People went to Canton for many reasons, but the most interesting one I heard was from seven skinny youths who had come from Hong Kong to go tenpin bowling.
I didn't laugh. Brainlessly banging cannonballs down a varnished ramp and watching the pins go bopping seemed like fun to me. It was a hot afternoon, and Canton was a big screechy place.
I loitered at the bowling alley but didn't play. I met an American named Barton, an oilman, who was supervising the drilling of wells. Were they offshore? He didn't say; he was rather circumspect, rather Chinese in fact, as if he suspected me of being engaged in industrial espionage.
Barton had been in Canton for four years, and before that had been in the Persian Gulf, which he had hated. But he hated China, too — his test wells had not paid off, though some others had. And the oil price was so low it hardly seemed worthwhile looking. It was certainly proving expensive. He told me several things I had not known — that China was a huge oil producer, that it had a surplus because there were so few motor vehicles in China (and the power plants and most of the trains were fueled by Chinese coal), and that China exported crude oil and gasoline to the United States. (Gasoline and fireworks are China's biggest exports to the U.S.)
The shrinking oil-exploration schemes had meant a cutback in Barton's mode of life, though. His wife and children lived in Hong Kong. The family used to get together twice a month. Now they met only once a month. It was pretty tough, Barton said, but necessary.
"I've got two kids to put through college. I need this job, I need the money — all the gweilos here do."
Most of the expatriates used that expression when they referred to themselves. It was south China and Hong Kong self-mockery and meant "foreign devil."
"I was offered a job in Singapore," he said. "It was also oil related. I probably should have taken it, but that place is too strict. I can't stand Lee Kuan Yew. He's a shit. They can have him. I'll take Dung any day."
Barton laughed the phlegmy, fruity laugh of the chain-smoker.
"Know what we call Lee Kuan Yew? Hitler-with-a-heart. Har! Har!"
As someone who had had his own problems with "Harry" Lee, I thought this description was funny and apt. And I was also struck by Barton's seriousness.
I was able to tell Barton my own Chinese oil-drilling story. In 1968, the Chinese embassy in Uganda brought a troupe of Red Guards to Kampala to put on a show. There were acrobats and accordion players and jugglers, all wearing red armbands; but the highlight of the evening was a Red Guard ballet about drilling for oil in one of the coldest and dreariest parts of China — Daqing, in the Manchurian province of Heilongjiang.
In the heat of the Ugandan night, they mimicked frostbite and hypothermia as they danced and drilled through layers of ice and rock. They dropped with exhaustion and were on the point of giving up altogether — no oil.
They were harangued all this time by Red Guards (dancing, chattering, shaking their fists), and at the lowest point, when they had all but abandoned the effort of drilling, one of the Red Guards produced the Little Red Book and began reading Mao's Thoughts. He read from the chapter, "Self-reliance and Arduous Struggle."
He showed his big square teeth and yelled, "What is work? Work is struggle! There are difficulties and problems in those places for us to overcome these difficulties. A good comrade is one who is more eager to go where the difficulties are greater!"
This cheered up the dancers dressed as riggers and drillers (they wore big bandagelike mittens and had rags on their feet). They were stirred by Mao's Thought, and as a chorus chanted, "Great Helmsman… Reddest of the Red Suns rising in the East," the drillers went back to work and at last struck oil, a great gusher. This was expertly simulated with lights and back-projection, and over all of it a portrait of Chairman Mao shimmered, as the Red Guards cheered. Oil! Mao's Thoughts! Prosperity! Workers serving the people! Overcoming difficulties!
Now all that was over and the oil workers are, typically, harassed Americans, separated from their families, quite well paid and trying to put their kids through college.
At the Trade Exhibition, which is an immense bazaar of Chinese merchandise and the pride of Canton, I met a disgruntled man from Hong Kong, one Mr. Tan, who was visiting his Cantonese relatives. He loved his relatives and was very loyal and dutiful, but he hated the Chinese attitude towards Mao. I had taken Mr. Tan to be an unassuming soul, but he was full of invective.
"Mao kept China in the dark for almost thirty years," he said. 'That's why these goods are substandard."
I said that some of the merchandise looked well made to me — the bicycles, the wrenches, the carpets. And though the electric appliances looked dangerous and ugly, the beaded bags, the screwdrivers, the canned food and the textiles were all great bargains.
"It is not enough to make these things," Mr. Tan said. "These people are in the dark. They think they know the world. They know nothing!"
It was even more mocking the way he said it in his Cantonese accent: Dey know nutting!
"Mao was a joke. He was so stupid. And they believed him. Ha!"
"Everyone says it's different now," I said.
"It looks different, but it is the same. You know why? Because they are the same."
That cynicism was characteristic of the people the Chinese called "Hong Kong Compatriots," and it was compounded of doubt and fear. It was voiced most strongly in Canton because Canton was the closest equivalent in Chinese terms to Hong Kong. The anxiety was contagious. Most people in Canton wondered — and with reason — What next?
I looked for people who might have a clue. The most knowing was of course an American banker who had been in Canton for about an hour and a half. But he had been there before. His name was Arthur Fliegle, and he had a sort of sales pitch in everything he said that sounded so convincing — at least he sounded convinced — that it seemed to reek of insincerity. But he was on the boil, and so I listened.
"Forget the hotels, forget the Friendship Stores and gift shops, forget the restaurants and bowling alleys — all the tourist-related stuff," Fliegle said. "That will go its own way. It earns some money, but it's no big deal."
"But the Chinese are trying to attract tourists," I said.
"Forget it. That's a detail. They want foreign investors. So look at it — look at the rest. The oil. The industry. The joint ventures. Want to hear an interesting statistic? We're dealing with about two hundred joint ventures through my Hong Kong bank. Guess how many of those two hundred are currently operating — I mean, actually off and running?"
I said I couldn't guess.
He raised two fingers. "Two. That's all. And neither of them is making any money."
"But everyone talks about joint ventures."
'They're whistling in the dark. Most companies have withdrawn their top people. They had highly paid executives in China, but they haven't been making any money. So they pull out their expensive American yuppies and they put in Joe Chen from Hong Kong — you know the guy, middle-aged, brown suit, plastic briefcase. They say 'Go for it, Joe!' and he makes a dive, hits a brick wall and staggers back. 'Go for it, Joe!' they yell again. And he hits the wall again. But so what? He's only costing twenty or thirty thousand a year. That's the kind of guy operating now. The six-figure executive is gone."
To provoke this man Fliegle I said that the Chinese seemed very confident about doing business.
"I'm not talking about them — I'm talking about investor confidence, and that seems to be ebbing away. That's why the next three or four years are so crucial. Already companies have pulled out. They aren't philanthropists or idealists. They want to make money, and if they don't make it they'll leave. At the moment, China's in a big expansionist phase, but so far there hasn't been much of a return — nothing to justify great hopes or big investments. The bubble might burst, and if it does it's going to be hell here. We'll know inside five years whether it's going to work."