by Paul Theroux
Mao’s house was at the far end of the village, in a glade. It was large and its yellow stucco and Hunanese design gave it the look of a hacienda—very cool and airy, with an atrium and a lovely view of its idyllic setting. Here Mao was born in December 1893. The rooms are neatly labeled: PARENTS’ BEDROOM, BROTHER’S ROOM, KITCHEN, PIGSTY, and so forth. It is the house of a well-to-do family—Mao’s father was “a relatively rich peasant,” clever with money and mortgages, and he was a moneylender of sorts. There was plenty of space here—a big barn and roomy kitchen. Mrs. Mao’s stove was preserved (DO NOT TOUCH), and a placard near it read: IN 1921 MAO ZEDONG EDUCATED HIS FAMILY IN REVOLUTION NEAR THIS STOVE. And in the sitting room: IN 1927 MEETINGS WERE HELD HERE TO DISCUSS REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES.
It was not like visiting Lincoln’s log cabin. It wasn’t Blenheim. It wasn’t Paul Revere’s house. For one thing it was very empty. The few Chinese nearby seemed indifferent to the house itself. They sat under trees listening to a booming radio. There were girls in pretty dresses. Their clothes alone were a political statement. But this handful of people were hardly visible. Its emptiness meant something. Because when it was heavily visited Shaoshan had represented political piety and obedience, now that it was empty it stood for indifference. In a sense, neglect was more dramatic than destruction, because the thing still existed as a mockery of what it had been.
It had the fusty smell of an old shrine. It had outlived its usefulness, and it looked a little absurd, like a once-hallowed temple of a sect of fanatics who had run off, tearing their clothes, and had never returned. Times have changed. Toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, the pseudonymous Simon Leys visited China and in Chinese Shadows, his gloomy and scolding account of his trip, he wrote that Shaoshan “is visited by about three million pilgrims every year.” That is eight thousand a day. Today there were none.
If Shaoshan was embarrassing to the Chinese, it was because the whole scheme had been to show Mao as more than human. There was an obnoxious religiosity in the way his old schoolhouse had been arranged to show little Mao as a sanctified student. But the building was empty, and there was no one walking down the lane, so it didn’t matter. I had the impression that the Chinese were staying away in droves.
One stall sold postcards. There was only one view: MAO’S BIRTHPLACE (the house in the glade). And there were a few Mao badges. It was the only place in China where I saw his face on sale, but even so it was just this little badge. There were also towels and dishcloths, saying SHAOSHAN.
There was a shop in the Mao Museum.
I said, “I would like to buy a Mao badge.”
“We have none,” the assistant said.
“How about a Mao picture?”
“We have none.”
“What about a Little Red Book—or any Mao book?”
“None.”
“Where are they?”
“Sold.”
“All of them?”
“All.”
“Will you get some more to sell?”
The assistant said, “I do not know.”
What do they sell, then, at the shop in the Mao Museum? They sell key chains with color photographs of Hong Kong movie actresses, bars of soap, combs, razor blades, face cream, hard candy, peanut brittle, buttons, thread, cigarettes, and men’s underwear.
The museum did try to show Mao as more than human, and in its eighteen rooms of hagiography Mao was presented as a sort of Christ figure, preaching very early (giving instructions in revolution by his mother’s stove) and winning recruits. There were statues, flags, badges, and personal paraphernalia—his straw hat, his slippers, his ashtray. Room by room, his life is displayed in pictures and captions: his schooldays, his job, his travels, the death of his brother, the Long March, the war, his first marriage …
And then, after such languid and detailed exposition, an odd thing happens in the last room. In Number Eighteen, time is telescoped, and the years 1949–76, his entire chairmanship, his rule, and his death, are presented with lightning speed. There is no mention of his two other marriages, nothing about Jiang Qing. Nonpersons like Jiang Qing and Lin Biao have been airbrushed out of photographs. The 1960s are shown in one picture, the mushroom cloud of China’s first atom bomb in 1964. The rest of the decade does not exist. There has been no Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Mao Museum was founded in 1967, at the height of it!
But by omitting so much and showing time passing so quickly, the museum gives the viewer a bizarre potted history of Mao’s final years. In the previous rooms he looks like a spoiled child, a big brat, scowling and solemn. In this final room he develops a very unusual smile and on his pumpkin face it has a disturbing effect. After 1956 he seems to be gaga. He starts wearing baggy pants and a coolie hat, and his face is drawn from a sag into a mad or senile grimace. He looks unlike his earlier self. In one picture he is lumberingly playing Ping-Pong. In 1972 and after, meeting Nixon, Prince Sihanouk, and East European leaders, he’s a heffalump, he looks hugely crazy or else barely seems to recognize the visitor grinning at him. There is plenty of evidence here to support what the Chinese say about him all the time—that after 1956 he was not the same.
Mao had set out to be an enigma and had succeeded. “The anal leader of an oral people,” the sinologist Richard Soloman had said. Mao can be described but not summed up. He was patient, optimistic, ruthless, pathologically anti-intellectual, romantic, militaristic, patriotic, chauvinistic, rebellious in a youthful way, and deliberately contradictory.
Shaoshan said everything about Mao: his rise and fall; his position today. I loved the empty train arriving at the empty station. Was there a better image of obscurity? As for the house and village, they were like many temples in China, where no one prayed any longer—just a heap of symmetrical stones representing waste, confusion, and ruin. China was full of such places, dedicated to the memory of someone or other and, lately, just an excuse for setting up picnic tables and selling souvenirs.
*“These were the virtues of Confucius, as described by one of his disciples,” runs the commentary in Mao’s Selected Works. So Mao was also criticizing Confucius for not being of a revolutionary spirit.
The Great Wall
BECAUSE IT IS A FLAT, DRY, NORTHERN CITY, AT THE EDGE OF Mongolia, Peking has beautiful skies. They are bluest in the freezing air of winter. China’s old euphemism for itself was Tianxia, “All beneath the sky”—and, on a good day, what a sky! It was limpid, like an ocean of air, but seamless and unwrinkled, without a single wavelet of cloud; endless uncluttered fathoms of it that grew icier through the day and then at the end of the winter afternoon turned to dust.
Thinking it would be empty, I went to see the Great Wall again. Dr. Johnson told Boswell how eager he was to go to China and see the Wall. Boswell was not so sure himself. How could he justify going to China when he had children at home to take care of?
“Sir,” Dr. Johnson said, “by doing so [going to China] you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a lustre reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China. I am serious, sir.”
The Wall is an intimidating thing, less a fortification than a visual statement announcing imperiously: I am the Son of Heaven and this is the proof that I can encircle the earth. It somewhat resembles, in intention, the sort of achievement of that barmy man Christo, who giftwrapped the Golden Gate Bridge. The Wall goes steeply up and down mountainsides. To what purpose? Certainly not to repel invaders, who could never cling to those cliffs. Wasn’t it another example of the Chinese love of taking possession of the land and whipping it into shape?
Anyway, it was not empty. It swarmed with tourists. They scampered on it and darkened it like fleas on a dead snake.
That gave me an idea. “Snake” was very close, but what it actually looked like was a dragon. The dragon is the favorite Chinese creature (“just after man in the
hierarchy of living beings”) and until fairly recently—eighty or a hundred years ago—the Chinese believed they existed. Many people reported seeing them alive—and of course fossilized dragon skeletons had been unearthed. It was a good omen and, especially, a guardian. The marauding dragon and the dragon slayer are unknown in China. It is one of China’s friendliest and most enduring symbols. And I found a bewitching similarity between the Chinese dragon and the Great Wall of China—the way it flexed and slithered up and down the Mongolian mountains; the way its crenellations looked like the fins on a dragon’s back, and its bricks like scales; the way it looked serpentine and protective, undulating endlessly from one end of the world to the other.
Mr. Tian
“IS IT COLD OUTSIDE?” I ASKED.
“Very,” said Mr. Tian. His eyeglasses were opaque with frost.
It was five-thirty on a Harbin morning, the temperature at minus thirty-five Centigrade and a light snow falling—little grains like seed pearls sifting down in the dark. When the flurry stopped, the wind picked up, and it was murderous. Full on my face it was like being slashed with a razor. We were on our way to the railway station.
“And you insist on coming with me?” I asked.
“Langxiang is forbidden,” Mr. Tian said. “So I must.”
“It is the Chinese way,” I said.
“Very much so,” he replied.
In this darkness groups of huddled people waited in the empty street for buses. That seemed a grim pastime, a long wait at a Harbin bus stop in winter. And, by the way, the buses were not heated. In his aggrieved account of his Chinese residence, the journalist Tiziano Terzani, writing about Heilongjiang (“The Kingdom of the Rats”), quotes a French traveler who said, “Although it is uncertain where God placed paradise, we can be sure that he chose some other place than this.”
The wind dropped but the cold remained. It banged against my forehead and twisted my fingers and toes; it burned my lips. I felt like Sam McGee. I entered the station waiting room and a chill rolled against me, as if my face had been pressed on a cold slab. The waiting room was unheated. I asked Mr. Tian how he felt about this.
“Heat is bad,” he said. “Heat makes you sleepy and slow.”
“I like it,” I said.
Mr. Tian said, “I once went to Canton. It was so hot I felt sick.”
Mr. Tian was twenty-seven, a graduate of Harbin University. There was humor in the way he moved. He was self-assured. He didn’t fuss. He was patient. He was frank. I liked him for these qualities. The fact that he was incompetent did not matter very much. Langxiang was a day’s journey by train—north, into the snow. He seemed an easy companion and I did not think he would get in my way.
He had no bag. He may have had a toothbrush in his pocket, where he kept his woolly cap and his misshapen gloves. He was completely portable, without any impedimenta. He was an extreme example of Chinese austerity. He slept in his long johns and wore his coat to meals. He rarely washed. Being Chinese he did not have to shave. He seemed to have no possessions at all. He was like a desert Bedouin. This fascinated me, too.
The train pulled in, steaming and gasping, just as the sun came up. It had come from Dalian, six hundred miles away, and it stopped everywhere. So it was sensationally littered with garbage—peanut shells, apple cores, chewed chicken bones, orange peel, and greasy paper. It was very dirty and it was so cold inside that the spit had frozen on the floor into misshapen yellow-green medallions of ice. The covering between each coach was a snow tunnel, the frost on the windows was an inch thick, the doors had no locks and so they banged and thumped as a freezing draft rushed through the carriages. It was the Heilongjiang experience: I crept in out of the cold and inside I felt even colder. I found a small space and sat hunched over like everyone else, with my hat and gloves on. I was reading Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and I scribbled on the flyleaf:
In the provinces every train is like a troop train. This is like one returning from the front, with the sick and wounded.
Even with three pairs of socks and thermal-lined boots my feet were cold; nor did I feel particularly cozy in my heavy sweater, Mongolian sheepskin vest, and leather coat. I felt like an idiot in my hat and fleece-lined mittens, but it annoyed me that I was still cold, or at least not warm. How I longed for the summer trains of the south and the sweltering trip on the Iron Rooster when I had lounged in my blue pajamas.
Mr. Tian said, “You come from which city in the States?”
“Near Boston.”
“Lexington is near Boston,” Mr. Tian said.
“How did you know that?”
“I studied American history in middle school. All Chinese study it.”
“So you know about our war of liberation, Mr. Tian?”
“Yes. There was also a Paul who was very important.”
“Paul Revere.”
“Exactly,” Mr. Tian said. “He told the peasants that the British were coming.”
“Not just the peasants. He told everyone—the peasants, the landlords, the capitalist-roaders, the stinking ninth category of intellectuals, the minorities, and the slaves.”
“I think you’re joking, especially about the slaves.”
“No. Some of the slaves fought on the British side. They were promised their freedom if the British won. After the British surrendered these blacks were sent to Canada.”
“I didn’t read about that,” Mr. Tian said, as the door blew open.
“I’m cold,” I said.
“I’m too hot,” Mr. Tian said.
The cold put me to sleep. I was wakened later by Mr. Tian, who asked me whether I wanted to have breakfast. I thought some food might warm me up so I said yes.
There was frost on the dining-car windows and ice on the dining-car floor, and a bottle of water on my table had frozen and burst. My fingers were too cold to hold any chopsticks. I hunched over with my hands up my sleeves.
“What food do they have?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want noodles?” I asked.
“Anything but noodles,” Mr. Tian said.
The waiter brought us cold noodles, cold pickled onions, diced Spam, which looked like a shredded beach toy, and cold but very tasty black fungus—a specialty of the province. Mr. Tian ate his noodles. It was the Chinese way. Even if it was not to your taste, when there was nothing else on the menu you ate it.
After several hours of crossing flat snowfields this train entered a mountainous region. The settlements were small—three or four short rows of bungalows, some of brick and some of mud and logs. They were the simplest slant-roofed dwellings and looked like the sort of houses that children draw in the first grade, with a narrow door and a single window and a blunt chimney with a screw of smoke coming out of it.
The toilet on the train looked as though a child had designed it, too. It was a hole in the floor about a foot across. Well, I had seen squat toilets before, but this one was traveling at about fifty miles an hour through the ice and snow of northern China. There was no pipe or baffle. If you looked down it you saw ice streaking past. A gust of freezing air rushed out of the hole. Anyone fool enough to use this thing would be frostbitten on a part of the body that is seldom frostbitten. And yet the passengers trooped into this refrigerated bum-freezer. When they came out their eyes were tiny and their teeth were clenched, as though they had just been pinched very hard.
We were still jogging along, stopping frequently. And the doors opened and closed with the same pneumatic gasp as those on a refrigerator, each time producing a cold blast through the coach. I hated having to get up, because when I sat down again my seat froze me.
It surprised me to see children standing outside their houses, watching the train go by. They wore thin jackets, no hats or gloves. Many of them had bright red cheeks. They had spiky unwashed hair and they wore cloth slippers. They looked very hardy, and they yelled at the train as it passed their icebound villages.
The mountains in the distance
were the southernmost peaks of the Lesser Khingan Range, and the foreground was all forest. Most of these settlements were simply overgrown lumber camps. One of the centers of logging activity is Langxiang. But I had also chosen it because it has a narrow-gauge railway that goes deep into the forest and carries logs back to town to be milled.
It was hardly a town. It was a sprawling one-story village with an immense lumber yard at its center and a main street where people with scarves wrapped around their faces stood all day in the cold selling meat and vegetables. One day in Langxiang I saw a man standing behind a square of cloth which held six frozen rats and a stack of rats’ tails. Were things so bad in Langxiang that they ate rats and rats’ tails?
“Do you eat these?” I asked.
“No, no,” came the muffled voice through the frosted scarf. “I sell medicine.”
“These rats are medicine?”
“No, no!” The man’s skin was almost black from the cold and the dry air.
And then he began speaking again, but I had no idea what he was saying in this local dialect. As he spoke the ice crystals thawed on his scarf.
Mr. Tian said, “He doesn’t sell rats. He sells rat poison. He shows these dead rats as proof that his poison is good.”
We had arrived at Langxiang in the middle of the afternoon, just as it was growing dark. This was a northern latitude in winter: night came early. I stepped from the cold train onto the freezing platform, and then we went to the guest house, which was also cold—but the clammy indoor cold that I found harder to bear than the icy outdoors. With curtains over the windows and the lights dim, it was like being in an underground tomb.