Like Charlotte Furth and others of her age and mine, I studied and taught about China for years (over two decades in my case) without actually setting foot in the country. But although my first visits came during roughly the same time period as Furth's (late 1970s, early 1980s), that is about as far as the parallel can be taken. Aside from the brevity of my early encounters, they were very tightly organized, and, for the most part, the only Chinese I had any real contact with were scholars like myself. I visited China. I did not live there.
Furth's year-long stay in China in 1981–82, the focus of this memoir, could not have been more different. Although new opportunities for the normalization of Sino-American relations had been opened as a result of the Nixon/Kissinger strategic moves of the early 1970s, it was only with the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China in 1979 that it became possible for American China scholars to spend more meaningful periods in the PRC carrying out research and other activities. Furth herself was one of four teaching Fulbright Scholars, classified as “foreign experts” by the Chinese; their main responsibility was to introduce American history and sociology to Chinese students.
The China of the early 1980s was of course very different from what it became over the ensuing several decades. It was far more isolated. Unlike the economic powerhouse of the present, it was a very poor country. Many of Furth's students were educated “sent down” youth, who only recently had been living under the harsh conditions of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. Unlike Chinese youth of today, some 350,000 of whom study annually at universities in the United States, those who in the early eighties had spent time abroad were the rare exceptions, and there was no Internet to inform Chinese about the rest of the world and what was going on in it.
Some of Furth's most telling observations concern the problems faced by the women in her classes. Around a third of her students were women from educated families, around half of whom were older professional teachers close in age to Furth herself. She describes in detail the conflicts and tensions experienced by these students: women from educated family backgrounds who married working-class men and found that their intellectual ambitions contrasted sharply with the expectations of their husbands and their husbands’ families, who wanted them to become full-time mothers and home makers; older women who had experienced the revolution as young adults in the 1950s and were well-established in professional careers by the time the Cultural Revolution campaigns favoring “reds” over “experts” forced them to cope with the widely held Maoist view that education was a source of class privilege.
Another area in which conflict and misunderstanding was widespread—in this instance between American teachers and their Chinese students—was in the teaching of American history, which Chinese tended to approach from a point of departure quite different from that of Americans. Chinese students were inclined to understand American history in terms of what they might have encountered in PRC state-approved textbooks. There was a general tendency, for example, to show little interest in religion as a spiritual practice. “How can it be,” one of Furth's favorite students asked her after class one day, “that the people of an advanced industrial civilization like the United States continue to believe in these superstitious stories” (p. 73)? The Chinese were also shocked at the persistence of poverty in a rich country and the apparent complacency of the American public in the face of it. And, of course, coming from a country with strongly authoritarian political traditions, they had great difficulty figuring out how certain aspects of the American political system—like the “separation of powers”—worked.
The early years of the period of “reform and opening,” as Chinese often described the early 1980s, were a uniquely difficult moment in the history of Sino-American relations. There were severe tensions in the relationship following Washington's announcement during the Reagan years that it was sending military aircraft to Taiwan. Fraternizing between foreigners and Chinese could be hazardous, and one had to move with care. And, as one might expect, there were difficulties for foreigners conducting research on politically sensitive subjects. The problems, however, were not experienced only on the American side. Furth observes in her epilogue that “we Americans were the fascinated, often baffled and even horrified spectators of a socio-political upheaval that we struggled to understand” (p. 131). But in another context, a Chinese student confided to her: “We are not allowed to tell you things. It is difficult to be a foreigner here, but not as difficult as to be a Chinese” (pp. 118–19).
In her preface, Furth asks how one was to go about understanding the newness of what one was experiencing in the China of the early 1980s. She writes: “The present is always a fleeting tightrope walk between the unalterable past and the unknown future. My year in China was a time when this perennial instability felt vertiginous to me” (p. xi). Furth's candid, deeply personal, and consistently engaging memoir does an admirable job of conveying what it was like dealing with this instability at the time.
