Riding the Iron Rooster

20: The Night Train to Xiamen: Number 375

It was the familiar exit from Shanghai, the main line through the cabbagey province of Zhejiang and tarted-up Hangzhou, the haunt of tourists and nifty little Japanese; and as soon as the hills appeared the sun slid behind them and night fell. There were three Chinese in my compartment when I pulled the blanket over my head, but by morning only one remained. This was Mr. Ni. He explained that the others had gotten off at Yingtan, when the train turned left onto the spur line through Fujian, the coastal province that faces Taiwan. Mr. Ni was also going to Xiamen, and even referred to it (for my benefit) by its old name, Amoy.

He was beginning work on an offshore dredging operation. He explained that he was a surveyor and that he disliked south China. It was his sorry fate to have been posted here for two years. He was Shanghai born and bred and had all of that city's characteristic bumptiousness — he was blunt, offhand, presumptuous and fluent. He regarded himself as cultured. Southerners were yokels, in his view. They were greedy. That was why so many of them had left China. (It was true the world was full of spirited and hard-working Fujianese.) We were at Zhangzhou, where tangerines grow.

"In Shanghai we are sick for knowledge," Mr. Ni said. "But these Amoy people are only interested in making money. That is their main characteristic. They don't like reading or education. Just business."

A moment later, Mr. Ni asked me if I wanted to change money — my Foreign Exchange Certificates for his renminbi. Or did I want an interpreter in Xiamen? Or he could accompany me on my way. He had taught himself English and wanted to practice it. Also — he repeated — what about changing money?

Mr. Ni was invaluable to me that day in unraveling the news of the political confusion in the People's Daily. Such subtle news did not get into the English-language China Daily. The first interesting item quoted a high politburo member, Li Peng, as saying, "The Party has full confidence in intellectuals."

An intellectual in China is someone with a high-school education, doing a white-collar job. It is not a bespectacled nerd who sits around sipping tea and quoting Mencius. In the way that Chinese society is more easily defined by negatives, an intellectual is not a factory worker or a peasant farmer. He (or she) is a person who can read and write, who does not get his hands dirty.

The main report in the paper was of Zhao Ziyang: a strong implication that he had taken Hu Yaobang's place. He had been elevated by Deng. That was incontestable. He had met a Hungarian delegation — meeting such delegations had been Mr. Hu's old job. But the clearest sign that he had displaced Mr. Hu completely was his unambiguous criticism of Mr. Hu.

He said that Mr. Hu had been "incapable of fighting against Westernization"; that he had sought "to push political reforms too far," and — in an unusual burst of frankness from a Chinese leader — that Mr. Hu "had been warned several times over the years."

It was obvious that Mr. Zhao was in the ascendant and that Mr. Hu was on his way to becoming a nonperson. Mr. Zhao was a natty dresser — he nearly always wore a Western suit and tie. He jogged. But he was careful to distance himself from Westernization, which was almost synonymous with bourgeois liberalization. It had already taken hold, and seemed at the moment to be irreversible. And because its adherents — so-called intellectuals — were nervous, displeased and demoralized, Mr. Zhao had to be especially enigmatic.

Mr. Ni and I puzzled over the paper, and then I asked him what he thought would happen? Would Mr. Zhao ultimately replace Deng Xiaoping?

"I do not know," he said, and raised his hands in surrender: it was the Chinese funk when considering the future. After the shocks and reverses that had surprised the Chinese, only an ignoramus would risk making a fool of himself in speculating on what was to come.

But what about the Chinese liking for gambling? Wasn't that a sort of forecasting and speculation? I felt it was, but gambling in Chinese terms is not rational. It isn't a judicious indication of a possible outcome. It is a fling, something reckless, with a hint of hysteria in it. You might bet on the result of two fighting crickets (it is a popular pastime in China) or on a throw of the dice because triumph depends entirely on luck or good fortune — spiritual qualities. But politics wasn't moral and it certainly wasn't a lottery. It had to do with ambition, power seeking and greed, and it was not only unreadable but regarded as unsuitable as an occasion for a gamble. The Chinese would have a flutter on a cricket but never on a commissar.

Mr. Ni was cautious, but Mrs. Deng, who joined us, was talkative. She was also headed for the coast. She was thirty, she had one child, her husband was studying engineering. She worked in a government office. She wore her hair fashionably curled, and her bright yellow sweater had poppies embroidered on it. She also wore a skirt. "But it's cold!" she cried, smacking her knees. "I should put on my trousers."

I asked her whether she had been surprised when Mr. Hu had been forced to resign.

"Not surprised at all!" she said. She blinked fiercely. She had small teeth. She silenced Mr. Ni. "What a man! Did you hear about the way he invited all those Japanese people to visit China? The Japanese pay for thirty Chinese, but we pay for three thousand of them. It makes no sense!"

"Maybe he was being generous," I said.

She batted me on the arm.

"Ha! Generous! He doesn't know what he's talking! He once read a speech at a general's funeral. 'We are so sad,' he said. But he was smiling! He just talks and talks. We say, 'He's so happy he doesn't know his name.' You understand? Ask him his name and he says, 'Ha! Ha! I forget!'"

"Do you think it is bad that he talks a lot?" I asked, knowing full well that blabbing is seen in China as dangerous and stupid.

"It is just big talk," Mrs. Deng said. "You know the saying about the skinny face?"

"Sorry, I don't."

"If you have a skinny face you beat your cheeks" — she smacked her face with her stiff fingers—"to make your cheeks swell up."

"What's the point?"

"Your cheeks get fat because you beat them, and you try to make people think you're rich."

"I see. A pretense to make yourself look good."

"Hu Yaobang is like that. Can such a man be head of this big country of China? Never."

This made more sense than the People's Daily, which linked Mr. Hu with bourgeois liberalization and student protest. He simply talked too goddamned much.

Another fellow I met on the trip to Xiamen had a familiar request. Would I please give him an English name? His Chinese name was Li Guoqing — or "National Day" Li — because he had been born on an auspicious day in October. I was a little sceptical about the Chinese who called themselves Ronnie and Julian, but Guoqing insisted, so I said, "How about George?"

He smiled and muttered it.

I asked him how much he was paying for his ticket from Shanghai to Xiamen. He said 40 yuan ($11). Mine had cost me 148 yuan ($41). If we had flown, his plane ticket would have cost 83 yuan ($23) and mine 173 yuan ($48). Foreigners in China always pay more. It is the policy. They also get better treatment, on the whole — though not necessarily in railway trains. I had heard of Chinese being bumped from Soft Class in favor of a foreigner, but I never saw it happen.

"Foreigners have more money," Guoqing said. "Why shouldn't they pay more?"

"If you come to America, do you think you should pay less because you're Chinese?" I asked.

But he wasn't listening. "Please call me George," he said.

***

Xiamen, on the hilly coast, had the reputation for being the richest city in China, for having the best houses and the happiest people. It also had the largest proportion of families with relatives living abroad. Stop anyone on the street in Xiamen, it was said, and they would tell you that they had an uncle in Manila, or a cousin in Singapore, or that a whole branch of the family was settled in California. They stayed in touch. In general when people left China for fresh pastures they left the poverty-stricken province of Fujian (Fukien) — this was in the nineteenth century — and most of them set sail from Xiamen (Amoy). They were seafaring people from one of the greatest Chinese ports: millions of them slipped away.

But they did not forget their homeland. They came back to marry. They sent money home. In many cases they returned and built large houses and retired here. Without question, Xiamen has the noblest houses, the grandest villas, the most elaborate walls and gardens, and the most magnanimous charitable and philanthropic enterprises. These are all the result of successful emigrants becoming rich overseas and for sentimental reasons remitting their funds.

The ships that were involved in the Boston Tea Party had come from here. The English word tea is Xiamen-dialect Chinese. Xiamen's style of building is found in Canton and also in old Singapore and rural Malaysia — the tall shop-house with an overhang, and the sidewalk running underneath that second story. It is associated with Straits Chinese — the shopkeepers of Southeast Asia. It is not found elsewhere in China. It is practical and pretty, and I cannot think of it without seeing men in flapping pajamas, and women measuring out rice from sacks, and young Chinese girls with soulful faces gazing out of shuttered upstairs windows.

The villas — big stout houses with high ceilings and wraparound verandahs — also resembled the old houses of Singapore and Malaysia that were torn down to make room for the banks and hotels. Until recently they were kept in Xiamen because no one had the money to tear them down or to replace them; but then they were valued for aesthetic and historical reasons, and a preservation order was placed upon them. The new buildings of Xiamen are in a suburb beyond the Causeway, where they belong.

I found it almost impossible to find fault with Xiamen. Because it is in the south, the fruit is wonderful and cheap — all kinds: haws, oranges, tangerines, apples, pears, persimmons, grapes. And because it is on the sea fish and seafood are plentiful and various — all sorts of eels, and big garoupas, and prawns. The best and most expensive were the lobster-sized crayfish. They were kept in tanks in the restaurants — the southern Chinese habit (because of a lack of refrigeration) of keeping food alive until the last moment. In other tanks were frogs, eels, fish, and ducks — and even ducklings. You were invited to point out your proposed entrée, and they cut its throat.

On a back street in Xiamen, at a grubby little restaurant, I saw two cages, one containing a baby owl and the other holding a scowling hawk. There was hardly enough meat on either of them to fill a dumpling. They perched unsteadily, confined by the small cages, and they trembled with anxiety. When I stopped to look at them, a crowd gathered. I asked the owner how much he wanted to make them into a meal. He said 20 yuan for the owl ($5.50) and 15 yuan for the hawk ($4).

"Why not let them go?"

"Because I paid for them," he said.

"But they're unhappy."

His laugh meant You are a fool.

He said, "They taste very nice."

"They are small," I said. "One mouthful and that's it."

"The meat of this bird is very good for your eyes," he said.

"That is not true," I said. "Only savages believe that."

He was offended and angry. His mouth went strange, and he said nothing.

"It's a superstition," I said. "It is old thinking. Like eating rhino horn for your dick. Listen" — he was now turning away—"This bird eats mice. It is helpful. You should let it go."

The man began to hiss at me, a sort of preliminary to blowing up in my face. I had no money. I went back to the hotel and got 35 yuan out of my room, but by the time I walked back to the restaurant, the cages were empty. I had imagined holding a little revival of the festival called The Liberation of Living Creatures, in which birds were released from cages. But I was too late today. The owl and the hawk had been eaten.

As a consolation I went to Xiamen market, bought two mourning doves for about a dollar a bird, and let them go. They flapped over the harbor, past the hooting boats, to the nearby island of Gulangyu. Believing it might be a sign, I followed them the next day.

***

Gulangyu was a small island containing a lovely settlement in which no wheeled vehicles were allowed — no cars, no bicycles, no pushcarts. It was a five-minute free ferry ride across the harbor, and from its highest point — Sunlight Rock — it looked like Florence, or a Spanish city, a tumbled expanse of tiled roofs, all terra-cotta and green trees and church steeples. There were three Christian churches at the center of the settlement: this island had once held only foreigners — Dutch, Portuguese, English, Germans. It was Japanese until the end of the war, and then there were a number of tough battles against the Nationalists, who ultimately took Quemoy, which is quite visible to the northeast.

"Enemy territory?" I asked.

"We are all Chinese brothers," Mr. Wei said.

"Then why the trenches and foxholes?"

The east coast of Xiamen was all military earthworks and gun emplacements.

"Because sometimes they shoot at us," Mr. Wei said.

But I liked old coastal China. It had been influenced by its traders and occupiers, and because of its seagoing communities it was outward looking. The dutiful and pious tycoons who had made millions overseas had obeyed the Confucian precepts and become philanthropic. The houses and schools they built blended with the Romanesque church with its sign, Ecclesia Catholica, and the old German consulate which might have been designed by Joseph Conrad. The philanthropoids had built villas in a section of Gulangyu called Sea View Gardens, and there they lived among foreign compradors and tea merchants and petty consular officials, each on his own colonnaded verandah, under the palm trees.

The building regulations on Gulangyu are unique in China for their fastidiousness. No building may be higher than three stories, all had to be made of red brick and carved stone, and all designs had to be approved by the Architectural Commission. They were good old-world designs, and even the newest buildings — the vegetable market and the museum — were being put up with great care. Restoration work was being carried out on the villas in order to turn them into hotels and guest houses without losing their character. It was odd for the Chinese, so practical and penny pinching, to spend extra time and money to make a thing look right. The magnificent city wall around Peking, with its forty-four bastions and sixteen gates had simply been bulldozed by Mao's goonish philistines, chanting, "Down with the Four Olds! Up with the Four News! New Thinking! New Customs! New Habits! New—!" In this same spirit, two miles of the Great Wall were pulled down between 1970 and 1974 by an army unit at Gubeikou; the ancient stone blocks of the wall were used to build army barracks.

But this vandalism of China's recent past did not extend to Gulangyu except in the form of big-character graffiti (Long Live the Thoughts of Mao Zedong! was still legible in two-foot characters on the walls of a villa) and in selective desecration. The Catholic church was turned into a factory, hate meetings were held in the Protestant ("Three-in-One") church, and the Buddha statues were smashed in the temples — a quarter of Xiamen is Buddhist.

I asked Mr. Wei the reason for the meticulous restoration of Gulangyu.

"Because the government wants to turn this into a tourist island," he said. He also said that he was relieved that the government had not decided to tear the place down, as they had so much else.

We were walking towards Sunlight Rock and ran into a junkman on a back street. He was a fat boy with a pole across his shoulders, carrying loads of wastepaper. I stopped him, and because his dialect was incomprehensible to me, Mr. Wei helped me quiz him.

The boy said that if the wastepaper was good quality, like old, neatly stacked newspapers, he would pay 50 fen for one kilo — about 6 cents a pound. That seemed to me pretty fair. But for other paper he paid less than a penny a pound.

How was business?

"No good," he said. "This is hard work for very little money."

Off he went, his pole bouncing from the weight of the wastepaper bundles.

"Why are you so interested in the Cultural Revolution?" Mr. Wei asked me.

"Because it influenced me at the time — twenty years ago when I was in Africa," I said. "I thought of myself as a revolutionary."

Mr. Wei smiled. He was twenty-one. His father was my age.

I said, "What did your father do during the Cultural Revolution?"

"He just stayed in the house."

"For how long?"

"Six or seven years."

We climbed to the top of Sunlight Rock. In 1982, at the age of seventy-eight, the chain-smoking Mr. Deng Xiaoping climbed to this summit. He was followed by a flunky with an oxygen bottle, but he didn't need it.

Looking across the harbor to Xiamen city I could see how the areas of light industry and banking had expanded westward. This was said to be one of the busiest boomtowns in China. Once upon a time they made paper umbrellas and firecrackers and chopsticks for export. These days they manufactured bicycles, toys, Camel cigarettes, and microchips. And the Kodak Company was installing a filmmaking plant at great expense.

The harbor was full of freighters and fishing boats. Beyond it, in the lanes and streets, there were stalls — people selling fried noodles, fruit, sweets, vegetables, fish soup. One of the happiest pastimes of people in south China is eating out — at greasy little restaurants or at stalls — by lantern light. I could not forgive them for stuffing rare birds into their mouths, but very few had the money for such delicacies. They were great noodle eaters, and because of the pleasant climate, they liked milling around the town and eating when the mood took them, a habit they had exported to Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia.

Xiamen was the only place in China were I was repeatedly accosted by pretty girls. They sneaked up behind me and snatched my arm. "Shansh marnie?" they said, and pinched me delightfully and held on. Was that all they wanted?

They were good-tempered people, but always in a flap. Inevitably there are squabbles among the Chinese, who live on top of each other. It is surprising that fighting is not more frequent. Fistfights are rare. Often children are beaten, and hit very hard. But the most common mode of conflict is the screaming out-of-hand row — two people screeching at each other, face to face. They are long and loud, and they attract large crowds of spectators. For face-saving reasons such disputes can only be resolved by a third party, and until that person enters the fray, the two squabblers go on shrieking.

I witnessed a barracking like this in Xiamen one day. All tourist sites have so-called Viewing Places, where the Chinese visitor is obliged to go — otherwise the trip is futile. The ritual element in tourism is carefully observed. In Xiamen there were the Eight Major Views, the Eight Minor Views and the Views Outside Views. It is customary to have your picture taken on the spot, and since few Chinese can afford to buy cameras, professional photographers stand around these Viewing Places and offer their services for one yuan a shot. The shouting match I saw was between one of these photographers and his dissatisfied customers.

Mr. Wei translated the screams. At first they were all about money — a man and wife claiming that the photographer had put the price up after they had agreed on a lower one. But for face-saving reasons, the screaming became more general and hysterical. It wasn't an argument. It was a random howling — everyone at once, the couple, the photographer and then the onlookers joined in. It started at the Viewing Place, moved down the path, flowed behind a rock and then continued in a shed. It was extremely loud and went on without a break, a remarkable torrent of abuse and exclamation.

"First we're told it's one kuai, and then the thief changes it to two!"

"I'm not speaking to anyone until the unit leader comes. But I've never been so insulted—"

"Someone get the unit leader!"

"This is ridiculous! All these people are liars!"

"We're being cheated!"

"Thieves—!"

They were almost certainly tourists, Mr. Wei said. He could tell from their northern accent. Shanxi, he thought. He was whispering, "The woman says that they are thieves. The man is saying liars. There is a child in the shed. The photographer is banging the table with his fist—"

Then there was a greater commotion and the child began to scream. Someone was howling at the child. Then everyone was howling at once.

"What happened, Mr. Wei?"

"The child cursed the worker."

"What did he say?"

"He called him a wang ba—a tortoise," Mr. Wei said, with some reluctance.

"Is that bad?"

"Yes. Very. If a wife sleeps with other men her husband is called a tortoise."

"Is that expression used all over China?"

"No. Mainly in the north. Northerners are very tough. North of the Chang Jiang they are loud and muscular. They use violent language. That's why the demonstrations in the north were large and noisy. But we are thin and small and very gentle. We don't use such language, calling someone a 'tortoise' because he overcharges you."

The screaming match was still in full cry fifteen minutes after it had started. I got bored and went away. Mr. Wei said he found it distasteful having to translate this abuse for me, but I told him I had to know these things in order to understand China. And I explained that our version of a tortoise is a cuckold, which (coming from cuckoo) is a more logical word. Female tortoises, I told him, are not great copulators. They only need one screw and they are able to lay fertile eggs for years!

"You are interested in arguments and also interested in biology."

"I'm interested in everything, Mr. Wei."

"In China we specialize in knowledge. One person studies agriculture, and another does engineering."

He went on in this vein until, soon after, we saw a child being beaten by its mother in a yard. I was riveted by it. The child was smacked so thoroughly that he became hysterical and could not be calmed. He went around hitting his mother and wetting himself and howling. He was about seven years old. The usual Chinese reaction to someone in distress is laughter, and soon Mr. Wei and the others watching began to find the tormented child an object of amusement.

Xiamen gave me vivid dreams, but the dreams were not of Xiamen or its ghosts — Marco Polo, foreign traders, Manichaeans, missionaries, pirates, or the compradors of old Amoy. I dreamed of home in one, and of Tadzhiks in another (was it a coincidence that the Tadzhiks were the only Indo-Europeans among China's minorities?). I dreamed of Ronald Reagan again. That was a lulu. The president appeared from behind a tree on the banks of the Potomac. He did a silly walk, waggling his legs, and said, "Come along to the picnic. You can do the cleaning up — okay, Paul?"

I slapped him on the back and said, "Wait till I tell my mother I'm cleaning up the White House!"

This annoyed him, because I deliberately twisted his words. He yelled at me, "It's a picnic!"

A few nights later I dreamed of walking through the ravines that I had seen earlier that week in the hills of Fujian. I was captured by some Mongolian-looking men who were led by a small and very fierce woman. They all had curved knives that they kept jabbing into me, as if impatient to kill me.

"Empty your bag!" the woman shrieked.

Only then did I realize that I had a bag and that I was carrying some little antique statues that I had bought in a Chinese market.

"Show your certificate!"

"Here," I said, finding a piece of paper in my bag. It was the wrong certificate, but I thought: The Gurkhas will save me.

The woman read my mind and replied, "We are the Gurkhas!"

That was probably more a nightmare of buying trinkets illegally than a nightmare of traveling on the open road in China and encountering strangers — nothing was safer than that, judging from my experience of traipsing up and down in China.

The wonderful market in Xiamen, and the dry-goods stores under the shop-houses, reminded me that the best buys in China are not in the souvenir shops and the Friendship Stores — not jade carvings, cork sculpture, ivory letter openers, stuffed pandas, turquoise jewelry, cloisonné, brassware, plastic chopsticks, lacquerware, bone bracelets, or the really dull and derivative paintings on scrolls. If I were to recommend anything special in China that was a bargain — good quality, one of a kind, worth bringing home — I would say: socket wrenches, screwdrivers, watercolor paints and brushes, pencils, calligraphy, sturdy brown envelopes, padlocks, plumber's tools, wicker baskets, espadrilles, T-shirts, cashmere sweaters, bonsai trees, silk carpets and silk cushion covers, tablecloths, terra-cotta pots, thermos jugs, illustrated art books, herbs, spices, and tea by the pound. Bamboo bird cages are also lovely, though the thought of keeping a bird in them is depressing. China may also be the only country in the world where you can buy a cricket cage — made either of a gourd or of porcelain.

A number of these items are made in Xiamen, in the Huli Industrial Area. In more revolutionary times this area was part of a land-reclamation scheme. Mao had said (this was during the early years of the Cultural Revolution), "China must learn to feed itself! People have one mouth but they have two hands!" And so forth. The Red Guards and work gangs decided to build a causeway linking Xiamen to the west side of the harbor, and then to fill in the land behind the causeway and plant rice. But the land was poor and salty. Rice would not grow. And time passed. Now the area is a stronghold of money-making ventures — banks, light industry, factories — as well as the city's new municipal buildings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who would shoot me?"

"The army!"

"Which army?"

"Maybe ours — maybe theirs."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is it any good?" she asked.

"Excellent. You'll love it."

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

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

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

"Any Tibetans in Sanming?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Why so few?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't know."

"Do you have healthy Marxist-Leninist thoughts?"

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

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

"Are you glad?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But the young Chinese must be teachable."

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

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

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

"What is the biggest problem?" I asked.

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

"Are you sorry you came to China?"

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

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

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