Iron and Silk (2 page)

“Your visa says you will be living in Changsha. Their visas say they will be living in Wuhan. But all of your tickets are for Changsha. They can’t get on the train with faulty papers.” We tried to explain that we all worked for the same organization, that my friends only wanted to help me settle for a day since I was new, and would then get back on the train for Wuhan, the next major stop on the line.

“You can’t do that. There’s a regulation.”

He took them to the Public Security Bureau office, leaving me alone with the bags in the room. The angry woman in the blue uniform showed up again and demanded to see my ticket. I showed it to her, and she demanded to see my friends’ tickets as well. “They have them,” I answered. “Then you’ll have to move their bags out of here,” she snapped.

Five minutes before the train left, Bob, Jean and Julian came running back into the waiting room with little permission slips. We grabbed our bags and ran across the monstrous platform, with the Chinese national anthem blaring over the loudspeakers. I got into the train first, opened a window and had them throw the bags in to me. They jumped on, and the train began to move.

After breakfast I heard over the loudspeaker a flourish of trumpets and a woman’s voice, quivering with emotion: “Comrades—we have arrived! Changsha—a city with a long
and glorious history …” I looked out the window and saw in the distance a sprawling cluster of cement buildings, and a group of peasants walking alongside the railroad tracks with a huge pig tied to a wheelbarrow that had a wooden wheel. In direct sunlight, at 97 degrees, they wore heavy black cotton jackets and pants that looked like quilts for all the patches sewn on them. The transition from countryside to city was abrupt: one moment we saw rice paddies, vegetable patches and fishponds, and several hundred yards later the train came to a halt in Changsha, a city of more than one million people and the capital of Hunan Province.

We unloaded our bags out the window, since the aisle was jammed with people shoving to get off or on, then stood with our mountain of luggage in the sweltering heat as a growing crowd of peasants, mouths agape, formed a tight circle around us. They were brusquely scattered by three somber men in Mao suits who strode up to us, determined that we were the right foreigners, then assumed postures and expressions that indicated warm, heartfelt greetings. Long handshakes occurred, and they identified themselves as members of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of Hunan Medical College: Comrade Hu, Comrade Lin and Group Leader Chen. Comrade Hu spoke English, and although all four of us spoke Chinese, he insisted on speaking English while the other two Foreign Affairs men smiled broadly, nodded and occasionally said, “Ah, ha ha!” Comrade Hu frowned with concentration and delivered a speech. “We are responsible for the safety and convenience of foreigners. On behalf of our college, we warmly welcome you. And now, let’s go.”

The Foreign Affairs team led us into the station and helped us carry our bags down a broken escalator into the main concourse, the largest empty room I have ever seen. The Changsha train station was built toward the end of the Cultural Revolution
to accommodate the hordes of pilgrims who came every day to visit Chairman Mao’s birthplace near Changsha. By the time construction ended, however, interest in the Chairman had waned, and since Changsha is neither a scenic nor an important city, hardly anyone stops there anymore.

A white van waited for us in front of the station. Its driver, an overweight fellow from North China, ran to greet us and shook all our hands for a long time, then helped load our things into the van. He started the engine, held his palm against the horn and gave it a long blast to warm it up, then shot full speed into the crowded streets. He swerved and braked violently to avoid pedestrians who darted into the road without looking, swarms of bicyclists who rode in the middle of the street, trucks, jeeps and huge buses that careened as if driven by madmen, and long carts piled sometimes ten feet high with construction materials, furniture, or tubs of human excrement, which were pulled by men dressed in rags, the veins of their necks and calves bulging from the strain. At no time during this ordeal was our horn silent, nor was that of any other vehicle on the road, rendering them all essentially useless. I asked Comrade Hu why the driver held the horn down like that, and he answered, without a trace of irony in his voice, “Traffic Safety.”

Small shops lined the streets, all with their doors propped open, so I was able to catch glimpses of carpenters, wool-spinners, key makers, bicycle repairmen, cooks and tailors, all working in rooms lit by a single bare bulb, using tools I had seen before only in antique shops or museums. In front of the shops, families of several generations sat on bamboo chairs and beds pulled out onto the sidewalk, fanning themselves, holding infants who urinated into the street, and playing cards.

It was all a bit shocking, but most shocking was how filthy
everything looked. I had heard that China was spotlessly clean. Instead, dishwater and refuse were thrown casually out of windows, rats the size of squirrels could be seen flattened out all over the roads, spittle and mucus lay everywhere, and the dust and ash from coal-burning stoves, heaters and factories mixed with dirt and rain to stain the entire city an unpleasant greyish-brown. The smell of nightsoil, left in shallow outhouse troughs for easy collection, wafted through the streets and competed with the unbelievable din of automobile horns to offend the senses. No one that I could see was smiling, or had red cheeks, as all the Chinese do in
China Reconstructs
magazine.

We reached the college, passing through an iron gate into a walled compound that contained more walls and gates, and some buildings. All the buildings were of grey concrete except for a few red brick ones, most of which were in the process of being either torn down or plastered with concrete so as to look “modern.” The entire campus seemed mired in a swamp of loose bricks, cinderblocks and grey mud. I asked Comrade Hu why there wasn’t any grass on the ground. “Grass makes mosquitoes,” he answered. The van moved toward a two-story brick house, where a group of older men in tailored Mao jackets stood in a loose circle, looking none too happy in the stupefying heat. When our van approached they all stiffened and broke into smiles, extending their hands to shake even before the van had come to a stop. A complicated flurry of introductions ensued, none of which I could absorb except that these were important people in the administration of the college, and they were all convinced that the deep friendship and understanding that already existed between us would become even deeper with time. As I shook hands with one of the leaders, Comrade Lin suddenly hawked as if clearing his entire chest cavity and sent a lump of mucus behind me onto
a brick a few feet away. I desperately wanted to laugh out loud, but no one even blinked, so neither did I. “The Chinese and American peoples have a long history of mutual friendship and cooperative teamwork,” the leader said. “I am sure your stay here will prove educational to us both.”

The leaders said that I must surely be tired from my journey, so they left me to settle into my new home. Comrade Hu led me into the house and pointed to my room. A four foot seven, sturdy-looking peasant woman in her late fifties sat inside. As soon as I came into view, she jumped straight up and ran at me, greeting me in Changsha dialect so loudly I thought her voice would knock me down. “This is Comrade Yang,” Comrade Hu told me. “Everyone calls her Old Yang. Her name means ‘sheep.’ She cleans the house and boils the water. If you need anything, let her know.” Old Sheep laughed in shrieks and ran to pick up my bags. The largest of them, my cello case, stood as tall as she, but she insisted on leaning it against her back and carrying it into the room.

I lay down on my bed, a wooden frame with a bamboo mat spread over it, and balanced an electric fan on my stomach so it would blow on my face. Even in my underwear I was sweating heavily, but the fan made me comfortable. Suddenly it stopped working. I got up and fiddled with the plug, to no avail, then put on some clothes and went outside. Old Sheep was hanging her laundry to dry on lines she stretched from the bars on my window to the cement wall surrounding our house. (The college built this wall, I was told, for the convenience of the American teachers, as it would protect us from “bad elements” who might come to bother us. By unfortunate coincidence, it also protected us from good elements such as our Chinese students and friends, who felt uneasy passing through the conspicuous iron gate that led into our compound.) I told Old Sheep about the fan and she laughed,
“Of course! The electricity is off!” I asked her how often that happened. “Sometimes every day, sometimes every other day, but sometimes we go for days without a blackout! Don’t worry, it will only be for a little while.” Then she asked me if I was thirsty, and when I told her I was, she trotted into the house and came back with a glass of boiling water. “Do you want tea leaves in this?” “No, thank you.”

That afternoon at exactly three o’clock, when
xiuxi
, the Chinese version of siesta, ends, Comrade Hu called my friends and me out of the house. “Now it is time for recreational activities. We will show you the scenic spots and places of revolutionary interest in Changsha.” We got into the van again, joining a few doctors from the college, and went for another hair-raising trip through downtown Changsha. We drove up Yuelu Mountain and visited the gravesites of several tens of local revolutionary heroes, then stopped at the Mawangdui museum, which
contains
spectacular cultural artifacts and the two-thousand-year-old preserved corpse of a marquise of the Han dynasty, all dug up out of nearby Mawangdui tomb. While I was looking at the corpse, one of the doctors told me that when it was first discovered it was in perfect condition. “But at that time, during the ‘so-called Cultural Revolution,’ bad leftist elements led by the Gang of Four were in power, so when the body was unearthed it was declared a relic of the feudal past, and was left in the sun to rot while peasants and workers threw stones at it. Isn’t that awful?” he asked, smiling.

Last of all, we went to see the tomb site where the marquise had lain for so many years before being discovered by the citizens of New China and brought to justice at last. Over a small hill, we came to a huge rain shelter. Under the shelter was a deep hole. “This is the hole,” said Comrade Hu. “If you
like, I can take a picture of you standing in front of it, so you will never forget it.”

As soon as we got back home I realized that I had terrible diarrhea, which was to plague me for the next three weeks. I had no appetite for dinner, but did manage to eat some rice and wash it down with some water that Old Sheep set out on a table for the afternoon so it might cool to room temperature. Just as we finished eating, Comrade Hu appeared in the dining hall. “And now, please, it is time for entertainment. Will you follow me?” The van picked us up once more and took us to the Hunan Theater, a huge, Soviet-looking building on the main street of town, May First Road. That night a troupe of performers from Congo sang and danced to promote friendship between China and Congo. The jammed theater was unbearably hot and stuffy, and reeked of sweat. The audience talked, walked around and spat loudly throughout the performance, so loudly during a mouth harp piece that the musicians gave up halfway through the song and stepped off stage. The performance came to a rousing finale when a striking black man dressed in a studded white body suit unbuttoned to his navel slid across the stage on his knees, threw his head back with abandon and sang out, “Africa—I love you!” in Chinese. At that point, all the Africans came onstage to sing together, where they were joined by a group of aging Hunan Province officials. The Africans, dressed in colorful native costumes, swayed and clapped as they sang a Chinese song—“Socialism is Good”—while the cadres, all dressed in identical grey Mao suits, stood motionless in front of them.

When the song was finished, a little Chinese girl with painted red cheeks came out with a bouquet of flowers, which she presented to the man in the white Elvis costume. The singer lifted her up in his arms and kissed her, whereupon she
became frightened and tried to wriggle free. The cadres turned around to face the singers and shake hands. At that moment, the curtain fell—right onto the heads of the cadres, sending one of their Mao caps rolling across the stage. A roar of laughter and applause rose up from the audience, and the entertainment had come to an end.

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