Fresh Air Fiend (24 page)

"Germans never make jokes about themselves," a woman told me in Frankfurt. But does any country do that? I assumed that in Saarbrücken, on the French border, there would be French jokes, but there aren't. They are rather in awe of the French there and have even adopted the French habit of making jokes about the Belgians.

Austrians are also mocked. Did you hear the one about the Austrian bank robber who went into a Munich bank and said, "Put your money in the air, give me all the hands you have, because I'm a hostage"? The bank teller replied, "Shall I give it to you in shillings?" because he knew that a fool like that had to be an Austrian.

The commonest jokes, I was told, are those about Turks. "Turkish jokes are now sanctioned, because the feeling against foreigners is very strong at the moment—and I should say that foreigners also include American servicemen, who are resented these days as much for their presumption as for their nuclear arsenal."

Turks in Germany are the perfect victims: they are dark, they are hairy and sinister-looking, they are mostly Muslim, they stick out like a sore thumb, and in general they are on the bottom rung of the workforce. People in factories tell Turkish jokes; kids in school tell them.

Everyone I met had heard Turkish jokes, but no one would repeat one. I solemnly said it was for my research. They said, No, the jokes are stupid, I can't tell jokes, I can never remember the punch line. One person told me, "They are unbelievably cruel jokes. They're awful. They're hard. They're like this: What is the difference between a Bavarian and a Turk? And the answer will be that the Bavarian is a human being and the Turk is an animal."

"I hate these jokes," a woman said to me with real feeling, and the more I asked, the more I seemed to be inquiring not about jokes but about the darker side of the German character. "The joke," Freud says, "is the contribution made to the comic from the realm of the unconscious." One was risked. "What are the two Turkish holidays?" Answer: "
Sommerschlussverkauf
and
Winterschlussverkauf
" (the summer bargain sale and the winter bargain sale).

That seemed pretty tame. I persisted. I was told to lay off. At first I took this for German delicacy. When I kept on asking for examples of Turkish jokes, I was told that there were no real Turkish jokes.

"They are anti-Jewish jokes with the names changed," I was told. "They are horrible. They are even about gas chambers."

As a matter of fact, many of the jokes in Freud's study are about Jews, and I mentioned this. One woman said she knew many such jokes—Turkish, Jewish, the lot.

Racial, ethnic, and xenophobic jokes say a great deal about the teller. I tried to encourage her: "Hear about the [choose victimized group] man who claimed his wife was a terrible housekeeper? He said, Every time I pee in the sink there's dirty dishes in it."

Naturally, she didn't laugh. She said, "I'm not going to tell you any. You'd just put it into one of your books."

T
HERE IS NO
Yangtze River. The name is unknown to most Chinese, who call it Da Jiang, "Great River," or Chang Jiang, "Long River," unless they live above Chongqing—there, the swift, silt-filled waters are referred to as Chinsha Jiang, "River of Gold Sand." That is only a misnomer now. As recently as the 1930s, in the winter months when the level dropped, the Chinese squatted at its edge and panned for gold, sluicing the mud and gathering gold dust. European travelers reported seeing washerwomen wearing thick gold bangles, made of the metal that had been carried from where the river—let us call it the Yangtze—rises in Tibet.

But it has more moods than names. "I am careful to give the date of each day's notes," Archibald Little wrote in
Through the Yangtse Gorges
(1887). "The river varies so wonderfully at different seasons that any description must be carefully understood only to apply to the day upon which it is written." Captain Little was overwhelmed by it; he compared it to the Mississippi and the Amazon; he said it was indescribable. The Yangtze has in many stretches a violent magnificence. It is subject to murderous floods, and its winter level creates rapids of such turbulence that the river captain steers his ship through the foam and travels down the tongue of the rapid, praying that no junk will lie in his path, as it is impossible for him to stop or reverse course. The Yangtze's four divisions are like four separate rivers: above Chongqing, it is mythic and still associated with gold and landslides; the Upper River (Chongqing to Ichang) is the wildest (here are the gorges and the landscape of China's Walter Scottish classic,
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms);
the Middle River (Ichang to Wuhan) is serene and a mile wide; the Lower River (Wuhan to Shanghai) is slow, clouded with silt, and populous.

I sailed fifteen hundred miles downstream, from Chongqing to Shanghai. Every mile of it was different, and there were twelve hundred miles I did not see. It crosses ten provinces, seven hundred rivers are joined to it—all Yangtze statistics are hopelessly huge and ungraspable; they obscure rather than clarify. And since words can have a greater precision than numbers, one day I asked a Chinese ship captain if he thought the river had a distinct personality.

He said, "The mood of the river changes according to the season. It changes every day. It is not easy. Navigating the river is always a struggle against nature. And there is only one way to pilot a ship well." Smiling and blowing cigarette smoke out of his nostrils, he explained, "It is necessary to see the river as an enemy."

Later, a man told me that in the course of one afternoon he had counted nine human corpses bobbing hideously down the river.

The Yangtze is China's main artery, its major waterway, the source of many of its myths, the scene of much of its history. On its banks are some of its greatest cities. It is the fountainhead of superstition. It provides income and food to half the population. It is one of the most dangerous rivers in the world, in some places one of the dirtiest, in others one of the most spectacular. The Chinese drink it and bathe in it and wash clothes in it and shit in it. It represents both life and death. It is a wellspring, a sewer, and a tomb; depthless in the gorges, puddle-shallow at its rapids. The Chinese say if you haven't been up the Great River, you haven't been anywhere.

They also say that in the winter, on the river, the days are so dark that when the sun comes out the dogs bark at it. Chongqing was dark at nine in the morning, when I took the rattling tin tram on the cog railway that leads down the black crags which are Chongqing's ramparts, down the sooty cliffs, past the tenements and billboards (Flying Pigeon Bicycles, Seagull Watches, Parrot Accordions) to the landing stage. A thick, sulfurous fog lay over the city, a Coketown of six million. The fog had muffled the morning noises and given the city an air of frightening solemnity. It also stank like poison. Dr. Ringrose, who was from Leeds, sniffed and said, "That is the smell of my childhood."

There were thirty-three of us, including Ringrose The others were American, most of them millionaires, many of them multimillionaires. "If you have two or three million," one of them told me in the dreary city of Wanxian, "you're not a millionaire—you're just getting by." Another enlarged on this. Not to be a poor millionaire, you needed twenty-five million. "If you have twenty-five," she said crisply, "you're all right." But Lurabelle Laughlin, from Pasadena, had inherited $50 million. Her husband, Harry, told me this. He said Lurabelle could buy and sell every person on board our ship. He wasn't being malicious, only factual. "And I'm not too badly off myself," he said.

"I hate walking," Mrs. Ver Bryck told me. Mrs. Ver Bryck, an oil heiress like Lurabelle, hailed from Incline, Nevada. "I never walk. I've been everywhere and didn't have to walk. I pay so I don't have to walk. And stairs are my bugbear. But you look like a walker, Paul. Are you going to walk and do all that crappy-ola?"

I cherish the memory of Ami Ver Bryck and Lurabelle Laughlin walking from the tramway at Chongqing across the muddy paving on the foreshore, with hundreds of Chinese in baggy blue suits watching in total silence. Lurabelle's mink coat was golden, made from thirty-five creatures of the tourmaline variety; Ami's was a rich glossy mahogany. And here was Bea Brantman, also in mink. "This is my football coat," she cried. "I wear it to all the games." Bea and her husband, who was known to everyone as Big Bob, had eleven children. Big Bob said, "I guess they'd put me in jail for that in China! Watch out, Bea, it's kind of slippery here. It looks more like an ocean than a river. You can't even see the other side."

It was a good companionable crowd, and though it seems a contradiction to say so, these millionaires represented a cross section of American society. Some had inherited their money, some had got it from divorce settlements, or had married into it, or had made it from nothing. One had earned it from brokering, another from gun accessories, another from burglar alarms, four were oil fortunes, one was advertising, others didn't say. Some struck me as rather stupid, with their cowboy novels and their remarks about building condominiums near Hankow or Ichang and all the talk about Connecticut. Some were very smart about Chinese history or porcelain, and they knew the various dates in the Cultural Revolution. They were Democrats and Republicans, Jewish and Christian, and they came from all over the United States. Interestingly, they never argued among themselves, no one was ever on the outs, and the spouses never fought. All of them had traveled before. Half had already been to China once and knew their way around Inner Mongolia. The rest were novices and called Mao "Mayo," and confused Thailand with Taiwan, and Fuji with Fiji. They were as tenacious and practical as the Chinese, and just as ethnocentric, but much funnier, and better at cards.

We boarded
Dong Fang Hong
("The East Is Red")
Number 39
and were soon under way. Because of the construction of locks and a dam at Ichang, we would travel downriver in two ships: the MS
Kun Lun
awaited us just below Ichang. Both
Number 39
and the
Kun Lun
were the same size, built to carry 900 people. But they had been specially chartered by Lindblad Travel. There were, as I say, only 33 of us, and a crew of 102. No hardships for us, and it seemed at times, though we were traveling through the very heart of the country, that China was elsewhere.

 

My mind kept going back to my first impression of China, and my disbelief. We had left the frenzy, the scavengers, the free-for-all of Hong Kong and were heading by train toward the hills—so blurred and blue you might mistake them for clouds. China began there, on those bare hillsides. I heard voices behind me.

"Look, Jack."

"Yeah."

"Lush vegetation."

"Yeah."

But for an hour, until the train reached the Chinese border at Lo Wu, it was not lush. It was still farming country, dusty fields and skinny crops as far as the eye could see.

Mrs. Ver Bryck was saying to me, "I've been everywhere, more than once." I took her to be well over seventy. In fact, she was just sixty-two. She chain-smoked. She had a shopping bag full of cartons of cigarettes. In another shopping bag she kept her supply of vodka. On this express to Canton, she told me how much she liked the Chinese. She loathed Italians—they controlled all the gambling in Nevada, she said. She despised the Japanese—they had charged her $410 for a room in Tokyo a few days before. It was the Royal Suite, but she had not asked for it, and she had spent only twelve hours in it. That was $34 an hour. She looked out the window at the cabbage, the lettuce, the beans, and at the culverts and ditches. "Look how they work," she said. "I love the Chinese."

Just before Lo Wu there was a fence—coils of barbed wire about twenty feet high—and then, as the train penetrated the People's Republic of China, billboards by the side of the tracks advertising Ginseng Bee Secretion, Tiensin Shoes and Slippers, and Marlboro Cigarettes. And inside the train, on a television set that had been showing a Chinese travelogue about Guilin, there were commercials for Rainbow television sets and Ricoh watches—men and women dancing sedately and all of them wearing a Ricoh. It was a flatter, duller version of Hong Kong commercialism, this Communist parody of advertising, and it was a bit sad, because it was the imperfect mimicry of Hong Kong vulgarity which was in turn an imitation of American crassness. It was saddest of all because it was unconvincing.

And it bore no relation to what was going on outside the train window. There, in Guangdong Province, everyone was harvesting rice. The tracks were surrounded by paddy fields. Some of the rice was already tied into bunches, and the rest was being gathered by hand or threshed. The people threshed it the old way, by whipping the rice grains into a basket. They worked in groups, never alone. In one field, about eighty people were threshing in the heat, and this was the beginning of my disbelief. I did not want to think how primitive this method was.

The land looked scraped—no trees, only tiny houses or huts, and cultivation everywhere. In places there were small stands of scrub pine or tall, weedy eucalyptus trees. But there was no shade. The people working in the dazzling dust had black cloth fringes sewn to their lampshade hats to keep off the sun. Some were yoked to huge watering cans, and they looked like miniature crucifixions in the mass of these bald hills.

That was the other strange thing. It was hot, even tropical, but the hills were naked, bald, scarred with plow marks and paths. Indeed, it was not lush. I saw an old man whipping a buffalo's wrinkled back with a stick, to beat him out of a ditch.

The first town, an hour out of Lo Wu, was a railway junction named Tang t'ou-hsia. Outside town was a brickworks. Men and women were making bricks in the old way here, out of mud and straw, clumping them out of wooden molds and stacking them into a cathedral shape which they turned into a furnace. Sweltering, the brick bakers stoked the fire. All the houses in this area were made of these liver-colored bricks.