A number of these items are made in Xiamen, in the Huli Industrial Area. In more revolutionary times this area was part of a land-reclamation scheme. Mao had said (this was during the early years of the Cultural Revolution), "China must learn to feed itself! People have one mouth but they have two hands!" And so forth. The Red Guards and work gangs decided to build a causeway linking Xiamen to the west side of the harbor, and then to fill in the land behind the causeway and plant rice. But the land was poor and salty. Rice would not grow. And time passed. Now the area is a stronghold of money-making ventures—banks, light industry, factories—as well as the city's new municipal buildings.
There had once been a commune here. There had been agricultural communes all around Xiamen. I had been interested by the ones I had seen elsewhere, by the way they had developed into cooperatives and family farms, so I visited what had been the Cai Tang Commune, in the countryside northwest of Xiamen, to see what had happened.
Walking through the fields at Cai Tang, I came across an ancient grave. Two eight-foot guardian figures, a man and a woman, had been placed at the entrance of the gravesite. This was behind a hill, at the margin of a field of carrots. A bird—perhaps a flycatcher—was flitting back and forth. And buried to their necks were stone animals—a horse, a ram, lions and other broken beasts. There was an altar, too, with carved tablets. It was all unnoticed and it had not been seriously vandalized. In an earlier period a traveler would have taken the figures and crated them and shipped them to the Fogg Museum at Harvard. The tablets said (according to Mr. Wei) that it was a Qing Dynasty grave of the Hu family. And it was so far off the beaten track that no one had disturbed it.
A farmer and his wife were working nearby, hurrying back and forth in the carrot field, each one of them wearing a yoke with a balanced pair of watering cans. A loudspeaker at the far side of the field played a Chinese opera.
"This was once part of the Cai Tang Commune," the man said. "We planted rice, because they wouldn't let us plant anything else. And we listened to the Thoughts of Mao Zedong on that loudspeaker all day."
I had to follow him through the carrot field. He would not stop watering in order to chat. But he said he didn't mind my questions.
"This is my family's land. I never liked the commune idea. I would rather work in my own fields."
"Do you think about freedom to do as you want?"
"Yes. I have more freedom now," he said. "I can plant what I like. They used to say 'Plant rice' whether it was a good idea or not. Know what the trouble was before? Too many officials."
He squelched through the mud to the standpipe, filled his buckets, filled his wife's buckets and off they went again through the plumelike carrot tops.
"You have a healthy crop of carrots," I said.
"These are for pigs," he said. "The price of carrots is low in the market at the moment, so instead of accepting a few fen I'll feed them to my pigs. It makes more sense. I can fatten ten pigs, get them up to a hundred kilos and sell each one for about a hundred yuan. When the price of carrots goes up, I'll sell the carrots at the market."
He was still splashing water and gasping up and down the field.
"This is much better business!" he called back.
From there I went to the eastern part of Xiamen, called "The Front Line" (Qian Xian) because Quemoy (Jinmen), which belongs to Taiwan, is just offshore. The east coast road had been closed for thirty-five years, because of the periodic hostilities, but just recently it was opened. There were trenches, pillboxes and fortifications everywhere, but there was also a lovely beach of palm trees and white sand and dumping surf—and not a soul on it.
I broad jumped a foxhole and made my way through the palms.
"Don't, Mr. Paul! You might get shot!"
Mr. Wei trembled at the edge of the road, calling me back.
"Who would shoot me?"
"The army!"
"Which army?"
"Maybe ours—maybe theirs."
He tried to console me—perhaps one day there would be peace between China and its easternmost province of Taiwan, and then I would be able to swim here. Because the area had been off-limits and dangerous (Quemoy had been bombarded from these gun emplacements in 1958, provoking an international incident), and because of the fear of retaliation that had aroused in the local Chinese, the beach was unspoiled and lovely.
One of the largest buildings in Xiamen was the Workers' Palace. Other Chinese cities had Soviet-inspired community centers like this—they had all been built in the 1950s—but I had never been inside one. Mr. Wei was bewildered by my interest, and he said it might be difficult to get permission to enter. I now knew enough about Chinese bureaucracy to realize that the quickest way to see the Workers' Palace would be to walk in and not bother with permission. It was such a dithering and buck-passing civil service that special requests were almost invariably turned down, while blatant trespassing was seldom challenged.
Once, this Workers' Palace had been all hate films and sessions of political indoctrination. Now the film theater was showing a documentary about the Dunhuang Caves, and the reading room was full of people perusing newspapers and magazines (among them, movie magazines and body-building monthlies); and in the drill hall there was an aerobics class. A dancing class had just ended.
I asked one of the women doing aerobics why she had decided to sign up.
"I do this for health and beauty," she said. "Also I have headaches."
It was in the library of this building that I found a copy of Dong Luoshan's translation of Orwell's 1984. It had been published in Canton in 1985. He had told me it was regarded as neican—circulated only to safe and unexcitable intellectuals. But obviously that was wrong. Anyone in Xiamen could come here and borrow it from the library—I specifically asked the librarian.
"Is it any good?" she asked.
"Excellent. You'll love it."
"I'll take it home with me tonight!"
Another room was lined with electronic games. I wondered whether anyone used them. Mr. Wei said they did, but that no one had spare cash to squander on them. I saw about eight children lurking near the machines and asked them whether they knew how these things worked. They said they did. Would they teach me? I asked. Oh, yes. So I pushed a few coins into these space-invader machines, and the children sprang into action, their fingers flying. They were as expert as any person in America, misspending his youth at the controls of an electronic game.
A young woman had just finished her dancing class and was on her way home when I accosted her. She was Wan Li, a cadre at the economics ministry. She had gone to the Dalian Foreign Language Institute (she hadn't met Cherry Blossom there, unfortunately) but she had been raised in the central Fujian town of Sanming. That town had the reputation in China of being somewhat Utopian. It had been developed by people from all over China, before the Cultural Revolution. Miss Wan claimed that everything that had been said about Sanming was true—no problems, no pollution, perfect integration, a model city.
"Any Tibetans in Sanming?"
"No," Miss Wan said. "They have to stay in Tibet and solve their own problems. But people in Sanming are very civilized. They are from all places. Like the United States!"