Riding the Iron Rooster

I was thinking how Roman and Victorian the bathhouse looked (there was a Women's bathhouse next door), how useful for travelers and bathless residents, how like a club it was and how congenial, when a homosexual Chinese man enlightened me.

"Most people go there to take a bath," he said. "But it is also a good place to go if you want to meet a boy and do things with him."

"What sort of things?"

He didn't flinch. He said, "One day I was in Xing Hua Yuan and saw two men in a private room, and one had the other one's cock in his mouth. That sort of thing."

A few days later I was walking down the street, and a young Chinese girl approached me and said hello. She fell into step next to me and before we had gone thirty yards she slipped her arm into mine and off we went, like a pair of old-fashioned lovers.

She was leading the way. I liked not having the slightest idea of what was going to happen next.

At first 1 thought she might be lame, because she had caught hold of me and held on tightly. But she was walking very briskly.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

She smiled beguilingly and led me on. When we passed the Friendship Store she steered me in, and at the door she began to hug me. She was still hugging in a sort of newlywed's embrace as we looked at chairs ("These look comfortable") and crockery ("Don't you think they have anything cheaper?"). This seemed very pleasant. I had no idea what I would say if 1 met someone I knew, but it hardly mattered.

I said, "What is your honorable surname?"

"Ma," she said, and giggled. There are so many different Ma's in Chinese that a nineteen-word tongue twister has been made from them.

We looked at the tea section. They had no peppermint tea—indeed, had never heard of it.

"I have never tasted it," Miss Ma said.

Or perhaps Mrs. Ma, because a moment later she let go of me and ran ahead and embraced a young Chinese man. He was not surprised to see her. I assumed they had arranged to meet. The trouble was that, being an ordinary comrade, she felt she would have been stopped from entering this store unless she was in the company of a foreigner.

What disturbed me was that her affection towards me had seemed unforced. Yet in a split second I was forgotten: she didn't look back.

I had been on my way to meet a Chinese teacher named Chen. When I told him what had happened, he said, "The security guards can be very harsh with us sometimes."

Still, that didn't bother the importuning money changers who lurked near the tourist hangouts pestering foreigners to change hard currency into local currency, offering about twenty percent more than the official rate. They sidled up and said, "Shansh marnie?"

I said to Chen that I did not understand why so many years of the Cultural Revolution hadn't made people more socially and politically aware. A few years ago it was "Serve the people," and now it was "Change money?"

Chen said that it was because of the Cultural Revolution that people had started a free-for-all, because that political convulsion had discredited politicians.

He said, 'The so-called Cultural Revolution was wonderful in teaching us never to follow blindly. Now we will never trust what politicians say."

Chen and I were drinking tea at a stall. He held up his white cup.

He said, "If Mao said, 'This is black,' we would all agree and say, 'Very black.' Now, we'd never do that. A spokesman in the government said recently The Japanese are our friends.' Everyone laughed. The Japanese—let's be frank—are no one's friends."

I asked him whether he felt humiliated by the memory of the Cultural Revolution.

'That's the word—humiliated. So many of the Red Guards who went to the countryside got married there, gave up being intellectuals and became farmers. Now they can't come back—and they want to. It would be a loss of face to come back."

"Were you a Red Guard?"

"Yes," he said promptly. "School three days, learning from a peasant farmer the other three days, and reading the Thoughts of Mao on our day off. We harvested and planted rice. It's a good thing I was young, because I didn't take it very seriously. I treated it like a game. But it was no game."

He went on to say that he was surprised by how liberated the young people were these days in Peking. They criticized the Party. They talked about democracy and free speech. He said, "I'm amazed by some of the things they say."

"In the past," he said, "the intellectuals and the scholars were discredited. No one really wanted to go to school, and only the secure Party officials advanced. You had a choice of being a worker or a peasant."

"What do people want now?"

"Now that we are no longer judged by our political consciousness, people have begun to be fanatical about education. That's the biggest single change in this country."

"But these former Red Guards and the refugees from the Cultural Revolution—surely they're out of school?"

"No," Chen said. 'There's a whole army of night-school students."

I wanted to leave for Shanghai and then to rattle around China on trains as the mood took me. But, inspired by Chen, before I set off I decided to offer my services as a night-school teacher, just to see whether what Chen had said was true. I took classes at the Peking Sun Yat-sen Spare-Time School, which was housed in a big gloomy high school in central Peking. My subject was English, which was the most popular subject in the school; but the students—there were 3000 of them—also studied business methods, typing, accounting and computer science. One of the computer teachers was from the United States, but I didn't meet him.

I felt a sort of giddy depression at the sight of so many students toiling in the semidarkness of this haunted-looking building. The light was poor, the chalk squeaked, the desks creaked, the textbooks were greasy and frayed, and the dictionaries were crumbling. The youngest student was eight, the oldest seventy-four. All of them worked during the day, if not at a salary-paying job then at an impromptu stall at the free market, boosting cassette tapes, or toys, or clothes that were sent up from Canton, where they had been made cheaply—there was a thirty percent markup on clothes, but even so they were very cheap.

I taught from a book called Modern American English.

"You're lucky to have me. I'm a modern American and I speak English," I said. They thought this was incredibly funny.

I was filling in for their regular teacher, Miss Bao, whose mother was being treated for hypertension at the Peking Capital Hospital near the duck restaurant (thus its nickname, "The Sick Duck").

It took us three days to deal with the lesson about health care.

The cost of health care in the United States is truly staggering, the text ran.

"Excuse me," Miss Lin said, "what is 'glaucoma'?"

"Excuse me," Mr. Zhao said, "what is 'Blue Cross'?"

"Excuse me," Mr. Li said, "but some weeks ago your president ordered the bombing of Libya. Did you agree with that?"

I said no, and explained why. And then I asked them whether they agreed with everything their government did. They said no, and giggled nervously, but didn't elaborate.

Each night, the students gathered in the twilight and then sat sleepily in the hot dusty classrooms for two hours; they went home in the dark.

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.

4. The Shanghai Express

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.

The proof that it was pornography was its feeble pretense of being a morality tale. After almost 2000 pages of sexual acrobatics—and detailed descriptions of aphrodisiacs, potions, pills, silver clasps, love rings and harnesses—the story ends with the main character, Hsi-men Ch'ing, literally screwing himself to death with the passionate Golden Lotus.

He arrives home too drunk to perform. Golden Lotus is disappointed.

... She played delicately with his weapon, but it was as limp as cotton wool and had not the slightest spirit. She tossed about on the bed, consumed with passionate desire, almost beside herself. She squeezed his prick, moved it up and down, put down her head and sucked. It was in vain. This made her wild beyond description.

She wakes him and gives him a strong aphrodisiac: three pills. "She was afraid that anything less would have no effect." And although he falls asleep again, his penis is erect, and so she mounts him.

... Her body seemed to melt away with delight ... she moved up and down about two hundred times. At first it was difficult because it was dry but soon the love juices flowed and moistened her cunt. Hsi-men Ch'ing let her do everything she wished, but he himself was perfectly inert. She could bear it no longer.... She twisted herself towards his penis which was completely inside her cunt, only his two balls staying outside. She stroked his penis with her hand, and it was wonderfully good. The juices flowed and in a short time she had used up five napkins. Even then Hsi-men kept on, although the tip of his prick was swollen and hotter than a live coal. It was so tight that he asked the woman to take off the ribbon, but his penis remained stiff and he told her to suck. She bent over and with her red lips moved the head of his prick to and fro, and sucked. Suddenly white semen poured out, like living silver, which she took in her mouth and could not swallow fast enough. At first it was just semen, soon it became blood which flowed without stopping. Hsi-men Ch'ing had fainted and his limbs were stiff outstretched.

Golden Lotus was frightened. She hastily gave him some red dates. Blood followed semen, and the blood was followed by freezing air. Golden Lotus was terrified. She threw her arms around him and cried, "Darling, how do you feel?"

Readers, there is a limit to our energy, but none to our desires. A man who sets no bounds to his passion cannot live more than a short time...

This book is a sort of phantom in China. Everyone knows of it; no one has seen it. I don't think there would be a counterrevolution if it were published. Banning it has made it notorious. It was only when Lady Chatterley was published freely that people realized what a silly and unreadable book it is. Anyway, Jin Ping Met was better railway reading than Red Star Heroes or We Fight Best When We March Our Hardest.

Outside Danyang, but in the middle of nowhere, a tractor rolled down a steep road and collided with the train. We came to a screeching halt ("Where are we?" "Is this a station?" "No, it's an accident—I think someone's killed") and there was a flurry of activity. No one dared to get off the train for fear of being left behind. A railway official plugged a portable phone into a trackside socket and described in detail what had happened. We all listened carefully.

"He says it's a broken tractor. He says we should call the police. He says no one is hurt. He says it was the farmer's fault. He says we can't go until the responsibility is decided."

The smashed tractor lay near the train, beside the tracks. A crowd gathered—all of them field-workers, rather sullenly watching the more prosperous travelers at the train windows. A railway crew appeared with walkie-talkies and notebooks, and a long discussion ensued over the nub of every Chinese problem: who is to blame? That was always another way of saying: Who is paying for this mistake? A man was hurt and yet after twenty minutes of argument the matter was determined to be too trivial to hold up this train—the fastest long-distance train in China, no stops except to take on fuel, from Peking to Shanghai. The peasants were guilty of allowing one of their tractors to ram the train—and as for the injured man, it was his own fault. We started on our way once again.

The fat young man, Deng, chased his thin wife into her berth and thrashed her with a pair of trousers. She sank her teeth into his ankle and bit him, and he howled. They were playing. The old woman snored in a soft, punctured way, and her son came in and gazed on her, didn't wake her, just smiled as she snored.

In order to get Deng to stop horsing around, I asked him what he was doing in China.

"I come here every six months," he said. "I do business."

He was a mechanical engineer. He had been educated in Toronto. He made rather an issue about his having come back from Canada. It was a sacrifice—"Lee Kwan Yew ruined the Singapore economy. There's eight percent unemployment. I could have stayed in Canada and made a lot of money."

I said I thought it was interesting that the little prosperous island of Singapore had started to fail, just as China was mightily rising—and the overseas Chinese were starting again to see China as a homeland.

'This is a useless place," Deng said, jerking his thumb out the train window. It was soon clear what he was pointing at. "China," he said. "It spends too much money on hi tech that it can't use. They have twenty-eight thousand computers that they can't use. Only ten percent are functioning. They buy things just to have them, so they can look good, and then they let them gather dust."

"You're saying that they have a kind of primitive pride that makes them irrational about spending," I said. "But it seems to me that the Chinese are very frugal—that they don't invest and spend enough. They are always sort of cheating themselves and muddling through and making a virtue of not complaining."

"Sure, they work hard—especially the farmers," Deng said. "And they can feed themselves. That's a good thing."

"So what's the problem?"

Deng glanced around and, seeing the old woman asleep, he said confidentially that the problem was in their heads.

Tapping his head he said, 'They're backward. They're peasants. They're ignorant. They go crazy. They're not like us."

"Who's 'us'?" I asked.

Deng laughed. Did he mean me? He didn't reply. He took his wife on his lap and tickled her until her shirttail came loose. Her stomach was the pale floury color of a steamed bun and her small breasts hardly dented her bra. I found this tormenting.

Pretty soon the old woman's son came in and woke her. We were arriving in Shanghai.

Shanghai is an old brown riverside city with the look of Brooklyn, and the Chinese—who are comforted by crowds—like it for its mobs and its street life. It has a reputation for city slickers and stylishness. Most of China's successful fashion designers work in Shanghai, and if you utter the words Yifu Sheng Luolang the Shanghainese will know you are speaking the name of Yves Saint-Laurent. When I arrived in the city, there was an editor of the French magazine Elle prowling the streets looking for material for an article on China to be called "The Fashion Revolution." According to the Chinese man who accompanied her—whom I later met—this French woman was mightily impressed by the dress sense of the Shanghai women. She stopped them and took their pictures and asked where they got their clothes. The majority said that they got them in the free market in the back streets or that they made the clothes themselves at home, basing them on pictures they saw in Western magazines. Even in the days of the Cultural Revolution, the women workers showed up at their factories with bright sweaters and frilly blouses under their blue baggy suits: it was customary to meet in the women's washroom and compare the hidden sweaters before they started work.

Because Shanghai is a cosmopolitan city and has seen more foreigners—both invaders and friendly visitors—than any other Chinese city, it is a polyglot place. It is at once the most politically dogmatic ("Oppose book worship" "Political work is the lifeblood of all economic work"—Mao) and the most bourgeois. When changes came to China they appeared first in Shanghai; and when there is conflict in China it is loudest and most violent in Shanghai. The sense of life is strong here, and even a city-hater like myself can detect Shanghai's spirit and appreciate its atmosphere. It is not crass like Canton, but it is abrasive—and in the hot months stifling, crowded, noisy and smelly.

It seemed to me noisy most of all, with the big-city all-night howl that is the sound track of New York (honks, sirens, garbage trucks, shouts, death rattles). Peking was rising and would soon be a city of tall buildings, but Shanghai had been built on mud and was growing sideways and spreading into the swamps of Zhejiang. All day the pile drivers hammered steel into this soft soil to fortify it, and one labored right outside my window with a cruel and dominating noise that determined the rhythm of my life. Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo! It affected the way I breathed and walked and ate: I moved my feet and lifted my spoon to Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo! It orchestrated my talking, too; it made me write in bursts, and when I brushed my teeth I discovered I did it to the pounding of this pile driver, the bang and its half-echo, Zhong-guo! It began at seven in the morning and was still hammering at eight at night, and in Shanghai it was inescapable, because nearly every neighborhood had its own anvil clang of Zhong-guo!

I walked the back streets in order to keep away from the traffic and the crowds. And I realized that it would be dishonest to complain too much about noise, the pile drivers and the frantic energy, because on my first visit to Shanghai I had felt it was dreary and moribund and demoralized. Why was it that they never knew when to stop? Even the back streets were crowded, with improvised stalls and houses that served as shop fronts and markets set up in the gutters, and people mending shoes and bicycles and doing carpentry on the sidewalk.

Towards the Bund—Shanghai's riverbank promenade—I saw a spire behind a wall and found a way to enter. It was Saint Joseph's Church, and the man I took to be the janitor, because he was so shabbily dressed in a ragged jacket and slippers, was the pastor, a Catholic priest. He was both pious and watchful, soft-spoken and alert—it is the demeanor of a Chinese Christian who has been put through more hoops than he cares to remember. The church had been wrecked during the Cultural Revolution, daubed with slogans and turned into a depot for machinery, and the churchyard had been a parking lot.

"Sacramentum," the priest said, pointing at the flickering candle, and he smiled with satisfaction: the consecrated Host was in the tabernacle.

I asked him why this was so. Was there a service today?

No, he said, and brought me to the back of the church where there was a coffin with a white paper cross stuck to it. He said there was a funeral tomorrow.

"I take it you're busy—lots of people coming to church."

"Oh, yes. And there are five churches in Shanghai. They are always full on Sundays."

He invited me to attend Mass, and out of politeness I said I might; but I knew I wouldn't. I had no business there: I was a heretic. And I was often annoyed by Westerners who, although they never went to church at home, would get the churchgoing bug in China, as an assertion of their difference or perhaps a reproach to the Chinese—as if religious freedom was the test of China's tolerance. Well, it was one test, of course, but it was exasperating to see the test administered by an American unbeliever. So I didn't go to church in China, but sometimes when I saw a bird in the grass I dropped to my knees and marveled it as it twitched there.

A few days later, on one of my walks I came to People's Park, and as it was a Sunday, I decided to verify something that I had heard in Peking. It was said that in Beihei Park there, and in People's Park here in Shanghai, there was an area reserved for anyone who wanted to speak English. This proved to be a fact. They called it the English Corner, half an acre of Chinese gabbing in English under the trees. Originally it started when a few old men who still spoke prerevolutionary English (having gone to mission schools) met on Sundays in the park to talk so that their English wouldn't get rusty. And then they found themselves the object of attention, and they were consulted in a respectful way by Chinese youths who wanted to learn English. What began as a casual one-hour interval in 1979 had become by 1986 a full-day Sunday institution. The Chinese can be very ritualistic in these matters: no one decreed the formation of the English Corner. It just happened, and it has evolved very formally. English is the unofficial language of the new China.

There were about two hundred Chinese in People's Park, and the way they stood and the sound of their English, made them seem like geese. Some were practicing or looking for friends, but many of them I discovered to be seeking advice about jobs that required English or applications to English-language universities. English speakers, in Shanghai as in no other Chinese city, comprised a sort of subculture.

I met Leroy, who was twenty-four, and who had learned to speak English in People's Park. He had been at it for five years.

"When I first came here in 1981 a man said to me, 'What is your name?' I couldn't tell him my name. I couldn't say anything in English. I was very frustrated. I decided to learn. I bought some books and I came along every Sunday."

He spoke English well, but a question still nagged: What about his name? How long had be been Leroy?

It was a simple explanation. As soon as his English improved, this young man, Li Ren, started to call himself Leroy. He said that English names had been regarded as bourgeois during the Mao era, but with the proliferation of English they had come back. There was usually an obvious choice. A girl called Zhenli might call herself Jenny, Zhulan would become Julian and Chen would probably decide upon John. Leroy had a friend Li Bing who chose the name Bingley and made himself sound like a Tory Member of Parliament. A student at Fudan University changed his name to Rambo, and over the next few months I met several Zeldas and a Ringo. I could not resist the conclusion that for these Chinese youths this was a way of distancing themselves from a culture that until recently had been intensely chauvinistic. It was also one in the eye for the Cultural Revolution if you went around calling yourself Bill and wearing a funny hat and sunglasses. Such people frequented the English Corner.

Leroy earned 80 yuan a month as an engineer in a textile factory—he was a college graduate—but his aim was to be hired as a trainee anything at the new Sheraton Hotel, the Hua Ting, on the outskirts of Shanghai. There were thirty-one hotels in Shanghai, but the Sheraton Hua Ting was regarded as the choicest.

"What are your chances of being hired?"

"I have already been offered a job. I was one of twenty people chosen from four hundred applicants. But you know in China we cannot just quit our job. We have to get permission to resign or to change jobs. I could earn two hundred and fifty yuan a month at the Sheraton, but my boss won't release me."

"That's terrible. Isn't there anything you can do about it?"

"Well, he says he has a daughter-in-law who needs a job. He knows my father is a foreman. If my father can find that woman a job, then my boss will release me. If not, I have to stay."

It was because of this problem that he had come today to the English Corner—to see some of his friends and ask their advice. So it was a sort of Agony Corner too.

He had the nervous attentiveness of a person who is self-taught and still learning. He said he was interested in Africa.

I wondered how up-to-date he was on Africa, so I asked him the new name of the Republic of Upper Volta.

"Burkina Faso," he said.

"What's the capital?"

"Ouagadougou."

"Very good!"

He said he had a lot of catching up to do, because he had spent so much time during the Cultural Revolution doing useless things. 1 asked him to be specific.

"School was suspended most of the time. But sometimes there were classes. We would go to school and criticize this one. Then we would criticize that one. We criticized Confucius. We criticized Laozi [Lao-tzu]. We criticized the teacher. If a teacher was bad we called them bourgeois and made them write confessions. Then we went home. It was a waste of time. But I didn't take it seriously."

I tried to picture a schoolroom full of red-hatted little beasts and brats menacing their teacher. It was very easy to imagine. And of course "criticize" in Chinese is a euphemism for many things. A women in the English Department at Fudan University walked with a cane as a result of criticism by Red Guards—she was kicked and beaten for advocating the reading of the bourgeois feudalist William Shakespeare. But times had changed. This same woman had just been a faculty adviser on a student production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Shanghai Shakespeare Festival in the spring of 1986.

The advantage for a Chinese person in learning English is that he can circumvent a great deal of official obstruction. Many books that are banned in Chinese are available in English. Leroy said that he had read 1984 and Animal Farm. I expressed surprise because Professor Dong had told me Orwell was neican, restricted. But Leroy didn't know this—didn't even know there were Chinese translations, because the translations were banned.

"What do you think of 1984?" I asked.

"It is like China today. Like certain parts. Like Tibet. And it is like Shanghai sometimes."

I said I thought the book was about fear and uncertainty, but when I pressed him for examples he became evasive, and not wishing to interrogate him I let the matter drop. He knew about the erotic classic Jin Ping Mei but did not know it was available to scholars or indeed that the book was circulated. For him, the book was part of the oral tradition, a lot of raunchy stories that people whispered to each other.

I asked him what changes in Shanghai had made the greatest impression on him. He said the difference in the way people dressed was the most obvious one, but that people's attitudes had also greatly altered—in thinking for themselves and in their expectations. He said I should see the free market and especially the sort of money-making work that people now did at home, such as tailoring, mending pots, fixing washtubs. And giving lessons: English lessons, music lessons, or dressmaking lessons. For 20 yuan you could be taught to sew by an established tailor—that was the going rate for about two months of twice-weekly lessons. There had never been any reason to learn to make clothes before because everyone wore the same factory-made clothes—the one blue cotton suit.

"But the biggest difference is that we can all get jobs now. In the past if you didn't have a job you stayed at home. The government gave you nothing, and you had to take money from your parents. Now everyone can find something to do. There is plenty of work."

I wished him well in pursuit of the job at the Sheraton, and I continued walking to test what he had said about people working at home. It seemed to be true that most people were toiling away at something or other to earn extra money—sewing, making pots, mending shoes, fixing umbrellas, selling homemade clothes. This sort of free-lancing was unheard of until about 1980. And the free market was also brisk, with small traders hawking vegetables, eggs, pet food, clocks, old watches, used eyeglasses, and birds they had snared.

A bloody revenge movie was showing in Shanghai. It was called Mister Legless and the hero of the title was shown on a poster in a wheelchair blowing the head off the man who had maimed him. Chinese were milling around and fighting for tickets, which they said were very scarce. All movies were popular and violent ones the most popular of all—Rambo had recently been shown to packed movie houses all over China.

An old man with a red armband was denouncing someone on the sidewalk, and when I inquired I discovered this man to be parr of the Anti-Spitting Brigade—there was a widespread campaign against spitting going on. I approved of that, but Chinese spitting is not half as bad as Chinese throat clearing: the hoick that can be heard for fifty yards and that sounds like the suction on a monsoon drain. After that, the spitting itself is rather an anticlimax.

Back at the English Corner in the park—which had a festive club-like atmosphere—I met Doctor Qin, who told me he was a psychiatrist.

I said I had been under the impression that there were no psychiatrists in China—certainly no universities had departments of psychology. And were there mental hospitals?

"Five years ago psychiatry was permitted—that was when I began studying," Doctor Qin said. "Before then there was no mental care. If someone had symptoms and was referred he was treated with acupuncture."

"Can you treat depression and schizophrenia with acupuncture?"

"No. And yet there were many cases. We see them all the time at the Shanghai Medical Center, where I practice. We have a famous medical system now, and there are eminent Chinese psychiatrists. They are old men who studied in Germany and the United States."

"How do you treat your patients?"

"We use drugs—medicine—and we talk to them. There are not many violent cases, but we have many depressives. That seems to be a Chinese problem. And about seventy percent of our patients are schizophrenics. Doctors in factories refer people to us, and we treat them."

I asked him whether he got many cases of paranoia.

"Not many. It is very rare in China. I only know of three such cases at the clinic."

"In the United States a paranoid person often thinks he's George Washington, and in other places paranoiacs says they're Hitler or Napoleon. Who does a Chinese paranoiac with a delusion of grandeur claim to be?"

'The emperor. Chairman Mao. Or God."

As I was talking to Doctor Qin a man approached me and said, "You speak German?"

"Ja wohl," I said, and babbled a little to please him. He spoke German very well and said that he had learned it as a messenger in the German consulate in Shanghai in the 1930s.

A little crowd had gathered around us. "Speak English!" someone said, and another bewildered Chinese said, "What language are you speaking—is that French?" Soon there were about twenty people listening to this man speaking German.

"If you want to stay here you must speak English," an officious Chinese man said, and took hold of the old man.

To calm matters, I asked the man his name. He said he was Mr. Zeng and he asked me to guess his age. I said, "About seventy."

"I was born in 1906," Mr. Zeng said. "I remember my father saying, 'The Emperor is on the throne.' He also told me about the old woman behind him"—the dowager empress—"that evil old woman."

"How do you manage to stay so young looking, Mr. Zeng?"

"It is easy. My father said, 'Never smoke opium' and I never did. At that time, everyone smoked it and they became very unhealthy. But I was strong—strong lungs." He puffed out his chest and then exhaled. "And I had another good reason. If I smoked opium my father would have beaten me on the backside."

I said, "You've lived through almost the whole of the twentieth century. What was the best period you've seen?"

"The best was just after Liberation. That was wonderful. Everyone was happy. There was peace."

"Is that the reason—because there was peace?"

"Not only that. I had two daughters. Before Liberation, girls were regarded as worthless—everyone wanted sons. But after Liberation I didn't have to worry, and my daughters didn't have to be ashamed anymore. Shall I tell you about my wife?"

"Please do," I said. Mr. Zeng had an impish and old-fashioned way of speaking, and the crowd of Chinese listeners leaned forward to catch what he said.

"About a year after I was born my parents decided that I was to marry a certain girl from the village. When I was twenty-three I finally married her. She was the most wonderful wife a man could have—the best cook. She made noodles. She made fish balls. She made the best dumplings. I can still taste those delicious dumplings." He licked his lips, and the watching Chinese laughed. He was aware that he was the center of attention, but he did not lose his poise. "She was my best friend! Shall I show you her picture?"

I said I would like to see it, and Mr. Zeng reached down and fossicked in his plastic bag—he had a bottle of Chinese rice wine and a pile of cookies; a comb; some pills; a blackened banana and a smudged newspaper. The crowd of onlookers pushed their heads forward as he searched for the picture.

There were loud gasps and hisses of disgust as Mr. Zeng brought out the picture. He flourished it—it was a corpse in a coffin, a small, pale head among some ruffles of satin; some wilted flowers; an incense burner; the withered face of the dead woman.

"She was a good wife," Mr. Zeng said proudly, and he smiled at the picture, and when he showed it around, the Chinese made faces and began to leave.

This business about girls being equal was disputed by other people I met in Shanghai, and it is obvious that Chinese society is dominated by males. With the one-child policy—and severe penalties for people who have more than one—the preference is for a boy. There was no shortage of whisperers who told of the large number of girl infants who were drowned like unwanted kittens, or strangled at birth, and infanticide was said to be very common. But these atrocities are difficult to substantiate. It is much more likely that determining the sex of the fetus before birth has led to a dramatic rise in abortions—1 was unsuccessful in getting abortion statistics, but the figures are very high. Any woman can get an abortion at any time: it is regarded as a patriotic duty. I would bet that more female fetuses are aborted than male ones, and when I put this supposition to Chinese in Shanghai they said it was likely.

Sang Ye, the coauthor of Chinese Lives, had told me in Peking that when I got to Shanghai I must definitely visit the industrial suburb of Min Hong, about fifteen miles outside the city.

"It will be a revelation to you as a traveler," he said. "In Min Hong the peasants from very rural areas have been turned into factory workers. They are people who are used to living in huts, and now they live in high-rise apartments. The problem is with their habits. They are not used to flushing toilets. They keep their chickens and ducks in their rooms with them."

He painted a picture of Dogpatch in a tower block: stinking toilets, livestock in the corridors, pitchforks propped against the walls, pigs wandering up and down the stairs.

"And they have not abandoned other peasant customs," he said. "Every night before dinner it is usual for a villager to stroll around to see what his relatives are going to eat. But this is hard to do in an apartment house. That's why the elevator operator goes out of his mind every day, as people get into the elevator and go from floor to floor checking on their relatives."

He finished by saying, "Min Hong is an interesting mess, and no tourist ever goes there."

That was all I needed to encourage me: I could already see the pigs and chickens, and those unspeakable toilets. I went out to Min Hong one day. I was disappointed by the apartment houses. None of them was higher than six stories, and as it is a law in China that only apartment houses higher than six stories need elevators, the elevator story was erroneous. And it was a big nondescript township—about 30,000 people: a power plant, factories, shops, a little market. Where were the pigs and ducks?

I prowled around the fairly ordinary lanes behind the houses and saw nothing remarkable. There were cyclists and pedestrians, people going to and from their jobs, to and from school, shoppers, old men gasping on stairs, people thinking: What is this foreigner looking at?

A man I met said that there was a joint venture in progress, making toys—"Matchbox cars." Not very interesting. A cosmetics factory. I tried not to yawn. Pepsi-Cola was thinking of opening a bottling plant.

I said, "I've heard the apartments are unusual."

He seemed bewildered but he said that if I wanted to look at one I could look at his.

That was typical Chinese hospitality. Very early in my trip I found they were unfailingly friendly and unsuspicious. This was particularly so in outlying areas: they were eager to talk, proud of their families, curious to know my reaction to the changes in China, and they were fairly open. And they hadn't the slightest idea who I was.

"Go right in," the man said.

It was a two-room flat, smelling of vegetables. There was also a big hallway, a bathroom and a kitchen. Five adults and two children lived here. These people, originally from up the line at Wuxi, had come here in 1959 when Min Hong was established.

They worked locally. All five adults—two men, three women—had jobs. There were two beds in each room, and dressers and chairs, and a table, a television. The flat was very neat; and there were potted plants on the windowsills. There were no books.

When I remarked on the television set, they turned it on and got a cowboy movie—Gregory Peck and Olivia de Havilland, speaking Chinese. We watched it for a while, and they gave me tea and we talked about Min Hong.

"I was told that some people here in Min Hong keep chickens and ducks."

"No, we have no chickens or ducks."

One of the women said, "But you ride horses in America."

"Just for fun," I said.

They didn't quite believe this. They had the idea that there were cowboys all over America, and I secretly felt that they had pigs and ducks in Min Hong.

"So you don't get on your horse."

That was a joke. The expression ma shang ("get on your horse") meant "quickly" or "hurry."

"I have to get on my horse now," I said.

So I left Min Hong. It was dull but it was decent: Sang Ye had been wrong. But why was squalor regarded as more interesting than order?

There was a stylish, youthful-looking man named Wang, whom I met one day in Shanghai. It turned out that we were both born in the same year, the Year of the Snake (but Wang used the Chinese euphemism for snake—"little dragon"). He was so friendly and full of stories that I saw him often, usually for lunch at the Jinjiang Hotel. He was a sensitive soul, but had a sense of irony, too, and said he had never been happier than he was walking the streets of San Francisco on his one trip to America—he hinted that he was eager to immigrate to the United States, but he never became a bore on the subject and did not ask me for help. He was unusual, even in Shanghai, for his clothes—a canary-yellow French jacket and pale blue slacks, a gold watch, a chain around his neck, and expensive sunglasses.

"1 like bright clothes," he said.

"Could you wear them during the Cultural Revolution."

He laughed and said, "What a mess that was!"

"Were you criticized?"

"I was under arrest. That's when I started smoking. I discovered that if you smoked it gave you time to think. They had me in a room—the Red Guards. They said, 'You called Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, a crazy lady.' She was a crazy lady! But I just lit a cigarette and puffed on it so that I could think of something to say."

"What did you say?"

"The wrong thing! They made me write essays. Self-criticism!"

"Describe the essays."

"They gave me subjects. 'Why I Like Charles Dickens,' 'Why I Like Shakespeare.'"

"I thought you were supposed to say why you didn't like them."

"They wouldn't believe that," he said. 'They called me a reactionary. Therefore, I had to say why I liked them. It was awful. Six pages every night, after work unit, and then they said. 'This is dog shit—write six more pages.'"

"What work did you do?"

"Played the violin in the Red Orchestra. Always the same tunes. The East Is Red,' 'Long Live the Thoughts of Mao,' 'Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman'—all that stuff. They made me play in the rain. I said, 'I can't—the violin will fall apart.' They don't know that a violin is glued together. 1 played in the rain. It fell apart. They gave me another one and ordered me to play under the trees during the Four Pest Campaign—to keep sparrows from landing in the branches."

The other three pests were mosquitoes, flies and rats.

"That's absurd," I said.

"We painted Huai Hai Lu—that's more absurd," Wang said.

"How can you paint a street?" I asked—the street he named was one of the main thoroughfares of Shanghai.

"We painted it red, out of respect for Chairman Mao," Wang said. "Isn't that stupid?"

"How much of the street did you paint?"

'Three and a half miles," Wang said, and laughed, remembering something else. "But there were stupider things. When we went to the work unit we always did the qing an (salute) to Mao's portrait on the gateway. We'd hold up the Red Book, say, 'Long Live Chairman Mao' and salute him. Same thing when we went home. People would make things in Mao's honor, like a knitted Mao emblem, or a red star in needlepoint, and put it in the special Respect Room at the unit—it was painted red. That was for Mao. If they wanted to prove they were very loyal they would wear the Mao badge by pinning it to their skin."

'That must have impressed the Red Guards," I said.

"It wasn't just the Red Guards—everyone blames them, but everyone was in it. That's why people are so embarrassed at the moment, because they realize they were just as stupid about Chairman Mao as everyone else. I know a banker who was given the job of fly catcher. He had to kill flies and save their little bodies in a matchbox. Every afternoon someone would come and count the dead flies and say, 'one hundred and seventeen—not good enough. You must have one hundred and twenty-five tomorrow.' And more the day after, you see? The government said there was going to be a war. 'The enemy is coming—be prepared.'"

"Which enemy?"

'The imperialists—Russia, India, the United States. It didn't matter which one. They were going to kill us," Wang said, and he rolled his eyes. "So we had to make bricks for the war effort. Ninety bricks a month for each person. But my parents were old, so I had to make their bricks. I used to come home from the unit, write my essay 'Why I Like Western Music,' and make bricks—1 had to deliver two hundred and seventy a month. And they were always asking me about my hole."

"Your hole?"

"The shen wa dong—Dig Deep Holes edict. That was for the war, too. Everyone had to have a hole, in case of war. Every so often the Red Guards would knock on your door and say, 'Where is your hole?'"

He said there were bomb shelters all over Shanghai that had been built on Mao's orders ("for the coming war"), and of course they had never been used. I asked him to show me one. We found this sub-terreanean vault—it was just like a derelict subway station—at 1157 Nanjing Road, and it had been turned into an ice-cream parlor. The fascinating thing to me was that it was now obviously a place where young men went to kiss their girlfriends. It was full of Chinese youths locked in the half nelson they regard as an amorous embrace. The irony was not merely that these kids were making out and feeling each other up in a place that had been built by frantic and paranoid Red Guards in the 1960s, but also that it was now called the Dong Chang Coffee Shop and owned and operated by the government.

I was talking to Wang one day about my trip through the Soviet Union when I mentioned how the scarcity of consumer goods there meant the Russians were always pestering foreigners for blue jeans, T-shirts, track shoes and so forth.

'That never happens in China," I said.

"No," Wang said. "But that reminds me. About three years ago there was a Russian ballet dancer at a hotel in Shanghai. I went to see the ballet—fabulous! And this dancer was very handsome. I recognized him, and he smiled at me. Then he pointed to my track shoes and pointed to himself. He wanted them, I understood that. They were expensive shoes—Nike, cost me fifty yuan. But I don't care much about money. We measured feet, side by side. Exact fit. I don't speak a word of Russian, but I could tell he really wanted those shoes."

"Did you sell them to him?"

"I gave them to him," Wang said, and frowned at the triviality of it. "I felt sorry for someone who just wanted a pair of shoes. It seemed sad to me that he couldn't get them in his own country. I took them off and walked to my office barefoot! He was really happy! I thought, He'll go back to Russia. He'll always remember this. He'll say, 'Once I was in China. I met a Chinese man and asked him for his shoes, and he gave them to me!'"

A moment later he said, "You can get anything you want in China. Food, clothes, shoes, bicycles, motorbikes, TVs, radios, antiques. If you want girls, you can find girls." And then in a wide-eyed way. "Or boys—if you want boys."

"Or fashion shows."

"They have fashion shows on television almost every week," Wang said. "Shanghai is famous for them."

I asked him what the old people made of these developments—hookers and high fashion in a country where just a few years ago foreign decadence was condemned and everyone wore baggy blue suits.

'The old people love life in China now," Wang said. "They are really excited by it. Very few people object. They had felt very repressed before."

A few days later I had an occasion to test that reaction. I was invited to the house of a former civil servant, recently retired—the Chinese use the French term cadre to describe these officials. This man, Ning Bailuo, was sixty-seven and a passionate Maoist. He'd had no formal education; he had risen through the ranks of the New Fourth Army, from 1940 to 1949, mainly organizing political programs and collecting food and money for the troops, first in their fight against the Japanese and then against the forces of Chiang Kai-shek. One of his earliest memories was of missing the ferry late one night to cross the Huangpu in Shanghai and a japanese soldier beating him with a stick for being out too late. He soon joined an anti-Japanese organization and later the army.

"Don't your experiences make you hate the Japanese?"

"No," he said, "it is only the generals we hate."

Chinese blaming is always reserved for higher-ups: underlings are always innocent. That was how they had been able to cope with the monstrous guilt in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. The entire horror show, the whole ten years of it, in every city and town in China, from Mongolia to Tibet, had been the work of four skinny demons: the Gang of Four. No Red Guard was ever held personally responsible for any act of terror—there were no trials, and I never heard any recrimination other than loud clucking.

Comrade Ning—as I thought of him—was thin and bony, with a Bogart face and long creases on his cheeks, and the same Bogart slurring of speech as his tongue snagged against his teeth. It was easy to see that he was a hard-liner, the tough and puritanical official who had known the privations of the 1930s, and all the phases that had led to this present boom. He still wore blue. He seemed to me the perfect person to ask about developments.

Although he was personally rather ascetic looking, his apartment was very large by Chinese standards—four spacious rooms, as well as a kitchen and a foyer. In accordance with Chinese practice there were beds in every room. Comrade Ning shared this apartment with his wife, his unmarried daughter, his son, his son's wife and two grandchildren.

His wife gave me a bowl of sweet lumps made of puffed rice. "You'll like them. They're Mongolian."

They tasted exactly like the concoction you see described on the back of cereal boxes in the States: Tastee 'n' Fun-licious Dessert Idea That Will Have Those Kids Asking for More!!! They were sticky and crunchy.

Picking fragments out of my teeth, I said that if he had been in the New Fourth Army he must have come across the song, "Baking the Cakes."

"My wife and I can sing that song," Comrade Ning said.

I told them I had met the man who had composed it—Zhang Mei, in Peking—and how we had talked about the patriotic songs in which the Japanese had been referred to as ghosts, rapists, robbers, devils and so forth.

"I have nothing personal against the Japanese," Comrade Ning said, "and I have no objection to their doing business in China. But there is'a militaristic element in Japanese society—that is something we have to be very careful of. Apart from that, the Chinese and Japanese have a great deal in common."

I said that when I had been in China six years before it had seemed very different, but that there had been a sort of equality in poverty. I said, "Doesn't it worry you that some people are getting rich—and a few people very rich?"

"You know about the watermelon tycoon?"

Wang had told me the story. A penniless peasant who knew the Chinese fondness for eating watermelon seeds started a small business that grew and grew. He hired workers, he bought land, he made millions; and then he bullied his workers, the government taxed him heavily, and recently he had renounced all his millions and returned to his peasant life. A moral fable in the form of a play was written about him and staged with government approval. It was called The March of a Foolish Man.

"He was a fool," Comrade Ning said. "But there is nothing wrong with being rich. Our aim is for everyone to be rich."

"But surely wealth will produce a privileged class that will undermine the socialist state."

"In China, privilege is not bought with money," Comrade Ning said. "Power comes from the political sphere, not the financial sphere."

"What about cases of corruption—back-handers?" I said. The Chinese term is houmen—"backdoor" business.

"Of course, there are such cases. The danger is when people have an excessive regard for money." Up went Comrade Ning's skinny finger. "Man should manipulate money—money should not manipulate man."

We talked about corruption. There was a current example: a Chinese businessman who had been taking bribes and embezzling from the government was found guilty in a Shanghai court. His woman accomplice was given a long sentence, but he was executed—the Chinese way: a bullet in the back of the neck.

"He had Hong Kong connections," Comrade Ning said, as if this sordid fact explained everything.

"Do you think the death penalty might be regarded as a little severe in a case of stealing?"

Comrade Ning laughed at me for this. His teeth were yellow, and so were his long fingernails. "There is a certain amount of money that makes this case serious. If anyone steals this amount he has to be killed."

"So you believe in the death penalty?"

"It is a Chinese custom," Comrade Ning said. "If you kill someone you pay with your life. That is simple. And his was the same sort of serious crime."

That leap in logic was characteristic of Chinese thinking, and lao-dong gaizao (Rehabilitation Through Labor) had declined in popularity. I specifically wanted to know what Comrade Ning thought about capital punishment since, along with Deng's reforms, in the three years between 1983 and 1986, 10,000 people were executed in China—and not only murderers, but also rapists, arsonists, swindlers and thieves. On August 30, 1983, there was a public execution in Peking of 30 convicted criminals. It was held in a sports stadium, which held a cheering crowd of 60,000 people. Soon after, the list of capital criminals was widened to include pimps, spies, armed robbers, embezzlers and organizers of secret societies. It is easy to calculate the number of Chinese who receive the final solution (their hands are tied, they are forced to kneel before witnesses, and they are dispatched with one bullet to the occiput, where the neck joins the skull). Their photographs are always displayed in whatever town they lived in, often at the railway station or outside the post office. In the rogues' gallery tacked to these bulletin boards, a red mark appears beside the criminals who have been executed.

I said, "Personally I don't believe in the death penalty."

"Why not?" Comrade Ning asked.

"Because it's savage and it doesn't work."

"What would you have done with those terrorists that bombed the dance hall in Berlin a few weeks ago?"

"Not condemned them to death, if that's what you mean," I said. "Anyway, don't you make a distinction between political violence and criminal violence? Let's suppose these men, whoever they are, were Palestinians. That's an army of liberation, isn't it?"

"We would regard what they did in Berlin as terrorism," Comrade Ning said. "That is a crime. Armed struggle," he went on, using the Maoist term for people's war, "is another matter. That is legitimate."

He could not be budged from wishing to execute every pimp and hooligan, along with every strangler and arsonist. He maintained that such drastic action kept the crime rate down. It was Maoism at its most anti-Confucian. Confucius abhorred capital punishment and had always been regarded by Maoists as a dangerous softie for his humane views (as in Analects XII, 19). But even a relatively open-minded man like Deng Xiaoping has revealed himself to be an energetic hangman, clinging to the Chinese belief in the efficacy of "killing a chicken to scare the monkeys." In a pep talk to the five-man standing committee of the politburo (and reprinted in a book of his talks and speeches entitled Fundamental Issues in Present-Day China), Deng said, "As a matter of fact, execution is the one indispensable means of education."

Returning to the subject of money, Comrade Ning said that he did not think there were financial problems in this new go-ahead money-making economy. The government would control the work force, protect the workers, tax the people getting rich and in general supervise all businesses. He said it seemed to him much more serious that prices were rising, in some cases to double-digit inflation—he used that English term in his Chinese sentence. But salaries were also rising. His wife knew a draftswoman in her native town of Wuxi who earned 300 yuan a month. That was regarded as a high salary, but most of it came from bonuses, because she was productive.

"So, Comrade Ning, you're an optimist."

"Of course!"

"No dangerous social tendencies that you can see?"

"Yes, there are some. But we are trying to deal with them. The government has instituted a program called 'Spiritual Civilization.' Look at the posters and slogans. You'll see a big-character poster near Suzhou Creek..."

The Spiritual Civilization program was a direct response to various types of antisocial behavior that emerged after the relaxation of restrictions—the open door policy. It was started in 1985, and as Chinese dogma is always expressed in clusters, it was made up of The Five Talks and The Four Beauties.

The Five Talks were concerned with communication. They were: Politeness, Civil Behavior, Morality, Attention to Social Relations and Attention to the Hygiene of One's Surroundings. This was all to combat a slob-factor that had become very obnoxious; and the slobs who weren't changed by The Five Talks might be altered by considering The Four Beauties. These were Beautiful Language, Beautiful Behavior, Beautiful Heart and Beautiful Environment.

As a program and prescription it seemed rather twee, but it was a great deal better than the brutishness that was called for in Smashing The Four Olds (burning churches, turning monasteries into shoe factories, and so forth), or observing The Eight Antis—persecuting intellectuals, burning books, and making teachers wear dunce caps and having them recite "I am a cow demon" all day in front of a mocking classroom.

It was Comrade Ning who explained the Spiritual Civilization program to me. I liked him, and I was impressed by him. He knew what the world news was and he was hospitable to a total stranger. His tolerance was of course a willing suspension of disbelief—at heart he clung to Mao's Thoughts—but he was without greed or envy, and he didn't have the slightest trace of vanity. He wasn't a bully either, and I respected him for arguing with me.

But afterwards, I heard that his wife had been rather cross with him. She had been listening the whole time.

She said to him, "If we have any criticisms or doubts about the current policies we should keep them to ourselves and not talk to foreigners about them."

There is a Chinese conundrum. If a place has a reputation for being beautiful, the Chinese flock to it, and its beauty is disfigured by the crowd. If a train is very fast, like the Shanghai Express from Peking, everyone tries to take it, and it is impossible to get a seat. The same is true for restaurants: the good ones are jammed. And hotels. Reservations are unthinkable, and the worst of it is that you are sometimes laughed at for ever believing that you had a chance: the Chinese can be extremely rude in turning you away—the Chinese elbow is very sharp.

This conundrum is constant in Shanghai. For example, Shanghai is known to be a city of sidewalks—wonderful for pedestrians, an excellent city for perambulating. Therefore, everyone walks; and the mobs are impenetrable.

None the less, if you push—as the Chinese do—it is possible to walk around Shanghai. Long ago, the Chinese overcame the natural human horror of being touched. The crowd reduces your progress to a shuffle, but it seemed to me that anything was preferable to a Shanghai bus.

Following Comrade Ning's suggestion I walked to Suzhou Creek and looked at the Spiritual Civilization sign—Cling to The Four Beauties. Then I walked farther, to the docks, a tangled, greasy, busy place of warehouses and the storerooms that the Chinese call godowns, and little indoor factories of tinsmiths and lock-makers and box-assemblers and rope-twisters. I came to the Shanghai Seamen's Club, a venerable building with teak-wood paneling and art-deco lamps and fluted cornices and a serviceable billiard room. It was a big old building and covered with soot, but it was attractive in a gloomy and indestructible way.

Inside, among the souvenirs and seamen's necessities like gloves and twine and sunglasses and slippers, there was political crap and propaganda about Chinese soldiers fighting in Vietnam, but masked as "Frontier Guards in South China." I noted down the captions. Comrade Hu Yaohang was wielding his writing brush [photo of Politburo member posing with big writing brush] to write a few words calling on the officers and fighters of the frontier guards "to be able to wield both the pen and the gun to make our country and people rich"-, and under a different photograph, showing five soldiers squinting at some bushes, All officers and fighters of the "Heroic Hard Sixth Company" rendering battle achievement in defending Laoshan battle.

I had a beer and kept walking and thought: These people were giving us a hard time over Vietnam? They were still fighting the Vietnamese—and probably getting their asses kicked, because nothing is more indicative of a war going badly than valiant propaganda like this. If a country shouted that it would fight to the last drop of blood that usually meant that it was ready to surrender; and in China, as a general rule, you could regard nothing as true until it had been denied. Anything officially denied was probably a fact.

I continued walking, across the metal bridge in front of what had once been Broadway Mansions, and over the creek to Huangpu Park, on the Bund, where the rest of the 1920s buildings still stood. I fantasized that there were certain cities in the world that could only succeed by becoming gross parodies of what they were—or of what people expected them to be (like a tall person who has no choice but to learn basketball), and that Shanghai was one of them.

The sign on the gate of the park gave a historical note: This park was guarded by police of the International Settlement and Chinese wen refused admittance. To add insult to injury the imperialists in 1885 put up at the gate a board with the words "No Admittance to Dogs and Chinese." This aroused among Chinese people popular indignation and disgust which finally compelled the imperialists to remove the board.

In another place the popularity of the park was remarked on: Admissions total over 5 million a year. On holidays it sometimes has a sight-seer density of 3 persons to the square meter. In Chinese terms this crowd-praise was wonderful: in the West, people are stifled by a crowd, but in China they feel propped up, and only the worthiest attractions have millions of visitors.

But that was not for me. I walked on and took shelter in a cool building beyond the Bund that had stained-glass windows—not a church, but a bank or counting house, because the windows showing Burne-Jones-like maidens were labeled Truth and Wisdom and Prudence. The foyer had a dome and a vaulted ceiling and onyx pillars, and a black marble floor. I thought: This is just the sort of place that would have had the shit kicked out of it during the Cultural Revolution.

To test my suspicion I asked a man—Mr. Lan Hongquan—who worked there. It was now a government office.

I said, "Isn't it amazing that this place survived the Cultural Revolution."

"It almost didn't," Mr. Lan said. "In 1967, the Red Guards burst in and splashed paint everywhere. They completely covered the windows and these marble walls with paint—it was black paint. You couldn't see anything of these decorations. The job was so big and expensive that it took ten years to clean up. It was only finished last year."

Quite a way up that street I came to the Shanghai Municipal Foreign Affairs Office, where I had an appointment with the chief of the Propaganda Division—such was his title—Mr. Wang Hou-kang, and his assistant, Miss Zhong.

"A very nice house," I said, in the palm court of this mansion.

"It belonged to a former capitalist."

He then told me that there were 164 joint ventures with 20 countries. I expressed surprise, but didn't ask any more questions, because I had been told by wiser minds that most of these joint ventures were still in the discussion stage; and it would have been embarrassing to Mr. Wang if I had asked him how many had borne fruit—the number of joint ventures in operation was very small.

Because I had been bucking the traffic all day, I said, "Do you think that Chinese people will ever own their own cars?"

"Very few will. And not for pleasure but business. What we want to do is make cars and sell them to other countries. The export market—that's what interests us."

I asked him what changes had struck him since Deng Xiaoping's reforms had taken effect.

"Magazines are more colorful—more open. More picturesque, I can say. And there is the writing."

"About politics?"

"No, about sex. Before, people never wrote about sex, and now they do."

Miss Zhong said, "Sometimes it is very embarrassing."

"People dare to express themselves through stories," Mr. Wang said. 'That is new. And people can engage in discussions without being labeled 'rightist' or 'counterrevolutionary' or 'bourgeois' if they said certain things."

"So no one calls anyone a paper tiger anymore?"

'There are still paper tigers. Paper tiger is more a philosophical concept," Mr. Wang said.

We talked about money after that. He said, 'Things have certainly changed. Take me for example. I earned ninety-two yuan a month in 1954 and did not get a salary increase until 1979."

"But did prices rise in the years when your salary didn't change?"

He laughed. I had not said anything funny. But there are many Chinese laughs. His was the one that meant: You are asking too many questions.

The subject of clothes was not contentious.

Mr. Wang said, "After Liberation, people cherished simple clothing. They identified the blue suits and the blue cap with revolution. People wore them and felt like revolutionaries. They were sturdy clothes and they were cheap—people felt thrifty wearing them. They made people equal."

"Why have they stopped wearing them?"

"By and by, some people wanted to wear more colorful clothes. But they were afraid. There was an idea prevailing that if people wore colorful clothes they would be part of the bourgeoisie." He laughed. His laugh meant: I don't believe that myself. "They remembered the Red Guards who used to go out with scissors. They cut your cuffs if they were too wide or too narrow. They cut your hair if it was too long."

"Do you think that will come again?"

And I saw the marching Red Guards, with their long scissors and their fiendish grins, marching down Nanjing Road, on the lookout for flapping cuffs or flowing locks. They raised their long scissors and went, Snip-snip! Snip-snip! I realized that a passionate and crazed teenager with a pair of scissors is much scarier than a soldier with a rifle.

Mr. Wang said, "I think the answer is definitely no."

"You seem pretty sure," I said.

"Yes, because the Ten Years' Turmoil"—that was the current euphemism—"went so far. It was so big. So terrible. If it had been a small thing it might return. But it involved everyone. We all remember. And I can tell you that no one wants it back."

The wisest thing that anyone can say is "I don't know," but no one says it much in China, least of all the foreigners. The exception to this in Shanghai was Stan Brooks, the American consul general. He had a steady gaze and was not given to predictions or generalizations. He was from Wyoming and had been in China off and on since the 1970s, when Mao's intimidating bulk still influenced all decisions and turned most of his colleagues into lackeys.

"I called them 'The Whateverists,'" Mr. Brooks said, basing it on the Chinese term fanshi (whatever). "Their view was that whatever Mao said about this or that was correct. Some members of the politburo have paid the price for being Whateverists."

I said that I had been amazed by changes in China—not just superficial changes, such as clothes and traffic, but more substantial ones—the way people talked about politics and money and their future, and the way they traveled. They had only been allowed to travel for the past five years, and now they went everywhere—in fact, a lot of them wanted to travel outside China and never come back.

"We have visa problems with some of those people," Mr. Brooks said. "They go to the States to study and they get jobs and stay on. Thousands will never come back to China."

"You must have guessed that China would change," I said, "but did you imagine that it would look like this?"

"Never," he said. "I had no idea. We could see that a new phase was opening up, but we weren't expecting this."

"Weren't there political scientists writing scenarios or projections?"

"Not that I know of. If they were, they certainly didn't foresee this. It took everyone by surprise."

And Mr. Brooks's view—also very sensible—was that since this hadn't been foreseen it was impossible to know what would follow it.

"We are witnessing China in the middle of turbulent passage," he said. "No one can put his hand on his heart and say what is going to happen next. We just have to watch closely and wish them well."

But over dinner—and now there were twelve of us at the consulate dining table—the subject of Chinese students staying on in America came up.

"Excuse me," said a thin elderly man, clearing his throat. This was Professor Phan, formerly a member of the History Department at Fudan University in Shanghai.

There was an immediate silence, because these were the first words the professor had spoken; and the suddenness of his soft voice made everyone self-conscious.

"My children saw the Red Guards humiliate me," he said, in a gentle and reasonable way. "Can you blame them for choosing to stay in Minnesota?"

And then Professor Phan was the only one eating, while the rest of us gaped. He had speared a small cluster of Chinese broccoli—he was unaware that he had become the center of attention. He seemed to be talking to the woman on his left.

"I was in prison for six years, from 1966 to 1972," he said, and smiled. "But I tell my friends, 'I was not really in prison for six years. I was in for three years—because every night when it was dark and I slept, I dreamed of my boyhood, my friends, the summer weather, and my household, the flowers and birds, the books I had read, and all the pleasures I had known. So it was only when I woke up that I was back in prison.' That was how I survived."

There was another silence while he ate what was on his fork; and then he saw that everyone was listening.

He said that he believed that Nixon's visit to China had something to do with his release, because some of the people accompanying Nixon in 1972 showed an interest in political prisoners and had asked to visit prisons.

"Usually we got one thin slice of meat a week. If the wind was strong it blew away. But just before President Nixon's visit we started to get three pieces. The prison guards were afraid that he might visit and ask how we were being treated."

Professor Phan had studied at Queen's College, Cambridge, and had lived in England from 1930 to 1939. There was a shyness in the way he spoke that made his intelligence seem even more powerful, and he had a slight giggle that he uttered just before he said something devastating. He seemed about seventy-five, and I had the feeling that though prison had aged him it had also in a way strengthened him. I should say this was a frequent impression I had in China, of former political prisoners. Their hardships and isolation, and even the abuse they suffered never seemed to have weakend them. On the contrary, they were tougher as a result, and contemptuous of their captors, and not only strong in their convictions but also outspoken.

In that respect, Professor Phan was typical, but not less impressive for that. He giggled softly and said, "Americans have no cause to fear the Chinese—none whatsoever. The Chinese are interested in only two things in the world—power and money. America has more power and money than anyone else. That is why the Chinese will always need the friendship of America."

It was clear that he was speaking with the ultimate cynicism, a bleak despair. He giggled again and called Mao "the Old Man," and he repeated something that Mr. Brooks had said to me, about Mao being like a feudal emperor.

"In prison we had to read the Old Man's speeches," Professor Phan said, and smiled sweetly. "Four volumes. Sometimes they made us recite the speeches, and if you got a word wrong the guards would become very angry and you'd have to start all over again. Apart from that we did nothing. We sat on the stone floor all day, like animals. I longed to go to bed and sleep and dream of the past."

Someone said, "What was your crime, Professor?"

"My crime? Oh, my crime was listening to the radio—American and English-language broadcasts."

After dinner I accompanied him home—he did not live far away, and it was a pleasant summer night.

'This humiliation you spoke of—"

I didn't quite know how to begin; but he knew what I was asking.

He said, "One night, in September 1966, forty Red Guards showed up at my house. Forty of them. They came inside—they burst in, and there were both men and women. They put me on trial, so to speak. We had 'struggle sessions.' They criticized me—you know the expression? They stayed in my house, all of them, for forty-one days, and all this time they were haranguing me and interrogating me. In the end they found me guilty of being a bourgeois reactionary. That was the crime. I was sent to prison."

"What was the sentence—the length, I mean?"

"Any length. I had no idea when I would be released. That was the worst of it."

"Forty Red Guards—that's very scary. And they were at your house for almost six weeks! Did you know any of them?"

"Oh, yes. Some of them were my students." He gave the same gentle giggle and said, "They are still around," and disappeared into his house.

On my walks in Shanghai, I often went past the Chinese Acrobatic Theater, a domed building near the center of the city. And I became curious and attended a performance; and after I saw it—not only the tumblers and clowns and contortionists, but the man who balanced a dinner service for twelve on a chopstick that he held in his mouth—I wanted to know more.

Mr. Liu Maoyou at the Shanghai Bureau of Culture was in charge of the acrobats. He had started out as an assistant at the Shanghai Library, but even at the best of times things are quiet at the city library, since it is next to impossible—for bureaucratic reasons—for anyone to borrow a book. The librarian is little more than a custodian of the stacks. So Mr. Liu jumped at the chance of a transfer and joined the Bureau of Culture, and he accompanied the Chinese acrobats on their first tour of the United States in 1980.

"We call it a theater because the performance has an artistic and dramatic element," Mr. Liu said. "It has three aspects—acrobats, magic and a circus."

I asked him how it started.

"Before Liberation all the acrobats were family members. They were travelers and performers. They performed on the street or in any open space. But we thought of bringing them together and training them properly. Of course, the Chinese had been acrobats for thousands of years. They reached their height in the Tang Dynasty and were allowed to perform freely."

Mr. Liu said this with such enthusiasm I asked him how he felt about the Tang Dynasty.

"It was the best period in China," he said. "The freest time—all the arts flourished during the Tang era."

So much for the Shanghai Bureau of Culture, but he was still talking.

"Before Liberation the acrobats were doing actions without art form," he said. "But they have to use mind as well as body. That's why we started the training center. We don't want these acrobats to be mind-empty, so after their morning practice they study math, history, language and literature."

He said that in 1986, 30 candidates were chosen from 3000 applicants. They were all young—between ten and fourteen years old—but Mr. Liu said the bureau was not looking for skill but rather for potential.

"We also have a circus," he said. "Also a school for animal training."

This interested me greatly, since I have a loathing for everything associated with performing animals. I have never seen a lion tamer who did not deserve to be mauled; and when I see a little mutt, wearing a skirt and a frilly bonnet, and skittering through a hoop, I am thrilled by a desire for its tormentor (in the glittering pants suit) to contract rabies.

'Tell me about your animal training, Mr. Liu."

"Before Liberation the only training we did was with monkeys. Now we have performing cats—"

"Household cats? Pussycats?"

"Yes. They do tricks."

It is a belief of many Chinese I met that animals such as cats and dogs do not feel pain. They are on earth to be used—trained, put to work, killed and eaten. When you see the dumb, laborious lives that Chinese peasants live it is perhaps not so surprising that they torture animals.

"Also pigs and chickens," Mr. Liu said.

"Performing chickens?"

"Not chickens but cocks."

"What do the cocks do?"

"They stand on one leg—handstanding. And some other funny things."

God only knows how they got these pea-brained roosters to do these funny things, but I had the feeling they wired them up and zapped them until they got the point.

"What about the pigs?" I asked.

'The pigs do not perform very often, but they can walk on two legs—"

And when he said that, I realized what it was that was bothering me. It was that everything he said reminded me of Animal Farm; and the fact that the book was a fable of totalitarianism only made Mr. Liu's images worse. He had described a living example of the moment in that book when oppression is about to overtake the farm. There is terror and confusion at the unexpected sight: It was a pig walking on his hind legs. And Orwell goes on, "Yes, it was Squealer. A little awkwardly, as though not quite used to supporting his considerable bulk in that position, but with perfect balance.... And a moment later, out from the door of the farmhouse came a long file of pigs, all walking on their hind legs..."

I was thinking of this as Mr. Liu was saying, "... and lions and tigers, and the only performing panda in China."

He said that the animals and the acrobats often went on tour—even to the United States. Many of the acrobats had worked in the United States. In 1985, a deal was made whereby Chinese acrobats would join Ringling Brothers Circus for a year or two at a time. In the first year there were fifteen, and in 1986 there were twenty hired-out Chinese acrobats working in America.

I asked Mr. Liu about the financial arrangement.

"I don't know exactly," he said, "but Ringling Brothers Circus pays us and we pay the acrobats."

"How much does Ringling Brothers pay you?"

"About two hundred to six hundred dollars a week, depending on the act. For each person."

"How much do you pay the acrobats?"

"About one hundred yuan."

Thirty bucks.

Talk about performing pigs! I wondered how long people would be willing to allow themselves to be treated as exportable merchandise. For some it was not long: the very week I had the conversation with Mr. Liu a man playing the role of an acrobatic lion disappeared in New York. Months later he still had not been found.

On my last day in Shanghai I tried to figure out what it was that I hated about big cities. It was not only the noise and the dirt and the constant movement—the traffic and the bad tempers; the sense of people being squeezed. It was also the creepy intimation of so many people having come and gone, worked and died; and now other people were living where those had died. My impression of wilderness was associated with innocence, but it was impossible for me to be in a city like this and not feel I was in the presence of ghosts.

This became a strong feeling of mine in Chinese cities. I kept thinking, Something awful happened here once, and I shuddered. It was probably a feeling that was enhanced by the refusal of the Chinese to talk about ghosts, since they were officially forbidden to discuss such ludicrous things. In the same way, the Chinese allow people to practice religion providing they don't talk about it; but no one who has any religious belief is admitted to the Chinese Communist Party—that is one of the Party's basic rules.

Shanghai seemed haunted to me. It was full of suggestions and whispers of violence. It was a city in which irrational murders had been committed—not just in the narrow, brown rooms of tottering buildings, but in the streets and alleys, and even in the parks and flower gardens. In the end I was impervious to its charms, and it became a rather diabolical place in my imagination. Or was it that the Shanghainese were very articulate and told such harrowing stories?

I heard some terrifying stories at Fudan University, and that campus was full of ghosts. It did not, at first glance, have the look of a place of learning. From the outside it looked like a Chinese factory—the same scrubby hedge and sharp fence, the same yellow walls and guarded gate and adjoining settlement of dusty half-built buildings, the barrackslike teachers' quarters and the villagey huts nearby, housing tailor, laundry, vegetable-seller, butcher, noodle shop and bicycle-mender. It all had the doomed and arbitrary appearance of a Chinese factory town, developed on impulse, unplanned and built on a shoestring, cutting every corner possible.

But this was a slightly misleading impression, because inside the hedges and walls it was shady and orderly, and even a little sleepy—or perhaps reflective—and as if to indicate the seriousness of their intentions, the students had, not long ago, vandalized their forty-foot statue of Chairman Mao. They had scratched out the motto on the plinth that had once read Long Live Chairman Mao!

That statue was one of the souvenirs of the Cultural Revolution. At that time students did not apply to Fudan. There were no entrance exams. Instead, suitably violent and fanatical youths were sent from their factories and work units to persecute the hapless teachers. Coming to class and spending the morning making your teacher parade up and down wearing a dunce cap was regarded as a serious endeavor by the students, who were not by any means all Red Guards. They were simply young and enjoyed the idea of turning the university upside down.

It is a compelling idea—standing a society on its head, putting children in charge, declaring a ten-year holiday, jailing and tormenting parents and authority figures, painting the streets red, chanting, settling scores with old enemies and refusing to study. But it does not take longer than a few seconds to see that it is totally impractical, not to say dangerous, and that any society having to endure it would become stupider, more brutish, slower, less subtle, backward and insecure.

"I'll give you an example of the English lessons," a university official told me. 'The students would show up in class, make their greeting to the portrait of Chairman Mao, and then when the teacher began speaking they would interrupt. This is a waste of time'; 'This is an imperialist subject'; 'What is the point of studying English?' That sort of thing."

Mr. Liu's attitude towards Chairman Mao was that the Old Man had really gone off in the late 1950s. I had heard this before—they suggested that he was gaga but they meant an extreme form of senile dementia.

"You think he was crazy?" I said.

"Let's say he made many mistakes," Mr. Liu said.

'Tell me one or two."

"All right. In 1957 the president of Peking University, who was a close personal friend of Mao, went to see him. His name was Ma Yinchu. He said, There are five hundred million people in China. We must do something about the population before it is too late.' Well, people say Mao was like an emperor. That is not so. But he had certain characteristics—like a sage, delivering wise sayings. He was very angry with President Ma for questioning him—for even bringing up this subject of population. He said, 'What is the problem? A man is born with one mouth but has two hands to feed that mouth.'"

"Is that a wise saying?"

"It is a silly saying," Mr. Liu said. "President Ma left feeling frustrated. He resigned his post and just stayed home reading books after that. That was Mao's first big mistake—not doing anything about the population when he was warned."

"Can you give me some more mistakes, Mr. Liu?"

'Two more. He always spoke about collective leadership and group decisions, but in fact that was all false. There was no democracy at all. That was a serious contradiction. And it was a mistake for him to use his personal popularity to sway the people. In the end this was a corrupting thing, because he manipulated them."

The president of Fudan is a shy, brilliant woman named Xie Xide, a Smith College graduate (class of' 49) and M.I.T. Ph.D. Her intelligence and her education and her original research in the field of physics were no help during the Cultural Revolution—it is a matter of record that they were held against her. She was shipped out of Shanghai to a factory, where she assembled radios during the day and studied Mao's Thoughts at night. The Thoughts were set to music. Doctor Xie was required to sing them. Was it any wonder that on the wall of her apartment there was a dramatic piece of calligraphy, two characters jing song, a sort of idealist's epigram that exhorts people to be like a pine tree (song) that not even a strong wind can bend (jing covers that whole defiant image). These characters were inscribed by Fang Yi, a former vice-premier in the Central Government and vice-chairman of the Academy of Sciences. He was a man noted for having a mind of his own.

President Xie has a pronounced limp, and it is whispered that she was tortured during the Cultural Revolution. But her own shyness made me too shy to ask a brutal question—and anyway, there were many examples of people who were physically mistreated by Red Guards. One of Deng Xiaoping's sons, Deng Pufang, was thrown out of a window. His spine was snapped and he is still in a wheelchair.

I asked in an oblique way about the university students' fanaticism, because Professor Phan had told me that he had been held for forty-one days by them in the struggle sessions at his house.

"The university students were very bad," President Xie said. "The young schoolchildren were bewildered—they hardly knew what was going on. But by far the worst were the high-school students."

I said nothing, because I wanted her to say more. She had a soft but very distinct voice.

"Here at Fudan the students humiliated their teachers," she said. "But in the high schools it was not unknown for students to beat their teachers to death."

I said that perhaps it was not really a political puzzle at all, this violence—that it might be a psychological one, and that the aberration lay in the lost childhood of the Chinese people. I asked whether the psychology department ever dealt with this decade of frenzy and mass hysteria.

"There is no psychology department," she said.

That was the problem, really—that the Chinese dealt with the past the way they did their peculiar privacies, by drawing a veil over it and not assigning blame or responsibility except to a handful of scapegoats. Ancient history in China was lively and immediate, but more modern history receded and blurred as it became recent, and what happened ten or fifteen years ago was all silence and shadows. No wonder there was an official policy forbidding people to believe in ghosts.

But Shanghai, even bursting at the seams, was a real city, and the fact that it was haunted only made it seem more citified. Also its ships and its civic pride and sea air and all its colleges reminded me of Boston. I had it in my mind to stay longer, but one day in Shanghai I met the Wittricks and the Westbetters. They had just arrived in Shanghai yesterday and they were leaving tomorrow.

"We're going to Canton," Rick said. "Why don't you come along? It's thirty-six hours. Scenery's supposed to be breathtaking. And Canton's gorgeous."

What the hell, I thought, and said okay.

5. The Fast Train to Canton

It was always like a fire drill, getting on or off a Chinese train, with people panting and pushing; but the journey itself was a great sluttish pleasure for everyone—a big middle-aged pajama party, full of reminiscences. It seemed to me that the Chinese, who had no choice but to live the dullest lives and perform the most boring jobs imaginable—doing the same monotonous Chinese two-step from the cradle to the grave—were never happier than when on a railway journey. They liked the crowded compartments and all the chatter; they liked smoking and slurping tea and playing cards and shuffling around in their slippers—and so did I. We dozed and woke and yawned and watched the world go by.

This was the last leg of the tour group's trip before they reached Hong Kong, and I was glad to see some familiar faces.

"See this piece in the China Daily?" Ashley Relph asked, and showed me the paper.

Under the headline miracle surgery for worker who lost limb it described how a man had been more or less devoured by his stitching machine in a clothes factory, and his arm had been severed. Just reading that gave me the anxious twinges I associated with a castration complex, but there was more. The poor fellow had been rushed to the hospital, and in a landmark surgical operation his arm had been sewn back on, "and he is now receiving therapy to learn how to use it again." The article also mentioned how fingers and toes had been sewn onto workers who had lost them. It had always worked.

It's a great society for mending things, I thought. There was no need for a man to be put on the occupational scrap heap simply because his arm had been chopped off. You found a way to reattach the arm, and you sent him back to work. The epoch of invention ended a thousand years ago, and these days the Chinese were perfecting a technique for making do and mending. This was not invisible mending. It was always obvious when a thing had been patched—it was a society of patches. They patched their underwear and darned their socks and cobbled their shoes. They rewrote their slogans and painted out the Thoughts of Chairman Mao, and come to think of it, that was a form of patching, too. But Mao had spoken repeatedly of the evils of wastefulness: 'Thrift should be the guiding principle in our government expenditure.... corruption and waste are very great crimes ... never be wasteful or extravagant." An entire section of his Thoughts is entitled "Building Our Country Through Diligence and Frugality."

One of the great differences between China under Mao and China under Deng was that the Mao mania for patching and mending had begun to subside, pride in poverty was regarded now as old hat, and the Dengists liked things that were brand-new. New clothes were now so cheap that no one had to waste time mending them. Yet I was sure that it was this make-do-and-mend philosophy that had inspired these medical advances and miracles with amputees.

The news items gave me the creeps though. I read a report about a man whose penis had been sewn back on. Fifty other men had had the same operation in China, "and 98 percent of them found their penis functioned again," the China Daily stated. Some of the men had what was called "one-stage reconstruction of the penis," which was not a reattachment but a whole new dick cobbled together from spare parts—a piece of rib, a skin graft, some loose tubes. A survey showed that most of the men were able to father children. "A father who went through the one-stage reconstruction of the penis even mailed his daughter's photo to us," Professor Chang, the mastermind of this technique, said.

The strangest case of human mending occurred not long ago in Shenyang. This was also reported in the China Daily, under the confusing headline TRANSPLANTED LEG SAVES GIRL'S ARM.

Eleven-year-old Meng Xin's left arm and leg were severed in a train accident.

To save her, the six surgeons used part of her severed leg to make a forearm, to which they attached her hand.

Following the 18-hour operation, Meng's skin on her transplanted forearm returned to normal, and her transplanted fingers have recovered their sense of touch.

She can clench her fist and move her left arm.

And yet these mending operations are not surprising to anyone who has looked under the hood of an old Chinese bus, or closely scrutinized the welds in a Chinese steam locomotive, or watched a Chinese street tailor or cobbler at work. And you only had to see the amazing contraption of hosepipes that filled the trains with water at the larger railway stations to realize that it was inevitable that such people would in time be able to rig up a new penis for an unfortunate Chinese castrato.

Ashley was still watching me reading the paper. Handing it back to him, I said, Yes, wasn't it remarkable?

"Lom mistair," he said, and winked at me. "It's the CIA, isn't it? You're an agent, you tell people you're a journalist because that's good cover. You go sniff-sniff-sniff and get people blabbing, and then you lock yourself in your room and write a report." He laughed. "That's all right. I don't care! I won't tell anyone." And he looked out of the window. "Jesus, I am so sick of this country—I can't wait to get back home. Chinese food—every day—Chinese food. And these people!"

"The Chinese?"

"Naw, they're all right. They're bloody small though," he said. "I was thinking of the tour here."

They were in the corridor, watching China go by. It was not very pretty here. The industrial suburbs of Shanghai continued for almost a hundred miles, until the train pulled into Hangzhou. Marco Polo had mentioned Hangzhou—it was one of the boasts of this tourist paradise with its lake, temples, hotels, restaurants, noodle stalls, take-your-picture booths. It was a help to have Marco Polo's praise as a blurb on your brochure ("the greatest city which may be found in the world"), but even that did not make the place sparkle for me. And I had always wondered why Marco Polo, who talked about everything and supposedly went everywhere, never mentioned either the Great Wall or the fact that the Chinese drank tea, in his Travels.

Ashley said the tourists were driving him mental, and he brought me up to date. The most obnoxious man (Kicker) and Wilma, the bald woman, had become lovers. There had been a fight in the French compartment, and one of them, who was bringing a legal action against another, had joined the American group, the Wittricks and Westbetters. Blind Bob was terribly bruised as a result of his Mister McGoo stumbling. Rick Westbetter was planning to write another letter to President Reagan—this one about Chinese duplicity. The Australians were feeling cranky, but of course they were relieved to be heading for Guangdong, since South China was closer to Australia. Bella Scoons was telling herself that the distance was no more than four trips to Kalgoorlie. The Cathcarts had made themselves unpopular by refusing to pay for a beer one hot day because "we've paid for this trip already, and that beer ought to be free." They made an issue of the one yuan (26 cents) and just sat and broke out into a virtuous sweat. Morthole had added to his rock collection: he could hardly heave the sack of them.

Kicker said ironically, "How about a tomb? We haven't seen a tomb today!"

"I'd like to show that fucker a tomb," Ashley said.

They were all tired and crabby. You need a good night's sleep, I wanted to say. It was like school, like an outing; it had gone on too long. Day Thirty-seven, Miss Wilkie was writing in her journal.

"It's ten thousand miles we've done," she said. 'Ten thousand miles. And believe me, it hasn't been a picnic."

This was Zhejiang Province, the old eternal China—no fashion shows here, no spivs, no "Shansh marnie?" no talk of microchips and reforms.

This was mostly paddy fields, and green shoots standing stiffly in black goop. It was an open, almost treeless landscape of bumpy ground and sharp-featured hills and greeny-blue mountains; tea, and rice, and bursting blue vegetables, reeking canals, tile-roofed huts, trampled dirt roads, coolie hats, and everyone dressed in the same style of pajamas. I saw two boys working a treadwheel that ran a chain-driven water pump, a machine that has been in continuous use in China since the first century A.D. according to Professor Needham.

The Zhejiang hills—the Kuocang Shan—were streaky: slashes of white and green, with claw marks and jagged ridges. There were no shade trees. Shade is an unnecessary luxury in an agricultural country and stunts the crops. In the unhindered sunshine, the landscape was austerely tended and harshly fertile, and familiar things like trees and huts were so out of scale the people looked miniaturized.

Everything they did was connected with food—planting it, growing it, harvesting it. The woman who looks as though she is sitting is actually weeding; those children are not playing, they are watering plants; and the man up to his shoulders in the creek is not swimming but immersed with his fishnet. The land here has one purpose: to provide food. The Chinese are never out of sight of their food, which is why as a people arrested at the oral stage of development (according to the scholar of psycho-history Sun Longji) they take such pleasure in fields of vegetables. I found the predictable symmetry of gardens very tiring to the eye, and I craved something wilder. So far, China seemed a place without wilderness. The whole country had been made over and deranged by peasant farmers. There was something unnatural and neurotic in that obsession. They had found a way to devour the whole country.

Hunger had made them ingenious. At Jinhua the train stopped for a while, and I saw a three-decker van for carrying pigs: animals in China always seemed to be kept in a space their own size. What could be crueler? I suppose the answer was: lots of things—an intellectual forced to shovel chicken shit, a Muslim forced to keep pigs, a physicist ordered to assemble radios, an historian in a dunce cap, a person beaten to death for being a teacher. Next to these Cultural Revolution atrocities, keeping a pig in a poke was not really very bad, though it may have contributed to other forms of heartlessness. It was a very hot and humid day, and the pigs were whimpering in their racks as the train passed.

The background was mountainous, the foreground as flat as Holland—square pools of rice shoots, and the roads no more than long narrow tracks. This landscape had no date—the people dressed as they always had; and it was impossible to date it by looking closely at tools and implements. I saw a thresher that looked like the first thresher in the world: a rigged-up whacking paddle hinged to a stick; and the buffalo yokes, the wooden plow, the long-fingered rakes and the fishermen's nets were all of ancient design. By sundown we had done 400 miles, and we had never been out of sight of bent-over farmers or cultivated fields. Every surface had been cultivated, but it was spring and so even these cabbages had beauty.

I began talking with a Chinese man named Zhao who had just visited his girlfriend in Shanghai and was heading back to Changsha in Hunan.

"I took her out to a restaurant and I ordered dishes to impress her. Duck, chicken, fish—everything. It cost me twenty yuan!"

That was about six dollars, and for a moment I thought So what? and didn't understand the anguish on his face.

Then Zhao said, 'That's a week's pay for me! I couldn't eat. I went to bed that night and I couldn't sleep." He clenched his fists and hammered with them. "Twenty yuan! I was cursing. I still feel bad."

"I'm sure she appreciated it." I said.

"Yes," he said. "She is a simple girl. She is a country girl. She is pure."

Just as the landscape altered and became hillier, the sun went down. A couple from Macau—Manuel was Portuguese, Veronica was Chinese—were in my compartment. Veronica was skinny, with a small schoolboy's face and a schoolboy's haircut. She pouted for a while in the upper berth, and then we all went to sleep. But I had never really got used to sleeping among strangers and so I woke up in the middle of the night and read my Jin Ping Mei and noticed once again that it was packed with foot fetishism and bondage games. I glanced up and saw Veronica staring down at me from the upper berth.

At dawn, under a pink sky, the train stopped at Zhuzhou, and Zhao got out to change for the train to Changsha.

I said good-bye to him. I was grateful for something he had told me—that on a railway line outside Changsha was Shaoshan, the village where Mao Zedong had been born.

"Everyone used to visit that village," he said. "Now no one does."

One of these days I'll go there, I thought. Zhao had given me careful directions.

This Canton train now turned south. With mountains always in the distance, we tracked across the rice terraces to Hengyang, where the railway divides—one line to Guangxi (Kwangsi), the other to Guangdong (Kwangtung)—The Two Kwangs, as they were once known.

The landscape had changed since Shanghai—not only its configuration (we were now among steep hills), but the methods of farming (these teetering, brimful terraces). The people here wore large wheel-like hats and lived in brick houses with porches, about six families to a house. And some of the houses looked grand and ambitious, with columns supporting the porch roofs and dragons molded on the waterspouts of the eaves.

Every available flat space was planted. Beans grew at the margins of the rice terraces, and there were cabbages on the hillsides, and spinach and greens at the edges of the roads. The earth had been moved and maneuvered so that everything—and especially the crumpled hills—looked man-made. The hills seemed a way of growing food vertically, like having fields on ledges and shelves to economize on space. The trees were tall and spindly, as if to take up the least amount of room.

"Was that Hengyang?" Manuel said.

I told him it was.

"That was the place where Li Si—the Emperor Shi Huangdi's minister—was sawed in half, for burning the books in 213 B.C." He smiled into his bristly beard. "The interesting thing is, he was sawed in half lengthwise."

He had left Portugal and had planned to be in Macau for about two years; but five years later he was still there. He wondered whether he would still be there when Macau was handed back to the Chinese in 1999. He said he was impressed with what he had seen in China—it was his first visit. But he smiled again.

"Maybe after five years all this could be turned upside down."

"Are you optimistic?"

"You know the saying? An optimist speaks—what?"

"Chinese," Veronica said.

"No. An optimist speaks Russian. A pessimist speaks Chinese." Then he frowned. "That doesn't sound right. I think it's An optimist speaks Chinese, a pessimist speaks Russian. That doesn't sound right either."

We debated this. I said, "Have you heard of the man who said, 'I speak English to my valet, French to my mistress, and German to my horse'?"

"And Chinese to my laundryman," Manuel said.

"And Portuguese to my cook," Veronica said.

With the whole day to kill, we tried to devise the itinerary for the longest railway journey in the world. It began in Portugal: Braganqa-Lisbon - Barcelona - Paris - Moscow - Irkutsk - Peking - Shanghai - Hong Kong.

We came to Chenzhou, an industrial city in a mountain valley, with high sharp gray-green peaks all around it. And at noon we passed through Pingshi, on the Hunan-Guangdong border. The cliffs had the look of temples, with vertical sides that might have been fluted and carved. But they weren't; this was simply the pattern in the basalt. Here the boulders were as huge as hills, and there were pagodas on them.

"Pagoda is a Portuguese word," Manuel said. "We say pagode in Portuguese—it means noise. I suppose they associated noise with these structures."

Mandarin was also Portuguese, he said—from mandar (to be in charge); and the Japanese arrigato (thank you) had come from obrigado.

I went to the dining car and took a seat next to a Chinese man in order to avoid Kicker ("First thing I do when I go home is have a big steak..."). We were passing through low jungle, but even so, rice and corn were being grown under the thin trees. I thought: There are no old trees in China—at least I hadn't seen any.

The food was not good, but to give my meals a point I invented a system for nominating a Dish of the Day. I had spent too many days eating unmemorably. This was a Cantonese train, with the distinctively wet and sticky cuisine—mushrooms, chicken, sweet-sour fish, greasy vegetables. I chose the eels as my Dish of the Day.

While I was eating I remembered another occasion, six years before, when I was eating with a Chinese youth—a pompous one who was the son of a well-placed official, a so-called cadre kid.

I had talked politics with him and he had said in one of his rebuttals, "I am a member of the proletariat—and you are not. You are bourgeois."

I mentioned this to my fellow diner, Mr. Zhu.

"What does 'proletariat' mean?"

I explained it.

He shook his head. "No. I am a higher class than that. I am a white-collar worker."

We talked about foreigners, because the dining car was full of tourists. Zhu said that, unlike Chinese, all foreigners were very excitable. We also had very loud voices. And we were gullible.

We discussed the Chinese proposition We can always fool a foreigner. Zhu said it was true, while I maintained that it was gloating and self-delusion. It was not even half true, but I had yet to meet a Chinese person who did not believe it deep down. I said that most foreigners suspect that the Chinese believe this, which makes the Chinese misapprehension even worse. "Consider the China pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind," Thoreau wrote at the end of Walden.

Later, at Yingde, under the wrinkled mountains there were pools of lotus flowers and shaggy green slopes of bamboo. You might mistake this for wilderness, but no: the bamboo is eaten and used for baskets and building houses; and the lotuses are not growing wild, they are farmed and harvested for their roots. That was another Dish of the Day: dessert of sliced lotus root in syrup.

All day, beside this track, another track was being laid: a new one, for heavy freight, to Hong Kong, in anticipation of 1997.

I sat by the window and looked out through the flickering rain. A boy was riding his buffalo home, and the sound of the train made pigs scatter under the banana trees, and it was so lush the train brushed against the tall tasseled weeds that grew beside the track. I saw clusters of deep-green bamboos, and women chopping firewood, and men smearing the wooden frames of houses with mud to make walls. And peeling blue gums, and a herd of buffalos under some lofty cliffs of orange clay. It was a very wet province, Guangdong, and very distinctive for not looking exhausted: it was fertile, orderly and energetic, and yet everything and everyone I saw had a specific purpose, which seemed to me very tiring to the eye—nothing random or accidental. Some minutes before we reached Canton the train stopped, and a large blue dragonfly hovered near my window. That was perfect—the Chinese dragonfly shimmering in the lushness of Guangdong.

It was very hot in the train, in the nineties, with high humidity. Some passengers had collapsed, others were gasping. I hated arriving in Canton, because it meant I had to change out of my pajamas. It was raining hard. Cyclists in plastic shrouds darted through the downpour. I had not been prepared for the traffic or the commerce—all the radio and television shops, the taxi drivers who listened to Hong Kong rock music on their radios, the luxurious hotels—the White Swan where Chinese went to look at the waterfall in the lobby; the 1147-room Garden Hotel, the biggest in China; the China Hotel (its motto: "For the Merchant Prince of Today"), advertising "A well-steaked reputation ... succulent jet-fresh prime U.S. and New Zealand corn-fed beef.... Our steaks have a delicious reputation"—which also goes to show how far the Chinese will go to please foreigners, since the Chinese on the whole find a simple cooked steak a barbarous and tasteless meal that is appreciated only by primitive folk like Mongolians and Tibetans.

No one I met remarked much on Canton. They spoke of Hong Kong and how it was going to be radically altered by Chinese control. I did not believe that. I did not think it would change. My feeling was that Canton was quickly turning into Hong Kong, and in most respects it was impossible to tell the difference.

The Chinese in Canton seemed well aware that making money and hustling in the Hong Kong manner was what mattered most. They could be mocking, too, about the government's solemn pretensions. One of the Party slogans—written on billboards in Canton—was Look to the Future! {Xiang qian kari). But the word for future (qian) sounds the same as the word money (qian) even though the character is radically different. So the current pun in Canton was Look to the Money!

Some Chinese in Canton asked me what I wanted to see there. I said, "How about a commune?" and they almost split their sides laughing. The Chinese laugh is seldom a response to something funny—it is usually Ha-ha, we're in deep shit or Ha-ha, I wish you hadn't said that or Ha-ha, I've never felt so miserable in my life—but this Cantonese boffo was real mirth. The idea of visiting a commune anywhere in Guangdong province was completely ridiculous. There were none! And didn't I know that Deng Xiaoping had officially declared the commune experiment to have been a failure? Didn't I know that everyone was paddling his own canoe now?

I said, "I was here six years ago and went to a huge commune outside Canton. Everyone said it was a model commune. It was a success. Factories. Rice fields. Fruit trees. A canning industry. I went to a woman's house and she had a radio, a television, a refrigerator—"

"She was the only person in the commune who had those things! It was a trick to impress you!"

"I just want to know what's there now," I said.

"It's all been broken up into geti hu."

Single-unit households, that is: every family for itself, or the family business.

"Is it working?"

"Yes, much better than before."

"So if I go out there and ask the people how things are, they'll say, 'Wonderful.'"

'That is correct."

I said, "How will I know they're not trying to impress me? Maybe that's a trick, too."

"No, no, no," this Chinese man said. "Nowadays, people tell you what is in their hearts. They are not afraid anymore."

"But they swore to me that the model commune I saw was running perfectly."

"What did you expect them to say?"

That was a good point. Why should they belittle it to a foreigner, especially when it was such a loss of face to do so?

"That commune was so large," my Chinese friend said, "that a person had to take a train to see the head of the committee."

"Is that a figure of speech?"

"Yes. It is a joke."

For uninteresting reasons I was unable to visit the commune and compare my impressions with what I had seen in 1980. What I remembered best was visiting the woman who had the big dusty television (with a red shawl over it: cloth television covers are still very popular in China), and listening to her spiel about this being a workers' paradise, and then going outside and watching children feeding white ducks in a green creek. But I swore that the first chance I got I would visit a commune and look at it closely for changes.

The changes were obvious in Canton. For one thing it was full of tourists. Some of these people were extremely elderly and infirm. They said they were looking forward to the Great Wall.

"Is there wheelchair access on the Great Wall?" they asked each other. "Is there a ramp? Is there Disabled Parking? Is there a Handicapped Entrance?"

It amazed me that people so frail should have risked being so far from home. But they were confident and curious, and I admired their pluck.

On the other hand, Canton was one of those places in the world where the hotels are so good and so all-encompassing that a guest need never leave: all the shops, events, colorful clothes, rugs, restaurants and everything else are right there in various parts of the air-conditioned building. And it is one of the facts of life in China today that the hotels are as great a tourist attraction as any of the temples or museums.

People went to Canton for many reasons, but the most interesting one I heard was from seven skinny youths who had come from Hong Kong to go tenpin bowling.

I didn't laugh. Brainlessly banging cannonballs down a varnished ramp and watching the pins go bopping seemed like fun to me. It was a hot afternoon, and Canton was a big screechy place.

I loitered at the bowling alley but didn't play. I met an American named Barton, an oilman, who was supervising the drilling of wells. Were they offshore? He didn't say; he was rather circumspect, rather Chinese in fact, as if he suspected me of being engaged in industrial espionage.

Barton had been in Canton for four years, and before that had been in the Persian Gulf, which he had hated. But he hated China, too—his test wells had not paid off, though some others had. And the oil price was so low it hardly seemed worthwhile looking. It was certainly proving expensive. He told me several things I had not known—that China was a huge oil producer, that it had a surplus because there were so few motor vehicles in China (and the power plants and most of the trains were fueled by Chinese coal), and that China exported crude oil and gasoline to the United States. (Gasoline and fireworks are China's biggest exports to the U.S.)

The shrinking oil-exploration schemes had meant a cutback in Barton's mode of life, though. His wife and children lived in Hong Kong. The family used to get together twice a month. Now they met only once a month. It was pretty tough, Barton said, but necessary.

"I've got two kids to put through college. I need this job, I need the money—all the gweilos here do."

Most of the expatriates used that expression when they referred to themselves. It was south China and Hong Kong self-mockery and meant "foreign devil."

"I was offered a job in Singapore," he said. "It was also oil related. I probably should have taken it, but that place is too strict. I can't stand Lee Kuan Yew. He's a shit. They can have him. I'll take Dung any day."

Barton laughed the phlegmy, fruity laugh of the chain-smoker.

"Know what we call Lee Kuan Yew? Hitler-with-a-heart. Har! Har!"

As someone who had had his own problems with "Harry" Lee, I thought this description was funny and apt. And I was also struck by Barton's seriousness.

I was able to tell Barton my own Chinese oil-drilling story. In 1968, the Chinese embassy in Uganda brought a troupe of Red Guards to Kampala to put on a show. There were acrobats and accordion players and jugglers, all wearing red armbands; but the highlight of the evening was a Red Guard ballet about drilling for oil in one of the coldest and dreariest parts of China—Daqing, in the Manchurian province of Heilongjiang.

In the heat of the Ugandan night, they mimicked frostbite and hypothermia as they danced and drilled through layers of ice and rock. They dropped with exhaustion and were on the point of giving up altogether—no oil.

They were harangued all this time by Red Guards (dancing, chattering, shaking their fists), and at the lowest point, when they had all but abandoned the effort of drilling, one of the Red Guards produced the Little Red Book and began reading Mao's Thoughts. He read from the chapter, "Self-reliance and Arduous Struggle."

He showed his big square teeth and yelled, "What is work? Work is struggle! There are difficulties and problems in those places for us to overcome these difficulties. A good comrade is one who is more eager to go where the difficulties are greater!"

This cheered up the dancers dressed as riggers and drillers (they wore big bandagelike mittens and had rags on their feet). They were stirred by Mao's Thought, and as a chorus chanted, "Great Helmsman ... Reddest of the Red Suns rising in the East," the drillers went back to work and at last struck oil, a great gusher. This was expertly simulated with lights and back-projection, and over all of it a portrait of Chairman Mao shimmered, as the Red Guards cheered. Oil! Mao's Thoughts! Prosperity! Workers serving the people! Overcoming difficulties!

Now all that was over and the oil workers are, typically, harassed Americans, separated from their families, quite well paid and trying to put their kids through college.

At the Trade Exhibition, which is an immense bazaar of Chinese merchandise and the pride of Canton, I met a disgruntled man from Hong Kong, one Mr. Tan, who was visiting his Cantonese relatives. He loved his relatives and was very loyal and dutiful, but he hated the Chinese attitude towards Mao. I had taken Mr. Tan to be an unassuming soul, but he was full of invective.

"Mao kept China in the dark for almost thirty years," he said. 'That's why these goods are substandard."

I said that some of the merchandise looked well made to me—the bicycles, the wrenches, the carpets. And though the electric appliances looked dangerous and ugly, the beaded bags, the screwdrivers, the canned food and the textiles were all great bargains.

"It is not enough to make these things," Mr. Tan said. "These people are in the dark. They think they know the world. They know nothing!"

It was even more mocking the way he said it in his Cantonese accent: Dey know nutting!

"Mao was a joke. He was so stupid. And they believed him. Ha!"

"Everyone says it's different now," I said.

"It looks different, but it is the same. You know why? Because they are the same."

That cynicism was characteristic of the people the Chinese called "Hong Kong Compatriots," and it was compounded of doubt and fear. It was voiced most strongly in Canton because Canton was the closest equivalent in Chinese terms to Hong Kong. The anxiety was contagious. Most people in Canton wondered—and with reason—What next?

I looked for people who might have a clue. The most knowing was of course an American banker who had been in Canton for about an hour and a half. But he had been there before. His name was Arthur Fliegle, and he had a sort of sales pitch in everything he said that sounded so convincing—at least he sounded convinced—that it seemed to reek of insincerity. But he was on the boil, and so I listened.

"Forget the hotels, forget the Friendship Stores and gift shops, forget the restaurants and bowling alleys—all the tourist-related stuff," Fliegle said. "That will go its own way. It earns some money, but it's no big deal."

"But the Chinese are trying to attract tourists," I said.

"Forget it. That's a detail. They want foreign investors. So look at it—look at the rest. The oil. The industry. The joint ventures. Want to hear an interesting statistic? We're dealing with about two hundred joint ventures through my Hong Kong bank. Guess how many of those two hundred are currently operating—I mean, actually off and running?"

I said I couldn't guess.

He raised two fingers. "Two. That's all. And neither of them is making any money."

"But everyone talks about joint ventures."

'They're whistling in the dark. Most companies have withdrawn their top people. They had highly paid executives in China, but they haven't been making any money. So they pull out their expensive American yuppies and they put in Joe Chen from Hong Kong—you know the guy, middle-aged, brown suit, plastic briefcase. They say 'Go for it, Joe!' and he makes a dive, hits a brick wall and staggers back. 'Go for it, Joe!' they yell again. And he hits the wall again. But so what? He's only costing twenty or thirty thousand a year. That's the kind of guy operating now. The six-figure executive is gone."

To provoke this man Fliegle I said that the Chinese seemed very confident about doing business.

"I'm not talking about them—I'm talking about investor confidence, and that seems to be ebbing away. That's why the next three or four years are so crucial. Already companies have pulled out. They aren't philanthropists or idealists. They want to make money, and if they don't make it they'll leave. At the moment, China's in a big expansionist phase, but so far there hasn't been much of a return—nothing to justify great hopes or big investments. The bubble might burst, and if it does it's going to be hell here. We'll know inside five years whether it's going to work."

I found what this man said interesting because he had no political ideas at all—he was all practical and unsentimental about the quickest way to make a buck. It fascinated me to think that there were many Chinese who were just the same.

Some Chinese had begun to rob graves. One of the commonest and most frequently condemned crimes in south China, where the best graves were, was relic smuggling: digging up armor, weapons, pots, bronzes, silver and ornaments, and bringing them to Hong Kong. In just two years, from 1984 to 1986, over a hundred instances of smuggling had been foiled by the Chinese police—and 20,000 antiques recovered. These were not just family treasures but items filched from Tang and Han Dynasty tombs in Hunan. In some instances, there was a medieval kind of vandalism—farmers trampling on Han lyres and flutes because they had tiger motifs inscribed on them, which the farmers found "inauspicious." Or the sixty tombs in Hengyang County which were destroyed by pig keepers, who used the mausoleum bricks to make pigsties. But the majority of the artifacts uncovered or stolen from tombs became smuggled goods.

Typically, the valuable contraband is hustled to Hong Kong by boat, or in trucks, hidden under loads of Chinese cabbages. The destination is nearly always Hong Kong—none of this stuff is ever sold in China.

There are almost no antiques of any value, or of any real age, for sale in China. It is illegal to sell anything older than 150 years—that is, anything earlier than the corny imitative and degraded late Qing stuff. For Tang celadons, Ming bowls, even ancient terra-cotta and neolithic figures, Hong Kong is the place, and Hong Kong is busier now than it has ever been, because the smuggling is so intense.

"Nowadays, the Chinese know it's valuable," an antique dealer told me. 'They used to sell it to the state, but they don't anymore—the state prices are too low. And it's this new attitude. Everyone's in business. Everyone is digging. They're looking for another Xian, another terra-cotta army—but this one they're going to sneak into Hong Kong. You'll see it in the shops in Hollywood Road and Cat Street. Already I am seeing the most incredible pieces—you wouldn't see them in the Victoria and Albert Museum, I'm not kidding. They are looting tombs, stealing from graves, digging holes. There has never been a period like this."

It was very easy to say what China wasn't. It wasn't a frenzied and fanatical slogan-chanting mob of workers and peasants. It wasn't very political—people rolled their eyes and began to yawn at the mention of Mao. It wasn't particularly well built, and indeed had some of the shoddiest-looking apartment houses I had ever seen. It wasn't a country with lovely cities—and even much of the countryside looked torn apart and scalped. It wasn't very orderly, it wasn't quiet, it wasn't democratic. It wasn't what it had been—particularly here in Canton. That was obvious.

But it was hard to say what China was. Perhaps there was an intimation of hope in its complexity, but it was maddening for me to sit there watching the Cantonese rain come down and not to know what this all meant. And then I got a big dose of people attitudinizing—there was probably more of it in Canton than anywhere else because Canton had more foreign visitors—and I thought: I'll just write it down and keep my own mouth shut, and I'll keep moving through China, going everywhere the train goes, to the highest and lowest places, the hottest, the coldest, the driest, the wettest, the emptiest, the most populous—that is the only way—and afterwards I'll make up my mind.

A few days before I left Canton I met a woman who had been there, she said, many times. She was also leaving, but she was going in a different direction. Her name was Lisa Packard. She lived in Hong Kong. She had been visiting China for a dozen years, off and on, and now she was sick of it. She was in her mid-forties and she seemed to me an enterprising person, with enough cultural and commercial interests to keep her busy. And she seemed well connected.

I agreed with her that things had changed, and I asked her whether she remembered the year that had happened.

"Remember the year?" she laughed. "I remember the week things changed. There was a speech by Deng. Everyone responded to it. The Chinese are experts at interpreting jargon, and they knew he was saying something significant. It was one particular week in 1984, and after that everything was different."

She said that sourly, so I said, "But there have been a lot of improvements."

"I don't think so," Lisa said. "I hate the changes. Now, all they want are trinkets and toys—color TVs, cameras, watches, tape recorders, refrigerators, motorcycles. They're greedy, they're starting to be very crooked, they don't trust each other, they lie. Remember how you used to hear how they'd give you back your used razor blades? 'Oh, we don't need these. We have razor blades of our own.' So honest! So straight! So Chinese!"

I said that was a directive of Mao's from the Little Red Book. The Three Main Rules of Discipline for soldiers—but also for Party workers—were: Obey orders in all your actions; Do not take a single needle or thread from the masses; and Turn in everything captured. He had also made rules such as Speak politely; Return everything you borrow, Do not swear at people; and Do not take liberties with women. Was this disillusionment with Mao a reason for this change in conduct?

Lisa said, "Their excuse is that they have to get things while they can. They've only had a few years of this free system. But they know that China has periods of violent change. No one had foreseen this period. No one can foresee when it might end. So they are absolutely frantic. They feel it could all end tomorrow, and so they are grabbing with both hands. 'If we delay we might never get another chance.' That's what they say when I ask."

"Surely that's an understandable attitude for people who have had their asses kicked for the past thirty years. And all the sermons they've had to listen to!" It often seemed as though Chinese life was one long sanctimonious drone of warning and advice, and it was often hard to distinguish the moralizing edicts of the Chinese Communist Party from the corn-pone saws of Elbert Hubbard. Not only Mao, but his followers as well had created a whole anthology of pious parables, from "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains" to "Lei Feng the Model Soldier."

"I'm talking about real corruption, the worst kind—Party corruption," Lisa Packard said. "Where only the high Party members get privileges—they go abroad, they get into five-star hotels, they have access to hard currency. The rest of the people are out of luck. But the army is watching. The army isn't sharing in any of this. A soldier has no means of making extra money, he is not part of the economy, he simply watches people come and go."

I had heard that before: only the army—still sentimentally called the People's Liberation Army—had the key to China's future because no one could govern without the army's consent. And the PLA was notoriously conservative.

'The army is watching, and what does it see? People who are spiritually hollow, spiritually bankrupt. At least with fat, crazy old Mao they had a kind of faith—even idealism—and a sense of working together. They always used that Chinese expression 'working together.' There was a unity in that, but it's totally lacking now. They're not nice, they're not polite. I think they're lost and it will all end horribly for them."

But far from dampening my ardor, what Lisa Packard said only made me eager to plunge back in. Anyway, I was sick of this rain. I heard there was no rain at all in Inner Mongolia, and that the crocuses were popping up all over distant Gansu; so I planned a long trip by train through the westernmost provinces of China—so ambitious a trip that I had to enlist the help of the Railway Board. They were suspicious, but they said that if I went to Peking they would discuss it with me. I needed permission, they said.

The tourists were leaving China for home. Some had gone already, the Wittricks, the Westbetters, laden with souvenirs (lacquerware, carpets, chopsticks, brassware, fans); and the Cathcarts were already back in Bexhill-on-Sea.

Kicker and Morris had not left the bar of The White Swan since arriving in Canton. Kicker said, 'The guys back home will never believe it when I say I screwed a bald woman."

He was chuckling softly. His laughter always reminded me that he had a metal plate in his head. Then he squinted at me.

"But I was a Marine," he said. "We fuck anything."

He had met a young Japanese woman in Canton—had just passed by the open door to her hotel room, started shooting the breeze and ended up in bed with her. Kicker was sixty-seven years old and had the face of a rapist. But his features softened as he recalled the encounter—just yesterday, it was, on the fourth floor.

"It was real nice," he said. 'That gal gave me more loving in those six hours than I had in fifteen years of marriage."

Morthole was looking on. He was very drunk. He was alone. He had not made any friends on his long trip. He asked me what I was planning to do. I told him: Head north—more China.

"More tombs," he said. "More chopsticks. More pagodas. What are you doing?"

"Trying to get the hang of it," I said.

"And you're going by train? It'll take ages!"

"It'll give me a feeling of accomplishment."

Morthole laughed. He did not seem to me very bright, but I had never said much to him. I had merely noted the times when he had gone in search of stones, and I had marveled at the satchelful he had collected. His prize was a chunk of the Great Wall—he wondered whether he would be able to smuggle it through customs at Canton Railway Station.

Each of those tourists had surprised me in one way or another. It made me think that you never really know anyone until you have traveled 10,000 miles in a train with them. I had sized them up in London, but they were all both better and worse then they had seemed then, and now they were beyond criticism because they had proved themselves to be human. Morthole, the recluse and rock collector, had a surprise for me, too. I had taken him for an illiterate, and I had not taken him very seriously—or his bag of rocks.

"Do you know The Excursion?" he said.

I said I didn't know what he was talking about. What was this, some China sight-seeing tour to the high spots?

"William Wordsworth," he said. "I learned it at school."

"Oh, that Excursion."

Morthole raised his glass and said,

An irksome drudgery seems it to plod on,

Through hot and dusty ways, or pelting storm,

A vagrant merchant under a heavy load

Bent as he moves, and needing frequent rest;

Yet do such travellers find their own delight...

Oh, God, I thought, and all this time I've been patronizing this poor bastard.

But speaking of travelers finding their own delight, I decided that day to leave Canton. I went to bed thinking how China exists so distinctly in people's minds that it is hard to shake that fantasy loose and see the real thing. It was not quite the same as looking for igloos in Alaska, or grass skirts in Tahiti, or big blubber-lipped Ubangis in Africa; but it was similar. And it was as wrong to lean on the fake Chinese imagery that comes thirdhand to every Westerner as it was to believe in the wholesome air of poverty.

I had a nightmare. I woke up in a sweat as the nightmare ebbed away: I was on a mobbed street, full of toothy and unfriendly faces, and felt trapped and suffocated in a big city. It was a Chinese city—a Chinese nightmare. I thought: Most of my nightmares are Chinese nightmares. On its most ordinary-seeming street, this unraveling republic had sights to scare the hell out of me. But I was growing fond of its gorgeous insects.

6. Train Number 324 to Hohhot and Lanzhou

It had been a very bad month on China's western railway, where wild yaks on the line accounted for some delays, and sandstorms were frequent. Just before I set off I read in the China Daily that 330 miles of track had been buried by the worst sandstorms for twenty years. The report was precise in its tale of woe: a "force 12 gale" had raged for forty-eight hours, and the "eye-blinding sandstorm" had dumped 100,000 tons of sand on the tracks, stranding forty-seven trains and closing the line for nine days, during which 10,000 rail passengers were evacuated. People died in the storm. People were injured. Vast prefectures of Gansu and Xinjiang were cut off.

But in the way it was ignored by the world, and even ignored by most Chinese (it was just a tiny news item), and in the way it was quickly remedied, it was a very Chinese disaster. (The 1976 earthquake in China, hardly noticed by the world, killed more than 2 50,000 people, and the famines of the late 1950's killed as many as 16 million people.) After the death and destruction, shovels were distributed, the trains were dug out, the tracks disinterred and new sand barriers erected—fences this time, instead of grass clumps. The Chinese had their political dilemmas, and the technological side of Chinese society was a mess ("communications" was an inappropriate word for toy telephones, Morse code and scribbled notes), but if it was possible for the Chinese to shovel themselves out of trouble, they succeeded brilliantly. Digging was a national preoccupation, and during the Cultural Revolution—as my friend Wang said—everyone had his own hole, in case of war. Come to think of it, the Great Wall too was a sort of digger's masterpiece. And the old fable that Mao always cited, "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains," was the digger's gospel—the point was that the old man was not foolish at all and that the Chinese could move mountains (even the metaphorical ones of imperialism and feudalism) by digging.

When the line was clear, I left for Hohhot, in Inner Mongolia. I was not alone. A small portly gentleman had been assigned to me. He had the face of a sea lion—not an unusual face in China. Speaking English was not one of his skills, but he was fluent in Russian, a language that mystifies me. His name was Mr. Fang. We were traveling together as a result of a discussion I had had with the Railway Board, but these discussions were more in the nature of struggle sessions.

A delegation had come to my hotel and delayed me with politeness and abused me with flattery, blackmailing me with such phrases as "famous writer," "important person" and "foreign friend." Indeed, I was so important and dignified that I could not possibly travel alone on this journey to the west, but would have to be provided with an entourage.

I said that I usually traveled alone, and that I made a virtue of it, and I refrained from saying that if I was in need of a traveling companion it certainly would not have been a huge, goofy man like Mr. Zhong, with his sinister laugh and his slurping way of eating.

We were in the restaurant of my hotel, Mr. Zhong, Mr. Fang, Mr. Chen and I. Mr. Zhong blew on the surface of his tea, then sucked it in, gurgled it inside his cheeks and gulped it. And his way with noodles was worse, and noisier: he made his mouth into a suck-hole and woofed them through it in a wet, twisted hank. His gasps made me feel violent towards him.

So far, Mr. Fang had not said anything; and Mr. Chen only put in a word now and then to be helpful.

"There is no earthly reason why anyone should come with me."

Mr. Zhong went schhhllooopp with his tea, and chewed it loudly, and then said, "To give you correct information."

"I think I'm capable of getting correct information on my own," I said. "I've done a little traveling, you know."

"But not in China."

"In China, as a matter of fact. Six years ago. Down the Yangtze."

"The Chang Jiang," he said, giving me correct information, as if I didn't know what the Chinese called the damned thing. Like all pedants, at heart he was just being stubborn and obstructive.

"And Peking and Canton."

"Beijing and Guangzhou," he said, woofing noodles.

"I'm giving you their English names, Mr. Zhong. We don't say Hellas for Greece, or Roma for Rome, or Paree, if we're speaking English. So I don't see the point—"

"I must come with you," Mr. Zhong said.

Never, I thought.

"We will leave tonight," he said.

Over my dead body, I thought.

"I will help you," he said.

"Believe me, it's extremely kind of you to offer," I said, "but I don't need your help."

His face was big and pale. He smiled at me and said, "I can carry your bag."

I said, "Did you go to a university?"

"Oh, yes. Jiaotong University. I studied engineering."

"So you're trained for a different job—not for carrying bags."

"My English is very good. I can be your interpreter."

"I want to improve my Chinese."

"I can help you with that," he said. "And you can teach me some more English, and about literature, and about your country."

"I'm afraid that's out of the question," I said.

"You must be looked after properly."

"I don't want to be looked after," I said. "I just want to take the train and stare out the window."

"Oh, no," he said. "We must do our best. You are our responsibility. And we can talk."

Why wasn't Mr. Fang saying anything?

"I may not want to talk," I said. "I may want to sit and read. I may want to look out of the window."

Mr. Zhong put his face against his tea cup, everted his pale lips, and whooshed at it. I had taken a dislike to him very early in the discussion—as soon as we were introduced, in fact—because he was a person whose banter sounded to me like a reprimand. I had left some papers in my room and he had said, "Don't get lost!" and "Don't disappear!"

"You are very generous to offer to look after me, but I can manage alone," I said. "I may not want to talk to anyone. And I don't want any of your kind assistance."

There followed a rapid conversation in Chinese, Mr. Fang doing most of the talking. I had been fascinated by his sea lion's face, his sorrowful eyes and down-turned mouth. He spoke with insistence and authority, and he had seemed very intelligent when he had been listening.

Fattish and insolent-looking Mr. Zhong went on slurping his noodles and sucking his tea as Mr. Fang spoke. One of Mr. Zhong's slurps was actually a form of reply. I decided that he looked brattish and spoiled, and I guessed that he had been a Red Guard, from the way he nagged.

He said quietly, "Mr. Fang says he will go with you."

"Why?"

"Because he does not speak English."

"I don't want to walk around with him either," I said, imagining Mr. Fang breathing down my neck.

"He will simply sit," Mr. Zhong said.

"But in another compartment," I said, "because I would like to meet other people."

"He will occupy another compartment," Mr. Zhong said.

"If he doesn't talk to me, and he doesn't walk around with me, and he doesn't travel in the same compartment," I said, "I don't understand why he wants to come with me."

'To make sure you are comfortable. Hospitality. You are our guest. Ha-ha!" Mr. Zhong's shouting laughter was cruel and accusing.

I said, "Mr. Fang is head of the department. He is obviously very busy. He has a desk, a chair, and work to do. He has to write reports. He has a family—right? Wife? Children?"

'Two females."

"Okay. So wouldn't it be a lot more convenient if he didn't come with me? I can hire local guides—it's cheap enough."

"Perhaps. But this is the Chinese way."

Mr. Chen was becoming anxious. He signaled to me with his eyes, Enough, no more, leave off.

That was how I came to be traveling with this small, silent man on the train to Hohhot. The fact was that the authorities had gotten wind that I was traveling in China, and afraid that I would snoop and that I'd rat on them afterwards, they stuck me with Mr. Fang. Interestingly, this episode was probably the most irritating thing that happened to me in China, and they could have made me very happy if they had decided not to haunt me in this way and attempt to obstruct me with this nannylike official.

When we were alone on the train and rolling through Hebei Province and its endless rice fields, I asked Mr. Fang in Chinese whether he spoke English.

"Not well," he said in Chinese, and it was then that he divulged his fluency in Russian. He had taught Russian literature and language at a technical college in Peking.

"Evgeny Onegin," he said. "Pushkin. Chekhov. Gogol. Dostoyevski."

"Turgenev. Tolstoy," I said, and he nodded. "Bulgakov. Mayakovsky."

Saying these names was like holding a conversation. But it was a short conversation. I had made a thing about not wanting to sit around talking English, and so they had called my bluff by sending this Russian speaker.

I was grateful that I had been spared Mr. Zhong. I had not wanted to travel with any official, but at least Mr. Fang was a gentle soul. He offered to carry my bag, and then he offered to heave it into the luggage rack; I said I could manage. His own bag was very small. Because the Chinese don't own much, they travel light. And Mr. Fang's bag contained a large book and not much else.

"Pushkin?" I said.

He laughed and showed me. It was an English-Chinese Dictionary. I tried to look up a few obscene words, but there were none in it. I riffled the pages and saw a word, a definition, and a sample sentence in italics: Because of the calumnies of the enemy, Lu Xun was compelled to fight harder.

It was a twelve-hour journey to Hohhot, but this was a long-distance train, going on to Lanzhou, so we left at midnight. We were joined by two jolly Cantonese who were going to Datong to change trains for the Taiyuan line. They were going, they said, to Pinghe, to an open-cast mine—one of the largest in China.

I looked on the map.

"I can't find Pinghe."

"It's not on the map yet."

That was another Chinese conundrum—that they could build cities faster than they could print them on maps, and build railways quicker than they could show them with black lines.

'The whole province of Shanxi is a coal seam," one of the men said. Heavy equipment was his specialty. He said that two thousand men were digging and that there would be coal being produced soon.

"What sort of a place is Pinghe?"

"It is a horrible place," the second man said, with a smile. "It is flat and windy. There are no trees. There is dust. It is desert."

They were traveling with enormous amounts of luggage, but they explained that most of it was food, since there was no food in Pinghe. There was nothing in Pinghe except coal.

They dragged themselves and their provisions off the train early the next morning, and soon after we entered Inner Mongolia—a bare dusty landscape, with low, stunted-looking trees, and square-sided settlements made of smooth mud, and goats, and mongrels, and people hacking at furrows and bashing weeds, and here and there, the occasional horseman. It was one of the regions the Chinese described by wincing and calling it "the grasslands"—and they prayed they would not be sent to work in such a region. On the other hand, it was a fact that the Hans had displaced the Mongolians here—the expatriates and exiles had taken over.

Rounding a bend, the engine came into view—a big black locomotive, squawking and blowing out smoke and steam, a fat kettle on wheels. The air was so still on the Mongolian plain that on the straighter stretches the smoke from the engine passed my windows and left smuts on my face, and I was eighteen coaches from the smokestack.

By hot, yellow noon, the landscape had wrinkled mountains behind it, but they were bare and blue, and some nearer hills were only slightly mossy. There were no trees. There were plowed fields everywhere, but nothing sprouting. In the villages there was a mud wall around every house. You would not have to be told you were in Mongolia—this was about as Mongolian as a place could possibly be.

I found Mr. Fang staring dejectedly out the window, and feeling sorry for him, I asked him about his Russian teaching.

"I liked it," he said, "except for the Red Guard period."

"What happened then?"

"From 1966 until 1972 there were no classes. I stayed at home and read books."

"Why? Had you been criticized?"

Criticize—that could mean forty-six of them howling at you or even beating you.

"Yes. They said I was a revisionist." In a plaintive way, he said, "Maybe it was true. I did not understand Marxist-Leninist theory." He turned to me and added, 'They didn't understand it either."

"Afterwards, did you feel bitter?"

"No. I said nothing. They were young. They didn't know anything. That whole period was a disaster."

He was upset by the memory, so I left him alone. But my curiosity impelled me to go back, because I couldn't understand how it was that he had spent all those years at home, reading books. I said, "You mean, you were just sitting there, turning pages?"

He shook his head. "I was carrying rocks."

It was forced labor, he explained. The whole technical college had been moved to a remote place called Mengjin, just north of Luoyang, in Henan Province; and there they had built a bridge over the Yellow River.

"Most of these railways were built by intellectuals who were sent to the countryside," he explained. 'That's why they took so long. What did we know about it?"

He was disgusted, he said. In the fifties, Japan and China were about equal, he went on. In the sixties Japan developed and China went backward. "Now look at the difference!"

I did not agree with his analysis, but instead of contradicting him I asked, "Would you like China to resemble Japan?"

"Frankly, no."

We were still at the window. As the mountains receded into the distance, the houses became more frequent and piled up and became uglier—the unmistakable sign in China that a city is not far off. There was a wide dry riverbed, a depleted tributary of the Dahei River, and tall gawky trees—Mongolian trees, like fakes, unconvincing because they are wholly out of place and too feeble to serve any purpose. Most trees I had seen in China seemed purely symbolic. I saw distant watertowers and chimneys, and not far off, a dust cloud. Beneath that dust cloud was Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia.

It was not really a city—it was a garrison that had been plonked down in the Mongolian prairie, and every building in it looked like a factory. It had been planned and much of it built by the Russians, but even its newer structures looked horrible—the hotel, the guest house, the department stores. I wondered whether it looked this way because of the Mongols themselves—what did tent-dwelling nomads know about city planning? But, no, it was not inhabited by Mongols. It was all Hans in short-sleeved shirts, pouting as they cycled on Hohhot's streets.

"What do you want to see?" Mr. Fang said.

"I want to see a Mongol," I said.

'There isn't time."

He explained that all the Mongols were over there, in the grasslands, in the rugged range they called the "Great Green Mountains." The horsemen, the wrestlers, the archers, the yak herds, were absent from Hohhot. They lived in the wild, which was their right these days as a so-called minority.

I declined a visit to Yijinhuoluo, the tomb of Genghis Khan (1162–1227), which the Chinese built recently as a sop to Mongolian national pride. It is a whitewashed yurt, in concrete, in the middle of nowhere.

"I want to see how people live here," I said.

Mr. Fang took me to the Five Pagoda Temple, which was a stack of defaced Buddhas, still showing traces of Cultural Revolution vandalism. But it was high enough for seeing the roofs of the old town, and the crooked lanes, and the minarets of the mosque.

"Let's go there," I said, pointing.

But Mr. Fang maneuvered me into the car, and we drove out of town to the tomb of Wang Zhaojun ("an imperial concubine who crossed the desert 2000 years ago to marry a minority chief in an effort to secure peace between the Han Dynasty and the native Xiongnus"). It was a man-made hill 150 feet high. He urged me to admire the ingenuity of the hill—think of all the digging!

"I would like to see some people," I said.

He took me to a pagoda, a lamasery, and then to the mosque.

"How many Muslims are there here?" I asked a man in a skullcap.

"Thousands."

"Have any been to Mecca?"

"One," he said. 'The government sent him last year."

The mosque was decorated in the Chinese style, with curved-tile roofs and red-painted eaves. In the center of the main building, high above the door, there was a clock face—a large one, that gave the mosque the look of a railway station. But this was all painted, and even the time was painted on it. The time was perpetually 12:45. No one knew why.

The following day I sneaked downstairs, skipped breakfast, and was on my way out the front door of the hotel when Mr. Fang hurried towards me, making a noise. It was a kind of laughter. By now I was able to differentiate between the various Chinese laughs. There were about twenty. None of them had the slightest suggestion of humor. Some were nervous, some were respectful, many were warnings. The loud honking one was a sort of Chinese anxiety attack. Another, a brisk titter, meant something had gone badly wrong. Mr. Fang's laugh this morning resembled the bark of a seal. It meant Hold on there! and it stopped me in my tracks.

"Where are you going, Mr. Paul?"

"For a walk."

Mr. Fang conferred with his Hohhot deputy. My walk was given official sanction, and I was driven about a hundred yards to the People's Park and released. It was not a large park. It was surrounded by high walls. Its artificial lake had dried up. It was very dusty. Here, I walked. Even at this early hour there were Chinese couples smooching. The poor things have nowhere else to go in China except public parks. I said to myself: It is wrong to expect too much from a Mongolian city.

Mr. Fang and his deputy were waiting for me by the turnstile at the exit gate.

"You enjoyed your walk?"

"Very much," I said.

"Now what would you like to do?"

"I think I'll go back and wash up," I said. "I need a shave."

Mr. Fang laughed in consternation and told me to wait. And he held another conference with his Hohhot deputy, while I stood, frowning at the city. There were no clouds overhead. The sky was blue, the earth brown, the air smelled of dust. It was a typical Mongolian day.

Mr. Fang gestured for me to get into the car. We drove across town to what I first took to be a factory and then realized was a hotel. It smelled of peeling paint and rotting carpets. I was escorted to a room where there were barber chairs and sinks. A young man approached holding a towel and twitching it.

Mr. Fang said, "He is very young and inexperienced, but he will try."

The young man smiled and worked open the cutthroat razor that he had been concealing with his towel.

"I can shave myself," I said, and did so, at one of the sinks.

Mr. Fang laughed: nervous admiration and a sort of pent-up anxiety. I could tell he was worried by what I would ask to do next. I spent the rest of the day trying to elude him and his deputy, and at last, in the market, I succeeded. It was late in the afternoon. We were all (Mr. Fang, his deputy, the driver and I) admiring a stack of vegetables, and when I saw they were transfixed by a shaggy mound of blue cabbages I slipped away.

I found the bird sellers and had an urge to buy every one of their birds and let the poor things go. There was once a Chinese festival—The Liberation of Living Creatures—that encouraged such practices. The Chinese are bird-mad. They pay large sums for the rarest birds, and they keep them in tiny ornate cages, or else they eat them. This is not bird fancying exactly; they covet the birds but they are not sentimental about them. At the Hohhot bird market there were people carrying home finches that had been stuffed into small plastic bags, and the new owners simply clutched them in their sweaty hands. I said it was a little hard on the birds, but they showed me that they had compassionately poked holes in the plastic bags.

There were rosefinches and hawks, and the most popular bird looked like a plover, with a ringed neck and brownish wings. But when I heard it sing I knew it was not a plover. One of the bird sellers wrote down its name, and I discovered later it was a Mongolian lark. It seemed a hell of a fate for such a musical bird to be snatched from its freedom in the immense grasslands and clapped into a tiny bamboo cage. But there are worse fates. One of the culinary perversions of France is making larks into pâté and spreading them on toast.

Later, when Mr. Fang found me, he introduced me to several officials. They had been sent to Hohhot from Peking. Everyone I had met in Hohhot, except the Muslims, had been sent from Peking. Hohhot was just another unpopular post, but no one complained. I did find it odd that after two and a half days in Mongolia I still had not met an ethnic Mongolian. Everyone I asked had the same explanation—a vague wave of the hand and a mutter, "Over there," meaning somewhere in the yellow emptiness of the grasslands.

When we left Hohhot, and were waiting for the train to arrive, I reminded Mr. Fang of our agreement not to travel together in the same compartment. He said that was fine with him. There was a commotion behind us—fifteen shuffling men escorting a high official across the platform. They were seeing him off. He was a stern, skinny man in a blue cap and baggy blue suit; his shapeless clothes alone marked him out as a hard-liner—the conservatives (always referred to in China as "leftists") still have not abandoned their Maoist look of austerity, and this one had an unusually fearsome look, as if daring anyone to laugh at his flappy pants.

His underlings were effusive in the insincerely solicitous way that arouses either contempt or pity—or indifference, as in the case of this official. All this bootlicking hardly made him blink, and he turned his back on them as they slurpingly said good-bye.

When I found my compartment, this man was in it, already seated and making tea. I had come to see that there was even a "leftist" way of making tea. The real hard-liners carried old chubby jam jars and reused the tea leaves again and again, seldom changing them but letting them pile up until the jar was half full of sodden leaves. I put a pinch of green tea into the teacup that was provided free by China Railways—surely he knew that?—and poured the hot water from the thermos, also provided free of charge.

"Hello," I said. "How are you?"

He nodded, saying nothing.

"Are you going to Yinchuan or Lanzhou?"

He stared at me.

"I'm going to Lanzhou," I said, and in English, "God, you're a friendly guy. But don't mind me—I'm just going to curl up with this book."

It was The Gobi Desert, by Mildred Cable, an account of her Chinese travels in the twenties, when she went up and down the deserts of Turkestan in a horse-drawn cart.

The sun reddened and dissolved into the dust of the Mongolian plain as we set off, jogging westward. In the morning the blue baggy man was gone, and I guessed he had gotten off in the Mongolian city of Baotou.

We followed the course of the Yellow River, its big loop in Mongolia and its straighter progress in the stricken province of Ningxia. No one had a good word for Ningxia, and I could see why. It was a parched and windblown place, with a tiny population, many of them the tenaciously backward-looking Hui people—Muslims. Privately, the Chinese regarded them as filthy and superstitious, but publicly they praised their quaint habits. The Chinese felt rather guilty about the Hui people. Knowing of the Hui horror of pigs and pork, officials in the time of Cultural Revolution put Huis in charge of pigsties and made them swineherds and bacon slicers.

We had left the sparse plains and grassy mountains of Mongolia and were now among big, bulky, Irish-looking mountains, scattered with sheep and goats. All the slopes were worn down and stony, with gullies and ravines and chopped-out sluices and quarries—as if sometime in the remote past water had rushed through this place and taken every live thing away, and the topsoil too. It was spectacular desolation.

The plain returned again and was as flat as a billiard table. The railway tracks were dead straight, and the steam locomotive pulling the train poured soot behind it. I kept the window closed when I realized that the black flakes were accumulating on me and Mildred. I decided that this landscape of straight lines had inspired people to build houses with lots of right angles—flat roofs and straight square walls. There seemed something melancholy in such enormous distances, and yet nearly everything that was plowable had been plowed. But I did not see anyone in those hot fields. The sun moved slowly through the high blue sky, and beneath it everything looked torpid, in tones of light brown. There were very few towns, but each one was a dismal anticlimax: square factories, square houses.

The gulping, wheezing steam engine, with its characteristic rattles and shakes, released a dragon of black smoke and it steamed onward through Ningxia. And once from the upraised track I saw a town that was all bungalows and yards—like a parody of an American suburb; indeed, like my hometown, Medford, made out of mud.

In the dining car the wind made a low, fuzzy moan through the rusty window screens. It was lunchtime, and we all had our snouts in the rice bowls. It was greasy spinach today, and little withered worms of pork, and knuckles of nameless meat.

I shared my table with Mr. Lu, on his way to Lanzhou. He was in his twenties and college educated. Perhaps it was because we were in the dining car that he began saying how people behaved very greedily and selfishly these days.

"They say, 'Everyone else is doing it—why shouldn't I?'"

I said, "Presumably it's because the lid is off, and people have more freedom." And I said that I had read that it was usually the case that when tyranny was relaxed people behaved more recklessly—sometimes sudden freedom brought chaos. But that wasn't an argument against freedom.

"I don't know," Mr. Lu said. "But we have never seen this sort of thing before. The Chinese even in bad times behaved very responsibly so as not to shame their families. But now it's every man for himself."

I said that on the whole I had found the Chinese very polite and helpful.

"It depends on how old they are," Mr. Lu said. 'The worst ones are those who were about ten or fifteen at the start of the Cultural Revolution. They were robbed of everything. They had no childhood, no education, no family, no training, no happiness at all. They are about thirty or forty years old now, and they are very angry—angry with everyone. They feel cheated. I know a woman in Lanzhou who said, 'If the city council doesn't give me an apartment I'll go find one, and I'll move in, and I won't budge.' I told her that was illegal. She said, 'I don't care.' That's not Chinese. But she was about thirty-five. She had lost everything in the Cultural Revolution. We are living in a very strange time."

"This train isn't so strange," I said.

He smiled at me. He said, "Not long ago on this train I saw an incident. A man in Hard Class was lying across one seat. That means he was taking up three sitting places. The other passengers were angry. But the man would not move. Finally, they got a policeman, who told the man to move.

"The man said no. The policeman said, 'Move.'

"'What are you going to do about it?' the man said.

"Of course, the policeman could do nothing if the man didn't cooperate. But that was very unusual—very un-Chinese. This man was thirty or so—that explained it to me. The lost generation. The interesting thing is that he did not move. The policeman went away. He had failed. He had even tried to use logic. 'You bought one ticket, but you are using three seats'—that sort of thing.

"'I don't care,' the man said. 'So what?' That's the attitude among that age group."

"Do you think it's serious?"

"Yes. And it frightens me," Mr. Lu said.

Mr. Lu asked me where I was going. I told him that I was headed into Xinjiang, and he made a face—a slight smile of pain. He said he had no desire to go into the desert. The cities of Turfan and Urumchi held no interest for him.

"If I had the time and the money I would go to Hangzhou or Suzhou," he said, expressing the common Chinese wish to go to a place where there were a million other tourists. "Or Guangzhou," he added—another Disneyland.

But to the question Where would you go? the Chinese I spoke to rarely named a place that was outside the Great Wall, reflecting the ancient fear and prejudice that it was all monkeys and hairy bastards and savages beyond the Wall.

There were two dozen Chinese college students on the train, going to Lanzhou from Peking to take part in a swimming meet. They were going Hard Class, and they seemed to enjoy being tumbled together in the dormitory coaches. At their technical college they lived just like this, eight to a room, with laundry hanging everywhere, and they slept on shelves that went up the wall.

As we passed from Ningxia into Gansu I talked to them. Some where shy and some frisked like kittens and others just glowered at my nosey questions. I asked most of them whether they believed in life after death. All of them said firmly no.

"But most Americans do," one said, and the rest of them agreed that this was so.

I had asked them that because we had begun by talking about dreams. They told me dreams they had—about guilt, persecution, being naked, being pursued.

"Everyone has those dreams," I said. "I used to dream about being chased by a monster that looked like a huge potato. And I still have dreams about suddenly realizing that I have to take an important exam that I'm unprepared for."

We were talking in English, which they spoke very well. In fact, one of the boys—unusual for a college student—was Westernized (in the Chinese way) to the extent that he had had his hair curled. It was the fashion in large Chinese cities that summer, among people who had money—men and women. Taxi drivers affected a Liberace coif, their hair permed and fluffed up, and sometimes lightly tinted. But it was not so common as to go unnoticed. Outside The Phoenix Beauty Salon in Shanghai, and Peking's Golden Flower Perma Parlor there were always baffled people pressed against the front windows, watching the dandified young men getting their hair curled.

The curly-haired student said he didn't have any dreams at all, presumably on the assumption that dreaming was too old-fashioned a preoccupation for a stylish trendsetter like him.

Anyway, I left the subject, and left their coach, but later when I was looking at the rubbly landscape I was joined by one of the girls, who said that she had had a dream that was worrying her.

"Three dreams, I mean. But all of them were about my father and my brother." She had a delicate face and anxious eyes, and she spoke in a shy but determined way. Obviously she had not wanted to tell me this dream in front of all the other students. "In the first dream my father killed my brother with a stick. In the second, he hanged my brother. In the third, he shot him. What does it mean?"

"Is your father violent?"

"Very violent," she said.

"What about your mother?"

"My mother passed away six months ago."

"When did you start having these dreams?"

"After she died."

"You live in Peking?"

"No. I study in Peking, but my home is in a country area, near Wuhan. It is a very large house—nine rooms, in a very remote place. It is also a very strange place. There are groves of bamboo all around it. Do you know the sound that bamboo makes?"

I nodded: it was one of the creepiest sounds in the world, the wind making the bamboo stalks rub and mutter.

"It is an old house," she said. "My mother died in it, and my father lives there with my younger brother. My father is not only violent. He is also very unhappy. I am afraid. Do you think my dream will come true?"

I said that she probably felt guilt for having gone to Peking to study. Her mother had been a restraining influence on her father, and she wanted to protect her brother.

'The last time I saw my brother he was unfriendly. It was Spring Festival. I was glad to see him, but he refused to go for a walk with me."

This was all very gloomy, and I tried to think of something to say, but before I could she spoke again.

"I think something terrible is going to happen," she said. "My father is going to kill my brother."

Actually I felt the same thing, but I didn't say so. I told her not to worry but to go home fairly soon, to see her brother and try to gain his confidence.

She said, 'This dream is telling me that I must get a job in Wuhan, near my home."

This corner of Gansu had the look of a landscape that had been bombed. But the craters and foxholes and exploded-looking ravines were the work of wind and water—wind, mostly, because this was semidesert. The Yellow River was motionless and soupy, and the hills were the color of corn bread and just as crumbly.

Once when I was talking with the students I saw Mr. Fang eyeing me. I knew he had been sent to keep me in line, and I was waiting for a chance to ditch him; but I felt a little sorry for him, in whatever report he had to write about my behavior or the subjects of my whispered conversations on the trains, because the poor man spoke no English. His sea-lion face often made him seem sad.

I found one of the teachers and discovered her to be just about my age. Her name was Professor Shi. In 1967, when she was a student, she was an ardent supporter of the Cultural Revolution and volunteered to travel from Peking to Anhui Province to work on a tea plantation. She abandoned all ideas of further study and picked tea for six years.

"I think it was like the Peace Corps," she said.

"No," I said. "The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient, and we weren't under any pressure to join. But going into the countryside in China was a big Maoist campaign."

"I asked to go," Professor Shi said, somewhat avoiding my point about her being pressured. "I wanted to live like a peasant."

"Did you succeed?" I asked. In Africa, in the sixties, I had had the vague idea of going native and living in a mud hut, and to that end I left my Peace Corps house and moved to an African township and into a two-room hut. But it hadn't worked. My African students thought it was undignified and my neighbors were afraid of me. Foreigners who moved into huts were either crackpots or spies.

Professor Shi said, "In the beginning it was wonderful. We had competitions to see who could pick the most tea. The hard part was not the picking or the bending. It was that you had to carry a heavy bag the whole time, full of tea leaves."

There were no lights at this tea plantation. But there was a stream, so these youngsters from the city decided to build a dam and put in a generator. This certainly resembled a Peace Corps project—the outsiders deciding that what these peasants needed were some of the comforts of home, juice—especially.

"We worked very hard for a year building the dam. At the end of that time, when it was finished, we set aside one night for the lights to be turned on and for the electricity to flow. I remember it very well. That night, when the electricity came on, I stood and cried—I was so happy. Others were crying too.

"The old electrician from the work unit said, 'You're tough Peking boys and girls. Why are you crying? This is just a simple dam and simple electric power and a few flickering bulbs.'

"He was wrong. We had done it all ourselves, with our own hands. Like picking the tea. That was why we cried."

I was affected by her story, although I had been somewhat annoyed by her comparison between the displaced intellectuals and the Peace Corps. But I saw that there was a connection, and both had emerged at the same time.

She had fallen silent. She had told me her good memory. She then said, "Later it was different. I became a teacher in 1974, and the Red Guards came to check up on us. They told us what to teach. They bullied us, and they were very tough. I was trying to teach English. They didn't like it. They said it was bourgeois and useless. That's when I changed my mind about the Cultural Revolution."

As an English teacher, she said, she understood Mao because she had read Percy Bysshe Shelley. I said, What?

"Mao was a political revolutionary," she said. "But he was also a romantic poet. That was the problem."

She saw the Old Man as a sort of dreamer in baggy pants, scratching out his poems with his goose-quill pen and leading shiny-faced youths into the fields to harvest rice and grain. But the old romantic, perhaps like all romantics, was not only impractical, but also selfish and egotistical, and by the sixties he was around the bend, too. This was a far cry from the young idealist Shelley, and not much like the old leech gatherer, Willy Wordsworth.

"He was also a tyrant, wasn't he?"

She said she didn't know about that. It was painful to think about recent history. She too wanted to go to the United States—to study, and for a change of pace.

It was now late afternoon, and damp and gray. The crumbly hills had caves cut into them, and every slope looked like a prehistoric settlement. It was not an optical illusion; this province was full of troglodytes knuckle-walking along these ledges and into the caverns they had chopped out of the hillside.

A young man was watching them with me. I took him to be one of the students on the swimming team, but he said no, rubber was his business—he made tires. Lanzhou was a center of rubber manufacturing.

I said, 'That's interesting," and he seemed rather sceptical, and smiled at me as if defying me to find anything interesting at all about tires or rubber.

"What about contraceptives?" I asked.

And then he asked me to explain what the word meant. This required gestures as well as a delicate description, but he got the point.

"I don't make them," he said. "But we have these things in China—for birth control. One-child policy, you know?"

I did not say so, but it seemed to me that people living five to a room was a form of birth control. In a country without any privacy and with very few trees, it was a wonder that any children were conceived.

But this subject reminded him—his name was Mr. Zhang—of an experience he had had in Peking.

Mr. Zhang said, "I was walking down the street. A man stopped me and said, 'Want a girl?'

"I told him no.

"'She's very nice. Five yuan.'

"'I am not interested,' I said.

"He said, 'I can get you a very dark and private corner in the park, so that you can be alone with her.'

"I said that I did not want her, but what about my friend? You see, I was looking after an American delegation of rubber dealers. One of them even asked me if there were girls. It is forbidden. But there are girls.

"'That is out of the question. We do not want an American.'

"I said, 'Why not?'

"'They are too big in their penis. The girl is Chinese. She is very small. It will hurt her too much.'

"I told him to think about it."

Mr. Zhang giggled, perhaps wondering whether he had gone too far—after all, I had told him I was an American. It was also very unusual that he should tell me this story. He covered himself by telling it in a disapproving way—son of pious and lurid at the same time.

The pimp told him not to go away while he consulted the girl.

"And then he came back and said, 'She says she will do it with the American, but it will cost twenty kuai.'"

Then Mr. Zhang looked very worried. Would I take him for a pimp? After all, it seemed as though he had been negotiating with this sleazy man—and pimping was a capital offense: a bullet in the back of the neck.

Very angrily, Mr. Zhang said, "We must rid China of such people!"

Already the train was slowing down in the deep ravine, and ahead Lanzhou lay smoking and steaming on both banks of the Yellow River.

7. The Iron Rooster

Lanzhou is a city in a valley of the Yellow River, and so it is long and narrow and hemmed in by mountains. There were hundreds of brickyards and smoking kilns on its outskirts, and it was brick colored, the same shade as its clayey landscape. It was damp and muddy this afternoon in early summer. Since ancient times it had been one of the gateways of China, the last place to change horses and buy provisions before heading for the outer limits of the empire. The next large settlements were in Turkestan, and beyond them was Europe. Lanzhou still looked like a city on the frontier, with the patched and botched appearance of all Chinese cities—no trees to speak of but plenty of tall factory chimneys and power lines. Most of the oil in Xinjiang was refined here, and it was whispered that in Lanzhou they made atomic bombs. If one accidentally went off in this remote mud-colored place, who would know?

Some of those chimneys were the minarets of mosques. This was the eastern limit of the Muslim world that had its other centers in Turfan and Kashgar and Khotan, at the edges of China. The mountains were bare and stony. The city's bleakness gave it a tidy look. The river was so shallow there was no boat on it larger than a sampan, and the water was like cocoa, the same orangey brown. Some men on the banks flung nets in and dragged out tiddlers, which they pinched in their fingers and saved. Another group of men used the river banks for curing goatskins—dousing them and then jumping up and down on them on the rocks. The rocks and stones were smooth, some were flat, the sort you find on the seashore. This was once part of the inland sea that had flooded towards the Pacific and created the Yangtze Gorges and dumped its sediment to make the whole of east China.

After a few days in Lanzhou I discovered that it had the same labyrinthine lanes in one section that Peking had—small cool courtyards, and tile roofs on which weeds had taken root, and carved doorways; and the squatting children and sweepers who always existed in those old neighborhoods. The temple at Five Spring Mountain was tended by a terrified monk, who stammered at my questions and pleaded with me to go away. At the base of the ancient but derelict pagoda there was a shooting gallery—kids with air pistols whacking away at tattered targets. In that same vandalized hillside, with its painted pavilions, there was a circus—daredevil motorcyclists speeding up the vertical walls of a jangling cage, while the Chinese gaped and refused to applaud.

The rest of Lanzhou looked as though it had been built the day before yesterday, in the 1950s, when the railway west was also built, under Russian guidance. The city did not have a prosperous air, and yet the stores were full of merchandise and the markets piled with vegetables. This was a railway junction to which trains came from every direction in China. Lanzhou had fish from the China Sea and fruit from Guangdong, meat from the north and dried apricots and raisins and prunes and nuts from Xinjiang in the west. It also had televisions and refrigerators, the two most coveted appliances in China.

I read a story in Lanzhou in the magazine Chinese Literature (Autumn 1986). It was by a well-known short-story writer and minister of culture, Wang Meng, and was called 'The Wind on the Plateau." It was clumsy but enlightening, a story about a family in the new consumption-conscious China. Zhao the teacher has changed his life from the austere one he was living in the sixties and seventies. He has bought property and owns a TV and a refrigerator. He believes his life is just about perfect.

Yet his son was far from satisfied with things as they were. He wanted video equipment, a musical door-chime, a motorcycle and a rubber dinghy. Why not go out and get an air-conditioner made in Australia?

This seemed to me one of the oddest shopping lists I could imagine, but it was a fairly accurate picture of the current state of craving. But I kept thinking, A rubber dinghy?

Meanwhile, Mr. Fang was still traipsing after me, and when I sauntered, so did he, and when I lollygagged, he just stood nearby looking futile and sorrowful. But one day in Lanzhou he came in very handy. I was passing a public toilet and saw a number of large plastic drums on the sidewalk outside. They stank so badly I asked what was in them. No one seemed to know, but then Mr. Fang materialized behind me and spoke one of the few English words he knew.

"Urine," he said.

There were sixty-three five-gallon drums arranged in rows, waiting to be collected. This hardly noticed feature of Chinese life—urine collection—puzzled me. Mr. Fang was pitifully eager to help me understand its purpose. He knew nothing about it himself, but between us, and using his dictionary, we tried to unravel the mystery.

Inside this public toilet, over the urinal, was a sign: We would like good quality urine, so please do not put anything in—no spitting, no paper, no cigarette butts. And another sign said, This urine is used for medicinal purposes.

Mr. Fang and I accosted a man coming out of the john and asked him what it was all about.

"They are saving this urine for medicine," he said. "I don't take it myself, but it's very good medicine."

What was this medicine intended to cure?

"I don't know," he said.

I asked him whether it was used for fertilizer.

"Oh, yes," he said. 'That too."

As we talked, passersby threaded their way through the 315 gallons of human piss that reeked in sticky drums on the sidewalk.

I thought Mr. Fang would feel useful if I gave him a job to do. He had been looking very demoralized. I asked him to find out what this urine collection was all about. He went away and returned with a ragged scrap of paper on which was written the single word enzyme. He said a doctor had written it down. But I was still dissatisfied.

I subsequently discovered that it was used in endocrinology, and that hormone crystals were sublimated from it. The Chinese had been using human urine in sophisticated medicine for a thousand years and in ancient China used it to treat a number of conditions, including impotence, hypogonadism and dysmenorrhea. These urine hormones also straightened out hermaphrodites. Steroids and pituitary hormones were also isolated from the urine. It was also news to me that present-day fertility drugs are extracted from the urine of menopausal Italian nuns.

The trouble was that my having enlisted Mr. Fang's help made him believe that I had softened towards him, and he was eager for more work on my behalf. Was there anything more I wanted him to do? he wondered. I couldn't think of anything until the day I went to Lanzhou Station to buy tickets for Turfan and Urumchi and saw a squabbling crowd of people, and rather insolent and sneering ticket sellers, and one man told me he had been at the station all day (it was now four in the afternoon) and still didn't have a ticket. So I asked Mr. Fang if he would buy the tickets. He said: Gladly! and gave me his chattering laugh—it called attention to his relief—and he went to work. Later, in his Confidential Memo titled Theroux, Paul, Mr. Fang perhaps scratched with his quill pen: Very interested in urine.