Riding the Iron Rooster (43 page)

"How do they know it's misreported?" I asked.

"Because we know the truth," a student said. "We listen to Hong Kong news here."

The Hong Kong stations came in loud and clear in Canton, and some Hong Kong newspapers circulated in the city, as well.

A student who called himself Andrew—he was a Cantonese fellow named Hen To—said, "I'll tell you anything you want to know about the demonstration here."

I liked his attitude, but there was not much to tell. He said the students in the south were complacent and money minded, not furiously political as in the north.

"We only had two hundred students in our demonstration," he said. "After they made a fuss here they marched to the government offices in town and sang songs. It wasn't much—not as big as Shanghai or Peking."

"What did the students say they wanted?"

"Democracy and reform," Andrew said.

"But China is changing very fast," I said.

"That's what the old people think," he said. "We young people say it is changing too slowly. But that is the government policy. They want China to look stable so that foreign investment will be encouraged. No one will put money into China if there are riots."

I asked him his plans.

"I'd like to take up business," he said. "Import and export."

"You might make a lot of money."

"I hope so."

"Then you'll become a capitalist-roader."

"Maybe," he said, and snickered. "I think we have a lot to learn. We want to use the good features of capitalism but not the bad ones."

"Is that possible?"

"We can try."

That was the new thinking—"To be rich is glorious," was a politically okay slogan. It was the philosophy of the young, of the rising students, and even of many farmers. It was the essence of Deng's thinking, too. It was in total opposition to Mao's philosophy, and it was one of the reasons Shaoshan had no visitors.

Andrew saw himself as an individual, with his own needs and desires. He didn't say what every student had said for the past thirty-five years when asked about their ambitions: "Serve the people." He said "business," "money," "import-export." He was fairly open-minded. He studied hard. He liked his fellow students. He lived in a room with seven others and did his homework in the library. His favorite author was Mark Twain. In the movie theater on campus (built by a Hong Kong tycoon named Leung) he had seen
On Golden Pond, Superman
and
Rambo.

I said that
Rambo
represented everything that I loathed.

"But he is strong," Andrew said. "His body is interesting. The way he looks. The things he does."

That was a point, the freakishness of it; but I said, "Do you realize that it was about Vietnam?"

"Yes."

"So doesn't that make it a reactionary, bourgeois, violently imperialistic movie?"

Andrew shrugged and said, "We don't take it that seriously."

He was twenty-one years old. His parents, as teachers, had been singled out during the Cultural Revolution.

I said, "They were The Stinking Ninth."

"Yes," he said. He knew exactly what I meant. Mao decreed nine categories of enemy: landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, foreign agents, capitalist-roaders, and—The Stinking Ninth—intellectuals. It is a strange list, because it seems to embrace the whole of humanity.

His parents had been rusticated—sent shoveling. They had fared better than the brother of my friend Miss Zhong, who had been locked in a broom cupboard right here at Zhongshan University by Maoists. His crime was that he was the son of a man who had once been a Guomindang politician. He was kept in the broom cupboard for two years and, after a severe interrogation, he hanged himself.

I told Andrew the tale. He said that it was not an unusual story. Well, that was true enough, but it made me feel once again that wherever I was in China I was among ghosts.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" I asked.

"No," Andrew said, and I could tell that he meant it.

He wasn't superstitious, he wasn't spiritual, and he certainly wasn't political—there was no future in Chinese politics. He was practical. His was the first generation in China to grow up with no dogma—no emperor, no gods, no chairman; no Taoism, no Maoism, no Buddhism. Nor had Andrew's generation been touched in the least by Christianity. Democracy was such a long shot that Andrew had not bothered to take part in the student demonstrations. His realism was a kind of glumness.

That night I wondered what would become of him. But of course it was very obvious. If he went into business and made some money he would prosper in a small way and raise a one-child family. He would not use expressions like
Serve the people.
He would regard himself as an intellectual
(zhishi fenzi),
the grandiose term the Chinese use for anyone who does not work with their hands. If he was self-employed, as he wanted to be, he would probably work hard. On holidays he would visit hotels like mine, where they had "holiday specials"—Christmas banquets, New Year's parties ("free hats, favors, racket-makers") and a "New Year's Day Champagne Brunch Buffet" at 28 yuan a throw.

One of the worst aspects of living in brisk, dictatorial China is that you seldom have an accurate idea of what is really going on. It is not that the Chinese government is inscrutable. Lazy travelers and visitors love Chinese mysteries, but the Chinese are quite knowable. And Chinese bureaucrats are among the most scrutable and obvious on earth. And yet anyone must find the Chinese média obfuscatory and unforthcoming. The Chinese people manage to keep abreast of events by depending on telepathy and whispers, and by the politburo hyperbole: if a high official is said to have a cold he's likely been fired; if he is "convalescing" he has been exiled; and if he is "extremely ill" he is about to be murdered.

And liberal does not mean liberal or open-minded. The connotations of the term, which is based on the Chinese characters for freedom
(ziyou),
are entirely negative, implying license or licentiousness. A Chinese official and most American Republicans would agree on what the word liberal implies. For Mao it was a term of abuse.

Meanwhile, the fuss over the students had not died down—the government was still ranting. But there was no public defiance. The Chinese had that squinting wind-in-the-face expression that they assumed when they were at their most resigned. No one on earth is more silent than a silent Chinese. I asked my usual provocative questions, but made little headway. I was sure a power struggle was in progress, because the eighty-three-year-old Deng Xiaoping had still not named his successor.

A Hong Kong student at Canton Station told me, "The government has denied that there is any problem."

"Then there must be a problem," I said. "Never believe anything in China until it has been officially denied."

We were waiting for the Peking Express on this humid winter night in Canton. It was said to be one of the best trains in China. It was the old Huguang Railway line. This was a thirty-six-hour trip—two nights on the train, which went 1500 miles, passing through five provinces, bisecting China from bottom to top and crossing the Yangtze River at Wuhan.

Some visitors to China laugh when you tell them you're taking a two-day trip on a train, and then they are delayed for five days at a Chinese airport, waiting for the fog to lift. Everyone who takes a plane in China has an airplane tale of woe.

The only bad moment the train passenger has is on the platform, when the other passengers are boarding. Which ones will be in your compartment? It is a much more critical lottery than a blind date, because these people will be eating and sleeping with you. I had seen lepers on trains, and bratty children and, on the way to Guilin, a man traveling with five parrots and no cage.

I watched the people boarding. The old woman in the padded jacket, carrying a lunch tin—some pungent stuff in there, chicken-foot stew, Cantonese cow tendon, and highly prized rotten eggs wrapped in seaweed. There was a spiv in sunglasses with a radio, a man with three suitcases and a crate of bananas; a salesman with his case of samples—rubber bungs, probably; three ornery mustached men wearing high-heeled shoes; a small family—haggard father, mother with pin-curl perm, and spoiled child snatching at things that moved. The harassed spiky-haired student; the fat-faced Party hack in the Mao suit; the secret drinker with swollen eyes; the pretty girl traveling with her dragonlike grandmother; the plump boys in new eyeglasses from Hong Kong; the physics prof on his way to a conference; the loud-voiced Chinese-American who speaks only a few words of Cantonese but uses them on everyone; the middle-aged Japanese couple, looking wrinkle-proof but anxious; the students returning from overseas loaded with duty-free presents, Western clothes and a musical suitcase; the skinny, smiling and lovably ineffectual-looking soldiers of the People's Liberation Army—it is impossible to feel threatened by soldiers whose uniforms are four sizes too big.

I was assigned to a compartment with some salesmen. One was the Chinese version of Willy Loman, and another was a frisky man who smiled too much and said, "I'm in machine tools," just as his American counterpart would do. There was a third man who was practically invisible, reminding me of how the Chinese to a large extent have perfected the art of living at close quarters.

Mr. Yeo, the machine-tool man, admired my sweater ("Nice one. Good quality. Very warm. You'll need it in Peking") and was full of direct questions: "You're—what? About thirty-five? Any children?"

He handed me an envelope of pemmican, as a sort of get-acquainted gift, shared his tea with me, and accepted a chocolate bar in return. I thought he might be exhaustingly friendly, but he slept through most of the trip and snored loudly. The Willy Loman character also slept a great deal, but woke at four in the morning and did lazy calisthenics, wagging his head and slapping his forearms. He was in feedstuffs and cereals. His luggage—both boxes and suitcases—filled the luggage shelf. He was very solemn except when I caught his eye. Then he broke into a laugh and gave me a broad smile. His laugh was urgent and meant:
No questions, please!
As soon as he turned away he frowned. That was also very Chinese.

The first night there was a tremendous amount of snoring in our compartment. From time to time it woke me with its flapping wind. It was louder than the clanging wheels of the train. But I slept soundly the rest of the time and didn't get up until nine.

The train was so cold that morning the windows were streaming with condensation. I shaved in cold water—but it was always cold—and in midmorning we arrived at Changsha, where I had been some months before on my way to Mao's birthplace. It had been steamy and dismal in the summer. In the winter it was smoggy and brown and much uglier. The words
a Chinese city
had acquired a peculiar horror for me, like
Russian toilet,
or
Turkish prison,
or
journalist's ethics.
In the cold rain of winter, with the cracked and sooty apartment houses, the muddy streets, the skinny trees and dark brown sky, Chinese cities are at their very worst.

But this city was the signal for the attendants to stoke the fires, and as soon as the coach was reasonably warm the passengers threw their clothes off and clomped around in plastic shoes and wrinkled pajamas. They propped themselves in the draft between the coaches and brushed their teeth. Some practiced t'ai chi in the corridors.

The dining car was crowded at lunchtime. Although there were no tourists on the train and everyone wore old clothes—shouting and spitting and blowing smoke into each other's faces—they were also flinging money around. I guessed that they were mainly Cantonese, on this profitable business route: Guangdong was a producer of goods and Peking a lucrative outlet. These scruffy passengers were all in business. The man next to me paid almost 20 yuan for a meal for himself and his wife. Call it five bucks and it doesn't seem much; but for a Chinese it was nearly a week's pay. He was a grizzled man with matted hair. He smoked and ate at the same time—chopsticks in one hand, cigarette in the other. His small boy did not eat. This little irritant dug out all the toothpicks from the plastic holder and threw them on the floor; then tipped over a glass of water; and then began smacking an ashtray against the table and squawking. He was about five or six. His father laughed at this obstreperousness—very un-Chinese. But that was not the only uncharacteristic behavior in this rowdy train. It was also full of drunks, and not only beer drinkers, but also old men getting plastered on the rice wine they had brought with them.

I read and dozed and woke up in the north of Hunan, at the city of Yueyang, which was a gray town surrounded by fat, shadowy mountains. A few hours later we came to Wuhan. I had been there once before, in 1980. It had seemed to me a nightmare city of muddy streets and black factories, pouring frothy poisons into the Yangtze. It was bigger than I remembered it, but not so black. There were dozens of high-level cranes putting up new buildings, including a hospital.

The Yangtze is almost a mile wide at Wuhan, and on its banks it has landing stages and flights of steps that resemble the ghats on the Ganges. On the Hankou side there were also many new buildings, and there were cars in the streets—I remembered the wagons and carts, pulled by old women. The buildings and the traffic jams were not necessarily improvements, but they made a difference. Modernization did not make any Chinese city look less horrific; many cities looked more so as a result of building schemes.

It was cold enough in Wuhan for people to be wearing mittens and boots. That was what the salesmen in my compartment were wearing when they got out, pulling their suitcases through the windows. They did it clumsily. They were bemused by the sight of a girl walking along the platform, carrying a dead fish.

Before we pulled out of Wuhan the sleeping-car attendant roused me and said I had to move.

"You are in the wrong berth," she said.