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Democracy, or at least the kids' notion of it, was all the rage. The whole country had been jostled the night before by several mild examples of the demonstrations that would eventually climax in the massacre in Tiananmen Square. A lot of people in China were tense, especially my old dean, who'd lived through several political "movements" and bore the lumps and bumps to prove it. The poor guy was on the verge of apoplexy at my vestibule. After all, he was the one who invited me to this 10th-rate university in the frozen industrial wasteland of the remote northeast, and he was supposed to be keeping an eye on my comportment in the classroom.

Between workshops, a few select graduate students and I had been discussing our pirated offsets of "1984." Intoxicated by the illusion of freedom that had briefly entered their lives, they'd been writing stories about fat, tyrannous bus conductors, and small-town party hacks lining their pockets in the name of the glorious revolution. These stories, inept as most of them were, had now apparently become objects of intense curiosity for "the leaders."

The previous year I'd taught in China's deep south, where the bare mention of Marxism, Leninism or Mao Zedong could be relied upon to brighten a dull lecture with hoots of derision from the back row. My subtropical undergraduates did have a party representative charged with their political and moral nurturing, but he hardly ever showed his face. Those two semesters in the sun had made me complacent, and it wasn't until the dean showed up at my door that I realized my seminars here in the north had been infiltrated by party spies, who held mere deans on a short leash.

The old man started moaning in my face from the blackness of the corridor. "We are colleagues and good friends, are we not, Dr. Bradley? I've told you many times how much I suffered in the so-called Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards made big-character posters about me and placed me under house arrest. They burned all my poems and broke my legs. They forced me to write self-criticisms for a whole year. You are, I suspect, a reasonably intelligent man, and you must understand that you place me once again in a difficult situation. I will be criticized severely for not keeping watch over my foreigners."

I had heard this at least a thousand times already. Until today it had only been on occasions as innocuous as dinner invitations. But this time, though the words were verbatim, the delivery was different: pure terror. More was at stake here than just his apartment on the fifth floor, where the rats were a little less dense. The dean knew firsthand what "the leaders" were capable of. The adolescent fury of the Red Guards had merely been a surgical instrument in their hands.

"I've always dealt honestly with you in all our work together," he was saying. "And I give you my solemn word, as a fellow scholar and teacher and lover of the English language, that none of your pupils will be persecuted in any way for what they have written."

I knew that last bit was an outright lie. The leaders did not want to read the stories for their aesthetic value. But I was nevertheless tempted to comply with the order.

I couldn't afford to be disassociated from the dean and all his editorial connections. He could be a forest-flattening dynamo, despite his dynastic birth date. We may have had our minor differences at the moment, but he and I both preferred collaborating on scholarly articles to doing just about anything else. Back in the good old days, we were quite a duo. Of course, that was before the occidental aberration called democracy came along and spoiled everything. That was before the young people's spirits were polluted with thoughts of Pepsi and Rambo and disco marathons on Stalin Square.

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