Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  Two years before, in one of the pebbly and decrepit Yantai parks, he had met a girl who was out walking with her friends. Mr. Hu was captivated by her. Her name was Mu. After a year of taking her for walks and buying her noodles and watching TV with her at her parents' apartment, Mr. Hu decided to get to the point.

  He said, "What do you say, Mu—shall we register?"

  Mu was excited. She could hardly speak. Shall we register? was an unambiguous proposal of marriage. Registering leads in only one direction. Article 7 of The Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China (1986) specifies, "Both the man and the woman desiring to contract a marriage shall register in person with the marriage registration office."

  Mr. Hu was twenty-six, and Mu was twenty-five. Article 5 states: "No marriage shall be contracted before the man has reached 22 years of age and the woman 20 years of age."

  When the couple's ages, status, jobs and addresses were verified, a marriage certificate was issued. Other clauses in the marriage law explain that cousins cannot marry, nor can lepers. Mr. Hu had expected that his work unit would give him a place to live—a room in Yantai. He put in several requests, but was bypassed.

  Mu told him to forget it. If they waited for a place to live they might never get married. She urged him to consider going through with the marriage. Could they live with his parents?

  Mr. Hu said okay—let's do it. But there was another problem. January was deemed an unlucky month, according to an old tradition, for the way it falls just before Spring Festival. Both sets of parents implored the couple not to get married in an inauspicious month.

  I said, "Did you agree that the month is unlucky?"

  "Not really," Mr. Hu said, but he seemed uncertain. "But for their sakes, we changed the date."

  "Are you superstitious?"

  His face became very thin with the chattering laugh that meant You have just asked me a tactless question, but I will nevertheless answer it. He said, "I don't think so."

  "Do you believe in God?" I asked.

  "Sometimes," he said. He did not laugh.

  By pretending to satisfy the old folks he could calm himself. He chose to get married just after Christmas. Chinese who study English rend to make a thing of Christmas—the eating, drinking, card-sending and gift-giving part: all its heathen elements.

  Mr. Hu bought basins of food and cartons of wine and beer. His school friend Hua did the cooking. On the big day he rented a taxi—something he had never before done on his own—and he was driven to Mu's house. He wore a Western suit and necktie. He picked up Mu and proceeded to his parents' house, and on his arrival there strings of firecrackers were unleashed. That was eleven in the morning. The guests arrived at noon, and everyone ate and drank until ten that night.

  At that point Mr. Hu and Mu went upstairs. They did not go to work for two days, nor did they stir out of the house. Their romantic tryst was sporadic, and this was not exactly a love nest, because seven people lived in the three-room apartment, and the TV set was in the room occupied by Mr. Hu and Mu. Occasionally members of the household wanted to watch their favorite programs.

  Article 9 of the Marriage Law states, "Husband and wife enjoy equal status in the home." This was a bit tricky in the house owned by Mr. Hu's parents, because his mother did all the cooking—Mu could not cook—and "home" was really just a euphemism for the TV room with its convertible bed.

  A unique feature of the Chinese Marriage Law is its unambiguous treatment of birth control. That is Article 12: "Husband and wife are in duty bound to practice family planning."

  I did not ask Mr. Hu how they managed this aspect, though I was deeply curious. I simply asked him how he was enjoying marriage.

  "So far, very nice," he said.

  He said it did not bother him that his wife kept her own name. The law allowed children in China to adopt the name of either parent. The law insists that parents be kind and that they act responsibly. This is spelled out in specific detail: "Infanticide by drowning and any other acts causing serious harm to infants are prohibited."

  If Mr. Hu's marriage did not work out, and Mu was of the same mind, a divorce could be very speedy. There were restrictions, of which the most interesting was Article 27: "The husband is not allowed to apply for a divorce when his wife is pregnant or within one year after the birth of a child." However, Mu could apply and could be granted a divorce, even though she happened to be pregnant. That seemed an enlightened and considerate way of looking at divorce. In general, the Marriage Law was as straightforward as a driver's manual.

  The snow did not let up. The sleet accumulated in Yantai. It was a grim place, with the wind blowing from Siberia.

  One snowy day a large group of pilgrims appeared in the hotel, wearing the smile that one instantly associates with people in possession of the Christian message. These were Americans, from Texas. They had come in search of a missionary who had been in this part of Shandong a hundred years ago. Her name was Lottie Moon. The group had discovered the ruins of Miss Moon's house about forty miles away at the coastal hamlet of Penglai. I was told that they regarded this woman as a saint and that they had volunteered to reconstruct the house and the church using their own money, and the Chinese government was on the point of agreeing to this. In Mao's China that would have been unthinkable.

  Only six years before, I had copied down an inscription under the photograph of a Catholic church in Nanjing. Its tone was very fierce. It read in part, American imperialism took preaching as its cover. All over China they erected churches like this and carried out destructive activities.... The American missionaries joined up with the Qing Dynasty troops and attacked the Small Sword Society troops, and the church acted as a stronghold.

  I asked Mr. Hu what he thought of this difference in official attitudes.

  "If people know about Lottie Moon and other missionaries in Yantai, they will visit here and enjoy themselves."

  By "people" he meant foreign tourists. His attitude was characteristic of the Chinese in general: if it brought in tourists and was not immoral, it was to be encouraged, whether it was missionaries, rebuilt churches, or city tours of the bourgeois suburbs of old Shandong. But there were obvious dangers in tourism. After the complete eradication of venereal disease (the fifty-year personal struggle of an idealistic doctor from Buffalo, New York, George Hatem, who became Chinese, transmogrifying himself into Ma Haiteh), the VD clinics were reopened in 1987, to cope with new outbreaks of the disease. But antibiotics were not to be the only remedy. The Chinese also recently decreed that the punishment for engaging in prostitution would be a bullet in the neck.

  18: The Slow Train to Qingdao: Number 508

  On these one-day railway trips, the Chinese could practically overwhelm a train with their garbage. Nearly everyone on board was befouling the available space. While I sat and read I noticed that the people opposite, after only a few hours, had amassed on their table (I scribbled the details on my flyleaf): duck bones, fish bones, peanut shells, cookie wrappers, sunflower-seed husks, three teacups, two tumblers, a thermos, a wine bottle, two food tins, spittings, leavings, orange rinds, prawn shells and two used diapers.

  The Chinese could be very tidy, but there was also something sluttishly comfortable about an accumulation of garbage, as though it were a symbol of prosperity. The coaches were smoky, and so crowded it was an effort to make my way down the aisle. The train was full of shrieks and stinks. The loudspeaker played a Chinese version of "Flower of Malaya" ("Rose, Rose, I love you, with an aching heart..."). Some big card games were in progress. Passengers read The Yantai Workers' Daily, and romantic novels (People's Liberation Army soldier and his gal back home in Wuhan), and a Chinese magazine I had not seen before, called World Screen, with a portrait of Roger Moore (as James Bond) on the cover.

  It was not an old railway line. At a time when steam trains were being phased out in the United States, and rail lines closed, this line from Yantai to Qingdao was being built. It was 1950, and a few years later a brand-new ol
d-fashioned steam engine went gasping down the track with red flags flying from its boiler. It should have happened sooner, but it was not in the interests of the Germans or the Japanese (who had occupied this province) to build the line. In any case, the vision and altruism that are espoused by colonialists are not readily apparent in China. Unlike in Africa and India, the imperialists in China set themselves up in competition against the Chinese, which was another reason Mao execrated them. They were not all racketeers, but they all thrived on China's disunity.

  This train still had a fifties feel—a little grim. Most of the passengers had boarded at Yantai and begun eating. They ate noodles, buckets of rice, seaweed, and nuts, fruit and everything else. They did not stop until we arrived at Qingdao in the evening. Unusually for a Chinese train, there were plenty of drinkers—and drunks, spitting, wheezing, puffy faced.

  Only a half a dozen of the passengers used the dining car for lunch. They were picking at Chinese spinach and another sinister-looking vegetable.

  "What will you have?" the supervisor asked.

  "How about some of that?" I said, pointing to the other people's dishes.

  "You don't want that stuff," he said. "We have many dishes. Different prices. Do you want the two, the four, the five, the eight or the ten?"

  "Which is the best one?"

  "The ten," he said. "You won't be sorry."

  He meant the 10 yuan lunch. It was a worker's week's pay. The dishes kept coming, the food was good, and there was so much food I made a tally of it. It was the largest meal I had on any Chinese train and might have been the best one. How odd that it should be served on this slow train in this out-of-the-way place. There was first a cold dish, sliced meat and white seaweed; and then shredded pork with carrot and bamboo slivers; shrimp and Chinese cabbage; diced chicken and celery; reconstituted dried fish; deep-fried eggs; Chinese spinach; egg-drop tomato soup, and a big basin of rice. I ate some of it and I marveled at the remainder of the $2.70 meal.

  My ticket had cost me less than $2. This was all a bargain. But there were other prices to pay. It took seven hours to go the 150 miles, so our average speed was about 20 miles an hour. We stopped every five minutes, literally that. Steam trains have a sort of jerky clanking way of stopping and starting—an indecisive motion—and all day, to this slow conga, clouds of smoke from the stack tumbled past the windows, as we crossed the flatness of Shandong in a reddening winter sun. We traveled through all the daylight hours, slowly, like a branch-line train moving through a backward shire in rural England, the train full of bumpkins, everyone talking and eating and enjoying themselves, and we stopped everywhere.

  We had crossed the peninsula—it had the shape of a turtle's head, and Qingdao lay on the south coast, the bottom of the beak. They said it was the coldest night of the year. There were frost crystals glittering in the air under the glaring lights. And in the swirling steam of the engine, the German station and its tower and its stopped clock produced that nightmare feeling I got in China when I was among European buildings in dramatic weather. After all, a nightmare is the world turned upside down, and thousands of Chinese mobbing a German railway station on a frosty night is a good example of that. It was a tangle of the familiar and the absurd to produce fear. And all around it was very dark.

  At the edge of the darkness, braving the cold, young men and women with flags and loud-hailers and megaphones called out, "Come to our hotel—!" "You are welcome at our guest house!" "We have good food and hot water!" They tried to outshout each other, in the spirit of competition and free enterprise, as they touted for business among the arriving passengers.

  The irrational dreamlike quality of Qingdao did not vanish when the sun came out the next day. It looked almost as odd in the daylight as at night, though less menacing. I don't feel at home in non-European cities that have been heavily influenced by European buildings. When homesick imperialists put up granite mansions and Baptist churches and Catholic cathedrals with spires, and semidetached houses with prim front gardens, I find it all a bit scary. It is out of place, it disorients me; anyway, what are all these Chinese doing here? I think. Or what is that stately Lutheran church doing near those noodle stalls? I am fascinated by such architectural capriccios (the gothic spires among the pagodas, the Chinese faces at the windows of the English-style bungalows), but it is no more relaxing than the bad dream it strongly seems to mimic.

  It is intensely reassuring to imperialists to build versions of their fat and monumental buildings, whether they fit the place or not. The Germans used a feeble pretext in the 1890s to threaten the Chinese and finally to force them to hand over various valuable concessions. In 1898 the Germans stuck a German town onto a small fishing village. One of the strangest buildings in China is in Qingdao, the former residence of the German governor, modeled on the Kaiser's palace. I went inside and looked around until the caretakers chased me away. It is palatial; it has ramparts, granite and stucco balconies, Tudor-style beams, glazed tiles, circular staircases, porticoes and galleries (on the inside, under the high vaulted ceiling) and a conservatory. It was built in 1906. It is in perfect condition. It looks as though it will last forever. Chairman Mao stayed in it when he visited Qingdao in 1958. For that reason, the Red Guards, who had a field day smashing up the evidence of diabolical foreign influences in Qingdao, left the governor's palace alone. It remains unoccupied. It serves no useful purpose.

  The Chinese in 1898 were browbeaten into granting the Germans a ninety-nine-year lease, but less than twenty years later—just after the outbreak of the First World War, in 1914—the Japanese occupied Qingdao. It is amazing that the Germans managed to accomplish so much in such a short time. Virtually all their buildings still stand, the railway still runs to Jinan, and the brewery produces the best beer in China—and sticks to the old spelling, Tsingtao beer.

  The Chinese guidebook to Qingdao begins, "Qingdao is a relatively young city with only eighty years of history. It used to be a small village. Since 1949, rapid developments have been made." So much for the imperial designs, the foreign occupation and two world wars. Even the U.S. Marines and the American Seventh Fleet had a spell in Qingdao. None of these humiliations is forgotten; they are simply not mentioned. The city is actually overrun with Japanese businessmen. I met Germans in my hotel (I asked them what they thought of the German buildings; they said, "Too old, too hard to heat"), and the Seventh Fleet was invited back in 1986, forty years after it had backed the wrong side (it had helped Chiang Kai-shek), and was given a warm welcome.

  The Chinese history of Qingdao was available, but the German history was obscure. I asked Mr. Ling, a university student, what he knew about it—how big was the German settlement, what was the population, how did they put up all these large buildings and suburbs?

  "There are no figures," said Mr. Ling.

  "There must be," I said.

  "Yes. But the authorities do not release these figures. It might seem too humiliating if we knew how few Germans there were occupying the town. It is bad history—that's what we think."

  "Do you really think it is bad history?"

  "No," he said. "I am interested in knowing the truth, but we have no books."

  That was a Chinese phenomenon. There was the distant past, the glorious anecdotal history; and there was the recent past, mostly Mao. In between, a thousand years of Chinese history, everything was obscure. Perhaps it was politically questionable, or humiliating, or contradictory, or, like the years that had been expunged from the Mao Museum in Shaoshan, a hideous embarrassment.

  In its way, Qingdao was as weird in its monuments and structures as the lost city of Gaocheng, in the boondocks of Xinjiang. Instead of a mud monastery or a crumbling mosque in the desert, Qingdao's counterparts were churches. The largest of them was the Catholic cathedral, built in a sort of twilight period in the early 1930s, when the city was under the control of the Nanking government and abounded with missionaries.

  It was a big bare church, made of gray stucco, with two sp
ires. It had been completely renovated—freshly painted, regilded statues and crosses, the Stations of the Cross newly touched up, the ornamented nave picked out in gold—everything bright and pious looking, with baskets of fresh flowers on the altar. There was room for 600 people here and it was said to be full on Sunday, but there were only 3 people praying on the day I went. It was midafternoon on a weekday; the kneeling people whispering their prayers were elderly. Over the high altar was a scroll painted on the wall: Venite Adoremus Domine. The Mass in Qingdao is said in Latin.

  "I remember when they tore the crosses off the steeples of this church, during the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Bai said. He was a young man who had recently graduated from Shandong University. He had been only nine years old in 1967, but he had a very clear memory of the Cultural Revolution, which had been fierce in Qingdao: this city was full of poisonous foreign influences, and such malignant and feudalistic harbingers of the right-deviationist wind (so to speak) had to be smashed by the vanguard of Mao Zedong's shining thought. It was well known that the Red Guards had kicked the shit out of foreign-looking Qingdao.

  But the steeples on the cathedral were very high.

  "How did they get up there?" I could not understand how they had scaled these steeples. And the crosses towered eight feet above them, so that was another problem.

  Mr. Bai said, "The Red Guards held a meeting, and then they passed a motion to destroy the crosses. They marched to the church and climbed up to the roof. They pulled up bamboos and tied them into a scaffold. It took a few days—naturally they worked at night, and they sang the Mao songs. When the crowd gathered they put up ladders and they climbed up and threw a rope around the Christian crosses, and they pulled them down. It was very exciting!"