"Does everyone in the cooperative get an equal amount of money?" I asked.
"No. Our income is determined by the number of people in our household, and our productivity."
"How do you keep track of productivity?"
"It would take too long to explain."
We went to the mayor's house. He was a sort of figurehead, appointed by the committee. He was not at home, but I was allowed to wander around his house. Two things interested me in his house. He had a number of books—novels, stories, poems—all sorts; not political tracts. And he had old-style Chinese furniture—black wooden chairs and rosewood tables, a carved settee and several elegant cabinets. They were antiques, but they were being used as ordinary household furniture.
Mr. Ma said that the cooperative was especially proud of their hospital. They had built it themselves. This was the only cooperative in China that had raised the money and then built and staffed its own hospital. It had cost 400,000 yuan—less than $100,000—and it was not just an acupuncture parlor. It had modern equipment and qualified doctors. It had electrocardiographs, an X-ray unit, an operating theater and a family-planning consulting room (the abortion clinic: probably the busiest department in any Chinese hospital). There was an acupuncturist on the staff, and also a full-time herbalist (who ran the department, dispensing from his stock of 300 herbs). It was a clean hospital. It did not smell. Its charges were low. In fact it had been built because the people at the cooperative hated going into Yantai to the county hospital and paying what they regarded as excessive amounts. It had cost 20 yuan to have a baby at the county hospital, it cost half that here—less than $3.
"Our motto is Serve the people," Mr. Ma said.
It was a Maoist phrase, but he made it sound as friendly and eager as a supermarket slogan.
Yantai was a sorrowful-looking town, like a gray windswept place on the coast of Ulster. It had had a large foreign community, so it was more than the wind and weather—it was the architecture, the oversized detached houses, the rather forbidding hospital, the villas made of granite blocks and red bricks, and the low stone cottages. These were all from the turn of the century, but they had lasted well. The dwellings built for a single family were hives—a family in each of the twelve rooms. The black and stony seashore was Irish, and so was the tangle of tide wrack, the overturned rowboats, the coils of nets and the people carrying baskets of mussels. The only un-Irish feature was a pictorial sign showing a Chinese couple and saying Late Marriage and Late Childbirth Are Worthy. To make the point, the woman (a new mother) was shown with swatches of gray hair. Since the Chinese don't normally get gray hair until they are in their sixties, this was a remarkable birth.
I liked the people of Yantai for complaining about the weather. It had turned from wet and windy to stormy—it was pelting freezing snow that hardened the mud in the streets, and plastered the sides of buildings with ice. There was none of the bewildering indifference to cold that characterized the people in Shenyang and Harbin. Here people bitched and groaned and squinted at the sleet and said, "What's this supposed to be?" They kicked it in the streets and developed an angry way of walking, a sort of exasperated shuffle, so that they wouldn't fall down. They hardly stopped commenting on it, and they apologized for it to me. All these reactions made me feel warm.
But the truth was that a little snow improved Yantai. It was not a pretty place. It looked stricken, random, exploited, Irish. The snow gave gentle contours to the big dry hills. The hills of Shandong lost their topsoil years ago. Nothing grows on them. They are heaps of mud and loose stones, like rubble piles and slag heaps. It is not an ugly landscape but an exhausted one.
To the manufacture of quill pens and chamber pots and grandfather clocks, Yantai had added the making of tapestries. The Chinese made eighteenth-century products in nineteenth-century factories, and so it was not odd that they should reach even further back in time and revive a medieval art form. It is obvious to anyone who travels even a little in China that the Chinese can be painstaking in their production of kitsch. The Yantai Woollen Needlepoint Tapestry Factory was an extreme example of this effort, which had its counterpart in the hobbyist who makes a model of the Spanish Armada with glue and toothpicks, or (as I saw once in New Hampshire) the front of a large building faced with old bottle caps.
I asked the manager whether they would do me a copy of the Bayeux Tapestry, and even after I had described it he unhesitatingly said yes. There were women picking out copies of the Mona Lisa, Vermeer's lute player and at least one Rembrandt. They were also doing generic birds and flowers, and the creature that is the unmistakable emblem of Chinese kitsch, the fluffy white kitten playing with a ball of yarn or worrying a goldfish. It is nearly impossible to travel in China at all without seeing this white kitten, and if you are especially valued as a foreign friend or compatriot you will be given one, under glass in needlepoint, as a present. Orville Schell, in one of his later and less enthusiastic books about the Chinese, mentions this white kitten and implies that its tastelessness signals the decline of Chinese culture. But surely it is merely a bit of harmless fun and misplaced artistry; nothing looks more like kitsch to the Chinese than our crazed production of chinoiserie—little fake pagodas and portraits of yellow-faced mandarins with silly pigtails. I did not mind the cat (made in huge quantities by the Yantai needlepointers) but I was unspeakably grateful no one gave me one.
These days the call was for needlepointing snapshots of favorite aunts and uncles, or fat children. At their needlepoint frames the women at the tapestry factory were doing large portraits of Roger and Betty Landrum in front of their piano in a suburb of Sydney, Australia; Mr. and Mrs. Chew Lim Hock, wincing at a bowl of flowers; two spoiled-looking Japanese kids on a seesaw, and the mayor of Timaru, New Zealand, Yantai's sister city. The likenesses and colors are surprisingly exact, and for about $400 they will do a needlepoint copy of that picture you took last summer of Uncle Dick waving from the porch. But why anyone wants to pay that money for a small and slightly blurry snapshot made into a gigantic tapestry wall hanging I cannot imagine.
In the end I was less interested in the fishing and manufacturing side of Yantai than I was in the recent history of Mr. Hu. After a few days he disclosed to me that he had been married for just two weeks. That information was like catnip to me; I asked him ceaseless questions. But he did not mind. He was a jaunty, thin man, with two distinct sides to his head. He was also very pleased with himself and happily talkative; with an air of a man of the world. He was proud of the fact that he had traveled out of Yantai—he had been as far as Qingdao and Qufu (the birthplace of Confucius). And, in his telling, his wedding had been quite an event.
Two years before, in one of the pebbly and decrepit Yantai parks, he had met a girl who was out walking with her friends. Mr. Hu was captivated by her. Her name was Mu. After a year of taking her for walks and buying her noodles and watching TV with her at her parents' apartment, Mr. Hu decided to get to the point.
He said, "What do you say, Mu—shall we register?"
Mu was excited. She could hardly speak. Shall we register? was an unambiguous proposal of marriage. Registering leads in only one direction. Article 7 of The Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China (1986) specifies, "Both the man and the woman desiring to contract a marriage shall register in person with the marriage registration office."
Mr. Hu was twenty-six, and Mu was twenty-five. Article 5 states: "No marriage shall be contracted before the man has reached 22 years of age and the woman 20 years of age."