"Are you an American?" she asked, hopefully, in English.
Her name was Mrs. Ji. She said she was pleased to meet an American because she had recently visited the United States — seeing relatives — and had had a wonderful time. She had spent most of her time in Seattle, but had also been to Los Angeles, San Francisco and even Las Vegas, where she had gambled and broken even.
In Shanghai I had met a Chinese woman who told me that the sight of Chinatown in Boston had depressed her. It seemed to her fatuous and antediluvian, a sort of Guangzhou ghetto. Didn't these people know better than to behave like sheep? I asked Mrs. Ji if she felt any of that exasperation.
"I know what she meant," Mrs. Ji said. "I don't like American food, so I ate at a lot of Chinese restaurants. They were all bad. And the so-called Sichuan restaurants — no good at all."
"But not much spitting," I said. 'These spittoons—"
"We spit too much," she said. "The government is trying to stop it."
The antispitting posters were everywhere, but it was really a campaign to encourage spitters to aim rather than to discourage spitting. The message was: Use a spittoon.
After a while — I was asking Mrs. Ji about her family — she told me that she was divorced.
"My husband met a younger woman a few years ago," she said, and volunteered the information that she herself was forty-eight years old.
"Was it easy to get a divorce?"
"Very easy."
"Are there many divorced people in China?"
"Many."
She didn't elaborate, and anyway it was a delicate subject. It was well known that there were a number of stresses in Chinese society: the shortage of money, the crowded households, the bureaucracy, the one-child family, and the husband and wife — quite a large proportion — who were separated for reasons of work: different factories, different cities, and sometimes different provinces. And many divorces resulted from the pairings-off between peasants and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution.
Perhaps my questions made Mrs. Ji self-conscious. After being so candid, she became quite prim and hurried away — had she seen someone watching? I paid for my lunch and went for a walk.
Chengdu had a number of Buddhist temples and pretty parks. It was one of the many Chinese cities which in the past twenty years had lost its city walls and battlements and beautiful gates; but conversely it was one of the few that had a towering statue of Chairman Mao on its main street. In the course of time, those statues would be broken up. Chengdu's Mao statue was one of the largest in China. It had not been vandalized or pulled down. Mao's liking for the poetry of Du Fu meant that the Tang poet's cottage in a Chengdu park is now a national shrine. But the city was oversized and charmless, and though some of its markets and shop-houses remained, too many of them had been torn down to make room for workers' barracks and tower blocks.
Encouraging people to live in big cities and tall buildings made it easier to control their lives. Of course Chinese cities had always been crowded, but the policies of the People's Republic had robbed them of any interest and made them plainer and reminded people that they were merely "screws" in the vast machine. I had an inkling of this walking around Chengdu, getting the railway-induced kinks out of my muscles. Chinese cities made me feel small and insignificant: they were not places to loiter in. They were the corners of the greater labyrinth, and it was impossible to go very far without coming upon a barrier — the road ended, or there was a roadblock, or a checkpoint. No wonder people mobbed the railway trains. And it was not surprising that when the Chinese visited places like Seattle or San Francisco their inclination was to stay.
I passed the Sichuan People's Hospital one day, walking on the outskirts of Chengdu. It was a busy place, or perhaps I had gotten there during visiting hours; anyway, a great number of people were coming and going. Fruit and vegetable stalls had been set up across the street from the hospital, where people could buy presents for the patients. But among those stalls were a half a dozen medicine men, selling potions that ranged from the outright quackery of antlers and birds' bills and snakeskins, to herbal remedies that were accepted in many Chinese hospitals. It was an appropriate place for the quacks, and they apparently operated on the assumption that if someone was not happy with his treatment at the state hospital he could supplement his medicine with lizards and powdered deer antlers.
Mr. Fang followed me everywhere, in his hesitant way, hanging back apprehensively, and smiling when I caught his eye. But it was always a smile of fear.
I walked past a family-planning poster — a large billboard near the center of Chengdu. It showed a Chinese leader welcoming the birth of one baby girl (the parents handing it over for approval). The slogan underneath said, China Needs Family Planning.
When I turned around and addressed Mr. Fang, the poor man yelped. Then he recovered himself and laughed. His laugh said Sorry for screaming!
"That man looks familiar," I said. "Is that Zhou Enlai?"
"Yes. It is Zhou."
"Why him on a family-planning poster?"
"People like him. People respect him."
"Why not Mao Zedong?"
"On a family-planning poster!" Mr. Fang said. He was right to find it absurd. After all, Mao had encouraged the Chinese to breed like rabbits. "Not so good," Mr. Fang said.
I asked him whether people had a more respectful attitude towards Mao or Zhou these days.
"For myself, I prefer Zhou. And I think many others do, too. But 1 cannot speak for them."
"Why do you prefer Zhou, Mr. Fang?"
"He was honest. He was a good man. Also during the Cultural Revolution he suffered much."
"Was he criticized?"
"Not in public, but within. It was worse. People know that."
Before I set off again, I said, "Mr. Fang, why don't you go back to the hotel and rest? It's not necessary to follow me."
"It is the Chinese way," Mr. Fang said.
The parks in Chengdu attracted the newer sort of Chinese youth.
Observe the young couple entering People's Park in a suburb of Chengdu one June afternoon. The first thing that strikes you about the man is that he does not look anything like the man in the family-planning poster. He is smoking a king-size cigarette — it dangles from his lips — and in his hand he has a suitcase-style cassette recorder and radio, and the screechy music (probably a Hong Kong tape) thumps against it and drowns conversation and frightens the dusty starlings. The fellow wears a T-shirt saying Cowboy, and the motif on the shirt is a long-nosed man in a ten-gallon hat. He also wears tight blue jeans and platform shoes with womanish high heels. His hair has been professionally curled — the Canton fashion spread to Shanghai and has recently reached Chengdu. He wears sunglasses. He swings his radio and puffs his cigarette.
His girlfriend (if she were his wife he would not be trying so hard to impress her) wears a pink dress. It is light and fluttery. She might have made it herself. She also wears the nylon knee socks that younger women favor, and high-heeled shoes, and sunglasses with rhinestones on the frames.
This is their day off. They are spending it in the park. Later on they will look for a tree and hide behind it for a session of old-fashioned smooching. The parks and the boulevards are full of such couples. They are the new people in the People's Republic — the inheritors. But their motto is Get it while you can.
I asked Mr. Fang whether he had seen them. He said he had. He was very disapproving of these youngsters.
"It is the fault of the Cultural Revolution," he said. "They saw that it was a disaster. For that whole time there was disruption. No one obeyed. That is why, now, these young people have no manners, no discipline and no ideas."