To the Ends of the Earth (36 page)

In the sixties there were several trains every hour. Now there is one train a day. It leaves at six in the morning from Changsha and arrives three hours later at Shaoshan. It returns from Shaoshan in the evening, just an old puffer on a forgotten branch line, which had outlived its purpose.

The road had always been popular, even after the train was running regularly. It was not only the best way for Red Guards and revolutionaries to prove their ardor, but long walks were part of Mao’s political program—the “Forge Good Iron Footsoles” scheme. The idea was that all Chinese
citizens were to have sturdy feet during the Cultural Revolution, because when the Nameless Enemy tried to invade China the evacuation of cities might be necessary. Mao filled the people with a war paranoia—that was the reason they were required to make bricks, dig trenches and bunkers and bomb shelters. They were also ordered to have hard feet and to take twenty-mile hikes on their days off in order to give themselves “iron footsoles” (“All I got were blisters,” my informant Wang told me). It was to this end that they trekked for four days on the road from Changsha to Shaoshan, sleeping in peasants’ huts and singing “The East Is Red,” “The Sun Rises in Shaoshan.” They also sang ditties that had been set to music from the Selected Thoughts, such numbers as “People of the World, Unite and Defeat the U.S. Aggressors and All Their Running Dogs!” with its stirring last line, “Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.” My favorite song from the Selected Thoughts, one I was assured had enlivened the marches along the Shaoshan road with its syncopation, went as follows:

They sang them on the trains, too. They flew flags. They wore Mao buttons and badges, and the red armband. It was not a trivial matter. It compared in size and fervor to
Muslims making the Hadj to Mecca. On one day in 1966, a procession of 120,000 Chinese thronged the village of Shaoshan to screech songs and perform the
qing an
with the
Little Red Book
.

Twenty years later I arrived at the station in an empty train. The station was empty. The unusually long platform was empty, and so were the sidings. There was not a soul in sight. The station was tidy, but that only made its emptiness seem much odder. It was very clean, freshly painted in a limpid shade of blue, and entirely abandoned. No cars in the parking lot, no one at the ticket windows. A large portrait of Mao hung over the station and on a billboard was the epitaph in Chinese:
MAO ZEDONG WAS A GREAT MARXIST, A GREAT PROLETARIAN REVOLUTIONARY, A GREAT TACTICIAN AND THEORIST
.

That was delicate: nothing about his being a great leader. Mao’s dying wish (obviously ignored) was to be remembered as a teacher.

I walked through the village, reflecting on the fact that nothing looks emptier than an empty parking lot. There were many here, designed for buses; they were very large and nothing was parked in them. I went to the hotel that was built for dignitaries and I sat in the almost-empty dining room, under a Mao portrait, eating and listening to people spitting.

The tide was out in Shaoshan; it was the town that time forgot—ghostly and echoing. And so it fascinated me. It was actually a pretty place, a rural retreat, with lovely trees and green fields, and a stream running through it that topped up the lotus ponds. In any other place an atmosphere of such emptiness would seem depressing, but this was a healthy neglect—what is healthier than refusing to worship a politician?—and the few people there had come as picnickers, not as pilgrims.

Mao’s house was at the far end of the village, in a glade. It was large and its yellow stucco and Hunanese design gave it the look of a hacienda—very cool and airy, with an atrium and a lovely view of its idyllic setting. Here Mao was born in December 1893. The rooms are neatly labeled:
PARENTS’ BEDROOM, BROTHER’S ROOM, KITCHEN, PIGSTY
, and
so forth. It is the house of a well-to-do family—Mao’s father was “a relatively rich peasant,” clever with money and mortgages, and he was a moneylender of sorts. There was plenty of space here—a big barn and roomy kitchen. Mrs. Mao’s stove was preserved (
DO NOT TOUCH
), and a placard near it read:
IN
1921
MAO ZEDONG EDUCATED HIS FAMILY IN REVOLUTION NEAR THIS STOVE
. And in the sitting room:
IN
1927
MEETINGS WERE HELD HERE TO DISCUSS REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES
.

It was not like visiting Lincoln’s log cabin. It wasn’t Blenheim. It wasn’t Paul Revere’s house. For one thing it was very empty. The few Chinese nearby seemed indifferent to the house itself. They sat under trees listening to a booming radio. There were girls in pretty dresses. Their clothes alone were a political statement. But this handful of people were hardly visible. Its emptiness meant something. Because when it was heavily visited Shaoshan had represented political piety and obedience, now that it was empty it stood for indifference. In a sense, neglect was more dramatic than destruction, because the thing still existed as a mockery of what it had been.

It had the fusty smell of an old shrine. It had outlived its usefulness, and it looked a little absurd, like a once-hallowed temple of a sect of fanatics who had run off, tearing their clothes, and had never returned. Times have changed. Toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, the pseudonymous Simon Leys visited China and in
Chinese Shadows
, his gloomy and scolding account of his trip, he wrote that Shaoshan “is visited by about three million pilgrims every year.” That is eight thousand a day. Today there were none.

If Shaoshan was embarrassing to the Chinese, it was because the whole scheme had been to show Mao as more than human. There was an obnoxious religiosity in the way his old schoolhouse had been arranged to show little Mao as a sanctified student. But the building was empty, and there was no one walking down the lane, so it didn’t matter. I had the impression that the Chinese were staying away in droves.

One stall sold postcards. There was only one view:
MAO’S BIRTHPLACE
(the house in the glade). And there were a few Mao badges. It was the only place in China where I saw his face on sale, but even so it was just this little badge. There were also towels and dishcloths, saying
SHAOSHAN
.

There was a shop in the Mao Museum.

I said, “I would like to buy a Mao badge.”

“We have none,” the assistant said.

“How about a Mao picture?”

“We have none.”

“What about a
Little Red Book—or
any Mao book?”

“None.”

“Where are they?”

“Sold.”

“All of them?”

“All.”

“Will you get some more to sell?”

The assistant said, “I do not know.”

What do they sell, then, at the shop in the Mao Museum? They sell key chains with color photographs of Hong Kong movie actresses, bars of soap, combs, razor blades, face cream, hard candy, peanut brittle, buttons, thread, cigarettes, and men’s underwear.

The museum did try to show Mao as more than human, and in its eighteen rooms of hagiography Mao was presented as a sort of Christ figure, preaching very early (giving instructions in revolution by his mother’s stove) and winning recruits. There were statues, flags, badges, and personal paraphernalia—his straw hat, his slippers, his ashtray. Room by room, his life is displayed in pictures and captions: his schooldays, his job, his travels, the death of his brother, the Long March, the war, his first marriage …

And then, after such languid and detailed exposition, an odd thing happens in the last room. In Number Eighteen, time is telescoped, and the years 1949–76, his entire chairmanship, his rule, and his death, are presented with lightning speed. There is no mention of his two other marriages, nothing about Jiang Qing. Nonpersons like Jiang Qing and Lin Biao have been airbrushed out of photographs. The 1960s are shown in one picture, the mushroom cloud of
China’s first atom bomb in 1964. The rest of the decade does not exist. There has been no Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Mao Museum was founded in 1967, at the height of it!

But by omitting so much and showing time passing so quickly, the museum gives the viewer a bizarre potted history of Mao’s final years. In the previous rooms he looks like a spoiled child, a big brat, scowling and solemn. In this final room he develops a very unusual smile and on his pumpkin face it has a disturbing effect. After 1956 he seems to be gaga. He starts wearing baggy pants and a coolie hat, and his face is drawn from a sag into a mad or senile grimace. He looks unlike his earlier self. In one picture he is lumberingly playing Ping-Pong. In 1972 and after, meeting Nixon, Prince Sihanouk, and East European leaders, he’s a heffalump, he looks hugely crazy or else barely seems to recognize the visitor grinning at him. There is plenty of evidence here to support what the Chinese say about him all the time—that after 1956 he was not the same.

Mao had set out to be an enigma and had succeeded. “The anal leader of an oral people,” the sinologist Richard Soloman had said. Mao can be described but not summed up. He was patient, optimistic, ruthless, pathologically anti-intellectual, romantic, militaristic, patriotic, chauvinistic, rebellious in a youthful way, and deliberately contradictory.

Shaoshan said everything about Mao: his rise and fall; his position today. I loved the empty train arriving at the empty station. Was there a better image of obscurity? As for the house and village, they were like many temples in China, where no one prayed any longer—just a heap of symmetrical stones representing waste, confusion, and ruin. China was full of such places, dedicated to the memory of someone or other and, lately, just an excuse for setting up picnic tables and selling souvenirs.

B
ECAUSE IT IS A FLAT, DRY, NORTHERN CITY, AT THE EDGE OF
Mongolia, Peking has beautiful skies. They are bluest in the freezing air of winter. China’s old euphemism for itself was
Tianxia
, “All beneath the sky”—and, on a good day, what a sky! It was limpid, like an ocean of air, but seamless and unwrinkled, without a single wavelet of cloud; endless uncluttered fathoms of it that grew icier through the day and then at the end of the winter afternoon turned to dust.

Thinking it would be empty, I went to see the Great Wall again. Dr. Johnson told Boswell how eager he was to go to China and see the Wall. Boswell was not so sure himself. How could he justify going to China when he had children at home to take care of?

“Sir,” Dr. Johnson said, “by doing so [going to China] you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a lustre reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China. I am serious, sir.”

The Wall is an intimidating thing, less a fortification than a visual statement announcing imperiously: I am the Son of Heaven and this is the proof that I can encircle the earth. It somewhat resembles, in intention, the sort of achievement of that barmy man Christo, who giftwrapped the Golden Gate Bridge. The Wall goes steeply up and down mountainsides. To what purpose? Certainly not to repel invaders, who could never cling to those cliffs. Wasn’t it another example of the Chinese love of taking possession of the land and whipping it into shape?

Anyway, it was not empty. It swarmed with tourists.
They scampered on it and darkened it like fleas on a dead snake.

That gave me an idea. “Snake” was very close, but what it actually looked like was a dragon. The dragon is the favorite Chinese creature (“just after man in the hierarchy of living beings”) and until fairly recently—eighty or a hundred years ago—the Chinese believed they existed. Many people reported seeing them alive—and of course fossilized dragon skeletons had been unearthed. It was a good omen and, especially, a guardian. The marauding dragon and the dragon slayer are unknown in China. It is one of China’s friendliest and most enduring symbols. And I found a bewitching similarity between the Chinese dragon and the Great Wall of China—the way it flexed and slithered up and down the Mongolian mountains; the way its crenellations looked like the fins on a dragon’s back, and its bricks like scales; the way it looked serpentine and protective, undulating endlessly from one end of the world to the other.

“I
S IT COLD OUTSIDE?”
I
ASKED
.

“Very,” said Mr. Tian. His eyeglasses were opaque with frost.

It was five-thirty on a Harbin morning, the temperature at minus thirty-five Centigrade and a light snow falling—little grains like seed pearls sifting down in the dark. When the flurry stopped, the wind picked up, and it was murderous. Full on my face it was like being slashed with a razor. We were on our way to the railway station.

“And you insist on coming with me?” I asked.

“Langxiang is forbidden,” Mr. Tian said. “So I must.”

“It is the Chinese way,” I said.

“Very much so,” he replied.

In this darkness groups of huddled people waited in the empty street for buses. That seemed a grim pastime, a long wait at a Harbin bus stop in winter. And, by the way, the buses were not heated. In his aggrieved account of his Chinese residence, the journalist Tiziano Terzani, writing about Heilongjiang (“The Kingdom of the Rats”), quotes a French traveler who said, “Although it is uncertain where God placed paradise, we can be sure that he chose some other place than this.”