Cultural Revolution China

Fashion in China has come a long way since the drab blue and gray Mao jackets of the 1960s and 1970s. Just how much it has changed will be apparent this weekend when a dozen professional models from Shanghai will show off Western-style suits, dresses and coats in floral prints and glimmering jewel tones. The women, who consular officials say are the first models from China to stride down runways in the United States, are sponsored by the Shanghai No.

Yao Yao, 18, emerged from her college entrance exam at Beijing No. 55 Middle School tired but relieved it was finally over. She had done what she could. In a few weeks, a website will reveal a single three-digit score that will determine her future. The odds are high for Yao and the other 8.8 million Chinese high school students who pored over Chinese, math, science, art and English questions in quiet halls around the nation this month. China has only 2.6 million university seats to offer them.

Critics are lauding Haijing Fu as that rare vocal breed--an authentic Verdi baritone. But singing came into his life only because he was desperate. Like most high school graduates at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution in China, Fu faced being sent to the countryside to be a farmer. "Everybody tried to do different things to avoid going," Fu said from his apartment in Queens, N.Y.

Little P is a red-haired joker with a robot dog and a mind bursting with rebellion. She has a closet filled with tight, midriff-baring clothes. Her biggest worry is getting fat. Meet Bad Girl, a cartoon aimed at a generation of young Chinese raised on a diet of imported video games, Kentucky Fried Chicken and communist rhetoric. When Song Yang published his Bad Girl comic book last year, his friends asked whether the character was him in disguise.

What kind of tipper are you? Do you tip in anticipation of great service, or reward for same? Do you feel guilty if you tip less than 15% when service is poor, or do you feel obliged to tip more than 15% when service is only adequate? Let's face it: Tipping has always been one of the more embarrassing aspects of travel. There are no rules, just customs, and customs differ from country to country, hotel to hotel and person to person. Service differs, too, of course.

In his darkest unpurged memories, Nob Seng can still see them coming on that fateful April morning 25 years ago, an army of sandal-clad peasant soldiers dressed in black, some of them just boys no taller than the rifles they carried, marching single file, silent and grim, into Phnom Penh to change the course of Indochina's history. Nob Seng was a policeman that day, April 17, 1975, and he did not know what to make of the spectacle.

The emperor of film in China was sitting excitedly on the edge of his chair describing his version of "The Last Emperor." Jinxian Teng, director of the Film Bureau of the People's Republic of China, essentially the chief authority of all film activity in the People's Republic, was remembering a movie that he planned in 1982--only to have it squelched by authorities then in power, partly because the opening scene included a shot of a female breast. His movie was "The Last Emperor."

A mainland Chinese writer I know once paid a visit to a well-known Australian author in his home. The Australian asked the Chinese what he wanted to drink. "A Coke would be nice," my friend replied. His outraged host demanded indignantly to know how he, a citizen of a communist country, could possibly desire the very symbol of American capitalism, yadda yadda yadda, neo-imperialism, yadda yadda yadda, exploitation, yadda yadda yadda.

The former prisoner runs a dirt-stained hand over a scar on his forehead and recalls the pain of near-daily whippings by police guards at the Fuxin Reeducation Through Labor facility in northeast China. "Since we didn't get enough to eat and the work they forced us to do was so hard, we'd collapse, leading to a bad beating," said Liu Jun, 36. "It was also a way for the police to remind you that bribing them would give you less work and more food.

When I left here in 1981, the city was known to most of the world as Peking, and Chinese friends all seemed to be saving for distant dreams: color television sets and sewing machines. When I returned for the first time to Beijing one polluted afternoon this spring, the hot ticket items were portable telephones and air conditioners. I had left a serene, monochromatic China, a universe not only committed to an ideology but also palpably different from most of the rest of the world because of it.