There were no lights at this tea plantation. But there was a stream, so these youngsters from the city decided to build a dam and put in a generator. This certainly resembled a Peace Corps project — the outsiders deciding that what these peasants needed were some of the comforts of home, juice — especially.
"We worked very hard for a year building the dam. At the end of that time, when it was finished, we set aside one night for the lights to be turned on and for the electricity to flow. I remember it very well. That night, when the electricity came on, I stood and cried — I was so happy. Others were crying too.
"The old electrician from the work unit said, 'You're tough Peking boys and girls. Why are you crying? This is just a simple dam and simple electric power and a few flickering bulbs.'
"He was wrong. We had done it all ourselves, with our own hands. Like picking the tea. That was why we cried."
I was affected by her story, although I had been somewhat annoyed by her comparison between the displaced intellectuals and the Peace Corps. But I saw that there was a connection, and both had emerged at the same time.
She had fallen silent. She had told me her good memory. She then said, "Later it was different. I became a teacher in 1974, and the Red Guards came to check up on us. They told us what to teach. They bullied us, and they were very tough. I was trying to teach English. They didn't like it. They said it was bourgeois and useless. That's when I changed my mind about the Cultural Revolution."
As an English teacher, she said, she understood Mao because she had read Percy Bysshe Shelley. I said, What?
"Mao was a political revolutionary," she said. "But he was also a romantic poet. That was the problem."
She saw the Old Man as a sort of dreamer in baggy pants, scratching out his poems with his goose-quill pen and leading shiny-faced youths into the fields to harvest rice and grain. But the old romantic, perhaps like all romantics, was not only impractical, but also selfish and egotistical, and by the sixties he was around the bend, too. This was a far cry from the young idealist Shelley, and not much like the old leech gatherer, Willy Wordsworth.
"He was also a tyrant, wasn't he?"
She said she didn't know about that. It was painful to think about recent history. She too wanted to go to the United States — to study, and for a change of pace.
It was now late afternoon, and damp and gray. The crumbly hills had caves cut into them, and every slope looked like a prehistoric settlement. It was not an optical illusion; this province was full of troglodytes knuckle-walking along these ledges and into the caverns they had chopped out of the hillside.
A young man was watching them with me. I took him to be one of the students on the swimming team, but he said no, rubber was his business — he made tires. Lanzhou was a center of rubber manufacturing.
I said, 'That's interesting," and he seemed rather sceptical, and smiled at me as if defying me to find anything interesting at all about tires or rubber.
"What about contraceptives?" I asked.
And then he asked me to explain what the word meant. This required gestures as well as a delicate description, but he got the point.
"I don't make them," he said. "But we have these things in China — for birth control. One-child policy, you know?"
I did not say so, but it seemed to me that people living five to a room was a form of birth control. In a country without any privacy and with very few trees, it was a wonder that any children were conceived.
But this subject reminded him — his name was Mr. Zhang — of an experience he had had in Peking.
Mr. Zhang said, "I was walking down the street. A man stopped me and said, 'Want a girl?'
"I told him no.
"'She's very nice. Five yuan.'
"'I am not interested,' I said.
"He said, 'I can get you a very dark and private corner in the park, so that you can be alone with her.'
"I said that I did not want her, but what about my friend? You see, I was looking after an American delegation of rubber dealers. One of them even asked me if there were girls. It is forbidden. But there are girls.
"'That is out of the question. We do not want an American.'
"I said, 'Why not?'
"'They are too big in their penis. The girl is Chinese. She is very small. It will hurt her too much.'
"I told him to think about it."
Mr. Zhang giggled, perhaps wondering whether he had gone too far — after all, I had told him I was an American. It was also very unusual that he should tell me this story. He covered himself by telling it in a disapproving way — son of pious and lurid at the same time.
The pimp told him not to go away while he consulted the girl.
"And then he came back and said, 'She says she will do it with the American, but it will cost twenty kuai.'"
Then Mr. Zhang looked very worried. Would I take him for a pimp? After all, it seemed as though he had been negotiating with this sleazy man — and pimping was a capital offense: a bullet in the back of the neck.
Very angrily, Mr. Zhang said, "We must rid China of such people!"
Already the train was slowing down in the deep ravine, and ahead Lanzhou lay smoking and steaming on both banks of the Yellow River.
7. The Iron Rooster
Lanzhou is a city in a valley of the Yellow River, and so it is long and narrow and hemmed in by mountains. There were hundreds of brickyards and smoking kilns on its outskirts, and it was brick colored, the same shade as its clayey landscape. It was damp and muddy this afternoon in early summer. Since ancient times it had been one of the gateways of China, the last place to change horses and buy provisions before heading for the outer limits of the empire. The next large settlements were in Turkestan, and beyond them was Europe. Lanzhou still looked like a city on the frontier, with the patched and botched appearance of all Chinese cities — no trees to speak of but plenty of tall factory chimneys and power lines. Most of the oil in Xinjiang was refined here, and it was whispered that in Lanzhou they made atomic bombs. If one accidentally went off in this remote mud-colored place, who would know?
Some of those chimneys were the minarets of mosques. This was the eastern limit of the Muslim world that had its other centers in Turfan and Kashgar and Khotan, at the edges of China. The mountains were bare and stony. The city's bleakness gave it a tidy look. The river was so shallow there was no boat on it larger than a sampan, and the water was like cocoa, the same orangey brown. Some men on the banks flung nets in and dragged out tiddlers, which they pinched in their fingers and saved. Another group of men used the river banks for curing goatskins — dousing them and then jumping up and down on them on the rocks. The rocks and stones were smooth, some were flat, the sort you find on the seashore. This was once part of the inland sea that had flooded towards the Pacific and created the Yangtze Gorges and dumped its sediment to make the whole of east China.
After a few days in Lanzhou I discovered that it had the same labyrinthine lanes in one section that Peking had — small cool courtyards, and tile roofs on which weeds had taken root, and carved doorways; and the squatting children and sweepers who always existed in those old neighborhoods. The temple at Five Spring Mountain was tended by a terrified monk, who stammered at my questions and pleaded with me to go away. At the base of the ancient but derelict pagoda there was a shooting gallery — kids with air pistols whacking away at tattered targets. In that same vandalized hillside, with its painted pavilions, there was a circus — daredevil motorcyclists speeding up the vertical walls of a jangling cage, while the Chinese gaped and refused to applaud.