Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (44 page)

Bought bride Forest Plum Ma and her husband, Wang Chengguo, outside their house in Dragon Hamlet
.
Photo: Jan Wong/
Globe and Mail

W
hat first attracted me to Mao’s China was its absolute purity. It was a country where evil had seemingly been eliminated by fiat. In a historically unprecedented mass campaign, the Communists had rounded up opium addicts, prostitutes and beggars and transformed them with strong doses of hard labor and Mao Zedong Thought. In the 1950s, with the help of a dermatologist from Buffalo, N.Y., named George Hatem, the Chinese had essentially eradicated venereal disease inside their borders. This was no idle propaganda claim. Sexually transmitted diseases were so rare that, in the 1970s, many young Chinese doctors had never seen an actual case of VD.

But by the 1990s, all the old evils were making a comeback, and then some. The absolutism and fervor of the early years, the deprivation and self-sacrifice, had all been for nothing. As China grappled with child labor, pollution, gambling, high crime rates and horrific industrial accidents, I felt compelled to explore this side of the country. In the 1970s, I had sometimes deliberately heard no evil, seen no evil and spoken no evil. Now, in a small way, I wanted to make amends. What’s more, many Chinese were eager to help me understand the plethora of social problems, explaining that the best way to attack problems was to expose them.

I found it especially depressing, as a Chinese-Canadian woman, to see that prostitution was flourishing again. My assistant, Yan Yan, and I had gone on a reporting trip to Hainan Island, China’s newest province. In Haikou, its free-for-all frontier capital, cars ignored one-way signs and everyone ignored venereal disease. At night, we watched desperate streetwalkers pluck at the sleeves of passing men. We peered into the darkened windows of seedy massage parlors. We even paid 7 yuan (90 cents) each to squeeze into a makeshift cinema to watch a badly made porno film in which the plot consisted of Lin Biao’s son holding beauty contests and screwing the contestants. In our hotel, I noticed women in stretch lace tops with spangles in their hair, but assumed it was merely the local bad taste. Only after a series of phone calls kept me awake the first night did I realize our hotel was crawling with prostitutes and Johns.

I knew that blending in gave me an edge as a reporter, but I didn’t realize how useful my camouflage would be until I went to Xian, an ancient city famous for its vast collection of terra cotta warriors. Yan Yan burst into my hotel room one night clutching a small piece of folded paper. “Guess what!” she said. Inside was a bit of tan powder. I looked at her, puzzled.

“Opium!” she hissed. “Our taxi driver knows where there’s an opium den.” I stared at her.
Opium?
An opium
den?
In China? In
1989?

“Let’s go,” I said.

I had booked Taxi Driver Pu (not his real name) for the four days we would be in Xian. As we drove through the darkened streets, my mind was reeling. Surely opium, once the scourge of old China, had been abolished under Communist rule. Taxi Driver Pu parked in the shadows. “Don’t tell them you’re a reporter,” he cautioned as he led the way up the darkened stairs of a low-rise brick apartment building, past bunches of drying leeks and untidy heaps of pressed coal-dust lumps. At the top floor, he paused, critically eyeing my baggy cotton trousers.

“You don’t look like the type. Let her do the talking,” he said, jerking his head at Yan Yan, who was wearing tight stonewashed jeans. He rapped on the scarred yellow door.

“Who is it?” a wary male voice called.

“Me,” said Taxi Driver Pu.

That was how Chinese always answered. No one ever said, “Zhao, here,” or “It’s Wang.” They just said, “Me.” The man inside unbolted the door. He was skinny, with a scrawny mustache, and appeared to be in his twenties.

“They’re with me,” said Taxi Driver Pu.

I guess I expected an opium den to have divans, candles and burgundy velvet curtains. Instead, we were in an ordinary run-down Chinese apartment with whitewashed walls and a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. I spoke as little as possible. What if they discovered I was a reporter? What if we got raided? I knew China executed drug dealers and sent addicts for hard labor in reeducation camps. What about reporters caught in opium dens?

Two young women lounged on a double bed covered with a grimy flowered sheet. An older man sat on a wooden chair. Taxi Driver Pu, who was in his forties, stood in a corner. Yan Yan and I took the remaining two chairs. The skinny young man who had let us in resumed smoking opium. In between inhalations, he gulped tea from an oversized enamel mug. His eyes slightly unfocused, he stared at a small black-and-white television, which was showing a movie with lots of Chinese running around in Mao suits.

“What
is
this movie?” he asked.

“It’s an old one from the fifties,” said Yan Yan, who knew every-thing.

A few minutes later, he asked again, and Yan Yan repeated her answer. A little later, he asked a third time.

“Shut up,” snapped one of the young women. She was dressed in A schoolgirlish plaid skirt and a cream blouse, with a black wool sweater tied over her shoulders. Her face was hard, and she swore like A longshoreman. She was, Taxi Driver Pu told me later, a “public
DUS
,” local slang for a prostitute because lots of customers rode her. She put a pinch of Big Dirt, as they called it, on a piece of foil and it a match underneath. The brownish powder liquefied and gave off a wisp of white smoke, which she expertly sucked up through a straw. She lit and relit the powder, each time greedily inhaling the wisp of smoke. Between puffs, she sucked on an orange. To my surprise, everyone seemed as addicted to fresh fruit as to opium.

“Why are you eating fruit?” I blurted out.

“Your mouth gets too dry,” the young man explained.

I didn’t know that they were smoking low-grade heroin. Few people at the time were aware that traffickers were shipping heroin from Burma’s Golden Triangle overland through China to Hong Kong and from there to North America, Europe and Australia. Three years later, when Beijing finally admitted that it had a drug problem, I interviewed doctors in rehabilitation clinics and realized that the addicts in Xian had been “chasing the dragon,” addict parlance for sucking up the wisp of heroin smoke.

After fifteen minutes of smoking, the prostitute fell back with a deep sigh against a folded quilt. “I’m hot,” she said. “Open the window.”

“No,” said the older man sharply. He switched on an electric fan.

The skinny young man, a drug dealer, moved the heroin from Lanzhou, the capital of northwest Gansu province, to Xian, the ancient terminus of the fabled Silk Road.

“It’s hard to get this stuff in Beijing,” I said, awkwardly trying to make conversation.

“We can do a deal,” he said instantly. “I’ll ship it to Beijing. You handle it from there. You can be the distributor.”

I smiled weakly. I did not need to do that kind of first-person story.

A tall, gaunt man in his late thirties walked in. His cheekbones were hollow, his long stringy hair hung down his neck. Even his mustache was thin. He wore baggy pants, a cheaply made Western-style suit jacket and heavy beige leather shoes. It turned out he was a dealer and an addict, and we were in his apartment. The man, whom I’ll call Sheng, squatted down on his haunches, put a pinch of powder on a piece of foil and lit a match underneath, simultaneously sucking in the smoke. Then he cut himself a slice of apple to nibble on while he prepared his next dose. Using a cigarette, he lit match after match and chased the dragon. Sheng suddenly stared at me. His pupils were dilated. It had just dawned on him where we were from.

“What really happened in Beijing?” he asked. “Did they really shoot people?”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“Of course they shot people.”

“How many do you think died?” I asked.

“Seven thousand,” he said flatly.

I told him the official government estimate was about three hundred dead but that some foreign embassies put the death toll at three thousand. “Do you believe the government?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” He snorted. “Not at all.”

Sheng, who had been jailed in Beijing for theft, had escaped and now ran a restaurant in Xian and sold drugs to support his thousand-dollar-a-month habit. “Want to try some?” he said, offering me some on a piece of foil.

“No, thanks,” I said, realizing I sounded absurdly polite. To my horror, Yan Yan accepted. As she handed over 50 yuan, the equivalent of $6, I scowled at her. She ignored me. Sheng helped her hold a match under the powder. Using a straw, she clumsily sucked up the smoke, missing half. She started giggling. Having spent my youth as a Maoist, not a dopehead, I knew nothing about drugs. I was terrified she would get addicted after one try. Later she told me the smoke left a sweet taste on the tongue and that, after a few minutes, she felt completely relaxed. “It was like walking on cotton puffs.”

About a half hour later, Sheng insisted on driving his older friend home — in Taxi Driver Pu’s car.

“Uh, why don’t you drive,” I said to Pu as we all piled into the car.

“He doesn’t know the way. I’ll drive,” insisted Sheng, clearly high as a kite. He turned on the ignition, put the car in first gear and drove shakily down the lane.

“Watch out for that bicycle!” Pu warned. I closed my eyes, and regretted not chasing the dragon myself.

Reading
Das Kapital
in the 1970s wasn’t a total waste because it helped me understand China in the 1990s. What Marx had predicted for capitalist society — the concentration of economic wealth in fewer and fewer hands and a widening gap between rich and poor — was actually occurring in a Communist system. China was now a
capitalist country under a Communist dictatorship, or a Communist country with a capitalist economy.

The gap between rich and poor was distinctly regional. Under Deng’s laissez-faire policies, the wealthy coastal regions were booming while the vast interior remained mired in poverty. But it wasn’t until I went to Gansu that I saw the terrible face of hunger and disease. Much of China’s poorest province was off-limits to foreigners, but I was able to get there thanks to an invitation from Canadian diplomats, who ran aid projects there and had special access.

Gansu, which borders Qinghai province, Outer Mongolia and the Uighur region of Xinjiang in northwest China, was an arid moonscape of barren gullies and mountains. On the same latitude as Kansas, its annual rainfall was so sparse that peasants blanketed their fields with stones to slow evaporation. Leprosy, dysentery, high infant mortality, malnutrition and tuberculosis plagued the province. But the worst curse of all was mental retardation.

About 1.2 percent of Gansu’s 22 million people were retarded, the highest rate in China. In 1989, the province passed its first eugenics law. “Insane, dull-witted and idiotic people must first complete sterilization operations before they can register for marriage. Some people say this is inhumane, but we think just the opposite is true,” said Jia Zhijie, Gansu’s governor, adding that there were instances in which children of mentally retarded parents died of neglect.

The new law shocked many in the West. Yet not so long ago, at least sixteen American states and two Canadian provinces used to sterilize people with mental illness, low IQs, epilepsy and, sometimes, syphilis and alcoholism. In 1972, by the time the province of Alberta repealed its 1920s Sexual Sterilization Act, more than 2,800 Albertans had been sterilized.

At Luo Family Mill Village, it was obvious why a eugenics law was needed. Seventy-eight villagers, or one out of every three, were retarded. Many suffered from cretinism, a form of mental retardation caused by iodine deficiency in the fetus. Others were dwarflike and retarded from Kashin-Beck disease, contracted from eating fungus-infected grain. Still others had become retarded after drinking water contaminated by heavy metals.

In mid-November, I shivered in my down coat. The children in this muddy hamlet wore only rags. Some lacked socks. An elderly woman, hunched over a cane, had an untreated goiter the size of a cantaloupe. A teenaged girl lay half-naked on the icy ground cramming dirt in her mouth while her retarded mother chuckled. Pigs and sheep and horses defecated into the creek, the only water supply. There was no school, store or clinic.

I knocked on the open door of a mud hut. In the darkness, I saw a man lying on an earthen
kang
, the coal-heated brick bed of north China, eating a bowl of cold boiled potatoes. “Want a potato?” Zhang De said hospitably, proffering his bowl. It was all he had. Chinese considered potatoes a poor substitute for wheat or rice, but Zhang’s grain bins were nearly empty. I didn’t see how he would get through the long winter. Nor did he. Although he was bedridden with back pain, he was anxious to get back to his fields. At forty-five, Zhang De was the only able-bodied person in his family.

“I was so poor I couldn’t afford a dowry,” he said, explaining that he had married a retarded mute no one else wanted for a wife. He pointed to his wife, sitting silently in the corner. She was a placid-faced woman, with a soiled blue scarf wrapped around her head. They had three daughters. Two were retarded mutes like their mother. The third had left home at age sixteen to marry. “I’m the only one in my family who’s clear up here,” he said, tapping his temple. His wife tried to help with the housework, but accomplished very little. “She doesn’t know anything,” he said, without rancor.

I felt utterly depressed. The ragged petitioners who had flooded into Beijing in 1979 had opened my eyes to the poverty in China, but I had never imagined there were whole wretched villages like Luo Family Mill. In 1995, China disclosed for the first time that 80 million of its people were so poor they did not have enough food or clothing. The World Bank put its own estimate at 100 million to 110 million. Deng Xiaoping’s philosophy was to allow a few people to get rich first, hoping they would drag along the rest of the country. Now, some parts of China were booming, but Gansu remained mired in poverty. Deng’s trickle-down economics had
done zip for Luo Family Mill. Yet I couldn’t see any other way. Maoism had been the great leveler – and everyone had been equally poor.