Riding the Iron Rooster (59 page)

The man began to hiss at me, a sort of preliminary to blowing up in my face. I had no money. I went back to the hotel and got 35 yuan out of my room, but by the time I walked back to the restaurant, the cages were empty. I had imagined holding a little revival of the festival called The Liberation of Living Creatures, in which birds were released from cages. But I was too late today. The owl and the hawk had been eaten.

As a consolation I went to Xiamen market, bought two mourning doves for about a dollar a bird, and let them go. They flapped over the harbor, past the hooting boats, to the nearby island of Gulangyu. Believing it might be a sign, I followed them the next day.

***

Gulangyu was a small island containing a lovely settlement in which no wheeled vehicles were allowed—no cars, no bicycles, no pushcarts. It was a five-minute free ferry ride across the harbor, and from its highest point—Sunlight Rock—it looked like Florence, or a Spanish city, a tumbled expanse of tiled roofs, all terra-cotta and green trees and church steeples. There were three Christian churches at the center of the settlement: this island had once held only foreigners—Dutch, Portuguese, English, Germans. It was Japanese until the end of the war, and then there were a number of tough battles against the Nationalists, who ultimately took Quemoy, which is quite visible to the northeast.

"Enemy territory?" I asked.

"We are all Chinese brothers," Mr. Wei said.

"Then why the trenches and foxholes?"

The east coast of Xiamen was all military earthworks and gun emplacements.

"Because sometimes they shoot at us," Mr. Wei said.

But I liked old coastal China. It had been influenced by its traders and occupiers, and because of its seagoing communities it was outward looking. The dutiful and pious tycoons who had made millions overseas had obeyed the Confucian precepts and become philanthropic. The houses and schools they built blended with the Romanesque church with its sign,
Ecclesia Catholica,
and the old German consulate which might have been designed by Joseph Conrad. The philanthropoids had built villas in a section of Gulangyu called Sea View Gardens, and there they lived among foreign compradors and tea merchants and petty consular officials, each on his own colonnaded verandah, under the palm trees.

The building regulations on Gulangyu are unique in China for their fastidiousness. No building may be higher than three stories, all had to be made of red brick and carved stone, and all designs had to be approved by the Architectural Commission. They were good old-world designs, and even the newest buildings—the vegetable market and the museum—were being put up with great care. Restoration work was being carried out on the villas in order to turn them into hotels and guest houses without losing their character. It was odd for the Chinese, so practical and penny pinching, to spend extra time and money to make a thing look right. The magnificent city wall around Peking, with its forty-four bastions and sixteen gates had simply been bulldozed by Mao's goonish philistines, chanting, "Down with the Four Olds! Up with the Four News! New Thinking! New Customs! New Habits! New—!" In this same spirit, two miles of the Great Wall were pulled down between 1970 and 1974 by an army unit at Gubeikou; the ancient stone blocks of the wall were used to build army barracks.

But this vandalism of China's recent past did not extend to Gulangyu except in the form of big-character graffiti
(L
ong
L
ive the
T
houghts of
M
ao
Z
edong! was still legible in two-foot characters on the walls of a villa) and in selective desecration. The Catholic church was turned into a factory, hate meetings were held in the Protestant ("Three-in-One") church, and the Buddha statues were smashed in the temples—a quarter of Xiamen is Buddhist.

I asked Mr. Wei the reason for the meticulous restoration of Gulangyu.

"Because the government wants to turn this into a tourist island," he said. He also said that he was relieved that the government had not decided to tear the place down, as they had so much else.

We were walking towards Sunlight Rock and ran into a junkman on a back street. He was a fat boy with a pole across his shoulders, carrying loads of wastepaper. I stopped him, and because his dialect was incomprehensible to me, Mr. Wei helped me quiz him.

The boy said that if the wastepaper was good quality, like old, neatly stacked newspapers, he would pay 50 fen for one kilo—about 6 cents a pound. That seemed to me pretty fair. But for other paper he paid less than a penny a pound.

How was business?

"No good," he said. "This is hard work for very little money."

Off he went, his pole bouncing from the weight of the wastepaper bundles.

"Why are you so interested in the Cultural Revolution?" Mr. Wei asked me.

"Because it influenced me at the time—twenty years ago when I was in Africa," I said. "I thought of myself as a revolutionary."

Mr. Wei smiled. He was twenty-one. His father was my age.

I said, "What did your father do during the Cultural Revolution?"

"He just stayed in the house."

"For how long?"

"Six or seven years."

We climbed to the top of Sunlight Rock. In 1982, at the age of seventy-eight, the chain-smoking Mr. Deng Xiaoping climbed to this summit. He was followed by a flunky with an oxygen bottle, but he didn't need it.

Looking across the harbor to Xiamen city I could see how the areas of light industry and banking had expanded westward. This was said to be one of the busiest boomtowns in China. Once upon a time they made paper umbrellas and firecrackers and chopsticks for export. These days they manufactured bicycles, toys, Camel cigarettes, and microchips. And the Kodak Company was installing a filmmaking plant at great expense.

The harbor was full of freighters and fishing boats. Beyond it, in the lanes and streets, there were stalls—people selling fried noodles, fruit, sweets, vegetables, fish soup. One of the happiest pastimes of people in south China is eating out—at greasy little restaurants or at stalls—by lantern light. I could not forgive them for stuffing rare birds into their mouths, but very few had the money for such delicacies. They were great noodle eaters, and because of the pleasant climate, they liked milling around the town and eating when the mood took them, a habit they had exported to Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia.

Xiamen was the only place in China were I was repeatedly accosted by pretty girls. They sneaked up behind me and snatched my arm. "Shansh marnie?" they said, and pinched me delightfully and held on. Was that all they wanted?

They were good-tempered people, but always in a flap. Inevitably there are squabbles among the Chinese, who live on top of each other. It is surprising that fighting is not more frequent. Fistfights are rare. Often children are beaten, and hit very hard. But the most common mode of conflict is the screaming out-of-hand row—two people screeching at each other, face to face. They are long and loud, and they attract large crowds of spectators. For face-saving reasons such disputes can only be resolved by a third party, and until that person enters the fray, the two squabblers go on shrieking.

I witnessed a barracking like this in Xiamen one day. All tourist sites have so-called Viewing Places, where the Chinese visitor is obliged to go—otherwise the trip is futile. The ritual element in tourism is carefully observed. In Xiamen there were the Eight Major Views, the Eight Minor Views and the Views Outside Views. It is customary to have your picture taken on the spot, and since few Chinese can afford to buy cameras, professional photographers stand around these Viewing Places and offer their services for one yuan a shot. The shouting match I saw was between one of these photographers and his dissatisfied customers.

Mr. Wei translated the screams. At first they were all about money—a man and wife claiming that the photographer had put the price up after they had agreed on a lower one. But for face-saving reasons, the screaming became more general and hysterical. It wasn't an argument. It was a random howling—everyone at once, the couple, the photographer and then the onlookers joined in. It started at the Viewing Place, moved down the path, flowed behind a rock and then continued in a shed. It was extremely loud and went on without a break, a remarkable torrent of abuse and exclamation.

"First we're told it's one
kuai,
and then the thief changes it to two!"

"I'm not speaking to anyone until the unit leader comes. But I've never been so insulted—"

"Someone get the unit leader!"

"This is ridiculous! All these people are liars!"

"We're being cheated!"

"Thieves—!"

They were almost certainly tourists, Mr. Wei said. He could tell from their northern accent. Shanxi, he thought. He was whispering, "The woman says that they are thieves. The man is saying liars. There is a child in the shed. The photographer is banging the table with his fist—"

Then there was a greater commotion and the child began to scream. Someone was howling at the child. Then everyone was howling at once.

"What happened, Mr. Wei?"

"The child cursed the worker."

"What did he say?"

"He called him a
wang ba
—a tortoise," Mr. Wei said, with some reluctance.

"Is that bad?"

"Yes. Very. If a wife sleeps with other men her husband is called a tortoise."

"Is that expression used all over China?"

"No. Mainly in the north. Northerners are very tough. North of the Chang Jiang they are loud and muscular. They use violent language. That's why the demonstrations in the north were large and noisy. But we are thin and small and very gentle. We don't use such language, calling someone a 'tortoise' because he overcharges you."

The screaming match was still in full cry fifteen minutes after it had started. I got bored and went away. Mr. Wei said he found it distasteful having to translate this abuse for me, but I told him I had to know these things in order to understand China. And I explained that our version of a tortoise is a cuckold, which (coming from cuckoo) is a more logical word. Female tortoises, I told him, are not great copulators. They only need one screw and they are able to lay fertile eggs for years!

"You are interested in arguments and also interested in biology."

"I'm interested in everything, Mr. Wei."

"In China we specialize in knowledge. One person studies agriculture, and another does engineering."

He went on in this vein until, soon after, we saw a child being beaten by its mother in a yard. I was riveted by it. The child was smacked so thoroughly that he became hysterical and could not be calmed. He went around hitting his mother and wetting himself and howling. He was about seven years old. The usual Chinese reaction to someone in distress is laughter, and soon Mr. Wei and the others watching began to find the tormented child an object of amusement.

Xiamen gave me vivid dreams, but the dreams were not of Xiamen or its ghosts—Marco Polo, foreign traders, Manichaeans, missionaries, pirates, or the compradors of old Amoy. I dreamed of home in one, and of Tadzhiks in another (was it a coincidence that the Tadzhiks were the only Indo-Europeans among China's minorities?). I dreamed of Ronald Reagan again. That was a lulu. The president appeared from behind a tree on the banks of the Potomac. He did a silly walk, waggling his legs, and said, "Come along to the picnic. You can do the cleaning up—okay, Paul?"

I slapped him on the back and said, "Wait till I tell my mother I'm cleaning up the White House!"

This annoyed him, because I deliberately twisted his words. He yelled at me, "It's a picnic!"

A few nights later I dreamed of walking through the ravines that I had seen earlier that week in the hills of Fujian. I was captured by some Mongolian-looking men who were led by a small and very fierce woman. They all had curved knives that they kept jabbing into me, as if impatient to kill me.

"Empty your bag!" the woman shrieked.

Only then did I realize that I had a bag and that I was carrying some little antique statues that I had bought in a Chinese market.

"Show your certificate!"

"Here," I said, finding a piece of paper in my bag. It was the wrong certificate, but I thought: The Gurkhas will save me.

The woman read my mind and replied, "We are the Gurkhas!"

That was probably more a nightmare of buying trinkets illegally than a nightmare of traveling on the open road in China and encountering strangers—nothing was safer than that, judging from my experience of traipsing up and down in China.

The wonderful market in Xiamen, and the dry-goods stores under the shop-houses, reminded me that the best buys in China are not in the souvenir shops and the Friendship Stores—not jade carvings, cork sculpture, ivory letter openers, stuffed pandas, turquoise jewelry, cloisonné, brassware, plastic chopsticks, lacquerware, bone bracelets, or the really dull and derivative paintings on scrolls. If I were to recommend anything special in China that was a bargain—good quality, one of a kind, worth bringing home—I would say: socket wrenches, screwdrivers, watercolor paints and brushes, pencils, calligraphy, sturdy brown envelopes, padlocks, plumber's tools, wicker baskets, espadrilles, T-shirts, cashmere sweaters, bonsai trees, silk carpets and silk cushion covers, tablecloths, terra-cotta pots, thermos jugs, illustrated art books, herbs, spices, and tea by the pound. Bamboo bird cages are also lovely, though the thought of keeping a bird in them is depressing. China may also be the only country in the world where you can buy a cricket cage—made either of a gourd or of porcelain.

A number of these items are made in Xiamen, in the Huli Industrial Area. In more revolutionary times this area was part of a land-reclamation scheme. Mao had said (this was during the early years of the Cultural Revolution), "China must learn to feed itself! People have one mouth but they have two hands!" And so forth. The Red Guards and work gangs decided to build a causeway linking Xiamen to the west side of the harbor, and then to fill in the land behind the causeway and plant rice. But the land was poor and salty. Rice would not grow. And time passed. Now the area is a stronghold of money-making ventures—banks, light industry, factories—as well as the city's new municipal buildings.