There were loud gasps and hisses of disgust as Mr. Zeng brought out the picture. He flourished it — it was a corpse in a coffin, a small, pale head among some ruffles of satin; some wilted flowers; an incense burner; the withered face of the dead woman.
"She was a good wife," Mr. Zeng said proudly, and he smiled at the picture, and when he showed it around, the Chinese made faces and began to leave.
This business about girls being equal was disputed by other people I met in Shanghai, and it is obvious that Chinese society is dominated by males. With the one-child policy — and severe penalties for people who have more than one — the preference is for a boy. There was no shortage of whisperers who told of the large number of girl infants who were drowned like unwanted kittens, or strangled at birth, and infanticide was said to be very common. But these atrocities are difficult to substantiate. It is much more likely that determining the sex of the fetus before birth has led to a dramatic rise in abortions—1 was unsuccessful in getting abortion statistics, but the figures are very high. Any woman can get an abortion at any time: it is regarded as a patriotic duty. I would bet that more female fetuses are aborted than male ones, and when I put this supposition to Chinese in Shanghai they said it was likely.
Sang Ye, the coauthor of Chinese Lives, had told me in Peking that when I got to Shanghai I must definitely visit the industrial suburb of Min Hong, about fifteen miles outside the city.
"It will be a revelation to you as a traveler," he said. "In Min Hong the peasants from very rural areas have been turned into factory workers. They are people who are used to living in huts, and now they live in high-rise apartments. The problem is with their habits. They are not used to flushing toilets. They keep their chickens and ducks in their rooms with them."
He painted a picture of Dogpatch in a tower block: stinking toilets, livestock in the corridors, pitchforks propped against the walls, pigs wandering up and down the stairs.
"And they have not abandoned other peasant customs," he said. "Every night before dinner it is usual for a villager to stroll around to see what his relatives are going to eat. But this is hard to do in an apartment house. That's why the elevator operator goes out of his mind every day, as people get into the elevator and go from floor to floor checking on their relatives."
He finished by saying, "Min Hong is an interesting mess, and no tourist ever goes there."
That was all I needed to encourage me: I could already see the pigs and chickens, and those unspeakable toilets. I went out to Min Hong one day. I was disappointed by the apartment houses. None of them was higher than six stories, and as it is a law in China that only apartment houses higher than six stories need elevators, the elevator story was erroneous. And it was a big nondescript township — about 30,000 people: a power plant, factories, shops, a little market. Where were the pigs and ducks?
I prowled around the fairly ordinary lanes behind the houses and saw nothing remarkable. There were cyclists and pedestrians, people going to and from their jobs, to and from school, shoppers, old men gasping on stairs, people thinking: What is this foreigner looking at?
A man I met said that there was a joint venture in progress, making toys—"Matchbox cars." Not very interesting. A cosmetics factory. I tried not to yawn. Pepsi-Cola was thinking of opening a bottling plant.
I said, "I've heard the apartments are unusual."
He seemed bewildered but he said that if I wanted to look at one I could look at his.
That was typical Chinese hospitality. Very early in my trip I found they were unfailingly friendly and unsuspicious. This was particularly so in outlying areas: they were eager to talk, proud of their families, curious to know my reaction to the changes in China, and they were fairly open. And they hadn't the slightest idea who I was.
"Go right in," the man said.
It was a two-room flat, smelling of vegetables. There was also a big hallway, a bathroom and a kitchen. Five adults and two children lived here. These people, originally from up the line at Wuxi, had come here in 1959 when Min Hong was established.
They worked locally. All five adults — two men, three women — had jobs. There were two beds in each room, and dressers and chairs, and a table, a television. The flat was very neat; and there were potted plants on the windowsills. There were no books.
When I remarked on the television set, they turned it on and got a cowboy movie — Gregory Peck and Olivia de Havilland, speaking Chinese. We watched it for a while, and they gave me tea and we talked about Min Hong.
"I was told that some people here in Min Hong keep chickens and ducks."
"No, we have no chickens or ducks."
One of the women said, "But you ride horses in America."
"Just for fun," I said.
They didn't quite believe this. They had the idea that there were cowboys all over America, and I secretly felt that they had pigs and ducks in Min Hong.
"So you don't get on your horse."
That was a joke. The expression ma shang ("get on your horse") meant "quickly" or "hurry."
"I have to get on my horse now," I said.
So I left Min Hong. It was dull but it was decent: Sang Ye had been wrong. But why was squalor regarded as more interesting than order?
There was a stylish, youthful-looking man named Wang, whom I met one day in Shanghai. It turned out that we were both born in the same year, the Year of the Snake (but Wang used the Chinese euphemism for snake—"little dragon"). He was so friendly and full of stories that I saw him often, usually for lunch at the Jinjiang Hotel. He was a sensitive soul, but had a sense of irony, too, and said he had never been happier than he was walking the streets of San Francisco on his one trip to America — he hinted that he was eager to immigrate to the United States, but he never became a bore on the subject and did not ask me for help. He was unusual, even in Shanghai, for his clothes — a canary-yellow French jacket and pale blue slacks, a gold watch, a chain around his neck, and expensive sunglasses.
"1 like bright clothes," he said.
"Could you wear them during the Cultural Revolution."
He laughed and said, "What a mess that was!"
"Were you criticized?"
"I was under arrest. That's when I started smoking. I discovered that if you smoked it gave you time to think. They had me in a room — the Red Guards. They said, 'You called Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, a crazy lady.' She was a crazy lady! But I just lit a cigarette and puffed on it so that I could think of something to say."
"What did you say?"
"The wrong thing! They made me write essays. Self-criticism!"
"Describe the essays."
"They gave me subjects. 'Why I Like Charles Dickens,' 'Why I Like Shakespeare.'"
"I thought you were supposed to say why you didn't like them."
"They wouldn't believe that," he said. 'They called me a reactionary. Therefore, I had to say why I liked them. It was awful. Six pages every night, after work unit, and then they said. 'This is dog shit — write six more pages.'"
"What work did you do?"
"Played the violin in the Red Orchestra. Always the same tunes. The East Is Red,' 'Long Live the Thoughts of Mao,' 'Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman'—all that stuff. They made me play in the rain. I said, 'I can't — the violin will fall apart.' They don't know that a violin is glued together. 1 played in the rain. It fell apart. They gave me another one and ordered me to play under the trees during the Four Pest Campaign — to keep sparrows from landing in the branches."