Riding the Iron Rooster Read online

  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.

&nbs
p; 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.