Riding the Iron Rooster

4. The Shanghai Express

But even though that's true — that it is difficult to make virtuous people interesting — it is also true that it is fairly easy to make the unvirtuous memorable and sometimes fascinating.

It was not just those folks in the flesh — the short buttocky young man and his androgynous bride, my companions in the compartment on the Shanghai Express, and all those hustlers at Peking Central Station, pestering travelers to use their hotels or their taxis or to eat at their restaurants. (It is not enough that the Chinese have relaxed the ban on commercial advertising; they are not content with putting up a billboard or a sign. They tend to the personal touch — buttonholing Chinese tourists, badgering yokels who have just arrived from distant Gansu, yelling into megaphones, wagging banners in their faces, and installing screaming jingles and advertisements on the loudspeakers in the trains themselves.) But to complete my study of Chinese vices, 1 had chosen as reading material the erotic novel that had been whispered about in Peking, Jin Ping Mei (The Golden Lotus). It had been banned in China since the Ming Dynasty, and it seemed there was no higher recommendation than that. From its earliest pages it was a ruthless novel, and it was also graphically sexual. The perfect book for the Shanghai Express — or maybe for a whole trip through China, since it was about 2000 pages long.

This little fat fellow and his skinny wife slept in the berth just above my head. He filled the space and she curled about him like a wood shaving. She was just as thin and delicate and she was the color of newly planed wood. They chattered and smooched. He was from Singapore, she was from Hong Kong; he was a wise guy, one of the new breed of humorless computer people, who plug themselves into their machines and begin to resemble their mainframe — his big bum looked like part of a console. And she was always fluttering and giggling; she was dizzy, didn't know anything, couldn't cook, didn't speak English in spite of having grown up in a British colony — didn't speak Mandarin either — but what did it matter, as long as fatso paid the bills and bought trinkets for her. His name was Deng and he was always pushing his chubby face into her.

The fourth person — just across from me, on the other side of the folding table and the hot-water jug — was an old woman, about seventy-odd, whose luggage consisted of a small plastic shopping bag, a basket of apples and a jam jar half full of soggy tea leaves. She unscrewed the lid, filled it with hot water from the jug and then blew and slurped in a dainty way.

In the upper berth, the buttocky man was murmuring to his snickering bride.

This situation reminded me of a vicious thrilling story I had once planned to write about a very nearsighted old terror who always sat nagging about damnation while her conniving daughter and her boyfriend made love across the room in a chair, the girl on his lap, like a melon on a knife — and all the while the old woman believed she was making a terrific impression.

Indeed, Deng in the upper berth reminded me even more strongly of the book I was reading, Jin Ping Mei. Where was the innuendo and subtlety I had been told about? This was one of the most sexually explicit novels I'd ever come across. I had just finished an episode in which the central character, Hsi-men, reclining with one of his many women throws plums between her parted legs, and the third plum comes to rest against her vulva. He chafes her with it and presses it into her vagina, until she has an orgasm; and then he eats that plum.

"Want some candy?" asked the fat young man in the upper berth, and offered me some Chinese chocolate.

It was almost midnight: he was also guzzling milk, and he had not stopped tickling his very thin wife. They seemed to me amazingly active for that time of night, and I wondered whether they were honeymooners.

I took some candy to be friendly, but the old woman refused. She looked tearful, but she wasn't unhappy. There is a certain Chinese face that looks grief stricken — swollen eyes and a sad, compressed mouth. Sometimes I saw a man and I imagined that he had just been sobbing. But, no, it was just that face — maybe he was from Guangdong. The old woman had that look. She lay down and went to sleep, and now asleep — pale and motionless — it was as though she were either dead or dying.

The young woman swung across the ceiling into her own berth, and her fat little husband went after her. She laughed and dived into the berth above me. Was this going to go on all night? They were dressed in the skintight clothes that the Chinese had begun to wear, perhaps as a reaction against the baggy suits that had been forced upon them for the past thirty-five years. I had the impression that the young man was an overseas Chinese.

"You can keep the light on," he said. "We're all right."

But I was falling asleep over my book. I finished a chapter, marveling at its rowdiness, and then switched off the compartment light.

There was a thud: the man hoisting himself into his wife's berth.

I was awakened in the night by sounds that reached me from the upper berth. They began like the rustle of curtains, and then a sudden tumbling motion — the thrashing of a body in a bed — and then sucking and swallowing noises, as of someone working on a piece of candy. There was a whisper. It was so low I could not say whether it was the man or the pretty woman — the word no. "No… no… no… no," repeated in a breathless yeslike way, "Bu… bu… bu… bu."

It went on for a long while, sometimes very slowly, as the passing stations flashed through the parted curtains. The sounds aroused me, and then when I was wide awake they made me completely objective. I felt like a ghost, which is the usual condition of a writer. I was hollow and insubstantial, hovering between the old woman and the lovers.

At dawn we left Shandong Province, which was the setting of the steamy Chinese novel I was reading. It was a happy blend of sex, wisdom and fine writing. Here is the first glimpse the priapic Hsi-men has of the discontented housewife (soon to be his mistress) Golden Lotus: Her hair was black as a raven's plumage; her eyebrows mobile as the kingfisher and as curved as the new moon. Her almond eyes were clear and cool, and her cherry lips most inviting…. Her face had the delicate roundness of a silver bowl. As for her body, it was as light as a flower, and her fingers as slender as the tender shoots of a young onion. Her waist was as narrow as the willow, and her white belly yielding and plump. Her feet were small and tapering; her breasts soft and luscious. One other thing there was, black-fringed, grasping, dainty and fresh, but the name of that I may not tell… it had all the fragrance and tenderness of fresh-made pastry, the softness and appearance of a new-made pie.

Those tiny feet are interesting. In another chapter, Hsi-men is beguiled by the sight of another woman's bound feet — the so-called "lily-feet."Old woman Hsueh found an opportunity to lift Mistress Meng's skirt slightly, displaying her exquisite feet, three inches long and no wider than a thumb…

I mention this because after we left Shandong and crossed the Grand Canal (Da Yunhe) we came to the city of Xuzhou (formerly Tong-shan), where I saw an old woman with small, stumpy feet on the platform, and she was walking painfully on these deformities that had once been thought to be so ravishing.

It was at Xuzhou in the yellow light of early morning that I saw the first real greenery since leaving London over a month before — fields of ripening rice, and young trees in leaf by the roadside, and large blowing poplars. It was the flat plain of eastern China, once a conglomeration of communes and now a region of smallholdings — an immensity of vegetables, cabbage as far as the eye could see, with big black pigs balanced neatly on their trotters in the foreground. I saw puddles and streams, and farmers plowing with tractors or bullocks, and people carrying heavy loads with a shoulder pole used as a yoke to carry a pair of baskets; white swimming ducks and fluttering geese, a small girl in a blue tunic sitting astride a buffalo, and field-workers sleeping off their breakfast against an embankment like drunken peasants in a Flemish painting. And there was a dark sow so heavily pregnant her teats grazed the dusty earth of the farmyard as she plodded.

Some rice was already being harvested. China is proud of the fact — as well it should be — that it not only feeds itself but for the first time in its history now exports more grains than it imports (generally speaking it sells rice and buys wheat). All this activity is dramatized by the fact that for the past few years field-workers have begun to wear bright clothes, and so they are highly visible as they hoe and harvest. From time to time, however, the rigid thing you take to be a scarecrow turns out to be a comrade either leaning on his shovel or practicing wushu or t'ai chi with his arms stuck out.

A few hours later the train pulled into Bengbu, a railway junction in the middle of Anhui Province. Our train was needed there for a little while because a movie scene was being shot at Bengbu Station — a young man and woman seeing someone off on our train, probably an irritating relative. A great crowd had gathered to watch the action, and the film crew and the railway police struggled to shift the mob out of the shot. There was no rough stuff. Everyone — even the police — was interested in the movie. There was no pushing, no anger; and I was impressed by the good humor. But unless they had a brilliant editor, I was sure the result would show the two actors waving good-bye, watched by 2000 goggling Chinese.

In any event there was only one take. When the Shanghai Express pulled out of Bengbu, that was the end of the shot.

Then we were in the green fields again. I was sure that the main difference between this visit and my previous one six years before, when I had sailed down the Yangtze, was that before, I had come in the middle of winter, when everything had been bleak. Then, a Chinese landscape seemed to me to be composed of rain, smoke, fog; and collapsing houses on a muddy road; and people with their hands shoved into their sleeves; and all those fat-faced pictures of Mao on the wall. And whenever I asked someone a question the answer was always either "Maybe" or "You think so?"

Spring and a half a dozen years seemed to have made a significant difference. Because China is so intensively agricultural, spring is splendid all over the country. It's impossible to see crops being planted, and weeded, and harvested, and not feel optimistic. The country was greener, leafier, visibly cheerier and more hopeful. It was not an illusion, this new Cycle of Cathay. If people seemed a little impatient it was perhaps because they knew well that in Chinese terms a cycle lasts sixty years. Lynn Pan began her book The New Chinese Revolution, about recent events in China, by describing what a cycle means in Chinese terms, and then she became specific: "In June 1981 the Chinese Communist Party, founded at a secret meeting in Shanghai in 1921, completed its first cycle of sixty and began on its next." It was also in June 1981 that Deng Xiaoping was made Number One (apart from being head of the politburo he has no real title) and opened China's doors — and then the West hurried in. Only a few years had passed, but the result was obvious. Nothing is more conspicuous than something that has been Westernized.

The passengers mobbed the corridors and hogged the windows just after eleven, and when I asked what was up, they said we would be crossing the Yangtze River soon. But they didn't call it that — the word "Yangtze" hardly exists in Chinese — they called it Chang Jiang, The Long River. Crossing it is an event because it is China's equator, the north-south divide. The Chinese in the north are different from the Chinese in the south. In the north, the Chinese say, they are imperious, quarrelsome, rather aloof, political, proud noodle-eaters; and across the river they are talkative, friendly, complacent, dark, sloppy, commercial-minded and materialistic rice-eaters.

The river is wide, sluggish and brown at this point — the city of Nanjing (Nanking). The bridge over the river is a famous landmark because halfway through its construction the Russians pulled out, believing the Chinese could not possibly finish it themselves; but they did, and it remains one of the few modern engineering feats in China that resulted in a structure that is actually pleasing to the eye. Beneath its leaping spans were the Yangtze boats — like a whole history of Chinese riverboats, every style and size, from the sampans and dugouts to the junks and river steamers — these last of the East Is Red fleet that sail the 1500 miles from Chongqing (Chungking) to Shanghai.

I went on reading Jin Ping Mei, marveling at its blend of manners, delicacy and smut. What a shame it was still banned in China after five centuries. Truly, if the Chinese were allowed to read it, I felt, they would discover a great deal about themselves. I did not believe they would be morally undermined by this stuff, and yet it would be a real thrill as well as a revelation.

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

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

She wakes him and gives him a strong aphrodisiac: three pills. "She was afraid that anything less would have no effect." And although he falls asleep again, his penis is erect, and so she mounts him…. Her body seemed to melt away with delight… she moved up and down about two hundred times. At first it was difficult because it was dry but soon the love juices flowed and moistened her cunt. Hsi-men Ch'ing let her do everything she wished, but he himself was perfectly inert. She could bear it no longer…. She twisted herself towards his penis which was completely inside her cunt, only his two balls staying outside. She stroked his penis with her hand, and it was wonderfully good. The juices flowed and in a short time she had used up five napkins. Even then Hsi-men kept on, although the tip of his prick was swollen and hotter than a live coal. It was so tight that he asked the woman to take off the ribbon, but his penis remained stiff and he told her to suck. She bent over and with her red lips moved the head of his prick to and fro, and sucked. Suddenly white semen poured out, like living silver, which she took in her mouth and could not swallow fast enough. At first it was just semen, soon it became blood which flowed without stopping. Hsi-men Ch'ing had fainted and his limbs were stiff outstretched.Golden Lotus was frightened. She hastily gave him some red dates. Blood followed semen, and the blood was followed by freezing air. Golden Lotus was terrified. She threw her arms around him and cried, "Darling, how do you feel?" Readers, there is a limit to our energy, but none to our desires. A man who sets no bounds to his passion cannot live more than a short time…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So what's the problem?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What are your chances of being hired?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Burkina Faso," he said.

"What's the capital?"

"Ouagadougou."

"Very good!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Can you treat depression and schizophrenia with acupuncture?"

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

"How do you treat your patients?"

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

I asked him whether he got many cases of paranoia.

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

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

'The emperor. Chairman Mao. Or God."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Go right in," the man said.

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

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

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

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

"No, we have no chickens or ducks."

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

"Just for fun," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"1 like bright clothes," he said.

"Could you wear them during the Cultural Revolution."

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

"Were you criticized?"

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

"What did you say?"

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

"Describe the essays."

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

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

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

"What work did you do?"

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

The other three pests were mosquitoes, flies and rats.

"That's absurd," I said.

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

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

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

"How much of the street did you paint?"

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

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

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

"Which enemy?"

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

"Your hole?"

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

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

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

'That never happens in China," I said.

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

"Did you sell them to him?"

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

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

"Or fashion shows."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You know about the watermelon tycoon?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So you believe in the death penalty?"

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

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

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

"Why not?" Comrade Ning asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course!"

"No dangerous social tendencies that you can see?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It belonged to a former capitalist."

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

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

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

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

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

"About politics?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The subject of clothes was not contentious.

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

"Why have they stopped wearing them?"

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

"Do you think that will come again?"

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

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

"You seem pretty sure," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'This humiliation you spoke of—"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked him how it started.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Household cats? Pussycats?"

"Yes. They do tricks."

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

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

"Performing chickens?"

"Not chickens but cocks."

"What do the cocks do?"

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

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

"What about the pigs?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

I asked Mr. Liu about the financial arrangement.

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

"How much does Ringling Brothers pay you?"

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

"How much do you pay the acrobats?"

"About one hundred yuan."

Thirty bucks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You think he was crazy?" I said.

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

'Tell me one or two."

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

"Is that a wise saying?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There is no psychology department," she said.

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

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

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

What the hell, I thought, and said okay.