“Where what is?” he asked.
“Shaolin Temple,” I said again, trying to get the tones just right.
Chinese is a tonal language. Words spelled the same way mean different things when pronounced with one of the four different tones: the 1st stays level, the 2nd rises, the 3rd sinks and then rises, and the 4th falls. For example, the sentence “ma [1st] ma [4th] ma [3rd] ma [1st]?” means “Did mother curse the horse?” First-year Chinese students either use their heads or their index fingers to try to get the tones right: half the class looks like bobblehead dolls, the other like conductors of a Lilliputian orchestra.
“Where?” he asked again.
I broke down and used my index finger, making a Nike swoosh for the third tone Shao (literally “young”) and a rising flick for the second tone lin (forest). “Shao…lin.” Still no comprehension. I tried a different approach.
“You know, kungfu,” I said, making some vague punching motions.
“Oh, the Shaolin Temple. You want to study kungfu?” he laughed. “The Shaolin Temple, I am not certain. I think it was destroyed.”
My heart dropped.
“Destroyed? What do you mean?”
“It is no longer,” he said. “Do you want to visit the Great Wall? I have a friend who is a tour guide.”
I stopped in the middle of the lobby. My mind was flying through exit options. The fall semester at Princeton had already started; I’d have to wait until spring semester to reenroll. I’d have to go back to Topeka and live with my parents. And this after we’d had such a big fight over my decision to go. I’d need to find a job to pay the money back. What had I spent so far? $1,400 for the plane ticket. $50 for the visa, $10 for the cab. I’d have to stay at least a day or two, at $110 a night, before I could change my tickets…
There was no way I was going back yet. Even if there were nothing left but charred remains, I’d see the Shaolin Temple.
“No, I do not want to see the Great Wall,” I told him.
I was still trying to convert my expenditures up until this point into minimum-wage hours when the doorman, who had carried my bags into my room, asked if I wanted to help him convert some of his local currency into dollars.
“My cousin, you understand, she is a very diligent student,” he explained. “She has been accepted to a college in America. But all she has is RMB. She needs American dollars. Will you help a friend?”
Appropriately for the country that invented paper money, China had two currencies: the people’s money (RMB) and foreign exchange currency (FEC), the only type of money the Bank of China would trade for dollars. While it served various functions, FEC was basically a fiscal prophylactic. It prevented the local populace from catching financial foreign diseases (dollars, yen, francs), which tended to result in a feverish desire to leave the country permanently. Because RMB was nonconvertible, a Chinese millionaire turned into a pauper the moment he stepped out of the country. But this contraceptive method was already breaking down due to the growing number of laowai and the size of the black market. To the Chinese, every foreigner was a walking currency exchange. After “Hallo,” “Shanja mahnie?” would be the mangled English I’d hear most frequently.
I didn’t understand much of this at the time. All I knew was FEC and RMB were supposed to be exchanged at a 1-to-1 rate. The government-run Bank of China was trading FEC for dollars at 5.7 to1. The doorman, my new friend, was offering RMB for dollars at 6.5 to 1. A great deal. Would $200 be okay?
Certainly.
That afternoon, as I sat staring at CNN in a jet-lagged fog, too tired to fall asleep and too exhausted to move, I was visited by another doorman, a maid, and two midlevel managers, all of whom had similarly remarkable, overachieving relatives in need of dollars for their studies abroad. It was not until several weeks later, after growing suspicious and asking around, that I discovered the black market rate was in fact 8.2 to 1. After traveling China by train in 1986, Paul Theroux would write at length about the Chinese saying, “You can always trick a foreigner.” Six years later the Chinese were too savvy to ever use that phrase in my presence, but the attitude hadn’t changed. Theroux thought the phrase, as well as being insulting, was inaccurate, but it wasn’t in my case. I was the sucker at the table, and I didn’t know it yet.
Of course, to be fair to those hotel employees, they still gave me a better rate than the Bank of China. The Chinese have another saying, “A fish stinks from its head.”
The next morning I went to Tiananmen Square, the largest public square in the world. It is like a gray, stone version of the National Mall in D.C.—an open center surrounded by the government’s memorials to itself. It is bound to the north by Tiananmen Gate, which leads to the Forbidden City and bears a humongous two-story portrait of Mao Zedong as its only ornament—China’s Lincoln Memorial. To the west is the Great Hall of the People, which houses the National People’s Congress—the Capitol rotunda. To the east is the National History Museum—the Smithsonian.
The last media image I had of China was of that college kid, my age, standing in front of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) tank, a live test of Gandhi’s thesis that nonviolent resistance can defeat machine guns, tanks, and army bayonets. Gandhi was wrong that day. I was visiting Tiananmen to pay my respects.
Today Tiananmen was filled with picture-taking mainland Chinese tourists, most of them with a small child in tow. (In 1979 Deng Xiaoping had established a fairly strictly enforced one-child-per-family policy to control population growth.) As I closed my eyes for a moment of silence, I heard a shotgun blast.
I hit the deck. I looked around with my hands covering my head. Boom! The shotgun fired again. I located the shooter. It was a Beijing taxi, backfiring.
As I pushed myself to my knees, I found myself face-to-face with a Chinese toddler wearing crotchless pants, which allowed him to tinkle and poop as freely as a pet, his uncircumcised boyhood swinging freely in the breeze. He was staring with concentration as if to determine what species of creature I was—Biggus nosus. I smiled. He picked his tiny nose. Scraping myself and what little dignity I had remaining off the stones, I stood up. The boy’s parents, rural peasants visiting their capital, were smiling. Wrapped in an army surplus winter coat, the husband pointed his camera at me and raised his eyebrows. I nodded. Then he pointed to the ground, indicating that he wanted to re-create the shot of me on my stomach cowering in fear. I demurred.
I decided to get some directions. I had my Fodor’s China book with me. I walked over to a police officer (or maybe it was an army officer—it’s hard to tell in a police state) and opened the book to the map of China.
“Excuse me, could you tell me where the Shaolin Temple is?” I asked in Mandarin.
He ignored me, staring straight ahead.
“I am sorry. My Chinese is not very good,” I said, trying to enunciate clearly. “Could you please tell me where the Shaolin Temple is?”
He didn’t flicker. Thinking I was getting the tones wrong again, I pantomimed a few kungfu moves.
“You know kungfu?”
Still no reaction. But the sight of a tall, skinny laowai making kungfu strikes next to an army guard gathered a crowd of onlookers, mostly elderly men and women.
“What do you want?” one of the old women with gray streaks through her hair asked in a friendly manner.
They were all smiling at the potential discovery of an amusing anecdote they could tell their friends when they returned home.
I pointed to the map of China and asked, “Do you know where the Shaolin Temple is?”
“Aiya,” she said. “Wow! The laowai’s Chinese is excellent.”
“Oh, no, it is inadequate,” I said, dropping my head. “Totally inadequate.”
“Look, the foreigner is humble,” she said, continuing to speak to the rest of the group about me as if I weren’t there. They all nodded in agreement and approval.
One of the men agreed by saying, “His Chinese is better than Dashan’s.”
Thi
s started an argument. A woman in the back disagreed, “This laowai’s Chinese is good but not quite to Dashan’s level.”
And so it went for several minutes. I later learned that Dashan (big mountain) was the Chinese name of Mark Rowswell, a Canadian, who had come over to teach English in 1988. His Chinese was so perfect, in particular his skill at a traditional form of comedic dialogue rich in puns and allusions called xiangsheng (crosstalk), that Chinese television variety shows regularly booked him as a performer and emcee. After his first appearance, he became a national celebrity and his Chinese the gold standard against which every other laowai’s Chinese was compared, usually unfavorably. As such, I would soon come to realize Dashan was the bane of every expatriate’s life.
Finally, I interrupted. “So where is the Shaolin Temple?”
“Oh, it is in Henan,” the first woman said, pointing to the center of the map.
A sense of relief washed over me, “So, the Shaolin Temple is there?”
She looked at me pointedly. “In the past it was there. It has been destroyed.”
“Are you sure?”
“During the war it was destroyed by the Japanese.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. But before I could turn away another old woman in the crowd came to my rescue.
“What kind of words are you saying? The Shaolin Temple has been rebuilt. My nephew visited it last year.”
“No, the Japanese destroyed it,” the first woman insisted.
“That was the southern Shaolin Temple in Fujian Province. The northern Shaolin Temple in Henan was rebuilt by the government.”
“Grandmother,” I asked, showing her the map of China. “How do I get there?”
The woman drew an imaginary line on the map from Beijing to Zheng Zhou, Henan’s capital, and said “huoche.”
“I am sorry,” I said. “I do not know the meaning of that word.”
She smiled and made the universal steam-whistle “choo choo” noise, garnering laughter from the crowd.
I thanked her profusely and immediately hailed a cab.
Beijing’s streets, the straight, wide avenues connected by a series of concentric ring roads, contained the entire history of human transportation: horses, donkeys, oxen, tractors, trucks, European luxury cars. But on that first visit it was the bicycles that caught my eye, mostly old 1950s paperboy models, gray with baskets in front, a migratory mass that flowed through the traffic in the hundreds, the thousands, swarming pedestrians and cars, moving like a flock of birds. As my cabdriver weaved in and out of the traffic toward my hotel, the groups were so dense that I held my breath every time one of the bicyclists made a sudden move, certain that this would cause a domino crash that would bring down the entire fleet of them, but it never did.
“How long have you been a cabdriver?” I asked when we stalled at a stoplight.
“Hey, your Chinese is excellent.”
“No, it is not very good.”
“No, no, you speak well. Do you know Dashan?”
“I have heard of him.”
“He’s Canadian. What country are you from?”
“America,” I replied.
“America is a good country. Very strong.”
“No, it’s just average.”
“Oh no, it is great. Not like China. China is inadequate. Too backward.”
“But you are progressing rapidly,” I said.
“Not enough. We’ll need fifty years of progress to catch up with America.”
“But on the economic front, China’s progress is much faster than America’s,” I said, thinking of the double-digit GDP growth that China had enjoyed over the past decade since Deng’s reforms took wing.
“You say the economic aspect,” he said, having caught my other meaning. “You don’t think the political aspect is progressing?”
“Not after June 4th.”
That was the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
“Ah,” he sighed and went silent.
For the first time, I noticed the laminated mini-portrait of Mao Zedong hanging from his rearview mirror. As it twisted around I saw that the other side had a portrait of Zhou Enlai—a hero of the Communist revolution and the driving figure behind China’s rapprochement with the United States in the 1970s.
I waited for a moment, trying to decide whether to press forward. I couldn’t get the image of that student standing in front of a tank out of my mind.
“What do you think of what happened?” I asked.
I was expecting him to be either evasive or ill-informed. The Chinese government had put out a lot of propaganda saying that the students had attacked the army first and the army was acting in self-defense. What he said surprised me.
“What I think is those college kids who are supposed to be so smart were really stupid. Fucking college kids.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do they know about democracy? What do they know about running the government? In five thousand years of history China has never had democracy. These stupid college kids want a revolution? They want democracy? Fangpi!” he spat. “Fart!”
Less than 5 percent of Chinese students attended college in the early 1990s, so they were the elite of the elite, and not always well loved by the rest of the country.
I tried again, “But freedom is good—”
“Freedom? How do we get freedom? Revolution? Revolutions don’t bring freedom. They bring luan. And what does chaos bring? Starvation. Who starves? Not college kids. The poor starve, that’s who.”
“But don’t you think it would be better to have more political freedom?”
“The government gives us economic openness. The people get richer. In return, we don’t bother the government about political openness.”
I leaned back in the seat. This wasn’t going the way I thought it would.
“Don’t you want both?” I asked.
“China has a saying, ‘Slowly, slowly go.’ Look at Russia. It used to be China’s big brother. They told us what to do. Then you Americans went over there and told them to have political and economic openness at the same time. How are they now? Now, Russian girls come to China to work as prostitutes. Now, we are big brother.”
“But you don’t think it’s bad that the army killed its own people?”
“It is a pity,” he said and was silent for a moment. Then he tried to explain himself again more slowly and deliberately.
“Look at it this way, China has more than one billion people,” he said. “So we have a few less now.”
He looked back in the rearview mirror at me. I must have had a look of horror on my face, because a wicked gleeful smile spread across his face. Freaking out the laowai was fun.
“You know what would be the best thing for China?” he asked.
“No, I don’t,” I said, knowing I was being set up.
“Get rid of half the people. That’d be about right. Just take half the people and kill them.”
“That wouldn’t be too easy,” I said, playing along. “How would you choose?”
“I’m glad you asked. I will tell you, my friend,” he said, enjoying himself. “China should go to war. Yes, China should go to war with America. And then China should send our soldiers into battle without any weapons.”
“China already tried that.”
“Really?”
“Yes, during the Korean War.”
“Heh, that’s right. Which side won?”
I remembered my grandfather telling me stories about how American soldiers on the backs of jeeps would fire into charging PLA units carrying broken broomsticks as their only weapons. The machine gunners would shoot until their barrels melted.
“Neither,” I said.
We rode the rest of the way in silence.
Over the next two years I would ask a variety of Chinese people, including some Beijing college students, what they thought about the Tiananmen Square massacre and heard essentially the same response, although usually with less c
ontempt for the protestors. The demonstrations were premature, they told me. China was not ready for democracy. A repressive government was preferable to luan.
Luan was the most terror-inducing word in the language, and given the country’s history, particularly its twentieth-century history, it probably should be. So the people and the government had come to an implicit social contract: The government (i.e., the Communist Party) would help the people lift themselves out of poverty, and in return, the people would not protest the repressive political power of the government.
And after the people were rich? I would ask. Mostly the Chinese would just shrug, “Who knows?” But I met one businessman who said with a refreshing cynicism, “You can’t buy love, but you can buy freedom.”
3
SLEEPING BEAUTY
The North Beijing train station was a vivid example of the kind of pervasive poverty the Chinese people were willing to concede their political freedom to escape. It looked like a refugee camp after a war of ethnic cleansing. Actually, a refugee camp looks better, because at least it has Red Cross tents. The lines of waiting travelers spread out of the terminal into the surrounding area for hundreds of yards. Clearly some of the peasants had camped out for days waiting for tickets. Everywhere I looked there were old women, pregnant women, and little kids trying to nap with only a coat or a piece of cardboard between them and the damp stone ground.
I had packed a sleeping bag, in case I would have to camp outside the Shaolin Temple to gain admittance, like Caine did in Kung Fu. Faced with the possibility of having to sleep outside the Beijing train station, this entire adventure was beginning to feel nightmarish. I fiddled with the travel pouch holding my passport and return airplane ticket. I went to an old peasant woman, who looked to be at the back of the line, and asked, “Should I wait behind you?”
“No,” she said and pointed to the other end of the hall. “Laowai over there.”
I cut through tangled lines until I finally was able to squeeze inside the building. The station was a vast gothic structure with huge arched ceilings. There were several dozen ticketing booths, each of which had lines that stretched beyond the building. I asked a young man where I should go to buy a ticket to Zheng Zhou, thinking that maybe the lines were divided by geographical region.
American Shaolin Page 3