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And what would become of us? Foreign experts detained in the People's Republic? Interviews on Voice of America, maybe even the BBC World Service? Book contracts? Tenure-track appointments in major first-world English departments? Before I knew it, I found myself praying that the communists would pack me off in chains for a brief but grueling stint at the Qinghai forced-labor camp. My wife could be re-educated in a stuffed toy factory. Think how svelte and employable we'd be upon release! Our deportation could be a big international incident.

Being a husky male WASP from a prosperous far-Western community, and a late baby boomer to boot, I didn't have much experience with this sort of thing. I was still in high school when the draft ended, and only got in one anti-Nixon demonstration. My experience with police officers was limited to the night I got stuck somewhere outside Provo, Utah, and a highway patrolman gave me a can full of unleaded and $5. So thumbing my nose at totalitarianism -- or at least inciting my disciples to thumb theirs -- was a new and exciting experience for me.

Occasionally, during those cold Manchurian nights, I'd calm down a bit and ponder the real pedagogical questions that should have been my main concern all along. For example, why had the grad students requested a course in creative writing in the first place? China, after all, is a country in which most full-time novelists and poets live on government salaries, and write accordingly.

This is not to say there weren't plenty of opportunities for freelance fiction translators. One publishing house after another was bringing out series like the highly successful "Contemporary Masterpieces of American Literature," featuring Arthur Hailey and Sidney Sheldon and other artists of that caliber. On Saturday afternoons my students would track me down for help in deciphering lists of "culturally loaded" terms that had stymied their progress through works such as "First Blood, Part II," "Iacocca" and "Nancy and Ronnie, a True-Life Love Story."

Cheap Mandarin versions of Freud's more titillating works were being hawked in street stalls, and Lady Chatterley could be had in Shanghai. There was a corresponding flowering of literary magazines, which were responsive not only to the loosening of censorship but to actual market forces. The formula at that time demanded just a little sex. Some of my students were trying to make a few yuan on the side pitching stories to these magazines, and they needed to be coached in the techniques of the soft pornographer. We devoted one whole class period to that very topic.

But was it possible the kids had purer interests in the fiction workshops? Did they actually have something they wanted to say? I considered this possibility with dread, having been indoctrinated in American creative writing programs, in which form equals content and preferably replaces it.

I wasn't the only one reluctant to deal with kids with a message. The same dean who was now twitching at my door had earlier that year asked me to "introduce Derrida to China" by writing an article for the university journal. Nothing would have pleased his tired soul more than to see English majors all across China safely off the streets, wrapped up in fluffy hermeneutic conceits, penning unintelligible -- therefore apolitical -- vignettes about their tiny navels.

I obliged him with a dozen or so pages of nonsense, just for the vita stuffer. But somehow my article did not generate much interest among the students. The babblings of lit-critters have little pertinence under conditions of actual political oppression. The inscrutability of texts is nothing but a non sequitur to young people whose heart and respiration rates can be visibly quickened by reciting Orwellian mottoes. They scoffed at the notion that all language is inherently repressive. How could something so exhilarating be repressive? They'd laugh in the face of their dorm monitor, and misquote Big Brother loudly in one voice: "Animals and English majors are free!"

Next page | Overnight, the jackboot came down