back and forth between English, French, Spanish, a bit of German, offering smatterings of each, like he was playing. I mean it was almost dolphin-like -- pirouetting through different languages.

And, clearly, if your choices are life-long bitterness or being a happy 60-year-old, who revels in knowledge and bubbles over in the presence of friendliness, one should choose acceptance every time.