Riding the Iron Rooster (42 page)

Mao had set out to be an enigma and had succeeded. "The anal leader of an oral people," the sinologist Richard Solomon had said. Mao can be described but not summed up. He was patient, optimistic, ruthless, pathologically anti-intellectual, romantic, militaristic, patriotic, chauvinistic, rebellious in a youthful way, and deliberately contradictory.

Shaoshan said everything about Mao, his rise and fall; his position today. I loved the empty train arriving at the empty station. Was there a better image of obscurity? As for the house and village—they were like many temples in China where no one prayed any longer; just a heap of symmetrical stones representing waste, confusion and ruin. China was full of such places, dedicated to the memory of someone or other and, lately, just an excuse for setting up picnic tables and selling souvenirs.

Mr. Fang was sitting in the hotel lobby with his head in his hands. He did not look up when a man near him hoicked loudly, spat a clam onto the floor and scuffed it with his foot.

"I'm leaving, Mr. Fang."

He raised his head and looked at me with his swollen eyes.

"Where are you going?"

"Canton for a while. Then Peking."

He groaned. "By train?" he asked. His lips were dry.

"The People's Railway is for the people," I said, recalling the slogan I had seen in the Yunnan town of Yiliang.

This made him wince. He said, "I am fifty-six years old. I have traveled a great deal. I was a Russian interpreter. I have been to Leningrad and other places. But I have never taken so many trains all at once. I have never slept on so many trains—I don't sleep at all. Trains, trains."

"A train isn't a vehicle," I said. "A train is part of the country. It's a place."

"No more," he said, not listening.

"I'm going to Canton."

"I must go with you," he said. "But we can take a plane."

"Sorry, no planes. Chinese planes frighten me."

"But the train—"

"You take the plane," I said. "I'll go by train."

"No. I go with you. It is the Chinese way."

He looked miserable, but I had very little sympathy for him. He had been sent to nanny me and breathe down my neck. He had been discreet—he had not gotten in my way; but who had asked him to come? Not me.

"Go back to Peking," I said. "I can go to Canton by myself."

"After Canton," he said, "are you taking more trains?"

"I don't know."

"Planes are quicker."

"I'm not in a hurry, Mr. Fang."

He said nothing more. I was glad: without even trying, I had outlasted him. He was at his wit's end, he hated trains now, he had suffered the torture of sleep deprivation. He was dying to go home.

And yet he followed me onto the express to Canton the following night, and he sat behind me in the dining car. He looked physically ill, and to make matters worse the dining car quickly filled up with some high-spirited tourists whose plane had been canceled.

They were the sort of good-hearted Americans who, at an earlier time in the history of American tourism, used to go to Pike's Peak. Now it was China. They went shopping. They were bussed to temples, where they also shopped. They talked a great deal, but not about Chinese culture. They said, "Joe senior died and she remarried twice more. She was an awful alcoholic." They said, "Bananas are good for you. They feed on carbohydrates." When someone among them mentioned Canton they said, "You can go bowling in Canton!"

But they were not more talkative than the Cantonese in the dining car, nor were they any louder. In a circumspect way they were appreciative.

The waiter put down a dish of green vegetables.

"Who's going to eat this?" a hearty woman said.

"What is it?" another woman asked.

"My son would eat that," said a third woman, peering at it.

"Is it spinach?"

"It's a type of spinach," a man said.

"Never mind!" a man from Texas cried. "The streets are safe! My poor wife's from west Texas and she didn't see a city until she was twenty-three years old. But I could put ten thousand dollars worth of gold on her and send her into the street and she'd be perfectly all right. Because this is China, not Texas."
^*

"But don't touch the water," the hearty woman said.

"It tastes like L.A. water," someone said. "I'm not used to it."

"It tastes like Saginaw water," a young woman said. "It's the chlorine. I had a cup of coffee there once and it was awful. I says, 'What's wrong with this coffee?' But it wasn't the coffee. It was the water."

Her friend—or perhaps husband—said, "Outside Saginaw, in hick towns like Hemlock, the water's real nice."

"Boy am I glad I didn't bring nylons!" the hearty woman said. "Did you think China was going to be this hot?"

"It's hot here, sure," said the man from Texas. "But up north it's freezing. It's all snow and ice. That's a fact."

"He's bringing more food," someone said.

"Jesus, do you think that has a name?"

A woman said in an announcing voice, "I'm going to tell all my friends who are going on a diet to go to China—I mean, the ones that are real picky about their food. They'd slim down good!"

"But the real picky ones wouldn't go to China," the young woman said.

As I left the dining car I heard someone say in an anxious voice, "My question is, what do they do with all these leftovers?"

A Cantonese man had entered my compartment. He was panting, fossicking in his knapsack. He looked simian and strange. He spoke no language but his own. He climbed into the upper berth and rattled his bags. I turned the light out. He turned it back on. He slurped tea out of his jam jar and harumphed. He noisily left the compartment and returned wearing striped pajamas. It was midnight and yet he was still leaping back and forth, once narrowly missing my glasses with his prehensile foot as he used the table as a foothold. I went to sleep and woke at about three in the morning. The man was reading, using a flashlight, and muttering softly. I slept very little after that.

I felt just as grouchy as Mr. Fang in Canton, and so I decided to stay awhile and not make any onward bookings. It is wrong to see a country in a bad mood: you begin to blame the country for your mood and to draw the wrong conclusions.

I had once laughed to think that there were luxury hotels in Canton, with delicatessens and discotheques. The Chinese there had taken up weight lifting; they had body-building magazines. The White Swan Hotel had hamburgers and a salad bar. The China Hotel had an air-conditioned bowling alley. Now it did not seem odd to think that people would go to China to shop, to eat, or to go bowling.

Mr. Fang said nervously, "No more trains?"

"Not at the moment."

"Maybe you will go home?"

"Maybe."

Was he smiling?

"I will take you to the station," he said. "Chinese custom. Say good-bye."

"That's not necessary, Mr. Fang. Why not take the plane back to Peking?"

"There is one leaving tomorrow morning," he said. He was eager.

"Don't worry about me," I said.

He seemed reluctant, but he said no more. I bought him a picture book about Guilin, and that evening, spotting him in the lobby, I gave it to him. He did not unwrap it. He slipped it under his arm, then gave me his sad sea-lion stare and said, "Yes," and shook my hand. "Bye-bye," he said, in English, and then abruptly turned away. It is not a reminiscing race, I thought. He kept walking. He did not look back.

Then, because this was Canton, I went bowling.

And then there were a number of public events that shocked the country. I did not set off immediately. It is so easy to be proven wrong in China. No sooner had I concluded that China was prospering and reforming, that people were freer and foreign investment rising, than the country was in crisis. True, some aspects of China never changed—the rice planters bent double, the weeder on his stool, the boy pedaling his 2000-year-Old irrigation pump, the buffalo man, the duck-herd. But in the months before I left Canton to resume my Chinese travels, the yuan was devalued by thirty percent—instead of three to the dollar there were now almost four—and the black market in hard currency was very brisk, and the most common greeting "Shansh marnie?" People were criticized for wanting to go abroad, and a law was passed requiring potential students to post a bond of 5000 yuan—an enormous sum—before they could study in another country. Foreign investment dropped by twenty percent, and Deng Xiaoping criticized Chinese manufacturers for producing shoddy goods that no one wanted.

And the students demonstrated, for the first time since the Cultural Revolution. The demonstrations were orderly, but the defiance implicit in such illegal gatherings was seen to be a sign of chaos. The Chinese horror of disorder made them seem important, though I felt the parades and demands were mostly half-baked. Traditionally, December and January have been regarded by the Chinese as appropriate months for disruption, and so there was a ritual end-of-term element in the demonstrations—high spirits, funny hats, a measure of farce. The grievances were numerous, and on posters and in their chanting, the students demanded press freedom, electoral re-form, a multiparty system, and official permission to demonstrate. Banners reading
We Want Democracy
were flown. They demanded sexual freedom and better food in the university cafeterias. Eight cities were affected, and the size of the demonstrations varied from a few hundred students in Canton to well over 100,000 (and an equal number of spectators) in Shanghai, which came to a standstill for a full day.

The Chinese government, with its liking for scapegoats (so much more economical than a full-scale witch-hunt), blamed one man for the country-wide outbreak. This was Dr. Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist and vice president of the National Science and Technical University in Hefei. He had been very busy. He had written articles in
China Youth News
criticizing students for having "low democratic consciousness." He lectured his own students at Hefei, and just a month before the demonstrations he had addressed students at Jiaotong University in Shanghai.

Dr. Fang's message was a mixture of noble sentiments and platitudes. Among other things, he said, "Men are born with rights—to live, to marry, to think, to receive an education," and that the only way for China "to transform the feudalistic ideas and gradually approach modern standards in thinking" was for its intellectuals "to demonstrate the strength they possess." He replied that government leaders were not above criticism.

"Democracy can be achieved only gradually through consistent effort," he said. "There is nothing to be afraid of. Criticizing government leaders is a symbol of democracy. I hold the view that we may criticize leaders."

The abusive term for such sentiments is "bourgeois liberalism"—a sort of selfish and privileged complaining. Soon after Dr. Fang gave the speech, the
People's Daily
attacked "the trend towards bourgeois liberalization." In the Chinese mind a person who holds liberal views is a rightist and a person who toes the Party line most strictly is a leftist.

Dr. Fang was vilified. Taiwan was blamed for fomenting trouble. The government papers said it was partly the work of "professional hooligans." In Shanghai a worker at a lacquerware factory was arrested as a counterrevolutionary for establishing his own political party, the Weimin (Defend the People) Patty. He was the only member of this party, but still it was no joke. Starting your own party meant that you intended to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party. That was treason, and the penalty for it was a bullet in the neck.

The very fact that the demonstrations were mentioned in the news was a sign that the government was alarmed. It was fairly well known that one of the demands of the Peking students was that the demonstrations would be reported in the newspapers. Disturbances of any kind had been hushed up in the past. At first, the government sent water trucks to Peking's Tiananmen Square at four in the morning. The paving stones were drenched, and the ice that resulted seemed like a guarantee that the students would fall down when they tried to march. But 3000 students appeared later that morning and kept their footing, and when 34 were arrested and hauled off to be interrogated another demonstration was mounted; more signs, more slogans, and the 34 were released.

The most worrying thing for the government was that in Shanghai both factory workers and students—not natural allies—had come together and marched in the same parade. To ingratiate themselves with the factory workers, the government blamed the students. The mayor of Shanghai addressed a large gathering of students and was heckled. "Who elected you?" a student called out. That was regarded as very shocking, because it is a total lapse of taste to suggest that someone like the mayor (who is appointed by the Central Government) is a Party hack.

The demonstrations were peaceful. Furthermore, they were essentially supporting Deng's policies of reform. "Bourgeois liberalization" was just what the government had been encouraging. But the government did not want to be seen this way, permitting arch-unrepentent capitalist-roaders, behind-the-scenes reactionaries, harbingers of feudalism, running dogs, those left in form but right in essence and promoters of the right-deviationist wing—to use the convenient Chinese categories—to flourish. It was, as far as I could see, the most recent example of the Chinese not knowing when to stop—first the government, then the students.

There was a suspicion that behind it all was a power struggle in the Chinese leadership. The students were being manipulated, not by Dr. Fang (who was fired from his university job and then expelled from the Party), but by leftists who wanted to discredit the reforming rightist Mr. Deng. Or was it the rightists who were inciting the students in order to provoke the leftists into overreacting?

I decided to find out for myself.

On a hot muggy winter day in Canton I went to Zhongshan University, south of the city on the opposite bank of the Pearl River, to see whether the students were still rioting. They were not. It was very placid under the eucalyptus trees. The students were cycling and punching volleyballs and jogging. They were doing their laundry, they were smooching, they were studying. Some of them stared at me. They had few inhibitions. They even talked about the demonstrations. They said their own professors were critical of the government and especially the official policy of suppressing or misreporting the news.