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"By late 1981, I had settled into the challenges of living in
Beijing. Housing had become a particular challenge.
For some time, I had lived in the rundown QianMen Hotel. There were simply no apartments
available for the new influx of foreign businessmen,
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diplomats and journalists now beginning to
flock to Beijing. All housing for foreigners had to be approved by the government service bureau
set up to assist and monitor "foreign guests."
While in 1982, it was now alright to visit Chinese friends in their homes, a practice impossible
just a few years earlier, local authorities would not permit foreign guests to live in a Chinese
home or rent in a Chinese neighborhood.
(I had a few Chinese friends who had small but tidy rooms which might have been rented, but for
the most part no one had even a few feet of extra living space.)
When China's first joint venture hotel, the Jianguo, a low rise structure modeled after a Palo
Alto, California Holiday Inn, opened its doors, anxious for a modern place to live, I was one of
the first guests in the door.
With its European restaurant "Justine" and its duplex hotel suites, it was posh by Beijing
standards.
It seemed like any international hotel anywhere. Yet of course it was not just
anywhere. This was
China and while the doors of the new hotel and those of the nation were certainly opening, I soon
learned that in 1982, the rules of personal conduct in this communist party ruled land were still
fixed in an earlier time.
Chinese officialdom still sternly frowned on marriages between Chinese and
foreigners. The law
forbade liaisons outside of marriage. Without special permits, Chinese were still prevented from
entering international hotels or the compounds where foreigners lived.
In November 1981, Chinese police arrested and then sentenced to hard labor a 24 year old woman
for the crime of living with a French diplomat.
Li Shuang, an avant garde artist, thought she had permission to marry a 33 year old French Embassy
attaché. Instead, one morning police dragged her away from the gate of the compound where he lived
and hustled her into a prison van.
Falling in love is always dangerous, falling in love with a Chinese woman could be very hazardous
indeed. Hazardous most of all for her.
But how about a Canadian born Chinese?
Colleen Leung and I met at the end of the "Gang of Four" trial in 1981 and we had become good
friends and companions.
The trial was the ultimate communist political show trial. A settling of scores in a pseudo legal
environment, as the forces of supreme leader Deng Xiaoping brought to account Jiang
Qing, the
widow of Chairman Mao Zedong and three of her supporters - Yao Wenyuan, Zhang Chunqiao and Wang
Hongwen.
Reporters in Beijing at the time had no access to the courtroom a block from Tiananmen Square. But we were permitted to screen carefully selected video tapes of the trial at the studios of China Central Television in an old Russian looking, wedding cake building.
Colleen worked at CCTV as what was called at the time a "foreign expert."
She saw herself, perhaps naively, as coming to China to serve in small way "the motherland." Her
service consisted largely of translating and polishing CCTV English language transitions (and in
the case of the Gang of Four trial making party dogma somehow more palatable to the Western ear.)
Like many Huaqiao or overseas Chinese, she sought to fit in, to be a part of a modernizing China.
As she wrote later: "I was a Chinese girl from Canada who wanted more than anything to be a Real
Chinese person. But with perfection of the act came more trouble than I bargained for."
Unwittingly, Colleen and I were about to fall a foul of Chinese laws on "co-habitation."
She was accused of shaming the Chinese people. In our little way we were about to find out about
Chinese "settling of scores in a pseudo legal environment."
And one "Da biza" or "big nosed" reporter came to find out what it was like not to write a story
but be the story.
The "Jianguo Hotel incident" was splashed across newspapers worldwide.
A particularly colorful account in the Washington Post ended up on the front page of the International Herald Tribune.
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