The First Lady's Own Tour

LIKE any curious homemaker, she first had to have a look at the kitchen. "I think all Americans love Chinese food," she said. "So I thought of it."

There was a lot to look at--and nibble on--in the kitchen of the Peking Hotel, an immaculate, white-tiled temple of taste employing 115 cooks and helpers. Sniffing and sampling as she went, she paused over the array of delicacies--goldfish in white sauce, egg rolls rampant on a field of seaweed, steamed baby bird couchant on clamshell pastry--and with the judicious eye of a diner selecting one from Column A and one from Column B. In the vegetable carving room, where chefs sculpted 6-ft. radishes, turnips, carrots and sugar beets into decorative flowers, she picked up a radish carnation, placed it on the chest of a beaming chef and burbled: "It's pretty enough to wear."

Expertly wielding chopsticks, she downed some chicken and bamboo shoots and, without a wince, a fiery stuffed pickled squash. "It's delicious," she said, slyly offering a bite to one of the attending newsmen. He chewed, swallowed and blanched. "Very spicy," a Chinese interpreter said belatedly. Then, turning down a proffered egg roll, the guest of honor pleaded: "If I eat any more, I'll need all new clothes." Finally, like a dutiful neighbor promising to return a borrowed cup of sugar, she said to her hosts: "When we have the reunion at the White House, we'll have Chinese food and I'll do the cooking. I'll have to take a few pots home." As for chopsticks, she revealed that she has at last solved the ancient Chinese puzzle of where to place the sticks between courses: "You just place them on someone else's plate."

By her own cheery admission, Pat Nixon was "loving every minute of it." Indeed, with the President sequestered with his aides and Chinese officials much of the time, the First Lady's own brand of gracious, chatty kitchen diplomacy did much to humanize the formality of the Nixons' journey. Stiff and sequestered herself in years past, she seemed to blossom in her role of the not-so-innocent abroad. Unlike Jackie Kennedy, who tended to upstage J.F.K. in their forays abroad, Pat Nixon has proved herself a master of the very subtle art of being winning and winsome in the role of distaff stage left. "The people," she says unabashedly, "are so friendly, warmhearted and generous." The same, just as unabashedly, could be said of her.

If not for the newsmen and Chinese officials clustered around her, in fact, Mrs. Nixon could have passed as a typical tourist eager to take in as many sights as possible. In her visit to the Summer Palace, a 659-acre complex that was once occupied by the Dowager Empress Tsu Hsi during the Ching Dynasty, she strolled through such exotic edifices as the Hall of Benevolence and Longevity, the Hall of Happiness in Longevity, the Hall of Dispelling the Clouds and the Pavilion of the Fragrance of Buddha. Going through the Gate of Longevity and Good Will, she remarked, "That's prophetic." Staring up at a pagoda perched on a hilltop, she asked about climbing up to have a closer look and was told that the trail was too hazardous. "I'm game," she said, but her hosts quickly hurried her on to other sights.

While she was perhaps not as inquisitive as reporters would have wished, the First Lady was never wanting for polite small talk--sometimes very small. In the Empress's dining room, she allowed there must not have been many guests because the table was so tiny. Noting the multipaneled mirror in the Empress's boudoir, she said that perhaps the imperial lady liked to look at herself. At the Peking Zoo, home of 4,000 animals, Mrs. Nixon chose to visit only the giant pandas, the rare, burly Asian mammals with raccoon-like faces. "They're adorable!" she exclaimed. Mrs. Nixon explained that Premier Chou En-lai had told her that in return for the President's gift of two musk oxen "we'll load up your plane with pandas." Would she be the one to name the pandas? "Oh no," she said, "they will be for all the American people. Somebody else will name them. There will be a big scramble for the zoo that gets them."*

At midweek Mrs. Nixon ventured out into a snowfall to tour the Evergreen People's Commune on the western edge of Peking. With her brilliant fur-lined red coat and carefully coiffed blonde hair, she seemed colorfully radiant as she passed the gray of Evergreen--gray earth, gray walls, gray houses, gray sky. Small, smiling Wang Tung-wu, vice chairman of the commune, explained with the enthusiasm of a Missouri farm agent that Evergreen houses 41,000 workers and produces 10,000 pigs and 120,000 tons of vegetables a year. Mrs. Nixon suggested that maybe the snow will help the crops.

Stopping off at the commune's clinic, she was ushered to a cot to see a 68-year-old woman undergoing acupuncture treatments. Taking one look at the silver and gold needles sticking in the woman's right shoulder, arm and leg, the First Lady quickly turned away, saying, "I think it's sort of rude to watch." Assured that it was not and that the patient was responding nicely, she went to see the pigpens outside. When photographers cried for her to get closer to the porkers, she asked, "Do you want me to pet one or get in the pen with them?"

However new or strange the sights, Mrs. Nixon seemed intent on stressing the common ties that bind. At a table tennis match in the commune, she said: "We have a Ping Pong table in Florida. We play Ping Pong." At the pigpen, she recalled her early days on a farm in Artesia, Calif.: "I once raised a prizewinner." At the commune's schoolhouse, she watched some third graders whiz through a math problem (56 X 38-:7 -19 X 4), and remarked: "I used to be a schoolteacher." Then, hugging and kissing some of the children, she said to her interpreter: "Tell them hello from all the children in America." There was even a touch of politics. At the Peking Glassware Factory later that day, Mrs. Nixon spotted some small green elephant figurines. "Ah, the elephant!" she exclaimed. "The symbol of our party."

* Zoos in Washington, D.C., Detroit and St. Louis have already bid for the pandas. Outside China, there are at present only three pandas in captivity, one each in London, Moscow and Pyongyang, North Korean.

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