In writing this article, I will be offending some old acquaintances by disclosing their privacy. For this reason, I will not use their real names. What I want to talk about is how the ideology of a historical period shaped the way peole pursue their most private business--falling in love.

 My high school years were spent in the latter half of the Cultural Revolution in China. When we were going to graduate, a classmate of mine fell unilaterally in love with a pretty girl in the class. He not only fell in love with her, but also believed that the girl was in love with him. His reason was very simple: his seat in the classroom was several rows behind the girl's. He noticed that for some time, the girl was casting her eye back at him from time to time. This he took as strong indication that the girl was sending him a message. He talked with me about this and I said it was not convincing enough. He, however, insisted on his analysis.

 At that time, Chinese people in general were very conservative in expressing their personal feelings. It was more so among high school students. Social interactions between boys and girls did not start until we were well into senior high. I remember in the second year of senior high, we started visiting classmates of the opposite sex. We learned how to entertain our visitors by offering them a seat and pouring them cups of teas. We learned how to stay properly long and properly short at our host/hostess's home. The visit was never done on individual bases. Normally there were more than one visitors coming together to one student's home. This was to keep the visit public lest there would be gossip.

This boy in my class was not very sociable and seldom participated in this kind of "courteous visits" , as another boy put it. So he asked me to accompany him to pay a visit to the girl. The girl happened not to be a member of my social circle in the class. It was not easy for me to do so, but as the girl was indeed very pretty, I was glad to take this chance to "have an eye with her pretty face" (yi du fang rong).

But there must be a reason for the visit, especially when the girl was not an insider of our social circle. The reason was thought by this boy: to visit her to hear her "opinion" of him. Indeed this English word "opinion" cannot fully convey the Chinese original "yijian". At that time, a pet phrase in interpersonal communication is "ti yijian"--offer one's opinion of another person, meaning to be critical of him. Normally it is the other person who come to you to solicit your "opinion" of him or her. This showed a kind of modesty, which meant that he or she felt that he or she could learn much from your "opinion".

This offering and soliciting of "opinion" was related to a Communist ethical ideology of criticism and self-criticism. We were taught to criticize ourselves for our own wrong doings and others when others had done something wrong. It was a means for purifying our thoughts. "ti yijian" was a very upright word that could not possibly incur any humiliation or rejection.

So we went to the girl's home to "hear her opinion". When we arrived at her home, we explained that it was now time to graduate and classmates were going on separate ways. We were taking this final chance to visit around (which means she was not the sole person to be visited, although she was) to solicit our dear classmates' opinion so that we could rectify our past mistakes and be more revolutionary in the future. Of course we did not say this much but the hidden words were like that.

After a rather stiff audience we felt we need to say bye bye. We did not succeed in soliciting any opinion from the girl. I was happy to leave but I found that I was leaving that boy far behind, who was talking to the girl who saw him to the gate of the courtyard where she lived . I seemed to have heard him almost forcing her to offer some opinion of him and the girl repeatedly and courteously said:" No opinion, no opinion," a gesture of politeness.

This over, the boy got more confidence because, as he said, the girl, when seeing him off, said to him: "Come visit when you are not busy." (mei shi zai lai ba). According to his analysis, this was a sign of invitation.

Of course that was only a daily courtesy without much substance. Its meaning then was not in the eye of the beholder but in the ear of the listener. Our boy and girl never got closer to each other later.

Another romance took place between a girl and a boy when they were in the countryside(During the Cultural Revolution, high school graduates were sent to rural areas because there were not many jobs for them in the cities). The boy graduated from senior high while the girl from junior high. They were from the same school in town though. The boy was a book worm and the girl liked chatting and knitting. The boy liked the girl because she was quite pretty among the few town girls sent to the same village and was rather lively in temperament. It so happened that the boy got a chance to be assigned a job in a factory back in town but the girl did not get such a chance and had to work in the village for longer time.

At that time, the boy's conception of the girl was that although there was a discrepancy in education between the two, and there was not much other in common between them, he felt that he could "reform" the girl so that they could finally walk on the same road.

After he was sent back to town, he bought a book, a novel by the title of "How Steel was Produced". This novel was a biographical novel written by a former Soviet Communist youth hero under the fictional name Paul Kachagin. It was not about steel production but about soul development under Communist ideology and in revolutionary struggles. The book excited many Chinese youth in the 50's, was banned during the Cultural Revolution because it described a petty bourgeois romance between the hero and his childhood playmate from a rich family(but as they grew up, they went different ways, as the published version suggested). That part of the book might have been the most read one I guess. The Chinese translation was later reprinted during the later years of the Cultural Revolution period.

Fearing that the book might get lost when it reached the village, our boy decided to mail it to the village Party secretary and ask him to give the book to the girl. He must have abstracted this Party secretary and turned him into a symbol of uprightness and reliability. As a result, his relation (also unilateral) with the girl became a big news in the village and one night, the girl's brother came to the boy's home, returned the book and said he'd better not write to his sister again.

An ironical thing is that while our boy was designing his strategy to win the girl, in a neighboring village, a boy who graduated from junior high made a big hole in the wall of his dormitory so that he could get into the next room where some girls lived. He inflated these girls and was finally punished by law.

Aug. 7, 1997 Fredericton, Canada

August 16, 1997, revised