China Witness

by Xinran Xue

  XINRAN: And the most unhappy thing?

  WU: The most unhappy thing? There are people in the government who act recklessly. I don't say anything out loud, but in my heart I don't approve. The peasant cadres in the past were all better than the ones now. I've got no way to say it.

  ***

  Judging by my experience of interviews in the countryside, I could feel that he was not being completely candid. There must have been other things that made him unhappy. But Old Mr Wu changed the subject, and his face immediately took on an actor's stage expression of "happiness".

  ***

  WU: There's nothing to make me sad. I play, I sing. If a man's happy he'll have long life. The happier a man is the longer he lives; the more anxious a man is the quicker he'll die.

  XINRAN: If you had your life over again, would you still live it this way?

  WU: That's not easy to say. Me, live my life again – I would be hundreds of years old! That's not possible.

  XINRAN: No, if you had your time over again, would you still stay here and run the tea house with your father, or would you go to live somewhere else? Do you regret your life, or do you think it was worth it?

  WU: It was worth it.

  XINRAN: Many foreigners say that China is very poor, and this place of yours is really very poor. You live in poverty here, is it worth it?

  WU: This place doesn't count as poor. When Chairman Mao was alive, just after Liberation, it was very poor. Now? Not poor.

  XINRAN: A lot of people here don't even earn three jiao a day, and you still don't think this is poor?

  WU: It's not poor now, truly. Back in 1949, 1950 and 1951, we were poor. Chairman Mao was making revolution in those days. There were no buses, not many people; that was real poverty. Foreigners? I say the foreigners are poor. When I went to Hangzhou I saw the trousers the foreigners were wearing, holes all over, and their hair was all dirty. Isn't that poor? Why be like that?

  XINRAN: Do you prefer Hangzhou or Linhuan?

  WU: For living Hangzhou is better, of course. But it's not so bad here either. A peasant's lot has been bitter since ancient times. Who told you to be born into this life, born into a peasant family to spend all day working in the muck and mire?

  XINRAN: Do you and your wife ever quarrel?

  WU: I've never fought or quarrelled with her since the day we were married, not even sworn at her.

  XINRAN: Comparing you and your wife, are you more successful than her, or the other way round? Who's more revolutionary, who's more successful?

  WU: She's more capable than me. She's a model worker, the first female Party member in the village. She's a cut above me.

  XINRAN: Can you still remember the ceremony when you two got married?

  WU: It was raining that day – she came in a sedan chair.

  XINRAN: Did you have a banquet?

  WU: We were very poor then, we didn't have any land yet, or a house, we didn't have a thing, my family was the poorest.

  XINRAN: Is there anything that you wanted to do that you haven't done yet?

  WU: No, I've done it all, a man should have a conscience.

  XINRAN: How old is the oldest person in the village?

  WU: The oldest is over ninety.

  XINRAN: Do a lot of people from outside come and see this place now?

  WU: Yes, they do.

  XINRAN: Do you know why they come?

  WU: We've got a lot of historic sites here, but many of them have been dug up, like the temple of the Town God and the temple at the east of the walls. They've all gone. People come because they've heard about them, but actually there's not a lot for them to see.

  XINRAN: If someone were to say that your tea house was too old, and wanted you to build a new one, would you be willing?

  WU: If you had the choice between something old and something new, who would take the old one?

  XINRAN: Do you like this kind of old-style tea house, or do you prefer the new style?

  WU: Of course the old-style tea house is better than the new style. Those new ones don't look like tea houses.

  XINRAN: And why did I come here? Do you know?

  WU: No, I don't know.

  XINRAN: Because Linhuan has preserved China's precious tea culture, tea-house culture and folk culture. Therefore, in future more and more people will come to visit your tea house. Would you like outsiders to come?

  WU: I'd like that. I'd like even foreigners to come to our tea house! I'll sing a bit of history for you, and you'll believe it. I tell you no lies, they're really welcome. Listen carefully, I made this up myself.

  Bamboo clappers, nine links in a chain,

  Gather round, comrades, hear what I'm saying

  I'll tell you about the Huaihai Campaign

  That's what I'll tell you today…

  In the first month, first day of the First

  An army there was under Mao Zedong,

  An army in Yan'an, two hundred thousand strong…

  In the second month, the dragon raised his head,

  To attack Xuzhou, Lin Bocheng his soldiers led.

  In the third month, the third of the Third,

  Deng Xiaoping's soldiers attacked Jinan,

  His soldiers surrounded the city of Jinan

  As his forces occupied Tianfushan.

  In the fourth month, the eighth of the Fourth,

  The Zaozhuang Station battle took off

  They didn't just take Zaozhuang for their own,

  But sent three regiments of foes to their final home.

  …

  In the sixth month the heat is hard to bear,

  Chiang Kai-shek was consumed with fear,

  And he took his troops and weapons out of there…

  XINRAN: You sing so well! Let's all of us give you a round of applause to thank you!

  ***

  The peasants drinking tea were taken aback at my suggestion: what're we supposed to clap for? What's to thank?

  It was time for my interview with Chen Lei, so I took my leave of the tea house and the excitable Old Mr Wu. Before I left, I asked him where he lived and what time he got up every day, saying that I would drop by before I left. When he heard this, disbelief was plainly written on his face, but he said politely, "There's no need to put you to so much trouble, thank you!"

  I sat in the yard of the village broadcasting station with Chen Lei, the hero who had preserved the ancient village of Linhuan. We talked for a long time, until darkness fell, and all we could see was in deep shadow.

  During this time, the big loudspeakers of the broadcasting station came to life at their set times and interrupted our discussion. Once it was to remind the villagers to abide by the regulations in the following day's market, and once summoning a villager to the loudspeaker station to collect something. Another was a repeat news broadcast from the radio station, and then another programme of opera, which was turned off at a shout from Chen Lei that I couldn't understand. But none of this prevented us from speaking freely.

  Chen Lei was dressed in a dark green polo shirt and a pair of fawn-coloured cotton trousers. There was a capable, vigorous look to him, but his forehead bore the marks of the trials and changes of many years. He had deep, thoughtful eyes, which held the dignity accumulated over seventy or eighty years.

  ***

  XINRAN: People have told me that the name your parents gave you wasn't Chen Lei. You changed your name, is that right?

  CHEN: In 1960, when I was working on the farm, I had this notion. I wanted people to know me, to be like thunder out of a clear sky, so I changed my name to Chen Lei, which means "thunder".

  XINRAN: You changed your name without consulting your parents? We Chinese say that our parents gave us life, and our names are the symbol of life that our parents gave us. Changing your name on your own whim must have got you a terrible reputation, almost as if you'd committed some terrible crime?

  CHEN: Well, it didn't. My parents must have felt uneasy, but when they saw I could achieve great thing
s… And in any case the thing was done, there wasn't anything to get unhappy about.

  XINRAN: Can you tell us what sort of people your parents were?

  CHEN: Both my parents were from poor families. They were both artisans, mending bicycles for a living. At that time there were eight of us, five boys and three girls. Things were pretty hard for my family. We all depended on my father's bicycle repairs. Later on I went to middle school; my family couldn't afford to send me to senior school so I went to work. Actually there are lots of reasons why I changed my name to Chen Lei. In 1960 I had a lot of ideas. I wanted to change life for the better, to live life at a higher level. My time in the Nanjing artillery regiment had changed my thinking: how could I change the life of our poverty-stricken countryside?

  XINRAN: So how could you change your home town?

  CHEN: I didn't know at first. I worked my heart out, and I wasn't the only one, but Linhuan didn't get any better. It was too poor here, desperately poor.

  XINRAN: Did none of your superiors help?

  CHEN: Before the 1980s, my superiors didn't do anything but class struggle. If you weren't leftist there was no way to survive. Besides, everybody was poor; nobody thought we were poorer than anybody else! Afterwards, just a few years after Reform and Opening, a journalist came here. He didn't take any pictures of the new-built streets, houses and shops, but concentrated on the rickety old tea houses, and it dawned on me that we had an original culture of our own that was a draw among all the decrepitude, part of a culture that was disappearing in other places.

  XINRAN: This was why you stood in front of the diggers of the government engineering team, determined to block their way? But for that, the Linhuan tea houses and old city walls would have been razed to the ground long ago, isn't that so?

  CHEN: We have hundreds and thousands of years of history here in Linhuan, and culture from the Shang and Zhou dynasties. [8] In the northwest of the town we have the remains of an old beaten earth city wall from the Spring and Autumn Period. [9] It's square in shape, 1,550 metres long from east to west, 1,409 metres wide from north to south, seven to fifteen metres high, thirty-six to sixty metres wide in the base, and three to eight wide at the top, enclosing an area of 2.7 square kilometres. There are four gates in the wall and watchtowers and signal beacon towers on the top. Linhuan's earth wall is currently China's sole surviving earthen town wall. If we compare it to the Vatican in the West, it's big enough to hold six Vaticans! So Linhuan has several millennia of cultural history, but where is the living culture? How can all this history be reflected through the living culture? It's all about constant movement. It was movement up and down the Grand Canal that engendered Linhuan's tea culture. I started to wonder how to use the original tea culture we had preserved here to push Linhuan towards the culture of the rest of the world, so the Linhuan people can make a living through cultural exchange.

  The old-fashioned tea houses we have here in the north of the country are completely different from southern tea houses. Northern-style tea houses serve big-bowl tea, the southern ones are for tasting tea. With us it's tea by the pot. In the past you could drink a whole day for five fen – go in as soon as it opened, and take some with you when you left. If there was a problem over land, a quarrel between wife and mother-in-law, or any other kind of dispute, they'd all say: "Come on, let's go to the tea house to talk it over!" The tea houses became news stations and cultural centres for local society.

  The most important thing we do is protect the two old streets in the old town, Nail Street and Flagstone Street, and their two tea houses. The special feature of the buildings in these streets is the "single tile" roofs; the tiles are laid flush with no overlap at all. When the ancient-buildings people from the Architectural Institute saw them they said, "Don't these single-tile roofs leak?" We said, "No, they don't!" We usually start with a layer of ordinary overlapping tiles, which are then covered with another layer of single tiles. We've had single tiles here since ancient times. We told the Architectural Institute that it was vital to preserve those two streets. If we don't preserve them now they'll disappear, a bit at a time, and once they're gone there'll never be any more. We now have about 5,600 square metres of the old city left, all old houses made of small blue-green bricks baked from local clay. That in itself is a big museum of ancient architecture.

  XINRAN: That's true. The city itself is a huge museum of ancient architectural culture, just like the city of Rome. Mr Chen, while you were talking I've been trying to picture it. Apart from the things that everyone knows, the ancient remains and culture that have survived here, what else is there? Is there anything else that can become a resource and a motive for opening up the daily life of the people of Linhuan? How large is the population of Linhuan?

  CHEN: There are 88,500 people in the greater Linhuan district, and 21,000 in the ancient building area.

  XINRAN: And what percentage of this population has been educated?

  CHEN: Hard to say. There are several teachers, and there used to be an old xiucai scholar. We still have a hall here where the xiucai candidates used to take part in the national exams in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

  XINRAN: Are there more young and middle-aged people in Linhuan or more old people?

  CHEN: More old people.

  XINRAN: So the old people are the tea houses' guarantee of survival?

  CHEN: All the old people in Linhuan have something to say about history, true. That's the wealth of the tea houses.

  XINRAN: Because I too once came under pressure from a different form of poverty, I know that poverty really does cause people's thinking to change. How many tea houses are there in Linhuan at present?

  CHEN: Sixteen. They used to be called tiger stoves. Now we call them tongzao – connecting stoves. They're all linked together, for heating kettles – they used iron kettles earlier, now they use aluminium kettles. In the past someone noticed that lighting a fire in all these individual stoves was very wasteful, but if you have an iron bucket next to your heated stove, you can heat it using the excess heat from the others. You can save a lot like that. We've been poor here for a very long time. Didn't Chairman Mao say that "poverty makes people's thinking change"? That's true; if you don't come up with ideas it's impossible to survive.

  XINRAN: Linhuan has four thousand years of history. Am I right in saying that it's impossible to bring back the original style of the ancient buildings along the Huai River using today's building materials?

  CHEN: We've been thinking about this too. You need different materials to make different houses. In our part of the world we have a lot of fired bricks. At first they were all blue-green bricks, made in special kilns – the best kind of china comes from those kilns. Later on the quality of the clay was affected by pollution. Then there was large-scale flooding in the region along the Huai River. The river water was full of sand, and when it came washing over, it left behind a lot of sand. But if you're careful in the extraction process, it's still possible to find good-quality clay. You come and see next year, it'll be different again. It will basically all be back the way it was, and it'll be the genuine article. We're repairing the old to bring back the old.

  XINRAN: In the past, did your connecting stoves include bathing, too, like the tiger stoves of Nanjing and Shanghai?

  CHEN: No, it was all just drinking. They drink and chat, discussing old things and new, ordinary people talking about their own business. If you have conflicts, if you have unfilial sons or daughters, then you drag them to the tea house to mediate. Once you're at the tea house a resolution is guaranteed, and everything will be fine, and you don't have to pay lawyers' fees or bring an accusation to the court.

  XINRAN: So what percentage of people in this place spend how much time in the tea house?

  CHEN: I can't give you a definite figure, but at least half the middleaged people, and most of the old men, and boys start going to the tea houses for tea from a very young age – sometimes there are even small children. I used to go to the tea house
when I was small to listen to the storytellers. We didn't have a word for news, but people who'd been to market far away would head for the tea house on their return to "sing the news". It was just like storytelling. You could hear all sorts of strange things in the tea houses. Old Mr Wu, who you interviewed, started "singing" the revolution in tea houses when he was ten years old. Our Linhuan tea houses were what our modern-day city people might call "news and media centres".

  XINRAN: Did you have that sort of thing in the Cultural Revolution too?

  CHEN: They sang news then too, but they didn't talk about politics – nobody dared. And every day there was someone reciting the works of Chairman Mao.

  XINRAN: According to your understanding of the people who run the tea houses, what is the greatest hardship of their lives, and the greatest happiness?

  CHEN: The hardship is opening at daybreak and staying open till midnight, spending all day constantly brewing tea and topping up people's pots, and slaving away all day for such a tiny income, just enough to keep body and soul together. But the joy for tea-house owners is that everybody goes there, they come into contact with people every day, they hear the news, and see a bit more of the world.

  XINRAN: So do you think that there are any differences between tea houses before and after Liberation?

  CHEN: They're pretty much the same. We're poor here. Nobody here wants to go messing around with these things. Almost all the old ways of doing things have been passed down from former generations.

  XINRAN: Have they been influenced by all the changing governments and regimes?

  CHEN: No, you reform your reform, they drink their tea. Nothing's changed.

  XINRAN: Were there any cases in the Cultural Revolution of people being impeached or reported on because of things that they'd said in the tea houses?

  CHEN: No, very few. At that time everybody was on their guard.

  XINRAN: So are the tea-drinking utensils the same as when you were small?