To the Ends of the Earth (32 page)

I
FOUND OUT THAT
P
EKING WAS FULL OF PUBLIC BATHHOUSES
—about thirty of them, subsidized by the government. They are one of the cheapest outings in China: for 60 fen (15 cents) a person is admitted and given a piece of soap, a towel, and a bed; and he is allowed to stay all day, washing himself in the steamy public pool and resting.

The one I found was called Xing Hua Yuan. It was open from eight-thirty in the morning until eight o’clock at night. Many people who use it are travelers who have just arrived in Peking after a long journey and want to look presentable for their friends and relatives—and of course who don’t want to impose on them for a bath.

The beds were in little cubicles, and men wrapped in towels were resting or walking around talking. It was like
a Roman bath—social, with the scalded Chinese, pinkish in the heat, sloshing themselves and yelling at each other in a friendly way. It was also possible to get a private room, for about double the ordinary rate.

I was thinking how Roman and Victorian the bathhouse looked (there was a women’s bathhouse next door), how useful for travelers and bathless residents, how like a club it was and how congenial, when a homosexual Chinese man set me straight.

“Most people go there to take a bath,” he said. “But it is also a good place to go if you want to meet a boy and do things with him.”

“What sort of things?”

He didn’t flinch. He said, “One day I was in Xing Hua Yuan and saw two men in a private room, and one had the other one’s cock in his mouth. That sort of thing.”

S
HANGHAI 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 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 picture 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 it 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 in Shanghai, and even a city hater like myself can detect Shanghai’s spirit and appreciate Shanghai’s 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 was right outside my window—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 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 households that served as shop fronts and markets set up in the gutters, and people mending shoes and bicycles and doing carpentry on the pavement.

Toward the Bund—Shanghai’s riverbank promenade—I saw a spire behind a wall and found a way to enter. It was St. Joseph’s Church, and the man I took to be the caretaker, 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 had 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 were 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 as it twitched there.

T
HERE WAS A STYLISH, YOUTHFUL-LOOKING MAN NAMED
Wang whom I met one day in Shanghai. It turned out that we were both born in the same year—the Year of the Snake (but Wang used the Chinese euphemism for snake, “little dragon”). He was so friendly and full of stories that I saw him often, usually for lunch at the Jin Jiang Hotel. He was a sensitive soul, but had a sense of irony, too, and said he had never been happier than when he was walking the streets of San Francisco on his one trip to America—he hinted that he was eager to emigrate to the United States, but he never became a bore on the subject and did not ask me for help. He was unusual, even in Shanghai, for his clothes—a canary-yellow French jacket and pale blue slacks, a gold watch, a chain around his neck, and expensive sunglasses.

“I like bright clothes,” he said.

“Could you wear them during the Cultural Revolution?”

He laughed and said, “What a mess that was!”

“Were you criticized?”

“I was under arrest. That’s when I started smoking. I discovered that if you smoked it gave you time to think. They had me in a room—the Red Guards. They said, ‘You called Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, a crazy lady.’ She was a crazy lady! But I just lit a cigarette and puffed on it so that I could think of something to say.”

“What did you say?”

“The wrong thing! They made me write essays. Self-criticism!”

“Describe the essays.”

“They gave me subjects. ‘Why I Like Charles Dickens,’ ‘Why I Like Shakespeare.’ ”

“I thought you were supposed to say why you didn’t like them.”

“They wouldn’t believe that,” he said. “They called me a reactionary. Therefore, I had to say why I liked them. It was awful. Six pages every night, after work unit, and then they said, ‘This is dog shit—write six more pages.’ ”

“What work did you do?”

“Played the violin in the Red Orchestra. Always the same tunes. ‘The East Is Red,’ ‘Long Live the Thoughts of Mao,’ ‘Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman,’ all that stuff. They made me play in the rain. I said, ‘I can’t—the violin will fall apart.’ They don’t know that a violin is glued together. I played in the rain. It fell apart. They gave me another one and ordered me to play under the trees during the Four Pests Campaign—to keep sparrows from landing in the branches.”

The other three pests were mosquitoes, flies, and rats.

“That’s absurd,” I said.

“We painted Huai Hai Lu—that’s more absurd,” Wang said.

“How can you paint a street?” I asked—the street he named was one of the main thoroughfares of Shanghai.

“We painted it red, out of respect for Chairman Mao,” Wang said. “Isn’t that stupid?”

“How much of the street did you paint?”

“Three and a half miles,” Wang said, and laughed, remembering something else. “But there were stupider things. When we went to the work unit, we always did the
qing an
[salute] to Mao’s portrait on the gateway. We’d hold up the Red Book, say, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao,’ and salute him. Same thing when we went home. People would make things in Mao’s honor, like a knitted Mao emblem, or a red star in needlepoint, and put it in the special Respect Room at the unit—it was painted red. That was for Mao. If they wanted to prove they were very loyal, they would wear the Mao badge by pinning it to their skin.”

“That must have impressed the Red Guards,” I said.

“It wasn’t just the Red Guards—everyone blames them, but everyone was in it. That’s why people are so embarrassed at the moment, because they realize they were just as stupid about Chairman Mao as everyone else. I know a banker who was given the job of fly catcher. He had to kill flies and save their little bodies in a matchbox. Every afternoon someone would come and count the dead flies and say, ‘One hundred seventeen—not good enough. You must have one hundred twenty-five tomorrow.’ And more the day after, you see? The government said there was going to be a war. ‘The enemy is coming—be prepared.’ ”

“Which enemy?”

“The imperialists—Russia, India, the United States. It didn’t matter which one. They were going to kill us,” Wang said, and rolled his eyes. “So we had to make bricks for the war effort. Ninety bricks a month for each person. But my parents were old, so I had to make their bricks. I used to come home from the unit, write my essay ‘Why I Like Western Music,’ and make bricks—I had to deliver two hundred seventy a month. And they were always asking me about my hole.”

“Your hole?”

“The
Shen wa dong
—Dig Deep Holes edict. That was for the war, too. Everyone had to have a hole, in case of war. Every so often the Red Guards would knock on your door and say, ‘Where is your hole?’ ”

He said there were bomb shelters all over Shanghai, which had been built on Mao’s orders (“for the coming war”), and of course they had never been used. I asked him to show me one. We found this subterranean vault—it was just like a derelict subway station—on 1157 Nanjing Road, and it had been turned into an ice-cream parlor. The fascinating thing to me was that it was now obviously a place where young folks went to kiss their girlfriends. It was full of Chinese youths locked in the half nelson they regard as an amorous embrace. The irony was not merely that these kids were making out and feeling each other up in a place that had been built by frantic and paranoid Red Guards in the 1960s, but also that it was now called the Dong Chang Coffee Shop and owned and operated by the government.

I was talking to Wang one day about my trip through the Soviet Union when I mentioned how the scarcity of consumer goods there meant they were always pestering foreigners for blue jeans, T-shirts, track shoes, and so forth.

“That never happens in China,” I said.

“No,” Wang said. “But that reminds me. About three years ago there was a Russian ballet dancer at the hotel in Shanghai. I went to see the ballet—fabulous! And this dancer was very handsome. I recognized him, and he smiled at me. Then he pointed to my track shoes and pointed to himself. He wanted them, I understood that. They were expensive shoes—Nike, cost me fifty yuan. But I don’t care much about money. We measured feet, side by side. Exact fit. I don’t speak a word of Russian, but I could tell he really wanted those shoes.”

“Did you sell them to him?”

“I gave them to him,” Wang said, and frowned at the triviality of it. “I felt sorry for someone who just wanted a pair of shoes. It seemed sad to me that he couldn’t get them in his own country. I took them off and walked to my office barefoot! He was really happy! I thought:
He’ll go back to Russia. He’ll always remember this. He’ll say, ‘Once I was in China. I met a Chinese man and asked him for his shoes, and he gave them to me!
’ ”

A moment later, he said, “You can get anything you want in China. Food, clothes, shoes, bicycles, motorbikes, TVs, radios, antiques. If you want girls, you can find girls.” And then in a wide-eyed way, “Or boys—if you want boys.”

“Or fashion shows.”

“They have fashion shows on television almost every week,” Wang said. “Shanghai is famous for them.”

I asked him what the old people made of these developments—hookers and high fashion in a country where just a few years ago foreign decadence was condemned and everyone wore baggy blue suits.