Riding the Iron Rooster (18 page)

"Go right in," the man said.

It was a two-room flat, smelling of vegetables. There was also a big hallway, a bathroom and a kitchen. Five adults and two children lived here. These people, originally from up the line at Wuxi, had come here in 1959 when Min Hong was established.

They worked locally. All five adults—two men, three women—had jobs. There were two beds in each room, and dressers and chairs, and a table, a television. The flat was very neat; and there were potted plants on the windowsills. There were no books.

When I remarked on the television set, they turned it on and got a cowboy movie—Gregory Peck and Olivia de Havilland, speaking Chinese. We watched it for a while, and they gave me tea and we talked about Min Hong.

"I was told that some people here in Min Hong keep chickens and ducks."

"No, we have no chickens or ducks."

One of the women said, "But you ride horses in America."

"Just for fun," I said.

They didn't quite believe this. They had the idea that there were cowboys all over America, and I secretly felt that they had pigs and ducks in Min Hong.

"So you don't get on your horse."

That was a joke. The expression
ma shang
("get on your horse") meant "quickly" or "hurry."

"I have to get on my horse now," I said.

So I left Min Hong. It was dull but it was decent: Sang Ye had been wrong. But why was squalor regarded as more interesting than order?

There was a stylish, youthful-looking man named Wang, whom I met one day in Shanghai. It turned out that we were both born in the same year, the Year of the Snake (but Wang used the Chinese euphemism for snake—"little dragon"). He was so friendly and full of stories that I saw him often, usually for lunch at the Jinjiang Hotel. He was a sensitive soul, but had a sense of irony, too, and said he had never been happier than he was walking the streets of San Francisco on his one trip to America—he hinted that he was eager to immigrate to the United States, but he never became a bore on the subject and did not ask me for help. He was unusual, even in Shanghai, for his clothes—a canary-yellow French jacket and pale blue slacks, a gold watch, a chain around his neck, and expensive sunglasses.

"1 like bright clothes," he said.

"Could you wear them during the Cultural Revolution."

He laughed and said, "What a mess that was!"

"Were you criticized?"

"I was under arrest. That's when I started smoking. I discovered that if you smoked it gave you time to think. They had me in a room—the Red Guards. They said, 'You called Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, a crazy lady.' She was a crazy lady! But I just lit a cigarette and puffed on it so that I could think of something to say."

"What did you say?"

"The wrong thing! They made me write essays. Self-criticism!"

"Describe the essays."

"They gave me subjects. 'Why I Like Charles Dickens,' 'Why I Like Shakespeare.'"

"I thought you were supposed to say why you didn't like them."

"They wouldn't believe that," he said. 'They called me a reactionary. Therefore, I had to say why I liked them. It was awful. Six pages every night, after work unit, and then they said. 'This is dog shit—write six more pages.'"

"What work did you do?"

"Played the violin in the Red Orchestra. Always the same tunes. The East Is Red,' 'Long Live the Thoughts of Mao,' 'Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman'—all that stuff. They made me play in the rain. I said, 'I can't—the violin will fall apart.' They don't know that a violin is glued together. 1 played in the rain. It fell apart. They gave me another one and ordered me to play under the trees during the Four Pest Campaign—to keep sparrows from landing in the branches."

The other three pests were mosquitoes, flies and rats.

"That's absurd," I said.

"We painted Huai Hai Lu—that's more absurd," Wang said.

"How can you paint a street?" I asked—the street he named was one of the main thoroughfares of Shanghai.

"We painted it red, out of respect for Chairman Mao," Wang said. "Isn't that stupid?"

"How much of the street did you paint?"

'Three and a half miles," Wang said, and laughed, remembering something else. "But there were stupider things. When we went to the work unit we always did the
qing an
(salute) to Mao's portrait on the gateway. We'd hold up the Red Book, say, 'Long Live Chairman Mao' and salute him. Same thing when we went home. People would make things in Mao's honor, like a knitted Mao emblem, or a red star in needlepoint, and put it in the special Respect Room at the unit—it was painted red. That was for Mao. If they wanted to prove they were very loyal they would wear the Mao badge by pinning it to their skin."

'That must have impressed the Red Guards," I said.

"It wasn't just the Red Guards—everyone blames them, but everyone was in it. That's why people are so embarrassed at the moment, because they realize they were just as stupid about Chairman Mao as everyone else. I know a banker who was given the job of fly catcher. He had to kill flies and save their little bodies in a matchbox. Every afternoon someone would come and count the dead flies and say, 'one hundred and seventeen—not good enough. You must have one hundred and twenty-five tomorrow.' And more the day after, you see? The government said there was going to be a war. 'The enemy is coming—be prepared.'"

"Which enemy?"

'The imperialists—Russia, India, the United States. It didn't matter which one. They were going to kill us," Wang said, and he rolled his eyes. "So we had to make bricks for the war effort. Ninety bricks a month for each person. But my parents were old, so I had to make their bricks. I used to come home from the unit, write my essay 'Why I Like Western Music,' and make bricks—1 had to deliver two hundred and seventy a month. And they were always asking me about my hole."

"Your hole?"

"The
shen wa dong
—Dig Deep Holes edict. That was for the war, too. Everyone had to have a hole, in case of war. Every so often the Red Guards would knock on your door and say, 'Where is your hole?'"

He said there were bomb shelters all over Shanghai that had been built on Mao's orders ("for the coming war"), and of course they had never been used. I asked him to show me one. We found this sub-terreanean vault—it was just like a derelict subway station—at 1157 Nanjing Road, and it had been turned into an ice-cream parlor. The fascinating thing to me was that it was now obviously a place where young men went to kiss their girlfriends. It was full of Chinese youths locked in the half nelson they regard as an amorous embrace. The irony was not merely that these kids were making out and feeling each other up in a place that had been built by frantic and paranoid Red Guards in the 1960s, but also that it was now called the Dong Chang Coffee Shop and owned and operated by the government.

I was talking to Wang one day about my trip through the Soviet Union when I mentioned how the scarcity of consumer goods there meant the Russians were always pestering foreigners for blue jeans, T-shirts, track shoes and so forth.

'That never happens in China," I said.

"No," Wang said. "But that reminds me. About three years ago there was a Russian ballet dancer at a hotel in Shanghai. I went to see the ballet—fabulous! And this dancer was very handsome. I recognized him, and he smiled at me. Then he pointed to my track shoes and pointed to himself. He wanted them, I understood that. They were expensive shoes—Nike, cost me fifty yuan. But I don't care much about money. We measured feet, side by side. Exact fit. I don't speak a word of Russian, but I could tell he really wanted those shoes."

"Did you sell them to him?"

"I gave them to him," Wang said, and frowned at the triviality of it. "I felt sorry for someone who just wanted a pair of shoes. It seemed sad to me that he couldn't get them in his own country. I took them off and walked to my office barefoot! He was really happy! I thought, He'll go back to Russia. He'll always remember this. He'll say, 'Once I was in China. I met a Chinese man and asked him for his shoes, and he gave them to me!'"

A moment later he said, "You can get anything you want in China. Food, clothes, shoes, bicycles, motorbikes, TVs, radios, antiques. If you want girls, you can find girls." And then in a wide-eyed way. "Or boys—if you want boys."

"Or fashion shows."

"They have fashion shows on television almost every week," Wang said. "Shanghai is famous for them."

I asked him what the old people made of these developments—hookers and high fashion in a country where just a few years ago foreign decadence was condemned and everyone wore baggy blue suits.

'The old people love life in China now," Wang said. "They are really excited by it. Very few people object. They had felt very repressed before."

A few days later I had an occasion to test that reaction. I was invited to the house of a former civil servant, recently retired—the Chinese use the French term
cadre
to describe these officials. This man, Ning Bailuo, was sixty-seven and a passionate Maoist. He'd had no formal education; he had risen through the ranks of the New Fourth Army, from 1940 to 1949, mainly organizing political programs and collecting food and money for the troops, first in their fight against the Japanese and then against the forces of Chiang Kai-shek. One of his earliest memories was of missing the ferry late one night to cross the Huangpu in Shanghai and a japanese soldier beating him with a stick for being out too late. He soon joined an anti-Japanese organization and later the army.

"Don't your experiences make you hate the Japanese?"

"No," he said, "it is only the generals we hate."

Chinese blaming is always reserved for higher-ups: underlings are always innocent. That was how they had been able to cope with the monstrous guilt in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. The entire horror show, the whole ten years of it, in every city and town in China, from Mongolia to Tibet, had been the work of four skinny demons: the Gang of Four. No Red Guard was ever held personally responsible for any act of terror—there were no trials, and I never heard any recrimination other than loud clucking.

Comrade Ning—as I thought of him—was thin and bony, with a Bogart face and long creases on his cheeks, and the same Bogart slurring of speech as his tongue snagged against his teeth. It was easy to see that he was a hard-liner, the tough and puritanical official who had known the privations of the 1930s, and all the phases that had led to this present boom. He still wore blue. He seemed to me the perfect person to ask about developments.

Although he was personally rather ascetic looking, his apartment was very large by Chinese standards—four spacious rooms, as well as a kitchen and a foyer. In accordance with Chinese practice there were beds in every room. Comrade Ning shared this apartment with his wife, his unmarried daughter, his son, his son's wife and two grandchildren.

His wife gave me a bowl of sweet lumps made of puffed rice. "You'll like them. They're Mongolian."

They tasted exactly like the concoction you see described on the back of cereal boxes in the States:
Tastee 'n' Fun-licious Dessert Idea That Will Have Those Kids Asking for More!!!
They were sticky and crunchy.

Picking fragments out of my teeth, I said that if he had been in the New Fourth Army he must have come across the song, "Baking the Cakes."

"My wife and I can sing that song," Comrade Ning said.

I told them I had met the man who had composed it—Zhang Mei, in Peking—and how we had talked about the patriotic songs in which the Japanese had been referred to as ghosts, rapists, robbers, devils and so forth.

"I have nothing personal against the Japanese," Comrade Ning said, "and I have no objection to their doing business in China. But there is'a militaristic element in Japanese society—that is something we have to be very careful of. Apart from that, the Chinese and Japanese have a great deal in common."

I said that when I had been in China six years before it had seemed very different, but that there had been a sort of equality in poverty. I said, "Doesn't it worry you that some people are getting rich—and a few people very rich?"

"You know about the watermelon tycoon?"

Wang had told me the story. A penniless peasant who knew the Chinese fondness for eating watermelon seeds started a small business that grew and grew. He hired workers, he bought land, he made millions; and then he bullied his workers, the government taxed him heavily, and recently he had renounced all his millions and returned to his peasant life. A moral fable in the form of a play was written about him and staged with government approval. It was called
The March of a Foolish Man.

"He was a fool," Comrade Ning said. "But there is nothing wrong with being rich. Our aim is for everyone to be rich."

"But surely wealth will produce a privileged class that will undermine the socialist state."

"In China, privilege is not bought with money," Comrade Ning said. "Power comes from the political sphere, not the financial sphere."

"What about cases of corruption—back-handers?" I said. The Chinese term is
houmen
—"backdoor" business.

"Of course, there are such cases. The danger is when people have an excessive regard for money." Up went Comrade Ning's skinny finger. "Man should manipulate money—money should not manipulate man."

We talked about corruption. There was a current example: a Chinese businessman who had been taking bribes and embezzling from the government was found guilty in a Shanghai court. His woman accomplice was given a long sentence, but he was executed—the Chinese way: a bullet in the back of the neck.

"He had Hong Kong connections," Comrade Ning said, as if this sordid fact explained everything.

"Do you think the death penalty might be regarded as a little severe in a case of stealing?"

Comrade Ning laughed at me for this. His teeth were yellow, and so were his long fingernails. "There is a certain amount of money that makes this case serious. If anyone steals this amount he has to be killed."