Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  But these people at the lunch were part of a class that has always existed in China—the scholar gentry. They were special and a little suspect and set apart. They were important but no emperor had ever really felt easy with them, and Mao had actually tried to cut them down to size and even humiliate them by sending them into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. It was a philosophy encapsulated in the remark: If you think you're so smart you can start shoveling that pig shit into the wheelbarrow. And at night these rusticated intellectuals studied the works of Marx and Lenin. It had all worked like a harsh form of aversion therapy, which was why the mood in China was so different now.

  "Most of the people in this room would much rather have their child be an underpaid scholar than a rich merchant," Mrs. Lord said. "That's a fact."

  I felt it would be rude to mention that the choice wasn't exactly that—between being a merchant or an intellectual; not in a country where 900 million people were peasant farmers.

  It was obvious that the sixteen card-carrying intellectuals at Mrs. Lord's were not typical, and they were Westernized enough to like drinking coffee—one of the rarest drinks in China—and to linger after the meal to talk a little more.

  Professor Dong Luoshan had recently translated Orwell's 1984— he had actually translated it in the year 1984, which seemed wonderfully appropriate. He had also translated Kurt Vonnegut and Saul Bellow into Chinese, but it was Orwell I wanted to talk about.

  He said, "I think it is a very gloomy novel."

  "Did it seem familiar to you?"

  "You are speaking of the recent past in China," he said, with a wink. "But I tell you the Cultural Revolution was worse. It was much worse."

  "Why don't more people write about it then?"

  "We are still trying to understand it, and it is a very painful subject."

  There is a special category of writing about the Cultural Revolution, known as "wound literature" (Shanghen wenxue), so "painful" was an appropriate word. A popular Chinese writer, Feng Jicai, writes almost exclusively about the Cultural Revolution. But the best book I had read, The Execution of Mayor Yin (1977), by Chen Jo-hsi, had not appeared in China.

  "Reading 1984 might get people thinking about it," I said.

  Professor Dong inclined his head in a cautioning way and said, "But most people cannot read it. It is a restricted book—it is neican."

  It meant "restricted," placing it on a sort of index of books reserved for the exclusive use of people who were sober and trustworthy readers. The average person couldn't read a book that was neican, and there was another phrase neibu for the things they couldn't talk about to foreigners—or at least weren't supposed to. But I seldom found the Chinese cagey; they talked about everything, and usually in a very candid way.

  Professor Dong was still talking about 1984 and how only intellectuals could read it. "It is necessary to have special permission to read such books."

  He said that bookstores and libraries all had a restricted section. You needed an approved "passbook" to get in and read this reckless and inflammatory stuff. But he said that in practice most people could read the books because they could be loaned from person to person once they were bought. It was the Chinese intellectuals themselves who limited the circulation of such books. The stiff-necked scholar gentry were not in the habit of loaning the books to slobs who might get the wrong idea.

  The funny thing was, that after all this explanation, I walked into a public library eight months later, in the south China port of Xiamen (Amoy), and found a copy of Professor Dong's translation of 1984. I asked the librarian whether it was freely circulated and she said, "Yes, of course. Is it any good?"

  The really strange and dangerous books, Professor Dong said, were the erotic classics—books like The Prayer Mat of Flesh and Jin Ping Mei. The latter (also known as The Golden Lotus) was written in the Ming Dynasty—say in the fourteenth century—and translations have been available to Westerners for a hundred years or more. Clement Egerton's version, done in the thirties, is regarded as one of the best. It concerns the life of a decadent young merchant and his various sexual encounters.

  "Do you actually think that book is harmful?"

  "Not to me," Professor Dong said, in the blinkered and superior way that makes Chinese intellectuals the butt of Chinese jokes and the object of a certain amount of Party hostility. And he went on, 'To the ordinary reader it is very harmful. You see, Chinese is not explicit. It is full of innuendo. Jin Ping Mei is like that. It does not say exactly what is happening, so you imagine all sorts of things. I think it should be restricted."

  I asked Professor Dong what he was doing at the moment, and he said that he had recently compiled a handbook of English phrases the average Chinese would not find in an English dictionary. He gave as examples "Walter Mittyism" and "Archie Bunker mentality."

  He asked what I was doing. I said I had just finished a novel set in the near future.

  "No one writes about the future in China. We hardly think about it. There is a little science fiction, but nothing about the future."

  "Doesn't anyone think, as Orwell did, that you can comment on the present by writing about the future?"

  He said, "We have a saying, 'Use the past to criticize the present.' That is a Chinese preoccupation. There was a mayor in Peking who wrote a play about an obscure figure during the Ming period. People were very shocked. 'You are criticizing Mao!' they said. That mayor was removed very soon after. And he disappeared."

  "Had he been criticizing Mao?"

  "Of course—yes!"

  About half the guests left, but the ones that stayed behind wanted to talk about religion. I said it was not my favorite subject but I would try to answer their questions. Were people in America religious? Why was there a sense of religion in Steinbeck and Faulkner and not in the works of any present-day writers? They were familiar with many British and American authors, but their way of mentioning book titles suggested to me that they might have read them in translation: Dickens's A Story About Two Places and Difficult Years, Hawthorne's The Red Letter, Steinbeck's Angry Grapes, and so forth. I recommended Sinclair Lewis, having just read him on the train. And I asked them about their own writing.

  "We are sick of politics," one of the young writers said. "Our writers have been dealing only with politics. People think of Chinese writers as obsessed with it. But that is changing. We want to write about other things. But we need to find an audience."

  I said I didn't think they would have any difficulty finding an audience for other subjects, because politics and politicians were so boring. "If you write about something else you'll have many readers."

  "But we have to please the first reader," another man said, and stuck a finger in the air.

  "He means the political censor," someone said.

  It seemed to me that there was a certain hypocrisy in believing in censorship for the lower orders but not for intellectuals, but I didn't want to intimidate them by questioning their logic. I told them that Henry Miller had been banned in England and America until the 1960s, and the Lady Chatterley trial was in 1963. So much for enlightenment in the West.

  "We are improving," one of the scholars said. "We have just published a series of volumes on the economics of Keynes."

  I said that perhaps John Maynard Keynes for them was like D. H. Lawrence for us, and I tried to imagine what forbidden, dark, brooding supply-side economics might be like.

  I was sobered up just before I left Mrs. Lord's when a young man approached me and said he heard that I was interested in Chinese railways.

  'There is a certain railway line that you should see," he said. "It is called 'Death Road.' During the Cultural Revolution people used to kill themselves on this section of track. One person a day, and sometimes more, jumped in front of the train. In those days the buildings in Peking weren't very tall—you couldn't kill yourself by jumping out of the window of a bungalow. So they chose the train because they were too poor to buy poison."

&nb
sp; "A few years ago, we used to see the tourists and say, 'Americans are so old,'" a man told me in Peking. And it was true: only old people went to China then, because it was very expensive and took time, and being a wealthy retiree helped if you wanted to go. But nowadays everyone went. There were tycoons, budget travelers, free-loaders, cyclists, tourists, archeologists and prospective students of kung fu. In Peking every one of them visited the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven and the Friendship Store. I had seen these sights on my previous trip. Very interesting, I thought; very big, too. But I had come to China to find things that were unspectacular.

  I went to Death Road. It was immediately clear why it had been chosen for suicides: it was a curve in the line hidden by a footbridge, with a dusty culvert on either side. It was possible to see where people jumped from and where they fell. Apart from that it seemed an ordinary place, just a section of track, but in its ordinariness lay all of its horror.

  Then I decided to go to the big foreign-language bookstore on Wangfujing Street to see if Professor Dong's book of English phrases was available. It was not, but I was given A Dictionary of New and Difficult English Words. In the B's I found balled, ball-up, ballsy, ballahoo [sic], and banged, and under shit the expression I feel shitty in my body—a newly minted American colloquialism. But most of the words were chemical compounds—methyloxylate, sulphur dioxide— and their Chinese equivalents.

  An elderly Chinese man was perusing a copy.

  "It is not much use to me," he said, "because I usually translate music theory and this is very scientific. You probably don't know many of these words."

  "Some of them look familiar," I said.

  His name was Zhang Mei. He was a musician, adept at several instruments, including the piano; a composer, a conductor, and lately a music teacher. He also sang, he said—he was a baritone. As well as Chinese music, he played and sang Schubert ("very sad"), Verdi and Handel ("my personal favorite"). He also liked Stephen Foster. He said that Foster was one of the most popular composers in China.

  "When I hear 'Beautiful Dreamer' I feel like weeping," I said.

  "I prefer Handel," Mr. Zhang said.

  He was small and frail and rather bent over, but when I said I was going for a walk he offered to come with me. He looked older than his years—he was seventy-five—but he walked nimbly. He said he had just seen his son off at Peking Central Station—the son was taking the train to Paris to study singing; he was not stopping on the way. I said, "It's a nine-day trip," but Mr. Zhang said, "He has a berth—he can sleep. He's very lucky."

  I asked him whether the government disapproved of Western music. He said no, not these days. Later I found out that there were official directives about such matters; for example, on 7 March 1977, the Party sent forth a decree lifting a ban on the playing of Beethoven's music.

  Mr. Zhang had never studied music. He said, "I am self-taught. I was in the New Fourth Army against the Japanese. I led the chorus, forty men. That was to rouse the troops. Also I wrote music and composed songs."

  I asked him for an example.

  "In the town of Huangzhou in Jiangsu Province we won an important battle. I commemorated it by writing The Song of the Baking Cakes.'"

  He explained that it was a patriotic song based on people baking a particular kind of cake, called shaobing. They served them when the soldiers went off to battle and welcomed the soldiers back with more cakes.

  I said, "Didn't you write songs about the Japanese as evil little fiends?"

  "Oh, yes," Mr. Zhang said. "In the songs we called them all sons of names. Ghosts. Robbers. Rapists. Because they were robbing and raping. If you say 'rapist' most people will know immediately that you're talking about a Japanese, even now."

  "Were they ghosts?"

  He laughed. "Ghosts are guizi. They are cruel. Well, not exactly cruel. They are abominable."

  I liked him. I asked him whether he was hungry. He said yes, but he also said he had very bad digestion. Nevertheless, he ordered an enormous amount of food. It cost 33 yuan and we ate very little of it. He paid for it in ordinary Chinese money (renminbi), and then I gave him the equivalent in Foreign Exchange Certificates, which were like hard currency. It was quite a transaction but it occurred to me that my changing this money was the whole point of his ordering this expensive meal.

  He said he had chosen the restaurant because it was Cantonese, and so was he. While we were eating, he overheard four Cantonese men speaking about their bill—their meal had cost 35 yuan.

  "They must be merchants to have paid so much for their meal," he said. He asked them if this was so, but they told him they worked in a nearby government office.

  "Times are changing," he said. As a veteran he had various pensions and subsidies that came to 271 yuan a month. He said he felt fairly well-off.

  I asked him what he thought of so many Japanese tourists visiting China after they had caused so much misery for the Chinese by occupying the country and fighting so tenaciously.

  "We have forgotten all that. It is better to forget. Anyway, Chairman Mao said, 'Most foreigners are good—only a few are bad.'"

  "I wonder what Chairman Mao would say if he saw what was taking place in Peking right now."

  Mr. Zhang said, "He would be interested. Certainly surprised."

  "He might not like it."

  "He would have to like it. The facts would teach him. He could not deny it."

  He said what most people had told me, that Mao in old age was senile. After 1957, Mao was not the same. He kept making mistakes and was easily misled by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four.

  "People worshipped him. It was very bad. He did not encourage it but he tolerated it."

  I asked Mr. Zhang whether he was optimistic about the changes in China.

  "Yes," he said. "Things are much better. We should have more money to spend, but if we tighten our belts for a few years I think we'll see some results."

  "Don't you think there could be a change for the worse when Deng dies?"

  "No. He has already chosen his successors."

  "So you don't see any problems?"

  "Overpopulation is a problem. Traffic is a problem—already we have too many cars. We have to manage that. But we are doing well in many areas, like agriculture."

  He said he liked what was happening to China. Chinese history was long, but it had distinct phases. This was a very tiny part of it, and it might be years before we could assess it. That reminded me of Mao's reply when someone had asked him about the French Revolution—what did he think of it? "It is too early to say," Mao said.

  Mr. Zhang then told me some of his war stories, as we strolled down Wangfujing. He had been a translator for General Chen Yi who, in April 1946, had a top-level meeting with an American general whose name Mr. Zhang could not remember. Liu Shaoqi (later chairman of the People's Republic, and much later tortured to death by Red Guards) was also present at this meeting.

  'The American general gave a carton of Camel cigarettes to General Chen Yi, and some chocolates to Liu Shaoqi, and a box of rations to me.

  "'We are in Shandong,' General Chen Yi said. 'We have many fruit trees here. You have my permission to encourage Americans to open a fruit-canning factory here.' But they didn't accept the invitation.

  'Then I gave them all a shock. I shook hands with the American general. The American translator did not dare to shake hands with General Chen Yi. Afterwards these Americans, who were members of UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), said to me, 'You're very progressive, comrade.'

  "'All men are equal,' I said."

  He was a nice man, and before we parted he said, 'The food at that restaurant wasn't very good, but I like this conversation. When you come back to Peking, come to my house and have some real Chinese food."

  From the train Peking had looked impressive: a city on the rise, cranes everywhere, workmen scrambling across girders, and the thump of pile drivers going, Zhong-guo! Zhong-g
uo!

  But when I went a little closer and walked around them, these new tenements looked very shaky. Some were made as if with a large-scale version of children's blocks, or put together out of three-room modules—a sort of gigantic building-puzzle kit. And it was dear why these prefab methods were being used. When a structure was put up from scratch, brick by brick, the windows were wonky and the doors weren't square and there were bulges in the walls, and the whole thing had a handmade look that the kinder architects call "the vernacular style."

  "No one knows how long they'll last," an American in Peking told me. 'They might turn out to be like those Hong Kong buildings that were put up with spit and sawdust and fell down about a year later."

  "Why do you think that?" I asked.

  "Because most of them are being put up by people from Hong Kong."

  Certainly the development called the Hua Guofeng Wall is beginning to crack. It is a hideous stretch of apartments and tower blocks that was put up as a prestige project by Mr. Hua before he was politically outmaneuvered by Mr. Deng. The buildings are not only mismatched and cracked and stained, but also, though only seven years old, have begun to fall down.

  I nosed around a tall apartment block and fell into conversation with Mr. Zheng Douwan on the ninth floor. He said that everything was fine at the moment, but he was tentative and I knew there was more to say.

  "Is it always fine?" I asked.

  "Not in the summer," he said. "The water table is so low in Peking that the pressure is bad. We can only get water as high as the fifth floor. This is a fifteen-story building, so the people on the upper ten floors have to get water in buckets."

  Droughts and water shortages are greatly feared in Peking, he told me: for the past six years the rainfall was way below average and the outlook this year was not good. (In the event, very little rain fell, though buildings continued to rise.)