Riding the Iron Rooster (55 page)

This train still had a fifties feel—a little grim. Most of the passengers had boarded at Yantai and begun eating. They ate noodles, buckets of rice, seaweed, and nuts, fruit and everything else. They did not stop until we arrived at Qingdao in the evening. Unusually for a Chinese train, there were plenty of drinkers—and drunks, spitting, wheezing, puffy faced.

Only a half a dozen of the passengers used the dining car for lunch. They were picking at Chinese spinach and another sinister-looking vegetable.

"What will you have?" the supervisor asked.

"How about some of that?" I said, pointing to the other people's dishes.

"You don't want that stuff," he said. "We have many dishes. Different prices. Do you want the two, the four, the five, the eight or the ten?"

"Which is the best one?"

"The ten," he said. "You won't be sorry."

He meant the 10 yuan lunch. It was a worker's week's pay. The dishes kept coming, the food was good, and there was so much food I made a tally of it. It was the largest meal I had on any Chinese train and might have been the best one. How odd that it should be served on this slow train in this out-of-the-way place. There was first a cold dish, sliced meat and white seaweed; and then shredded pork with carrot and bamboo slivers; shrimp and Chinese cabbage; diced chicken and celery; reconstituted dried fish; deep-fried eggs; Chinese spinach; egg-drop tomato soup, and a big basin of rice. I ate some of it and I marveled at the remainder of the $2.70 meal.

My ticket had cost me less than $2. This was all a bargain. But there were other prices to pay. It took seven hours to go the 150 miles, so our average speed was about 20 miles an hour. We stopped every five minutes, literally that. Steam trains have a sort of jerky clanking way of stopping and starting—an indecisive motion—and all day, to this slow conga, clouds of smoke from the stack tumbled past the windows, as we crossed the flatness of Shandong in a reddening winter sun. We traveled through all the daylight hours, slowly, like a branch-line train moving through a backward shire in rural England, the train full of bumpkins, everyone talking and eating and enjoying themselves, and we stopped everywhere.

We had crossed the peninsula—it had the shape of a turtle's head, and Qingdao lay on the south coast, the bottom of the beak. They said it was the coldest night of the year. There were frost crystals glittering in the air under the glaring lights. And in the swirling steam of the engine, the German station and its tower and its stopped clock produced that nightmare feeling I got in China when I was among European buildings in dramatic weather. After all, a nightmare is the world turned upside down, and thousands of Chinese mobbing a German railway station on a frosty night is a good example of that. It was a tangle of the familiar and the absurd to produce fear. And all around it was very dark.

At the edge of the darkness, braving the cold, young men and women with flags and loud-hailers and megaphones called out, "Come to our hotel—!" "You are welcome at our guest house!" "We have good food and hot water!" They tried to outshout each other, in the spirit of competition and free enterprise, as they touted for business among the arriving passengers.

The irrational dreamlike quality of Qingdao did not vanish when the sun came out the next day. It looked almost as odd in the daylight as at night, though less menacing. I don't feel at home in non-European cities that have been heavily influenced by European buildings. When homesick imperialists put up granite mansions and Baptist churches and Catholic cathedrals with spires, and semidetached houses with prim front gardens, I find it all a bit scary. It is out of place, it disorients me; anyway, what are all these Chinese doing here? I think. Or what is that stately Lutheran church doing near those noodle stalls? I am fascinated by such architectural capriccios (the gothic spires among the pagodas, the Chinese faces at the windows of the English-style bungalows), but it is no more relaxing than the bad dream it strongly seems to mimic.

It is intensely reassuring to imperialists to build versions of their fat and monumental buildings, whether they fit the place or not. The Germans used a feeble pretext in the 1890s to threaten the Chinese and finally to force them to hand over various valuable concessions. In 1898 the Germans stuck a German town onto a small fishing village. One of the strangest buildings in China is in Qingdao, the former residence of the German governor, modeled on the Kaiser's palace. I went inside and looked around until the caretakers chased me away. It is palatial; it has ramparts, granite and stucco balconies, Tudor-style beams, glazed tiles, circular staircases, porticoes and galleries (on the inside, under the high vaulted ceiling) and a conservatory. It was built in 1906. It is in perfect condition. It looks as though it will last forever. Chairman Mao stayed in it when he visited Qingdao in 1958. For that reason, the Red Guards, who had a field day smashing up the evidence of diabolical foreign influences in Qingdao, left the governor's palace alone. It remains unoccupied. It serves no useful purpose.

The Chinese in 1898 were browbeaten into granting the Germans a ninety-nine-year lease, but less than twenty years later—just after the outbreak of the First World War, in 1914—the Japanese occupied Qingdao. It is amazing that the Germans managed to accomplish so much in such a short time. Virtually all their buildings still stand, the railway still runs to Jinan, and the brewery produces the best beer in China—and sticks to the old spelling, Tsingtao beer.

The Chinese guidebook to Qingdao begins, "Qingdao is a relatively young city with only eighty years of history. It used to be a small village. Since 1949, rapid developments have been made." So much for the imperial designs, the foreign occupation and two world wars. Even the U.S. Marines and the American Seventh Fleet had a spell in Qingdao. None of these humiliations is forgotten; they are simply not mentioned. The city is actually overrun with Japanese businessmen. I met Germans in my hotel (I asked them what they thought of the German buildings; they said, "Too old, too hard to heat"), and the Seventh Fleet was invited back in 1986, forty years after it had backed the wrong side (it had helped Chiang Kai-shek), and was given a warm welcome.

The Chinese history of Qingdao was available, but the German history was obscure. I asked Mr. Ling, a university student, what he knew about it—how big was the German settlement, what was the population, how did they put up all these large buildings and suburbs?

"There are no figures," said Mr. Ling.

"There must be," I said.

"Yes. But the authorities do not release these figures. It might seem too humiliating if we knew how few Germans there were occupying the town. It is bad history—that's what we think."

"Do you really think it is bad history?"

"No," he said. "I am interested in knowing the truth, but we have no books."

That was a Chinese phenomenon. There was the distant past, the glorious anecdotal history; and there was the recent past, mostly Mao. In between, a thousand years of Chinese history, everything was obscure. Perhaps it was politically questionable, or humiliating, or contradictory, or, like the years that had been expunged from the Mao Museum in Shaoshan, a hideous embarrassment.

In its way, Qingdao was as weird in its monuments and structures as the lost city of Gaocheng, in the boondocks of Xinjiang. Instead of a mud monastery or a crumbling mosque in the desert, Qingdao's counterparts were churches. The largest of them was the Catholic cathedral, built in a sort of twilight period in the early 1930s, when the city was under the control of the Nanking government and abounded with missionaries.

It was a big bare church, made of gray stucco, with two spires. It had been completely renovated—freshly painted, regilded statues and crosses, the Stations of the Cross newly touched up, the ornamented nave picked out in gold—everything bright and pious looking, with baskets of fresh flowers on the altar. There was room for 600 people here and it was said to be full on Sunday, but there were only 3 people praying on the day I went. It was midafternoon on a weekday; the kneeling people whispering their prayers were elderly. Over the high altar was a scroll painted on the wall:
Venite Adoremus Domine.
The Mass in Qingdao is said in Latin.

"I remember when they tore the crosses off the steeples of this church, during the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Bai said. He was a young man who had recently graduated from Shandong University. He had been only nine years old in 1967, but he had a very clear memory of the Cultural Revolution, which had been fierce in Qingdao: this city was full of poisonous foreign influences, and such malignant and feudalistic harbingers of the right-deviationist wind (so to speak) had to be smashed by the vanguard of Mao Zedong's shining thought. It was well known that the Red Guards had kicked the shit out of foreign-looking Qingdao.

But the steeples on the cathedral were very high.

"How did they get up there?" I could not understand how they had scaled these steeples. And the crosses towered eight feet above them, so that was another problem.

Mr. Bai said, "The Red Guards held a meeting, and then they passed a motion to destroy the crosses. They marched to the church and climbed up to the roof. They pulled up bamboos and tied them into a scaffold. It took a few days—naturally they worked at night, and they sang the Mao songs. When the crowd gathered they put up ladders and they climbed up and threw a rope around the Christian crosses, and they pulled them down. It was very exciting!"

After that, they did the same thing to the other three churches, a sort of Venetian-looking one and a vast, solid Lutheran one with a witch's hat for a steeple. They stacked the crosses at the Red Guard headquarters, but pious people stole them and took them away, burying them in the hills east of the city. These crosses were only disinterred a few years ago, when the reforms came into force. But the change is dramatic. For example, I bought a locally made crucifix—they were mass-producing them now in Qingdao—for seventy-five cents.

Mr. Bai said he had vivid memories of the Cultural Revolution because he had not had to go to school. He chased after the Red Guards, watching them destroy houses and persecute people; he had found it all thrilling, and he had always been part of the crowd when some spectacular piece of vandalism was unleashed.

He had even watched persecutions nearer home.

"There was a man in our compound whom we called 'The Capitalist.' He lived on the far side of the courtyard. We had a label or a name for everyone there. One we called 'The Carpenter,' and another 'The Scholar.' We paid rent to The Capitalist'—he owned the houses."

I said, "If you were only nine years old, how did you know what was going on?"

"There was nothing else for me to do except watch. And it was like a fever. All day, for years, I watched and listened." He smiled, remembering. "One day in 1967, the Red Guards held a meeting—"

I saw Mr. Bai, a little raggedy-assed urchin, peering through the window at the screaming youths with their red armbands.

"They decided to criticize The Capitalist. There were about eight or nine of us following them—we were just little kids. We made a paper dunce cap for The Capitalist. His name was Zhang. We went into his house—pushed the door open without knocking. He was in bed. He was very sick—he had stomach cancer. We shouted at him and denounced him. We made him confess to his crimes. We forced him to lower his head so that we could put on the dunce cap—lowering the head was a sort of submission to the will of the people, you see."

"Did you parade him through the streets?"

"He had cancer. He could not walk. We mocked him in his bed. Then the neighbors came in. They also accused him—but not of being a capitalist. I remember one woman shouted, 'You borrowed cooking pots and materials and never gave them back!' She was very angry about something he had done many years ago. Others said, 'You tried to squeeze people' and 'You took money.'"

"What did the man say?"

"Nothing. He was afraid. And we found a great thing. On one of his old chairs there was a tiny emblem of the Guomindang. That proved he was a capitalist and a spy. Everyone was glad about that. We screamed at him, 'Enemy! Enemy!' He died soon after."

This had almost taken my breath away. I said, "That's a really terrible story."

"Sure," Mr. Bai said, but without much force. "It is terrible."

But it was by the book. Mao said, "To right a wrong it is necessary to exceed proper limits, and the wrong cannot be righted without the proper limits being exceeded."

That was turning a compassionate Chinese proverb on its head, one about the evil of going beyond proper limits to right a wrong. But Mao said that it was necessary to parade landlords down the street in dunce caps, and to sleep in their beds, and take their grain, and humiliate them, "to establish the absolute authority of the peasants."

This little treatise "On Going Too Far" was written in 1927. It was part of the script for the Cultural Revolution. The Old Man was greatly in favor of going too far ("going too far" has "a revolutionary significance"). "To put it bluntly," he went on, "it was necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror..."

But this German imperial outpost on the Chinese shore, which had been besieged at various times, and occupied by successive waves of Japanese, Americans and Nationalist Chinese, as well as the fiercest Red Guards (maddened by the city's look of European feudalism and all these Christian nests of superstition), had in the end turned out to be that quaintest of settlements, the seaside retirement town. The houses would not have disgraced the streets of Bexhill-on-Sea, on England's geriatric coast. Qingdao even had a breezy promenade, and slowly strolling oldies. It had a pier. It had ice-cream sellers. But it wasn't raffish and blowsy, a place for day-trippers. It was like its English counterpart—just as bungaloid.

High Party officials—secretaries, directors and deputies longed to get a room or an apartment in Qingdao and spend the rest of their days in the sea air with its snap and tang. It was perhaps a bourgeois dream, but who could blame them? It was more a town than a city. It was not heavily industrialized. The weather was lovely most of the year—pleasant in the summer, bracing in the winter. There was only the occasional typhoon, but it was obvious that Qingdao was able to withstand such storms. It was not a congested place. It was almost unique among Chinese towns for having a unity of architectural style—it just so happened that it was German and not Chinese unity, but so what? That was the luck of its youth and the fact that it had been planned and built in such a short time. It wasn't the centuries-old accretion of monuments, pagodas, ruins, factories, apartment blocks, political boondoggling and bad ideas that made up the average Chinese city. It was not only a pretty place—the familiar and absurd its strongest features—but it was manifestly prosperous. Yantai was not a patch on it. It looked well-to-do. Its food was excellent—fresh seafood, Shandong vegetables. Its beaches were clean. There were plovers strutting on them. And those old folks you took to be members of the cleanup brigade, grubbing around the rocks and poking in the sand, stuffing sea urchins and black kelp into their bags, were actually market traders who were selling this stuff to eat; but the result of their gathering left the beaches of Qingdao bright and tidy. No wonder the Chinese wanted to retire here.