The Belly of the Beast
As the Anti-Imperialist delegates celebrated socialist Asia and condemned the United States, they also developed intense conflicts with one another. As Pat Sumi reflected, “The only way to explain what it was like is for you . . . to spend every day for two and a half months with the same eleven people in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language. . . . Every weird idiosyncrasy, eccentricity, twitch, habit, not to mention sexuality, power trips, egos, everything comes into play. . . . People had fights. People stopped speaking to each other.”1 These tensions, with one notable exception, were not publicly aired, either during the delegation’s travels or immediately following their return. Aside from Elaine Brown’s conflicts with Eldridge Cleaver, the volatile differences were expressed in documents that were more privately circulated at the time or from recollections long after the trip.2 The deterioration of group dynamics generated multiple and at times contradictory accounts of what occurred.
Representing a cross-section of the U.S. radical Left, the Anti-Imperialist Delegation shared a revolutionary critique of America and an admiration for socialist Asia. However, the individuals on the delegation subscribed to different political goals, ideologies, and strategies. They also preferred diverse methods of communication and organizing. In addition, they were relative strangers who had distinct personalities. These political and personal differences, as Pat Sumi suggested, festered under the incubating pressures of living for an extended period of time in unfamiliar settings. Because of the delegation’s limited ability to communicate or travel freely, they were forced to spend extensive amounts of time together.
Figure 9. Anti-Imperialist Delegation (arms raised) with Vietnamese women (wearing hats). Delegation members, left to right, front: Pat Sumi, Ann Froines, Randy Rappaport, Elaine Brown, and Jan Austin; back: Gina Blumenfeld, Bob Scheer, Eldridge Cleaver, Alex Hing, and Andy Truskier. Eldridge Cleaver Papers, BANC PIC 1991.078-PIC, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Furthermore, the reach of the U.S. security state, even beyond American borders, heightened insecurities and divisions within the Anti-Imperialist Delegation. At the time, Eldridge Cleaver was in exile but still under surveillance. As the most recognized leader and as the person responsible for initiating the delegation, he imposed his authority on the group. Cut off geographically from his base in the United States, Cleaver’s continued political relevance was in many ways dependent on his connections with the socialist Third World. In turn, his stature within these international networks relied on an actual or perceived ability to mobilize the political resources and contacts of the Black Panthers and the U.S. radical Left. Consequently, Cleaver was deeply invested in the interactions and outcomes of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation. He was a charismatic and persuasive figure but also inclined toward demanding control and obedience. Bob Scheer, his co-organizer and confidante, literally served as second in command.
Figure 10. Eldridge Cleaver with Vietnamese women. Eldridge Cleaver Papers, BANC PIC 1991.078-PIC, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
The power dynamics within the Anti-Imperialist Delegation need to be analyzed utilizing an intersectional framework.3 The authority of Cleaver and Scheer held distinct gender implications. No female delegates could speak or make decisions on behalf of the group. In addition, the travelers at times formed alliances with or expressed hostility toward one another due to race, ethnicity, and sexuality. These difficult dynamics eddied around the figure of Cleaver. Some delegate accounts of the Black Panther leader and even fragments of his own writings portray Cleaver as a mercurial and abrasive person who expressed sexist, anti-Semitic, and even anti-Asian sentiments. He led a multiracial, multiethnic, cross-gender group to socialist Asia, but Cleaver also targeted members of his own delegation for humiliation and hostility.
The Panthers frequently described African Americans as residing within “the belly of the beast.”4 The beast symbolized, in their eyes, the militaristic, racist, and imperialist country of the United States. In fact, Cleaver referred to America as “Babylon,” a site of corruption and iniquity. Being in the belly of the beast, African Americans had the revolutionary potential to tear down the corrupt system from inside. Yet Cleaver, like other radicals who challenged social norms, also had the capacity to reinscribe social hierarchies. They could reproduce the beast within themselves and in their interactions with one another.
Nevertheless, these portrayals of Cleaver, both by others and by himself, need to be carefully evaluated and contextualized. Certainly, the more public and negative narrations about the Anti-Imperialist Delegation, written by Elaine Brown and Eldridge Cleaver himself, surfaced in highly charged political circumstances. Brown’s allegations about Cleaver justified a volatile split within the Black Panther Party (BPP) that emerged after the delegation returned from socialist Asia. Cleaver’s autobiographical account of his political exile was published many years later, when he was brokering a deal to return to the United States. In other words, the experiences of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation could be interpreted and reinterpreted depending on the political needs of the narrators.
These accounts of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation and of socialist Asia, then, reveal the strength of traditional and not just radical orientalist thinking in two ways. First, the depictions of Asian and Asian American individuals at times evoked stereotypical representations of both Orientals and communists. Second, Asia once again serves as a blank canvas on which Western travelers can project their fears and aspirations in order to more clearly define their own identities.
Elaine Brown provided two troubling accounts of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation. Although she gave glowing public reports about her travels soon after her return, she offered much more critical assessments in her 1992 autobiography, A Taste of Power, and in a draft of an undated report, most likely written for Huey Newton soon after her return from socialist Asia. Newton was both a cofounder of the BPP and the organization’s minister of defense. Like other leaders of the party, Newton experienced run-ins with the police and spent three years in prison. An international campaign helped to secure his release, which occurred just as the Anti-Imperialist Delegation received an invitation to travel from North Korea to North Vietnam. Newton’s return soon ignited a public and violent division with Eldridge Cleaver.
The split within the Black Panthers resulted from a combination of external and internal factors.5 The FBI made extensive efforts to foster suspicion and conflict within the group.6 They targeted both Cleaver and Newton with misinformation campaigns, sending letters that made false accusations about each other’s actions and loyalty. The fact that Cleaver was in exile and Newton was making a difficult and public readjustment to life outside of prison made them particularly vulnerable to these efforts. Cleaver, Newton, and their respective supporters also developed different political priorities. Cleaver, who was in daily contact with revolutionary leaders in the Third World, advocated for the importance of armed struggle for the BPP. Newton and other survivors of the systematic decimation of Panthers through state-sanctioned violence and incarceration searched for alternative strategies to maintain a foothold in the United States. By focusing on community service or survival programs and eventually on electoral politics, the Black Panthers hoped to build and mobilize a broader base of support within urban African American communities.
The conflicts of the BPP directly shaped Brown’s autobiography and the account of her travels that she wrote for Huey Newton. Her reports of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation, both privately conveyed and in some cases publicly circulated through the Black Panther newspaper, provided ammunition for Huey Newton to criticize and eventually expel Eldridge Cleaver from the party. Brown’s autobiography, published over two decades after the Anti-Imperialist Delegation’s trip, offered justification for the actions of Newton and herself.
The title of Brown’s document for Huey, “Hidden Traitor,” was a direct reference to Eldridge Cleaver. In this piece, she states, “the defection of Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party had apparently begun sometime long before he organized, in exile from Algeria, the Anti-Imperialist Delegation to Korea. However, I became familiar with his disdain from the BPP, and through the BPP, of course, for the people, at the time of the delegation’s visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”7 In her 1992 autobiography, Brown recounts that Cleaver publicly announced an impending split in the BPP in Moscow, before the Anti-Imperialist Delegation arrived in North Korea and before the release of Huey Newton. According to Brown, Cleaver wanted the support of the delegation for his “left wing of the party” as opposed to “the right wing operating out of national headquarters, dominated by reformist David Hilliard and his nepotistic hierarchy.”8 Brown claimed that she was unaware of this political division within the party until then. She also was appalled that Cleaver would reveal internal issues of the BPP to people who were not black and did not belong to the organization. Brown portrays Cleaver as having lost touch with reality and as responsible for initiating the conflicts within the party. In her autobiography, she described her reaction to Cleaver’s public airing of the BPP’s dirty laundry: “Was he serious? . . . Had exile driven him so mad he did not see? Had he been given some new mind-altering drug that had erased the police raids and assassinations from his brain? He had obviously forgotten the detail of the party mandate, based on the teachings of Malcolm X, that no member speak against another outside the ranks.”9
Brown elaborated on Cleaver’s unstable and volatile personality by highlighting his hostile and chauvinistic behavior toward women—black, Asian, and white. Brown, who had a sexual relationship with Cleaver, claimed that he threatened violence and verbally assaulted her throughout the trip to enlist her support for his agenda in the BPP. In addition, Brown recounted his abuse of his wife, Kathleen Cleaver. In A Taste of Power, Brown writes:
There was something sadly heroic about Kathleen. . . . There was her defiant acceptance of Eldridge’s well-known brutality toward her. . . . What threw me back into a shell of fear was Eldridge’s behavior on the visit to Kathleen. She was weak and less than one month from delivering. Nevertheless, Eldridge immediately launched into an attack on her about nothing in particular, something personal to them. Her listless response only increased his hostility to her. He did not feel shit about her condition, he told her, since the baby she was carrying was probably not his.
When she tried to defend herself, he shouted her down. “Shut up! Shut up, bitch!” True to form, Kathleen hung on, chiding him with spitfire responses, pushing further with her high-bred intelligence. Incapable of shutting her up, he finally slapped her hard, right there in the pristine orderliness of a North Korean hospital reserved for Communist Party leaders.10
In “Hidden Traitor,” Brown suggests that Eldridge purposely sent Kathleen to the DPRK as a way to lock her away “under the guise of being a guest of the Korean people.”11 This charge that Eldridge was holding Kathleen hostage also surfaced in an article that Brown published in the BPP’s newspaper after the split occurred.12 In that article, Brown charges Eldridge with killing a man who briefly became Kathleen’s lover when the couple returned to Algeria. Brown’s efforts to discredit Cleaver for his hypermasculinity reflected a broader effort within the Black Panthers to address issues related to gender inequality.13
Kathleen Cleaver, the first woman to serve on the central committee of the BPP, has directly challenged the veracity of Elaine Brown’s accounts, stating, “whatever she portrayed of my relationship to Eldridge is either fantasy or hallucination.”14 Barbara Easley-Cox, who was present with Kathleen in North Korea and Algeria, also discredits Brown’s portrayal of the Cleavers. Kathleen and Eldridge did have a complex and at times difficult relationship. They first met when Kathleen worked as an organizing secretary for SNCC. She attended a 1967 conference at Fisk University, where Eldridge was an invited speaker. She recalled being immediately attracted to him: “I’m sitting there typing the agenda, and I spin around and see Eldridge Cleaver standing in the doorway staring at me. . . . He was huge, big as a door frame. He was a very stately and mesmerizing person. . . . He was very—what’s the right word? Magnetic. You couldn’t help but notice this person.”15 They fell in love and by December, they were married. Within a year, though, Eldridge fled the country and Kathleen, who discovered that she was pregnant a week after his departure, eventually joined him in exile. While abroad, she gave birth to two children, whose names reflected their travels. Their son, Maceo, was named after the Cuban revolutionary Antonio Maceo, and their daughter, Joju Younghi, was named in honor of her birthplace, North Korea. Kathleen admitted that Eldridge was a difficult man. In an interview given after their divorce, she recalled, “My life with Eldridge was very, very frustrating. I had always kept the vision that he was difficult because he was a man under difficult circumstances, and that if those circumstances changed, then he would be easier to live with. Those circumstances did change, but he didn’t get any easier to live with: he was just as ornery and cantankerous and difficult.”16 Despite these personal conflicts, Kathleen was not held hostage by Eldridge or the North Koreans. She was closely monitored by the FBI, but she could travel without the immediate threat of imprisonment. In other words, she chose to live and raise her family abroad in order to share Eldridge’s life of political exile.
Kathleen’s actions, writings, speeches, and interviews indicate that she understood their endeavors overseas in a very different way from Elaine Brown. Kathleen characterizes their initiatives as an intentional strategy to internationalize the BPP. Although born of circumstances not in their control, the Cleavers’ life outside of the United States allowed them to make connections with revolutionary movements around the world. In fact, Kathleen believes that it was their presence on the global stage that further intensified FBI surveillance and infiltration:
The whole idea of a conscious, political policy on an international scale that was being articulated within the Black Panther Party . . . was horrifying to the State Department. . . . There’s a memo—not a memo, a directive . . . [that] talked about how they really have no interest in seeing any form of connection between what they called the militants in the United States, the black militants in the United States with Arabs outside the United States or Africans outside of the United States. And so, it’s important to control the type of politics that, that develop within the black movement here because that will have an impact on what kind of relationship the United States can maintain in African countries. So . . . you might say that this [Anti-Imperialist] delegation is on the fringes of playing with fire.17
Kathleen believes that to put out this wildfire, the FBI authorized intensified infiltration within both the party and the Anti-Imperialist Delegation itself. Given the role that Elaine Brown played in spreading misinformation about the Cleavers to Huey Newton and in exacerbating divisions within the party, Kathleen believes that Brown was a government agent. She publicly made this accusation both in the aftermath of the split and in an interview given in 2006.18
Brown’s charges against Eldridge extend beyond his abusive interactions with herself and Kathleen. She also questioned his relationship to the white activists on the delegation, specifically the choice of Robert Scheer as his co-leader and the decision to include so many white women on the delegation. These accusations in turn cast suspicion on Cleaver’s commitment to the BPP and provided evidence of his lack of political integrity. These criticisms emerge most forcefully in “Hidden Traitor” rather than in Brown’s published autobiography.
To join the Anti-Imperialist Delegation, Brown traveled to Paris on the same flight as Bob Scheer. Their initial and subsequent interactions led her to regard him as a political opportunist, motivated by a shallow sense of adventurism toward the Third World. Upon meeting Scheer, it surprised Brown “to find that a person not of our Party, nor of our community, was more familiar with the inner-workings of our Party than certainly I was and that that person had subsequently even formulated certain opinions about the internal relationships in our Party. Robert Scheer began his discussion . . . by casually mentioning that he knew that David Hilliard was part of ‘the Right Wing of the BPP.’ ”19 Her surprise turned to disgust when he regaled her with stories of his and Cleaver’s sexual conquests in Cuba: “He would even mention several of the women’s names (most of whom were, by the way, white women) and he talk[ed] incessantly about how much he and Eldridge enjoyed the fine Cuban cigars, rum, and women (in that order!). Scheer’s whole attitude toward . . . Cleaver’s exile in Cuba seemed to be adventuristic.”20
Brown cites Scheer to allege that Cleaver’s departure from Cuba was not due to political differences with his hosts but rather “because of his Bacchanalian attitude . . . [which] forced [him] then to go elsewhere and remain in hiding.”21 Brown decided that Scheer was “no more than a typical American slob who was involved in variety of activities which had nothing whatever to do with the struggles of oppressed people. Because he is not a member of the Third World, of the oppressed world, he is afforded the luxury of a vicarious relationship with our struggles. The fact is, however, that he was permitted to enact such a relationship and to, in fact, exert influence over our struggle to whatever degree by E.C.”22
Brown further charges that Cleaver’s sexual desire for white women and Scheer’s role as Cleaver’s accomplice explain the demographic makeup of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation. As Brown observed, “Sexual relations between individuals had become a pre-occupation and an obsession with Eld.. [sic] It seemed, in fact, to be really his prime concern and prime motivation in everything that he did.”23 Eldridge Cleaver initially achieved literary fame for his “Letters from Prison,” in which he admitted his obsession with “The Ogre—the white woman.” As the ultimate sexual taboo for a black man, “the Ogre possessed a tremendous and dreadful power over me.”24 The reigning racial and gender order had “indoctrinated [him] to see the white woman as more beautiful and desirable than my own black woman.”25 To retaliate against the lynchings of black men in the name of protecting white womanhood and to exact revenge against white men who sexually abused black women, Cleaver “became a rapist”; in his eyes, “rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women.”26 He began, though, by “practicing on black girls in the ghetto.”27 In this same essay, Cleaver also admitted that he was wrong: “I had gone astray—astray not so much from the white man’s law as from being human, civilized—for I could not approve the act of rape.”28
Although Cleaver publicly denounced his own acts of sexual violence, he readily pursued sexual relationships for various reasons, including personal pleasure and political advantage. He seduced an emotionally vulnerable white female coworker at Ramparts during a turbulent period in the magazine’s office and subsequently learned significant insights about the power struggles through her.29 On his long boat ride to Cuba as an exile, Cleaver passed the time having sex with a white female activist, a person he despised because of her politics but also someone whom he found physically desirable.30
It is likely Cleaver had sexual relationships with members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation. In addition to Elaine Brown’s retelling of their travels, Alex Hing also expressed the opinion that Cleaver “had sex with as many of the women on the delegation that he could.”31 The sexual “revolution” of the 1960s, with its emphasis on experimentation and “free love,” likely shaped the behavior of some delegation members.32 Also, the unexpected length of their travels and the sense of dislocation that they experienced might have fostered a desire for physical and possibly emotional intimacy. If Brown and Hing are accurate in their characterizations of sexual relationships, then members of the delegation did not challenge but in fact replicated the practices of other Western travelers who tended to view the East as a particularly appropriate location for erotic pleasure.
Did Eldridge Cleaver perceive women only as sexual conquests and disregard their roles as political activists? In a journal written during the Anti-Imperialist Delegation’s trip, Cleaver proposed a unique role for white women:
Within the White community in the U.S.A., White Women constitute the most revolutionary element. The problem posed above is for white women, who are simultaneously waging both a class struggle and a struggle for women’s liberation from oppression by men, to resort to the only solution to the problem: Revolutionary Violence. White Women must pick up the gun and the bomb and go into action against the hated system. They must be implacable in their resolve to destroy the system that is oppressing them and not waver in their firm resolve to carry the struggle forward to its bitter sweet end.
The Conscious resort to revolutionary violence by white women will throw the ruling class into an unprecedented crisis. It would speed up the disintegration of the repressive forces into the hands and at the service of the ruling class—Army, National Guard, State & local police. There will be extreme differences of opinion amongst the troops over the question of murdering White Women. This goes to the heart of America. Many of the troops would turn their guns against their superior officers before carrying out orders to kill white women. Black troops will not be allowed to do it. A very interesting situation will be the result.33
This call to arms was being enacted in the United States by the Weather Underground, a group of predominantly white men and women that emerged in 1969 out of a faction within Students for a Democratic Society. Because political lobbying and nonviolent protest did little to stop the U.S. war in Vietnam, members of the Weather Underground turned to violence. They plotted to bomb symbolic physical structures, like banks and government buildings, including the Pentagon. They issued warnings before their attacks, because they did not intend to harm individuals.34 None of the members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation were affiliated with the Weather Underground, at least not publicly. Even if they held revolutionary beliefs, they did not in fact engage in armed struggle.
Cleaver’s call for white women to take up revolutionary violence was written in a private notebook and was likely not a serious political position. What is striking about his musings is its resonance with his earlier argument for rape. Because white women are perceived as needing protection by white men, Cleaver believed that the mobilization of white women as literal shock troops could be detrimental to the existing social order. Rather than raping white women, he expressed a desire to enlist them on the front line of political battle. Both perspectives suggest that Cleaver regarded white women as tools, sexual and military pawns, in his larger political struggle.
The white female members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation had diverse reactions to Eldridge Cleaver and Bob Scheer. Randy Rappaport recalled, “The sexism would just pour out of” them.35 Cleaver, in her opinion, demanded complete abjection. She believed that Brown’s description of his harangue in Moscow “catches the emotional tone” of his two- to three-hour speech: “What he was essentially, I think, trying to do at that point was to really put the fear of God into us and to sort of establish his absolute authority over us. . . . The basic message that came through is, you’re all at my beck and call. I control your lives from here on in.”36 Cleaver reinforced this message of authoritarian control by monitoring the interactions of delegation members. Rappaport recalled being reprimanded for socializing with Cubans at their hotel in Hanoi. Scheer called her away from the bar for a special meeting with Cleaver. The Black Panther leader bullied and intimidated her to reinforce the message that she should not speak to anyone without his authorization, particularly people from Cuba, a country where he had recently fled. Rappaport recalled that it was not just the content of Cleaver’s message but rather the explosive demeanor that he used to reinforce his power. In contrast, he behaved politely and diplomatically to their Asian hosts.37 Rappaport subsequently reflected that Cleaver’s authoritarian behavior had to do with his own sense of insecurity. “I mean, he came from a situation where people had been killed . . . that underneath there was just the fear of uncertainty of his life. . . . I think his biggest fear was being irrelevant and of wasting his talent.”38
Cleaver’s demand for submission had gendered implications, considering the power dynamics within the group. He was clearly the alpha male in the group, and Scheer was his beta. Rappaport described Scheer as “Eldridge’s shadow. . . . He was more than a gopher. . . . He was the one who would do . . . Eldridge’s dirty work.”39 While all the other delegates shared hotel rooms during their travels, Eldridge Cleaver, Bob Scheer, and Elaine Brown had private rooms. Brown believed that for the two male co-leaders, it was a form of privilege. She recalled that when their entourage traveled to visit various sites, Cleaver and Scheer almost always rode in a separate car while the rest traveled on a bus.40 In contrast, Brown described the assignment of a separate room as a form of punishment, a way to isolate her from the other members of the delegation. The individuals whom I interviewed knew nothing of Brown’s conflicts with Cleaver until they read her autobiography. Their lack of knowledge could testify either to Cleaver’s skill in containing Elaine or to her skills in reinventing a believable past.
Ann Froines also described Cleaver and “Bob Scheer as being among the most chauvinistic men [she had] met in the movement or spent any time with.”41 The female members bonded through “one sort of outburst kind of discussion” in reaction to Bob Scheer, who “was making a lot of fun of women’s liberation.” In contrast, the two other men on the delegation, Alex Hing and Andy Truskier, were “soft spoken, respectful. . . . I thought of them as . . . men who could really sit around in a group that was majority women and participate in talk and not dominate.”
In contrast, Cleaver and Scheer insisted on being front and center. Randy Rappaport recalled one particular incident that revealed their inability to allow female autonomy. In Vietnam, the Women’s Union invited the female delegates for a separate meeting. Rappaport recalled, “The Vietnamese men were fine with this. . . . So we got there . . . [and] we’re about maybe an hour into it and Eldridge and Scheer . . . burst through the door in this private meeting with the Vietnamese Women’s Union. I mean, these were . . . high-level people . . . in the national liberation. . . . It was appalling male behavior and it was so obvious that he could not tolerate being left out or that he was afraid that we were gonna say things about him.”42 In addition, Rappaport believed that Cleaver’s behavior reflected his inability to consider women as significant and independent political thinkers and actors.43
Delegation members did not openly criticize these gender power dynamics. Elaine Brown explained that she wanted to protect the BPP from outside criticism and felt little solidarity with the white women who traveled with her. In “Hidden Traitor,” she characterized them as members of “bourgeois culture” who complained needlessly about the lack of physical comforts.44 She also described these individuals as sexual accomplices of Cleaver.45 She recalled that when she first learned of Huey Newton’s release from prison, “all of us were gathered in one particular spot with the exception of Eld. and one of the women on the delegation. We finally found him in her private room; we had to literally beat on the door for almost 5 minutes before we could get his attention.”46
White delegation members, like Ann Froines, stifled their criticisms of Cleaver and Scheer, because of the desire to “keep a kind of united front with respect to our hosts.”47 Delegation members were dependent upon Cleaver because of his status as the most recognized movement “celebrity” and as the leader of their tour. Any disagreements or unpleasantries had to be endured, partly because they had limited ability to complain or even communicate with their Asian hosts. In other words, their isolation as travelers in a foreign land made them susceptible to “power trips.” In addition, the delegates also felt an obligation to promote an image of political unity. Given their commitment to racial equality, they were particularly concerned about publicly criticizing a well-known African American leader. Rappaport explained that this sense of solidarity had to do with their experiences as members of “old Left” families: “For those of us who grew up as red diaper babies, the feeling of loyalty and not speaking ill of comrades . . . is very powerful. . . . [It was] almost like a dictum from our families, because they had lived through the McCarthy period. The worst people in the world, in our families, were the people who had testified or who had given evidence in some way, or spies. . . . So it’s taken me all these years . . . almost forty years to get to a point where I can even talk about this. Where I can even share with you the negative stuff.”48
The difficult dynamics were not just internal to the Black Panthers or between white women and the male co-leaders. Lines of exclusion also were drawn for Jewish members of the delegation. Randy Rappaport, who had difficulty publicly discussing conflicts about gender, felt even more reluctant about raising the issue of anti-Semitism. She recalled, “As I’ve looked back on it that they were sort of an in-group, a semi-in-group, because nobody was really in except maybe Scheer. A semi-in-group and an out-group and as I analyze that . . . I think the out-group were the Jewish women and the two Asians.”49 Although Eldridge recognized that his closest white allies and supporters tended to be Jewish, he also resented their presence and political influence. The conflicts revolved around whiteness, Zionism, and gender.
Historian Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, in her study of black-Jewish relations during the twentieth century, argues against sweeping pronouncements of either solidarity or enmity between the two groups.50 Instead, she posits the need to recognize the diversity among both African Americans and Jews as well as the need for historical contextualization to understand shifting relationships between communities. Greenberg argues that a sense of solidarity that had emerged over the middle decades of the twentieth century fell apart as the political platform of liberalism collapsed in the late 1960s and 1970s. She identifies four basic assumptions of liberalism: “First, rights accrue to individuals, not groups. Second, although achievement depends on the individual the state has a role to play in guaranteeing equality of opportunity (but not equality of outcome). Third, in a capitalist democracy, liberalism stresses reform rather than revolution, compromise rather than confrontation. Finally, as its goal for civil society, liberalism enthrones pluralism, the championing of difference within a broadly agreed-upon framework of what constitutes socially acceptable behavior.”51 Each of these goals was challenged by the tenets of black power and more broadly Third World socialist liberation movements. Black power activists demanded the recognition of historic and ongoing inequalities based on race. Consequently, they emphasized the need to redistribute resources based on group rights and to work toward achieving equality of outcome. Some black power advocates, like the Panthers, advocated revolution, not reform, and they demanded self-determination, not integration within a pluralistic society.
While some African Americans adopted black power to redress racial inequality, some Jews regarded this agenda as anti-Semitic. African American writer James Baldwin published a famous essay in 1967 titled “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic because They Are Anti-White.”52 Baldwin argues that African American resentment of Jews stemmed from the differential racial and socioeconomic positions that the two groups occupied in American society. Because of anti-Semitism, Jews tended to own property and run businesses in economically depressed and predominantly black neighborhoods. Even though both groups experienced marginalization, power hierarchies still existed between the two groups. As Greenberg states, “If Jews were not entirely white, they nonetheless often ‘stood in’ for whites in black people’s minds. . . . Jews served this ‘stand-in’ function because so many worked in black neighborhoods as landlords, shopkeepers, and middlemen.”53 Also, in the post–World War II era, class differences increased between Jews and blacks, thereby heightening divergences of racial and political identification. In simplistic terms, Jews tended to become increasingly white, while African Americans identified increasingly as black.
Baldwin articulates this disconnect between the two groups:
One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows that it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is. . . . The Jew’s suffering is recognized as part of the moral history of the world and the Jew is recognized as a contributor to the world’s history: this is not true for the blacks. Jewish history, whether or not one can say it is honored, is certainly known: the black history has been blasted, maligned and despised. The Jew is a white man, and when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery.54
Baldwin qualifies some of his assertions, indicating that not everyone who holds power over African Americans is Jewish. He also concedes that not all Jews behave or think the same way. However, his language tends to assume and posit essentialized interpretations of Jewishness and blackness.
Baldwin’s essay appeared shortly before the 1968 Ocean Hill–Brownsville conflicts regarding race and education. Throughout New York City at the time, “90 percent of the teachers . . . were white . . . [and] the majority of the teachers were Jewish.”55 In contrast, “more than half of the students were Black or Puerto Rican.”56 In the neighborhoods of Ocean Hill–Brownsville, the parents, inspired by black power politics, demanded community control and more resources for public education. They also called for greater diversity in the curriculum as well as the hiring of nonwhite teachers and administrators. Scholars of black-Jewish relations regard the volatile conflicts in Ocean Hill–Brownsville as a key turning point, which crystallized an emerging discord between the two groups.57
Eldridge Cleaver was familiar with Baldwin’s work and even published a review of the author’s writing in Soul on Ice. Cleaver, like James Baldwin, used a linguistic shorthand to characterize Jewish activists. Cleaver described the New Left as “Jewish controlled.”58 They constituted “the hard core of Jewish political manipulators—The Wienbergs, Rubins, the Savio-Rosenthals, the Mike Parkers, Burnstiens—all the way to Brooklyn and Tel Aviv. The Bob Scheers.”59 Although Scheer was Cleaver’s right-hand man, the Black Panther leader regarded him with caution and disdain. In an essay about Scheer, titled “Enter the Devil,” Cleaver refers to the journalist as “the Devil,” who served as “the front man for the Jews.”60
Cleaver also portrayed himself and other members of the BPP as being engaged in political maneuvers with Jewish members of the New Left. In one particular tense confrontation, he recalled, “The Jews were pissed off because we were a phenomenon in their midst which they could not control, and we were pissed off because we saw that they intended either to control us or sabotage us.”61 The most volatile issue of contention, as Cleaver perceived it, centered on the issue of Palestine and Israel.62 Like other black power activists, Cleaver was an advocate of Third World liberation. He supported the Palestinian liberation movement and even met with Yasser Arafat during his stay in Algeria. Zionism, the call for a Jewish homeland, and the creation of Israel represented a form of imperialism in Eldridge’s eyes. The charge of Jewish imperialism became particularly acute following the 1967 Six-Day War. In this brief war, Israel defeated and gained land from the bordering Arab countries of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Even though Cleaver worked with Jewish members of the New Left to critique American policies in Vietnam, he charged the same individuals with ignoring Israeli imperialism. In Cleaver’s words, “the Jews . . . at bottom . . . were all Zionists, and that what was wrong with the American Left was that it refused to confront the question of Palestine.”63
On the one hand, Cleaver’s accusations shed light on difficult political issues. On the other hand, his comments demonstrate a propensity to project a uniformity of belief and action on all individuals of Jewish heritage. Even the FBI, eager to find ways to undermine the Black Panthers, devised a plan to inform Jewish American organizations of Cleaver’s anti-Zionism in order to neutralize cross-racial political alliances.64 During the Anti-Imperialist Delegation’s trip, Cleaver persisted in making sweeping statements about Jews and Israel. One of the Jewish female travelers, whom the Black Panther leader targeted with his contempt and intimidation tactics, nevertheless reminded him to distinguish between the Israeli state and Jewish people as well as between different individuals of Jewish ancestry.65
Similar to Jewish delegation members, Asian American activists also occupied an outsider position within the group hierarchy. Both Elaine Brown and Eldridge Cleaver wrote dismissively of Alex Hing and Pat Sumi. Cleaver particularly resented Sumi due to class, gender, and personality differences. Furthermore, the Black Panther leader’s portrayals of the two Asian American travelers were conflated with his later denunciations of Asian socialism.
Although Elaine Brown has little to say about her fellow travelers, she specifically mentioned Alex Hing and Pat Sumi in her autobiography but in a trivializing fashion. Brown recalled, “Besides the whites, there were two Asians: a young, diminutive Japanese woman and a fellow from San Francisco’s Chinatown, whose face was overwhelmed by acne.”66 Brown does not refer to Pat Sumi and Alex Hing by name, although she traveled with them for over two months; their individual histories and personalities are completely absent. Instead, they are described in purely ethnic and physical terms. Not surprisingly, both Hing and Sumi had negative reactions to Brown as well. They described her as self-serving and arrogant in interviews given many years after the conclusion of their journey together.67
Cleaver offers a similarly one-dimensional portrayal of the two Asian American activists. Published eight years after their travels to socialist Asia and after Cleaver renounced his former belief in socialism, Soul on Fire describes two incidents to highlight the condescension of the Asian people who hosted the delegation and the humiliation suffered by the Asian American travelers. Cleaver also does not name Hing but describes him as “a young Chinese man from California, with great enthusiasm for his ancestral homeland.”68 When Hing tried to speak to their guide-interpreter in Chinese, “she turned and glared at him; in words that cut to the bone, she said loudly, ‘Comrade Brother, please speak English. We cannot understand your version of Chinese.’ ” Cleaver interpreted the exchange as representative of “Communist arrogance and insensitivity.”69 Hing, who grew up speaking English and had limited Cantonese language skills, remembered attempting to speak Chinese with one of their guides. Although most of their Chinese hosts spoke the official national language of Mandarin, Hing remembered having a positive interaction with one who did speak the Cantonese dialect.70 His recollections of the exchange contrasted greatly with Cleaver’s. In fact, although Cleaver claims to be sympathetic to Hing, his characterization of both the interpreter and the Chinese American activist focuses on their zealotry for communism.
Cleaver’s description of Sumi also emphasizes her single-minded political devotion. He explained that there was another Asian American in the delegation, “a young radical Japanese woman from the West Coast really caught up in the righteous magic of this return to Asia. She was hard-boiled, seldom smiled, and was always most professional about her correct revolutionary stance.”71 Cleaver likewise recounts how Sumi was humiliated during the trip: “The youngster from the West Coast caught it on both cheeks—first for being Japanese, second for being American. The Koreans were not friendly to her; they had limited capacity to express the international solidarity of workers who were supposedly united. . . . The poison of racism hit her where she least expected it; but then, that is the Communist style.”72 Sumi recalled how her Korean hosts encouraged her not to feel a sense of personal guilt about Japanese colonialism. In contrast, in Cleaver’s account, Sumi’s treatment by their Korean hosts is used to depict the narrowness and inflexibility of Asian communists. In addition, Cleaver’s description of Sumi reveals that he also viewed her as ideologically rigid.
Cleaver’s portrayal of Asian communists and Asian American radicals reveals the force of traditional orientalist thinking. The charge that Hing and Sumi lacked emotion echoes stereotypes of Orientals as being expressionless or, in the words of Eldridge, as manifestations of the “inscrutable East.”73 Strikingly, Alex Hing and Pat Sumi are not criticized for being apolitical model minorities. Rather, they are depicted as being overzealous model revolutionaries. The portrayals of the Asian American delegates in turn provide an opportunity to criticize socialist Asia for its totalitarianism, for a single-minded devotion to communism. Alex Hing and Pat Sumi in some ways are depicted as being not fully Asian, either due to limited language abilities or to ethnic differences from their hosts. Simultaneously, Cleaver conflated Asian Americans with Asians by emphasizing their similar political beliefs and personalities.
These caricatured depictions of Asian communists and Asian American radicals in Soul on Fire can be interpreted as stand-ins for Cleaver’s former self. Previously devoted to socialist revolutionary ideology, Cleaver sought to exorcize his past life and reinvent his identity in order to end his exile abroad. As the former minister of information for the Black Panthers, he was responsible for publishing Kim Il Sung’s writings in the organization’s newspaper. Also, Cleaver had led this highly publicized tour of North Korea, North Vietnam, and Red China. No doubt he felt pressure to renounce his former infatuation with socialist Asia to gain permission to reenter the United States. Following in an orientalist tradition, the Asian and Asian American revolutionaries served as foils for Cleaver to distance himself from his former beliefs and to recreate himself as an acceptable American.
Similar to their reactions to Elaine Brown, both Alex Hing and Pat Sumi had largely negative perceptions of Eldridge Cleaver. Hing recalled in a 2005 interview that during their travels in Socialist Asia, “my opinion of him very seriously deteriorated quite quickly. I thought he was really arrogant. And he would say things that I would never say or even believe. He would say that the ‘masses are asses,’ which is contrary to Mao Tse-tung thought, counter to everything that I believed in, and counter to what the Panthers were saying.”74 Sumi also expressed her intense dislike for Cleaver, specifically because he confiscated her travel journal. Throughout the tour, she had been recording the experiences of the delegation and her reflections about their travels. Cleaver explained that he wanted to protect the information from the U.S. State Department, a concern that was certainly legitimate given the FBI’s careful monitoring of the delegation’s travels and the efforts of the COINTEL program in targeting and sabotaging the organization. In “Gangster Cigarettes,” a poem that Cleaver wrote about the delegation, he suggests that other dynamics also were at work: “We all began to fear her book / And some began to hate the girl / And call her Jap behind her back.”75 Cleaver suspected that Sumi was a government agent. Randy Rappaport observed this dynamic. She recalled that Cleaver “definitely did not trust Pat. . . . He decided that by the time we got to China, after Vietnam, that she was [a] CIA agent.”76
Cleaver’s dislike of Sumi stemmed from various reasons. Rappaport recalled that “Pat was a little more outspoken.” Cleaver, who demanded obedience, particularly from women, likely did not appreciate Sumi’s efforts to question him. Also, her middle-class upbringing and serious demeanor contrasted greatly with Cleaver’s underclass background and performative political style. When Cleaver confiscated Sumi’s notebook, he also humiliated her publicly in front of the delegation. Alex Hing recalled, “Eldrige [sic] disliked Pat and often mocked some of her petty bourgeois mannerisms and thinking. . . . After taking possession of Pat’s journal, which included poetry and drawings, Eldrige read aloud to the delegation certain passages in a sarcastic manner.”77 In other words, Cleaver created an environment that fostered group hostility toward Sumi, a hatred that he characterizes as having racial overtones. It is unlikely that other members of the delegation called Sumi a “Jap.” Given Cleaver’s propensity for using ethnic slurs, it is likely that he used the racially pejorative term about her. As for Sumi’s reactions to Cleaver, she stated years later that she would “never forgive him . . . never.”78
Activists of the 1960s generation tended to perceive the world in dichotomous ways—the revolutionary Third World versus the imperialist West, the “people” versus “fascist pigs,” the revolutionary vanguard versus the running dogs. The Anti-Imperialist Delegation, which represented a cross-section of the U.S. radical Left, illuminated the complexities of human beings. Being in the belly of the beast, they at times also reproduced the beast within themselves. They held contradictory ideas and behaved at odds with their stated values. In addition, their conflicts with one another indicate differences of political goals, strategies, and ideologies. Furthermore, their suspicions of one another as government agents and as political sellouts reveal the reach of the U.S. security state in fomenting psychological warfare and counterinsurgency against activists. Finally, the isolating experience of extended travel in relatively unfamiliar societies and cultures exacerbated these divisions and fueled a pervasive sense of insecurity and dislocation.
This airing of dirty laundry within the Anti-Imperialist Delegation exposes the fault lines between activists of varying racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds. Yet there are also counternarratives that focus on the hopeful and genuine possibilities of cross-racial and international alliances. Even the most reviled individuals on this journey experienced moments of political inspiration and human connection.
Just as Anti-Imperialist Delegation members privately questioned Eldridge’s behavior, they also noted the controlled and constructed nature of their travels, particularly in DPRK but also in the PRC. Even under these constraints, they experienced “emotionally intense” epiphanies. Randy Rappaport recalled that hearing about the burning of the warehouse of prisoners in North Korea “didn’t feel like propaganda to me.” In fact, she recalled writing in the guest book in the museum that the experience “just seared my heart.”79 Similarly, Pat Sumi reflected years later that despite what she learned about the Chinese Cultural Revolution since her 1970 visit, she could not deny the political inspiration of that movement:
None of us really knew what was going on. We knew what we were told was going on, and we took it all at face value. When the Chinese told us that the Cultural Revolution was one of the greatest accomplishments of the Chinese Revolution I believed them. How could I not? Everywhere you go everyone is telling you what a great accomplishment the Cultural Revolution is. And you meet peasants who are in their eighties and they tell you—while they are waving their little red book—that the reason they believe in Mao Tse-Tung was that in the old days they would never have survived this long. You can’t argue with that. . . . I believed him.80
The delegation experienced their most profound moments of political connection in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Compared to the other socialist countries, they found North Vietnam to be much more open and less scripted. The travelers could wander more freely and at times used French to have conversations with locals. Compared to the North Koreans and even the Chinese, the North Vietnamese were more familiar with Westerners due to the legacy of European colonialism. In addition, by 1970, the DRV was considerably more practiced at hosting American activists. The other socialist Asian countries were just beginning people’s diplomacy efforts and learning how to do so effectively. Delegation members found the North Vietnamese to be more “warm” and “friendly.” As Randy Rappaport recalled, “They wanted to know who we were as people and not just as comrades who could do something for them.”81
An unanticipated detour in their travels demonstrated clearly the values of their Vietnamese hosts. The Anti-Imperialist Delegation had journeyed into the countryside by bus one day. Due to previous bombing attacks, their bus had to cross a river on a raft, which had to be dragged across on a rope. It had rained that day, off and on. Rappaport recalled that by the time they were prepared to return to Hanoi,
The river was too swollen to cross. . . . They [the hosts] had to figure out what they were going to do with us for the night. . . . So they took us to a school in the mountains. . . . It was raining quite a bit too and going up the mountain . . . was a little bit scary. You know, in this very rickety bus—there was a bombing halt at that point but these roads were narrow. . . . It might have been like a Communist Party school ’cause I would say people were in their late teens and early twenties and everybody had a little room . . . [a] very tiny little desk . . . little bowl of water for washing your hands, and . . . a hard pallet . . . like a straw mat on it and some kind of pillow but it wasn’t a soft pillow, it was like something hard. . . . They gave up their rooms for us. There was very little food there obviously and they gave us . . . warm condensed milk with some, maybe some kind of grain or something in it for a little bit more nutrition. . . . We had been eating very lavishly at the hotel, you know. . . . This country’s at war, but you know, we were guests.82
The next day, when they attempted to cross the river again, the delegation was given a small lunch box of rice balls to share with each other: “They knew we were hungry, I guess. You know, we were big stocky Americans who . . . were used to eating a lot. And the whole group of them walked away about a hundred yards and stood and smoked cigarettes under some trees while we ate and . . . somebody actually said or maybe I just thought this, ‘They’re standing there because they don’t want to embarrass us by being with us and not eating.’ ”83
Rappaport recalled feeling “this incredible sense of gratitude . . . and I think everybody felt [it]. . . . [Even] Eldridge was touched. . . . It would be very easy to just describe him in terms of . . . a bully. . . . But there was this other side to him. . . . He was genuinely touched.”84 Even after Cleaver later recanted some of his former radical politics, he would describe “the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong . . . [as] forever friends of the Black Panthers.”85 And, in her autobiography, Elaine Brown recognized, “the Vietnamese offered us their best, when they had so little.”86 By more fully understanding the difficulties of achieving solidarity, it becomes possible to appreciate the rare moments of mutual understanding and inspiration.
After the Anti-Imperialist Delegation left socialist Asia, the travelers pursued diverse political paths. Immediately after the tour ended, Eldridge Cleaver escorted the group to Algeria, where he pronounced the establishment of the international branch of the BPP on 13 September 1970.87 His hopes for an independent and visible base outside of the United States were soon dampened by the public and violent split within the BPP and his expulsion from the party. Kathleen Cleaver believes that the timing of the conflict was not coincidental; precisely because Eldridge was officially establishing himself and the Black Panthers on the world stage, there were increased efforts by the U.S. government to foster conflicts between Panther leaders and their organization.88
Elaine Brown, despite Cleaver’s alleged threats, safely returned to the United States with the rest of the delegation on 16 September. The FBI prepared for their return by ordering U.S. customs to search their bags at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City.89 They confiscated both the letters by POWs and the film footage of the delegation’s travels. As Brown stepped off the plane, she met Huey Newton for the first time. She quickly became his lover and confidante. At Newton’s request, they traveled to the PRC the following year to cultivate connections with Chinese leaders before the arrival of President Nixon. This subsequent journey to the East was made possible through the contacts that Brown had established during her previous trip with Eldridge Cleaver. When Newton eventually fled the United States to avoid another prison sentence, Brown became the first female chair of the BPP and transformed the organization through a focus on community programs and electoral politics.90 She attributed the new Panther strategy to China and Huey Newton. In her autobiography, she explained, “China had been instructive. China’s recent entrance into the U.N. was neither contradictory to China’s goal of toppling U.S. imperialism nor an abnegation of revolutionary principles. It was a tactic of socialist revolution. It was a tactic, Newton concluded, that offered us a great example.”91 If China could become a legitimate political power in the United Nations, then perhaps the Panthers could maintain their revolutionary agenda and run for electoral office.
According to Pat Sumi, neither she nor Alex Hing wanted to leave socialist Asia. She recalled, “Alex and I volunteered to stay behind and bring reports,” but “for whatever reason Cleaver made the decision that we would go back.”92 Upon their return to the United States, Hing and Sumi began another series of tours. Due to their association with movement celebrity Eldridge Cleaver and their experiences of traveling through the forbidden socialist nations of Asia, they became highly sought-after speakers, especially within the emerging Asian American movement. When Hing arrived back in San Francisco, he discovered the Red Guard on the point of dissolution. They faced both police harassment and financial pressures from landlords who disliked their politics. Consequently, the organization experienced a division similar to that of the Black Panthers with some members advocating the formation of an underground military contingent. Hing decided to focus on community organizing instead and joined I Wor Kuen, a revolutionary nationalist organization that eventually embraced Marxist-Leninism. Like the Red Guard, I Wor Kuen consisted predominantly of Asian American activists and named itself after a social movement in China, specifically the 1898 Boxer Rebellion that sought to repel Western imperialism.93
Following the Anti-Imperialist Delegation trip, Pat Sumi increasingly involved herself with Asian American issues. She became a staff member of Gidra magazine and contributed several articles based on her travels in socialist Asia. In her speaking tours, she had the opportunity to meet other Japanese American leftists, such as former Communist Party member Karl Yoneda and Harlem-based activist Yuri Kochiyama. She described the experience of discovering radicals from an older generation as being akin to meeting her political “parents.”94 Sumi became widely regarded not as a model minority but as a model revolutionary, especially for other Asian American women. Along with other female members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation like Randy Rappaport, Ann Froines, Gina Blumenfeld, and Janet Kranzberg, Pat Sumi helped to organize the Indochinese Women’s Conferences of 1971. These meetings, held in Canada, provided opportunities for North American women to meet face-to-face with Southeast Asian heroines.95 During this period, Sumi exchanged her Jackie Kennedy look for a Mao suit, an attire that other Asian American activists also adopted.
Some of the white female activists, including Jan Austin, Gina Blumenfeld, and Ann Froines, maintained some contact with Eldridge Cleaver, and almost all of them continued their activism in some form or other. Froines stayed the course for a long time. She returned to New Haven to continue her support for Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale during their lengthy trial, which lasted from October 1970 through May 1971. Both were acquitted and the charges dismissed. For these efforts, Ann, her husband, and their daughter experienced, she said, “a sudden spate of harassment. Lots of obscene telephone calls, threats to kidnap Rebecca. All the tires of my car have been slashed twice in the span of one week. . . . I think it’s the pigs because they have gotten the car when it has been parked in different parts of the city.”96
Figure 11. Pat Sumi on the cover of Rodan, an Asian American movement publication. Drawing by Saichi Kawahara, reproduced in Steve Louie and Glenn Omatsu, eds., Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2001), p. 16.
Froines remained dedicated, though, not only to the Panthers but to North Korea and North Vietnam as well. In November 1970, she organized a protest at the United Nations, demanding that this international body recognize and redress its role in supporting American aggression in Korea. She discovered, though, despite her efforts to arouse public interest, that “there was no receptivity really to the information about North Korea. There was no context in which people could act on it.”97 Froines also stayed in touch with Gina Blumenfeld, Randy Rappaport, Janet Kranzberg, and Alex Hing about a plan to open two People’s Anti-Imperialist Centers, one on the East Coast and the other on the West Coast. These would serve as resource centers to promote a broader understanding of American policies in socialist Asia. However, it was difficult to rally human and financial resources for these endeavors. Instead, Froines found more common ground for antiwar activism. She became the Midwest coordinator of the Indochina Peace Campaign, an organization started by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.
Despite the persistence of this activist energy, the traumatic experience of the journey left its mark. Randy Rappaport recalled that she “was really in an emotionally very bad shape the year after the trip.”98 She withdrew from politics for a period of time. The Anti-Imperialist Delegation, though, did reignite her interest more broadly in Asian culture, religion, and people. She had previously studied Indian culture and language as an anthropology major. As she said, “I’ve often jokingly said to friends, I went to . . . Asia communist and I came back a Buddhist.”99
The 1970 Anti-Imperialist Delegation was a product of and helped to fuel a larger social movement. From the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, American radicals who protested the war in Southeast Asia sought inspiration and political instruction from Third World socialist leaders. Asian revolutionaries also prioritized fostering these international relationships as part of their international and domestic strategies. Consequently, articles and images about Asia circulated widely within movement publications during this period. In addition, traveling to these forbidden lands offered the possibility of establishing personal contact and gaining more accurate information. Travel theorists remind us, though, that there is a need to “interrogate the notion that travel (i.e. ‘seeing’ other cultures) inevitably results in knowledge.”100 The interviews and writings of the delegates suggest that even as they cultivated an anti-imperialist gaze, their perception of Asia could still be refracted through an orientalist lens. In fact, as the conflicting accounts about what really occurred during the trip suggest, the depictions of socialist Asia and of people of Asian descent can be narrated and renarrated in response to the changing political and personal needs of the narrator.