River Town (27 page)

Tonight they were exhausted—they were like children who had been given permission to stay up all night, and in their excitement they had worn themselves out by dinnertime. Ariel's eyes were heavy with fatigue, and she told me that she had tried to go back to the dormitory but the doors were locked. Nobody was allowed to go to sleep until Hong Kong returned.

Ten minutes before midnight, I stepped into one of the TV rooms. All of the lights were off and almost one hundred students were watching the tiny screen. I looked for Rebecca and saw him sitting alone in a corner. The light of the television flickered blue off his glasses.

For days there had been torrential rains in Hong Kong. The ceremony continued, as steady as the clock that counted down in the corner of our television screen, and the students cheered when President Jiang Zemin appeared. They applauded when they first caught sight of the Chinese flag. They laughed at Prince Charles, and at the kilted Scottish flag-bearers who marched across the podium. At the stroke of midnight the students screamed when the red flag rose and the Chinese national anthem began to play, and the teaching building rang with the roar of the celebration.

After midnight there were speeches, with Jiang Zemin promising that there would be no changes in the economy and the human rights of the Special Autonomous Region. In Hong Kong it was still raining hard. I listened for a few minutes and then left. On the way back to my apartment, I cut through the croquet court, where a few student couples were celebrating in their own way. They were making out in the shadows, taking advantage of the night.

YAN'AN LOOKED AS IF A HARD RAIN
would wash it away. A fine yellow dust covered the small city, and the crumbling hills above town were pockmarked by the oval mouths of caves. People still lived in caves in the suburbs of Yan'an, and many of the troglodytes were making a good show of it. There were caves with televisions, refrigerators, karaoke machines. North of Yan'an were villages whose school buildings and government offices had been carved into the dry loess hillsides. It was, in a land of blazing summers and cold winters, a sensible way to live.

The countryside in this part of northern China was forbidding and desolate, but it was also eerily beautiful. And it was exactly what I needed after a year in Sichuan; nothing could be more different from Fuling's green rice terraces and misty rivers. The air in Yan'an was dry and there was a hard blue sky above the dusty hills.

I was free that summer. The Peace Corps was going to fund my Chinese study for a month in Xi'an, but that wouldn't start for two weeks and now I was wandering into northern Shaanxi province. In some ways this region was the heart of modern China, at least politically, because the Long March had ended here in 1935. Ever since my arrival in Fuling, I had heard about the Long March and the Yan'an years, and I knew that northern Shaanxi province had been crucial to the Communist resistance against both the Japanese and the Kuomintang. And from history I also knew that the fragility of the
landscape was an illusion; these hills had seen far worse than hard rains, but they were still here.

A sign near the entrance to the Yan'an Revolution Museum said: “Celebrate Hong Kong's Return, Wish Prosperity to the Motherland.” I paid ten yuan and saw the museum's exhibits. Mao Zedong's horse was stuffed and on display, along with Mao's machete and saddle. There was a war poem written in Mao's distinctive flowing calligraphy. There were maps of major battles, and photographs of the revolutionaries who had lived in Yan'an. There weren't many tourists. The glass-eyed horse's name was Xiao Qing and it stood slightly off-kilter.

Looking at the horse's name I thought about Jiang Qing, the woman who married Mao in Yan'an, and I realized that I hadn't seen any photographs of her. I walked back to the entrance, where the ticket-taker was knitting a sweater.

“Didn't Chairman Mao meet Jiang Qing here?” I asked.

“Yes,” the worker said.

“Do you have any pictures of her?”

“No photos of the Gang of Four,” she said curtly, and then she went back to her knitting.

It was the same at Zaoyuan Park, where they had the cave homes of Mao and the other Red Army leaders. Liu Shaoqi's cave had photos of him and his wife, Wang Guangmei; and Zhu De was pictured with his wife; but in Mao's cave all traces of Jiang Qing were gone. She was a complication of history, and so her memory had been removed, leaving the cave with only its simple furnishings: a bed, a bathtub, a bookshelf, a stone floor. Out in front, tourists could dress up in the gray uniforms of the wartime Communists and have their photos taken. Teenage girls giggled as they mounted horses and brandished pistols.

I met a Xi'an railway mechanic in his forties, who said that he had come to teach his daughter about the Revolution. She was eight years old, with pigtails and plastic Hong Kong Returns slippers. “The younger people in China don't know about the Revolution,” her father said. “Our generation does, so I've taken her here to study our Chinese history.”

He asked me what Americans thought about the Revolution, and I said that most people didn't understand it, which was the safest response. It always made the Chinese happy when
waiguoren
said they didn't understand China. The mechanic and I talked for a while and
then, as a polite way to show that the conversation was ending, he said solemnly, “Our two countries have taken different roads. But now we are friends.”

“Yes,” I said. “We can forget about the problems of the past.” Many of my random discussions in small places like Fuling and Yan'an ended like that; the people seemed to feel a need to summarize the relations between China and America, as if this had great bearing on the conversation at hand. Often it was the first time they had spoken with an American, which made our interaction seem like a momentous occasion. I liked that aspect of spending time in remote parts of China—every casual conversation was a major diplomatic event.

I was in the mood to talk, and so I sat on a bench near the park entrance. Within minutes an old man caught sight of me and hurried over. He told me that he was a veteran of Yan'an's Red Army, and he smiled when I said I was American.

“Thank you for helping us in the War of Resistance Against the Japanese,” he said. It wasn't the first time I had been thanked for my country's role in World War II. Chongqing cab drivers were particularly fond of expressing their gratitude, and I gave the old man the same response I always gave the cabbies.

“
Mei guanxi
,” I said. “No problem.”

By now a small crowd had gathered, curious to see the
waiguoren
. I began to talk with a student from Xi'an's Communications University, who explained that she had come because she was interested in the early years of Chinese Communism. I asked her what would have happened if the revolutionaries had failed.

“Today there would be no Communist Party,” she said.

“What if there were no Communist Party?”

“China would be different?”

“How?”

“It would be like Taiwan,” she said. “Like America.”

“What are those places like?”

“The economy is developed, but—” and now she shifted from Chinese into faltering English, because it was a phrase she remembered from her studies—“but the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

“What about the new economic policies—do you agree with Reform and Opening?”

“Of course. All of us agree with that.”

“But what about the gap between the rich and the poor? Doesn't it get bigger?”

“Some people will get rich,” she said, “like scientists and businessmen. But this is necessary to develop the economy, and although others will improve more slowly, they will improve.”

We talked for a few minutes longer. She asked if it was true that most Americans didn't understand China, and I agreed. I said nothing about the challenge of understanding a country in which one heard theories of trickle-down Capitalist economics in front of the enshrined cave homes of Marxist revolutionaries. On my way out of the museum, I passed rows of souvenir stands, where they sold Mao pendants, Communist Party history books, fake jade, cloth hangings, necklaces, statues, bracelets, stamps, cymbals, drums, gourmet rice. A commemorative Hong Kong Returns coin set was 320 yuan. The hawkers shouted out to me as I left.

 

THAT EVENING
policemen burst into my hotel room after midnight. It was a cheap hotel near the train station, and I was fast asleep when the cops came in.

There was no warning. I had locked the door but the policemen got a key from one of the workers, and they entered and turned on the light. By the time I sat up, five officers were crowding around my bed, and I was terrified.

“What's the problem? What's the problem?” I asked the question again and again, but they simply stared at me. “What's the problem? What's the problem?” They listened and stared, and finally one of them spoke.

“We want to see your passport,” he said.

Trembling, I took out my money belt and gave him the passport. He opened it and looked at the photograph on the first page. Then slowly he gazed at the second page. There was nothing on that page except the colorful designs of the passport paper, and the other policemen crowded around to look. The cop turned to the third page, also emptily full of color, and they stared at that as well.

My head was starting to clear and now I saw how young-looking
they were—little more than scrawny boys in baggy uniforms. They gazed at me shyly. I showed them the passport page with the Chinese visa and they liked that, because they could read it. They flipped through the rest of the pages and then handed it back, smiling.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Yes,” said one of them. But still they stood there staring at me in bed. There was a long silence.

“Well,” I said, “I'm tired. I think I will go to sleep now. Thank you very much.”

“Thank you,” all of them said at once. They took a long last look at me before they walked out. I locked the door behind them and went back to sleep.

 

THERE WAS NO GOOD REASON TO GO
to Yulin and it took ten hours to get there. None of the guidebooks said much about it, except that
waiguoren
were restricted to staying in two expensive hotels. Yulin was a small town at the very northern tip of Shaanxi province, right near the border of Inner Mongolia, which was why I decided to go.

North of Yan'an the countryside grew even more desolate, rising through narrow canyons filled with cave dwellings. The river alongside the road died to a trickle, and in the burning heat all life was centered around that frail stream of water: peasants toting buckets, women washing clothes, boys swimming naked in shallow green pools. There were crop terraces high above the river, decorated with dusty signs: Control the Population, Improve the Population Quality. Having people here at all said a great deal about China, and it said far more that even in this godforsaken place their population was controlled.

After five hours I had seen enough. It was a brutally hot, dusty day, and the road was under construction, and the broken-down bus was crowded. But there was nothing to do except stick it out. Virtually every bus trip I took in China seemed to reach that point—all of them were exactly twice as long as I was willing to bear. And I knew that I would have to come back the same way, and that in Yulin I would undoubtedly pay a ridiculous price to stay in a three-star
waiguoren
hotel, and I wished I hadn't come.

I arrived just after sunset and saw a cheap hotel next to the bus
station. My guidebook said that it was restricted to Chinese, but I figured there was nothing to lose by trying. The worker stared at me in surprise when I walked in. Frantically she waved and gestured me back toward the door, her eyes wide and silent as if she had been struck dumb.

“I can speak Chinese,” I said, and the shock of hearing this made her eyes widen even further. Finally she recovered enough to ask what I wanted.

“I want to stay at this hotel.”

“
Waiguoren
can't stay here,” she said. “You have to go to a different hotel.” But she was still too shocked to be rude, the way most workers were when they were set against giving you something. This gave me an idea.

“They've changed that rule,” I said. “
Waiguoren
can stay in the same places as Chinese now.”

Her eyes narrowed but she was still listening. I took some of my Chinese textbook's vocabulary and ran with it. “The National People's Congress changed the law,” I said. “In Beijing they just changed it. Haven't you heard? At least it's changed if you're a teacher. Foreign teachers can stay in Chinese hotels, because we live in China and our salaries are the same as Chinese. See—here's my
danwei
card.”

I gave her my red work unit card, my light green foreign resident card, my dark green foreign expert card, and my blue passport. The cards made a colorful pile and the worker leafed through them slowly, awed and overwhelmed. The Chinese have a weakness for official documents, and they often liked staring at the black-and-white foreign devil pictures on my identification cards. She gazed at them carefully, one by one, and then she gave me a registration slip for a two-dollar room. For the rest of the summer, I always referred to the National People's Congress when all else failed, and this turned out to be a remarkably effective tactic. Finally I saw the point of all the political jargon that I had memorized in class.

The next morning I caught a taxi north of Yulin, where the Great Wall ran through the desert. Tourists rarely came to see the wall here, because it was unrestored and the northern Shaanxi roads were so bad. There was no mention of the wall in my guidebook, but I had a Chinese map of the province which marked the ruins clearly.

The cabbie took me to a big Ming Dynasty fort that stood five
miles outside of town, where Yulin's irrigated fields ended and the desert began. From the fort's highest tower the view stretched northward for miles. Occasionally the barrenness was punctuated by a slice of green where water had found its way—a stand of trees, a lonely field—but mostly it was just sand and low brown hills and a vast thoughtless sky. At nine in the morning the sun was already hot. I looked out at the empty landscape, at the hard low line of the horizon, and I realized why they had built the wall here. Even if there had been no Mongol threat, the terror of the land's monotony would be enough to make you build something.

The wall ran east and west from the fort. Westward it continued to its final stopping point at Jiayu Pass, in the mountains of northern Gansu province. Eastward the ruins ran to Zhonghai Pass, at the shore of the Yellow Sea. All told the distance between these two endpoints was probably more than fifteen hundred miles, and Yulin was somewhere roughly in the middle; but the wall had never been fully surveyed and nobody knew the exact length. I stood there at the desert fort, looking out at the heat waves shimmering above the sandy hills, and I decided to go toward the ocean. I tightened my boots and walked east along the ruins.

Most of the wall was just a three-foot-high ridge of packed earth that had been worn down by the wind and sand. Every two hundred yards or so I passed the ruins of a signal tower—a crumbling twenty-foot-high pile of dirt standing uselessly under the burning sun. I followed the wall through a brick factory, and then it swung across an irrigation canal and through a cornfield. A mound of sand swallowed the ridge, and I skirted the dune until I saw the next tower rising in the distance. A field of poplars had been planted nearby, the trees thin and brittle-looking under the Shaanxi sun. The Great Wall sank to a foot-high mound, and beyond that the lone and level sands stretched far away.