Wally Meets Red China

The following is adapted from Wally Linder’s memoir, A Life of Labor and Love:
In the early 1970s, Progressive Labor Party saw the Chinese Communists as the main revolutionary hope for the future. The Party shipped them nearly a thousand issues of every issue of CHALLENGE. The official Chinese news agency would begin every article on events in the U.S. with, “U.S. Challenge says….”
To have more direct contact, it was proposed that I travel to Geneva to talk with China’s ambassador.
This was years before Richard Nixon established relations with the Chinese—or before PLP oncluded that China was going the way of the Soviet Union and becoming what is now the world’s second biggest capitalist economy. My trip had to be secret, even from my own family. How to tell my wife Esther that I would be gone for a week doing Party work? I told her I had to meet with our comrades in San Francisco.I flew to Paris and took a cab to the train station to travel to Geneva. After renting a hotel room near the Chinese ambassador’s residence, I walked there to meet their officials. I was greeted by the ambassador and sat down to a delicious seven-course meal of Chinese dishes, ones I had never encountered in Brooklyn.
Afterwards, the ambassador asked me about my experiences as a communist in the U.S. I told him about my 11 years on the railroad and answered questions about the Party’s ongoing activities. I told him we wanted to have closer relations with the Chinese Party; the ambassador said he would report our discussions to Peking and get back to me soon. He then suggested I rent a car and become a “tourist” for a week before returning to get the answer from Peking.
This was my first trip anywhere beyond the U.S. and Canada. I decided to drive over the Alps to Italy. I arrived in Milan and took in the sights, especially the outdoor debates in the central square, and ate some delicious Italian food. I then returned to Geneva to receive the reply from Peking, which I would take back to New York.
By the time I got back to Brooklyn, two weeks had elapsed—a week longer than I’d told Esther I’d be gone. By the eighth day of my trip, she’d been getting concerned about what was happening “in San Francisco,” so she asked our chairperson Milt how to get in touch with me. Somehow he convinced her he couldn’t phone me because I had gone down to Mexico to exchange experiences with the famous communist painter, David Siqueiros, who had strong ties with Mexico’s railroad workers.
When I finally arrived back in Brooklyn, I apologized to Esther and stuck with the Mexico story. Later that spring, however, she was gathering clothes for the cleaners when lo and behold, she plucked my passport from an inside jacket pocket—and found entries for Paris and Geneva. She confronted me and said, “What’s all this?” Now that it was all over, I felt obliged to explain the whole business. At first she was suspicious, but then she relented.  Her last words on the subject were: “Why couldn’t you take me with you?”