The Peace Correspondent (7 page)

As we get off our bus at the primary school, hundreds of children lined up in two orderly rows begin applauding. It is a moving experience. I am told later by an old China hand in Hong Kong that this is not a Chinese custom. The Chinese were taught to clap by the Russians, and they think that all Westerners like it. The kids keep up the applause as we pass in front of them and walk to the school. There, I realize I have left my film behind, so I head back to the bus. As soon as they see me, the children start applauding again. They keep it up as I run to the bus, enter the wrong one, exit to renewed applause, leap into the next bus, pick up my film and trot back to join my group, now disappearing behind the buildings. It is like running a gauntlet of hundreds of curious, peering black eyes.

“Now we know how Mao felt,” remarks a caustic German.

In a one-room school, four-year-olds shout out their Mandarin lessons with all the gusto of a high school football team in training. In the sports building, we encounter the famous ping pong diplomacy. We watch the boys and girls playing at about 10 tables, then we are invited to play. The kids destroy the Westerners in every game. In the yard outside, children from all over the school complex run to the assembly yard and take their places in front of a stage, just like soldiers forming up on a parade ground.

A political demonstration? No. they all have ping pong paddles and, in unison, with great shouts they go through the motions of playing a game.

Our last official stop is a school room where about 20 children in bright costumes and heavy makeup stand outside the door and sing a song of greeting. It is the only flash of color we see in China outside the stage of the acrobatic and magic show. Inside, we cram into the desks, knees almost to our chins, and drink tea while the kids dance and sing to the squeak of the er hu and other traditional instruments - the token dance of praise to Chairman Hua Kuo Fung and Chairman Mao Tse Tung, as well as apolitical
numbers such as The Swallows Return to the Meo people.

The show over, the children return to the front of the school to say goodbye to their guests, shyly offering their tiny hands to shake, a touching scene even to callous journalists convinced it is a public relations job for the People's Republic.

The whole new tourism policy seems to me to be a form of public relations exercise. While the country badly needs the hard foreign currency, as one tour guide explained it, “We want to make friends.” And China, the xenophobic Gang of Four gone, feels confident enough to show itself off.

I never touched the great scribe's pen; the Chinese muse will never sing for me. It wasn't the climb, although the thousand steep steps up the cliffside outside Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, were frighteningly precipitous. But the narrow path to the top of Dragon Gate was as crowded as a Cantonese free market, with squealing children, smooth-cheeked young soldiers on leave and stolid, craggy peasants. Just ahead, a shrine in the rock wall contains the golden image of Kui Xing, the Patron God of Scholars, Wen Chang, the God of Literature.

So I turn away, a hundred steps short of the last overhanging terrace, to retreat past the Tower Which Reaches Heaven, the Cave of the Compassionate Clouds and the Cave of the Splendor of the Clouds. On this busy weekend afternoon, gasping pilgrims squeeze along the slippery-smooth, time-worn marble steps high on the mountain face, peasants picnic in little pagodalike tea gardens and children try to lob coins into a stone phoenix nest high above an altar cut in the wall.

From 1781 to 1835, impoverished Taoist monk Wu Laiqing and his stone cutters hacked the steps out of this bare rock face. Along the way, they carved gods and grottoes, phoenixes, pavilions and these narrow corridors leading to the deity who helped students pass the Imperial Examinations -- or the current version.

No, I didn't touch the great literate's pen, as advised, but I don't want to write Chinese anyway, I rationalize. Instead, I pause by rows of snack stands to nibble on pickled turnips and
tiny shrimps packed into flat cakes, to gaze at Lake Dianchi far below, and to contemplate the joys of travel way down south in China.

Climate, geography, distance from the capital and a rich mixture of some 26 minority peoples make Yunnan a unique tourist destination. The province was always removed from the mainstream of Chinese history, largely because it was once a three-month journey there from Peking. Its own rich history and culture provides ample diversion for the tourist wandering so far south.

This sunny March day, the capital, Kunming, earns its self-styled sobriquet, City of Eternal Spring. While far in the north, frozen tourists huddle along the Great Wall outside Peking, buying bulky fur hats for protection against icy winds, Kunming's air, scented with burning coal, is as soft and warm as in a tropical garden. Even Siberian seagulls winter in this balmy clime, locals boast.

Kunming, the former Yunnanfu, 900 kilometers from Burma and only 400 from Vietnam, reflects these Southeast Asian influences. Elephant trunk and bear's paw still tarnish some menus, but as the government passed a wildlife protection act last year, only simulated versions are now available. Or so we are told.

Two things bring home how near we are to the southern neighbors. Outside the Green Lake Hotel, minority people costumed like northern Thailand's hill tribesmen aggressively flog embroidered purses, belts and hats while a central government official looks away at this shameless, free enterprise hustling.

And a stroll through the municipal museum, with the great Red Soviet star on top, reveals the province's ethnic mix. There are Miao and Yao living on the border with Vietnam, and Jingbo women who wear heavy coin necklaces -- a coin for each of their past lovers. Some groups nail water buffalo skulls to house fronts, like the Torajahs in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Bao people build stupas like the northern Thais, while the Jao's musical instruments and water pipes resemble those in Tibet.

Politically tied to Mother China to the north, Yunnan has had strong connections in modern times with southern neighbors. In 1910, French empire builders completed the Indo-China railway linking Kunming to Haiphong, Vietnam. The infamous 1,000 kilometer Burma Road, a mucky path through rugged mountains from Lashio, Burma, to Kunming along the southern branch of the old Silk Road, opened to motor vehicles in 1939.

When the Japanese cut off the road in 1942, American General Claire Lee Chennault's Flying Tigers airlifted supplies to the city over the 5,000 meter mountain passes of the “Hump.” Although the Tigers flew into the city for many years, little American influence is now apparent. All I can find is a nondescript road the American flyers once frequented that an older resident recalls as “Yankee Street.”

Kunming displays less English than more Westernized Guangzhou or Shanghai; Some street signs in Western script, a sign for a cooking school, and one that says, simply, “store.”

The entrance to attractive Green Lake Park exhibits modern American influence in the form of large Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck signs. The spacious park, framed with classical, China plate-pattern weeping willows, is modern, urban China at play. Children zip around on the pavement in miniature electric cars that play Happy Birthday to You or on a more traditional dragon boat ride. On the lake, soldiers and young girls play flirtatious tag in rowboats, while all round, family groups and flocks of school girls admire the “Four Celebrated Blossoms” (camellia, magnolia, azalea and primrose) and soak in the warm spring sun.

A roadside “sugar artist” engenders early gambling habits in candy-craving children. They spin a roulette wheel to select the animal from the Chinese zodiac he will create for them. The lucky ones get a dragon, five times the size of others. For a few fen, the man dips a spoon into the molten, colored toffee, twirls it quickly around on his table as it cools to fashion the flat, skeletal outline of the chosen animal. Just as he hands over his creation, a gust of wind shatters the delicate dragon, scattering the pieces,
tinkling like little temple bells.

The bells at the crowded Buddhist Bamboo Temple tinkle not just for the tourist but for the worshippers, mostly the elderly, bowing, lighting incense and praying. Despite the “No photography” signs, everyone inside is shooting posed family pictures, including commercial photographers with booths. A cheerful trio of gold-toothed, joss-waving ladies I photograph descends on me, demanding in harsh Yunnanese dialect that I send them copies. When some young soldiers pose atop a fence post, a screaming, indignant monk in mufti dashes from the temple to scatter the irreverent but sheepish PLA group.

Inside the temple, with its three fine gold Buddhas, stand the Five Hundred Lohans, “A pearl in the treasure house of Oriental sculpture.” The story has it that in 1884, the abbot hired sculptor De Shen to adorn the temple. His amusing, nontraditional figures, drawn from local notables, are early Tiger Balm Gardens-style. The caricatures, somewhat like political cartoons, were perhaps too accurate. When the tableau was completed and revealed to the public, the artist disappeared forever.

If the economic health of a community can be judged by its marketplace, Yunnan is prosperous. In the thriving Muslim Market, men with faces brown and wrinkled as Yunnan's famous walnuts puff bamboo water pipes before heaps of dark local tobacco, slabs of dried beef, chickens in huge baskets and trussed-up turkeys. Country folk in baggy blue and brown, here to sell their produce, wander the narrow, cobbled streets wondering at big city life.

A woman squats on the ground wrapping duck eggs in brown mud and straw to make 100-year-old eggs. In the bird market, a patient vendor teaches her caged parrot to say “ni hao” (hello). Chefs cheerfully invite us into odoriferous, open-air cafes to lunch on bubbling soups and crackling gyoza-style dumplings. A showy noodle maker stretches, twirls and boils the white dough into long white strands, grandstanding for his foreign audience. In a nearby square, masseurs and masseuses in white coats and
white, broad-brimmed hats, many of them blind, perform gentle massages, twisting limbs and kneading muscles in full public view.

Despite Kunming's appeal, some of Yunnan's greatest attractions are outside the capital. In the past two years, 10 regions have been opened to tourists, some on the international borders. But China is just too big, time does not allow for more adventurous exploration this time. With only a few days, I head to the prime tourist spot, the Lunan Stone Forest of bizarre but bewitching rock “trees” 120 kilometers to the southwest.

From the air, the dry countryside outside Kunming looks swollen like a fresh blood blister surrounded with bruise-colored greens and yellows. As our bus leaves the city and surrounding flooded rice paddies behind, we climb into red-dirt hills and fields of yellow rapeseed, green wheat and broadbeans.

This is rural, story-book China. Peasants work the fields with ancient hoes. The blazing holes in the ground we see from afar are kilns firing red bricks. Traditional, upcurving tile roofs top adobe or thatch and wattle huts. Boys chewing sugar cane drive horse carts or “walking tractors,” and everywhere, there is road building, Chinese-style. Workers painstakingly, arduously break and fit together rocks. Even where it is prosperous, China has the enduring shabbiness of Mexico, with rubble and bricks and pipes and construction material all around. It is not all traditional, though. Japanese tourists in modern air-conditioned Hino buses race us for the Stone Forest.

Wavering, too-loud Taiwanese love songs -- another surprise to one still not accustomed to the “new” China -- float back from the tape deck, followed by a medley of Don't Cry for Me Argentina and The Mexican Hat Dance. Our guide, with a unique sense of humor, cackles cheerfully about the tiger that came into Kunming, just last year -- from where nobody knows -- killing two people and injuring three. He also entertains us with English jokes. Why does a bicycle need a kick stand? Because it is two tired. English is fast catching on in China.