Fresh Air Fiend (29 page)

I asked him whether he thought there would be another Cultural Revolution.

"Sure," he said.

"Why?"

"Mao said so. Another one. And one after that. Just one after the other."

The Antique Exchange is where the Chinese sell family treasures to the government, so that they can be resold in government antique shops and Friendship Stores (which are full of valuable and pretty museum pieces).

On a high stool in a darkened room sits a skinny Chinese man with protruding yellow teeth and wire-frame glasses. He is sitting crosslegged on the stool, and he wears a skullcap and puffs a cigarette by the light of a dim lamp. He points, raises a long fingernail, and beckons a man forward.

The man steps into the light carrying a canvas bag. He wears a loose army uniform and slippers. He begins to take crockery out of the bag—rice bowls, plates, dishes.

"No, no, no—" The smoker waves this stuff away.

The soldier takes out a stone lion.

"No—"

The soldier puts the lion away and takes out more rice bowls.

"No—"

The soldier takes out a blue porcelain jar, about ten inches high, luminous and lovely even in this bad light.

The skinny man stops smoking. He sets the jar aside.

The canvas bag is empty. The man shifts on his stool and writes a chit. There is no bargaining; the antique is assigned a price. The soldier puts the rejected stuff back into the bag, takes his slip of paper, and collects some money.

"They buy things for ten bucks, they sell them for a hundred bucks," a Chinese man had told me in Shanghai. The city was full of English speakers using slang from the Second World War.

What interested me was that this smoky, seedy interior was a government bureau. Outside it, a sign in Chinese said, "Sell Your Old Plates, Bronzes, and Carvings for Cash." Of course, this is capitalism in the service of the state, buying up heirlooms to sell to tourists, but the smoking man, the shelves of cracked porcelain, the dusty bronzes, the pitiful prices, pawnshop gloom—it all looked as old as China.

The antique shop prices were very high, but most of the merchandise deserved to be in museums. How long, I wondered, would these treasures be available to tourists?

Not everyone saw these objects as treasures. A woman from New York, Dorothy Hirshon, who would squint at an item and say, "That's the ugliest thing in China."

One night after dinner, at about nine o'clock, I went for a walk down a dark street. I had been out only about ten minutes when I was greeted ("Good evening, sir") by three young men, Comrade Ma, Comrade Lu, and Comrade Wee. They wanted to practice their English. I said that I had been reading the supernatural stories of Pu Sung-ling, his
Strange Tales of Liaozhai.
I asked them whether they believed in ghosts. They found this very funny.

"I don't believe in ghosts," Comrade Ma said.

I asked him why not.

"I never see one."

I said, "So there are no ghosts in China?"

"No," Comrade Lu said.

"What about your ancestors?" I asked.

Comrade Ma said, "They are under the ground."

I asked them whether they celebrated the Ching Ming Festival by exploding firecrackers in the graveyards.

They said they didn't celebrate it at all. "Overseas Chinese do that."

We passed a railway embankment where, behind a row of trees, young people were kissing. They embraced, standing up, on the shadowy side of the tree trunks. I called attention to the couples.

Comrade Ma said, "Since the Gang of Four were smashed, there is now kissing. From 1949 until the Gang of Four, there was no kissing. Now there is kissing. Even on television there is kissing."

"Did the Gang of Four kiss?"

"Oh, yes. But inside their houses!" Comrade Ma said.

The others laughed. They regarded Ma as a great wit.

I asked whether they themselves kissed girls.

Comrade Ma said, "Comrade Lu has a darling. He kisses. I have two darlings. I kiss them."

I said, "Indoors or outdoors?"

"Only married people can kiss indoors, in a room. We kiss over there. In the trees. Sometimes in the park. In the park, at night, you can put your hands around the girl—and other places. Ha-ha! Also other things. But it is very stony on the ground. Too many rocks!"

"Mister Paul," Comrade Wee said, "what is the proper way to kiss?"

He had told me earlier that he was a printer. This inspired me. I said that kissing was like printing. You printed your lips on the girl's lips—not too hard. They laughed and said, Yes, that's what they thought it was like.

I asked them when they planned to get married. They said when they were about thirty-five or so. They were twenty-six and twenty-seven, and each earned 50 yuan (about $30) a month.

Since the trial of the Gang of Four had recently started, I asked, "Are the Gang of Four guilty?"

"Oh, yes. Guilty."

"But not Chairman Mao, eh?" I said. "Chairman Mao was a great man, right?"

Comrade Ma smiled at me and said, "Maybe."

Comrade Wee said, "Do you think so?"

"I don't know," I said.

"You are very clever!"

We talked about the Yangtze. The people there, they said, had different clothes and different "hairs." This topic provoked Comrade Lu to tell me that his father lived in Surinam—in South America, of all places. But he hated it. "Too many Negroes." Hong Kong was better, Lu said.

Comrade Ma told me that he had a bicycle, a TV, and a radio. I said that he had everything, apparently.

"No. I want to go to Hong Kong."

They all agreed: they all wanted to go to Hong Kong. But they had never been outside Shanghai. They lived with their parents, and would go on living with them until they married. I asked whether they regarded themselves as revolutionaries. No, they said, they were workers.

"I don't want to be a revolutionary," Comrade Ma said.

Had they been in the army?

"There are too many people in the army," Comrade Lu said. "They like the army. It is better than farming. Harvesting rice is hard work. It is easier to be a soldier."

They were cheery, candid fellows, and we continued walking the dark streets of Shanghai, talking about everything.

What about sports? I asked.

"Table tennis," Comrade Ma said.

"Badminton," Comrade Lu said.

"I take"—Comrade Wee glanced nervously at the others—"I take cold showers."

 

In Shanghai, as in other cities in China, the air was bad; it stank and was dark brown. People mobbed the streets, because their rooms were so small and crowded. The streets were free. There is little sign of money, no sign of wealth. Small ugly coins and filthy paper rags are money, worthless stuff. The people have clean faces, and they observe a kind of ragged order. One can only compare this to the competing crowds and distress of India. Here, there are scarcely any beggars; there is little apparent violence. Most people are dressed exactly the same.

There is a powerful silence in these streets, and the junkyard smell—dust and old rags—is not the smell of death but of illness. More motor traffic would make these cities uninhabitable, but in a crude way the people have made motors unnecessary. The people seldom talk—their silence, which looks enforced, is the most amazing thing.

Sometimes you can discern the future in the present, yet I could not tell what was in store for these people. Would it always be freezing in winter in cheap cotton clothes, walking through the muddy streets in cloth slippers, carting the steel rods used for awful concrete buildings, saying nothing, masked against the air pollution that gives China the look of existing in a permanent sunset? China looked sad in its simplicity. It seemed to me that it would look hideous if it ever became prosperous.

 

Postscript, 1999

When I took my Yangtze trip in November 1980, the hard-line Maoists still controlled the Politburo and Hua Guofeng was Party chairman. The reformers in the government, among them Deng Xiaoping, had not yet consolidated their power. China had hardly changed since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The Chinese still wore their revolutionary clothes, blue boiler suits and cloth slippers. Their motto was "Serve the people," though they were already sick of saying it. China is a different country now.

S
UDDENLY
, in eastern Guangdong—all bulldozers and buffalo—my driver, Mr. Li Zhongming, began driving on the wrong side of the road again. Was it the freshly dismembered human corpse, all its separate parts splashed Chinese red, scattered widely like a load of fresh pork off the back of a truck on our side of the highway—and the ensuing traffic jam—that made him do it? No. Mr. Li liked spinning the steering wheel and whipping over to face the oncoming traffic, racing to pass cars in front of us. He had hardly glanced at the mutilated body. "This is quicker," he said.

Of course the risks were enormous—trucks and buses bore down on us head-on—but he sped by everyone with an eat-my-dust expression on his face, his teeth bared in aggression. He was so persistent I began to think of his driving on the wrong side (and the carnage on the right, one of the numerous auto accidents I saw during an average day) as a metaphor for modernized China—the so-called miracle you read about every time you open a magazine or newspaper. Seen from a distance, the country does seem wondrous, but up close it is messier and more complicated. Like most economic miracles, it is also an ecological disaster. And it has its victims—that disemboweled pedestrian and millions of Chinese with their skinny shoulders to the wheel.

Not Mr. Li, though, booting our assembled-in-China Audi down the main road to Shantou (old Swatow), past red hills being shoveled apart and bulldozed to use for filling in rice fields and to make room for tenements and factories. The entire landscape was being leveled for hundreds of miles, and when it began to rain, water coursed down the clawed, eroded hills, washing silt into the sewers and drains and flooding the roads, causing another traffic jam.

Into the wrong lane Mr. Li went again, playing chicken with oncoming dump trucks and tractors and bikes. He did not dodge them. He just blew his horn and surged forward against the flow of cockeyed headlights.

Strengthening Mr. Li in his luck was a portrait of Mao Zedong on his dashboard. This gesture, wholly apolitical, was a recent fetish for drivers in China. Just a year before, a taxi driver in Beijing claimed in
People's Daily
that he had been spared in a car crash, in which there had been many fatalities, because he had kept a picture of the old man on the dash. Many Chinese drivers began using the picture for spiritual protection. They reminded me of the images of Saint Christopher that I saw in cars when I was growing up in Massachusetts in the 1950s.

Mao kitsch is popular in China now. You can buy Mao badges, Mao portraits, and embroidered knickknacks of the great man in baggy pants. His speeches are back in print. I often thought of them, and of one in particular, his "Report on the Peasants in Hunan," when in 1922 he had traveled around the countryside, noting abuses, jotting down wisdom, and making suggestions. That was what I told myself I was doing—simply looking around, gathering impressions for my "Report on the Factory Workers of Guangdong and Fujian in This Era of Chinese Prosperity." Mao was on my mind, too.

High art comes and goes in China, but kitsch is indestructible. In a dusty shop of a small town in rural Guangdong I had bought some Mao playing cards and Mao cassettes.
Memories of Mao
was playing on Mr. Li's tape deck, the tuneful "
Dong Fang Hong
"

 

The East is Red!
The sun rises!
China produces Mao Zedong!

 

We passed two men on a big red 350cc joint-venture Wuyang-Honda motorcycle, and the man on the rear seat was yakking wildly on a cellular phone, making a deal without a helmet at seventy miles an hour. Gunning his engine, Mr. Li was happy. Everywhere I looked, I saw ruined hills and abandoned paddy fields and bamboo scaffolding where just months before there had been bamboo groves. There was nothing notable here, only freshly robbed graves—one of the recent growth industries in rural China; smuggled burial artifacts sell for good prices in Hong Kong—and the odd forlorn pagoda, seemingly flummoxed in its
feng shui
and almost certainly doomed. Nothing ancient, nothing notable, no "sights," nothing but new brown crumbly factories and tenements rising from the filled-in rice fields.

Mr. Li drove erratically, leaning on his horn, and only hunger made him slow down, which he did at a medium-sized town by the shores of a stagnant lake. And as though guiding himself by his sense of smell, he was soon parked in front of a hotel restaurant, where we were joined by Miss Ma, who was to escort us to a local factory.

"I did not order these
ji jao,
" I said when our dishes began arriving at the table. Two plates of deep-fried chicken feet sat steaming in front of me.

"The driver likes them," Miss Ma said. "And, um—"

She hesitated. She had something more to say and was trying to find words for it; at this stage we hardly knew each other. Then she risked her correction.

"They are not
ji jao,
" she said. "We call them
fengjao
"

"Phoenix feet?"

"It sounds nicer," she said.

Mr. Li was tonging chicken feet into his mouth and humming snatches of "
Dong Fang Hong.
" As I paid the bill, I was thinking:
It's quicker this way! The East is Red! The driver likes them! Phoenix feet!

After snoozing for two hours in his car in the parking lot while I interrogated the factory workers, Mr. Li woke, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and glanced at his watch at the same time. Then he demanded 200 yuan (a month's salary for most factory workers). It was a tip, he said, yawning, for working overtime.

 

Not long ago it was Red China. For those of us who grew up in the 1950s, it was a forbidden place, like a throwback to the much older China of the Middle Kingdom, ruled by the Celestial Emperor, the Son of Heaven, who demanded the kowtowing of outsiders. These days we are colloquially termed
gweilos,
"ghost men" (Mr. Li would have used that word when referring to me; "foreign friend" is now just prissy bureaucratese). But in those other, darker days we were serious
gweilos.
In 1956, the now forgotten American doctor Tom Dooley wrote with feeling from his little hospital in Laos, "I am at the rim of Red Hell." That just about summed up China's image as a nightmarish dictatorship, where persecution and torture and slave labor were commonplace. And Mao—arrogant, ruthless, serene—was the emperor. Mao's various campaigns of the 1950s and early 1960s—Religious Reform, Hundred Flowers (and its aftermath), Anti-Rightist, Great Leap Forward—were seen from the outside as nameless and indiscriminate witchhunts.