Riding the Iron Rooster (37 page)

What exactly do these minority people themselves think? Are they rebellious or downtrodden? Do they crave autonomy? Their numbers are very small: only 5000 Drung people in Yunnan, only 12,000 Jinuos and twice that number of Pumis. The Uighurs and the Yi people were another matter—there were millions of them. At about the time I was in Yunnan there were uprisings and riots among Soviet minorities—in Kazakhstan and Kirghizia. I could imagine that happening in China—perhaps a Muslim rebellion like the one that raged through Xinjiang in the nineteenth century. And I could imagine the same result: it would be ruthlessly suppressed.

People also go to Kunming to visit the stone forest ("We call this one Chicken Tree—can you see why?") and to see the polluted lake and the temples above it, which are so relentlessly visited they are practically worn away from the successive waves of trampling feet, and those temples that aren't are buried under ice-cream sticks and candy wrappers and half-eaten moon cakes.

I went for walks. I even managed to lose Mr. Fang for a few days. I went to an exhibition commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Zhou Enlai. There was a sort of Zhou Enlai cult growing in China. It was also the tenth anniversary of the death of Mao, but no such exhibition had been mounted for him. Of the thirty-odd photographs in the Zhou exhibition, only one showed Mao Zedong—in 1949, Liberation Year: Mao very small, Zhou very large.

At an antique shop near the exhibit I saw a very shapely bronze incense burner—a water buffalo. It stood among the junk jewelry, the broken pocket watches, the old forks with twisted tines, the Yunnanese tobacco pouches. I asked how much?

The price he quoted was seventeen thousand dollars.

I was still laughing as I strolled through the market in the Kunming back streets. It was there that I worked out a way of eating Chinese dumplings without risking infectious hepatitis or cholera or bubonic plague (there had been recent outbreaks of this medieval life-shortener in northern Yunnan and Qinghai). There are few dishes tastier than freshly fried or steamed Chinese dumplings, and they were tastiest in the open-air markets. But the plates they were served in were washed in dirty water, and the chopsticks were simply wiped off and reused.

My hygienic answer was to ask for them in a piece of paper—and to provide my own paper. And the chopsticks could be made safe by scorching them in the cooking fire—holding them in the flames for a few moments to kill the germs. But as a matter of fact many travelers in China carry their own chopsticks.

My favorite spot in Kunming was the park at Green Lake—though it was an unprepossessing park, with a go-cart track, a children's football field, and a pathetic circus in two brown tents (the star attraction was a tortured-looking bear pacing in a tiny cage). The lake itself had disappeared, dried out, grown weeds and grass: there was no water at all in it.

But that area had become the meeting place for people who wanted to kill time by singing, putting on plays or operas, or making music. It seemed very odd to me at first, the people in little groups—twenty or thirty such groups scattered throughout the park; and each gathering of people producing a play or listening to someone singing. There were duets, there were trios, and many were accompanied by men playing violins. Often the duet was an old man and an old woman.

"They are singing a love song," a bystander told me. His name was Xin. He agreed with me that it was very touching to see these people performing.

He said, "For ten years we hated each other and were very suspicious. We hardly spoke to each other. It was terrible."

He meant during the Cultural Revolution but didn't say it. Like many people he could not bear uttering the mocking words.

"This is like a dream to these people. The old ones can hardly believe it. That's why they are here. To talk and to remember. They don't want to forget the old songs. This is their way of remembering."

What made these musical performances especially unusual was their exuberance, because the Chinese are very shy and rather self-conscious, and find it an agony to be set apart and stared at (which was why the Red Guards' struggle sessions were so painful and so often ended in the suicide of the person "struggled"). The fact that some were performing solo was a measure of their energy and confidence. It is a great deal easier to stand alone and sing if you are happy.

Some of the people were telling stories in dialogue form, others were playing traditional songs. At least half the groups of old people were performing the Yunnan version of Peking opera, called
dian xi.
The most ambitious one I saw involved four or five singers who stood under the trees and acted out a sad love story from Zhejiang called
Flower Lamp (Hua Deng).

"This is known all over China," Xin said, and he explained it.

It concerned a young man Liang Shanbo and his lover, Zhu Yingtai. The plot was not unlike that of
Romeo and Juliet.
The lovers' families were so opposed that it was impossible for the two to meet without using a subterfuge. Liang had the clever idea of dressing up as a woman (the man playing Liang in the park used a fan to suggest this), and in this way gained access to the lovely Zhu. The romance blossoms, but both families are against the marriage. After some complications ("The plot zigzags," Xin said) they realize they cannot marry. Zhu kills herself. Liang sings a pathetic love song on her grave, and then he kills himself. The end.

The motley groups in the park in Kunming liked this one best of all. It was performed among the bamboos, and accompanied by old violinists in faded blue jackets and caps. But even the skinniest old men and the most elderly women wore animated expressions—and they were all playful. Of all the people I saw in China, they were the happiest.

The trouble with China was that it was overrun with people and—except for the occasional earthquake or sandstorm—I rarely saw examples of man's insignificance beside the greater forces of nature. The Chinese had moved mountains, diverted rivers, wiped out the animals, eliminated the wilderness; they had subdued nature and had it screaming for mercy. If there were enough of you it was really very easy to dig up a whole continent and plant cabbages. They had built a wall that was the only man-made object on earth that could be seen from the moon. Whole provinces had been turned into vegetable gardens, and a hill wasn't a hill—it was a way of growing rice vertically. Some of the ruination was not deliberate; after all, in Chinese terms prosperity always spelled pollution.

That was how I felt until I reached Yunnan. Then I saw the more familiar situation—and one I found more subtle and energizing—people dwarfed by nature, crowded by jungle, hemmed in by the elements, rained on and battered by the unpredictable tantrums of heaven and earth.

I saw such landscapes on my way to Vietnam. Kunming is only two hundred miles from the Vietnam border. Looking at a map one day, I saw a railway line leading south, and I looked for Mr. Fang to arrange for me to travel on it. Wasn't he shadowing me in order to offer Chinese hospitality? Hadn't he urged me to give him something to do? How thrilled he was when I asked him to translate for me, or commiserated with him about the spivs and the louts and said, "I blame their parents!"

But when I asked him to get me permission to take the narrow-gauge railway to the border, he turned ashen.

"It is forbidden," he said.

"The line is open as far as Bao Xiu," I said. I had checked in the railway timetable—there were two trains a day.

"But you are a foreigner."

"You said that you would help me. If you don't help me, what is the point of your being with me, Mr. Fang?"

"I will try." I knew he meant it, because he seemed very rattled: he was steeling himself to see a higher official.

That same night Mr. Fang came to me and said that permission had been granted for me to take the train south. But the line into Vietnam had been severed in 1979, so I would have to content myself with a journey about a third of the way—to Yiliang—and then come straight back. I said that was fine with me.

"Mr. Wei will go with you."

"Who is Mr. Wei?"

"You will see tomorrow."

The train left at seven in the morning: Mr. Wei was at the station. He had already bought the tickets, and before I could say anything, he was apologizing for the train—just a little one, he said, tiny coaches, steam engine, uncomfortable seats, no dining car. Mr. Wei was a small malnourished-looking man in his thirties. But he was not as sulky as he seemed—he was merely nervous. He said he hated these little trains and these jungly places.

I wanted to tell him that I liked seeing examples of man's insignificance beside the greater forces of nature. But I decided not to. I had brought a pound of peanuts (35 cents in Kunming market) and spent the early part of the trip eating those until Mr. Wei relaxed.

The French had built this line. At about the turn of the century, after they had consolidated their hold on Indochina, they decided to open up the interior. There was money to be made by selling French products in these Chinese provinces. And there was a great deal the French wanted to buy—silks, minerals, furs, leather goods, precious stones. And they had a vague idea of extending their influence into China. The railway was finished in 1910, and until fairly recently it was easier to ship goods to Kunming from Shanghai via Hanoi than it was cross-country.

Mr. Wei didn't think much of this train, but to me it was practically ideal—like the best kind of sleepy branch-line train that creaked through the countryside. Europe and America had gotten rid of them, but they still sauntered through China. People played checkers and smoked the pipes that were big lengths of bamboo that looked like drainpipes. They were all farmers—no sunglasses or platform shoes here, no Guangzhou brassieres or cassette recorders.

After a while, Mr. Wei began talking. He said, "I missed out on my education," and I knew he was referring to the Cultural Revolution, so we talked about that. "I hated it," he said. "It was bad in Kunming."

"Because they smashed the temples?"

"Not only that. They fought. One factory fought another factory. They fought in the streets—people screaming. They had sticks, they had guns. They set fires. People died."

"Hundreds or thousands?"

"I don't know. Hundreds maybe."

"Were you a Red Guard?" He was just the right age—about thirty-five now.

"No," he said, almost vehemently. "I didn't like them."

"Do you think they are bad men when you see them now, the ones who were Red Guards?"

"Now? No, I don't. They are not bad men. They weren't protecting Mao. That's what they said. Each one thought he could do a better job. That's why they fought."

"They killed people, though."

"We can't blame them for that. That is the responsibility of the leaders."

That was the usual line, and a useful one too: all the blame had been put on the Gang of Four. Having such scapegoats was probably another example of Chinese economy. What was the point in tearing the country apart when in a ritualistic way (the trial had been televised) all the blame could be put on four people who were then promptly purged.

When we had gone ten miles, Mr. Wei (whom I now realized was no lackey) relaxed and pointed out the sights. That was Running Horse Hill (Pao Ma Shan), where there was a complex of buildings called the Fire-Bury Works (Huozang Chang): the local crematorium.

"People send their dead body to the works," Mr. Wei said. "The men put gasoline on the body. They burn it. They get ashes. They put the ashes in a small box. The people take it home and put it on a desk."

"Everybody does this?"

"Most people do it. A few take the ashes to the mountains—to a Buddhist temple. But we take it home. I have my mother's sister in a box."

These burial rites of the Chinese were bad news to American entrepreneurs of the 1970s who tried to export coffins to the People's Republic. In the same fortune-hunting spirit, in the nineteenth century the Sheffield Silver Company sent vast shipments of forks and spoons to China, hoping to tempt the Chinese away from their chopsticks.

Beside the rail line were beehive huts which, when I looked closer, I saw were actually tombs. Mr. Wei said that thirty or forty years ago people were buried like that; but no more.

I saw people walking through the cool, yellow woods, and farmers on their way to market who had stopped near the railway to wash their vegetables in the ditch water—which was foul. In a shady spot a man was unhurriedly tearing open a buffalo's throat, slaughtering it. The creature was on its back, with its legs in the air, and its wounded neck was bright red, with a bib of flesh hanging down, and its blood running into the railway ditch.

An old woman got on the train at one of the many small stations. She had a little girl with her, and then a younger woman joined her. She had a baby slung on her back.

We fell into conversation—Mr. Wei translating their rustic Yunnanese dialect. It seemed that the young woman had given birth to a little girl. But she and her husband were disappointed. They decided to take the drastic step of having another child. As soon as the woman became pregnant she was fined 1000 yuan, a penalty called a
fa kuai;
but she paid up willingly in the hope that the child would be a boy. It was indeed a boy.

These were the poorest people imaginable—lined faces, threadbare clothes, cracked hands, and wearing bonnets and broken slippers. And this woman had stumped up what was for most city dwellers a year's wages to have a second child. (The fact that the second child in China is nearly always a boy leads many people to conclude that female infanticide is quite common.)

"The city people don't have extra children," Mr. Wei said. "They are happy with one. But the country people want more children—to help them with their farming and also to look after them when they are old."

The one-child policy was instituted in 1976, and seemed to work well, although the population has continued to grow at unanticipated rates. The fear these days is that there will be a great number of old people in China at the end of the century—a sort of mushroom effect; and that the one-child family will create a nation of small spoiled brats. Already there is a creature in China which has appeared for the first time in vast numbers: the fat, selfish little kid with rotten teeth, sitting in front of a television set, whining for another ice cream.