Riding the Iron Rooster

19: The Shandong Express to Shanghai: Train Number 234

This featureless brown farmland with its ditches and its telephone poles and its tile-roofed houses looked as dreary as Belgium. From the farmers' point of view it was the worst time of year. The muddy lanes, the ruts, the puddles, the cold, the January drizzle. There was nothing to eat yet. The people labored along on bikes, they thrashed their oxen, they pushed carts that rolled uncertainly on big, wobbly wheels.

There was a Belgian man in my compartment. After we got acquainted I nerved myself and asked him the question I had been rehearsing.

"Does this part of Shandong look like Belgium?"

We looked at the ditches, the plowed fields, the puddles, the poles.

"Yes. Is similar."

So I had not been imagining it. These winter journeys in China were tiring, and I sometimes suspected that my weariness blurred my perceptions — or else made me giddy and fanciful. And these long stretches of brown, plowed China could be depressing. The whole of this overpopulated region was like that. And, like Belgium, it tired my eyes.

Alain was from Antwerp. He was traveling with his Chinese counterpart, Li. They were going to Hefei, but they did not know that Hefei was the new center of student protest. They had no interest in politics. They were telephone engineers in a Belgian-Chinese joint venture to upgrade the telephone system. Alain said, "I think we arrive here just in time."

It was well known that Chinese phones were hopeless. It was impossible to direct dial any Chinese city, and it was very hard to make even a local call. And when you got through you often heard five other voices — or more — holding simultaneous conversations. A Chinese phone was like Chinese life: it was full of other people, close together, doing exactly what you were trying to do. Often the phone went dead. You could wait eight hours to be connected. Occasionally a whole city would be cut off. For several days it might be impossible to make a call outside Shanghai. In Taiyuan, the provincial capital of Shanxi, any calls, other than local ones, were out of the question: the city was isolated, though it could be reached by telegraph, using Morse code. The old Chinese phones were of heavy black Bakelite that shattered or chipped if they were struck; the new phones were lightweight plastic, like toys, and were usually a color that did not inspire confidence, such as flamingo pink or powder blue. It was possible to imagine how the Chinese felt about them from the way they shrieked into them. It was always shrieks. No one ever chatted on a telephone in China.

I told Alain these things. He knew them, he said. He was aware that his task was monumental. Fortunately he had a sense of humor, or at least a sense of silliness, that made life bearable. His English was shaky. He said things like, "Will you traduce her for me?" and "I feel happy as a roy" and "The Chinese has good formation but bad motivation."

He was the complete Foreign Expert. He did not speak Chinese. He had no interest in politics. Chinese art to him was the enameled ashtrays and bamboo back scratchers they sold at the Friendship Stores. Apart from Qingdao and Hefei and Shanghai, he had not traveled anywhere. He said he knew Belgium intimately, though. He was fluent in both Flemish and French. He tried to teach me to pronounce the almost unpronounceable Flemish word schild (shield), but I could do no more than approximate it and sounded as though I were swallowing a quahog.

We played capitals to kill the time. Mr. Li knew little more than Alain, who failed on Hungary, India and Peru (Mr. Li knew Hungary). Alain did not read. He amused himself with his video camera, for which he had paid $1200 in a duty-free shop. He sent tapes home — tapes of Shandong looking horribly like Belgium.

Mr. Li was somewhat similar.

"Think of a country," I said.

He was baffled. "I cannot think of one."

"Any country," I said. "Like Brazil, or Zambia, or Sweden."

He made a face: nothing. He did not know any geography at all. He was not just geocentric; he was ignorant.

Their field was telephones — wiring, systems, satellites, exchanges, linkups, computers. They had this very narrow but very deep area of expertise, and it was all they cared about. They could talk animatedly about computer telephone systems, but about nothing else. Mention the rain in Guangdong or the snow in Harbin and they looked blank. Don't mention books.

They were the new people in the world, the up-and-comers, the only employable folks: they had technical skills, they were problem solvers, and they were willing to travel. In every other respect they were stupid, but their stupidity did not matter. I found them very friendly because they were enthusiastic about their work.

"My boss is not happy with me today," Alain said. "But the fault is the workers. Chinese workers like to sleep."

Mr. Li agreed with this.

We looked at Alain's snapshots — a great stack of cozy Belgian interiors. Fat people in bright clothes. People eating or sitting in small parlors.

"This is my grandmother. This is my sister. My mother. My father…"

We went through the stack twice. I got to recognize the porcelain figures on the mantelpiece at Alain's grandmother's, and a particular cushion, and his father's blue sweater. Alain loved looking at them. He said he missed home.

"What do you miss most?"

"Beef," he said. That was what the man had told me in Harbin. What was it about beef? Alain said, "But I have this."

He brought out a bulging knapsack. It contained a stock of canned goods. Alain called it his emergency kit. He had brought it from Antwerp. He had canned carrots, canned mackerel, cans of sardines, and a brand of cocktail sausages called TV Meat. They were for nibbling in front of a television. Alain also had one of those, a twelve-inch set, for playing his video tapes. He had more luggage than anyone I had ever seen on a train. "My landlord in Antwerp told me I could not leave my things in my apartment, so I took it all to China." He also had many cans of beef chunks in gravy, packages of a pemmican-looking substance called Bifi, a can of chocolate paste called Choco that he spread on bread, and a dozen chocolate bars.

It had been my intention to get off this train at Xuzhou, in a remote corner of Jiangsu Province, and to make my way, somehow, about a hundred miles southeast to the little town of Huai'an, which was on the Grand Canal. In that town, in 1898, Zhou Enlai was born. I wanted to see his house. Had it been made into a shrine, like Mao's in Shaoshan? And if so, was it now as deserted as Mao's birthplace, or was it teeming with well-wishers? It was whispered by many people that Zhou was the secret hero of the Chinese Revolution. Of course he had written very little, and he was no theorist; but he was urbane and compassionate. He was a gentleman — the sort described and praised by Confucius: temperate, kind, magnanimous, and so forth.

The trouble with the stop in Xuzhou was that it occurred at three in the morning. At that hour the whole of China is asleep. I would be emerging from the train at this ridiculous hour on a winter night, and have six hours to kill before knowing whether it was possible to find a bus or a car to Zhou Enlai's homestead.

I decided to stay in bed.

Alain and Li got off at Bengbu at five in the morning to transfer to a Hefei train. Before we turned in they piled their boxes and suitcases outside in the corridor. The Head of the Train complained about Alain's trunk, but Mr. Li explained that it contained the foreign expert's worldly goods from Belgium.

"Regulations, regulations," the Head said. "You must register it."

They didn't bother. More people knocked on the door in the night to complain about it, but I was asleep at five when they got up. I woke up when one of them sat on my foot, but then they were gone. That was the way with trains — something dreamlike in the way people came and went. By eight there was someone else in Alain's berth, reading a comic book. It was a young woman, with a veil drawn tight over her face because of the dust.

"The Great River," she said, using the Chinese name for the Yangtze.

I decided to piss into it. I went to the toilet. On the door was a long Chinese word, TINGCHESHIQINGWUSHIYONG, which was seven characters run together, meaning, "While the train is stopped, please don't use this room." But it hadn't stopped; it was crossing the long railway bridge over the Yangtze. I entered the room, peered into the open hole and let fly.

Having seen Xinjiang and the northeast and the open spaces of Inner Mongolia, I now knew that this eastern part of classical China was the least interesting to look at. It was brown factories and black canals separated by flat cabbage fields. It had been plowed and fertilized and planted for thousands of years, but it was no miracle that anything at all grew here. The secret is revealed every morning, as men with long-handled dippers scoop human shit out of dark barrels and fertilize the fields. It was the flattest, ugliest and most populous part of China; but its shifters kept it in business. Shanghai residents produced 7 500 tons of human shit a day. It was all used. Farm yields were high, but the place epitomized drudgery. Everyone's energy was expended in simply existing there, and every inch of land had been put to use. Why grow flowers when you can grow spinach? Why plant a tree when you can use the sunshine on your crop? And the untillable soil was perfect for a factory. People praised Wuxi's Lake Tai, but the lake was dead, and Wuxi was simply awful looking, part of the sprawl of Shanghai, although it was seventy-five miles from the Bund.

In any kind of travel there is a good argument for going back and verifying your impressions. Perhaps you were a little hasty in judging the place? Perhaps you saw it in a good month? Something in the weather might have sweetened your disposition? In any case, travel is frequently a matter of seizing a moment. It is personal. Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine. Our accounts of the journeys would be different. You would notice how I provoked people with questions, and how I loitered in the market, and my fear of Chinese water that amounted almost to hydrophobia. I might mention your impatience, or your liking for dumplings, or the way you wilted in the heat. You would write about the kinds of Chinese food, and I about the way they wolfed it. If you spoke about Mao, I would contradict you.

On a second visit to Shanghai I was startled by its crowds and traffic — people and cars vying for the right of way; and by its contrasts of horror and beauty; and by its neurotic energy, a sort of frenzy that was unique to Shanghai.

The Shanghainese have a sense of belonging to the city that resembles the New Yorker's strong identification with New York. It is not chauvinism or civic pride. It is a sense of shared experience, the same headaches and complaints, a sort of it's-awful-but-I-love-it attitude. It is also a sense of being possessed by the place, locked in its embrace and embattled at the same time. Speaking as someone from out of town, I find both Shanghai and New York pretty dreadful. The noise alone is cause enough to regard them as uninhabitable. I grew up in the big-enough city of Boston, and when people talk about New York's (or Shanghai's) vitality, I simply see a lot of frantic pedestrians. And writers who celebrate cities always seem laughable to me, because every city dweller, in order to keep sane and survive, invents his own city. Your New York is not my New York. On the other hand, my Shanghai would probably be yours. It is simple but dense; it is horizontal; and it has remarkably few landmarks. New York is vertical, a city of interiors — and secrets; but Shanghai is its streets. There is not enough room for so many people indoors, and so people work, talk, cook, play and carry on their businesses on the sidewalks. There is no other way for the city to cope with its overpopulation. It is the most visible and obvious of cities, and perhaps therein lies its charm for those who praise it: that its modes of life and work are so apparent to even the casual stroller. There is also a strong sense of old China in the sidewalk life, and such sights seem to give it "atmosphere." But I would rather live in a place where I could walk without incessantly bumping into people, or dodging traffic, or where I could hear myself think.

But the sense of urban solidarity that characterizes Shanghai had a marked effect on the student demonstrations. It was the only city where factory workers linked arms with students. And the numbers were so great (they varied from 100,000 to 200,000) that the city came to a halt — no buses, no taxis, and no one was able to work.

I went out to Fudan University on the outskirts — and wretched-looking outskirts at that — where I talked with students about the demonstrations.

One student told me, "We held meetings, but we wanted to disassociate ourself from the Party, so we insisted that student cadres had to leave the hall. These cadres are appointed by the Party — we didn't want them."

"Did the cadres join the march?"

"No," the student said. "We put their names on our posters, but we printed their names upside down or in slanted characters."

"What was the point of that?"

"It is disrespectful to print someone's name upside down."

True, a Chinese person's name is everything to him. It represents himself, his parents, his extended family and even his village. The worst, most insulting curse anyone can utter in China against a Chinese person is Cao ni de xing! "Fuck your name!"

The student said that the term running dogs was used in the demonstrations, for the first time since the Cultural Revolution. And big-character posters were another artifact from that time that had been pressed into service, but they now read More Freedom and We Want Democracy. Rising prices, low salaries, poor public transportation, byzantine election procedures, and difficult rules governing studying abroad were other grievances.

I carefully noted these down, and then a young man named Mr. Hong said, "You know about the Jan and Dean concert?"

Jan and Dean? "Baby Talk," "Surf City" and "Ride the Wild Surf"? The early sixties, Southern California, totally tubular surfer duo? That Jan and Dean? I had been under the impression that after Jan wrapped his car around a tree in 1966, suffering paralysis and brain damage, this group was no longer operational.

But I was wrong. This American group, which outdated the Beach Boys (who were their sometime collaborators), had undergone a recrudescence and were yapping to beat the band, actually singing "Surf City" in Shanghai, twenty-nine years after they had released their first record. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. After all, Mr. Tian had sung me a Neil Sedaka song in the Langxiang wilderness only a month before.

Mr. Hong said, "We liked Jan and Dean very much. The students were excited. Jan and Dean invited some students onto the stage to dance. They were dancing and enjoying themselves. But afterwards those students were accused by the police of being disruptive."

"What happened to them?"

"They were taken into custody. They were beaten."

This also fueled the students' enthusiasm for a demonstration. But there was a feeling that the students had been led into a trap, since the conservatives used the demonstrations as an excuse to call for a limiting of the reforms.

Everyone agreed that what was happening in China indicated a power struggle in the inner Party, between the reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping and the eight or ten so-called leftists, who were antireformers, led by Peng Zhen (chairman of the National People's Congress). In spite of his dogmatic Maoist views, Peng had never been purged. These puritanical old troopers, many of whom had shared the privations of the Long March, were outraged by students who were making demands. Their American counterparts might be the VFW, who also hated student protests. The problem was that there were also people in the inner Party who were pushing harder for reform.

I paid a call on Mr. Brooks, the American consul-general, who had impressed me so much a few months before by telling me that he didn't have the slightest idea of what would happen next in China.

"The Chinese will go on doing business," he said. "Foreign investors aren't concerned with student demonstrations. What would worry them is a return to Stalinism."

We then talked about Deng's successor. Would it be Hu Yaobang, Deng's bridge partner? Deng himself had indicated this.

Mr. Brooks said that Deng had hoped to step down, but that he wanted to make sure his policies would continue. When Deng went he wanted to take all the doubtful people with him.

"The trouble is," Mr. Brooks said, "Mr. Hu has disappeared from view. A foreign minister told a visiting Japanese delegation, 'He's tired.' In Chinese terms that means he can't do the work."

I listened to the radio that night and heard a news report that Hu Yaobang had been forced to resign after a session of self-criticism in which he said he had "made many mistakes."

So, just like that, Mr. Hu was gone, and Deng didn't have a successor.

Dr. Xie Xide, the president of Fudan University, was a member of the Central Committee. I saw her the following day and asked her how she had found out about Mr. Hu's resignation.

"I heard it on the Voice of America," she said. "But I was not surprised. He tended to make decisions without consulting anyone. For example, once he was on an official visit to Japan. He was very enthusiastic. He invited three thousand Japanese students to visit China."

"To study?"

"No. Just for a visit," Dr. Xie said. "But we are a poor country. We can't afford that sort of thing."

Mr. Hu had often had his foot in his mouth. He had begun to wear Western suits, and although he had been designated a sort of official greeter of Eastern Bloc delegations (the nine Poles in porkpie hats, the Rumanian wrestlers, the representatives of the Hungarian joint venture in making paprika), Mr. Hu's sympathies were with the Western capitalists. He became very excited at one stage about contagious diseases and he advocated the abandonment of chopsticks in favor of knives and forks. And why not have individual portions, he exclaimed, instead of the Chinese common dish in the middle of the table, and everyone shoving his chopsticks in? He had recently gone to Tibet and suggested that the Han people should leave the region forthwith and let the Tibetans run it themselves. (In itself it was a bold thought, but it would have set a disastrous example to other autonomous regions, like Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.) He had also said, rather tactlessly (considering his past as Party Secretary), "Marxism cannot solve China's problems."

The official version of Mr. Hu's departure was that at "an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China's Central Committee, Hu Yaobang made a self-criticism of his mistakes on major issues of political principles in violation of the Party's principle of collective leadership." This was reported by China's official mouthpiece, the Xinhua News Agency. Mr. Hu was further accused of having caused "a slackening of ideological control."

In a word, Mr. Hu was being blamed for the student protests. He was spineless, weepy, ideologically unsound. In the pantheon of modern Chinese goblins and enemies, which included a running dog, a paper tiger, a snake spirit and a cow demon, Mr. Hu had become one of the slimiest and least trustworthy, a bourgeois liberal. The Maoist view still stood: a liberal was a dangerous hypocrite.

He was not the only one to go. A day or so later, the writer Wang Ruowang was expelled from the Communist Party. Was this interesting, and did anyone care about such boring political ambushes? My feeling was that I would much rather have been bird-watching in Heilongjiang, yet these political events were not without their amusing ironies. For example, this man Wang had had his problems before. In 1957 he had been labeled "a rightist" in Mao's Anti-Rightist Campaign, a witch-hunt that had followed the Hundred Flowers Campaign (when the rightists had been suckered into making public criticisms of the Party). And then, in 1966, Mr. Wang had fallen again. He was "struggled" and finally charged with being "a cow demon." This he had to live with for ten years. He was then rehabilitated and made a council member of the Chinese Writers' Association and of the Shanghai Writers' Association. His crime (so Xinhua said) was that he "advocated bourgeois liberalization," and criticized the Party saying, "you [the Party] have nothing left to do now that the people have the freedom to write and to pick whatever theatrical performances they like."

Shanghai had just seen a Chinese run of the torrid O'Neill play Desire Under the Elms, so there was a grain of truth in that (it had been banned until recently). In a sense, the only heresy that Mr. Wang committed was that he said what everyone knew to be true.

It was very obvious that many people behaved like capitalists and petit-bourgeois traders. They had family businesses. They owned shops. Just the day before Wang fell, I had a ride in a privately owned taxi. "I own this car," the man said. It was a jalopy, but it was all his. People were changing jobs, making dresses, peddling their own wares, and selling their vegetables off their own pushcarts. But it was a great mistake for anyone to call this capitalism. You had to call it The Chinese Way. And it was an error for anyone to draw attention to the new freedoms. Hypocrisy was necessary. The government did not want to appear soft; and the Party preferred to live with the illusion that it was more repressive than it actually was.

It was another instance of the Chinese hating idle talk. It was a puritanical dislike for loose behavior and foolery. The Chinese attitude was, Get on with the job, don't talk so much, don't ask questions. It did not matter very much if someone was making a fat profit out of his cabbages, or if he was putting on a Western play, or if he believed in the hygienic value of the knife and fork. The error was in talking about such things, because that created conflict. I remember my Chinese friend in Peking, when I was protesting about Mr. Fang being my nanny. This knowledgeable Chinese fellow looked at me, closed his eyes, and shook his head, a gesture that meant: Don't say another word.

In the meantime, as long as you didn't gloat about it, you could do pretty much as you liked. These days no one breathed down my neck. They had forgotten that I was wandering through China. And one day in Shanghai I saw some students from Nankai University in Tianjin — about twenty of them — who were about to leave for a tour of the United States. They were a theatrical troupe, who were on their way to Minneapolis and St. Louis and a dozen other cities to perform a play adapted from the novel Rickshaw Boy.

They were friendly, eager students, very excited about their overseas tour. I took one aside and asked him about the production. The novel, by Lao She, is the story of a rickshaw puller in Peking in the 1930s.

I said, "Wasn't Lao She hounded to death by Red Guards?"

"Ha! Ha!" the student said, and the laugh meant emphatically Don't bring that up!

I stayed in Shanghai a while longer. I bought an old goldfish bowl at the antique shop. I saw a truly terrible Chinese movie: it was violent and thoroughly philistine. It rained. People talked about the power struggle in the inner Party. They were not cynical or indifferent to such big changes — the expulsions and resignations — but since they could do nothing about them they had to accept them. The rain began to leak into my soul. I walked through the rat's maze of back lanes near the cathedral and got glimpses of ancient China in the drizzle. I was happiest those nights, trudging alone in the rain, glancing into windows, seeing people ironing and making noodles and pasting up the red banners for the Chinese New Year, watching people roistering in cheap steamy restaurants and strangling chickens. It was wonderful to be anonymous those dark nights in Shanghai, when no one could see my face, and I heard a mother scolding a child with "Where have you been?"