Forbidden Fruit – 1980 Beijing, a Memoir is now available on Amazon, although the official pub. date is February, 2016.  See author’s website for details: www.gailpellett.com

For thirty years, chapters, fragments, scenes, observations, diary entries, letters and flirtatious meanderings have been residing in a box under my desk.  Much of this writing took place in Beijing in 1980 and ’81, while I was living and working at Central Broadcasting – Radio Beijing.  In a frenzy of trying to make sense of this sensually, intellectually and emotionally destablizing year, I wrote manically when I returned.  First at my friend Deirdre English’ home in San Francisco, then at the home of another dear and generous friend, Karen Brown, in New York.

What was I thinking?

I had returned to the U.S., to New York, penniless and confused, depressed from leaving a budding relationship behind in China and distraught at trying to make sense of a year living and working at a news media institution that had no concept of journalism and in a police state without sharing the language. Although I had started hammering my brain with Mandarin the moment I arrived and although I was already dreaming in Mandarin when I left a year later, I was hopelessly illiterate.  There is nothing so disorienting.  What was I thinking?  I’m a journalist.  I envisioned a book immediatley, but soon disassembled from this plan as I realized how damaging my writing — however innocent — could be to co-workers and friends in Beijing.  Their jobs, housing and children’s schooling could be at stake.  So I quietly put all those papers — yes, we generated an awful lot of paper while writing drafts in those days — in a box.  Without computers then, no disks.  Just tons of paper, filling a large box.  Beneath my desk.

Tainted by working for the People’s Republic

I moved on.  At first unable to get work because I was somehow tainted by Red China.  I had, afterall, arranged on my own terms to work for the Chinese government.  I hadn’t been sent by Fullbright, or US AID or the American networks.  No, I wasn’t even a U.S. citizen then.  I was still a Canadian with a Green card.  No matter.  I really wanted to go back, but with an American radio or television network behind me. (The Canadians already had people there).   I had worked inside a sensitive Chinese institution.  I had dozens of great ideas for stories.  None of the American networks even had a bureau in Beijing.    I went to see folks at ABC, at NBC and my old colleagues at NPR.  No interest.  Raised eyebrows.  NPR had vague interest if I raised the money to do it.   I was out of money, I had to get to work.  I had to hit the ground running in New York and produce pieces for NPR about local and domestic issues.  I had to pack away that extraordinary experience and get back to work, find a cheap apartment — a sublet from another generous girlfriend — and figure out how to re-enter.   China got put in a Box.

Who’s Out There?

Deirdre English was editor of Mother Jones in those days and urged me to write a piece about the experience for MJ, but I couldn’t somehow massage that year into something that could be contained within it’s covers.  Then my China buddy, Ron Dorfman, editor of The Quill, in Chicago, talked me through a way to focus in on one part of the experience.  Radio Beijing.  Keep it focused.  What it was like doing that kind of radio after my background and experience.  Who’s Out There? was published in 1982.

China Stories – Love and Marriage in the PRC

As I returned to producing features and documentaries for NPR I produced two on Chinese themes — one created from interviews I had recorded in Beijing called Love and Marriage in the People’s Republic and another based on interviews with Chinese students – from Radio Beijing’s English Department where I had worked —  at the University of Missouri Journalism School.  And in 1985 — after leaving MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour and all those utterly American stories I wrote a long, long feature piece for The Village Voice about Chinese dissident artists who were piling into New York for their first encounter with Western art and life –  Is There Art After Liberation?  China’s Scorched Flowers Go West.

Big China stays in the box

But China, the big, scattered, complicated, confusing, mysterious story, stayed in the Box.  Other Americans who went off to teach for a year in China returned and published books within a year.  What was wrong with me?   I convinced myself that teaching university students was a very different situation than working inside a propaganda organization close to the Central Committee in the nation’s capitol.   The students were looser, more open, the university offered more stretch and time off.  My situation at Radio Beijing was totally different.  Incomparable really.  China in a Box.

Over the past few years I have re-conceived the China book several times.  First, I wanted to fictionalize it all.  A series of short stories.  Then, I wanted to make it into a huge examination of westerners confronting China — the historical story.  Explorers, missionaries, journalists primarily.  That story is  so rich, and is relevant to our current era for Westerners trying to make sense of this rising global power.  Once I cleared my desk of so many other distractions, my China finally emerged from the Box.  Now, Forbidden Fruit – 1980 Beijing, a Memoir.   Here’s how to buy it:  http://gailpellett.com/