by Paul Theroux
It was his heliophobia that made me want to see his house. This weedy little man had a horror of the sun. I thought his house might not have any windows, or perhaps special shutters; or maybe he lived in a bomb shelter in the basement.
Cherry Blossom was saying in Chinese to the driver, “I did not know that Lin Biao lived in Dalian,” and then to me in English, “It’s too dark to find his house. Let’s go to the beach instead.”
We headed for the south part of Dalian, to a place called Fu’s Village Beach. Because of the cliffs and the winding road, the driver went very slowly.
Cherry Blossom said, “This car is as slow as cold molasses in January.”
“You certainly know a lot of colorful expressions, Cherry.”
“Yes. I am queer as a fish.” And she giggled behind her hand.
“You should be as happy as a clam,” I said.
“I like that one so much! I feel like a million dollars when I hear that.”
These colloquial high jinks could have been tiresome, but it was such a novelty for a Chinese person to be playful I enjoyed it. And I liked her for not taking herself too seriously. She knew she was mildly excruciating.
Meanwhile we were descending to Fu’s Village—great rocky cliffs and an empty beach of yellow sand with the January wind off the sea beating the waves against it. Offshore there were five blob-like islands floating blackly on the gulf. A couple was canoodling on the beach—the Chinese do it standing up, out of the wind, usually behind a rock or a building, and they hug each other very tightly. It is all smooching. These two ran away when they saw me. A drunken fisherman staggered across the beach toward his big wooden rowboat that was straight off an ancient scroll: a sharply rockered bottom, very clumsy, the shape of a wooden shoe, probably very seaworthy.
I asked Cherry Blossom whether she took her tourists here. She said there wasn’t time.
“Some of the people have funny faces,” she said.
“What is the funniest face you have ever seen, Cherry?”
She shrieked, “Yours!” and clapped her hands over her eyes and laughed.
“Another of your saucy jokes, Cherry Blossom!”
She became rather grave and said, “But truly the Tibetans have the funniest faces. They are so funny I get frightened.”
“What about American faces?”
“Americans are wonderful.”
We had tea at a vast empty restaurant. We were the only customers. It was at the top of one of Fu’s cliffs, with a panoramic view.
“Do you want to see the Dragon Cave?”
I said yes, and was taken upstairs to see a restaurant decorated to resemble a cave. It had fiberglass walls, bulging brown plastic rocks, and lights shining through plastic stalactites, and each table was fixed in a greeny-black cleft, with fake moss and boulders around it. The idea was perhaps not a bad one, but this was a vivid example of the Chinese not knowing when to stop. It was shapeless, artless, grotesquely beyond kitsch; it was a complicated disfigurement, wrinkled and stinking, like a huge plastic toy that had begun to melt and smell. You sat on those wrinkled rocks and bumped your head on the stalactites and ate fish cheeks with fresh ginger.
Cherry Blossom said, “Do you think it’s romantic?”
“Some people might find it romantic,” I said. And I pointed out the window. “That’s what I find romantic.”
The tangerine sun had settled into the Gulf of Bohai, coloring the little islands and the cliffs of Dalian, and the long stretch of empty beach.
Cherry Blossom said, “Let your imagination fly!”
We left the Dragon Cave (and I thought: It must have a counterpart in California). I said, “I understand there are recuperation tours. People come to this province to try out Chinese medicine.”
“Yes. It is like a fat farm.”
“Where did you learn that, Cherry Blossom?”
“My teachers at the institute were Americans. They taught me so many things!”
She had loved her years at the Dalian Foreign Languages Institute. She was now only twenty-two, but she intended to go on studying and working. She had no intention of getting married, and in explaining why, she lost her joky manner and became distressed.
Her decision not to marry was the result of a trip to Peking. She had taken a group of visiting doctors to see a Chinese hospital—how it worked, how the patients were treated, the progress of surgical operations, and so forth. The doctors expressed an interest in seeing a delivery. Cherry Blossom witnessed this and, so she said, almost went into shock at the sight of the baby issuing forth with its squashed head and its bloody face and streaming water. The mother had howled and so had the baby.
In all respects it was a completely normal birth.
“It was a mess,” she said, and touched her plump cheeks in disgust. “I was afraid. I hated it. I would never do it—never. I will never get married.”
I said, “You don’t have to have babies just because you get married.”
She was shaking her head. The thought was absurd—she couldn’t take it in. The whole point of marriage these days was to produce one child. Even though the Party was now stressing that the best marriages were work-related, the husband and wife joint members of a work unit, a busy little team, Cherry Blossom could not overcome the horror of what she had seen in the delivery room of Capital Hospital in Peking. She said she intended to remain in the dormitory of the Working Women’s Unit and go on knitting.
It was late at night when we crossed Dalian to get to the harbor, where I intended to take the ship to Yantai. We passed through the old bourgeois suburbs that had been built by the Japanese and the Russians. On the sloping streets of these neighborhoods there were seedy semidetached villas and stucco bungalows under the bare trees. I had not seen anything quite like them in China. They were appropriate to the suburban streets, the picket fences and the brick walls; and then I saw the laundry in the front yards and the Chinese at the windows.
I often passed down streets like this, seeing big gloomy villas with gables and jutting eaves and mullioned windows, but always in nightmares. They were the sort of houses which first looked familiar in the dream, and then I saw evil faces at the windows, and I realized that I was no longer safe. How often in nightmares I had been chased down streets like these.
“I am sorry to see you go,” Cherry Blossom said, when we arrived at the boat.
She was the only person in China who ever said that to me. In her old-fashioned way, with her old-fashioned clichés, she was very nice. I wished her well and we shook hands. I wanted to tell her that I was grateful to her for looking after me. I started to say it but she cut me off.
“Keep the wind at your back, Paul,” she said, and giggled again, delighted with her own audacity.
*She was wrong. Mao was the mover of a resolution to forbid the naming of provinces, cities, towns, or squares for himself or other living leaders (Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. 4, p. 380).
Driving to Tibet
GOLMUD WAS HARDLY A TOWN. IT WAS A DOZEN WIDELY scattered low buildings, some radio antennas, a water tower. One of the few cars in town was Mr. Fu’s ridiculous Galant: there were some buses, but they were the most punished-looking vehicles I had seen in China—and no wonder, for they toiled up and down the Tibetan Plateau.
“Snow,” Mr. Fu said—his first word.
I had not expected this snow, and it was clear from his gloomy tone that neither had he. The snow lay thinly in the town, but behind the town it was deep and dramatic—blazing in the shadows of the mountain range.
He said, “We cannot go to Lhasa tomorrow. Maybe the day after, or the day after that, or—”
I asked him why.
“The snow. It is everywhere—very deep,” he said. He was driving fast through the rutted Golmud streets—too fast, but I had seen him drive in Xining and I knew this to be normal. At the best of times he was a rather frantic driver. “The snow is blocking the road.”
“You are sure?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see it?”
He laughed: Ha-ha! You idiot! “Look at it!”
“Did anyone tell you that the road was blocked with snow?”
He did not reply, so that meant no. We continued this sparring. The snow was bad news—it glittered, looking as though it were there forever. But surely someone had a road report?
“Is there a bus station in Golmud?”
He nodded. He hated my questions. He wanted to be in charge, and how could he be if I was asking all the questions? And he had so few answers.
“People say the road is bad. Look at the snow!”
“We will ask at the bus station. The bus drivers will know.”
“First we go to the hotel,” he said, trying to take command.
The hotel was another prison-like place with cold corridors and squawks and odd hours. I had three cactuses in my room, and a calendar and two armchairs. But there were no curtains on the windows, and there was no hot water. “Later,” they said. The lobby was wet and dirty from the mud that had been tracked in. An ornamental pond behind the hotel was filled with green ice, and the snow was a foot deep on the path to the restaurant. I asked about food. “Later,” they said. Some of the rooms had six or eight bunk beds. Everyone inside wore a heavy coat and fur hat, against the cold. Why hadn’t my cactus plants died? The hotel cost $9 for a double room, and $2 for food.
“Now we go to the bus station,” I said.
Mr. Fu said nothing.
“We will ask someone about the snow.”
I had been told that buses regularly plied between Golmud and Lhasa, especially now that there were no flights—the air service to Tibet had been suspended. Surely one of these bus drivers would put us in the picture.
We drove to the bus station. On the way, I could see that Golmud was the ultimate Chinese frontier town, basically a military camp, with a few shops, a market, and wide streets. There were very few buildings, but since they were not tall, they seemed less of a disfigurement. It was a place of pioneers—of volunteers who had come out in the 1950s, as they had in Xining. They had been encouraged by Mao to develop the poor and empty parts of China; and of course, Tibet had to be invaded and subdued, and that was impossible without reliable supply lines—settlements, roads, telegraph wires, barracks. First the surveyors and engineers came, then the railway people and the soldiers, and then the teachers and traders.
“What do you think of Golmud, Mr. Fu?”
“Too small,” he said, and laughed, meaning the place was insignificant.
At the bus station we were told that the snow wasn’t bad on the road. A Tibetan bus had arrived just that morning—it was late, of course, but it was explained that all the buses were late, even when there was no snow.
I said, “We will go tomorrow, but we will leave early. We will drive until noon. If the snow is bad we will turn back and try again another day. If it looks okay we will go on.”
There was no way that he could disagree with this, and it had the additional merit of being a face-saving plan.
We had a celebratory dinner that night—wood-ear fungus, noodles, yak slices, and the steamed buns called mantou that Mr. Fu said he could not live without (he had a supply for the trip to Tibet). There was a young woman at the table, sharing our meal. She said nothing until Mr. Fu introduced her.
“This is Miss Sun.”
“Is she coming with us?”
“Yes. She speaks English.”
Mr. Fu, who spoke no English at all, was convinced that Miss Sun was fluent in English. But at no point over the next four or five days was I able to elicit any English at all from Miss Sun. Occasionally she would say a Chinese word and ask me its English equivalent.
“How do you say luxing in English?”
“Travel.”
Then her lips trembled and she made a choking sound, “Trow.”
And, just as quickly, she forgot even that inaccurate little squawk.
Over the dinner, I said, “What time are we leaving tomorrow?”
“After breakfast,” Mr. Fu said.
The maddening Chinese insistence on mealtimes.
“We should get an early start, because the snow will slow us down.”
“We can leave at nine.”
“The sun comes up at six-thirty or seven. Let’s leave then.”
“Breakfast,” Mr. Fu said, and smiled.
We both knew that breakfast was at eight. Mr. Fu was demanding his full hour, too. I wanted to quote a Selected Thought of Mao about being flexible, meeting all obstacles and overcoming them by strength of will. But I couldn’t think of one. Anyway, a Mao Thought would have cut no ice with young, skinny, frantic Mr. Fu, who played Beethoven and wore driving gloves and had a freeloading girlfriend. He was one of the new Chinese. He even had a pair of sunglasses.
“We can buy some food and eat it on the way,” I said, as a last desperate plea for an early start.
“I must eat mantou when it is hot,” Mr. Fu said.
That annoyed me, and I was more annoyed the next morning when at half past nine I was still waiting for Mr. Fu, who was himself waiting for a receipt for his room payment. At last, near ten, we left, and I sat in the back seat, wishing I were on a train, and feeling sour at the prospect of spending the whole trip staring at the back of Miss Sun’s head.
Lhasa was a thousand miles away.
Looking toward Tibet I had a glimpse of a black and vaporous steam locomotive plowing through a dazzling snow-field under the blue summits and buttresses of the Tanggula Shan. It was one of the loveliest things I saw in China—the chugging train in the snowy desert, the crystal mountains behind it, and the clear sky above.
Mr. Fu, I could see, was terrified of the snow. He did not know its effect firsthand. He had only heard scare stories. That was why he had wanted to stay in Golmud for another week, until the snow melted. He believed that there was no way through it. But the snow was not bad.
In the first passes, so narrow they were nearly always in shadow, there was ice. Mr. Fu took his time. He was a poor driver—that had been obvious in the first five minutes of driving with him—but the snow and ice slowed him and made him careful. The icy stretches looked dangerous, but by creeping along (and trying to ignore the precipitous drop into the ravine by the roadside), we managed. For miles there was slippery snow, but this too Mr. Fu negotiated. Two hours passed in this way. It was a lovely sunny day, and where the sun had struck it, some of the snow had melted. But we were climbing into the wind, and even this sun could not mask the fact that it was growing colder as we gained altitude.
We passed the first range of mountains, and behind them—though it was cold—there was less snow than on the Golmud side. Mr. Fu began to increase his speed. Whenever he saw a dry patch of road, he floored it and sped onward, slowing only when more snow or ice appeared. Twice he hit sudden frost heaves, and I was thrown out of my seat and bumped my head.
“Sorry!” Mr. Fu said, still speeding.
I sipped tea from my thermos and passed cassettes to Miss Sun, who fed them into the machine. After a hundred miles we had finished with Brahms. I debated whether to hand her the Beethoven symphonies, as I listened to Mendelssohn. I drank green tea and looked at the sunny road and snowy peaks and listened to the music, and I congratulated myself on contriving this excellent way of going to Lhasa.
There was another frost heave.
“Sorry!”
He was an awful driver. He ground the gears when he set off, he gave the thing too much gas, he steered jerkily, he went too fast; and he had what is undoubtedly the worst habit a driver can have—but one that is common in China: going downhill he always switched off the engine and put the gears into neutral, believing that he was saving gas.
I am not a retiring sort of person, and yet I said nothing. A person who is driving a car is in charge, and if you are a passenger you generally keep your mouth shut. I had an urge to say something and yet I thought: It’s going to be a long trip—
no sense spoiling it at the outset with an argument. And I wanted to see just how bad a driver Mr. Fu was.
I soon found out.
He was rounding bends at such speed that I found myself clutching the door handle in order to prevent myself from being thrown across the seat. I could not drink my tea without spilling it. He was doing ninety—I could not tell whether the dial said kilometers or miles per hour, but did it matter? And yet if I said slow down, he would lose face, his pride would be hurt, and wasn’t it true that he had got us through the snow? It was now about noon, with a dry road ahead. At this rate we would get to our first destination, the town of Amdo, before nightfall.
“Play this one, Miss Sun.”
Miss Sun took the Chinese cassette of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She rammed it into the machine and the first few bars played. The sun was streaming through the windows. The sky was clear and blue, and the ground was gravelly beneath the gray hills. There were snowy peaks to the left and right of us, just peeping over the hills. We were approaching a curve. I was a little anxious but otherwise very happy on the highest road in the world, the way to Lhasa. It was a beautiful day.
I remembered all of this clearly, because it was about two seconds later that we crashed.
There was a culvert on the curve, and a high bump in the road that was very obvious. But Mr. Fu was doing ninety, and when he hit the bump, we took off—the car leaped, I felt weightless, and when we came twisting down we were heading into an upright stone marker on the right. Mr. Fu was snatching at the steering wheel. The car skidded and changed direction, plunging to the left-hand side of the road. All this time I was aware of wind rushing against the car, a noise like a jet stream. That increased and so did the shaking of the car as it became airborne again and plowed into a powerful wind composed of dust and gravel. We had left the road and were careering sideways into the desert. Mr. Fu was battling with the wheel as the car was tossed. My clearest memory was of the terrific wind pressing against the twisted car, the windows darkened by flying dust, and of a kind of suspense. In a moment, I thought, we were going to smash and die.