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she laughed,“Of course! The electricity is off!” I asked her how often that happened. “Sometimes every day, sometimes every other day, but sometimes we go for days without a blackout! Don’t worry, it will only be for a little while.” Then she asked me if I was thirsty, and when I told her I was, she trotted into the house and came back with a glass of boiling water. “Do you want tea leaves in this?” “No, thank you.”
    That afternoon at exactly three o’clock, when
xiuxi
, the Chinese version of siesta, ends, Comrade Hu called my friends and me out of the house. “Now it is time for recreational activities. We will show you the scenic spots and places of revolutionary interest in Changsha.” We got into the van again, joining a few doctors from the college, and went for another hair-raising trip through downtown Changsha. We drove up Yuelu Mountain and visited the gravesites of several tens of local revolutionary heroes, then stopped at the Mawangdui museum, which
contains
spectacular cultural artifacts and the two-thousand-year-old preserved corpse of a marquise of the Han dynasty, all dug up out of nearby Mawangdui tomb. While I was looking at the corpse, one of the doctors told me that when it was first discovered it was in perfect condition. “But at that time, during the ‘so-called Cultural Revolution,’ bad leftist elements led by the Gang of Four were in power, so when the body was unearthed it was declared a relic of the feudal past, and was left in the sun to rot while peasants and workers threw stones at it. Isn’t that awful?” he asked, smiling.
    Last of all, we went to see the tomb site where the marquise had lain for so many years before being discovered by the citizens of New China and brought to justice at last. Over a small hill, we came to a huge rain shelter. Under the shelter was a deep hole. “This is the hole,” said Comrade Hu. “If youlike, I can take a picture of you standing in front of it, so you will never forget it.”
    As soon as we got back home I realized that I had terrible diarrhea, which was to plague me for the next three weeks. I had no appetite for dinner, but did manage to eat some rice and wash it down with some water that Old Sheep set out on a table for the afternoon so it might cool to room temperature. Just as we finished eating, Comrade Hu appeared in the dining hall. “And now, please, it is time for entertainment. Will you follow me?” The van picked us up once more and took us to the Hunan Theater, a huge, Soviet-looking building on the main street of town, May First Road. That night a troupe of performers from Congo sang and danced to promote friendship between China and Congo. The jammed theater was unbearably hot and stuffy, and reeked of sweat. The audience talked, walked around and spat loudly throughout the performance, so loudly during a mouth harp piece that the musicians gave up halfway through the song and stepped off stage. The performance came to a rousing finale when a striking black man dressed in a studded white body suit unbuttoned to his navel slid across the stage on his knees, threw his head back with abandon and sang out, “Africa—I love you!” in Chinese. At that point, all the Africans came onstage to sing together, where they were joined by a group of aging Hunan Province officials. The Africans, dressed in colorful native costumes, swayed and clapped as they sang a Chinese song—“Socialism is Good”—while the cadres, all dressed in identical grey Mao suits, stood motionless in front of them.
    When the song was finished, a little Chinese girl with painted red cheeks came out with a bouquet of flowers, which she presented to the man in the white Elvis costume. The singer lifted her up in his arms and kissed her, whereupon shebecame frightened and tried to wriggle free. The cadres turned around to face the singers and shake hands. At that moment, the curtain fell—right onto the heads of the cadres, sending one of