When Prof. Shapiro told me she was once trained as a dancer, it all made sense. She has an artful demeanor when she walks, and moves with a bodily unison only possible after years of training. Her elegance comes across not just in the way she moves around her office and house and sits cross-legged with ease, but in her verbal expressions and her warm, keen gaze into your eyes. You feel an attentiveness as she listens, but also a hint of her lively mental energy swirling through her mind.
Prof. Shapiro is the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Environment, Development, & Health at Washington D.C.’s American University. Her research focuses on environmental politics and Chinese politics under Mao. As stellar as her academic credentials and publications are, she had an equally mesmerising life before entering academia. She taught English in Changsha in 1979, as China began to open up to the world. She became the first American to marry a Chinese person in the People’s Republic, a marriage that required the personal approval of Deng Xiaoping and was ultimately instrumental in the pro-democracy movement in Hunan in 1981. Prof. Shapiro and her then-husband Liang Heng became a high-flying writer couple in the ‘80s, publishing multiple best-sellers on life inside China that earned them great fame. In the ‘90s, she oversaw projects on China at the National Endowment for Democracy to help build China’s nascent civil society. Since the late ‘90s, she has immersed herself in the study of Asia’s environmental politics with a focus on China, which we will discuss in a future episode.
Fantasies are often a fraught business, for once confronted with reality, they tend to fade away. However, the more I speak with people who lived through China’s ‘80s, the more my fantasies about that decade — its openness, freedom, curiosity, a sense of possibility, a daring taste for transformation — stood up to the test of reality. As China, the U.S., and other countries enter dangerous and narrowing territories, we are increasingly constrained in our imaginative ability — to contemplate a good, worthy, collective future. Amid conflicts, turmoil, reshaping, and overlapping nostalgia, humanity as a whole is now tasked to envision new possibilities. But the treasure trove of China’s ‘80s is only beginning to be taken seriously. Prof. Shapiro’s story — which was edited for brevity and clarity — is yet another great piece of oral history for that time of imagination. So I invite you to enjoy this one.
Leo
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A ‘sent-down youth’ from Berkeley to Changsha
Could you talk about your first trip to China?
It was 1977, and I was a member of the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association.
I was in Shanghai when Deng Xiaoping came back to power. There was a lot of noise, symbols, flags. I said to our guide, “What’s going on?” And she said, “Deng Xiaoping came back.” I said, “Who’s Deng Xiaoping?” She said, “Deng Xiaoping was a good comrade.” That’s all she could say. So I didn’t know I was there at a really historic moment.
I was moved by how eager people were for our help. People said, “You have to come back and help us, we need you.” At that time, the women all wore long braids, everybody was on bicycles and looked very slender and strong. The women and the men seemed very equal.
For us, as critics of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, we had a romantic notion that Chairman Mao had done something wonderful for China
For us, as critics of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, we had a romantic notion that Chairman Mao had done something wonderful for China and that the people’s communes were good, as he said. We were particularly interested in women holding up half the sky. It was very appealing in 1977, at the very beginning of the spread of feminism in the U.S.
Were you a good student of Mao at the time?
I don’t think I was a deep student of Mao. We had our own cultural revolution in America. The civil rights movement, the hippie movement, and the anti-war movement. Young people in America were experimenting with communes. It was a very different kind of commune than they had in China. But there was a feeling that perhaps there were some good answers in China. And, of course, the information coming out of China was extremely limited — almost nonexistent. It was easy to have those romantic ideas.
Did you find China quite what you expected?
For the first trip, my positive impression was reinforced. Even though there were some indications that things were not what I imagined them to be, I didn’t have the context to interpret what I saw.
At one point, our train stopped for about 15 minutes in Xi’an. Our guide got off and stayed off for a while. When she came back, she was crying. I said, “Why are you crying?” She said, “I just saw my son for the first time since he was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.” I didn’t have any context for that. But I could have guessed that things maybe were not so wonderful.
Later on you studied Chinese at Princeton. What was that like?
Princeton was one of the few schools in America at that time that had a really good Chinese language program. Most of the teachers were from Taiwan. I was an anthropology major with a minor in East Asian Studies. I started Chinese in my sophomore year.
Sinology in those days was all about how the Ming Dynasty was so wonderful, Confucianism was so great. My interest in contemporary China, Mao, and all that — I didn’t have any mentors for that at Princeton. Nobody was interested in what was going on inside the mainland at that time.
After I graduated from Princeton, I went to the Midwest to study dance for a year, and I did a literature degree at the University of Illinois.
I went to China in July 1977. I was scheduled to go to Berkeley to do a PhD in comparative literature. But I became so interested in China as a result of that trip that I switched from comparative literature to Asian studies at Berkeley.
At the time, I was like, “What does that mean? Hunan?” I had to look on the map.
Then I was halfway — or most of the way — through my master’s at Berkeley when the Chinese government decided, as a result of the Four Modernisations program, that they needed to have English teachers.
Those first 40 English teachers were all people who had gone to China as part of the U.S.-China Friendship Association. I arrived in China as a teacher in March of 1979. And I was assigned to Hunan, Changsha, to the Teacher’s College. I was the only foreigner there.
How did you get the opportunity to teach?
Oh, they called me up — the Chinese liaison office. They just said, “Get ready. When can you be there?”
They were treating you as a “sent-down youth” from America.
Yeah. At the time, I was like, “What does that mean? Hunan?” I had to look on the map. Maybe I was disappointed it wasn’t Beijing or Shanghai. But now I know how lucky I was to be in a more remote area.
And why Hunan Teacher’s College?
Because it was the biggest (in the province). It was training English teachers for the whole province. There were like 400 English majors in that department. All those students were supposed to stay in Hunan to teach English. So they really needed a native speaker.
They gave me what they thought was a fancy professor’s room, but someone had to carry the water up in pole buckets. There was no flush toilet. And they gave me an air conditioner because it’s so hot there, but the electricity wasn’t good enough to run it. If I turned it on, everything would shut down.
But when I first got there, they weren’t letting me teach the students. They wanted me to teach all those old Russian professors because they were supposed to…
Be turned into English teachers?
And they couldn’t learn it, right? They were in their 50s and 60s and set in their ways. I taught the last of the Worker-Peasant-Soldier students when I got there. Then came the people through the gaokao examinations. Those old Russian teachers couldn’t teach them, so they had no choice but to give that very precious “foreign expert” to the students.
What was life like in Changsha at the time?
They gave me what they thought was a fancy professor’s room, but someone had to carry the water up in pole buckets. There was no flush toilet. And they gave me an air conditioner because it’s so hot there, but the electricity wasn’t good enough to run it. If I turned it on, everything would shut down.
I was up on the hill, walked down to the classroom, and taught a lot of classes. I gradually combined my students into bigger groups so they could all listen to me; getting to listen to a native speaker was the most important thing.
The students were so good. They were smart, and had experienced so much hardship. To come to school was so precious for them. It was a great time.
How did that experience of teaching change your views on China?
As I got to know my students, they would tell me more about what they had experienced. We would have conversation class, and I would say, “Tell me about how wonderful it was to go to the countryside to learn from the peasants.” And they would say, “Actually, it wasn’t wonderful at all.” That gradually educated me.
A Hunan democracy movement catalysed by a Deng Xiaoping-approved marriage
When you went to Hunan, it was the perfect time because in 1980, a democracy movement erupted in the Hunan Teachers College, and some even say that was the precursor to the whole period of liberalisation in the ‘80s in China. What do you think?
That’s not the way it unfolded, though. It only unfolded like that because I had married Liang Heng, and if he weren’t married to me, he wouldn’t have run for the local People’s Congress, and the movement would not have broken out.
Could you elaborate?
I got married to Liang Heng in 1980. And we came briefly to the U.S. in the summer for him to look around. He was struck by our free speech. I remember I was with some friends at Berkeley, and they were complaining, “Ronald Reagan is such a bad president.” He was like, “Oh my God, can you say that?”
And then, when we went back to China for him to finish up his degree, there were elections for the local People’s Congress. He ran as a candidate, even though the local party had picked their own people. So, he was running as an independent candidate.
But he would not have done that if he wasn’t married to me. He wouldn’t have been protected. So it wasn’t like I got there just at the right time. No. I was actually instrumental — not me personally, but a U.S. person being there enabled that democracy movement to happen.
Tao Sen was a classmate of Liang Heng. He got in much more trouble. After they shut down the movement, they basically said to Liang Heng, “We’re going to let you graduate, and you get out of here. Go to America.” But some of the other student leaders were given bad job assignments or actually put in prison for a while.
What do you think about your marriage with Liang Heng now?
It was wonderful while it lasted, about seven or eight years. It was an interesting, rewarding time. We wrote three books together and became a writing duo, a speaking duo; we spoke at so many universities and did so many TV shows.
We were involved with interesting people in New York City, in Human Rights Watch and other places. It was a fruitful time. And sometimes, certain marriages will survive in one cultural context but maybe not so much in another one. Maybe, had we stayed in China, we would have stayed together.
But for him, in the U.S., with his English not being so good, he felt pressure, and he was ambitious. Ultimately, we decided to split up. But our lawyer, when we were doing it, said, “I never saw two people more friendly when they’re doing a divorce.”
That’s wonderful.
People sometimes think he used me, I used him, or something like that. It was a good marriage while it lasted.
I believe I was the first American to marry a Chinese in China. There had been a French person before that. Of course, once Deng Xiaoping approved it, everybody was like, “Congratulations.” We got the marriage license with all those flags on it and everything. The local officials had a party for us at a hotel.
And it’s amazing reading about how you wrote directly to Deng Xiaoping to get your marriage approved. Why did you have to write to the supreme leader?
Because after we started to work on Son of the Revolution, that was also when Wei Jingsheng was arrested for talking about the Fifth Modernisation. We became afraid for Liang Heng that it would be dangerous for him to continue and for us to be together.
So then we decided, let’s get married. That way, we’ll protect him. So we said to the school leaders, “We’re going to get married.” And the leaders said, “No, you can’t.” They gave the excuse that he was a college student, and college students are not allowed to get married. But I think, really, they were completely afraid.
Liang Heng wrote a bunch of letters to local offices, and I guess he also wrote to Deng Xiaoping or the Zhongyang (Central Committee). I don’t know, but somehow the story came to us that Deng Xiaoping saw this letter and said, “Yes, it’s a symbol of U.S.-China friendship. It’s a good thing.” And so all those people, all of a sudden, they’re like, “Yay, U.S.-China friendship!”
I believe I was the first American to marry a Chinese in China. There had been a French person before that. Of course, once Deng Xiaoping approved it, everybody was like, “Congratulations.” We got the marriage license with all those flags on it and everything. The local officials had a party for us at a hotel.
Did it impact your work as a teacher?
Yeah, it impacted my work, because once we were married, we had a whole other year in China together as a married couple. The assumption was then that nobody needed to be in charge of me because Liang Heng was in charge of me. That way, we could travel anywhere we wanted. Before, there had been certain leaders who were in charge of me.
Anybody who had been born around the early ‘50s had roughly that same pattern. They’d been a Red Guard; their parents had been criticised; they’d been sent to the countryside as an educated youth; they had become disillusioned at a certain moment, perhaps at the Lin Biao incident; they had become the awakened young people; and at some moment, they realised, “Wait a minute, everything that we gave to the revolution was basically a lie.”
In charge of the foreigner?
Yeah. But now Liang Heng was in charge — I was China’s daughter-in-law, right? We travelled a lot. We would go to places that were technically not open to foreigners, but because I was married to him, we could go there.
Fortunately, because I’m short and I spoke Chinese, and my hair was pretty dark then — now it’s more grey — and people wore those kouzhao (facemasks), people didn’t notice that I was a foreigner. I went to lots and lots of places that no foreigners had ever been to, and people didn’t even realise that a foreigner was there.
And how did you find the Chinese family?
Liang Heng had come from a broken family because of the Cultural Revolution. His mother had been labeled as a rightist, and his father was really sick from mistreatment in the countryside. His two sisters had been sent to the countryside and were still there. So his family was pretty spread out. That’s what we wrote about in Son of the Revolution.
After we got married, Liang Hong was able to get his father returned from the countryside to some housing in the Hunan Daily. But his father was crippled by a lack of medical care. It’s not like we had dinner every night. I don’t think I met the family very much.
It was much more writing Son of the Revolution that helped me understand the pattern that so many people in China had experienced. Anybody who had been born around the early ‘50s had roughly that same pattern. They’d been a Red Guard; their parents had been criticised; they’d been sent to the countryside as an educated youth; they had become disillusioned at a certain moment, perhaps at the Lin Biao incident; they had become the awakened young people; and at some moment, they realised, “Wait a minute, everything that we gave to the revolution was basically a lie.” That’s why that book has had such a long history, even though many other books have been written, because in so many ways, that story is typical.
As a feminist scholar, what do you think about that dynamic where the man tells the story and the woman writes it?
In a way, initially I was surprised because we chose to make Son of the Revolution completely in his voice. There wasn’t a male-female decision at all, it was because it was his story. But I remember sometimes being surprised when people would say, “Oh, I read your husband’s book,” Then I would be a little offended — “Who do you think wrote it?” But it’s really his story.
I don’t feel in any way that there was any kind of gender inequality between us. Each of us got a lot out of that relationship.
‘What does life want to get out of us?’
The whole period of the ‘80s in China is remembered as a period of liberalisation, freedom, opening-up.
It was amazing. It was such an exciting time for the Chinese people.
What was your life like in China during the ‘80s?
We came back in ‘81. Liang Heng applied for an expedited U.S. passport. So we were able to go back, and he didn’t feel unsafe.
We wrote another book called After the Nightmare — we had some friends among the leadership who had helped us to get married. And they would say, “Okay, you wrote about the Cultural Revolution. It wasn’t untrue. But why don’t you write about some of the good things that are happening in China now?”
So it was a moment when people felt free and excited about ideas, as if maybe this economic liberalisation might eventually lead to political liberalisation as well — which, of course, didn’t happen. But there was a notion in the ‘80s, leading up to Tiananmen, that first perestroika and then glasnost was going to come.
So we said, “Okay, we’ll come back.” So we did this other book called After the Nightmare. We just travelled around. Each chapter chronicled a different kind of experience of Chinese life.
People say the ‘80s was amazing. Why? What was amazing about it?
People felt these new freedoms all the time. People were publishing things, and were able to see films that they hadn’t been able to see. The door was opening. Foreign artists and symphonies and ideas were coming in.
People began to feel, for the first time, as if they could decide their own careers after graduation. Maybe you don’t take the assignment that your school gives you, and take the risk and go off to Shenzhen and start your own business.
So it was a moment when people felt free and excited about ideas, as if maybe this economic liberalisation might eventually lead to political liberalisation as well — which, of course, didn’t happen. But there was a notion in the ‘80s, leading up to Tiananmen, that first perestroika and then glasnost was going to come.
And as an American going to China in the ‘80s, how did you feel? For the Chinese, it would be like unshackling your chains and gaining new freedom, but those freedoms would be quite familiar to you.
Yeah, but I was interested in the Chinese people’s experience. It wasn’t about my experience.
But what was your experience? Were you inspired?
I never wanted to be a writer. That was never my ambition. But sometimes, because of the experiences that I’d had, I felt certain obligations to tell people’s stories because there wasn’t somebody else who could tell them. People would come to me with their stories, and I would feel like, “I guess nobody else is going to do it. I guess I have to do it.” So that was a responsibility.
There’s a famous book called Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. And he says, “Our question should not be what do we want to get out of life, but rather what does life want to get out of us?” We should rise to the occasion. And in many ways, China — not consistently, because I took big breaks from it — has asked me to deliver something, has pulled out something, a contribution that I could make.
One pretty influential thing that you and Liang Heng started was The Intellectual magazine, Zhishi Fenzi, which influenced not just Chinese students abroad, but many in China too. Could you talk about that experience of starting this magazine and getting the Chinese intellectuals to contribute?
That was more Liang Heng’s project than mine, although I was certainly there when he was putting it together. His model for it was a kind of Chinese New York Review of Books. He would approach Chinese intellectuals overseas to write articles.
In those days, it was really very much about “What is civil society?” There was a lot of curiosity. People didn’t know what that term meant. There was no such thing, and so there was a lot of intellectual work involved with explaining the roots of civil society and what that could mean.
I don’t remember how long that magazine went on. It was once a month or once every two months for maybe a couple of years. And there was always a question of how to get it back into China.
The China burnout
You’re not the first person who told me they got tired of China. What is it about China that got you tired?
Perry Link has a great book called Evening Chats in Beijing. And in it, he talks a great deal about the sort of burden of the Chinese intellectual and how the Chinese intellectual can never stop trying to figure out, “You love the motherland, but does the motherland love you?” — in the words of that play, Bitter Love, Ku Lian.
I was tired of constantly trying to figure out, “What can we do about China?” — that burden. And ultimately, a feeling like, “this is not ultimately my burden. This is your burden.”
In my marriage to Liang Heng, I was tired of constantly trying to figure out, “What can we do about China?” — that burden. And ultimately, a feeling like, “this is not ultimately my burden. This is your burden.” That was a big factor in our deciding to split up, being tired of China. I don’t have to work on China. Right now, I’m really interested in working on Norway. Nobody says I have to work on China. I like working on China, but many courses I teach right now have nothing to do with China. I’m talking to you because you’re asking me to, but I wouldn’t have this conversation every day of the week. It’s exhausting in a way, to think about these things.
In the ‘90s, your attention moved away from China. How did you start working for the National Endowment for Democracy?
They were looking for a new senior program officer for Asia. Even though they were attracted to my China background, what appealed to me about the job was that it had a broader Asia focus. I had a chance to work on Indonesia. I spent a lot of time working on Burma and Cambodia. We were able to support some communities overseas from Tibet.
It was a great chance to explore, and that’s been very helpful to me now in my teaching. It’s very important to be able to say to students that, “Yeah, I went to Indonesia. I was in Cambodia. I visited these places. I understand them.”
Did you support any Chinese groups? And what were your interactions with them like?
We did support Tibetan groups. I was not a fan of [Chinese human rights activist and former labor camp inmate] Harry Wu, but there was a congressperson that loved Harry Wu, so we had to keep supporting him. My assistant traveled with Harry Wu at some point to Russia, and Harry Wu had the effrontery to tell people who had survived Russian prison camps that they were lucky because the Chinese camps were so much worse. We don’t need that. First of all, how could he know? And how could he say that?
There are some people that have been so wounded by China that their only goal is to hurt China back, and nothing China can do could ever be good. That’s why I was not a fan of Harry Wu. I know we did support some other Chinese groups. I just don’t remember what they were.
The good is that you get to support some civil society groups that are really good. The bad is that certain Congress people will come in and interfere and say, “You have to support this or that.” It does have that very strong anti-communist tone to it, and the understanding of democracy is formulaic and Westernised. There’s a lot of focus on elections, and much less of a human rights and intellectual freedom orientation, which is more what I feel comfortable with.
I was there for just two years, and I learned a lot. And then I really felt that it was time for me to do something completely different.
Recommended readings
Viktor Frankl, 1946, Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press
Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, 1984, Son of the Revolution, Knopf Doubleday
Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, 1986, After the Nightmare, Knopf
Perry Link, 1993, Evening Chats in Beijing, W. W. Norton & Company
About us
The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.
We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!
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