by Hugh M. Lewis

I have undertaken somewhat belatedly the retelling of this story about our year in China. It is now distant enough to be no longer so painful. It is mostly just sentimental. It remains recent enough in our memories that the details have not completely been washed away by the tides of time. Many of the minor details have probably slipped between the cracks of time. Other books were written, other places visited subsequent to that year. Our year there, from the summer of 1998 to1999, was perhaps unusual, and perhaps common in many ways to the experiences of many Americans who seek to live in China. Many others have written well about their episodes with trying to teach English in China. Most noteworthy are the books Coming Home Crazy and River Town: Two Years on the Yangtse, both of which are much better written and more interesting than this monograph. The best I accomplished on coming home was to put a collection of verse, mostly written in China or shortly thereafter, into a small collection entitled The Great Wall. In this case, the Great Wall was of course a somewhat ironic metaphor of the sinocentrism and cultural closure of the Chinese.

It has not been my intention to write yet another travelogue of an American's year in China. Numerous Americans have no sojourned to China--all had probably very similar and yet very unique experiences. It has not been the intention of this work to criticize the Chinese government or people--there is no people without contradiction or who are beyond criticism. The object of this book was to tell an allegorical tale, largely in the first-person, of a journey to the heart of China. If it is allegorical, it is meant to be so on a number of levels. Intending to do one kind of structured Anthropology primarily, we ended up doing several different kinds of conventional ethnography unconventionally and unintentionally. It was an allegory of ourselves, as Americans lost in China, as much as it was of China, for I do believe we looked more foolish in Chinese eyes than they appeared in ours.

I went primarily as an Anthropologist, and secondly as a teacher of ESL. I was professionally conscientious and foolish enough to try to combine both agendas into a single integrated research design--Second Language Acquisition patterns and the application of symbolic framing techniques developed earlier during my doctoral fieldwork. Little did I know that the Chinese authorities did not share my same interests. They really only wanted a native English speaking model for their students to practice on. They did not even really care about my teaching.

I remember having rather grandiose designs about the outcomes of our plans in China. Much of this was based upon the unrealistic media hype of the progressive and developed nature of China. It is the China that the Chinese government, and the American government, want the American people to see. It is the China of the Bunt of Shanghai and white-washed Tinniamen square of Beijing. Rarely is a glimpse had of the conditions of the interior of China, and distant from our imagination and our experience are the realities of the Chinese interior.

Surprisingly, plans in China could have succeeded, beyond even what I may have realistically hoped for. Connections were finally made. The veil of bureaucratic secrecy was lifted somewhat in time. But by then, my family was in major disrepair, and I could not entertain realistically continuing in that mode with my family in tow. The May bombing incident brought out the true tenuousness and vulnerability of our presence in China, and showed to me clearly how fickle and merciless were International affairs that could turn on a dime.

In the year we were in China we met no other Americans except for a couple early on. We talked only with Chinese and dealt only with Chinese on their terms. As usual, we were there just long enough to start not feeling so uncomfortable about many things characteristic of China--the spitting, the dirtiness of the streets and some of the people, the common place poverty, etc. Just as we were really beginning to get adjusted, after a mostly uncomfortable year, we were suddenly on the train going back the other direction. It ended almost as suddenly as it began, and with as little fan fare.

In spite of frustration of communist authorities and manipulation by school authorities, who, once having my signature on their contract, were no longer very interested in my research, we did manage to accomplish meaningful work in China upon a number of levels. In spite of the May bombing incident that came at precisely the time I was going to circulate my main symbolic framing battery among my students, other forms and levels of research were accomplished that I feel had significance of equal measure to any form of systematic or quantitative work I could have done. Fieldwork came by small measures, and our ability to penetrate the screens of obfuscation that surrounded us at all times improved gradually as the days wore on. Surprisingly, it was disconformity and deliberately breakig frames that accomplished more than frustrated compliance that allowed us to be continue to be manipulated to our own ignorance and detriment. Things were learned in time, and more and more people came to us, as they learned to trust and confide in us, secrets and hidden stories that we would not otherwise have been privy to. It became possible, given the input of signals from a variety of sources, to piece together larger patterns of things that lay constantly in the background of people's everyday lives. We became able to make what I would consider to be reliable inferences from first hand evidence to larger frameworks in which such conclusions forced themselves at least by the logic of cultural agreement, closure, conservatism and reinforced conformity.

Hence, I quickly learned that it was probably unwise to carry a camera around and take photographs freely. We were very near several large military installations and bases, and it was evident as well that China harbors secrets in the many caves of its many mountains that it doesn't want the rest of the world to know about. What these secrets are is anyone's conjecture, but some kinds of conjectures seem more reasonable than others. It is not the best way of doing ethnographic fieldwork, but in circumstances such as were presented to us in China, it was perhaps the only way we had of conducting some kind of reasonable search without taking undue risks or appearing overly intrusive.

Certain ethical issues in conducting fieldwork in China emerged clearly in the foreground. No anthropologist, I believe, can conduct genuine and serious fieldwork in China without having to come to terms with similar kinds of issues. These issues pose an inherent dilemma for any ethnographer seeking to describe Chinese society in a realistic manner. At the same time, the limits of one's involvement and sense of obligation also becomes tested sorely by situations that at times calls for decisive action, and at other times, for careful calculation. For no anthropologist who has not conducted fieldwork in China would be qualified for determining off-hand the correct moral or ethical posture or determination to be made in situations that one inevitably encounters in China. Issues reflecting cultural relativity of values, humanistic values, and the values of serious academic conduct, can come into clear conflict with one another. Having had to deal with these dilemmas in the course of our year in that room in China, I believe I have emerged at the end of it a more enlightened anthropologist than how I went there to begin with. One cannot always even know what the right thing is to do in every single situation that arises, and yet one must invariable act, and hopefully in a decisive manner. I cannot any longer accept anthropology naively on faith in its scientific objectivity alone. At the same time, maintaining at least a presumption of such objectivity is necessary to the conduct of reliable fieldwork.

The central dilemma became for myself the question of carrying forward fieldwork upon different levels in spite obvious intentions and efforts of the Chinese authorities to prevent or obfuscate such work, even if such work may have put myself and my small family at some risk. This dilemma also came to focus on attempting to take into account the marginalized realities of excluded others I had met in China, realities that the communist authorities clearly did not want me to see. It is difficult for instance, to abide by rules and the sanctions of the Chinese authorities who gave me permission to work there, if these rules and sanctions entailed, for instance, the violation of our own basic rights and interests, much less the interests and rights of others. I found, for instance, that my role as a teacher of young and impressionable college students, intelligent but uninformed, was fundamentally different from my role as an ethnographer on one hand or as a family man and father on the other hand, and that sometimes these multiple roles came into contrast and contradiction to one another. At such times, do I put being an ethnographer before the needs and interests of my students or my family, or the needs of my family before or after the needs of my students. In the course of the year, these dilemmas created more than a little conflict between my wife and myself, upon which relationships the strains seemed to come to a focus, and at the same time, management in all three areas required a delicate balancing act, an acrobatic feat worthy of any Chinese circus, that did not always work out as I had intended.

The following is a day-to-day account of a year my small family and I spent in central China. My wife had made a silent pledge to herself to keep a journal from the day she left until the day she returned. My gratitude for her determination to carry this personal project through—we could not have foreseen or known ahead of time the events and circumstances that were to effect our lives following. When I realized what she was up to, I encouraged her in the project, and helped her with advice and information. I kept notebooks, but these were sporadic between my many teaching duties and often addressed other issues than the particulars of our daily lives. What follows is a construction after the fact of the year we were in China, using my wife’s journals, my own notes and recollections relating to particular events and episodes, and letters that were written back and forth. It is an honest account. I have chosen only to edit a few particular things that were of a private and intimate nature and therefore not the business of the rest of the world to share.

By early spring of 1998, my current employment had begun petering out. My relationship with my employer, whom I considered a friend, had slowly deteriorating since the previous summertime. I was finishing up the book for the Robidoux project and knew that it was time for us to move on. During the previous summer I had culminated a second phase of the project that consisted of putting together an extensive gallery display and informational exhibit relating to themes of the Robidoux and the fur trade. The restaurant and banquet hall in which this exhibit was situated was itself in the heart of Rendezvous country in Wyoming. He was expecting to make a lot of money real fast, especially with the Mormon trail event celebrating the 150 year founding of the Mormon church. Restauranteurs all over the area stocked up on steak and lobster in the hope that the Mormon trail days would bring an unusual amount of traffic through their front doors. When this did not happen, there was a natural reaction of great disappointment. In hindsight, I would say that it was at that point that Gordon had changed his mind about things. In late summer I took about a week off—the only vacation I had during the two years I worked for him—and I traveled to see the historical sites at Scott’s Bluffs, Fort Laramie, and then down to Delta, Colorado, to visit the Fort Uncompahgre there. It was a productive trip, and I found much helpful information and met new people. He had proven consistently unwilling to devote any substantial money into the project. Subsequent to our trip, we began building cabinets for display and a sign and a teepee to put out in front of the parking lot to attract more customers. Looking for significant directions to carry the project forward, I had through the previous six months come up with one set of ideas after the other, but each time he beat around the bush and backed down when it came to investing more than a few hundred into the project. I lined up several highly qualified people, at Gordon’s request, for one project after another, but each time, in the end, Gordon would back down and I would be left hanging between these people and Gordon’s interests. By November I told Gordon that the best thing to do was to simply finish writing the book, and then to let things happen as they may afterward. I realized then that Gordon was extremely difficult to deal with. Besides, I realized that, after a year and a half, he was offering me neither a pay-raise nor any longer term sense of security in the job. Besides, Uncle Sam had hit us pretty severely for back taxes, and this sunk my savings of the two years work with Gordon considerably, and I realized then that I wasn’t going anywhere very fast for all the work I was doing.

I worked through the winter months on the book, and had a rough final draft of it done by late February. It was still far to long—over a thousand pages—to easily print our selves, and I had to devote another couple of months to the final editing of the book. At the same time, Gordon was always calling me to help out with one facet or another of his project—earlier it had been to lay in some concrete behind his restaurant. Later it was to build a soda-fountain cabinet near his waitress area—it turned into two cabinets. I finished the copying of the book by about May, and waited around in June for all the binding supplies to arrive. I began the final binding of the book in the last weeks of June. We had printed about 52 copies, and the binding took several weeks to complete. It had grown hot then and it was our last days in Rock Springs. I had already quite Gordon in about mid May. I called him one evening to see about meeting that night down at the restaurant to finish up some window shelves in the central dining area. We had to work through the night in this area because it was crowded with customers most times of the day, seven days a week. He appeared disinterested about the project. Before finally hanging up, I mentioned to him in passing that I had found in research the copyright law like he had asked me to, that in fact I still retained copyright on the book as the original author of a creative text. He then accused me of trying to steal the book from him. He had long had it in his mind that he was going to finally capitalize on this book. It would be a best seller, make millions of dollars, and Robert Redford would buy the rights for the book to make another mountain-man movie like Jeremiah Johnson. I became angry with Gordon—I told him that he wanted me to research the law, and that I was simply reporting what I had learned about it. But, angry, I told him I quit. I did not see him again for a couple of weeks, when he came around inquiring about the book. Our friendship was broken, and though I treated him decently and even kindly, we both knew there could be no salvaging the situation.

It was in about May that I had begun looking for another job. I wrote off a few applications to colleges in the U.S., and subscribed to a newsletter announcing foreign positions. I found an ad in the Chronicle of Higher Education, to which I had subscribed for the hell of it since the previous summer. It announced teaching jobs in central China. It gave minimum requirements, which I clearly met, and an address to send a query letter with transcripts and letters of recommendation. On a whim, since I had extra copies of everything, I sent in the materials. I had, before coming to Rock Springs in 1996, been involved with my mentor back in Missouri with the idea of doing post-doctoral fieldwork in China. I had written off a couple of grant applications, and made contact with one individual in China, but it did not pan out, like everything else at the time. I had no serious intention of working in China, but I had already applied to another foreign university and thought, what the hell, at least we wouldn’t be in Rock Springs any longer.

Several months later I was surprised to get a letter of acceptance from the Chinese for teaching. It was the first positive response I had gotten from any application in the last several years, after almost four hundred such applications. It told me that their authorities would soon be contacting me in the near future. By then, I had gotten on the Internet. We had bought a new Dell computer in February, and one of my first projects was to build for Gordon a new web-site. It took a couple of weeks to learn, but I soon had it figured out. I received notice of an offer to work at a college in Zhengzhou, China, just before we were returning to Los Angeles to visit my mom for a week in June. By then I was no longer being paid by Gordon, and we had little else to do while waiting for our binding supplies to come in. The offer for employment in China was attractive to me because I thought it would give us an opportunity to further the kind of research I had been doing several years previously. It offered us a furnished apartment and a vacation. It was attractive even for my wife, until we found out how low the pay was relative to comparable pay in the U.S. I was not sure to decide, and sent back an e-mail telling them that I would make my final decision when I returned from California. We went to California and I discussed it with my Mom and family for several days. When we got back to Rock Springs I sent them a letter right away advising them of my intention of accepting their offer. They soon wrote back a note saying that the offer had been given to someone else. I found this very difficult to take since I had already made up my mind and was preparing, even then, for our departure. Without prospects for a job, my world and sense of security came suddenly crashing down around me. I had made up my mind to leave Rock Springs. I sent back another letter in query asking if other schools might have openings. The Foreign Affairs person told me that she would check into the matter and come back to me later. That was my first acquaintance with how the Chinese worked.

One day, a couple of weeks later, I received an e-mail from a medical university—an offer of acceptance for a position that was even better than the previous offer. I immediately accepted this offer, but received no reply for several more days. Then, late that night, the telephone woke me up early in the morning and some Chinese man on the other line was telling me that I was to sign a contract with his school. I had never heard of it before then and I told him that I was supposed to be working for another school. He told me not to worry about it but to receive by fax the contract of employment with his school, and to send it back to him immediately. The next day I received an e-mail message from the Medical University telling me that the job had been given to someone else. So I reluctantly agreed to the third school, though I was not clear as to the full or exact terms of the contractual offer at the time. I was told on the phone that it would be the same as my previous offer. Unfortunately for us, that was our first, but not our last, acquaintance with Mr. Zhou.

The next couple of days were spent trying to get the medical examinations that cost us nearly $400 U.S. The Chinese required an official seal or chop—chops are important in the Chinese system, as they have been for thousands of years, but not in the American system—convincing them of this was difficult to do, and even the signature and seal of a notary public authenticating the records and our identity was not enough to satisfy the authorities in China. We were advised then that we may have to get higher level certification of our records through the State Department. I realized then that it would probably be better to do so in Los Angeles than in Rock Springs, and so we timed our departure from Rock Springs as soon as we could manage.

A couple of days later, I received another e-mail from the Foreign Affairs person at the second Medical University. He wanted me to break my agreement with the Teacher’s College and to desperate come to his college. They had even decided to create a special teaching position for us there at the schools, so much did they like my letter and ideas for a teaching program in medical English terminology. It came down to a tussle between Mr. Zhou and this Medical School. Finally, though I told Mr. Zhou that I had to chose the Medical School program, he must have pulled strings for it was a day or to later that I received an e-mail from the Foreign Affairs person telling me that the decision was final that I would go to the Teacher’s college. Thus our fate was finally decided, but not conclusively. There was still a sense of uncertainty whether the medical records with the unofficial stamp of the doctor would be acceptable by the visa people at the Chinese embassy in Los Angeles.

Our last two weeks in Rock Springs were then spent hurriedly trying to finish binding the book, and to arrange the storage and moving of all our possessions. I did most of the moving by myself. We decided to sell off most of our larger furniture, and I decided to sell off most of my tools to make a little extra cash for us to spend. The final production costs of the book itself had taken most of our savings. Gordon paid only a small amount toward the final copying of a about 20 books, and I paid the balance that came to a couple of thousand dollars total. It was important for me though to put the book out, as I knew that it would be the only way of protecting my authorship and legal entitlement to the book afterward. I had already sunk two years of my life in to the project and the research.

Our landlady was also anxious to get us out early. We had given her a month’s notice and she found an eager renter. The last week was hectic for us. We had no furniture. Even the last two days we worked until the early morning hours to finish the binding of the book, and our electricity was cut off and we had to run a drop-light outside to the next-door apartment to finish the books. Fortunately, our friends from a nearby apartment fixed dinner for us two nights in a row. I did not get but a couple of hours sleep the last day before we left Rock Springs. I still had several van loads of boxes and things to move to our storage unit.

We waited around about 10 days to finally get our passports back from the embassy. During the entire time I was completely unsure of everything, and had great many second thoughts about getting back on the highway and turning around and going back the other direction towards Rock Springs. Even up until the day the passports came back to us by express mail, I was almost decided to abandon the entire idea of working so far away in China. But within a couple of days of receiving the passport, we had booked reservations for flying to China by the end of August, about a week before the semester was supposed to begin.

I would say that I had made up my mind to sojourn to China, to try to recover a sense of loss in the research I had been involved with for my dissertation, and it promised in this way far more than it actually paid. I also had a great deal of ambivalence and uncertainty about going there. I remember very clearly a dream that woke me up a couple of nights before our departure. There was a volcano on the land we were on, near the coast and it was bursting up through the ground in fissures. At the same time, a tidal wave was coming in from the sea and then a huge tornado funnel formed and raced towards our little wooden house on the hill. I remember hiding my family down low in the house as the tornado passed over us. I remember this dream left a poor taste in my mouth, but I dismissed it, as I was dismissing everything else at the time.

A couple of days before our departure, we made arrangements to purchase a new lap top computer and some new luggage for carrying our things. I had chosen to bring much of the research stuff I had in Malaysia, which added considerably to the weight, as well as a whole MacIntosh computer tower that filled the largest bag. I brought this because it was loaded with a special language program for teaching English to Mandarin speakers. I had been in correspondence with Mr. Zhou, but he would give me no direct or certain information about things to bring and not bring, about syllabi or anything. The fax bill afterward came to nearly $560. The only positive thing that happened during this period was that we found, after a morning of shopping, a very nice 4 piece set of luggage marked at $30 for close out, it being off-season.

So it was on Saturday, August 22^nd, 1998, the eve of our departure. We were both over-prepared and only partially prepared for our China experience, and not knowing quite what to expect next.