Riding the Iron Rooster (20 page)

Mr. Wang said, "I think the answer is definitely no."

"You seem pretty sure," I said.

"Yes, because the Ten Years' Turmoil"—that was the current euphemism—"went so far. It was so big. So terrible. If it had been a small thing it might return. But it involved everyone. We all remember. And I can tell you that no one wants it back."

The wisest thing that anyone can say is "I don't know," but no one says it much in China, least of all the foreigners. The exception to this in Shanghai was Stan Brooks, the American consul general. He had a steady gaze and was not given to predictions or generalizations. He was from Wyoming and had been in China off and on since the 1970s, when Mao's intimidating bulk still influenced all decisions and turned most of his colleagues into lackeys.

"I called them 'The Whateverists,'" Mr. Brooks said, basing it on the Chinese term
fanshi
(whatever). "Their view was that whatever Mao said about this or that was correct. Some members of the politburo have paid the price for being Whateverists."

I said that I had been amazed by changes in China—not just superficial changes, such as clothes and traffic, but more substantial ones—the way people talked about politics and money and their future, and the way they traveled. They had only been allowed to travel for the past five years, and now they went everywhere—in fact, a lot of them wanted to travel outside China and never come back.

"We have visa problems with some of those people," Mr. Brooks said. "They go to the States to study and they get jobs and stay on. Thousands will never come back to China."

"You must have guessed that China would change," I said, "but did you imagine that it would look like this?"

"Never," he said. "I had no idea. We could see that a new phase was opening up, but we weren't expecting this."

"Weren't there political scientists writing scenarios or projections?"

"Not that I know of. If they were, they certainly didn't foresee this. It took everyone by surprise."

And Mr. Brooks's view—also very sensible—was that since this hadn't been foreseen it was impossible to know what would follow it.

"We are witnessing China in the middle of turbulent passage," he said. "No one can put his hand on his heart and say what is going to happen next. We just have to watch closely and wish them well."

But over dinner—and now there were twelve of us at the consulate dining table—the subject of Chinese students staying on in America came up.

"Excuse me," said a thin elderly man, clearing his throat. This was Professor Phan, formerly a member of the History Department at Fudan University in Shanghai.

There was an immediate silence, because these were the first words the professor had spoken; and the suddenness of his soft voice made everyone self-conscious.

"My children saw the Red Guards humiliate me," he said, in a gentle and reasonable way. "Can you blame them for choosing to stay in Minnesota?"

And then Professor Phan was the only one eating, while the rest of us gaped. He had speared a small cluster of Chinese broccoli—he was unaware that he had become the center of attention. He seemed to be talking to the woman on his left.

"I was in prison for six years, from 1966 to 1972," he said, and smiled. "But I tell my friends, 'I was not really in prison for six years. I was in for three years—because every night when it was dark and I slept, I dreamed of my boyhood, my friends, the summer weather, and my household, the flowers and birds, the books I had read, and all the pleasures I had known. So it was only when I woke up that I was back in prison.' That was how I survived."

There was another silence while he ate what was on his fork; and then he saw that everyone was listening.

He said that he believed that Nixon's visit to China had something to do with his release, because some of the people accompanying Nixon in 1972 showed an interest in political prisoners and had asked to visit prisons.

"Usually we got one thin slice of meat a week. If the wind was strong it blew away. But just before President Nixon's visit we started to get three pieces. The prison guards were afraid that he might visit and ask how we were being treated."

Professor Phan had studied at Queen's College, Cambridge, and had lived in England from 1930 to 1939. There was a shyness in the way he spoke that made his intelligence seem even more powerful, and he had a slight giggle that he uttered just before he said something devastating. He seemed about seventy-five, and I had the feeling that though prison had aged him it had also in a way strengthened him. I should say this was a frequent impression I had in China, of former political prisoners. Their hardships and isolation, and even the abuse they suffered never seemed to have weakend them. On the contrary, they were tougher as a result, and contemptuous of their captors, and not only strong in their convictions but also outspoken.

In that respect, Professor Phan was typical, but not less impressive for that. He giggled softly and said, "Americans have no cause to fear the Chinese—none whatsoever. The Chinese are interested in only two things in the world—power and money. America has more power and money than anyone else. That is why the Chinese will always need the friendship of America."

It was clear that he was speaking with the ultimate cynicism, a bleak despair. He giggled again and called Mao "the Old Man," and he repeated something that Mr. Brooks had said to me, about Mao being like a feudal emperor.

"In prison we had to read the Old Man's speeches," Professor Phan said, and smiled sweetly. "Four volumes. Sometimes they made us recite the speeches, and if you got a word wrong the guards would become very angry and you'd have to start all over again. Apart from that we did nothing. We sat on the stone floor all day, like animals. I longed to go to bed and sleep and dream of the past."

Someone said, "What was your crime, Professor?"

"My crime? Oh, my crime was listening to the radio—American and English-language broadcasts."

After dinner I accompanied him home—he did not live far away, and it was a pleasant summer night.

'This humiliation you spoke of—"

I didn't quite know how to begin; but he knew what I was asking.

He said, "One night, in September 1966, forty Red Guards showed up at my house. Forty of them. They came inside—they burst in, and there were both men and women. They put me on trial, so to speak. We had 'struggle sessions.' They criticized me—you know the expression? They stayed in my house, all of them, for forty-one days, and all this time they were haranguing me and interrogating me. In the end they found me guilty of being a bourgeois reactionary. That was the crime. I was sent to prison."

"What was the sentence—the length, I mean?"

"Any length. I had no idea when I would be released. That was the worst of it."

"Forty Red Guards—that's very scary. And they were at your house for almost six weeks! Did you know any of them?"

"Oh, yes. Some of them were my students." He gave the same gentle giggle and said, "They are still around," and disappeared into his house.

On my walks in Shanghai, I often went past the Chinese Acrobatic Theater, a domed building near the center of the city. And I became curious and attended a performance; and after I saw it—not only the tumblers and clowns and contortionists, but the man who balanced a dinner service for twelve on a chopstick that he held in his mouth—I wanted to know more.

Mr. Liu Maoyou at the Shanghai Bureau of Culture was in charge of the acrobats. He had started out as an assistant at the Shanghai Library, but even at the best of times things are quiet at the city library, since it is next to impossible—for bureaucratic reasons—for anyone to borrow a book. The librarian is little more than a custodian of the stacks. So Mr. Liu jumped at the chance of a transfer and joined the Bureau of Culture, and he accompanied the Chinese acrobats on their first tour of the United States in 1980.

"We call it a theater because the performance has an artistic and dramatic element," Mr. Liu said. "It has three aspects—acrobats, magic and a circus."

I asked him how it started.

"Before Liberation all the acrobats were family members. They were travelers and performers. They performed on the street or in any open space. But we thought of bringing them together and training them properly. Of course, the Chinese had been acrobats for thousands of years. They reached their height in the Tang Dynasty and were allowed to perform freely."

Mr. Liu said this with such enthusiasm I asked him how he felt about the Tang Dynasty.

"It was the best period in China," he said. "The freest time—all the arts flourished during the Tang era."

So much for the Shanghai Bureau of Culture, but he was still talking.

"Before Liberation the acrobats were doing actions without art form," he said. "But they have to use mind as well as body. That's why we started the training center. We don't want these acrobats to be mind-empty, so after their morning practice they study math, history, language and literature."

He said that in 1986, 30 candidates were chosen from 3000 applicants. They were all young—between ten and fourteen years old—but Mr. Liu said the bureau was not looking for skill but rather for potential.

"We also have a circus," he said. "Also a school for animal training."

This interested me greatly, since I have a loathing for everything associated with performing animals. I have never seen a lion tamer who did not deserve to be mauled; and when I see a little mutt, wearing a skirt and a frilly bonnet, and skittering through a hoop, I am thrilled by a desire for its tormentor (in the glittering pants suit) to contract rabies.

'Tell me about your animal training, Mr. Liu."

"Before Liberation the only training we did was with monkeys. Now we have performing cats—"

"Household cats? Pussycats?"

"Yes. They do tricks."

It is a belief of many Chinese I met that animals such as cats and dogs do not feel pain. They are on earth to be used—trained, put to work, killed and eaten. When you see the dumb, laborious lives that Chinese peasants live it is perhaps not so surprising that they torture animals.

"Also pigs and chickens," Mr. Liu said.

"Performing chickens?"

"Not chickens but cocks."

"What do the cocks do?"

"They stand on one leg—handstanding. And some other funny things."

God only knows how they got these pea-brained roosters to do these funny things, but I had the feeling they wired them up and zapped them until they got the point.

"What about the pigs?" I asked.

'The pigs do not perform very often, but they can walk on two legs—"

And when he said that, I realized what it was that was bothering me. It was that everything he said reminded me of
Animal Farm;
and the fact that the book was a fable of totalitarianism only made Mr. Liu's images worse. He had described a living example of the moment in that book when oppression is about to overtake the farm. There is terror and confusion at the unexpected sight:
It was a pig walking on his hind legs.
And Orwell goes on, "Yes, it was Squealer. A little awkwardly, as though not quite used to supporting his considerable bulk in that position, but with perfect balance.... And a moment later, out from the door of the farmhouse came a long file of pigs, all walking on their hind legs..."

I was thinking of this as Mr. Liu was saying, "... and lions and tigers, and the only performing panda in China."

He said that the animals and the acrobats often went on tour—even to the United States. Many of the acrobats had worked in the United States. In 1985, a deal was made whereby Chinese acrobats would join Ringling Brothers Circus for a year or two at a time. In the first year there were fifteen, and in 1986 there were twenty hired-out Chinese acrobats working in America.

I asked Mr. Liu about the financial arrangement.

"I don't know exactly," he said, "but Ringling Brothers Circus pays us and we pay the acrobats."

"How much does Ringling Brothers pay you?"

"About two hundred to six hundred dollars a week, depending on the act. For each person."

"How much do you pay the acrobats?"

"About one hundred yuan."

Thirty bucks.

Talk about performing pigs! I wondered how long people would be willing to allow themselves to be treated as exportable merchandise. For some it was not long: the very week I had the conversation with Mr. Liu a man playing the role of an acrobatic lion disappeared in New York. Months later he still had not been found.

On my last day in Shanghai I tried to figure out what it was that I hated about big cities. It was not only the noise and the dirt and the constant movement—the traffic and the bad tempers; the sense of people being squeezed. It was also the creepy intimation of so many people having come and gone, worked and died; and now other people were living where those had died. My impression of wilderness was associated with innocence, but it was impossible for me to be in a city like this and not feel I was in the presence of ghosts.

This became a strong feeling of mine in Chinese cities. I kept thinking, Something awful happened here once, and I shuddered. It was probably a feeling that was enhanced by the refusal of the Chinese to talk about ghosts, since they were officially forbidden to discuss such ludicrous things. In the same way, the Chinese allow people to practice religion providing they don't talk about it; but no one who has any religious belief is admitted to the Chinese Communist Party—that is one of the Party's basic rules.

Shanghai seemed haunted to me. It was full of suggestions and whispers of violence. It was a city in which irrational murders had been committed—not just in the narrow, brown rooms of tottering buildings, but in the streets and alleys, and even in the parks and flower gardens. In the end I was impervious to its charms, and it became a rather diabolical place in my imagination. Or was it that the Shanghainese were very articulate and told such harrowing stories?

I heard some terrifying stories at Fudan University, and that campus was full of ghosts. It did not, at first glance, have the look of a place of learning. From the outside it looked like a Chinese factory—the same scrubby hedge and sharp fence, the same yellow walls and guarded gate and adjoining settlement of dusty half-built buildings, the barrackslike teachers' quarters and the villagey huts nearby, housing tailor, laundry, vegetable-seller, butcher, noodle shop and bicycle-mender. It all had the doomed and arbitrary appearance of a Chinese factory town, developed on impulse, unplanned and built on a shoestring, cutting every corner possible.