The Rectification of a Name

We were all under Madam Bai Shizhen’s thumb. With her “bowl on the head” haircut, blue Mao suit, and national health glasses, she gave little away except the gravity with which she discharged her responsibility for foreign bankers in the Beijing of 1982. For domiciled foreigners in post-Cultural Revolution China, that brand of responsibility was tricky, indeed. None of us could really fathom the horrors of that epoch, let alone comprehend a local getting carted off for simply wearing a German watch.

I had first visited China in 1978 on a tour with family. Coming back to live in Beijing now was simply thrilling! I had been chosen as the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company’s founding representative, reporting to Tim Weitzer, a legendary China hand based in Hong Kong. He was said to have been an Air America pilot during the Vietnam War, and he had the whiff of a spy about him. A volatile fundamentalist Christian who knew his way around China, getting the bank onto the mainland was clearly his baby.

Having learned that the bank’s application had been approved, Tim and I traveled up to Beijing to receive the appropriate official documents. In that spirit, we presented ourselves at the old Bank of China building right off of Tiananmen Square. Madam Bai and a greasy-haired flunky welcomed us—a quarter century later, he is a big wig in one of the state banks. (When we meet up these days, he talks about our good old times that certainly escape my memory.) There was a third person in that room, as well. His name was Pu Dacheng, and he was clearly of mixed Chinese ancestry. Madam Bai immediately let us know that he was now assigned to us as our primary contact within the Bank of China. His leathery hand stunned me when I shook it. Only the punishing experience of having been “sent down” to hard labor in the countryside could have accounted for such texture. Mr. Pu knew some English, taught to him by his American mother who married his Chinese father as a student abroad; and that must have accounted for his recall to the capital in order to assist the bank in rejoining the world. But his mixed parentage had also ensured particularly brutal treatment during the Cultural Revolution. As stern as he tried to be, he simply could not hide a liveliness that went on to inform our relationship during my sojourn in Beijing. Years later, news of his subsequent suicide hit me hard.

Once introductions were out of the way, tea had been sipped, and small talk had become too little to matter, Madam Bai suddenly stood up and announced that our license had been approved. She