Bette Bao Lord`s roots go deep in China, where she was born, and in America, where she was raised. The natural blending of her roots and her writing talents-although she says with a laugh, ”I hated writing”-lend a sense of destiny to Lord`s books, which seek to give a personal focus to today`s complex and enigmatic China.
This week marks the one-year anniversary of the massacre in Beijing`s Tiananmen Square.
”When Americans saw the people in Tiananmen Square last year,” Lord said during a recent interview in Chicago, ”they saw just a sea of black-haired people. I felt that I had to write `Legacies` because I wanted to put faces and stories with what happened there.”
”Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic,” (Knopf, $19.95) is Lord`s fourth book. Just published, it has already climbed onto the New York Times best-seller list and been translated into 10 languages. The stories of brutal repression it tells come from an earlier era-Mao`s Cultural Revolution (1966-76)-and give a historical background for why a million Chinese filled Tiananmen Square last year to support the protesting students.
Lord`s husband Winston Lord was the American ambassador to China from November 1985 to mid-April 1989, so it was to the American Embassy in Beijing that Chinese from all walks of life came to tell their stories into her tape recorder. In the end, she had 600 tapes.
”I was lucky,” she says, ”because I was in China at the height of the openness.”
Lord holds the people who shared their painful ordeals with her in deep respect. ”Only a person who has suffered through great difficulties and who has a sense of self can do this,” she says. ”Ultimately, I think these stories are triumphant.”
Lord is acutely aware of the hand of destiny in her life. ”I have often thought,” she says, ”that if I had not left China, any one of these people in the book could have been me.”
In fact, some of the stories are of close relatives, including a dearly loved aunt, Goo Ma. A teacher when the Cultural Revolution began, Goo Ma was imprisoned by the Red Guards for six months in a windowless broom closet in her school.
”Each morning,” writes Lord, ”her students would strip her, make her kneel, place a steel rod across her calves and take turns jumping on it.”
When Goo Ma was not locked in the broom closet, she was taken to a huge stage and forced to spend hours in the ”takeoff position” (feet together, body bent at the waist, arms over her head and behind her back like wings)
while an auditorium of students jeered at her. She was beaten; to further humiliate her, her head was shaved, but only on one side.
What enabled her to endure, Goo Ma told Lord, was an anger so intense that it erased all other emotions. ”I vowed to live and see the day,” said Goo Ma, ”when I would be a teacher once more.” And she did.
”Even after her retirement years later,” says Lord, ”she still volunteered to help teachers.” Goo Ma died while Bette and Winston Lord were living in China.
Lord`s own life stands in vivid counterpoint to the Chinese people she writes about, and she is skillful at weaving its strands into the darker tapestry of their stories. Sometimes that includes a glimpse into the often unpredictable life inside the American Embassy.
One incident Lord relates concerns a Thanksgiving dinner she and Winston were hosting at the Embassy for 100 guests: A new Chinese chef cooked the turkeys and stuffed them-he says-”with onions ordered from America.” What onions? wonders Lord, and then discovers that the ”American onions” are in reality hyacinth bulbs sent to her by a friend.
”Grasping at straws,” she writes, ”I thought, `Maybe, just maybe, Chinese eat hyacinth bulbs.` ” Not so. A more dire thought enters her head:
Maybe the hyacinth bulbs are poisonous? With visions of 100 dead bodies under her roof the next morning, Lord places a frantic call to the Poison Control Center in Atlanta. Toss the stuffing, she is told, but eat the turkeys.
Bette Bao Lord had once planned to be a chemist-”You know,” she says,
”every Chinese child is supposed to grow up to be an `-ist,` as in
`scientist.` ” So when she arrived at Tufts College in 1954, she signed up for chemistry, where her lab work quickly made an impression on her professor. ”Leave my department and pass,” he told her, ”or stay and flunk.”
(”I was a bull in a china shop,” she admits.) She switched to history, then went on to get her masters in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston, where she met Winston. They married in 1963.
”In this day of Donald Trump and Ivana,” says Lord, who is now 52, ”I feel that the biggest success in my life is 27 years of wonderful marriage. Winston and I are a team. We don`t divide our lives male and female. I could not stand to change diapers (the Lords have two grown children) or walk the dog; he could not stand to do the taxes or hang pictures. So whoever objects the least does the unpleasant chores.”
Their dual careers have meant sweeping lifestyle changes for both of them. After Winston had spent eight years of 16-hour days working ”very, very closely” with Henry Kissinger during the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, he wanted to take a year off ”to be with the kids and recharge his intellectural batteries,” says Lord.
So in 1974 the family moved to Nederland, a tiny town in Colorado where none of them knew a soul. While Winston caught up on his reading and re-entered the kids` lives (Lisa was 10 and Win was 6), Bette began writing
”Spring Moon,” her second book.
Lord`s first book, ”Eighth Moon,” is the story of her youngest sister, Sansan, who was an infant and remained in China when the rest of the family immigrated to New York in 1946. Lord believed that Sansan`s story offered unique insights into modern China and tried to find someone to write it. When she could not, she decided to write it herself.
With her uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time, Lord was invited by a friend to attend a booksellers` convention (”We really went so we could load up on freebies,” says Lord). The friend introduced her to Cass Canfield, then head of Harper and Row. He took Lord aside and gave her five minutes to tell him the story she wanted to write, promising to publish it if he liked her idea. Harper and Row published ”Eighth Moon” in 1962 when Lord was only 23.
”But one pays, I think,” says Lord, a friendly, lively woman, ”for early successes, or unexpected successes or successes you don`t believe that you`ve earned. I was scared to raise a pen for the next 10 years. I didn`t write a thing. I had what they tell me is `imposter syndrome,` where you think that the next time they`ll find you out and pelt you.”
Her writing block gave way after 1973, when Lord made her first visit to China since she had come to America as a small child. ”At that time,” she says, ”there were very few visitors, and I was going to write a book about it.” But the political situation in China made her wary of exposing her family; since she owed Harper and Row a manuscript, she offered to do a novel for them instead.
Thus she turned to ”Spring Moon” (published in 1981). It took ”six long, long years” to complete it. ”Novels are like knitting a whole cloth,” she says. ”If you change this part, it affects everything else. There are no parameters or limits in novels. So you try everything, and you don`t know whether anything works until you`ve tried it. Many chapters I wrote 24 times before I said, `That`s right.` ” (After its publication, ”Spring Moon”
spent 31 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.)
Lord wrote her novel on her own unique schedule: from midnight to 6 a.m. weekdays. Then she would sleep. ”There was just too much going on in the day,” she says. ”I need quiet; I can`t even stand the buzz of my computer.” Winston got the children off to school in the morning; she took care of them in the afternoon.
The Lords` move to the American Embassy in China brought her full-circle. This time, it was her turn to adjust.
”I didn`t write when I was the ambassador`s wife,” she says. ”I had to give my all to doing that, and I didn`t resent it.”
When Winston Lord`s tour of duty ended in mid-April, he returned to the United States; Lord remained in Beijing as a consultant to the CBS television crew covering the Gorbachev-Deng Xaioping meeting and the student demonstrations.
Late one warm May night, Lord went with several Chinese friends to join the crowds in Tiananmen Square. Standing there, she felt the same exhilaration and hope that surged and spread beyond China to an astonished, watching world. It was ”China`s Spring”; at hand were long-dreamed of changes. When she left to join Winston in New York on May 30, she was certain that a dialogue between the students and the government leaders was at hand.
When four days later (a year ago to this day), tanks plowed into Tiananmen Square and soldiers turned their weapons against their unarmed fellow Chinese, Lord-like the rest of the world-was stunned. Watching the massacre unfold on television, she was determined to give voice to the Chinese she had come to know, now silenced through repressive government edicts.
”I wrote `Legacies` very quickly and easily,” she says, ”because I felt it urgent to get the information out.”
Lord has hope for the China of tomorrow. ”The mind-set has been broken,” she says, referring to the masses who decided to support the students instead of the government. ”Group think” is ending.
Yet the echoes of the painful revelations in ”Legacies” linger. A journalist told Lord this story from his youth: ”At the start of the Cultural Revolution, I was 13. I took my father`s army belt and joined other Red Guards going from home to home. The people were strangers to me, but all had been designated snake spirits and cow demons by their neighborhood committees. And so I beat them. . . . Even when I saw a man beaten to death, I thought it was normal.”
Lord does not believe that there can be another period of repression as pervasive and horrible as the Cultural Revolution.
”When the party shot into the crowds and at their own people in Tiananmen Square,” she says, ”their legitimacy was gone. The people are not reporting on each other on the whole; before, an anonymous letter could taint somebody`s life forever. Today, I think the government would want the people to hate one another and to be suspicious of one another, but I think those days are gone. I think a healing process has happened and that people are caring for each other.”
For now, however, China is a hard place. Bette Bao Lord, when asked if she knows what has happened to her friends in China since the Tiananmen Square massacre, replies, ”I do, but I don`t want to talk. I don`t want to get them in trouble.”
