John Pomfret Interview (2007): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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John, welcome back to Berkeley.
Thanks a lot. It's great to be back.
How did you come to write this book?
Well, at the end of my tour, my third time living in China in 2003, I very much wanted to write a book about China, had lived there on and off for the last twenty-some odd years. But I didn't want to do the normal correspondent thing which was to pull up all your really good stories and slap them together into a good book and put a theme on top of that and hope to have a good book to sell. I wanted to write something a little bit different.
I'd had this unusual experience as a foreign student in China in the early
eighties. 
The
photograph that's on the front cover of the book has followed me wherever
I've been, and a friend and I were looking at that photograph on my wall
one day and he said, "You know, that's really your book. Why don't
you go back and find those guys and write about them?" And so over
the course of 2003 - 2004 I went back and found all the people that I'd
lost touch with, and got closer to people who I'd kept in touch with, and
constructed a book about their lives as a way to write about how China's
changed since the late fifties and early sixties, until today.
We need to go back and talk a little more about your background, because you were uniquely situated. In the eighties you were an undergraduate at Stanford and you decided to go to China as an exchange student. In what year?
I made the decision to go in '79 and then the opportunity came to go in '80, so it was very early. I had just finished my junior year at Stanford and professors there encouraged me, even though they didn't have programs for undergraduates, to use any trick in the book to get there. An American Chinese professor at the Stanford linear accelerator had an old classmate in Beijing who was running the Beijing Language Institute. We started to write and he invited me to come to China. Visas took a long time then as well, but nonetheless it worked out and so I got a chance to go.
This was before you had decided you were going to be a journalist. You were just a student of Asian affairs. Had you already studied the Chinese language?
I studied one year of college Chinese, and then I took a year off to focus on complete academics and stopped language for a while. And then I took a summer at Berkeley and then I went to Beijing.
What was China like when you first arrived? This is before the wave of capitalism that was to come. Talk about that.
When we look at photographs today of Beijing and Shanghai, these amazing skyscrapers, these skylines right out of cartoons like the Jetsons, it's very difficult to believe that [at that time in] Beijing, the tallest building was maybe 14 stories. In Nanjing, the city where I went to university, the tallest building was less than 10. This was a desperately poor country. And the colors on the streets, the clothes people wore, were only blue and green. Occasionally you'd see children with colorful clothes but that was about it. The markets were empty, the shelves were bare. It was really a very, very dismal place. Dust hung over the air everywhere.
And no highways yet.
No highways, bicycles everywhere, very few private cars. A lot of these Eastwind trucks barreling up and down and through rutted streets, open sewers. It was a very pungent place, but fascinating nonetheless, especially for a kid who grew up in New York City.
And so the first question becomes, was this just your destiny? For a junior it must have taken a lot of gumption, and also a very inquisitive, exploring mind.
The Chinese have a term for it. They call it yuen fen, which is a term that means things that are fated to happen. It's a Buddhist terminology. I think that has a lot to do with it. I was just pushed in that direction. A variety of things worked together to put me on the road to going to China. Indeed, a year before, I'd applied to go to Taiwan to teach as a foreign student teaching English and I was rejected to do that, and if I hadn't been rejected I wouldn't have had the opportunity to go to the mainland, which was by far the most fascinating of the two experiences.
In terms of gumption, not so much. I was twenty-one, I was footloose, I wanted an adventure, and I was interested in China. At that time China was abuzz in the news. The Chinese had attacked Vietnam, Deng Xiaoping had come to America, we were normalizing relations, and so there was this buzz about China. It was the latest thing, as far as many of us were concerned. Going there was the hippest thing I could imagine.
One of the images that sticks out as I read the book was the lowly freshman, although you were a junior, arriving at the dorm. What was that like, experiencing this new way of life? Every undergraduate [experiences this] when they go off to college, but they're going off maybe to Stanford or the Ivy League, or a state university.
Well, this is a dorm like no other dorm I'd ever experienced. My first semester in China was doing language training, and so I was living with one other Westerner in a dorm that was relatively similar to the type of dorm you might have in America, pretty low standard, but the reason why I applied to go to Nanjing University was that I knew there you could live with Chinese -- not simply with a Chinese person living in a foreigners' dormitory but actually with foreigners living in a Chinese dormitory. And I wanted to do that, I wanted to have that experience, and they said yes, Nanjing University was the one place where you could do that. And so, in early February of 1981 I find myself in this dorm room, knocking open a door, and there are seven guys -- actually there were eight guys that day that I walked in -- four bunk beds, four tables, eight stools, and then all their clothes packed in these leather or cardboard briefcases shoved underneath their mattresses in their beds. The place was literally like, I would think, a 1930s work camp - type feel, packed in. I'd never lived with seven other guys before, but it was really an amazing experience.
How hard was it to break the ice? Were you embodiment of the "running dog of capitalism" in their eyes, or hadn't they bought into that line?
A few people bought into that line, but the Chinese by that time were so tired of ideological campaigns, and they were so almost instinctively distrustful of their government, that when an American showed up in their midst and began to communicate with them relatively normally (and my Chinese was lousy but it got pretty good, pretty quickly), they would in many cases open up to me, in fact much more than they would to their other classmates because I wasn't a particular threat. If I learned secrets about them they knew that I was not going to go around their back and tell it to somebody.
Several of them obviously looked at me as potentially someone who could benefit them because of my access to the outside world. I could get them college applications, etc., because many of them wanted to go overseas. I did a lot of college essay writing while I was in China for those couple of years.
Your coursework and your interaction in the classroom -- tell us a little about that.
The coursework was Chinese history. I was a Chinese history major and the courses were stultifyingly boring. Chinese history and the teaching of Chinese history has always been tightly controlled in China because Mao himself, a historian of some repute, understood that if you controlled history one of the things you very much controlled was the whole way of how history was looked at and how regimes got their legitimacy or lost their legitimacy. And so, our history was basically pabulum served up to us by history professors, many of whom had been through hell during the Cultural Revolution. These people were not the type of people who would openly criticize anymore, because they had suffered so much that they were pretty much cowed. So, the classes were boring, a lot of repetition, a lot of memorization.
Did you ever go home with any of your fellow students? Were you invited to come meet the family during holidays?
Yes, that happened on several occasions. Each time it was preceded by a long period of them requesting, first, a Nanjing University Party committee to allow them permission to ask me to their house, and then to the local Party committee who controlled their neighborhood to allow them permission to let the foreigner come to the house. And that application process could take as long as a month.
I would imagine that on these visits the families were very -- there's something about Chinese hospitality that's truly wonderful, and it must have been the case even in [those] times when poverty was even greater than it is now.
Yes, I had a teaching job in Beijing to make a little sideline money, and some of my students would invite me over to their houses, and I later learned literally they were spending the equivalent of a month's salary just to feed me for one evening. I only learned that later, but that's the type of hospitality that was regular doled out to foreigners at that time.
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