To the Ends of the Earth

by Paul Theroux

  “Sacramentum,” the priest said, pointing at the flickering candle, and he smiled with satisfaction: the consecrated host was in the tabernacle.

  I asked him why this was so. Was there a service today?

  No, he said, and brought me to the back of the church, where there was a coffin with a white paper cross stuck to it. He said there was a funeral tomorrow.

  “I take it you’re busy—lots of people coming to church.”

  “Oh yes. And there are five churches in Shanghai. They are always full on Sundays.”

  He invited me to attend Mass, and out of politeness I said I might, but I knew I wouldn’t. I had no business there: I was a heretic. And I was often annoyed by westerners who, although they never went to church at home, would get the churchgoing bug in China, as an assertion of their difference or perhaps a reproach to the Chinese—as if religious freedom were the test of China’s tolerance. Well, it was one test, of course, but it was exasperating to see the test administered by an American unbeliever. So I didn’t go to church in China, but sometimes when I saw a bird in the grass I dropped to my knees and marveled as it twitched there.

  The Red Guards and the Violinist

  THERE WAS A STYLISH, YOUTHFUL-LOOKING MAN NAMED Wang whom I met one day in Shanghai. It turned out that we were both born in the same year—the Year of the Snake (but Wang used the Chinese euphemism for snake, “little dragon”). He was so friendly and full of stories that I saw him often, usually for lunch at the Jin Jiang Hotel. He was a sensitive soul, but had a sense of irony, too, and said he had never been happier than when he was walking the streets of San Francisco on his one trip to America—he hinted that he was eager to emigrate to the United States, but he never became a bore on the subject and did not ask me for help. He was unusual, even in Shanghai, for his clothes—a canary-yellow French jacket and pale blue slacks, a gold watch, a chain around his neck, and expensive sunglasses.

  “I like bright clothes,” he said.

  “Could you wear them during the Cultural Revolution?”

  He laughed and said, “What a mess that was!”

  “Were you criticized?”

  “I was under arrest. That’s when I started smoking. I discovered that if you smoked it gave you time to think. They had me in a room—the Red Guards. They said, ‘You called Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, a crazy lady.’ She was a crazy lady! But I just lit a cigarette and puffed on it so that I could think of something to say.”

  “What did you say?”

  “The wrong thing! They made me write essays. Self-criticism!”

  “Describe the essays.”

  “They gave me subjects. ‘Why I Like Charles Dickens,’ ‘Why I Like Shakespeare.’ ”

  “I thought you were supposed to say why you didn’t like them.”

  “They wouldn’t believe that,” he said. “They called me a reactionary. Therefore, I had to say why I liked them. It was awful. Six pages every night, after work unit, and then they said, ‘This is dog shit—write six more pages.’ ”

  “What work did you do?”

  “Played the violin in the Red Orchestra. Always the same tunes. ‘The East Is Red,’ ‘Long Live the Thoughts of Mao,’ ‘Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman,’ all that stuff. They made me play in the rain. I said, ‘I can’t—the violin will fall apart.’ They don’t know that a violin is glued together. I played in the rain. It fell apart. They gave me another one and ordered me to play under the trees during the Four Pests Campaign—to keep sparrows from landing in the branches.”

  The other three pests were mosquitoes, flies, and rats.

  “That’s absurd,” I said.

  “We painted Huai Hai Lu—that’s more absurd,” Wang said.

  “How can you paint a street?” I asked—the street he named was one of the main thoroughfares of Shanghai.

  “We painted it red, out of respect for Chairman Mao,” Wang said. “Isn’t that stupid?”

  “How much of the street did you paint?”

  “Three and a half miles,” Wang said, and laughed, remembering something else. “But there were stupider things. When we went to the work unit, we always did the qing an [salute] to Mao’s portrait on the gateway. We’d hold up the Red Book, say, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao,’ and salute him. Same thing when we went home. People would make things in Mao’s honor, like a knitted Mao emblem, or a red star in needlepoint, and put it in the special Respect Room at the unit—it was painted red. That was for Mao. If they wanted to prove they were very loyal, they would wear the Mao badge by pinning it to their skin.”

  “That must have impressed the Red Guards,” I said.

  “It wasn’t just the Red Guards—everyone blames them, but everyone was in it. That’s why people are so embarrassed at the moment, because they realize they were just as stupid about Chairman Mao as everyone else. I know a banker who was given the job of fly catcher. He had to kill flies and save their little bodies in a matchbox. Every afternoon someone would come and count the dead flies and say, ‘One hundred seventeen—not good enough. You must have one hundred twenty-five tomorrow.’ And more the day after, you see? The government said there was going to be a war. ‘The enemy is coming—be prepared.’ ”

  “Which enemy?”

  “The imperialists—Russia, India, the United States. It didn’t matter which one. They were going to kill us,” Wang said, and rolled his eyes. “So we had to make bricks for the war effort. Ninety bricks a month for each person. But my parents were old, so I had to make their bricks. I used to come home from the unit, write my essay ‘Why I Like Western Music,’ and make bricks—I had to deliver two hundred seventy a month. And they were always asking me about my hole.”

  “Your hole?”

  “The Shen wa dong—Dig Deep Holes edict. That was for the war, too. Everyone had to have a hole, in case of war. Every so often the Red Guards would knock on your door and say, ‘Where is your hole?’ ”

  He said there were bomb shelters all over Shanghai, which had been built on Mao’s orders (“for the coming war”), and of course they had never been used. I asked him to show me one. We found this subterranean vault—it was just like a derelict subway station—on 1157 Nanjing Road, and it had been turned into an ice-cream parlor. The fascinating thing to me was that it was now obviously a place where young folks went to kiss their girlfriends. It was full of Chinese youths locked in the half nelson they regard as an amorous embrace. The irony was not merely that these kids were making out and feeling each other up in a place that had been built by frantic and paranoid Red Guards in the 1960s, but also that it was now called the Dong Chang Coffee Shop and owned and operated by the government.

  I was talking to Wang one day about my trip through the Soviet Union when I mentioned how the scarcity of consumer goods there meant they were always pestering foreigners for blue jeans, T-shirts, track shoes, and so forth.

  “That never happens in China,” I said.

  “No,” Wang said. “But that reminds me. About three years ago there was a Russian ballet dancer at the hotel in Shanghai. I went to see the ballet—fabulous! And this dancer was very handsome. I recognized him, and he smiled at me. Then he pointed to my track shoes and pointed to himself. He wanted them, I understood that. They were expensive shoes—Nike, cost me fifty yuan. But I don’t care much about money. We measured feet, side by side. Exact fit. I don’t speak a word of Russian, but I could tell he really wanted those shoes.”

  “Did you sell them to him?”

  “I gave them to him,” Wang said, and frowned at the triviality of it. “I felt sorry for someone who just wanted a pair of shoes. It seemed sad to me that he couldn’t get them in his own country. I took them off and walked to my office barefoot! He was really happy! I thought: He’ll go back to Russia. He’ll always remember this. He’ll say, ‘Once I was in China. I met a Chinese man and asked him for his shoes, and he gave them to me!’ ”

  A moment later, he said, “You can get anything you want in China. Food, c
lothes, shoes, bicycles, motorbikes, TVs, radios, antiques. If you want girls, you can find girls.” And then in a wide-eyed way, “Or boys—if you want boys.”

  “Or fashion shows.”

  “They have fashion shows on television almost every week,” Wang said. “Shanghai is famous for them.”

  I asked him what the old people made of these developments—hookers and high fashion in a country where just a few years ago foreign decadence was condemned and everyone wore baggy blue suits.

  “The old people love life in China now,” Wang said. “They are really excited by it. Very few people object. They had felt very repressed before.”

  Performing Animals

  ON MY WALKS IN SHANGHAI I OFTEN WENT PAST THE CHINESE Acrobatic Theater, a domed building near the center of the city. And I became curious and attended a performance; and after I saw it—not only the tumblers and clowns and contortionists, but also the man who balanced a dinner service for twelve on a chopstick that he held in his mouth—I wanted to know more.

  Mr. Liu Maoyou was in charge of the acrobats at the Shanghai Bureau of Culture. He had started out as an assistant at the Shanghai Library, but even at the best of times things are quiet at the city library, since it is next to impossible—for political reasons—for anyone to borrow a book. The librarian is little more than a custodian of the stacks. He jumped at the chance of a transfer and joined the Bureau of Culture, and he accompanied the Chinese acrobats on their first tour of the United States in 1980.

  “We call it a theater, because it has an artistic and dramatic element,” Mr. Liu said. “It has three aspects—acrobats, magic, and a circus.”

  I asked him how it started.

  “Before Liberation all the acrobats were family members. They were travelers and performers. They performed on the street or in any open space. But we thought of bringing them together and training them properly. Of course, the Chinese had been acrobats for thousands of years. They reached their height in the Tang Dynasty and were allowed to perform freely.”

  Mr. Liu said this with such enthusiasm that I asked him how he felt about the Tang Dynasty.

  “It was the best period in China,” he said. “The freest time—all the arts flourished during the Tang era.”

  So much for the Shanghai Cultural Bureau, but he was still talking.

  “Before Liberation they were doing actions without art form,” he said. “But they have to use mind as well as body. That’s why we started the training center. We don’t want these acrobats to be mind-empty, so after their morning practice they study math, history, language, and literature.”

  He said that in 1986 thirty candidates were chosen from three thousand applicants. They were all young—between ten and fourteen years old, but Mr. Liu said the bureau was not looking for skill but rather for potential.

  “We also have a circus,” he said. “Also a school for animal training.”

  This interested me greatly, since I have a loathing for everything associated with performing animals. I have never seen a lion tamer who did not deserve to be mauled; and when I see a little mutt, wearing a skirt and a frilly bonnet, and skittering through a hoop, I am thrilled by a desire for its tormentor (in the glittering pantsuit) to contract rabies.

  “Tell me about your animal training, Mr. Liu.”

  “Before Liberation the only training we did was with monkeys. Now we have performing cats—”

  “Household cats? Pussycats?”

  “Yes. They do tricks.”

  It is a belief of many Chinese I met that animals such as cats and dogs do not feel pain. They are on earth to be used—trained, put to work, killed, and eaten. When you see the dumb, laborious lives that Chinese peasants live it is perhaps not so surprising that they torture animals.

  “Also pigs and chickens,” Mr. Liu said.

  “Performing chickens?”

  “Not chickens but cocks.”

  “What do the cocks do?”

  “They stand on one leg—hand standing. And some other funny things.”

  God only knows how they got these pea-brained roosters to do these funny things, but I had the feeling they wired them up and zapped them until they got the point.

  “What about the pigs?” I asked.

  “The pigs do not perform very often, but they can walk on two legs—”

  And when he said that I realized what it was that was bothering me. It was that everything he said reminded me of Animal Farm; and the fact that it was a fable of totalitarianism only made Mr. Liu’s images worse. He had described a living example of the moment in that book when oppression is about to overtake the farm. There is terror and confusion at the unexpected sight: It was a pig walking on his hind legs. And Orwell goes on:

  Yes, it was Squealer. A little awkwardly, as though not quite used to supporting his considerable bulk in that position, but with perfect balance.… And a moment later, out from the door of the farmhouse, came a long file of pigs, all walking on their hind legs.…

  I was thinking of this as Mr. Liu was saying, “—and lions and tigers, and the only performing panda in China.”

  He said that the animals and the acrobats often went on tour—even to the United States. Many of the acrobats worked in the United States. In 1985 a deal was made whereby Chinese acrobats would join Ringling Brothers Circus for a year or two at a time. In the first year there were fifteen, and in 1986 there were twenty hired-out Chinese acrobats working in America.

  I asked Mr. Liu about the financial arrangement.

  “I don’t know exactly,” he said, “but Ringling Brothers Circus pays us and we pay the acrobats.”

  “How much does Ringling Brothers pay you?”

  “About two hundred to six hundred dollars a week, depending on the act. For each person.”

  “How much do you pay the acrobats?”

  “About one hundred yuan.”

  Thirty dollars.

  Talk about performing pigs! I wondered how long people would be willing to allow themselves to be treated as exportable merchandise. For some it was not long: the very week I had the conversation with Mr. Liu a man playing the role of an acrobatic lion disappeared in New York. Months later he still had not been found.

  The Edge of the World

  BY MIDAFTERNOON THE TRAIN WAS MOVING ACROSS A FLAT green plain between two ranges of low mountains, the Qilian Shan and the Helan Shan. In places I could see the crumbled sections of the Great Wall. Where the land was flat, it was intensively cultivated, and in places there were tall, slender, and rather redundant-looking poplars. The Chinese, averse to planting shade trees, favored the skinny symbolic tree that doubled as a fence. The idea of The Forest was alien to China. It only existed in northern Heilongjiang province—the Manchurian northeast; and I had heard that even the little that remained was being cut down and made into chopsticks and toothpicks and Ping-Pong paddles.

  In most other countries, a landscape feature was a grove of trees, or a meadow, or even a desert; so you immediately associated the maple tree with Canada, the oak with England, the birch with the Soviet Union, and desert and jungle with Africa. But no such thing came to mind in China, where the most common and obvious feature of a landscape was a person—or usually many people. Every time I stared at a landscape, there was a person in it staring back at me.

  Even here in the middle of nowhere there were people and settlements. The villages were walled in, and most houses had walls around them: mud smeared over bricks. They were the sort of stockades that are frequent in Afghanistan and Iran—at the far end of this Silk Road—and probably a cultural hangover from the memory of marauders and Mongol hordes, the Central Asian nightmare.

  The day had turned very hot. It was now in the nineties. I saw eighteen sheep crowded into a little blot of shade under a frail hawthorn tree. Children cooled themselves by kicking water in a ditch. Farmers with lampshade hats planted crops by pushing one sprout at a time into the ground, a process that had a greater affinity to needlepoint sewing
than to farming, as though they were stitching a design into the furrows. And though there were black peaks and mountain ranges on both sides of the train, the land ahead fell away, and it was as if we were approaching the ocean—the land dipped and had the smooth, stony look of the seashore. It was the hottest part of the day, but even so the land was full of people. Hours later, in an immense and stony desert I saw a man in a faded blue suit, bumping over the stones on his bike.

  Then there were sand dunes near the track—big soft slopes and bright piles; but the snowy peaks in the distance still remained. I had not realized that there was anything so strange as this on this planet.

  I was eating dinner in the empty dining car at about eight that night when we came to Jiayuguan. What I saw out the window is printed on my mind: in the summer dusk of the Gobi Desert, a Chinese town lay glowing in the sand, and rising above it, ten stories high, was the last gate in the Great Wall, the Jia Yu Watchtower—a fortress-like structure with pagoda roofs; and the train slowed at the Wall’s end, a crumbled pile of mud bricks and ruined turrets that the wind had simplified and sucked smooth. In the fading light of day, there was this ghostly remainder of the Great Wall, and what looked like the last town in China. The Wall went straggling west, but it was so small and destroyed it looked like little more than an idea or a suggestion—the remnants of a great scheme. But my excitement also came from seeing the red paint on the gate, and the yellow roof, and the thought that this train was passing beyond it into the unknown. The sun slanted on the gray hills and the desert and blue bushes. Most of what I saw was through the blurring haze of the day’s dust, and the intimation at sunset was that I would fall off the edge of the world as soon as it got dark.