![]() Even the worldly Roys were in the habit of calling “Mao” “Male,” no matter how many times I gently put forth the correct pronunciation of the Chairman’s famous surname. One lady asked me if we had electricity another thought Taiwan was a different country. Even though I had been here only a very short time, I could tell people didn’t really know much about us. But in a way I also considered it my duty as a Chinese to inform the Westerners about my homeland. I did this in part out of my gratitude to the Roys: I wanted to please them and make them proud of me. As always, I was eager and patient in answering them. ![]() None of us, of course, expected that I’d get into a fight.Īs had happened before, people got interested in me upon Roy’s introduction, and questions about China poured out. The Roys took me under their wing as though I were their long lost Chinese son. Everything about the couple seemed exotic and charming to me. They kissed on the mouth in public Roy addressed her always as “Lucy, my love,” while she called him “Darling.” I fell under their spell instantly. Roy was French: tall, delicate-boned, very pale, and very pretty. He and his wife were romantic with one another. An avuncular air hung about him: he had a big beard like Karl Marx, and bemused twinkling eyes that peered out below bushy eyebrows. A Canadian of Scottish ancestry, he had lived all over Europe before settling in this small university town in the American Deep South. Roy was the world’s leading scholar on the poet Robert Burns. In those days, meeting a citizen from Red China was, for most Americans, if not as unusual as meeting a Martian, certainly more unexpected than meeting an Eskimo. Ji has recently arrived from Peking.” After that, with the satisfaction of the owner of a rare curiosity, all he needed to do was watch me be examined and appreciated by the astonished interlocutor. Then, having secured the person’s polite attention, he’d drop his little bomb: “Mr. Liam Roy, my American sponsor, had taken me there to show me off. Not long after my arrival in the United States, in 1980, I attended an evening party where I got into a fight. ![]() In a postscript, author Zha Jianying explains that when she unearthed the story earlier this year, she felt it resonated with the current moment in U.S.-China relations. It is the first piece of original fiction to appear on ChinaFile since our launch in 2013. The short story that follows was written 20 years ago but never published. ![]()
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