The ships that were involved in the Boston Tea Party had come from here. The English word tea is Xiamen-dialect Chinese. Xiamen's style of building is found in Canton and also in old Singapore and rural Malaysia—the tall shop-house with an overhang, and the sidewalk running underneath that second story. It is associated with Straits Chinese—the shopkeepers of Southeast Asia. It is not found elsewhere in China. It is practical and pretty, and I cannot think of it without seeing men in flapping pajamas, and women measuring out rice from sacks, and young Chinese girls with soulful faces gazing out of shuttered upstairs windows.
The villas—big stout houses with high ceilings and wraparound verandahs—also resembled the old houses of Singapore and Malaysia that were torn down to make room for the banks and hotels. Until recently they were kept in Xiamen because no one had the money to tear them down or to replace them; but then they were valued for aesthetic and historical reasons, and a preservation order was placed upon them. The new buildings of Xiamen are in a suburb beyond the Causeway, where they belong.
I found it almost impossible to find fault with Xiamen. Because it is in the south, the fruit is wonderful and cheap—all kinds: haws, oranges, tangerines, apples, pears, persimmons, grapes. And because it is on the sea fish and seafood are plentiful and various—all sorts of eels, and big garoupas, and prawns. The best and most expensive were the lobster-sized crayfish. They were kept in tanks in the restaurants—the southern Chinese habit (because of a lack of refrigeration) of keeping food alive until the last moment. In other tanks were frogs, eels, fish, and ducks—and even ducklings. You were invited to point out your proposed entrée, and they cut its throat.
On a back street in Xiamen, at a grubby little restaurant, I saw two cages, one containing a baby owl and the other holding a scowling hawk. There was hardly enough meat on either of them to fill a dumpling. They perched unsteadily, confined by the small cages, and they trembled with anxiety. When I stopped to look at them, a crowd gathered. I asked the owner how much he wanted to make them into a meal. He said 20 yuan for the owl ($5.50) and 15 yuan for the hawk ($4).
"Why not let them go?"
"Because I paid for them," he said.
"But they're unhappy."
His laugh meant You are a fool.
He said, "They taste very nice."
"They are small," I said. "One mouthful and that's it."
"The meat of this bird is very good for your eyes," he said.
"That is not true," I said. "Only savages believe that."
He was offended and angry. His mouth went strange, and he said nothing.
"It's a superstition," I said. "It is old thinking. Like eating rhino horn for your dick. Listen"—he was now turning away—"This bird eats mice. It is helpful. You should let it go."
The man began to hiss at me, a sort of preliminary to blowing up in my face. I had no money. I went back to the hotel and got 35 yuan out of my room, but by the time I walked back to the restaurant, the cages were empty. I had imagined holding a little revival of the festival called The Liberation of Living Creatures, in which birds were released from cages. But I was too late today. The owl and the hawk had been eaten.
As a consolation I went to Xiamen market, bought two mourning doves for about a dollar a bird, and let them go. They flapped over the harbor, past the hooting boats, to the nearby island of Gulangyu. Believing it might be a sign, I followed them the next day.
***
Gulangyu was a small island containing a lovely settlement in which no wheeled vehicles were allowed—no cars, no bicycles, no pushcarts. It was a five-minute free ferry ride across the harbor, and from its highest point—Sunlight Rock—it looked like Florence, or a Spanish city, a tumbled expanse of tiled roofs, all terra-cotta and green trees and church steeples. There were three Christian churches at the center of the settlement: this island had once held only foreigners—Dutch, Portuguese, English, Germans. It was Japanese until the end of the war, and then there were a number of tough battles against the Nationalists, who ultimately took Quemoy, which is quite visible to the northeast.
"Enemy territory?" I asked.
"We are all Chinese brothers," Mr. Wei said.
"Then why the trenches and foxholes?"
The east coast of Xiamen was all military earthworks and gun emplacements.
"Because sometimes they shoot at us," Mr. Wei said.
But I liked old coastal China. It had been influenced by its traders and occupiers, and because of its seagoing communities it was outward looking. The dutiful and pious tycoons who had made millions overseas had obeyed the Confucian precepts and become philanthropic. The houses and schools they built blended with the Romanesque church with its sign, Ecclesia Catholica, and the old German consulate which might have been designed by Joseph Conrad. The philanthropoids had built villas in a section of Gulangyu called Sea View Gardens, and there they lived among foreign compradors and tea merchants and petty consular officials, each on his own colonnaded verandah, under the palm trees.
The building regulations on Gulangyu are unique in China for their fastidiousness. No building may be higher than three stories, all had to be made of red brick and carved stone, and all designs had to be approved by the Architectural Commission. They were good old-world designs, and even the newest buildings—the vegetable market and the museum—were being put up with great care. Restoration work was being carried out on the villas in order to turn them into hotels and guest houses without losing their character. It was odd for the Chinese, so practical and penny pinching, to spend extra time and money to make a thing look right. The magnificent city wall around Peking, with its forty-four bastions and sixteen gates had simply been bulldozed by Mao's goonish philistines, chanting, "Down with the Four Olds! Up with the Four News! New Thinking! New Customs! New Habits! New—!" In this same spirit, two miles of the Great Wall were pulled down between 1970 and 1974 by an army unit at Gubeikou; the ancient stone blocks of the wall were used to build army barracks.
But this vandalism of China's recent past did not extend to Gulangyu except in the form of big-character graffiti (Long Live the Thoughts of Mao Zedong! was still legible in two-foot characters on the walls of a villa) and in selective desecration. The Catholic church was turned into a factory, hate meetings were held in the Protestant ("Three-in-One") church, and the Buddha statues were smashed in the temples—a quarter of Xiamen is Buddhist.
I asked Mr. Wei the reason for the meticulous restoration of Gulangyu.
"Because the government wants to turn this into a tourist island," he said. He also said that he was relieved that the government had not decided to tear the place down, as they had so much else.
We were walking towards Sunlight Rock and ran into a junkman on a back street. He was a fat boy with a pole across his shoulders, carrying loads of wastepaper. I stopped him, and because his dialect was incomprehensible to me, Mr. Wei helped me quiz him.
The boy said that if the wastepaper was good quality, like old, neatly stacked newspapers, he would pay 50 fen for one kilo—about 6 cents a pound. That seemed to me pretty fair. But for other paper he paid less than a penny a pound.
How was business?
"No good," he said. "This is hard work for very little money."
Off he went, his pole bouncing from the weight of the wastepaper bundles.
"Why are you so interested in the Cultural Revolution?" Mr. Wei asked me.
"Because it influenced me at the time—twenty years ago when I was in Africa," I said. "I thought of myself as a revolutionary."
Mr. Wei smiled. He was twenty-one. His father was my age.
I said, "What did your father do during the Cultural Revolution?"