The expatriate

* Last Updated: August 14. 2008 10:56PM UAE / August 14. 2008 6:56PM GMT

Shapiro has lived in the same house since 1960. He shares it with his daughter and granddaughter, both Chinese citizens. Natalie Behring for The National

Around the time of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, a small crowd of foreign sympathisers came to help build the Maoist dream. Sixty years later, one of them is still there. Michael Donohue meets Sidney Shapiro.


On January 31 1949, when the People’s Liberation Army came marching into Beijing – heralding the imminent demise of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang regime in mainland China – Sidney Shapiro, a bespectacled 33-year-old lawyer from Brooklyn, New York, rode his bicycle up to Xizhimen, the city’s north-west gate, to take a look at the soldiers.

There, he remembered years later, he saw a parade of “clean, smartly stepping, smiling young men” being welcomed by cheering crowds, and a line of American-made vehicles that the Communists had captured from Guomindang forces. Shapiro, who had spent the last year and a half in China but had been in Beijing for only a couple of months, was enchanted. “Parents held their kids higher on their shoulders for a better view,” he later wrote. “The streets were gay with flags and bunting.” The Mao era had arrived.

Almost six decades later, Shapiro is still here – a robust 92-year-old Chinese citizen with white hair, a strong handshake, and an exceptionally well-preserved Brooklyn accent. Part of a wave of westerners who settled in Beijing in the early Mao years to sign up for the “socialist experiment,” Shapiro is one of a tiny few who lasted long enough to experience the entire, ongoing era of Communist rule – and to see China stage an Olympic opening ceremony last Friday night that gave almost no acknowledgement to Mao’s legacy.

Shapiro has spent much of his life trying to explain his adopted home to the West, first by translating Chinese literature into English, then by writing books of his own. In 1963, he traded his US passport for a Chinese one. Twenty years later he became a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a prestigious body that makes recommendations to the Party leadership. He is not the only foreign-born member of the CPPCC, but he is the only one to have had a bar mitzvah (which took place when Calvin Coolidge was the American president).

On a Friday afternoon earlier this summer, Shapiro sat at a small table in his modest, neatly kept bungalow a minute’s walk from Qianhai Lake – in one of the oldest and best-preserved neighborhoods in Beijing – and talked about his past. The title of his autobiography, I Chose China (2000), is slightly misleading, because his original connection to the country came entirely by chance. When the Second World War began, he was working as the junior partner in his father’s law firm in New York, feeling bored with life. Getting drafted into the army, in 1942, came as a relief. After a few months manning an anti-aircraft gun in New Jersey, he received an odd mission: to study Chinese. He excelled at the language, but the war ended without his getting to use it.

Shapiro riding his bicycle to work in the 1960s, just outside the door of his present home. Courtesy Sidney Shapiro

“The war was a change for me,” he says, “and when it was over, I didn’t want to go back to being a lawyer. I didn’t want to spend my life helping one son of a ***** screw some other son of a ***** out of some money.” So in 1947 he decided to test his new language skills in Shanghai – where despite his distaste for the profession he initially found work as a lawyer.

more at: http://www.thenational.ae/article/20080814/REVIEW/559194546/1008