Fresh Air Fiend

  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 bung
alows 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.

  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."