Riding the Iron Rooster (14 page)

"'All men are equal,' I said."

He was a nice man, and before we parted he said, 'The food at that restaurant wasn't very good, but I like this conversation. When you come back to Peking, come to my house and have some real Chinese food."

From the train Peking had looked impressive: a city on the rise, cranes everywhere, workmen scrambling across girders, and the thump of pile drivers going,
Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo!

But when I went a little closer and walked around them, these new tenements looked very shaky. Some were made as if with a large-scale version of children's blocks, or put together out of three-room modules—a sort of gigantic building-puzzle kit. And it was dear why these prefab methods were being used. When a structure was put up from scratch, brick by brick, the windows were wonky and the doors weren't square and there were bulges in the walls, and the whole thing had a handmade look that the kinder architects call "the vernacular style."

"No one knows how long they'll last," an American in Peking told me. 'They might turn out to be like those Hong Kong buildings that were put up with spit and sawdust and fell down about a year later."

"Why do you think that?" I asked.

"Because most of them are being put up by people from Hong Kong."

Certainly the development called the Hua Guofeng Wall is beginning to crack. It is a hideous stretch of apartments and tower blocks that was put up as a prestige project by Mr. Hua before he was politically outmaneuvered by Mr. Deng. The buildings are not only mismatched and cracked and stained, but also, though only seven years old, have begun to fall down.

I nosed around a tall apartment block and fell into conversation with Mr. Zheng Douwan on the ninth floor. He said that everything was fine at the moment, but he was tentative and I knew there was more to say.

"Is it always fine?" I asked.

"Not in the summer," he said. "The water table is so low in Peking that the pressure is bad. We can only get water as high as the fifth floor. This is a fifteen-story building, so the people on the upper ten floors have to get water in buckets."

Droughts and water shortages are greatly feared in Peking, he told me: for the past six years the rainfall was way below average and the outlook this year was not good. (In the event, very little rain fell, though buildings continued to rise.)

Mr. Zheng said, "From the bath point of view it's like England in the thirties. There is no hot water in any of these flats. If you want a bath you heat a kettle and pour it into a tin bathtub. It is very inconvenient, but I don't complain because that is how everyone lives."

But not tourists, not high Party officials, and not the new classes of people with money—taxi drivers and some traders. In 1980 there were three taxi companies in Peking; now there are 230, with 14,000 taxis. All are controlled by the government or by official agencies, but the drivers do well out of it because the people who take taxis are generally foreigners and they pay in Foreign Exchange Certificates.

The free market (
ziyou shichang
) allows anyone to do business and keep the profits. This was one of Deng's reforms, and it is the reason why factory workers are often very cross—and why they demand high bonuses and complain about inflation. The street traders in the free market can quite easily earn five times a factory worker's salary, and after an informal survey of the hawkers and traders in various Peking markets, I figured their monthly earnings to be between 500 and 700 yuan—enough to buy "The Big Three."

One market woman told me, "What people used to want were a bicycle, a radio and a gas stove. Now the Big Three are a refrigerator, a cassette machine and a color television."

Some of the markets are operated by retired factory workers who simply want a friendly place to go during the day. They say things like, "I've always been interested by old beads and pots," and they have the flea-market mentality that is familiar to anyone from Cape Cod. They love talking about the bits of peculiar junk they've accumulated and, being pensioners, are not really doing this for a living. These traders are not to be confused with the people who have been doing business in the same place for years—the specialists in birds, or fish, or herbs. In most Chinese cities, the Bird Market is a specific location and may have been unchanged for hundreds of years.

Flea market seemed to me an appropriate comparison, since that was how most people pronounced it. I saw an opium pipe on one little stall. It was about eighteen inches long, with a silver bowl and a jade mouthpiece.

"That's a genuine old piece. Forty yuan and worth every bit of it. Take it away."

"I'll give you twenty," I said.

"Listen, if you weren't with this Chinese man I would have written '120' on a piece of paper and said Take it or leave it.'"

"All right, twenty-five."

He pretended he hadn't heard me. He said, "The interesting thing about this pipe is its mouthpiece. See how strong it is?" He banged it against the tabletop. "A man would ride his horse with this hanging by his side. If he saw a thief, or if someone attacked him he would bop him on the head with it. See, use it like a club—bop! bop!"

"Thirty."

'The bowl is real silver. This is a hundred years old. I've been collecting these pipes my whole life. I worked in a shoe factory. I'm retired! I don't even have to sell you this pipe, but you're a foreigner and I want to do you a favor."

"Thirty is my highest offer."

'This is an antique, comrade. It's a collector's item. It's a pipe. It's a weapon. Take it."

"Okay, thirty-five."

"Fine. It's yours. Shall I wrap it up? Here," he said, taking out an old copy of
The People's Daily
and folding the pipe into it. "Serves two functions. Wrapping paper and afterwards you can read it."

I had stopped at that free market on my way to the bathhouse. Because of what Mr. Zheng had told me about the inconvenience of bathing, I had inquired and found out that Peking was full of public bathhouses—about thirty of them, subsidized by the government. They are one of the cheapest outings in China: for 60 fen (16 cents) a person is admitted and given a piece of soap, a towel and a bed; and he is allowed to stay all day, washing himself in the steamy public pool and resting.

The one I found was called Xing Hua Yuan. It was open from 8:30 in the morning until 8:00 at night. Many people who use it are travelers who have just arrived in Peking after a long journey and want to look presentable for their friends or relatives—and of course who don't want to impose on them for a bath.

The beds were in little cubicles, and men wrapped in towels were resting or walking around talking. It was like a Roman bath—it was social, the scalded Chinese, pinkish in the heat, were sloshing themselves and yelling at each other in a friendly way. It was also possible to get a private room, for about double the ordinary rate.

I was thinking how Roman and Victorian the bathhouse looked (there was a Women's bathhouse next door), how useful for travelers and bathless residents, how like a club it was and how congenial, when a homosexual Chinese man enlightened me.

"Most people go there to take a bath," he said. "But it is also a good place to go if you want to meet a boy and do things with him."

"What sort of things?"

He didn't flinch. He said, "One day I was in Xing Hua Yuan and saw two men in a private room, and one had the other one's cock in his mouth. That sort of thing."

A few days later I was walking down the street, and a young Chinese girl approached me and said hello. She fell into step next to me and before we had gone thirty yards she slipped her arm into mine and off we went, like a pair of old-fashioned lovers.

She was leading the way. I liked not having the slightest idea of what was going to happen next.

At first 1 thought she might be lame, because she had caught hold of me and held on tightly. But she was walking very briskly.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

She smiled beguilingly and led me on. When we passed the Friendship Store she steered me in, and at the door she began to hug me. She was still hugging in a sort of newlywed's embrace as we looked at chairs ("These look comfortable") and crockery ("Don't you think they have anything cheaper?"). This seemed very pleasant. I had no idea what I would say if 1 met someone I knew, but it hardly mattered.

I said, "What is your honorable surname?"

"Ma," she said, and giggled. There are so many different
Ma's
in Chinese that a nineteen-word tongue twister has been made from them.

We looked at the tea section. They had no peppermint tea—indeed, had never heard of it.

"I have never tasted it," Miss Ma said.

Or perhaps Mrs. Ma, because a moment later she let go of me and ran ahead and embraced a young Chinese man. He was not surprised to see her. I assumed they had arranged to meet. The trouble was that, being an ordinary comrade, she felt she would have been stopped from entering this store unless she was in the company of a foreigner.

What disturbed me was that her affection towards me had seemed unforced. Yet in a split second I was forgotten: she didn't look back.

I had been on my way to meet a Chinese teacher named Chen. When I told him what had happened, he said, "The security guards can be very harsh with us sometimes."

Still, that didn't bother the importuning money changers who lurked near the tourist hangouts pestering foreigners to change hard currency into local currency, offering about twenty percent more than the official rate. They sidled up and said, "Shansh marnie?"

I said to Chen that I did not understand why so many years of the Cultural Revolution hadn't made people more socially and politically aware. A few years ago it was "Serve the people," and now it was "Change money?"

Chen said that it was because of the Cultural Revolution that people had started a free-for-all, because that political convulsion had discredited politicians.

He said, 'The so-called Cultural Revolution was wonderful in teaching us never to follow blindly. Now we will never trust what politicians say."

Chen and I were drinking tea at a stall. He held up his white cup.

He said, "If Mao said, 'This is black,' we would all agree and say, 'Very black.' Now, we'd never do that. A spokesman in the government said recently The Japanese are our friends.' Everyone laughed. The Japanese—let's be frank—are no one's friends."

I asked him whether he felt humiliated by the memory of the Cultural Revolution.

'That's the word—humiliated. So many of the Red Guards who went to the countryside got married there, gave up being intellectuals and became farmers. Now they can't come back—and they want to. It would be a loss of face to come back."

"Were you a Red Guard?"

"Yes," he said promptly. "School three days, learning from a peasant farmer the other three days, and reading the Thoughts of Mao on our day off. We harvested and planted rice. It's a good thing I was young, because I didn't take it very seriously. I treated it like a game. But it was no game."

He went on to say that he was surprised by how liberated the young people were these days in Peking. They criticized the Party. They talked about democracy and free speech. He said, "I'm amazed by some of the things they say."

"In the past," he said, "the intellectuals and the scholars were discredited. No one really wanted to go to school, and only the secure Party officials advanced. You had a choice of being a worker or a peasant."

"What do people want now?"

"Now that we are no longer judged by our political consciousness, people have begun to be fanatical about education. That's the biggest single change in this country."

"But these former Red Guards and the refugees from the Cultural Revolution—surely they're out of school?"

"No," Chen said. 'There's a whole army of night-school students."

I wanted to leave for Shanghai and then to rattle around China on trains as the mood took me. But, inspired by Chen, before I set off I decided to offer my services as a night-school teacher, just to see whether what Chen had said was true. I took classes at the Peking Sun Yat-sen Spare-Time School, which was housed in a big gloomy high school in central Peking. My subject was English, which was the most popular subject in the school; but the students—there were 3000 of them—also studied business methods, typing, accounting and computer science. One of the computer teachers was from the United States, but I didn't meet him.

I felt a sort of giddy depression at the sight of so many students toiling in the semidarkness of this haunted-looking building. The light was poor, the chalk squeaked, the desks creaked, the textbooks were greasy and frayed, and the dictionaries were crumbling. The youngest student was eight, the oldest seventy-four. All of them worked during the day, if not at a salary-paying job then at an impromptu stall at the free market, boosting cassette tapes, or toys, or clothes that were sent up from Canton, where they had been made cheaply—there was a thirty percent markup on clothes, but even so they were very cheap.

I taught from a book called
Modern American English.

"You're lucky to have me. I'm a modern American and I speak English," I said. They thought this was incredibly funny.

I was filling in for their regular teacher, Miss Bao, whose mother was being treated for hypertension at the Peking Capital Hospital near the duck restaurant (thus its nickname, "The Sick Duck").

It took us three days to deal with the lesson about health care.

The cost of health care in the United States is truly staggering
, the text ran.

"Excuse me," Miss Lin said, "what is 'glaucoma'?"

"Excuse me," Mr. Zhao said, "what is 'Blue Cross'?"

"Excuse me," Mr. Li said, "but some weeks ago your president ordered the bombing of Libya. Did you agree with that?"

I said no, and explained why. And then I asked them whether they agreed with everything their government did. They said no, and giggled nervously, but didn't elaborate.

Each night, the students gathered in the twilight and then sat sleepily in the hot dusty classrooms for two hours; they went home in the dark.