Fresh Air Fiend (27 page)

One of the millionaires said, "These gorges come up to expectations. Very few things do. The Taj Mahal did. The Pyramids didn't. But these gorges!"

We passed Wushan. A funeral procession was making its way through the empty streets, beating drums and gongs, and at the front of the procession three people in white shrouds—white is the Chinese color of mourning—and others carrying round paper wreaths like archery targets. And now we were in the longest gorge, twenty-five miles of cliffs and peaks, and beneath them rain-spattered junks battling the current.

At one time, this part of the Yangtze was filled with rapids. Captain Williamson's list of landmarks noted all of them. They were still in the river, breaking ships apart, in 1937. The worst have since been dynamited away. The most notorious was the Hsin Lung Tan, a low-level rapid caused by a terrific landslide in 1896. It was wild water, eighty feet wide, but blasting opened it to four hundred feet, and deepened it. Thirty years ago, only the smallest boats could travel on the river during the winter months; now it is navigable by even the largest throughout the year.

Our ship drew in below Yellow Cat Gorge, at a place called Dou Shan Tuo ("Steep Hill Village"). We walked to the road and took a bus to the top of the hill. Looking across the river at the pinnacles called "The Three Daggers," and at the sun pouring honey into the deep cliffs, one of the passengers said with gusto, "What a place for a condominium!"

 

We transferred from
Number 39
to the MS
Kun Lun,
by any standard a luxurious ship. She is popularly known as "Mao's yacht," because in the 1950s and early 1960s she was used to take visiting dignitaries up and down the Yangtze. Any number of prominent Albanians can boast that they slept in one of the
Kun Lun
's sumptuously carpeted suites and danced in the lounge or got stewed to the gills in the sixty-foot-wide club room. The idea for the fancy ship was Jiang Qing's—Chairman Mao's third wife and the celebrated political criminal of the Gang of Four. She had the guts of a river ship torn out and redecorated it in the style of Waldorf-Astoria Ming—art deco and lotus blossoms—and did not stint on the curtains or the blue bathtubs. The Gregorys (Fred and Muriel) had a rat in their suite, but never mind—Raymond Barre, the former French premier, once slept there.

The chief feature of this wilderness of antimacassars is space: wide passageways, large cabins, huge lounges, and sofas on which seven can sit comfortably and catch up on the
Peking Review
or listen to
News
About Britain
on the BBC World Service—there are two gigantic Spring Thunder shortwave radios on board. The bar is so big, you hardly notice the grand piano. For this reason, the
Kun Lun
was "criticized" during the Cultural Revolution, turned over to the people, and vandalized. Cots and bunks were crammed into the suites, and for four years the proletariat used her as an ordinary river ship. When the Lindblads found her a few years ago she was in mothballs. Lars-Eric Lindblad offered a deal to the China Travel Service: he would fix her up, restore her to her original splendor, if he was allowed to use her for tours. The scheme was agreed upon, and now the
Kun Lun
is afloat again, as great an anachronism, as large a contradiction, as could possibly be found in the People's Republic.

We were on the Middle River now, and there were no complaints. Or rather, not many. I did hear a shrill drunken voice moan one evening, "I hate Chinese food. Once a month, maybe. But every damned day?" And another night, Mrs. Ver Bryck looked at me tipsily and said, unprovoked and unbidden, "Of course I'm happier than you are. I've got more money."

We stayed two days at Wuhan. The river had become wider, the banks lower and flatter, and the cities had grown more interesting. We watched a thyroidectomy being performed at a hospital in Wuchang, the patient anesthetized by four acupuncture needles in her hands and a little voltage. In the early morning I prowled the streets of Hankow and noticed that free markets had sprung up—until such improvisatory capitalism was forbidden. At six o'clock one morning I saw my first Chinese beggar, and on the next corner a trio of child acrobats balancing plates on their heads and doing handstands, and then passing the hat. New Hankow looked something like old Hankow.

Walking at night in Hankow and Canton and other hot places, where the windows were open I could hear people indoors playing mahjong, the sounds of the tiles clicking like castanets and the chatter of the players. It has not been outlawed, and the various types of Chinese chess—
xiang qi,
which has some similarities to our own chess, and
wei qi,
which is the same as the Japanese game
go
—are actually encouraged. In alleys, sitting on overturned crates, Chinese men can often be seen playing cards, the game they call aiming high. In Hankow and Wuhan I saw gamblers throwing dice in the shadows, playing dominoes, and arguing over cards.

The suggestion that the Chinese might be gambling was always sharply denied. Gambling is seen as one of the worst things a person could do, and such shock was expressed when the subject came up that I was certain the urge to gamble was still strong.

"Games should be played just for fun," one Comrade Wu said. And he told me the story of a man who gambles away his money, his food, his radio, and is finally forced to use his wife to give value to a wager—and he loses the bet and his wife.

But there are all sorts of stakes. In Shanghai, four men squatted in an alleyway playing cards, a bottle of homemade gin and a pile of clothespins nearby. Each time someone lost a hand, he had to put a clothespin on his ear and take a swig of gin. The drunkest of them had a cluster of clothespins on his ear and looked a complete jackass, which was of course the point—the others were laughing at him.

Shame was a sort of teaching technique. A gambler paid his debt by submitting to public humiliation. If the gamblers were caught by the authorities, however, they would be punished with another form of humiliation.

"Oh, it is very bad," Comrade Wu said. "They pay a fine, some are even put into prison. We
educate
them."

I seldom heard the word "education" in China without its sounding like a smack in the face.

At Suchow Primary School the headmistress said that the teachers never used corporal punishment. Those who did were "educated," "and if a teacher cannot learn to teach patiently, and resorts to hitting, he is criticized."

She made "criticized" sound like a whipping. It was another form of discipline, a refinement of humiliation. A person, one of the billion, was criticized by being singled out and exposed. He was severely questioned by various members of his block or commune and made publicly to show contrition.

This, in effect, was what the Gang of Four trial was all about: public humiliation. The trial was its own punishment—the court did not need to impose any sentences at the end. Dragging someone out of a mob, singling out an individual, demanding that a student stand up while the others remain seated, these are the worst things that can happen to someone who values his anonymity and sees himself as part of the powerful Chinese army of workers. Isolated, the person loses his power and is humiliated and weakened by the gaze of the mob. In the nineteenth century it was done with the cangue, a heavy wooden collar that thieves were made to wear.

It is hard to disentangle education from discipline, since both are imposed and carry penalties. Education is learning English, but education is also learning your place. Education might be a discussion with neighbors following a misdemeanor—it is a telling-off, and the offender is given a few books of Mao or Lenin to read. Education might also be a "struggle session" or something similar with the local Party committee: "Change your ways or else," and many books of Mao or Lenin to read. But education also means a pig farm in Inner Mongolia, a farm in Shenyang or Ganzu Province—long days slopping the hogs or planting trees, and studying Communist texts at night. In China, the most extreme form of education is prison.

 

At Lu Shan, a hill station above the Yangtze port of Juijang, Harry Laughlin pointed to one of the millionaires walking up a hill and said, "He's captious, that's what we call his type."

Harry, a millionaire too, sometimes described himself as an educator. He had taught psychology—never mind his two Mercedeses (or Lura belle's Rolls).

"He's insecure," Harry said as we walked along the stony path to a pagoda. "Notice how he's always alone? He's trying to prove something. He always walks ahead, always apart from the group. See, he wants to show us his ass. Very interesting. He's making a statement there."

I had thought that the odd man out was Mr. Clark, because he was almost eighty-two and kept stepping on his camera. Or he would look up and smile and say, "I lost my pen. I had that pen for years." He became friendly with Dr. Ringrose, and then I decided Dr. Ringrose—"Ringnose," one of the New York ladies called him—was the odd man out. He was a cancer doctor from Calgary, originally from Leeds. He had some Yorkshire traits—downrightness, unsmiling humor, practicality—but also a sense of grievance. He dressed like a camper. He was a bachelor, he was very intelligent, and he was a pedant. He boasted about his travels and his books. In our gray guest house at Lu Shan he said, "I have six thousand books. People in Calgary are amazed."

Lu Shan was a quiet gloomy place, paradise for the Chinese who visit here. It was the opposite of every other Chinese city I had seen—cool, not crowded, not elbow-bumping. The Chinese did not seem to notice Lu Shan's smell or its decrepitude. It was exotic: they made movies here because the landscape—the piny backdrop, with cliffs and peaks and deep valleys—was classically Chinese. Package tours from Shanghai and Nanjing to Lu Shan cost 30 to 40 yuan, about a month's wages.

The Chinese went in groups, marveling at the azaleas and dwarf cedars and the lone pines and waterfalls they recognized from scroll paintings. The rhododendrons were tall, bushy trees. The architecture was English-looking: stone bungalows, stone shops, and a large stone Catholic church. The church had been turned into a movie theater (a bust of Chairman Mao in the foyer), and that month it was showing
She,
a love story. On the hill paths stood little signs with Chinese characters carved in the gray stone. "Share happiness, share difficulties"—the slogan of a Chinese general in the 1920s. Near a stone seat, this motto: "Sitting here and dreaming here."

In the early morning Lu Shan resembled every hill station I had ever seen, from Simla and Fraser's Hill to the ones above Medan in Sumatra, and Surabaja. The people had rosy cheeks, the pine trees dripped, the stone bungalows were dark and damp-stained, and low clouds and fog settled over the mission steeples and villa roofs until their outlines looked faintly penciled in the mist. The gloom in Lu Shan was the same gloom I had noticed in other hill stations, perhaps because such places were entirely a European invention, always dank and hard to manage, requiring intensive upkeep, and the inheritors rather baffled by the layout. The Lu Shan Guest House had English virtues: fine banisters, light fittings, and solid walls. But the rooms smelled of mildew, the lights did not work, and the whole place had lost its ornaments—no pictures, no plants. The previous occupants had moved out, and the new ones, being poor, could not furnish the house properly.

In Lu Shan I listened to our Comrade Tao question one of the millionaires' wives about life in America.

Mr. Tao asked, "Is rent very high in America?"

"I've never paid rent," the American lady said.

This surprised Mr. Tao. He said, "What about food? You must spend ten or twenty dollars a week on food."

"Twenty dollars is nothing," the lady said.

In China it was almost a month's salary.

"Do you have a bicycle?" the Chinese man asked.

"Yes, I do, but I only use it for fun."

"A bicycle for fun!" he said. "What about a car, do you have one?"

"Yes."

"What kind is it?"

This was a difficult question. The lady could not answer. She said, "Actually, I have four cars."

Comrade Tao seemed to swallow something very large, and he blinked and squinted at the lady, who had become self-conscious and was saying, "There's a Chevy convertible, but I can't really use it in bad weather. I usually take one of the smaller ones—they're easier to park, and you save gas. And the others..." Comrade Tao stared.

But the lady had seen her mistake and tactfully changed the subject to azaleas.

Near Lu Shan was a nursery and botanical garden. I asked what effect the Cultural Revolution had had on their operation. The director said, "All my greenhouses were destroyed for being bourgeois."

I had noticed faint traces of huge "big-character" slogans on the façade of the Lu Shan Guest House. No one would translate them for me, and two Chinese men denied seeing them.

 

The millionaires on the Yangtze were always polite, always sociable, and always stayed off contentious topics. "Don't talk to him about politics," Jerry McCarthy said. "No way! Don't mention the Equal Rights Amendment." Occasionally I heard people issue warnings like this; it meant that a potential conflict had been discovered and was to be avoided in the future. In this way an atmosphere of harmony was maintained.

But when they played games, they played to win. I played gin rummy with one of them and he spent the whole time badgering me, mocking me, telling me what I was doing wrong, predicting my discards. He became very angry at one point, and after about eight games, when it was clear that I had beaten him, he cursed and stomped away.

The next day he followed me around the deck saying, "The shill ... the gin rummy expert ... the novice,"and he demanded that I play him again.

"This time we'll play for a dollar a point, just to keep up your concentration. What do you say, Paulie boy? What about it? A rematch! Come on!"

He was not happy until he had beaten me three nights in a row, and then he refused to play me again, on the pretext that it was a waste of his time. So I played gin rummy with the ladies from New York, who proved exhausting opponents.