China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom

2. A Dissertation Is Not a Dinner Party

13 2 A Dissertation Is Not a Dinner Party Berkeley in the 1960s was a magnet for world-class social thinkers, and apart from my addiction to China I had developed an abiding interest in grand sociological theory. Like many of my classmates and teachers I was disposed to favor elegant, abstract concepts over messy, inconvenient facts. I was particularly enamored of the classical European sociologists Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Seventy years earlier they had predicted the inevitable triumph of secular industrial institutions and values—such as specialized labor, bureaucratic organization, and cost-benefit (i.e., instrumental) calculation—over the traditional, patriarchal institutions and absolute values of premodern agrarian societies and religious communities . By contrast, Mao Zedong was attempting to build a late-twentieth -century society of quasi-religious true believers, one in which “red” zealots held sway over technical and professional “experts,” where bureaucracy and hierarchy were denounced as devices for enslaving workers and peasants, and where instrumental calculations of personal cost and benefit were regarded as symptoms of “bourgeois individualism.” I was eager to test the practical limits of Mao’s utopian experiment against the predictions of grand sociological theory. There was just one fly in my ointment, albeit a very large one: Mainland China was off limits to American scholars. The U.S. government, in its infinite wisdom, continued to recognize Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime-in-exile on Taiwan, the Republic of China (ROC), as the authentic voice of 600 million Chinese. As the next best thing to doing research in China proper, I devised a plan to spend a year in the British Crown 14 a dissertation is not a dinner party Colony of Hong Kong, interviewing Chinese refugees and scouring local Chinese newspapers and magazines for evidence to support my principal thesis that Mao’s revolutionary, antibureaucratic ideology was profoundly incompatible with the structural requirements of running a modern industrial society. Unhappily for me, the Wise Men who administered my fellowship funds felt I wasn’t quite ready to be turned loose on Hong Kong. They thought my Chinese-language skills needed further refining and polishing , so they stipulated, as a precondition for my Hong Kong research, a preparatory year of full-time immersion language study in the Republic of China. A year in Taiwan: Take it or leave it. I took it. Arriving at Taipei’s Sung-shan Airport in the summer of 1966 in the wake of a grade-3 typhoon, with wife Carolyn and infant son Matthew in tow, my first reaction was one of dismay. Walking across the tarmac we got soaked to the bone, while all around us people were chattering away in an abrasive, incomprehensible dialect that sounded only vaguely and distantly like anything I’d ever heard before. I went into shock. After four years of intensive classroom language study, including private lessons with a tutor who spoke only the purest of standard Chinese (Mandarin) bell tones, I could not understand a word anyone was saying. Who were these people? What language were they speaking? Articulating slowly and haltingly in my formal classroom Chinese, I managed to communicate with an equally dismayed and uncomprehending taxi driver. I asked him to take us to an inexpensive hotel, whereupon he led us on a long and costly journey through the waterlogged streets of Taipei before depositing us in a seedy-looking neighborhood, in front of a neon sign flashing the Chinese characters fandian (飯店), which means “hotel.” Negotiating uncertainly with a puzzled-looking desk clerk, I secured a room, where the three of us dried out, bathed, and eventually fell asleep, exhausted by our ordeal. Only much later, when we were awakened in the wee hours of the night by incessant banging, creaking, and groaning through the walls and ceiling of our poorly insulated hotel room, did it slowly dawn on us that we had landed in one of Taipei’s notorious “bouncing tatami” hotels—a brothel. I now understood the desk clerk’s initial puzzlement. Welcome to Free China! After a mostly sleepless night, we spent the next day wearily hunting for a place to live. Discouraged by unrelenting rains that left low-lying a dissertation is not a dinner party 15 areas of Taipei under as much as three feet of water, we reluctantly called off our search in mid-afternoon. That evening we dragged ourselves to an orientation session for incoming graduate students...