by Paul Theroux
20: The Night Train to Xiamen: Number 375
It was the familiar exit from Shanghai, the main line through the cabbagey province of Zhejiang and tarted-up Hangzhou, the haunt of tourists and nifty little Japanese; and as soon as the hills appeared the sun slid behind them and night fell. There were three Chinese in my compartment when I pulled the blanket over my head, but by morning only one remained. This was Mr. Ni. He explained that the others had gotten off at Yingtan, when the train turned left onto the spur line through Fujian, the coastal province that faces Taiwan. Mr. Ni was also going to Xiamen, and even referred to it (for my benefit) by its old name, Amoy.
He was beginning work on an offshore dredging operation. He explained that he was a surveyor and that he disliked south China. It was his sorry fate to have been posted here for two years. He was Shanghai born and bred and had all of that city's characteristic bumptiousness—he was blunt, offhand, presumptuous and fluent. He regarded himself as cultured. Southerners were yokels, in his view. They were greedy. That was why so many of them had left China. (It was true the world was full of spirited and hard-working Fujianese.) We were at Zhangzhou, where tangerines grow.
"In Shanghai we are sick for knowledge," Mr. Ni said. "But these Amoy people are only interested in making money. That is their main characteristic. They don't like reading or education. Just business."
A moment later, Mr. Ni asked me if I wanted to change money—my Foreign Exchange Certificates for his renminbi. Or did I want an interpreter in Xiamen? Or he could accompany me on my way. He had taught himself English and wanted to practice it. Also—he repeated—what about changing money?
Mr. Ni was invaluable to me that day in unraveling the news of the political confusion in the People's Daily. Such subtle news did not get into the English-language China Daily. The first interesting item quoted a high politburo member, Li Peng, as saying, "The Party has full confidence in intellectuals."
An intellectual in China is someone with a high-school education, doing a white-collar job. It is not a bespectacled nerd who sits around sipping tea and quoting Mencius. In the way that Chinese society is more easily defined by negatives, an intellectual is not a factory worker or a peasant farmer. He (or she) is a person who can read and write, who does not get his hands dirty.
The main report in the paper was of Zhao Ziyang: a strong implication that he had taken Hu Yaobang's place. He had been elevated by Deng. That was incontestable. He had met a Hungarian delegation—meeting such delegations had been Mr. Hu's old job. But the clearest sign that he had displaced Mr. Hu completely was his unambiguous criticism of Mr. Hu.
He said that Mr. Hu had been "incapable of fighting against Westernization"; that he had sought "to push political reforms too far," and—in an unusual burst of frankness from a Chinese leader—that Mr. Hu "had been warned several times over the years."
It was obvious that Mr. Zhao was in the ascendant and that Mr. Hu was on his way to becoming a nonperson. Mr. Zhao was a natty dresser—he nearly always wore a Western suit and tie. He jogged. But he was careful to distance himself from Westernization, which was almost synonymous with bourgeois liberalization. It had already taken hold, and seemed at the moment to be irreversible. And because its adherents—so-called intellectuals—were nervous, displeased and demoralized, Mr. Zhao had to be especially enigmatic.
Mr. Ni and I puzzled over the paper, and then I asked him what he thought would happen? Would Mr. Zhao ultimately replace Deng Xiaoping?
"I do not know," he said, and raised his hands in surrender: it was the Chinese funk when considering the future. After the shocks and reverses that had surprised the Chinese, only an ignoramus would risk making a fool of himself in speculating on what was to come.
But what about the Chinese liking for gambling? Wasn't that a sort of forecasting and speculation? I felt it was, but gambling in Chinese terms is not rational. It isn't a judicious indication of a possible outcome. It is a fling, something reckless, with a hint of hysteria in it. You might bet on the result of two fighting crickets (it is a popular pastime in China) or on a throw of the dice because triumph depends entirely on luck or good fortune—spiritual qualities. But politics wasn't moral and it certainly wasn't a lottery. It had to do with ambition, power seeking and greed, and it was not only unreadable but regarded as unsuitable as an occasion for a gamble. The Chinese would have a flutter on a cricket but never on a commissar.
Mr. Ni was cautious, but Mrs. Deng, who joined us, was talkative. She was also headed for the coast. She was thirty, she had one child, her husband was studying engineering. She worked in a government office. She wore her hair fashionably curled, and her bright yellow sweater had poppies embroidered on it. She also wore a skirt. "But it's cold!" she cried, smacking her knees. "I should put on my trousers."
I asked her whether she had been surprised when Mr. Hu had been forced to resign.
"Not surprised at all!" she said. She blinked fiercely. She had small teeth. She silenced Mr. Ni. "What a man! Did you hear about the way he invited all those Japanese people to visit China? The Japanese pay for thirty Chinese, but we pay for three thousand of them. It makes no sense!"
"Maybe he was being generous," I said.
She batted me on the arm.
"Ha! Generous! He doesn't know what he's talking! He once read a speech at a general's funeral. 'We are so sad,' he said. But he was smiling! He just talks and talks. We say, 'He's so happy he doesn't know his name.' You understand? Ask him his name and he says, 'Ha! Ha! I forget!'"
"Do you think it is bad that he talks a lot?" I asked, knowing full well that blabbing is seen in China as dangerous and stupid.
"It is just big talk," Mrs. Deng said. "You know the saying about the skinny face?"
"Sorry, I don't."
"If you have a skinny face you beat your cheeks"—she smacked her face with her stiff fingers—"to make your cheeks swell up."
"What's the point?"
"Your cheeks get fat because you beat them, and you try to make people think you're rich."
"I see. A pretense to make yourself look good."
"Hu Yaobang is like that. Can such a man be head of this big country of China? Never."
This made more sense than the People's Daily, which linked Mr. Hu with bourgeois liberalization and student protest. He simply talked too goddamned much.
Another fellow I met on the trip to Xiamen had a familiar request. Would I please give him an English name? His Chinese name was Li Guoqing—or "National Day" Li—because he had been born on an auspicious day in October. I was a little sceptical about the Chinese •who called themselves Ronnie and Julian, but Guoqing insisted, so I said, "How about George?"
He smiled and muttered it.
I asked him how much he was paying for his ticket from Shanghai to Xiamen. He said 40 yuan ($11). Mine had cost me 148 yuan ($41). If we had flown, his plane ticket would have cost 83 yuan ($23) and mine 173 yuan ($48). Foreigners in China always pay more. It is the policy. They also get better treatment, on the whole—though not necessarily in railway trains. I had heard of Chinese being bumped from Soft Class in favor of a foreigner, but I never saw it happen.
"Foreigners have more money," Guoqing said. "Why shouldn't they pay more?"
"If you come to America, do you think you should pay less because you're Chinese?" I asked.
But he wasn't listening. "Please call me George," he said.
***
Xiamen, on the hilly coast, had the reputation for being the richest city in China, for having the best houses and the happiest people. It also had the largest proportion of families with relatives living abroad. Stop anyone on the street in Xiamen, it was said, and they would tell you that they had an uncle in Manila, or a cousin in Singapore, or that a whole branch of the family was settled in California. They stayed in touch. In general when people left China for fresh pastures they left the poverty-stricken province of Fujian (Fukien)—this was in the nineteenth century—and most of them set sail from Xi
amen (Amoy). They were seafaring people from one of the greatest Chinese ports: millions of them slipped away.
But they did not forget their homeland. They came back to marry. They sent money home. In many cases they returned and built large houses and retired here. Without question, Xiamen has the noblest houses, the grandest villas, the most elaborate walls and gardens, and the most magnanimous charitable and philanthropic enterprises. These are all the result of successful emigrants becoming rich overseas and for sentimental reasons remitting their funds.
The ships that were involved in the Boston Tea Party had come from here. The English word tea is Xiamen-dialect Chinese. Xiamen's style of building is found in Canton and also in old Singapore and rural Malaysia—the tall shop-house with an overhang, and the sidewalk running underneath that second story. It is associated with Straits Chinese—the shopkeepers of Southeast Asia. It is not found elsewhere in China. It is practical and pretty, and I cannot think of it without seeing men in flapping pajamas, and women measuring out rice from sacks, and young Chinese girls with soulful faces gazing out of shuttered upstairs windows.
The villas—big stout houses with high ceilings and wraparound verandahs—also resembled the old houses of Singapore and Malaysia that were torn down to make room for the banks and hotels. Until recently they were kept in Xiamen because no one had the money to tear them down or to replace them; but then they were valued for aesthetic and historical reasons, and a preservation order was placed upon them. The new buildings of Xiamen are in a suburb beyond the Causeway, where they belong.
I found it almost impossible to find fault with Xiamen. Because it is in the south, the fruit is wonderful and cheap—all kinds: haws, oranges, tangerines, apples, pears, persimmons, grapes. And because it is on the sea fish and seafood are plentiful and various—all sorts of eels, and big garoupas, and prawns. The best and most expensive were the lobster-sized crayfish. They were kept in tanks in the restaurants—the southern Chinese habit (because of a lack of refrigeration) of keeping food alive until the last moment. In other tanks were frogs, eels, fish, and ducks—and even ducklings. You were invited to point out your proposed entrée, and they cut its throat.
On a back street in Xiamen, at a grubby little restaurant, I saw two cages, one containing a baby owl and the other holding a scowling hawk. There was hardly enough meat on either of them to fill a dumpling. They perched unsteadily, confined by the small cages, and they trembled with anxiety. When I stopped to look at them, a crowd gathered. I asked the owner how much he wanted to make them into a meal. He said 20 yuan for the owl ($5.50) and 15 yuan for the hawk ($4).
"Why not let them go?"
"Because I paid for them," he said.
"But they're unhappy."
His laugh meant You are a fool.
He said, "They taste very nice."
"They are small," I said. "One mouthful and that's it."
"The meat of this bird is very good for your eyes," he said.
"That is not true," I said. "Only savages believe that."
He was offended and angry. His mouth went strange, and he said nothing.
"It's a superstition," I said. "It is old thinking. Like eating rhino horn for your dick. Listen"—he was now turning away—"This bird eats mice. It is helpful. You should let it go."
The man began to hiss at me, a sort of preliminary to blowing up in my face. I had no money. I went back to the hotel and got 35 yuan out of my room, but by the time I walked back to the restaurant, the cages were empty. I had imagined holding a little revival of the festival called The Liberation of Living Creatures, in which birds were released from cages. But I was too late today. The owl and the hawk had been eaten.
As a consolation I went to Xiamen market, bought two mourning doves for about a dollar a bird, and let them go. They flapped over the harbor, past the hooting boats, to the nearby island of Gulangyu. Believing it might be a sign, I followed them the next day.
***
Gulangyu was a small island containing a lovely settlement in which no wheeled vehicles were allowed—no cars, no bicycles, no pushcarts. It was a five-minute free ferry ride across the harbor, and from its highest point—Sunlight Rock—it looked like Florence, or a Spanish city, a tumbled expanse of tiled roofs, all terra-cotta and green trees and church steeples. There were three Christian churches at the center of the settlement: this island had once held only foreigners—Dutch, Portuguese, English, Germans. It was Japanese until the end of the war, and then there were a number of tough battles against the Nationalists, who ultimately took Quemoy, which is quite visible to the northeast.
"Enemy territory?" I asked.
"We are all Chinese brothers," Mr. Wei said.
"Then why the trenches and foxholes?"
The east coast of Xiamen was all military earthworks and gun emplacements.
"Because sometimes they shoot at us," Mr. Wei said.
But I liked old coastal China. It had been influenced by its traders and occupiers, and because of its seagoing communities it was outward looking. The dutiful and pious tycoons who had made millions overseas had obeyed the Confucian precepts and become philanthropic. The houses and schools they built blended with the Romanesque church with its sign, Ecclesia Catholica, and the old German consulate which might have been designed by Joseph Conrad. The philanthropoids had built villas in a section of Gulangyu called Sea View Gardens, and there they lived among foreign compradors and tea merchants and petty consular officials, each on his own colonnaded verandah, under the palm trees.
The building regulations on Gulangyu are unique in China for their fastidiousness. No building may be higher than three stories, all had to be made of red brick and carved stone, and all designs had to be approved by the Architectural Commission. They were good old-world designs, and even the newest buildings—the vegetable market and the museum—were being put up with great care. Restoration work was being carried out on the villas in order to turn them into hotels and guest houses without losing their character. It was odd for the Chinese, so practical and penny pinching, to spend extra time and money to make a thing look right. The magnificent city wall around Peking, with its forty-four bastions and sixteen gates had simply been bulldozed by Mao's goonish philistines, chanting, "Down with the Four Olds! Up with the Four News! New Thinking! New Customs! New Habits! New—!" In this same spirit, two miles of the Great Wall were pulled down between 1970 and 1974 by an army unit at Gubeikou; the ancient stone blocks of the wall were used to build army barracks.
But this vandalism of China's recent past did not extend to Gulangyu except in the form of big-character graffiti (Long Live the Thoughts of Mao Zedong! was still legible in two-foot characters on the walls of a villa) and in selective desecration. The Catholic church was turned into a factory, hate meetings were held in the Protestant ("Three-in-One") church, and the Buddha statues were smashed in the temples—a quarter of Xiamen is Buddhist.
I asked Mr. Wei the reason for the meticulous restoration of Gulangyu.
"Because the government wants to turn this into a tourist island," he said. He also said that he was relieved that the government had not decided to tear the place down, as they had so much else.
We were walking towards Sunlight Rock and ran into a junkman on a back street. He was a fat boy with a pole across his shoulders, carrying loads of wastepaper. I stopped him, and because his dialect was incomprehensible to me, Mr. Wei helped me quiz him.
The boy said that if the wastepaper was good quality, like old, neatly stacked newspapers, he would pay 50 fen for one kilo—about 6 cents a pound. That seemed to me pretty fair. But for other paper he paid less than a penny a pound.
How was business?
"No good," he said. "This is hard work for very little money."
Off he went, his pole bouncing from the weight of the wastepaper bundles.
"Why are you so interested in the Cultural Revolution?" Mr. Wei asked me.
"Because it influenced me at the time—twenty years
ago when I was in Africa," I said. "I thought of myself as a revolutionary."
Mr. Wei smiled. He was twenty-one. His father was my age.
I said, "What did your father do during the Cultural Revolution?"
"He just stayed in the house."
"For how long?"
"Six or seven years."
We climbed to the top of Sunlight Rock. In 1982, at the age of seventy-eight, the chain-smoking Mr. Deng Xiaoping climbed to this summit. He was followed by a flunky with an oxygen bottle, but he didn't need it.
Looking across the harbor to Xiamen city I could see how the areas of light industry and banking had expanded westward. This was said to be one of the busiest boomtowns in China. Once upon a time they made paper umbrellas and firecrackers and chopsticks for export. These days they manufactured bicycles, toys, Camel cigarettes, and microchips. And the Kodak Company was installing a filmmaking plant at great expense.
The harbor was full of freighters and fishing boats. Beyond it, in the lanes and streets, there were stalls—people selling fried noodles, fruit, sweets, vegetables, fish soup. One of the happiest pastimes of people in south China is eating out—at greasy little restaurants or at stalls—by lantern light. I could not forgive them for stuffing rare birds into their mouths, but very few had the money for such delicacies. They were great noodle eaters, and because of the pleasant climate, they liked milling around the town and eating when the mood took them, a habit they had exported to Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia.
Xiamen was the only place in China were I was repeatedly accosted by pretty girls. They sneaked up behind me and snatched my arm. "Shansh marnie?" they said, and pinched me delightfully and held on. Was that all they wanted?