Under the headline miracle surgery for worker who lost limb it described how a man had been more or less devoured by his stitching machine in a clothes factory, and his arm had been severed. Just reading that gave me the anxious twinges I associated with a castration complex, but there was more. The poor fellow had been rushed to the hospital, and in a landmark surgical operation his arm had been sewn back on, "and he is now receiving therapy to learn how to use it again." The article also mentioned how fingers and toes had been sewn onto workers who had lost them. It had always worked.
It's a great society for mending things, I thought. There was no need for a man to be put on the occupational scrap heap simply because his arm had been chopped off. You found a way to reattach the arm, and you sent him back to work. The epoch of invention ended a thousand years ago, and these days the Chinese were perfecting a technique for making do and mending. This was not invisible mending. It was always obvious when a thing had been patched — it was a society of patches. They patched their underwear and darned their socks and cobbled their shoes. They rewrote their slogans and painted out the Thoughts of Chairman Mao, and come to think of it, that was a form of patching, too. But Mao had spoken repeatedly of the evils of wastefulness: 'Thrift should be the guiding principle in our government expenditure…. corruption and waste are very great crimes… never be wasteful or extravagant." An entire section of his Thoughts is entitled "Building Our Country Through Diligence and Frugality."
One of the great differences between China under Mao and China under Deng was that the Mao mania for patching and mending had begun to subside, pride in poverty was regarded now as old hat, and the Dengists liked things that were brand-new. New clothes were now so cheap that no one had to waste time mending them. Yet I was sure that it was this make-do-and-mend philosophy that had inspired these medical advances and miracles with amputees.
The news items gave me the creeps though. I read a report about a man whose penis had been sewn back on. Fifty other men had had the same operation in China, "and 98 percent of them found their penis functioned again," the China Daily stated. Some of the men had what was called "one-stage reconstruction of the penis," which was not a reattachment but a whole new dick cobbled together from spare parts — a piece of rib, a skin graft, some loose tubes. A survey showed that most of the men were able to father children. "A father who went through the one-stage reconstruction of the penis even mailed his daughter's photo to us," Professor Chang, the mastermind of this technique, said.
The strangest case of human mending occurred not long ago in Shenyang. This was also reported in the China Daily, under the confusing headline TRANSPLANTED LEG SAVES GIRL'S ARM.Eleven-year-old Meng Xin's left arm and leg were severed in a train accident.To save her, the six surgeons used part of her severed leg to make a forearm, to which they attached her hand.Following the 18-hour operation, Meng's skin on her transplanted forearm returned to normal, and her transplanted fingers have recovered their sense of touch.She can clench her fist and move her left arm.
And yet these mending operations are not surprising to anyone who has looked under the hood of an old Chinese bus, or closely scrutinized the welds in a Chinese steam locomotive, or watched a Chinese street tailor or cobbler at work. And you only had to see the amazing contraption of hosepipes that filled the trains with water at the larger railway stations to realize that it was inevitable that such people would in time be able to rig up a new penis for an unfortunate Chinese castrato.
Ashley was still watching me reading the paper. Handing it back to him, I said, Yes, wasn't it remarkable?
"Lom mistair," he said, and winked at me. "It's the CIA, isn't it? You're an agent, you tell people you're a journalist because that's good cover. You go sniff-sniff-sniff and get people blabbing, and then you lock yourself in your room and write a report." He laughed. "That's all right. I don't care! I won't tell anyone." And he looked out of the window. "Jesus, I am so sick of this country — I can't wait to get back home. Chinese food — every day — Chinese food. And these people!"
"The Chinese?"
"Naw, they're all right. They're bloody small though," he said. "I was thinking of the tour here."
They were in the corridor, watching China go by. It was not very pretty here. The industrial suburbs of Shanghai continued for almost a hundred miles, until the train pulled into Hangzhou. Marco Polo had mentioned Hangzhou — it was one of the boasts of this tourist paradise with its lake, temples, hotels, restaurants, noodle stalls, take-your-picture booths. It was a help to have Marco Polo's praise as a blurb on your brochure ("the greatest city which may be found in the world"), but even that did not make the place sparkle for me. And I had always wondered why Marco Polo, who talked about everything and supposedly went everywhere, never mentioned either the Great Wall or the fact that the Chinese drank tea, in his Travels.
Ashley said the tourists were driving him mental, and he brought me up to date. The most obnoxious man (Kicker) and Wilma, the bald woman, had become lovers. There had been a fight in the French compartment, and one of them, who was bringing a legal action against another, had joined the American group, the Wittricks and Westbetters. Blind Bob was terribly bruised as a result of his Mister McGoo stumbling. Rick Westbetter was planning to write another letter to President Reagan — this one about Chinese duplicity. The Australians were feeling cranky, but of course they were relieved to be heading for Guangdong, since South China was closer to Australia. Bella Scoons was telling herself that the distance was no more than four trips to Kalgoorlie. The Cathcarts had made themselves unpopular by refusing to pay for a beer one hot day because "we've paid for this trip already, and that beer ought to be free." They made an issue of the one yuan (26 cents) and just sat and broke out into a virtuous sweat. Morthole had added to his rock collection: he could hardly heave the sack of them.
Kicker said ironically, "How about a tomb? We haven't seen a tomb today!"
"I'd like to show that fucker a tomb," Ashley said.
They were all tired and crabby. You need a good night's sleep, I wanted to say. It was like school, like an outing; it had gone on too long. Day Thirty-seven, Miss Wilkie was writing in her journal.
"It's ten thousand miles we've done," she said. 'Ten thousand miles. And believe me, it hasn't been a picnic."
This was Zhejiang Province, the old eternal China — no fashion shows here, no spivs, no "Shansh marnie?" no talk of microchips and reforms.
This was mostly paddy fields, and green shoots standing stiffly in black goop. It was an open, almost treeless landscape of bumpy ground and sharp-featured hills and greeny-blue mountains; tea, and rice, and bursting blue vegetables, reeking canals, tile-roofed huts, trampled dirt roads, coolie hats, and everyone dressed in the same style of pajamas. I saw two boys working a treadwheel that ran a chain-driven water pump, a machine that has been in continuous use in China since the first century A.D. according to Professor Needham.
The Zhejiang hills — the Kuocang Shan — were streaky: slashes of white and green, with claw marks and jagged ridges. There were no shade trees. Shade is an unnecessary luxury in an agricultural country and stunts the crops. In the unhindered sunshine, the landscape was austerely tended and harshly fertile, and familiar things like trees and huts were so out of scale the people looked miniaturized.
Everything they did was connected with food — planting it, growing it, harvesting it. The woman who looks as though she is sitting is actually weeding; those children are not playing, they are watering plants; and the man up to his shoulders in the creek is not swimming but immersed with his fishnet. The land here has one purpose: to provide food. The Chinese are never out of sight of their food, which is why as a people arrested at the oral stage of development (according to the scholar of psycho-history Sun Longji) they take such pleasure in fields of vegetables. I found the predictable symmetry of gardens very tiring to the eye, and I craved something wilder. So far, China seemed a place without wilderness. The whole country had been made over and deranged by peasant farmers. There was something unnatural and neurotic in that obsession. They had found a way to devour the whole country.