The other three pests were mosquitoes, flies and rats.
"That's absurd," I said.
"We painted Huai Hai Lu — that's more absurd," Wang said.
"How can you paint a street?" I asked — the street he named was one of the main thoroughfares of Shanghai.
"We painted it red, out of respect for Chairman Mao," Wang said. "Isn't that stupid?"
"How much of the street did you paint?"
'Three and a half miles," Wang said, and laughed, remembering something else. "But there were stupider things. When we went to the work unit we always did the qing an (salute) to Mao's portrait on the gateway. We'd hold up the Red Book, say, 'Long Live Chairman Mao' and salute him. Same thing when we went home. People would make things in Mao's honor, like a knitted Mao emblem, or a red star in needlepoint, and put it in the special Respect Room at the unit — it was painted red. That was for Mao. If they wanted to prove they were very loyal they would wear the Mao badge by pinning it to their skin."
'That must have impressed the Red Guards," I said.
"It wasn't just the Red Guards — everyone blames them, but everyone was in it. That's why people are so embarrassed at the moment, because they realize they were just as stupid about Chairman Mao as everyone else. I know a banker who was given the job of fly catcher. He had to kill flies and save their little bodies in a matchbox. Every afternoon someone would come and count the dead flies and say, 'one hundred and seventeen — not good enough. You must have one hundred and twenty-five tomorrow.' And more the day after, you see? The government said there was going to be a war. 'The enemy is coming — be prepared.'"
"Which enemy?"
'The imperialists — Russia, India, the United States. It didn't matter which one. They were going to kill us," Wang said, and he rolled his eyes. "So we had to make bricks for the war effort. Ninety bricks a month for each person. But my parents were old, so I had to make their bricks. I used to come home from the unit, write my essay 'Why I Like Western Music,' and make bricks—1 had to deliver two hundred and seventy a month. And they were always asking me about my hole."
"Your hole?"
"The shen wa dong—Dig Deep Holes edict. That was for the war, too. Everyone had to have a hole, in case of war. Every so often the Red Guards would knock on your door and say, 'Where is your hole?'"
He said there were bomb shelters all over Shanghai that had been built on Mao's orders ("for the coming war"), and of course they had never been used. I asked him to show me one. We found this sub-terreanean vault — it was just like a derelict subway station — at 1157 Nanjing Road, and it had been turned into an ice-cream parlor. The fascinating thing to me was that it was now obviously a place where young men went to kiss their girlfriends. It was full of Chinese youths locked in the half nelson they regard as an amorous embrace. The irony was not merely that these kids were making out and feeling each other up in a place that had been built by frantic and paranoid Red Guards in the 1960s, but also that it was now called the Dong Chang Coffee Shop and owned and operated by the government.
I was talking to Wang one day about my trip through the Soviet Union when I mentioned how the scarcity of consumer goods there meant the Russians were always pestering foreigners for blue jeans, T-shirts, track shoes and so forth.
'That never happens in China," I said.
"No," Wang said. "But that reminds me. About three years ago there was a Russian ballet dancer at a hotel in Shanghai. I went to see the ballet — fabulous! And this dancer was very handsome. I recognized him, and he smiled at me. Then he pointed to my track shoes and pointed to himself. He wanted them, I understood that. They were expensive shoes — Nike, cost me fifty yuan. But I don't care much about money. We measured feet, side by side. Exact fit. I don't speak a word of Russian, but I could tell he really wanted those shoes."
"Did you sell them to him?"
"I gave them to him," Wang said, and frowned at the triviality of it. "I felt sorry for someone who just wanted a pair of shoes. It seemed sad to me that he couldn't get them in his own country. I took them off and walked to my office barefoot! He was really happy! I thought, He'll go back to Russia. He'll always remember this. He'll say, 'Once I was in China. I met a Chinese man and asked him for his shoes, and he gave them to me!'"
A moment later he said, "You can get anything you want in China. Food, clothes, shoes, bicycles, motorbikes, TVs, radios, antiques. If you want girls, you can find girls." And then in a wide-eyed way. "Or boys — if you want boys."
"Or fashion shows."
"They have fashion shows on television almost every week," Wang said. "Shanghai is famous for them."
I asked him what the old people made of these developments — hookers and high fashion in a country where just a few years ago foreign decadence was condemned and everyone wore baggy blue suits.
'The old people love life in China now," Wang said. "They are really excited by it. Very few people object. They had felt very repressed before."
A few days later I had an occasion to test that reaction. I was invited to the house of a former civil servant, recently retired — the Chinese use the French term cadre to describe these officials. This man, Ning Bailuo, was sixty-seven and a passionate Maoist. He'd had no formal education; he had risen through the ranks of the New Fourth Army, from 1940 to 1949, mainly organizing political programs and collecting food and money for the troops, first in their fight against the Japanese and then against the forces of Chiang Kai-shek. One of his earliest memories was of missing the ferry late one night to cross the Huangpu in Shanghai and a japanese soldier beating him with a stick for being out too late. He soon joined an anti-Japanese organization and later the army.
"Don't your experiences make you hate the Japanese?"
"No," he said, "it is only the generals we hate."
Chinese blaming is always reserved for higher-ups: underlings are always innocent. That was how they had been able to cope with the monstrous guilt in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. The entire horror show, the whole ten years of it, in every city and town in China, from Mongolia to Tibet, had been the work of four skinny demons: the Gang of Four. No Red Guard was ever held personally responsible for any act of terror — there were no trials, and I never heard any recrimination other than loud clucking.
Comrade Ning — as I thought of him — was thin and bony, with a Bogart face and long creases on his cheeks, and the same Bogart slurring of speech as his tongue snagged against his teeth. It was easy to see that he was a hard-liner, the tough and puritanical official who had known the privations of the 1930s, and all the phases that had led to this present boom. He still wore blue. He seemed to me the perfect person to ask about developments.
Although he was personally rather ascetic looking, his apartment was very large by Chinese standards — four spacious rooms, as well as a kitchen and a foyer. In accordance with Chinese practice there were beds in every room. Comrade Ning shared this apartment with his wife, his unmarried daughter, his son, his son's wife and two grandchildren.
His wife gave me a bowl of sweet lumps made of puffed rice. "You'll like them. They're Mongolian."
They tasted exactly like the concoction you see described on the back of cereal boxes in the States: Tastee 'n' Fun-licious Dessert Idea That Will Have Those Kids Asking for More!!! They were sticky and crunchy.
Picking fragments out of my teeth, I said that if he had been in the New Fourth Army he must have come across the song, "Baking the Cakes."
"My wife and I can sing that song," Comrade Ning said.
I told them I had met the man who had composed it — Zhang Mei, in Peking — and how we had talked about the patriotic songs in which the Japanese had been referred to as ghosts, rapists, robbers, devils and so forth.