To the Ends of the Earth (33 page)

“The old people love life in China now,” Wang said. “They are really excited by it. Very few people object. They had felt very repressed before.”

O
N MY WALKS IN
S
HANGHAI
I
OFTEN WENT PAST THE
C
HINESE
Acrobatic Theater, a domed building near the center of the city. And I became curious and attended a performance; and after I saw it—not only the tumblers and clowns and contortionists, but also the man who balanced a dinner service for twelve on a chopstick that he held in his mouth—I wanted to know more.

Mr. Liu Maoyou was in charge of the acrobats at the Shanghai Bureau of Culture. He had started out as an assistant at the Shanghai Library, but even at the best of times things are quiet at the city library, since it is next to impossible—for political reasons—for anyone to borrow a book. The librarian is little more than a custodian of the stacks. He jumped at the chance of a transfer and joined the Bureau of Culture, and he accompanied the Chinese acrobats on their first tour of the United States in 1980.

“We call it a theater, because it has an artistic and dramatic element,” Mr. Liu said. “It has three aspects—acrobats, magic, and a circus.”

I asked him how it started.

“Before Liberation all the acrobats were family members. They were travelers and performers. They performed on the street or in any open space. But we thought of bringing them together and training them properly. Of course, the Chinese had been acrobats for thousands of years. They reached their height in the Tang Dynasty and were allowed to perform freely.”

Mr. Liu said this with such enthusiasm that I asked him how he felt about the Tang Dynasty.

“It was the best period in China,” he said. “The freest time—all the arts flourished during the Tang era.”

So much for the Shanghai Cultural Bureau, but he was still talking.

“Before Liberation they were doing actions without art form,” he said. “But they have to use mind as well as body. That’s why we started the training center. We don’t want these acrobats to be mind-empty, so after their morning practice they study math, history, language, and literature.”

He said that in 1986 thirty candidates were chosen from three thousand applicants. They were all young—between ten and fourteen years old, but Mr. Liu said the bureau was not looking for skill but rather for potential.

“We also have a circus,” he said. “Also a school for animal training.”

This interested me greatly, since I have a loathing for everything associated with performing animals. I have never seen a lion tamer who did not deserve to be mauled; and when I see a little mutt, wearing a skirt and a frilly bonnet, and skittering through a hoop, I am thrilled by a desire for its tormentor (in the glittering pantsuit) to contract rabies.

“Tell me about your animal training, Mr. Liu.”

“Before Liberation the only training we did was with monkeys. Now we have performing cats—”

“Household cats? Pussycats?”

“Yes. They do tricks.”

It is a belief of many Chinese I met that animals such as cats and dogs do not feel pain. They are on earth to be used—trained, put to work, killed, and eaten. When you see the dumb, laborious lives that Chinese peasants live it is perhaps not so surprising that they torture animals.

“Also pigs and chickens,” Mr. Liu said.

“Performing chickens?”

“Not chickens but cocks.”

“What do the cocks do?”

“They stand on one leg—hand standing. And some other funny things.”

God only knows how they got these pea-brained roosters to do these funny things, but I had the feeling they wired them up and zapped them until they got the point.

“What about the pigs?” I asked.

“The pigs do not perform very often, but they can walk on two legs—”

And when he said that I realized what it was that was bothering me. It was that everything he said reminded me of
Animal Farm;
and the fact that it was a fable of totalitarianism only made Mr. Liu’s images worse. He had described a living example of the moment in that book when oppression is about to overtake the farm. There is terror and confusion at the unexpected sight:
It was a pig walking on his hind legs
. And Orwell goes on:

I was thinking of this as Mr. Liu was saying, “—and lions and tigers, and the only performing panda in China.”

He said that the animals and the acrobats often went on tour—even to the United States. Many of the acrobats worked in the United States. In 1985 a deal was made whereby Chinese acrobats would join Ringling Brothers Circus for a year or two at a time. In the first year there were fifteen, and in 1986 there were twenty hired-out Chinese acrobats working in America.

I asked Mr. Liu about the financial arrangement.

“I don’t know exactly,” he said, “but Ringling Brothers Circus pays us and we pay the acrobats.”

“How much does Ringling Brothers pay you?”

“About two hundred to six hundred dollars a week, depending on the act. For each person.”

“How much do you pay the acrobats?”

“About one hundred yuan.”

Thirty dollars.

Talk about performing pigs! I wondered how long people would be willing to allow themselves to be treated as exportable merchandise. For some it was not long: the very week I had the conversation with Mr. Liu a man playing
the role of an acrobatic lion disappeared in New York. Months later he still had not been found.

B
Y MIDAFTERNOON THE TRAIN WAS MOVING ACROSS A FLAT
green plain between two ranges of low mountains, the Qilian Shan and the Helan Shan. In places I could see the crumbled sections of the Great Wall. Where the land was flat, it was intensively cultivated, and in places there were tall, slender, and rather redundant-looking poplars. The Chinese, averse to planting shade trees, favored the skinny symbolic tree that doubled as a fence. The idea of The Forest was alien to China. It only existed in northern Heilongjiang province—the Manchurian northeast; and I had heard that even the little that remained was being cut down and made into chopsticks and toothpicks and Ping-Pong paddles.

In most other countries, a landscape feature was a grove of trees, or a meadow, or even a desert; so you immediately associated the maple tree with Canada, the oak with England, the birch with the Soviet Union, and desert and jungle with Africa. But no such thing came to mind in China, where the most common and obvious feature of a landscape was a person—or usually many people. Every time I stared at a landscape, there was a person in it staring back at me.

Even here in the middle of nowhere there were people and settlements. The villages were walled in, and most houses had walls around them: mud smeared over bricks. They were the sort of stockades that are frequent in Afghanistan and Iran—at the far end of this Silk Road—and probably a cultural hangover from the memory of marauders and Mongol hordes, the Central Asian nightmare.

The day had turned very hot. It was now in the nineties. I saw eighteen sheep crowded into a little blot of shade under a frail hawthorn tree. Children cooled themselves by kicking water in a ditch. Farmers with lampshade hats planted crops by pushing one sprout at a time into the ground, a process that had a greater affinity to needlepoint sewing than to farming, as though they were stitching a design into the furrows. And though there were black peaks and mountain ranges on both sides of the train, the land ahead fell away, and it was as if we were approaching the ocean—the land dipped and had the smooth, stony look of the seashore. It was the hottest part of the day, but even so the land was full of people. Hours later, in an immense and stony desert I saw a man in a faded blue suit, bumping over the stones on his bike.

Then there were sand dunes near the track—big soft slopes and bright piles; but the snowy peaks in the distance still remained. I had not realized that there was anything so strange as this on this planet.

I was eating dinner in the empty dining car at about eight that night when we came to Jiayuguan. What I saw out the window is printed on my mind: in the summer dusk of the Gobi Desert, a Chinese town lay glowing in the sand, and rising above it, ten stories high, was the last gate in the Great Wall, the Jia Yu Watchtower—a fortress-like structure with pagoda roofs; and the train slowed at the Wall’s end, a crumbled pile of mud bricks and ruined turrets that the wind had simplified and sucked smooth. In the fading light of day, there was this ghostly remainder of the Great Wall, and what looked like the last town in China. The Wall went straggling west, but it was so small and destroyed it looked like little more than an idea or a suggestion—the remnants of a great scheme. But my excitement also came from seeing the red paint on the gate, and the yellow roof, and the thought that this train was passing beyond it into the unknown. The sun slanted on the gray hills and the desert and blue bushes. Most of what I saw was through the blurring haze of the day’s dust, and the intimation at sunset was that I would fall off the edge of the world as soon as it got dark.

“T
HE DESERT WHICH LIES BETWEEN
A
NSI AND
H
AMI IS A
howling wilderness, and the first thing which strikes the wayfarer is the dismalness of its uniform, black, pebble-strewn surface.” That was Mildred Cable speaking. And reading her book reminded me that I was missing one of the glories of this region by not visiting the caves at Dunhuang—Buddhas, frescoes, holy grottoes; the sacred city in the sands. But I intended to go one better, by visiting the lost city of Gaocheng (Karakhoja) whenever this train got to Turfan.

I had gone to bed in a strange late twilight amid a rugged landscape, and I woke, slowly jogging in the train, to a flat region of sand and stones. Farther off were large humpy sand dunes, which had the appearance of having softly flowed and blown there, because there was nothing like them nearby. The dunes were like simple gigantic animals that went blobbing along through the desert, smothering whatever they encountered.

Soon a patch of green appeared—an oasis. Once there was merely a road linking the oases—but “once” meant only thirty years ago. Before then it was a rough road, what remained of the Silk Route. But these oases were not metaphors for a few trees and a stagnant pool. They were large towns, well watered from underground irrigation canals, and grapes and melons were grown in great profusion. Later in the day the train stopped at Hami. The Hami melon is famous all over China for its sweet taste and its fragrance; and Hami had been no insignificant place, although now it was what remained of the fruit-growing communes of the fifties and sixties. It had known great
days, and had had a khan until this century. It had been overrun by Mongols, by Uighurs, by Tibetans and Dzungars. It had been repeatedly reoccupied by the Chinese since the year
A.D
. 73, during the Later Han Dynasty, and had been a Chinese city from 1698 onward. Nothing of this remained. What had not been damaged in the Muslim Rebellion of 1863–73 had been flattened in the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese had a facility for literally defacing a city—taking all its characteristic features away, robbing it of its uniqueness, cutting its nose off. Now all Hami was known for was its pig iron.

The peaks beyond Hami and farther up the line had patches of snow on their ridges that lay like saddle blankets, squarish and flat. But down here in the train and on the desert it was very hot—over one hundred degrees in the train and hotter outside. The sun burned down on the sand and stones. There were a few gullies, and in the oldest and deepest ones, which were sheltered, perhaps a dead wutong tree, and here and there clumps of camel thorn, the only identifiable weed, apart from the spikes of gray lichens. We were heading toward a dusty range of hills that was surmounted by a blue range of mountains, and rising up beyond were more mountains, which were bright with snow patches and ice slides—long streaks that might have been glaciers.

They were the first sight I had of the Bogda Shan, the Mountains of God. They were very rugged and very high, but their snow was the only lively feature of this place. Beneath those mountains there was nothing but desert, “the howling wilderness,” which this afternoon was too bright to stare at. Rainfall is unknown here, and most of those mountains seemed little more than a vast, poisoned massif—a lifeless pack of rock. This is the dead center of Asia.

In this oddly lighted world of snow and sand, the stone mountains reddened and rushed up to the train. In the distance was a green basin, five hundred feet below sea level, the lowest place in China, and one of the hottest. Another oasis, the town of Turfan. Round about there was nothing else but a hundred miles of blackish gravel, and Turfan itself
was twenty miles from the station. I got off the train here.

T
URFAN
(“
ONE OF THE HOTTEST PLACES ON THE FACE OF THE
earth”) was an extremely popular oasis about four hundred years ago. Before then it had been a desert town overrun by successive waves of nomads, Chinese, Tibetans, Uighurs, and Mongols. The Silk Road established it as a great oasis and bazaar, but after that—from about the sixteenth century—it was all downhill. And after it was finally left alone by the warlords and the Manchus, new marauders appeared in the shape of enterprising archaeologists, and the few frescoes and statues that remained after more than two thousand years of continuous civilization were snatched and carried away to places like Tokyo, Berlin, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Such a place seemed to me unmissable. The station was at the edge of the depression. All I could see were telephone poles in the stony desert, and the huge purply-red range called The Flaming Mountains. The town of Turfan did not reveal itself until I was almost on top of it, and even then it seemed less like a Chinese town than a Middle Eastern one—it was straight out of the Bible, with donkeys and grape arbors and mosques, and people who looked Lebanese, with brown faces and gray eyes.