Riding the Iron Rooster (60 page)

There had once been a commune here. There had been agricultural communes all around Xiamen. I had been interested by the ones I had seen elsewhere, by the way they had developed into cooperatives and family farms, so I visited what had been the Cai Tang Commune, in the countryside northwest of Xiamen, to see what had happened.

Walking through the fields at Cai Tang, I came across an ancient grave. Two eight-foot guardian figures, a man and a woman, had been placed at the entrance of the gravesite. This was behind a hill, at the margin of a field of carrots. A bird—perhaps a flycatcher—was flitting back and forth. And buried to their necks were stone animals—a horse, a ram, lions and other broken beasts. There was an altar, too, with carved tablets. It was all unnoticed and it had not been seriously vandalized. In an earlier period a traveler would have taken the figures and crated them and shipped them to the Fogg Museum at Harvard. The tablets said (according to Mr. Wei) that it was a Qing Dynasty grave of the Hu family. And it was so far off the beaten track that no one had disturbed it.

A farmer and his wife were working nearby, hurrying back and forth in the carrot field, each one of them wearing a yoke with a balanced pair of watering cans. A loudspeaker at the far side of the field played a Chinese opera.

"This was once part of the Cai Tang Commune," the man said. "We planted rice, because they wouldn't let us plant anything else. And we listened to the Thoughts of Mao Zedong on that loudspeaker all day."

I had to follow him through the carrot field. He would not stop watering in order to chat. But he said he didn't mind my questions.

"This is my family's land. I never liked the commune idea. I would rather work in my own fields."

"Do you think about freedom to do as you want?"

"Yes. I have more freedom now," he said. "I can plant what I like. They used to say 'Plant rice' whether it was a good idea or not. Know what the trouble was before? Too many officials."

He squelched through the mud to the standpipe, filled his buckets, filled his wife's buckets and off they went again through the plumelike carrot tops.

"You have a healthy crop of carrots," I said.

"These are for pigs," he said. "The price of carrots is low in the market at the moment, so instead of accepting a few fen I'll feed them to my pigs. It makes more sense. I can fatten ten pigs, get them up to a hundred kilos and sell each one for about a hundred yuan. When the price of carrots goes up, I'll sell the carrots at the market."

He was still splashing water and gasping up and down the field.

"This is much better business!" he called back.

From there I went to the eastern part of Xiamen, called "The Front Line" (
Qian Xian)
because Quemoy (Jinmen), which belongs to Taiwan, is just offshore. The east coast road had been closed for thirty-five years, because of the periodic hostilities, but just recently it was opened. There were trenches, pillboxes and fortifications everywhere, but there was also a lovely beach of palm trees and white sand and dumping surf—and not a soul on it.

I broad jumped a foxhole and made my way through the palms.

"Don't, Mr. Paul! You might get shot!"

Mr. Wei trembled at the edge of the road, calling me back.

"Who would shoot me?"

"The army!"

"Which army?"

"Maybe ours—maybe theirs."

He tried to console me—perhaps one day there would be peace between China and its easternmost province of Taiwan, and then I would be able to swim here. Because the area had been off-limits and dangerous (Quemoy had been bombarded from these gun emplacements in 1958, provoking an international incident), and because of the fear of retaliation that had aroused in the local Chinese, the beach was unspoiled and lovely.

One of the largest buildings in Xiamen was the Workers' Palace. Other Chinese cities had Soviet-inspired community centers like this—they had all been built in the 1950s—but I had never been inside one. Mr. Wei was bewildered by my interest, and he said it might be difficult to get permission to enter. I now knew enough about Chinese bureaucracy to realize that the quickest way to see the Workers' Palace would be to walk in and not bother with permission. It was such a dithering and buck-passing civil service that special requests were almost invariably turned down, while blatant trespassing was seldom challenged.

Once, this Workers' Palace had been all hate films and sessions of political indoctrination. Now the film theater was showing a documentary about the Dunhuang Caves, and the reading room was full of people perusing newspapers and magazines (among them, movie magazines and body-building monthlies); and in the drill hall there was an aerobics class. A dancing class had just ended.

I asked one of the women doing aerobics why she had decided to sign up.

"I do this for health and beauty," she said. "Also I have headaches."

It was in the library of this building that I found a copy of Dong Luoshan's translation of Orwell's
1984.
It had been published in Canton in 1985. He had told me it was regarded as
neican
—circulated only to safe and unexcitable intellectuals. But obviously that was wrong. Anyone in Xiamen could come here and borrow it from the library—I specifically asked the librarian.

"Is it any good?" she asked.

"Excellent. You'll love it."

"I'll take it home with me tonight!"

Another room was lined with electronic games. I wondered whether anyone used them. Mr. Wei said they did, but that no one had spare cash to squander on them. I saw about eight children lurking near the machines and asked them whether they knew how these things worked. They said they did. Would they teach me? I asked. Oh, yes. So I pushed a few coins into these space-invader machines, and the children sprang into action, their fingers flying. They were as expert as any person in America, misspending his youth at the controls of an electronic game.

A young woman had just finished her dancing class and was on her way home when I accosted her. She was Wan Li, a cadre at the economics ministry. She had gone to the Dalian Foreign Language Institute (she hadn't met Cherry Blossom there, unfortunately) but she had been raised in the central Fujian town of Sanming. That town had the reputation in China of being somewhat Utopian. It had been developed by people from all over China, before the Cultural Revolution. Miss Wan claimed that everything that had been said about Sanming was true—no problems, no pollution, perfect integration, a model city.

"Any Tibetans in Sanming?"

"No," Miss Wan said. "They have to stay in Tibet and solve their own problems. But people in Sanming are very civilized. They are from all places. Like the United States!"

She was about twenty-five and seemed very frank beneath her nervous giggle. She came to the Workers' Palace every day, she said, because she liked meeting people here—she enjoyed talking to strangers.

Mr. Wei merely looked on, but I could see he was quite taken by this young woman's boldness.

I said, "Are you a member of the Chinese Communist Party?"

"You are the second American in Xiamen to ask me that!" she said. "There are three hundred people in my unit at the ministry. Only twenty are members of the Party."

"Why so few?"

"Because it is hard to be a member. You don't volunteer. You have to be asked to join the Party. You must first act very well and leave a good impression. Do your work diligently—work overtime, study, be obedient."

"Like Lei Feng, the model soldier," I said. Lei Feng had scrubbed floors all night because of his love for Mao. In China he was a joke or else a paragon, according to who you were talking to. Most Chinese I had spoken to had found Lei Feng a bit of a pain, if not an outright fake.

Miss Wan gave me a Chinese reply. "Not like Lei Feng. You have to be noticed."

Lei Feng had only been noticed after his death, when his diaries were found, containing such exclamations as "I have scrubbed another floor and washed more dishes! My love for Mao is shining in my heart!"

Miss Wan said, "You have to be selected for the Party. The Party needs the best people—not just anyone who wants to join. If the Party works well, the country will work. The Party needs high-quality people."

"I'm sure you're a high-quality person."

"I don't know."

"Do you have healthy Marxist-Leninist thoughts?"

"I am trying," she said, and laughed. "I also like dancing!"

After she left, Mr. Wei said, "She gave me her card. Did you see?"

"Are you glad?"

"Oh, yes. I hope I see her again. It is so hard to meet girls in China."

He said he probably would not get married for another five years. Twenty-six was a good age for marriage.

With the greatest tact I could muster I asked him whether he had ever slept with a woman. I put it obliquely. He proudly said no.

"It seems to be a problem in China. No sex for young people." It had been one of the issues in the student demonstrations.

"It's a problem. Even if you meet a girl there is no place to take her. But I don't mind."

"You mean you don't believe in sex before marriage?"

He looked slightly disgusted. "It is unlawful and against our traditions."

With that, 2000 years of sensuality went straight out the window. Mr. Wei seemed blind to the fact that Chinese culture was rooted in sexual allusions. The mythical Yellow Emperor had made himself immortal by sleeping with a thousand women; and even a common object like a piece of jade had sexual associations—it was said to be the petrified semen of the celestial dragon. The dragon was phallic, the lotus was a sort of icon for the vulva, and so forth.

"Would you be arrested if you were caught with a woman?"

"You might be. You would be criticized. You could be reported."

"But surely you could be very careful if you had a lover."

"Someone would know," Mr. Wei said. "And even if you didn't get caught, people would look down on you."

That seemed to settle it, but Mr. Wei equivocated when I asked him about Miss Wan.

"I will keep her card," he said, breathing hard.

That was the last I saw of Mr. Wei. But I had no trouble fending for myself in Xiamen. For one thing, Spring Festival was about to begin, and this the happiest of Chinese holidays put everyone in a good mood, as they bought greeting cards and calligraphy and red paper banners with New Year's greetings inked on them.

Just before I left Xiamen I met an American, Jim Koch, a Kodak employee who had been hired to supervise the installation of a coating machine. This sounded a fairly modest contraption, but it had cost the Chinese $70 million, and the entire project was costing $300 million. The object was for the Chinese to make their own film for cameras and not be dependent upon the Japanese for photographic supplies.

Jim Koch had recently been married to Jill and had been looking forward to this post. But after three months in Xiamen he admitted to being rather doubtful. He was not pessimistic, but he was certainly cautious. What had surprised him most was Chinese ineptness.

"They're used to working with their hands," he said. "That's the problem. They can rig up something with a piece of wire and a stick. But they have never relied on sophisticated machinery or high tech. I have to show them every detail about a hundred times."

"But the young Chinese must be teachable."

"They're the worst. The laziest, the slowest, the most arrogant. The older workers are the best—the over fifties. The ones from thirty to forty seem to have a chip on their shoulder, as if they were cut out for better things."

"They were in the Cultural Revolution, so perhaps they're feeling cheated."

"Maybe. But I thought this was going to be pretty straightforward. Maybe eight months. The Chinese said twelve. But it will take longer."

"What is the biggest problem?" I asked.

"Cleanliness," Jim said. "If a floor looks clean they think it's clean. They use these bunches of twigs and straw to sweep. But that's not good enough. For this kind of equipment you need an absolutely dust-free environment, otherwise particles get into the film and wreck it. So now we have to seal the plant and install an air-conditioning system."

"Are you sorry you came to China?"

"No. But I thought it was going to be different. You know, the Chinese are supposed to be so clever. But a lot of these projects in Xiamen have had problems. That's why there are so many empty factories here." His voice dropped and he added, "It's going to be a long haul."

But it did not strike me as a tragedy if Xiamen's factories were working at half strength. There would always be money flowing into the city from her native sons and daughters who had prospered overseas. And Xiamen was a pretty place precisely because it had not developed heavy industry, and because—pressured by the romantics and the retirees—it had not vandalized its old buildings and elaborate gardens.

The Lunar New Year came. The whole country was on the move, and people threw firecrackers into the streets. It was impossible to travel in the crush of passengers enacting the yearly ritual of going home. I could not buy train tickets. So I did nothing but wait until the festival ended, and then I resumed my travels, heading westward.

On my way to Xian to catch the Qinghai local I ran into the mountaineer Chris Bonington. He said he was in China to climb Menlungtse, a mountain near Everest and almost as high.

"We're also looking for a yeti," he said.

His good health and his courage and his tigerish way of turning his head made him seem very youthful. He had a look of smiling innocence and strength, a happy man whose life was devoted to adventuring up mountains.

He was serious about the Abominable Snowman. A previous Everest expedition had photographed a yeti footprint on the Menlung Glacier.

"Are you going to bring one back in a cage?"

He smiled. Was that a twinkle in his eye? He said, "No, all we want is a picture."

Presumably that was worth money. There was no profit in climbing a 23,ooo-foot mountain and risking your neck; but if you managed to get a picture of the great hairy monster of the Himalayas you were newsworthy and bankable. Money to finance expeditions was always a problem in mountaineering. Bonington's small team of four or five climbers had forty cases of supplies among them, which entailed hiring numerous sherpas and yaks to transport them.