A Tribute to My Grandfather Who Left Tudeh Party at a Young Age Calling it Bogus

A scene from the movie “The Barbarian Invasion,” where a dying radical socialist is chatting with a group of old academic gals.

-We have been everything. Separatists, independantists, sovereigntists, sovereignty-associationists.
-At first we were existentialists.
-We read Sartre and Camus.
-Then Fanon, we became anti-colonialists.
-We read Marcuse and became Marxists.
-Marxist-Leninist.
-Trotskyists.
-Maoists.
-After Solzhenitsyn we changed.
-We were Structuralists.
-Situationists.
-Feminists.
-Deconstructionists
-Is there and “ism” we have not worshipped?
-Cretinism.
-Come on, think of Guo Jing?
-Who was Guo Jing?
-An archaeologists with a skirt slit to the crotch.
-In the 70s, China opens up to the west. She comes on a cultural exchange. The University sends its trusty radical, me…. I enter the dining room of her hotel. I spot her, and die. Beauty that could melt Emperor Qin’s 7,000 terra cotta warriors. I order tea, we make small talk. I can see us doing the Pekinese lotus.
-The Szechwan dragon.
-To make myself appear interesting, I dive in: “your country has achieved so much. We are so envious. Your Cultural Revolution is Wonderful.” Her lovely black eyes glaze over. I’m mortified to realize that she is thinking, “He is either a CIA agent in the west or the worst cretin in the west.” The latter hypothesis wins out.
-So much for the lotus and dragon.
-For two years she’d cleaned pigsties on a re-education farm. Father murdered, mother committed suicide. And some dumb French-Canadian, who’s seen the films of Jean-Luc Godard and read Philippe Sollers, says that the “Chinese Cultural Revolution is wonderful.” Cretinism doesn’t sink any lower.