Shadow of the Silk Road (2 page)

The sun rose over a new city. Along its inner avenues, and far out to the skyline, Xian had suffered a hallucinatory change. Eighteen years before, I trudged through a run-down provincial capital. Its sombre ramparts, survivors of the Cultural Revolution, had enclosed little but concrete office blocks and half-empty state emporia. There is a stench of coal dust in my memory, and autumnal mud. Rusting trucks and a river of bicycles had meandered the ghostly grid of ancient streets. The colours along the sidewalks were regulation brown, grey and serge blue. It seemed a place of inert history, and fatal patience.

But now it had shattered into life. I recognised almost nothing. It had not frozen to grandeur like Beijing, but transformed into a hectic procession of overcrowded shopping malls, restaurants and high-tech industrial suburbs. The nine-mile circuit of its walls, which once seemed to enclose nothing, was bursting with reborn vigour, the massive gates funnelling in traffic which clogged the boulevards for miles. Eight-lane highways–including the beleaguered bicycle lane–shot between hotels and prestige apartment blocks carrying the new-fangled private cars and a fleet of ten thousand Citroen taxis.

At the city’s heart, the Ming dynasty bell tower had become a swirling traffic island. As you circle its upper gallery, banging your head on its crossbeams, an enormous shopping mall opposite showers you with computerised advertisements, and a cavernous McDonald’s gleams alongside; slogans proclaim new motor scooters, CD players, mobile phones. From here the traffic streams
away to the four points of the Ming compass. At every boulevard’s end the fort-like gates leave jaundiced profiles in the smog, while beyond them hovers a crowd of suburban skyscrapers, like the ghost of the future waiting to break through.

The future can hardly wait. The whole city is in a turmoil of construction. Every other site is marked by a giant computer image of what will be built there–glass-and-tile institutes and company headquarters topped by tilted eaves and temple turrets like paper hats, with a scattering of blond visitors dotted in below for prestige and perspective–so that whole stretches of avenue become futuristic theatre-sets. If you return next year, these vistas promise, you will enter a different city. All that China wants to be, Xian is becoming.

Already the shops and hoardings are persuading you that everywhere is here: Paris, New York, London. The supermarkets are stacked with goods inaccessible even five years ago: electrical products pour in from eastern China; food is piled up in what to older people seems a curious dream. And here and there some glossy mall oversteps into Elysium altogether. These cold palaces offer an unmediated West: Givenchy, Arden, Bally, Gieves & Hawkes, Dior, L’Oréal. The assistants look blank and sanitised, as if adapting by instinct to their role, and their customers, appearing shyly provincial–boyish men, girlish women–glide up and down bedazzled on the escalators.

Sometimes, through half-closed eyes, I tried to reimagine the city of my memory. But I found myself recalling a place which I was no longer sure had existed, under whose louring ramparts, now reverberating with traffic, the farmers had spread their market stalls, and avenues had run deserted. Already this older Xian was retreating to a sepia photograph in my head. I struggled to recover it, but it faded by the hour.

All around now, another generation was on the move. Their pace was more nervous and directed. Little silver cellphones glittered at every ear. In my memory, their parents’ expressions were guarded or blank, and footsteps lumbered. But now they had wakened into difference: more changeable, demonstrative, uneasy. A few reminded me of friends in the West. I half expected them to
ignite in recognition. Couples were walking hand in hand, even kissing–a Maoist outrage. Women with auburn-dyed hair were walking little dogs. Long, pointed shoes were in fashion–like jesters’ slippers–and luridly bleached jeans.

Something had been licensed which they called the West. I gawped at it like a stranger. Yet the outbreak of individualism, I sensed, was not quite that. Being Western was a kind of conformity. Even as the West touched them, they might be turning it Chinese. And among these crowds of urban young an undertow of rural migrants–like shockwaves from their past–was threading the streets: loud-mouthed men and women with sun-blackened faces and bushy hair, whose harsh voices filled the noodle shops.

On this transforming city, old people gazed as if at some heartless pageant. Dressed in their leftover Mao caps and frayed cloth slippers, they would settle by a roundabout or park and stare for hours as the changed world unfolded. It was hard to look at them unmoved. Men and women born in civil war and Japanese invasion, who had eked out their lives through famine in the Great Leap Forward and survived the Cultural Revolution, had emerged at last to find themselves redundant. Under their shocks of grey hair the faces looked strained or emptied by history. Sometimes they seemed faintly to smile. They smoked continuously, if they could afford it, and tugged their trouser legs above their knees to catch the sun. And sometimes their expressions had quietened into a kind of peace, even amusement, so that I wondered in surprise what memory can have been so sweet.

Stray from any avenue within the walls, and you become lost in a skein of old suburbs. Just behind the concrete boulevards, they pulse like the city’s unconscious–twist and bifurcate into claustrophobic courtyards where the flimsy wooden walls of family compounds, studded with cracked windows, last out the cold winters under grey-tiled roofs or corrugated tin. As you walk here, the weight of Xian’s past returns. You hear only the squeak of bicycles or the clatter of a pedicab as it deposits its bone-shaken passengers.

In one street, where artists and calligraphers toiled in dark
studios, I was surrounded by classical ink-stones for sale, and ranks of badger-hair brushes in discrete sizes (with a stuffed ferret-badger hanging alongside as guarantee). Vendors of bamboo pipes and bottle-flutes blew them in quaint seduction as I passed. But the wonky eaves and balconies above them had been self-consciously restored, and the alley was called ‘Old Culture Street’. Beyond it, lanes selling painted fans and classical opera costumes merged into a market of massed artefacts in lacquer and porcelain, jade and bone. Reproduced as antique, they occupied a shadowland where the old crafts had grown nostalgic, food for tourists. Among them all–the quaint and the occasionally beautiful–I even found mementoes of the Cultural Revolution, manufactured as curiosities. There were Little Red Books for sale, published as posthumous souvenirs; cigarette lighters played ‘The East is Red’ as they lit up. On a popular wristwatch a painted image of Mao Zedong waved his hand jerkily with every second. ‘He is not greeting you,’ the vendor grinned. ‘He is saying goodbye.’ It was as if those years, with all their horror, were being sucked already into the slipstream of the past. The pain was leaving them. They had become kitsch.

But that afternoon a storekeeper offered me another Little Red Book, almost forty years old. It was stained with oil, and inscribed with its owner’s name, Yang Shaomin. Then an old unease came over me. The terror of the Cultural Revolution–its unknown millions persecuted, its hallmark mental cruelty–had never quite left me. Eighteen years ago I had encountered its human wreckage everywhere. I fingered the book tentatively, almost with reverence. It seemed to breathe a corrupt mana. I remembered photographs of Mao Zedong haranguing the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square, and the ocean of Red Books lifted to worship him. Had this been one of them? It felt rough and small in my hands. In the back it enclosed a yellowed newspaper clipping of Mao’s thoughts. And as I fingered its paper, that nightmare became real again, and I wondered what had happened to Yang Shaomin, and what he had done.

Then I was back in the daylit street. It was snarled with traffic, and children were coming out of school. Years before, they would
have followed their teacher in a dutiful crocodile, the infants strung together by a long cord. Now they jostled and shouted and ran amok. Their satchels were inscribed ‘Happy Journey’ and ‘No. 1 Cool Dog’. I felt foolishly comforted. In the local cinema a Shanghai romance called
Why me, Sweetie?
was playing alongside
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
.

Now I was walking in fascinated confusion. My eyes kept alighting on those vaguely disturbing advertisements featuring Europeanised models. Their eyes were unnaturally rounded, the epicanthic folds surgically cut, their noses subtly arched or thinned by photographic lighting, and the bud-like mouths were stretched in a Western smile.

‘We are not like our parents. We have no time and no security. You say we walk differently from the old, well that is why. It’s something nervous.’

He seemed to wince across the restaurant table: a young man, barely twenty-three, with a pale, heart-shaped face. ‘Our parents’ world was safer: state pensions, assured jobs and housing. And they want to go on as before, cautiously, preserving. But my generation–our world depends on us.’

He looked at once anxious and excited. This was the sea-change that was transforming China. All at once the future had grown more potent than the past. Change was rendering things obsolete. You could see this where high-rise apartment blocks barged into the old suburbs, bulldozing the clustered generations of the communal courtyard and banking up tiers of nuclear families in their place. Whole regions of the city had become unrecognisable, the man said. And of course it was not merely buildings that were being exchanged, it was the values they fostered.

‘I spent my childhood in those old
hutong
courtyards. Relationships were warmer then.’ His mouth puckered, as if hunting a lost taste. I wondered if he were not simply regretting being adult. ‘Now we live on the fourteenth floor of a skyscraper, and whenever we go out we lock an iron door behind us.’

He was the awkward by-product of this changed world. He loved animals and green spaces–in childhood he had longed
hopelessly for a dog–and was studying ecology with a tinge of despair at his country’s ruthlessness. He was an only child. ‘Most of my friends are outcomes of the One Child policy, state birth control. They call us “little emperors”. Parents and relatives all dote on these single children. But I don’t think it shapes us for reality. I read the other day of a ten-year-old boy who died drowning, trying to save his friend. He couldn’t swim at all. Everybody said: how brave! But I thought: that’s a typical little emperor. Stupid. He imagined he could do anything.’ His chopsticks dithered over chilli-flavoured chicken. He had eaten almost nothing. ‘There’s a kind of wisdom we’re not taught,’ he said. ‘And every family is full of silences.’

With vague wonder I realised that to him the terrors of the Cultural Revolution were pure history. Mao Zedong had died years before he was born: a symbol, not a man. He said: ‘My parents never talk of that time. I think they don’t want to remember. So I’ll never know what they did. They were Red Guards, of course, and I heard that my father smashed up old things. He may even have killed a man. But I’ll never know.’

He suddenly laughed. ‘The Cultural Revolution is a joke to my friends. When we take group snapshots we sing silly Mao hymns. That’s what they did in those days. They sang hymns before taking a photo. And if you wanted to buy a camera, the shopkeeper might not sell until you’d chanted two or three Mao hymns…’

I said: ‘Can you imagine you and your friends at that time? What you’d have done?’ An old disquiet was surfacing.

‘No. I really can’t imagine this…or, well…no, I can’t…The truth is my whole generation is sick of politics. The government’s rotten. People just join the Party to get on. We want change, but nobody’s going to die for it.’

I thought of the Tiananmen Square massacre. However incoherently, its victims had died for change. But even as I asked him, I realised he had been nine years old at the time.

He said: ‘My father was working in Beijing then, and I was at primary school. I remember the noise and the soldiers, and later we saw blood in the streets everywhere. Soon afterwards I crossed that square with my mother, and I realised something terrible had
happened. But that was all, and she said nothing. And now we don’t think about it much, or talk about that.’

In his alert, restless eyes, I imagined misgiving. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I think they were brave.’

For a while he picked delicately at the chicken in front of him, sometimes dabbing the corners of his mouth with his sleeve. Then he said with the sudden, paradoxical spareness of his people: ‘I’m afraid of death. And loneliness. When I close my eyes, I go cold. I think: death is like this. Blackness, where there’s no feel or taste. Many young people are afraid of it, I think. Old people can look back on rich lives, perhaps, and are not afraid…’

I thought: everything was always assured to them.

‘…But we young people are unfulfilled, and afraid. Some of my friends go to the Buddhist temple, but only because they want something. I don’t believe in that. For us, after death, there’s nothing.’

The valleys of the Wei and Yellow rivers, where Xian stands, were China’s ancient heartland. To the north the plateaux of windborn loam mount towards Inner Mongolia; to the south the hills, suddenly humid, are terraced for rice and tea. It was in the mild basin between, now spread with wheat and cotton, that the tyrant-emperor Qin Shi Huangdi proclaimed the first capital of a unified China in 221
BC
, and was buried in a tomb guarded by massed echelons of terracotta warriors which came to light more than two thousand years afterwards. In his reign the fiefdoms of the past were brutally homogenised: their script, their laws, even their history. He knit together the Great Wall with the labour of a million conscripts and peasants, who died of exhaustion and were immured in it like landfill. The annals of all dynasties but the emperor’s were put to the flames, and dissenting scholars buried alive. Nothing survived that was not his. So a recognisable country came into being: a land in which diversity was morally offensive.