A jolt, and everything moves. Steel cries out against steel, and I hang my head off the bunk to peer out the window. The depots of Beijing roll slowly by, and a thrill catches in my throat. I’m heading for the hinterlands of this empire. No going back now. A man climbs onto the top bunk of Berth 7 and stares at me. A cigarette hangs from his lips, and a large pink scar is chiseled out of his left cheek. I say “nĭ hăo” (hello), to snap his gaze. “Nĭ hăo,” he nods, and after a hefty, thoughtful puff of smoke, he asks my nationality and age. He’s a photographer with the China International Travel Service, he reveals proudly, and he explains to me the various parts of this vast country. “The coast is the face of China,” he says. “It’s rich, prosperous, and smiling.” He carves a smile in the air with his finger. “Now you,” he jabs his finger at me, “you’re going into the countryside—the belly of China.”
He says no more, and I peer again out the window. The belly. A cloying chicken odor wafts up through the cigarette fumes. I climb down, slip my socked feet back into my shoes, and sit beside the four men on the bottom bunk. One of them, a baby-faced man in a blue polo shirt, is dealing cards onto the sticky red table. The other three men smile at me while shelling peanuts, stacking chicken bones, and organizing cards in their hands. “He speaks Mandarin!” calls the photographer from his top bunk. They all look at me expectantly.
“Wŏ huì shuō yì diăn,” I say. I can speak a little.
“Not bad!” shoots the baby-faced dealer. “Are you accustomed to life in China?” He has deep dimples and an enormous forehead.
“Yes,” I say, as always. “Well, a bit,” I add. “It’s very interesting.” They ask about America, and I say it’s also a big country, like China—“difficult to describe in a few words.”
“Everyone has a car, right?” asks an older man, gray-haired at the ears.
“Most people.” I nod. “Not everyone.”
“The crime rate in America is very high,” explains the dealer, picking a card from his hand. “Lots of—” he uses a word I don’t know. He slaps the card down, and with that they take turns hurling cards violently onto the table, laughing with such genuine friendliness it’s hard to believe they met barely thirty minutes ago. I watch but can’t make sense of the game. The older man asks whether I like cards, and I nod but admit I don’t know their game.
“It’s easy,” says a man in a garish plaid shirt and dotted tie, slamming the Nine of Diamonds onto the table. “You just match the suits.” He shows me his cards to clarify, pointing at the Queen of Diamonds.
The fourth player, my sixth roommate, has hair that sticks up like a carrot and a nose reddened from embarrassment or a cold. He appears to win, and he tells me to play in his place. I refuse, but everyone insists—it’s apparently inevitable. “Sit down,” orders the dealer with a smile. “Take your cards.”
It’s my turn. I emphatically slap down the Jack of Spades, but the older man puts his hand on the card with a laugh. “Don’t cheat like a Japanese!”
I get away with the Eight of Spades but make so many mistakes they lose interest in the game and focus on me. Where did I live at Peizheng? How much money did I make? Did I graduate from college? Do I have loans? Where’s my wife? Do I believe Jesus will save me? The older man pours me tea, and I answer the questions. When I describe my recent stay in Beijing and complain about being barred from Tiananmen, they consider it strange that I even attempted to enter the square. “You’re a foreigner,” nods the dealer, as if to explain everything. I mention that since China now has a new ruler, it will hope to snatch Taiwan next. They agree that that’s what all Chinese hope for. The older man shakes his head. “America wants to be the policeman of the world, but you shouldn’t intrude in China’s affairs. The world is beginning to listen to a new voice—the Chinese voice.”
They offer me some sour dried fruit and vinegary green peppers, and I amaze them by successfully using chopsticks with my left hand. They gape at me eagerly, as if they’ve always heard Caucasians were freaks and now finally have an excuse to simply stare. I look down and explain that yes, indeed, I am left-handed. After I manage to pincer a dried lychee and pop it into my mouth, I reconfigure the chopsticks slightly for a stronger grip, and that’s the opportunity the older man needs to jump in and teach me the right way: one stick must be stationary, and I must be able to click the ends together and make a sound. They all instruct me, out of both pity and, it seems, a desire to indoctrinate me with correct thought and action, as if something horrible might happen were someone needlessly different. All Chinese are right-handed, as if it were law, but after a bit of tinkering they seem satisfied with me, a lifetime leftie.
“You must be very intelligent,” the mustached man finally nods.
“Well,” I disagree. “I can’t figure out this game.”
“No, most Americans are left-handed,” the dealer says.
The man with the garish tie eyes me. “In China, we have no gays or left-handed people because we have self-discipline.” He speaks matter-of-factly, and I just let it go.
I get up to search for the bathroom, letting the sickly guy back to the table. As I walk down the aisle, I pass people similarly comfortable in each little six-bunk home: Every bottom bed now appears to be a communal couch, each small table between them a place for ashtrays, jars of yellow tea, playing cards, newspapers, spare socks, bananas, packets of pork jerky. Shoes are off, games are on, and the mood is mellow for the two-day haul to Xi’an. A red-uniformed stewardess is rolling a cart down the aisle, refilling each home’s hot water thermos. The water’s free, but she’s asking a few yuan for soft drinks, shrimp crackers, and red plastic souvenirs. I shimmy around her cart and reach the end of the car, where I wrinkle my nose at the piercing stench of urine as I locate the bathroom. The metal room is alarmingly wet, and the toilet is a hole through which, from the right angle, the tracks can be seen speeding by. The floor sways, the wheels beneath me clatter. I hang my toilet paper on a nail, balance carefully, and squat.
Back in my bunk, the speaker, inches from my ear, blares about etiquette. “Railway guests must use proper trash receptacles...” Before the noise can drive me insane or the cigarette smoke asphyxiate me, I climb back down and claim one of two fold-out vinyl seats under the luggage rack. My companions apparently have no qualms about wantonly tossing their chicken bones, cigarette butts, and used tea leaves onto the floor. My eyes are drawn out the window. Miles of beautiful, green farmland sweep by, stretching endlessly. The lush farmland gives way gradually to a countryside painted with lighter greens and rawer beiges, then to still paler swaths of terrain that look taut and tired as if worked too hard. Civilization has picked and plowed this land continuously for over four millennia—the longest continuous civilization anywhere on earth. A small village rushes by in a blur of men squatting on a concrete platform; they’re there, then gone. They squat, at every station, every park, every hospital, every event; there always seem to be more people than can be accommodated. It’s as if China doesn’t have enough chairs. Only here aboard this hard sleeper is there room. Here are the folks at the front of the line, China’s new middle class, the ones who love Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the ones who are turning some meager profit, the ones who no longer need to farm the tired earth.
The farmland vanishes as we roll into the expansive metropolis of Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province. “Special fast” trains like this one stop only in the largest cities. The train slows, slows, and lurches to a halt. The dealer hops out, and I watch him wander across the spacious platform, beneath hammer-and-sickle banners, towards capitalist gètĭhu with their wagons of orange soda, noodle soup, and roasted chicken haunches. Meanwhile, beside me, the guy with the tie pushes up the window and buys a bowl of pork dumplings from a vendor. The torrid afternoon rushes in, smelling of sewage, and I marvel at how quickly I grow used to things—like air-conditioning, like the curt music of Mandarin, like solitude. I step down into the heat, to let it make me uncomfortable for a
moment.
Six different people remind me to reboard, and I smile. How could I feel alone when I have a billion parents? I sit again on the foldout chair, and the sniffling, spiky-haired guy, who could use some parenting himself, takes the other chair as the train resumes its roll. We gaze together out the window, watching pinches of mountains slowly approach from the horizon. China is a geological staircase from the Pacific to the Himalaya, and we’re ascending the first step, entering the province of Shanxi. We’re climbing into the belly. Lumpy hills sprout up around us, and I feel my solitude again—this state defined by what it lacks. I feel the expansion of nothingness inside me, the expansion of new and unseen spaces to explore. Solitude is now. Through the window, the sun detonates on the ragged horizon, shooting rays of pink and orange through spiraling strands of cloud.
The stewardess comes by with a meal cart, and the ill man hands her 10元. She scoops food onto a paper plate: a mound of white rice, a dollop of fatty beef, a spoonful of chopped green stalks, a sprinkling of chili peppers, a bright red sausage and, right on top, a rubbery fried egg. It seems expensive, but I opt for the same. I’ve been getting by on bananas and crackers, and it’s time for a real meal. As we chopstick the sustenance into our mouths, he asks in his rural accent about jobs in America. He’s on his way out to Gansu province to do construction. Buildings, he explains, are built differently here in China. He goes on and on, and I soon grow tired of trying to understand his stream of words. My eyes, my ears, my brain—my whole being—suddenly feels exhausted. I make a final comment, trying not to be rude, and then I stop listening. I spit out a bone from the last bit of beef, choke down the undercooked rice, and toss the plate into the hanging garbage bag. At least the droning voice in the speaker will be happy with me.
Medieval Germany rises up before my mind’s eye. I climb into my bunk and relax with Narcissus & Goldmund. The monk Narcissus teaches Goldmund about astrology, a forbidden subject in the cloister. He also teaches him science, which he calls “the determination to find differences.” He explains who they are, as people, these two devout yet opposite men: Goldmund, who’s still a boy, is ruled by the passionate senses, while Narcissus is ruled by arid reason; Goldmund is an artist, Narcissus a thinker. Shaking his head, Goldmund disagrees, denying all the differences. He wants to be strong, to be certain, to be holy, to be a monk.
I visit the bathroom to floss and brush, taking care to spit every drop back into the sink. My roommates bid me good-night, and I climb up top with my journal. I write about the huíguī and politics and war, about solitude and fatigue and friendliness, about trying to follow the conversations around me, and about the Chinese viewpoints that seem increasingly trite and shallow. On the stroke of ten, the car goes black. Mandatory bedtime. I unfold my cube of blankets, check my pouch and possessions, and stretch out. Like a lullaby, the bump-bump-clack-clack of the tracks rocks me to sleep.
Chapter 18
The New Light Party
治大國若烹小鮮
Ruling a large country is like cooking a small fish.
Tao Te Ching, 60
A carrot salesman in the market tells me the news. “Deng Xiaoping is dead.” I continue haggling with him and tell him I don’t believe him. He nods insistently. He finally packs up his produce, as others are doing around him. I move on to the scarred man selling incense. He confirms the impossible. The Paramount Leader, the emperor, the successor to Mao Tse-tung, is gone, whisked away by winter winds and some type of lung infection.
In China, emperors’ deaths are traditionally accompanied by small events, like earthquakes, floods, and revolutions. Mao died in 1976, when a heaven-shaking earthquake near Beijing leveled entire cities, killing a quarter million people. Deng followed Mao and held the reins for twenty years. Until today. I rush home, tell Byron, and dial the American Consulate. A man answers with a calm voice and a mild Georgia twang. “It’s true. Deng is dead. Things look OK now,” he says. “Stay in touch. If there’s trouble, it’ll start in Beijing, and there’ll be time to evacuate.” Every television channel carries retrospectives on Deng’s life: He was born in this quaint town in Sichuan Province; here he is as a young revolutionary worker in a French car factory; here he is with Mao, who called him “that little fellow.” Weren’t Deng’s market reforms great? He reformed our socialist economy; he initiated free markets in Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Guangzhou; he said, “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.”
I wander back out onto the streets, my curiosity getting the better of me. Traffic is nonexistent. The market is now closed, as are government buildings. Many shops are already decorated with fresh flowers and portraits of Deng. I explore the alleys of the market all the way down to the river, wondering whether the displays of sympathy are genuine or simply politically correct.
The day goes by without an earthquake or a revolution, and then another day, and another, and suddenly it’s Chinese New Year, the Year of the Ox. Firecrackers ring and roar in the reopened market, and a huge ox made of cardboard and dressed in confetti charges down the alley. A new era and a new year, all in a single week.
People are out everywhere again, and from various conversations I surmise that the displays are genuine: People really believe Deng brought prosperity to Guangzhou. Vendors repeatedly mention small bottles, and then I spot them—displayed on windowsills or arranged with photographs on staircases. Deng’s given name, Xiaoping, sounds like the Mandarin for “little bottle,” and so throughout his tumultuous political career people have displayed bottles to show support for him.
On TV, Communist Party Secretary Jiang Zemin dominates the screen with emotionless grimaces. Prime Minister Li Peng strides about as well. The banished but popular Zhao Ziyang is mentioned, and then the screen goes white. Could the banished leaders who have been living in Hong Kong since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre try a power play? Could this powder keg blow? We’re left to speculate. Deng followed Mao, but not based on any imperial dynasty’s coronation, let alone a popular election. There are new uncensored TV specials too. One declares China to be “the most Internet-ready country in the world”—without mentioning that almost no one owns a computer. Another declares that the people of Hong Kong are now, as strange as it sounds, even more “eager to be reunited with the Motherland”—despite the fact that political chaos is exactly what Hong Kongers fear when the British colony returns to China this coming summer. Another program explores America’s desire to rule the world and to subjugate China. “The U.S. has achieved its position through slavery and environmental pillage, and Chinese people must become strong and smart and protect the world from American hegemony,” says one analyst. The evening news repeatedly plays footage—as if to scare people—of American military exercises and American tanks, fighter jets, and aircraft carriers arriving in Taiwan. Byron decides it’s propaganda designed both to obscure political uncertainty among the leadership of the Communist Party and simultaneously to foment fear in order to rally the masses around the Party. For once I agree with him.
Second semester begins, and I tell my students about American culture, in the hope that at least these teenagers won’t succumb to jingoism or hatred. With the leadership vacuum in Beijing and with the American military massing in the Taiwan Straits, war between this country and my own suddenly seems possible.
Or perhaps it is all just propaganda.
Heeding the unfamiliar call of duty, I lecture my first class. “In America, most high school students spend about one hour on homework each night. Some—”
“One hour?” Sandoh interrupts immediately, glancing around the classroom. “Americans are lazy.” He grins into his desk. “And fat!”
“They are not lazy,” I counter, trying to remember how much time my classmates at Milton High School really spent on schoolwork. “The children, not the teachers, move from room to room—like you do for my class. Think about it, they’re like you. They’re also in school and taking tests on math and English
and science and—”
“Do they study Chinese?” Money asks.
“No, not too many. A lot of students study French and Spanish.” I describe my high school classes and courses, but they’re either not following me or they’re just bored. I ask if they have any questions. They leap to life. It’s the first instant I’ve truly thrown class open. They ask about everything they associate with America: The NBA, New York, Michael Jackson, superhero movies, Kobe Bryant. We move on to my hobbies, my hometown, my distant family, my nonexistent girlfriends. Watching their appreciative smiles and searching eyes, their eagerness to ask and understand, I realize that they’re not interested in the propaganda—they never were—and that I would never be able to control what they think anyway. My mind jumps back with them, to my own ninth grade days, and I devise a plan.
Using some Mandarin, I explain that they are to come up with a huàtí (topic)—something of their own choosing—and that they will work on it for two weeks and then make an oral presentation to the class. I watch them ponder for a few minutes. Walking from child to child, pad of paper in hand, I take down each student’s huàtí. Hong Kong, the Eiffel Tower, a nearby village named Huadu, Tom Cruise, grandparents, the food of Sichuan Province, Julia Roberts, Star Wars, Australian wildlife, Italian soccer.
Alice, who started the year as Sally, looks up at me when I reach her desk. “Rénquán.”
My eyes widen. “Human rights?”
She nods. I write it down and move to the next student.
March 4
Jiang Zemin, humorless and conservative, tapped by Deng in 1989 to a top post, is apparently the new ruler of China. Things are returning to their rhythm. “Growth must continue. Modernization and industrialization must go forward.” These are the government’s priorities, according to the local news, which also praises the peaceful transition as evidence of China’s political maturity.
Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China Page 13