Riding the Iron Rooster (35 page)

"I don't know."

"Who is the leader of the Chinese people?"

"Deng Xiaoping."

"Who is the president of the United States?"

This puzzled him for a moment, but only a moment. "President," he began thoughtfully, and drew a breath. "Nixon."

Nixon had been out of office for twelve years.

"You think Nixon is president of the United States right now?"

"Yes. I think so. I like him. Do you like him?"

"Not very much."

"Which party do you support? Liberty Party, or the other one?"

"Liberty Party," I said. "We call them Democrats." But Mr. Cheung was not listening. He had hoisted his bags for our arrival in Chengdu. I said, "By the way, who is the governor-general of Hong Kong?"

"Sir Something," Mr. Cheung said, and hurried off the train.

***

At a dark, noisy garagelike restaurant called Pockmarked Mother Chen's (Chen Ma Po, home of hot bean curd), I looked into a mirror and saw Mr. Fang staring at the back of my head. After my bowl of bean curd was served to me I was given a plate of hot dumplings. I liked them, but I hadn't ordered them. They weren't on the menu; they had been bought at a stall.

"That man bought them for you," the waiter said, pointing to the back of the room.

But by then Mr. Fang had gone. He had been very observant over these past weeks: he knew of my fondness for dumplings. But he had never mentioned it. I was touched by his gesture, but then I became suspicious. What else had he noticed about me?

The bean curd was flavored with oil and onion and chopped pork and flakes of red pepper the size of a thumbnail. The fried dumplings were filled with spinach. The rice was damp and lumpy, but that didn't matter—Chinese rice was made in huge tureens, so it was always stodgy. This was the Chinese equivalent of a fast-food joint. People popped in for a quick meal and they hurried away. Near me a blind man sat with his guide boy—the blind man had a tight grip on the boy's wrist. And satisfied eaters, having finished, were blowing their noses in their fingers, or hawking loudly, or spitting onto the floor.

Turning away from the sight of a man taking aim at a spittoon—was I a silly ethnocentric old fussbudget for finding a brimming spittoon unwelcome in a restaurant?—I saw a woman watching me.

"Are you an American?" she asked, hopefully, in English.

Her name was Mrs. Ji. She said she was pleased to meet an American because she had recently visited the United States—seeing relatives—and had had a wonderful time. She had spent most of her time in Seattle, but had also been to Los Angeles, San Francisco and even Las Vegas, where she had gambled and broken even.

In Shanghai I had met a Chinese woman who told me that the sight of Chinatown in Boston had depressed her. It seemed to her fatuous and antediluvian, a sort of Guangzhou ghetto. Didn't these people know better than to behave like sheep? I asked Mrs. Ji if she felt any of that exasperation.

"I know what she meant," Mrs. Ji said. "I don't like American food, so I ate at a lot of Chinese restaurants. They were all bad. And the so-called Sichuan restaurants—no good at all."

"But not much spitting," I said. 'These spittoons—"

"We spit too much," she said. "The government is trying to stop it."

The antispitting posters were everywhere, but it was really a campaign to encourage spitters to aim rather than to discourage spitting. The message was: Use a spittoon.

After a while—I was asking Mrs. Ji about her family—she told me that she was divorced.

"My husband met a younger woman a few years ago," she said, and volunteered the information that she herself was forty-eight years old.

"Was it easy to get a divorce?"

"Very easy."

"Are there many divorced people in China?"

"Many."

She didn't elaborate, and anyway it was a delicate subject. It was well known that there were a number of stresses in Chinese society: the shortage of money, the crowded households, the bureaucracy, the one-child family, and the husband and wife—quite a large proportion—who were separated for reasons of work: different factories, different cities, and sometimes different provinces. And many divorces resulted from the pairings-off between peasants and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution.

Perhaps my questions made Mrs. Ji self-conscious. After being so candid, she became quite prim and hurried away—had she seen someone watching? I paid for my lunch and went for a walk.

Chengdu had a number of Buddhist temples and pretty parks. It was one of the many Chinese cities which in the past twenty years had lost its city walls and battlements and beautiful gates; but conversely it was one of the few that had a towering statue of Chairman Mao on its main street. In the course of time, those statues would be broken up. Chengdu's Mao statue was one of the largest in China. It had not been vandalized or pulled down. Mao's liking for the poetry of Du Fu meant that the Tang poet's cottage in a Chengdu park is now a national shrine. But the city was oversized and charmless, and though some of its markets and shop-houses remained, too many of them had been torn down to make room for workers' barracks and tower blocks.

Encouraging people to live in big cities and tall buildings made it easier to control their lives. Of course Chinese cities had always been crowded, but the policies of the People's Republic had robbed them of any interest and made them plainer and reminded people that they were merely "screws" in the vast machine. I had an inkling of this walking around Chengdu, getting the railway-induced kinks out of my muscles. Chinese cities made me feel small and insignificant: they were not places to loiter in. They were the corners of the greater labyrinth, and it was impossible to go very far without coming upon a barrier—the road ended, or there was a roadblock, or a checkpoint. No wonder people mobbed the railway trains. And it was not surprising that when the Chinese visited places like Seattle or San Francisco their inclination was to stay.

I passed the Sichuan People's Hospital one day, walking on the outskirts of Chengdu. It was a busy place, or perhaps I had gotten there during visiting hours; anyway, a great number of people were coming and going. Fruit and vegetable stalls had been set up across the street from the hospital, where people could buy presents for the patients. But among those stalls were a half a dozen medicine men, selling potions that ranged from the outright quackery of antlers and birds' bills and snakeskins, to herbal remedies that were accepted in many Chinese hospitals. It was an appropriate place for the quacks, and they apparently operated on the assumption that if someone was not happy with his treatment at the state hospital he could supplement his medicine with lizards and powdered deer antlers.

Mr. Fang followed me everywhere, in his hesitant way, hanging back apprehensively, and smiling when I caught his eye. But it was always a smile of fear.

I walked past a family-planning poster—a large billboard near the center of Chengdu. It showed a Chinese leader welcoming the birth of one baby girl (the parents handing it over for approval). The slogan underneath said,
China Needs Family Planning.

When I turned around and addressed Mr. Fang, the poor man yelped. Then he recovered himself and laughed. His laugh said
Sorry for screaming!

"That man looks familiar," I said. "Is that Zhou Enlai?"

"Yes. It is Zhou."

"Why him on a family-planning poster?"

"People like him. People respect him."

"Why not Mao Zedong?"

"On a family-planning poster!" Mr. Fang said. He was right to find it absurd. After all, Mao had encouraged the Chinese to breed like rabbits. "Not so good," Mr. Fang said.

I asked him whether people had a more respectful attitude towards Mao or Zhou these days.

"For myself, I prefer Zhou. And I think many others do, too. But 1 cannot speak for them."

"Why do you prefer Zhou, Mr. Fang?"

"He was honest. He was a good man. Also during the Cultural Revolution he suffered much."

"Was he criticized?"

"Not in public, but within. It was worse. People know that."

Before I set off again, I said, "Mr. Fang, why don't you go back to the hotel and rest? It's not necessary to follow me."

"It is the Chinese way," Mr. Fang said.

The parks in Chengdu attracted the newer sort of Chinese youth.

Observe the young couple entering People's Park in a suburb of Chengdu one June afternoon. The first thing that strikes you about the man is that he does not look anything like the man in the family-planning poster. He is smoking a king-size cigarette—it dangles from his lips—and in his hand he has a suitcase-style cassette recorder and radio, and the screechy music (probably a Hong Kong tape) thumps against it and drowns conversation and frightens the dusty starlings. The fellow wears a T-shirt saying
Cowboy,
and the motif on the shirt is a long-nosed man in a ten-gallon hat. He also wears tight blue jeans and platform shoes with womanish high heels. His hair has been professionally curled—the Canton fashion spread to Shanghai and has recently reached Chengdu. He wears sunglasses. He swings his radio and puffs his cigarette.

His girlfriend (if she were his wife he would not be trying so hard to impress her) wears a pink dress. It is light and fluttery. She might have made it herself. She also wears the nylon knee socks that younger women favor, and high-heeled shoes, and sunglasses with rhinestones on the frames.

This is their day off. They are spending it in the park. Later on they will look for a tree and hide behind it for a session of old-fashioned smooching. The parks and the boulevards are full of such couples. They are the new people in the People's Republic—the inheritors. But their motto is Get it while you can.

I asked Mr. Fang whether he had seen them. He said he had. He was very disapproving of these youngsters.

"It is the fault of the Cultural Revolution," he said. "They saw that it was a disaster. For that whole time there was disruption. No one obeyed. That is why, now, these young people have no manners, no discipline and no ideas."

"You sound angry, Mr. Fang."

He did not reply. He laughed—a sharp stuttering and explosive laugh that meant he was very angry.

He had said he disliked modern Chinese stories. He meant he was out of sympathy with them. Who were these spoiled brats and spendthrifts who appeared in the pages of
Beijing Literature
and
Harvest
and
Monthly Literary Miscellany?
Actually they were just the sort of youngsters you saw every day in the public parks, trying to be cool, which meant mimicking Western ways—sunglasses, curled hair, platform shoes, knee socks, flared trousers, blue jeans, transistor radios, earphones, and for a lucky few, motorcycles. The girls even had to have a fancy brassiere, probably the most superfluous garment in China.

In Xu Naijian's recent (1985) story, "Because I'm Thirty and Unmarried," the so-called spinster is told by her girl cousin, "What kind of bra is this you're wearing, so big and ungainly? Get yourself one of those bras from Xinjiekou. They're a nice shape—made in Guangzhou. You're so out of date..."

The puzzling conflict that arises when a Chinese person is faced with choosing between the East and the West was expressed by the Chinese traveler Liang Ch'i-ch'ao. "Of course we may laugh at those old folks among us," he wrote in
Travel Impressions of Europe
(1919), "who block their own road of advancement and claim that we Chinese have all that is found in Western learning. But should we not laugh even more at those who are drunk with western ways and regard everything Chinese as worthless, as though we in the last several hundred years have remained primitive and have achieved nothing?"

As Mr. Fang walked along with me (but a few steps behind), we passed a refreshment stand and heard loud singing—one uproarious voice trying to manage a twangling Chinese song. The singer, a man, was seated at a table, his back turned to us. His two companions, who were sober, wore terrified smiles. The man was at the final stage of Chinese drunkenness: red faced, singing and drooling. Another bottle of beer and his eyes would swell up, he would gasp for breath and soon be out cold.

"That is also a result of the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Fang said. "What does he care? He has lost all discipline. He has no pride. It is bad behavior."

Then the man stood up, still singing, and staggered a little. He turned aside. He did not see me, but I saw him. It was Cheung, the taxi driver from Kowloon.

The biggest statue of Buddha in the world, and probably the ugliest, is three hours down the main Chengdu-Kunming line at Leshan, a riverside town. The Buddha and the surrounding temples make it a place of pilgrimage. The statue sits in a niche as big as a gorge, at the confluence of three rivers. It is said that this Buddha was erected there 1200 years ago because the turbulence created by the meeting rivers had drowned so many boatmen. Even now I could see men battling through the suds in their sampans as I watched.

But this Buddha was less an object of veneration than an example of the Chinese fascination with freakishness—the very big, the very weird, the highly unusual. This Buddha's ears were twelve feet long. Chinese tourists frolicked on his feet. You could park a car on the nail of his big toe. Close up he was Brobdingnagian—big, plain, disproportionate—with weeds growing from his cracks. I imagined he did not look so grotesque from the river. There were dragon-boat races on the river that week: more freakishness—oarsmen throwing panicky ducks into the water and then chasing them in the luridly painted boats.

There were dragon-boat men in the restaurant at Leshan. They were singing and swilling beer and engaged in drinking contests (the loser had to clip clothespins to his ears so that he would look like a total jackass). For lunch I had the specialties of this pleasant town—frogs' thighs and green bean seeds, and then I went to the holy mountain at Emei. Like Leshan, Emei is also a place of pilgrimage. It is considered an act of piety to climb the mountain—holiness at 10,000 feet, on this penultimate staging post to even holier Tibet.