Holidays in Heck (13 page)

Most quail shot east of the Mississippi are raised in pens and set out for the benefit of sportsmen. Thus, as shopping is hunting for women, hunting is shopping for men—a visit to the poultry department at Safeway, although Perdue roasters never have a chance to fly away unscathed and make me look like a fool.

The hunting grounds at Brays are laid out in the old cattle pastures and among the groves of live oaks. The fields are carefully sown with the right vegetation and selectively brush-hogged. The men in charge of the quail pens make sure that the birds are acclimatized—so they'll covey up the way they do in nature and fly well when flushed. Land
that's been settled since the 1600s requires a lot of cultivation to make it wild. Senior guide Billy Aiken has a good ol' boy's accent. However, it's in Latin. He knows the taxonomic name of every plant in the quail fields. He has degrees in these things.

“So,” said Mrs. O., “there's basically no point to hunting. Everybody just goes to a lot of bother to shoot little quail.”

“Um, yes,” I said.

Mrs. O. eyed the grass tangles where the birds, which discomfort her so, were hiding. “I can understand that,” she said.

Billy and fellow guide Bryan opened their kennels, releasing seventy-some pounds of English pointers, Boomer and Pal.

“Good doggies!” said Mrs. O., whose loathing of birds is matched by such affection for dogs that she cried at the end of
Cujo
because the rabid Saint Bernard died.

“These aren't pets,” I warned her. “These are serious working dogs.” The serious working dogs trotted over to Mrs. O., licked her face, and rolled on their backs to have their tummies scratched.

Mrs. O. and Perry lined up at a cover with Billy in the middle and Boomer quartering all over the place. Boomer pointed an Audubon Society calendar photograph of a covey—a perfect feathered rondel of quail backed against each other and ready to fly in every direction. Billy had Mrs. O. walked in. I held my breath. A big quail flush is a myocardial rupture moment for even the hardened nimrod. There was a great burst of birds at Mrs. O.'s feet; a convulsion of quail rose in her face. This must have been a nightmare for her, an Imax screening of Hitchcock's
The Birds
with her eyelids taped open. I mean this is the woman who calls me
at work when there are pigeons on the kitchen windowsill. Mrs. O. didn't flinch.

“It would have embarrassed Boomer,” she said.

Mrs. O. didn't flinch, but on the other hand, Mrs. O. didn't shoot, either. “I was afraid I'd hit that tree,” she explained to Billy.

He was a model of tact, explaining the harmlessness of No. 7 shot to a mature live oak. Boomer pointed more birds. This time Mrs. O. did shoot, but she shot from the hip. “Because my shoulder hurts from yesterday's shooting lesson,” she stated with precise feminine logic.

Billy, who probably should be our nation's ambassador to the UN, where ability to suppress laughter is a vital asset, said, “Next time think one-two-three-four. Lift the gun to your shoulder, press your cheek to the stock, push the safety forward, pull the trigger back. One-two-three-four. Lift, press, push, pull.”

Mrs. O., being a woman, listened. Boomer flushed a madhouse covey, bigger than the first and flying harder. Mrs. O. turned her gun on a particular bird. There was a puff of feathers, and a perpendicular drop. Boomer brought the quail to her feet.

Billy picked up the bird and Mrs. O. backed away. Billy thought she was having a PETA moment of animal cruelty regret. “Aw,” he said, “it's not like it would have lived very long in the wild.”

“Why don't you let Boomer make sure it's completely dead?” said Mrs. O.

That night we had dinner with Sally and Perry. “Well,” said Sally, “how do you like birds now?”

“With quince preserves and curried rice, thank you,” said Mrs. O., spearing another air lizard on the serving fork.

Spring 2006

I
sn't China supposed to be moving toward political liberty? I believe the theory is that as an autocratic nation grows more prosperous, a middle class with socioeconomic influence arises. This middle class then exerts its influence on government by convening a Long Parliament, beheading King Charles, having an American Revolution, rolling tumbrels full of aristocrats through the streets of Paris, storming a Winter Palace, and things like that. The result is freedom and democracy for all, albeit with certain delays while the less estimable members of the middle class such as Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao get sorted.

And so it seemed to be going in China, back in 1989 in Tiananmen Square. But then China's political development
took a left turn, or a right turn (depending on your framework of political analysis)—a wrong turn, anyway

Freedom House is a private, nonprofit, bipartisan organization that promotes international freedom and democracy. It was founded in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, the man who'd lost the 1940 presidential election to Eleanor's husband. Eleanor and Wendell (odd bedfellows though they may have been—though not literally) were concerned by totalitarianism's growing threats to peace and liberty. Freedom House remains concerned. Me too, especially about China.

China represents a large percentage of the world's population and an ever-larger percentage of the world's production of material goods. That's a big chunk of unfreedom and nondemocracy. One of the main wheels on the planet's vehicle of liberty is seized up.

Besides promoting freedom and democracy, Freedom House also monitors them. Each year Freedom House publishes
Freedom in the World
, a thick, scholarly tome surveying political rights and civil liberties in every nation and territory. Scores are given for Political Rights and Civil Liberties on a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being as politically righteous or as civilly liberated as human nature allows and 7 being completely otherwise. China, in the years since the events in Tiananmen Square, has gone from a score of 7 for Political Rights and 6 for Civil Liberties to a score of 7 for Political Rights and 6 for Civil Liberties. Freedom House gives nations and territories one of three overall ratings: “Free,” “Partly Free,” and “Not Free.” China is rated “Not Free.” By measurable standards, freedom in China has changed very little since Freedom House initiated its scores and ratings half a century ago.

Yet Freedom House, although I respect its research and objectivity and served for years on its board, cannot be exactly right. The mere increase in China's prosperity must mean that more Chinese have greater wherewithal to exercise some aspects of free will. Certainly the Chinese are more free now than they were during the Great Leap Forward, when millions lost all their freedoms by starving to death. And the Chinese are more free to go about their business than they were during the Cultural Revolution, when there was no business to go about.

Measurement of freedom is difficult. A fairly accurate calculation can be made of the degree to which people can speak their minds, practice their religions, organize labor unions, or gather for political protests. People either do or don't have rights to vote, receive fair trials, and be secure in their homes and their personal lives. How well those rights are honored can be gauged. But once people rise above a subsistence level of economics (a subject about which Freedom House pretends no expertise), and material freedoms come into play, there are suddenly 1.3 billion different wants and needs. Humans are notoriously bad at figuring out what these are, even for themselves. And we are neither very accurate nor very generous when we estimate the wants and needs of others or their freedom to obtain them.

Freedom and democracy are abstract. Quotidian existence is conducted mostly in the world of things and stuff.

I went to China to take a tour of the world of things and stuff. I traveled with old friends, whom I'll call Tom and Mai. Tom is a Californian who's lived in Hong Kong for decades, working in the mining and metallurgy business. He was
breaking ground on a pelletized iron ore processing plant in Nanjing. Tom seems to know everyone in China who has anything to do with iron, steel, coal, or drinking beer. Tom's wife, Mai, and her brothers, Hong Kong natives, had owned, until recently, a company that brokered textile machinery. When China began its “open-door” economic policy, Mai had the job of taking mainland clients to Europe (where they'd encounter their first fork, escalator, lingerie shop, etc.) and arranging for them to purchase used spinning, weaving, and dyeing equipment.

Everywhere Tom, Mai, and I went we were involved in the facts of China, not the ideas of China. Although Tom's and Mai's friends and business associates shared one idea—to banquet the three of us to death. At one meal in Chongqing there was a communal pot of boiling oil laced with chilies that could be used to commit arson. Raw ingredients were heaped upon our plates, and, using our chopsticks fondue-style, we cooked—I kept a list—two kinds of tripe, quail eggs, eels, chicken stomachs, chicken intestines, some very scary-looking fish, and the kind of sprouts that were about to turn into the beanstalk that Jack climbed.

Mai is fluent in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. With her help I talked to people who worked in private enterprise and people who worked in government and people who worked on furthering cooperation between the two. That is, I talked to the kind of people who are necessary to the advocacy of freedom and democracy but who, so far, don't seem to be advocating it. They were forthcoming enough about their government, but they didn't care—or didn't care to say—much about the political theory of it. In Tom's opinion, “Their attitude is, ‘Shhh . . . Politics is sleeping; don't wake it up.' ” I wanted to know what the Chinese think about politics
when politics is not what they're thinking about. Maybe we should be listening to what they don't say.

I was in Shanghai in 1997, and it looked like a knockoff of a great city, a sort of made-in-Hong-Kong Hong Kong. Everything had been built yesterday. And they'd built a lot of it—more than they seemed to have any use for. There was a marsh called Pudong on the far side of the Huangpu River where the ground was so low-lying that the water and sewer pipes had to be suspended above the pavement. Pudong was dotted with empty office complexes and buildings full of unrented apartments.

Now Pudong is some of the most expensive real estate on earth. Mai, Tom, and I stopped at a condominium where the sale price was $10,000 per square meter. Despite arriving in a chauffeured car wearing our corporate boardroom clothes, we were turned away at the gate. An attractive but severe young lady in black Prada told us we'd need to make an appointment days in advance.

We had dinner that night with Mr. Liu and Mrs. Sung. (I've changed everyone's name. China
does
have a rating of 6 for Civil Liberties.) They were two of the principal Pudong developers, quiet, and quietly dressed middle-aged people who had worked in Shanghai's city planning bureaucracy. With that bureaucracy's blessing they set out on their own. They were appalled by the American invasion of Iraq. I was jet-lagged and a bit drunk, but I did my best to make a case for U.S. actions, ending, a bit lamely, with “of course it's too bad to have a war.”

“Not too bad,” said Mrs. Sung.

“Too
expensive,
” said Mr. Liu.

With Tom and Mai, I took a train west a couple of hours to Wuxi, a city of nearly 5 million people that I'd never heard
of. It's the size of ten Clevelands. And if you wonder what happened to Cleveland, Wuxi is where it went. Industrial parks spread for miles with neat, sleek, enormous buildings set in swaths of lawn and landscaping—manufacturing sites for Volvo, GE, Panasonic, Sony, Westinghouse, Nikon, Bridgestone, Timkin, Bosch, and The Nature Factory (I'd wondered where they made that).

We were given a city tour by Mr. Chen, a manufacturer of fleece and plush fabrics. He was proud of Wuxi and so proud of his own fabrics that, although he's the CEO of the company, he carries samples in the trunk of his Audi Quattro.

Mr. Chen was born in 1950 and was studying to be an industrial engineer when the Cultural Revolution arrived. He joined the Red Guards.

“Everyone came to their senses when Mao died,” he said. “They realized they had no food or anything else and had been just fighting with each other for nine years.”

Thereupon Mr. Chen (if there was irony in this, he didn't let on) joined the People's Liberation Army. During clashes with the Russians along the Amur River, he noticed that the Soviet troops were wearing lighter, warmer synthetic fabrics instead of furs. Although he knew nothing about textiles, he used his friendship with some senior officers to get himself assigned to a small research team. When China entered the world economy, so did Mr. Chen. He had permission, encouragement, and perhaps (though he didn't say so) financing from the People's Liberation Army.