Copy link Copied Copy link Copied Subscribe to gift this article Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Already a subscriber? Login In 1985, I was invited to work as a “foreign expert” in Beijing for the magazine China Pictorial , published by the Foreign Languages Press under China’s Ministry of Culture. China Pictorial was a government-owned propaganda publication distributed through embassies overseas.
It stretched to 24 pages a month, consisting of grainy pictures with paragraph-long captions about China’s happy national minorities and agricultural achievements. The magazine had about 300 employees. I had previously worked at BusinessWeek in New York, which ran to about 64 pages each week and, though famously overstaffed, had about a third as many employees.
Anne Stevenson-Yang, third from the left, at the Academy of Building Design in Beijing in 1987. Stevenson-Yang taught English there. Anne Stevenson-Yang The 300 staffers at China Pictorial were distributed through 18 language sections, including Indonesian, even though the Indonesian edition had not been published since China broke off relations with Indonesia after the 1965 coup attempt, which President Suharto accused China of supporting.
The Indonesian section still employed five translators. One of them fixed radios for everyone else and took a lot of naps on the cot he had installed in the office. Another wrote poetry.
And another would spend the days walking up and down the h.
