Public Bathhouse
I FOUND OUT THAT PEKING WAS FULL OF PUBLIC BATHHOUSES — about thirty of them, subsidized by the government. They are one of the cheapest outings in China: for 60 fen (15 cents) a person is admitted and given a piece of soap, a towel, and a bed; and he is allowed to stay all day, washing himself in the steamy public pool and resting.
The one I found was called Xing Hua Yuan. It was open from eight-thirty in the morning until eight o’clock at night. Many people who use it are travelers who have just arrived in Peking after a long journey and want to look presentable for their friends and relatives — and of course who don’t want to impose on them for a bath.
The beds were in little cubicles, and men wrapped in towels were resting or walking around talking. It was like a Roman bath — social, with the scalded Chinese, pinkish in the heat, sloshing themselves and yelling at each other in a friendly way. It was also possible to get a private room, for about double the ordinary rate.
I was thinking how Roman and Victorian the bathhouse looked (there was a women’s bathhouse next door), how useful for travelers and bathless residents, how like a club it was and how congenial, when a homosexual Chinese man set me straight.
“Most people go there to take a bath,” he said. “But it is also a good place to go if you want to meet a boy and do things with him.”
“What sort of things?”
He didn’t flinch. He said, “One day I was in Xing Hua Yuan and saw two men in a private room, and one had the other one’s cock in his mouth. That sort of thing.”
Shanghai
SHANGHAI IS AN OLD BROWN RIVERSIDE CITY WITH THE LOOK of Brooklyn, and the Chinese — who are comforted by crowds — like it for its mobs and its street life. It has a reputation for city slickers and stylishness. Most of China’s successful fashion designers work in Shanghai, and if you utter the words Yifu Sheng Luolang, the Shanghainese will know you are speaking the name of Yves Saint-Laurent. When I arrived in the city, there was an editor of the French magazine Elle prowling the streets looking for material for an article on China called “The Fashion Revolution.” According to the Chinese man who accompanied her — whom I later met — this French woman was mightily impressed by the dress sense of the Shanghai women. She stopped them and took their picture and asked where they got their clothes. The majority said that they got them in the Free Market in the back streets or that they made the clothes themselves at home, basing them on pictures they saw in western magazines. Even in the days of the Cultural Revolution, the women workers showed up at their factories with bright sweaters and frilly blouses under their blue baggy suits; it was customary to meet in the women’s washroom and compare the hidden sweaters before they started work.
Because it is a cosmopolitan city and has seen more foreigners — both invaders and friendly visitors — than any other Chinese city, it is a polyglot place. It is at once the most politically dogmatic (“Oppose book worship,” “Political work is the lifeblood of all economic work”: Mao) and the most bourgeois. When changes came to China, they appeared first in Shanghai; and when there is conflict in China, it is loudest and most violent in Shanghai. The sense of life is strong in Shanghai, and even a city hater like myself can detect Shanghai’s spirit and appreciate Shanghai’s atmosphere. It is not crass like Canton, but it is abrasive — and in the hot months stifling, crowded, noisy, and smelly.
It seemed to me noisy most of all, with the big-city, all-night howl that is the sound track of New York (honks, sirens, garbage trucks, shouts, death rattles). Peking was rising and would soon be a city of tall buildings, but Shanghai had been built on mud and was growing sideways and spreading into the swamps of Zhejiang. All day the pile drivers hammered steel into this soft soil to fortify it, and one was right outside my window — a cruel and dominating noise that determined the rhythm of my life. Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo! It affected the way I breathed and walked and ate: I moved my feet and lifted my spoon to Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo! It orchestrated my talking, too, it made me write in bursts, and when I brushed my teeth I discovered I did it to the pounding of this pile driver, the bang and its half echo, Zhong-guo! It began at seven in the morning and was still hammering at eight at night, and in Shanghai it was inescapable, because nearly every neighborhood had its own anvil clang of Zhong-guo!
I walked the back streets in order to keep away from the traffic and the crowds. And I realized that it would be dishonest to complain too much about noise, the pile drivers, and the frantic energy, because on my first visit to Shanghai I felt it was dreary and moribund and demoralized. Why was it that they never knew when to stop? Even the back streets were crowded, with improvised stalls and households that served as shop fronts and markets set up in the gutters, and people mending shoes and bicycles and doing carpentry on the pavement.
Toward the Bund — Shanghai’s riverbank promenade — I saw a spire behind a wall and found a way to enter. It was St. Joseph’s Church, and the man I took to be the caretaker, because he was so shabbily dressed in a ragged jacket and slippers, was the pastor, a Catholic priest. He was both pious and watchful, soft-spoken and alert — it is the demeanor of a Chinese Christian who had been put through more hoops than he cares to remember. The church had been wrecked during the Cultural Revolution, daubed with slogans, and turned into a depot for machinery, and the churchyard had been a parking lot.
“Sacramentum,” the priest said, pointing at the flickering candle, and he smiled with satisfaction: the consecrated host was in the tabernacle.
I asked him why this was so. Was there a service today?
No, he said, and brought me to the back of the church, where there was a coffin with a white paper cross stuck to it. He said there was a funeral tomorrow.
“I take it you’re busy — lots of people coming to church.”
“Oh yes. And there are five churches in Shanghai. They are always full on Sundays.”
He invited me to attend Mass, and out of politeness I said I might, but I knew I wouldn’t. I had no business there: I was a heretic. And I was often annoyed by westerners who, although they never went to church at home, would get the churchgoing bug in China, as an assertion of their difference or perhaps a reproach to the Chinese — as if religious freedom were the test of China’s tolerance. Well, it was one test, of course, but it was exasperating to see the test administered by an American unbeliever. So I didn’t go to church in China, but sometimes when I saw a bird in the grass I dropped to my knees and marveled as it twitched there.