Fresh Air Fiend (28 page)

I played Scrabble, too, and that was worse. I had never played such unenjoyable Scrabble in my life. Most of the players cheated or tried to slip non-words by me. One woman insisted that "adze" was spelled "adz." There was no English dictionary on our ship, and she claimed that "yo" was a word. When I challenged her, she said, "Yo-ho-ho!"

They were also full of odd information. The paint on an airplane fuselage weighs between 150 and 400 pounds—there was a fuel economy in flying unpainted planes. I was told that by one of our millionaires while we were touring Nanjing. "And did you know that Dustin Hoffman is a dwarf?" a woman said one day. "No bicycle in China has gears, but every one of them has a lock," an observant passenger said.

I discovered that the term for yogurt in Chinese was
suan niu nai
(homemade cheese does not exist in China). I ordered some and was eating it with pleasure when Dr. Ringrose said, "We put yogurt on certain forms of skin cancer."

And they asked questions, sometimes the damnedest questions. Before we went ashore at Hankow a lady asked the Chinese tour leader, "What shall I wear?" She meant what style of dress.

At the thermos bottle factory, Mr. Clark asked the guide, "How many pounds per square inch is the pressure on that glass-blowing apparatus?"

At the Wuhan Conservatory, Mr. Jones asked, "What is the name of that instrument?" He was told it was a harp, but he wanted its Chinese name. The musician looked at him and said loudly, "
Zhong!
"

People asked how much water flowed through a particular spot on the Yangtze, and what the depth was, and the width, and the population here and there ("four or five million" was a frequent answer to many different questions). I decided that demanding statistics was a way of getting their money's worth—why else would someone pay $10,000 to sail through China?

At Hubei Medical College Hospital one of the millionaires gazed at an electrical transformer hooked up to some acupuncture needles that were inserted into a patient's wrists.

"How much voltage?" he asked.

He was told.

"Is that AC or DC?"

He was told, and satisfied that it was DC, he walked away.

All over the river, people were fishing, some with hooks and lines, others with circular weighted nets, or curtains of nets which they trailed behind their sampans, or the complicated tentlike nets in bamboo frames that Abbé David saw raised and lowered in Shashi. They caught tiny fish, sardine-sized, and they kept even the minnows. More modern methods might have emptied the Yangtze of all its fish, but Comrade Wu had told me that some men still fished with trained cormorants and otters.

The river had widened again. On this stretch I was seldom able to see the far bank, and we sailed to Juijang in a heavy mist, glad for the night at Lu Shan ("The road is very twisty," our guide Mr. Chen said, "but we have a good driver and he will not go bananas"). In both Juijang and Lu Shan, people could be seen fighting for movie tickets. The same films were playing in both places,
The Great Dictator
and
City Lights,
starring China's favorite actor, Cha-li Zhuo Bi-lin.

On our way to Nanjing, I talked to the
Kun Lun
's captain. Like Captain Liu of
Number 39,
he had worked his way up from steward by on-the-job training and had never gone to naval college. "There is no reason for a man to remain a steward his whole life. I tell my men, Work hard and there will be promotions for you."

I asked him what the difficulties were in navigating on the Yangtze.

"Two main ones," he said. "First, from December to March, the water is very low and the channel is narrow. This makes things difficult because there is so much other traffic on the river. The second is the weather. There is fog and mist from October to April, and sometimes it is impossible to see what lies ahead. Radar is often no help. To avoid getting into an accident, some nights we anchor until the weather clears."

I said that it seemed very little had changed on the Yangtze. People fished in the old way; they sailed, rowed, and towed wooden junks; they watered their fields carrying buckets on yokes; and right here in Juijang, women washed clothes by clubbing and thrashing them in the muddy water. People still crossed the river in rusty ferries and still drowned by the score when the river was in flood.

The captain reminded me of the Four Modernizations and said that with the smashing of the Gang of Four, things would improve. How ironic, I thought: the leader of the Gang of Four had probably sat in this very cabin; she was certainly responsible for its decor.

"Before Liberation, this river was different. The foreigners were very careless. They ran rampant. The Chinese people hated and feared them, because they had a reputation for not stopping for a junk or a sampan, or they might swamp a small boat in their wake. It made them unpopular. The gunboats were the worst of all. The foreigners were disliked for the way they used the river—Japanese, French, Italian, English, American. But things are different now."

We went ashore at Nanjing. The Gang of Four trial had started. The China Travel Service guides encouraged us to watch it. This show trial reminded me of Hate Week in
1984,
and the defendants looked sick and crazy after four years in prison. I ended up playing gin rummy with Harry Laughlin, who said he was dying to get back to Pasadena.

Above Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum in Nanjing was a slogan that was translated in my guidebook as "The world belongs to the people."

I mentioned this to Mr. Gregory, one of the Connecticut millionaires, who said President Carter was stupid. Mr. Gregory was also an authority on semi-precious stones, and he told me that he had owned more than twenty Cadillacs. He had the security and burglar alarm business, and one day he told me, "I think it's about time the world started to be afraid of America again." He often said something at dinner that made the whole table of ten go silent. Then someone would smile at a big bowl and say, "Now what do you suppose
that
is?"

"'The world belongs to the people,'" Mr. Gregory said. Then he breathed hard. "Well, that's not true."

"Why not?"

"The world belongs to
some
people, but not
the
people."

He was speaking of the world as it ought to be, not as it was.

"No, sir, not
the
people."

Later I came across a different translation, without the loaded word "people." "The world belongs to everyone," it said.

I mentioned this to Mr. Gregory.

"That's better" he said. "That's true."

He liked everyone, but he didn't think much of the people.

Slogans were often a problem. At the Xiao Ying Primary School in Nanjing, a slogan that had been painted on a wall at the time of the Cultural Revolution had read, "Never Forget Class Struggle." Half of it had been obliterated: "Never Forget."

Then there were the Four Modernizations: National Defense, Science and Technology, Industry, and Agriculture. At school, children were taught the Five Loves: Love Work, Love People, Love Neighbors, Love Science, and Love Public Property. In the mid-1970s the Eight Antis were to be supported, and it was patriotic and comradely to be Anti-Intellectual, Anti-Western, Anti-Bourgeois, Anti–Capitalist Roader, Anti-Revisionist, Anti-Traditional, Anti-Confucian, and Anti-Imperialist. It was important to remember that the Four News were different from the Four Modernizations, and that the Four Olds were especially pernicious. I never discovered what the Four Olds were.

Slogans of an abusive nature had been removed from building façades in western China, but many of Chairman Mao's picturesque phrases still remained lettered on the walls of certain buildings, and it was one of the pleasures of China to hear these translated by our guides: "Yes, it says, 'Despicable American Imperialists and Their Running Dogs Must Never Be Allowed...'"

The name of the oldest restaurant in Suzhou, the Pine and Crane (perhaps three hundred years old), was thought to be too bourgeois during the Cultural Revolution, so it was changed to The East Is Red. Recently it has been changed back to the Pine and Crane. Heavenly Park, an ancient garden, was changed to Workers' Park, but it has also reverted to its original name.

Many slogans served only to intimidate the passerby or to deface a lovely wall. "Love Public Property" might be scrawled on a fine building. Slogans were merely a form of public graffiti. In the Yangtze gorges some of the graffiti were very old, but I came across more recent stuff. I went to a formal garden in Suzhou called the Garden of the Master of Nets. It had been laid out in the year 1140. In the Pavilion of the Accumulated Void (it is a Taoist concept), the rosewood walls are covered with graffiti, for example: "Li Han Ming Came Here on His Travels 1980."

We were often invited to admire buildings or objects by the Chinese. Look at this Catholic church! they would say. Look at this jade suit made for a nobleman! Look at these tombs! Their explanations were very brief—a date, an anecdote, a name, and then on to the next sight.

There were always signs near these sights, and I discovered that the signs usually differed from the explanations we received. I asked the Chinese guides to translate the signs. They did so with great reluctance, but the experience was illuminating.

Caption under a photograph of a Catholic church in Canton, built in 1861:

 

In order to build this church, people were forced to move away. The citizens felt very angry. People were not allowed to build residences around this church. No person was allowed to look through the windows of this church.

 

Caption under a photograph of a Catholic church in Nanjing, built in the 1850s:

 

American imperialism took preaching as its cover. All over China Americans erected churches like this and carried out destructive activities. In 1853 in Shanghai, the Small Sword Society echoed the Taiping rebels. They occupied Shanghai, country and city. The American missionaries joined up with the Ching Dynasty troops and attacked the Small Sword Society troops, and the church acted as a stronghold. After the Ching troops lost, the American missionaries escorted them to safety at the American embassy.

 

Sign next to the jade burial suit (Han Dynasty, 202
B.C.
–
A.D.
220) in the Nanjing Museum:

 

The feudal rulers exploited the workers before birth, oppressed the laboring peoples, and even after death wanted to wear the blood and sweat of the laboring peoples, as represented by the jade suit. They planned to preserve their corpses. This reflects the tremendous waste of the feudal rulers and reveals their limitless exploitative nature.

 

Inscription on the Ming tombs outside Beijing:

 

The real landlords of these forty square kilometers were the peasants. But after the emperor selected this site, the imperial troops came in like mad animals. They destroyed the orchards and razed the villages. They used military might to expel the laboring peasants, who had been here for centuries, and they occupied the site.

The numerous peasant families remembered with malice. They took everything they owned and left behind their destroyed lives.

After the tombs were established, this area was labeled off limits. If one of the masses came here, he was caned one hundred strokes. If he grabbed a handful of earth, he was executed.

This is the background of the feudalistic ruling classes' oppression of the peasantry.

 

These explanations were for the Chinese. Foreigners were given different explanations, or none at all. At the churches, the museums, and the Ming tombs, there was always a Chinese to say, "Isn't it pretty?"

 

At Suzhou I took the Shanghai Express, the last part of my sail through China. Policemen at Suzhou station barked orders at the people streaming in. The policemen were nasty-looking. I had seen such men be very rough in China, at times manhandling cyclists and pedestrians. Now they were shouting at the travelers, telling them which platform to go to, how to line up and look sharp.

Within a few minutes we were out of that ancient city and had lost sight of the canals and the city moat. We traveled across the vegetable fields of Jiangsu. The last hills I had seen were south of Nanjing. Long ago, this plain through which the Shanghai Express was passing was part of the Pacific Ocean: over millions of years, the Yangtze had extended China's land mass and swelled its estuary into several new provinces.

The soil did not look fertile—Chinese soil seldom did. The gardens were oblongs, stretching to the horizons on both sides of the train. This was Chinese topography, the vegetable plot. Where there were hills, they had vegetables on them. Where there was a riverbank, it was a riverbank with vegetables. A valley, a plain, whatever—it always looked the same, slightly exhausted and orderly with cabbages.

Someone said, "Look, a pig!"

Because there were so few animals to be seen, a pig or a goat caused great interest, and a dog—those rare cross-eyed mongrels—was a sensation. The Chinese did not grow flowers except in pots, in parks and for special occasions. The Chinese were practical, unspiritual, materialistic, baffled, and hungry, and these qualities had brought a crudity and a terrible fatigue to their country. In order to stay alive, they had to kill the imagination; the result was a vegetable economy and a monochrome culture.

Shanghai was commercial, but the advertising often puzzled me: "Dragonfly Cotton Shoes! They Are Stylish and Cheap!" "Rado Watch! Styleproof, Scratchproof, Timeproof!" and "Aero Tennis Racket—Indeformable!"

I decided to have a look at the Antique Exchange. On the way there I met a Chinese man who had worked for the U.S. Navy during World War II. He had an excellent American accent. He summed up for me the years since Liberation: "The first ten years were bad, the next ten years were okay, but the past ten years have been terrible. I don't know how we got through them. It was the Cultural Revolution. Boy, that was terrible."