当年，他们第一次来中国

    “我们这些热爱中国的年轻美国人被放逐到香港和台湾这样的地方去学习中文，感觉就像是被逐出圣地的犹太人，”斯切尔说。“我们与我们的研究对象（和愿望）被无情地隔绝，只能羡慕那些我们认识的、成功穿过中国帷幕的少数法国人、加拿大人和英国人。”斯切尔把他那一帮人比作“在恋爱中孤立无助的天鹅。就像马塞尔•普鲁斯特笔下的平凡主角对奥德特的单恋一样，因为无望引起对方关注，更别说追求成功，我们对中国的热恋反而变得更加强烈。”

    然而，突然之间，他们就身在其中了。最初的那一刻（乘坐军事运输机飞越喜马拉雅山脉，踏上北京首都机场的柏油碎石路面，或者更为常见的是，穿过罗湖桥从香港步行到中国大陆），所有人都深受震动，留下了永生难忘的记忆。但接着就是幻想的破灭（并非总是如此，但常有发生，而且通常很快）。

    记者乔纳森•米尔斯基在1972年时还是大学教授。那时他参加了一个由政府发起的、为期六周的访华之旅。这次行程从参观广东省某高楼里一个“普通中国工人家庭”的住房开始。那是所漂亮的房子：三个颜色鲜艳的房间，私人厨房和浴室，收音机、电视和闪闪发光的新自行车一应俱全。这些令米尔斯基印象深刻，直到第二天早上，他在无人陪同的情况下散步时碰巧遇见昨天见过的那个人。“他招手让我到他家喝点‘白茶’，也就是白开水，”米尔斯基写道。“但不是原来的那套房子。单调，简陋，墙壁斑驳，只有两间屋子，没有私人厨房和浴室。”米尔斯基受骗了。他回到酒店，“被所闻所见弄得震惊不已”。

    史蒂文•曾现任诺丁汉大学（the University of Nottingham）中国政策研究所（the China Policy Institute）负责人。他是避居香港的中国造反派之子。1978年，他抵达罗湖桥时，真想要跑过桥去。他写道：“我迫不及待地想踏上祖国，呼吸那里的空气，欣赏那里的美景，认识那些‘结束了百年耻辱’的英雄人民。”然而，他见到的是一种新的、但却似曾相识的不平等：为特权人物准备的优惠机票；漓江渡船上层与下层甲板之间不可逾越的栅栏；为了从外国人手里得到十块钱，互相大打出手的街头乞丐。史蒂文很想回香港。

    斯切尔写到，对很多外国人来说，“与中国的首次接触是我们职业生涯中最重要的时刻之一”。我要补充一点，很多人至今仍然难以理解他们当年看到的景象。佩里•林克在上世纪六十年代曾是位反战积极分子，因此，“我对社会主义中国抱有很高的期望”。但他在1973年抵达中国后不久便开始心生疑虑。当时，他在苏州一个白色石桌上拍到了一只苍蝇。直到那时他还真的相信研究生院里教授的那一套，也就是大跃进时期开展的除四害运动已经成功地消灭了中国所有的苍蝇。

    "we young American China followers who found ourselves marooned in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan studying Chinese were left to feel something like Jews exiled from the Holy Land," Schell continues. "So inexorably isolated from the object of our study (and desire) were we, that we could only envy those few French, Canadian, and British nationals of our acquaintance who had managed … to penetrate the Chinese veil." Schell goes on to compare his cohort to "a group of forlorn Swanns in love. And like Marcel Proust's anti-hero's unrequited passion for Odette, our infatuation with China was only made more ardent by the hopelessness of any possibility of attention, much less consummation."

    Then, suddenly, they were in, and in those first few moments (flying over the Himalayas in a military transport, stepping onto the tarmac at Beijing's Capital Airport or, more commonly, crossing the Lo Wu Bridge on foot from Hong Kong to the mainland) all were powerfully affected in ways they would never forget. What followed -- not invariably, but often, and usually pretty quickly -- was disillusionment.

    Journalist Jonathan Mirsky was a college professor in 1972 when he joined a state-sponsored six-week tour that began with a visit to the home of a "typical Chinese worker family" in a Canton high-rise. It was a nice place: three brightly painted rooms, private kitchen and bath, a radio, a TV, and shiny new bicycles for all. Mirsky was impressed -- until he went for an unescorted walk early the next morning and happened to run into the same guy he'd met the day before. "He gestured to me to come in and have some 'white tea' -- boiling water," Mirsky writes. "But it was a different flat, shabby, poorly painted, only two rooms, no private kitchen or bathroom." Mirsky had been had. He returned to his hotel, "stunned by what I had seen and heard."

    Steve Tsang directs the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham. In 1978, Tsang was the rebellious son of Chinese refugees living in Hong Kong. When he arrived at the Lo Wu Bridge, he wanted to run across it. "I could not wait to set foot on the motherland, breathe its air, take in the scenery, and get to know the heroic people who 'ended a century of humiliation,'" he writes. What he discovered instead was evidence of a new, if familiar, inequality: preferential plane tickets for the elite; an impenetrable barrier between the upper and lower decks on a Li River ferry boat; and beggars in the streets, willing to fight one another for a foreigner's 10 yuan. Tsang was glad to get back to Hong Kong.

    Schell notes that for many non-Chinese, "these moments of first contact were among the most important in our ongoing professional lives." To which I would add, many are still struggling to make sense of them. Perry Link was an antiwar activist in the 1960s whose views "led me to look at socialist China with very high hopes." He began to doubt soon after his arrival in 1973, when he photographed a fly on a white stone table in Suzhou. Until then he actually believed, as he had been taught in graduate school, that the Anti-Four Pests Campaign carried out during the Great Leap Forward had succeeding in eliminating all flies in China.