Riding the Iron Rooster (54 page)

"Our motto is Serve the people," Mr. Ma said.

It was a Maoist phrase, but he made it sound as friendly and eager as a supermarket slogan.

Yantai was a sorrowful-looking town, like a gray windswept place on the coast of Ulster. It had had a large foreign community, so it was more than the wind and weather—it was the architecture, the oversized detached houses, the rather forbidding hospital, the villas made of granite blocks and red bricks, and the low stone cottages. These were all from the turn of the century, but they had lasted well. The dwellings built for a single family were hives—a family in each of the twelve rooms. The black and stony seashore was Irish, and so was the tangle of tide wrack, the overturned rowboats, the coils of nets and the people carrying baskets of mussels. The only un-Irish feature was a pictorial sign showing a Chinese couple and saying
Late Marriage and Late Childbirth Are Worthy.
To make the point, the woman (a new mother) was shown with swatches of gray hair. Since the Chinese don't normally get gray hair until they are in their sixties, this was a remarkable birth.

I liked the people of Yantai for complaining about the weather. It had turned from wet and windy to stormy—it was pelting freezing snow that hardened the mud in the streets, and plastered the sides of buildings with ice. There was none of the bewildering indifference to cold that characterized the people in Shenyang and Harbin. Here people bitched and groaned and squinted at the sleet and said, "What's this supposed to be?" They kicked it in the streets and developed an angry way of walking, a sort of exasperated shuffle, so that they wouldn't fall down. They hardly stopped commenting on it, and they apologized for it to me. All these reactions made me feel warm.

But the truth was that a little snow improved Yantai. It was not a pretty place. It looked stricken, random, exploited, Irish. The snow gave gentle contours to the big dry hills. The hills of Shandong lost their topsoil years ago. Nothing grows on them. They are heaps of mud and loose stones, like rubble piles and slag heaps. It is not an ugly landscape but an exhausted one.

To the manufacture of quill pens and chamber pots and grandfather clocks, Yantai had added the making of tapestries. The Chinese made eighteenth-century products in nineteenth-century factories, and so it was not odd that they should reach even further back in time and revive a medieval art form. It is obvious to anyone who travels even a little in China that the Chinese can be painstaking in their production of kitsch. The Yantai Woollen Needlepoint Tapestry Factory was an extreme example of this effort, which had its counterpart in the hobbyist who makes a model of the Spanish Armada with glue and toothpicks, or (as I saw once in New Hampshire) the front of a large building faced with old bottle caps.

I asked the manager whether they would do me a copy of the Bayeux Tapestry, and even after I had described it he unhesitatingly said yes. There were women picking out copies of the Mona Lisa, Vermeer's lute player and at least one Rembrandt. They were also doing generic birds and flowers, and the creature that is the unmistakable emblem of Chinese kitsch, the fluffy white kitten playing with a ball of yarn or worrying a goldfish. It is nearly impossible to travel in China at all without seeing this white kitten, and if you are especially valued as a foreign friend or compatriot you will be given one, under glass in needlepoint, as a present. Orville Schell, in one of his later and less enthusiastic books about the Chinese, mentions this white kitten and implies that its tastelessness signals the decline of Chinese culture. But surely it is merely a bit of harmless fun and misplaced artistry; nothing looks more like kitsch to the Chinese than our crazed production of chinoiserie—little fake pagodas and portraits of yellow-faced mandarins with silly pigtails. I did not mind the cat (made in huge quantities by the Yantai needlepointers) but I was unspeakably grateful no one gave me one.

These days the call was for needlepointing snapshots of favorite aunts and uncles, or fat children. At their needlepoint frames the women at the tapestry factory were doing large portraits of Roger and Betty Landrum in front of their piano in a suburb of Sydney, Australia; Mr. and Mrs. Chew Lim Hock, wincing at a bowl of flowers; two spoiled-looking Japanese kids on a seesaw, and the mayor of Timaru, New Zealand, Yantai's sister city. The likenesses and colors are surprisingly exact, and for about $400 they will do a needlepoint copy of that picture you took last summer of Uncle Dick waving from the porch. But why anyone wants to pay that money for a small and slightly blurry snapshot made into a gigantic tapestry wall hanging I cannot imagine.

In the end I was less interested in the fishing and manufacturing side of Yantai than I was in the recent history of Mr. Hu. After a few days he disclosed to me that he had been married for just two weeks. That information was like catnip to me; I asked him ceaseless questions. But he did not mind. He was a jaunty, thin man, with two distinct sides to his head. He was also very pleased with himself and happily talkative; with an air of a man of the world. He was proud of the fact that he had traveled out of Yantai—he had been as far as Qingdao and Qufu (the birthplace of Confucius). And, in his telling, his wedding had been quite an event.

Two years before, in one of the pebbly and decrepit Yantai parks, he had met a girl who was out walking with her friends. Mr. Hu was captivated by her. Her name was Mu. After a year of taking her for walks and buying her noodles and watching TV with her at her parents' apartment, Mr. Hu decided to get to the point.

He said, "What do you say, Mu—shall we register?"

Mu was excited. She could hardly speak.
Shall we register?
was an unambiguous proposal of marriage. Registering leads in only one direction. Article 7 of The Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China (1986) specifies, "Both the man and the woman desiring to contract a marriage shall register in person with the marriage registration office."

Mr. Hu was twenty-six, and Mu was twenty-five. Article 5 states: "No marriage shall be contracted before the man has reached 22 years of age and the woman 20 years of age."

When the couple's ages, status, jobs and addresses were verified, a marriage certificate was issued. Other clauses in the marriage law explain that cousins cannot marry, nor can lepers. Mr. Hu had expected that his work unit would give him a place to live—a room in Yantai. He put in several requests, but was bypassed.

Mu told him to forget it. If they waited for a place to live they might never get married. She urged him to consider going through with the marriage. Could they live with his parents?

Mr. Hu said okay—let's do it. But there was another problem. January was deemed an unlucky month, according to an old tradition, for the way it falls just before Spring Festival. Both sets of parents implored the couple not to get married in an inauspicious month.

I said, "Did you agree that the month is unlucky?"

"Not really," Mr. Hu said, but he seemed uncertain. "But for their sakes, we changed the date."

"Are you superstitious?"

His face became very thin with the chattering laugh that meant
You have just asked me a tactless question, but I will nevertheless answer it.
He said, "I don't think so."

"Do you believe in God?" I asked.

"Sometimes," he said. He did not laugh.

By pretending to satisfy the old folks he could calm himself. He chose to get married just after Christmas. Chinese who study English rend to make a thing of Christmas—the eating, drinking, card-sending and gift-giving part: all its heathen elements.

Mr. Hu bought basins of food and cartons of wine and beer. His school friend Hua did the cooking. On the big day he rented a taxi—something he had never before done on his own—and he was driven to Mu's house. He wore a Western suit and necktie. He picked up Mu and proceeded to his parents' house, and on his arrival there strings of firecrackers were unleashed. That was eleven in the morning. The guests arrived at noon, and everyone ate and drank until ten that night.

At that point Mr. Hu and Mu went upstairs. They did not go to work for two days, nor did they stir out of the house. Their romantic tryst was sporadic, and this was not exactly a love nest, because seven people lived in the three-room apartment, and the TV set was in the room occupied by Mr. Hu and Mu. Occasionally members of the household wanted to watch their favorite programs.

Article 9 of the Marriage Law states, "Husband and wife enjoy equal status in the home." This was a bit tricky in the house owned by Mr. Hu's parents, because his mother did all the cooking—Mu could not cook—and "home" was really just a euphemism for the TV room with its convertible bed.

A unique feature of the Chinese Marriage Law is its unambiguous treatment of birth control. That is Article 12: "Husband and wife are in duty bound to practice family planning."

I did not ask Mr. Hu how they managed this aspect, though I was deeply curious. I simply asked him how he was enjoying marriage.

"So far, very nice," he said.

He said it did not bother him that his wife kept her own name. The law allowed children in China to adopt the name of either parent. The law insists that parents be kind and that they act responsibly. This is spelled out in specific detail: "Infanticide by drowning and any other acts causing serious harm to infants are prohibited."

If Mr. Hu's marriage did not work out, and Mu was of the same mind, a divorce could be very speedy. There were restrictions, of which the most interesting was Article 27: "The husband is not allowed to apply for a divorce when his wife is pregnant or within one year after the birth of a child." However, Mu could apply and could be granted a divorce, even though she happened to be pregnant. That seemed an enlightened and considerate way of looking at divorce. In general, the Marriage Law was as straightforward as a driver's manual.

The snow did not let up. The sleet accumulated in Yantai. It was a grim place, with the wind blowing from Siberia.

One snowy day a large group of pilgrims appeared in the hotel, wearing the smile that one instantly associates with people in possession of the Christian message. These were Americans, from Texas. They had come in search of a missionary who had been in this part of Shandong a hundred years ago. Her name was Lottie Moon. The group had discovered the ruins of Miss Moon's house about forty miles away at the coastal hamlet of Penglai. I was told that they regarded this woman as a saint and that they had volunteered to reconstruct the house and the church using their own money, and the Chinese government was on the point of agreeing to this. In Mao's China that would have been unthinkable.

Only six years before, I had copied down an inscription under the photograph of a Catholic church in Nanjing. Its tone was very fierce. It read in part,
American imperialism took preaching as its cover. All over China they erected churches like this and carried out destructive activities.... The American missionaries joined up with the Qing Dynasty troops and attacked the Small Sword Society troops, and the church acted as a stronghold.

I asked Mr. Hu what he thought of this difference in official attitudes.

"If people know about Lottie Moon and other missionaries in Yantai, they will visit here and enjoy themselves."

By "people" he meant foreign tourists. His attitude was characteristic of the Chinese in general: if it brought in tourists and was not immoral, it was to be encouraged, whether it was missionaries, rebuilt churches, or city tours of the bourgeois suburbs of old Shandong. But there were obvious dangers in tourism. After the complete eradication of venereal disease (the fifty-year personal struggle of an idealistic doctor from Buffalo, New York, George Hatem, who became Chinese, transmogrifying himself into Ma Haiteh), the VD clinics were reopened in 1987, to cope with new outbreaks of the disease. But antibiotics were not to be the only remedy. The Chinese also recently decreed that the punishment for engaging in prostitution would be a bullet in the neck.

On these one-day railway trips, the Chinese could practically overwhelm a train with their garbage. Nearly everyone on board was befouling the available space. While I sat and read I noticed that the people opposite, after only a few hours, had amassed on their table (I scribbled the details on my flyleaf): duck bones, fish bones, peanut shells, cookie wrappers, sunflower-seed husks, three teacups, two tumblers, a thermos, a wine bottle, two food tins, spittings, leavings, orange rinds, prawn shells and two used diapers.

The Chinese could be very tidy, but there was also something sluttishly comfortable about an accumulation of garbage, as though it were a symbol of prosperity. The coaches were smoky, and so crowded it was an effort to make my way down the aisle. The train was full of shrieks and stinks. The loudspeaker played a Chinese version of "Flower of Malaya" ("Rose, Rose, I love you, with an aching heart..."). Some big card games were in progress. Passengers read
The Yantai Workers' Daily,
and romantic novels (People's Liberation Army soldier and his gal back home in Wuhan), and a Chinese magazine I had not seen before, called
World Screen,
with a portrait of Roger Moore (as James Bond) on the cover.

It was not an old railway line. At a time when steam trains were being phased out in the United States, and rail lines closed, this line from Yantai to Qingdao was being built. It was 1950, and a few years later a brand-new old-fashioned steam engine went gasping down the track with red flags flying from its boiler. It should have happened sooner, but it was not in the interests of the Germans or the Japanese (who had occupied this province) to build the line. In any case, the vision and altruism that are espoused by colonialists are not readily apparent in China. Unlike in Africa and India, the imperialists in China set themselves up in competition against the Chinese, which was another reason Mao execrated them. They were not all racketeers, but they all thrived on China's disunity.