Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  I often passed down streets like this, seeing big gloomy villas with gables and jutting eaves and mullioned windows; but always in nightmares. They were the sort of houses that first looked familiar in the dream, and then I saw evil faces at the windows, and I realized that I was no longer safe. How often in nightmares I had been chased down streets like these.

  "I am sorry to see you go," Cherry Blossom said, when we arrived at the boat.

  She was the only person in China who ever said that to me. In her old-fashioned way, with her old-fashioned clichés, she was very nice. I wished her well, and we shook hands. I wanted to tell her that I was grateful to her for looking after me. I started to say it, but she cut me off.

  "Keep the wind at your back, Paul," she said, and giggled again, delighted with her own audacity.

  17: On the Lake of Heaven to Yantai

  This ship, the Tian Hu (Lake of Heaven), made a nightly journey across the Bohai Gulf to Yantai, on the coast of Shandong Province. It carried over a thousand passengers, mostly in steerage, and some in six-berth cabins. Seen from this ship Dalian was merely black hills and a black harbor, and Yantai was under the moon somewhere, a hundred-odd nautical miles away.

  The Tian Hu was full of spitters—something to do with the sea air, perhaps, and the wish to have a good hawk. I had resolved that I was going to ignore them, but it was on this ship that I realized what had been bothering me about Chinese spitting. It was, simply, that they were not very good at it.

  They spat all the time. They cleared their throats so loudly they could drown conversation—they could sound like a Roto-Rooter or someone clearing a storm drain, or the last gallon of water leaving a Jacuzzi. With their cheeks alone they made the suctioning: hhggaarrkh! And then they grinned and positioned their teeth, and they leaned. You expected them to propel it about five yards, like a Laramie stockman spitting over a fence. But no, they never gave it any force. They seldom spat more than a few inches from where they stood. They did not spit out, they spat down: that was the essential cultural difference that it took me almost a year in China to determine. It was not one clean shot with a ping into the spittoon, but a series of dribbles that often ran down the ouside of the revolting thing. They bent low when they spat, there was a certain bending of the knees and crooking of the back that was a preliminary to Chinese spitting. It was not aggressive propulsion. It was almost noiseless. They just dropped it and moved on. Well, it was a crowded country—you couldn't just turn aside and hock a louie without hitting someone. But after the snarkings, the mucus streaking through their passages with a smack, Chinese spitting was always something of an aimless anticlimax. *

  I had just about settled into my bunk for the voyage, and had begun to dream, when a bell clanged and a foghorn sounded. We had arrived in Yantai. It was four-thirty in the morning. The pier was shrouded in freezing fog, there was ice on the gantries, and I could hear the sea lapping the docking posts, but I could not make anything out—fog and ocean were mingled. The lack of visibility did not deter or slow the passengers. All one thousand of them plunged into the sea fog and shuffled across the quay to—where? There were no buses or taxis at this hour of the morning, and few of these people lived in this small town. They had to wait for morning, when the big broken-down buses would come and take them away.

  It is a melancholy fact that Chinese transportation is almost always full—seldom a spare seat, never a spare coach. Every train, every bus, every ship—no matter what the day, the time, the season. It was interesting to me that on a weekday night in a month when people normally did not travel, the Tian Hu was full. The train to Dalian had been full, and so had the train to Shenyang. It was never possible to be sure of a seat, and in these conditions even if you got the seat you were crammed in. Transportation in China is always crowded; it is nearly always uncomfortable; it is often a struggle. The pleasures are rare, but they are intense and memorable. Travel in China, I suspected, would give me a lasting desire for solitude.

  I had been traveling steadily south for a number of days, and so I took a day off in Yantai. It was unseasonably cold, with a sleety wind blowing off the sea and icy snow spread thinly on the town. It was a bleak and battered place, of low rubble-strewn hills and bouldery beaches. It was full of abandoned brick huts on which Maoist slogans had been defaced. After a day of sitting listening to the wind and drinking tea and writing, and mooching in the town, I had dinner (scallops in egg white with rancid spinach: vegetables in winter could be dire). And I conceived a plan.

  For months I had wanted to see a commune. I had wondered what had happened to the commune outside Canton that I had seen in 1980. This province of Shandong was famous for its agricultural communes—or at least it had been. And the Chinese had always boasted about them before; so, now that the communes had been reformed, what did they look like?

  Mr. Hu, my guide in Yantai, tried to dissuade me from seeing a commune. He said wouldn't I be happier seeing the padlock factory, the embroidery and needlepoint factory, or the place where they made grandfather clocks. I wanted to say, And you make steam engines and hat racks and quill pens and doilies and chamber pots. Who does your market research?

  "A commune is what I would really like to see," I said.

  "They were canceled in 1979. There are none. So you see it is impossible."

  "Then what about a village or a cooperative that used to be a commune? I'm sure they didn't just burn them down, Mr. Hu."

  "I will find one for you."

  He kept his word, and the next day we drove to what had once been the Xi Guan (Western Pass) Commune. It was now called the Bright Pearl Cooperative. Its new name had come from a newspaper article that had been written praising it as "The Pearl of Shandong." It had 500 households—about 1500 people. It looked like a small township and was about twenty miles outside Yantai; it seemed an unprepossessing place. But as soon as I arrived, Party Secretary Ma Weihong told me that it was now an extremely wealthy cooperative. In 1971 the per capita income had been 100 yuan a year; this figure was now, in 1986, 9000 yuan. People had more money than they needed, and so each person was given a thousand a year and the rest was invested in the village.

  How had they managed this phenomenal increase in their fortunes? Mr. Ma gave me a long explanation, but in effect he was saying that everything changed after the government got off the people's backs.

  "During the Cultural Revolution this cooperative was a commune with a one-crop economy—wheat. That's all. We were capable of doing more, but we couldn't because the Parry would not permit it. After 1979 we began to diversify—new crops, a nursery, various industries, transport, commerce and a hotel. These projects were all profitable."

  "You have more money, but do you have more purchasing power?" I explained the term to him.

  Mr. Ma said, "It's true that prices are higher. But we have more than compensated for the rise."

  "Couldn't you have achieved that high income with one crop if you had worked hard?"

  "We worked hard," he said. "But the policy of one crop was incorrect."

  "At the time, did you know that you were working to carry out an incorrect policy?"

  "Yes, but it was the Cultural Revolution. We could not do anything about it," Mr. Ma said. "But now we have changed all that. We have more relationships with the free market. We are rich now."

  It was so strange to hear a Chinese person utter this dangerous word.

  I said, "Is it good to be rich?"

  "Yes. Very good." He hadn't blinked. He was sitting with his arms folded. His expression said, Next question.

  "But isn't that a capitalistic attitude?"

  "No. You and I are on different roads, but we are going to the same place."

  "Which place?"

  "To more richness and wealth," Mr. Ma said, uttering more heresies. "Listen, we used to have a slogan, 'We should be rich together or we should be poor together.'"

  "Do you still believe that?"

  "Not exactly. I think if you can be
rich your own way you should do it."

  "Then you'll be bourgeois."

  "There is absolutely no danger of that."

  He spoke with such conviction that I could not think of any more questions. He was an older man. He had been in this place twenty years ago when it had been a poor commune. Who could blame him for gloating a little about the success of the place today? And I liked him for never saying /. He nearly always replied saying we; but it was a socialist we, not a royal we.

  "What would you do if things continued to improve and you ended up with an enormous amount of money?"

  "We would donate it to a poor village, or we would give it to the government in taxes."

  I had met him in the big, drafty meeting room, and he had offered me some apples to eat that had been grown on the cooperative—one of the newer projects. They were firm and juicy. Mr. Ma said they were sent all over China. We walked ouside—Mr. Hu bringing up the rear—and he showed me the other money-making projects. This commune grew and sold mushrooms. It seemed a modest business, but I later learned that mushroom sales to the United States are phenomenal: most Pizza Hut mushrooms are from China.

  I said, "During the Cultural Revolution, were intellectuals sent to work here on this commune?"

  He shook his head. "No. Even this place was considered too good for them. Most intellectuals were sent into the countryside—to farms and into the mountains. They went to the most backward provinces, like Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu. And Mongolia. Lots of intellectuals ended up in Mongolia. They had to suffer. That's what we said."

  "Do you think the suffering did them any good?"

  Mr. Ma said, "The policy was incorrect."

  And yet it was so natural. I thought of all the upstarts, know-it-alls, teachers, critics and book reviewers that I would love to have seen herded onto a train to Mongolia to shovel pig shit and live in barns. But of course I would be among them. In China, an intellectual is usually just someone who does not do manual labor. And there we would all be, digging holes, as a punishment for being so boring. It was an awful fate, but it was easy to imagine how the policy had come about. Everyone in his life has wished at one time or another for someone he disliked to be trundled off to shovel shit—especially an uppity person who had never gotten his hands dirty. Mao carried this satisfying little fantasy to its nasty limit.

  Mr. Ma showed me his hotel. Two years ago this building was put up on the theory that it couldn't fail because there were only two hotels in Yantai. The Bright Pearl Cooperative Hotel had forty rooms, it was painted green and yellow, and by Chinese standards it was a bargain. It was drafty but clean. It was not expensive. I said I would not mind moving in, but Mr. Ma said that they could not take foreigners yet.

  There was a slimy pool in the lobby, and over the waterfall (which worked in spurts) a mural of the Great Wall and a stuffed tortoise. These were standard items of interior decoration in the newer Chinese hotels. The only variables were the size of the pool, the dimensions of the tortoise, the depth of the algae, and was the Great Wall painted or embroidered? This one was painted, and a wall fixture—a light socket—had been included in the mural.

  "Hu Yaobang visited us last year," Mr. Ma said, referring to the high-spirited party secretary who had been regarded as Deng Xiaoping's successor. "He held a briefing in here."

  We entered the conference room. There was no commemorative photo of Hu Yaobang, but there were other knickknacks: an ivory sculpture of a small dragon, a statue of a Chinese poet, sixteen tiny Buddhas, lots of ashtrays, a palm tree, and a stuffed penguin in a glass case, with a plaque saying, Presented by the Chinese Antarctic Expedition.

  "Does everyone in the cooperative get an equal amount of money?" I asked.

  "No. Our income is determined by the number of people in our household, and our productivity."

  "How do you keep track of productivity?"

  "It would take too long to explain."

  We went to the mayor's house. He was a sort of figurehead, appointed by the committee. He was not at home, but I was allowed to wander around his house. Two things interested me in his house. He had a number of books—novels, stories, poems—all sorts; not political tracts. And he had old-style Chinese furniture—black wooden chairs and rosewood tables, a carved settee and several elegant cabinets. They were antiques, but they were being used as ordinary household furniture.

  Mr. Ma said that the cooperative was especially proud of their hospital. They had built it themselves. This was the only cooperative in China that had raised the money and then built and staffed its own hospital. It had cost 400,000 yuan—less than $100,000—and it was not just an acupuncture parlor. It had modern equipment and qualified doctors. It had electrocardiographs, an X-ray unit, an operating theater and a family-planning consulting room (the abortion clinic: probably the busiest department in any Chinese hospital). There was an acupuncturist on the staff, and also a full-time herbalist (who ran the department, dispensing from his stock of 300 herbs). It was a clean hospital. It did not smell. Its charges were low. In fact it had been built because the people at the cooperative hated going into Yantai to the county hospital and paying what they regarded as excessive amounts. It had cost 20 yuan to have a baby at the county hospital, it cost half that here—less than $3.

  "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.