Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  After that, they did the same thing to the other three churches, a sort of Venetian-looking one and a vast, solid Lutheran one with a witch's hat for a steeple. They stacked the crosses at the Red Guard headquarters, but pious people stole them and took them away, burying them in the hills east of the city. These crosses were only disinterred a few years ago, when the reforms came into force. But the change is dramatic. For example, I bought a locally made crucifix—they were mass-producing them now in Qingdao—for seventy-five cents.

  Mr. Bai said he had vivid memories of the Cultural Revolution because he had not had to go to school. He chased after the Red Guards, watching them destroy houses and persecute people; he had found it all thrilling, and he had always been part of the crowd when some spectacular piece of vandalism was unleashed.

  He had even watched persecutions nearer home.

  "There was a man in our compound whom we called 'The Capitalist.' He lived on the far side of the courtyard. We had a label or a name for everyone there. One we called 'The Carpenter,' and another 'The Scholar.' We paid rent to The Capitalist'—he owned the houses."

  I said, "If you were only nine years old, how did you know what was going on?"

  "There was nothing else for me to do except watch. And it was like a fever. All day, for years, I watched and listened." He smiled, remembering. "One day in 1967, the Red Guards held a meeting—"

  I saw Mr. Bai, a little raggedy-assed urchin, peering through the window at the screaming youths with their red armbands.

  "They decided to criticize The Capitalist. There were about eight or nine of us following them—we were just little kids. We made a paper dunce cap for The Capitalist. His name was Zhang. We went into his house—pushed the door open without knocking. He was in bed. He was very sick—he had stomach cancer. We shouted at him and denounced him. We made him confess to his crimes. We forced him to lower his head so that we could put on the dunce cap—lowering the head was a sort of submission to the will of the people, you see."

  "Did you parade him through the streets?"

  "He had cancer. He could not walk. We mocked him in his bed. Then the neighbors came in. They also accused him—but not of being a capitalist. I remember one woman shouted, 'You borrowed cooking pots and materials and never gave them back!' She was very angry about something he had done many years ago. Others said, 'You tried to squeeze people' and 'You took money.'"

  "What did the man say?"

  "Nothing. He was afraid. And we found a great thing. On one of his old chairs there was a tiny emblem of the Guomindang. That proved he was a capitalist and a spy. Everyone was glad about that. We screamed at him, 'Enemy! Enemy!' He died soon after."

  This had almost taken my breath away. I said, "That's a really terrible story."

  "Sure," Mr. Bai said, but without much force. "It is terrible."

  But it was by the book. Mao said, "To right a wrong it is necessary to exceed proper limits, and the wrong cannot be righted without the proper limits being exceeded."

  That was turning a compassionate Chinese proverb on its head, one about the evil of going beyond proper limits to right a wrong. But Mao said that it was necessary to parade landlords down the street in dunce caps, and to sleep in their beds, and take their grain, and humiliate them, "to establish the absolute authority of the peasants."

  This little treatise "On Going Too Far" was written in 1927. It was part of the script for the Cultural Revolution. The Old Man was greatly in favor of going too far ("going too far" has "a revolutionary significance"). "To put it bluntly," he went on, "it was necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror..."

  But this German imperial outpost on the Chinese shore, which had been besieged at various times, and occupied by successive waves of Japanese, Americans and Nationalist Chinese, as well as the fiercest Red Guards (maddened by the city's look of European feudalism and all these Christian nests of superstition), had in the end turned out to be that quaintest of settlements, the seaside retirement town. The houses would not have disgraced the streets of Bexhill-on-Sea, on England's geriatric coast. Qingdao even had a breezy promenade, and slowly strolling oldies. It had a pier. It had ice-cream sellers. But it wasn't raffish and blowsy, a place for day-trippers. It was like its English counterpart—just as bungaloid.

  High Party officials—secretaries, directors and deputies longed to get a room or an apartment in Qingdao and spend the rest of their days in the sea air with its snap and tang. It was perhaps a bourgeois dream, but who could blame them? It was more a town than a city. It was not heavily industrialized. The weather was lovely most of the year—pleasant in the summer, bracing in the winter. There was only the occasional typhoon, but it was obvious that Qingdao was able to withstand such storms. It was not a congested place. It was almost unique among Chinese towns for having a unity of architectural style—it just so happened that it was German and not Chinese unity, but so what? That was the luck of its youth and the fact that it had been planned and built in such a short time. It wasn't the centuries-old accretion of monuments, pagodas, ruins, factories, apartment blocks, political boondoggling and bad ideas that made up the average Chinese city. It was not only a pretty place—the familiar and absurd its strongest features—but it was manifestly prosperous. Yantai was not a patch on it. It looked well-to-do. Its food was excellent—fresh seafood, Shandong vegetables. Its beaches were clean. There were plovers strutting on them. And those old folks you took to be members of the cleanup brigade, grubbing around the rocks and poking in the sand, stuffing sea urchins and black kelp into their bags, were actually market traders who were selling this stuff to eat; but the result of their gathering left the beaches of Qingdao bright and tidy. No wonder the Chinese wanted to retire here.

  I walked around, wishing I could stay longer. Generally speaking, it was not an ambition I had very often in China. I would visit a place and get hold of it, and after three or four days I would want to let go and move on. The Chinese themselves were always telling me that I should go here or there—see this garden or that pavilion. In Qingdao they said, "You should go to Mount Tai"—the holy mountain on the east of the peninsula. But I was happy in beautiful, breezy Qingdao, and it was a bonus that after dark it looked slightly nightmarish.

  It had been perfectly placed on the shore, taking full advantage of the cliffs. With the sea in front, and the apple orchards behind it, and the heavy industry well hidden, it seemed well planned. It also had a number of colleges and universities; it had several technical schools and an oceanographic institute. So, in addition to the vacationers and retired people, it also had a great number of students.

  Qingdao was one of the pleasantest Chinese cities for walking in—I guessed that that had been part of the scheme to make it habitable. I met students on my walks. I asked them everything and I justified my interrogations by the observation about Confucius in the Analects: "When The Master entered the Grand Temple he asked questions about everything."*

  There had been no demonstrations here. One girl said, "A few years ago I would have demonstrated, but now I have too much to lose. The government would destroy me."

  She was twenty-one and was about to become a student teacher. She shrugged when she told me that, as though it was not quite what she had wanted.

  "Is there anything wrong with being a teacher?" I asked.

  "No. It's good work. But, you know, factory workers earn more than teachers because they get bigger bonuses."

  Another girl said, "I feel old"—she was twenty-two. And she explained, "It is as if my life is all decided and mapped out. Nothing unexpected will happen. I will graduate. I will get an M.A. The government will say that I must become a teacher. I will spend my life that way."

  "What would you do if you had your choice?"

  "I would travel—not necessarily to foreign countries," she said. "I would wander, just wander, in China. Have you noticed that no one wanders here? No one is open-minded and aimless. Everyone has a purpose. But I would go here and ther
e, talking to people, and I would choose out-of-the-way places, like Gansu and Xinjiang."

  The male students I talked to were much less adventurous than the women; much more conventional. The women seemed a little giggly, but that was only shyness. They could be very direct.

  "When did you first feel old?" one asked me.

  I answered truthfully. "When I was six or seven, in the first grade. And then when I graduated from high school. And when I turned thirty. Since then I have felt fairly young—that is, until you asked me that question."

  Most of them had been born in the first years of the Cultural Revolution, so they had no memory of it. They regarded it the way I had regarded the Great Depression in America, or the Second World War. They seemed episodes from the past—not very remote, but what mattered was that they were over. The depression had had an end, and so had the war. People with college degrees sold apples on the street, went one of my father's depression stories. The neighborhood air-raid warden yelled "Put that light out!" That for me, was the war. The young Chinese had the same sort of exemplary stories of the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Mr. Bai, they had not even tagged along after the Red Guards. Theirs were always stories of disappearances, of neighbors and relatives sent into the countryside.

  Their sharpest memories were of Mao's death, the Gang of Four, and Deng and his reforms, but even so they were more impatient than hopeful.

  "If you live through these changes they seem very slow," one said. "It is only because you are a foreigner, on the outside, that the changes seem dramatic. For us they are very ponderous."

  When I considered that it was still illegal for a foreigner to talk at random with any Chinese citizen—the old rule was seldom enforced, but it was a well-known rule nonetheless—I was grateful for this frankness. The healthiest sign in China was this straight talk.

  Because the students were not of the Maoist years they were ambivalent about the Old Man. Indeed, I sometimes found talking to the young that I was more enthusiastic about Mao than they were. I admired his military brilliance, his subtle mind, his wit and charisma, his ingenuity and toughness. Who could not admire the Long March, or his tenacity against the Japanese, his voluminous writing, his ability to unify this enormous country? Of course, Confucianism also kept these people unified and family minded, but Mao, who loved contradiction (and even wrote a long essay on the subject), remained for me the most fascinating and ambiguous figure in Chinese history.

  For these students he was an uninteresting riddle. He had cast a long shadow, yes; but they were still living in that shadow, and they didn't like it very much.

  "He was a strange man," a student in Qingdao told me.

  I asked who he resembled, because Chinese life is full of models, like the heroic soldier, Lei Feng, the inspired worker, Iron Man Wang (Wang Jinxi), and the Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains.

  "He was unlike any other Chinese man," the student said. "I think he read too many books and began to make a place for himself in Chinese history. He was an arrogant and self-important man. He behaved like an emperor."

  My reaction was Yes, but—yet why bother to sell them on Mao? They had to live the rest of their lives here. I could leave any time I liked. In the end it was for them to deal with his memory, not me.

  "When Mao died, I knew I had to cry," another student said. "We had been required to love him. I was just a little kid at school. I didn't feel anything, but the teachers were watching. I had to force myself to cry."

  Ice was packed into the bays and inlets. It was January, after all. But it was sunny, and during the day it was almost warm. The rocks on the promontories of Qingdao were fluted with ice, too, and some were ringed by glassy skirts of ice crust. I wondered whether it was because it was out of season that the place was so pleasant. There was a swimmer on Beach Number Two one day. He strolled down and plunged in, as people were said to do in freezing Harbin in the winter, breaking ice in the river to go for a dip. But it wasn't swimming. It was a rather pointless act of willpower, like holding a lighted match under your finger (a loony pastime advocated by the convicted Watergate flunky Gordon Liddy, by the way). Would people do such things if no one were watching, or if they couldn't tell someone about it later on?

  I had arrived in Qingdao on a freezing night, feeling I had stepped into a nightmare made up of old German movies and winter storms, steam locomotives and fog, and the black station with the hands missing from its clock face. I left on a dazzling springlike day, and now in the sunshine I could see that the station was a relic, with the red star of China planted on its conical roof. The loud whistle blew, and a moment later the train was tracking past the islands and lighthouse and breezy streets, into the open country of Shandong that was so flat it had the look of a floodplain.

  19: The Shandong Express to Shanghai: Train Number 234

  This featureless brown farmland with its ditches and its telephone poles and its tile-roofed houses looked as dreary as Belgium. From the farmers' point of view it was the worst time of year. The muddy lanes, the ruts, the puddles, the cold, the January drizzle. There was nothing to eat yet. The people labored along on bikes, they thrashed their oxen, they pushed carts that rolled uncertainly on big, wobbly wheels.

  There was a Belgian man in my compartment. After we got acquainted I nerved myself and asked him the question I had been rehearsing.

  "Does this part of Shandong look like Belgium?"

  We looked at the ditches, the plowed fields, the puddles, the poles.

  "Yes. Is similar."

  So I had not been imagining it. These winter journeys in China were tiring, and I sometimes suspected that my weariness blurred my perceptions—or else made me giddy and fanciful. And these long stretches of brown, plowed China could be depressing. The whole of this overpopulated region was like that. And, like Belgium, it tired my eyes.

  Alain was from Antwerp. He was traveling with his Chinese counterpart, Li. They were going to Hefei, but they did not know that Hefei was the new center of student protest. They had no interest in politics. They were telephone engineers in a Belgian-Chinese joint venture to upgrade the telephone system. Alain said, "I think we arrive here just in time."

  It was well known that Chinese phones were hopeless. It was impossible to direct dial any Chinese city, and it was very hard to make even a local call. And when you got through you often heard five other voices—or more—holding simultaneous conversations. A Chinese phone was like Chinese life: it was full of other people, close together, doing exactly what you were trying to do. Often the phone went dead. You could wait eight hours to be connected. Occasionally a whole city would be cut off. For several days it might be impossible to make a call outside Shanghai. In Taiyuan, the provincial capital of Shanxi, any calls, other than local ones, were out of the question: the city was isolated, though it could be reached by telegraph, using Morse code. The old Chinese phones were of heavy black Bakelite that shattered or chipped if they were struck; the new phones were lightweight plastic, like toys, and were usually a color that did not inspire confidence, such as flamingo pink or powder blue. It was possible to imagine how the Chinese felt about them from the way they shrieked into them. It was always shrieks. No one ever chatted on a telephone in China.

  I told Alain these things. He knew them, he said. He was aware that his task was monumental. Fortunately he had a sense of humor, or at least a sense of silliness, that made life bearable. His English was shaky. He said things like, "Will you traduce her for me?" and "I feel happy as a roy" and "The Chinese has good formation but bad motivation."

  He was the complete Foreign Expert. He did not speak Chinese. He had no interest in politics. Chinese art to him was the enameled ashtrays and bamboo back scratchers they sold at the Friendship Stores. Apart from Qingdao and Hefei and Shanghai, he had not traveled anywhere. He said he knew Belgium intimately, though. He was fluent in both Flemish and French. He tried to teach me to pronounce the almost unpronounceable Flemish word schild (shield), but I cou
ld do no more than approximate it and sounded as though I were swallowing a quahog.

  We played capitals to kill the time. Mr. Li knew little more than Alain, who failed on Hungary, India and Peru (Mr. Li knew Hungary). Alain did not read. He amused himself with his video camera, for which he had paid $1200 in a duty-free shop. He sent tapes home—tapes of Shandong looking horribly like Belgium.

  Mr. Li was somewhat similar.

  "Think of a country," I said.

  He was baffled. "I cannot think of one."

  "Any country," I said. "Like Brazil, or Zambia, or Sweden."

  He made a face: nothing. He did not know any geography at all. He was not just geocentric; he was ignorant.

  Their field was telephones—wiring, systems, satellites, exchanges, linkups, computers. They had this very narrow but very deep area of expertise, and it was all they cared about. They could talk animatedly about computer telephone systems, but about nothing else. Mention the rain in Guangdong or the snow in Harbin and they looked blank. Don't mention books.

  They were the new people in the world, the up-and-comers, the only employable folks: they had technical skills, they were problem solvers, and they were willing to travel. In every other respect they were stupid, but their stupidity did not matter. I found them very friendly because they were enthusiastic about their work.

  "My boss is not happy with me today," Alain said. "But the fault is the workers. Chinese workers like to sleep."

  Mr. Li agreed with this.

  We looked at Alain's snapshots—a great stack of cozy Belgian interiors. Fat people in bright clothes. People eating or sitting in small parlors.