Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  It struck me that many of the American passengers were sedentary types. One man said to me, "Back home, my wife and I lead a very sedimentary life." I knew what he meant. And this was a kind of sedentary travel. Nor did these armchair travelers read books. All their talk was about places they had been. Many of their sentences began, "When we were in Kenya..."Or it might be Tierradel Fuegoor Inner Mongolia. For facts they seldom referred to anything but their travel. They had seen crime in Korea, or an election in Costa Rica, or poverty in Turkey. To me they said, "You've got a big race problem." It wasn't personal; they meant England—I lived there.

  Most of them had discovered that if you had enough money and time, you did not have to read. You could discover things for yourself—or, rather, be told about them by a national guide. In the corporate lives they led, they had become used to people telling them things, filling them in on a situation. In China we had "briefings." They loved briefings. You sat there and someone with a briefcase gave you the lowdown—facts, figures, a little history—and you interrogated him for ten minutes. Then it was over. It was so much easier than reading, so much more reassuring. But, of course, as travelers we were regarded as big and busy. In a sense, the commune workers and the people in factories and the sailors on the Yangtze ships were working for us.

  "I've known a lot of women like her," a man told me. "A hell of a lot of women. I've met them on trips like this. They go to Mongolia. They go to Pago Pago. Peru. Sri Lanka. And they never do anything. We had one with us on the Galápagos trip. She never got off the ship! Can you imagine going to the Galápagos and not getting off the ship? It was a twenty-eight-day trip!"

  "Why do you suppose she came here?" I asked.

  "To drink. Haven't you seen her? She's having a grand time. She's got a whole box full of whiskey sours. She stays in the hotel and drinks while we're at the communes. The only thing is, she's got to drink them warm. She doesn't trust the ice. It's got germs!"

  Later, he said, "I'll make a prediction. I'll bet you she never gets off the boat on the Yangtze. She'll just sit there, drinking her whiskey sours."

  He was right. But sometimes I was grateful for this old woman's company—at night, in the lounge of the Dong Fang Hong Number 39, after everyone had gone to their cabins. By half past nine nearly everyone was in bed except this woman and me, drinking and playing gin rummy.

  One night she looked across the table and said, "I was rotten spoiled," and she smiled. "My daughter was rotten spoiled. And I'm going to make goddam sure that my granddaughter is rotten spoiled."

  Sixty-five miles below Chongqing, at Fuling, I was joined at the rail by one of the passengers, a stockbroker. We talked about the price of gold and the delinquent bullion market as, on the shore, small tent camps of Chinese sifted gravel and lugged it in buckets to waiting sampans. We passed gardens and talked about land deals and Washington real estate.

  "Timber," he said. "This is a very good time to buy timber. Something like Weyerhaeuser. The slump in building has meant the stock's depressed. But you can't go wrong with timber. What you want is a well-managed company, with a good product and good record."

  There was a commune on the next hill: vegetables, a factory, chimney, huts, a brickworks. We watched it pass. He told me the American stock market was vastly undervalued. Then the dinner gong rang.

  We were soon at Feng Tu. Abbé David: "Very pretty because of its pagodas, towers and the green hills around it." Captain Williamson: "One hill is said to be haunted." Nothing had been torn down, but much had been added: Feng Tu was a sullen agglomeration of scorched factories and workers' flats under a weeping corona of smog.

  "It certainly looks haunted to me," I said to the political commissar on our ship. The political commissar is the labor relations man. If there is slackness in the galley or the engine room on a Chinese ship, the political commissar reminds the workers of their duties. Ours was Comrade Sun, who had been working on the river since 1950 ("just after Liberation"), when he was seventeen. He knew the hills and temples of Feng Tu very well.

  No, he said, it was not haunted.

  "There are no ghosts," says a Chinese pamphlet entitled Stories About Not Being Afraid of Ghosts. "Belief in ghosts is a backward idea, a superstition and a sign of cowardice. This is a matter of common sense today among the people. But while there are no demons ... there are many things which resemble them—imperialism, reactionaries, difficulties and obstacles in work, for example." Comrade Sun was a member of the Party; he agreed with this pamphlet.

  We talked about river superstitions. It was not easy. He did not want to give me the idea that people today were silly enough to believe any of this stuff. But I pestered him for frights and beliefs.

  "There was an old belief," Comrade Sun said, "that if a fish jumped out of the water onto the deck of a ship, you could not eat it. Fish often jumped onto the junks. They still do, when they're swimming upstream. Such fish were regarded as demons."

  "Did they throw the fish back?" I asked.

  "No. They had to take it ashore. Dig a hole. Then bury it."

  "What do they do now?"

  "Eat them."

  I had read of another belief of the junk sailors, that when the wind died they stood on the deck and whistled, to call the wind, so that they would not have to go ashore and tow the boat. Whistling up a wind may once have been a practice among British sailors—the idea occurs in Macbeth. It struck me as a weird and attractive superstition.

  Comrade Sun said yes, long ago it was believed that if you whistled, the wind would rise. Then he smiled. "I don't think it does any good at all."

  That evening, the Number 39 anchored below the remote town of Shibao Block (Shih Pao Chai, or "Precious Stone Castle"). This is one of the most unusual, and probably the least spoiled, places in China. It is a perfect butte, 150 feet high, which once had a monastery on top and now has a bare temple. The way to the top is up a staircase in an elevenstory red pavilion built against the perpendicular side of the rock. Amazingly, it remains just as it was described by travelers a hundred years ago. The view from the top is a reminder that there are towns in China with no factories, little mechanization, and only the oldest methods of plowing and planting. The town at the base of the rock is a labyrinth of slimy alleys, muddy streets, and cobblestone passageways that look like the "wynds" of Edinburgh. And shops: carpenters, bakers, weavers of funeral wreaths, fruit sellers. Just outside the town a wizened man led a blindfolded buffalo trampling around in circles, to soften the mud for the making of bricks and roof tiles.

  I had brought a snapshot to Shibao Block. It was one of Captain Williamson's and showed the town through the simple eye of a box camera in 1927. The townsfolk were interested. They called the mayor, Comrade Lu, and examined the snapshot. They found it very odd. It was clearly their town, yet one house was not where it should be. This snapshot was the past, and they had never seen an old picture of the town. The mayor asked to be photographed holding the picture.

  "Please take his picture," the interpreter said. "He is a big potato."

  He meant it as the highest praise.

  Nearly the whole town of Shibao Block saw us off: silent faces staring at Howard Buhse's red golfer's cap and Ira Weinstein's foot-long telephoto lens and Lurabelle's mink and Jerry McCarthy's whirring movie camera and old Mr. Chase's tape recorder (he recorded everything, even the sound of the ship's engines) and the pinks and blues of the ladies' $350 synthetic Ultrasuede dresses and my yellow suede shoes. We were bizarre. There was not a sound, not a murmur from the hundreds of people on the shore.

  There were more watchers downstream at Wanxian, a city more nightmarish than Chongqing—mud, rain, black streets, broken windows, smoke, and every house front wearing a film of soot. It was once a city of great beauty, famous for its perfectly poised feng shui. But the bluffs and hills that were praised are now covered with factories, the most shocking a silk-weaving plant, where thirteen hundred women and girls were losing their health in the dim light, making
silk thread from soaked cocoons. It was a sweatshop, all these women sacrificed to the manufacture of hideously patterned bolts of silk in garish colors. They worked quickly, silently, with ruined hands, to the racket of the jolting looms.

  In the days that followed, we passed through the gorges. Many people come to the Yangtze for the gorges alone; they excite themselves on these marvels and skip the rest of the river. The gorges are wonderful, and it is almost impossible to exaggerate their splendor, but the river is long and complicated, and much greater than its gorges, just as the Thames is more than what lies between Westminster and Greenwich.

  The great gorges lie below Bai De ("White King City"), the lesser gorges just above Ichang. Bai De was as poisonous-looking as any of the other cities, but as soon as we left it the mountains rose, enormous limestone cliffs on each side of the river that plunged straight into the water. They were formed at the dawn of the world, when the vast inland sea in western China began to drain east and wear the mountains away. Limestone is a curious substance. It occurs in blocks, has cracks and corners, so the flow zigzagged, controlled by the stone, and made right angles: you see no exit, only the end of what looks like a blind canyon.

  From Captain Williamson's Notes:

  Pa Yang Hsia (Eight Cliffs Gorge): About twelve miles below Wanhsien, the river flows through plateaux of sandstone for about five miles. On the left bank, three Buddhas are carved in the cliff face and when the river falls low enough the little figures are cleaned and repainted.

  Yun Yang Hsien: This city is on the left bank about 145 miles above Ichang. Opposite the city is a picturesque temple which is said to contain a magic bell.

  Bai De (White King City): Below this important city the scene changes dramatically, as the river hence to Ichang—110 miles—winds its way through gorges in the mountainous regions which lie athwart its course.

  Feng Hsiang Hsia (Wind Box Gorge): Below Bai De is one of the most picturesque of the gorges, four miles long, precipitous sides, 700 to 800 feet in places. At the upper entrance to this gorge, off the left bank, is the isolated Goose Tail Rock—the summit about 80 or 90 feet above the river at winter level. Below the Goose Tail, the square holes of "Meng Liang's Ladder" can be seen zigzagging up the right-hand cliffs, on the right bank, while further down the gorge, in a niche high up on the left-bank cliffs, can be seen the ends of the "wind boxes."

  Wu Shan Hsien: Below the Wind Box Gorge is an open ten-mile reach.... [At the] end of the reach is Wu Shan Hsien, the easternmost city in Szechuan—a picturesque, romantic city, with its walls and drum towers situated immediately above the entrance to the longest gorge of the river.

  Wu Shan Hsia (Wu's Mountain Gorge): Wu (witch) was a legendary wizard who dwelt on the mountain at the first reach of this gorge and is credited with blowing a twenty-five-mile gap through the mountains to permit the river to pass.

  Kuei Chou (now called Zi Gui): Picturesque small town on the left bank behind low prongs of projecting reefs.

  Niu Kan Ma Fei Hsia (Ox Liver and Horse Lung Gorge): Situated below Kuei Chou, this gorge is four miles long on a bend in the river. It takes its name from a rocky outcrop on the cliff face on the left bank.

  Teng-ying Hsia (Lampshine Gorge): This gorge is about eight miles long. At the end of the gorge the river turns abruptly left, into the Yellow Cat Gorge.

  HuangMao Hsia (Yellow Cat Gorge): In the bend is a large smooth round rock which, because of its appearance, is called the Sleeping Pig. This last of the gorges is about eight miles long, and at its lower end the river emerges into open country and reaches the port of Ichang.

  After seeing the great gorges of the upper Yangtze, it is easy to believe in gods and demons and giants.

  There are graffiti on the gorges. Some are political ("Mankind Unite to Smash Capitalism"), some are poetic ("Bamboos, flowers, and rain purify the traveler"), while other scribbled characters give the gorge's name or its history, or they indicate a notable feature in the gorge. "Wind Box Gorge" is labeled on the limestone, and the wind boxes have painted captions. "Meng-liang's Ladder," it says, at the appropriate place. These are the zigzag holes that Captain Williamson mentioned in his notes, and they have a curious history. In the second century A.D. the Shu army was encamped on the heights of the gorge. The Hupeh general, Meng-liang, had set out to conquer this army, but he was faced with the vertical gorge wall, more than seven hundred feet high. Meng-liang had his men cut the ladder holes in the stone, all the way to the top of the gorge, and his army ascended this way. They surprised the enemy camp and overwhelmed them, ending the domination of Shu. (In 1887 Archibald Little wrote, "The days are long past since the now effeminate Chinese were capable of such exertions.")

  The wind blows fiercely through the gorges, as it does in New York between skyscrapers. It is a good thing, too, because the junks can sail upstream—there is little room here for trackers. On the day I passed through, the sky was leaden, and the wind was tearing the clouds to pieces, and the river itself was yellow-brown or viscous and black, a kind of eel color. It is not only the height of the gorges but the narrowness of the river—less than a hundred yards in places—that makes it swift, nearly two hundred feet per second in the narrower parts. The scale gives it a look of strangeness and fills it with an atmosphere of harmonious splendor—the majestic cliffs. The thousand-foot gorge walls, the daggerlike pinnacles, the dark foaming river below, and the skinny boatmen on their vessels of splinters and rags.

  Archibald Little wrote, "I rejoiced that it had been my good fortune to visit the Yangtse Gorges before the coming stream of European tourists, with the inevitable introduction of Western innovation in their train, should have destroyed all their old world charm." The cities, certainly, are black and horrific, but the gorges are changeless and completely unlike anything I had ever seen before. In other landscapes I have had a sense of deterioration—the Grand Canyon looks as if it is wearing away and being sluiced, stone by orange stone, down the Colorado River. But the gorges look powerful and permanent, and make every person and artifact look puny. They will be here long after humans have destroyed themselves with bombs.

  It is said that every rock and cliff has a name: "The Seated Woman and the Pouncing Lion," "The Fairy Princess," and, less lyrically, "The Ox Liver and Horse Lung Gorge" (the organs seen in boulder formations high on the cliff face). The Yangtze is a river of precise nomenclature. Only simple, wild places, like the volcanic hills of southwest Uganda, are full of nameless topography; naming is one of the features of Chinese civilization and settlement. I asked the pilot of our ship if it was so that every rock in the Yangtze had a name. He said yes.

  "What is the name of that one?" I asked, quickly pointing out the window.

  "That is Pearl Number Three. Over there is Pearl Number Two. We shall be coming to Pearl Number One in a few minutes." He had not hesitated. And what was interesting was that these rocks looked rather insignificant to me.

  One of the millionaires said, "These gorges come up to expectations. Very few things do. The Taj Mahal did. The Pyramids didn't. But these gorges!"

  We passed Wushan. A funeral procession was making its way through the empty streets, beating drums and gongs, and at the front of the procession three people in white shrouds—white is the Chinese color of mourning—and others carrying round paper wreaths like archery targets. And now we were in the longest gorge, twenty-five miles of cliffs and peaks, and beneath them rain-spattered junks battling the current.

  At one time, this part of the Yangtze was filled with rapids. Captain Williamson's list of landmarks noted all of them. They were still in the river, breaking ships apart, in 1937. The worst have since been dynamited away. The most notorious was the Hsin Lung Tan, a low-level rapid caused by a terrific landslide in 1896. It was wild water, eighty feet wide, but blasting opened it to four hundred feet, and deepened it. Thirty years ago, only the smallest boats could travel on the river during the winter months; now it is navigable by even the largest throughout the year.
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  Our ship drew in below Yellow Cat Gorge, at a place called Dou Shan Tuo ("Steep Hill Village"). We walked to the road and took a bus to the top of the hill. Looking across the river at the pinnacles called "The Three Daggers," and at the sun pouring honey into the deep cliffs, one of the passengers said with gusto, "What a place for a condominium!"

  We transferred from Number 39 to the MS Kun Lun, by any standard a luxurious ship. She is popularly known as "Mao's yacht," because in the 1950s and early 1960s she was used to take visiting dignitaries up and down the Yangtze. Any number of prominent Albanians can boast that they slept in one of the Kun Lun's sumptuously carpeted suites and danced in the lounge or got stewed to the gills in the sixty-foot-wide club room. The idea for the fancy ship was Jiang Qing's—Chairman Mao's third wife and the celebrated political criminal of the Gang of Four. She had the guts of a river ship torn out and redecorated it in the style of Waldorf-Astoria Ming—art deco and lotus blossoms—and did not stint on the curtains or the blue bathtubs. The Gregorys (Fred and Muriel) had a rat in their suite, but never mind—Raymond Barre, the former French premier, once slept there.