When Apollo 11 touched down

on the moon in July 1969, Kim Gordon was one of the few

British schoolboys who knew nothing about it. Aged 13,

he was mad about cars, planes and engines. But he was also

shut away from the world, living in captivity in Beijing.

For two long years, Room 421 of the Xin Qiao hotel

was both home and prison for Kim and his parents, Eric

and Marie. They had no access to a radio or telephone,

newspapers or letters from home. Their relatives back in

England had no idea where they were, nor even whether

they were alive. Their room measured just four square

metres – enough for a desk, a chair and three little beds,

crammed close together. During those two years the fam-

ily had no one to talk to but their interrogators, and no

diversions except for a couple of books and some sheets of

hotel writing paper.

Fifty years later, as we sat in his Brighton flat, Kim

showed me the creations he had improvised in those

endless, empty days: tiny, intricate paper buses complete

with upper decks; handwritten plays and diaries; and

letters to friends back at primary school in East Finchley,

north London – letters that would never be posted.

Kim’s long adventure in China had begun in 1965. His

pa rents were com mu nists who, d isencha nted by t he Sov iet

variant of the ideology they encountered on family holi-

days to eastern Europe, had become excited by its younger

version in China. There, Mao Zedong’s revolution was just

16 years old, and the Gordons wanted to see it first hand.

Eric got a job as a copy editor at the Foreign Languages

Press, and the family left their basement flat in London for

a new life in Beijing, then known as Peking. Kim recalls a

thrilling midwinter journey from Europe across Asia,

pausing in ice-bound Irkutsk in Siberia. “The whole thing

was a total adventure into this strange universe,” he says.

In Beijing, the family moved into a vast hostel complex

built to house thousands of Soviet advisors. In 1961, Mao’s

China had parted ways with Khrushchev’s Soviet Union

on ideological grounds. Those Soviet advisors and their

families were recalled, and the hostel complex was left

empty except for a few dozen sympathetic foreigners,

joined in 1965 by the Gordons.

“To us kids, it’s like a kingdom!” nine-year-old

Kim wrote. “You can imagine what mischief we can get up

to.” He and the other children chased each other around

the deserted building, discovering doors that led to a net-

work of underground tunnels dug to enable evacuation

in the event of nuclear war. This warren of subterranean

The Cultural Revolution

passages, extending far beneath the city, was designed

to allow hundreds of thousands of people to escape.

“We used to play hide and seek in them,” Kim remembers.

“The other thing we really enjoyed playing was ‘Kill the

Americans’, because, of course, this was the time of the

Vietnam War – so the Americans were the enemy. So we

played ‘goodies and baddies’, and the ‘baddies’ were the

American imperialists.”

I

n the 1960s, China was one of the poorest coun-

tries on Earth. Where the megalopolis of Beijing

now towers, Kim remembers fields of maize.

Camels plodded in from the Gobi Desert, and

donkey carts filled the dirt lanes; sewerage, clean

water and decent roads were a world away. Kim

attended the local Chinese school; it was strict and dull,

but he quickly began to learn Chinese. He also joined the

Young Pioneers, the Communist children’s organisation,

along with his classmates.

In a letter Kim wrote to his grandmother in December

1965, his sharp sense of detail is already apparent:

“It is nearly winter now. In China in the winter is very

very cold so you have to wear a lot of clothes. In winter the

Chinese wear padded clothes that means that the clothes

are stuffed with cotton wool. At the moment I wear pad-

ded shoes, hat, gloves when it gets very cold I will start

wearing a padded jacket.”

Kim’s many letters to his grandmother and his

schoolfriend Peter document in detail his enthralling new

life. He wrote about the brown-and-white kitten (“with fur

about an inch long”) given to him by a Chinese boy, his

stamp collection, and the propaganda dramas and slogans E

RI

C^ G

OR

DO

N

“The other thing we really enjoyed playingi

was ‘Kill the Americans’, because, of course,i

this was the time of the Vietnam War”i

9TKVKPIJQOG

A letter Kim Gordon wrote

to his grandmother in

London in 1965. His letters

from China detailed his

experiences and youthful

impressions of the nation’s

changing politics