Holidays in Heck (16 page)

Mrs. Xia, who runs a franchise business to set people up in the garment trades, sent her car and driver through this mob to the boat docks. Mai and I took the car to the villa that had been General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell's HQ when Chungking was the Kuomintang capital during World War II. A huge photo of Chiang Kai-shek graced the front hall. I expressed my surprise to the docent. “We have to respect history,” she said.

We went to dinner with Mrs. Xia and her husband and Mr. Kang, who runs what is in effect a Chinese Wal-Mart, a combined department store and supermarket that does 6.4 billion yuan in annual business and produces over 1 billion yuan in after-tax profits. Mr. Xia is an important something (I didn't quite catch what and maybe wasn't meant to) in the Chongqing Communist Party.

Mrs. Xia was fashion-forward, her colors and patterns and makeup merrily clashing away. Mr. Xia was in an anonymous gray suit. And Mr. Kang had muscles bulging out of his sport clothes. He looked like a younger Jackie Chan.

Mr. Kang gave me a management lecture straight from the
New York Times
' “Business, How-To, and Miscellaneous” best-seller list. He told me it was important that information and understanding be shared by all levels of employees in a company. “And,” he added, “that goes for countries, too.

“We are proud of ourselves nowadays,” Mr. Kang said. “I think America believes China is a worthy competitor.” He said that clothing, food, shelter, and transportation are well taken care of in China. Now everyone wants to travel. He urged the United States to open its travel market. But he
said it was no longer so important for kids to study abroad. Mr. Xia said that Chinese industrial ownership was “thirty percent private, thirty percent government, thirty percent overseas, and ten percent by the people.”

Mr. Kang, like Mao, was from Hunan. He studied business and, after graduating from college, he was sent to Chongqing as a government department store manager. “I missed my family,” he said. “I could have gone back to live under the shelter of my parents. But here if I succeeded it would be my own accomplishment. I wanted to prove I could do it. For ten years life was very simple, nothing exciting. I kept looking for new things, kept learning. Life is very fair to everybody. If you fail, don't get upset. If you succeed, don't be proud. Character and goal are very important, and persistence. You have to look to details and you will get to big business later. Once you achieve that you should look for something higher. You should be a responsible person.”

I managed to interrupt and ask him how he got started. Business was bad at the government department store, so Mr. Kang and two of the other managers went to the government and said that they thought they could do a better job themselves. The government agreed to let them try. They opened their own branch of the government store and made 7 million yuan the first year. Now they run the whole chain and own 30 percent of it.

“Does the department store have more competition these days?” I asked.

“Very big competition,” said Mr. Kang. “Competition is good. No competition, no growth. I love competition. It makes me excited to go for the fight.”

Mr. Xia said, “He's full of confidence.”

Mr. Kang said that he hoped by the time he retired his stores would be everywhere in China.

“Even the central government,” Mr. Xia said, “is emphasizing that people are the most important.”

“I have full confidence in China,” said Mr. Kang. “We have to be patriotic.” Then, making a leap I didn't really follow, he said, “I support George Bush. He is very frank. Very sincere. But I would ask Bush one thing—to solve the Taiwan problem.”

Mrs. Xia started as a seamstress. But she always admired entrepreurs. “After I'd had a baby,” she said, “I thought I should follow my goal to do achievement in life.” She took a job as a salesperson at a clothing store even though this paid less than being a garment worker. She wanted to see how the business worked. She borrowed 20,000 yuan (about $2,500) and on this slim capital started her own clothing line. By the end of the second year it had almost 4 million yuan in sales volume. Then she began franchising her business.

“The government is very supportive of what I'm doing,” she said. “They gave me a 300,000-yuan bonus for helping to solve their unemployment problems.” Now she's organizing an “industrial city” for garment manufacturing.

“I have a very great achievement feeling,” Mrs. Xia said. “But I have also lost things. I slept two or three hours a night. I lost my husband because I wasn't spending enough time with him. I took my child and had nothing. Then, while I was experiencing my toughest times, I met Mr. Xia. He gave me great support. He was a university lecturer who got promoted to the Chongqing Committee. I have gone through my problems. I have proved myself. I was selected to the provincial assembly and am giving back to society.
Also, I got the support and approval of government. But my corporation is all myself. Because of my high achievement I make my family very happy.”

We took a stroll through the center of the city so that Ms. Xia could show me the Party's aptly named Big Hall, built in Bolshevik baroque in 1956 and one of the ten largest buildings in Asia.

“We are learning from American marketing culture,” Ms. Xia said. “But we can't learn everything, because the culture is different.”

Across from the Big Hall was a monument to the Three Gorges Dam. In a contrast of style with its neighbor this monument consisted of piles of ten-foot-high pyramidal concrete anchors used to keep eroding soil from washing away, interspersed with enormous tires from earth-moving equipment.

“The water won't actually rise much in Chongqing,” Mr. Xia said.

Between the monument and the Big Hall was a square almost as expansive as Tiananmen in Beijing. When Mai and I were back in Hong Kong, I mentioned to Tom that the whole time we'd been on the mainland I'd hardly heard the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 mentioned.

“That's no surprise,” Tom said. “Tiananmen Square is where the abdication of the last emperor was proclaimed in 1912. It's where the student demonstrations, which led to the formation of the Chinese Communist Party, were held in 1919. It's where the Japanese occupation government announced its East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, where Mao declared victory over the Kuomintang in 1949, and where a million Red Guards swore loyalty to Mao during the Cultural Revolution. When the Chinese see a bunch of people
gathering in Tiananmen Square, they don't get all warm and fuzzy the way we do. The Chinese think, ‘Here we go again.' ”

Mai and I flew to Guangzhou (Canton, as it was known for centuries). We stayed with Mai's friend Qing and her husband, Phillip. Phillip had been a museum curator in the United States. He moved to China to restore the antique furniture that had been wrecked and neglected by the communists and to build reproductions using the original types of wood, tools, and finishes. He showed me through his workshop, where he also runs a training program for young Chinese cabinetmakers.

“After a couple of generations when no one cared about craftsmanship,” Phillip said, “the craftsmanship is stunning.” I watched a young man making an intricate dovetail with a hatchet—the kind of hatchet that was featured in 1940s movie serials about Tong Wars.

Phillip said, “There is, however, a Chinese tendency to do things the hard way.”

Qing's father, Mr. Zhao, is one of the last surviving veterans of the Long March of 1934–1935, when the communists escaped encirclement by Kuomintang forces and regrouped to fight both Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese.

Mr. and Mrs. Zhao came to lunch at their daughter's house. They were full of a rare good cheer of old age. When Qing introduced me as an American, Mr. Zhao laughed and said, “Bush is thinking too much—about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea. He should think less!”

Mr. Zhao was familiar with the costs of excess theory. He and his wife had been upper-level Party officials in Guangzhou. When Qing was a girl the Cultural Revolution had
come. She'd told me how everything had gone away—her parents' jobs; the family's house; their food, clothes, and privileges. Mr. and Mrs. Zhao had been subjected to “criticism,” as it was so coyly called. “But,” Qing had said, “like a kid, I kind of enjoyed the excitement—all of us living in one room and the fighting in the streets.”

Mr. Zhao had joined the revolution in 1932, when he was twelve. He belonged to a Communist Party Boy Scout–like organization. He was sixteen when the Long March began. He was one of the “Little Red Devils” who accompanied the troops. He went with the Fourth Red Army led by Zhang Guotao, Mao's more sensible rival for Party leadership. Mr. Zhao did not seem bitter that Mao had won out, or about the Red Guards, or even at Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang troops. “We tried to go to Yunnan to fight the Japanese,” he said, “but had to fight the Kuomintang first to get there.” Then the Kuomintang sent them material for the war against Japan. “And,” Mr. Zhao laughed, “we used it to fight the Kuomintang later.”

He was, however, still mad at the Japanese. “They had the ‘Three Policies,' ” he said. ‘“Burn everything. Rob everything. Kill everything.' Totally unhuman.”

“The Japanese people are good people, but their leaders are not,” said Mrs. Zhao, soothingly.

Mr. Zhao started out with the Fourth Army taking care of the horses, but was promoted to radio operator. He fought the Japanese for eight years. The Fourth Army crossed the measureless grasslands of western Szechwan three times. The plateau is so full of mire and free of landmarks that the only way they could keep their units together was to spread sideways from horizon to horizon and go forward in a single rank. Even mounted soldiers sank, sometimes horse and all.
They starved until they ate their leather belts. When they finally found some potatoes, one potato filled them so much they were sick. The Fourth Army started the Long March 100,000 strong. Only 25,000 were left at the end. And when they'd reached a mountain fastness—not far form where Mr. Tian's coke furnace is today—they were surrounded by the Japanese. They escaped thanks to the leadership of Peng Dehuai, the best of the Long March military commanders. Some of the women cadres were pregnant and made it down the mountain by holding onto the tails of horses. Other women crawled into baskets and rolled down. Mr. Zhao was assigned to take care of Peng's wife. He was given two bullets: one for himself, because he knew the radio codes; and one for Mrs. Peng. “People like us could not be caught,” Mr. Zhao said.

Peng Dehuai would lead the Chinese troops in the Korean War and then be purged by Mao and beaten by the Red Guards, 130 times, until he died.

“Dad,” said Qing, “A lot of this stuff I've never heard you talk about before.”

Mr. Zhao smiled with the pleasure of being an octogenarian and still able to surprise. Deng Xiaoping had restored Mr. and Mrs. Zhao to their Party posts, but they'd retired in the middle 1980s. “I consider myself very lucky to have survived,” Mr. Zhao said. “After the fight with the Kuomintang, when the Communist Party was in charge, I got a lot of benefits from the Communist Party, the opportunity to study.” He met Mrs. Zhao at the Party School in Beijing in 1950.

Mr. Zhao was not quite sure what he thought about all the economic development. “He has opened his mind a little bit about money,” said Mrs. Zhao. “This is good for his physical and mental health. He's not sure if things are
good or bad, but he doesn't talk too much—doesn't argue or criticize.”

“I get good Party benefits,” Mr. Zhao said. “The organization gives me care and concern. The family is more or less not a big problem.” He winked at Phillip. “ I feel I have accomplished my wishes. All the children are fifty years old, so I don't have to worry. Now I'm eighty-six. It's wonderful. After that it doesn't matter how long I live. There is a government resort we go to every year. We've built strong relationships there. Right now I have no other wish. If I want to have another meal I go ahead and have it. My only worry is if my wife falls or gets ill. Then she can't take care of me! I am slightly selfish!”

*
Well, not quite, but one takes Mr. Wu's point.

June 2006

I
t was déjà vu like I'd never seen before. The cliff walls rose from the Yangtze River with a shockingly familiar exoticism. For two and a half millennia China's artists have been inspired by the Yangtze's Three Gorges. And I suddenly understood the improbable, fantastic imagination of Chinese artists. It turns out they're just copying. The crackle-glaze boulder shapes, the crinkum-crankum ledges, the skewed pagoda silhouettes of the mountains belonged to no Occidental geography. Crevice-rooted trees grew branches in chinoiserie decorative curves. Noodle-thin waterfalls splashed columns of calligraphy patterns beside scenery half-emphasized and half-obscured by a feng shui of mist. And in the narrow, crooked alley of sky above the canyons cirrocumulus clouds
formed into the endless loops and curlicues of an imperial dragon's butt. Here was every Chinese landscape-painting scroll rolled, as it were, into one.