We struggle haplessly to communicate through sign language, then the woman’s husband invites me to the adjacent living room to see a video of the island in 1960. It is fascinating, like a National Geographic special from an earlier time, with stone houses, women with large wooden tubs diving for fish and seaweed, and no apparent sign of modern dress or implements. Having exhausted the possibilities of Hongdo nightlife, I walk back to the guest house through the narrow streets, buffeted by the stiff wind howling from the sea.
Back in the traditional room, I watch Korean news on TV, then drift to sleep, my head on the hard, wheat husk pillow, feeling the comforting warmth coming up from the ondol floor (heated underneath), while a storm rages outside.
Dawn comes, chilly, grey, drizzling and so foggy I can barely see across the little harbor below. My proprietress fetches me to join her other three guests. The breakfast we eat seated on the floor is the same as dinner, along with black wafers of seaweed taken from a bag like a bale of hay in the corner. Over a warming instant coffee, another guest tells me with sign language about the morning round-island boat tour.
Passing village storekeepers out on the street early, greeting tourists and offering their wares, I head back to the pier. On the beach, people bow as they pass several Buddhist monks in broad straw hats and baggy traditional garb, and a nun, her shaved-head topped with a straw pith helmet. They are tourists like us. Clumps of visitors in matching yellow, blue or clear disposable rain jackets stand around chattering happily in the drizzle. Koreans travel not so much for the “where” but for the “who with.” For these Confucians, travel is a structured social occasion, so they are unfazed by the dismal weather.
We all board several wood-hulled boats with about 50 or 60 passengers each, and disappear into the mist for the round-island tour. For several hours, we circle the island, the long boats nosing forward into caves or running close along bizarre rocks shaped by the elements. Like so many other “end of the earth” places, it is a dramatic setting. A tour guide chatters on about the rocks and all their stories, and maintains an energetic sales patter, hawking the Hongdo video and Polaroid photos.
The only words I understand are “Ko-ka Ko-la.” The overhanging rock with a cleft in it does look like an old-style Coke bottle. It is frustrating, missing the commentary, until a young Korean, part of a Presbyterian Church group from Seoul, asks me in good English if I can understand what is being said. Then he translates for me, and I can appreciate the Korean imagination, applied to these geographic oddities. There is the Number 1 Rock, the most beautiful in Hongdo, and Sad Rock, which is separated from the island when the tide comes in. He points out the Pregnant Monk -- hastening to add it was a virgin pregnancy.
With a little imagination, I can now make out The Perfect Couple, Candle, ET Rock, Squirrel Rock, Tall Rock, Kettle Rock and Lucky Turtle Rock, lucky because turtles represent longevity. Birds’ Apartment Rock is named for the many birds living there. My unofficial guide and rock guru points out a white mark high on a cliff. Long ago an old man fell asleep while fishing there. He woke suddenly when he caught something, pulled it up quickly, and it made that impression.
“We Koreans like stories,” the young man explains.
Later we pass the Solitary Ladies, a row of nine small islands. When the women’s father went to the mainland to buy festival costumes, he got caught in a violent storm and never returned. Bad-Minded Man Rock is a big, solid block balancing precariously high on a cliff. If a bad man passes under it, the rock will fall down on him, the tour guide explains, as we pass close underneath. It is an old local joke.
Independence Rock is shaped just like Independence Gate in Seoul, and another resembles a map of Korea, complete with the North-South demarcation line. We peer into the Cave of a Korean harp player, and another where 10-meter long snakes are supposed to dwell.
When Korean music comes on the tinny PA speakers, the middle-aged Korean women start dancing energetically on the deck. Below deck, where others huddle from the wind, jovial ladies stumble around pretending to be seasick, and clap their hands to the music, creating a party atmosphere. Some of the less spirited young ladies from the church group are genuinely drowsy and seasick.
Later, we stop alongside a fishing boat that appears to float in on the mist. On deck, fishermen fillet and slice live fish, putting the pieces on plates of shredded onions to sell to hungry passengers.
Back at the bay I rush to the dock to get my ticket to the mainland, but there is gloom of another type. The ferry is full, so I will miss my train to Seoul, and my flight home. But just when things looked bleak as a Hongdo day, help comes from the Christian group. The young man tells me that the local parson will talk to the ferry captain to try to get me a seat.
While we wait on the wet, slippery dock for the boat, friendly, lively group members tease the gray-haired, jovial parson.
“He only knows three English phrases,” they tell me. “I’m hungry, help me and I can’t speak English.”
When the hydrofoil arrives, they slip me aboard past the ticket taker, find me a seat on the upper deck, and I am able to buy a ticket from the captain.
Here I meet Miss Lee, an earnest young reporter from a weekly religious newspaper, who provides an enlightening insight into the Korean approach to appreciating the view.
Millions of Koreans collect natural stones, a national hobby called Su Sok (or susok), meaning Live Stone. Miss Lee carefully writes it out in Hangul (Korean script) for me, then writes, “Collecting stones strive to imitate and express the liveliness of the universe and earth.”
The treasured rocks are not just beautiful, natural objects, but reflect Taoist and Confucian philosophy, stressing man’s harmony with nature. “It is part of yin and yang,” Miss Lee explains. And these stones, like Hongdo, look better when they are wet.
Although I don’t entirely understand, I begin to appreciate the idea, the emotion. I recall the people on the boat dancing, singing and reveling in the misty atmosphere. And the rocks do take on a haunting, eerie, but compelling aspect on this grey day. Yes, I was lucky for the misty, murky weather.
Still, I would like to return to see Hongdo in the sunshine, just like in the postcards.
CHINA
CANTON
The Door Creaks Open
June 1978
THIS incident was highly amusing to the journalists and hangers-on at the Hong Kong Press Club in Wan Chai. Some six or so years ago, a number of Royal Australian Navy sailors bought tickets for a weekend trip to Canton from a man in a bar in Wan Chai, Hong Kong’s Suzy Wong district. The trip was to include return train tickets, meals, hotels and guided tours. Of course the hapless seamen were stuck with worthless tickets - and the friendly man at the bar could not be found. A weekend in Canton? Preposterous. Everyone knew then that China was a closed country, that no one was let in except socialist politicians, left-leaning journalists and special interest groups, and then only by invitation.
Now, however, the preposterous is the possible.
There is a rent in the Bamboo Curtain. Since January of this year, travel to China has become simple for residents and visitors to Hong Kong. The faceless bureaucrats in Peking have decided that the Year of the Horse is to be the Year of the Tourist, and it is now as easy to organize a trip to China as to China Bar (a small town in British Columbia, Canada).
A trip to Canton is not a “holiday” in the normal sense. There are no beaches, few architectural or artistic gems to marvel at, only mediocre food (better Chinese food is served in Hong Kong) and the city, like the weather, is grey and grim. The weekend features the thrills of a ceramic factory, the excitement of a visit to a people’s commune, the delights of Chinese nightlife, highlighted by a three hour acrobatic show, a sort of Sino Ed Sullivan Show.
The trip starts at Kowloon’s ugly new Hong Hom Station, where Hong Kong secretaries and civil servants, backpacking Americans, Canadians, Europeans and Japanese, and Filipino families are divided into groups of about
27. The one-hour trip through the New Territories passes villages, fields and temples brightened by colored flags and commercial signs, final evidence of the decadent capitalist world before entering the dull, uniform blue and grey of China.
The train terminates at Lowu station, where passengers walk across the narrow bridge, the once impenetrable gateway to China. The red flag with yellow stars of China hangs higher than the red, white and blue of Britain’s Union Jack, an arrangement clearly agreed upon by the two country’s protocol officers. At the far end of the bridge, soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army stand, like some kind of olive-drab Grenadier Guards, while eager tourists quickly contribute to the wealth of the Eastman Kodak film company.
Once inside the People’s Republic, the segregation into groups becomes serious, and visitors must stay with their party for all bus rides and tours throughout the weekend. Almost my first act in China is to run afoul of these regulations by trying to get into the wrong railway car. A young tour guide asks to see my card, panics slightly because I am two cars down from Group Seven, my group, and leads me firmly but gently by the hand to my proper place, and tells me to wear my badge in future to avoid similar errors. Comrades in charge of tourism frown upon Western acts of asserting individuality such as not wearing an identification badge.
At precisely 1 p.m., to stirring martial music, the comfortable first-class train - each passenger firmly in his proper place - departs for the short run to China. And immediately the countryside is so Chinese, it is a visual cliche, like a setting for a movie based on a Pearl S Buck novel. Farmers in cone-shaped hats walk ankle-deep in the mud behind water buffalo, workers bicycle along the roads, women in baggy outfits bounce along with bamboo poles, loads hanging from each end, balanced on their shoulders, groups of geese and flocks of children scatter on either side of the road. Everywhere, peasants are planting rice, carrying vegetables or somehow engaged in preparing for that great Chinese passion - eating. The scene looks as if its director had carefully studied one of those huge Chinese wall murals before going to work.
At Canton, the stereotype jumps from rural to urban. Outside the huge station, we face a solid wall of people clad in the baggy blue jacket and pants of the Chinese worker. They are packed so tight that the air at the station exit is warmer, more humid than inside. I come to the scarcely-original conclusion that there are many people in China. Are they all here to meet friends, or to peer at the big, white-skinned, large-nosed gwai-los (foreigners, white ghosts)?
Everywhere over the next few days, curious Chinese gather wherever we stop, to stare blankly at the foreign devils. Old China hands say that one reason foreigners are not allowed to wander around freely in most cities is that they would cause a riot among curious Chinese craning to get a closer look. The experience is reminiscent of the scientist who put a monkey in a room to observe it, then peeked in the keyhole only to find the monkey peeking back at him. Have they brought us here to look at China, or so the Chinese can look at us, I wonder?
Canton, gateway to Hong Kong, has by far the most Western influence, and although there is a heavy schedule of visits to factories, monuments and the “Pavilion of Blood-cemented Friendship between the Chinese and Soviet Peoples,” visitors can wander the streets on their own.
On my second day in the grim, rubble-strewn city, I escape the temptations of the Friendship Store, with its brocade and books, China and Mao badges, and take a random walk through the streets. These are uniformly dull, miles of two- and three-storied buildings seemingly stamped from the same pattern.
A camera-laden tourist wandering the back streets attracts considerable friendly attention, and very quickly becomes a Pied Piper to the street urchins. In an open doorway, I notice a small factory where workers are making test tubes and other laboratory equipment by hand, heating the glass tubes over a small burner and bending them. Perfect for a “China industrializes” shot, and I am invited in.
But the task is impossible. Whenever the camera gets close to one of the young girls, she squeals with embarrassment, and, despite shouts of encouragement from her fellow workers, flees her work bench. Soon the place is in turmoil, full of laughter and banter, but no production, most of the girls having left their benches to huddle in mock terror in the corner. Fearing the entry of a stern party cadre concerned that the monthly production figures of the Kwantung Province glassware factory might fall below the quota, I depart.
A phalanx of children blocks my path, but like Moses parting the water of the Red Sea, I cleave a path through the pack merely by pointing my mighty Olympus camera at them.
It is time for dinner, and one feature of the trip is a meal in one of Canton’s best restaurants (we eat most of our meals in the cavernous dining room of the Tung Fang hotel, where tourists stay).
It is a feast, 12 courses of meat, vegetables, fish and prawns in combinations only the Chinese could dream up. Many would-be trenchermen fall by the wayside long before the last dishes are brought to the table. But if the Chinese make heavenly food, they make hellish liquor. Pigtailed waitresses in white smocks and Bruce Lee kung-fu shoes, no doubt motivated by the Chinese stereotype of Westerners as gross creatures with insatiable appetites, pour drinks with a reckless generosity. These include a reddish colored wine, like cheap sherry adulterated with sugar and rubbing alcohol, and a white, foul firewater tasting of sweat socks soaked in liquefied blue cheese. Fortunately, there is a seemingly endless supply of China’s Tsingtao and Baiyun beer.
This big meal is the height of the nightlife, as determined late revelers gather at the restaurant on the top floor of the old wing of the Tung Fang hotel, where tired waitresses trying to close the place down and go home reluctantly sell drinks. Canton is not Sin City, and the fleshy pleasures of much of the Orient are absent in this moralistic society. (In fact, many tourists report a drop in carnal interests, perhaps the result of seeing all of the women in pig tails and the same baggy outfits). Reliable reports from refugees who make it to Hong Kong say there are prostitutes in China. These are called roadside chickens, or motors, but there have been no confirmed sighting of these rare birds by Western observers.
The highlight of the trip comes on the last day when we head out of the city for a people’s commune, an hour away on a narrow asphalt road. The only other traffic we meet is bicycles, tractors and occasional trucks, a scene of pastoral calm marred by our driver’s fascination with his horn.
The misty, overcast weather gives an eerie beauty to the countryside, where peasants behind their plows or bending over planting rice are reflected in the calm, muddy water.
The Huashan People’s Commune, we are told, is of average size, consisting of 14,200 families divided into 26 production brigades. Do all communes have a demonstration board in the lecture hall complete with colored lights indicating new roads, irrigation canals and power lines? The pep talk by the head of the commune is surprisingly low key and easy on the propaganda, and we are taken on a tour of the machinery workshops and the hospital. At the hospital’s old folk’s home, an 88-year-old woman gives the system the biggest plug we have heard yet, telling us how bad it was before 1949.
As we get off our bus at the primary school, hundreds of children lined up in two orderly rows begin applauding. It is a moving experience. I am told later by an old China hand in Hong Kong that this is not a Chinese custom. The Chinese were taught to clap by the Russians, and they think that all Westerners like it. The kids keep up the applause as we pass in front of them and walk to the school. There, I realize I have left my film behind, so I head back to the bus. As soon as they see me, the children start applauding again. They keep it up as I run to the bus, enter the wrong one, exit to renewed applause, leap into the next bus, pick up my film and trot back to join my group, now disappearing behind the buildings. It is like running a gauntlet of hundreds of curious, peering black eyes.
“Now we know how Mao felt,” remarks a caustic German.
In a one-room school, four-year-olds shout out their M
andarin lessons with all the gusto of a high school football team in training. In the sports building, we encounter the famous ping pong diplomacy. We watch the boys and girls playing at about 10 tables, then we are invited to play. The kids destroy the Westerners in every game. In the yard outside, children from all over the school complex run to the assembly yard and take their places in front of a stage, just like soldiers forming up on a parade ground.
A political demonstration? No. they all have ping pong paddles and, in unison, with great shouts they go through the motions of playing a game.
Our last official stop is a school room where about 20 children in bright costumes and heavy makeup stand outside the door and sing a song of greeting. It is the only flash of color we see in China outside the stage of the acrobatic and magic show. Inside, we cram into the desks, knees almost to our chins, and drink tea while the kids dance and sing to the squeak of the er hu and other traditional instruments - the token dance of praise to Chairman Hua Kuo Fung and Chairman Mao Tse Tung, as well as apolitical numbers such as The Swallows Return to the Meo people.
The show over, the children return to the front of the school to say goodbye to their guests, shyly offering their tiny hands to shake, a touching scene even to callous journalists convinced it is a public relations job for the People’s Republic.
The whole new tourism policy seems to me to be a form of public relations exercise. While the country badly needs the hard foreign currency, as one tour guide explained it, “We want to make friends.” And China, the xenophobic Gang of Four gone, feels confident enough to show itself off.
YUNNAN
Kunming to the Stone Forest
Spring 1987
I never touched the great scribe’s pen; the Chinese muse will never sing for me. It wasn’t the climb, although the thousand steep steps up the cliffside outside Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, were frighteningly precipitous. But the narrow path to the top of Dragon Gate was as crowded as a Cantonese free market, with squealing children, smooth-cheeked young soldiers on leave and stolid, craggy peasants. Just ahead, a shrine in the rock wall contains the golden image of Kui Xing, the Patron God of Scholars, Wen Chang, the God of Literature.
The Peace Correspondent Page 4