by Pico Iyer
Twenty minutes later, a gliding taxi took me through broad avenues of tree-lined quiet, past an elaborate network of sentry posts and into the Forbidden City of the New China: Beijing’s main foreigners’ compound. Jinguomenwai reminded me of nothing so much as some bleak housing estate in a featureless British industrial town: block after block of numbered concrete towers, encircled by parking lots and vacant lots in which African kids played dustily and Muslim mothers wheeled prams. Behind them, stretching grayly into the gray distance, were more built-by-number blocks, a motorway, a hazy skyline. Within this well-guarded protectorate, my host explained, the expat community was obliged to live as if it were a commune like any other: foreigners did their shopping at the Friendship Store, their socializing at the International Club, their living inside this group of blocks, or one of two others.
That night, for dinner, we went around the corner to the Jianguo Hotel, a replica of the Holiday Inn in Palo Alto. Aliens, my host explained, did enjoy a little more freedom now than they had done in the past, but they were still kept largely under house arrest. A few lucky foreigners were put up in the splendor of the $150-a-night Great Wall Hotel (which offered on Friday nights “the romance of the Mediterranean … souvlaki, pastas, gnocchi”), and others could take $85 lunches at Maxim’s. But the Jianguo was the place where most foreign residents usually ate. In the coffee shop, customers consulted menus on HOJO place mats while white-bloused, green-skirted waitresses circulated with refills of coffee and men in tall white hats cooked burgers; in the lobby, a girl clunked her way unhappily through “Beautiful Dreamer” and the theme from Love Story, while in the French restaurant, tuxedoed waiters with Parisian manners served us filet mignon, duck à l’orange and mandarin sorbet with peach slices. As we went on chatting, my host happened to mention that he came from California. In reality, he came from the next town up the coast from mine. And, as it transpired, he had been to college in my own hometown. As a matter of fact, we soon discovered, he had learned some of his political theory from my father. That was my first sign that Beijing was among the smallest of places, as well as the largest.
SCALE, INDEED, WAS the single great feature of Beijing: sheer monumentality. The city had little of the decorous dignity or stately grandeur of a Washington, D.C., or even a New Delhi; it just had bigness plain and simple. And the plainness and simplicity only heightened the bigness. Beijing’s buildings seemed solid, unguarded, declarative, tributes in block capitals to the rightness of the Right Way. This was not, it seemed, a place that allowed itself the luxury of decorative flourishes or side-street nuances; it was a city of grand simplicities.
In Beijing, moreover, proportion was an expression of priority. The huge public buildings made concrete the assertion of a will that was public, an ego that was only collective; their effect was to state inarguably that the sum of individuals was less than the whole of the state. Beijing thus appeared to be both imperial and impersonal: a city drafted by committee. And this in turn made for a curious disjunction: while the public world here seemed constructed on the epic scale, the private was on the miniature. The place seemed built not for people but for abstractions. The streets were huge, but virtually carless. The official buildings were enormous, but the sidewalk stalls were cramped. The bureaucratic monoliths were gargantuan and yet, by all accounts, private homes were smaller here than anywhere else in the world. Everything, in fact, was topsy-turvily scaled, right down, and up, to a system in which more than a thousand million people were ruled by one twinkling four foot eleven octogenarian who liked to remain behind the scenes. Beijing seemed a Brobdingnag peopled by Lilliputians.
In recent years, of course, this vertical division had been further stressed and strained by a horizontal split. Erected like a Trojan horse within the very heart of the Old China was a New China, designed to encourage all the influences that the country had long worked hard to keep out: capitalism, individualism, fashion, freedom, the flash and grab of the West. The rationale was simple: China wanted progress, and progress meant the West. In return for giving foreigners a precious glimpse of the past, the country now hoped to gain a lucrative taste of the future; by attracting the outer world, it planned to bolster the inner.
Thus the world’s largest country had started putting Mao’s celebrated maxim—“Make the past serve the present, make the foreign serve China”—to radically new use. The Great Wall, established to keep out the world at large, was now being used to attract it. Foreign influences, long reviled as obscene, were now being welcomed. The little red book was now being rivaled by the big greenback. And as the country began hawking its tradition to the outsiders it had long distrusted, it also set about importing Western goods, methods and funds—everything, so it hoped, but Western values.
So far, the government had generally managed to keep its interactions with foreign admirers as ritualized and precisely choreographed as a Chinese opera. Foreign devils had been admitted—but only, so it seemed, in much the same spirit as the barbarians who had flocked to China for centuries to kowtow before the emperor. And thousands of foreigners, who had long had a soft spot for chinoiserie and old Cathay, were more than willing to comply with any and every demand in their eagerness to inspect a Middle Kingdom as romantic to them as Middle Earth. Thus, six years after the door had begun to creak open, ceremonial visitors were still flocking in to pay their respects. Just before I arrived in China, three wandering shepherds of Washington—Geraldine Ferraro, Robert Dole and Tip O’Neill—passed through to salute the birth of the New China. The day I arrived in Beijing, Richard Nixon, still regarded here as a hero who had helped to open the door, returned to pay a call on the ruling triad; not far behind him came Felipe González. Jerry Rawlings of Ghana followed soon thereafter, and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore was celebrating his birthday at Confucius’ birthplace. The Chancellor of Austria arrived in Chengdu just as I got there, and a steady train of panjandrums was lining up outside, waiting to file through the Great Wall, the Great Hall of the People and the latest version of the Great Leap Forward.
By now, of course, the New China had also agreed to receive official delegations, as well as just plain tourists (so long as they acted like diplomatic delegations). In 1985, in fact, tourism was 59 percent higher than in the boom year of 1984, and four million foreigners were crowding around the Great Wall (soon to be surrounded, no doubt, by a Great Mall). In 1982, the door had even been opened to individual travelers. By the time I was in China, however, facilities for visitors were still so limited that tourism remained largely a matter of tour group collectives being herded around local collectives (in the courtship of the West, as on any uncertain date, there was safety in numbers). China had opened up to the West—but it had done so, I felt, in the spirit of a girl who admits a suitor just long enough to accept his tributes before showing him the door.
Thus foreigners in China even more than other closed socialist countries such as Cuba or Burma still found themselves treated in the manner of deposed royalty, quarantined within their own sumptuous world-within-a-world. Foreign residents lived like diplomats, or prisoners, within their imperial—and imperialist—compounds; tourists, meanwhile, were transported around the country inside a kind of capitalist’s cordon sanitaire. They were given special waiting rooms at airports, special reserved seats on buses, special carriages in trains. They traveled in their own taxis and sometimes their own planes, made merry in their own segregated discos. They paid specially marked-up entrance fees at monuments, and special 75 percent higher rates on trains. They even had their own kind of currency—the Foreign Exchange Certificate (FEC)—with which to pay for foreigners-only hotels and $50 foreigners-only taxis. And their only contact with the country came from Western-wise locals and jingle-singing children.
On paper, at least, China’s “friendship offensive” was thus proceeding as planned; in practice, however, the delicate mating dance was charged with all the uncertainties that attend any young woman who lets herself be wined and dined while
hoping that her admirer will be content with nothing in return but a farewell kiss. The Chinese were making friends as a way of making money; many Westerners hoped that by giving money, they could gain new friends. In the process, more than a billion peasants were suddenly being confronted by teams of butter-reeking round-eyes from the West, whose own intentions were confused by their dangerously wide eyes. Thus questions began to multiply. How far could the girl go without committing or compromising herself? What exactly was expected of her in return? What if her suitor, in his keenness to get closer, suddenly lost his head? And what if the girl, in spite of everything, somehow lost her heart?
IN THE DAYS that followed, I found myself constantly shuttled back and forth from one side of the curtain to the other. Now I was among peasants in the shabby streets, now with foreigners in their gilded cages. One minute the city would extend her left hand, and the next minute her right, and neither seemed to know what the other was doing.
MY FIRST FULL morning in the capital, I awoke before dawn and walked through the sleeping foreigners’ compound to a nearby park. Inside, slow-moving ancients were ghosting their way through a daily tai chi ballet in the early light, while out from a small pavilion came the weird piping of ancient instruments played by a group of old-timers. Later, as the light came up, the rhythm for the city as a whole was set by the bicycles that wheeled along in leisurely brigades, pedaling, pedaling, pedaling with hasteless equanimity. Again the numbers were almost impossible to grasp: there were 5.6 million bicycles in Beijing and all of them seemed to be moving through the streets at once. But again, theirs seemed a casual motion, tranquil as the flight of swallows. Nothing smudged the grand serenity of the big city, neither cars nor airplanes nor horns; even in Tiananmen Square the vast quiet seemed scarcely dented by humanity.
Later that afternoon, I chanced down a small lane overhung with willows, a hushed place beside a river. Temples peeped up in the distance and above a wall. Along the noiseless riverbank, a solitary old man sat in thoughtful repose, some children clambered up a tree. The afternoon drifted past with the twittering hum of Indian summer. Later, in the drizzle, the Summer Palace was a moody vision of a long-ago canvas, half hidden and softened by the mist. In the golden twilight, back on the main street, men and women languidly batted shuttlecocks back and forth while old men looked on, arms folded, leaning on the seats of bicycles propped up against trees.
That evening, however, I was catapulted back into the other Beijing. I had managed to track down a local colleague, Jimi Florcruz, and he invited me to join him and a friendly bear of a Chinese student at Beijing’s latest night spot, the city’s greatest social revolution, said Jimi, in all his fourteen years of living here. So we drove over to the plush Lido Hotel and gulped down a few sandwiches at the Tenpin coffee shop (its menus shaped like their eponyms). Then we hit the new China’s first set of bowling lanes. Nobody else was in evidence there, except for a few Filipinos who worked in the local hotels and a tiny Chinese girl who looked about twelve but was, I was told, a very important person—the country’s foremost Taiwan-style singer. Jimi, who came here several times a week, dispatched the pins with elegant efficiency. The Chinese giant, a stranger to the sport, sent the balls hurtling through the air so that they landed with a tremendous crash somewhere in roughly the same province as the pins. The diminutive songstress was a marvel of precision. And I, to my surprise, bowled a 138, my highest—and if truth be told, my lowest—score in a decade.
THE NEXT DAY, Jimi pushed a Dire Straits cassette onto his tape system and drove me in his Honda through enormous streets to a large block of old apartments. Up a narrow flight of stairs he led me, and then up to a small door. A handsome old lady opened up, and, twinkling delightedly at the sight of her adoptive son, hurried off into the kitchen to cook up the vegetables he had brought. Meanwhile, her husband padded out to give us a formal welcome. He too was in his seventies, and he too was strikingly handsome, a patrician elegance in his unlined face, his thick white hair and his unstooped body.
The couple’s small main room had the same look of well-cared-for poverty, the same poignant attic quality that I had often seen in Bombay and Havana, its few objects arranged with touching care. Motioning us to two chairs, the old man sat down on a narrow bed. Beside him, on a sideboard, reverentially covered by a dish towel, was a TV and a Betamax (brought back, I was told, by a nephew studying in Paris). Scattered around were a few old Bee Gees cassettes.
As our host began firing questions at Jimi about the latest news from Taiwan, America, the world, he handed me a stack of dusty old photo albums to leaf through. Inside, I was instantly transported back to the glamour of a vanished age—Shanghai, 1936—when the air was electric with talk of “democracy.” In every other brown-and-white snapshot, proud young men, solemn in their horn-rimmed glasses, impeccably garbed in three-piece suits and sleek overcoats, posed gravely in front of statues whose erectness was outdone by their own; and in every other stamp-sized picture, their glamorous sisters and fiancées showed off the latest fashions from Wellesley or Milan. Every shot, moreover, caught the whole golden confederacy in a moment of splendid preparation—seated in rows before large houses, looking up from long tables at lavish banquets, striking Hollywood poses at some ski resort. This gentleman, explained the old man, was now an important professor in America, this man had followed General Chiang to Taiwan, this lady was a socialite in New York. Every one of them had fled—except, so it seemed, our gentle host.
And what about these X’s, I asked, scrawled in crude ballpoint across some of the holiday snaps—were they the handiwork of some mischievous child? No, said Jimi calmly, this was the doing of the Red Guards. They had raided the house during the Cultural Revolution, confiscated all the pictures and pinned them up at the old man’s institute as proof of his decadence. These were the only photos that the couple had managed to recover. The rest of their past had been destroyed.
A silence fell. Then the bright-eyed old man assured me that these days, life was much easier. He and his wife were free now to publish a Kuomintang newspaper, and to tell jokes about Uncle Mao. They were allowed to stage dances and plays (he directed my attention to their latest, color photos) to raise funds for democracy. They had even been told that they might be assigned another apartment. And the famous singer who lived next door was free to perform any opera she wanted—not just the four revolutionary scores permitted by Madame Mao. That brought her almost 100 yuan ($30) each month.
In its way, indeed, the family had made its peace with the New China. The couple’s young grandson and his pretty fiancée (now sitting decorously, knee by knee, in the tiny room next door) were both members of the People’s Liberation Army song-and-dance unit; their perky granddaughter, who was helping out in the kitchen, spoke English so well that the diplomatic services were trying to lure her away from a hotel (though the hotel refused to release her unless the manager’s underemployed and underqualified daughter was also given a position in the diplomatic services). As for the old man himself, he had recently embarked on a new career as a translator. Though he spoke not a word of English, he had labored, with the help of the heavy dictionary Jimi had given him, sentence by painful sentence, through the whole of Brian’s Song, the heartrending tale of a Chicago Bears running back who had died of cancer. That rendition had proved so wildly popular that now he had been commissioned to do the same with Ingrid Bergman’s autobiography. He was also working on the lives of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Elizabeth Taylor. On his desk lay the proofs of Gielgud’s memoirs.
Yet through all the tales of profit and progress, the Old China hung in the air like incense. Sitting together on the bed after lunch, the couple explained a little about how their world had changed. In the old days, they said, people had usually been more polite: often, two strangers at a bus stop were so busy saying “After you,” “No, after you,” that the bus would end up leaving without them both. And in the old days, they continued, not angrily but with a quiet wistfuln
ess, people had had more respect for their elders, a greater sense of family. Nowadays, they did not know what to believe. With that, the old lady smiled and asked how long Jimi and I had been friends. We had met only yesterday, he explained, but we had worked together on stories for years. “Ah,” she said, eyes twinkling. “An acquaintance of the spirit!” “No, no,” broke in her cheerful granddaughter. “An acquaintance of the telex.”
THAT EVENING, I went to a party in a palatial flat in Jinguomenwai, where hot dogs and chicken were barbecued to the sound of the Temptations, and all the talk was of the video rental club set up by the couple at the Mexican embassy, and two girls just out of Radcliffe asked excitedly after common friends from Adams House.
MY LAST DAY in Beijing, I let myself just wander. Again, the overwhelming impression was of proportion askew: every other citizen seemed to be draped in shirt sleeves that swallowed up his hands, trousers baggy enough to fit three, jackets that hung around shoulders as if around an umbrella stand. In a sense, it seemed a version, in miniature, of the way that the individual never slipped snugly into the state here, but always seemed as removed from it as a spectator from the elaborate stagecraft of a Peking opera.
Indeed, the look that I came most to associate with Beijing was one of wide-eyed innocence, of peasants in ill-fitting suits gathered on the pavements, hands behind their backs as they peered around them, speechless and spellbound, at the stentorian monuments of the China both old and new. Sometimes I saw gray-beards simply gazing at a building in wonderment; sometimes I saw them gaping at the industrial-strength dimensions of an avenue. Often, I found them assembled in serene fascination on a sidewalk while a couple posed for a photo, or an Australian haggled with a vendor, or a Cadillac drove up to a foreigner’s hotel. Along the wide thoroughfares, rheumy-eyed old men led toddlers in peaked army caps by the hand, each as unsteady as the other, and each, so it seemed, as stunned by the new world around them.