Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  Despite her experience of urban life, Cindy still had the village girl’s habit of transforming every public place into a rubbish dump: Within fifteen minutes on the plane, and later on the train, our seats were soaked with spilled water and covered in poppy seeds, bits of used tissue paper, and so on. What she did to our seats, other people were doing to China’s streets, rivers, and lakes. And what individuals do, factories do on a much grander scale.

  Sprawling along the banks of the Yangtze, surrounded by mountains, Chongqing in June sits beneath a permanent layer of hot, damp industrial air and gives one the sense of being smothered under a blanket. High-rise buildings in the nouveau-riche Communist style have sprouted in the old city center, high above the riverbanks. But the closer you get to the river, the shabbier the housing: brick shantytowns with prewar factories, stinking public latrines, and outdoor eateries offering delicious stews of frogs, fish, and pigs’ brains simmering in red-hot chilies. Small, dark brown men from the villages carry heavy loads up and down the hills on bamboo poles. And the mighty Yangtze itself is like a slow-moving sewer.

  I shared a room in a newish hotel in the town center with Cindy’s cousin, the student. He was a serious young man, with only vague childhood memories of 1989. Students today, he said, were different. They were more practical, more realistic, and would not be used by people who wanted to bring down the government. In any case, he added, the campus was now under very tight control. His dream was to go to the United States.

  Before turning in, we watched television for a bit. Young women in green People’s Liberation Army uniforms and sexy black boots sang patriotic songs about being “ordinary women” today but prepared to “kill for the motherland tomorrow.” Their eyes blazed with patriotic fervor, rather like those Maoist heroines in revolutionary operas of the 1960s or like the “spy” I had met in Shenzhen. I thought of Mel Brooks and “Springtime for Hitler,” in his film The Producers. We switched the television off but could not get to sleep for some time, since the phone kept ringing with inquiries: Did we want a “special massage”?

  Daquan, where we got off the train from Chongqing, is a provincial dump: wide, barely paved streets lead to the large new railway station, in front of which shady young men in sunglasses hang about with nothing much to do. The arrival of a foreigner provides a temporary diversion, but soon everything settles down again in a late afternoon torpor, like the dust on a country road after a car has gone by. Cindy warned me several times to hold tight to all my belongings. “You cannot trust anyone here.” When I showed insufficient fear, she said: “You foreigners just don’t understand. Chinese people are bad, very bad.”

  Still, Daquan has a sleazy charm, not unlike what one imagines Mississippi gambling towns must have been like when Mark Twain was alive. The streets are filthy, and the local river is filled with plastic bottles and other rubbish that people casually toss away while having their meals on the rusty boats moored to a jetty not far from the town center, with its massage parlors, seedy hotels, and cheap restaurants. The men tend to dress like Latino gangsters, in their shades, garish shirts, and loud suits, and most women dress like nightclub hostesses, even if they are not, tottering around in impossibly high heels, diaphanous evening dresses, or skimpy velvet shorts. There is much vitality in these towns, but it is a rustic, earthy vitality, that of people who are not yet used to urban living but who enjoy some of the freedoms it brings.

  Daquan was a metropolis compared to the county town where Cindy’s uncle lives. We arrived in K. at dusk. It had rained that afternoon and the main street, lined with small shops, was a muddy strip. Bicycle-rickshaw riders strained every muscle in their wiry bodies to negotiate the puddles, which sat like little ponds in the road, while a rickety bus splashed us with sheets of muddy water. A man was hacking the head off a chicken. There was a dance hall with pink neon lights and a painted picture outside of a blond woman in a ball gown. There were two barbershops offering various kinds of massages. Women in flesh-colored stockings squatted outside, skirts hitched up almost to their waists, while men sat around in small groups, fanning themselves and drinking tea. The younger men nudged one another and sniggered as Cindy and I walked by. The women tittered, and the older people stared openmouthed.

  Uncle and Aunt lived on one of the side streets, which was, like the town itself, littered with rubbish. The house was a three-story concrete building, with one barred window. From the outside it looked like a garage, or a jail. Cindy shouted. Her aunt, a chubby, smiling woman in her late forties, let us in. She wore plastic sandals and a filmy brown dress, which clung to her thick hips.

  Downstairs was a dark room with a wooden table, some chairs, a sink, and no further decoration. It was where Uncle and Aunt had dinner. The living room and two bedrooms were on the second floor. There was a plastic-covered sofa in the living room, an enormous television set, a karaoke machine, a calendar on the wall with a picture of Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, and a kind of bunk, upon which Uncle was sitting, dressed in a pair of black boxer shorts and a white undershirt. Uncle, too, had a short, flabby figure, with a potbelly that bulged under his shirt. He was reading a paper, and made short grunting noises. Uncle was a school inspector. His small eyes, set in a round, sallow face, were bloodshot and shrewd.

  After he had finished with his paper, Uncle sidled up to me and asked me whether foreigners in my country took drugs and had sex with prostitutes. I tried to answer his questions as best I could. He nodded and said: “In China, prostitution is strictly forbidden.”

  When I put it to him that prostitution seemed to be rather common in China nonetheless, he shrugged and told me that the police were in cahoots with the brothel owners. He had a friend who owned a massage parlor. Business was good, because the owner had been a classmate of the police chief. “The main problem in China today,” he said, as though launching into a speech, “is corruption.” Uncle planted his hands on his thighs, making dents in the soft flesh. “Even the Party bosses,” he went on, “pocket public money, or give it to their friends to do business.”

  It was not entirely clear how much Uncle disapproved of all this, for he was proud to know one or two of those Party bosses himself. Indeed, he said, his relations with the local authorities were excellent. And with a stagey whisper, so the women couldn’t hear, he asked me whether I would like to visit the massage parlor with him. Since the owner was his personal friend, he said, the service would be “first class.”

  Uncle, it turned out, was not officially a Party member but had been told to join one of the official “democratic” parties, sanctioned and effectively controlled by the Communist Party to give China a wholly false image of political pluralism.

  I had hoped to be able to set off with Cindy to her mother’s village the following morning, but things did not turn out to be so simple. I was told the village was a very long way from the town. Also, since it had been raining, the roads would be flooded. Besides, there was nothing of interest in the village. And the facilities were very primitive, no good at all for a foreign guest. The food wouldn’t agree with me, and conditions were most unhygienic. No, it would be much better for me to stay in town. Cindy nodded her agreement. She still needed Uncle’s help to apply for permission to leave China.

  Staying in town actually meant staying in the house. Whenever I said I would like to go out for a walk, Uncle and Aunt, and Cindy too, waved away this ignorant notion. It was much too hot to walk around, and too dangerous for a foreign guest to go out alone. There might be trouble. That would not do at all. Why didn’t I just sit down and relax. They would switch on the karaoke machine and play some music videos for me.

  Of course these were all excuses. To “take care” of someone, whether a foreigner or a subordinate, is to control him. Authoritarianism in East Asia—my Japanese experiences came to mind while I traveled in China—is often wrapped in a warm maternal cloak. Don’t do anything on your own, it is too dangerous, we will take care of everything. And soon one is reduced to the
state of a helpless child.

  And so I sat and sat while Uncle played his music videos, cranking up the volume, and took turns with his wife singing syrupy pop songs through a loud and weirdly echoing microphone. The videos were of girls in long white dresses and young men in tuxedos running in slow motion through clouds of dry ice, or romping through the tourist sites of Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Paris.

  Aunt actually had a fine singing voice, which she used to good effect when she sang Chinese folk songs while doing the laundry. Unlike Cindy, Aunt still had some knowledge of an older, rural culture, before it was stamped on in the Mao years, but she seemed barely conscious of the effortless grace of her singing. No one in the house, except myself, appeared to be listening to her. It was just the hum of her physical labor, the rhythm of her daily life.

  I must have looked glum when, on the second evening, Uncle and Aunt spent three solid hours warbling their Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop songs through the karaoke machine. At one point Uncle repeated the same wretched song four times, until he felt he had got it right. The sound of his voice, echoing from the concrete walls of the small living room, sounded like that of a wounded animal howling in pain. But Uncle and Aunt were trying to be solicitous hosts and wondered whether I might not prefer something more familiar to my ears. There followed thirty minutes of video footage of Abba and then of some French Muzak. When this didn’t make me seem any happier, they simply turned up the volume, with encouraging smiles. When I looked even glummer, I was asked what was wrong. Didn’t I like music? So I said an unforgivable thing. I said I preferred Aunt’s natural singing voice when she did the laundry. I said I liked the old folk songs.

  Aunt’s face went through several emotions in quick succession. First there was bafflement. Then there was hurt. Here I was, an honored foreign guest, and I was making fun of their backwardness. Or at least I was not sufficiently appreciative of the fact that they were modern, educated people, who had left village life behind them. I was implying that Uncle and Aunt still belonged to the world of old folk songs, to the world, that is, of Cindy’s mother, the world they didn’t really want me to see.

  When he wasn’t on the karaoke machine, Uncle was proud to show off his official credentials as an educated man, as a demonstration of his zige. One morning, after having once again ignored my request to head off for the village, Uncle told me to sit down and ordered his wife to produce “the box” for my inspection. The box was covered in red felt and had the PRC flag embossed on it. While Uncle gave me a sidelong glance, grinning in anticipation, Aunt took out a brown envelope that contained a newspaper article, something about the evils of “feudalism,” written by Uncle. He explained that he used to teach history at a middle school. There was also a document testifying to his later appointment as a school inspector.

  Though I dreaded being cooped up in the house, I soon realized that our twice-daily outings, once for tea in the morning, once for dinner in the evening, offered only limited relief. Uncle insisted that we walk together, ahead of the women, and would proceed to hold forth about China. China was an old country, he said, with five thousand years of history. China was a very complicated country, too, which foreign friends could never truly comprehend. China had fifty-six minorities. And all Chinese people loved China. For example, when the U.S. and NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, all the Chinese people were furious. Uncle pulled an angry face.

  Partly out of boredom, partly out of a desire to needle him, I asked Uncle who the Chinese people were. Did they include the Tibetans or the Uighurs in the Muslim western areas? Was there any difference between the Han Chinese and the minorities? Did they perhaps have different views on certain matters? I knew he wouldn’t give me an honest, or even an interesting, answer but it was something to do. “China,” he solemnly intoned, “has fifty-six minorities. All citizens of the PRC are Chinese. And we all love our motherland.”

  I did not like Uncle, and began to feel he did not much like me, either. When I voiced my dissatisfaction to Cindy about being trapped in the house, she looked concerned and said she understood my feelings but there was still plenty of time to go to the village. Why didn’t I relax and talk to Uncle. He was an educated man and could tell me many interesting things. But of course the main thing was that she still needed to sort out her visa problems, and Uncle was not to be rushed.

  I decided to sulk, a demeaning but effective way in China to get your feelings across. And finally, on the fourth day, it was decided that we might proceed to the village. Aunt would come with us. As soon as we left the town behind us, bumping along in a small bus, my mood lifted. Rain had turned the landscape, with its gentle hills, bamboo groves, and watery rice paddies, into a beautiful emerald green. A water buffalo stood in a distant field, like an ink dot on a Chinese scroll, and a plume of smoke curled up from a gray-brick farmhouse with a pretty tiled roof. At last I felt I had truly arrived in China, or should I say “China,” for it was a notion, a romantic idea, a fiction that I carried with me which was no more concrete than any other idea of the country or culture or history or people that we call by that name.

  Picking their way through the rice fields, past the village school and the duck pond, my two companions, Aunt in a semi-diaphanous dress with bits of silver glitter, Cindy in a miniskirt and high heels, were giggling like village girls returning home from the big city.

  The family farm consisted of three houses built at the foot of a green hill. In the middle was a newish, two-story house with modern white tiles pasted onto the front wall. Two older farmhouses, quaint, but dark and cramped inside, and slowly crumbling, stood on either side of the main house. Cindy’s grandmother lived in one of the old houses. The other was occupied by Cindy’s uncle, the only man left on the farm and, from what I gathered from Cindy, the black sheep of the family; he was always drunk. Cindy’s mother lived in the main house. In front was a large yard, where Grandmother fed the ducks and grabbed one by the neck when it was needed for dinner.

  Meals were taken on the ground floor of the new house. The second floor looked unused, almost as if it were a showroom of some kind. A new television set and a karaoke machine, bought in Guangzhou by Cindy’s brother, still stood there, wrapped in Styrofoam. Various parts of a pig, slaughtered some time ago and already turned reddish brown, hung out to dry on a clothesline strung across the room. Occasionally I noticed a large, black rat scurrying toward the kitchen, which was next to a narrow courtyard where we washed ourselves at night with pails of boiled water.

  There was a mystery about the pigs that I didn’t immediately grasp. While drinking tea with Grandmother soon after we arrived, I heard grunting. Later I spotted a large pink ear spilling out from under the door of one of the rooms. But when I asked how many pigs there were, I got shifty looks and evasive answers. No pigs. Sometimes pigs, but not now. There used to be pigs. And so forth. I realized that I was not dreaming only when I was told later that farmers had to pay tax according to the number of pigs they kept. It was the crude but only way for local tax collectors—often petty gangsters paid by Party officials—to have a rough idea how much money people had.

  Cindy’s mother was a small, thin, dark-skinned woman, who managed to carry enormous loads despite her lean frame. She showed me where she received her congregation of Christians once a week, on Monday nights. It was a room to the side of the place where we ate, containing a blackboard and a few wooden benches. She had written the words of a Chinese hymn on the blackboard, asking the Lord Yehova to come to China and relieve people of their troubles. I asked her whether she was a Protestant. Of course, she said, for Catholics are different: “They worship the mother of Jesus.”

  What about her recent problems with the police? She smiled, and said it was no problem. They had taken her in for questioning and had wanted to know who her leader was. She answered that she had only one leader, and his name was Jesus. The police insisted that she was a member of a subversive organization and ordered her again to reveal the leader’s name. W
hen she refused to name anyone but Jesus, they eventually let her go, but said they could come back for her anytime. “Stupid idiots!” she said. “As though there was any other boss but Jesus!”

  Mother was firmly convinced that Christians went to heaven while sinners roasted in hell. Her conversion had taken place two years before, after her husband died of a diseased liver and Cindy and her brother left for the south. Perhaps she had felt depressed and lonely. But it was not immediately clear how she was converted. There was some talk about “a man in the village.” But it was impossible to get her to say whether this man was an itinerant evangelist or a local “underground” Christian. Some areas of Sichuan have a long history of peasant Christianity, which reemerges as soon as the repression is relaxed.

  One thing was clear: Neither Cindy nor Aunt approved of it. Cindy called her mother’s faith “evil.” She used the word xie, which can mean “heresy” or “fallacy,” as well as “evil.” It is the official government term used for Falun Gong and other banned religious groups. Cindy told Aunt stories about Christian baptism. People took off all their clothes, she said, and danced around naked. Both erupted in derisive laughter. Aunt hitched up her dress and slapped her plump thighs. It was the funniest thing she had ever heard.

  Later the conversation took a nastier turn. Mother had prepared a freshly killed duck, which we ate in the Sichuan style, with hot chili peppers. Grandmother was there, and so was the uncle’s family, including his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Cindy’s cousin. A shy young woman, she spoke the clearest standard Chinese and was better educated than the others. I often saw her sitting alone with a book. After a stint as a factory worker in Guangzhou, she had come home to study for the entrance exam to a medical college, but even if she passed the test, she still might not make it, for a college education was expensive, and nobody was prepared to pay for her, a mere girl.