"These Chinese people who have money we call 'secondhand sellers.'" He meant hustlers, peddlers, junk dealers. "They don't read or go to museums or temples. They have money, that's all."
I taught Mr. Tan the word "philistine."
I went to the Yungang Caves outside Datong, where travelers used to draw chalk circles on the beautiful frescoes and Chinese workmen would hack them off the wall and wrap them up; and where another lively business was the beheading of Buddhas. Even so, there are plenty of Buddhas left — and several in the larger caves are as tall as a three-story building. But there is something predictable about Chinese sight-seeing, and even the best attractions — which these Buddhist caves were — have been renovated and repainted until all the art is lost. What travelers had begun to destroy by snatching and plundering, the Red Guards finished in the Cultural Revolution, and the only reason the Red Guards were not totally successful in wiping out the sculptures in the Yungang Caves was that there were too many of them. So they survived, but they were not quite the same afterward.
The same was true of the Hanging Temple, the "midair monastery," an odd Wei Dynasty structure of steep stairs and balconies built against the vertical side of a ravine at Hengshan, about forty miles south of Datong. The Chinese flock to it; tourists are encouraged to visit. But it too had been wrecked by Red Guards, and it too had been rebuilt, and a great deal had been lost in the restoration. It looked garish and clumsy and patched.
Sight-seeing is one of the more doubtful aspects of travel, and in China it is one of the least rewarding things a traveler can do — primarily a distraction and seldom even an amusement. It has all the boredom and ritual of a pilgrimage and none of the spiritual benefits.
Much more interesting to me on this visit to the Hanging Temple was the Valley of the Lings, a great dry gorge in which most of the Lings lived in caves. They had hollowed out parts of the steep walls where there were ledges, and scooped out passageways and chopped windows into them. A few lived in mud huts on the floor of the valley, but the rest inhabited the terraces of cave dwellings with their crudely cut doors and windows in the reddish rock. The place looked very strange and primitive, but walking around, I could see that life was going on as normal — the people tended vegetable gardens, they fished, they did their laundry and cooked and aired their mattresses and ran a few shops and had a school and a brickworks. And they were located in a dramatic cleft in the mountains and must have known how lucky they were to have this space and this good air.
One of the weirder Chinese statistics is that 35 million Chinese people still live in caves. There is no government program to remove these troglodytes and put them into tenements, but there is a scheme to give them better caves. The China Daily (19 May 1986) described how a farsighted architect, Ren Zhenying, had designed "an improved cave" by making the caverns larger and adding bigger windows and doors and ventilators. One model cave had forty-two rooms, and a number of three-bedroom apartments. He was quoted as saying, "It stays cool in summer and warm in winter and saves energy and land that could be used for farming."
It seemed to me a kind of lateral thinking. Why rehouse or resettle these cave dwellers? The logical solution was to improve the caves. That was very Chinese.
It was a bit like steam locomotives — those brand-new antiques that they turned out year after year. The design was not bad — it just looked old-fashioned, and in a coal-producing country, the steam locomotive was very economical.
If this was a time warp it was a very reassuring one. My hotel bedroom had a spittoon and a chamber pot. The armchairs had slipcovers and antimacassars, and the varnished desk was covered by an embroidered cloth, and it held a water jug, a propped-up calendar and a vase of plastic flowers. In the drawer was a small bottle of ink, and a penholder with a steel nib. None of it could be called modern, but most of it was unbreakable.
It seems comic and perhaps absurd to most Westerners; but it is not a joke — not in a society where they fish in rivers using nets designed 2000 years ago. China has suffered more cataclysms than any other country on earth. And yet it endures and even prospers. I began to think that long after the computers had exploded and the satellites had burned out and all the jumbo jets had crashed and we had awakened from the hi-tech dream, the Chinese would be chugging along in choo-choo trains, and plowing the ancient terraces, and living contentedly in caves, and dunking quill pens in bottles of ink and writing their history.
3. Night Train Number 90 to Peking
Never mind that their uniforms don't fit, that their caps slip sideways and their toes stick out of their sandals; what most Chinese officials illustrate is how bad-tempered and unbending Chinese bureaucracy is. They are in great contrast to the average person who doesn't wear a uniform, who is fairly flexible and who will probably be willing to make a deal. Such hustlers are found in the Free Market — as the new bazaars are called — and not on Chinese railways.
The glowering and barking woman at the gate at Datong Station at midnight was exactly like Cerberus. Three minutes before the Lanzhou train pulled out she slammed the entry gate and padlocked it, leaving a group of soldiers and many other latecomers clinging to the bars and making them miss their train. As a further indignity she switched off the overhead lights of the ticket barrier and left us all in the dark. She would not let me through until the Peking train pulled in. And then she slammed the gate again and made more latecomers watch while I boarded. It is not merely unbending; there is often a lot of sadism in bureaucracy.
It was almost midnight. I found my berth in the sleeping car and, ignoring the other occupants (was one a woman?), went to bed. At 5:30 in the morning, Chinese bureaucracy rose up again and flung the door open, switched on the lights and demanded the blankets and sheets. I turned over, trying to return to my dream — tacking in a light breeze across Lewis Bay. The sleeping-car attendant in a white pastrycook's hat and apron dug her fingers into my hip and yelled at me to get up.
"The train doesn't arrive until seven-fifteen!"
"Get up and give me the bedding!"
"Let me sleep!"
A young man sitting on the berth opposite said to me, "They want you to get out of bed. They are folding the sheets."
"What's the hurry? We won't arrive for almost two hours. I want to sleep."
The sleeping-car attendant took hold of the blankets, and I knew she was going to do the Mongolian trick of snapping the bedding off me in one stroke.
My Chinese was functional and unsubtle. I said to the young man, "Do me a favor. Translate this. If they're eager to do a good job, tell them to go clean the toilet. It was so disgusting last night I couldn't use it. The floor's dirty. The windows are dirty. There's no hot water in the thermos jug. What's so important about the blankets?"
He shook his head. He wouldn't translate. He knew — and so did I — that if the blankets and sheets were folded the sleeping-car attendants could go straight home as soon as we arrived in Peking Central Station. They were not paid overtime for folding laundry.
Shhlloooppp: she whipped the bedding off me and left me shivering in my blue pajamas in the predawn darkness.
"I couldn't tell them," the young man said. "They wouldn't listen."
He meant they would lose face. After all, they were only doing their job. His name was Mr. Peng. He was reading Huckleberry Finn to improve his English. I always softened to people I saw reading books, but I told him that one would not do much for his English. He was twenty-seven, a native of Datong. He was married. His wife was a secretary. He said she was a simple girl — that was what had attracted him to her. They had no children. "We are only allowed to have one, so we're waiting a little while."