"You sound angry, Mr. Fang."
He did not reply. He laughed — a sharp stuttering and explosive laugh that meant he was very angry.
He had said he disliked modern Chinese stories. He meant he was out of sympathy with them. Who were these spoiled brats and spendthrifts who appeared in the pages of Beijing Literature and Harvest and Monthly Literary Miscellany? Actually they were just the sort of youngsters you saw every day in the public parks, trying to be cool, which meant mimicking Western ways — sunglasses, curled hair, platform shoes, knee socks, flared trousers, blue jeans, transistor radios, earphones, and for a lucky few, motorcycles. The girls even had to have a fancy brassiere, probably the most superfluous garment in China.
In Xu Naijian's recent (1985) story, "Because I'm Thirty and Unmarried," the so-called spinster is told by her girl cousin, "What kind of bra is this you're wearing, so big and ungainly? Get yourself one of those bras from Xinjiekou. They're a nice shape — made in Guangzhou. You're so out of date…"
The puzzling conflict that arises when a Chinese person is faced with choosing between the East and the West was expressed by the Chinese traveler Liang Ch'i-ch'ao. "Of course we may laugh at those old folks among us," he wrote in Travel Impressions of Europe (1919), "who block their own road of advancement and claim that we Chinese have all that is found in Western learning. But should we not laugh even more at those who are drunk with western ways and regard everything Chinese as worthless, as though we in the last several hundred years have remained primitive and have achieved nothing?"
As Mr. Fang walked along with me (but a few steps behind), we passed a refreshment stand and heard loud singing — one uproarious voice trying to manage a twangling Chinese song. The singer, a man, was seated at a table, his back turned to us. His two companions, who were sober, wore terrified smiles. The man was at the final stage of Chinese drunkenness: red faced, singing and drooling. Another bottle of beer and his eyes would swell up, he would gasp for breath and soon be out cold.
"That is also a result of the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Fang said. "What does he care? He has lost all discipline. He has no pride. It is bad behavior."
Then the man stood up, still singing, and staggered a little. He turned aside. He did not see me, but I saw him. It was Cheung, the taxi driver from Kowloon.
10: The Halt at Emei Shan: Train Number 209 to Kunming
The biggest statue of Buddha in the world, and probably the ugliest, is three hours down the main Chengdu-Kunming line at Leshan, a riverside town. The Buddha and the surrounding temples make it a place of pilgrimage. The statue sits in a niche as big as a gorge, at the confluence of three rivers. It is said that this Buddha was erected there 1200 years ago because the turbulence created by the meeting rivers had drowned so many boatmen. Even now I could see men battling through the suds in their sampans as I watched.
But this Buddha was less an object of veneration than an example of the Chinese fascination with freakishness — the very big, the very weird, the highly unusual. This Buddha's ears were twelve feet long. Chinese tourists frolicked on his feet. You could park a car on the nail of his big toe. Close up he was Brobdingnagian — big, plain, disproportionate — with weeds growing from his cracks. I imagined he did not look so grotesque from the river. There were dragon-boat races on the river that week: more freakishness — oarsmen throwing panicky ducks into the water and then chasing them in the luridly painted boats.
There were dragon-boat men in the restaurant at Leshan. They were singing and swilling beer and engaged in drinking contests (the loser had to clip clothespins to his ears so that he would look like a total jackass). For lunch I had the specialties of this pleasant town — frogs' thighs and green bean seeds, and then I went to the holy mountain at Emei. Like Leshan, Emei is also a place of pilgrimage. It is considered an act of piety to climb the mountain — holiness at 10,000 feet, on this penultimate staging post to even holier Tibet.
I met a group of eight elderly pilgrims at Emei. They were all in their seventies and carried backpacks — ingenious wicker baskets — and walking sticks and food bundles. They were the classic instance of smiling and portable pilgrims.
"Where do you come from?"
"From Xitang."
Over three hundred miles away, in the northeast of Sichuan.
"Why did you come here?"
"To pray to our God."
"And we are now going to Wuhou Temple in Chengdu," one old woman said. "To pray."
The women wore a sort of nun's cap — a starched white cloth carefully folded and pinned; and they had thick socks, like leg warmers, and like the men they leaned on hiking staffs. They were bluff and hardy and very good humored. Some of the women smoked pipes, and one chomped on a cigar. The men wore cloaks with big sleeves. They said they had climbed to the top of the mountain. None of them wore anything sturdier than sandals or cloth slippers.
China has five holy mountains. It is the Chinese Buddhist's wish — and the wish of many foreign hikers — to climb them all. The trouble is that, being holy and being Chinese, they have been trampled for thousands of years. They have steps cut to the summit, and noodle stalls along the way, and kiosks selling postcards, monks selling strings of beads, hawkers, fruiterers and professional photographers who charge one yuan per pose. And along with the tough grannies toiling towards the top, there are the Americans in their Chinese T-shirts, Chinese in their American T-shirts, the Germans wearing rucksacks, and the French clutching the guidebook that says Chine. None of this makes the mountain less holy, but it makes the climb less fun.
For some reason, Emei was full of monkeys — frowning rhesus monkeys. They pestered pilgrims and snatched food and rode on the necks of their owners in a lazy and confident way, sitting on a man's neck, with their legs dangling over his chest. They picked their teeth as they rode along. On a back road near Emei I saw a man giving his monkey a piggyback ride, as he cycled — just like a father and child.
I stayed at what was described to me as the Railway University at Emei — it was Mr. Fang's doing. Actually it was the Institute of Communications, and it had 30,000 students. I was in the guest house, which, being new and "modern," had the bizarre touches that the Chinese reserve for their most expensive structures. And when these structures venture out of the realm of Chinese architecture altogether, they acquire things like concrete umbrellas on the terrace, padded velvet walls, fuse boxes in the dining room, murals of pandas, cactuses in the bathroom as a sort of suggestion that there is no water, very scary-looking bare wires protruding from the walls, water stains on the ceiling which take on the appearance of caricatures, and in the smallest rooms the most enormous sofas. The reflecting pool is another feature of such places. These pools were very entertaining — you never knew what you might find in them: dead fish, shoes, a bicycle wheel, rusty cans, chopsticks; but never anything as dull as algae. The one at Emei was full of water, and in the water a very large mirror that had plopped off the wall and shivered to pieces in the pool.
"What do you think of the guest house?" Mr. Fang asked me.
"Excellent," I said. "I want to stay longer."
But the cook sized me up and did one of the cruelest things any cook can do in rural China: he made me Western food — what he conceived to be Western food. Undercooked potatoes, pink chicken, boiled cabbage, and something so odd I had to ask its name.
"Bean—"
His English was like his cooking: strange mimicry. But I eventually found out what he was trying to tell me: wiener schnitzel.