by Rob Gifford
Chinese friends from the countryside have told me (though I have no sure evidence of it) that family-planning officials have buckets of water in the operating room where forced abortions take place, and that children who are not killed by the injection are drowned in the buckets. I am just about to ask the doctor about this when the bus brakes suddenly and she and her two nurses stand and walk to the front, smiling their goodbyes.
For a moment I want to follow them off, but they are already descending the steps, getting out at a small village in the middle of nowhere. I would have to retrieve my backpack and persuade them to let me go into the clinic with them, which would be unlikely. Then officials would arrive and want to check my passport, with its journalist visa in it. As I hesitate, the bus sets off again, and I am left looking out the back window at the three women beside the road, gathering up their bags.
I sit fuming and regret my decision not to get off.
Perhaps the most shocking thing is that the doctor is just an ordinary middle-aged woman. She doesn’t look evil or inhumane. She has children. Perhaps she has grandchildren. But she is faithfully implementing this brutal policy apparently as calmly as though she were designing traffic systems. How is it that the Chinese government is able to make people do these things? What is it that can make a mother of two override her humanity and think she is doing a wonderful, patriotic thing by killing eight-month-old unborn babies?
For all the changes, and the glitzy lights of Shanghai, Nanjing, and Xi’an, the state is still paramount in China and will be obeyed on the issues that it cares about. Ultimately, for all the changes, the rights of the individual do not count for much.
The bus rattles on across the fringes of the desert, and I continue to fume, and to hate China. It’s one of those days when I am simply glad that I am leaving.
Our narrow road is running parallel to Route 312 now, about fifty miles north of it. It’s too tight for two buses to pass at normal speed, and the driver slows when trucks and buses come in the opposite direction. Old Hundred Names ride their bicycles along the road, to market or a neighboring village, wobbling in the slipstream of the buses or trucks that pass. There are few private cars except an occasional official black Volkswagen or Audi speeding through on an inspection tour, or returning from a long lunch.
The man with the mousy face sitting behind me doesn’t want to talk, but another woman gets on the bus and sits herself down next to me. Her work has something to do with irrigation in the nearest town, and we chat a little about the importance of water conservation. Not surprisingly, she says the water situation here is desperate. When we reach Jinchang, another forlorn desert town, I change buses for another two-hour ride to the town of Yongchang, a few miles from a village where I’ve heard that locals make some extraordinary claims about their ancestry.
In ancient times, the Silk Road west of Lanzhou was all about movement. The Sons of the Yellow Emperor stayed where they were, in eastern China, while out in the west, where so-called civilization met so-called barbarism, few Han Chinese people settled unless forced to by exile. But other ethnic groups were constantly shifting, and movement along the Silk Road has created a maelstrom of ethnicities in China’s northwest. Perhaps the most tantalizing claim of ethnic origin comes from a small village, just off Route 312 in central Gansu province, in the shadow of the western stretches of the Great Wall. The village is called Liqian, which happens also to be the ancient Chinese word for Rome. Some historians, and now some residents, claim that the people who live there are descendants of a Roman legion that came to China two thousand years ago.
The idea that the people of Liqian (pronounced Lee-chyen) were descended from Romans was first put forward by an Oxford professor who rejoiced in the name of Homer Hasenpflug Dubs. In 1955, in a lecture to the China Society in London, Dubs put forward his thesis, that in 53 B.C., when the Romans were defeated by the Parthians at the battle of Carrhae in modern-day Turkey, a group of Roman soldiers was taken prisoner and transported to Central Asia, where they were captured by the Chinese and taken back to China.
Dubs based his whole theory on a couple of rather vague references found in Chinese historical writings. One was a military formation used in battle in China that was similar to one used in Rome, the other was a similar type of building. And, er, that’s about it.
I had read about the Lost Roman Legion some time before. It had even been written about in the official Chinese press and hailed as a sign of contact between the two great civilizations two thousand years ago. When I saw that Liqian was very close to Route 312, I had decided to pay a visit.
Liqian itself is a small, dusty village, with no paved road. I’d connected by minibus to the nearby town of Yongchang, and then a grinning taxi driver in a battered Chinese-made taxi had driven me the fifteen minutes to Liqian. There don’t seem to be many people in the streets today, but on stepping out of the car, I see a man driving a blue tractor trailer toward me. It is belching out smoke into the clean rural air. I flag him down, and he pulls up beside me. His hair is slightly lighter than that of most Chinese, and his nose, while hardly aquiline, has a noticeably high bridge. He fixes me with a pair of uncannily green eyes.
“Ave. Civis Romanus sum” is what I want to say.
“Qing wen, ni shi Luo Ma ren ma?” is what I actually ask. “Excuse me, but are you a Roman, by any chance?”
“Shenme?” He does a double take, squinting at me against the sun. “What?”
“You know, the Romans, green eyes and all that,” I persist.
“Oh, Romans,” he says, suddenly realizing what I am asking. “Keneng. Possibly.”
“Keneng, but you’re not sure?” I ask.
“Right.” He pauses, with a slightly goofy grin. “You ren shuo. Some people have said that.” And that’s all he has to say on the matter.
I stop several other people, and everyone is equally hazy about their possible Roman roots. The only thing vaguely Roman about the dusty village is a forlorn little portico put up by the local government with pseudo-Roman pillars containing a stone tablet, on which is inscribed in Chinese characters a summary of the story of the “Lost Roman Legion of China.”
It is becoming clear that this is all a rather hopeful effort by an Oxford professor and a few ambitious local officials to prove a link between two of the great empires of the past. The closest links I can see are the green eyes of many of Liqian’s inhabitants, but there are plenty of Tajiks, Uighurs, Persians, and Pashtuns who have green eyes. China clearly has plenty of rural myths as well as urban ones.
I hesitate, wondering whether to invest more time exploring the myth, worried that a column of legionaries might march out from behind a dusty wall the minute I leave. But in the end I decide not to waste any more time here. I hitch up my toga, and jump back into the car for Yongchang, where I climb aboard a minibus for the town of Zhangye.
The driver takes the old Route 312 for a while, then joins the new road. As we speed along on a freeway as good as any in the United States or Europe, a dirt rampart appears. It looks rather old and decrepit, but it goes on and on, running parallel with the road. Suddenly I realize what it is.
“Chang Cheng!” I exclaim like a child to the man next to me, my finger pressed against the window. “Great Wall!”
He smiles and nods.
It’s a far cry from the sections of the wall near Beijing, which are more than fifty feet high and made of solid bricks and mortar. There, you could march an army, of soldiers or tourists, along the top. But here, it looks like simply a mud wall, about ten to twenty feet high. Any stray Mongol horde that wandered this way would have no trouble hopping over it. The main Gobi railway line then appears behind it, the three lines racing alongside one another, heading northwest.
The reason for the Great Wall’s state of disrepair here was the expansion of China’s boundaries. Until the last dynasty of China (the Qing, which ran from 1644 to 1912), the wall marked the outer limits of the Chinese Empire. But in the eighteen
th century the Qing rulers expanded their territory and stationed garrisons to the north and west of the wall, thus superseding it as a last defense.
A sign beside Route 312 says 2643 kilometers. That’s the distance I’ve come from Shanghai—about sixteen hundred miles. Soon after the sign, Route 312 bends slightly north and slices right through a gap in the Great Wall, so that the wall now runs to the south of the road. The desert stretches on and on. It’s not the rolling, Sahara-style sand dunes we generally visualize as desert but more of a rocky scrubland, with small villages strung along the old Route 312, still running parallel to the freeway. Some have been there for centuries. Others look as though they have only just been built.
Even here, in the barren outer reaches of the Chinese Empire, government propaganda is everywhere.
Lift high the banner of science. Oppose cults.
Taking drugs harms yourself, your family, and your country.
Daughters can also carry on the family line.
The sign on the archway as the bus enters the next town says GOLDEN ZHANGYE. That may be stretching it a little, but despite its isolated situation in the middle of the Gobi Desert, Zhangye (pronounced Jahngyeah, population 114,000) does not feel as though it is being left behind. It has the classic feel of a midsize town anywhere in China. The stores are heaving with consumer goods (though not as modern and expensive as those in the stores farther east), there are cars on the streets, new apartment blocks are springing up, and the restaurants are full. There are even large posters all over town of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, starring in their newly released movie, Mr. & Mrs. Smith. In short, Zhangye is a pleasant, bustling, if somewhat isolated, oasis town that is bearing witness to the renaissance of the Silk Road.
Marco Polo wrote that he stopped in Zhangye (he called it Kan Chau), toward the end of the Silk Road’s last heyday in the thirteenth century, before the faster sea routes to China relegated it to obscurity. He said he spent a whole year here, though I’ve no idea how he passed the time. I plan to stay just one night. But what a wonderful evening it turns out to be.
A motor rickshaw takes me from the bus station to what the guidebook says is one of the better hotels in Zhangye. It’s a nice, airy place called, imaginatively, the Zhangye Hotel. As I check in, I ask the clerk, in my most patronizing white-man tone, whether he knows what I mean when I say I need to get onto the Internet.
“There’s broadband in every room, sir,” he says.
I dump my backpack and head out to find dinner.
Zhangye has probably the biggest town square I’ve seen outside Tiananmen. Nearby, construction is nearly finished on a huge Catholic church. Who on earth is paying for this edifice? In the shadow of the church, an old lady is burning paper money beside the road, watched by what must be her grandson. It is presumably some special day for honoring the dead.
As I watch her, two men come and stand alongside me.
“You don’t do that in your America, do you?” says one, making the usual assumption about my nationality and pointing to the fake money, now ablaze on the sidewalk.
“No, we don’t,” I reply. “And before today, I hadn’t seen many people doing it in your China.”
“Oh yes, old habits die hard,” says the other man with a smile.
They both look about thirty, a little overdressed for a Gobi oasis town, in suit and tie. They are clearly on their way somewhere. The older, bolder one introduces himself. “We are the local representatives of An Li.”
“An Li?”
He lifts up his bag. It has the Chinese characters An Li on it, and below them, the English name of the company, Amway.
“Amway? American Amway? Direct-selling Amway?”
“Yes.” He grins. “You know it!”
“Of course, but I wasn’t expecting to bump into Amway representatives in the middle of the Gobi Desert.”
“We have only had an office here for three years,” he says. “But already it is going very well.”
I tell them that I haven’t yet eaten dinner and ask if they would join me. In true Chinese fashion, they insist that dinner is on them, and we head to a noodle bar that serves the local specialty, sun ji chao pao, a sort of chopped noodle dish, with meat. There are no free tables, so we sit on one side of a huge round table while a family sits eating around the other side. Our noodles arrive quickly, with large pieces of thinly sliced meat on top of them.
The older man tells me that his name is Ren Wei (pronounced Run Way), that he is Han Chinese and thirty-five years old. He has a broad forehead, a shock of thick black hair, and the face of an eager schoolboy. Ren grew up in Xinjiang, farther along Route 312 to the north-west, and worked for five years in a factory in his hometown, even more remote than Zhangye, where his father had been posted years before. But, like so many people in small-town China, he had bigger ambitions. “Over there, I couldn’t realize my potential,” he says.
So he headed east to Zhangye, where he set about selling fake DVDs for one yuan a shot. He enjoyed the freedom of working for himself and made some money.
He then made his first big mistake, he says, investing all his savings in a travel business, building yurts and tents for tourists to stay in outside Zhangye. The venture went bankrupt, and he returned to Zhangye to look for a job. He says he worked at many businesses, including some of the big names in the beverage industry, Wahaha, Jianlibao, even Sprite, but he says it was very unsatisfying. Even if he made money for the company, he says, he personally did not benefit.
He heard about Amway through a friend and came along to one of their meetings. That was just nine months ago, and he is already completely hooked. He is almost shaking with excitement as he discusses his new career—the money he can earn, the possibilities it creates. “I will do this for the rest of my life,” he says, beaming broadly. “I will never do anything else. I just love the freedom of this.”
He pulls out his government work license and holds it up. “This is my office,” he exclaims with a smile, negating sixty years of the planned economy with one gesture. “This is all I need.”
His friend, Li Caijin (pronounced Lee Tsai-jin), who is only twenty-six, is thinner and quieter. He used to work in an office for a state-owned railroad company. He says he’d go to work, read the paper, drink tea, and, like so many employees of state-owned companies, do very little all day. He has also just started, but both of them talk about their mentor, a man they call Teacher Hu, who is now, after only three years, earning the equivalent of two to three thousand U.S. dollars a month, a huge sum for this (or any) part of China.
“He vacations everywhere, owns a new house, and a great car. It’s amazing,” says Ren as he pulls from his bag a catalog of Amway products available in China. “Of course, we don’t have such a wide selection of products as in the U.S.,” he says, “but it is growing rapidly, and all the products are made in China, in a factory in Guangdong, so it is very convenient.”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a breath-freshener spray. “We Chinese like to eat whole garlic, you know,” he says, as though foreigners might not have noticed this. “Now, you can buy an Amway breath-freshener spray, and it takes the smell away.”
He takes a little squirt, then puts the breath freshener back in his pocket and returns to his garlic-laden noodles.
There’s a brief pause while we all lean forward, put the edges of our bowls to our lips, and slurp the hot soup of our meat and noodle dish.
“So what is your dream?” I ask Ren.
“My dream is to be like you,” he says. “I always see you young Westerners, carrying your backpacks on your backs. You’re so young, but you’re so independent, and you don’t have a care in the world. You’re just traveling with your backpack around China. That’s what I want to do. Go backpacking in your country, and everywhere.”
Li is more earnest. He says his dream is to get Amway products out to the whole world. “We say to each other, Amway was started in the U.S., developed in Japan, it matured in Chi
na’s coastal cities, but its real huihuang, its real zenith, its real glory will be seen in the interior of China, in places like Zhangye. This is where the market is.”
He is talking in almost religious terminology, and I realize that the dream of being the one who cracks the China market, who deodorizes those 2 billion armpits and freshens the breath of those 1 billion garlic eaters, is not limited to Western businessmen. Chinese businessmen dream that dream too.
The three of us put our bowls to our mouths once more and slurp a final chorus. Ren asks me if I want to go to their office, which he says is nearby. They are holding a meeting, he says. Never one to turn down an invitation in China, I agree. He insists on paying the bill as we head for the door.
“By the way, what was that meat with the noodles?” I ask him.
“That was donkey meat,” he says.
______
We walk to the Amway office past more posters of Brad Pitt as Mr. Smith. It’s a third-floor walk-up, just around the corner. Six other Amway reps, three men and three women, all as eager as Ren Wei, are already there. The men are all dressed identically in smart shirt and tie, and dark slacks. The women also, though not in uniform, all wear similar casual shirts and slacks. Chinese women seem rarely to wear skirts. Teacher Hu, the man who appears to have been responsible for bringing Amway to Zhangye, is there as well. They all shake my hand, welcome me, and offer me a seat for what turns out to be a meeting to encourage new salespeople to join. Each salesperson has brought along at least one friend, and we sit in the large office on chairs that have been laid out to face a speaker’s table at the front.
