by Paul Theroux
Mr. Zheng said, "From the bath point of view it's like England in the thirties. There is no hot water in any of these flats. If you want a bath you heat a kettle and pour it into a tin bathtub. It is very inconvenient, but I don't complain because that is how everyone lives."
But not tourists, not high Party officials, and not the new classes of people with money—taxi drivers and some traders. In 1980 there were three taxi companies in Peking; now there are 230, with 14,000 taxis. All are controlled by the government or by official agencies, but the drivers do well out of it because the people who take taxis are generally foreigners and they pay in Foreign Exchange Certificates.
The free market (ziyou shichang) allows anyone to do business and keep the profits. This was one of Deng's reforms, and it is the reason why factory workers are often very cross—and why they demand high bonuses and complain about inflation. The street traders in the free market can quite easily earn five times a factory worker's salary, and after an informal survey of the hawkers and traders in various Peking markets, I figured their monthly earnings to be between 500 and 700 yuan—enough to buy "The Big Three."
One market woman told me, "What people used to want were a bicycle, a radio and a gas stove. Now the Big Three are a refrigerator, a cassette machine and a color television."
Some of the markets are operated by retired factory workers who simply want a friendly place to go during the day. They say things like, "I've always been interested by old beads and pots," and they have the flea-market mentality that is familiar to anyone from Cape Cod. They love talking about the bits of peculiar junk they've accumulated and, being pensioners, are not really doing this for a living. These traders are not to be confused with the people who have been doing business in the same place for years—the specialists in birds, or fish, or herbs. In most Chinese cities, the Bird Market is a specific location and may have been unchanged for hundreds of years.
Flea market seemed to me an appropriate comparison, since that was how most people pronounced it. I saw an opium pipe on one little stall. It was about eighteen inches long, with a silver bowl and a jade mouthpiece.
"That's a genuine old piece. Forty yuan and worth every bit of it. Take it away."
"I'll give you twenty," I said.
"Listen, if you weren't with this Chinese man I would have written '120' on a piece of paper and said Take it or leave it.'"
"All right, twenty-five."
He pretended he hadn't heard me. He said, "The interesting thing about this pipe is its mouthpiece. See how strong it is?" He banged it against the tabletop. "A man would ride his horse with this hanging by his side. If he saw a thief, or if someone attacked him he would bop him on the head with it. See, use it like a club—bop! bop!"
"Thirty."
'The bowl is real silver. This is a hundred years old. I've been collecting these pipes my whole life. I worked in a shoe factory. I'm retired! I don't even have to sell you this pipe, but you're a foreigner and I want to do you a favor."
"Thirty is my highest offer."
'This is an antique, comrade. It's a collector's item. It's a pipe. It's a weapon. Take it."
"Okay, thirty-five."
"Fine. It's yours. Shall I wrap it up? Here," he said, taking out an old copy of The People's Daily and folding the pipe into it. "Serves two functions. Wrapping paper and afterwards you can read it."
I had stopped at that free market on my way to the bathhouse. Because of what Mr. Zheng had told me about the inconvenience of bathing, I had inquired and found out that Peking was full of public bathhouses—about thirty of them, subsidized by the government. They are one of the cheapest outings in China: for 60 fen (16 cents) a person is admitted and given a piece of soap, a towel and a bed; and he is allowed to stay all day, washing himself in the steamy public pool and resting.
The one I found was called Xing Hua Yuan. It was open from 8:30 in the morning until 8:00 at night. Many people who use it are travelers who have just arrived in Peking after a long journey and want to look presentable for their friends or relatives—and of course who don't want to impose on them for a bath.
The beds were in little cubicles, and men wrapped in towels were resting or walking around talking. It was like a Roman bath—it was social, the scalded Chinese, pinkish in the heat, were sloshing themselves and yelling at each other in a friendly way. It was also possible to get a private room, for about double the ordinary rate.
I was thinking how Roman and Victorian the bathhouse looked (there was a Women's bathhouse next door), how useful for travelers and bathless residents, how like a club it was and how congenial, when a homosexual Chinese man enlightened me.
"Most people go there to take a bath," he said. "But it is also a good place to go if you want to meet a boy and do things with him."
"What sort of things?"
He didn't flinch. He said, "One day I was in Xing Hua Yuan and saw two men in a private room, and one had the other one's cock in his mouth. That sort of thing."
A few days later I was walking down the street, and a young Chinese girl approached me and said hello. She fell into step next to me and before we had gone thirty yards she slipped her arm into mine and off we went, like a pair of old-fashioned lovers.
She was leading the way. I liked not having the slightest idea of what was going to happen next.
At first 1 thought she might be lame, because she had caught hold of me and held on tightly. But she was walking very briskly.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
She smiled beguilingly and led me on. When we passed the Friendship Store she steered me in, and at the door she began to hug me. She was still hugging in a sort of newlywed's embrace as we looked at chairs ("These look comfortable") and crockery ("Don't you think they have anything cheaper?"). This seemed very pleasant. I had no idea what I would say if 1 met someone I knew, but it hardly mattered.
I said, "What is your honorable surname?"
"Ma," she said, and giggled. There are so many different Ma's in Chinese that a nineteen-word tongue twister has been made from them.
We looked at the tea section. They had no peppermint tea—indeed, had never heard of it.
"I have never tasted it," Miss Ma said.
Or perhaps Mrs. Ma, because a moment later she let go of me and ran ahead and embraced a young Chinese man. He was not surprised to see her. I assumed they had arranged to meet. The trouble was that, being an ordinary comrade, she felt she would have been stopped from entering this store unless she was in the company of a foreigner.
What disturbed me was that her affection towards me had seemed unforced. Yet in a split second I was forgotten: she didn't look back.
I had been on my way to meet a Chinese teacher named Chen. When I told him what had happened, he said, "The security guards can be very harsh with us sometimes."
Still, that didn't bother the importuning money changers who lurked near the tourist hangouts pestering foreigners to change hard currency into local currency, offering about twenty percent more than the official rate. They sidled up and said, "Shansh marnie?"
I said to Chen that I did not understand why so many years of the Cultural Revolution hadn't made people more socially and politically aware. A few years ago it was "Serve the people," and now it was "Change money?"
Chen said that it was because of the Cultural Revolution that people had started a free-for-all, because that political convulsion had discredited politicians.
He said, 'The so-called Cultural Revolution was wonderful in teaching us never to follow blindly. Now we will never trust what politicians say."
Chen and I were drinking tea at a stall. He held up his white cup.
He said, "If Mao said, 'This is black,' we would all agree and say, 'Very black.' Now, we'd never do that. A spokesman in the government said recently The Japanese are our friends.' Everyone laughed. The Japanese—let's be frank—are no one's friends."
I asked him whether he felt humiliated by the memory of the Cult
ural Revolution.
'That's the word—humiliated. So many of the Red Guards who went to the countryside got married there, gave up being intellectuals and became farmers. Now they can't come back—and they want to. It would be a loss of face to come back."
"Were you a Red Guard?"
"Yes," he said promptly. "School three days, learning from a peasant farmer the other three days, and reading the Thoughts of Mao on our day off. We harvested and planted rice. It's a good thing I was young, because I didn't take it very seriously. I treated it like a game. But it was no game."
He went on to say that he was surprised by how liberated the young people were these days in Peking. They criticized the Party. They talked about democracy and free speech. He said, "I'm amazed by some of the things they say."
"In the past," he said, "the intellectuals and the scholars were discredited. No one really wanted to go to school, and only the secure Party officials advanced. You had a choice of being a worker or a peasant."
"What do people want now?"
"Now that we are no longer judged by our political consciousness, people have begun to be fanatical about education. That's the biggest single change in this country."
"But these former Red Guards and the refugees from the Cultural Revolution—surely they're out of school?"
"No," Chen said. 'There's a whole army of night-school students."
I wanted to leave for Shanghai and then to rattle around China on trains as the mood took me. But, inspired by Chen, before I set off I decided to offer my services as a night-school teacher, just to see whether what Chen had said was true. I took classes at the Peking Sun Yat-sen Spare-Time School, which was housed in a big gloomy high school in central Peking. My subject was English, which was the most popular subject in the school; but the students—there were 3000 of them—also studied business methods, typing, accounting and computer science. One of the computer teachers was from the United States, but I didn't meet him.
I felt a sort of giddy depression at the sight of so many students toiling in the semidarkness of this haunted-looking building. The light was poor, the chalk squeaked, the desks creaked, the textbooks were greasy and frayed, and the dictionaries were crumbling. The youngest student was eight, the oldest seventy-four. All of them worked during the day, if not at a salary-paying job then at an impromptu stall at the free market, boosting cassette tapes, or toys, or clothes that were sent up from Canton, where they had been made cheaply—there was a thirty percent markup on clothes, but even so they were very cheap.
I taught from a book called Modern American English.
"You're lucky to have me. I'm a modern American and I speak English," I said. They thought this was incredibly funny.
I was filling in for their regular teacher, Miss Bao, whose mother was being treated for hypertension at the Peking Capital Hospital near the duck restaurant (thus its nickname, "The Sick Duck").
It took us three days to deal with the lesson about health care.
The cost of health care in the United States is truly staggering, the text ran.
"Excuse me," Miss Lin said, "what is 'glaucoma'?"
"Excuse me," Mr. Zhao said, "what is 'Blue Cross'?"
"Excuse me," Mr. Li said, "but some weeks ago your president ordered the bombing of Libya. Did you agree with that?"
I said no, and explained why. And then I asked them whether they agreed with everything their government did. They said no, and giggled nervously, but didn't elaborate.
Each night, the students gathered in the twilight and then sat sleepily in the hot dusty classrooms for two hours; they went home in the dark.
When I finished my stint I made a farewell speech.
"People always tell you that night school is a good thing," I said. "But they are the same people who go home after a day's work and eat and snooze and listen to the radio. You students are doing one of the hardest things in the world—studying at night, when you're tired. It's hard to remember things when you're tired. And everyone else is resting. Doing this and also doing a job is like having two jobs."
This struck a responsive chord. They nodded and urged me to continue.
"You may get discouraged and wonder why it's so hard for you to study at night school," I said. "Believe me, it's hard for everyone. It takes courage to do it. I am very proud of you, and you should be proud. If you weren't tough you wouldn't be here. I wish you all the very best of luck."
They applauded softly and, because we had overstayed the time, they were shooed into the night by the janitor, who wanted to lock the place. On the page the night-school folk might seem a little dim and wraithlike, eagerly waiting to become substantial in daylight, but with no vice or peccadillo to give them color. What can one do except to say that they are worthy and that they are doing all they can to find their way through the Chinese mob? It is always difficult for a writer to make virtuous people interesting.
4. The Shanghai Express
But even though that's true—that it is difficult to make virtuous people interesting—it is also true that it is fairly easy to make the unvirtuous memorable and sometimes fascinating.
It was not just those folks in the flesh—the short buttocky young man and his androgynous bride, my companions in the compartment on the Shanghai Express, and all those hustlers at Peking Central Station, pestering travelers to use their hotels or their taxis or to eat at their restaurants. (It is not enough that the Chinese have relaxed the ban on commercial advertising; they are not content with putting up a billboard or a sign. They tend to the personal touch—buttonholing Chinese tourists, badgering yokels who have just arrived from distant Gansu, yelling into megaphones, wagging banners in their faces, and installing screaming jingles and advertisements on the loudspeakers in the trains themselves.) But to complete my study of Chinese vices, 1 had chosen as reading material the erotic novel that had been whispered about in Peking, Jin Ping Mei (The Golden Lotus). It had been banned in China since the Ming Dynasty, and it seemed there was no higher recommendation than that. From its earliest pages it was a ruthless novel, and it was also graphically sexual. The perfect book for the Shanghai Express—or maybe for a whole trip through China, since it was about 2000 pages long.
This little fat fellow and his skinny wife slept in the berth just above my head. He filled the space and she curled about him like a wood shaving. She was just as thin and delicate and she was the color of newly planed wood. They chattered and smooched. He was from Singapore, she was from Hong Kong; he was a wise guy, one of the new breed of humorless computer people, who plug themselves into their machines and begin to resemble their mainframe—his big bum looked like part of a console. And she was always fluttering and giggling; she was dizzy, didn't know anything, couldn't cook, didn't speak English in spite of having grown up in a British colony—didn't speak Mandarin either—but what did it matter, as long as fatso paid the bills and bought trinkets for her. His name was Deng and he was always pushing his chubby face into her.
The fourth person—just across from me, on the other side of the folding table and the hot-water jug—was an old woman, about seventy-odd, whose luggage consisted of a small plastic shopping bag, a basket of apples and a jam jar half full of soggy tea leaves. She unscrewed the lid, filled it with hot water from the jug and then blew and slurped in a dainty way.
In the upper berth, the buttocky man was murmuring to his snickering bride.
This situation reminded me of a vicious thrilling story I had once planned to write about a very nearsighted old terror who always sat nagging about damnation while her conniving daughter and her boyfriend made love across the room in a chair, the girl on his lap, like a melon on a knife—and all the while the old woman believed she was making a terrific impression.
Indeed, Deng in the upper berth reminded me even more strongly of the book I was reading, Jin Ping Mei. Where was the innuendo and subtlety I had been told about? This was one of the most sexually explicit novels I'd ever come across. I had just fini
shed an episode in which the central character, Hsi-men, reclining with one of his many women throws plums between her parted legs, and the third plum comes to rest against her vulva. He chafes her with it and presses it into her vagina, until she has an orgasm; and then he eats that plum.
"Want some candy?" asked the fat young man in the upper berth, and offered me some Chinese chocolate.
It was almost midnight: he was also guzzling milk, and he had not stopped tickling his very thin wife. They seemed to me amazingly active for that time of night, and I wondered whether they were honeymooners.
I took some candy to be friendly, but the old woman refused. She looked tearful, but she wasn't unhappy. There is a certain Chinese face that looks grief stricken—swollen eyes and a sad, compressed mouth. Sometimes I saw a man and I imagined that he had just been sobbing. But, no, it was just that face—maybe he was from Guangdong. The old woman had that look. She lay down and went to sleep, and now asleep—pale and motionless—it was as though she were either dead or dying.
The young woman swung across the ceiling into her own berth, and her fat little husband went after her. She laughed and dived into the berth above me. Was this going to go on all night? They were dressed in the skintight clothes that the Chinese had begun to wear, perhaps as a reaction against the baggy suits that had been forced upon them for the past thirty-five years. I had the impression that the young man was an overseas Chinese.
"You can keep the light on," he said. "We're all right."
But I was falling asleep over my book. I finished a chapter, marveling at its rowdiness, and then switched off the compartment light.
There was a thud: the man hoisting himself into his wife's berth.
I was awakened in the night by sounds that reached me from the upper berth. They began like the rustle of curtains, and then a sudden tumbling motion—the thrashing of a body in a bed—and then sucking and swallowing noises, as of someone working on a piece of candy. There was a whisper. It was so low I could not say whether it was the man or the pretty woman—the word no. "No ... no ... no ... no," repeated in a breathless yeslike way, "Bu ... bu ... bu ... bu."
