Riding the Iron Rooster (15 page)

When I finished my stint I made a farewell speech.

"People always tell you that night school is a good thing," I said. "But they are the same people who go home after a day's work and eat and snooze and listen to the radio. You students are doing one of the hardest things in the world—studying at night, when you're tired. It's hard to remember things when you're tired. And everyone else is resting. Doing this and also doing a job is like having two jobs."

This struck a responsive chord. They nodded and urged me to continue.

"You may get discouraged and wonder why it's so hard for you to study at night school," I said. "Believe me, it's hard for everyone. It takes courage to do it. I am very proud of you, and you should be proud. If you weren't tough you wouldn't be here. I wish you all the very best of luck."

They applauded softly and, because we had overstayed the time, they were shooed into the night by the janitor, who wanted to lock the place. On the page the night-school folk might seem a little dim and wraithlike, eagerly waiting to become substantial in daylight, but with no vice or peccadillo to give them color. What can one do except to say that they are worthy and that they are doing all they can to find their way through the Chinese mob? It is always difficult for a writer to make virtuous people interesting.

But even though that's true—that it is difficult to make virtuous people interesting—it is also true that it is fairly easy to make the unvirtuous memorable and sometimes fascinating.

It was not just those folks in the flesh—the short buttocky young man and his androgynous bride, my companions in the compartment on the Shanghai Express, and all those hustlers at Peking Central Station, pestering travelers to use their hotels or their taxis or to eat at their restaurants. (It is not enough that the Chinese have relaxed the ban on commercial advertising; they are not content with putting up a billboard or a sign. They tend to the personal touch—buttonholing Chinese tourists, badgering yokels who have just arrived from distant Gansu, yelling into megaphones, wagging banners in their faces, and installing screaming jingles and advertisements on the loudspeakers in the trains themselves.) But to complete my study of Chinese vices, 1 had chosen as reading material the erotic novel that had been whispered about in Peking,
Jin Ping Mei (The Golden Lotus).
It had been banned in China since the Ming Dynasty, and it seemed there was no higher recommendation than that. From its earliest pages it was a ruthless novel, and it was also graphically sexual. The perfect book for the Shanghai Express—or maybe for a whole trip through China, since it was about 2000 pages long.

This little fat fellow and his skinny wife slept in the berth just above my head. He filled the space and she curled about him like a wood shaving. She was just as thin and delicate and she was the color of newly planed wood. They chattered and smooched. He was from Singapore, she was from Hong Kong; he was a wise guy, one of the new breed of humorless computer people, who plug themselves into their machines and begin to resemble their mainframe—his big bum looked like part of a console. And she was always fluttering and giggling; she was dizzy, didn't know anything, couldn't cook, didn't speak English in spite of having grown up in a British colony—didn't speak Mandarin either—but what did it matter, as long as fatso paid the bills and bought trinkets for her. His name was Deng and he was always pushing his chubby face into her.

The fourth person—just across from me, on the other side of the folding table and the hot-water jug—was an old woman, about seventy-odd, whose luggage consisted of a small plastic shopping bag, a basket of apples and a jam jar half full of soggy tea leaves. She unscrewed the lid, filled it with hot water from the jug and then blew and slurped in a dainty way.

In the upper berth, the buttocky man was murmuring to his snickering bride.

This situation reminded me of a vicious thrilling story I had once planned to write about a very nearsighted old terror who always sat nagging about damnation while her conniving daughter and her boyfriend made love across the room in a chair, the girl on his lap, like a melon on a knife—and all the while the old woman believed she was making a terrific impression.

Indeed, Deng in the upper berth reminded me even more strongly of the book I was reading,
Jin Ping Mei.
Where was the innuendo and subtlety I had been told about? This was one of the most sexually explicit novels I'd ever come across. I had just finished an episode in which the central character, Hsi-men, reclining with one of his many women throws plums between her parted legs, and the third plum comes to rest against her vulva. He chafes her with it and presses it into her vagina, until she has an orgasm; and then he eats that plum.

"Want some candy?" asked the fat young man in the upper berth, and offered me some Chinese chocolate.

It was almost midnight: he was also guzzling milk, and he had not stopped tickling his very thin wife. They seemed to me amazingly active for that time of night, and I wondered whether they were honeymooners.

I took some candy to be friendly, but the old woman refused. She looked tearful, but she wasn't unhappy. There is a certain Chinese face that looks grief stricken—swollen eyes and a sad, compressed mouth. Sometimes I saw a man and I imagined that he had just been sobbing. But, no, it was just that face—maybe he was from Guangdong. The old woman had that look. She lay down and went to sleep, and now asleep—pale and motionless—it was as though she were either dead or dying.

The young woman swung across the ceiling into her own berth, and her fat little husband went after her. She laughed and dived into the berth above me. Was this going to go on all night? They were dressed in the skintight clothes that the Chinese had begun to wear, perhaps as a reaction against the baggy suits that had been forced upon them for the past thirty-five years. I had the impression that the young man was an overseas Chinese.

"You can keep the light on," he said. "We're all right."

But I was falling asleep over my book. I finished a chapter, marveling at its rowdiness, and then switched off the compartment light.

There was a thud: the man hoisting himself into his wife's berth.

I was awakened in the night by sounds that reached me from the upper berth. They began like the rustle of curtains, and then a sudden tumbling motion—the thrashing of a body in a bed—and then sucking and swallowing noises, as of someone working on a piece of candy. There was a whisper. It was so low I could not say whether it was the man or the pretty woman—the word no. "No ... no ... no ... no," repeated in a breathless yeslike way, "
Bu ... bu ... bu ... bu.
"

It went on for a long while, sometimes very slowly, as the passing stations flashed through the parted curtains. The sounds aroused me, and then when I was wide awake they made me completely objective. I felt like a ghost, which is the usual condition of a writer. I was hollow and insubstantial, hovering between the old woman and the lovers.

At dawn we left Shandong Province, which was the setting of the steamy Chinese novel I was reading. It was a happy blend of sex, wisdom and fine writing. Here is the first glimpse the priapic Hsi-men has of the discontented housewife (soon to be his mistress) Golden Lotus:

Her hair was black as a raven's plumage; her eyebrows mobile as the kingfisher and as curved as the new moon. Her almond eyes were clear and cool, and her cherry lips most inviting.... Her face had the delicate roundness of a silver bowl. As for her body, it was as light as a flower, and her fingers as slender as the tender shoots of a young onion. Her waist was as narrow as the willow, and her white belly yielding and plump. Her feet were small and tapering; her breasts soft and luscious. One other thing there was, black-fringed, grasping, dainty and fresh, but the name of that I may not tell ... it had all the fragrance and tenderness of fresh-made pastry, the softness and appearance of a new-made pie.

Those tiny feet are interesting. In another chapter, Hsi-men is beguiled by the sight of another woman's bound feet—the so-called "lily-feet."

Old woman Hsueh found an opportunity to lift Mistress Meng's skirt slightly, displaying her exquisite feet, three inches long and no wider than a thumb...

I mention this because after we left Shandong and crossed the Grand Canal (Da Yunhe) we came to the city of Xuzhou (formerly Tong-shan), where I saw an old woman with small, stumpy feet on the platform, and she was walking painfully on these deformities that had once been thought to be so ravishing.

It was at Xuzhou in the yellow light of early morning that I saw the first real greenery since leaving London over a month before—fields of ripening rice, and young trees in leaf by the roadside, and large blowing poplars. It was the flat plain of eastern China, once a conglomeration of communes and now a region of smallholdings—an immensity of vegetables, cabbage as far as the eye could see, with big black pigs balanced neatly on their trotters in the foreground. I saw puddles and streams, and farmers plowing with tractors or bullocks, and people carrying heavy loads with a shoulder pole used as a yoke to carry a pair of baskets; white swimming ducks and fluttering geese, a small girl in a blue tunic sitting astride a buffalo, and field-workers sleeping off their breakfast against an embankment like drunken peasants in a Flemish painting. And there was a dark sow so heavily pregnant her teats grazed the dusty earth of the farmyard as she plodded.

Some rice was already being harvested. China is proud of the fact—as well it should be—that it not only feeds itself but for the first time in its history now exports more grains than it imports (generally speaking it sells rice and buys wheat). All this activity is dramatized by the fact that for the past few years field-workers have begun to wear bright clothes, and so they are highly visible as they hoe and harvest. From time to time, however, the rigid thing you take to be a scarecrow turns out to be a comrade either leaning on his shovel or practicing wushu or t'ai chi with his arms stuck out.

A few hours later the train pulled into Bengbu, a railway junction in the middle of Anhui Province. Our train was needed there for a little while because a movie scene was being shot at Bengbu Station—a young man and woman seeing someone off on our train, probably an irritating relative. A great crowd had gathered to watch the action, and the film crew and the railway police struggled to shift the mob out of the shot. There was no rough stuff. Everyone—even the police—was interested in the movie. There was no pushing, no anger; and I was impressed by the good humor. But unless they had a brilliant editor, I was sure the result would show the two actors waving good-bye, watched by 2000 goggling Chinese.

In any event there was only one take. When the Shanghai Express pulled out of Bengbu, that was the end of the shot.

Then we were in the green fields again. I was sure that the main difference between this visit and my previous one six years before, when I had sailed down the Yangtze, was that before, I had come in the middle of winter, when everything had been bleak. Then, a Chinese landscape seemed to me to be composed of rain, smoke, fog; and collapsing houses on a muddy road; and people with their hands shoved into their sleeves; and all those fat-faced pictures of Mao on the wall. And whenever I asked someone a question the answer was always either "Maybe" or "You think so?"

Spring and a half a dozen years seemed to have made a significant difference. Because China is so intensively agricultural, spring is splendid all over the country. It's impossible to see crops being planted, and weeded, and harvested, and not feel optimistic. The country was greener, leafier, visibly cheerier and more hopeful. It was not an illusion, this new Cycle of Cathay. If people seemed a little impatient it was perhaps because they knew well that in Chinese terms a cycle lasts sixty years. Lynn Pan began her book
The New Chinese Revolution,
about recent events in China, by describing what a cycle means in Chinese terms, and then she became specific: "In June 1981 the Chinese Communist Party, founded at a secret meeting in Shanghai in 1921, completed its first cycle of sixty and began on its next." It was also in June 1981 that Deng Xiaoping was made Number One (apart from being head of the politburo he has no real title) and opened China's doors—and then the West hurried in. Only a few years had passed, but the result was obvious. Nothing is more conspicuous than something that has been Westernized.

The passengers mobbed the corridors and hogged the windows just after eleven, and when I asked what was up, they said we would be crossing the Yangtze River soon. But they didn't call it that—the word "Yangtze" hardly exists in Chinese—they called it
Chang Jiang,
The Long River. Crossing it is an event because it is China's equator, the north-south divide. The Chinese in the north are different from the Chinese in the south. In the north, the Chinese say, they are imperious, quarrelsome, rather aloof, political, proud noodle-eaters; and across the river they are talkative, friendly, complacent, dark, sloppy, commercial-minded and materialistic rice-eaters.

The river is wide, sluggish and brown at this point—the city of Nanjing (Nanking). The bridge over the river is a famous landmark because halfway through its construction the Russians pulled out, believing the Chinese could not possibly finish it themselves; but they did, and it remains one of the few modern engineering feats in China that resulted in a structure that is actually pleasing to the eye. Beneath its leaping spans were the Yangtze boats—like a whole history of Chinese riverboats, every style and size, from the sampans and dugouts to the junks and river steamers—these last of the East Is Red fleet that sail the 1500 miles from Chongqing (Chungking) to Shanghai.

I went on reading
Jin Ping Mei,
marveling at its blend of manners, delicacy and smut. What a shame it was still banned in China after five centuries. Truly, if the Chinese were allowed to read it, I felt, they would discover a great deal about themselves. I did not believe they would be morally undermined by this stuff, and yet it would be a real thrill as well as a revelation.