我的第一次中国之行是在2007年春天。当时，我正在报道迈克尔•戴尔的一次访华行程。他定期都会前往他全球电脑帝国的这个遥远地区。我下榻上海四季酒店（Shanghai Four Seasons），当晚在顶层的酒吧里喝了杯酒，一边俯看周围灯光绚丽多彩的摩天大楼，一边倾听一支中国摇滚翻唱乐队的演奏。第二天早晨，我和戴尔上了辆豪华轿车，前往戴尔公司（Dell）中国总部参加公司全体会议。本来需要半小时的行程只花了10分钟，这得感谢警车的鸣笛护送和不怕跨过道路中线的司机。

    那段行驶路程最令我吃惊，因为这个人民共和国的车流竟然为了一位财富500强CEO而让道。好吧，这是我的第一次中国之行，我哪知道还有这种事？

    当然，在21世纪头十年，我早就该知道才对。但30位先驱们不可能早就知道。现在，他们的笔触生动、富于揭示性的散文已经结集成册，汇编成《我的第一次中国之行：学者、外交官和记者回忆他们与中国的首次相遇》（My First Trip to China: Scholars, Diplomats, and Journalists Reflect on their First Encounters with China）。这本书的编辑是刘建民（音译），书中记述的最早中国之行发生在1942年抗日战争时期，最晚是1986年，但所有行程都发生在中国成为全球经济大国之前。

    这本书的撰稿人包括：洛伊斯•惠勒•斯诺，她是《红星照耀中国》（Red Star Over China）的作者埃德加•斯诺的遗孀，1970年首次到访中国；西德尼•里顿伯格（1945年），这位美国人曾加入中国共产党，在中国呆了35年，其中16年都是在监狱中度过；哈佛大学（Harvard）学者埃兹拉•沃格尔（1973年）。此外还有几位商界人士，例如香港“中国会”（China Club）创始人邓永锵（1979年）和《财富》（中文版）董事长高德思（1975年）。

    有些话题频繁出现，比如：对工业化之前中国自然美景的赞美；对中国人民的喜爱；对中国社会和经济迅猛发展的敬畏。但把这些引人入胜的故事串起来的，不是他们在抵达中国时发现了什么，而是他们带来了什么。不管怎么说，这些故事都是关于中国的纯真、中国的失落以及后来之事。

    经验丰富的中国通奥维尔•斯切尔在引言中写到，“当时，我们星球上最后一块未经探索的区域正在消失，没有为我们留下惯常所见的那种混杂着新奇与冒险的产物”。此时，冷战“意外地成为了新的禁地替代形式”，其中最吸引人的莫过于毛泽东时代的中国。

    My first trip to China was in the spring of 2007. I was covering Michael Dell on one of his periodic expeditions to the far reaches of his global computer empire. I stayed at the Shanghai Four Seasons, where I had a drink that night in the top-floor bar overlooking colorfully lit skyscrapers and listening to a Chinese rock-and-roll cover band. The next morning I got into a limousine with Dell, and we rode across town to a company-wide rally at Dell's (DELL) China headquarters. What should have been a half-hour trip took 10 minutes, thanks to a honking police escort and a driver unafraid to cross the centerline.

    It was that limo ride that surprised me the most, the way the traffic parted in the People's Republic for the benefit of a Fortune 500 CEO. Well, it was my first trip, how was I supposed to know?

    By the first decade of the 21st century, of course, I should have known. Not so the 30 pioneers whose vivid and revealing essays appear in My First Trip to China: Scholars, Diplomats, and Journalists Reflect on their First Encounters with China, edited by Kin-ming Liu. The earliest visit recounted here took place in 1942, during the Japanese occupation; the latest, in 1986. All took place in the years before China's sprint to the top of the global economy.

    Contributors include Lois Wheeler Snow, widow of Edgar Snow, author of Red Star Over China, whose first visit was in 1970; Sidney Rittenberg (1945), an American who joined the Chinese Communist Party and spent 16 of his 35 years in China in prison; Harvard scholar Ezra Vogel (1973); and a smattering of business types, including David Tang (1979), owner of Hong Kong's China Club, and Fortune's own Tom Gorman (1975), publisher of Fortune China.

    Certain themes abound: appreciation of China's pre-industrial natural beauty; affection for its people; and awe at the distance travelled on the country's path to social and economic development. But what binds these compelling stories is not what the visitors found when they arrived; it's what they brought with them. In one way or another, they're all stories about innocence, its loss, and what comes after.

    "Just as the last geographically unexplored pockets of our planet were vanishing and leaving us without our accustomed fix of exotica and romance," veteran China hand Orville Schell writes in his introduction, the Cold War served up "a surprising new surrogate form of the forbidden," no part of it more alluring than Mao's China.

    “我们这些热爱中国的年轻美国人被放逐到香港和台湾这样的地方去学习中文，感觉就像是被逐出圣地的犹太人，”斯切尔说。“我们与我们的研究对象（和愿望）被无情地隔绝，只能羡慕那些我们认识的、成功穿过中国帷幕的少数法国人、加拿大人和英国人。”斯切尔把他那一帮人比作“在恋爱中孤立无助的天鹅。就像马塞尔•普鲁斯特笔下的平凡主角对奥德特的单恋一样，因为无望引起对方关注，更别说追求成功，我们对中国的热恋反而变得更加强烈。”

    然而，突然之间，他们就身在其中了。最初的那一刻（乘坐军事运输机飞越喜马拉雅山脉，踏上北京首都机场的柏油碎石路面，或者更为常见的是，穿过罗湖桥从香港步行到中国大陆），所有人都深受震动，留下了永生难忘的记忆。但接着就是幻想的破灭（并非总是如此，但常有发生，而且通常很快）。

    记者乔纳森•米尔斯基在1972年时还是大学教授。那时他参加了一个由政府发起的、为期六周的访华之旅。这次行程从参观广东省某高楼里一个“普通中国工人家庭”的住房开始。那是所漂亮的房子：三个颜色鲜艳的房间，私人厨房和浴室，收音机、电视和闪闪发光的新自行车一应俱全。这些令米尔斯基印象深刻，直到第二天早上，他在无人陪同的情况下散步时碰巧遇见昨天见过的那个人。“他招手让我到他家喝点‘白茶’，也就是白开水，”米尔斯基写道。“但不是原来的那套房子。单调，简陋，墙壁斑驳，只有两间屋子，没有私人厨房和浴室。”米尔斯基受骗了。他回到酒店，“被所闻所见弄得震惊不已”。

    史蒂文•曾现任诺丁汉大学（the University of Nottingham）中国政策研究所（the China Policy Institute）负责人。他是避居香港的中国造反派之子。1978年，他抵达罗湖桥时，真想要跑过桥去。他写道：“我迫不及待地想踏上祖国，呼吸那里的空气，欣赏那里的美景，认识那些‘结束了百年耻辱’的英雄人民。”然而，他见到的是一种新的、但却似曾相识的不平等：为特权人物准备的优惠机票；漓江渡船上层与下层甲板之间不可逾越的栅栏；为了从外国人手里得到十块钱，互相大打出手的街头乞丐。史蒂文很想回香港。

    斯切尔写到，对很多外国人来说，“与中国的首次接触是我们职业生涯中最重要的时刻之一”。我要补充一点，很多人至今仍然难以理解他们当年看到的景象。佩里•林克在上世纪六十年代曾是位反战积极分子，因此，“我对社会主义中国抱有很高的期望”。但他在1973年抵达中国后不久便开始心生疑虑。当时，他在苏州一个白色石桌上拍到了一只苍蝇。直到那时他还真的相信研究生院里教授的那一套，也就是大跃进时期开展的除四害运动已经成功地消灭了中国所有的苍蝇。

    "we young American China followers who found ourselves marooned in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan studying Chinese were left to feel something like Jews exiled from the Holy Land," Schell continues. "So inexorably isolated from the object of our study (and desire) were we, that we could only envy those few French, Canadian, and British nationals of our acquaintance who had managed … to penetrate the Chinese veil." Schell goes on to compare his cohort to "a group of forlorn Swanns in love. And like Marcel Proust's anti-hero's unrequited passion for Odette, our infatuation with China was only made more ardent by the hopelessness of any possibility of attention, much less consummation."

    Then, suddenly, they were in, and in those first few moments (flying over the Himalayas in a military transport, stepping onto the tarmac at Beijing's Capital Airport or, more commonly, crossing the Lo Wu Bridge on foot from Hong Kong to the mainland) all were powerfully affected in ways they would never forget. What followed -- not invariably, but often, and usually pretty quickly -- was disillusionment.

    Journalist Jonathan Mirsky was a college professor in 1972 when he joined a state-sponsored six-week tour that began with a visit to the home of a "typical Chinese worker family" in a Canton high-rise. It was a nice place: three brightly painted rooms, private kitchen and bath, a radio, a TV, and shiny new bicycles for all. Mirsky was impressed -- until he went for an unescorted walk early the next morning and happened to run into the same guy he'd met the day before. "He gestured to me to come in and have some 'white tea' -- boiling water," Mirsky writes. "But it was a different flat, shabby, poorly painted, only two rooms, no private kitchen or bathroom." Mirsky had been had. He returned to his hotel, "stunned by what I had seen and heard."

    Steve Tsang directs the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham. In 1978, Tsang was the rebellious son of Chinese refugees living in Hong Kong. When he arrived at the Lo Wu Bridge, he wanted to run across it. "I could not wait to set foot on the motherland, breathe its air, take in the scenery, and get to know the heroic people who 'ended a century of humiliation,'" he writes. What he discovered instead was evidence of a new, if familiar, inequality: preferential plane tickets for the elite; an impenetrable barrier between the upper and lower decks on a Li River ferry boat; and beggars in the streets, willing to fight one another for a foreigner's 10 yuan. Tsang was glad to get back to Hong Kong.

    Schell notes that for many non-Chinese, "these moments of first contact were among the most important in our ongoing professional lives." To which I would add, many are still struggling to make sense of them. Perry Link was an antiwar activist in the 1960s whose views "led me to look at socialist China with very high hopes." He began to doubt soon after his arrival in 1973, when he photographed a fly on a white stone table in Suzhou. Until then he actually believed, as he had been taught in graduate school, that the Anti-Four Pests Campaign carried out during the Great Leap Forward had succeeding in eliminating all flies in China.

    林克坦承：“1973年过后，我了解到了很多东西，这才知道我在六十年代末从表面判断毛泽东的‘社会主义’犯了多大的错误。”他后来成为普林斯顿大学（Princeton）东亚研究教授。“我错得不能再错。令我有点困惑的是，我在上世纪六十年代认识的其他一些左派友人有时似乎不愿面对这个明显的事实。”

    《我的第一次中国之行》起源于香港《信报财经新闻》（Hong Kong Economic Journal）网站上的一个每周系列专题。刘建民在致谢时写到，这个专题的两位撰稿人司徒华和罗伯特•斯卡拉皮诺已经去世，他们的文章没有收录在书中。据我所知，第三位撰稿人理查德•鲍姆在刘建民完成编写之后、该书出版之前也已经去世。刘建民在收集这些回忆文章方面做出了出色的工作，并且恰逢其时。（财富中文网）

    译者：千牛絮

    "In the years since 1973 I have learned much, much more about how wrong I was in the late 1960s to take Mao Zedong's 'socialism' at face value," confesses Link, who later became a professor of East Asian studies at Princeton. "I could not have been more mistaken. I am a bit puzzled that others among my leftist friends from the 1960s sometimes seem reluctant to face this obvious fact."

    My First Trip to China originated in a weekly series on the website of the Hong Kong Economic Journal. As Liu notes in his acknowledgements, two contributors to that series whose essays were not included in the book -- Szeto Wah and Robert Scalapino -- have since died, A third that I know of, Richard Baum, died after Liu finished writing and before the book appeared. Liu has performed a great service in collecting these memories, and he's done it none too soon.