Those tiny feet are interesting. In another chapter, Hsi-men is beguiled by the sight of another woman's bound feet—the so-called "lily-feet."
Old woman Hsueh found an opportunity to lift Mistress Meng's skirt slightly, displaying her exquisite feet, three inches long and no wider than a thumb...
I mention this because after we left Shandong and crossed the Grand Canal (Da Yunhe) we came to the city of Xuzhou (formerly Tong-shan), where I saw an old woman with small, stumpy feet on the platform, and she was walking painfully on these deformities that had once been thought to be so ravishing.
It was at Xuzhou in the yellow light of early morning that I saw the first real greenery since leaving London over a month before—fields of ripening rice, and young trees in leaf by the roadside, and large blowing poplars. It was the flat plain of eastern China, once a conglomeration of communes and now a region of smallholdings—an immensity of vegetables, cabbage as far as the eye could see, with big black pigs balanced neatly on their trotters in the foreground. I saw puddles and streams, and farmers plowing with tractors or bullocks, and people carrying heavy loads with a shoulder pole used as a yoke to carry a pair of baskets; white swimming ducks and fluttering geese, a small girl in a blue tunic sitting astride a buffalo, and field-workers sleeping off their breakfast against an embankment like drunken peasants in a Flemish painting. And there was a dark sow so heavily pregnant her teats grazed the dusty earth of the farmyard as she plodded.
Some rice was already being harvested. China is proud of the fact—as well it should be—that it not only feeds itself but for the first time in its history now exports more grains than it imports (generally speaking it sells rice and buys wheat). All this activity is dramatized by the fact that for the past few years field-workers have begun to wear bright clothes, and so they are highly visible as they hoe and harvest. From time to time, however, the rigid thing you take to be a scarecrow turns out to be a comrade either leaning on his shovel or practicing wushu or t'ai chi with his arms stuck out.
A few hours later the train pulled into Bengbu, a railway junction in the middle of Anhui Province. Our train was needed there for a little while because a movie scene was being shot at Bengbu Station—a young man and woman seeing someone off on our train, probably an irritating relative. A great crowd had gathered to watch the action, and the film crew and the railway police struggled to shift the mob out of the shot. There was no rough stuff. Everyone—even the police—was interested in the movie. There was no pushing, no anger; and I was impressed by the good humor. But unless they had a brilliant editor, I was sure the result would show the two actors waving good-bye, watched by 2000 goggling Chinese.
In any event there was only one take. When the Shanghai Express pulled out of Bengbu, that was the end of the shot.
Then we were in the green fields again. I was sure that the main difference between this visit and my previous one six years before, when I had sailed down the Yangtze, was that before, I had come in the middle of winter, when everything had been bleak. Then, a Chinese landscape seemed to me to be composed of rain, smoke, fog; and collapsing houses on a muddy road; and people with their hands shoved into their sleeves; and all those fat-faced pictures of Mao on the wall. And whenever I asked someone a question the answer was always either "Maybe" or "You think so?"
Spring and a half a dozen years seemed to have made a significant difference. Because China is so intensively agricultural, spring is splendid all over the country. It's impossible to see crops being planted, and weeded, and harvested, and not feel optimistic. The country was greener, leafier, visibly cheerier and more hopeful. It was not an illusion, this new Cycle of Cathay. If people seemed a little impatient it was perhaps because they knew well that in Chinese terms a cycle lasts sixty years. Lynn Pan began her book The New Chinese Revolution, about recent events in China, by describing what a cycle means in Chinese terms, and then she became specific: "In June 1981 the Chinese Communist Party, founded at a secret meeting in Shanghai in 1921, completed its first cycle of sixty and began on its next." It was also in June 1981 that Deng Xiaoping was made Number One (apart from being head of the politburo he has no real title) and opened China's doors—and then the West hurried in. Only a few years had passed, but the result was obvious. Nothing is more conspicuous than something that has been Westernized.
The passengers mobbed the corridors and hogged the windows just after eleven, and when I asked what was up, they said we would be crossing the Yangtze River soon. But they didn't call it that—the word "Yangtze" hardly exists in Chinese—they called it Chang Jiang, The Long River. Crossing it is an event because it is China's equator, the north-south divide. The Chinese in the north are different from the Chinese in the south. In the north, the Chinese say, they are imperious, quarrelsome, rather aloof, political, proud noodle-eaters; and across the river they are talkative, friendly, complacent, dark, sloppy, commercial-minded and materialistic rice-eaters.
The river is wide, sluggish and brown at this point—the city of Nanjing (Nanking). The bridge over the river is a famous landmark because halfway through its construction the Russians pulled out, believing the Chinese could not possibly finish it themselves; but they did, and it remains one of the few modern engineering feats in China that resulted in a structure that is actually pleasing to the eye. Beneath its leaping spans were the Yangtze boats—like a whole history of Chinese riverboats, every style and size, from the sampans and dugouts to the junks and river steamers—these last of the East Is Red fleet that sail the 1500 miles from Chongqing (Chungking) to Shanghai.
I went on reading Jin Ping Mei, marveling at its blend of manners, delicacy and smut. What a shame it was still banned in China after five centuries. Truly, if the Chinese were allowed to read it, I felt, they would discover a great deal about themselves. I did not believe they would be morally undermined by this stuff, and yet it would be a real thrill as well as a revelation.
The proof that it was pornography was its feeble pretense of being a morality tale. After almost 2000 pages of sexual acrobatics—and detailed descriptions of aphrodisiacs, potions, pills, silver clasps, love rings and harnesses—the story ends with the main character, Hsi-men Ch'ing, literally screwing himself to death with the passionate Golden Lotus.
He arrives home too drunk to perform. Golden Lotus is disappointed.
... She played delicately with his weapon, but it was as limp as cotton wool and had not the slightest spirit. She tossed about on the bed, consumed with passionate desire, almost beside herself. She squeezed his prick, moved it up and down, put down her head and sucked. It was in vain. This made her wild beyond description.
She wakes him and gives him a strong aphrodisiac: three pills. "She was afraid that anything less would have no effect." And although he falls asleep again, his penis is erect, and so she mounts him.
... Her body seemed to melt away with delight ... she moved up and down about two hundred times. At first it was difficult because it was dry but soon the love juices flowed and moistened her cunt. Hsi-men Ch'ing let her do everything she wished, but he himself was perfectly inert. She could bear it no longer.... She twisted herself towards his penis which was completely inside her cunt, only his two balls staying outside. She stroked his penis with her hand, and it was wonderfully good. The juices flowed and in a short time she had used up five napkins. Even then Hsi-men kept on, although the tip of his prick was swollen and hotter than a live coal. It was so tight that he asked the woman to take off the ribbon, but his penis remained stiff and he told her to suck. She bent over and with her red lips moved the head of his prick to and fro, and sucked. Suddenly white semen poured out, like living silver, which she took in her mouth and could not swallow fast enough. At first it was just semen, soon it became blood which flowed without stopping. Hsi-men Ch'ing had fainted and his limbs were stiff outstretched.