A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  Mrs Wang had invited me to lunch at her apartment, and this was no culture shock, either. True, we ate eggs-in-aspic, a kind of pickled small turnip, and strips of a glutinous substance which suggested to me jellified seawater, but nevertheless hers was a home that would not seem unduly exotic in, say, Cleveland, Ohio. It was the bourgeois home par excellence. It had the statutory upright piano, with music open on the stand, the 16-inch colour TV on the sideboard, a picture of two kittens playing with a ball of wool, a bookshelf of paperbacks and a daily help. It had a daughter who had come over to help cook lunch, and a husband away at the office who sent his regards. ‘We are very lucky,’ said kind Mrs Wang. ‘We have a certain social status.’

  *

  So this was China? I had to pinch myself. The Dictatorship of the People (Principle of Government No. 3, I remembered) does not visibly discipline Shanghai. Occasionally bespectacled soldiers of the People’s Revolutionary Army trundle through town on rattly motor-bikes with sidecars, and outside the Municipal Headquarters (né Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank) two fairly weedy-looking troopers stand on sheepish sentry-go. Otherwise Authority is inconspicuous. The traffic flows in cheerful dishevelment over the intersections, ineffectually chivvied along over loudspeakers by policemen smoking cigarettes in their little white kiosks. Jay-walkers proliferate, and in the crinkled back streets of the old quarter there seems no ideological restraint upon the free-enterprise peddlers and stall-holders, with their buckets of peaches, their plastic bags of orange juice, eels squirming in their own froth and compounds of doomed ducks.

  Nobody seemed shy of me. Everyone wanted to talk. A factory worker I met in the park took me off without a second thought to his nearby apartment (two dark rooms almost entirely occupied by cooking utensils and bicycles), and the only hazard of the Shanghai street, I discovered, was the student who wished to practise his English. Stand just for a moment on the Bund, watching the ships go by, or counting the flitting sea-bats in the evening, and you are hemmed in, pressed against the balustrade, squeezed out of breath, by young men wanting to know if the word ‘intend’ can legitimately be followed by a gerund. Go and lick an ice-cream in the park, and like magic there will materialize out of the trees Mr Lu and a troop of elderly friends, all of whom remember with affection their English lessons with Miss Metcalfe at the Mission School, but none of whom has ever been quite sure about the propriety of the split infinitive.

  Well! So this was the policy of the Open Door, which is bringing modernity to China, and has made foreigners and all their ways respectable. It seemed remarkably liberating. I often talked politics with people I met, and their answers sounded uninhibited enough. The Cultural Revolution, that hideous upheaval of the 1960s? A terrible mistake, a tragedy. The future of China? Nobody knew for sure what kind of country this was going to be. Communism versus capitalism? There was good and bad in both. Would they like to go to America? Of course, but they would probably come home again. What a kind face Zhou Enlai had! Yes, he had a lovely face, he was a good kind man, the father of his people. Did they like the face of Mao Zedong?

  Ah, but there was a hush when I asked this question. They thought for a moment. Then – ‘We don’t know,’ was the mumbled answer, and suddenly I realized that they had not been frank with me at all. Not a reply had they given, but was sanctioned by the political orthodoxy of the moment. Did they like the face of Chairman Mao? He was a great man they knew, he had fallen into error in his later years, it had been admitted, but nobody it seems had ever told them whether to like his face. My perceptions shifted there and then, and where I had fancied frankness, now I began to sense evasions, veils or obliquities everywhere. This was, I reminded myself, the very birthplace and hot-bed of the Gang of Four, that clique of xenophobic zealots – it was from an agreeable half-timbered villa near the zoo, Frenchified in a bowered garden, that their murderous frenzies were first let loose. A decade ago I might have had a very different greeting in Shanghai, and Mrs W. would probably have been banished to one of the remoter onion-growing communes for giving me lunch.

  No, perhaps it was not so home-like after all. On the Bund one evening a young man with the droopy shadow of a moustache pushed his way through the crowd and confronted me with a kind of dossier. Would I go through this examination paper for him, and correct his mistakes? But I had done my grammatical duty, I considered, for that afternoon, and I wanted to go and look at the silks in Department Store No. 10. ‘No,’ said I. ‘I won’t.’

  At that a theatrical scowl crossed the student’s face, screwing up his eyes and turning down the corners of his mouth. He looked, with that suggestion of whiskers round his chin, like a Chinese villain in a bad old movie, with a gong to clash him in. I circumvented him nevertheless, and ah yes, I thought in my new-found understanding, if the Gang of Four were still around you would have me up against a wall by now, with a placard around my neck, and a mob there to jeer me, not to consult me about participles!

  *

  As it was, I hasten to add, every single soul in Shanghai was kind to me, and as a matter of fact my conscience pricked me, and I went back and corrected his damned papers after all. The Open Door really is open in this city, and Foreign Guests are enthusiastically welcomed, from package tourists shepherded by guides in and out of Friendship Stores to bearded language students scooting about on bicycles. Back-packers labour through town in search of dormitories: peripatetic writers hang over the girders of Waibaidu Bridge watching the barges pass below.

  Of these categories, the peripatetic writer seems the hardest for the Chinese mind to accommodate. ‘What is your field?’ Mr Lu asked me. I answered him with a quotation from the Psalms, to the effect that my business was simply to grin like a dog and run about the city. ‘You are a veterinary writer?’ he inquired. Other people urged me to contact the Writers’ Association, or at least to visit the new quarters in the north-east of the city, ‘where many intellectuals live’, so that we could discuss common literary problems. Just running about the city did not satisfy them. It could not be productive.

  One night I went to the acrobats, as every Shanghai visitor must, and realized with a jerk – I choose the word deliberately – what the sense of role means in China. There have been professional acrobats in this country for more than 2,000 years, and in Shanghai they have an air-conditioned circular theatre, elaborately equipped with trapdoors, pulleys and chromium trapezes, for their daily performances of the all-but-incredible. They were astonishing, of course. They leapt and bounced around like chunks of rubber, they hurled plates across the stage faster than the eye could see, they balanced vast pyramids of crockery on tops of poles while standing on one foot on each other’s heads, they were yanked to appalling standstills after falling headlong out of the roof.

  ‘It is interesting to think,’ said my companion, ‘that in the Old China acrobats were like gypsies, of very low status. Now they are honoured performers. They have their role in society.’ They were slotted, in short, and as I watched them it seemed to me that they not only had acrobats’ limbs, and muscles, and eyes, but acrobats’ thoughts, too, acrobats’ emotions, specifically acrobatic libidos, and I fancied that if you stripped away their masks of acrobat make-up, there would only be other masks below, left behind from previous performances.

  And it dawned on me that all those homely shuffling Shanghai crowds could be slotted too, if you had the key, into their inescapable roles. They were not really, as I had thought at first, at all like crowds of Third Avenue or Oxford Street. Every single citizen out there had his allotted place in the order of things, immutable. What is your field? I am a Housewife. I am a Retired Worker. I am a Peasant. I am an Acrobat. I am a Student, and would be much obliged, please, if you would explain to me in simple language the meaning of the following English sentence …

  I did see one beggar in Shanghai, on the pavement opposite the former Park Hotel. He seemed to have broken his leg, and sat all bowed and bandaged, sobbing, while an associate held up an X-ray of the
fracture. I am a Beggar, it seemed to say! The passers-by looked horrified, but whether by the mendicant himself, or by the nature of his illness, I was unable to determine, the Shanghai dialect not being my field.

  *

  I went to the Yu Garden from a sense of duty – it is a National Protected Treasure, even though it was built in pure self-indulgence by an official of the Ming dynasty, who caused its Rockery Hill to be constructed out of boulders brought from thousands of miles away and stuck together with rice-glue. I was ensnared there, however, by the children. There must have been a hundred of them outside the Hall for the Viewing of Rockery Hill, all three or four years old, some of them tied together with string to prevent them straying off into the Hall for Watching Swimming Fish, and I wasted a good half-hour playing with them. What adorable merry faces! What speed of mood and response, mock-terror, sham-apprehension, sheer hilarity! I stayed with them until they were led off two by two, a long crocodile of black-haired roly-poly imps, towards the Hall of Jade Magnificence.

  There is nowhere like Shanghai for infant-watching, but in the end, among all the increasingly puzzling and deceptive inhabitants of this city, it was the children who baffled me most. They have a particular fondness for foreigners, and will pick one out from miles away, across a crowded square, clean through the Tower of Lasting Clearness, to wiggle an introductory finger. They have no apparent vices. They never cry, they don’t know how to suck a thumb, and though their trousers are conveniently supplied with open slits in their seats, I am sure they never dirty themselves anyway.

  How I wished I could get inside their little heads, and experience the sensations of a People’s Revolutionary childhood! Do they never fret, these infants of the Middle Kingdom? Is that sweet equanimity of theirs force-fed or innate, ethnic or indoctrinated? Could it really be that this society is bringing into being a race that needs no nappies? The children in the Yu Garden waved and made funny faces at me as they stumped away, but they left me uneasy all the same.

  So next day I went to one of the notorious Children’s Palaces, after-school centres where children can either have fun, or be coached in particular aptitudes. I say notorious, because for years these places have been shown off to visiting foreigners, so that they long ago acquired the taint of propaganda. Certainly through my particular Palace a constant succession of tourist groups was passing, led by the hand by selected infants in somewhat sickly intimacy, and in the course of the afternoon the children presented a musical show, mostly of the Folk-Dance-from-Shanxi-Province kind, which did seem short on innocent spontaneity, and long on ingratiation.

  But what disturbed me more than the stage management was the utter oblivion of the children themselves to the peering, staring, bulb-flashing tourists led all among them, room by room, by those minuscule trusties (who have an unnerving habit, by the way, of calling their charges Auntie). With an uncanny disregard they continued their ping-pong or their video games, pedalled their stationary bicycles, made their model ships, practised their flutes, repeated once again that last crescendo in the Harvest-Song-of-the-Yugur-Minority, or sat glued to the pages of strip-cartoon books, turning their pages with what seemed to me an unnatural rapidity. Their eyes never once flickered in our direction. Their attention never wavered. They simply pursued their activities with an inexorable concentration, never idle, never squabbling, just turning those pages, batting those balls, pedalling those pedals, twanging those strings or piping those Chinese flutes.

  I was bemused by them. Were they really reading at all? Were they even playing, in our sense of the verb? Search me! I can only report one odd little episode, which sent me away from the Children’s Palace peculiarly uncomfortable, and came to colour my whole memory of Shanghai. Early in a performance of ‘Jingle Bells’ by an orchestra of children under the age of five, the virtuoso lead xylophonist happened to get herself a full tone out of key. She never appeared to notice; nor did any of the other performers, all dimples, winsome smiles and bobbing heads up there on the stage. On they went in fearful discord, tinkle-tinkle, clang-clang, simpering smugly to the end.

  *

  The airline magazine on CAAC Flight 1502, Shanghai to Beijing, was six months old. It was like flying in a dentist’s waiting-room, I thought. Also the seats in the 707 seemed to be a job lot from older, dismembered aircraft, some of them reclining, some of them rigid, while people smoked unrestrictedly in the non-smoking section, and our in-flight refreshment was a mug of lukewarm coffee brought by a less than winning stewardess. I was not surprised by all this. I was lucky, I knew, that there were no wicker chairs in the middle of the aisle, to take care of over-booking, and at least we were not called upon, as passengers on other flights have been, to advance en masse upon reactionary hijackers, bombarding them with lemonade bottles.

  The enigmas were mounting. Why, I wondered, were the Chinese modernizing themselves with such remarkable ineptitude? Did they not invent the wheelbarrow a thousand years before the West? Had they not, for that matter, split the atom and sent rockets into space? Were they not brilliantly quick on the uptake, acute of observation, subtle of inference? The broad-minded Deng Xiaoping is boss man of China these days, and he is dedicated to technical progress of any derivation – as he once said, in a famous phrase, what does it matter whether a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice? China simmers all over with innovation and technology from the West: yet still the coffee’s cold on Flight 1502.

  The brick-laying of contemporary China would shame a backyard amateur in Arkansas. The architecture is ghastly. In the newest and grandest buildings cement is cracked, taps don’t work, escalators are out of order. Respect Hygiene, proclaim the street posters, but the public lavatories are vile, and they have to put spittoons in the tombs of the Ming emperors. Western architects, I am told, often despair to find air-conditioning connected to heating ducts, or fire-escapes mounted upside-down, and although it is true that the Chinese-made elevators in my Shanghai hotel were the politest I have ever used, with buttons marked Please Open and Please Close, still I felt that all the courtesy in the world would not much avail us if we ever got stuck half-way.

  Why? What happened to the skills and sensibilities that built the Great Wall, moulded the exquisite dragon-eaves, dug out the lovely lakes of chinoiserie? Feudalism stifled them, the official spokesmen say. Isolation atrophied them, the historians maintain. Maoism suppressed them, say the pragmatists. Communism killed them, that’s what, say the tourists knowingly. But perhaps it goes deeper than that: perhaps the Chinese, deprived of their ancient magics, observing that nothing lasts, come Ming come Mao, have no faith in mere materialism, and put no trust in efficiency. Feng shui, the ancient Chinese geomancy which envisaged a mystic meaning to the form of everything, is banned from the People’s Republic; and dear God, it shows, it shows.

  Never mind: with an incomprehensible splutter over the public address system, and a bit of a struggle among those who could not get their tables to click back into their sockets, we landed safely enough in Beijing.

  *

  The first thing that struck me about this prodigious capital, which commands the destinies of a quarter of the earth’s inhabitants, was the nature of its light. It was a continental light, a light of steppes or prairies, and it seemed to be tinged with green. At first I thought of it as metallic, but later it seemed to me more like concrete: arched in a vast bowl over the capital, a sky of greenish concrete!

  And concrete too was the dominant substance of the city down below: stacks of concrete, yards of concrete, parks paved with concrete, their trees ignominiously sunk in sockets of soil, vast highways like concrete glaciers across the city, and everywhere around the flat skyline the looming shapes of high-rise blocks, their grim squareness broken only by the outlines of cranes lifting final concrete slabs to their summits. No need for rice-glue, I concluded, in Beijing.

  I was staying on the outskirts of the city, almost in the country. There the concrete was interrupted often by fields of vege
tables, and the traffic that passed in the morning was half-rural – mule-carts all among the buses, juddering tractors sometimes. Most of the drivers looked half-dead with fatigue, so early had they awoken in the communes, I suppose, and the traffic itself seemed to rumble by in monotonous exhaustion. I went one morning to the Lugou Bridge, which used to be the city limit for foreigners, and standing there amongst its 282 sculpted lions, all different, above its green-rushed river, watched those tired reinforcements labouring into the city: on the next bridge upstream, big black puffing freight trains, wailing their whistles and snorting; on the next bridge to the south, bumper to bumper an unbroken line of ugly brown trailer-trucks; across the old structure beside me, past the ancient stele eulogizing Morning Moonlight on Lugou Bridge, half a million bicyclists, half-awake, half-asleep, lifeless on their way to work …

  Somewhere over there, I knew, was the source and fulcrum of the Chinese presence – the Inner City of Beijing, which used to be Peking, which used to be Peiping, which was Kubla Khan’s Dadu – the home of Deng Xiaoping, the home of Chairman Mao, the home of the Manchu emperors, and the Mings and the Hans before them. I approached it warily. Like the supplicants of old China, kept waiting for a year or two before granted audience with the Son of Heaven, I hung around the fringes of the place, waiting for a summons.

  I grinned a lot, and ran (but not too energetically, for the temperature was around 95° Fahrenheit). If Shanghai felt at first unexpectedly familiar, Beijing seemed almost unimaginably abroad. Everything was different here. The faces were different, the eyes were different, the manners were colder and more aloof. Nobody wanted help with gerunds. Though as it happened people were more attractively dressed than they had been in Shanghai, far more girls in skirts and blouses, even a few young men in suits and ties, still they were infinitely more alien to me. The children, their heads often shaved or close-clipped, their cheekbones high, did not respond so blithely. A sort of grave and massive contemplation greeted me wherever I went, as though through each pair of thoughtful eyes all the billion Chinese people, Jilin to Yunnan, were inspecting me as I passed.