"He just stayed in the house."
"For how long?"
"Six or seven years."
We climbed to the top of Sunlight Rock. In 1982, at the age of seventy-eight, the chain-smoking Mr. Deng Xiaoping climbed to this summit. He was followed by a flunky with an oxygen bottle, but he didn't need it.
Looking across the harbor to Xiamen city I could see how the areas of light industry and banking had expanded westward. This was said to be one of the busiest boomtowns in China. Once upon a time they made paper umbrellas and firecrackers and chopsticks for export. These days they manufactured bicycles, toys, Camel cigarettes, and microchips. And the Kodak Company was installing a filmmaking plant at great expense.
The harbor was full of freighters and fishing boats. Beyond it, in the lanes and streets, there were stalls—people selling fried noodles, fruit, sweets, vegetables, fish soup. One of the happiest pastimes of people in south China is eating out—at greasy little restaurants or at stalls—by lantern light. I could not forgive them for stuffing rare birds into their mouths, but very few had the money for such delicacies. They were great noodle eaters, and because of the pleasant climate, they liked milling around the town and eating when the mood took them, a habit they had exported to Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia.
Xiamen was the only place in China were I was repeatedly accosted by pretty girls. They sneaked up behind me and snatched my arm. "Shansh marnie?" they said, and pinched me delightfully and held on. Was that all they wanted?
They were good-tempered people, but always in a flap. Inevitably there are squabbles among the Chinese, who live on top of each other. It is surprising that fighting is not more frequent. Fistfights are rare. Often children are beaten, and hit very hard. But the most common mode of conflict is the screaming out-of-hand row—two people screeching at each other, face to face. They are long and loud, and they attract large crowds of spectators. For face-saving reasons such disputes can only be resolved by a third party, and until that person enters the fray, the two squabblers go on shrieking.
I witnessed a barracking like this in Xiamen one day. All tourist sites have so-called Viewing Places, where the Chinese visitor is obliged to go—otherwise the trip is futile. The ritual element in tourism is carefully observed. In Xiamen there were the Eight Major Views, the Eight Minor Views and the Views Outside Views. It is customary to have your picture taken on the spot, and since few Chinese can afford to buy cameras, professional photographers stand around these Viewing Places and offer their services for one yuan a shot. The shouting match I saw was between one of these photographers and his dissatisfied customers.
Mr. Wei translated the screams. At first they were all about money—a man and wife claiming that the photographer had put the price up after they had agreed on a lower one. But for face-saving reasons, the screaming became more general and hysterical. It wasn't an argument. It was a random howling—everyone at once, the couple, the photographer and then the onlookers joined in. It started at the Viewing Place, moved down the path, flowed behind a rock and then continued in a shed. It was extremely loud and went on without a break, a remarkable torrent of abuse and exclamation.
"First we're told it's one kuai, and then the thief changes it to two!"
"I'm not speaking to anyone until the unit leader comes. But I've never been so insulted—"
"Someone get the unit leader!"
"This is ridiculous! All these people are liars!"
"We're being cheated!"
"Thieves—!"
They were almost certainly tourists, Mr. Wei said. He could tell from their northern accent. Shanxi, he thought. He was whispering, "The woman says that they are thieves. The man is saying liars. There is a child in the shed. The photographer is banging the table with his fist—"
Then there was a greater commotion and the child began to scream. Someone was howling at the child. Then everyone was howling at once.
"What happened, Mr. Wei?"
"The child cursed the worker."
"What did he say?"
"He called him a wang ba—a tortoise," Mr. Wei said, with some reluctance.
"Is that bad?"
"Yes. Very. If a wife sleeps with other men her husband is called a tortoise."
"Is that expression used all over China?"
"No. Mainly in the north. Northerners are very tough. North of the Chang Jiang they are loud and muscular. They use violent language. That's why the demonstrations in the north were large and noisy. But we are thin and small and very gentle. We don't use such language, calling someone a 'tortoise' because he overcharges you."
The screaming match was still in full cry fifteen minutes after it had started. I got bored and went away. Mr. Wei said he found it distasteful having to translate this abuse for me, but I told him I had to know these things in order to understand China. And I explained that our version of a tortoise is a cuckold, which (coming from cuckoo) is a more logical word. Female tortoises, I told him, are not great copulators. They only need one screw and they are able to lay fertile eggs for years!
"You are interested in arguments and also interested in biology."
"I'm interested in everything, Mr. Wei."
"In China we specialize in knowledge. One person studies agriculture, and another does engineering."
He went on in this vein until, soon after, we saw a child being beaten by its mother in a yard. I was riveted by it. The child was smacked so thoroughly that he became hysterical and could not be calmed. He went around hitting his mother and wetting himself and howling. He was about seven years old. The usual Chinese reaction to someone in distress is laughter, and soon Mr. Wei and the others watching began to find the tormented child an object of amusement.
Xiamen gave me vivid dreams, but the dreams were not of Xiamen or its ghosts—Marco Polo, foreign traders, Manichaeans, missionaries, pirates, or the compradors of old Amoy. I dreamed of home in one, and of Tadzhiks in another (was it a coincidence that the Tadzhiks were the only Indo-Europeans among China's minorities?). I dreamed of Ronald Reagan again. That was a lulu. The president appeared from behind a tree on the banks of the Potomac. He did a silly walk, waggling his legs, and said, "Come along to the picnic. You can do the cleaning up—okay, Paul?"
I slapped him on the back and said, "Wait till I tell my mother I'm cleaning up the White House!"
This annoyed him, because I deliberately twisted his words. He yelled at me, "It's a picnic!"
A few nights later I dreamed of walking through the ravines that I had seen earlier that week in the hills of Fujian. I was captured by some Mongolian-looking men who were led by a small and very fierce woman. They all had curved knives that they kept jabbing into me, as if impatient to kill me.
"Empty your bag!" the woman shrieked.
Only then did I realize that I had a bag and that I was carrying some little antique statues that I had bought in a Chinese market.
"Show your certificate!"
"Here," I said, finding a piece of paper in my bag. It was the wrong certificate, but I thought: The Gurkhas will save me.
The woman read my mind and replied, "We are the Gurkhas!"
That was probably more a nightmare of buying trinkets illegally than a nightmare of traveling on the open road in China and encountering strangers—nothing was safer than that, judging from my experience of traipsing up and down in China.
The wonderful market in Xiamen, and the dry-goods stores under the shop-houses, reminded me that the best buys in China are not in the souvenir shops and the Friendship Stores—not jade carvings, cork sculpture, ivory letter openers, stuffed pandas, turquoise jewelry, cloisonné, brassware, plastic chopsticks, lacquerware, bone bracelets, or the really dull and derivative paintings on scrolls. If I were to recommend anything special in China that was a bargain—good quality, one of a kind, worth bringing home—I would say: socket wrenches, screwdrivers, watercolor paints and brushes, pencils, calligraphy, sturdy brown envelopes, padlocks, plumber's tools, wicker baskets, espadrilles, T-shirts, cashmere sweaters, bonsai trees, silk carpets and silk cushion covers, tablecloths, terra-cotta pots, thermos jugs, illustrated art books, herbs, spices, and tea by the pound. Bamboo bird cages are also lovely, though the thought of keeping a bird in them is depressing. China may also be the only country in the world where you can buy a cricket cage—made either of a gourd or of porcelain.