Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (49 page)

Retro-hardship became hip. People flocked to nostalgic eateries like Beijing’s Remembering Bitterness Restaurant to listen to blind accordion players while sampling famine-era menus of fried locusts and boiled weeds. Photography studios rented flouncy wedding dresses so brides could be queen for a minute. And pet dogs, as opposed to the stir-fried variety, became a hot status symbol despite a continuing Maoist ban on dogs. (Rabies is rendered in Chinese as “mad dog disease.”) While the middle class had to content itself with renting dogs — 10 yuan, or $1.25, for ten minutes — the rich flaunted pedigreed Pekingese and shih tzus. To deal with the illegal fad, special police squads swept through neighborhoods, strangling dogs with steel wire looped at the end of metal poles. As Muffy and Maoism faced off, I remembered Fragrance, my old dog-beating roommate, and was not surprised Muffy lost.

The new middle class still didn’t have hot running water at home, but public bathhouses began offering specialty soaks scented with milk or Shaoxing rice wine. I sampled the Nescafe bath, which the attendant promised would perk me up. It didn’t. Although Nescafe’s agent in Beijing could not tell me the manufacturer’s recommended amount for a bath, he was thrilled to hear the Chinese were wallowing in his product.

Having lived through the days when I had to shop daily for perishables, I was cheered that people could now afford refrigerators. But some conspicuous consumption raised eyebrows. Yan Yan showed up for work one day with tattooed boomerangs in place of her eyebrows. When Housekeeper Ma also arrived with an air of permanent surprise, I knew it was a trend. For a month’s pay, Beijing clinics also sliced and stitched eyelids to create a second fold, transforming almond shapes into Round Eyes.

After forty years of deprivation, people were lavishing money on themselves, often literally. Some women opted for bigger breasts and some men decided to get bigger penises. I personally thought that was going a bit overboard, but I had never let excess get in the way of a good story. When the official Xinhua News Agency published a small item on China’s first penis-extension doctor, Lena Sun and I rushed to Wuhan, a gritty industrial port on the Yangtze River, to interview him.

“First, before I say anything, are you both married?” asked Dr. Long Daochou, chief of plastic surgery at Hubei Medical College’s Number One Affiliated Hospital. We had invited the felicitously named Dr. Long to a get-to-know-you dinner, hoping he would let us visit his penis clinic. He turned out to be a jolly, libidinous fellow with friendly puppy-dog eyes who loved discussing racially linked penis sizes, vaginal elasticity and various combinations of interracial marriage — provided you weren’t a virgin.

“We’re both married,” I quickly assured him. “We each have a son, and our husbands are both foreigners, white.”

“Then you must be very satisfied,” he said, beaming, as Lena choked on her rice. Dr. Long was a firm believer in length. He continued to expound on his favorite subject in a hearty voice, oblivious to the knot of fascinated waitresses hovering nearby. “Chinese
women have the smallest vaginas, just like Chinese men have the smallest penises. White people have bigger penises. The longer the penis, the greater the sexual satisfaction for the woman. It doesn’t much change for the man.”

The Long Dong Silver episode of the Anita Hill — Clarence Thomas hearings was all over CNN at the time, but Dr. Long hadn’t heard about the sexual-harassment controversy dogging the U.S. Supreme Court nominee. “The bigger the better, the longer the better,” he boomed as other diners glanced our way. “Blacks have longer and bigger penises than whites.”

“I thought that was a big myth,” I said, fretting that I would never get racially-linked penis sizes into the paper.

“I saw it myself,” insisted Dr. Long, who was fifty-seven. “I was part of a volunteer Chinese medical team in Algeria from 1968 to 1971. As a doctor, I got to see everything.” Unerect, Asians averaged five inches and Caucasians six or seven inches, he told us. “Blacks are even longer.”

Some of his patients had been sent by their wives. Others got on his waiting list after their fiancées saw the goods and broke off the engagement. I remembered how my classmates had buried their burning faces in their laps during a population-control lecture at Big Joy Farm, and was glad that Chinese women had become more assertive. “Twenty years ago, if sexual relations were bad, women suffered their whole lives,” he continued. “But today, if a young woman isn’t happy, she just says, ‘Bye-bye.’ ” He said the “bye-bye” part in English. The waitresses tittered behind their hands. Dr. Long invited us to visit his clinic the next morning.

“Lena,” I said back at the hotel that night, “we need a specialized vocabulary list.”

“I’m not calling
my
interpreter,” she said.

I called Norman. “Tell me the Chinese words for orgasm, oral sex and premature ejaculation.”

“Orgasm is
extreme joy
, oral sex is
mouth perversion
and premature ejaculation is
early leaking,”
he said. “Why?”

I wanted to tell him that Wuhan was a really swinging town. Instead I told him what Dr. Long had said about Chinese penis sizes and asked if he had ever paid attention back when he used public bathhouses.

“I never noticed any difference,” he said, “but then I never ran around with a ruler.”

The next day, Dr. Long met us wearing a white surgical cap, a white coat and a broad smile. In his office we paged through before-and-after photos, lovingly displayed in blue brocade albums. After admiring his handiwork, we dipped into a shoebox full of fan mail. Then it was time to visit the ward.

“Pretend you’re medical students,” said Dr. Long, thrusting a couple of white lab coats at us. We scurried after him, pulling on the coats as we clutched our notebooks and cameras. He barged into a ward and, without warning, flipped the quilt off the patient nearest the door. The man was naked from the waist down. A small teepee-like frame protected his penis, which was partially wrapped in thick white bandages.

“We operated on him yesterday. He used to be one inch,” said Dr. Long. Whipping a small metal ruler from his breast pocket, the doctor took a quick measure. “See? Three point seven inches.” Patient and doctor beamed. Now
this
was China reconstructs.

“I wasn’t normal. I was always afraid to find a girlfriend,” said the patient, a twenty-one-year-old security guard from Manchuria. He glanced down at his member, still swollen from surgery, and grinned. “Now I can.”

The next patient was a twenty-two-year-old metalworker from northwest China. He was awaiting surgery. “Drop your pants,” Dr. Long ordered. I couldn’t help myself. I stared in fascination. He had no pubic hair, and his penis was a mere half inch long.

“Look,” said Dr. Long, fingering the tiny protuberance. “It’s only skin, nothing else. He was born like that. It’s a micro-penis. He never developed. We’re going to have to lengthen it
and
thicken it.” This humiliating synopsis brought back memories of Fu the Enforcer telling me I was so flat I looked like a boy. I searched for a neutral question.

“How will you pay for the operation?” I asked.

The patient burst into tears. “My father is retired,” he sobbed, “but he managed to save the money for me. I’m his only son.”

Dr. Long patted him on the shoulder and told him to pull up his pants. “Don’t worry. We’ll fix you up.”

Dr. Long charged a couple of hundred dollars an operation, or about three to four months’ pay for a state worker. He rejected anyone with impotence, ejaculation problems or a penis five inches or longer. Dr. Long didn’t extend so much as excavate, uncovering the base of the penis the way you might scoop out the earth around a building to expose the basement to light and air.

“The penis extends deep inside the body,” he said. “We cut the suspensory ligaments at the side of the pubic bone so the entire length can be used. No one has lost sensitivity or the ability to have an erection.” Dr. Long claimed to have performed more than two hundred such operations, with an average extension of three inches. Caucasians and blacks got better results because, relatively speaking, their buried part was longer, he said.

I understood why his waiting list was so full when Dr. Long introduced the third patient, a twenty-five-year-old peasant from central China. He was meekly waiting for us with his pants down. His operation was scheduled for the following week.

“It’s because of this I’ve never married,” he said. He looked down and pointed to his … 
nothing
.

“A dog bit it off when he was three months old,” explained Dr. Long. “In the village, children just squat down wherever they are. There are always lots of dogs and pigs, and they fight to eat the feces. Sometimes in the commotion, they end up biting off the penis.” The vast majority of his patients, he said, were maimed as toddlers in open-crotch pants. I had a flashback of the Jurassic Park latrine at Farmer Wang’s, and shuddered. China desperately needed a Pampers factory, or at least a dog-food industry.

Dr. Long had launched his penis-extending career in 1984 by fixing up one of those dog-bite victims. Although doctors had sewn the little boy’s penis back on at the time, it remained toddler-sized. Now the boy had become a young man and he wanted to get married. Dr. Long suggested a prosthesis, but the patient refused. He wanted a real penis.

“I said I couldn’t do it. Then his father got down on his knees and said to me, ‘He’s my only son. Please do something so we can have grandsons to carry on the family line.’ ” Dr. Long called a meeting of Wuhan’s top urologists and reconstructive surgeons.
Nobody had any ideas. He began dissecting corpses and pondered the suspensory ligaments. The son agreed to be the first guinea pig, and the operation was a success. With the suspensory ligaments severed, the newly extended penis was nearly four inches long when flaccid and more than five inches long when erect. “He married two years later,” said Dr. Long, with a thousand-watt smile. “They wrote me a letter to tell me they had a baby girl the following year.”

I didn’t believe Dr. Long about racially linked penis sizes. When I got back to Beijing, I phoned Seattle-based
PATH
, an affiliate member of the United Nations task force on condom sizes, part of the International Standards Organization. Did blacks really have bigger penises than whites? Were Asians the smallest of them all? “It still has an emotional edge and is considered to be mythology, but we know this is probably true,” said Dr. Michael Free,
PATH’S
vice-president and a reproductive physiologist. He told me that the World Health Organization made a special condom with a circumference of 106 millimeters for Africa, compared with a standard 104-millimeter size in North America and Europe,
PATH
itself supplied a 98-millimeter condom to Asia, and had helped build a factory in China that manufactured condoms in four sizes, from 104 millimeters to 90 millimeters.

Ninety millimeters?

Dr. Free assured me I hadn’t heard wrong. “It’s the smallest size
PATH
is aware of in the world,” he said.

Mao had always railed against “sugar-coated bullets.” What he meant was that post-victory decadence could kill a communist as surely as real ammunition could. Now, after so many years of intense Maoism, the Chinese were in hot pursuit of those sugar-coated bullets. Besides tattooed brows and bigger penises, they seemed to be embracing the worst parts of Western civilization. They bought pin-up calendars of busty blondes. They re-recorded “The East Is Red” to a disco beat. And they snacked on Kentucky Fried Chicken at the Great Wall.

In April 1992, when the world’s biggest McDonald’s opened in Beijing, I felt as though a great civilization was taking a Great Leap Backward. But who was I to judge? After all, I had dreamed of
greasy french fries down at Big Joy Farm. I dutifully went to cover the opening. “I wanted to be the first Chinese in Beijing to taste a Big Mac,” said Dong Jie, a serious-faced college student who had waited in line since 4 a.m. When the doors finally opened at 8:36, he and hundreds of others stampeded into the marble and glass building.

“Put on the music,” a manager shouted.

“Stand back,” a McDonald’s executive warned.

There was no breakfast menu. Dong Jie raced to one of the twenty-nine cash registers and ordered a Big Mac and a hot chocolate. He struggled with the white plastic lid. “How do you open this?” he wondered out loud. Before anyone could stop him, he plunged in the straw provided by an overzealous server and took a sip, scalding his tongue. Gamely, he took a bite of his Big Mac, called a
Ju Han Bao
, or a giant hamburger. “It’s delicious,” he said.

American executives surveyed the feeding frenzy with glee. “Did you see the people out there!” cried James Cantalupo, president of McDonald’s international division. Pressed against the wall of the staircase by the crush, he had the glazed-eye look of a capitalist who just realized that a billion Chinese will eat burgers for breakfast.

“What time does lunch start here?” he said, glancing at his watch. He burst out laughing when he realized it was just 9:30 a.m.

It wasn’t all that funny to me. This was the site, three years earlier, where people had died trying to keep the army from Tiananmen Square. After the massacre, while other corporations dithered, McDonald’s pounced on the prime location, just across from the Beijing Hotel. The two-story, seven-hundred-seat restaurant was seven times bigger than the average U.S. McDonald’s.

At the press conference on opening day, I sat in the front row and listened to a speech by Xing Chunhua, the Chinese chairman of Beijing McDonald’s. He had a round face, thinning hair and a look of great importance. On the lapel of his dark pinstriped suit, he wore a McDonald’s icon where I presumed he once had pinned a Mao button. “This is not just a restaurant opening,” enthused Chairman Xing (pronounced
Sing
), “but the culmination of the fruits of labor between two partners who share the same vision and values.”

“The same vision and values?” McDonald’s and Dengism? I liked that quote. When I went home and showed Norman the elaborate press kit, he let out a yelp. “What’s wrong?” I said.