AMBASSADORS

1.

The first time my father visited a communist country was in 1962, when he was seventeen. He recorded his impressions of the trip, which he took with his parents to Yugoslavia and Hungary, in a journal I found recently in my grandmother’s basement, on top of a derelict Ping-Pong table. The journal was in an envelope with several generations of passports, some bearing seventy-five-year-old stamps—Greek, Palestinian, and Egyptian—in the same refined palette of blue, green, and ochre. In spite of its stiff maroon leather cover and formal antique font, my paternal great-grandparents’ passport, issued May 13, 1929, is a fairly relaxed document. At that time, smack between the wars and a safe six months before the Crash, the two of them carried a joint passport, bearing a youthful portrait (my great-grandmother’s hair is bobbed) and the endorsement “good for travel in all countries unless otherwise limited.” It seems to stop just short of a breezy “Have a swell time.”

By the time my grandparents took my father to the Eastern bloc, American passports had changed. The three of them still traveled on a family passport, but its jacket was now green, patterned with the seal of the U.S. Department of State. It’s dated March 13, 1956, and there are a host of new restrictions: “This passport is not valid for travel to Albania, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Rumania or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” nor for “those portions of Korea and Viet-Nam under Communist control,” although in my grandparents’ case this portion of the passport had been stamped, “Void.” The picture taken of the three of them shows my grandfather, with his characteristic expression of wary disapproval; my grandmother, bright and a bit dazed; and my father behind them, in a plaid shirt with a white undershirt showing, looking somehow (at age eleven) as if he knows the future—as if he’s part of some other photograph taken years later, after the world has changed.

Six years after that photograph was taken, they drove from Munich to Budapest, making an “uneventful crossing of the Iron Curtain” at the Hungarian border, where my father noted “barbed wire, cleared strips, armed guards, and a patrol plane”:

When we stopped for an old-fashioned steam locomotive at a crossing, two shorts-clad boys edged up to the car to look in and were promptly motioned away by an Hungarian-speaking man, apparently an official of the communist government (riding alone in a red convertible). They came back and got two pieces of American chewing gum, which one quickly put into his pocket to make sure it was not taken away from him. But he promised to share it with his friend. They waved something to us as we left and said something about “Amerikanishe.” This is the first time we have ever felt that we were ambassadors making an impression in virgin territory.

When I asked his permission to quote from this journal, my father sighed. “It’s full of smug, teenaged assertions about the evils of communism, isn’t it?”

My father’s first impressions (meticulously recorded with the new Adler portable typewriter he’d bought in Germany, on tissue-thin blue stationary from the British Overseas Airlines Corporation) are observant, occasionally smug, and very rarely “teenaged” by any current standard. Reading them for the first time, I marveled at how old-fashioned they sounded; the second time, I wondered how different they were from my own impressions of communism, as a teenager in the 1980s, and from my journal entries during a first trip to China last May.

One of the only nonfiction books that I read more than once as a teenager was Ekaterina Jung’s memoir, Growing Up in Moscow, an emigrant’s recollection of her childhood in the USSR. I had particularly looked forward to Chapter 9, “Sex and the Soviet Teenager,” which turned out to have much more to do with what wasn’t allowed than what was: “One of the not-so-bad consequences of film censorship was that many teenagers turned to books, including classics, as the only available repository of smutty material.” In spite of being born in New York City in the mid-1970s, to Dr. Spock-reading parents, I also learned most of what I knew about sex at that time from novels. (What teenager wants to talk to her parents about sex, particularly the kind of parents who want to talk about it?) I would occasionally choose something from the bookstore because the title or cover, without being obvious, seemed to promise some instruction. This method was inconsistent at best: Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was completely inscrutable, and Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear trilogy, which my mother unwittingly bought for me—with the idea that it would encourage an interest in evolutionary biology—turned out to be shocking in its specificity.

As a teenager, Jung loved to read, was passionate about libraries, and hoped to be a writer, although her early efforts (romantic dramas involving political dissidents) ended in frustration. Her small insurrections—getting a fake ID in order to use the Foreign Language Library two years before it was permitted—were just my speed. She was a privileged young woman who experienced oppression in her own life in “one real way. . . . It wasn’t just that I couldn’t say what I believed—I had to say things I didn’t believe, a distinction of no small consequence.” Although Jung emphasized her relative advantages, and made light of the trials she endured before her family’s emigration in 1980, to me she had all the nobility of the dissidents she admired.

I got the opportunity to go to China through the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs. According to their mission statement: “IIP designs, develops, and implements a variety of information initiatives and strategic communications programs” for “key international audiences.” A representative from the program told me that they had thought of me because some of the stories in my book Lucky Girls take place in Asia, and because the IIP wanted to start sending younger writers abroad. One State Department employee in China later suggested that these days the program was focusing on younger audiences, who had presumably become “key international audiences” in the fight against terrorism. Perhaps the thought was that younger writers would be better able to strategically communicate with these younger audiences—to make a good impression in not-so-virgin territory.

The plan was for me to meet with university students in five Chinese cities (Beijing, Tianjin, Guilin, Kunming, and Shanghai) to talk about writing and contemporary fiction. I had been studying Mandarin for two years, but I was counting on the Chinese university students I met to speak English; if we relied on my Chinese, we would be limited to such topics as “Shopping” and “At the Beijing Post Office.” Nevertheless, in the weeks before my trip, I practiced phrases on anyone who would listen:

“Zhe tiao huang kuzi tai xiao le. Neng bu neng huan yi tiao?”

“What does that mean?” my sister asked patiently.

“This pair of yellow pants is too small. Can I exchange them?”

“Small yellow pants,” my sister said. “You’re all set.”

Somehow, when I agreed to participate in the IIP program, I had pictured a version of my book tour. I imagined myself giving readings at the Chinese equivalent of small independent bookstores in the Pacific Northwest—not an analogy that makes much sense as it turns out. I managed not to consider the ominous prospect of an audience who would be listening in their second or third language. (It is my experience that relatively few people want to listen to fiction readings by first-time short story writers, even in their first language.) As soon as I arrived in China, I received e-mails from press officers in Beijing and Shanghai with the unsettling information that my “presentations” would each be two hours long. The e-mail from Beijing also informed me that my presentation in Tianjin (a satellite city about an hour by car from Beijing) would be preceded by an interview with Tianjin TV. The station had provided sample questions in advance:

1. Please tell us about your life, especially your life in Asia.

2. Which famous American writers have influenced you? (The most famous American writer in China is Hemingway.)

3. Give us your opinion on American contemporary literature and Asian culture, including Chinese culture.

The press officer concluded with a kind warning: “This interview will be unlike any you may have done in the past . . . or hopefully ever will do again.”

The interviewer, a woman about my age, was wearing a futuristic white and silver jumpsuit, paired with high-heeled silver ankle boots. The idea was that she would ask her questions in Chinese, while I nodded and smiled; then a translator would convey the question to me in English, which I would answer while the interviewer nodded and smiled. They allowed me to pass on question number three (a bit daunting in scope); more important than what I said, the producer emphasized, was that I pretend the translator didn’t exist—something I failed at so miserably that the translator had to switch seats, so that she was out of my line of sight.

Afterward I attempted to practice my Chinese, saying something that could be roughly translated as: “Thank you, thank you! Beautiful university! Very happy to come to China! Extremely happy to meet you!”

“Oh, you speak Chinese!” the producer said generously—after taking a moment to confirm that the sounds coming out of my mouth were indeed intended to approximate his language.

In Shanghai, the consular press officer had decided that we should distribute a story from my book in advance so that the students would be familiar with it. He told me he’d chosen “The Tutor,” a story about an American teenaged girl living in Bombay and her Indian SAT tutor, for two reasons. First, the students I would be speaking to “tended to come from backgrounds where they had tutors, and they understand the tutor/pupil relationship—although in your story it departs from the norm, of course.” (In my story, the pupil seduces the tutor, of course.) “Second, and this is more difficult to explain, we had to submit a story to the classes that took into account what the Chinese authorities would be willing to allow.” Although all of my stories had “very real-life adult situations, including sexual situations,” in “The Tutor,” they were “handled in a subtle enough way that we could stay under the radar, as it were.”

In spite of my nervousness, I was excited; the phrase, “under the radar,” reminded me of Growing Up in Moscow. Although I don’t think I admitted this to myself, part of the reason that I was interested in going to China—in fact, that I had started studying Chinese in the first place—was the exotic romance of a closed society, a place that kept secrets. As pathetic as this sounds, I wanted to know what it was like not to be free. How else could “freedom” mean anything at all?

2.

Budapest July 11, 1962: Forgot to observe yesterday that the people’s sad faces were apparent even in the park where they were necking on the benches. The only time they would smile a little was on the dance floor of the hotel, with the band playing from American editions of “Artistry in Rhythm,” “Saints,” and a garbled version of “Peter Gunn.” . . . Mummy was disturbed by the little children marching along like soldiers outside the Parliament building and the red-neckerchiefed “pioneers” who stared coldly at us as we passed them in a church we were visiting. [Our guide] either didn’t understand or didn’t answer when we asked if there were any comparable movements for parents who didn’t want their children indoctrinated with communism.

I had been asked to talk about writing and publishing in America; the question I most wanted to ask the students I met, however, was whether they thought it made sense to write fiction from a point of view significantly different from your own. I talked about men writing as women, women writing as men, young people writing as old people and vice versa; but what I really wanted to know was whether they thought writers could exchange their identity (cultural, national, racial) for another. Wasn’t there something wrong with that?

The prevailing wisdom, in my college literary theory workshops, was that there was something very wrong with it. The professor of my introductory literature seminar was of Native American descent; as we sat in class discussing Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony,” I remember realizing with horror that in my room at home was a picture of me one Halloween dressed as an Indian (the sort of Indian who was once called a “red Indian”) wearing a blanket, a feather, holding my palm up next to my face: “How.” What if my professor had seen that? What would he think if he knew about the “Indian Princesses,” a version of the Boy Scouts in which little girls went on camping trips, sang Iroquois songs, and made traditional kachina dolls out of paint, feathers, and cardboard paper towel rolls—of which my father had unfortunately served as “Big Chief,” in a headdress with feathers down to his ankles?

Like my classmates, I was soon letting words like postcolonialism and essentialism roll off my tongue as if they were natural to me—the same way I smoked my first joint and slept with my first college boyfriend. Essentialism—the idea that all human beings are at bottom similar, have similar needs and wants—was a relic by the time I got to college. The fuzzy seventies-style identity politics I had learned from my parents, that “underneath,” people were all the same, was now taboo. Now people were not the same. As I progressed through my English major, I found myself taking classes from professors whose critical agenda was “new critic” or “poststructuralist,” rather than “postcolonial” or “new historicist.” I felt more comfortable talking about Andrew Marvell’s metaphorical use of gardens, or enjambment in Robert Browning, than I did about such delicate subjects as race and nationality.

It seems to me now that essentialism is the thing that makes me a writer and, more important, a reader: the moment in fiction—I think of George Eliot and Alice Munro in particular—when the reader thinks, Yes—that is exactly how I felt, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen it written down before. Perhaps I hardly wrote in college because I had always imagined that when I did, I would sound somehow different from the way I sounded in real life. I expected to be stranger, more mysterious, and more complicated, like the writers I admired—Cormac McCarthy, William Gaddis, William Gass. Naturally, I was disgusted with what I first produced: realistic stories about girls growing up in families like mine. In my first fiction-writing classes, I solved the problem by cloaking these narratives in great clouds of mystifying language. No one would be able to accuse me of being ordinary or boring because no one, least of all myself, would be able to tell what I meant.

The first time I wrote honestly about an experience significantly different from my own was in the story the State Department approved for distribution to the students in Shanghai. I hadn’t felt that there was anything wrong with choosing to write from that perspective—a young Indian man who’d grown up in Bombay—any more than I had in another story, from the point of view of an American man my father’s age who had fought in Vietnam. I wrote about these characters because of what they had in common with me—both were writers—and didn’t bother too much about what was different. But afterward I wondered: Can a young person write as an older person? Can a woman write as a man? Can a Chinese author take on an American perspective, and if so, can an American write from a Chinese point of view?

I finally had this question answered for me in Kunming, the capital of the pleasant southern province Yunnan, where the teachers warned me that the students would “not be like the ones in Beijing and Tianjin.” “Speak more slowly,” they instructed. “Don’t read from your book—just tell them what the stories are about.” In the late morning, about sixty students filed into a large, open classroom with tiers of wooden seats. I stood behind a podium, in front of a sign welcoming me (author of “Luky Girls”) to Kunming. After my talk, as the students were filing out, a young man passed me a note.

“Not from me,” he whispered, and disappeared:

To Nell,

I’m sorry that I was mind-absent sometimes during your talk, so I missed much. It’s strange that I think Emily Dick-son must be a lady like the very girl standing on the platform, shy, sensitive and intelligent.

You said you are hesitate when asked what you do. Well, ask yourself do you really like writing? Do you enjoy yourself in that process? Emily left us her best poems even after withdrew from social communication. A poet is a poet as long as she is writing poems, why bother to definite yourself? Write as long as you feel like.

Sincerely yours,
Renée

The comparison to Emily Dickinson is charming—it’s true that I am female, Caucasian, and not a particularly avid partygoer—but unfortunately belongs to a gentle Chinese tradition of prefacing criticism with excessive praise. I had designed this talk for students at my own high school, whose primary anxieties were about how the choices they made now would affect their futures. Certainly there are many students in China who are consumed by exactly these worries. But there are also young people all over the world, like “Renée,” who are prematurely wise. My talk was about the “choices” I had made in relation to writing; I forgot that you don’t make choices when you’re writing. You can write in a way that’s unnatural to you, but you can’t do it for very long. Sooner or later you find yourself writing as yourself, no matter how different that self ends up looking on the page. From childhood I remember English teachers talking about the importance of creativity, of “expressing yourself,” but you don’t write in order to express yourself. (That happens naturally, whether you like it or not.) You write because you feel like talking to someone; as soon as you no longer have anything to communicate, presumably you stop writing. You “write as long as you feel like.”

In all of the classrooms I visited, there were certain questions that inevitably got asked. Some of these were the type of thing I might have asked a foreign writer in America; we’re always curious to know what an outsider thinks of us—where we live, and our particular cultural obsessions:

“What is your impression of Guilin?”

“What are your views on Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain?”

And:

“I see you have taken some inspiration in India and Thailand. Would you like to come and take some inspiration in China?”

When I told this student that I was hoping to come back to China, she looked at the ceiling for a moment, and remarked, “Then . . . I hope your next book isn’t called Depressed Girls.”

Other questions were practical, about life in America and Americans. Because the English teachers at each university were often at a loss as to how to introduce a fiction writer who had published only one book and won no international prizes, their introductions often fell back on the fact that I had graduated from Harvard. (Like Ernest Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain, Harvard University enjoys widespread name recognition in China. A book called Harvard Girl, a mother’s recollection of everything she did during her daughter’s childhood to ensure that the girl would eventually go abroad to study there, has sold 1.5 million copies.) By the time I’d done three or four presentations, I was sick of answering questions about Harvard.

“Describe Harvard,” one bored-looking male student in Kunming asked, as soon as I finished my talk.

“What specifically are you interested in?”

He looked at me as if he were talking to a small child. “How to apply there,” he said.

In Shanghai, at a university that had been described to me as the “Yale of China,” an extremely well-spoken student, who spiked his speech with “ums” and “you knows”—not in the lazy way of native English speakers, but as a kind of colloquial flourish—ventured a more abstract question: “In New York City, um, you know, if there is a Chinese boy? And he is very handsome and very smart, and also very rich? And an American girl is, um, you know, in love with him. Well, my question is, will she tell him that she loves him—or will she . . . ”

His question, which had the entire class more attentive than they’d been until this point, was interrupted by a teacher in the front row, who stood up and preempted it: “Describe Harvard University for our students, please, and give us your opinion on how it compares to the ancient universities of Europe.”

So much for cultural exchange.

Even when the students were allowed to ask whatever they wanted, I often misunderstood the questions. At Nankai University in Tianjin, a female student raised her hand and asked whether it was important to have “heroes” in fiction. I spent some time talking about what I had learned from writing and literature teachers, and also from reading writers I admire. Reading, I told the student, was the only real way to learn to write.

“Does that answer your question?” I asked.

The student smiled and shook her head. “I mean, can a character in a story do bad things? Crimes or drugs or . . . other things? Or should the writer not put those things in stories, in case some reader might imitate them?”

This much more interesting question, which seemed to touch on the idea of censorship while phrasing it as a question about a writer’s responsibility to her readers, was impressive, but I was struck even more by the student’s willingness to correct me. At every Chinese university I visited, the desire to communicate on both sides was stronger than our shyness; of course, no communication is possible if we’re too timid to tell each other when we’ve been misunderstood.

In Kunming I had lunch with an especially engaging young teacher, who had just come from teaching a class on “business English.”

“Our textbook says Americans don’t care about families,” he told me apologetically. “They use the high divorce rate as evidence. But I don’t think that’s right?”

“That doesn’t seem quite right,” I agreed.

“Chinese writers don’t know about America,” he concluded with satisfaction.

“Most American writers don’t know about China,” I quickly countered, but the teacher was hardly interested in this banality. When I answered questions in China, I was careful to be safe. I wasn’t worried about “what the Chinese authorities would allow”—as soon as I got to China I could see that for a foreigner, almost everything is allowed—but I had the common traveler’s anxiety about making a cultural mistake and offending one’s hosts. My answers to people’s questions were often formulaic, and I found that they answered mine in the same way. Inevitably, the real opportunities came in listening to each other’s questions rather than getting the answers.

After lunch, I went to the student bookstore, where I looked for and couldn’t find the “business English” textbook. Instead I bought a book called Colloquial English, which, like my Chinese textbook, is made up of dialogues, reading-comprehension questions, and grammar exercises. Unlike my Chinese textbook, the book is focused in particular on colloquial language, designed to help students speak like real Americans—Americans such as “Batty” and “Harry,” who show up in dialogues throughout the book:

BATTY: Tell me, Harry. Do you think Jenny has been playing a game? I have a hunch that she is trying to get closer to Mark.

HARRY: It’s very clever of you. Now you see a better picture of the game. Mark has been on the gravy train. He’s rolling in money these days.

BATTY: But Mark never goes steady with any girl. He may also be playing the field with Jenny.

HARRY: But Jenny is not the one who can be fooled. Mark will be outfoxed, I bet.

Colloquial English is precious to me—more precious than the scroll painting of a water buffalo I received as a thank you present in Tianjin, or the “Beijing Normal University” fountain pen, or the Miao minority embroidered purse from Yunnan University. It has the appeal of the children’s party game telephone, the unbelievable slipperiness of language. “To have another thing coming,” becomes “to have another think coming,” and is translated into Chinese as da cuo te cuo, which my Chinese teacher roughly translates back: “big mistake, especially mistake.” The book represents how far we’re going to have to go in my lifetime, in order to understand both the dangers and the spectacular possibilities of the glib media word globalization. I’m not sure whether two people asking each other “Do citizens of your country care about their families?” qualifies as “strategic communication;” on the other hand, it feels like a place to start. Sometimes it seems like a miracle that we can understand each other at all.

3.

When my grandparents took my father to Eastern Europe in 1962, they drove a black Mercedes that they had rented in Munich.

“But a Mercedes there was just like a Ford here,” my ninety-seven-year-old grandmother reminded me, when I asked her what she remembered about the trip. The frugal middle-class habits of the Freudenbergers are one of my grandmother’s preoccupations, along with our refined southern heritage. (The reality is almost exactly the opposite: No one in the family is particularly frugal, and according to my late great-uncle Rob, an amateur genealogist, the Freudenbergers come from a long line of “horse thieves and Tennessee dirt farmers.”)

On the road from Skopie to Titograd, the car broke down. My father and his father, whom he called Joe, went to the state tourist office, leaving Mummy and the Ford-like Mercedes “in a peasant’s front yard.”

“She offered me some native wine,” my grandmother told me. “Of course I declined.” (My grandmother is a strict Baptist, proud of the fact that she’s never tasted even communion wine; in her church, they substitute grape juice.) “I couldn’t speak to her, but I rubbed my stomach to let her know. She understood me too!”

My grandmother remembered every detail of that breakdown: the gasoline coupons necessary for the tow truck and the names of passengers picked up along the way—a French family visiting relatives in Romania, who lent them small change and then refused to be reimbursed. The amount of space my father devoted to the breakdown in his journal suggests that for him, too, it was one of the most memorable events of the trip. He recalled Mr. Christian’s description of their “miserable” relatives in Romania: “The tourist who goes behind the Iron Curtain, and does not have relatives to visit, doesn’t see the bad side of communism.” My father disagreed—the only time in the journal that he broke intellectual company with the adults around him:

One of Christian’s brothers in Rumania confided in him that eventually, he feels, the satellite countries will get a chance to defect to the west, that the people are miserable under the commies.

They don’t seem miserable in the countries we’ve seen. The commies seem to have raised the living standards and have certainly got rid of the royalty—which is good. But the lack of initiative the people show, how they seem unable to advance except through party channels, and the necessity of governing the people’s republic through police-state measures seem to be the worst aspects of com’m.

What is the thing that sends us halfway around the world, makes us risk bad roads and unfamiliar food, not to mention sad faces and cold stares? Is it the desire to communicate? What makes communication across language and cultural barriers so thrilling, particularly to a family like ours—a family that, whatever else it might be, is full of awkward, shy people who are perhaps happier writing down their experiences than they were while they were having them?

We travel in order to cultivate ambivalence. Because we will never know what it’s like to be someone else—our fathers, our neighbors, a farmer halfway across the world—doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t imagine and fail. Each act of imagination gives us, if not another experience, then another window on our own. It makes us sit up straighter, smooth our hair, think a moment before we open our mouths. On the bad road from Skopie to Titograd, my father and his parents had one of those sudden realizations common among travelers, and became aware of the eyes around them:

The Germans are said not to be well-liked here, although we have seen no open signs of it. Since our car is German, we brought a small American flag, which we stuck up on the back ledge with chewing gum.