The River at the Centre of the World (39 page)

Frank Walker's life was that of the professional expatriate. China today had been Iraq three years before,
*
and next it would be some godforsaken site in Africa or deeper Asia or who knows where. He and his family took their two- and three-year postings in their stride; they existed in a world of foreign schools and pen pals and video rentals and The Club and advertisements for tax havens and discussions about exchange rates and vaccinations and trying to learn brand-new languages and dealing with security guards and looking forward to the weekly mail calls from home and having to pay for long-distance telephony and going months without butter or fresh milk and having to eat dinners of baked beans and Danish biscuits from tins and dealing with the afflictions of strange insect bites and crowds who stare at you and of living with unfamiliar and half-worthless coins and listening to odd radio stations playing weird music and driving odd-looking cars and waiting for the six-monthly long-haul flights home.

His job was to look after the fleet of huge trucks that haul dirt and rocks away from the excavations: their brand name is Terex, the company belongs to General Motors, and the factory is in Glasgow. There were thirty of them, reinforced giants of steel and tungsten thirty feet tall with tyres bigger than a man: they had come by land all the way up from Canton – no train was big enough to carry them – and Frank in his Peugeot had led the convoy twelve hundred miles, going no faster than twelve miles an hour over rutted roads where no foreigner had been for years. The looks on the village children's faces, as they spotted this vast armada of western iron rumbling through – were ‘never to be forgotten’. It had taken three weeks to go from Canton to the Ertan dam site – a memorable journey, said Frank with a grin.

Frank invited me to ride a Terex on a working expedition into the heart of the mountain – a terrifying half-hour, as it turned out, of heat and dust and insufferable noise. The Chinese driver was an irrepressibly cheerful little man, five feet nothing and seemingly quite unsuited for driving the forty tons of mixed metals that constitute a Terex earth-moving truck. He told me he had been a farmer until the dam builders had hired him the year before – and now he was having great fun, the power steering and computerized brakes allowing him to throw his gigantic toy around as though it were made of straw and tissue paper.

We roared through the portals of a huge tunnel and, belching thick smoke from our exhaust, we gunned downwards into the centre of the mountain, under a glistening roof of wet granite. A chain of dim lights marked the way: every so often there would be an open cavern with a gaggle of men and strange machines that were digging, burrowing, tunnelling. Sirens would sound, red lights would flash, there would be the crump of distant explosions, and the walls would throb and pulse. The driver would merely pause and grin, then gun his engine, and roar forward again into the abyss.

Ten minutes later and we were at the site where we had been ordered to collect and haul away the fifty tons of newly broken rock. The driver spun the vehicle around like a London taxi and then backed gingerly downward into a brand-new raw-rock tunnel, the wheels slipping and scratching for a hold on the newly fractured gravel on the floor. The mighty vehicle at first slid this way and that, the cab scraping angrily against the dripping walls, the headlights uselessly illuminating the rock ceiling. There was no other lighting in the tunnel – and there was still smoke pouring from the blast site and ghoulish screams and yells from an excavator crew, who were eagerly talking us backward to where they could dump rock onto us.

Then there came a sudden cry to stop! The driver locked the brakes and we held our breath as, with a deafening roar and a terrible bouncing and rocking and the wails and shrieks of tortured coil springs, we reeled under the assault of tons upon tons of rock that were now pouring onto us from on high. Then a hiss of final gravel and dust and there was a blessed silence; the driver lit a cigarette, but as he did so there was a shout from outside, the crew urging us to be on our way and make room for another truck, another load. The driver snapped his gearshift into forward and slammed his foot down on the metal pedal, and we creaked slowly, but then faster and faster, back up the slope, out into the lit tunnel, and after ten more minutes and to my eternal relief, back into the sunshine again.

A foreman ticked off the driver's load – another forty renminbi added to his pay slip. I jumped down, thanking him profusely, declining his kind suggestion I might enjoy another go.

‘They kill themselves all the time,’ Frank announced cheerily. ‘They've no idea how to handle these monsters. Last week three lads stole one from the parking lot and drove it straight off the cliff into the river.

‘They've not been found. Nor has the Terex for that matter – the river's powerful deep. And you know what? One of the boys had just been married, and his widow came up to where the Terex had gone over, and she jumped in the river too, killing herself. Pretty girl. Stupid, too, so far as I can see.

‘I'll never understand these people. If they're not working they're asleep. If they're not sleeping they're eating. And if they're not doing either of those then they're killing themselves. Odd folk the Chinese, if you ask me.’
*

Some of the single men took a more tolerant attitude. I spent one afternoon in a bar with two Britons, one a crane driver from Middlesbrough and the other an electrician from Cleveland, and with the six young Chinese tarts they had managed to find who, when we met, were entwined around them like convolvulus, vowing not to leave, and getting stickily drunk on enormous glasses of Bailey's.

‘Our interest in these girls?’ said the crane driver, when I asked him. He pinched one, whom he had introduced as Hourglass, and she giggled warmly. ‘It's purely sexual. Oh sure, they say they want to marry us and come back to the West – but quite frankly, and I can say this out loud because they haven't the faintest idea what I'm saying, we're only interested in screwing them. And very good at it they are, too.

‘And you know what the nice thing is – they're so fucking backward in these parts they'll do it without asking for money. They think they're in love with us! They think the sun shines out of our arseholes. Have you ever heard anything so stupid?’ And he thwacked Hourglass on her backside again, making her coo with delight.

Lily, who was appalled, was about to say something – but the expression on the man's face changed suddenly.

‘You keep quiet, young lady,’ he said, wagging a finger at her. ‘This is my business – hers and mine. No poking your nose in where it don't concern you.’

*

I found a dead man on the street that evening. I saw him from the corner of my eye, lying beside the road as we drove back to the hotel. I told the driver to turn round and go back for a look.

The man was lying on his back, his eyes wide open. He was quite naked. He seemed to have a head injury – perhaps, I thought, he had been knocked down by a car.

On the other side of the road a group of men were sitting around a small fire, tucking into blue-and-white bowls of rice. They were no more than thirty feet from the corpse. I asked them if they knew what happened.

‘Oh, that fellow!’ said one of them, laughing and pushing great balls of rice into his mouth. ‘He was just a crazy man. Always around here, shouting at the cars. Never wore any clothes. Some minority, I guess. I could never understand what he was saying. Hit by a car a couple of hours ago.’

The men seemed not in the slightest bit concerned that they were having their dinner beside a cadaver, and none of them had bothered to see – after the car hit him – if he had been killed outright. I suggested that we might cover him up.

‘Suit yourself,’ said the same man, pausing briefly from his feeding and gesturing with a chopstick to where a roll of matting stood by a wall. ‘Use that.’

And so I unrolled the matting and carried it across to the man and knelt and closed his eyes, before placing the mat over him so that his head and most of his body was covered. His feet stuck out of the end; they were dirty and calloused from years of walking barefoot. He may have been mad; but he had had a knotty stick, which I found and placed beneath the mat, beside him. When he was alive, a few hours before, he probably looked like a harmless mendicant, or a Chinese palmer. We were near Tibet; there were lots of pilgrims in these parts.

On the way home I called in at a police station, and they thanked me. Later that night I drove past and the man had been removed. The group were still sitting around the fire, and they waved at me as I passed, doubtless thinking that I was quite as crazy as the man who had met his end beside their evening dinner table.

Our taxi driver's first remark about a dam being built and the foreigners working on it had triggered a cascade of coincidence. Frank Walker was the first link in this trail: his translator, a rather sulky young lady named Ena, was the second.

Ena was a pretty and willing girl who, her pouting aside, enjoyed something of a following among the young male inhabitants of Panzhihua. One of her friends, an insurance salesman who dreamed of greater things, turned out to have as his hobby a passionate interest in the headwaters of the Yangtze. Ena knew that Lily and I were going there; and one day she introduced us to her young man, who was named Wu Wei. He fell on us with glee: as an insurance salesman his life was rather dull. But nine years before, he said with evident pride, he had been a member of one of the all-Chinese expeditions of river rafters who had managed to paddle their way down the entire length of the Yangtze. He himself had only been on the upper reaches, specifically along the tributaries known as the Dam Qu and the Tuotuo: any help he could give to us, he would. And perhaps we would like to see some videotapes?

And so for the next two days, dawn to dusk, amid the blaring car horns and the grinding din from the city's steel mills, we watched tape after tape of the expedition's progress along the upper reaches of the river. Wu's interest was in Tibet – and even though he was a Han Chinese, born and brought up in Yunnan, he kept a photograph of the Dalai Lama taped to the inside of one of his living-room cupboards and was constantly critical of China's repressive policies towards what the government officially called Xizang Autonomous Province, but which he insisted on calling Tibet.

‘We have been brutes – no doubt about it,’ he said. ‘I love the Tibetan people. I have always said we should cherish them, regard them as brothers, as equals. We should not seek to dominate them. They are different. Their way of life, their religion – all different. Who are we Chinese to tell them how to live their lives?’

Lily blanched on hearing this. We had not discussed Tibet in much detail; but whenever we had, and whenever I had said how terrible a shame it was that China's policies towards the Tibetans had been so cruel, she had reacted defensively. I knew that she was secretly proud of – or at least a supporter of – her country's foreign policies, and that she saw the Tibetans as primitive innocents who had been consistently misled by religious zealots and egged on by western romantics; but now Wu – a Chinese like herself – was taking the same position as I. She fell quiet, but I knew we would have to face the problem in a day or so. I knew also, if I was to avoid a scene like that on the Panzhihua train, that I would have to deal with this disagreement with the utmost caution and tact.

Wu then came up with an idea. He would make contact with a friend who had also been on the expedition, a man who lived in Chengdu and worked for an organization that had access to four-wheel-drive cars, which would surely be needed if we hoped to get high up on the river. He had a feeling the organization would be eager to help. But that was for the following weeks. For now, he said – can I lend you my own car and let you explore the reaches close to Panzhihua? If you like, he added hopefully, I can come along as well, and be your guide.

Never before in my dozen years of travelling in China had a private individual ever offered – or been able – to supply me with both transport and his own time to show me around a corner of his country. There were always official guides available – Local Guides or National Guides, a corps d'elite of half-English-speaking and too often woefully ignorant young men and women, screened and cleared as faithful adherents to the Party line, who would, for a sizeable fee, escort you along a predetermined route to show off the nation at its best. There were also enthusiastic amateurs like Lily, who would jump at the chance of touring companionship, of helping a stranger in exchange for learning more about the cultural fingerprints of foreigners. But never before had I come across a sedate, employed, and politically independent-minded man or woman who would be willing or able to stop everything, drop everything and come away for no better reason than to demonstrate a part of his country of which he felt proud. Why would he do such a thing? I could only think of one kind of person who might do it.

‘I suppose you think I'm actually a policeman,’ Wu replied, reading my mind, chortling. ‘And I suppose you think that I think you're a spy. So that's the only logical reason we can travel together – me to show you what the Party wants and to keep an eye on you while you're travelling. That must be the logical view.

‘In fact it's more simple. I really am just fascinated by the Yangtze. Meeting someone else who likes the river – well, I just want to do anything I can to help. Believe it or not as you like. I think your people might do the same for me, if I ever come to your country.’

(I was ashamed to say this latter seemed rather improbable. The notion that a lone Chinese traveller might fetch up in Arkansas, profess a fascination with the Mississippi River, and promptly find a local insurance salesman who would take a week off to drive him from Osceola to Eudora was frankly laughable. The Chinese often have a stern and forbidding visage; but behind it, equally often, is a kindness and a hospitality few other people can imagine.)