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BOB POTTER: Phone lines for your questions, too. Forecast for Minnesota is a very pleasant one today. It'll be partly sunny and mild with highs from the upper 40s in the far Northeast to the low 60s in the Southwest. Partly cloudy tonight. Lows in the mid 30s to the low 40s and then highs. Tomorrow, again, upper 50s to lower 60s. In the Twin Cities, low 60s forecast for this afternoon with sunny skies. Not much of a wind. Partly cloudy tonight and tomorrow. Low tonight, 35 to 40. And the high tomorrow somewhere between 55 and 60.

The stock market is giving ground in moderate trading today in a carryover of selling from yesterday. Analysts say enthusiasm for equities is restrained by continuing doubts about the outlook for interest rates. And rates were up a little in bond market trading today. Traders are also apparently reacting warily to renewed selling in the Tokyo Stock Market, where prices fell by more than 3% in the last session of Japan's fiscal year. As of 11:30 Central Time, the DOW industrials stand at 2711.04. That's a drop of 16 and 2/3 points from yesterday's close. The transportation index is down 3.02, and the utilities are down 0.82.

Minnesota Public Radio's coverage of issues related to secondary education is made possible in part by a major grant from Ashland Oil Incorporated and its Valvoline instant oil change division. 12:00 is the time. This is member supported Minnesota Public Radio. And this is KNOW, Minneapolis St. Paul. In the Twin Cities at last report, sunny skies, 52 degrees. A wind from the South at six.

Minnesota Public Radio's coverage of regional public policy issues is supported by a grant from the Northwest Area Foundation. And we welcome Bill home to the studios in St. Paul. Hi, Bill. How are you?

BILL HOLM: Hi.

BOB POTTER: It's nice to see you.

BILL HOLM: It's good finally to see the book out.

BOB POTTER: Well, it is. It is. It was in galley form when we were doing our Minnesota Public Radio fund drive about a month and a half or two ago. And now the book is out in paperback version. A very attractive book it is. Coming Home Crazy-- An Alphabet of China Essays by Bill that you wrote while you were over in China teaching for about a year, was it not?

BILL HOLM: Yeah, I wrote the essays not in China. I took notes on what happened to me and tried to organize it for a long time after I got back. And Rudy was unable to do that until July of last year. Really, this is called classic Minnesota procrastination. You have to think for about two or three years first.

BOB POTTER: Because when was it you were over there?

BILL HOLM: I went in the fall of '86 and came back in the fall of '87. And then went again briefly for a month in Christmas of '88. And I didn't get around to beginning on the book really until July of '89.

BOB POTTER: Have you had any reaction to it from people in China?

BILL HOLM: Well, of course, one of the things that changed the book was the June 4th demonstrations in Tiananmen. And the focus of the book took a different turn. I had originally meant it to be a kind of witty book berating Americans for having too much money and the adventures wandering around heart seat trains in China and having dinner in odd places and eating live eels. But the tone of the book took a rather darker turn after the Tiananmen thing, because there was no way to amuse an audience with colorful adventures in China that had watched the murders in Tiananmen Square.

So of necessity, the book took a darker tone and it took a more Orwellian tone. There's still, I hope, some humor in it, because funny things happened to me in China. But essentially the Tiananmen thing gave a focus to what I was trying to say. But of course, since the Chinese official line now is that the brave soldiers were assaulted by counter-reaction, counter-revolutionary elements and hooligans in Tiananmen Square and bravely fighting back. Many soldiers died, but no population. And nothing happened.

So since the book mentions that event, my guess is that it's going to be difficult to get it into China. Though I did get a letter from an American teaching in Anhui Province who had gotten the piece that was in the New York Times. And he asked me to send him a copy of the book.

BOB POTTER: So you'll find out if it gets through, I suppose.

BILL HOLM: Yeah.

BOB POTTER: Eventually. Bill Holm is with us. And if you have a question about his book Coming Home Crazy, you're more than welcome to give us a call. The number in the Minneapolis St. Paul area is 227-6000. 227-6000 in the Twin Cities. Elsewhere, 1800-652-9700. 1-800-652-9700.

Have you heard from any of the people that you met over there since Tiananmen? And if so, what have they had to say?

BILL HOLM: I've had a few letters and a few telephone calls and a few communications via people who came out and who brought things with them. And I've talked to a few Chinese who were in China during the thing and had the real story of what happened. But of course, if perhaps I'm too frightened, I'm a little leery of sending frank letters to people for fear that they're being opened and being used.

And every time I've been on the telephone, I always had this odd feeling more than I did that I was in China that the call was being monitored at one or both ends. My guess is that most of the Chinese want very badly to maintain the same kind of openness in communication with Westerners. But they've been through this so many times before, the fearfulness that someone is watching and that what they say in their opinions will soon be used against them.

BOB POTTER: What is your best guess about what will happen there?

BILL HOLM: That, of course, is the $64,000 question. You ask someone Chinese, and they don't know either. The current guess is that when Deng Xiaoping dies, there will be a power struggle. Almost everyone, I think, agrees that as long as the army is on the side of power, nothing will change. Because the army, of course, has the guns. And they've clearly established their willingness to use those guns in order to maintain authority.

So if something were to break down inside the army so that there were an element that were on the side of the students in Tiananmen Square on the side of the 20th century, on the side of something or other other than the power in Beijing, then possibly there might be some change in China. So it may be 10 years, it may be 20 years.

And the sad thing for the Chinese, we read in the papers now, of course, that Wang Mang, the culture minister, is back being re-educated through labor. And Chinese novelists have stopped writing novels. Chinese filmmakers, including the brilliant one in Xian, Wu Tianming, who was the best of the Chinese film directors, have stopped making films. The film studios are now making propaganda pieces about the brave soldiers and the brave old Long March veterans saving China from communism.

But these are the same people who just got done losing 10, 15, 20 years of their careers in the Cultural Revolution. Were just rehabilitated, had 10 years to start writing, making films, dancing, acting, having lives as artists and intellectuals. And then wham, the door closes on them again.

BOB POTTER: And they're back to ground zero.

BILL HOLM: So if you're Chinese, a little older than I, let's say 55 or 60, and you've tried to have a career, your career, you've lost 20, 30 years of it. And now you're looking at another 10, 20 years gone. And you're hoping that your health will hold out so that when you're 75 again, you might have five good years to write and to publish before you die.

My great sadness is for those truncated lives that are ruined by politics. And my sense of amazement is that the Chinese, after 20 years of that, will come back and resume right where they left off. Being imaginative and being brave and publishing and starting to create an intellectual life. And it's like waiting for the other boot to fall on your neck. And then 10 years gone again.

BOB POTTER: Bill Holm is with us talking about his experiences in China back in the mid to late 1980s. And the phone lines are open. In the Twin Cities, It's 227-6000. 227-6000. Elsewhere, 1-800-652-9700. And maybe as the hour continues, Bill, we'll get you to read a couple of paragraphs here and there.

But let's talk a little bit. Now you really described a little bit about the dark side of the whole thing. But on the lighter side and on the other side of it, what were some of your experiences over there? I mean, here you come over from Minnesota, plunk down in that culture that no Minnesotan could be expected to be familiar with. What were some of the strange things that happened to you?

BILL HOLM: Well, I was maybe more unfamiliar than most in that I was about 1,000 years out of date. I'd grown up reading Chinese poetry. So I knew the old Chinese poets. And like any 60s guy, I knew Mao's Little Red Book and a little of the Cultural Revolution. All of what I knew was wrong, of course. As I saw it. There's nothing like a little experience in order to correct your opinions and to make you more modest in your expression of them.

So I got to China. And one of the things that any reader of Chinese literature by Westerners notices is that Westerners get to China and they're appalled by the disorder, by the oddness of it, by the government, by a number of things. But they are utterly and completely charmed and delighted by the Chinese citizens. To the degree that they're able to make friends and to communicate and to travel around and to meet the Chinese. I mean, they're simply marvelous people.

BOB POTTER: How were you able to communicate? Do you speak the language?

BILL HOLM: I learned very, very little Chinese. I could, with all the wrong tones, buy vegetables, buy train tickets. And if I was invited to somebody's house for dinner, exchange clichés about the weather until something complicated like fog came up. In which case, I would have to drop hopelessly out of the conversation.

But I had marvelous students. They had, sometimes all by themselves with just tapes and never having met a foreigner, learned English. So when there was a movie on or there was a lecture in Chinese, they would come over and they'd get me and they'd say, come on, it's a hot lecture. I'd say, it's in Chinese. That's all right. We need practice translating.

So sometimes I'd have two of them, one on either ear. And they would argue about sentences. They'd say, what do you mean? You missed the translation on that. That's wrong. Don't tell home bad information. And I'd say, guys, shut up and keep translating. I just missed the last paragraph.

BOB POTTER: Just missed the last five minutes or so, yeah.

BILL HOLM: But so it was like always being surrounded by translators. And I discovered a curious thing. I had a friend who taught at a college for mechanical engineers in Xi'an, and her students were quite bad in English. So Marcy learned very good Chinese because of necessity. Since there was no one around who spoke good English, she had to pick up Chinese in order to communicate. This happened to many teachers and students.

But I had the creme de la creme of students in Xi'an. I mean, they were wonderfully literate. They were translating American novels and translating my poems. And I spent a lot of time hanging around with them. So my Chinese was limited in that if I would go out and I would try to use Chinese and they were along, they would all hide their faces and begin giggling and say, maybe it's better for us to do this.

BOB POTTER: 10 minutes past the hour. Bill Holm is with us. And we have some folks on the line with questions. Let's get to the callers. Thanks for waiting. You're on the air now. Hello.

PATTY ISAACS: Hi. I just had to call in. My name is Patty Isaacs, and I taught English at Jiao Tong University in 1981 and '82. The same place where Bill Holm taught. And I did see his article in the New York Times, although I haven't read his book. And I just had to touch bases and let you know how true your comments ring. True to me, having been there a number of years ago. Things seem to-- although they've changed, they seem to be very much the same.

My husband has a master's in Chinese. He always wanted to go to China. This happened a year after we got married. So I took a night class, and off we went. And I went as an apolitical person. I was along for the ride. And an astounding characteristic of going to China is that no matter how apolitical you want to be when you go there, if you've been there for a while, you become politicized.

BOB POTTER: Did you find that to be the case, Bill?

BILL HOLM: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

BOB POTTER: And in what ways did you become politicized?

BILL HOLM: Well, you become politicized because you make friends and you see the dire effects of politics in the lives of people. Americans can be pretty well insulated from politics. You had the story about Frenzel quitting. And a little talk about what's going to happen in the House of Representatives. You can insulate yourself from American politics. I have friends, intelligent people who write books, who travel around, who are thoughtful, who just have said, the hell with it. They don't vote. They don't pay any attention to it.

And they have Henry Miller's attitude in his arguments with George Orwell. Miller and Orwell knew each other well and admired each other's work. And Miller was always giving Orwell a bad time for thinking too much about politics. And he'd say, aren't there any girls in London, George? Can't you have a good time. And Orwell would write back to Miller and he'd say, Henry, don't you know Hitler's is in Germany? There's a war coming. And you're in Paris and they're going to march on top of your head.

So they would have this argument. But when you're in China, of course, you become political against your will. I mean, if you pay any attention to what happens to you. You don't get fond of politics. In fact, you develop what I think is the real China-- the Chinese Laobaixing, the old 100 Names. The common man's attitude toward politics in China. If you could take all the political theorists on the face of the planet-- capitalist, communist, free enterprisers, socialist schemers, improvers, and do-gooders-- and get them into a large ocean liner over the Mindanao Trench, which is 37,000 deep in the Pacific. And then if you had a torpedo that you could shoot with dead accuracy into the hull, that there would be a great deal of joy at watching that boat full of the political theorizers of the planet going down seven miles under the Pacific.

[LAUGHS]

But it was funny. I must tell a story to Mrs. Isaacs, who just called. If you're still listening. We both taught at Jiao Tong University. And I got wonderful letters from people who had been at Jiao Tong. Jiao Tong is part of a chain of universities in China. The original one was in Shanghai. It's one of the oldest universities in the country, and it was organized to train engineers and scientists to run the railroad network, which was built in the 19th century.

When I first got into the New York Times piece and in the book Coming Home Crazy, I tell people that the translation of Jiao Tong is Traffic University. Well, I got a very brisk letter from somebody in New York after the Times piece saying, dear Bill Holm, Jiao Tong University is Transportation University, not Traffic University. I am Chinese, and I read a lot. I speak the language. I know. Thank you. So there.

Well, and of course, she's dead, right. And I knew that. But when I first got to town, I was met by a fellow from the Ybon, the foreign office, whose first foreign language was German. I suppose that's why he didn't communicate too well with all the Americans and the Brits. And my German is baby German, and his English was baby English. So I said to him, I said, Mr. Zheng, Jiao Tong, what does that mean? And he said, Jiao Tong, it means-- and he was obviously stuck for the word. And he was mulling over his German. And he said, it means something like traffic.

Well, so I told this to somebody Chinese. And they giggled and said, well, Zheng was stuck for a word. But I thought it was so funny that I kept saying it ironically all year. And this is a danger of telling funny stories. After a while, you forget that they're funny stories and the truth is somewhere else. So I apologize to Ms. Chen in New York City. I even knew in my better and more lucid moments that Jiao Tong means transportation.

BOB POTTER: It's a quarter past the hour. Here's another listener with a question for Bill Holm. You're on the air. Hi.

AUDIENCE: Hi. Yes, I have a question about your opinion about what's happened in Eastern Europe. And the media tries to equate the two situations as being identical. And in Eastern Europe, the majority of the population was for getting rid of the communist government. But I never got that feeling about the Tiananmen Square issue, that the majority of the Chinese were actually for this. And the media has criticized the president for not doing more.

And after all, with the large population of the Chinese people, how can we not keep relations going with them? Do you think that the two situations are identical, or do you think that the majority of the Chinese don't really want a democratic system?

BILL HOLM: Here's one difference. I made a joke when I got back from China that there were more Marxists on the Minnesota city council than there were in the Politburo in Beijing. And I think that's true. Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng and Yang Shangkun and the old boys is aware, as you and I, that Marxist ideas have not worked very well economically for China.

But the same thing was true in Russia. I'm not sure communism, as Marx understood it, has ever gotten a fair chance on this planet. Because I don't think we were dealing in Russia or China with communism. We were dealing with dictatorships. And this is an old human phenomena. We were dealing with those who had power and intended very well, thank you, to hang on to it by whatever means necessary.

So in China, the Chinese wanted a reform of the party. They didn't care what it was called. What they wanted was a little humanity, a little accountability, and a little room to breathe and to have mental lives. And if you called that communism or if you called it agribusiness, they wouldn't have cared. The name didn't make so much difference to them as the fact.

BOB POTTER: Did you get the feeling, though, that the vast majority of the Chinese people supported those who were demonstrating in Tiananmen?

BILL HOLM: Let me give you another image. When you get into the countryside in China, which is maybe 700 or 800 million of the Chinese, and I did a little traveling in farm towns, you would find people who, if you asked them who Li Peng was, they wouldn't know. They would have a picture of Mao Zedong. These would be Chinese farmers. And they would say, he's the emperor of China. And they'd say, no, he wasn't an emperor, he was a communist and he's dead now. And they'd say, oh, did they change governments?

China doesn't have or didn't have until recently any television at all. Not the communication systems. The farmers were poor. They were isolated. There was no road system. People didn't drive from one place to the other. People living in little villages in China would have seen no one but their fellow villagers or an occasional invading army for hundreds of years. They would never have seen a foreigner. They would hardly have seen anyone from Beijing.

So a great proportion of the Chinese countryside is simply apolitical in that way. They don't care who's in power in Beijing, and they don't know where Beijing is. They just want to grow rice and be left alone. But the people in the cities, I would say people who had been to school, who had had some contact with life, who were literate, and who read and who thought, all recognized that there was a great necessity for change in China.

The other thing about Eastern Europe and China-- people often ask me this question. Deng Xiaoping gave an order to the army to go in and shoot. And of course, he saved his power. He saved the power of the old guard. In his way, he was exactly rational. He understood that his power was disappearing. And the way to keep it was to shoot.

Prior to this year or this last fall, when the Hungarians erupted, the Russians sent troops in. When the spring happened in 1968, the Russians sent troops in. When Poland got foxy, the Russians sent troops in. This year, I think Gorbachev made perfectly clear to the leaders of Eastern Europe that they were on their own.

Now, whatever else Gorbachev does as a man or is a politician, give him credit for keeping his word in this. I mean, he simply said, what happens, happens. You're on your own, and my troops will not cross the border to get you out of trouble or to rectify the situation. So he gave the order not to shoot. There would be no talk of German reunification now. If when the Germans got foxy, you sent in three or four Russian divisions and sealed the borders and shot a few people who were trying to get over. You could get the Germans back in line quickly.

And you could get Americans in line. You can get any population on the face of the Earth to do what you want them to do if you order the army to point its guns at them and shoot if they get out of line. Humans are not crazy. And if somebody's pointing a gun right at their chest and saying, do this, they'll do it. Us, too.

BOB POTTER: Let's go back to the phones here. Talk with Bill Holm. The phone number in the Twin Cities is 227-6000. There's a line or two open. And the line outside Minneapolis St. Paul is 1800-652-9700.

OK, your turn to talk to Bill Holm. Hello there.

AUDIENCE: Hi. I've just been real interested to listen to what you say and to agree with almost every word. I was in China from September of '88 till June 8th of '89. And your comment about your translators, I mean, some of my translators had learned their English from the Voice of America. And I found that really fascinating, the important role it had played for so many people.

But I've noticed since I've been back, I've been real startled by the frankness that I'm getting in many of my letters from my Chinese friends and not only friends, but people who want me to help them get out. But many of these letters come through and they've been opened. And they're saying things that I'm wondering if I would have said even there with my US passport, much more tied. Have you gotten any of that at all?

BILL HOLM: Yeah, I've had a couple. And maybe it's my cowardice. And I'm glad to hear you say that. That gives me strength for mission, as they used to say in the Icelandic Lutheran Church a hundred years ago. Because I've been fearful about getting people in trouble. I know I'm a mouthy and demonstrative sort of a fellow, and I got people in trouble in China. And I would sometimes say to my Chinese students and friends, I say, shouldn't I shut up and not cause trouble? They'd say, no, we need to see barbarians behave with some rambunctiousness.

So I've been afraid to do it. It's perhaps my cowardice. And I'm glad to hear that those letters are getting through. Have you answered the letters?

BOB POTTER: I don't think she's still there.

BILL HOLM: Well, yeah. And I would say if you get those letters, answer them. But use some discretion. But you were in China in '88 and '89. It's so wonderful to think about people being there. I've missed it terribly. And one of my reasons for hating the Tiananmen thing is my simple lonesomeness to go back.

BOB POTTER: And you don't want to go back as long as the situation is the way it is?

BILL HOLM: Well, I will, I suppose. I don't know what happens after this crazy book. And I don't know if it makes any difference to anyone. Marcy and I have been invited to go and teach next year at another college in China. And I thought about that. I want to do it, but I don't want to get people in trouble and I don't want to-- I find it difficult to remain quiet.

BOB POTTER: What do you miss about it?

BILL HOLM: I miss my Chinese friends. I miss that sense of adventure on going into the classroom. I miss the sense of adventure of going off on a trip, not knowing whether you're going to get there and what kinds of adventures you're going to have on the way. I miss, for one thing, wearing my old clothes that I wore when I got home from China. One of the things that happens to every American in China-- I'm a heavy fellow. And I got to China. And within six months, my pants were hanging off me. And not only had I not dieted. I had gone out to dinner every time I could, eaten as much as I could.

I felt better than I had ever felt in my life. I had lost 40 pounds. I could actually walk up a mountain without huffing and puffing too badly. And this happened to the 16 Minnesota kids who were there, to other teachers. And so I just assumed that that would be a continual state of operations. But when I got back to America, of course, the first thing I did was got into the seat of my car, went and drank a bottle of bad American beer, and had a couple of hamburgers. And one thing led to another, and now I'm back into my old belt holes.

BOB POTTER: And there come those 40 pounds marching right back at you.

BILL HOLM: So I figure the only way to take my gut off again is to get back to China and have adventures. For one thing, you don't-- the car and its absence has an amazingly profound effect on one's daily life.

BOB POTTER: You walk everywhere or bicycle or--

BILL HOLM: Walk or bicycle, really. And I mean, that's the way you get places. The Chinese think nothing of walking 15, 20 miles or bicycling halfway across the country. You frequently can't get permission to buy train tickets or plane tickets. In order to travel in China on official things, you have to have letters of permission from your work unit to move from one place to another. So the Chinese do the sensible thing. They walk or bicycle.

BOB POTTER: What's the furthest distance you suppose you biked?

BILL HOLM: I mostly stayed off bicycles for the simple reason that Chinese bicycle traffic is awful. And I had this vision of me with my rudimentary technique smashing into five Chinese citizens and falling on top of them. And the international headlines, 250 pounds Icelander crushes eight local citizens.

My friend Marcy biked all over town. And she would bike 15, 20 miles. I mean, just to go visit somebody. One Chinese woman I knew commuted from an art conservatory south of Xi'an to see the man that she was going with. And it was 15 miles there, 15 miles back. So 30 miles a day.

BOB POTTER: Boy, a lot of people here think twice about driving that far, don't they? Let's go back to the telephones here. More questions for Bill Holm. You're on the air now. Go ahead, please.

AUDIENCE: Yes. First of all, compliments to the author on his book. I found it intriguing and full of a lot of insights. I, too, had spent a year and a half traveling around Asia. And most of that time was spent teaching in Taiwan. Since then, I've become fluent in Mandarin. And I'm now an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota. I'm studying social sciences and Asian studies.

And my question is basically to speculate on the future. And that is, do you think that there would be any openings in China for Westerners to come in and help them with social programs or welfare programs or any kind of youth development programs that are not going to be considered real political or real backed by the US and that sort of thing? Any ideas or opinions about that?

BILL HOLM: There was, I know that. The Chinese were very anxious to have advice and help. Both curiously from-- if social workers, people dealing with family problems, because there were lots of them in China. The political campaigns had done terrible havoc to families. Broken them apart.

And the other thing, the Chinese really had no tradition of psychology. I mean, the old official Marxist notion was that reading Mao is going to make you sane. And I talked to a Chinese psychiatrist who taught at a medical school. And I said, what did you do? There must have been a lot of depression in China. And he said, yeah, there was. And I said, well, what-- during the Cultural Revolution, all those years when people would come to you and say, I'm depressed, what would you say?

He'd say, well, the only thing you could say is just try to cheer them up a little. I mean, but now there was a recognition that, in fact, there was a need for dealing with depression. For dealing with simply people who couldn't take the madness of Chinese life and broke under the strain of it and needed some help.

I don't know. My answer to your question-- there's a good teacher's answer. I don't know what the state of things is now. I know the teachers are still being hired in China to do various work. But I don't know what else is available. And my guess is if you're at the university, there must be someone there who knows. I envy you, by the way, being fluent in Chinese now. If I had been 20, 30 years younger, I would not have been an English teacher. I would have learned Chinese, taken five years, stupid as I am, and been a sinologist.

BOB POTTER: Bill Holm is with us. His book is called Coming Home Crazy. It's just out. And we'll take another call, then. Bill, I'm going to ask you to read something from it. I'm sure you've got a bunch of passages and paragraphs marked of various things that you like, and I'll just have you do one after this next question, OK? Go ahead, please. You're on with Bill Holm. You're calling from where?

RAY ANDERSON: Hi, this is Ray Anderson.

BILL HOLM: Well, hello, Ray.

RAY ANDERSON: How are you, Bill?

BILL HOLM: How good to hear your voice.

RAY ANDERSON: How are you doing?

BILL HOLM: Are you up in the North?

RAY ANDERSON: I'm up in the woods. Are you coming up here this summer?

BILL HOLM: Well, I hope so. Ray is calling from Rainier, Minnesota, which is the end of the road, let me tell you, in Minnesota. It does not go any further.

RAY ANDERSON: I got a couple questions, Bill.

BILL HOLM: OK.

RAY ANDERSON: How about photography in China? Do they restrict it, or can you shoot when you want to or what you want to?

BILL HOLM: The Chinese are incredible fans of photography. Little street photographers, stands where people have their pictures taken and they get developed, are all over China and every tourist place. The Great Wall is full of little photography studios. And it's humorous to foreigners, because the Chinese are great posers. This has something to do with the Chinese character, the Chinese mind, and old Chinese paintings.

They're not interested in just pictures of landscape, just pictures of clouds. It has to have human beings in them, preferably your relatives or preferably yourself. So they're great posers. My friend Marcy was climbing a mountain, one of the sacred mountains of China, Emei in Sichuan. And she took a wonderful picture of a girl sitting, putting on makeup and combing her hair. This is almost at the top of a 10,000-foot mountain, where there's an overlook.

Two young couples had marched up. And what they really wanted to do was to get their picture taken at the top of the mountain. So she had stopped, and she was here in the middle of in this mountain cliff, putting on her makeup with a little mirror and straightening her hair. And when the Chinese pose, I mean, it's not au naturale. Caught in an unguarded moment. They strike heroic and romantic poses. And it's quite wonderful to see this.

As for Westerners photographing China, I took lots of photographs. And once I got into trouble for it. I was shooting from a train window. And many people did shoot from train windows, because you took trains to travel in China and you went through wonderful countryside. But I was in Gansu, a poor province. And I took a picture of three women by the side of the track picking up the coal, the slag that had fallen out of the train.

And I just thought it looked like a beautiful Edward Curtis shot in this bleak place of these three brave women with their coal baskets. And a policeman came, and with great anger and ferocity, confiscated my camera and was going to arrest me. And I had to have a Chinese student get me out of that. Because I had photographed poverty, and I had intended to humiliate and denigrate the four modernizations in the people's socialist reconstruction.

BOB POTTER: Boy.

BILL HOLM: Well, I got out of that one. But I thought there was no better way for the cop. Of course, there's a verbal photograph of it in the book. I would have forgotten the picture if I'd taken it. Otherwise, it didn't come out. But by stopping me from taking the photograph, he had two choices. He could either shoot me, or he must have known that I would at some point write about it. And that I could remember it far better than I could photograph it. But the Chinese are great fans of photography.

BOB POTTER: OK, let's take one more question from you and Ranir, then we'll ask Bill to read.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, I want to ask about railroad travel. Can you go from China to, say, Burma by railroad, or, for instance, Soviet Union?

BILL HOLM: Soviet Union, yes. Burma, no. There's wars on the Burmese border, wars on the Vietnamese border, wars on the Indian border. You can take the train all the way to London from lots of places in China. And I recommend doing it. You take, of course, the trans-Siberian. And the Chinese train is the nicer one. The food is better and it's cleaner. You leave China and you go up through Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, which is now no longer a communist country.

And all through Siberia, and you go to Moscow, and I knew a couple of young Canadians who then plugged in, went to Warsaw, to East Berlin, to Frankfurt, to Amsterdam, and took the hydrofoil over the channel to London. And what a grand train trip that is. So yes, indeed, you can do it. And I highly recommend it. You and Ruth should do that. I want to come along.

BOB POTTER: What would you like to read here, Bill?

BILL HOLM: I'll read a little description of one of my students singing an American song. What a page.

BOB POTTER: All right.

BILL HOLM: These essays have got rather odd titles like "dumplings," and "Iceland," and "Jesus," which is a description of going to a Lutheran Church. One of them is about the music that made its way into China. Called Red River Valley. And the Red River Valley happened to be one of the Chinese favorite American songs. And they would always say to me, do not All-American students love the beautiful Red River Valley? And I'd have to confess that, yeah, well, their grandmothers liked it. But it had fallen in bad days.

So one of my students was a lovely singer. And she had gone out to visit one of her friends who had spent six months in America in a little town in the mountains of Gansu. And we'd gone out to look at Buddhas during the day and then come back and had dumplings and made them and sat around telling stories and singing. And we walked down to the river in this desert town. And I'll read a little description of what happened.

"It was a lovely night sitting around that jolly tiny apartment in that dry, remote town, eating juicy dumplings, drinking local beer, joking, laughing, watching the sun go down over the edge of the desert. We decided to work off our dumplings by strolling down to the heavenly water river that gave the town its name. Like most Chinese towns at night, this little one was alive with eaters, strollers, arguers, gamblers, peddlers, even lovers.

It was a fine spring night, with stars coming out over the desert. The same dipper, the same North Star here on the opposite side of the planet. The river was a poor excuse for heavenly. Mostly a dry stone bed with scattered rivulets sloshing along toward the Yellow River. We sat down on stones, watched some little boys fishing. They were having a good time, but no luck.

Chinese life is so much confined behind walls and barriers-- physical, economic, sexual and political-- and is so often made harsh by Chinese duty and necessity, that everyone on that riverbank felt amazing freedom and joy. We were affectionate friends out of the Chinese box on a lovely night, in a lovely place. A chorus of raucous frogs almost drowned out the conversation. But no one cared. They were friendly frogs.

Finally, someone piped up. Wang Xiao, returned the favor to our comrade frogs. Sing to them. Oh no, I couldn't do that, said a small, shy voice. More coaxing from everyone. An old routine. Well, perhaps. Shall I sing an American song? Dear reader, you must see this picture. Wang Xiao, the woman who is about to sing, is 25, but looks like a little girl. She is disarmingly pretty and speaks English with a soft British accent. She blushes when she is praised.

She is famous among her friends for her lovely voice. Not the high, sharp voice of a Chinese opera singer, but a clear, soft, delicate voice with a slight fluttering vibrato. The quality of water shivered by a small wind. If she were blond and Swedish, she would be the Christmas angel and sing the Santa Lucia song. There would not be a single dry eye in the church. But she is not Swedish, but Chinese. And her long black hair keeps falling over one eye.

She is stylishly dressed in Chinese blue jeans and a bright red sweater. The moon has just come up over the stone bridge and lights both her face in profile and the brilliant red of her sweater. One of the men who listens is already in love with her, but dares say nothing. He is too poor. Within a year of this night, he will marry her. He doesn't know this now.

The night booms with the croaking of frogs. The little boys have stopped fishing and look at Wang Xiao. The shreds of river glide over stones in almost though not complete silence, Wang Xiao sings very slowly and with great tenderness, Red River Valley, as if it were Dido's lament. Or as if she were desdemona, singing the duet with Othello. But poor Othello was only the Gansu frogs croaking over the heavenly water.

Wang Xiao sang a line. The frog stopped, listening. Another line, a few ribbits. Another line. Come and sit by my side if you love me. Ribbit, ribbit, ribbit. Do not hasten to bid me adieu. Ribbit, ribbit, ribbit. Just remember the Red River Valley. Ribbit, ribbit, ribbit. And the cowboy who loved you so true. A timpani roll of ribbits.

This went on for four or five verses enclosed with a chorus in Chinese. It was simultaneously funny and romantic. No one knew whether to weep or giggle. At the end, we were all in love with each other, with Wang Xiao, with the frogs, with the desert night, with heavenly water, with the cowboy who loved us, with the Red River valley. With our own lives. Fie on politics that keeps human beings from living those nights. Fie on lies and loudspeakers. Fie on governments. Fie on the East as red and the Star Spangled Banner and God Save the Queen. Let us have real music. Let us sing to each other.

BOB POTTER: From Coming Home Crazy by Bill Holm. Back to the telephones and more questions for him today. Thanks for waiting. You're on the air. Calling from where today?

AUDIENCE: I'm calling from Nimrod, Minnesota.

BOB POTTER: From Nimrod. OK, what's your question for Bill?

AUDIENCE: My question is two parts. Number one, you've partially answered this question. We have a friend in China who was here in Minnesota on a teacher exchange program. Since Tiananmen square, I'm a little reticent about writing to him. I mean, I do write to him, but I write non-controversial things like New Year's cards and birthday cards. Wondering how much it's good to say in a letter at this time.

The other thing is we like sending gifts to him, and we sent him books, for instance, in January of 1989, which took about five months for him to get. I'm wondering if you have any ideas of what kind of things it would be proper to send at a time like this.

BILL HOLM: Well, I'd say send him my book, but I don't know if that's a safe thing to do. I think you're doing the right thing. To keep contact, to write newsy letters. Because for one thing, even despite politics, the Chinese are relieved to hear just news of daily life. What goes on in America, what your family's doing, what your kids are doing.

And also to send books. To keep sending gifts. To keep the supply of books and of information coming through. That's dried up a lot in China. Remember also that the customs men sometimes are not sympathetic to the party. I mean, China is now shot through like a cheese full of holes with people who are party members, who are security men, but who knew perfectly well that the students are right and are horrified by what those policemen did.

I mean, it literally is a powder keg waiting to go off. So keep contact. Be discreet, just use good sense. And keep as much contact as you can and keep the flow of books. You're doing the right thing.

BOB POTTER: Do you think your book would get through?

BILL HOLM: Yeah, probably. One thing I found about China is that like any police state, they're remarkably inefficient. It's a hell a lot of work to maintain a police state and to monitor all those billion people, and the Chinese do a good job of it when they put their minds to it. They also have to use the Chinese to watch over each other and to be stool pigeons to turn people in.

But you send something to the post office and it happens to be that there's nobody there who reads English that day. So it gets thrown in the back room and nobody ever looks at it again. And it's simply lost. And it wasn't that the police confiscated it. It just got lost through sheer inefficiency. Some days, you've got somebody working on the mail censoring division or sorting mail to foreigners whose son was in Tiananmen Square and who has a private opinion, which he keeps to himself.

But he looks at those things, reads them himself, and then seals them again and sends them through. So it's erratic, of course. You're always running a risk that you're going to get some real toad who's going to cause trouble. But there's also the possibility that something good will come through.

BOB POTTER: Yeah. If you were sending something to somebody that the wrong sensor happened to pick up, would that reflect badly on the person to whom it was addressed, do you suppose?

BILL HOLM: They might be called in and said, what are you getting this kind of mail? What's your relationship with this foreigner? There's a process to this. Chinese are required to write self-criticisms and thought examinations. Aren't those wonderful words?

BOB POTTER: Sounds nice.

BILL HOLM: It's straight out of Orwell.

BOB POTTER: It's amazing. Let's go back to the phones here. Another question. Hi, you're on with Bill Holm now.

AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm a student of University of Minnesota. I'm a Chinese student. And I like this program very much. I have one question. I was following the news around the June the 4th very closely. And I had found that Chinese urban public has lost the confidence, totally lost the confidence in the communist regime this time.

But after June 4th massacre, you see, because of this propaganda campaign started, restarted. And also because you see the Chinese had no access to the International news about what happened in Eastern Europe. I just want to know, what do you think of the urban public feeding now? After the June massacre and after the Eastern European-- what happened in Eastern European countries.

This is the first question. And second. Do you think that my feeling that the Chinese are no longer as they were before? Is illusion, or do you agree with me? I think after this May, the June the 4th, I think Chinese are no longer as there before. I mean, they are not politically obedient or as before. They have their own feelings. Though they don't know in detail what's wrong, what's the difference between totalitarian regime and democracy. But they have the general feeling that totalitarian regime is no good. They don't like that.

BOB POTTER: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right to get to the second one first. The things changed profoundly. I mean, you would know better than I am and would have access to more information. And I don't know what city you're from. But from what information I can get from people I talk to, there's a sense of a kind of undercurrent that's quite different from things before.

That even people who are not political and who are used to keeping their judgments to themselves and getting on with daily life, which is a kind of Chinese genius to just say this is politics, but now we have to get food on the table and have a good time or do something. I think that that's profoundly changed by what happened. And my guess is that the old boys in the party know that that's profoundly changed and they're terrified.

As for the information getting through, I read the same things you do in the papers about the propaganda campaigns in grade schools and about the films that are coming out now with versions and the TV programs. But I also had an interesting conversation with Chinese citizen. And I asked him this question. And I said, is it possible that kids and people who weren't there will begin to believe the lying version of this?

And he said, well, the Chinese have a very interesting way of reading newspapers. He said, we read newspapers backwards. And I knew immediately what he meant. He meant that you read the way that-- students are taught to read swift in school. That almost the exact opposite of what is reported in the Renmin Ribao, the People's Daily, may be in fact what happened. So I think there's a lot of ironic reading at one level among the Chinese public.

I don't know how well propaganda works on children. I'm afraid it would work all too well in America. But my hope is that even children were conscious enough of what happened and their parents were, and there's enough talk that has a double meaning that people know the true version of events. I also know that Voice of America is still getting through. And that there's a kind of underground circuit of information.

The odd thing is, of course, that they're not jamming Voice of America in English. But it is being jammed in Chinese. One thing I must praise the American government here-- I don't often do this in public. When I was a kid, I thought Voice of America was an instrument of Joe McCarthy's stupid anti-communism. And it was a propaganda thing, and I didn't want to pay for it.

When I got to China and I met some Voice of America people-- and this was during the Reagan administration, when things were awful ideologically. But Voice of America was no longer ideological. It was a real information service, and it did genuine work. And it gave honest reporting. And the Voice of America reporters were skeptical and intelligent. And in my limited experience, honorable people. I thought, there's a place I want my tax dollar to go. Honest reporting, good journalism.

All right. Back to the phones. And another question for Bill Holm. You're on the air with him. Where are you calling from?

AUDIENCE: I'm calling from Bemidji.

BOB POTTER: From Bemidji. OK, what's your question?

AUDIENCE: OK. I work for the Humane Society and stuff. And I saw a film that they were eating dogs and cats. And I was wondering if this is really happening. What animals you can take out of the Chinese region and stuff.

BILL HOLM: Yeah, unfortunately-- well, I don't know unfortunately or not. My opinion's changed on that. There are jokes about the Cantonese that they eat anything except the legs on the table. Remember that the Chinese are poor and that poor people don't have ideological opinions. Given a choice between starving and making do, poor people eat everything.

And the Chinese have had at least three major famines and periods of starvation in the 20th century. For one thing, they like dogs. I mean, dogs are raised as a domestic animal. And there's a myth in parts of China that in the winter time, you have to eat boiled dog because it's full of iron and will protect you from the cold.

Unfortunately, the Chinese also, because they're poor, have decimated their stock of irreplaceable animals sometimes. I was offered a snow leopard skin, and I was horrified. But it was just a farmer whose pigs were being eaten by a snow leopard, so he shot the snow leopard. He doesn't have Sierra Club opinions because he's operating on a starvation regiment.

There are snake restaurants in Canton, of course, where you can go and pick out a live snake and have snake soup and fresh snake. I became very fond of live river eels. When you go into a Chinese market, you realize that there are more things that nourish human beings than just roast beef commercials. And at first, Westerners are appalled by that and horrified. But then they discover that we eat cheese. And the Chinese say, milk is awful to begin with, and then you let it rot. Cheese smelled to the Chinese like baby vomit. And they couldn't understand how human beings could eat rotten stuff that was rotten to begin with. And eat the things that babies ate.

Well, one of the things going to a different culture teaches you is not to have so many firm opinions about the habits of others. That human beings are wide and various, and they're nourished by many things. And as a guest in a country-- and this is also true of people coming to Minnesota who are appalled by hotdish. Minnesotans live to ripe old ages, eating Jell-O and hotdish and soft bread. And pie. It's not good, and it may not be your choice. But Howard Moore and I have been eating it every day for years.

BOB POTTER: Were there any foods that you were really not able to accustom yourself to?

BILL HOLM: Well, the one I really didn't much care for was the plate of water buffalo gristle.

BOB POTTER: Oh my.

BILL HOLM: But considered a great delicacy. And of course, the Chinese have got health theories. All very good for longevity. The other thing I was given, of course, was bottles of ginseng wine. Because if you believe what they tell you about ginseng and if you got enough ginseng into you, you would last to be 700 or 800 years old. You'd be one of Swift's Struldbruggs.

But for the rest of it, I looked at it and I thought, here's a billion, 200 million people. And they can eat this stuff. And I'm human. I got a human digestive tract. I'm a little odd looking. But if it doesn't kill them, it won't kill me. And I'd been in Iceland, where I ate sour whale blubber and that sort of thing. And various other odd foods.

BOB POTTER: OK. Great lunchtime conversation here with Bill Holm. His book is called Coming Home Crazy. And it is just out this week, I think, wasn't it?

BILL HOLM: I just got my first copies on Saturday night. And I threw away the teddy bear, and I slept with a copy under the pillow.

BOB POTTER: Let's go on to your question now. Thanks for waiting. Go ahead, please.

AUDIENCE: Hello.

BILL HOLM: Hi.

AUDIENCE: Hi, Bill. How are you?

BILL HOLM: Well, hello.

AUDIENCE: Hi. I missed the first 10 minutes of your talk. And but did you say you taught at the Xi'an Jiao Tong University?

BILL HOLM: Yeah, I did. I don't know if I told a little story about the mistranslation of the word. But that's where I was, yes. At Xi'an Jiao Tong, not at Shanghai.

AUDIENCE: I am a graduate of that college. And I was there from 1980-- '78 to '82.

BILL HOLM: '78 to '82. You were gone by the time I got there. I came in the fall of '86.

AUDIENCE: But actually, but my father is a professor in that University.

BILL HOLM: My goodness, I probably know him.

AUDIENCE: Really? Well, let's not name any names. But I just have to say that Chen Jiao Tong University is not a traffic school or it's not a transportation school. It's basically a Institute of Technology. So it's real funny you translate that name and somebody could wrote you a letter.

BILL HOLM: And of course, I should make plain that now Jiao Tong is like Caltech or like MIT or something like that. A polytechnic school also with a school of humanities and foreign languages and the music department. I was talking about the history of the school. Its original gestation when it started, I think, in 1892 or sometime in the 1890s. It's a very old college in China.

BOB POTTER: All right, we're getting down near the end of the hour. We have time for a couple, three more questions here. And your turn is next. Hello.

AUDIENCE: Hello. I wanted you to expand a little on the article that I read in the Times Review of how students in the US are so different. I really feel that we don't appreciate literature as much as we could. And I thought maybe you could talk about that a little.

BILL HOLM: I don't think students are different genetically or different in terms of intelligence. I'm not sure that I buy that. I think they are different in terms of upbringing, and their parents have given them different experiences. So when the students I get get to college, they're rather passive people. They're also pretty comfortable people.

I mean, I took a survey on Marshall, which is surely not Edina or haven for the rich. Of the number of TV sets, VCRs, expensive sound systems, walkmans, microwaves, and that kind of stuff that kids have got in their dorm rooms. I mean, everybody's got a car, everybody's got a TV set, everybody's got the traveling Walkman and the good sound system and a CD player and that kind of thing.

We're pretty comfortable. And somehow, literature has something to do with one's ideals and one's strivings and one's discontents with the world. And if your world has made you pretty contented in a material way, that takes some of the edge off of things, I think.

BOB POTTER: Did you get the feeling the students that you taught worked harder than American students? More intense, more interested in their studies?

BILL HOLM: Oh yes. They're much more used to-- there are lots of lazy people in China. And once you get into university, it's hard to get thrown out of it. But they were capable of great bursts of work. Partly because of that Chinese tradition in education of memorizing things. I mean, literally, you could ask a Chinese class to memorize a short story by Hawthorne, and they would do it.

BOB POTTER: Wow.

BILL HOLM: I mean, say we're going to do a Young Goodman Brown tomorrow. Memorize it. And you would get up in the morning and you'd find students out mumbling to themselves and talking to the trees and going through feats of memorization. Partly so mentally, they're very well trained to acquire things in that way quickly. And they liked the experience of talking and arguing about literature once they got to trust you and got into it.

I just taught a long night class in America a couple of nights ago, and it was just like pulling teeth with a slow drill to get people to argue about a book and to react to it and to tell what they felt and to tell how the book connected to them and to give their ideas. I mean, they're willing to sit there and listen to me entertain them with my ideas about the book.

BOB POTTER: Well, you are, after all, the teacher.

BILL HOLM: Yeah, except--

BOB POTTER: And that's what they're paying for.

BILL HOLM: Except much as I love to talk, I regard teaching as a dialogue.

BOB POTTER: OK. Let's have a conversation with one more listener here near the end. Hello, you're on the air.

AUDIENCE: Well, hello, Bill.

BILL HOLM: Hi.

AUDIENCE: I'm calling on behalf of the Icelandic community. And I want to reiterate once more how very proud we are of you and your accomplishments.

BILL HOLM: Well, hello, Helga. One thing-- you haven't seen your copy of the book yet. You'll get it shortly, but all the Icelanders will be pleased that the second longest essay in the book is entitled Iceland. And it's a comparison of Iceland and China. I don't know exactly. It may not be apparent to innocent listeners what those two have got in common. But I was, of course visited in Iceland, in China, by one of my dear old friends from China-- or from Iceland, who came, and we had Iceland, China week.

And I taught a bunch of my Chinese students to sing an Icelandic folk song.

[ICELANDIC SINGING]

And of course, since Chinese has no R, To teach Chinese chorus to trill Rs was quite the thing. I had to recruit a couple of Mongolians who could do it.

BOB POTTER: Bill, as we wrap up here, when you came on, you talked a little bit about how it was for you to go over to China and some of the experiences entering the country. When you came back from a year there, what was it like to reenter the United States?

BILL HOLM: Well, that was when I went berserk. I mean, the title Coming Home Crazy means that literally. That when you fly into the San Francisco airport, and you sit down and you are back in the United States. The United States looks utterly mad to you. Now, this happens to anybody who stays abroad for a long time, even in Europe. I mean, there's a necessary period of readjustment.

But we seem to think American life is normal. American life is the most abnormal thing that has ever existed on this planet.

BOB POTTER: Can you tell us in about a half a minute what you're talking about there? What about it?

BILL HOLM: The incredible emptiness, richness, and good luck of America. I mean, you look at America from the air, and you drive around and you see this empty place. This young place. Gerta has a little poem where he envies America. He says, oh America, you're a lucky country. Your ground isn't soaked with old blood and weighted down with the old stones of castles and fortresses.

He said, that's why you're such a buoyant, happy country. And Gerta, as a European, of course, who loved his own culture and history, envied Americans that. Well, it's a very great thing. And we seem to associate it with virtue rather than good luck. It's all right to be lucky. But there's a madness in thinking that you deserve it because of who you are. Except your luck gladly and with grace.

BOB POTTER: And at that point, we must end. Thanks a lot, Bill, and lots of luck with the book. It's very, very nice.

BILL HOLM: Thank you, Bob.

BOB POTTER: Bill Holm, author of Coming Home Crazy. Good afternoon. This is Gary Eichten. This weekend, a special measles clinic is being set up in St. Paul. There's been an unusually large number of measles cases in St. Paul this year, and let's hope the special immunization program will head off any further problems. Meanwhile, officials are gearing up for a program which will require all college students in Minnesota to get their shots. We'll take a look at that story on MPR Journal this afternoon. We invite you to join us for that item and the news of the day. 5:30, right after all things considered.

Major funding for Minnesota Public Radio programming provided by 3M, maker of Scotchgard brand protectors. That's mid for today. This is Bob Potter.

And you're tuned to KNOW. Minneapolis, St. Paul. Sunny skies now 52 degrees in the Twin Cities. And no, it's up to 55 now, up to 55. And we might hit 60. MPR network station KZSE FM in the Rochester area is beginning its second year of quality news and information broadcasting. Thanks go out to all members who support the MPR news and information network stations.

We'll get the news from National Public Radio in just about a half a minute. Then best friend will be in with today's edition of Takeout. What have you cooked up for us today, Beth?

BETH FRIEND: Something a little different. Something playful, something adventurous. A little radio drama. A little science fiction radio drama. So you'll hear the medium used in a little bit of a different way today, with Richard Dreyfuss playing a myriad of characters.

BOB POTTER: Well, that sounds very interesting.

BETH FRIEND: Good.

BOB POTTER: OK, that's Beth Friend, and she'll be in with takeout in just a few minutes after the news from NPR. I guess the big regional news story of the day that we'll be hearing about later on is the decision by Congressman Bill Frenzel not to seek re-election in November. A minute now after 1:00.

SHARON GREENE: From National Public Radio news in Washington, I'm Sharon Greene. Thousands of people--