In any kind of travel there is a good argument for going back and verifying your impressions. Perhaps you were a little hasty in judging the place? Perhaps you saw it in a good month? Something in the weather might have sweetened your disposition? In any case, travel is frequently a matter of seizing a moment. It is personal. Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine. Our accounts of the journeys would be different. You would notice how I provoked people with questions, and how I loitered in the market, and my fear of Chinese water that amounted almost to hydrophobia. I might mention your impatience, or your liking for dumplings, or the way you wilted in the heat. You would write about the kinds of Chinese food, and I about the way they wolfed it. If you spoke about Mao, I would contradict you.
On a second visit to Shanghai I was startled by its crowds and traffic—people and cars vying for the right of way; and by its contrasts of horror and beauty; and by its neurotic energy, a sort of frenzy that was unique to Shanghai.
The Shanghainese have a sense of belonging to the city that resembles the New Yorker's strong identification with New York. It is not chauvinism or civic pride. It is a sense of shared experience, the same headaches and complaints, a sort of it's-awful-but-I-love-it attitude. It is also a sense of being possessed by the place, locked in its embrace and embattled at the same time. Speaking as someone from out of town, I find both Shanghai and New York pretty dreadful. The noise alone is cause enough to regard them as uninhabitable. I grew up in the big-enough city of Boston, and when people talk about New York's (or Shanghai's) vitality, I simply see a lot of frantic pedestrians. And writers who celebrate cities always seem laughable to me, because every city dweller, in order to keep sane and survive, invents his own city. Your New York is not my New York. On the other hand, my Shanghai would probably be yours. It is simple but dense; it is horizontal; and it has remarkably few landmarks. New York is vertical, a city of interiors—and secrets; but Shanghai is its streets. There is not enough room for so many people indoors, and so people work, talk, cook, play and carry on their businesses on the sidewalks. There is no other way for the city to cope with its overpopulation. It is the most visible and obvious of cities, and perhaps therein lies its charm for those who praise it: that its modes of life and work are so apparent to even the casual stroller. There is also a strong sense of old China in the sidewalk life, and such sights seem to give it "atmosphere." But I would rather live in a place where I could walk without incessantly bumping into people, or dodging traffic, or where I could hear myself think.
But the sense of urban solidarity that characterizes Shanghai had a marked effect on the student demonstrations. It was the only city where factory workers linked arms with students. And the numbers were so great (they varied from 100,000 to 200,000) that the city came to a halt—no buses, no taxis, and no one was able to work.
I went out to Fudan University on the outskirts—and wretched-looking outskirts at that—where I talked with students about the demonstrations.
One student told me, "We held meetings, but we wanted to disassociate ourself from the Party, so we insisted that student cadres had to leave the hall. These cadres are appointed by the Party—we didn't want them."
"Did the cadres join the march?"
"No," the student said. "We put their names on our posters, but we printed their names upside down or in slanted characters."
"What was the point of that?"
"It is disrespectful to print someone's name upside down."
True, a Chinese person's name is everything to him. It represents himself, his parents, his extended family and even his village. The worst, most insulting curse anyone can utter in China against a Chinese person is Cao ni de xing! "Fuck your name!"
The student said that the term running dogs was used in the demonstrations, for the first time since the Cultural Revolution. And big-character posters were another artifact from that time that had been pressed into service, but they now read More Freedom and We Want Democracy. Rising prices, low salaries, poor public transportation, byzantine election procedures, and difficult rules governing studying abroad were other grievances.
I carefully noted these down, and then a young man named Mr. Hong said, "You know about the Jan and Dean concert?"
Jan and Dean? "Baby Talk," "Surf City" and "Ride the Wild Surf"? The early sixties, Southern California, totally tubular surfer duo? That Jan and Dean? I had been under the impression that after Jan wrapped his car around a tree in 1966, suffering paralysis and brain damage, this group was no longer operational.
But I was wrong. This American group, which outdated the Beach Boys (who were their sometime collaborators), had undergone a recrudescence and were yapping to beat the band, actually singing "Surf City" in Shanghai, twenty-nine years after they had released their first record. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. After all, Mr. Tian had sung me a Neil Sedaka song in the Langxiang wilderness only a month before.
Mr. Hong said, "We liked Jan and Dean very much. The students were excited. Jan and Dean invited some students onto the stage to dance. They were dancing and enjoying themselves. But afterwards those students were accused by the police of being disruptive."
"What happened to them?"
"They were taken into custody. They were beaten."
This also fueled the students' enthusiasm for a demonstration. But there was a feeling that the students had been led into a trap, since the conservatives used the demonstrations as an excuse to call for a limiting of the reforms.
Everyone agreed that what was happening in China indicated a power struggle in the inner Party, between the reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping and the eight or ten so-called leftists, who were antireformers, led by Peng Zhen (chairman of the National People's Congress). In spite of his dogmatic Maoist views, Peng had never been purged. These puritanical old troopers, many of whom had shared the privations of the Long March, were outraged by students who were making demands. Their American counterparts might be the VFW, who also hated student protests. The problem was that there were also people in the inner Party who were pushing harder for reform.
I paid a call on Mr. Brooks, the American consul-general, who had impressed me so much a few months before by telling me that he didn't have the slightest idea of what would happen next in China.
"The Chinese will go on doing business," he said. "Foreign investors aren't concerned with student demonstrations. What would worry them is a return to Stalinism."
We then talked about Deng's successor. Would it be Hu Yaobang, Deng's bridge partner? Deng himself had indicated this.
Mr. Brooks said that Deng had hoped to step down, but that he wanted to make sure his policies would continue. When Deng went he wanted to take all the doubtful people with him.
"The trouble is," Mr. Brooks said, "Mr. Hu has disappeared from view. A foreign minister told a visiting Japanese delegation, 'He's tired.' In Chinese terms that means he can't do the work."
I listened to the radio that night and heard a news report that Hu Yaobang had been forced to resign after a session of self-criticism in which he said he had "made many mistakes."