Riding the Iron Rooster

3. Night Train Number 90 to Peking

Never mind that their uniforms don't fit, that their caps slip sideways and their toes stick out of their sandals; what most Chinese officials illustrate is how bad-tempered and unbending Chinese bureaucracy is. They are in great contrast to the average person who doesn't wear a uniform, who is fairly flexible and who will probably be willing to make a deal. Such hustlers are found in the Free Market — as the new bazaars are called — and not on Chinese railways.

The glowering and barking woman at the gate at Datong Station at midnight was exactly like Cerberus. Three minutes before the Lanzhou train pulled out she slammed the entry gate and padlocked it, leaving a group of soldiers and many other latecomers clinging to the bars and making them miss their train. As a further indignity she switched off the overhead lights of the ticket barrier and left us all in the dark. She would not let me through until the Peking train pulled in. And then she slammed the gate again and made more latecomers watch while I boarded. It is not merely unbending; there is often a lot of sadism in bureaucracy.

It was almost midnight. I found my berth in the sleeping car and, ignoring the other occupants (was one a woman?), went to bed. At 5:30 in the morning, Chinese bureaucracy rose up again and flung the door open, switched on the lights and demanded the blankets and sheets. I turned over, trying to return to my dream — tacking in a light breeze across Lewis Bay. The sleeping-car attendant in a white pastrycook's hat and apron dug her fingers into my hip and yelled at me to get up.

"The train doesn't arrive until seven-fifteen!"

"Get up and give me the bedding!"

"Let me sleep!"

A young man sitting on the berth opposite said to me, "They want you to get out of bed. They are folding the sheets."

"What's the hurry? We won't arrive for almost two hours. I want to sleep."

The sleeping-car attendant took hold of the blankets, and I knew she was going to do the Mongolian trick of snapping the bedding off me in one stroke.

My Chinese was functional and unsubtle. I said to the young man, "Do me a favor. Translate this. If they're eager to do a good job, tell them to go clean the toilet. It was so disgusting last night I couldn't use it. The floor's dirty. The windows are dirty. There's no hot water in the thermos jug. What's so important about the blankets?"

He shook his head. He wouldn't translate. He knew — and so did I — that if the blankets and sheets were folded the sleeping-car attendants could go straight home as soon as we arrived in Peking Central Station. They were not paid overtime for folding laundry.

Shhlloooppp: she whipped the bedding off me and left me shivering in my blue pajamas in the predawn darkness.

"I couldn't tell them," the young man said. "They wouldn't listen."

He meant they would lose face. After all, they were only doing their job. His name was Mr. Peng. He was reading Huckleberry Finn to improve his English. I always softened to people I saw reading books, but I told him that one would not do much for his English. He was twenty-seven, a native of Datong. He was married. His wife was a secretary. He said she was a simple girl — that was what had attracted him to her. They had no children. "We are only allowed to have one, so we're waiting a little while."

Dawn came up on Peking. It was immediately apparent that this sprawling and countrified capital was turning into a vertical city. It was thick with tall cranes, the heavy twenty-story variety that are shaped like an upside-down L. I counted sixty of them before we reached Peking Central Station. They were building new apartment blocks, towers, hotels, office buildings. There were overpasses and new tunnels, and most of the roads looked recent. The traffic choked some of these streets. The city was bigger, noisier, brighter, more prosperous — it amazed me, because I had seen it in thinner times. And of course I was thinking also of the Russian gloom and Mongolian deprivation and Polish anger; the self-denial and rapacity, the food shortages, the banged-up cars. Peking was being transformed, as if someone had simply sent out a decree saying, "Build this city." In a way, that was exactly what had happened. This new mood, this boom, was less than five years old. In Chinese history that is no more than an eye-blink, but it was clear that the city was rising.

That was my first impression — of newness: new taxis, new buildings, clean streets, bright clothes, billboards. It was not a lived-in looking city, but rather one for visitors — tourists and businessmen. There were nine new hotels going up, and more restaurants and department stores. No new theaters or parks. The new schools specialized in languages and offered courses in tourism; and one of the larger new schools did nothing but train taxi drivers. Some movie houses had reopened, but there were no new orchestras. Peking had stopped being an imperial city and had begun to be a tourist attraction. The most disturbing sign of its transformation was that it was full of foreign bankers and accountants.

It is probably true to say that any nation that is passionate about putting up new buildings is equally passionate about pulling old ones down. For a thousand years or more Peking was surrounded by a high and elaborate wall, with vast pillars and gates, that had made the city into a fortress. In 1963, to make room for some hideous tenements, the wall was knocked down. Its absence has not been particularly lamented. The traditional Chinese compounds they call yards (siheyuan), with the wall, the circular moon gate and screen behind it, and the rambling house — these made up the residential sections of Peking. They too are mostly gone — again sacrificed to the tower blocks. The little inns and guest houses are going or gone, and huge hotels have taken their place — the Holiday Inn and the Sheraton Great Wall are but two of the thirty high-priced hotels. The part of Peking that has not changed at all is the Forbidden City, for even the Chinese know that if they were to pull that down, there would be no reason for anyone to visit Peking. And any sentiment the Chinese may have about Tiananmen Square is contradicted by the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet they have recently installed in the southwest corner, not far from Chairman Mao Memorial Hall.

That Chinese history is layer upon layer, the present half-obliterating the past, is dramatically evident in the big-character slogans of Chairman Mao's thoughts that have been painted over with Toyota ads or turned into billboards for toothpaste and watches. Just beneath the new car or the computer or the brand name it is often possible to read All Reactionaries Are Paper Tigers! or We Should Support Whatever the Enemy Opposes! As in Datong, there are far too many of these and they are far too boldly inscribed for anyone to do anything but paint over them — and even then there is usually a reminding remnant that is legible. Perhaps the reason there are so many billboards and printed slogans of a commercial nature in Peking is not that these are in themselves valuable but that they are useful in covering up the Mao worship in six-foot Chinese characters that were known as Highest Instruction (zuigao zhishi) — the phrase pertains only to Mao.

I asked Mr. Peng why the slogans were crossed out.

'They were just political."

"Is that bad?"

"They weren't practical."

But in 1985 a victory celebration after a football game turned into a xenophobic riot in which foreigners were attacked and car windows broken. And billboards advertising Japanese goods were the focus for some of the violence. Subsequently, some of the billboards were quietly removed or modified. On a previous occasion, another football victory (China beat Bulgaria) caused a crowd of several thousand Chinese fans to gather late one night in front of the Peking Hotel and chant "We beat you! We beat you!" Then, only foreigners stayed in that hotel, which was why it was the focus of the mob's gloating. But now the phrase "foreign friends" is on everyone's lips. The poet Yen-shi Chiu-t'u wrote a century ago: Last year we called him the Foreign Devil,

Now we call him "Mr. Foreigner, Sir!" We weep over the departed but smile when

a new wife takes her place.

Ah, the affairs of the world are like

the turning of a wheel.

Because of a prior arrangement, and because foreign travelers are assigned to hotels, I was at the Yan Xiang Hotel, paying 160 yuan ($53) a night. Mr. Peng was in what he called a Chinese hotel — it didn't have a name, it had a number — for which he paid 3 yuan (75 cents) a night. This was not unusual. There are Chinese prices and foreigner's prices, a double standard that is applied in restaurants and shops; to entrance fees to museums and exhibitions; on buses, in taxis, planes and trains. On the average, a foreigner is required to pay three or four times more than a Chinese person. An American of Chinese extraction who has lived in Boston since birth and speaks no Mandarin is not classified as a foreigner: overseas Chinese are another category. Businessmen and official visitors are yet another class, with certain privileges.

It is impossible to come across these complicated class distinctions and not feel that in time they will create the kind of conflicts that led to the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Peng said maybe — because the average wage (100 yuan a month) was still too low, bonuses too irregular, and for the first time in its history The People's Republic was experiencing inflation.

"But I hope it won't happen," Mr. Peng said. "I think revolution is destructive."

"If there hadn't been a revolution in China, your life would have been rather different."

"Maybe better, maybe worse," he said.

I said, "But can't you say that you've lived through an interesting period of history?"

"Just a little bit of it. Chinese history is enormous. The Cultural Revolution was hardly anything."

In The House of Exile, Nora Wain writes, "I asked what war this was. Shun-ko's husband answered, 'It is not a war. It is just a period. When you are adequately educated in Chinese history you will comprehend. We have these intervals of unrest, sixty to a hundred years in length, between dynasties, throughout the forty-six centuries of our history.'"

Mr. Peng had not been a Red Guard. He was in his early teens during the Cultural Revolution, but he had resisted joining the unit. It had not made him popular.

"To show that I loved Chairman Mao I had to engage in the demonstrations. But my heart wasn't in it. It was regarded as wonderful to wear an armband that showed you were a Red Guard. And the best thing was to be the leader of your Red Guard unit."

"Who was the leader at your school?"

"A boy called Wei Dong — he gave himself the name, because it's a way of saying 'Defender of Mao Zedong,' He was a very important boy. He knew all the slogans. He made us say them. It was a strange time. The whole country was in a state of revolution."

"What happened to Wei Dong?"

"I see him now and then. He is completely changed. He is a teacher. He has children. He's an ordinary worker. That's the worst thing to be — it's so hard. He has very little money and no respect. No more speeches or slogans. No one blames him for what happened, but no one is interested in him either."

"Don't you think anything was achieved in the Cultural Revolution?"

"No. And a lot was lost. We wasted time. Mao was muddled. His brain was tired. Zhou Enlai could have saved us from it, but he let Mao lead. We really trusted Zhou, and that was why the Qingming Festival in 1976 was a real event. Thousands of people showed up to mourn him. It was spontaneous. But we didn't know what to do. Tiananmen Square was full of people feeling very confused."

"When did you stop feeling confused?"

"When Deng took over and did away with portraits and opened China's doors," Mr. Peng said.

"Maybe this is just one of those short periods in Chinese history."

"I hope it's a long period," Mr. Peng said.

Bette Bao Lord, the wife of the American ambassador to China, is a great deal better known than her husband both in America (where her novel Spring Moon was a best-seller) and in China (where the book is being made into a movie). The name Winston Lord was so patrician that it seemed more that of a character in a certain kind of women's fiction; but not Bette Bao Lord's. Her novel was rightly praised as an accurate portrayal of a family caught in the crosswinds of Chinese history. It was set in a period that Mrs. Lord observed firsthand. It seemed wonderfully symmetrical that, having been born in China and educated and raised in the United States, she had recently returned to China as the ambassador's wife.

With less than a day's notice from me, she arranged a lunch-party for sixteen people. When I met her this seemed less surprising. She did not strike me as a person to whom anyone had ever said no.

She was slim and had the severe good looks of a Chinese beauty — skin like pale velvet and a lacquered elegance that fashion magazines call devastating. She had the alert and yet contented air of someone who has had everything she has ever wanted, and probably been given it lavishly rather than having had to demand it. Her jet-black hair was yanked back tightly into a knot and stabbed with a stiletto. She wore a stylish white jacket and skirt, a striped blouse and cruel shoes, and large white coral earrings were snapped against the sides of her head like earphones designed by Fabergé. She was so eager to put me at my ease that I immediately became tense.

In the steamy May heat of Peking, Mrs. Lord was uncommonly energetic. This was her way. Her gusto was a kind of confidence, and she could be hearty in two languages. She was brisk, she laughed loudly and deep in her throat, and she had the very un-Chinese habit of poking my arm, or rapping my knee or hitting my shoulder to get my attention or make a point. These would have been exhausting qualities in another person, but in Mrs. Lord they were stimulating. I liked being poked in the arm by this glamorous woman.

Once, tapping me, she said (speaking of the importance of planning), "It's like choosing the right husband or wife…"

I thought this was odd, because I had never regarded marriage as a conscious choice. It was something else: you fell in love and that was it, for better or worse. But she seemed very rational — that was certainly Chinese of her — and I guessed that she had spent her life making the right choices.

She told me she felt very lucky. I imagined that many women must hate her, since she was what most would want to be — a ravishing overachiever, a little empress in her own right. She told me she was forty-seven. She looked about thirty-five and, because some Chinese faces are unalterable even by time, would probably look that way for a long while.

We talked about publishing. Her career has been blessed — two books, both huge successes. She had been in Peking only six months and had planned to write a new novel. But running the embassy household, doing menus, dealing with servants and guests and family, had turned her into a sort of Victorian housemother. To give herself a sense of order, she said, she was keeping a diary — probably for publication.

"I find myself sitting next to Deng Xiaoping, or being introduced to a visiting head of state, and I think, 'I must write this down!' Don't you think that's important?"

"Yes, but people mainly read diaries to discover trivial things and indiscretions. My advice would be: put everything down, don't edit or censor it, and be as indiscreet as possible."

"Is that what you do?" she said, swiftly crossing her legs and wrapping herself into a querying posture.

"I only keep a diary when I travel," I said. I did not say that I think diaries are death to writing fiction — trying to remember all that stuff.

"Because traveling is so interesting?"

"No. Because travel writing is a minor form of autobiography."

And then a woman entered without knocking to say that the guests had arrived.

"They're all Party members!" Mrs. Lord said confidentially. She was pleased with herself, and who wouldn't be? Out of one billion people, only 44 million are members of the Chinese Communist Party — four and a half percent.

These guests were writers and scholars. Most of them had been abroad and nearly all of them spoke English perfectly. Nor were they daunted by the Western menu — the soup first, and then the prawns and meat loaf — or the knives and forks. Indeed, one of them told me that not long ago Hu Yaobang, the Party secretary, had advocated the use of knives and forks. Chopsticks were unsanitary, Mr. Hu maintained, and the Chinese habit of taking food from common dishes was a factor in the spread of germs. Mr. Hu frequently made mischievous remarks of this kind. He had also said that Marxism was outdated and that the Han Chinese should perhaps vacate Tibet.

I asked the woman next to me whether she agreed with Mr. Hu about chopsticks or anything else.

"I'd like to keep an open mind," she said. Her accent was extraordinary — not just English, but upper-class English, the intonation of a well-bred headmistress. She sounded like the head of Cheltenham Ladies College, and she seemed the sort of woman the English praise by calling her "a bluestocking." I was not surprised to hear that she taught at Peking University or that her chief subject was Henry James.

She said she was exasperated by the bad translations of James into Chinese.

"When Casper Goodwood says to Isabel, 'Just wait!' they translate it as 'Wait a minute'—as if he's going to pop right back, you see. It's very trying, but what can one do?"

I asked her whether the government interfered with her teaching — after all, until recently foreign novels had been regarded as a poisonous bourgeois influence ("sugar-coated bullets").

"The government leaves us alone and lets us get on with the job. It was quite different during the Cultural Revolution," she said, daintily separating her butterfly prawn from its tail. "There were loudspeakers on the campus, and they were on all the time."

"Did you hate it?"

"At first, yes. And then I was bored by it. That was the worst of the Cultural Revolution. The boredom. One would wake to the loudspeakers. They would be saying very loudly, 'Never forget class struggle.' One would brush one's teeth and on the toothbrush was the slogan Never Forget Class Struggle. On the washbasin it said, Never Forget Class Struggle. Wherever one looked there were slogans. Most people hated them — it was really very insulting. I was thoroughly bored."

All this in her soft and rather fatigued English accent; and then she spoke up again.

"But there was very little that one could do."

Xiao Qian, listening quietly to this woman, was a man in his seventies who had spent the years 1939 to 1945 in Britain. Because of the war he had not been able to sail home; but he pointed out that because he had spent those war years in Britain he had seen the British at their best. He was wearing what looked like an old school tie. I asked him whether this was so. He said, yes, it was the tie of King's College, Cambridge, where he had read English.

"I don't think of China as being a tie-wearing society," I said, and I told him a story about a Frenchman I had once met. Had all the violence and turmoil in the sixties changed his way of thinking? I had asked. "Yes," he had said, "I no longer wear a cravat."

Mr. Xiao said, "People have started wearing them. And of course a tie is often necessary if you travel abroad."

He had recently been to Singapore, he said.

"I used to teach there," I said.

"It is an economic miracle," he said, and smiled, adding, "and a cultural desert. They have nothing but money. Their temples are like toys to us. They are nothing — they are not even real. Their Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew is an Oriental posing as a Westerner. But he is not all bad. For example, he has a Confucian idea of the family in politics. In Singapore if you take an old person into your household you get a reduction in taxes. There is something Confucian in that. It's a good idea."

"My students were bullied by the government of Singapore," I said. "If they studied English or political science they weren't given scholarships. The government only gave money to students who did economics or business — money-making subjects, it was thought. And some of the students at the University of Singapore were informers. Oddly enough, they were looking for Maoists and reporting on anyone sympathetic to the People's Republic."

"Now they are quite keen to do business with us," Mr. Xiao said. "But it is a very severe government. They are always watching and listening. People in Singapore are afraid."

It seemed very odd to hear a comrade in the People's Republic tut-tutting about authoritarianism and fear.

I said, "But is it so different here in China?"

"Even during our worst times," he said, "even during the Cultural Revolution, we did not have these — what do you call these machines that listen to your voice?"

"Bugging devices?"

"Exactly. No listening devices. But in Singapore, before anyone opens his mouth he feels with his hands under the table to see whether there is a device that is listening."

Mr. Xiao was not drinking, but others were, and downing glasses of wine they grew red faced and a bit breathless.

A young man next to Mr. Xiao asked me what I was doing in China.

"Just traveling around, taking trains," I said.

"Are you writing a report?"

"Not at all," I said, and I told him my motto: Grin like a dog and wander aimlessly.

He said that was precisely what he enjoyed doing. In fact, somewhat in the manner of Studs Terkel, he was cycling around the country tape-recording people's reminiscences. He was about to publish the transcripts in book form under the title Chinese Lives. He wondered whether there was anything I wished to ask him about the Chinese railways — he said he was an expert. His name was Sang Ye.

I told him that I was particularly looking forward to taking the train from Peking to Urumchi — the longest railway journey in China: four and a half days of mountains and desert.

"They call that train 'The Iron Rooster,'" he said.

He explained that iron rooster (tie gongji) implied stinginess, because "a stingy person does not give away even a feather — nor does an iron rooster." It also meant useless and was part of a larger proverb which included a porcelain crane, a glass rat, and a glazed cat (ciqi he, boli haozi, liuli mao). The list didn't include a white elephant but that was what was meant. There was also a bit of word play with iron rooster, because it included a pun on "engineering" and "engine."

But the stingy reference was its real meaning, because until recently this accident-plagued line was run by the Xinjiang government. Technically, Xinjiang is a vast reservation of Uighur people — romantic desert folk with a Mongolian culture quite distinct from the Han Chinese. And this remote railway ministry in the autonomous region would neither surrender control of the railway nor would they maintain it. This was more than I wanted to know about the Iron Rooster, but the name made me more than ever eager to climb aboard.

When lunch was over Mrs. Lord invited me to say something. The formal progress of a Chinese banquet depends on little speeches: a word of welcome from the host, followed by something grateful from the guest — that is at the beginning; and afterwards, more formal pleasantries, some toasts, and a very abrupt end. No one lingers, no one sits around and shoots the bull. All the Chinese banquets I attended concluded in a vanishing act.

I made my little speech. I said my thanks and sat down. But Mrs. Lord needled me. Hadn't I been to China before? And shouldn't I say something to compare that visit with this?

So I stood up again and said frankly that even six years ago people had been very reluctant to talk about the Cultural Revolution. It was worse than bad manners: it was unlucky, it marked you, it was a political gesture, it wasn't done. And when people had referred to it they had spoken of it in euphemisms, like the British referring to World War Two as "the recent unpleasantness." But these days people talked about those ten frenzied years, and when they called it the Cultural Revolution they usually prefixed the phrase "so-called" (suowei), or they renamed it The Ten Years' Turmoil. Surely it was a good thing that people talked about it in a critical way?

"Is that all you've noticed?" Mrs. Lord said, encouraging me to continue.

I said that the tourists and business people seemed to constitute a new class and that such privileged and bourgeois people might be demoralizing to the much poorer Chinese.

"We have never taken foreigners seriously," one of the guests said. He was a man at the end of the table. 'The most-quoted proverb these days is: We can fool any foreigner."

"I think that's a very dangerous proverb," I said.

Mrs. Lord said, "Why 'dangerous'?"

"Because it's not true."

Mrs. Lord said, "The Chinese don't know what goes on in the hotels — they don't go in."

"We're not allowed in," the bluestocking said. "But no one actually stops you. I went into a big hotel a few months ago. There was a bowling alley and a disco and a bookstore. But I didn't have any foreign exchange certificates, so I couldn't buy anything."

Someone said, "I think that regulation forbidding Chinese from going into tourist hotels is going to change very soon."

Mrs. Lord said, "My friends talk about this privilege thing. Of course it's a problem. My Chinese friends tend to be pessimistic, but I'm an optimist. I think things will go on improving. And I want to help. I feel I owe it to this country. I've had everything."

I said, "Oddly enough, I was affected by the Cultural Revolution. It was the sixties upheaval, and I was in Africa when China was seeking influence there. I read the Thoughts of Mao and the Peking Review. I felt like a revolutionary."

"I had one of those Thoughts of Mao books," a man said. "1 put it away. I don't know where it is. I suppose I've lost it. You don't actually mean you read it?"

To prove my point, I recited, "A revolution is not a dinner party" — from the Little Red Book; and another saying that I often thought of in my traveling through China: "Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it."

A sigh of exasperation went up.

"He set us back thirty years," someone said.

"If you go to the inner part of Peking University you'll see a statue of Mao," one of the scholars said. "But there aren't many around. And on the base where it once said 'Long Live The Thoughts of Mao Zedong' there is nothing but his name."

It was not for me to tell them they were out of touch with the thinking of the Central Committee, which had recently met (September 1986) and passed a resolution that reaffirmed "The Four Cardinal Principles: keeping to the socialist road, upholding the people's democratic dictatorship, upholding the leadership of the Communist Party, and upholding Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought."

But these people at the lunch were part of a class that has always existed in China — the scholar gentry. They were special and a little suspect and set apart. They were important but no emperor had ever really felt easy with them, and Mao had actually tried to cut them down to size and even humiliate them by sending them into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. It was a philosophy encapsulated in the remark: If you think you're so smart you can start shoveling that pig shit into the wheelbarrow. And at night these rusticated intellectuals studied the works of Marx and Lenin. It had all worked like a harsh form of aversion therapy, which was why the mood in China was so different now.

"Most of the people in this room would much rather have their child be an underpaid scholar than a rich merchant," Mrs. Lord said. "That's a fact."

I felt it would be rude to mention that the choice wasn't exactly that — between being a merchant or an intellectual; not in a country where 900 million people were peasant farmers.

It was obvious that the sixteen card-carrying intellectuals at Mrs. Lord's were not typical, and they were Westernized enough to like drinking coffee — one of the rarest drinks in China — and to linger after the meal to talk a little more.

Professor Dong Luoshan had recently translated Orwell's 1984— he had actually translated it in the year 1984, which seemed wonderfully appropriate. He had also translated Kurt Vonnegut and Saul Bellow into Chinese, but it was Orwell I wanted to talk about.

He said, "I think it is a very gloomy novel."

"Did it seem familiar to you?"

"You are speaking of the recent past in China," he said, with a wink. "But I tell you the Cultural Revolution was worse. It was much worse."

"Why don't more people write about it then?"

"We are still trying to understand it, and it is a very painful subject."

There is a special category of writing about the Cultural Revolution, known as "wound literature" (Shanghen wenxue), so "painful" was an appropriate word. A popular Chinese writer, Feng Jicai, writes almost exclusively about the Cultural Revolution. But the best book I had read, The Execution of Mayor Yin (1977), by Chen Jo-hsi, had not appeared in China.

"Reading 1984 might get people thinking about it," I said.

Professor Dong inclined his head in a cautioning way and said, "But most people cannot read it. It is a restricted book — it is neican."

It meant "restricted," placing it on a sort of index of books reserved for the exclusive use of people who were sober and trustworthy readers. The average person couldn't read a book that was neican, and there was another phrase neibu for the things they couldn't talk about to foreigners — or at least weren't supposed to. But I seldom found the Chinese cagey; they talked about everything, and usually in a very candid way.

Professor Dong was still talking about 1984 and how only intellectuals could read it. "It is necessary to have special permission to read such books."

He said that bookstores and libraries all had a restricted section. You needed an approved "passbook" to get in and read this reckless and inflammatory stuff. But he said that in practice most people could read the books because they could be loaned from person to person once they were bought. It was the Chinese intellectuals themselves who limited the circulation of such books. The stiff-necked scholar gentry were not in the habit of loaning the books to slobs who might get the wrong idea.

The funny thing was, that after all this explanation, I walked into a public library eight months later, in the south China port of Xiamen (Amoy), and found a copy of Professor Dong's translation of 1984. I asked the librarian whether it was freely circulated and she said, "Yes, of course. Is it any good?"

The really strange and dangerous books, Professor Dong said, were the erotic classics — books like The Prayer Mat of Flesh and Jin Ping Mei. The latter (also known as The Golden Lotus) was written in the Ming Dynasty — say in the fourteenth century — and translations have been available to Westerners for a hundred years or more. Clement Egerton's version, done in the thirties, is regarded as one of the best. It concerns the life of a decadent young merchant and his various sexual encounters.

"Do you actually think that book is harmful?"

"Not to me," Professor Dong said, in the blinkered and superior way that makes Chinese intellectuals the butt of Chinese jokes and the object of a certain amount of Party hostility. And he went on, 'To the ordinary reader it is very harmful. You see, Chinese is not explicit. It is full of innuendo. Jin Ping Mei is like that. It does not say exactly what is happening, so you imagine all sorts of things. I think it should be restricted."

I asked Professor Dong what he was doing at the moment, and he said that he had recently compiled a handbook of English phrases the average Chinese would not find in an English dictionary. He gave as examples "Walter Mittyism" and "Archie Bunker mentality."

He asked what I was doing. I said I had just finished a novel set in the near future.

"No one writes about the future in China. We hardly think about it. There is a little science fiction, but nothing about the future."

"Doesn't anyone think, as Orwell did, that you can comment on the present by writing about the future?"

He said, "We have a saying, 'Use the past to criticize the present.' That is a Chinese preoccupation. There was a mayor in Peking who wrote a play about an obscure figure during the Ming period. People were very shocked. 'You are criticizing Mao!' they said. That mayor was removed very soon after. And he disappeared."

"Had he been criticizing Mao?"

"Of course — yes!"

About half the guests left, but the ones that stayed behind wanted to talk about religion. I said it was not my favorite subject but I would try to answer their questions. Were people in America religious? Why was there a sense of religion in Steinbeck and Faulkner and not in the works of any present-day writers? They were familiar with many British and American authors, but their way of mentioning book titles suggested to me that they might have read them in translation: Dickens's A Story About Two Places and Difficult Years, Hawthorne's The Red Letter, Steinbeck's Angry Grapes, and so forth. I recommended Sinclair Lewis, having just read him on the train. And I asked them about their own writing.

"We are sick of politics," one of the young writers said. "Our writers have been dealing only with politics. People think of Chinese writers as obsessed with it. But that is changing. We want to write about other things. But we need to find an audience."

I said I didn't think they would have any difficulty finding an audience for other subjects, because politics and politicians were so boring. "If you write about something else you'll have many readers."

"But we have to please the first reader," another man said, and stuck a finger in the air.

"He means the political censor," someone said.

It seemed to me that there was a certain hypocrisy in believing in censorship for the lower orders but not for intellectuals, but I didn't want to intimidate them by questioning their logic. I told them that Henry Miller had been banned in England and America until the 1960s, and the Lady Chatterley trial was in 1963. So much for enlightenment in the West.

"We are improving," one of the scholars said. "We have just published a series of volumes on the economics of Keynes."

I said that perhaps John Maynard Keynes for them was like D. H. Lawrence for us, and I tried to imagine what forbidden, dark, brooding supply-side economics might be like.

I was sobered up just before I left Mrs. Lord's when a young man approached me and said he heard that I was interested in Chinese railways.

'There is a certain railway line that you should see," he said. "It is called 'Death Road.' During the Cultural Revolution people used to kill themselves on this section of track. One person a day, and sometimes more, jumped in front of the train. In those days the buildings in Peking weren't very tall — you couldn't kill yourself by jumping out of the window of a bungalow. So they chose the train because they were too poor to buy poison."

"A few years ago, we used to see the tourists and say, 'Americans are so old,'" a man told me in Peking. And it was true: only old people went to China then, because it was very expensive and took time, and being a wealthy retiree helped if you wanted to go. But nowadays everyone went. There were tycoons, budget travelers, free-loaders, cyclists, tourists, archeologists and prospective students of kung fu. In Peking every one of them visited the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven and the Friendship Store. I had seen these sights on my previous trip. Very interesting, I thought; very big, too. But I had come to China to find things that were unspectacular.

I went to Death Road. It was immediately clear why it had been chosen for suicides: it was a curve in the line hidden by a footbridge, with a dusty culvert on either side. It was possible to see where people jumped from and where they fell. Apart from that it seemed an ordinary place, just a section of track, but in its ordinariness lay all of its horror.

Then I decided to go to the big foreign-language bookstore on Wangfujing Street to see if Professor Dong's book of English phrases was available. It was not, but I was given A Dictionary of New and Difficult English Words. In the B's I found balled, ball-up, ballsy, ballahoo [sic], and banged, and under shit the expression I feel shitty in my body—a newly minted American colloquialism. But most of the words were chemical compounds—methyloxylate, sulphur dioxide— and their Chinese equivalents.

An elderly Chinese man was perusing a copy.

"It is not much use to me," he said, "because I usually translate music theory and this is very scientific. You probably don't know many of these words."

"Some of them look familiar," I said.

His name was Zhang Mei. He was a musician, adept at several instruments, including the piano; a composer, a conductor, and lately a music teacher. He also sang, he said — he was a baritone. As well as Chinese music, he played and sang Schubert ("very sad"), Verdi and Handel ("my personal favorite"). He also liked Stephen Foster. He said that Foster was one of the most popular composers in China.

"When I hear 'Beautiful Dreamer' I feel like weeping," I said.

"I prefer Handel," Mr. Zhang said.

He was small and frail and rather bent over, but when I said I was going for a walk he offered to come with me. He looked older than his years — he was seventy-five — but he walked nimbly. He said he had just seen his son off at Peking Central Station — the son was taking the train to Paris to study singing; he was not stopping on the way. I said, "It's a nine-day trip," but Mr. Zhang said, "He has a berth — he can sleep. He's very lucky."

I asked him whether the government disapproved of Western music. He said no, not these days. Later I found out that there were official directives about such matters; for example, on 7 March 1977, the Party sent forth a decree lifting a ban on the playing of Beethoven's music.

Mr. Zhang had never studied music. He said, "I am self-taught. I was in the New Fourth Army against the Japanese. I led the chorus, forty men. That was to rouse the troops. Also I wrote music and composed songs."

I asked him for an example.

"In the town of Huangzhou in Jiangsu Province we won an important battle. I commemorated it by writing The Song of the Baking Cakes.'"

He explained that it was a patriotic song based on people baking a particular kind of cake, called shaobing. They served them when the soldiers went off to battle and welcomed the soldiers back with more cakes.

I said, "Didn't you write songs about the Japanese as evil little fiends?"

"Oh, yes," Mr. Zhang said. "In the songs we called them all sons of names. Ghosts. Robbers. Rapists. Because they were robbing and raping. If you say 'rapist' most people will know immediately that you're talking about a Japanese, even now."

"Were they ghosts?"

He laughed. "Ghosts are guizi. They are cruel. Well, not exactly cruel. They are abominable."

I liked him. I asked him whether he was hungry. He said yes, but he also said he had very bad digestion. Nevertheless, he ordered an enormous amount of food. It cost 33 yuan and we ate very little of it. He paid for it in ordinary Chinese money (renminbi), and then I gave him the equivalent in Foreign Exchange Certificates, which were like hard currency. It was quite a transaction but it occurred to me that my changing this money was the whole point of his ordering this expensive meal.

He said he had chosen the restaurant because it was Cantonese, and so was he. While we were eating, he overheard four Cantonese men speaking about their bill — their meal had cost 35 yuan.

"They must be merchants to have paid so much for their meal," he said. He asked them if this was so, but they told him they worked in a nearby government office.

"Times are changing," he said. As a veteran he had various pensions and subsidies that came to 271 yuan a month. He said he felt fairly well-off.

I asked him what he thought of so many Japanese tourists visiting China after they had caused so much misery for the Chinese by occupying the country and fighting so tenaciously.

"We have forgotten all that. It is better to forget. Anyway, Chairman Mao said, 'Most foreigners are good — only a few are bad.'"

"I wonder what Chairman Mao would say if he saw what was taking place in Peking right now."

Mr. Zhang said, "He would be interested. Certainly surprised."

"He might not like it."

"He would have to like it. The facts would teach him. He could not deny it."

He said what most people had told me, that Mao in old age was senile. After 1957, Mao was not the same. He kept making mistakes and was easily misled by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four.

"People worshipped him. It was very bad. He did not encourage it but he tolerated it."

I asked Mr. Zhang whether he was optimistic about the changes in China.

"Yes," he said. "Things are much better. We should have more money to spend, but if we tighten our belts for a few years I think we'll see some results."

"Don't you think there could be a change for the worse when Deng dies?"

"No. He has already chosen his successors."

"So you don't see any problems?"

"Overpopulation is a problem. Traffic is a problem — already we have too many cars. We have to manage that. But we are doing well in many areas, like agriculture."

He said he liked what was happening to China. Chinese history was long, but it had distinct phases. This was a very tiny part of it, and it might be years before we could assess it. That reminded me of Mao's reply when someone had asked him about the French Revolution — what did he think of it? "It is too early to say," Mao said.

Mr. Zhang then told me some of his war stories, as we strolled down Wangfujing. He had been a translator for General Chen Yi who, in April 1946, had a top-level meeting with an American general whose name Mr. Zhang could not remember. Liu Shaoqi (later chairman of the People's Republic, and much later tortured to death by Red Guards) was also present at this meeting.

'The American general gave a carton of Camel cigarettes to General Chen Yi, and some chocolates to Liu Shaoqi, and a box of rations to me.

"'We are in Shandong,' General Chen Yi said. 'We have many fruit trees here. You have my permission to encourage Americans to open a fruit-canning factory here.' But they didn't accept the invitation.

'Then I gave them all a shock. I shook hands with the American general. The American translator did not dare to shake hands with General Chen Yi. Afterwards these Americans, who were members of UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), said to me, 'You're very progressive, comrade.'

"'All men are equal,' I said."

He was a nice man, and before we parted he said, 'The food at that restaurant wasn't very good, but I like this conversation. When you come back to Peking, come to my house and have some real Chinese food."

From the train Peking had looked impressive: a city on the rise, cranes everywhere, workmen scrambling across girders, and the thump of pile drivers going, Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo!

But when I went a little closer and walked around them, these new tenements looked very shaky. Some were made as if with a large-scale version of children's blocks, or put together out of three-room modules — a sort of gigantic building-puzzle kit. And it was dear why these prefab methods were being used. When a structure was put up from scratch, brick by brick, the windows were wonky and the doors weren't square and there were bulges in the walls, and the whole thing had a handmade look that the kinder architects call "the vernacular style."

"No one knows how long they'll last," an American in Peking told me. 'They might turn out to be like those Hong Kong buildings that were put up with spit and sawdust and fell down about a year later."

"Why do you think that?" I asked.

"Because most of them are being put up by people from Hong Kong."

Certainly the development called the Hua Guofeng Wall is beginning to crack. It is a hideous stretch of apartments and tower blocks that was put up as a prestige project by Mr. Hua before he was politically outmaneuvered by Mr. Deng. The buildings are not only mismatched and cracked and stained, but also, though only seven years old, have begun to fall down.

I nosed around a tall apartment block and fell into conversation with Mr. Zheng Douwan on the ninth floor. He said that everything was fine at the moment, but he was tentative and I knew there was more to say.

"Is it always fine?" I asked.

"Not in the summer," he said. "The water table is so low in Peking that the pressure is bad. We can only get water as high as the fifth floor. This is a fifteen-story building, so the people on the upper ten floors have to get water in buckets."

Droughts and water shortages are greatly feared in Peking, he told me: for the past six years the rainfall was way below average and the outlook this year was not good. (In the event, very little rain fell, though buildings continued to rise.)

Mr. Zheng said, "From the bath point of view it's like England in the thirties. There is no hot water in any of these flats. If you want a bath you heat a kettle and pour it into a tin bathtub. It is very inconvenient, but I don't complain because that is how everyone lives."

But not tourists, not high Party officials, and not the new classes of people with money — taxi drivers and some traders. In 1980 there were three taxi companies in Peking; now there are 230, with 14,000 taxis. All are controlled by the government or by official agencies, but the drivers do well out of it because the people who take taxis are generally foreigners and they pay in Foreign Exchange Certificates.

The free market (ziyou shichang) allows anyone to do business and keep the profits. This was one of Deng's reforms, and it is the reason why factory workers are often very cross — and why they demand high bonuses and complain about inflation. The street traders in the free market can quite easily earn five times a factory worker's salary, and after an informal survey of the hawkers and traders in various Peking markets, I figured their monthly earnings to be between 500 and 700 yuan — enough to buy "The Big Three."

One market woman told me, "What people used to want were a bicycle, a radio and a gas stove. Now the Big Three are a refrigerator, a cassette machine and a color television."

Some of the markets are operated by retired factory workers who simply want a friendly place to go during the day. They say things like, "I've always been interested by old beads and pots," and they have the flea-market mentality that is familiar to anyone from Cape Cod. They love talking about the bits of peculiar junk they've accumulated and, being pensioners, are not really doing this for a living. These traders are not to be confused with the people who have been doing business in the same place for years — the specialists in birds, or fish, or herbs. In most Chinese cities, the Bird Market is a specific location and may have been unchanged for hundreds of years.

Flea market seemed to me an appropriate comparison, since that was how most people pronounced it. I saw an opium pipe on one little stall. It was about eighteen inches long, with a silver bowl and a jade mouthpiece.

"That's a genuine old piece. Forty yuan and worth every bit of it. Take it away."

"I'll give you twenty," I said.

"Listen, if you weren't with this Chinese man I would have written '120' on a piece of paper and said Take it or leave it.'"

"All right, twenty-five."

He pretended he hadn't heard me. He said, "The interesting thing about this pipe is its mouthpiece. See how strong it is?" He banged it against the tabletop. "A man would ride his horse with this hanging by his side. If he saw a thief, or if someone attacked him he would bop him on the head with it. See, use it like a club — bop! bop!"

"Thirty."

'The bowl is real silver. This is a hundred years old. I've been collecting these pipes my whole life. I worked in a shoe factory. I'm retired! I don't even have to sell you this pipe, but you're a foreigner and I want to do you a favor."

"Thirty is my highest offer."

'This is an antique, comrade. It's a collector's item. It's a pipe. It's a weapon. Take it."

"Okay, thirty-five."

"Fine. It's yours. Shall I wrap it up? Here," he said, taking out an old copy of The People's Daily and folding the pipe into it. "Serves two functions. Wrapping paper and afterwards you can read it."

I had stopped at that free market on my way to the bathhouse. Because of what Mr. Zheng had told me about the inconvenience of bathing, I had inquired and found out that Peking was full of public bathhouses — about thirty of them, subsidized by the government. They are one of the cheapest outings in China: for 60 fen (16 cents) a person is admitted and given a piece of soap, a towel and a bed; and he is allowed to stay all day, washing himself in the steamy public pool and resting.

The one I found was called Xing Hua Yuan. It was open from 8:30 in the morning until 8:00 at night. Many people who use it are travelers who have just arrived in Peking after a long journey and want to look presentable for their friends or relatives — and of course who don't want to impose on them for a bath.

The beds were in little cubicles, and men wrapped in towels were resting or walking around talking. It was like a Roman bath — it was social, the scalded Chinese, pinkish in the heat, were sloshing themselves and yelling at each other in a friendly way. It was also possible to get a private room, for about double the ordinary rate.

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.