Riding the Iron Rooster (58 page)

It was another instance of the Chinese hating idle talk. It was a puritanical dislike for loose behavior and foolery. The Chinese attitude was, Get on with the job, don't talk so much, don't ask questions. It did not matter very much if someone was making a fat profit out of his cabbages, or if he was putting on a Western play, or if he believed in the hygienic value of the knife and fork. The error was in talking about such things, because that created conflict. I remember my Chinese friend in Peking, when I was protesting about Mr. Fang being my nanny. This knowledgeable Chinese fellow looked at me, closed his eyes, and shook his head, a gesture that meant:
Don't say another word.

In the meantime, as long as you didn't gloat about it, you could do pretty much as you liked. These days no one breathed down my neck. They had forgotten that I was wandering through China. And one day in Shanghai I saw some students from Nankai University in Tianjin—about twenty of them—who were about to leave for a tour of the United States. They were a theatrical troupe, who were on their way to Minneapolis and St. Louis and a dozen other cities to perform a play adapted from the novel
Rickshaw Boy.

They were friendly, eager students, very excited about their overseas tour. I took one aside and asked him about the production. The novel, by Lao She, is the story of a rickshaw puller in Peking in the 1930s.

I said, "Wasn't Lao She hounded to death by Red Guards?"

"Ha! Ha!" the student said, and the laugh meant emphatically
Don't bring that up!

I stayed in Shanghai a while longer. I bought an old goldfish bowl at the antique shop. I saw a truly terrible Chinese movie: it was violent and thoroughly philistine. It rained. People talked about the power struggle in the inner Party. They were not cynical or indifferent to such big changes—the expulsions and resignations—but since they could do nothing about them they had to accept them. The rain began to leak into my soul. I walked through the rat's maze of back lanes near the cathedral and got glimpses of ancient China in the drizzle. I was happiest those nights, trudging alone in the rain, glancing into windows, seeing people ironing and making noodles and pasting up the red banners for the Chinese New Year, watching people roistering in cheap steamy restaurants and strangling chickens. It was wonderful to be anonymous those dark nights in Shanghai, when no one could see my face, and I heard a mother scolding a child with "Where have you been?"

It was the familiar exit from Shanghai, the main line through the cabbagey province of Zhejiang and tarted-up Hangzhou, the haunt of tourists and nifty little Japanese; and as soon as the hills appeared the sun slid behind them and night fell. There were three Chinese in my compartment when I pulled the blanket over my head, but by morning only one remained. This was Mr. Ni. He explained that the others had gotten off at Yingtan, when the train turned left onto the spur line through Fujian, the coastal province that faces Taiwan. Mr. Ni was also going to Xiamen, and even referred to it (for my benefit) by its old name, Amoy.

He was beginning work on an offshore dredging operation. He explained that he was a surveyor and that he disliked south China. It was his sorry fate to have been posted here for two years. He was Shanghai born and bred and had all of that city's characteristic bumptiousness—he was blunt, offhand, presumptuous and fluent. He regarded himself as cultured. Southerners were yokels, in his view. They were greedy. That was why so many of them had left China.
(It was true the world was full of spirited and hard-working Fujianese.) We were at Zhangzhou, where tangerines grow.

"In Shanghai we are sick for knowledge," Mr. Ni said. "But these Amoy people are only interested in making money. That is their main characteristic. They don't like reading or education. Just business."

A moment later, Mr. Ni asked me if I wanted to change money—my Foreign Exchange Certificates for his
renminbi.
Or did I want an interpreter in Xiamen? Or he could accompany me on my way. He had taught himself English and wanted to practice it. Also—he repeated—what about changing money?

Mr. Ni was invaluable to me that day in unraveling the news of the political confusion in the
People's Daily.
Such subtle news did not get into the English-language
China Daily.
The first interesting item quoted a high politburo member, Li Peng, as saying, "The Party has full confidence in intellectuals."

An intellectual in China is someone with a high-school education, doing a white-collar job. It is not a bespectacled nerd who sits around sipping tea and quoting Mencius. In the way that Chinese society is more easily defined by negatives, an intellectual is not a factory worker or a peasant farmer. He (or she) is a person who can read and write, who does not get his hands dirty.

The main report in the paper was of Zhao Ziyang: a strong implication that he had taken Hu Yaobang's place. He had been elevated by Deng. That was incontestable. He had met a Hungarian delegation—meeting such delegations had been Mr. Hu's old job. But the clearest sign that he had displaced Mr. Hu completely was his unambiguous criticism of Mr. Hu.

He said that Mr. Hu had been "incapable of fighting against Westernization"; that he had sought "to push political reforms too far," and—in an unusual burst of frankness from a Chinese leader—that Mr. Hu "had been warned several times over the years."

It was obvious that Mr. Zhao was in the ascendant and that Mr. Hu was on his way to becoming a nonperson. Mr. Zhao was a natty dresser—he nearly always wore a Western suit and tie. He jogged. But he was careful to distance himself from Westernization, which was almost synonymous with bourgeois liberalization. It had already taken hold, and seemed at the moment to be irreversible. And because its adherents—so-called intellectuals—were nervous, displeased and demoralized, Mr. Zhao had to be especially enigmatic.

Mr. Ni and I puzzled over the paper, and then I asked him what he thought would happen? Would Mr. Zhao ultimately replace Deng Xiaoping?

"I do not know," he said, and raised his hands in surrender: it was the Chinese funk when considering the future. After the shocks and reverses that had surprised the Chinese, only an ignoramus would risk making a fool of himself in speculating on what was to come.

But what about the Chinese liking for gambling? Wasn't that a sort of forecasting and speculation? I felt it was, but gambling in Chinese terms is not rational. It isn't a judicious indication of a possible outcome. It is a fling, something reckless, with a hint of hysteria in it. You might bet on the result of two fighting crickets (it is a popular pastime in China) or on a throw of the dice because triumph depends entirely on luck or good fortune—spiritual qualities. But politics wasn't moral and it certainly wasn't a lottery. It had to do with ambition, power seeking and greed, and it was not only unreadable but regarded as unsuitable as an occasion for a gamble. The Chinese would have a flutter on a cricket but never on a commissar.

Mr. Ni was cautious, but Mrs. Deng, who joined us, was talkative. She was also headed for the coast. She was thirty, she had one child, her husband was studying engineering. She worked in a government office. She wore her hair fashionably curled, and her bright yellow sweater had poppies embroidered on it. She also wore a skirt. "But it's cold!" she cried, smacking her knees. "I should put on my trousers."

I asked her whether she had been surprised when Mr. Hu had been forced to resign.

"Not surprised at all!" she said. She blinked fiercely. She had small teeth. She silenced Mr. Ni. "What a man! Did you hear about the way he invited all those Japanese people to visit China? The Japanese pay for thirty Chinese, but we pay for three thousand of them. It makes no sense!"

"Maybe he was being generous," I said.

She batted me on the arm.

"Ha! Generous! He doesn't know what he's talking! He once read a speech at a general's funeral. 'We are so sad,' he said. But he was smiling! He just talks and talks. We say, 'He's so happy he doesn't know his name.' You understand? Ask him his name and he says, 'Ha! Ha! I forget!'"

"Do you think it is bad that he talks a lot?" I asked, knowing full well that blabbing is seen in China as dangerous and stupid.

"It is just big talk," Mrs. Deng said. "You know the saying about the skinny face?"

"Sorry, I don't."

"If you have a skinny face you beat your cheeks"—she smacked her face with her stiff fingers—"to make your cheeks swell up."

"What's the point?"

"Your cheeks get fat because you beat them, and you try to make people think you're rich."

"I see. A pretense to make yourself look good."

"Hu Yaobang is like that. Can such a man be head of this big country of China? Never."

This made more sense than the
People's Daily,
which linked Mr. Hu with bourgeois liberalization and student protest. He simply talked too goddamned much.

Another fellow I met on the trip to Xiamen had a familiar request. Would I please give him an English name? His Chinese name was Li Guoqing—or "National Day" Li—because he had been born on an auspicious day in October. I was a little sceptical about the Chinese •who called themselves Ronnie and Julian, but Guoqing insisted, so I said, "How about George?"

He smiled and muttered it.

I asked him how much he was paying for his ticket from Shanghai to Xiamen. He said 40 yuan ($11). Mine had cost me 148 yuan ($41). If we had flown, his plane ticket would have cost 83 yuan ($23) and mine 173 yuan ($48). Foreigners in China always pay more. It is the policy. They also get better treatment, on the whole—though not necessarily in railway trains. I had heard of Chinese being bumped from Soft Class in favor of a foreigner, but I never saw it happen.

"Foreigners have more money," Guoqing said. "Why shouldn't they pay more?"

"If you come to America, do you think you should pay less because you're Chinese?" I asked.

But he wasn't listening. "Please call me George," he said.

***

Xiamen, on the hilly coast, had the reputation for being the richest city in China, for having the best houses and the happiest people. It also had the largest proportion of families with relatives living abroad. Stop anyone on the street in Xiamen, it was said, and they would tell you that they had an uncle in Manila, or a cousin in Singapore, or that a whole branch of the family was settled in California. They stayed in touch. In general when people left China for fresh pastures they left the poverty-stricken province of Fujian (Fukien)—this was in the nineteenth century—and most of them set sail from Xiamen (Amoy). They were seafaring people from one of the greatest Chinese ports: millions of them slipped away.

But they did not forget their homeland. They came back to marry. They sent money home. In many cases they returned and built large houses and retired here. Without question, Xiamen has the noblest houses, the grandest villas, the most elaborate walls and gardens, and the most magnanimous charitable and philanthropic enterprises. These are all the result of successful emigrants becoming rich overseas and for sentimental reasons remitting their funds.

The ships that were involved in the Boston Tea Party had come from here. The English word
tea
is Xiamen-dialect Chinese. Xiamen's style of building is found in Canton and also in old Singapore and rural Malaysia—the tall shop-house with an overhang, and the sidewalk running underneath that second story. It is associated with Straits Chinese—the shopkeepers of Southeast Asia. It is not found elsewhere in China. It is practical and pretty, and I cannot think of it without seeing men in flapping pajamas, and women measuring out rice from sacks, and young Chinese girls with soulful faces gazing out of shuttered upstairs windows.

The villas—big stout houses with high ceilings and wraparound verandahs—also resembled the old houses of Singapore and Malaysia that were torn down to make room for the banks and hotels. Until recently they were kept in Xiamen because no one had the money to tear them down or to replace them; but then they were valued for aesthetic and historical reasons, and a preservation order was placed upon them. The new buildings of Xiamen are in a suburb beyond the Causeway, where they belong.

I found it almost impossible to find fault with Xiamen. Because it is in the south, the fruit is wonderful and cheap—all kinds: haws, oranges, tangerines, apples, pears, persimmons, grapes. And because it is on the sea fish and seafood are plentiful and various—all sorts of eels, and big garoupas, and prawns. The best and most expensive were the lobster-sized crayfish. They were kept in tanks in the restaurants—the southern Chinese habit (because of a lack of refrigeration) of keeping food alive until the last moment. In other tanks were frogs, eels, fish, and ducks—and even ducklings. You were invited to point out your proposed entrée, and they cut its throat.

On a back street in Xiamen, at a grubby little restaurant, I saw two cages, one containing a baby owl and the other holding a scowling hawk. There was hardly enough meat on either of them to fill a dumpling. They perched unsteadily, confined by the small cages, and they trembled with anxiety. When I stopped to look at them, a crowd gathered. I asked the owner how much he wanted to make them into a meal. He said 20 yuan for the owl ($5.50) and 15 yuan for the hawk ($4).

"Why not let them go?"

"Because I paid for them," he said.

"But they're unhappy."

His laugh meant
You are a fool.

He said, "They taste very nice."

"They are small," I said. "One mouthful and that's it."

"The meat of this bird is very good for your eyes," he said.

"That is not true," I said. "Only savages believe that."

He was offended and angry. His mouth went strange, and he said nothing.

"It's a superstition," I said. "It is old thinking. Like eating rhino horn for your dick. Listen"—he was now turning away—"This bird eats mice. It is helpful. You should let it go."