Performing Animals
ON MY WALKS IN SHANGHAI I OFTEN WENT PAST THE CHINESE Acrobatic Theater, a domed building near the center of the city. And I became curious and attended a performance; and after I saw it — not only the tumblers and clowns and contortionists, but also the man who balanced a dinner service for twelve on a chopstick that he held in his mouth — I wanted to know more.
Mr. Liu Maoyou was in charge of the acrobats at the Shanghai Bureau of Culture. He had started out as an assistant at the Shanghai Library, but even at the best of times things are quiet at the city library, since it is next to impossible — for political reasons — for anyone to borrow a book. The librarian is little more than a custodian of the stacks. He jumped at the chance of a transfer and joined the Bureau of Culture, and he accompanied the Chinese acrobats on their first tour of the United States in 1980.
“We call it a theater, because it has an artistic and dramatic element,” Mr. Liu said. “It has three aspects — acrobats, magic, and a circus.”
I asked him how it started.
“Before Liberation all the acrobats were family members. They were travelers and performers. They performed on the street or in any open space. But we thought of bringing them together and training them properly. Of course, the Chinese had been acrobats for thousands of years. They reached their height in the Tang Dynasty and were allowed to perform freely.”
Mr. Liu said this with such enthusiasm that I asked him how he felt about the Tang Dynasty.
“It was the best period in China,” he said. “The freest time — all the arts flourished during the Tang era.”
So much for the Shanghai Cultural Bureau, but he was still talking.
“Before Liberation they were doing actions without art form,” he said. “But they have to use mind as well as body. That’s why we started the training center. We don’t want these acrobats to be mind-empty, so after their morning practice they study math, history, language, and literature.”
He said that in 1986 thirty candidates were chosen from three thousand applicants. They were all young — between ten and fourteen years old, but Mr. Liu said the bureau was not looking for skill but rather for potential.
“We also have a circus,” he said. “Also a school for animal training.”
This interested me greatly, since I have a loathing for everything associated with performing animals. I have never seen a lion tamer who did not deserve to be mauled; and when I see a little mutt, wearing a skirt and a frilly bonnet, and skittering through a hoop, I am thrilled by a desire for its tormentor (in the glittering pantsuit) to contract rabies.
“Tell me about your animal training, Mr. Liu.”
“Before Liberation the only training we did was with monkeys. Now we have performing cats—”
“Household cats? Pussycats?”
“Yes. They do tricks.”
It is a belief of many Chinese I met that animals such as cats and dogs do not feel pain. They are on earth to be used — trained, put to work, killed, and eaten. When you see the dumb, laborious lives that Chinese peasants live it is perhaps not so surprising that they torture animals.
“Also pigs and chickens,” Mr. Liu said.
“Performing chickens?”
“Not chickens but cocks.”
“What do the cocks do?”
“They stand on one leg — hand standing. And some other funny things.”
God only knows how they got these pea-brained roosters to do these funny things, but I had the feeling they wired them up and zapped them until they got the point.
“What about the pigs?” I asked.
“The pigs do not perform very often, but they can walk on two legs—”
And when he said that I realized what it was that was bothering me. It was that everything he said reminded me of Animal Farm; and the fact that it was a fable of totalitarianism only made Mr. Liu’s images worse. He had described a living example of the moment in that book when oppression is about to overtake the farm. There is terror and confusion at the unexpected sight: It was a pig walking on his hind legs. And Orwell goes on:
Yes, it was Squealer. A little awkwardly, as though not quite used to supporting his considerable bulk in that position, but with perfect balance.… And a moment later, out from the door of the farmhouse, came a long file of pigs, all walking on their hind legs.…
I was thinking of this as Mr. Liu was saying, “—and lions and tigers, and the only performing panda in China.”
He said that the animals and the acrobats often went on tour — even to the United States. Many of the acrobats worked in the United States. In 1985 a deal was made whereby Chinese acrobats would join Ringling Brothers Circus for a year or two at a time. In the first year there were fifteen, and in 1986 there were twenty hired-out Chinese acrobats working in America.
I asked Mr. Liu about the financial arrangement.
“I don’t know exactly,” he said, “but Ringling Brothers Circus pays us and we pay the acrobats.”
“How much does Ringling Brothers pay you?”
“About two hundred to six hundred dollars a week, depending on the act. For each person.”
“How much do you pay the acrobats?”
“About one hundred yuan.”
Thirty dollars.
Talk about performing pigs! I wondered how long people would be willing to allow themselves to be treated as exportable merchandise. For some it was not long: the very week I had the conversation with Mr. Liu a man playing the role of an acrobatic lion disappeared in New York. Months later he still had not been found.
The Edge of the World
BY MIDAFTERNOON THE TRAIN WAS MOVING ACROSS A FLAT green plain between two ranges of low mountains, the Qilian Shan and the Helan Shan. In places I could see the crumbled sections of the Great Wall. Where the land was flat, it was intensively cultivated, and in places there were tall, slender, and rather redundant-looking poplars. The Chinese, averse to planting shade trees, favored the skinny symbolic tree that doubled as a fence. The idea of The Forest was alien to China. It only existed in northern Heilongjiang province — the Manchurian northeast; and I had heard that even the little that remained was being cut down and made into chopsticks and toothpicks and Ping-Pong paddles.
In most other countries, a landscape feature was a grove of trees, or a meadow, or even a desert; so you immediately associated the maple tree with Canada, the oak with England, the birch with the Soviet Union, and desert and jungle with Africa. But no such thing came to mind in China, where the most common and obvious feature of a landscape was a person — or usually many people. Every time I stared at a landscape, there was a person in it staring back at me.
Even here in the middle of nowhere there were people and settlements. The villages were walled in, and most houses had walls around them: mud smeared over bricks. They were the sort of stockades that are frequent in Afghanistan and Iran — at the far end of this Silk Road — and probably a cultural hangover from the memory of marauders and Mongol hordes, the Central Asian nightmare.
The day had turned very hot. It was now in the nineties. I saw eighteen sheep crowded into a little blot of shade under a frail hawthorn tree. Children cooled themselves by kicking water in a ditch. Farmers with lampshade hats planted crops by pushing one sprout at a time into the ground, a process that had a greater affinity to needlepoint sewing than to farming, as though they were stitching a design into the furrows. And though there were black peaks and mountain ranges on both sides of the train, the land ahead fell away, and it was as if we were approaching the ocean — the land dipped and had the smooth, stony look of the seashore. It was the hottest part of the day, but even so the land was full of people. Hours later, in an immense and stony desert I saw a man in a faded blue suit, bumping over the stones on his bike.