Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  Then there were the Four Modernizations: National Defense, Science and Technology, Industry, and Agriculture. At school, children were taught the Five Loves: Love Work, Love People, Love Neighbors, Love Science, and Love Public Property. In the mid-1970s the Eight Antis were to be supported, and it was patriotic and comradely to be Anti-Intellectual, Anti-Western, Anti-Bourgeois, Anti–Capitalist Roader, Anti-Revisionist, Anti-Traditional, Anti-Confucian, and Anti-Imperialist. It was important to remember that the Four News were different from the Four Modernizations, and that the Four Olds were especially pernicious. I never discovered what the Four Olds were.

  Slogans of an abusive nature had been removed from building façades in western China, but many of Chairman Mao's picturesque phrases still remained lettered on the walls of certain buildings, and it was one of the pleasures of China to hear these translated by our guides: "Yes, it says, 'Despicable American Imperialists and Their Running Dogs Must Never Be Allowed...'"

  The name of the oldest restaurant in Suzhou, the Pine and Crane (perhaps three hundred years old), was thought to be too bourgeois during the Cultural Revolution, so it was changed to The East Is Red. Recently it has been changed back to the Pine and Crane. Heavenly Park, an ancient garden, was changed to Workers' Park, but it has also reverted to its original name.

  Many slogans served only to intimidate the passerby or to deface a lovely wall. "Love Public Property" might be scrawled on a fine building. Slogans were merely a form of public graffiti. In the Yangtze gorges some of the graffiti were very old, but I came across more recent stuff. I went to a formal garden in Suzhou called the Garden of the Master of Nets. It had been laid out in the year 1140. In the Pavilion of the Accumulated Void (it is a Taoist concept), the rosewood walls are covered with graffiti, for example: "Li Han Ming Came Here on His Travels 1980."

  We were often invited to admire buildings or objects by the Chinese. Look at this Catholic church! they would say. Look at this jade suit made for a nobleman! Look at these tombs! Their explanations were very brief—a date, an anecdote, a name, and then on to the next sight.

  There were always signs near these sights, and I discovered that the signs usually differed from the explanations we received. I asked the Chinese guides to translate the signs. They did so with great reluctance, but the experience was illuminating.

  Caption under a photograph of a Catholic church in Canton, built in 1861:

  In order to build this church, people were forced to move away. The citizens felt very angry. People were not allowed to build residences around this church. No person was allowed to look through the windows of this church.

  Caption under a photograph of a Catholic church in Nanjing, built in the 1850s:

  American imperialism took preaching as its cover. All over China Americans erected churches like this and carried out destructive activities. In 1853 in Shanghai, the Small Sword Society echoed the Taiping rebels. They occupied Shanghai, country and city. The American missionaries joined up with the Ching Dynasty troops and attacked the Small Sword Society troops, and the church acted as a stronghold. After the Ching troops lost, the American missionaries escorted them to safety at the American embassy.

  Sign next to the jade burial suit (Han Dynasty, 202 B.C.–A.D. 220) in the Nanjing Museum:

  The feudal rulers exploited the workers before birth, oppressed the laboring peoples, and even after death wanted to wear the blood and sweat of the laboring peoples, as represented by the jade suit. They planned to preserve their corpses. This reflects the tremendous waste of the feudal rulers and reveals their limitless exploitative nature.

  Inscription on the Ming tombs outside Beijing:

  The real landlords of these forty square kilometers were the peasants. But after the emperor selected this site, the imperial troops came in like mad animals. They destroyed the orchards and razed the villages. They used military might to expel the laboring peasants, who had been here for centuries, and they occupied the site.

  The numerous peasant families remembered with malice. They took everything they owned and left behind their destroyed lives.

  After the tombs were established, this area was labeled off limits. If one of the masses came here, he was caned one hundred strokes. If he grabbed a handful of earth, he was executed.

  This is the background of the feudalistic ruling classes' oppression of the peasantry.

  These explanations were for the Chinese. Foreigners were given different explanations, or none at all. At the churches, the museums, and the Ming tombs, there was always a Chinese to say, "Isn't it pretty?"

  At Suzhou I took the Shanghai Express, the last part of my sail through China. Policemen at Suzhou station barked orders at the people streaming in. The policemen were nasty-looking. I had seen such men be very rough in China, at times manhandling cyclists and pedestrians. Now they were shouting at the travelers, telling them which platform to go to, how to line up and look sharp.

  Within a few minutes we were out of that ancient city and had lost sight of the canals and the city moat. We traveled across the vegetable fields of Jiangsu. The last hills I had seen were south of Nanjing. Long ago, this plain through which the Shanghai Express was passing was part of the Pacific Ocean: over millions of years, the Yangtze had extended China's land mass and swelled its estuary into several new provinces.

  The soil did not look fertile—Chinese soil seldom did. The gardens were oblongs, stretching to the horizons on both sides of the train. This was Chinese topography, the vegetable plot. Where there were hills, they had vegetables on them. Where there was a riverbank, it was a riverbank with vegetables. A valley, a plain, whatever—it always looked the same, slightly exhausted and orderly with cabbages.

  Someone said, "Look, a pig!"

  Because there were so few animals to be seen, a pig or a goat caused great interest, and a dog—those rare cross-eyed mongrels—was a sensation. The Chinese did not grow flowers except in pots, in parks and for special occasions. The Chinese were practical, unspiritual, materialistic, baffled, and hungry, and these qualities had brought a crudity and a terrible fatigue to their country. In order to stay alive, they had to kill the imagination; the result was a vegetable economy and a monochrome culture.

  Shanghai was commercial, but the advertising often puzzled me: "Dragonfly Cotton Shoes! They Are Stylish and Cheap!" "Rado Watch! Styleproof, Scratchproof, Timeproof!" and "Aero Tennis Racket—Indeformable!"

  I decided to have a look at the Antique Exchange. On the way there I met a Chinese man who had worked for the U.S. Navy during World War II. He had an excellent American accent. He summed up for me the years since Liberation: "The first ten years were bad, the next ten years were okay, but the past ten years have been terrible. I don't know how we got through them. It was the Cultural Revolution. Boy, that was terrible."

  I asked him whether he thought there would be another Cultural Revolution.

  "Sure," he said.

  "Why?"

  "Mao said so. Another one. And one after that. Just one after the other."

  The Antique Exchange is where the Chinese sell family treasures to the government, so that they can be resold in government antique shops and Friendship Stores (which are full of valuable and pretty museum pieces).

  On a high stool in a darkened room sits a skinny Chinese man with protruding yellow teeth and wire-frame glasses. He is sitting crosslegged on the stool, and he wears a skullcap and puffs a cigarette by the light of a dim lamp. He points, raises a long fingernail, and beckons a man forward.

  The man steps into the light carrying a canvas bag. He wears a loose army uniform and slippers. He begins to take crockery out of the bag—rice bowls, plates, dishes.

  "No, no, no—" The smoker waves this stuff away.

  The soldier takes out a stone lion.

  "No—"

  The soldier puts the lion away and takes out more rice bowls.

  "No—"

  The soldier takes out a blue porcelain jar, about ten inches
high, luminous and lovely even in this bad light.

  The skinny man stops smoking. He sets the jar aside.

  The canvas bag is empty. The man shifts on his stool and writes a chit. There is no bargaining; the antique is assigned a price. The soldier puts the rejected stuff back into the bag, takes his slip of paper, and collects some money.

  "They buy things for ten bucks, they sell them for a hundred bucks," a Chinese man had told me in Shanghai. The city was full of English speakers using slang from the Second World War.

  What interested me was that this smoky, seedy interior was a government bureau. Outside it, a sign in Chinese said, "Sell Your Old Plates, Bronzes, and Carvings for Cash." Of course, this is capitalism in the service of the state, buying up heirlooms to sell to tourists, but the smoking man, the shelves of cracked porcelain, the dusty bronzes, the pitiful prices, pawnshop gloom—it all looked as old as China.

  The antique shop prices were very high, but most of the merchandise deserved to be in museums. How long, I wondered, would these treasures be available to tourists?

  Not everyone saw these objects as treasures. A woman from New York, Dorothy Hirshon, who would squint at an item and say, "That's the ugliest thing in China."

  One night after dinner, at about nine o'clock, I went for a walk down a dark street. I had been out only about ten minutes when I was greeted ("Good evening, sir") by three young men, Comrade Ma, Comrade Lu, and Comrade Wee. They wanted to practice their English. I said that I had been reading the supernatural stories of Pu Sung-ling, his Strange Tales of Liaozhai. I asked them whether they believed in ghosts. They found this very funny.

  "I don't believe in ghosts," Comrade Ma said.

  I asked him why not.

  "I never see one."

  I said, "So there are no ghosts in China?"

  "No," Comrade Lu said.

  "What about your ancestors?" I asked.

  Comrade Ma said, "They are under the ground."

  I asked them whether they celebrated the Ching Ming Festival by exploding firecrackers in the graveyards.

  They said they didn't celebrate it at all. "Overseas Chinese do that."

  We passed a railway embankment where, behind a row of trees, young people were kissing. They embraced, standing up, on the shadowy side of the tree trunks. I called attention to the couples.

  Comrade Ma said, "Since the Gang of Four were smashed, there is now kissing. From 1949 until the Gang of Four, there was no kissing. Now there is kissing. Even on television there is kissing."

  "Did the Gang of Four kiss?"

  "Oh, yes. But inside their houses!" Comrade Ma said.

  The others laughed. They regarded Ma as a great wit.

  I asked whether they themselves kissed girls.

  Comrade Ma said, "Comrade Lu has a darling. He kisses. I have two darlings. I kiss them."

  I said, "Indoors or outdoors?"

  "Only married people can kiss indoors, in a room. We kiss over there. In the trees. Sometimes in the park. In the park, at night, you can put your hands around the girl—and other places. Ha-ha! Also other things. But it is very stony on the ground. Too many rocks!"

  "Mister Paul," Comrade Wee said, "what is the proper way to kiss?"

  He had told me earlier that he was a printer. This inspired me. I said that kissing was like printing. You printed your lips on the girl's lips—not too hard. They laughed and said, Yes, that's what they thought it was like.

  I asked them when they planned to get married. They said when they were about thirty-five or so. They were twenty-six and twenty-seven, and each earned 50 yuan (about $30) a month.

  Since the trial of the Gang of Four had recently started, I asked, "Are the Gang of Four guilty?"

  "Oh, yes. Guilty."

  "But not Chairman Mao, eh?" I said. "Chairman Mao was a great man, right?"

  Comrade Ma smiled at me and said, "Maybe."

  Comrade Wee said, "Do you think so?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  "You are very clever!"

  We talked about the Yangtze. The people there, they said, had different clothes and different "hairs." This topic provoked Comrade Lu to tell me that his father lived in Surinam—in South America, of all places. But he hated it. "Too many Negroes." Hong Kong was better, Lu said.

  Comrade Ma told me that he had a bicycle, a TV, and a radio. I said that he had everything, apparently.

  "No. I want to go to Hong Kong."

  They all agreed: they all wanted to go to Hong Kong. But they had never been outside Shanghai. They lived with their parents, and would go on living with them until they married. I asked whether they regarded themselves as revolutionaries. No, they said, they were workers.

  "I don't want to be a revolutionary," Comrade Ma said.

  Had they been in the army?

  "There are too many people in the army," Comrade Lu said. "They like the army. It is better than farming. Harvesting rice is hard work. It is easier to be a soldier."

  They were cheery, candid fellows, and we continued walking the dark streets of Shanghai, talking about everything.

  What about sports? I asked.

  "Table tennis," Comrade Ma said.

  "Badminton," Comrade Lu said.

  "I take"—Comrade Wee glanced nervously at the others—"I take cold showers."

  In Shanghai, as in other cities in China, the air was bad; it stank and was dark brown. People mobbed the streets, because their rooms were so small and crowded. The streets were free. There is little sign of money, no sign of wealth. Small ugly coins and filthy paper rags are money, worthless stuff. The people have clean faces, and they observe a kind of ragged order. One can only compare this to the competing crowds and distress of India. Here, there are scarcely any beggars; there is little apparent violence. Most people are dressed exactly the same.

  There is a powerful silence in these streets, and the junkyard smell—dust and old rags—is not the smell of death but of illness. More motor traffic would make these cities uninhabitable, but in a crude way the people have made motors unnecessary. The people seldom talk—their silence, which looks enforced, is the most amazing thing.

  Sometimes you can discern the future in the present, yet I could not tell what was in store for these people. Would it always be freezing in winter in cheap cotton clothes, walking through the muddy streets in cloth slippers, carting the steel rods used for awful concrete buildings, saying nothing, masked against the air pollution that gives China the look of existing in a permanent sunset? China looked sad in its simplicity. It seemed to me that it would look hideous if it ever became prosperous.

  Postscript, 1999

  When I took my Yangtze trip in November 1980, the hard-line Maoists still controlled the Politburo and Hua Guofeng was Party chairman. The reformers in the government, among them Deng Xiaoping, had not yet consolidated their power. China had hardly changed since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The Chinese still wore their revolutionary clothes, blue boiler suits and cloth slippers. Their motto was "Serve the people," though they were already sick of saying it. China is a different country now.

  Chinese Miracles

  Memories of China

  SUDDENLY, in eastern Guangdong—all bulldozers and buffalo—my driver, Mr. Li Zhongming, began driving on the wrong side of the road again. Was it the freshly dismembered human corpse, all its separate parts splashed Chinese red, scattered widely like a load of fresh pork off the back of a truck on our side of the highway—and the ensuing traffic jam—that made him do it? No. Mr. Li liked spinning the steering wheel and whipping over to face the oncoming traffic, racing to pass cars in front of us. He had hardly glanced at the mutilated body. "This is quicker," he said.

  Of course the risks were enormous—trucks and buses bore down on us head-on—but he sped by everyone with an eat-my-dust expression on his face, his teeth bared in aggression. He was so persistent I began to think of his driving on the wrong side (and the carnage on the right, one of the numerous
auto accidents I saw during an average day) as a metaphor for modernized China—the so-called miracle you read about every time you open a magazine or newspaper. Seen from a distance, the country does seem wondrous, but up close it is messier and more complicated. Like most economic miracles, it is also an ecological disaster. And it has its victims—that disemboweled pedestrian and millions of Chinese with their skinny shoulders to the wheel.

  Not Mr. Li, though, booting our assembled-in-China Audi down the main road to Shantou (old Swatow), past red hills being shoveled apart and bulldozed to use for filling in rice fields and to make room for tenements and factories. The entire landscape was being leveled for hundreds of miles, and when it began to rain, water coursed down the clawed, eroded hills, washing silt into the sewers and drains and flooding the roads, causing another traffic jam.

  Into the wrong lane Mr. Li went again, playing chicken with oncoming dump trucks and tractors and bikes. He did not dodge them. He just blew his horn and surged forward against the flow of cockeyed headlights.

  Strengthening Mr. Li in his luck was a portrait of Mao Zedong on his dashboard. This gesture, wholly apolitical, was a recent fetish for drivers in China. Just a year before, a taxi driver in Beijing claimed in People's Daily that he had been spared in a car crash, in which there had been many fatalities, because he had kept a picture of the old man on the dash. Many Chinese drivers began using the picture for spiritual protection. They reminded me of the images of Saint Christopher that I saw in cars when I was growing up in Massachusetts in the 1950s.

  Mao kitsch is popular in China now. You can buy Mao badges, Mao portraits, and embroidered knickknacks of the great man in baggy pants. His speeches are back in print. I often thought of them, and of one in particular, his "Report on the Peasants in Hunan," when in 1922 he had traveled around the countryside, noting abuses, jotting down wisdom, and making suggestions. That was what I told myself I was doing—simply looking around, gathering impressions for my "Report on the Factory Workers of Guangdong and Fujian in This Era of Chinese Prosperity." Mao was on my mind, too.