Riding the Iron Rooster Read online

  '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 popula
rity 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.

  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 go
od 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.