Riding the Iron Rooster (12 page)

"Yes, but people mainly read diaries to discover trivial things and indiscretions. My advice would be: put everything down, don't edit or censor it, and be as indiscreet as possible."

"Is that what you do?" she said, swiftly crossing her legs and wrapping herself into a querying posture.

"I only keep a diary when I travel," I said. I did not say that I think diaries are death to writing fiction—trying to remember all that stuff.

"Because traveling is so interesting?"

"No. Because travel writing is a minor form of autobiography."

And then a woman entered without knocking to say that the guests had arrived.

"They're all Party members!" Mrs. Lord said confidentially. She was pleased with herself, and who wouldn't be? Out of one billion people, only 44 million are members of the Chinese Communist Party—four and a half percent.

These guests were writers and scholars. Most of them had been abroad and nearly all of them spoke English perfectly. Nor were they daunted by the Western menu—the soup first, and then the prawns and meat loaf—or the knives and forks. Indeed, one of them told me that not long ago Hu Yaobang, the Party secretary, had advocated the use of knives and forks. Chopsticks were unsanitary, Mr. Hu maintained, and the Chinese habit of taking food from common dishes was a factor in the spread of germs. Mr. Hu frequently made mischievous remarks of this kind. He had also said that Marxism was outdated and that the Han Chinese should perhaps vacate Tibet.

I asked the woman next to me whether she agreed with Mr. Hu about chopsticks or anything else.

"I'd like to keep an open mind," she said. Her accent was extraordinary—not just English, but upper-class English, the intonation of a well-bred headmistress. She sounded like the head of Cheltenham Ladies College, and she seemed the sort of woman the English praise by calling her "a bluestocking." I was not surprised to hear that she taught at Peking University or that her chief subject was Henry James.

She said she was exasperated by the bad translations of James into Chinese.

"When Casper Goodwood says to Isabel, 'Just wait!' they translate it as 'Wait a minute'—as if he's going to pop right back, you see. It's very trying, but what can one do?"

I asked her whether the government interfered with her teaching—after all, until recently foreign novels had been regarded as a poisonous bourgeois influence ("sugar-coated bullets").

"The government leaves us alone and lets us get on with the job. It was quite different during the Cultural Revolution," she said, daintily separating her butterfly prawn from its tail. "There were loudspeakers on the campus, and they were on all the time."

"Did you hate it?"

"At first, yes. And then I was bored by it. That was the worst of the Cultural Revolution. The boredom. One would wake to the loudspeakers. They would be saying very loudly, 'Never forget class struggle.' One would brush one's teeth and on the toothbrush was the slogan
Never Forget Class Struggle.
On the washbasin it said,
Never Forget Class Struggle.
Wherever one looked there were slogans. Most people hated them—it was really very insulting. I was thoroughly bored."

All this in her soft and rather fatigued English accent; and then she spoke up again.

"But there was very little that one could do."

Xiao Qian, listening quietly to this woman, was a man in his seventies who had spent the years 1939 to 1945 in Britain. Because of the war he had not been able to sail home; but he pointed out that because he had spent those war years in Britain he had seen the British at their best. He was wearing what looked like an old school tie. I asked him whether this was so. He said, yes, it was the tie of King's College, Cambridge, where he had read English.

"I don't think of China as being a tie-wearing society," I said, and I told him a story about a Frenchman I had once met. Had all the violence and turmoil in the sixties changed his way of thinking? I had asked. "Yes," he had said, "I no longer wear a cravat."

Mr. Xiao said, "People have started wearing them. And of course a tie is often necessary if you travel abroad."

He had recently been to Singapore, he said.

"I used to teach there," I said.

"It is an economic miracle," he said, and smiled, adding, "and a cultural desert. They have nothing but money. Their temples are like toys to us. They are nothing—they are not even real. Their Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew is an Oriental posing as a Westerner. But he is not all bad. For example, he has a Confucian idea of the family in politics. In Singapore if you take an old person into your household you get a reduction in taxes. There is something Confucian in that. It's a good idea."

"My students were bullied by the government of Singapore," I said. "If they studied English or political science they weren't given scholarships. The government only gave money to students who did economics or business—money-making subjects, it was thought. And some of the students at the University of Singapore were informers. Oddly enough, they were looking for Maoists and reporting on anyone sympathetic to the People's Republic."

"Now they are quite keen to do business with us," Mr. Xiao said. "But it is a very severe government. They are always watching and listening. People in Singapore are afraid."

It seemed very odd to hear a comrade in the People's Republic tut-tutting about authoritarianism and fear.

I said, "But is it so different here in China?"

"Even during our worst times," he said, "even during the Cultural Revolution, we did not have these—what do you call these machines that listen to your voice?"

"Bugging devices?"

"Exactly. No listening devices. But in Singapore, before anyone opens his mouth he feels with his hands under the table to see whether there is a device that is listening."

Mr. Xiao was not drinking, but others were, and downing glasses of wine they grew red faced and a bit breathless.

A young man next to Mr. Xiao asked me what I was doing in China.

"Just traveling around, taking trains," I said.

"Are you writing a report?"

"Not at all," I said, and I told him my motto: Grin like a dog and wander aimlessly.

He said that was precisely what he enjoyed doing. In fact, somewhat in the manner of Studs Terkel, he was cycling around the country tape-recording people's reminiscences. He was about to publish the transcripts in book form under the title
Chinese Lives.
He wondered whether there was anything I wished to ask him about the Chinese railways—he said he was an expert. His name was Sang Ye.

I told him that I was particularly looking forward to taking the train from Peking to Urumchi—the longest railway journey in China: four and a half days of mountains and desert.

"They call that train 'The Iron Rooster,'" he said.

He explained that iron rooster (
tie gongji
) implied stinginess, because "a stingy person does not give away even a feather—nor does an iron rooster." It also meant useless and was part of a larger proverb which included a porcelain crane, a glass rat, and a glazed cat
(ciqi he, boli haozi, liuli mao).
The list didn't include a white elephant but that was what was meant. There was also a bit of word play with iron rooster, because it included a pun on "engineering" and "engine."

But the stingy reference was its real meaning, because until recently this accident-plagued line was run by the Xinjiang government. Technically, Xinjiang is a vast reservation of Uighur people—romantic desert folk with a Mongolian culture quite distinct from the Han Chinese. And this remote railway ministry in the autonomous region would neither surrender control of the railway nor would they maintain it. This was more than I wanted to know about the Iron Rooster, but the name made me more than ever eager to climb aboard.

When lunch was over Mrs. Lord invited me to say something. The formal progress of a Chinese banquet depends on little speeches: a word of welcome from the host, followed by something grateful from the guest—that is at the beginning; and afterwards, more formal pleasantries, some toasts, and a very abrupt end. No one lingers, no one sits around and shoots the bull. All the Chinese banquets I attended concluded in a vanishing act.

I made my little speech. I said my thanks and sat down. But Mrs. Lord needled me. Hadn't I been to China before? And shouldn't I say something to compare that visit with this?

So I stood up again and said frankly that even six years ago people had been very reluctant to talk about the Cultural Revolution. It was worse than bad manners: it was unlucky, it marked you, it was a political gesture, it wasn't done. And when people
had
referred to it they had spoken of it in euphemisms, like the British referring to World War Two as "the recent unpleasantness." But these days people talked about those ten frenzied years, and when they called it the Cultural Revolution they usually prefixed the phrase "so-called" (
suowei
), or they renamed it The Ten Years' Turmoil. Surely it was a good thing that people talked about it in a critical way?

"Is that all you've noticed?" Mrs. Lord said, encouraging me to continue.

I said that the tourists and business people seemed to constitute a new class and that such privileged and bourgeois people might be demoralizing to the much poorer Chinese.

"We have never taken foreigners seriously," one of the guests said. He was a man at the end of the table. 'The most-quoted proverb these days is: We can fool any foreigner."

"I think that's a very dangerous proverb," I said.

Mrs. Lord said, "Why 'dangerous'?"

"Because it's not true."

Mrs. Lord said, "The Chinese don't know what goes on in the hotels—they don't go in."

"We're not allowed in," the bluestocking said. "But no one actually stops you. I went into a big hotel a few months ago. There was a bowling alley and a disco and a bookstore. But I didn't have any foreign exchange certificates, so I couldn't buy anything."

Someone said, "I think that regulation forbidding Chinese from going into tourist hotels is going to change very soon."

Mrs. Lord said, "My friends talk about this privilege thing. Of course it's a problem. My Chinese friends tend to be pessimistic, but I'm an optimist. I think things will go on improving. And I want to help. I feel I owe it to this country. I've had everything."

I said, "Oddly enough, I was affected by the Cultural Revolution. It was the sixties upheaval, and I was in Africa when China was seeking influence there. I read the Thoughts of Mao and the
Peking Review.
I felt like a revolutionary."

"I had one of those Thoughts of Mao books," a man said. "1 put it away. I don't know where it is. I suppose I've lost it. You don't actually mean you read it?"

To prove my point, I recited, "A revolution is not a dinner party"—from the Little Red Book; and another saying that I often thought of in my traveling through China: "Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it."

A sigh of exasperation went up.

"He set us back thirty years," someone said.

"If you go to the inner part of Peking University you'll see a statue of Mao," one of the scholars said. "But there aren't many around. And on the base where it once said 'Long Live The Thoughts of Mao Zedong' there is nothing but his name."

It was not for me to tell them they were out of touch with the thinking of the Central Committee, which had recently met (September 1986) and passed a resolution that reaffirmed "The Four Cardinal Principles: keeping to the socialist road, upholding the people's democratic dictatorship, upholding the leadership of the Communist Party, and upholding Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought."

But these people at the lunch were part of a class that has always existed in China—the scholar gentry. They were special and a little suspect and set apart. They were important but no emperor had ever really felt easy with them, and Mao had actually tried to cut them down to size and even humiliate them by sending them into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. It was a philosophy encapsulated in the remark:
If you think you're so smart you can start shoveling that pig shit into the wheelbarrow.
And at night these rusticated intellectuals studied the works of Marx and Lenin. It had all worked like a harsh form of aversion therapy, which was why the mood in China was so different now.

"Most of the people in this room would much rather have their child be an underpaid scholar than a rich merchant," Mrs. Lord said. "That's a fact."

I felt it would be rude to mention that the choice wasn't exactly that—between being a merchant or an intellectual; not in a country where 900 million people were peasant farmers.

It was obvious that the sixteen card-carrying intellectuals at Mrs. Lord's were not typical, and they were Westernized enough to like drinking coffee—one of the rarest drinks in China—and to linger after the meal to talk a little more.

Professor Dong Luoshan had recently translated Orwell's
1984—
he had actually translated it in the year 1984, which seemed wonderfully appropriate. He had also translated Kurt Vonnegut and Saul Bellow into Chinese, but it was Orwell I wanted to talk about.

He said, "I think it is a very gloomy novel."

"Did it seem familiar to you?"

"You are speaking of the recent past in China," he said, with a wink. "But I tell you the Cultural Revolution was worse. It was much worse."

"Why don't more people write about it then?"

"We are still trying to understand it, and it is a very painful subject."

There is a special category of writing about the Cultural Revolution, known as "wound literature" (
Shanghen wenxue),
so "painful" was an appropriate word. A popular Chinese writer, Feng Jicai, writes almost exclusively about the Cultural Revolution. But the best book I had read,
The Execution of Mayor Yin
(1977), by Chen Jo-hsi, had not appeared in China.