In 1975, Roland and Annette Trotignon, French language teachers in Canton, China, gave their son Nicolas a teddy bear purchased in Hong Kong. “The people of Hong Kong have not yet been liberated!” the boy declared. Nothing could have been more obvious to the five-year-old, who spent his days alongside Chinese children in a state-run nursery: The people of Hong Kong could not yet have been liberated “because they still ha[d] toys.” Nicolas and his family had access to better food than their Chinese colleagues, a hot bath every six months, and the freedom to travel to Hong Kong. The Trotignons lived in China, but, as Nicolas might have said, their lives were not yet “liberated.”
Nicolas Trotignon's story does not appear in Beverley Hooper's Foreigners under Mao: Western Lives in China, 1949–1976, but it very well could have. It follows the general outline of many of the personal and...
