Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  Zou Yunjun said that in his case it was a matter of all three. He was thirty-nine years old and he did manual labor on the oil fields. Zou had a crew cut and a scar that started at his hairline, ran straight down his forehead, and ended in a point between his eyebrows, like an exclamation mark. His given name was a combination of the words “cloud” and “army,” and he said that it meant “Army of the Heavens.” His father had given him the name because of his military experience—he was another Korean War veteran who had fought near the Yalu River. Zou was well built and he often went shirtless around the sanatorium. A gold chain hung around his neck. He wore a fake Rolex. He flirted with the nurses, and they seemed to like it.

  One afternoon, I was sitting in the shade with Zou, and a nurse told him to come for treatment at eight o’clock the following morning.

  “That’s too early,” Zou said, and he grinned. “Anyway, I like to use the toilet at eight o’clock.”

  The nurse giggled and covered her mouth with her hand. “OK,” she said. “Nine o’clock.”

  “Ten,” said Zou.

  The nurse scurried off, laughing uncontrollably. Later that day, I asked Zou about politics, and he said that the Chinese leaders he most admired were Mao Zedong; Tang Taizong, the second emperor of the Tang dynasty; and Genghis Khan.

  “But he was Mongolian,” I said.

  “Mongols are one of the fifty-six nationalities of China,” Zou said. He told me that he admired Genghis Khan because he had expanded the Chinese empire all the way to Moscow. I knew that very few Mongolians would agree that their national hero had been Chinese, but this was a common belief in China. I asked Zou what he thought about Jiang Zemin.

  “He’s fine,” he said, shrugging. “But it’s hard for him to compare with all these famous leaders from history.”

  Zou and the other patients didn’t seem to notice the plainclothes cops. There was always at least one hanging around the lobby of the VIP building, and whenever I walked on the grounds of the sanatorium, somebody moved in the same direction, keeping me in sight. Outside the front gate, as many as four men waited; if I left the complex, they activated their cell phones. I had never experienced anything like this in China—usually, if the authorities wanted you to leave, they simply asked. But here they seemed content to let me wander freely as long as I remained in sight. One morning, I finally approached two of the cops at the gate.

  They tried to appear nonchalant. One was the crew-cut man I had seen in the lobby on the first day—heavyset, in his forties, wearing a dirty tan T-shirt. His partner was better dressed: a fake Izod shirt and black leather loafers that featured the Playboy logo. He had bad skin. I asked him where he was from.

  “Changchun,” Playboy said, naming a city in the northeast. He said that he was in Beidaihe for therapy, and I asked him what was the matter.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” he said quickly. “I’m just resting. It’s vacation.”

  “I thought you said you were here for therapy.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I’m here for vacation.” He commented awkwardly on Beidaihe’s good weather and nice beaches, and then he said he had to leave. The two of them wandered off, Playboy and Crew Cut; they cast furtive glances over their shoulders. It was one of the few conversations I’d had with a Chinese in which I wasn’t asked a single question.

  In Beidaihe, it was tempting to see people as politically naive. Each summer, the nation’s leaders came to town, and some of the most important decisions in the history of the People’s Republic had been negotiated here. Beidaihe had been home to the final drama of Lin Biao’s career, when the highest leadership of the Communist Party had been at risk of a coup. But none of this seemed to matter to people on the street. Lin Biao’s house was fenced off, and apart from the heated pool, the mansion didn’t inspire conversation. In the same way, people showed no curiosity about Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, or about the upcoming transition.

  But it was also true that the average Chinese citizen had very little information about these men. Hu Jintao was a cipher—in the Communist Party, it was a tradition for up-and-coming leaders to maintain a low profile. Hu was fifty-nine years old, and he had spent much of his career in the Chinese hinterlands. He never granted interviews. His most significant political experience had been in Tibet, where he had been appointed to Communist Party secretary, the top position, in 1988. That had been a sensitive moment—the region had been suffering from ethnic unrest, and the previous leadership had just been purged. One of Hu’s first significant acts was to give the eulogy at the funeral of the Panchen Lama, the most important Tibetan holy man after the Dalai Lama. Some Tibetans believed that the Chinese government had arranged for the Panchen Lama to be murdered, and tensions were so high that nothing was going to be solved with a eulogy. Hu quoted Deng Xiaoping’s praise of the Panchen Lama as a staunch patriot of China. Within a month, after dozens of Tibetans died in violent clashes with the police, Tibet was placed under martial law, which lasted for two years. During this time, Hu was neither particularly cruel nor particularly skillful. He simply followed Beijing’s orders and rode out the storm.

  In the same way, Jiang Zemin was best known for surviving difficult times. In 1989, when he was the party secretary of Shanghai, he was able to keep the city mostly peaceful during the Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent crackdown. As president of the nation, he weathered the Asian financial crisis. But Jiang had little charisma and he never captured the popular imagination; unlike previous leaders, he was neither a war hero nor a former peasant. He seemed to share much of his power with others in the Politburo. Jiang wore heavy, old-fashioned glasses, and sometimes he made awkward efforts to deliberately echo the words of his more revered predecessors, Mao and Deng. His contribution to the nation’s ideology was a twenty-thousand-word speech about development that became known as “Three Represents.” Millions of Chinese studied this document in their schools and work units, but very few of them could tell you anything meaningful about it. Much of the speech was an exercise in tautology: “All relations of production and superstructures, regardless of their nature, develop with the development of productive forces. . . . As for how things will develop specifically in the future, the answer to this question should come from practice in the future.” The language of the speech became clear only when it defined a negative: “We must resolutely resist the impact of Western political models such as the multiparty system or separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.”

  In the same way, it was easiest to define Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao by who they were not. They were not Mao Zedong, and they were not Mikhail Gorbachev. China was no longer ruled by one man’s whim, and it was not yet ruled by law. The People’s Republic was the first Communist state to have outlived the cult of personality, and the blandness of men like Jiang and Hu was perhaps their most salient characteristic. Not long after the Beidaihe conference, it was announced that Jiang Zemin would resign from all three of his leadership positions—the first Chinese Communist leader to willingly step down. During Hu Jintao’s first year in power, he ended the tradition of meeting secretly in Beidaihe. The beach summits belonged to an earlier era, when individual leaders mattered much more, and when there always seemed to be the risk of a purge or a coup. Today’s China had become much more systematized, and its totalitarianism had evolved into something else: a one-party state with a high degree of economic freedom. If the citizens seemed passive, it was because they had seen much worse. After all those years it was a relief to think about something other than politics.

  The day that Yao Yongjun’s hip treatment was finished, he telephoned and invited me to go out drinking to celebrate. I didn’t know whether I should go—the oil workers seemed like simple men, and I was afraid that my trouble with the cops would somehow compromise them. I had been careful to limit my contact with the patients to the public parts of the sanatorium. After thinking about the invitation, I decided that it was best to explain my conce
rns to Yao and see how he responded.

  But as I was walking through the sanatorium to meet him, Playboy appeared and took a seat near some of the patients. Crew Cut came from another direction and stood nearby. Nobody else seemed to notice them; the patients chatted as usual. In recent days, I had felt myself slipping into a strange private world: much of my attention was focused on the surveillance, and yet life around me continued as usual.

  Yao Yongjun hobbled over and shook my hand, smiling broadly. Two of the other patients pulled up in a car and told us to hurry, because everybody else was waiting. Reluctantly, I got inside. As we left, I saw Crew Cut put his phone to his ear. I imagined this wasn’t a hard assignment: Look for a foreigner and three guys on crutches.

  We hired a private room on the second floor of a restaurant. There were seven of us, the crutches lined up neatly against the wall. It was warm, and one by one the men took off their shirts in preparation for the drinking. A waitress served warm beer and bowls of ice cubes. There were many benefits to the years I’d spent in China, and one of them was that I’d grown to appreciate the way that beer fizzes when you toss an ice cube into the glass. A man at the table ordered a bottle of Diwang wine, which came from vineyards nearby. The Diwang didn’t fizz when he added the ice.

  One old man who worked in a coal mine was smoking Big Double Nine cigarettes. “That was Chiang Kai-shek’s favorite brand,” Zou Yunjun said.

  “Do you know what Mao smoked?” Yao asked me.

  I guessed the brand that is named after the central government compound in Beijing. “Zhongnanhai?”

  “Zhonghua,” Yao corrected me. “China brand.”

  “Deng Xiaoping smoked Panda cigarettes,” somebody else said.

  “Zhou Enlai smoked Zhadan.”

  I asked what Jiang Zemin smoked.

  “He doesn’t smoke. The leaders watch their health nowadays.”

  Zou changed the subject. “What’s the difference between Chinese women and foreign women?” he asked.

  After a while, I went downstairs to see if Playboy or Crew Cut was on the job, but I didn’t see either of them. Back at the table, Yao Yongjun asked if I liked Beidaihe. We had been drinking steadily for more than an hour, exchanging toasts around the table, and his face was flushed. I chose my words carefully.

  “To be honest, I’ve had some problems here because I’m a journalist,” I said. “It’s not usually this way, but there have been a lot of police following me. Actually, there were two plainclothes officers in front of the hospital when we left.”

  “I already know about that,” Yao said.

  “You know about the police?”

  He nodded. His eyes were so calm that it took me a moment to continue.

  “I don’t want to cause you any trouble,” I stammered.

  “It’s no trouble,” he said. “It doesn’t worry us. Anyway, there’s nothing you can do about it,” he added. “Just ignore it.”

  He made a toast to his hometown, which was halfway to Siberia. The room went silent: no murmurs, no cicadas. The only sound was the ice clinking as we raised our glasses to the oil fields of Daqing.

  Boomtown Girl

  Emily couldn’t tell me exactly why she had left her hometown after graduating from the local teachers college. “There was something in the heart,” she said. “My mother says that I just won’t be satisfied with a happy life. She says that I’m determined to chiku—eat bitter.” In any event, she wouldn’t have been content with life as a local schoolteacher. “Teaching is a good job for a woman, and it’s easy to find a husband, because men like to have teachers as their wives,” she said. “It could have been a very comfortable life. But if it’s too comfortable I think it’s like death.”

  She was slipping away even when I first met her. That was in 1996, when I taught English at the teachers college in Fuling, a small town on the Yangtze River in Sichuan Province. My students were training to become middle-school teachers, and one day I asked them to respond to a hypothetical question: Would you rather have a long life with the normal ups and downs, or an extremely happy life that ends after another twenty years?

  Nearly all my students took the first option. Most of them came from farms in the Sichuan countryside, and several pointed out that their families were so poor that they couldn’t afford to die in two decades. Emily, though, chose the short life. At nineteen she was the youngest student in the class. She wrote:

  It seems to me that I haven’t been really happy for quite a long time. Sometimes I owe my being dispirited to the surroundings, especially the oppressive atmosphere in our college. But I find the other students can enjoy themselves while I am complaining, so I think the problem is in myself.

  Everything she wrote that year marked her as different. She contradicted her classmates; she skirted the Communist Party line; she had her own opinions. She wrote about her father, a math professor who had spent the Cultural Revolution in political exile, working in a coal mine; and she wrote about her older sister, who had gone to the city of Shenzhen, seven hundred miles away, to look for work. When I asked my students to compose a business letter to an American organization, Emily chose the Country Music Association, in Nashville. She told me that she was curious to learn what country music was like. Another time, she asked if I had any black friends, because she had never seen a black person, except on television. When my literature class performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she played Titania. She was a good actress, although she had a tendency to play every role with a touch of a smile, as if she were watching herself from a great distance. She had a round face, high cheekbones, and full lips. Her eyes were thin and delicate, like those of a woman in a classical Chinese painting. Emily once remarked to me that her features had been considered beautiful when she was a young teenager, but nowadays the preference was for bigger eyes, because they looked more Western. She did not wear makeup. She dressed simply, and unlike many young Chinese women she did not dye her hair. She had chosen her English name in honor of Emily Brontë.

  After graduation, most of my students accepted government-assigned teaching jobs in their hometowns. But Emily went south to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, with her boyfriend to look for work. He was a square-faced young man with bristly hair, hard black eyes, and a quick temper, and he wanted to continue on to Shanghai. “I hadn’t decided to break up with him yet,” Emily told me later. “But I knew I didn’t want to go to Shanghai.” Instead, in November of 1997, she went to Shenzhen, and within a few months they had broken up for good. In Shenzhen, it took her less than a week to find a position as a secretary in a factory that produced costume jewelry for export. Her starting salary was 870 yuan a month, or $105 in U.S. dollars. Most of her former classmates were earning about $40 a month as teachers in Sichuan.

  It was not unusual for former students to call and tell me about various milestones of independence. Often, these had to do with money and new possessions—a salary raise, a new apartment. Once, a student called to tell me that he had acquired a cell phone. He talked about the cell phone for a few minutes, and then he mentioned, in an offhand way, that he had also become engaged. Five months after starting the factory job, Emily called to report that she had received a raise, to $120 a month.

  She laughed when I said that she now made as much money as I did. But she sounded a little funny, and I asked if something was wrong.

  “The company has an agent in Hong Kong,” she said slowly. “He often comes here to Shenzhen. He is an old man, and he likes me.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Because I am fat.” She giggled nervously. I knew that she had gained a little weight, and in some ways it made her even prettier.

  “Does he want you to be his girlfriend?”

  “Perhaps.” Her voice sounded small on the phone.

  “Is he married?”

  “He is divorced. He has young children in Taiwan. But he usually works in Hong Kong.”

  “How often does he come to She
nzhen?”

  “Twice a month.”

  “Is it a big problem?”

  “He always finds a way to be with me,” she said. “He says he will help me find a job in Hong Kong if I want one. The salaries are much higher there, you know.”

  “That sounds like a very bad idea,” I said carefully. “If you want another job, you should not ask him for help. That will only cause big problems in the future. You should try to avoid him.”

  “I do,” she said. “And I tell my coworkers to always be with me if he is here.”

  “Well, if it becomes a big problem, you should leave the job.”

  “I know,” she said. “Anyway, it is not such a good job, and if I have to leave I will.”

  In those days, the city of Shenzhen was surrounded by a sixty-seven-mile-long chain-link fence. It was about ten feet high, and some sections were topped by barbed wire. If you approached the city from the north, you entered one of the fence’s checkpoints and followed a modern highway through low green hills. The new buildings grew taller as you approached the downtown area. At the intersection of Shennan and Hongling roads, there was a massive billboard that represented, at least in the spiritual sense, the heart of the city. The billboard featured an enormous image of Deng Xiaoping against a backdrop of the Shenzhen skyline, with the phrase PERSIST IN FOLLOWING THE COMMUNIST PARTY’S BASIC LINE FOR ONE HUNDRED YEARS WITHOUT CHANGE. Locals and visitors often posed for photographs in front of the sign. In February of 1997, when Deng died, thousands of Shenzhen residents spontaneously gathered at the billboard to make offerings of flowers, written verses, and other memorials. They sang “Spring Story,” which was the official Shenzhen song:

  In the spring of 1979

  An old man drew a circle on the southern coast of China

  And city after city rose up like fairy tales

  And mountains and mountains of gold gathered like a miracle . . . .