The Road Not Taken
Did the China triplack kuan-hsi?
We hadn't actually packed our bags yet, but we certainly were beginning to think seriously about what to take. And I don't suppose the bad news would have been easy to take at any point, but the psychological moment seemed especially un- fortunate: The day before the letter came, "there had been a party for the Hanover contingent of the trip, and I had just begun reading with special anticipation Orville Schell's marvelous New Yorker piece on his eight-week stay in China. Suddenly, after a year of planning, working, and getting our hopes up, we weren't going.
What made us think that we could get an alumni tour of China off the ground in the first place? The seeds of the idea were planted as long ago as November 1973, when Dartmouth played host over a Thanksgiving weekend to an official delegation of Chinese educators (ALUMNI MAGAZINE, January 1974). Those seeds began to sprout in my mind as I saw increasing numbers of my friends, in and out of Sinology, leaving for what was becoming the standard three-week Friendship Tour of the People's Republic. If they can go, I reasoned, why can't I? And if Dartmouth can play host to China, why can't China play host to Dartmouth? So the sprouts began to blossom into a proposal that I thought would produce benefits both for the College and for the larger cause of Sino-American amity.
As one in his stable of speakers, I had gotten to know Mickey Stuart '7l, then director of Alumni College, pretty well, so after I had done enough checking around to become convinced that the idea was at least plausible, I broached the subject with him. His response was a brief moment of incredulity that grew into a broad smile. "Why not?" he said, "Let's do it." The next step was up to him. He checked around with various members of the administration, and tested the waters in Crosby Hall: Would it be good for the College, and for the alumni? Could we do it? He found green lights everywhere he turned. Then a moment of doubt crept in. What if we got it all together, and then couldn't go? Would we all wind up with egg on our faces, trying to explain things to an angry group of would-be participants? If we failed, would the disappointment hurt other alumni programs? We thought for a long time about those questions, and finally decided to go ahead; we felt that as long as we were honest about the chances of the tour being turned down by the Chinese authorities, we couldn't really lose, and if we went it would be fantastic If nothing else, we would all learn a lot
In the spring of 1976 the program got going in earnest. After much consultation with people who had taken trips to China much reading of travel memoirs guidebooks, and everything else we could get our hands on, Mickey Stuart and I composed a long letter to China. We started from ground zero. We explained what and where Dartmouth College is what our Alumni Seminar program is all about. We mentioned the Chinese delegation that came to Dartmouth and our desire to reciprocate. Then we asked the big question: Could we visit China for three weeks in the spring of 1977? The letter, and all subsequent ones, went to Luxingshe, the China International Travel Agency, with copies to the Chinese Liaison Office in Washington.' Even the address had a nice ring to it: East Changan Street, Peking.
Word came back in less than a month, and it was at least not discouraging. Enclosed, said Luxingshe (we never did find out the name of the person we were corresponding with), is a China Tour Booking and Registration Form. Please tell us when you want to come, give particulars about all participants, and we'll let you know.
We had decided on the spring of 1977 to give us plenty of time to make arrangements, and also because spring is said to be very beautiful in eastern China. We zeroed in on April, overlapping into May just enough to catch the May Day festivities in Peking. It had been agreed long since that the trip would be run as a Dartmouth Seminar, with me along to give a short course in modern Chinese history to a group of alumni willing to do some serious reading beforehand and treat the whole trip as an educational experience, not just a vacation. But were the alumni interested?
To find out, we placed a half-page ad in the September ALUMNI MAGAZINE. In bold white-on-black, the characters Chung-kuo (China) fairly leaped off the page; underneath was the confident legend, "Dartmouth Alumni College Visits The People's Republic of China." The caveat, "subject to approval by the Chinese authorities," was tucked away in the text. Would 24 alumni, we wondered, be willing to set aside $3,000 for a trip to China that might not actually go?
We needn't have worried. By late September, shortly after Steve Calvert '68 took over from Mickey Stuart in the Alumni College office, the phone began to jump off its hook. Letters of inquiry poured in. There was enough interest so that we had to have a way of separating the truly interested from the merely curious. How many would put a hundred dollars out front to get on the list?
The tour quickly was oversubscribed by more than 100 per cent. That made a delicate job for Crosby Hall - how to say no to half the applicants. We had requested from everyone certain information required by the Chinese (including questions about religious and political affiliations rather intrusive by our standards), and a short essay stating why one wanted to go to China. That gave us something to go on. But in the end the list of participants and alternates was set up in a balancing act involving many people, with the main goal of presenting the Chinese with as broad a cross-section of Dartmouth as possible. Male and female, Florida to Tokyo, New Hampshire to southern California, Class of '25 to Class of '77 - Dartmouth in miniature. A couple of slots, from a permissible total of 24, were filled in advance.
Vice President Ruth Adams signed up and became the ranking College person on board. Dean of the Faculty Leonard Rieser '44 had signed up, but later had to withdraw. I was to go as tour leader. Asian Studies major Ann Peters Duffy '77 was recruited as tour assistant for her Chinese-speaking talents, and the faculty Committee on Graduate Fellowships contributed a small grant to help finance her participation. Some others seemed to have a special claim: Jerry Mitchell '51, head of the Dartmouth Travel Bureau, was accepted on the tour and put to work figuring out itineraries and making air and hotel bookings. Stanley Smoyer '34, former head of the Alumni Council, seemed likely to add a cachet of authority to the group in the eyes of the Chinese. The remaining places on the list quickly were filled.
Vitae for all of the participants had to be typed and sent with all of the other paperwork to Peking. A reading list was compiled, and books sent out to the participants so that they would be up on their quotations from Chairman Mao when the trip set forth. Passports began to accumulate in the Alumni College office, and people began renewing their smallpox vaccinations. Just before the application went in to Peking, a strategy session was held. We decided that an assistant professor of history didn't have enough clout to impress the Chinese as tour leader, and besides we'd heard that they didn't much like the idea of groups being led by their own accompanying China expert. So Ruth Adams, as senior person, found herself our designated leader, and I wound up as something called "accompanying faculty lecturer." We'd done all we could, and suddenly there was nothing left to do but wait.
Wait, and hope, and make tentative plans. What was the weather like in Peking in April? What clothes does one wear in a People's Republic? Gertrude Bettman, wife of a Hanover alumnus, asked for a brief Chinese lesson in her "three essential phrases" - "Please," "thank you," "where's the ladies' room?" - and I began writing out a small friendship speech for Ruth Adams to memorize, syllable by syllable. Attacks of nerves set in, too. Had China recovered enough from the Great Earthquake to allow groups in again on a regular basis? What would be the effect of unsettled political conditions - the death of Chairman Mao, and the campaign against Mao's widow and the Gang of Four?
At last, a bare month before we were due to leave, the letter arrived in my mailbox. I didn't want to open it. I didn't have to. It was too thin. An acceptance letter would have been a fat one - stuffed with booking forms, visa applications, more paperwork. I opened it, read what I already knew it would say, and walked over to Steve Calvert's office so we could start breaking the bad news to our comrades.
That would be the end of the story but for a curious phrase in the letter from Peking: "As too many requests are sent in by foreign friends to visit China and too limited are our facilities to accommodate them, we are not yet in a position to meetyour request ..." (my emphasis). Immediately I wrote back to Peking to find out what that meant. I'm still waiting to find out if my optimistic interpretation of that phrase is correct - and if the Chinese might later be in a position to accommodate us. Hope springs eternal.
What are we missing out on? I think the sight that I'll miss most is of the young fields of spring rice in the Yangtse River Valley, the greenest, most beautiful green there is. We won't see the Great Wall, the only one of man's works visible from the moon, or the imperial Summer Palace with its infamous Marble Boat. (The Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi built a boat-shaped marble tea pavilion in the midst of a lake by expropriating the national naval budget for 1894. A friend of mine who visited China last year was told by his guide, "It was good that she did that. If the money had been used to build warships they would have been sunk by the Japanese, but now the people can enjoy this nice pavilion.") We won't see an operation performed under acupuncture analgesia in a Peking hospital, or visit the Shanghai shipyards, or be welcomed by the singing and dancing of children at a commune school. We won't see a museum full of treasures unearthed by the archaeologists of New China, or drive along the Grand Canal, a thousand miles long and a thousand years old. There are enough disappointments to fill a long list for each of us. But we won't complain about under-heated hotel rooms and impossibly crowded schedules; we won't drink a thousand cups of green tea while dozing through Revolutionary Committee indoctrination lectures, and that's something.
Was it all worth it? The answer so far seems to be yes. For the small nonrefundable part of their deposit, par- ticipants got more than their few good books on China and the temporary incentive to read them. Irv Bettman '31 says that reading the books was almost like being there. And besides, half the pleasure of a trip is in the anticipation. Upbeat commiseration was the mood when the Upper Valley contingent of the trip gathered early in April to discuss might-have-beens over a Chinese dinner. (All would-be participants on the trip are welcome to the same if they ever visit Hanover; I immodestly bill myself as the best non-native Chinese cook in the Upper Valley.)
In the short time since the bad news arrived, I've been asked a couple of times to play China-watcher and come up with the "real reasons" why our group was turned down. Short of resorting to divination, I can't think of any way to come up with a solid answer. One lesson seems to be that even a year is not enough lead time for planning such a trip, and next time around we will try getting our final application papers in many months in advance of our proposed travel date. Beyond that, as far as we know we did everything right, so there's no way to know what went wrong. In dealing with the People's Republic of China, one confronts a faceless bureaucracy that does not feel at all constrained to justify its actions to outsiders. Even in terms of broad policy trends, no foreign expert can say for sure exactly what is going on in China; when it comes to a small and specific issue, such as why the Dartmouth Alumni College tour was rejected, there is nothing that one can do but guess.
A few days ago I told a friend, one of the lucky ones who's already been to China that our group had been turned down "Not enough kuan-hsi," he replied sagely Kuan-hsi means "connection," and like the English word, it has a double meaning. Was a Dartmouth Alumni College tour simply not relevant enough for the Chinese to want to say yes? Or is it that we lack the pull to get ourselves in? We don't know yet. What we do know is that sometime, after we've had time to fall back and re-group, we're going to try again. And one day, after we've tried hard enough and mustered up enough kuan-hsi, "Dartmouth Alumni College Visits the People's Republic of China" will be a simple statement of fact, and the road not taken will be just a bit "less traveled by."
