Age of Ambition (43 page)

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In the winter of 2010 we moved into a small brick house on Guoxue Hutong—the Alley of National Studies. It was a grand title for a dead-end street so narrow and crooked that two cars couldn't pass at the same time. In the spring, it narrowed further when the neighborhood card game took up residence on the shady side of the street.

The Alley of National Studies—surrounded by noisy boulevards, north of the Forbidden City—was a remnant of old Beijing that had fended off demolition because it was wedged between two treasures: the Lama Temple (Beijing's largest Tibetan monastery) and the Confucius Temple (a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China's most important philosopher). These were surrounded by the city's largest concentration of fortune-tellers, and together they made the neighborhood the most spiritually alive patch of the capital. It had the feel of a chaotic open-air market stocked with not products but creeds.

The name of the alley came from its location: “National Studies” referred to the mix of philosophy, history, and politics at the core of Chinese culture. Defining exactly what this entailed—which history should be taught, which ideas were valid—was fraught, but generations of Chinese thinkers had dreamed of finding the strongest recipe to insulate China from the pressures of Westernization. Liang Qichao, the foremost intellectual of the early twentieth century, called for promoting the “essence of the country,” and in recent years, Chinese leaders had recommitted themselves to this idea, in the hope of fastening the remnants of socialism to deeper roots in Chinese culture. They were unnerved by the spread of Western political values, and like the philosophy student Tang Jie, they reembraced the Chinese classics as a defense. A banner went up declaring our neighborhood
THE HOLY LAND OF NATIONAL STUDIES
.

Our alley had no stores or bars or restaurants. It was only a hundred yards off the main road, Yonghegong Dajie, but the dead end and the old houses made it feel like a village encircled by a city of nineteen million people. One neighbor kept a rooster to greet the dawn. Another took his exercise by snapping a bullwhip in the morning air. We lived in close proximity to one another; at my desk, I listened for the moment, each night, when my neighbor, a widow named Jin Baozhu, fired up her stove at exactly 6:00 p.m.; at 6:05, the hiss of hot oil; at 6:15, dinner.

In its seclusion, life in the alley had an improvisational quality; at Chinese New Year, a neighbor invited us over for fireworks, which were not, strictly speaking, legal. One year they tipped over and fired a rocket into the crowd. Two months later, Mrs. Jin decided to knock down her house and rebuild it with a few extra feet of space that she absorbed from open land. I didn't mind—she needed it; her place was tiny—but my landlord was incensed. He accused her of “stealing sunlight” and filed a lawsuit. They couldn't agree on who owned what, in part because people had seized so much from each other during the Cultural Revolution.

Not far from our front door, an official bulletin board was set aside for “Anti-Cult Warnings and Education.” Large Chinese characters across the top read,
BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR CULTS. BUILD HARMONY.
With so much spiritual activity in the neighborhood, the government kept a wary eye on it, because it worried about groups that competed for loyalty and devotion. When the spiritual movement Falun Gong emerged in China in the 1990s, and appealed for greater rights and recognition, the Party declared it a cult and rounded up its members in a crackdown that has continued ever since. One poster was headed
COUNTERING FALUN GONG'S DAILY PLOTS TO CAUSE TROUBLE AND DESTRUCTION.
It said that cults “use computer networks to create and spread rumors that throw social order into disorder.” I never heard anyone in the neighborhood talk about joining a cult, but if I did, there was a poster explaining how to respond:
DON'T LISTEN, DON'T READ, DON'T SHARE, AND DON'T JOIN
.

Outsiders often saw the Chinese as pragmatists with little time for faith, but for thousands of years the country had been knitted together by beliefs and rituals. At one point, Beijing had more temples than any other city in Asia. Daoism and Buddhism flourished alongside a range of indigenous deities: scholars prayed to the God of Literature, the sick appealed to the God of Rheumatism, and artillerymen worshipped the God of Cannons. Beijing attracted pilgrims from thousands of miles away, some of whom made their way by prostrating flat on the ground with every step, like inchworms.

After the Cultural Revolution subsided, Chinese scholars were gradually permitted to reinterpret Marx's belief that religion was “the opiate of the masses,” and they argued that he was referring to religion in the Germany of his day, not religion itself. By then, China was pursuing material satisfaction, and people found that it could satisfy only some of their yearnings; on the existential questions—meaning, self-cultivation, life itself—it was a dead end. Now and then, a surge of patriotism provided a form and direction to people's lives, but it was, as the Japanese author Haruki Murakami wrote of the nationalism in his own country, “like cheap liquor”: “It gets you drunk after only a few shots and makes you hysterical,” he wrote, “but after your drunken rampage you are left with nothing but an awful headache the next morning.”

By the time we settled in the neighborhood, China was in the midst of a full-fledged revival. The “spiritual void” was now being filled, as one study put it, by a “religious universe, exploding centrifugally in all directions.” People did not trust the institutions around them: the Party was ravaged by hypocrisy; the press was crippled by bribery and censorship; the big companies were known for patronage and nepotism. People were placing their faith elsewhere. In the poorest reaches of the countryside, temples were reopening and offering a mix of Daoism, Buddhism, and the folk religions. There were now sixty to eighty million Christians, a community as large as the Communist Party. I met Pentecostal judges and Baha'i tycoons.

Faced with so many options, some people hedged with a bit of spiritual promiscuity: before the school exams each spring, I watched Chinese parents stream past the gates of the Lama Temple to pray for good scores. Then they crossed the street to pray at the Confucius Temple, and some finished the afternoon at a Catholic Church, just in case.

Some of the fastest-growing groups blended religion, business, and self-improvement. I attended the meeting of an organization called “Top Human,” which recruited ambitious men and women to sell “inspirational marketing” products that help you “see into your psychology.” Local papers asked if it was a “spiritual marketing” program or, perhaps, a “religion.” Eventually the government shut it down, and the founders went to jail, reportedly on charges of tax evasion.

Over the years, I'd followed the stories of those on the hunt for fortune after so many years of poverty. And I'd traveled the country to meet truth-tellers of one kind or another. But the longer I stayed in China, the more I sought to understand the changes that were harder to glimpse—the quests for meaning. Nothing had caused more upheaval in the last hundred years of Chinese history than the battle over what to believe. I wanted to know what life was like for men and women trying to decide what mattered most, and I didn't have to look far. In the bookstores of my neighborhood, the Chinese titles included
A Guidebook for the Soul
and
What Do We Live For?
From my front door, I could walk to every point on the compass and find a different answer.

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Due east of the Alley of National Studies was the Lama Temple, a spectacular complex of brightly painted wood-and-stone pavilions wreathed in the smoke of incense. It was one of the world's most important Tibetan monasteries and, to the Chinese government, one of the most sensitive places in the city. Beijing had once been close to Tibetan Buddhism; emperors had kept thousands of monks in the capital to pray for protection of the empire. But the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, fled China in 1959 after rejecting the Communist Party's claims to his homeland and trekking over the mountains to India. In exile, he won the Nobel Peace Prize and helped turn Tibetans, in the words of his friend Robert Thurman, a Columbia University professor and former monk, into the “the baby seals of the human-rights movement.” Just as Pope John Paul II had been an icon of opposition to the Soviet empire, the Dalai Lama became the face of resistance to Chinese rule. After the uprising in Tibet in the spring of 2008, Chinese leaders accused the Dalai Lama of fomenting unrest. He denied any involvement, but they considered him a “wolf in monk's clothing” intent on “splitting the motherland.”

There were always police in uniform and plain clothes around the temple, which was a curious sight because most of the visitors were not Tibetans; most were prosperous young Chinese couples who came to burn incense and pray for a healthy baby. For many of them, Tibet was China's glamorous Wild West, a chic destination associated with spirituality and rugged individualism. “When I'm in Tibet,” a young Chinese rock musician told me, “I can be free.”

I knew a number of Han Chinese adherents of Tibetan Buddhism, including a private-equity investor named Lin, who wore Buddhist beads on one wrist and a Swiss watch on the other. He struggled to reconcile his faith with the government's warnings about the Dalai Lama. “When I was learning from my Tibetan teachers, I used to ask them, ‘Are you Chinese or Tibetan? Are you going to use my money to buy weapons?'” he said. He had dabbled in psychology and spiritualism, and settled on the Tibetan variety of Buddhism because it felt purer than the Chinese variety, which had been merged with elements of Daoism and other traditions. Of the Dalai Lama, he said, “He's written about sixty books, and I've probably read thirty of them.”

We were at an outdoor café in Beijing, and another friend at the table—a restaurateur who happened to be a Communist Party member—gave a theatrical gasp and said, “He is brave for saying that.” Lin rolled his eyes, and I got the sense that he enjoyed the audacity that accompanied his faith. “I think the Dalai Lama is not actually a Tibetan separatist,” Lin said. “If he were, Tibet would have been out of control by now.”

Radiating, in all directions, from the Lama Temple were blocks of tiny storefronts occupied by feng shui consultants, blind soothsayers, and “name-givers,” who could reveal, for the right price, the most auspicious name for a baby or a new business. After decades underground, the fortune-telling business was out in the open—and booming. So much about success and failure in China hinged on mysterious factors, on hidden relationships and invisible deals, that people were eager to seek a divine advantage.

The soothsayers advertised their services with signs in the windows:
PREDICT THE POLITICAL AND FINANCIAL FUTURE; EVALUATE THE PROSPECTS OF MARRIAGE; IMPROVE A SCORE ON THE COLLEGE-ENTRANCE EXAM.
More advanced procedures were available upon request, including, as one sign put it,
THE RESOLUTION OF SPELLS, ETCETERA
. The shop that belonged to Shang Degang always reminded me of an obstetrician's office; it was papered with photos of smiling clients where the snapshots of thriving kids would be. “This young lady, Peng Yuan, was a nobody when she came to Beijing,” he told me one afternoon, tapping a finger on the picture of a woman who had a tense smile and red cheeks. “Now she's a cosmetologist, and she's friends with many famous people.” In the photo, she was holding something green and flat. “I made that jade plate for her, and it turned her fortune around.”

Master Shang's office was cluttered with not-so-ancient books such as
Wall Street Feng Shui
, and his services mixed Buddhism, Daoism, and a smidgen of hocus-pocus. But his sales pitch hinged mostly on a connection to history: he identified himself as a descendent of Shang Kexi, an ancient general, and on his desk, he kept a leather-bound copy of the Shang family tree, which was four inches thick. It impressed his clients because so many of those family trees were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Clients who could never know the details of their own history found some comfort in knowing his. His sign promised
SUPERNATURAL SERVICES ONCE AVAILABLE ONLY TO THE UPPER CLASS
.

For all Mao's efforts, folk religion still thrived in every corner of life. The first autumn after we moved in, I heard the sound of scratching and digging in the ceiling above my desk. I didn't mind, but after a few weeks my office began to smell a bit like a zoo. Through the window one night, I saw a furry blond creature dart up the tree and disappear into a hole in the roof. I mentioned it to my neighbor Huang Wenyi, and he smiled.

“That's a weasel,” he said. “You should be happy!” A weasel, he said, was a sign of imminent wealth, as were hedgehogs, snakes, foxes, and rats. Since those species hung around tombs, they were believed to bear the souls of ancestors. “Don't mess with it,” Huang said. I mentioned the animal to our housekeeper, Auntie Ma, and she said sternly, “Don't hit it. Never a hit a weasel.”

But the smell over my desk was making it difficult to work. Something had to be done. A few days later, I was standing in the courtyard with an exterminator named Han Changdong. I described what I'd seen. He nodded reassuringly. “That's a weasel,” he said. “You're a very lucky man.”

“But you're in the business of extermination,” I said.

Han shrugged and said, “Chinese people would consider it very auspicious to have a weasel move into a house.” As more of the city turned to concrete, Han said, the last wild animals were crowding into the alleys in search of wood and straw. He fished around in his bag of tools. “In my hometown, you'd burn an offering of thanks to the God of Wealth. But this situation is different. We'll sort it out.” From his bag, he produced a container of rat poison, which didn't make me feel very good.