by Paul Theroux
I asked him to reflect on capital punishment in China, the 10,000 corpses that had accumulated in the past three years (and they had just added prostitution to the list of capital crimes, so there would be many more).
"Capital punishment in China," he said, and paused, "is swift."
I was overcome by the cold weather, by the sight of people cycling through the snow with frost on their faces, by the bitter air, by temperatures that made me feel bruised.
Mr. Sun got me a ticket out of town, but when we took the car to the station, he twisted his face and said, "That driver is ominous. The last time I was with him he crashed his taxi."
It was seven-thirty on a frosty morning in sooty old Mukden. We had half an hour to get to the station. We immediately confronted a traffic jam (trolleybus with its poles off the wires blocking the road) and were held up for fifteen minutes. Then we started again, and a rumble and thump from the rear wheel slewed the car: a flat tire.
"I told you. This driver is ominous."
"How will I get to the station?"
"You can walk," he said. "But first you must pay the driver."
"Why should I pay him? He didn't get me to the station. I might miss the train!"
"In this case you pay ten yuan, not fifteen. Cheaper! You save money!"
I threw the money at the ominous driver and hurried to the station, slipping on the ice. I caught the train with a minute to spare—another refrigerated train, but at least it was going south.
On this train I met Richard Woo, who worked for Union Carbide, and had been in and around Shenyang for almost two years. I asked him what his qualifications were for this assignment.
"I was in Saskatchewan."
Ah, that explained everything. He also knew all the lingo. "We sell them the design package.... We provide input on the plant." But Union Carbide did not get involved in the construction of the plants. He had views on Chinese workers.
"The work mentality is quite different from that in Europe or America. They are slow, the pay is little. The Chinese are not bad workers, but the system is bad. If they have incentives they perform better."
I was not planning to ask him what Union Carbide was making in Shenyang, because I did not think I would understand it; but I was bored, so I asked.
"Antifreeze," Mr. Woo said.
The train continued through the flat, snowy fields, all of them showing plow marks and furrows and stubble beneath the ice crust. There were factories, and they looked beautiful, blurred and softened and silvered by frost and the vapor from their chimneys.
There might have been berths on this train, but if so, I didn't see them. I was afraid that if I got up someone would snatch my seat—I had seen it happen. I did not want to stand for six hours—it was almost 300 miles more to Dalian. As it was we were jammed in, shoulder to shoulder—the smokers, the noodle eaters, the spitters, the bronchial victims, the orange peelers.
There was no dining car. A woman wearing a nightcap came around with a pushcart, selling dried fish and heavy blobs of sponge cake—the favorite snacks of the Chinese traveler. I chose the fish. It was tough and tasted (and looked) like an old innersoie—a Chinese innersole, and a minority one at that. On the wrapper it was described as "Dried Fish With Minority Flavor."
I was still cold. The cold was mystifying. I hated it like boredom or bad air. It was like aches and pains—perhaps a fear of death informed my feeling and made the cold frightening, because degree zero is death. I found it dehumanizing, and my heart went out to the people who had to live and work in Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning. And yet it is well known that the spirit among the people in these provinces is especially bright—the hinterland of China is famous for having high morale, the people regarding themselves as pioneers.
But the cold affected me. It is a blessing that cold is hard to describe and impossible to remember clearly. I certainly have no memory for low temperatures. And so afterwards I had no memorable sensations of the month-long freeze I had been through—only the visual effects: frosty faces, scarves with frozen spit on them, big bound feet, and mittens, and crimson faces, flecks of ice on that crow-black Chinese hair, the packed snow, the vapor that hung over the larger cities and made even the grimmest city magical, and the glittering frost—the special diamondlike shimmer that you get when it's thirty below.
After a few hundred miles the snow grew thinner and finally with an odd abruptness, at the town of Wangfandian there was none. The landscape had the shabby and depressed look that places have when you are used to seeing them covered with snow. There was something drastic about there being no more snow.
The symmetry and twiggy patterns of bare, brown orchards below the Qian Shan, and the stone cottages not far from Dalian, gave these hills the look of Scotland and its ruined crofts.
A young Chinese woman smiled at me as I stepped onto the platform at Dalian. She was very modern, I could see. Her hair had been waved into a mass of springy curls. She wore sunglasses. Her green coat had a fur collar—rabbit. She said she had been sent to meet me. Her name was Miss Tan.
"But please call me Cherry."
"Okay, Cherry."
"Or Cherty Blossom."
It was hard to include those two words in an ordinary sentence. "What is the fare to Yantai, Cherry Blossom?" But I managed, and she always had a prompt reply, usually something like, "It will cost you one arm and one leg." She had a fondness for picturesque language.
She led me outdoors, and as we stood on the steps of Dalian Station, she said, "So what do you think of Dalian so far?"
"I have only been here seven minutes," I said.
"Time flies when you're having fun!" Cherry Blossom said.
"But since you asked," I went on, "I am very impressed with what I see in Dalian. The people are happy and industrious, the economy is buoyant, the quality of life is superb. I can tell that morale is very high. I am sure it is the fresh air and prosperity. The port is bustling, and I'm sure the markets are filled with merchandise. What I have seen so far only makes me want to see more."
"That is good," Cherry Blossom said.
"And another thing," I said. "Dalian looks like South Boston, in Massachusetts."
It did, too. It was a decaying port, made out of bricks, with wide streets, cobblestones and trolley tracks, and all the paraphernalia of a harbor—the warehouses, dry docks and cranes. I had the impression that if I kept walking I would eventually come to The Shamrock Bar and Grill. It was also Boston weather—cold and partly sunny under blowing clouds—and Boston architecture. Dalian was full of big brick churches that had probably once been called Saint Pat's, Saint Joe's and Saint Ray's—they were now kindergartens and nurseries, and one was the Dalian Municipal Library. But reform had come to Dalian and with it such businesses as The Hot Bread Bakery and the Hong Xing (Red Star) Cut and Perma.
"And also men hurry to Hong Xing to get a perma," Cherry Blossom said. "They go lickety-split."
The streets looked like Boston's streets. Never mind that the main thoroughfare in Dalian was called Stalin Road (Sidalin Lu). It looked like Atlantic Avenue.
At the turn of the century the Russians had schemed to make Dalny (as they called it; it means "far away" in Russian) a great port for the tsar's ships. It was valuable for fighting the Japanese because, unlike Vladivostok, it would not freeze in the winter. After the Russo-Japanese war, when the Japanese flew kites in Dairen—each kite saying The Russians Have Surrendered!—this port city was handed to the Japanese. They simply completed the Russian plan for turning what had been a fishing village into a great port. It prospered until the Second World War, and when the Japanese were defeated, the Russians were given the city under the Yalta terms. The Russians remained until well after he Chinese Liberation, when the Chinese renamed the city Dalian (Great Link). I liked it for its salt air and sea gulls.
"What desires do you entertain in Dalian?" Cherry Blossom said.
I told her that I had come here to get warm after the freeze in
Dongbei, the Northeast. And I needed a ticket on the ship that traveled from Dalian across the Bohai Gulf to Yantai. Could she get that for me?
"Keep your fingers crossed," she said.
She vanished after that. I found an old hotel—Japanese prewar baronial; but I was turned away. I was accepted at the dreary new Chinese hotel, a sort of Ramada Inn with a stagnant fish pond in the lobby. I spent the day looking for an antique shop, and the only one I found was disappointing. A man tried to sell me a trophy awarded to the winner of a schoolboys' javelin competition in 1933 at a Japanese high school. "Genuine silver," he whispered. "Qing Dynasty."
The next day I saw Cherry Blossom. She had no news about my ticket.
"You will just have to keep your hopes up!"
We agreed to meet later, and when we did she was smiling.
"Any luck?" I asked.
"No!" She kept smiling. And with this bad news I noticed that she had a plump and slightly pimply face. She was wearing an arsenic-green wool scarf to match the wool cap she herself had knitted in the dormitory (she had four roommates) at the Working Women's Unit.
"I have failed completely!"
Then why was she smiling? God, I hated her silly hat.
"But," she said, wiggling her fingers, "wait!"
She had a sharp way of speaking that made every sentence an exclamation. She reached into her plastic handbag.
"Here is the ticket! It has been a total success!"
Now she wagged her head at me and made her tight curls vibrate like springs.
I said, "Were you trying to fool me, Cherry Blossom?"
"Yes!"
I wanted to hit her.
"Is that a Chinese practical joke?"
"Oh, yes," she said, with a giggle.
But then aren't all practical jokes exercises in sadism?
I went to the free market—open since 1979. Every sort of fish, shellfish and seaweed was on display—a pound of big, plump prawns was five dollars, but that was the most expensive item. They also sold squid, abalone, oysters, conch, sea slugs and great stacks of clams and flatfish. The fishermen did not look Chinese; they had a flat-headed Mongolian appearance and might have been Manchus, of whom there are five or six million in this peninsula and in the north. The market gave me an appetite, and that night I had abalone stir-fried in garlic sauce: delicious.
Cherry Blossom said that foreign cruise ships stopped in Dalian in the summer. The tourists stayed for half a day.
"What can you see in Dalian in half a day?"
She said they all got on a bus and visited the shell-carving factory, the glassware factory, a model children's school (the kids sang songs from The Sound of Music) and then it was back to the ship and on to Yantai or Qingdao.
"I'd like to see Stalin Square," I said.
We went there. In the center of it was a statue to the Russian army, which had occupied the city after the war.
"There are no Stalin Squares in the Soviet Union, Cherry Blossom. Did you know that?"
She said, no, she was surprised to hear it. She asked why.
"Because some people think he made a few mistakes," I said, though I did not mention the pogroms, the secret police, purges, or the mustached brute's ability to plan large-scale famines in order to punish dissenting regions.
"Is there a Mao Zedong Square in Dalian, Cherry Blossom?"
"No," she said, "because he made a few mistakes.* But don't cry over spilled milk!"
I told her that I had read somewhere that the evil genius Lin Biao—China's Trotsky—had lived in Dalian. She said no, this was not so. She had lived her whole life in Dalian, and no one had ever mentioned Lin's connection.
But the driver was older. He said yes, Lin Biao had lived there in Dalian. Lin Biao, a great military tactician, was now maligned because he had done so much to build up Mao—it was Lin who devised the Little Red Book and chose all the quotations; and in the end (so it was said) he had plotted to assassinate Mao, when Mao was weak and at his heffalump stage; and Lin, in trying to flee the country by plane ("seeking protection from his Moscow masters ... as a defector to the Soviet revisionists in betrayal of the Party and the country"), had crashed in dear old Undur Khan, in the People's Republic of Mongolia. Foul play was never mentioned. It was regarded as natural justice that this heliophobe should meet an untimely death.
It was his heliophobia that made me want to see his house. This weedy little man had a horror of the sun. I thought his house might not have any windows, or perhaps special shutters; or maybe he lived in a bomb shelter in the basement.
Cherry Blossom was saying in Chinese to the driver, "I did not know that Lin Biao lived in Dalian," and then to me in English, "It's too dark to find his house. Let's go to the beach instead."
We headed for the south part of Dalian, to a place called Fu's Village Beach. Because of the cliffs and the winding road, the driver went very slowly.
Cherry Blossom said, "This car is as slow as cold molasses in January."
"You certainly know a lot of colorful expressions, Cherry."
"Yes. I am queer as a fish." And she giggled behind her hand.
"You should be as happy as a clam," I said.
"I like that one so much! I feel like a million dollars when I hear that."
These colloquial high jinks could have been tiresome, but it was such a novelty for a Chinese person to be playful I enjoyed it. And I liked her for not taking herself too seriously. She knew she was mildly excruciating.
Meanwhile we were descending to Fu's Village—great rocky cliffs and an empty beach of yellow sand, with the January wind off the sea beating the waves against it. Offshore there were five bloblike islands floating blackly on the gulf. A couple was canoodling on the beach, out of the wind—the Chinese do it standing up, usually behind a rock or a building, and they hug each other very tightly. It is all smooching. These two ran away when they saw me. A drunken fisherman staggered across the beach, towards his big wooden rowboat that was straight off an ancient scroll: a sharply rockered bottom, very clumsy, the shape of a wooden shoe, probably very seaworthy.
I asked Cherry Blossom whether she took her tourists here. She said there wasn't time.
"Some of the people have funny faces," she said.
"What is the funniest face you have ever seen, Cherry?'
She shrieked "Yours!" and clapped her hands over her eyes and laughed.
"Another of your saucy jokes, Cherry Blossom!"
She became rather grave and said, "But truly, the Tibetans have the funniest faces. They are so funny I get frightened."
"What about American faces?"
"Americans are wonderful."
We had tea at a vast, empty restaurant. We were the only customers. It was at the top of one of Fu's cliffs, with a panoramic view.
"Do you want to see the Dragon Cave?"
I said yes and was taken upstairs to see a restaurant decorated to resemble a cave. It had fiberglass walls, bulging brown plastic rocks, lights shining through plastic stalactites, and each table was fixed in a greeny-black cleft, with fake moss and boulders around it. The idea was perhaps not a bad one, but this was a vivid example of the Chinese not knowing when to stop. It was shapeless, artless, grotesquely beyond kitsch; it was a complicated disfigurement, wrinkled and stinking, like a huge plastic toy that had begun to melt and smell. You sat on those wrinkled rocks and bumped your head on the stalactites and ate fish cheeks with fresh ginger.
Cherry Blossom said, "Do you think it's romantic?"
"Some people might find it romantic," I said. And I pointed out the window. "That's what I find romantic."
The tangerine sun had settled into the Gulf of Bohai, coloring the little islands and the cliffs of Dalian and the long stretch of empty beach.
Cherry Blossom said, "Let your imagination fly!"
We left the Dragon Cave (and I thought: It must have a counterpart in California). I said, "I understand there are recuperation tours. People come to this province to try out Chi
nese medicine."
"Yes. It is like a fat farm."
"Where did you learn that, Cherry Blossom?"
"My teachers at the institute were Americans. They taught me so many things!"
She had loved her years at the Dalian Foreign Languages Institute. She was now only twenty-two, but she intended to go on studying and working. She had no intention of getting married, and in explaining why, she lost her jokey manner and became distressed.
Her decision not to marry was the result of a trip to Peking. She had taken a group of visiting doctors to see a Chinese hospital—how it worked, how the patients were treated, the progress of surgical procedures, and so forth. The doctors expressed an interest in seeing a delivery. Cherry Blossom witnessed this and, so she said, almost went into shock at the sight of the baby, with its squashed head and its bloody face, issuing forth and streaming water. The mother had howled and so had the baby.
In all respects it was a completely normal birth.
"It was a mess," she said, and touched her plump cheeks in disgust. "I was afraid. I hated it. I would never do it—never. I will never get married."
I said, "You don't have to have babies just because you get married."
She was shaking her head. The thought was absurd—she couldn't take it in. The whole point of marriage these days was to produce one child. Even though the Party was now stressing that the best marriages were work related, the husband and wife joint members of a work unit, a busy little team, Cherry Blossom could not overcome the horror of what she had seen in the delivery room of Capital Hospital in Peking. She said she intended to remain in the dormitory of the Working Women's Unit and go on knitting.
It was late at night when we crossed Dalian to get to the harbor, where I intended to take the ship to Yantai. We passed through the old bourgeois suburbs that had been built by the Japanese and the Russians. On the sloping streets of these neighborhoods there were seedy semidetached villas and stucco bungalows under the bare trees. I had not seen anything quite like them in China. They were appropriate to the suburban streets, the picket fences and the brick walls; and then I saw the laundry in the front yards and the Chinese at the windows.