China is one of the first countries that I ever learnt about. Canadian children learn about China in the sandbox; it is the place that you will reach if you dig deep enough. They also learn about China when they find out what a billion is. There are a billion people in China, they are told. A billion people! My personal mythology linked me to China in another way as well. The idea of China as a place always accompanied that strange explanation that I had once been inside my mother’s belly. I was told that I had been in my mother’s belly while she was in China. That is quite a thought for a small child: in the belly in China! I later learnt that my parents had indeed visited China in October 1973; I was born in December.
I also remember that when my brothers and I were quite young, before we had started to accompany my father on official trips, he was gone for a whole month on a trip to China. To Tibet, in fact. It was the longest time that he had been away since we were born. We asked him why he was going to Tibet, and he replied that he was going because he had never been there before. What a mysterious answer that was! Maybe we too would go to Tibet some day, because we certainly hadn’t been there either. My father told us that Tibet was the place where the Himalayas were. They were the highest mountains in the world. It was also the home of the Yeti, a.k.a. the Abominable Snowman, and the land of Shangri-La, the most beautiful place in the world. At our cottage, we had an old map of the world on the wall, and my father pointed Tibet out to us. Under the name were parentheses and some script that said, “Occupied by China since 1951.” What did that mean? I asked. He told us that Tibet was part of China. But that it hadn’t always been.
Because it was his first trip away from us that I can remember, my father’s journey to Tibet fascinated me. It was not so much the place that stuck in my head but the fact that he had gone away, as far away as a place called Tibet, in China, where the mountains are. We waited for him and grew ever more excited as his return approached. And when, as predicted, he did indeed return, he looked and smelt different, which we hadn’t expected at all. He had a beard and a tan, and a strange energy about him. He radiated a kind of power, seemed more aggressive and alive than usual. It was as if his eyes still reflected the sights that he had seen, as if his body was still poised to meet them head on. This was a new father, not the patient and adoring father but the free spirit who had wandered the world. The lone traveller. The observer of things. The holder of secret knowledge. He brought with him a series of elaborately painted papier mâché masks and painted wooden swords from the Chinese opera.
For the first time, I began to understand what travelling was: going far away to places one had never visited but somehow needed to go to, and then returning home with strange and wonderful things, somehow changed, both inside and out. I had begun to grasp what my father meant when he said that he had travelled around the world and been to a hundred countries. More importantly, I had begun to understand why one travels. And, in my mind at least, I had begun to become a traveller myself. China became inextricably linked to travel.
ALL JOURNEYS START in the mind, with the desire, the need even, to go somewhere. In 1960 Pierre Trudeau and Jacques Hébert needed to go to China. And they had to impress that need upon their peers; in every sense, they argued, China needed to be recognized. “It seemed to us imperative that the citizens of our democracy should know more about China,” they wrote in the preamble to their book.
And so the Two Innocents set off to China. What, then, does innocence mean? Hébert and Trudeau never really explain the term. As a child, when I asked my father what the enigmatic words “deux innocents” on the cover of his book actually meant, he replied that he and Jacques were the two innocents. This explanation didn’t suffice, of course.
“How could you be innocent?” I prodded; “Innocent of what?”
“Innocent of not knowing any better,” was all that he added.
To this day, innocence remains a mysterious term to me. In French, especially, it has many meanings and interpretations. It is often used as a synonym for “simple.” Sometimes it refers to a child, candid and pure. It can imply both naiveté and wisdom—naiveté when applied to others, wisdom for oneself. It can describe both honesty and ruse. In a courtroom, the guilty often profess their innocence.
Most superficially, here is what I take the term to mean. Trudeau and Hébert were innocents. They wandered inadvertently into a serious place, frolicked a bit, observed all the strange and serious stuff that was happening, then came home and simply reported everything that they saw. They didn’t know where they were going, had no preconceived notions about what they would see. And they had no agenda, no axe to grind, so no one could accuse them of making things up, of having a plan or being biased. They simply didn’t know enough to have guile or guilt. That at least was their strategy.
“Innocence” could also be taken as a disclaimer for the would-be reader. This is not an expert book, the term says. In fact, real experts on China were a rare—even non-existent—breed back then. Hébert and Trudeau certainly never claimed to be great experts on China, before, during or after the trip. They point out, however, that they are experienced travellers, veteran observers of the world who are simply curious. They are not about to embark upon a lengthy or meticulous study of China; they are simply going to wander haphazardly into the place with open eyes and ears and take it as it comes. These “innocents” invite their readers to share in their youthful and optimistic curiosity, to accept that “those who have toured a country observantly and in good faith are in some danger of knowing more about it than those who haven’t been there.” What could be more innocent?
In truth, their innocence and implied lack of agenda were not entirely sincere. They were really more like a rhetorical stance, a plea of innocence addressed to the court of public opinion. Hébert and Trudeau did have an agenda. But their agenda was to rise above partisan Cold War propaganda, to transcend that simplistic dialectic that played capitalism versus communism, West versus East.
When Deux Innocents was first published, in 1961, China was far beyond the reach of even the most intrepid adventurer. It simply wasn’t accessible to the beatnik traveller or the dilettante globetrotter. The only way for a traveller to go to China was to be invited by the Communist government. Surprisingly, however, China did not hold back on invitations.
In 1960 the Western powers still considered the Kuomintang exiles on the smallish island of Taiwan to be the legitimate government of China. As they did for both the Soviet and, much later, the Cuban revolutions, they assumed that the Chinese revolution was only a momentary occurrence, to be quickly overcome by more Western-friendly forces. Many thought that it was only a matter of time before the Kuomintang Nationalists regained control of China. It would be 1972 before the United States overcame its wishful thinking and finally recognized the “transient” Communist Party as the legitimate government of the People’s Republic of China. Canadians should know that Canada had recognized China two years before Nixon’s bold trip to Beijing; Pierre Trudeau was the Canadian prime minister at the time. It is absurd, Trudeau argued, not to recognize a country of a billion people.
But ten years earlier, in 1960, Western governments were still a long way from considering the People’s Republic of China a legitimate nation, and the Communist Party was desperate for recognition. One of the Party’s strategies for obtaining it was to appeal directly to Western citizens. In the late fifties and early sixties China regularly issued invitations to Western business leaders and influential journalists and notables. The hope was that once these important people witnessed first-hand how functional Red Chinese society appeared to be, or at the very least how firm the Communist Party’s grip was, they couldn’t fail to report back that there was nothing ephemeral about Red China and