Riding the Iron Rooster (11 page)

It was almost midnight. I found my berth in the sleeping car and, ignoring the other occupants (was one a woman?), went to bed. At 5:30 in the morning, Chinese bureaucracy rose up again and flung the door open, switched on the lights and demanded the blankets and sheets. I turned over, trying to return to my dream—tacking in a light breeze across Lewis Bay. The sleeping-car attendant in a white pastrycook's hat and apron dug her fingers into my hip and yelled at me to get up.

"The train doesn't arrive until seven-fifteen!"

"Get up and give me the bedding!"

"Let me sleep!"

A young man sitting on the berth opposite said to me, "They want you to get out of bed. They are folding the sheets."

"What's the hurry? We won't arrive for almost two hours. I want to sleep."

The sleeping-car attendant took hold of the blankets, and I knew she was going to do the Mongolian trick of snapping the bedding off me in one stroke.

My Chinese was functional and unsubtle. I said to the young man, "Do me a favor. Translate this. If they're eager to do a good job, tell them to go clean the toilet. It was so disgusting last night I couldn't use it. The floor's dirty. The windows are dirty. There's no hot water in the thermos jug. What's so important about the blankets?"

He shook his head. He wouldn't translate. He knew—and so did I—that if the blankets and sheets were folded the sleeping-car attendants could go straight home as soon as we arrived in Peking Central Station. They were not paid overtime for folding laundry.

Shhlloooppp:
she whipped the bedding off me and left me shivering in my blue pajamas in the predawn darkness.

"I couldn't tell them," the young man said. "They wouldn't listen."

He meant they would lose face. After all, they were only doing their job. His name was Mr. Peng. He was reading
Huckleberry Finn
to improve his English. I always softened to people I saw reading books, but I told him that one would not do much for his English. He was twenty-seven, a native of Datong. He was married. His wife was a secretary. He said she was a simple girl—that was what had attracted him to her. They had no children. "We are only allowed to have one, so we're waiting a little while."

Dawn came up on Peking. It was immediately apparent that this sprawling and countrified capital was turning into a vertical city. It was thick with tall cranes, the heavy twenty-story variety that are shaped like an upside-down L. I counted sixty of them before we reached Peking Central Station. They were building new apartment blocks, towers, hotels, office buildings. There were overpasses and new tunnels, and most of the roads looked recent. The traffic choked some of these streets. The city was bigger, noisier, brighter, more prosperous—it amazed me, because I had seen it in thinner times. And of course I was thinking also of the Russian gloom and Mongolian deprivation and Polish anger; the self-denial and rapacity, the food shortages, the banged-up cars. Peking was being transformed, as if someone had simply sent out a decree saying, "Build this city." In a way, that was exactly what had happened. This new mood, this boom, was less than five years old. In Chinese history that is no more than an eye-blink, but it was clear that the city was rising.

That was my first impression—of newness: new taxis, new buildings, clean streets, bright clothes, billboards. It was not a lived-in looking city, but rather one for visitors—tourists and businessmen. There were nine new hotels going up, and more restaurants and department stores. No new theaters or parks. The new schools specialized in languages and offered courses in tourism; and one of the larger new schools did nothing but train taxi drivers. Some movie houses had reopened, but there were no new orchestras. Peking had stopped being an imperial city and had begun to be a tourist attraction. The most disturbing sign of its transformation was that it was full of foreign bankers and accountants.

It is probably true to say that any nation that is passionate about putting up new buildings is equally passionate about pulling old ones down. For a thousand years or more Peking was surrounded by a high and elaborate wall, with vast pillars and gates, that had made the city into a fortress. In 1963, to make room for some hideous tenements, the wall was knocked down. Its absence has not been particularly lamented. The traditional Chinese compounds they call yards (
siheyuan
), with the wall, the circular moon gate and screen behind it, and the rambling house—these made up the residential sections of Peking. They too are mostly gone—again sacrificed to the tower blocks. The little inns and guest houses are going or gone, and huge hotels have taken their place—the Holiday Inn and the Sheraton Great Wall are but two of the thirty high-priced hotels. The part of Peking that has not changed at all is the Forbidden City, for even the Chinese know that if they were to pull that down, there would be no reason for anyone to visit Peking. And any sentiment the Chinese may have about Tiananmen Square is contradicted by the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet they have recently installed in the southwest corner, not far from Chairman Mao Memorial Hall.

That Chinese history is layer upon layer, the present half-obliterating the past, is dramatically evident in the big-character slogans of Chairman Mao's thoughts that have been painted over with Toyota ads or turned into billboards for toothpaste and watches. Just beneath the new car or the computer or the brand name it is often possible to read
All Reactionaries Are Paper Tigers!
or
We Should Support Whatever the Enemy Opposes!
As in Datong, there are far too many of these and they are far too boldly inscribed for anyone to do anything but paint over them—and even then there is usually a reminding remnant that is legible. Perhaps the reason there are so many billboards and printed slogans of a commercial nature in Peking is not that these are in themselves valuable but that they are useful in covering up the Mao worship in six-foot Chinese characters that were known as Highest Instruction (
zuigao zhishi
)—the phrase pertains only to Mao.

I asked Mr. Peng why the slogans were crossed out.

'They were just political."

"Is that bad?"

"They weren't practical."

But in 1985 a victory celebration after a football game turned into a xenophobic riot in which foreigners were attacked and car windows broken. And billboards advertising Japanese goods were the focus for some of the violence. Subsequently, some of the billboards were quietly removed or modified. On a previous occasion, another football victory (China beat Bulgaria) caused a crowd of several thousand Chinese fans to gather late one night in front of the Peking Hotel and chant "We beat you! We beat you!" Then, only foreigners stayed in that hotel, which was why it was the focus of the mob's gloating. But now the phrase "foreign friends" is on everyone's lips. The poet Yen-shi Chiu-t'u wrote a century ago:

Last year we called him the Foreign Devil,
Now we call him "Mr. Foreigner, Sir!
"

We weep over the departed but smile when
a new wife takes her place.
Ah, the affairs of the world are like
the turning of a wheel.

Because of a prior arrangement, and because foreign travelers are assigned to hotels, I was at the Yan Xiang Hotel, paying 160 yuan ($53) a night. Mr. Peng was in what he called a Chinese hotel—it didn't have a name, it had a number—for which he paid 3 yuan (75 cents) a night. This was not unusual. There are Chinese prices and foreigner's prices, a double standard that is applied in restaurants and shops; to entrance fees to museums and exhibitions; on buses, in taxis, planes and trains. On the average, a foreigner is required to pay three or four times more than a Chinese person. An American of Chinese extraction who has lived in Boston since birth and speaks no Mandarin is not classified as a foreigner: overseas Chinese are another category. Businessmen and official visitors are yet another class, with certain privileges.

It is impossible to come across these complicated class distinctions and not feel that in time they will create the kind of conflicts that led to the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Peng said maybe—because the average wage (100 yuan a month) was still too low, bonuses too irregular, and for the first time in its history The People's Republic was experiencing inflation.

"But I hope it won't happen," Mr. Peng said. "I think revolution is destructive."

"If there hadn't been a revolution in China, your life would have been rather different."

"Maybe better, maybe worse," he said.

I said, "But can't you say that you've lived through an interesting period of history?"

"Just a little bit of it. Chinese history is enormous. The Cultural Revolution was hardly anything."

In
The House of Exile,
Nora Wain writes, "I asked what war this was. Shun-ko's husband answered, 'It is not a war. It is just a period. When you are adequately educated in Chinese history you will comprehend. We have these intervals of unrest, sixty to a hundred years in length, between dynasties, throughout the forty-six centuries of our history.'"

Mr. Peng had not been a Red Guard. He was in his early teens during the Cultural Revolution, but he had resisted joining the unit. It had not made him popular.

"To show that I loved Chairman Mao I had to engage in the demonstrations. But my heart wasn't in it. It was regarded as wonderful to wear an armband that showed you were a Red Guard. And the best thing was to be the leader of your Red Guard unit."

"Who was the leader at your school?"

"A boy called Wei Dong—he gave himself the name, because it's a way of saying 'Defender of Mao Zedong,' He was a very important boy. He knew all the slogans. He made us say them. It was a strange time. The whole country was in a state of revolution."

"What happened to Wei Dong?"

"I see him now and then. He is completely changed. He is a teacher. He has children. He's an ordinary worker. That's the worst thing to be—it's so hard. He has very little money and no respect. No more speeches or slogans. No one blames him for what happened, but no one is interested in him either."

"Don't you think anything was achieved in the Cultural Revolution?"

"No. And a lot was lost. We wasted time. Mao was muddled. His brain was tired. Zhou Enlai could have saved us from it, but he let Mao lead. We really trusted Zhou, and that was why the Qingming Festival in 1976 was a real event. Thousands of people showed up to mourn him. It was spontaneous. But we didn't know what to do. Tiananmen Square was full of people feeling very confused."

"When did you stop feeling confused?"

"When Deng took over and did away with portraits and opened China's doors," Mr. Peng said.

"Maybe this is just one of those short periods in Chinese history."

"I hope it's a long period," Mr. Peng said.

Bette Bao Lord, the wife of the American ambassador to China, is a great deal better known than her husband both in America (where her novel
Spring Moon
was a best-seller) and in China (where the book is being made into a movie). The name Winston Lord was so patrician that it seemed more that of a character in a certain kind of women's fiction; but not Bette Bao Lord's. Her novel was rightly praised as an accurate portrayal of a family caught in the crosswinds of Chinese history. It was set in a period that Mrs. Lord observed firsthand. It seemed wonderfully symmetrical that, having been born in China and educated and raised in the United States, she had recently returned to China as the ambassador's wife.

With less than a day's notice from me, she arranged a lunch-party for sixteen people. When I met her this seemed less surprising. She did not strike me as a person to whom anyone had ever said no.

She was slim and had the severe good looks of a Chinese beauty—skin like pale velvet and a lacquered elegance that fashion magazines call devastating. She had the alert and yet contented air of someone who has had everything she has ever wanted, and probably been given it lavishly rather than having had to demand it. Her jet-black hair was yanked back tightly into a knot and stabbed with a stiletto. She wore a stylish white jacket and skirt, a striped blouse and cruel shoes, and large white coral earrings were snapped against the sides of her head like earphones designed by Fabergé. She was so eager to put me at my ease that I immediately became tense.

In the steamy May heat of Peking, Mrs. Lord was uncommonly energetic. This was her way. Her gusto was a kind of confidence, and she could be hearty in two languages. She was brisk, she laughed loudly and deep in her throat, and she had the very un-Chinese habit of poking my arm, or rapping my knee or hitting my shoulder to get my attention or make a point. These would have been exhausting qualities in another person, but in Mrs. Lord they were stimulating. I liked being poked in the arm by this glamorous woman.

Once, tapping me, she said (speaking of the importance of planning), "It's like choosing the right husband or wife..."

I thought this was odd, because I had never regarded marriage as a conscious choice. It was something else: you fell in love and that was it, for better or worse. But she seemed very rational—that was certainly Chinese of her—and I guessed that she had spent her life making the right choices.

She told me she felt very lucky. I imagined that many women must hate her, since she was what most would want to be—a ravishing overachiever, a little empress in her own right. She told me she was forty-seven. She looked about thirty-five and, because some Chinese faces are unalterable even by time, would probably look that way for a long while.

We talked about publishing. Her career has been blessed—two books, both huge successes. She had been in Peking only six months and had planned to write a new novel. But running the embassy household, doing menus, dealing with servants and guests and family, had turned her into a sort of Victorian housemother. To give herself a sense of order, she said, she was keeping a diary—probably for publication.

"I find myself sitting next to Deng Xiaoping, or being introduced to a visiting head of state, and I think, 'I must write this down!' Don't you think that's important?"