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3 1 The Occidental Tourist For more than forty years China has been my drug of choice. From time to time there have been experimental forays into other stimulants, but China has always produced the most reliable high. When you find something that works, that doesn’t lose its kick or require stronger doses over time, you stick with it. As a Jewish American kid growing up in Los Angeles, I had no particular predisposition toward China or the Chinese. My parents were the offspring of Russian and Eastern European immigrants. Before graduating from high school, the closest I ever came to Chinese culture was Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, and the egg rolls at Madame Wu’s Cantonese Garden; the only pearls of ancient Oriental wisdom I encountered were the fauxConfucian platitudes embedded in said Madame Wu’s fortune cookies. After starting at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1957, I floundered for a while as a pre-law major, taking some constitutional law classes and pitching for the freshman baseball team. In the middle of my sophomore year I realized that law was not for me and switched to political science. I also joined a campus fraternity, but I soon tired of the bloated, beery bravado of the “brothers” and dropped out after one year. By then, chronic bursitis in my left shoulder had put an end to my pitching aspirations . I tried playing first base for a while but just couldn’t hit the curve ball. After batting only .167 in half a dozen intrasquad games, the baseball coach, Art Reichle, called me aside and told me I was being cut from the varsity. I was crushed. For two years at UCLA my grades were mediocre—mostly Bs and Cs. 4 the occidental tourist Like so many other students then and now, I was adrift, lacking motivation . But being cut from the baseball team helped focus my attention. At around the same time, the end of my sophomore year, I began dating my future wife, Carolyn Paller—a community college transfer student who carried an intimidating 4.0 grade point average. Her academic success stirred my competitive juices, and in my junior year I began studying in earnest. I took a couple of courses on international relations and found them to my liking. One of my professors, a gentle, grandfatherly Scotsman named Malbone Graham, took me under his wing. I began to blossom, and my grades showed distinct improvement. But it was not until my senior year that I accidentally stumbled into the course that would ultimately change my life. With baseball practice no longer part of my daily regimen, I had a part-time job as a storeroom clerk at the UCLA Student Health Service. Because of my work schedule, I needed to find a Tuesday-Thursday afternoon class that would count toward my major in political science. As it happened, the only one offered that semester—the spring of 1961—was Poli. Sci. 159, “Government and Politics of China.” Such are the banal roots of life-altering events that Chinese politics, far from being a calling, was in the first instance merely a scheduling convenience. The professor, H. Arthur Steiner, was a crusty old geezer, a former Marine Corps colonel who had displayed no particular interest in China prior to being assigned to the U.S. liaison force that landed at Tianjin, in Northeast China, at the close of World War II. Professor Steiner was a real piece of work. Rigid and demanding, brooking no nonsense from students, he was the closest thing to a drill instructor I ever encountered. But he was a challenging teacher, and his stories about postwar China were fascinating . He definitely got my attention. The first book we read in Steiner’s class was Red Star over China, Edgar Snow’s engrossing tale of the early years of the Communist revolution, including the first authorized biography of Mao Zedong and a blow-byblow account of the Red Army’s epic 1934–36 Long March. It was utterly captivating—a real-life adventure of derring-do, featuring Mao and his heroic band of Red Army guerrillas repeatedly outwitting and outmaneuvering Chinese Nationalist generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his much larger but inept anti-Communist forces. When I told my father about Red Star over China, he was, to say the least, skeptical. A union shop steward in the Hollywood film industry, he [3.133.121.160] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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