Part 10 (1/2)
”Yes,” I said. ”We can forget about the problems of the past.” Many of my random discussions in small places like Fuling and Yan'an ended like that; the people seemed to feel a need to summarize the relations between China and America, as if this had great bearing on the conversation at hand. Often it was the first time they had spoken with an American, which made our interaction seem like a momentous occasion. I liked that aspect of spending time in remote parts of China-every casual conversation was a major diplomatic event.
I was in the mood to talk, and so I sat on a bench near the park entrance. Within minutes an old man caught sight of me and hurried over. He told me that he was a veteran of Yan'an's Red Army, and he smiled when I said I was American.
”Thank you for helping us in the War of Resistance Against the j.a.panese,” he said. It wasn't the first time I had been thanked for my country's role in World War II. Chongqing cab drivers were particularly fond of expressing their grat.i.tude, and I gave the old man the same response I always gave the cabbies.
”Mei guanxi,” I said. ”No problem.”
By now a small crowd had gathered, curious to see the waiguoren waiguoren. I began to talk with a student from Xi'an's Communications University, who explained that she had come because she was interested in the early years of Chinese Communism. I asked her what would have happened if the revolutionaries had failed.
”Today there would be no Communist Party,” she said.
”What if there were no Communist Party?”
”China would be different?”
”How?”
”It would be like Taiwan,” she said. ”Like America.”
”What are those places like?”
”The economy is developed, but-” and now she s.h.i.+fted from Chinese into faltering English, because it was a phrase she remembered from her studies-”but the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
”What about the new economic policies-do you agree with Reform and Opening?”
”Of course. All of us agree with that.”
”But what about the gap between the rich and the poor? Doesn't it get bigger?”
”Some people will get rich,” she said, ”like scientists and businessmen. But this is necessary to develop the economy, and although others will improve more slowly, they will improve.”
We talked for a few minutes longer. She asked if it was true that most Americans didn't understand China, and I agreed. I said nothing about the challenge of understanding a country in which one heard theories of trickle-down Capitalist economics in front of the enshrined cave homes of Marxist revolutionaries. On my way out of the museum, I pa.s.sed rows of souvenir stands, where they sold Mao pendants, Communist Party history books, fake jade, cloth hangings, necklaces, statues, bracelets, stamps, cymbals, drums, gourmet rice. A commemorative Hong Kong Returns coin set was 320 yuan. The hawkers shouted out to me as I left.
THAT EVENING policemen burst into my hotel room after midnight. It was a cheap hotel near the train station, and I was fast asleep when the cops came in. policemen burst into my hotel room after midnight. It was a cheap hotel near the train station, and I was fast asleep when the cops came in.
There was no warning. I had locked the door but the policemen got a key from one of the workers, and they entered and turned on the light. By the time I sat up, five officers were crowding around my bed, and I was terrified.
”What's the problem? What's the problem?” I asked the question again and again, but they simply stared at me. ”What's the problem? What's the problem?” They listened and stared, and finally one of them spoke.
”We want to see your pa.s.sport,” he said.
Trembling, I took out my money belt and gave him the pa.s.sport. He opened it and looked at the photograph on the first page. Then slowly he gazed at the second page. There was nothing on that page except the colorful designs of the pa.s.sport paper, and the other policemen crowded around to look. The cop turned to the third page, also emptily full of color, and they stared at that as well.
My head was starting to clear and now I saw how young-looking they were-little more than scrawny boys in baggy uniforms. They gazed at me shyly. I showed them the pa.s.sport page with the Chinese visa and they liked that, because they could read it. They flipped through the rest of the pages and then handed it back, smiling.
”Is everything okay?” I asked.
”Yes,” said one of them. But still they stood there staring at me in bed. There was a long silence.
”Well,” I said, ”I'm tired. I think I will go to sleep now. Thank you very much.”
”Thank you,” all of them said at once. They took a long last look at me before they walked out. I locked the door behind them and went back to sleep.
THERE WAS NO GOOD REASON TO GO to Yulin and it took ten hours to get there. None of the guidebooks said much about it, except that to Yulin and it took ten hours to get there. None of the guidebooks said much about it, except that waiguoren waiguoren were restricted to staying in two expensive hotels. Yulin was a small town at the very northern tip of Shaanxi province, right near the border of Inner Mongolia, which was why I decided to go. were restricted to staying in two expensive hotels. Yulin was a small town at the very northern tip of Shaanxi province, right near the border of Inner Mongolia, which was why I decided to go.
North of Yan'an the countryside grew even more desolate, rising through narrow canyons filled with cave dwellings. The river alongside the road died to a trickle, and in the burning heat all life was centered around that frail stream of water: peasants toting buckets, women was.h.i.+ng clothes, boys swimming naked in shallow green pools. There were crop terraces high above the river, decorated with dusty signs: Control the Population, Improve the Population Quality. Having people here at all said a great deal about China, and it said far more that even in this G.o.dforsaken place their population was controlled.
After five hours I had seen enough. It was a brutally hot, dusty day, and the road was under construction, and the broken-down bus was crowded. But there was nothing to do except stick it out. Virtually every bus trip I took in China seemed to reach that point-all of them were exactly twice as long as I was willing to bear. And I knew that I would have to come back the same way, and that in Yulin I would undoubtedly pay a ridiculous price to stay in a three-star waiguoren waiguoren hotel, and I wished I hadn't come. hotel, and I wished I hadn't come.
I arrived just after sunset and saw a cheap hotel next to the bus station. My guidebook said that it was restricted to Chinese, but I figured there was nothing to lose by trying. The worker stared at me in surprise when I walked in. Frantically she waved and gestured me back toward the door, her eyes wide and silent as if she had been struck dumb.
”I can speak Chinese,” I said, and the shock of hearing this made her eyes widen even further. Finally she recovered enough to ask what I wanted.
”I want to stay at this hotel.”
”Waiguoren can't stay here,” she said. ”You have to go to a different hotel.” But she was still too shocked to be rude, the way most workers were when they were set against giving you something. This gave me an idea. can't stay here,” she said. ”You have to go to a different hotel.” But she was still too shocked to be rude, the way most workers were when they were set against giving you something. This gave me an idea.
”They've changed that rule,” I said. ”Waiguoren can stay in the same places as Chinese now.” can stay in the same places as Chinese now.”
Her eyes narrowed but she was still listening. I took some of my Chinese textbook's vocabulary and ran with it. ”The National People's Congress changed the law,” I said. ”In Beijing they just changed it. Haven't you heard? At least it's changed if you're a teacher. Foreign teachers can stay in Chinese hotels, because we live in China and our salaries are the same as Chinese. See-here's my danwei danwei card.” card.”
I gave her my red work unit card, my light green foreign resident card, my dark green foreign expert card, and my blue pa.s.sport. The cards made a colorful pile and the worker leafed through them slowly, awed and overwhelmed. The Chinese have a weakness for official doc.u.ments, and they often liked staring at the black-and-white foreign devil pictures on my identification cards. She gazed at them carefully, one by one, and then she gave me a registration slip for a two-dollar room. For the rest of the summer, I always referred to the National People's Congress when all else failed, and this turned out to be a remarkably effective tactic. Finally I saw the point of all the political jargon that I had memorized in cla.s.s.
The next morning I caught a taxi north of Yulin, where the Great Wall ran through the desert. Tourists rarely came to see the wall here, because it was unrestored and the northern Shaanxi roads were so bad. There was no mention of the wall in my guidebook, but I had a Chinese map of the province which marked the ruins clearly.
The cabbie took me to a big Ming Dynasty fort that stood five miles outside of town, where Yulin's irrigated fields ended and the desert began. From the fort's highest tower the view stretched northward for miles. Occasionally the barrenness was punctuated by a slice of green where water had found its way-a stand of trees, a lonely field-but mostly it was just sand and low brown hills and a vast thoughtless sky. At nine in the morning the sun was already hot. I looked out at the empty landscape, at the hard low line of the horizon, and I realized why they had built the wall here. Even if there had been no Mongol threat, the terror of the land's monotony would be enough to make you build something.
The wall ran east and west from the fort. Westward it continued to its final stopping point at Jiayu Pa.s.s, in the mountains of northern Gansu province. Eastward the ruins ran to Zhonghai Pa.s.s, at the sh.o.r.e of the Yellow Sea. All told the distance between these two endpoints was probably more than fifteen hundred miles, and Yulin was somewhere roughly in the middle; but the wall had never been fully surveyed and n.o.body knew the exact length. I stood there at the desert fort, looking out at the heat waves s.h.i.+mmering above the sandy hills, and I decided to go toward the ocean. I tightened my boots and walked east along the ruins.
Most of the wall was just a three-foot-high ridge of packed earth that had been worn down by the wind and sand. Every two hundred yards or so I pa.s.sed the ruins of a signal tower-a crumbling twenty-foot-high pile of dirt standing uselessly under the burning sun. I followed the wall through a brick factory, and then it swung across an irrigation ca.n.a.l and through a cornfield. A mound of sand swallowed the ridge, and I skirted the dune until I saw the next tower rising in the distance. A field of poplars had been planted nearby, the trees thin and brittle-looking under the Shaanxi sun. The Great Wall sank to a foot-high mound, and beyond that the lone and level sands stretched far away.
It was a ragged, patchwork landscape, and the green swaths of corn and cl.u.s.ters of poplars spoke of hard work that, in the face of the dunes and the dead brown horizon, appeared likely to be wasted. Likewise the ruined wall was a testimony to another sort of wastefulness, because the Ming rulers had built the fortification against outsiders who would have been better handled through diplomacy. And the size of the thing-both its pathetic smallness and its amazing bigness; the fact that I could step across it easily and the fact that it stretched for fifteen hundred miles-all of that showed how far the Chinese could go with a bad idea.
But it also seemed very Chinese that despite its original failure the wall now had great value. It had become perhaps the most powerful symbol of national pride, and n.o.body connected it with negative qualities like isolationism and stubbornness. Television stations often showed a music video that had been filmed on the Great Wall; the song was called ”Love My China,” and it celebrated the nation's fifty-five minorities and the happiness they enjoyed in the People's Republic. ”Love My China” was a miserable, cloying song, but like so many of the bad music programs on television it had a sort of fatal attraction-I always watched it to the bitter end. The song's conclusion featured representative minorities dancing on the Great Wall, dressed in traditional costumes as they sang about how much they loved their China. Every time I watched it, I thought: Your China built that wall to keep you people out.
It seemed there was always something of this sort on television-at virtually any hour of the day you could find a channel that was focusing on some happy minority, usually the Tibetans. This kind of entertainment struck me as uniquely hypocritical, at least until the next year when I returned home from China and tutored at a public elementary school in Missouri, where the children celebrated Thanksgiving with traditional stories about the wonderful friends.h.i.+p between the Pilgrims and the Indians. I realized that these myths were a sort of link between America and China-both countries were arrogant enough to twist some of their greatest failures into sources of pride. And now that I thought about it, I remembered seeing Indians dance more than a few times on American television.
But just like Thanksgiving, the Great Wall had outgrown its original significance and now it simply meant greatness. Much of what was commonly written about it was false-that it was two thousand years old, that it could be seen from s.p.a.ce-but the facts didn't matter. Even as a metaphor for Chinese isolationism it had lost its force, because every foreign dignitary was taken to view the Great Wall near Beijing, and every waiguoren waiguoren tourist visited it. It was a major attraction of the new open China, a bridge rather than a wall, and it allowed the Chinese to introduce outsiders to the glories of their country in a single awe-inspiring vista. Rather than keeping the barbarians out, it ensured that after arrival they viewed China with a certain respect, and thus its construction hadn't really been a waste. It had taken an extra five hundred years, but finally the Chinese had made something useful out of the Great Wall. And in the same way I knew that the hard-fought patches of corn among these sand dunes weren't wasted; somehow they would survive. tourist visited it. It was a major attraction of the new open China, a bridge rather than a wall, and it allowed the Chinese to introduce outsiders to the glories of their country in a single awe-inspiring vista. Rather than keeping the barbarians out, it ensured that after arrival they viewed China with a certain respect, and thus its construction hadn't really been a waste. It had taken an extra five hundred years, but finally the Chinese had made something useful out of the Great Wall. And in the same way I knew that the hard-fought patches of corn among these sand dunes weren't wasted; somehow they would survive.
I followed the wall east for nearly an hour. Sometimes I walked on top and the dirt crumbled beneath my feet. I pa.s.sed another group of poplars, startling a pheasant that crashed away through the underbrush. Lizards skittered across the sand. I ran out of water and then I walked back to the fort.
IT WAS IN YULIN that I first realized my Chinese life had turned a corner. It had never been easy to live as a that I first realized my Chinese life had turned a corner. It had never been easy to live as a waiguoren waiguoren in a place like Fuling, where the pressures could be exhausting-the stifling attention, the constant mocking shouts, the ongoing struggle of establis.h.i.+ng what a foreigner could and couldn't do. But there was also another side to these ha.s.sles, because the Chinese were fascinated by in a place like Fuling, where the pressures could be exhausting-the stifling attention, the constant mocking shouts, the ongoing struggle of establis.h.i.+ng what a foreigner could and couldn't do. But there was also another side to these ha.s.sles, because the Chinese were fascinated by waiguoren waiguoren and once a conversation started they tended to treat me much better than the average person. It was very different from America, where you wouldn't shout at somebody just because he looked strange, but at the same time you probably wouldn't go out of your way to talk with him or show him kindness. and once a conversation started they tended to treat me much better than the average person. It was very different from America, where you wouldn't shout at somebody just because he looked strange, but at the same time you probably wouldn't go out of your way to talk with him or show him kindness.