Riding the Iron Rooster

5. The Fast Train to Canton

It was always like a fire drill, getting on or off a Chinese train, with people panting and pushing; but the journey itself was a great sluttish pleasure for everyone — a big middle-aged pajama party, full of reminiscences. It seemed to me that the Chinese, who had no choice but to live the dullest lives and perform the most boring jobs imaginable — doing the same monotonous Chinese two-step from the cradle to the grave — were never happier than when on a railway journey. They liked the crowded compartments and all the chatter; they liked smoking and slurping tea and playing cards and shuffling around in their slippers — and so did I. We dozed and woke and yawned and watched the world go by.

This was the last leg of the tour group's trip before they reached Hong Kong, and I was glad to see some familiar faces.

"See this piece in the China Daily?" Ashley Relph asked, and showed me the paper.

Under the headline miracle surgery for worker who lost limb it described how a man had been more or less devoured by his stitching machine in a clothes factory, and his arm had been severed. Just reading that gave me the anxious twinges I associated with a castration complex, but there was more. The poor fellow had been rushed to the hospital, and in a landmark surgical operation his arm had been sewn back on, "and he is now receiving therapy to learn how to use it again." The article also mentioned how fingers and toes had been sewn onto workers who had lost them. It had always worked.

It's a great society for mending things, I thought. There was no need for a man to be put on the occupational scrap heap simply because his arm had been chopped off. You found a way to reattach the arm, and you sent him back to work. The epoch of invention ended a thousand years ago, and these days the Chinese were perfecting a technique for making do and mending. This was not invisible mending. It was always obvious when a thing had been patched — it was a society of patches. They patched their underwear and darned their socks and cobbled their shoes. They rewrote their slogans and painted out the Thoughts of Chairman Mao, and come to think of it, that was a form of patching, too. But Mao had spoken repeatedly of the evils of wastefulness: 'Thrift should be the guiding principle in our government expenditure…. corruption and waste are very great crimes… never be wasteful or extravagant." An entire section of his Thoughts is entitled "Building Our Country Through Diligence and Frugality."

One of the great differences between China under Mao and China under Deng was that the Mao mania for patching and mending had begun to subside, pride in poverty was regarded now as old hat, and the Dengists liked things that were brand-new. New clothes were now so cheap that no one had to waste time mending them. Yet I was sure that it was this make-do-and-mend philosophy that had inspired these medical advances and miracles with amputees.

The news items gave me the creeps though. I read a report about a man whose penis had been sewn back on. Fifty other men had had the same operation in China, "and 98 percent of them found their penis functioned again," the China Daily stated. Some of the men had what was called "one-stage reconstruction of the penis," which was not a reattachment but a whole new dick cobbled together from spare parts — a piece of rib, a skin graft, some loose tubes. A survey showed that most of the men were able to father children. "A father who went through the one-stage reconstruction of the penis even mailed his daughter's photo to us," Professor Chang, the mastermind of this technique, said.

The strangest case of human mending occurred not long ago in Shenyang. This was also reported in the China Daily, under the confusing headline TRANSPLANTED LEG SAVES GIRL'S ARM.Eleven-year-old Meng Xin's left arm and leg were severed in a train accident.To save her, the six surgeons used part of her severed leg to make a forearm, to which they attached her hand.Following the 18-hour operation, Meng's skin on her transplanted forearm returned to normal, and her transplanted fingers have recovered their sense of touch.She can clench her fist and move her left arm.

And yet these mending operations are not surprising to anyone who has looked under the hood of an old Chinese bus, or closely scrutinized the welds in a Chinese steam locomotive, or watched a Chinese street tailor or cobbler at work. And you only had to see the amazing contraption of hosepipes that filled the trains with water at the larger railway stations to realize that it was inevitable that such people would in time be able to rig up a new penis for an unfortunate Chinese castrato.

Ashley was still watching me reading the paper. Handing it back to him, I said, Yes, wasn't it remarkable?

"Lom mistair," he said, and winked at me. "It's the CIA, isn't it? You're an agent, you tell people you're a journalist because that's good cover. You go sniff-sniff-sniff and get people blabbing, and then you lock yourself in your room and write a report." He laughed. "That's all right. I don't care! I won't tell anyone." And he looked out of the window. "Jesus, I am so sick of this country — I can't wait to get back home. Chinese food — every day — Chinese food. And these people!"

"The Chinese?"

"Naw, they're all right. They're bloody small though," he said. "I was thinking of the tour here."

They were in the corridor, watching China go by. It was not very pretty here. The industrial suburbs of Shanghai continued for almost a hundred miles, until the train pulled into Hangzhou. Marco Polo had mentioned Hangzhou — it was one of the boasts of this tourist paradise with its lake, temples, hotels, restaurants, noodle stalls, take-your-picture booths. It was a help to have Marco Polo's praise as a blurb on your brochure ("the greatest city which may be found in the world"), but even that did not make the place sparkle for me. And I had always wondered why Marco Polo, who talked about everything and supposedly went everywhere, never mentioned either the Great Wall or the fact that the Chinese drank tea, in his Travels.

Ashley said the tourists were driving him mental, and he brought me up to date. The most obnoxious man (Kicker) and Wilma, the bald woman, had become lovers. There had been a fight in the French compartment, and one of them, who was bringing a legal action against another, had joined the American group, the Wittricks and Westbetters. Blind Bob was terribly bruised as a result of his Mister McGoo stumbling. Rick Westbetter was planning to write another letter to President Reagan — this one about Chinese duplicity. The Australians were feeling cranky, but of course they were relieved to be heading for Guangdong, since South China was closer to Australia. Bella Scoons was telling herself that the distance was no more than four trips to Kalgoorlie. The Cathcarts had made themselves unpopular by refusing to pay for a beer one hot day because "we've paid for this trip already, and that beer ought to be free." They made an issue of the one yuan (26 cents) and just sat and broke out into a virtuous sweat. Morthole had added to his rock collection: he could hardly heave the sack of them.

Kicker said ironically, "How about a tomb? We haven't seen a tomb today!"

"I'd like to show that fucker a tomb," Ashley said.

They were all tired and crabby. You need a good night's sleep, I wanted to say. It was like school, like an outing; it had gone on too long. Day Thirty-seven, Miss Wilkie was writing in her journal.

"It's ten thousand miles we've done," she said. 'Ten thousand miles. And believe me, it hasn't been a picnic."

This was Zhejiang Province, the old eternal China — no fashion shows here, no spivs, no "Shansh marnie?" no talk of microchips and reforms.

This was mostly paddy fields, and green shoots standing stiffly in black goop. It was an open, almost treeless landscape of bumpy ground and sharp-featured hills and greeny-blue mountains; tea, and rice, and bursting blue vegetables, reeking canals, tile-roofed huts, trampled dirt roads, coolie hats, and everyone dressed in the same style of pajamas. I saw two boys working a treadwheel that ran a chain-driven water pump, a machine that has been in continuous use in China since the first century A.D. according to Professor Needham.

The Zhejiang hills — the Kuocang Shan — were streaky: slashes of white and green, with claw marks and jagged ridges. There were no shade trees. Shade is an unnecessary luxury in an agricultural country and stunts the crops. In the unhindered sunshine, the landscape was austerely tended and harshly fertile, and familiar things like trees and huts were so out of scale the people looked miniaturized.

Everything they did was connected with food — planting it, growing it, harvesting it. The woman who looks as though she is sitting is actually weeding; those children are not playing, they are watering plants; and the man up to his shoulders in the creek is not swimming but immersed with his fishnet. The land here has one purpose: to provide food. The Chinese are never out of sight of their food, which is why as a people arrested at the oral stage of development (according to the scholar of psycho-history Sun Longji) they take such pleasure in fields of vegetables. I found the predictable symmetry of gardens very tiring to the eye, and I craved something wilder. So far, China seemed a place without wilderness. The whole country had been made over and deranged by peasant farmers. There was something unnatural and neurotic in that obsession. They had found a way to devour the whole country.

Hunger had made them ingenious. At Jinhua the train stopped for a while, and I saw a three-decker van for carrying pigs: animals in China always seemed to be kept in a space their own size. What could be crueler? I suppose the answer was: lots of things — an intellectual forced to shovel chicken shit, a Muslim forced to keep pigs, a physicist ordered to assemble radios, an historian in a dunce cap, a person beaten to death for being a teacher. Next to these Cultural Revolution atrocities, keeping a pig in a poke was not really very bad, though it may have contributed to other forms of heartlessness. It was a very hot and humid day, and the pigs were whimpering in their racks as the train passed.

The background was mountainous, the foreground as flat as Holland — square pools of rice shoots, and the roads no more than long narrow tracks. This landscape had no date — the people dressed as they always had; and it was impossible to date it by looking closely at tools and implements. I saw a thresher that looked like the first thresher in the world: a rigged-up whacking paddle hinged to a stick; and the buffalo yokes, the wooden plow, the long-fingered rakes and the fishermen's nets were all of ancient design. By sundown we had done 400 miles, and we had never been out of sight of bent-over farmers or cultivated fields. Every surface had been cultivated, but it was spring and so even these cabbages had beauty.

I began talking with a Chinese man named Zhao who had just visited his girlfriend in Shanghai and was heading back to Changsha in Hunan.

"I took her out to a restaurant and I ordered dishes to impress her. Duck, chicken, fish — everything. It cost me twenty yuan!"

That was about six dollars, and for a moment I thought So what? and didn't understand the anguish on his face.

Then Zhao said, 'That's a week's pay for me! I couldn't eat. I went to bed that night and I couldn't sleep." He clenched his fists and hammered with them. "Twenty yuan! I was cursing. I still feel bad."

"I'm sure she appreciated it." I said.

"Yes," he said. "She is a simple girl. She is a country girl. She is pure."

Just as the landscape altered and became hillier, the sun went down. A couple from Macau — Manuel was Portuguese, Veronica was Chinese — were in my compartment. Veronica was skinny, with a small schoolboy's face and a schoolboy's haircut. She pouted for a while in the upper berth, and then we all went to sleep. But I had never really got used to sleeping among strangers and so I woke up in the middle of the night and read my Jin Ping Mei and noticed once again that it was packed with foot fetishism and bondage games. I glanced up and saw Veronica staring down at me from the upper berth.

At dawn, under a pink sky, the train stopped at Zhuzhou, and Zhao got out to change for the train to Changsha.

I said good-bye to him. I was grateful for something he had told me — that on a railway line outside Changsha was Shaoshan, the village where Mao Zedong had been born.

"Everyone used to visit that village," he said. "Now no one does."

One of these days I'll go there, I thought. Zhao had given me careful directions.

This Canton train now turned south. With mountains always in the distance, we tracked across the rice terraces to Hengyang, where the railway divides — one line to Guangxi (Kwangsi), the other to Guangdong (Kwangtung) — The Two Kwangs, as they were once known.

The landscape had changed since Shanghai — not only its configuration (we were now among steep hills), but the methods of farming (these teetering, brimful terraces). The people here wore large wheel-like hats and lived in brick houses with porches, about six families to a house. And some of the houses looked grand and ambitious, with columns supporting the porch roofs and dragons molded on the waterspouts of the eaves.

Every available flat space was planted. Beans grew at the margins of the rice terraces, and there were cabbages on the hillsides, and spinach and greens at the edges of the roads. The earth had been moved and maneuvered so that everything — and especially the crumpled hills — looked man-made. The hills seemed a way of growing food vertically, like having fields on ledges and shelves to economize on space. The trees were tall and spindly, as if to take up the least amount of room.

"Was that Hengyang?" Manuel said.

I told him it was.

"That was the place where Li Si — the Emperor Shi Huangdi's minister — was sawed in half, for burning the books in 213 B.C." He smiled into his bristly beard. "The interesting thing is, he was sawed in half lengthwise."

He had left Portugal and had planned to be in Macau for about two years; but five years later he was still there. He wondered whether he would still be there when Macau was handed back to the Chinese in 1999. He said he was impressed with what he had seen in China — it was his first visit. But he smiled again.

"Maybe after five years all this could be turned upside down."

"Are you optimistic?"

"You know the saying? An optimist speaks — what?"

"Chinese," Veronica said.

"No. An optimist speaks Russian. A pessimist speaks Chinese." Then he frowned. "That doesn't sound right. I think it's An optimist speaks Chinese, a pessimist speaks Russian. That doesn't sound right either."

We debated this. I said, "Have you heard of the man who said, 'I speak English to my valet, French to my mistress, and German to my horse'?"

"And Chinese to my laundryman," Manuel said.

"And Portuguese to my cook," Veronica said.

With the whole day to kill, we tried to devise the itinerary for the longest railway journey in the world. It began in Portugal: Braganqa-Lisbon — Barcelona — Paris — Moscow — Irkutsk — Peking — Shanghai — Hong Kong.

We came to Chenzhou, an industrial city in a mountain valley, with high sharp gray-green peaks all around it. And at noon we passed through Pingshi, on the Hunan-Guangdong border. The cliffs had the look of temples, with vertical sides that might have been fluted and carved. But they weren't; this was simply the pattern in the basalt. Here the boulders were as huge as hills, and there were pagodas on them.

"Pagoda is a Portuguese word," Manuel said. "We say pagode in Portuguese — it means noise. I suppose they associated noise with these structures."

Mandarin was also Portuguese, he said — from mandar (to be in charge); and the Japanese arrigato (thank you) had come from obrigado.

I went to the dining car and took a seat next to a Chinese man in order to avoid Kicker ("First thing I do when I go home is have a big steak…"). We were passing through low jungle, but even so, rice and corn were being grown under the thin trees. I thought: There are no old trees in China — at least I hadn't seen any.

The food was not good, but to give my meals a point I invented a system for nominating a Dish of the Day. I had spent too many days eating unmemorably. This was a Cantonese train, with the distinctively wet and sticky cuisine — mushrooms, chicken, sweet-sour fish, greasy vegetables. I chose the eels as my Dish of the Day.

While I was eating I remembered another occasion, six years before, when I was eating with a Chinese youth — a pompous one who was the son of a well-placed official, a so-called cadre kid.

I had talked politics with him and he had said in one of his rebuttals, "I am a member of the proletariat — and you are not. You are bourgeois."

I mentioned this to my fellow diner, Mr. Zhu.

"What does 'proletariat' mean?"

I explained it.

He shook his head. "No. I am a higher class than that. I am a white-collar worker."

We talked about foreigners, because the dining car was full of tourists. Zhu said that, unlike Chinese, all foreigners were very excitable. We also had very loud voices. And we were gullible.

We discussed the Chinese proposition We can always fool a foreigner. Zhu said it was true, while I maintained that it was gloating and self-delusion. It was not even half true, but I had yet to meet a Chinese person who did not believe it deep down. I said that most foreigners suspect that the Chinese believe this, which makes the Chinese misapprehension even worse. "Consider the China pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind," Thoreau wrote at the end of Walden.

Later, at Yingde, under the wrinkled mountains there were pools of lotus flowers and shaggy green slopes of bamboo. You might mistake this for wilderness, but no: the bamboo is eaten and used for baskets and building houses; and the lotuses are not growing wild, they are farmed and harvested for their roots. That was another Dish of the Day: dessert of sliced lotus root in syrup.

All day, beside this track, another track was being laid: a new one, for heavy freight, to Hong Kong, in anticipation of 1997.

I sat by the window and looked out through the flickering rain. A boy was riding his buffalo home, and the sound of the train made pigs scatter under the banana trees, and it was so lush the train brushed against the tall tasseled weeds that grew beside the track. I saw clusters of deep-green bamboos, and women chopping firewood, and men smearing the wooden frames of houses with mud to make walls. And peeling blue gums, and a herd of buffalos under some lofty cliffs of orange clay. It was a very wet province, Guangdong, and very distinctive for not looking exhausted: it was fertile, orderly and energetic, and yet everything and everyone I saw had a specific purpose, which seemed to me very tiring to the eye — nothing random or accidental. Some minutes before we reached Canton the train stopped, and a large blue dragonfly hovered near my window. That was perfect — the Chinese dragonfly shimmering in the lushness of Guangdong.

It was very hot in the train, in the nineties, with high humidity. Some passengers had collapsed, others were gasping. I hated arriving in Canton, because it meant I had to change out of my pajamas. It was raining hard. Cyclists in plastic shrouds darted through the downpour. I had not been prepared for the traffic or the commerce — all the radio and television shops, the taxi drivers who listened to Hong Kong rock music on their radios, the luxurious hotels — the White Swan where Chinese went to look at the waterfall in the lobby; the 1147-room Garden Hotel, the biggest in China; the China Hotel (its motto: "For the Merchant Prince of Today"), advertising "A well-steaked reputation… succulent jet-fresh prime U.S. and New Zealand corn-fed beef…. Our steaks have a delicious reputation" — which also goes to show how far the Chinese will go to please foreigners, since the Chinese on the whole find a simple cooked steak a barbarous and tasteless meal that is appreciated only by primitive folk like Mongolians and Tibetans.

No one I met remarked much on Canton. They spoke of Hong Kong and how it was going to be radically altered by Chinese control. I did not believe that. I did not think it would change. My feeling was that Canton was quickly turning into Hong Kong, and in most respects it was impossible to tell the difference.

The Chinese in Canton seemed well aware that making money and hustling in the Hong Kong manner was what mattered most. They could be mocking, too, about the government's solemn pretensions. One of the Party slogans — written on billboards in Canton — was Look to the Future! {Xiang qian kari). But the word for future (qian) sounds the same as the word money (qian) even though the character is radically different. So the current pun in Canton was Look to the Money!

Some Chinese in Canton asked me what I wanted to see there. I said, "How about a commune?" and they almost split their sides laughing. The Chinese laugh is seldom a response to something funny — it is usually Ha-ha, we're in deep shit or Ha-ha, I wish you hadn't said that or Ha-ha, I've never felt so miserable in my life—but this Cantonese boffo was real mirth. The idea of visiting a commune anywhere in Guangdong province was completely ridiculous. There were none! And didn't I know that Deng Xiaoping had officially declared the commune experiment to have been a failure? Didn't I know that everyone was paddling his own canoe now?

I said, "I was here six years ago and went to a huge commune outside Canton. Everyone said it was a model commune. It was a success. Factories. Rice fields. Fruit trees. A canning industry. I went to a woman's house and she had a radio, a television, a refrigerator—"

"She was the only person in the commune who had those things! It was a trick to impress you!"

"I just want to know what's there now," I said.

"It's all been broken up into geti hu."

Single-unit households, that is: every family for itself, or the family business.

"Is it working?"

"Yes, much better than before."

"So if I go out there and ask the people how things are, they'll say, 'Wonderful.'"

'That is correct."

I said, "How will I know they're not trying to impress me? Maybe that's a trick, too."

"No, no, no," this Chinese man said. "Nowadays, people tell you what is in their hearts. They are not afraid anymore."

"But they swore to me that the model commune I saw was running perfectly."

"What did you expect them to say?"

That was a good point. Why should they belittle it to a foreigner, especially when it was such a loss of face to do so?

"That commune was so large," my Chinese friend said, "that a person had to take a train to see the head of the committee."

"Is that a figure of speech?"

"Yes. It is a joke."

For uninteresting reasons I was unable to visit the commune and compare my impressions with what I had seen in 1980. What I remembered best was visiting the woman who had the big dusty television (with a red shawl over it: cloth television covers are still very popular in China), and listening to her spiel about this being a workers' paradise, and then going outside and watching children feeding white ducks in a green creek. But I swore that the first chance I got I would visit a commune and look at it closely for changes.

The changes were obvious in Canton. For one thing it was full of tourists. Some of these people were extremely elderly and infirm. They said they were looking forward to the Great Wall.

"Is there wheelchair access on the Great Wall?" they asked each other. "Is there a ramp? Is there Disabled Parking? Is there a Handicapped Entrance?"

It amazed me that people so frail should have risked being so far from home. But they were confident and curious, and I admired their pluck.

On the other hand, Canton was one of those places in the world where the hotels are so good and so all-encompassing that a guest need never leave: all the shops, events, colorful clothes, rugs, restaurants and everything else are right there in various parts of the air-conditioned building. And it is one of the facts of life in China today that the hotels are as great a tourist attraction as any of the temples or museums.

People went to Canton for many reasons, but the most interesting one I heard was from seven skinny youths who had come from Hong Kong to go tenpin bowling.

I didn't laugh. Brainlessly banging cannonballs down a varnished ramp and watching the pins go bopping seemed like fun to me. It was a hot afternoon, and Canton was a big screechy place.

I loitered at the bowling alley but didn't play. I met an American named Barton, an oilman, who was supervising the drilling of wells. Were they offshore? He didn't say; he was rather circumspect, rather Chinese in fact, as if he suspected me of being engaged in industrial espionage.

Barton had been in Canton for four years, and before that had been in the Persian Gulf, which he had hated. But he hated China, too — his test wells had not paid off, though some others had. And the oil price was so low it hardly seemed worthwhile looking. It was certainly proving expensive. He told me several things I had not known — that China was a huge oil producer, that it had a surplus because there were so few motor vehicles in China (and the power plants and most of the trains were fueled by Chinese coal), and that China exported crude oil and gasoline to the United States. (Gasoline and fireworks are China's biggest exports to the U.S.)

The shrinking oil-exploration schemes had meant a cutback in Barton's mode of life, though. His wife and children lived in Hong Kong. The family used to get together twice a month. Now they met only once a month. It was pretty tough, Barton said, but necessary.

"I've got two kids to put through college. I need this job, I need the money — all the gweilos here do."

Most of the expatriates used that expression when they referred to themselves. It was south China and Hong Kong self-mockery and meant "foreign devil."

"I was offered a job in Singapore," he said. "It was also oil related. I probably should have taken it, but that place is too strict. I can't stand Lee Kuan Yew. He's a shit. They can have him. I'll take Dung any day."

Barton laughed the phlegmy, fruity laugh of the chain-smoker.

"Know what we call Lee Kuan Yew? Hitler-with-a-heart. Har! Har!"

As someone who had had his own problems with "Harry" Lee, I thought this description was funny and apt. And I was also struck by Barton's seriousness.

I was able to tell Barton my own Chinese oil-drilling story. In 1968, the Chinese embassy in Uganda brought a troupe of Red Guards to Kampala to put on a show. There were acrobats and accordion players and jugglers, all wearing red armbands; but the highlight of the evening was a Red Guard ballet about drilling for oil in one of the coldest and dreariest parts of China — Daqing, in the Manchurian province of Heilongjiang.

In the heat of the Ugandan night, they mimicked frostbite and hypothermia as they danced and drilled through layers of ice and rock. They dropped with exhaustion and were on the point of giving up altogether — no oil.

They were harangued all this time by Red Guards (dancing, chattering, shaking their fists), and at the lowest point, when they had all but abandoned the effort of drilling, one of the Red Guards produced the Little Red Book and began reading Mao's Thoughts. He read from the chapter, "Self-reliance and Arduous Struggle."

He showed his big square teeth and yelled, "What is work? Work is struggle! There are difficulties and problems in those places for us to overcome these difficulties. A good comrade is one who is more eager to go where the difficulties are greater!"

This cheered up the dancers dressed as riggers and drillers (they wore big bandagelike mittens and had rags on their feet). They were stirred by Mao's Thought, and as a chorus chanted, "Great Helmsman… Reddest of the Red Suns rising in the East," the drillers went back to work and at last struck oil, a great gusher. This was expertly simulated with lights and back-projection, and over all of it a portrait of Chairman Mao shimmered, as the Red Guards cheered. Oil! Mao's Thoughts! Prosperity! Workers serving the people! Overcoming difficulties!

Now all that was over and the oil workers are, typically, harassed Americans, separated from their families, quite well paid and trying to put their kids through college.

At the Trade Exhibition, which is an immense bazaar of Chinese merchandise and the pride of Canton, I met a disgruntled man from Hong Kong, one Mr. Tan, who was visiting his Cantonese relatives. He loved his relatives and was very loyal and dutiful, but he hated the Chinese attitude towards Mao. I had taken Mr. Tan to be an unassuming soul, but he was full of invective.

"Mao kept China in the dark for almost thirty years," he said. 'That's why these goods are substandard."

I said that some of the merchandise looked well made to me — the bicycles, the wrenches, the carpets. And though the electric appliances looked dangerous and ugly, the beaded bags, the screwdrivers, the canned food and the textiles were all great bargains.

"It is not enough to make these things," Mr. Tan said. "These people are in the dark. They think they know the world. They know nothing!"

It was even more mocking the way he said it in his Cantonese accent: Dey know nutting!

"Mao was a joke. He was so stupid. And they believed him. Ha!"

"Everyone says it's different now," I said.

"It looks different, but it is the same. You know why? Because they are the same."

That cynicism was characteristic of the people the Chinese called "Hong Kong Compatriots," and it was compounded of doubt and fear. It was voiced most strongly in Canton because Canton was the closest equivalent in Chinese terms to Hong Kong. The anxiety was contagious. Most people in Canton wondered — and with reason — What next?

I looked for people who might have a clue. The most knowing was of course an American banker who had been in Canton for about an hour and a half. But he had been there before. His name was Arthur Fliegle, and he had a sort of sales pitch in everything he said that sounded so convincing — at least he sounded convinced — that it seemed to reek of insincerity. But he was on the boil, and so I listened.

"Forget the hotels, forget the Friendship Stores and gift shops, forget the restaurants and bowling alleys — all the tourist-related stuff," Fliegle said. "That will go its own way. It earns some money, but it's no big deal."

"But the Chinese are trying to attract tourists," I said.

"Forget it. That's a detail. They want foreign investors. So look at it — look at the rest. The oil. The industry. The joint ventures. Want to hear an interesting statistic? We're dealing with about two hundred joint ventures through my Hong Kong bank. Guess how many of those two hundred are currently operating — I mean, actually off and running?"

I said I couldn't guess.

He raised two fingers. "Two. That's all. And neither of them is making any money."

"But everyone talks about joint ventures."

'They're whistling in the dark. Most companies have withdrawn their top people. They had highly paid executives in China, but they haven't been making any money. So they pull out their expensive American yuppies and they put in Joe Chen from Hong Kong — you know the guy, middle-aged, brown suit, plastic briefcase. They say 'Go for it, Joe!' and he makes a dive, hits a brick wall and staggers back. 'Go for it, Joe!' they yell again. And he hits the wall again. But so what? He's only costing twenty or thirty thousand a year. That's the kind of guy operating now. The six-figure executive is gone."

To provoke this man Fliegle I said that the Chinese seemed very confident about doing business.

"I'm not talking about them — I'm talking about investor confidence, and that seems to be ebbing away. That's why the next three or four years are so crucial. Already companies have pulled out. They aren't philanthropists or idealists. They want to make money, and if they don't make it they'll leave. At the moment, China's in a big expansionist phase, but so far there hasn't been much of a return — nothing to justify great hopes or big investments. The bubble might burst, and if it does it's going to be hell here. We'll know inside five years whether it's going to work."

I found what this man said interesting because he had no political ideas at all — he was all practical and unsentimental about the quickest way to make a buck. It fascinated me to think that there were many Chinese who were just the same.

Some Chinese had begun to rob graves. One of the commonest and most frequently condemned crimes in south China, where the best graves were, was relic smuggling: digging up armor, weapons, pots, bronzes, silver and ornaments, and bringing them to Hong Kong. In just two years, from 1984 to 1986, over a hundred instances of smuggling had been foiled by the Chinese police — and 20,000 antiques recovered. These were not just family treasures but items filched from Tang and Han Dynasty tombs in Hunan. In some instances, there was a medieval kind of vandalism — farmers trampling on Han lyres and flutes because they had tiger motifs inscribed on them, which the farmers found "inauspicious." Or the sixty tombs in Hengyang County which were destroyed by pig keepers, who used the mausoleum bricks to make pigsties. But the majority of the artifacts uncovered or stolen from tombs became smuggled goods.

Typically, the valuable contraband is hustled to Hong Kong by boat, or in trucks, hidden under loads of Chinese cabbages. The destination is nearly always Hong Kong — none of this stuff is ever sold in China.

There are almost no antiques of any value, or of any real age, for sale in China. It is illegal to sell anything older than 150 years — that is, anything earlier than the corny imitative and degraded late Qing stuff. For Tang celadons, Ming bowls, even ancient terra-cotta and neolithic figures, Hong Kong is the place, and Hong Kong is busier now than it has ever been, because the smuggling is so intense.

"Nowadays, the Chinese know it's valuable," an antique dealer told me. 'They used to sell it to the state, but they don't anymore — the state prices are too low. And it's this new attitude. Everyone's in business. Everyone is digging. They're looking for another Xian, another terra-cotta army — but this one they're going to sneak into Hong Kong. You'll see it in the shops in Hollywood Road and Cat Street. Already I am seeing the most incredible pieces — you wouldn't see them in the Victoria and Albert Museum, I'm not kidding. They are looting tombs, stealing from graves, digging holes. There has never been a period like this."

It was very easy to say what China wasn't. It wasn't a frenzied and fanatical slogan-chanting mob of workers and peasants. It wasn't very political — people rolled their eyes and began to yawn at the mention of Mao. It wasn't particularly well built, and indeed had some of the shoddiest-looking apartment houses I had ever seen. It wasn't a country with lovely cities — and even much of the countryside looked torn apart and scalped. It wasn't very orderly, it wasn't quiet, it wasn't democratic. It wasn't what it had been — particularly here in Canton. That was obvious.

But it was hard to say what China was. Perhaps there was an intimation of hope in its complexity, but it was maddening for me to sit there watching the Cantonese rain come down and not to know what this all meant. And then I got a big dose of people attitudinizing — there was probably more of it in Canton than anywhere else because Canton had more foreign visitors — and I thought: I'll just write it down and keep my own mouth shut, and I'll keep moving through China, going everywhere the train goes, to the highest and lowest places, the hottest, the coldest, the driest, the wettest, the emptiest, the most populous — that is the only way — and afterwards I'll make up my mind.

A few days before I left Canton I met a woman who had been there, she said, many times. She was also leaving, but she was going in a different direction. Her name was Lisa Packard. She lived in Hong Kong. She had been visiting China for a dozen years, off and on, and now she was sick of it. She was in her mid-forties and she seemed to me an enterprising person, with enough cultural and commercial interests to keep her busy. And she seemed well connected.

I agreed with her that things had changed, and I asked her whether she remembered the year that had happened.

"Remember the year?" she laughed. "I remember the week things changed. There was a speech by Deng. Everyone responded to it. The Chinese are experts at interpreting jargon, and they knew he was saying something significant. It was one particular week in 1984, and after that everything was different."

She said that sourly, so I said, "But there have been a lot of improvements."

"I don't think so," Lisa said. "I hate the changes. Now, all they want are trinkets and toys — color TVs, cameras, watches, tape recorders, refrigerators, motorcycles. They're greedy, they're starting to be very crooked, they don't trust each other, they lie. Remember how you used to hear how they'd give you back your used razor blades? 'Oh, we don't need these. We have razor blades of our own.' So honest! So straight! So Chinese!"

I said that was a directive of Mao's from the Little Red Book. The Three Main Rules of Discipline for soldiers — but also for Party workers — were: Obey orders in all your actions; Do not take a single needle or thread from the masses; and Turn in everything captured. He had also made rules such as Speak politely; Return everything you borrow, Do not swear at people; and Do not take liberties with women. Was this disillusionment with Mao a reason for this change in conduct?

Lisa said, "Their excuse is that they have to get things while they can. They've only had a few years of this free system. But they know that China has periods of violent change. No one had foreseen this period. No one can foresee when it might end. So they are absolutely frantic. They feel it could all end tomorrow, and so they are grabbing with both hands. 'If we delay we might never get another chance.' That's what they say when I ask."

"Surely that's an understandable attitude for people who have had their asses kicked for the past thirty years. And all the sermons they've had to listen to!" It often seemed as though Chinese life was one long sanctimonious drone of warning and advice, and it was often hard to distinguish the moralizing edicts of the Chinese Communist Party from the corn-pone saws of Elbert Hubbard. Not only Mao, but his followers as well had created a whole anthology of pious parables, from "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains" to "Lei Feng the Model Soldier."

"I'm talking about real corruption, the worst kind — Party corruption," Lisa Packard said. "Where only the high Party members get privileges — they go abroad, they get into five-star hotels, they have access to hard currency. The rest of the people are out of luck. But the army is watching. The army isn't sharing in any of this. A soldier has no means of making extra money, he is not part of the economy, he simply watches people come and go."

I had heard that before: only the army — still sentimentally called the People's Liberation Army — had the key to China's future because no one could govern without the army's consent. And the PLA was notoriously conservative.

'The army is watching, and what does it see? People who are spiritually hollow, spiritually bankrupt. At least with fat, crazy old Mao they had a kind of faith — even idealism — and a sense of working together. They always used that Chinese expression 'working together.' There was a unity in that, but it's totally lacking now. They're not nice, they're not polite. I think they're lost and it will all end horribly for them."

But far from dampening my ardor, what Lisa Packard said only made me eager to plunge back in. Anyway, I was sick of this rain. I heard there was no rain at all in Inner Mongolia, and that the crocuses were popping up all over distant Gansu; so I planned a long trip by train through the westernmost provinces of China — so ambitious a trip that I had to enlist the help of the Railway Board. They were suspicious, but they said that if I went to Peking they would discuss it with me. I needed permission, they said.

The tourists were leaving China for home. Some had gone already, the Wittricks, the Westbetters, laden with souvenirs (lacquerware, carpets, chopsticks, brassware, fans); and the Cathcarts were already back in Bexhill-on-Sea.

Kicker and Morris had not left the bar of The White Swan since arriving in Canton. Kicker said, 'The guys back home will never believe it when I say I screwed a bald woman."

He was chuckling softly. His laughter always reminded me that he had a metal plate in his head. Then he squinted at me.

"But I was a Marine," he said. "We fuck anything."

He had met a young Japanese woman in Canton — had just passed by the open door to her hotel room, started shooting the breeze and ended up in bed with her. Kicker was sixty-seven years old and had the face of a rapist. But his features softened as he recalled the encounter — just yesterday, it was, on the fourth floor.

"It was real nice," he said. 'That gal gave me more loving in those six hours than I had in fifteen years of marriage."

Morthole was looking on. He was very drunk. He was alone. He had not made any friends on his long trip. He asked me what I was planning to do. I told him: Head north — more China.

"More tombs," he said. "More chopsticks. More pagodas. What are you doing?"

"Trying to get the hang of it," I said.

"And you're going by train? It'll take ages!"

"It'll give me a feeling of accomplishment."

Morthole laughed. He did not seem to me very bright, but I had never said much to him. I had merely noted the times when he had gone in search of stones, and I had marveled at the satchelful he had collected. His prize was a chunk of the Great Wall — he wondered whether he would be able to smuggle it through customs at Canton Railway Station.

Each of those tourists had surprised me in one way or another. It made me think that you never really know anyone until you have traveled 10,000 miles in a train with them. I had sized them up in London, but they were all both better and worse then they had seemed then, and now they were beyond criticism because they had proved themselves to be human. Morthole, the recluse and rock collector, had a surprise for me, too. I had taken him for an illiterate, and I had not taken him very seriously — or his bag of rocks.

"Do you know The Excursion?" he said.

I said I didn't know what he was talking about. What was this, some China sight-seeing tour to the high spots?

"William Wordsworth," he said. "I learned it at school."

"Oh, that Excursion."

Morthole raised his glass and said,An irksome drudgery seems it to plod on,

Through hot and dusty ways, or pelting storm,

A vagrant merchant under a heavy load

Bent as he moves, and needing frequent rest;

Yet do such travellers find their own delight…

Oh, God, I thought, and all this time I've been patronizing this poor bastard.

But speaking of travelers finding their own delight, I decided that day to leave Canton. I went to bed thinking how China exists so distinctly in people's minds that it is hard to shake that fantasy loose and see the real thing. It was not quite the same as looking for igloos in Alaska, or grass skirts in Tahiti, or big blubber-lipped Ubangis in Africa; but it was similar. And it was as wrong to lean on the fake Chinese imagery that comes thirdhand to every Westerner as it was to believe in the wholesome air of poverty.

I had a nightmare. I woke up in a sweat as the nightmare ebbed away: I was on a mobbed street, full of toothy and unfriendly faces, and felt trapped and suffocated in a big city. It was a Chinese city — a Chinese nightmare. I thought: Most of my nightmares are Chinese nightmares. On its most ordinary-seeming street, this unraveling republic had sights to scare the hell out of me. But I was growing fond of its gorgeous insects.