Video Night in Kathmandu (21 page)

As soon as the rickshaw drivers retreated, the Brit and I advanced into the Jinjiang to resume our siege. For more than an hour, we hurried up to each new attendant who appeared at the desk and repeated our appeal. For more than an hour, we were rebuffed. Finally, with a hearty curse, the Brit gave up and went off in search of a train timetable. I, as a last resort, decided to try that ever-helpful model of civic pride, Zheng.

Upon arrival at Zheng’s office, however, I was greeted only by two young girls who could hardly contain their delight at finding someone on whom to practice their English, German and French. For an hour or so, we complimented one another on our proficiency in all three languages. Then Zheng reappeared. Chengdu was a Paradise on Earth, I reminded him, but I was being kept out of it. Predictably outraged, he summoned his troops, and the four of us returned to the Jinjiang. My cohorts marched up to the desk. I heard a few shotgun sentences. I saw a desk clerk try to save face. I was told that a room was available.

Thus, six hours after my arrival, I was able at last to settle down in a room. In the day that followed, I made a full inspection of the capital of Sichuan, the capital of the New China’s agricultural revolution. In the proverbial “land of heavenly abundance,” I quickly realized, I had emerged into an entirely different world from that of the capital. For in Beijing, the New China and the Old China seemed to be safely laid out side by side; in Chengdu, however, the two were as strangely mixed as if a color Polaroid had been superimposed upon a sepia-colored snapshot. The city’s main arteries were crowded with vegetable carts and shops, and the shops were crowded with ancient vials and pounding ghetto blasters. At the head of the main street was the largest statue of Mao in the world and, around it, giant billboards commemorating the holy trinity of the New China—Sanyo, Seiko and Sony.
First Blood
was showing down the street, while in my hotel room I could listen, on the radio, to “Phoenix-Shaped Hairpin” at 3:30, move on to “Foreign Music: Thank you; Coffee-Bean Grinding; A Song” at 6:00, catch “Medley of Themes from Hawaiian Music” at 6:30 and hear “Instrumental: My Sweetheart: A Lovable Rose” at 7:30. Only half an hour later, the programming culminated in “Su Wu Tends Sheep.” But when at last I did get my first, long-awaited taste of Chinese television, I found myself staring at a group of children dressed
as cats and dogs, crazily swirling around a toy car. At the conclusion of this Dance of the Sugar Plum Comrade, on came another show in which real, animated cats and dogs merrily chased one another around, in honor, I could only assume, of Deng’s most famous maxim (“It matters little whether a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice”). A little later, a Hong Kong movie was shown, but it was soon thrown completely off kilter by a long and unusually frank topless scene—testament, I suspected, to some editor’s erratic scissors.

Somewhat discombobulated, I went out into the bustling, light-filled streets. Chengdu and I, however, were never on the same wavelength. I saw a sign for a rest room and gratefully hurried in—to find an impassive matron crouching in a cubicle behind an open door. I bought a ticket to see some local acrobats in action—and went in to discover a huge screen blasting out a kung fu classic. I hired a rickshaw to take me to the Jinjiang and was dropped off, an hour later, in front of a small house at the end of a maze of back streets. And when I ventured into a local restaurant for my first-ever genuine Chinese meal, I pointed at a chicken, and was swiftly served a banquet for ten with a bill for twenty. Before very long, the meal had also succeeded in reuniting me with a traveling companion even more mercurial than the Frenchman—a fever. Thus I returned to Guangzhou in much the same state as when I had left it, at the start of my circular journey, fevered and fatigued.

THE GUANGZHOU THAT
I saw now, however, seemed a very different place from the one I had left just a few weeks before, if only because my sense of China was radically altered. As I drove through the electric streets on my way back into town, I felt myself in a different country, a different century, from Beijing or Chengdu. On every side was a quickening pace, a flashing commotion, a boomtown dynamism and drive that could have put Bombay or Jakarta to shame. The boys who elsewhere rode bicycles were revving up scooters, the girls who elsewhere looked sadly miscast in ill-fitting costumes here struck worldly poses in their pretty dresses, nail polish and T-shirts that said “Superstar” or “Cute.” I saw what looked like Sears, and it turned out to be the local Friendship Store. A notice in English advertised a “Motorcar Fitting Company.” Signs, huge billboards,
colored lights, pulsed through the brilliant streets. I could easily have believed that I was over the border in Hong Kong. Only one thing reminded me I was not: in the capital of capitalism, flashing neon is prohibited, while in the capital of southern China all the lights were winking furiously.

Passing through the electric doors of the White Swan Hotel, a glittering palace built on a lake, I entered a lobby graced with a tumbling waterfall and a beautifully landscaped three-tier garden of red bridges, ferns and tidy walkways. At the reception desk, rows of neatly lipsticked young ladies stood to attention, while a nearby pianist trilled her way through “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” With a few brisk taps on a computer, a receptionist assigned me a room. At the elevator bank, a liveried attendant pressed the
P
button for me. Soothed by a melodious piano concerto, I was lifted twenty-seven floors closer to heaven. At the top, a floor attendant led me to a suite glittering with luxuries: a mini-bar; a set of boxed soaps and shampoos; a color TV that received two English-language stations from Hong Kong, in-house video and a channel devoted entirely to recording the facilities of the hotel; and a booklet describing the swimming pool, the tennis court, the babysitting service, the health club, the Hong Kong direct-dial phones and every other feature befitting a member of the Leading Hotels of the World. Then the lady pulled back the curtain and there—hey presto!—was a terrace and a blaze of lights.

Dazzled by this splendor of riches—two days earlier, after all, I had been staying in a bare cell on the windswept plains of Tibet—I hurried down to the lobby to inspect its facilities. Though it was 10:30 at night, the shopping arcade was still hectic with activity. Customers and workers buzzed in and out of the shiny Travel Office, the Telex Office, the one-hour Photo Developing Store. A Madison Avenue elegance graced the antique stores in the shopping arcade, and the bookshop was packed with everything from Gertrude Stein to Robert Stone. Tuxedoed men ushered guests into discos and nightclubs. And at the Buffeteria, well-fed customers were tucking into dishes called “Yes, Sir, Cheese My Baby,” “Bacon your Pardon,” “A Legitimate Beef” and “Ike and Tuna Turner.” Not far away was a VIP entrance.

With Marxism like this, I thought, who needed capitalism?

———

BY THEN
, I had also seen enough of the New China to appreciate that Joe, my first contact in the country, had been prompted by something more than simple philanthropy in giving me his train ticket to Beijing; though he had sold it at face value, he had been paid, and always would be paid by newcomers just stepping off the train from Hong Kong, in precious FEC. He had thus been assured of a tidy, riskless, 60 percent profit. At the same time, however, I had only to think back to the CARE package he had pressed upon me as I boarded my train to realize that Joe’s canniness about his own well-being did not necessarily diminish his concern about mine. I therefore wasted no time in ringing up my former benefactor and arranging to spend the weekend with him on a tour of the New China.

As soon as Joe and his friend, a round-faced and bespectacled journalist called Wu, appeared at my hotel next morning, I explained how the CAAC meal and my ill-advised trip to the Genuine Chinese Restaurant in Chengdu had conspired to incite a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions within my stomach. Without a moment’s hesitation, they whisked me off to the nearby apothecary market and there began enthusiastically pointing out deer antlers, turtle-shell juice, starfish and tiger bone (“In Guangzhou,” said Joe, not very comfortingly, “people eat everything with four legs except a table. And anything that flies except a plane”). Some of these cures were mere superstition, he acknowledged: “the hair vegetable,” for example—he pointed to what looked like a Brillo pad—was regarded as a panacea only because the Chinese word for it sounded like the ideogram for “making a fortune.” But this, he went on—indicating some items in a jar and a drink—would make me healthy for life. Excellent. What did it contain? Oh, nothing much, said Joe: the edible part was bear’s penis and the beverage was tiger’s urine. It would cost me only 400 yuan for the former and 100 yuan for the latter. This, I thought bitterly, sounded very much like the English phrase for “making a fortune”; the miracle cure cost the equivalent of eighteen months’ wages for the average worker.

Newly convinced of the relative merits of the New China, I dragged my bewildered guides back to the hotel and hurried off to consult its certified nurse—a matron who listened intently as
I described all my symptoms in exquisite and excruciating detail, nodded sagely at the end of my heart-wrenching monologue and then revealed that she spoke no English. When a translator delivered a rough summary of my condition, however, she again listened with a seraphic calm and then, without a word, pulled out three tablets, placed them in an envelope and handed them silently over to me. Five hours later, I was cured.

Back out on the jostled streets, Joe resumed his hymning of the booming energies of the New China. Some of these vendors made 2,000 yuan a month on the open market, he exulted, and one of them was said to be a millionaire. Once he had seen a man pull out 100,000 yuan in cash to pay for a truckful of produce. Guangzhou was so far ahead of the rest of the country that people came here all the way from Beijing just to buy, say, 1,000 pairs of jeans for 22 yuan a piece, each of which they could sell back home for 30 yuan. Many Chinese businessmen, in fact, had grown as active as the entrepreneurs of Hong Kong or New York—except, alas, that they were forbidden to ride planes. In the five days it took them to make the Beijing-Guangzhou round trip by train, the market often rose and fell precipitously. Still, in the new economic order, Guangzhou was unquestionably the capital of the nation. “I tell my friends,” said Joe, “that in the thirties everyone went to Yenan, the center of the Revolution; now, everyone comes to Guangdong, the center of the New Revolution. In Shanghai, ten yuan is a lot of money; here, it’s nothing. In Chengdu, I was once thrown into jail for staying in the Jinjiang tourist hotel; here, I can stay anywhere. In Beijing, people are interested only in politics, in power and prestige; here they want to make money.”

That, he said, had always been the great problem with his country: lack of incentives. Why should members of a construction crew try to complete a 120-day project in 100 days? They knew they would get no extra money and no extra jobs; besides, their bosses would never give them bonuses in which they could not share themselves. Even now, there was no incentive to get educated: a taxi driver could earn in two days what a teacher made in a month. But nowadays, at least there were some inducements to work hard; there was more drive, more ambition, a greater will to succeed. People in the New China were ready to do anything, said Joe, to make money. In one province,
two peasants had tried to sell off bottles of industrial alcohol, diluted to 60 percent, as booze. The result was twenty-two deaths. Recently, a more professional outfit on Hainan had been caught in a $1.5 billion scam, in which they had used Party funds to smuggle in 3 million television sets, 200,000 VCRs and 90,000 vehicles.

Politicians too were growing shrewder about courting the public “Sure,” continued the ever-fluent Joe. “Many people say, ‘Democracy is hypocrisy.’ Yet even baby kissing is better than what happened before, however selfish the motive. Sure, there are many sad effects to competition. But right now it is needed. Our people are lazy, inefficient. They don’t want to achieve anything. The peasant is still poor, but now at least he has something to work for. And now he has pride in his heart.”

Naturally, he went on, the New China could not solve all the problems of his country overnight. Some people resisted every kind of change. One local firm had invited a German expert to inspect their operations. At the end of his tour, the visitor had submitted a hundred-page report, accompanied by a promise to turn the company around if he were allowed to act as president for a few months. The company obliged, and the German promptly fired the vice president and the Party Secretary. Instantly, profits soared. In general, however, it was impossible to fire the Party Secretary. And if the Party Secretary could not be fired, neither could X, who was his ally. And if X could not be fired, it was difficult to fire Y, his rival. And so it went.

Indeed, said Joe, chuckling, the prison in which he had once spent two months was a perfect reflection of society as a whole. The entire place had been run on a basis of bribery, patronage and seniority. Only by befriending the senior convict had he managed to get a bed on the other side of the cell from the dreaded “shit pit.”

At lunch, Joe casually tossed off the equivalent of an average worker’s weekly wages on a sumptuous feast for the three of us, and then we returned to the clangorous commotion of downtown Guangzhou. The area was as crowded as Fifth Avenue on the Saturday before Christmas. In Beijing, Joe announced proudly, only 60 percent of the buildings in the central blocks were commercial; here, the figure was 90 percent. Shopkeepers paid 1,000 yuan a month just for a building overlooking the main
street. And all about, he whispered, were the covert influences that flourished in the New China. Those men over there with the red armbands were the “Social Order Keepers.” Many of the shoppers pushing through the crush were plainclothesmen, seeking out some of the 10,000 smugglers who worked the district, hawking watches, high-tech goods, porno tapes. Because of the 500 percent tax placed on luxury items, a VCR cost 18,000 yuan, and even a pair of sunglasses 50. Overseas Chinese, however, were permitted to bring eight luxury items into the country duty-free. “The government is too poor to buy new films,” Joe reported with delight. “But the people can afford to buy all the latest videos.”