Excerpts from Letters to Mom in italics.
07 January 1966
We have been having nice weather. During the days I could walk around in a short-sleeved shirt. I'm soon going to get ready to take CiCi to the movie - "The Amorous Adventures of Mollie Flanders." Ought to be pretty good.
Taipei had a movie district that pulsated so thick with people in the evening that viewers disembarked from taxis and pedicabs a block away. The gaudy movie marquees are remembered as two stories high and illuminated with flashing neon lights. Bigger-than-life billboard posters decorated the theater facades. It was necessary to pay a scalper to avoid the senseless wait. Inside, it surprised Steve to find the heads were unisex.
When the curtains parted, the Chinese national anthem played and the visage of the knowing Gimo gazed upon the civilian audience now standing at attention. As the anthem played the screen showed the Republic of China's blue and red flag superimposed over clips of R.O.C. destroyers maneuvering in the Taiwan Strait and other scenes of military might. The opening patriotic footage showed happy rice farmers using mechanized walk behind tractors. In contrast, Steve only saw water buffalo in the rice fields as he commuted the hill.
There were socially oriented commercials at the movies. Everything Western was admired as modern. In one, a blonde American housewife, probably a dependent stationed in Taipei, promoted birth control pills. The advertisement showed a pouting, worried woman who puts off her horny husband because her rug apes and curtain climbers are currently causing havoc in the living room. He gives her a pill. Then come smiles - even the children are playing contentedly in the next scene. Guess they lived happily ever after.
Another commercial huckstered a product that even back then would have been banned in the States as politically incorrect (25 years before the term was coined). The ad was for toothpaste. Sounds harmless, but it was called "Darkies!" The front of the box prominently displayed a silhouette of a minstrel with shiny white teeth. The Chinese marketers were not yet attuned to the new American sensibilities of dignity and racial equality.
I usually have off Thursday and Friday, so I worked on Xmas. I took off a couple hours early and took CiCi out for turkey dinner at the Navy Club. It was free for me and only a dollar for your guest. Pretty good. I had turkey dinner at noon at the chow hall, so I had roast beef for supper. By the way, the chow hall is great - it won several Mayo (Air Force) awards for the best in the USAF several years. It's about as good as a nice restaurant. I try not to go in the chow hall because I always eat too much.
I've been reading another modern history on China & it's taking up my spare time. I don't have any pictures of CiCi, but I'd like to send you one sometime to see how cute she is.
Oh, the newspaper is called the "China Post," but it's well-earned nickname is the "Propaganda Post." It is so far to the "right," that Goldwater and Welch [John Birch Society] would have a hard time topping it. The only other newspaper that I can get with any regularity is almost as bad - The Stars and Stripes. All you can read is military news censored by the brass. It's editorials are conservative - William Buckley and John Chamberlain. It's really a shame. Can't even get Playboy without paying nearly $2 an issue on the local economy.
Although the China Post was archconservative, it did not have to exaggerate to describe conditions behind the bamboo curtain in 1966. About five years after Mao's Great Leap Forward catapulted millions of mainlanders into communes and colossal disaster, Chairman Mao launched the infamous Cultural Revolution. Beginning in the spring of 1966, believing that creeping capitalism was corrupting the masses and was counterrevolutionary, Mao unleashed his Red Guards. Composed mostly of students, the Red Guards used the mantra of "Quotations from Chairman Mao" as their standard to purge a variety of public figures. The purgative was near anarchy accompanied by mass violence and civil disorder; only the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) attempting to stay somewhat neutral, prevented a complete breakdown.
Intellectuals and professionals, in addition the "rightist" elements of the party, became prime targets of the marauding hordes of Red Guards. At risk of oversimplification, the blue collar versus white-collar mentality comes to mind. Quoting from Mao's Little Red Book, the Red Guards marched off to re-educate the intellectuals and scholars to accept their need to participate in manual labor. The professionals were accused of being more concerned with possessing "expertise" than being "red." This contrasts with our McCarthyites who would rather be "dead" than "Red." Interestingly as an historical note, Deng Xiaoping who was pushing pragmatic economic policies in the early 1960's was a main target of Mao's repression. But Deng would rebound and prevail in the post-Mao era, successfully urging market-oriented reforms in the 1990's. In free China, AG2 Fehr purchased a non-copyrighted little red book in English for no particular reason. Don't believe any were available in Chinese -- seditious material.