| China
Diary, Part 1
[Note: These diaries are made up
of notes I jotted while travelling in China during the summer of 2001 with
my wife Rosie (who is Chinese) and our two small children. They
appeared on NRO only in part. Here I have included the full
diaries.]
Beijing,
China: Week of July 1st to
July 7th
---------------------------------------
Having written a couple of pieces on this site in strong opposition to
Beijing getting the 2008 Summer Olympics, I find myself in something of a
moral quandary over here. I
still don't want Beijing to get the Olympics, for the aforementioned
reasons. On the other hand,
here I am among Beijing friends and relatives, all of whom are treating us
with unstinting generosity, all of whom I am dearly fond of, and all of
whom desperately want their city to get the Olympics.
Beijingers have a great sense of municipal pride as well they
might have, considering the transformation this city has undergone this
past 20 years. (Yes, you can
deplore the destruction of picturesque old neighborhoods if you like, and
if you have never depended for your water supply on a standpipe shared by
nine other families; but the
Beijingers wanted a modern city, with skyscrapers and six-lane
expressways, and they made one.) It
seems harsh to want to deprive this kind, witty, hospitable people of a
thing that would give them so much satisfaction, especially when one
recalls how they supported the students in the 1989 uprising, and bore the
brunt of the disgraceful army rampage that followed.
Am I letting my tender feelings get the better of me?
No, I still don't want Beijing to get the Games.
I am, though, very nervous when the topic comes up in conversation,
which it does two or three times a day.
What if someone asks me: "Do you think Beijing should
get the Games?" I'm not
going to lie, but on the other hand I don't want to start a fight, or to
cause distress and dismay to people who have treated me with consideration
and kindness far beyond the call of duty.
So far I have not been brought to the test; and since we only have
a week in Beijing, I may escape altogether.
In fact, the question whether Beijing should have the
Olympics does not seem to have occurred to any of my kith and kin here.
All they ask is: "Do
you think Beijing will get the Games?"
To which I reply, in perfect truthfulness: "Yes, I am sure she will."
---------------------------------------
Mysteries of the East: What
is this thing with rolling up the trouser legs?
When a Chinese man wants to relax and watch the passing charivari
for half an hour, he sits on a wall with his back against a pillar, gets
himself comfortable, lights a cigarette and then rolls up his trouser
legs. Why?
I asked Rosie. She:
"I don't know. It's
a guy thing. Why don't you ask them?"
For some reason this is not as simple as it ought to be.
I don't want to ask family, for fear they might think I am mocking
them in some way. A stranger,
then; but how to broach the
subject? In a dumpling parlor
this afternoon there was a man sitting on the far side of the room from us
with his trousers rolled all the way up to mid-thigh, exposing a pair of
white, scrawny, hairless and singularly unattractive legs.
I was of a mind to go over and ask him about it, but chickened out.
Shall report back on this one.
---------------------------------------
Anyone who thinks the Chinese Communist Party has withdrawn to some place
out of sight so that the people of China can get on with their lives
should have been here this first week of July.
Sunday was the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Party, and
you can't get away from the fact. Every
night this week there have been TV spectaculars of breathtaking vulgarity
extolling the CCP and its achievements.
These shows feature meticulously choreographed formation dances,
backed with garish light displays and periodically flooded with enough
dry-ice stage mist to throw global warming into high gear.
Totalitarian self-advertisement has, one gathers, advanced from
Leni Riefenstahl to Busby Berkeley. In
between the dances are desperately unfunny xiang-sheng (i.e.
double-act) comedians, with punch lines pointing up the benevolence and
omniscience of the Party. To
delight the ear there are fat operatic types, their faces contorted in
simulated emotion, belting out songs of unspeakable sentimentality and,
when they descend to the realm of actual fact, mendacity.
"Eighty years ago my country was born," gushed one fat
tenor. Say what?
Eighty years? China? But of course it has been a constant propaganda theme of the
Party that they are the country.
In fact, a little later, a large contralto woman with terrifying messa
di voce and a dress that looked remarkably like the one Scarlett
O'Hara improvised from the family drapes came on and sang that old
evergreen from the seventies: "Without The Communist Party There
Would Be No New China." This
one I actually knew, having learned it for a college choral competition
back in '83, so I sang along for a few bars:
Mother
taught me a song:
'Without
the Communist Party there would be no New China.'
This
song
Flew
up from Mother's heart
This
song,
As
she roamed across
Our
country's mountains and rivers.
At
which point Rosie came in. "For
heaven's sake, can you still remember that stuff?"
It had been during one of those choir practices that our eyes first
met. Yes, honey, I can still
remember.
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It's a clichι, but it's true: travelling
with small children in China opens up to you a whole new side of the
national character. The
Chinese have always been philoprogenitive, of course, but sentimental
about children? Surely not.
What about those stories of peasant women giving birth with a
bucket of water next to the bed, so if the infant is female it can be
quickly disposed of? What,
for that matter, about foot-binding, a gross form of child abuse?
Well, I don't know; but I do know that Eleanor Muriel (8)
and Daniel Oliver (6) are being spoiled rotten by absolutely everyone.
At first they were alarmed when perfect strangers bore down on them
in streets and parks, beaming, arms outstretched, cooing in Mandarin.
They soon got the point, though, and now express unfeigned delight
at each new shower of compliments and gifts.
One old fellow took Ollie's hand, lifted it up with great
tenderness, stroked the boy's forearm, and murmured: "Look at the
color of his skin! So
beautiful!" (Not an
utterance you will hear much in the U.S.A. nowadays, I think.)
The question of course is: how
shall we ever re-acclimatize them to the humdrum disciplines of home and
school after six weeks of being drooled over by every adult they
encounter? Nellie, in the
space of one week, has learned to simper.
Oh, Lord.
---------------------------------------
At the entrance plaza to the Summer Palace we were approached by a man of
about sixty, shabbily but cleanly dressed, who asked, in perfectly clear
and grammatical English, if we wanted a guide. I thanked him and said we did not. He bowed diffidently and wandered away. From the style of his English a style I have often heard
in China I would guess that he learned the language in his youth,
probably for some academic purpose. He
had the bearing and manners of an intellectual.
Supposing him to have been born in 1940, he would have been 9 when
the Communists came to power, 17 in the "anti-rightist" purges,
19 to 21 during the terrible Mao famine, 26 when the Great Cultural
Revolution broke out. He was,
in short, of that generation whose lives had been comprehensively wrecked
by the communists. Probably
he had made it as far as college graduation, had a year or two of suitable
employment, then been sent down to the countryside to shovel manure for a
decade, being "rehabilitated" too late in life to get a decent
job. Later, walking round the
lakeside in the shade of the trees (the loveliest long walk in Beijing), I
wished I had hired him. He
might, of course, have turned out to be a bore, a crank or a con man, but
most likely he had some stories to tell.
If you are visiting the Summer Palace and this old boy comes up to
you, please hire him. Pay him
what he asks, then tip him extravagantly and send me the bill, care of National
Review.
---------------------------------------
Dinner-table talk with Uncle and Aunt.
Uncle is a native Beijinger; Aunt, Rosie's mother's younger sister,
is, like all Rosie's family, from the north-east (which nobody in China ever
calls "Manchuria"). Uncle
says Beijing has been overrun by immigrants from other provinces looking
for work. At first they work
very willingly for anyone that will hire them, for any wages they can get. Then, when they wise up and realise how much higher living
standards are in the capital compared to what they have known out in the
sticks, they become resentful and difficult.
The city couldn't cope without them, though (here it starts to
sound like a discussion of U.S. immigration).
Each province or region develops its own employment niche.
The Zhejiang people are good at petty street commerce, Henan people
make the best construction workers, and so on.
"How about us north-easterners?" asks Rosie.
Uncle laughs. "Their
specialty is crime."
---------------------------------------
Tiny things that I love about
China:
The way a Chinese girl emits a little "Eh!" of surprise
when she turns round and realizes she has been standing on line next to a
foreigner. Also, the way she
drops her eyes and puts a hand over her mouth when you make her laugh.
Also ... this is going
to need a whole column to itself, though.
In fact, it needs a book ... which, now I come to think of it, I
have already written. But
enough of these personal obsessions.
---------------------------------------
If you have time to see only one of the sights in Beijing, see the Temple
of Heaven (Tian Tan) complex.
Whenever I come here, the beauty and harmony of the place soothe my
soul and ease my spirit. Tian
Tan has, in fact, tremendous spiritual gravitas, the way the old
European cathedrals do, and is, by Chinese standards, surprisingly
unspoiled. Get there early,
before the tour buses arrive, and just soak it in.
The Temple complex was part of the great burst of building activity
that took place during the reign of the YongLe Emperor in the early 15th
century. That was the Ming
dynasty, the last truly Chinese dynasty, and the last one to restrict its
administrative ambitions to those territories actually inhabited by
Chinese people. It was
followed by the perfectly uncreative Manchu dynasty, a Siberian tribe who
never had an original idea between the lot of them, and who extended the
bounds of their realm far beyond metropolitan China, thus establishing the
rickety, resentful empire the communists still insist on calling
"China" today. And
even here, in the Temple complex, a place that ought to be kept holy and
pristine, the communists have left their thuggish mark.
To the west of the Good Harvest Temple I came across a large
display of flowers in pots. The flowers had been arranged to show, against a red
background, a lurid yellow hammer and sickle, and the legend: "1921-2001". These
vandals; these brutish, ignorant vandals.
---------------------------------------
Phrases you will hear often in a
modern Chinese city. I went to the Bank of China
to change some traveller's checks. Uh-oh:
"Dian-nao huai-le!"
(The computer's down.)
---------------------------------------
To the WangFuJing bookstore to buy books for the kids, in yet another
doomed attempt to get some Chinese into their silly heads. Children's books? Third
floor. Coming off the
escalator on three, we were confronted with a row of giant portrait
posters hung from the ceiling. Left
to right: Marx, Engels,
Lenin, Stalin, Sun Yat-sen, Mao Tse-tung, Liu Shao-chi, Chou En-lai, Chu
Teh, Deng Xiao-ping. The
first time I came to this bookstore, in 1983, there was a similar display,
but only showing the first four of these worthies (called "the four
beards" by the Chinese, whose language does not distinguish between a
beard and a mustache). In a jokey mood, and desperate to get rid of my last Chinese
currency (perfectly nonconvertible at that time) I actually bought one of
each and took them home with me to England, where they later got lost in a
move. Eighteen years later,
those four look exactly the same, and the pantheon has grown.
---------------------------------------
Daytime TV in China. The 25
cable channels I checked at a random time between 9:30 and 10:00 on a
Friday morning were showing the following.
- An MTV-type show with
music videos.
- A "product
placement" interview program.
- More music videos
(Chinese pop is terrible).
- Golf, with English
commentary.
- A soap opera set in
the military.
- A family soap.
- An old movie about the
revolution.
- One of those Busby
Berkeley dry-ice spectaculars advertising the CCP.
- Financial news.
- An old black and white
movie from the 1950s, cloaks & daggers in pre-revolutionary
Shanghai, struggles of the early Party.
- A program about
jewels.
- A modern propaganda
movie, the Party saves the day down on the farm.
- Health program.
- Propaganda show on
behalf of the military.
- Mao movie.
(That is, a movie about the revolution, with an actor playing
the part of Mao. There
are so many of these, it's a whole genre, and a couple of actors seem
to have done nothing else for years but play Mao.
Some of these movies are quite good, though of course the
history is all twisted.)
- Another
Mao movie!
- Highbrow "dramedy"
about urban professionals. No visible politics.
- Lowbrow sitcom, very
slapstick, no politics.
- Soccer, Chinese commentary. The
Chinese, the young men at any rate, are soccer-mad.
In a dinner-table conversation, I mentioned that I had once
lived in Liverpool. "It's
a big port city in north-west England," I added helpfully.
The men all laughed. "We
know that! Liverpool
great soccer team!"
- News.
- Propaganda movie.
- Kids' program.
- Imported soap
(Australian?) dubbed into Chinese.
- Kids' program.
---------------------------------------
This evening, Friday, we boarded the overnight express to Changchun, up in
Manchuria, where Rosie's father and brother live. We ride soft sleeper, which costs as much as the plane but is
far more civilized. The kids
grab the top two bunks and have the time of their lives up there throwing
pillows and duvets around. Their
entire experience of rail travel to date has been the Long Island Railroad
commuter train they have never seen a compartment locomotive.
This is the high point of the trip for them so far:
"Are we really going to sleep here?
Really?" ...
except that there is no one in the compartment to coo over them, Mom and
Dad being way past the cooing stage.
The lie-zhang (woman in charge of this carriage) does her
best on her occasional calls to see if we need anything, but she is too
young to coo properly. Chinese trains are far more pleasant than they were 20 years
ago. The lie-zhang
always used to be a dragon, hired (apparently) for her pinched, suspicious
face, sour nature, and more-than-my-job's-worth refusal to contemplate
stepping outside the rules by even a millimeter.
On one memorable occasion in 1986, Rosie and I, recently married,
were riding soft-sleeper together in a carriage whose lie-zhang had
it fixed in her mind that I was, in fact, engaged in violating
some Chinese equivalent of the Mann Act. Our wedding certificate failed to convince her, and she
actually put a radio-phone call through from the moving train to the Civil
Affairs office we had got married in, a hundred miles away. By pleasant contrast, this new breed of lie-zhang is
pretty, dressed in a smart flight-attendant style uniform, smiles, asks
politely to see our tickets and passports, and actually seems not to
mind us being on her train! No
doubt about it, China has improved.
---------------------------------------
Changchun, Northeast China:
July 7th to 13th
---------------------------------------
The high point of our first day in the Northeast was a visit to pay our
respects to Taiye (pronounced "tie-yeah").
The literal meaning of "Taiye" is "Ultimate
Grandpa". Our particular
Taiye is Rosie's father's father, progenitor of the whole paternal side of
Rosie's family, which now numbers 34.
Taiye was born in the lunar year called yi shi in the old
style, most of which fell in our year 1905.
By the old Chinese reckoning, according to which you are one year
old at birth and two when your first lunar New Year comes around, he is
97, and that is how he was advertised to me.
However, Taiye first saw light of day on the third day of the
twelfth lunar month, which means most likely in the early days of 1906, so
by our numbering he is probably a mere 95 years old.
We found him sitting on his bed he has had much difficulty
walking this last couple of years, though he was riding a bicycle well
into his nineties. Still a
thickset ox of a man, he is perfectly bald and has a plump red face
glowing with qi the vital force in traditional Chinese
physiology (pronounced "chee").
He looked, in fact, exactly like Shouxing Lao, the old man with the
bulbous forehead you see in collections of Chinese porcelain figurines,
the embodiment of longevity. Though
somewhat deaf, Taiye is clear-headed and reads his newspaper every day.
He invited me to quiz him on current affairs.
I asked him who the president of the United States is.
"Bu-shi! Difficult election!"
The British prime minister? "Bu-lai-er!"
Russia? "Pu-ting!"
Then he asked me if Soong
May-ling (Chiang Kai-shek's widow) is still alive.
I said I believed she was, and 102 years old the last time I
checked. People of these very
oldest generations all like to keep careful track of each other.
Taiye has had two wives and ten children survive five boys and
five girls. (Strangely, his
given name in Chinese is "Jiwu", which means "lucky
five".) His second wife
died this last February, in fact, but nobody has told him yet.
Husband and wife had been living apart for some years, since his
physical attentions became too much for her.
In his late eighties he was still insisting on his conjugal rights,
an aspect of the marriage in which his wife had by that time lost all
interest. On one occasion
Taiye broke down the bedroom door she had locked against him. Talk about vital force!
At the dinner table he challenged me to arm wrestle Chinese
style, with the arms straight and unsupported.
I am no gym rat, but I keep myself in shape and am decently strong.
I felt embarrassed to take up the challenge, but the company, all
knowing smiles, insisted. Taiye
beat me in less than ten seconds. The
Ultimate Grandpa.
---------------------------------------
Some dinner-table talk on politics. Taiwan?
Nobody can see what the difficulty is.
"Hong Kong and Macao came back to the Motherland with no
trouble. Why should Taiwan be any different?"
The communists? The late Deng Xiaoping is widely credited with the tremendous
improvements in living standards this past twenty years, but the present
leadership seems to inspire little affection.
The general feeling one gets is of a sort of guarded disgust and
impatience. The thing Chinese
people want above all else is to be a normal country, like Germany or
Australia or Japan. At some
level just below the verbal, even quite unintellectual Chinese people
understand that this dream cannot be fully attained while the communists
hold power. I would not
describe the people I am mixing with here as politically sophisticated,
but they know that certain things are just not right ... which
means there are sound democratic instincts beneath the surface of Chinese
life, waiting to be called into action.
---------------------------------------
No trouble getting some practice at conversational Chinese here.
Just find yourself a city where few foreigners go, seek out a
neighborhood where they never see a non-Chinese face from one year's end
to the next, sit down on one of the stools in the street outside a little
dumpling shop, and wait. In
less than five minutes some bold spirit will take the stool opposite you
and enquire: Nin shi na-guo ren? "What country are you
from?" The remainder of
the interrogation has a pretty standard format.
"Are
you here on business?"
"No,
just a vacation."
"You're
very tall. How tall are you?"
"Hundred
eighty-eight." [I.e.
centimeters.]
"How
old?"
"Thirty-nine." [Like Jack Benny, I stopped counting at thirty-nine.]
"What
kind of work do you do in America?"
"I
work with computers."
"What's
your monthly salary?"
"Hard
to say in Chinese. Living
expenses are totally different."
This
last is a perfectly normal, perfectly polite inquiry. Everybody in China knows how much everybody else makes.
If you don't know, you ask. My
brother-in-law, a high school librarian, makes a thousand yuan a month
(i.e. US$125). I know because
I asked him. His wife makes
the same, helping supervise standards for a construction firm.
Their family income is therefore US$3,000 a year, which puts them
squarely in the middle class by urban Chinese standards.
They have a pleasant airy apartment near the city center, every
electronic gadget you could think of (including a cell phone each) and
plenty of savings. They pay income tax at four per cent. Nor do they work very hard:
my brother-in-law goes in at 8:30, knocks off at 11:30, is expected
back at his desk by 2:30, then leaves for the day at 4!
---------------------------------------
The main drag in Changchun has been re-named.
It is now People's Boulevard.
When I first came here in the early eighties, it was Stalin
Boulevard. This was a bit of
an imposition on the people of Manchuria, who suffered grievously during
the brief Soviet occupation that followed Japan's defeat in 1945.
The Soviets stripped Manchurian industry of such equipment as it
possessed and hauled it all back to Russia, pausing now and then from
their efforts to go on a spree of rape and private looting. Eventually a deal was cut: Stalin withdrew his troops and
Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists took control.
Stalin never liked Mao, whom he thought heterodox.
He preferred Chiang Kai-shek, in spite of the fact that Chiang had
been slaughtering communists for twenty years and routinely referred to
communism as "poison". An
infidel is always less dangerous than a heretic, I guess.
When Chiang departed the Chinese mainland for his exile in Taiwan,
the last person to shake his hand was the Soviet ambassador.
Even after the communists took Manchuria, Stalin supported the
local warlord Gao Gang rather than Mao.
(During the early years of communist rule, Mao had a lot of trouble
with some of his own generals who did not grasp that the warlord period
was over or, to put it more precisely, that one warlord, Mao, was more
cunning and ruthless than the rest of them put together.)
Gao declared Manchuria an autonomous state under Soviet protection
and actually issued his own currency at one point.
He was an old Party war-horse, had in fact been in charge of the
base at Yan-an when Mao arrived there with his battered, exhausted troops
at the end of the Long March. "If
not for me, Mao would be nothing," Gao boasted.
"He came to me a beggar in rags!"
A wiser man would not have said this.
Out-maneuvered at a Party meeting in 1954, Gao disappeared.
The official version is that he committed suicide:
"His last act of anti-Party betrayal," hisses the
communist encyclopedia. It
goes without saying that in the current flood of movies and TV docudramas
about Party "history", inconvenient characters like Gao Gang
(not to mention Mao's wife, and Lin Biao, and Wang Shi-wei, and Zhao
Ziyang and a score of others) have been carefully airbrushed out.
---------------------------------------
Walking the streets of a north Chinese city, you come face to face or
rather nose to nose with one of China's most pressing problems: a lack of water. The
place stinks, and the main reason it stinks is that there is not enough
water to keep the drains flushed. In
some districts of Changchun water is rationed you can only use the
faucets at certain times of the day.
In other parts of north China things are even worse, one hears.
The mighty Yellow River is currently discharging into the ocean ...
nothing at all. Earlier this
year a vast dust storm from the Gobi desert crossed the Pacific and dumped
particulate matter on the U.S.A. Then it crossed the Atlantic and dumped the remainder on
Europe! Nobody seems to know
what to do about this.
---------------------------------------
The two indispensible books to read as background before visiting
Manchuria are H.E.M. James's Long White Mountain and Peter
Fleming's One's Company. James
was an officer in the British Army of India, who took a long sabbatical to
trek round Manchuria in the mid-1880s.
As a companion he took a brother officer, one Lieutenant
Younghusband, who twenty years later (by which time he was a colonel) led
the famous expedition into Tibet. Long
White Mountain is one of the small masterpieces of Victorian travel
writing, full of wry observation and an amused attitude to danger,
truculent natives, and gross physical discomfort.
James was also a keen naturalist, and kept a log of all the
interesting flora and fauna he encountered.
Fleming was of the post-WW1 school of British travel writers, whose
outstanding exponent was Robert Byron (The Road to Oxiana).
Even more detached than a Victorian, even more insouciant towards
local hazards and horrors, Fleming toured Manchuria in 1933, when the
Japanese had occupied the region and set it up as the
"independent" state of Manchukuo.
Fleming was contemptuous of the Japanese, but only because he
thought they were lousy colonialists, who, in their hearts, wished they
had stayed at home. (The
opposite of the British attitude. There
is apparently no Japanese poem equivalent to "Mandalay".)
As well as being informative and opinionated, Fleming is also a very
funny writer.
---------------------------------------
Well, I said I would, so I will. First
Aunt Taiye's eldest daughter herself has three daughters, one set
of twins and a spare (this was in the days before the one-child policy).
The elder two are happily married; the youngest one is divorced.
Divorce is not uncommon in China, but still a bit disgraceful. However, no-one in the family blames the girl.
When I asked my father-in-law why she had got divorced, he
explained in that direct Chinese way:
"The guy was a useless jerk.
He knew how to spend money, but he didn't know how to earn a
living." The girl has
now apparently developed a grudge against all Chinese men.
She wants to marry a foreigner.
("What kind of foreigner?"
I asked, rather nonplussed by all this directness.
"Someone like you," she replied.
I wish I didn't blush so easily.)
Anyway, the family is lobbying me to find an American husband for
her. In vain I have protested that no American man is likely to
marry sight unseen; that to take an animus against all 600 million Chinese
persons of the male persuasion on the basis of one bad instance is
stretching the principle of induction to breaking point; and that being
unable to speak English, the girl is going to face colossal difficulties
living abroad. Their faith in
my powers to conjure up a husband for this woman is total, and I cannot
bear to let them down. So
please, if there are any honest men out there in need of a wife they
cannot communicate with, who possesses no marketable skills and is not
particularly pretty (though a little cosmetic dentistry and a decent hair
stylist would do wonders), but is honest, clean, healthy and good-hearted,
please contact me at National Review.
Especially if you are someone like Derb.
---------------------------------------
Banquet fatigue. Everyone's
being so nice that I hate to say it, but I must:
Chinese hospitality is way over the top.
Arriving Saturday morning, we were given a huge meal at Fourth
Uncle's place where Taiye lives that evening.
Sunday, Father-in-Law threw an even bigger bash for us at a
restaurant: three full tables
in a private room, 28 of the 34 family members present, with karaoke
afterwards. (I sang Edelweiss,
Jingle Bells and a Chinese folk song I learned in my chorister
days. This extravaganza, by
the way "nuts to soup", as Rosie says, at the poshest
restaurant in town, was the family's official jie-feng, the
banquet traditionally given to welcome back travellers who have been long
away from home. It cost 580 yuan, i.e. around US$2.50 a head.)
Monday, the husband of the second of those three daughters hosted
us at another restaurant. Tuesday, First Aunt, at an even more sumptuous place with a
Manchu theme. Tonight, the
husband of the first daughter, at yet another restaurant... It's all very flattering, and I am a big fan of Chinese food;
but there are starting to be moments when I feel I would kill for a
plain cheese sandwich and a slice of apple pie.
There is, I note, a Macdonald's (Mai-dang-lao) in the town.
Perhaps I could slip out...
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