MICHAEL Bristow had known the man he refers to only as 'the teacher' for several years before he realised his secret.

A BBC correspondent reporting on China from Beijing, Michael would welcome the teacher to his home two or three times a week to learn Chinese from him.

Gradually, the pair became friends. Looking back, Michael realises that there were signs that the teacher was different: Michael just failed to pick up on them.

The teacher would sometimes turn up for Chinese lessons with glowing, pink-tinged lips. Michael put that down to a lip balm used to protect him from chapped lips in Beijing's dry winter months. Another time he arrived in a T-shirt that seemed too tight for a man of nearly 60.

And then there was the facelift. "It wasn't something you would expect from a man of his age," Michael writes, in his new book China in Drag. "But I didn't want to ask. I decided that he would tell me if he wanted to."

The teacher didn't. But gradually the two men's friendship deepened. Michael learned the story of the teacher's life: of schooling cut short by the Cultural Revolution - which saw the teacher, like millions of other young people across China, taken out of school and sent to the countryside to learn to be a good Communist; of a job in a factory manufacturing the flavour-enhancer MSG; of a wife and child; of the teacher's eventual rise to a job as teacher and journalist.

It was a fascinating life. And Michael realised that if he wanted to write a book about modern China, he could do far worse than tell this man's life story.

The last 100 years in China have been years of unprecedented turmoil; years of war against the Japanese; of civil war; of revolution; of political upheaval and oppression; and, more recently, of miraculous economic growth.

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Modern China: Locals exercisng on the shore of Lake Sha in the central city of Wuhan. Photo: Stephen Lewis

The teacher had lived through many of those years. "And while in some respects he's not unusual or extraordinary in any way, he has lived through extraordinary times," Michael says.

So the pair agreed to go travelling together, to revisit the places that had been important in the teacher's life: the 'indestructible scholar tree' that was the only thing left of the old courtyard in Beijing where the teacher had grown up; Double River Farm in the cold north east, where he'd been sent as a boy after being taken out of school; and Changsha, home of Mao Zedong. As they travelled, Michael and the teacher would talk. And by telling the story of the teacher's life, Michael thought, he'd tell the story of modern China.

It was as they were travelling that the teacher finally revealed his secret. They were in Changsha. After a busy day they returned to their hotel, and each retired to their room, agreeing to meet for dinner.

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Just before 8pm, Michael emerged into the hotel corridor, to find the teacher standing there.

"But something was different," he writes in China in Drag. "It took me a second or two to realise what had changed: he'd dumped his usual shirt and trousers and now appeared before me wearing a smile and a full outfit of women's clothes." The teacher, it turned out, was a cross-dresser.

After Michael's initial shock, it didn't affect their friendship. And it didn't affect their travels through China - although it was clear, from that very first evening as they walked through Changsha in search of a restaurant, that the teacher enjoyed the quizzical looks he was getting.

It did, however, give Michael the title for for his book.

After five years as a BBC correspondent in China, he returned to the UK. He's now the Asia Pacific editor of the BBC's World Service. But having grown up at East Cowick near Goole, he wanted to come back to Yorkshire to live. So he and his family now live in York, and his children go to school here.

China in Drag will officially be published on Thursday (September 21). Ahead of publication, he agreed to be interviewed over a coffee to talk about the book.

At first, I was keen to take him to task over that title. Having lived in China myself for many years, and having married a Chinese woman who has, like the teacher, lived through extraordinary times, I felt the title was a cheap hook - one that trivialised the teacher's life, and the things he'd been through. The fact that the teacher was a cross-dresser was the least interesting thing about him, I said.

Michael took it on the chin.

The title China in Drag was a pun, he said. It referred not only to the teacher, but to China itself - a country which tried to present itself as one thing, but was actually something quite different.

The Chinese government today is organised and efficient, and it has done some good things, he says. "People were eating the bark off trees two generations ago. Now they are contemplating holidaying in Bali." It is an enormous boon, he says, to have a roof over your head, and not to wonder where your children's next meal will come from. "They (the Chinese government) have managed to do that for people."

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But that has come at a huge cost, he says. China is controlled by an authoritarian regime that brooks no dissent, offers people no choice, and is determined to hold onto power at all costs.

Just improving the material quality of people's lives isn't enough, Michael says. "Human beings ought to be able to choose the way they live."

In his own way, by coming out as a cross dresser, Michael's teacher has done just that.

China in Drag is not the complete story of China, or the only story, Michael accepts. "I would be the first to say it is a partial view of China. It is my book, my writing, my observation."

Well, and the teacher's. Michael admits he owes an enormous debt to the man who helped him understand some of the complexities of China, and who filled in some of the gaps. And it is thanks to the teacher that China in Drag contains lovely moments such as that near the beginning of the book, where the pair visit the area of Beijing where the teacher grew up.

The traditional alley and courtyard where the teacher once lived has long gone. But the tree that stood in the centre of the courtyard remains, standing amongst shrubs outside the entrance to a modern office block in the city's new financial district. A small green plaque with the words 'ancient tree' has been nailed to the trunk.

"The tree has witnessed many of the political changes of the last hundred years," Michael writes. "The courtyard home it once sheltered was given to the teacher's grandfather by his boss, who ran a rickshaw business. He was a capitalist, to use the derogatory language once employed by China's communist rulers.

"It was a fact that meant the teacher never quite believed government officials when they criticised the old economic order...If businessmen had been so bad, what set of circumstances had led one of them to give his grandfather a house?"

What indeed?

  • China in Drag by Michael Bristow is published by Sandstone Press on September 21, priced £8.99