When I arrived at the Yan’an History Museum, I discovered that there was a staff of seven or eight working on the exhibit. The majority was from Xi’an - two were designers, two were artists, and one was a sculptor. Two other men and I were assigned to work on the content of the exhibit. This small group of three was responsible for preparing explanations to all the exhibits in the museum.
In order to write, I had to study and check all kinds of historical material in the museum information room. The information room in the Yan’an History Museum was not big, but to me it was a very nice library at that time. I had the opportunity to sneak into a library for the first time in six years. What a feast for a college-educated young man who had not been in a library continuously for six years! Every time when I got there, I was just like a hungry cow rushing into a vegetable garden – gobbling whatever came to my sight. It was here in this small library that I came across, for the first time, the Red Star over China by Edgar Snow and Inside Red China by Helen Snow. I was excited and interested in the books by native writers of the English language about China’s revolution. I already understood the background information of these books so I was much closer to what I was reading. The book by Helen Snow was especially interesting. Her adventures in the Northwest were more breathtaking than any of the feature movies I had seen before. I fell in love immediately with the works by the Snows.
In the first year of my work at the history museum there were visiting groups of other communist party organizations from foreign countries to study the Chinese revolution. There were also visiting groups from the United States who used to work in Yan’an in the war times. Whenever there were such visiting groups, there would be leaders and interpreters from the Liaison Department of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, or the national office of the People’s Friendship Association. The interpreters were usually very young and the leading escorts were cadres who had lived in Yan’an. This was why the curators of the History Museum always asked our three-person group to follow the visiting groups in the exhibition hall. We were given two assignments. First, write down any questions the visitors asked, and second, to collect what the leading escorts would say since they were veterans of Yan’an. This was to save the living documentation.
As an English learner, I naturally paid more attention to their interpretation. The content in the History Museum was like a huge encyclopedia. During the visit the museum guide would talk very fast (they were actually reciting what they had memorized). Then these became a hard nut for the interpreters from Beijing to tackle. Sometimes I noticed that the young interpreters were very nervous, sweating on their heads, and could not find those special terms in their brains. I became very sympathetic to these interpreters. As the old saying goes, ‘It is not difficult if you know it.’ Fortunately all of this content was in the English version of the four volumes of the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, and I still remembered them. Sometimes I couldn’t help myself from speaking out some of the phrases. This helped the interpreters from Beijing a little. When I first did this, they were very surprised, and would ask me, “Can you speak English?”
The leaders from Beijing as well as from the provincial foreign affairs office said, “Eh, it seems that this young man can speak English. We should give him an opportunity to have a try”. I could not reject their proposal, and began to interpret. My English interpretation surprised everyone on the spot. They said, “Oh, we have discovered a hidden interpreter in Yan’an.” Thus I was discovered.
After that, the Liaison Department of the Party Central Committee in Beijing often appointed me as the interpreter in the Yan’an Museum whenever they had a foreign visiting group to Yan’an. But my colleagues there said that I had changed my profession. I did not know whether I should laugh or cry because they did not know I was an English major. They thought my profession was to write the historical material.
A year later, in 1974, when Mr. Lu Man, Director General of the Provincial Foreign Affairs Office heard that I was originally a professional cadre from his office and had been sent to the cadre school. He came to realize that I had been forgotten in the Provincial Foreign Affairs Office. He decided to transfer me back from Yan’an.
My experience in Yan’an had laid down a foundation for my work and career later. Everything that happened to me after the 1970s is closely connected to my experience during this period of time. Now I could say that nothing would have happened to me in the later days without my experience in the cadre school and Yan’an.