Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
She smiled and said we would have to wait. Our car and driver had been reassigned
and our substitute car was caught in traffic. Twenty minutes later a vintage Red Flag auto-
mobile pulled up. We climbed inside the trash-strewn backseat, which smelled of years of
chain-smoking drivers.
Undeterred, Lin Xi got into the front seat, and as we drove into town, she announced
that she would tell us her life story. Born to a farmer father and teacher mother in 1966,
Lin Xi said she remembered hearing people shouting, “Long Live Chairman Mao, the
Communist Party and the People's Republic of China.”
“They didn't care about their lives, only about politics,” she said. “We were told that the
Americans were imperialists and that Europeans were the running dog of the American
imperialists. We prepared for war with you—can you imagine? Now I am your tour guide.”
She was bitter that her education was so bad that “we were not expected to have aca-
demic excellence, only political excellence.” And she was bitter about the lies she was
told. “We did not know the outside world. We felt we were in heaven because we had a
watch, a sewing machine and a bicycle. We were told others didn't have as much as we
did.”
She said that when Chairman Mao died in 1976, “the Great Man Deng Xiaoping
opened us to the outside world. Before, we had been told we were the best in the world,
and we learned that was wrong, that three-fourths of the world lived better than we did.”
Her life improved as the economy grew at 10 percent a year. Then, she said, it was
almost destroyed by the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989. “At first, I supported the
students and sent them money. Then I realized that the students lived in an ivory tower. If
they had won, China would have collapsed and the world would have had to feed us.”
She nodded her head to signal the end. “Just now I have told you how China's changes
have changed my life in my lifetime.”
Bill and I had the feeling that not only was this Lin Xi's standard script delivered for
every tourist who traveled with her but that it had been approved by her political super-
iors at the China Youth Travel Service, the government bureau where she worked. Her
“personal story” didn't waver from the Communist Party line that condemned the radical
policies of Mao Zedong without criticizing him and that cast Deng as the modern savior.
It even included a confession by Lin Xi and an acknowledgment of her mistakes.
This turned out to be only the first chapter of her “personal story,” which she continued
to deliver at appropriate moments during our three days together, each episode emphasiz-
ing the positive economic and political improvements of the New China, each revolving
around her discovering of the wisdom of the government.
We arrived at the Tang Paradise Hotel. Bill and I were pleased that we had insisted on
a Chinese-only hotel policy. The hotel had the multilayered roof of a mythical Chinese
palace. Inside, the white walls were accented with red lacquer and black fretwork. I asked
Search WWH ::
Custom Search