Riding the Iron Rooster (16 page)

The proof that it was pornography was its feeble pretense of being a morality tale. After almost 2000 pages of sexual acrobatics—and detailed descriptions of aphrodisiacs, potions, pills, silver clasps, love rings and harnesses—the story ends with the main character, Hsi-men Ch'ing, literally screwing himself to death with the passionate Golden Lotus.

He arrives home too drunk to perform. Golden Lotus is disappointed.

... She played delicately with his weapon, but it was as limp as cotton wool and had not the slightest spirit. She tossed about on the bed, consumed with passionate desire, almost beside herself. She squeezed his prick, moved it up and down, put down her head and sucked. It was in vain. This made her wild beyond description.

She wakes him and gives him a strong aphrodisiac: three pills. "She was afraid that anything less would have no effect." And although he falls asleep again, his penis is erect, and so she mounts him.

... Her body seemed to melt away with delight ... she moved up and down about two hundred times. At first it was difficult because it was dry but soon the love juices flowed and moistened her cunt. Hsi-men Ch'ing let her do everything she wished, but he himself was perfectly inert. She could bear it no longer.... She twisted herself towards his penis which was completely inside her cunt, only his two balls staying outside. She stroked his penis with her hand, and it was wonderfully good. The juices flowed and in a short time she had used up five napkins. Even then Hsi-men kept on, although the tip of his prick was swollen and hotter than a live coal. It was so tight that he asked the woman to take off the ribbon, but his penis remained stiff and he told her to suck. She bent over and with her red lips moved the head of his prick to and fro, and sucked. Suddenly white semen poured out, like living silver, which she took in her mouth and could not swallow fast enough. At first it was just semen, soon it became blood which flowed without stopping. Hsi-men Ch'ing had fainted and his limbs were stiff outstretched.

Golden Lotus was frightened. She hastily gave him some red dates. Blood followed semen, and the blood was followed by freezing air. Golden Lotus was terrified. She threw her arms around him and cried, "Darling, how do you feel?"

Readers, there is a limit to our energy, but none to our desires. A man who sets no bounds to his passion cannot live more than a short time...

This book is a sort of phantom in China. Everyone knows of it; no one has seen it. I don't think there would be a counterrevolution if it were published. Banning it has made it notorious. It was only when
Lady Chatterley
was published freely that people realized what a silly and unreadable book it is. Anyway,
Jin Ping Met
was better railway reading than
Red Star Heroes
or
We Fight Best When We March Our Hardest.

Outside Danyang, but in the middle of nowhere, a tractor rolled down a steep road and collided with the train. We came to a screeching halt ("Where are we?" "Is this a station?" "No, it's an accident—I think someone's killed") and there was a flurry of activity. No one dared to get off the train for fear of being left behind. A railway official plugged a portable phone into a trackside socket and described in detail what had happened. We all listened carefully.

"He says it's a broken tractor. He says we should call the police. He says no one is hurt. He says it was the farmer's fault. He says we can't go until the responsibility is decided."

The smashed tractor lay near the train, beside the tracks. A crowd gathered—all of them field-workers, rather sullenly watching the more prosperous travelers at the train windows. A railway crew appeared with walkie-talkies and notebooks, and a long discussion ensued over the nub of every Chinese problem: who is to blame? That was always another way of saying: Who is paying for this mistake? A man was hurt and yet after twenty minutes of argument the matter was determined to be too trivial to hold up this train—the fastest long-distance train in China, no stops except to take on fuel, from Peking to Shanghai. The peasants were guilty of allowing one of their tractors to ram the train—and as for the injured man, it was his own fault. We started on our way once again.

The fat young man, Deng, chased his thin wife into her berth and thrashed her with a pair of trousers. She sank her teeth into his ankle and bit him, and he howled. They were playing. The old woman snored in a soft, punctured way, and her son came in and gazed on her, didn't wake her, just smiled as she snored.

In order to get Deng to stop horsing around, I asked him what he was doing in China.

"I come here every six months," he said. "I do business."

He was a mechanical engineer. He had been educated in Toronto. He made rather an issue about his having come back from Canada. It was a sacrifice—"Lee Kwan Yew ruined the Singapore economy. There's eight percent unemployment. I could have stayed in Canada and made a lot of money."

I said I thought it was interesting that the little prosperous island of Singapore had started to fail, just as China was mightily rising—and the overseas Chinese were starting again to see China as a homeland.

'This is a useless place," Deng said, jerking his thumb out the train window. It was soon clear what he was pointing at. "China," he said. "It spends too much money on hi tech that it can't use. They have twenty-eight thousand computers that they can't use. Only ten percent are functioning. They buy things just to have them, so they can look good, and then they let them gather dust."

"You're saying that they have a kind of primitive pride that makes them irrational about spending," I said. "But it seems to me that the Chinese are very frugal—that they don't invest and spend enough. They are always sort of cheating themselves and muddling through and making a virtue of not complaining."

"Sure, they work hard—especially the farmers," Deng said. "And they can feed themselves. That's a good thing."

"So what's the problem?"

Deng glanced around and, seeing the old woman asleep, he said confidentially that the problem was in their heads.

Tapping his head he said, 'They're backward. They're peasants. They're ignorant. They go crazy. They're not like us."

"Who's 'us'?" I asked.

Deng laughed. Did he mean me? He didn't reply. He took his wife on his lap and tickled her until her shirttail came loose. Her stomach was the pale floury color of a steamed bun and her small breasts hardly dented her bra. I found this tormenting.

Pretty soon the old woman's son came in and woke her. We were arriving in Shanghai.

Shanghai is an old brown riverside city with the look of Brooklyn, and the Chinese—who are comforted by crowds—like it for its mobs and its street life. It has a reputation for city slickers and stylishness. Most of China's successful fashion designers work in Shanghai, and if you utter the words
Yifu Sheng Luolang
the Shanghainese will know you are speaking the name of Yves Saint-Laurent. When I arrived in the city, there was an editor of the French magazine
Elle
prowling the streets looking for material for an article on China to be called "The Fashion Revolution." According to the Chinese man who accompanied her—whom I later met—this French woman was mightily impressed by the dress sense of the Shanghai women. She stopped them and took their pictures and asked where they got their clothes. The majority said that they got them in the free market in the back streets or that they made the clothes themselves at home, basing them on pictures they saw in Western magazines. Even in the days of the Cultural Revolution, the women workers showed up at their factories with bright sweaters and frilly blouses under their blue baggy suits: it was customary to meet in the women's washroom and compare the hidden sweaters before they started work.

Because Shanghai is a cosmopolitan city and has seen more foreigners—both invaders and friendly visitors—than any other Chinese city, it is a polyglot place. It is at once the most politically dogmatic ("Oppose book worship" "Political work is the lifeblood of all economic work"—Mao) and the most bourgeois. When changes came to China they appeared first in Shanghai; and when there is conflict in China it is loudest and most violent in Shanghai. The sense of life is strong here, and even a city-hater like myself can detect Shanghai's spirit and appreciate its atmosphere. It is not crass like Canton, but it is abrasive—and in the hot months stifling, crowded, noisy and smelly.

It seemed to me noisy most of all, with the big-city all-night howl that is the sound track of New York (honks, sirens, garbage trucks, shouts, death rattles). Peking was rising and would soon be a city of tall buildings, but Shanghai had been built on mud and was growing sideways and spreading into the swamps of Zhejiang. All day the pile drivers hammered steel into this soft soil to fortify it, and one labored right outside my window with a cruel and dominating noise that determined the rhythm of my life.
Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo!
It affected the way I breathed and walked and ate: I moved my feet and lifted my spoon to
Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo!
It orchestrated my talking, too; it made me write in bursts, and when I brushed my teeth I discovered I did it to the pounding of this pile driver, the bang and its half-echo,
Zhong-guo!
It began at seven in the morning and was still hammering at eight at night, and in Shanghai it was inescapable, because nearly every neighborhood had its own anvil clang of
Zhong-guo!

I walked the back streets in order to keep away from the traffic and the crowds. And I realized that it would be dishonest to complain too much about noise, the pile drivers and the frantic energy, because on my first visit to Shanghai I had felt it was dreary and moribund and demoralized. Why was it that they never knew when to stop? Even the back streets were crowded, with improvised stalls and houses that served as shop fronts and markets set up in the gutters, and people mending shoes and bicycles and doing carpentry on the sidewalk.

Towards the Bund—Shanghai's riverbank promenade—I saw a spire behind a wall and found a way to enter. It was Saint Joseph's Church, and the man I took to be the janitor, because he was so shabbily dressed in a ragged jacket and slippers, was the pastor, a Catholic priest. He was both pious and watchful, soft-spoken and alert—it is the demeanor of a Chinese Christian who has been put through more hoops than he cares to remember. The church had been wrecked during the Cultural Revolution, daubed with slogans and turned into a depot for machinery, and the churchyard had been a parking lot.

"
Sacramentum,
" the priest said, pointing at the flickering candle, and he smiled with satisfaction: the consecrated Host was in the tabernacle.

I asked him why this was so. Was there a service today?

No, he said, and brought me to the back of the church where there was a coffin with a white paper cross stuck to it. He said there was a funeral tomorrow.

"I take it you're busy—lots of people coming to church."

"Oh, yes. And there are five churches in Shanghai. They are always full on Sundays."

He invited me to attend Mass, and out of politeness I said I might; but I knew I wouldn't. I had no business there: I was a heretic. And I was often annoyed by Westerners who, although they never went to church at home, would get the churchgoing bug in China, as an assertion of their difference or perhaps a reproach to the Chinese—as if religious freedom was the test of China's tolerance. Well, it was one test, of course, but it was exasperating to see the test administered by an American unbeliever. So I didn't go to church in China, but sometimes when I saw a bird in the grass I dropped to my knees and marveled it as it twitched there.

A few days later, on one of my walks I came to People's Park, and as it was a Sunday, I decided to verify something that I had heard in Peking. It was said that in Beihei Park there, and in People's Park here in Shanghai, there was an area reserved for anyone who wanted to speak English. This proved to be a fact. They called it the English Corner, half an acre of Chinese gabbing in English under the trees. Originally it started when a few old men who still spoke prerevolutionary English (having gone to mission schools) met on Sundays in the park to talk so that their English wouldn't get rusty. And then they found themselves the object of attention, and they were consulted in a respectful way by Chinese youths who wanted to learn English. What began as a casual one-hour interval in 1979 had become by 1986 a full-day Sunday institution. The Chinese can be very ritualistic in these matters: no one decreed the formation of the English Corner. It just happened, and it has evolved very formally. English is the unofficial language of the new China.

There were about two hundred Chinese in People's Park, and the way they stood and the sound of their English, made them seem like geese. Some were practicing or looking for friends, but many of them I discovered to be seeking advice about jobs that required English or applications to English-language universities. English speakers, in Shanghai as in no other Chinese city, comprised a sort of subculture.

I met Leroy, who was twenty-four, and who had learned to speak English in People's Park. He had been at it for five years.

"When I first came here in 1981 a man said to me, 'What is your name?' I couldn't tell him my name. I couldn't say anything in English. I was very frustrated. I decided to learn. I bought some books and I came along every Sunday."

He spoke English well, but a question still nagged: What about his name? How long had be been Leroy?

It was a simple explanation. As soon as his English improved, this young man, Li Ren, started to call himself Leroy. He said that English names had been regarded as bourgeois during the Mao era, but with the proliferation of English they had come back. There was usually an obvious choice. A girl called Zhenli might call herself Jenny, Zhulan would become Julian and Chen would probably decide upon John. Leroy had a friend Li Bing who chose the name Bingley and made himself sound like a Tory Member of Parliament. A student at Fudan University changed his name to Rambo, and over the next few months I met several Zeldas and a Ringo. I could not resist the conclusion that for these Chinese youths this was a way of distancing themselves from a culture that until recently had been intensely chauvinistic. It was also one in the eye for the Cultural Revolution if you went around calling yourself Bill and wearing a funny hat and sunglasses. Such people frequented the English Corner.