Riding the Iron Rooster Read online

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

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

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

  "Maybe better, maybe worse," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

  "Who was the leader at your school?"

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

  "What happened to Wei Dong?"

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

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

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

  "When did you stop feeling confused?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Because traveling is so interesting?"

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

  "Did you hate it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He had recently been to Singapore, he said.

  "I used to teach there," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Bugging devices?"

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

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

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

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

  "Are you writing a report?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Mrs. Lord said, "Why 'dangerous'?"

  "Because it's not true."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A sigh of exasperation went up.

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

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

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