But afterwards, I heard that his wife had been rather cross with him. She had been listening the whole time.
She said to him, "If we have any criticisms or doubts about the current policies we should keep them to ourselves and not talk to foreigners about them."
There is a Chinese conundrum. If a place has a reputation for being beautiful, the Chinese flock to it, and its beauty is disfigured by the crowd. If a train is very fast, like the Shanghai Express from Peking, everyone tries to take it, and it is impossible to get a seat. The same is true for restaurants: the good ones are jammed. And hotels. Reservations are unthinkable, and the worst of it is that you are sometimes laughed at for ever believing that you had a chance: the Chinese can be extremely rude in turning you away — the Chinese elbow is very sharp.
This conundrum is constant in Shanghai. For example, Shanghai is known to be a city of sidewalks — wonderful for pedestrians, an excellent city for perambulating. Therefore, everyone walks; and the mobs are impenetrable.
None the less, if you push — as the Chinese do — it is possible to walk around Shanghai. Long ago, the Chinese overcame the natural human horror of being touched. The crowd reduces your progress to a shuffle, but it seemed to me that anything was preferable to a Shanghai bus.
Following Comrade Ning's suggestion I walked to Suzhou Creek and looked at the Spiritual Civilization sign—Cling to The Four Beauties. Then I walked farther, to the docks, a tangled, greasy, busy place of warehouses and the storerooms that the Chinese call godowns, and little indoor factories of tinsmiths and lock-makers and box-assemblers and rope-twisters. I came to the Shanghai Seamen's Club, a venerable building with teak-wood paneling and art-deco lamps and fluted cornices and a serviceable billiard room. It was a big old building and covered with soot, but it was attractive in a gloomy and indestructible way.
Inside, among the souvenirs and seamen's necessities like gloves and twine and sunglasses and slippers, there was political crap and propaganda about Chinese soldiers fighting in Vietnam, but masked as "Frontier Guards in South China." I noted down the captions. Comrade Hu Yaohang was wielding his writing brush [photo of Politburo member posing with big writing brush] to write a few words calling on the officers and fighters of the frontier guards "to be able to wield both the pen and the gun to make our country and people rich"-, and under a different photograph, showing five soldiers squinting at some bushes, All officers and fighters of the "Heroic Hard Sixth Company" rendering battle achievement in defending Laoshan battle.
I had a beer and kept walking and thought: These people were giving us a hard time over Vietnam? They were still fighting the Vietnamese — and probably getting their asses kicked, because nothing is more indicative of a war going badly than valiant propaganda like this. If a country shouted that it would fight to the last drop of blood that usually meant that it was ready to surrender; and in China, as a general rule, you could regard nothing as true until it had been denied. Anything officially denied was probably a fact.
I continued walking, across the metal bridge in front of what had once been Broadway Mansions, and over the creek to Huangpu Park, on the Bund, where the rest of the 1920s buildings still stood. I fantasized that there were certain cities in the world that could only succeed by becoming gross parodies of what they were — or of what people expected them to be (like a tall person who has no choice but to learn basketball), and that Shanghai was one of them.
The sign on the gate of the park gave a historical note: This park was guarded by police of the International Settlement and Chinese wen refused admittance. To add insult to injury the imperialists in 1885 put up at the gate a board with the words "No Admittance to Dogs and Chinese." This aroused among Chinese people popular indignation and disgust which finally compelled the imperialists to remove the board.
In another place the popularity of the park was remarked on: Admissions total over 5 million a year. On holidays it sometimes has a sight-seer density of 3 persons to the square meter. In Chinese terms this crowd-praise was wonderfuclass="underline" in the West, people are stifled by a crowd, but in China they feel propped up, and only the worthiest attractions have millions of visitors.
But that was not for me. I walked on and took shelter in a cool building beyond the Bund that had stained-glass windows — not a church, but a bank or counting house, because the windows showing Burne-Jones-like maidens were labeled Truth and Wisdom and Prudence. The foyer had a dome and a vaulted ceiling and onyx pillars, and a black marble floor. I thought: This is just the sort of place that would have had the shit kicked out of it during the Cultural Revolution.
To test my suspicion I asked a man — Mr. Lan Hongquan — who worked there. It was now a government office.
I said, "Isn't it amazing that this place survived the Cultural Revolution."
"It almost didn't," Mr. Lan said. "In 1967, the Red Guards burst in and splashed paint everywhere. They completely covered the windows and these marble walls with paint — it was black paint. You couldn't see anything of these decorations. The job was so big and expensive that it took ten years to clean up. It was only finished last year."
Quite a way up that street I came to the Shanghai Municipal Foreign Affairs Office, where I had an appointment with the chief of the Propaganda Division — such was his title — Mr. Wang Hou-kang, and his assistant, Miss Zhong.
"A very nice house," I said, in the palm court of this mansion.
"It belonged to a former capitalist."
He then told me that there were 164 joint ventures with 20 countries. I expressed surprise, but didn't ask any more questions, because I had been told by wiser minds that most of these joint ventures were still in the discussion stage; and it would have been embarrassing to Mr. Wang if I had asked him how many had borne fruit — the number of joint ventures in operation was very small.
Because I had been bucking the traffic all day, I said, "Do you think that Chinese people will ever own their own cars?"
"Very few will. And not for pleasure but business. What we want to do is make cars and sell them to other countries. The export market — that's what interests us."
I asked him what changes had struck him since Deng Xiaoping's reforms had taken effect.
"Magazines are more colorful — more open. More picturesque, I can say. And there is the writing."
"About politics?"
"No, about sex. Before, people never wrote about sex, and now they do."
Miss Zhong said, "Sometimes it is very embarrassing."
"People dare to express themselves through stories," Mr. Wang said. 'That is new. And people can engage in discussions without being labeled 'rightist' or 'counterrevolutionary' or 'bourgeois' if they said certain things."
"So no one calls anyone a paper tiger anymore?"
'There are still paper tigers. Paper tiger is more a philosophical concept," Mr. Wang said.
We talked about money after that. He said, 'Things have certainly changed. Take me for example. I earned ninety-two yuan a month in 1954 and did not get a salary increase until 1979."
"But did prices rise in the years when your salary didn't change?"
He laughed. I had not said anything funny. But there are many Chinese laughs. His was the one that meant: You are asking too many questions.
The subject of clothes was not contentious.
Mr. Wang said, "After Liberation, people cherished simple clothing. They identified the blue suits and the blue cap with revolution. People wore them and felt like revolutionaries. They were sturdy clothes and they were cheap — people felt thrifty wearing them. They made people equal."