Riding the Iron Rooster

18: The Slow Train to Qingdao: Number 508

On these one-day railway trips, the Chinese could practically overwhelm a train with their garbage. Nearly everyone on board was befouling the available space. While I sat and read I noticed that the people opposite, after only a few hours, had amassed on their table (I scribbled the details on my flyleaf): duck bones, fish bones, peanut shells, cookie wrappers, sunflower-seed husks, three teacups, two tumblers, a thermos, a wine bottle, two food tins, spittings, leavings, orange rinds, prawn shells and two used diapers.

The Chinese could be very tidy, but there was also something sluttishly comfortable about an accumulation of garbage, as though it were a symbol of prosperity. The coaches were smoky, and so crowded it was an effort to make my way down the aisle. The train was full of shrieks and stinks. The loudspeaker played a Chinese version of "Flower of Malaya" ("Rose, Rose, I love you, with an aching heart…"). Some big card games were in progress. Passengers read The Yantai Workers' Daily, and romantic novels (People's Liberation Army soldier and his gal back home in Wuhan), and a Chinese magazine I had not seen before, called World Screen, with a portrait of Roger Moore (as James Bond) on the cover.

It was not an old railway line. At a time when steam trains were being phased out in the United States, and rail lines closed, this line from Yantai to Qingdao was being built. It was 1950, and a few years later a brand-new old-fashioned steam engine went gasping down the track with red flags flying from its boiler. It should have happened sooner, but it was not in the interests of the Germans or the Japanese (who had occupied this province) to build the line. In any case, the vision and altruism that are espoused by colonialists are not readily apparent in China. Unlike in Africa and India, the imperialists in China set themselves up in competition against the Chinese, which was another reason Mao execrated them. They were not all racketeers, but they all thrived on China's disunity.

This train still had a fifties feel — a little grim. Most of the passengers had boarded at Yantai and begun eating. They ate noodles, buckets of rice, seaweed, and nuts, fruit and everything else. They did not stop until we arrived at Qingdao in the evening. Unusually for a Chinese train, there were plenty of drinkers — and drunks, spitting, wheezing, puffy faced.

Only a half a dozen of the passengers used the dining car for lunch. They were picking at Chinese spinach and another sinister-looking vegetable.

"What will you have?" the supervisor asked.

"How about some of that?" I said, pointing to the other people's dishes.

"You don't want that stuff," he said. "We have many dishes. Different prices. Do you want the two, the four, the five, the eight or the ten?"

"Which is the best one?"

"The ten," he said. "You won't be sorry."

He meant the 10 yuan lunch. It was a worker's week's pay. The dishes kept coming, the food was good, and there was so much food I made a tally of it. It was the largest meal I had on any Chinese train and might have been the best one. How odd that it should be served on this slow train in this out-of-the-way place. There was first a cold dish, sliced meat and white seaweed; and then shredded pork with carrot and bamboo slivers; shrimp and Chinese cabbage; diced chicken and celery; reconstituted dried fish; deep-fried eggs; Chinese spinach; egg-drop tomato soup, and a big basin of rice. I ate some of it and I marveled at the remainder of the $2.70 meal.

My ticket had cost me less than $2. This was all a bargain. But there were other prices to pay. It took seven hours to go the 150 miles, so our average speed was about 20 miles an hour. We stopped every five minutes, literally that. Steam trains have a sort of jerky clanking way of stopping and starting — an indecisive motion — and all day, to this slow conga, clouds of smoke from the stack tumbled past the windows, as we crossed the flatness of Shandong in a reddening winter sun. We traveled through all the daylight hours, slowly, like a branch-line train moving through a backward shire in rural England, the train full of bumpkins, everyone talking and eating and enjoying themselves, and we stopped everywhere.

We had crossed the peninsula — it had the shape of a turtle's head, and Qingdao lay on the south coast, the bottom of the beak. They said it was the coldest night of the year. There were frost crystals glittering in the air under the glaring lights. And in the swirling steam of the engine, the German station and its tower and its stopped clock produced that nightmare feeling I got in China when I was among European buildings in dramatic weather. After all, a nightmare is the world turned upside down, and thousands of Chinese mobbing a German railway station on a frosty night is a good example of that. It was a tangle of the familiar and the absurd to produce fear. And all around it was very dark.

At the edge of the darkness, braving the cold, young men and women with flags and loud-hailers and megaphones called out, "Come to our hotel—!" "You are welcome at our guest house!" "We have good food and hot water!" They tried to outshout each other, in the spirit of competition and free enterprise, as they touted for business among the arriving passengers.

The irrational dreamlike quality of Qingdao did not vanish when the sun came out the next day. It looked almost as odd in the daylight as at night, though less menacing. I don't feel at home in non-European cities that have been heavily influenced by European buildings. When homesick imperialists put up granite mansions and Baptist churches and Catholic cathedrals with spires, and semidetached houses with prim front gardens, I find it all a bit scary. It is out of place, it disorients me; anyway, what are all these Chinese doing here? I think. Or what is that stately Lutheran church doing near those noodle stalls? I am fascinated by such architectural capriccios (the gothic spires among the pagodas, the Chinese faces at the windows of the English-style bungalows), but it is no more relaxing than the bad dream it strongly seems to mimic.

It is intensely reassuring to imperialists to build versions of their fat and monumental buildings, whether they fit the place or not. The Germans used a feeble pretext in the 1890s to threaten the Chinese and finally to force them to hand over various valuable concessions. In 1898 the Germans stuck a German town onto a small fishing village. One of the strangest buildings in China is in Qingdao, the former residence of the German governor, modeled on the Kaiser's palace. I went inside and looked around until the caretakers chased me away. It is palatial; it has ramparts, granite and stucco balconies, Tudor-style beams, glazed tiles, circular staircases, porticoes and galleries (on the inside, under the high vaulted ceiling) and a conservatory. It was built in 1906. It is in perfect condition. It looks as though it will last forever. Chairman Mao stayed in it when he visited Qingdao in 1958. For that reason, the Red Guards, who had a field day smashing up the evidence of diabolical foreign influences in Qingdao, left the governor's palace alone. It remains unoccupied. It serves no useful purpose.

The Chinese in 1898 were browbeaten into granting the Germans a ninety-nine-year lease, but less than twenty years later — just after the outbreak of the First World War, in 1914—the Japanese occupied Qingdao. It is amazing that the Germans managed to accomplish so much in such a short time. Virtually all their buildings still stand, the railway still runs to Jinan, and the brewery produces the best beer in China — and sticks to the old spelling, Tsingtao beer.

The Chinese guidebook to Qingdao begins, "Qingdao is a relatively young city with only eighty years of history. It used to be a small village. Since 1949, rapid developments have been made." So much for the imperial designs, the foreign occupation and two world wars. Even the U.S. Marines and the American Seventh Fleet had a spell in Qingdao. None of these humiliations is forgotten; they are simply not mentioned. The city is actually overrun with Japanese businessmen. I met Germans in my hotel (I asked them what they thought of the German buildings; they said, "Too old, too hard to heat"), and the Seventh Fleet was invited back in 1986, forty years after it had backed the wrong side (it had helped Chiang Kai-shek), and was given a warm welcome.

The Chinese history of Qingdao was available, but the German history was obscure. I asked Mr. Ling, a university student, what he knew about it — how big was the German settlement, what was the population, how did they put up all these large buildings and suburbs?

"There are no figures," said Mr. Ling.

"There must be," I said.

"Yes. But the authorities do not release these figures. It might seem too humiliating if we knew how few Germans there were occupying the town. It is bad history — that's what we think."

"Do you really think it is bad history?"

"No," he said. "I am interested in knowing the truth, but we have no books."

That was a Chinese phenomenon. There was the distant past, the glorious anecdotal history; and there was the recent past, mostly Mao. In between, a thousand years of Chinese history, everything was obscure. Perhaps it was politically questionable, or humiliating, or contradictory, or, like the years that had been expunged from the Mao Museum in Shaoshan, a hideous embarrassment.

In its way, Qingdao was as weird in its monuments and structures as the lost city of Gaocheng, in the boondocks of Xinjiang. Instead of a mud monastery or a crumbling mosque in the desert, Qingdao's counterparts were churches. The largest of them was the Catholic cathedral, built in a sort of twilight period in the early 1930s, when the city was under the control of the Nanking government and abounded with missionaries.

It was a big bare church, made of gray stucco, with two spires. It had been completely renovated — freshly painted, regilded statues and crosses, the Stations of the Cross newly touched up, the ornamented nave picked out in gold — everything bright and pious looking, with baskets of fresh flowers on the altar. There was room for 600 people here and it was said to be full on Sunday, but there were only 3 people praying on the day I went. It was midafternoon on a weekday; the kneeling people whispering their prayers were elderly. Over the high altar was a scroll painted on the wall: Venite Adoremus Domine. The Mass in Qingdao is said in Latin.

"I remember when they tore the crosses off the steeples of this church, during the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Bai said. He was a young man who had recently graduated from Shandong University. He had been only nine years old in 1967, but he had a very clear memory of the Cultural Revolution, which had been fierce in Qingdao: this city was full of poisonous foreign influences, and such malignant and feudalistic harbingers of the right-deviationist wind (so to speak) had to be smashed by the vanguard of Mao Zedong's shining thought. It was well known that the Red Guards had kicked the shit out of foreign-looking Qingdao.

But the steeples on the cathedral were very high.

"How did they get up there?" I could not understand how they had scaled these steeples. And the crosses towered eight feet above them, so that was another problem.

Mr. Bai said, "The Red Guards held a meeting, and then they passed a motion to destroy the crosses. They marched to the church and climbed up to the roof. They pulled up bamboos and tied them into a scaffold. It took a few days — naturally they worked at night, and they sang the Mao songs. When the crowd gathered they put up ladders and they climbed up and threw a rope around the Christian crosses, and they pulled them down. It was very exciting!"

After that, they did the same thing to the other three churches, a sort of Venetian-looking one and a vast, solid Lutheran one with a witch's hat for a steeple. They stacked the crosses at the Red Guard headquarters, but pious people stole them and took them away, burying them in the hills east of the city. These crosses were only disinterred a few years ago, when the reforms came into force. But the change is dramatic. For example, I bought a locally made crucifix — they were mass-producing them now in Qingdao — for seventy-five cents.

Mr. Bai said he had vivid memories of the Cultural Revolution because he had not had to go to school. He chased after the Red Guards, watching them destroy houses and persecute people; he had found it all thrilling, and he had always been part of the crowd when some spectacular piece of vandalism was unleashed.

He had even watched persecutions nearer home.

"There was a man in our compound whom we called 'The Capitalist.' He lived on the far side of the courtyard. We had a label or a name for everyone there. One we called 'The Carpenter,' and another 'The Scholar.' We paid rent to The Capitalist'—he owned the houses."

I said, "If you were only nine years old, how did you know what was going on?"

"There was nothing else for me to do except watch. And it was like a fever. All day, for years, I watched and listened." He smiled, remembering. "One day in 1967, the Red Guards held a meeting—"

I saw Mr. Bai, a little raggedy-assed urchin, peering through the window at the screaming youths with their red armbands.

"They decided to criticize The Capitalist. There were about eight or nine of us following them — we were just little kids. We made a paper dunce cap for The Capitalist. His name was Zhang. We went into his house — pushed the door open without knocking. He was in bed. He was very sick — he had stomach cancer. We shouted at him and denounced him. We made him confess to his crimes. We forced him to lower his head so that we could put on the dunce cap — lowering the head was a sort of submission to the will of the people, you see."

"Did you parade him through the streets?"

"He had cancer. He could not walk. We mocked him in his bed. Then the neighbors came in. They also accused him — but not of being a capitalist. I remember one woman shouted, 'You borrowed cooking pots and materials and never gave them back!' She was very angry about something he had done many years ago. Others said, 'You tried to squeeze people' and 'You took money.'"

"What did the man say?"

"Nothing. He was afraid. And we found a great thing. On one of his old chairs there was a tiny emblem of the Guomindang. That proved he was a capitalist and a spy. Everyone was glad about that. We screamed at him, 'Enemy! Enemy!' He died soon after."

This had almost taken my breath away. I said, "That's a really terrible story."

"Sure," Mr. Bai said, but without much force. "It is terrible."

But it was by the book. Mao said, "To right a wrong it is necessary to exceed proper limits, and the wrong cannot be righted without the proper limits being exceeded."

That was turning a compassionate Chinese proverb on its head, one about the evil of going beyond proper limits to right a wrong. But Mao said that it was necessary to parade landlords down the street in dunce caps, and to sleep in their beds, and take their grain, and humiliate them, "to establish the absolute authority of the peasants."

This little treatise "On Going Too Far" was written in 1927. It was part of the script for the Cultural Revolution. The Old Man was greatly in favor of going too far ("going too far" has "a revolutionary significance"). "To put it bluntly," he went on, "it was necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror…"

But this German imperial outpost on the Chinese shore, which had been besieged at various times, and occupied by successive waves of Japanese, Americans and Nationalist Chinese, as well as the fiercest Red Guards (maddened by the city's look of European feudalism and all these Christian nests of superstition), had in the end turned out to be that quaintest of settlements, the seaside retirement town. The houses would not have disgraced the streets of Bexhill-on-Sea, on England's geriatric coast. Qingdao even had a breezy promenade, and slowly strolling oldies. It had a pier. It had ice-cream sellers. But it wasn't raffish and blowsy, a place for day-trippers. It was like its English counterpart — just as bungaloid.

High Party officials — secretaries, directors and deputies longed to get a room or an apartment in Qingdao and spend the rest of their days in the sea air with its snap and tang. It was perhaps a bourgeois dream, but who could blame them? It was more a town than a city. It was not heavily industrialized. The weather was lovely most of the year — pleasant in the summer, bracing in the winter. There was only the occasional typhoon, but it was obvious that Qingdao was able to withstand such storms. It was not a congested place. It was almost unique among Chinese towns for having a unity of architectural style — it just so happened that it was German and not Chinese unity, but so what? That was the luck of its youth and the fact that it had been planned and built in such a short time. It wasn't the centuries-old accretion of monuments, pagodas, ruins, factories, apartment blocks, political boondoggling and bad ideas that made up the average Chinese city. It was not only a pretty place — the familiar and absurd its strongest features — but it was manifestly prosperous. Yantai was not a patch on it. It looked well-to-do. Its food was excellent — fresh seafood, Shandong vegetables. Its beaches were clean. There were plovers strutting on them. And those old folks you took to be members of the cleanup brigade, grubbing around the rocks and poking in the sand, stuffing sea urchins and black kelp into their bags, were actually market traders who were selling this stuff to eat; but the result of their gathering left the beaches of Qingdao bright and tidy. No wonder the Chinese wanted to retire here.

I walked around, wishing I could stay longer. Generally speaking, it was not an ambition I had very often in China. I would visit a place and get hold of it, and after three or four days I would want to let go and move on. The Chinese themselves were always telling me that I should go here or there — see this garden or that pavilion. In Qingdao they said, "You should go to Mount Tai" — the holy mountain on the east of the peninsula. But I was happy in beautiful, breezy Qingdao, and it was a bonus that after dark it looked slightly nightmarish.

It had been perfectly placed on the shore, taking full advantage of the cliffs. With the sea in front, and the apple orchards behind it, and the heavy industry well hidden, it seemed well planned. It also had a number of colleges and universities; it had several technical schools and an oceanographic institute. So, in addition to the vacationers and retired people, it also had a great number of students.

Qingdao was one of the pleasantest Chinese cities for walking in — I guessed that that had been part of the scheme to make it habitable. I met students on my walks. I asked them everything and I justified my interrogations by the observation about Confucius in the Analects: "When The Master entered the Grand Temple he asked questions about everything."^*

There had been no demonstrations here. One girl said, "A few years ago I would have demonstrated, but now I have too much to lose. The government would destroy me."

She was twenty-one and was about to become a student teacher. She shrugged when she told me that, as though it was not quite what she had wanted.

"Is there anything wrong with being a teacher?" I asked.

"No. It's good work. But, you know, factory workers earn more than teachers because they get bigger bonuses."

Another girl said, "I feel old" — she was twenty-two. And she explained, "It is as if my life is all decided and mapped out. Nothing unexpected will happen. I will graduate. I will get an M.A. The government will say that I must become a teacher. I will spend my life that way."

"What would you do if you had your choice?"

"I would travel — not necessarily to foreign countries," she said. "I would wander, just wander, in China. Have you noticed that no one wanders here? No one is open-minded and aimless. Everyone has a purpose. But I would go here and there, talking to people, and I would choose out-of-the-way places, like Gansu and Xinjiang."

The male students I talked to were much less adventurous than the women; much more conventional. The women seemed a little giggly, but that was only shyness. They could be very direct.

"When did you first feel old?" one asked me.

I answered truthfully. "When I was six or seven, in the first grade. And then when I graduated from high school. And when I turned thirty. Since then I have felt fairly young — that is, until you asked me that question."

Most of them had been born in the first years of the Cultural Revolution, so they had no memory of it. They regarded it the way I had regarded the Great Depression in America, or the Second World War. They seemed episodes from the past — not very remote, but what mattered was that they were over. The depression had had an end, and so had the war. People with college degrees sold apples on the street, went one of my father's depression stories. The neighborhood air-raid warden yelled "Put that light out!" That for me, was the war. The young Chinese had the same sort of exemplary stories of the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Mr. Bai, they had not even tagged along after the Red Guards. Theirs were always stories of disappearances, of neighbors and relatives sent into the countryside.

Their sharpest memories were of Mao's death, the Gang of Four, and Deng and his reforms, but even so they were more impatient than hopeful.

"If you live through these changes they seem very slow," one said. "It is only because you are a foreigner, on the outside, that the changes seem dramatic. For us they are very ponderous."

When I considered that it was still illegal for a foreigner to talk at random with any Chinese citizen — the old rule was seldom enforced, but it was a well-known rule nonetheless — I was grateful for this frankness. The healthiest sign in China was this straight talk.

Because the students were not of the Maoist years they were ambivalent about the Old Man. Indeed, I sometimes found talking to the young that I was more enthusiastic about Mao than they were. I admired his military brilliance, his subtle mind, his wit and charisma, his ingenuity and toughness. Who could not admire the Long March, or his tenacity against the Japanese, his voluminous writing, his ability to unify this enormous country? Of course, Confucianism also kept these people unified and family minded, but Mao, who loved contradiction (and even wrote a long essay on the subject), remained for me the most fascinating and ambiguous figure in Chinese history.

For these students he was an uninteresting riddle. He had cast a long shadow, yes; but they were still living in that shadow, and they didn't like it very much.

"He was a strange man," a student in Qingdao told me.

I asked who he resembled, because Chinese life is full of models, like the heroic soldier, Lei Feng, the inspired worker, Iron Man Wang (Wang Jinxi), and the Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains.

"He was unlike any other Chinese man," the student said. "I think he read too many books and began to make a place for himself in Chinese history. He was an arrogant and self-important man. He behaved like an emperor."

My reaction was Yes, but — yet why bother to sell them on Mao? They had to live the rest of their lives here. I could leave any time I liked. In the end it was for them to deal with his memory, not me.

"When Mao died, I knew I had to cry," another student said. "We had been required to love him. I was just a little kid at school. I didn't feel anything, but the teachers were watching. I had to force myself to cry."

Ice was packed into the bays and inlets. It was January, after all. But it was sunny, and during the day it was almost warm. The rocks on the promontories of Qingdao were fluted with ice, too, and some were ringed by glassy skirts of ice crust. I wondered whether it was because it was out of season that the place was so pleasant. There was a swimmer on Beach Number Two one day. He strolled down and plunged in, as people were said to do in freezing Harbin in the winter, breaking ice in the river to go for a dip. But it wasn't swimming. It was a rather pointless act of willpower, like holding a lighted match under your finger (a loony pastime advocated by the convicted Watergate flunky Gordon Liddy, by the way). Would people do such things if no one were watching, or if they couldn't tell someone about it later on?

I had arrived in Qingdao on a freezing night, feeling I had stepped into a nightmare made up of old German movies and winter storms, steam locomotives and fog, and the black station with the hands missing from its clock face. I left on a dazzling springlike day, and now in the sunshine I could see that the station was a relic, with the red star of China planted on its conical roof. The loud whistle blew, and a moment later the train was tracking past the islands and lighthouse and breezy streets, into the open country of Shandong that was so flat it had the look of a floodplain.