by Paul Theroux
It went on for a long while, sometimes very slowly, as the passing stations flashed through the parted curtains. The sounds aroused me, and then when I was wide awake they made me completely objective. I felt like a ghost, which is the usual condition of a writer. I was hollow and insubstantial, hovering between the old woman and the lovers.
At dawn we left Shandong Province, which was the setting of the steamy Chinese novel I was reading. It was a happy blend of sex, wisdom and fine writing. Here is the first glimpse the priapic Hsi-men has of the discontented housewife (soon to be his mistress) Golden Lotus:
Her hair was black as a raven's plumage; her eyebrows mobile as the kingfisher and as curved as the new moon. Her almond eyes were clear and cool, and her cherry lips most inviting.... Her face had the delicate roundness of a silver bowl. As for her body, it was as light as a flower, and her fingers as slender as the tender shoots of a young onion. Her waist was as narrow as the willow, and her white belly yielding and plump. Her feet were small and tapering; her breasts soft and luscious. One other thing there was, black-fringed, grasping, dainty and fresh, but the name of that I may not tell ... it had all the fragrance and tenderness of fresh-made pastry, the softness and appearance of a new-made pie.
Those tiny feet are interesting. In another chapter, Hsi-men is beguiled by the sight of another woman's bound feet—the so-called "lily-feet."
Old woman Hsueh found an opportunity to lift Mistress Meng's skirt slightly, displaying her exquisite feet, three inches long and no wider than a thumb...
I mention this because after we left Shandong and crossed the Grand Canal (Da Yunhe) we came to the city of Xuzhou (formerly Tong-shan), where I saw an old woman with small, stumpy feet on the platform, and she was walking painfully on these deformities that had once been thought to be so ravishing.
It was at Xuzhou in the yellow light of early morning that I saw the first real greenery since leaving London over a month before—fields of ripening rice, and young trees in leaf by the roadside, and large blowing poplars. It was the flat plain of eastern China, once a conglomeration of communes and now a region of smallholdings—an immensity of vegetables, cabbage as far as the eye could see, with big black pigs balanced neatly on their trotters in the foreground. I saw puddles and streams, and farmers plowing with tractors or bullocks, and people carrying heavy loads with a shoulder pole used as a yoke to carry a pair of baskets; white swimming ducks and fluttering geese, a small girl in a blue tunic sitting astride a buffalo, and field-workers sleeping off their breakfast against an embankment like drunken peasants in a Flemish painting. And there was a dark sow so heavily pregnant her teats grazed the dusty earth of the farmyard as she plodded.
Some rice was already being harvested. China is proud of the fact—as well it should be—that it not only feeds itself but for the first time in its history now exports more grains than it imports (generally speaking it sells rice and buys wheat). All this activity is dramatized by the fact that for the past few years field-workers have begun to wear bright clothes, and so they are highly visible as they hoe and harvest. From time to time, however, the rigid thing you take to be a scarecrow turns out to be a comrade either leaning on his shovel or practicing wushu or t'ai chi with his arms stuck out.
A few hours later the train pulled into Bengbu, a railway junction in the middle of Anhui Province. Our train was needed there for a little while because a movie scene was being shot at Bengbu Station—a young man and woman seeing someone off on our train, probably an irritating relative. A great crowd had gathered to watch the action, and the film crew and the railway police struggled to shift the mob out of the shot. There was no rough stuff. Everyone—even the police—was interested in the movie. There was no pushing, no anger; and I was impressed by the good humor. But unless they had a brilliant editor, I was sure the result would show the two actors waving good-bye, watched by 2000 goggling Chinese.
In any event there was only one take. When the Shanghai Express pulled out of Bengbu, that was the end of the shot.
Then we were in the green fields again. I was sure that the main difference between this visit and my previous one six years before, when I had sailed down the Yangtze, was that before, I had come in the middle of winter, when everything had been bleak. Then, a Chinese landscape seemed to me to be composed of rain, smoke, fog; and collapsing houses on a muddy road; and people with their hands shoved into their sleeves; and all those fat-faced pictures of Mao on the wall. And whenever I asked someone a question the answer was always either "Maybe" or "You think so?"
Spring and a half a dozen years seemed to have made a significant difference. Because China is so intensively agricultural, spring is splendid all over the country. It's impossible to see crops being planted, and weeded, and harvested, and not feel optimistic. The country was greener, leafier, visibly cheerier and more hopeful. It was not an illusion, this new Cycle of Cathay. If people seemed a little impatient it was perhaps because they knew well that in Chinese terms a cycle lasts sixty years. Lynn Pan began her book The New Chinese Revolution, about recent events in China, by describing what a cycle means in Chinese terms, and then she became specific: "In June 1981 the Chinese Communist Party, founded at a secret meeting in Shanghai in 1921, completed its first cycle of sixty and began on its next." It was also in June 1981 that Deng Xiaoping was made Number One (apart from being head of the politburo he has no real title) and opened China's doors—and then the West hurried in. Only a few years had passed, but the result was obvious. Nothing is more conspicuous than something that has been Westernized.
The passengers mobbed the corridors and hogged the windows just after eleven, and when I asked what was up, they said we would be crossing the Yangtze River soon. But they didn't call it that—the word "Yangtze" hardly exists in Chinese—they called it Chang Jiang, The Long River. Crossing it is an event because it is China's equator, the north-south divide. The Chinese in the north are different from the Chinese in the south. In the north, the Chinese say, they are imperious, quarrelsome, rather aloof, political, proud noodle-eaters; and across the river they are talkative, friendly, complacent, dark, sloppy, commercial-minded and materialistic rice-eaters.
The river is wide, sluggish and brown at this point—the city of Nanjing (Nanking). The bridge over the river is a famous landmark because halfway through its construction the Russians pulled out, believing the Chinese could not possibly finish it themselves; but they did, and it remains one of the few modern engineering feats in China that resulted in a structure that is actually pleasing to the eye. Beneath its leaping spans were the Yangtze boats—like a whole history of Chinese riverboats, every style and size, from the sampans and dugouts to the junks and river steamers—these last of the East Is Red fleet that sail the 1500 miles from Chongqing (Chungking) to Shanghai.
I went on reading Jin Ping Mei, marveling at its blend of manners, delicacy and smut. What a shame it was still banned in China after five centuries. Truly, if the Chinese were allowed to read it, I felt, they would discover a great deal about themselves. I did not believe they would be morally undermined by this stuff, and yet it would be a real thrill as well as a revelation.
The proof that it was pornography was its feeble pretense of being a morality tale. After almost 2000 pages of sexual acrobatics—and detailed descriptions of aphrodisiacs, potions, pills, silver clasps, love rings and harnesses—the story ends with the main character, Hsi-men Ch'ing, literally screwing himself to death with the passionate Golden Lotus.
He arrives home too drunk to perform. Golden Lotus is disappointed.
... She played delicately with his weapon, but it was as limp as cotton wool and had not the slightest spirit. She tossed about on the bed, consumed with passionate desire, almost beside herself. She squeezed his prick, moved it up and down, put down her head and sucked. It was in vain. This made her wild beyond description.
She wakes him and gives him a strong aphrodisiac: three pills. "She was afraid that anything less would ha
ve no effect." And although he falls asleep again, his penis is erect, and so she mounts him.
... Her body seemed to melt away with delight ... she moved up and down about two hundred times. At first it was difficult because it was dry but soon the love juices flowed and moistened her cunt. Hsi-men Ch'ing let her do everything she wished, but he himself was perfectly inert. She could bear it no longer.... She twisted herself towards his penis which was completely inside her cunt, only his two balls staying outside. She stroked his penis with her hand, and it was wonderfully good. The juices flowed and in a short time she had used up five napkins. Even then Hsi-men kept on, although the tip of his prick was swollen and hotter than a live coal. It was so tight that he asked the woman to take off the ribbon, but his penis remained stiff and he told her to suck. She bent over and with her red lips moved the head of his prick to and fro, and sucked. Suddenly white semen poured out, like living silver, which she took in her mouth and could not swallow fast enough. At first it was just semen, soon it became blood which flowed without stopping. Hsi-men Ch'ing had fainted and his limbs were stiff outstretched.
Golden Lotus was frightened. She hastily gave him some red dates. Blood followed semen, and the blood was followed by freezing air. Golden Lotus was terrified. She threw her arms around him and cried, "Darling, how do you feel?"
Readers, there is a limit to our energy, but none to our desires. A man who sets no bounds to his passion cannot live more than a short time...
This book is a sort of phantom in China. Everyone knows of it; no one has seen it. I don't think there would be a counterrevolution if it were published. Banning it has made it notorious. It was only when Lady Chatterley was published freely that people realized what a silly and unreadable book it is. Anyway, Jin Ping Met was better railway reading than Red Star Heroes or We Fight Best When We March Our Hardest.
Outside Danyang, but in the middle of nowhere, a tractor rolled down a steep road and collided with the train. We came to a screeching halt ("Where are we?" "Is this a station?" "No, it's an accident—I think someone's killed") and there was a flurry of activity. No one dared to get off the train for fear of being left behind. A railway official plugged a portable phone into a trackside socket and described in detail what had happened. We all listened carefully.
"He says it's a broken tractor. He says we should call the police. He says no one is hurt. He says it was the farmer's fault. He says we can't go until the responsibility is decided."
The smashed tractor lay near the train, beside the tracks. A crowd gathered—all of them field-workers, rather sullenly watching the more prosperous travelers at the train windows. A railway crew appeared with walkie-talkies and notebooks, and a long discussion ensued over the nub of every Chinese problem: who is to blame? That was always another way of saying: Who is paying for this mistake? A man was hurt and yet after twenty minutes of argument the matter was determined to be too trivial to hold up this train—the fastest long-distance train in China, no stops except to take on fuel, from Peking to Shanghai. The peasants were guilty of allowing one of their tractors to ram the train—and as for the injured man, it was his own fault. We started on our way once again.
The fat young man, Deng, chased his thin wife into her berth and thrashed her with a pair of trousers. She sank her teeth into his ankle and bit him, and he howled. They were playing. The old woman snored in a soft, punctured way, and her son came in and gazed on her, didn't wake her, just smiled as she snored.
In order to get Deng to stop horsing around, I asked him what he was doing in China.
"I come here every six months," he said. "I do business."
He was a mechanical engineer. He had been educated in Toronto. He made rather an issue about his having come back from Canada. It was a sacrifice—"Lee Kwan Yew ruined the Singapore economy. There's eight percent unemployment. I could have stayed in Canada and made a lot of money."
I said I thought it was interesting that the little prosperous island of Singapore had started to fail, just as China was mightily rising—and the overseas Chinese were starting again to see China as a homeland.
'This is a useless place," Deng said, jerking his thumb out the train window. It was soon clear what he was pointing at. "China," he said. "It spends too much money on hi tech that it can't use. They have twenty-eight thousand computers that they can't use. Only ten percent are functioning. They buy things just to have them, so they can look good, and then they let them gather dust."
"You're saying that they have a kind of primitive pride that makes them irrational about spending," I said. "But it seems to me that the Chinese are very frugal—that they don't invest and spend enough. They are always sort of cheating themselves and muddling through and making a virtue of not complaining."
"Sure, they work hard—especially the farmers," Deng said. "And they can feed themselves. That's a good thing."
"So what's the problem?"
Deng glanced around and, seeing the old woman asleep, he said confidentially that the problem was in their heads.
Tapping his head he said, 'They're backward. They're peasants. They're ignorant. They go crazy. They're not like us."
"Who's 'us'?" I asked.
Deng laughed. Did he mean me? He didn't reply. He took his wife on his lap and tickled her until her shirttail came loose. Her stomach was the pale floury color of a steamed bun and her small breasts hardly dented her bra. I found this tormenting.
Pretty soon the old woman's son came in and woke her. We were arriving in Shanghai.
Shanghai is an old brown riverside city with the look of Brooklyn, and the Chinese—who are comforted by crowds—like it for its mobs and its street life. It has a reputation for city slickers and stylishness. Most of China's successful fashion designers work in Shanghai, and if you utter the words Yifu Sheng Luolang the Shanghainese will know you are speaking the name of Yves Saint-Laurent. When I arrived in the city, there was an editor of the French magazine Elle prowling the streets looking for material for an article on China to be called "The Fashion Revolution." According to the Chinese man who accompanied her—whom I later met—this French woman was mightily impressed by the dress sense of the Shanghai women. She stopped them and took their pictures and asked where they got their clothes. The majority said that they got them in the free market in the back streets or that they made the clothes themselves at home, basing them on pictures they saw in Western magazines. Even in the days of the Cultural Revolution, the women workers showed up at their factories with bright sweaters and frilly blouses under their blue baggy suits: it was customary to meet in the women's washroom and compare the hidden sweaters before they started work.
Because Shanghai is a cosmopolitan city and has seen more foreigners—both invaders and friendly visitors—than any other Chinese city, it is a polyglot place. It is at once the most politically dogmatic ("Oppose book worship" "Political work is the lifeblood of all economic work"—Mao) and the most bourgeois. When changes came to China they appeared first in Shanghai; and when there is conflict in China it is loudest and most violent in Shanghai. The sense of life is strong here, and even a city-hater like myself can detect Shanghai's spirit and appreciate its atmosphere. It is not crass like Canton, but it is abrasive—and in the hot months stifling, crowded, noisy and smelly.
It seemed to me noisy most of all, with the big-city all-night howl that is the sound track of New York (honks, sirens, garbage trucks, shouts, death rattles). Peking was rising and would soon be a city of tall buildings, but Shanghai had been built on mud and was growing sideways and spreading into the swamps of Zhejiang. All day the pile drivers hammered steel into this soft soil to fortify it, and one labored right outside my window with a cruel and dominating noise that determined the rhythm of my life. Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo! It affected the way I breathed and walked and ate: I moved my feet and lifted my spoon to Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo! It orchestrated my talking, too; it made me write in bursts, and when I brushed my teeth I discovered I did it to the pound
ing of this pile driver, the bang and its half-echo, Zhong-guo! It began at seven in the morning and was still hammering at eight at night, and in Shanghai it was inescapable, because nearly every neighborhood had its own anvil clang of Zhong-guo!
I walked the back streets in order to keep away from the traffic and the crowds. And I realized that it would be dishonest to complain too much about noise, the pile drivers and the frantic energy, because on my first visit to Shanghai I had felt it was dreary and moribund and demoralized. Why was it that they never knew when to stop? Even the back streets were crowded, with improvised stalls and houses that served as shop fronts and markets set up in the gutters, and people mending shoes and bicycles and doing carpentry on the sidewalk.
Towards the Bund—Shanghai's riverbank promenade—I saw a spire behind a wall and found a way to enter. It was Saint Joseph's Church, and the man I took to be the janitor, because he was so shabbily dressed in a ragged jacket and slippers, was the pastor, a Catholic priest. He was both pious and watchful, soft-spoken and alert—it is the demeanor of a Chinese Christian who has been put through more hoops than he cares to remember. The church had been wrecked during the Cultural Revolution, daubed with slogans and turned into a depot for machinery, and the churchyard had been a parking lot.
"Sacramentum," the priest said, pointing at the flickering candle, and he smiled with satisfaction: the consecrated Host was in the tabernacle.
I asked him why this was so. Was there a service today?
No, he said, and brought me to the back of the church where there was a coffin with a white paper cross stuck to it. He said there was a funeral tomorrow.