China Road

by Rob Gifford

  There is moss on Hua Shan. Moss is one of my favorite things in all the world. Deep, dank, dark green moss. Northern China has little of it, because it never rains. Hua Shan has plenty, clinging to rocks, and to trees, and to whatever roots and bark it can find. I stop occasionally just to touch it.

  After about an hour and a half of sweaty uphill climbing, a set of stone steps materializes ahead of me, some broken, most greened with time, leading to a stone arch at the top. I climb the steps and look through the arch into a tiny garden.

  At the back of the garden is a huge white slab of Hua Shan rock, like some Chinese Golgotha protruding from the mountain itself. Cut into the rock are three cave doorways.

  In front of the caves, up to the right, behind some large sunflowers and an overgrown vegetable plot, are steps leading to a small hut. I walk past the caves and call out gently. “You ren ma? Is anyone here?”

  Silence.

  Then suddenly the curtain across the hut’s door is lifted and out steps a small man in a pair of blue shorts and a red cotton tank top.

  Somehow I wasn’t expecting the monk to look like he was going for a jog.

  “Are you Daoist Monk Shi?” I ask.

  “I am,” he says, smiling kindly. He looks as if he is perhaps in his mid-thirties, with a broad face and a goatee that is long enough to be gently wispy at the end. His long black hair is pulled back into a bun.

  I explain who I am, that I am a friend of Artist Zheng, who is arriving later in the day, and that I’m writing a book. I ask him if he would mind chatting with me for a while.

  “Mei you wenti. Huanying,” he says. “No problem. You are welcome.”

  Although (or perhaps because) I work in one of the most worldly, plugged-in professions on the planet, wired 24/7 into what is going on around the globe, I have to confess that I have a seriously monastic streak. I love my job, the news, the travel, the writing, the intellectual engagement with the world, but at regular intervals, I feel the need to get away from it all, to climb a mountain, and just escape. When we go on vacation to rural Italy, I wander off to find monasteries, and my wife sometimes wonders if I’m coming back. A few years ago I stumbled across a magnificent old monastery in which there lived a silent order of monks. I almost joined on the spot. Talk about an antidote to rolling news.

  So to me there is something completely compelling about a man withdrawing from society to live with nature on a mountainside.

  My T-shirt is totally soaked, so I ask the hermit if I can hang it up to dry in the sun, and he points to a clothesline outside his cave bedroom. I sit down in just my shorts and sandals, feeling a little self-consciously back to nature myself.

  Of course, I have questions, so I lick my pencil and start to put them to Hermit Shi (pronounced Shuh).

  First up, what exactly is the Dao?

  “The Dao is the wanwu yuanxian de yige guilu.”

  I repeat it in Chinese and write it down, but then have to translate it slowly for myself out loud.

  “Wanwu yuanxian de yige guilu. The law of the origin of the ten thousand things.”

  Hmmm. So is Daoism a religion?

  “Yes.”

  So, there are gods?

  “Originally, there were no gods, but when the old Daoist masters died, they became gods, and people worshiped them. And that is who the statues in the lower cave down there are.” He points.

  “So what are you trying to do here?”

  “I’m trying to retreat from the fenza shiwu, the complex affairs of the world.”

  “And what do you think of all this development all around you? This crazy development in modern China?”

  “Development is good. We can’t regret development. But too much development damages nature. It is a little extreme at the moment. Certainly there is too much running after money.”

  “What about computer science? What about electronic information engineering?”

  “Believing in science is okay. Science is the most natural thing. The only reason we have science is because, thousands of years ago, our ancestors talked about nature.”

  I ask him about the massive power plant just beside Hua Shan, which to me looks like a monstrosity.

  “Science is progress. Progress is good. But science cannot depart from metaphysics. If development goes against nature, it is not progress but regress. If you need electricity, then you must build electricity plants. If you don’t need it, and it’s excessive, then it’s not right.”

  Support for coal-burning power plants. That’s not quite what I was expecting.

  “So what about modern Chinese people, and their mind-set generally?”

  “They strive for a modern lifestyle, but they have lost their roots. They should return to simplicity and truth.”

  We plunge into a long discussion about the similarities and differences between Daoism and Christianity, and especially about the knowability of the divine.

  The Dao in Daoism, the Way itself, is by its nature unknowable. The first line of the classic Daoist text, the Dao De Jing, lays this out very clearly: “The way that can be walked is not the True Way, the name that can be named is not the True Name.”

  I always feel this single line has had more impact on the Chinese psyche than almost any other. There is no absolute spiritual truth. Truth, if it even exists, is unknowable.

  Contrast this with Judaism and Christianity (or, for that matter, Islam), which claim to be revelations of divine truth.

  Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Christianity says truth is knowable, and that assertion has shaped Western thinking. Even if not everyone believes in Christianity, the idea of an objective, existing moral truth has persisted.

  When the first Western missionaries arrived in China, they managed to blend the Western and Eastern thinking rather beautifully in their translation of the opening words of John’s Gospel. “In the beginning was the Word,” it says in English. In Chinese this is translated, “In the beginning was the Dao [the Way].”

  I like Hermit Shi. He talks about things that I like talking about more than computer science and information engineering. We talk and talk, and he seems to enjoy chatting too. Finally, I say I have one last question before I must put on my now-dry T-shirt and leave him alone. He raises his eyebrows in expectation.

  “So,” I ask him, “what do you think is the meaning of life?”

  I laugh as I ask it, and he laughs as he hears it.

  “The meaning of life is the realization of the Dao.”

  “But how do you realize the Dao?”

  “By coexisting with nature.”

  I write it down, religiously.

  As he walks me to the stone archway at the entrance of his garden, I ask him if I might come back and stay with him sometime, and he agrees.

  “So can I just show up?”

  “Sure,” he replies, “or you can call me.”

  “Call you?”

  “Yes, call my cell phone. Here’s the number.”

  There is a gentle, wispy smoke hanging over Hua Shan as I descend the path from the hermit’s cave. This would make the perfect mystical-spiritual-romantic photograph if I could just get over the suspicion that the smoke might be coming from the nearby power station.

  Back at the Hairy Woman Cave Hostel, my friend Zheng is up and eating brunch. We sit for about an hour interviewing each other about what we are both doing here. He tells me more about his spiritual search, and the frustrations of living in China when all people want to do is earn money. He laments the rise of the petty bourgeoisie, as he calls them, and says that “the economic water has submerged active thinking.” Then we say goodbye, and he sets off up the path to spend the week with the hermit, and I set off down the hill to catch a bus back to Xi’an.

  At the bottom of the mountain, I walk under the railroad track as an express thunders past, elude the vendors who want to sell me Hua Shan postcards and T-shirts and sun hats, and climb aboard
a minibus for the journey back to Xi’an, hoping I can just sit quietly for a while and contemplate the Dao.

  The ticket collector comes around to collect my fare. He’s a genial-looking guy, just this side of raffish, who could be taken a lot more seriously if he didn’t have a folded wet towel on the top of his head. He occasionally takes it off to wipe his sweating face, then puts it back on his head. He asks me where I’m from, and the usual chitchat ensues, including a remarkably favorable assessment of the United Kingdom. “Hong Kong is good, because you guys governed it,” he says.

  One row in front of me, on the other side of the aisle, is a youngish-looking Chinese man with a buzz cut and very shiny shoes. He looks as though he might be an off-duty soldier, and he takes exception to what the ticket collector has said.

  “So you think Britain should just govern the whole of China, do you?” he shoots at Mr. Wet Towel.

  “Sure. They couldn’t do a worse job than this bunch,” the man with the towel replies provocatively, without mentioning Any Particular Party.

  “Look, I don’t love the Communist Party,” says Shiny Shoes (needing to establish his street credibility, and the fact that he’s not a corrupt official), “but you can’t be that pessimistic.”

  Mr. Wet Towel is not to be put down by patriotism. Having collected all the fares, he sits at the front facing the passengers and, completely dismissing Shiny Shoes’s argument, says, “Of course I’m pessimistic. Living in this country. It’s just too corrupt.”

  The debate rages for five minutes, with no one else taking part, then the two give up and sit in silence. Finally, more passengers climb onboard, and we pull out toward the expressway for the two-hour journey back to Xi’an.

  11. Elvis Lives

  I spend a final day in Xi’an, visiting more imperial tombs outside the city in the morning and browsing through the city’s bookstores in the afternoon. The bestsellers are all management books, guides on how to make a million, and biographies of successful Western businessmen. I flick through the history books on sale, which devote a page to the history of China since 1949 and about two hundred pages to the different periods before. I search for any remaining sign of Marxist theory, eventually finding Mao’s little-read book hidden away on an upstairs floor, unmissed by the entrepreneurs devouring the business section below.

  Throughout the afternoon, I also hold auditions for the role of driver in my road movie. If I’m going to spend the next two days in some guy’s taxi, he had better have something to say. In each taxi I get into, I chat with the driver about everything and nothing. How much can he tell me about the local area? Will he have friends in the countryside we can stop off and see? How’s his driving? They chat back, oblivious to the fact that they’re auditioning for the role of a lifetime.

  The minute I jump into Old Gu’s car, I know he is the man. If there were Elvis Presley look-alike competitions in China, Old Gu could turn up just as he is and win first prize. He says he’s nearly sixty, but he looks much younger. He has thick dark hair, slightly greased, and a slight curl to his upper lip. If he had not been contributing to the Communist reconstruction of Shaanxi province as a young man in the 1950s and ’60s, I swear he would have been throwing girls in long, swingy skirts over his shoulder on the dance floors of Memphis. He has a slightly laconic slant on life that makes me like him immediately. I tell him to meet me at my hotel the following day, a Sunday, at seven in the morning for an early start.

  Old Gu shows up on time, and we head out of town, with me humming “Blue Suede Shoes” in the back. His car is a well-cared-for VW Santana, with a frilly curtain across the back window and curtains on all the passenger windows too. The air-conditioning works, and we will no doubt need it later on. Before we reach the outskirts of Xi’an, he pulls over and waits by the side of the road outside an apartment block.

  “Is it okay if my wife comes too?” he asks suddenly.

  “Your wife?”

  “Yes, she’d like to see the countryside on the way to the northwest. And it’s also safer driving if there are two of us.”

  As he is speaking, a slender, middle-aged woman with a round face opens the front passenger door and steps in. She carries nothing but a small plastic bag. Presented with the marital fait accompli, I acquiesce, settle into the backseat, and let it go. Perhaps chitchat with two people will be more interesting than chitchat with just one. We make small talk. They both grew up in Xi’an. Their son is at university, so they have an empty nest now. They are both from China’s most tragic generation. America’s baby boomers were lifted up on the wings of postwar prosperity. China’s baby boomers were sucked down into the whirlpool of Mao’s madness. Both Elvis and Mrs. Elvis had their educations interrupted by political campaigns. Xi’an has many problems, they say, unemployment and corruption especially. But, after decades of turmoil, they seem grateful for the relative stability of modern China.

  Unless you had traveled along it all the way from Shanghai and formed a certain attachment to its shabby ways, its chaotic turnoffs, and its worn tarmac, stained with oil and mud, you would probably not take Route 312 west from Xi’an. My next destination is Lanzhou, a journey of more than three hundred miles, and a new expressway between the two cities provides a much more direct route. The guidebook says the trip takes fourteen hours by bus along the expressway, but it will take me two days driving with Elvis and his wife along Route 312. The old road snakes rather indirectly toward Lanzhou, forming two wiggly sides of a long, flat triangle to the north of the expressway’s hypotenuse.

  Elvis steers a course through the factories and new apartment blocks of the suburbs, out onto Route 312.

  It is the morning of my thirty-seventh birthday, and the broad Chinese sky seems to acknowledge the special occasion by opening up into a particularly radiant blue.

  Shaanxi province (of which Xi’an is the capital) has been the heartland of the Communist Party since 1935, when Mao Zedong established the town of Yan’an, about three hundred miles north of Xi’an, as the Party’s base. Mao had struggled to bring the revolution to the peasants of southern China in the late 1920s. He managed to rally about a hundred thousand peasants at his guerrilla bases there, but they were harassed on every side by the forces of Mao’s nemesis, Chiang Kaishek. Chiang was also trying to reunite the collapsed country, but without the aid of Communism. Finally, hard-pressed by Chiang’s troops, in the fall of 1934 Mao’s ragtag band of Communist Party members fled the south on what would become known in Communist legend as the Long March. They marched for nearly a year through central, western, and northern China, reaching the relative safety of Yan’an in the fall of 1935. From there, the Communists eventually launched their conquest of the whole of China in the 1940s.

  More than ninety thousand of the original Long Marchers deserted or perished, but the eight thousand or so who reached Shaanxi were to form the core of the Party that took over China in 1949. The barren yellow earth here proved a fertile recruiting ground for their revolutionary message of giving land to the landless peasants.

  Had it not been for the Japanese invasion in 1937, which forced Chiang Kaishek to ally with the Communists against the invaders, Chiang, who was virulently anti-Communist, would probably have wiped out the nascent Communist Party. But the invasion gave the Party a breathing space. It grew stronger during the Second World War, and Old Hundred Names started to put their faith in its members, inspired by what they saw of the Communists’ incorruptibility, their desire to fight for the peasants and the downtrodden, and their promises of land reform. It still took until 1949 for the Communists to conquer all of China, but no one in Shaanxi ever forgot that it was here that the victory became a possibility.

  Now, though, it’s a different story. The Communist Party may be filling the pockets of many, but it has lost the hearts of most. Indeed, the Party lost the revolution almost as soon as the revolution was won, and Communist China unraveled into a twisted mess of famine and political struggle. By the time Mao died, in 1976, people w
ere exhausted, glad not to have to believe in him anymore. And now the spiritual vacuum that was left is being filled by something completely different.

  Two hours out of Xi’an, I ask Elvis to pull his VW sedan off the busy four-lane stretch of Route 312. A sign beside the road announces the village of Shuangzhao (pronounced Shwahng-jow). A small red-brick church nestles beside an apple orchard, just thirty yards back from the road, sitting behind a wall daubed with a huge advertisement for fertilizer. Above the church’s entrance are three large Chinese characters, which read “Fu Yin Tang”: Good News Hall. Globalization has not reached Shuangzhao, and foreigners are scarce in these parts, so I am greeted by curious looks as I wander over to the tiny church.

  Dotted across the Shaanxi countryside are dozens and dozens of simple Protestant churches like this one, and more ornate Catholic churches too. This is the flip side of the breakdown in Communist ideology in China: the reemergence of religion.

  “Zaoshang hao. Good morning. You libai ma? Is there a service this morning?”

  “You libai. Yes, there is.”

  An old lady is standing at the entrance to the church, like a female St. Peter, checking off the members of the congregation as they enter through its less than pearly gates. She tilts her head to one side to get a closer look at the foreigner in front of her, and her face breaks into a huge, toothless grin. She ushers me in, arms waving, voice rising, like a parent welcoming home the prodigal, and sits me down at the back of the church, next to two other old ladies. If it weren’t for their beaming, toothless smiles, the triumvirate of grannies could have stepped right out of Act 1, Scene 1, of Macbeth. Three benevolent witches, cooking up good spiritual spells at the back of a rural Chinese church.