Fresh Air Fiend (25 page)

"What do you think?" Mrs. Ver Bryck asked.

"Rustic," I said. "Very nice."

But it was mournfully backward: no cars, no tractors, no threshing machines, only farming by hand and brickmaking. I saw no livestock—no pigs, no chickens. It was like all the pictures I had seen of old China: the same baggy smocks and sandals and straw hats, the same laborious agriculture, the same simplicity.

On the television set in the train, a film of singing soldiers began to roll. They were well-dressed soldiers, and as they sang a pretty girl in a red dress skipped through fields and past a waterfall. Outside the train, people were harvesting rice, sweating their guts out in the brickworks; I saw soldiers there, too, standing by the tracks in their flimsy uniforms, looking too small and meek to be fighting men.

 

The
Blue Danube
was playing on the ship's loudspeakers as
Number 39
swung between sampans, fishing smacks, and burdened ferries. The captain greeted us in the lounge and told us the current was moving at six feet per second and added, "As your captain, I am responsible for your safety, so please don't worry about it."

Captain Liu was sixty. He had a narrow, flat-backed head, bristly hair, a seeping wound in his left eye, and large spaces between his teeth. He had always worked on the river. His father had been a tracker on a junk, rowing and towing junks upstream. Captain Liu himself had started out as a steward, serving food on a Chinese riverboat, at the age of fifteen. "I was the 'boy,' as they say in English, but I worked my way up to captain. I never went to school. You can't learn about this river in a school. You can only learn it by being on the bridge."

This is true, and not much has been written about the Yangtze. Before I left London, I had been given a list of twenty-eight landmarks on the Upper River, patiently typed by Captain A. R. Williamson, who had spent nearly thirty years sailing up and down the river. Captain Williamson is ninety, living in vigorous retirement in Hove, and is one of the historians of the river. I was lucky in meeting him and lucky to have a detailed list of things to look out for—towns, skiffs, pagodas, rapids, and shrines. It was Captain Williamson's list that convinced me that, though a great deal has changed in China, the Yangtze today is essentially the same one Captain Williamson traveled on in 1920, and Archibald Little sailed on in 1886, and Abbé David botanized on in the 1860s, and Italian missionaries proselytized on in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The river and the ways of many of the river dwellers are as old as China. There is a painting in the Shanghai Museum of junks and sampans on a river, by Zhang Zheduan. Those vessels have the same sails, mats, rigging, rudders, and oars as ones I saw on the Yangtze the other day. But it is a Sung Dynasty painting, one thousand years old.

A half hour below Chongqing, Captain Williamson's notes said, was a large Buddha in a shrine at the top of a long flight of steps. The niche was there, and the steps, but the Buddha was gone. In Captain Williamson's day, all upriver junks set off strings of firecrackers on passing the Buddha, "in gratitude for safe passage." There were no firecrackers now, though there were dozens of passing junks.

Mottled hills appeared in the mist on both sides of the river, and here, just above Chang Shou, the river narrowed to about seventy-five feet. The ship slowed to negotiate this rocky bottleneck and gave me time to study the hills. In the last century, Abbé David saw fortifications on the tops of them. In his
Diaries
is a wonderful account of his Yangtze trip. "These are refuges in times of trouble for the country people, where they can go with their possessions and be safe from the depredations of rebels and brigands." Banditry was widespread on the Yangtze from the earliest times; the 1920s and 1930s were especially terrible, as warlords' armies fought their way to Chongqing. Peace did not come to the river until 1949, when a brooding bureaucracy with parrot-squawk slogans took over.

Now, every inch of these hills was farmland—it is the agricultural overstrain of China. On the steepest slopes were terraces of vegetables. How was it possible to water the gardens on these cliff faces? I looked closely and saw a man climbing up the hillside, carrying two buckets on a yoke. He tipped them into a ditch and, without pausing further, started down the hill. No one is idle on the Yangtze. In the loneliest bends of the river are solitary men breaking rocks, smashing them into gravel. You might think they would sit down and rest (who is watching?) or soak their feet in the shallows. It is killing work. No, they go on hammering, and the sound I associate with these hidden stretches of the Upper River is that of hammers and chisels, a sound like the sweetest chimes.

 

In 1937 Captain Williamson saw only the city walls of Chang Shou from the river. Today there are no city walls, and Chang Shou ("Long Life") is one of the nightmare cities of the Yangtze. It has burst through its old walls and sprawled across the banks, blackening three hillsides with chimneys, factories, and blocks of workers' flats. "Looks like Pittsburgh," someone said. But Chongqing had looked like Pittsburgh, and so had six other cities downstream. Yellow froth streamed from pipes and posterns, and drained into the river with white muck and oil and the suds of treated sewage and beautifully colored poison. And on a bluff below the town there was an ancient untroubled pagoda, still symmetrical, looking as if it had been carved from a piece of laundry soap. These pagodas have a purpose. They are always found near towns and cities and, even now in unspiritual China, serve a spiritual function, controlling the
feng shui
of a place: they balance the female influence of the yin (darkness) and the male influence of the yang (light). The Chinese say they no longer believe in such superstitious malarkey, but the visible fact is that most pagodas survived the Cultural Revolution. Anything that a fanatical Red Guard left intact must be seen as worthy, if not sacred. The pagodas on the Yangtze bluffs remain pretty much as they always were.

It was near Chang Shou, about noon on that first day, that I saw a sailing junk being steered to the bank. The sail was struck, and five men leaped onto the shore with tow lines around their waists. They ran ahead, then jerked like dogs on a leash, and immediately began towing the junk against the current. These are trackers. They are mentioned by the earliest travelers on the Yangtze. They strain, leaning forward, and almost imperceptibly the sixty-foot junk begins to move upstream. There is no level towpath. The trackers are rock climbers; they scamper from boulder to boulder, moving higher until the boulders give out, and then dropping down, pulling and climbing until there is a reach on the river where the junk can sail again. The only difference—but it is a fairly large one—between trackers long ago and trackers today is that they are no longer whipped. "Often our men have to climb or jump like monkeys," wrote a Yangtze traveler, in the middle of the nineteenth century, of his trackers, "and their backs are lashed by the two chiefs, to urge them to work at critical moments. This new spectacle at first revolts and angers us, but when we see that the men do not complain about the lashings we realize that it is the custom of the country, justified by the exceptional difficulties along the route." Captain Little saw a tracker chief strip his clothes off, jump into the river, and roll himself in sand until he looked half human, like a gritty ape. Then he did a demon dance, and howled, and whipped the trackers, who—scared out of their wits—willingly pulled a junk off a sandbank.

The trackers sing or chant. There are garbled versions of what they say. Some travelers have them grunting and groaning, others are more specific and report the trackers yelling, "
Chor! Chor!
"—slang for "
Shang-chia,
" or "Put your shoulder to it." I asked a boatman what the trackers were chanting. He said that they cried out "
Hai tzo! Hai tzo!
" over and over again, which means "Number! Number!" in Sichuanese, and is uttered by trackers and oarsmen alike.

"When we institute the Four Modernizations," the boatman added—this man was one of the minuscule number who are members of the Chinese Communist Party—"there will be no more junks or trackers."

One day I was standing at the ship's rail with Big Bob. We saw some trackers, six of them, pulling a junk. The men skipped from rock to rock, they climbed, they hauled the lines attached to the junk, and they struggled along the steep rocky towpath. They were barefoot.

Bob Brantman winced. It was a wince of sagacity, of understanding: Yes, it said, I now see what this is all about. Then he spoke, still wincing a little.

"The profound cultural difference between people!"

I looked at him. He was nodding at the trackers scampering among the rocks on the shore.

"They don't care about television," he said.

I said, "That's true."

"Huh?" He was encouraged. He was smiling now. He said, "I mean, they couldn't care less if the Rams are playing tomorrow."

The Los Angeles Rams were Big Bob's favorite football team.

"Am I right or not?"

"You're right, Bob," I said. "They don't care about television or the Rams."

The junks and these trackers will be on the river for some time to come. Stare for five minutes at any point on the Yangtze and you will see a junk, sailing upstream with its ragged, ribbed sail; or being towed by yelling, tethered men; or slipping downstream with a skinny man clinging to its rudder. There are many newfangled ships and boats on the river, but the Yangtze is a river of junks and sampans, fueled by human sweat. There is nothing lovelier than a junk with a following wind (the wind blows upstream, from east to west, a piece of great meteorological luck and a shaper of Chinese history), sailing so well that the clumsy vessel looks as light as a water bird paddling and foraging in the muddy current.

That image is welcome, because there is little bird life on the Yangtze—indeed, China itself is no place for an ornithologist. It is hard to say if the absence of trees is the reason for the scarceness of birds. Or is it the use of powerful insecticides, or the plain hunger of the people, who seem to kill anything that moves? Apart from a few kites and hawks and some feeble sparrows, the only wild ground-dwelling creature I saw in China was a rat, and in twenty-two trips on the Yangtze, a Lindblad guide told me he had seen only one wild thing, a small snake. No wonder the Chinese stared at mink coats and alligator handbags! Abbé David saw very few birds on the river in the 1860s, and, as a naturalist, he was looking hard for them. He put it down to the willful destruction of animals by the Chinese, and his reflection on this has proved to be prophetic: "A selfish and blind preoccupation with material interests has caused us to reduce this cosmos, so marvelous to him with eyes to see it, to a hard matter-of-fact place. Soon the horse and the pig on the one hand and wheat and potatoes on the other will replace hundreds of thousands of animals and plants given us by God."

Down the Yangtze, the awful prediction has been fulfilled. You expect this river trip to be an experience of the past, and it is. But it is also a glimpse of the future. In a hundred years or so, under a cold uncolonized moon, what we call the civilized world will all look like China, muddy and senile and oldfangled: no trees, no birds, and shortages of fuel and metal and meat, but plenty of pushcarts, cobblestones, ditch diggers, and wooden inventions. Nine hundred million farmers splashing through puddles and the rest of the population growing weak and blind working the crashing looms in black factories.

Forget rocket ships, supertechnology, moving sidewalks, and all the rubbishy hope in science fiction. No one will ever go to Mars and live. A religion has evolved from the belief that we have a future in outer space, but it is a half-baked religion, a little like Mormonism or the cargo cult. Our future is the mildly poisoned earth and its smoky air. We are in for hunger and hard work, the highest stage of poverty—no starvation, but crudeness everywhere, political art, simple language, bad books, brutal laws, plain vegetables, and clothes of one color. It will be damp and dull, monochrome and crowded—how could it be different? There will be no star wars or galactic empires and no more money to waste on the loony nationalism in space programs. Our grandchildren will probably live in a version of China. On the dark brown banks of the Yangtze the future has already arrived.

 

It struck me that many of the American passengers were sedentary types. One man said to me, "Back home, my wife and I lead a very sedimentary life." I knew what he meant. And this was a kind of sedentary travel. Nor did these armchair travelers read books. All their talk was about places they had been. Many of their sentences began, "When we were in Kenya..."Or it might be Tierradel Fuegoor Inner Mongolia. For facts they seldom referred to anything but their travel. They had seen crime in Korea, or an election in Costa Rica, or poverty in Turkey. To me they said, "You've got a big race problem." It wasn't personal; they meant England—I lived there.

Most of them had discovered that if you had enough money and time, you did not have to read. You could discover things for yourself—or, rather, be told about them by a national guide. In the corporate lives they led, they had become used to people telling them things, filling them in on a situation. In China we had "briefings." They loved briefings. You sat there and someone with a briefcase gave you the lowdown—facts, figures, a little history—and you interrogated him for ten minutes. Then it was over. It was so much easier than reading, so much more reassuring. But, of course, as travelers we were regarded as big and busy. In a sense, the commune workers and the people in factories and the sailors on the Yangtze ships were working for us.

"I've known a lot of women like her," a man told me. "A hell of a lot of women. I've met them on trips like this. They go to Mongolia. They go to Pago Pago. Peru. Sri Lanka. And they never do anything. We had one with us on the Galápagos trip. She never got off the ship! Can you imagine going to the Galápagos and not getting off the ship? It was a twenty-eight-day trip!"