“What do you think of this?” I asked Mr. Jiang.
“I like the turtle with bamboo,” he said. “The muntjac is a bit salty.”
“You’ve had this before?”
“Oh yes.”
“What does the driver think?” I said. I was trying to describe to myself the taste of the snake and the crane and the pigeon. I laughed, thinking that whenever someone ate something exotic they always said “chicken.”
The silent driver, endlessly stuffing himself, made a dive for the turtle, tonged some into his bowl, and gobbled it. He did the same to the wawa fish.
“He likes the fish,” Mr. Jiang said.
The driver did not glance up. He ate like a predator in the wild — he paused, very alert, his eyes flicking, and then he darted for the food and ate it in one swift movement of his claw-like chopsticks.
Afterward, slightly nauseated from the forbidden food, I felt like a Hindu who had just eaten hamburger. I said I would walk home. Mr. Jiang tried to drag me into the car, but I resisted. Then, hiding his sheepishness in hearty guffaws, he handed me the bilclass="underline" 200 yuan.
That was four months’ salary for these young men. It was a huge amount of money. It was the foreigner’s airfare from Guilin to Peking. It was the price of two of the best bicycles in China, the Flying Pigeon Deluxe. It was more than a night at the Great Wall Sheraton. It represented a good radio. It was two years’ rent of a studio apartment in Shanghai. It was the cost of an antique silver bowl in the bazaar at Turfan.
I paid Mr. Jiang. I wanted a reaction from him. There was none. That was for form’s sake. The Chinese make a practice of not reacting to any sort of hospitality. But I persisted.
“Is the driver impressed with this meal?”
“Not at all,” Mr. Jiang said. “He has eaten this many times before. Ha! Ha!”
It rang in my ears — one of the few genuine laughs I heard in China.
It meant, We can always fool a foreigner.
I was the hairy, big-nosed devil from the back of beyond, one of those foreigners (wei-guo ren), whom the Chinese regard as the yokels of the world. We lived in crappy little countries that were squeezed at the edge of the Middle Kingdom. The places we inhabited were insignificant but bizarre. Once the Chinese believed that we tied ourselves into bunches so that we would not be snatched away by eagles. Some of our strange societies were composed entirely of women, who became pregnant by staring at their shadows. We had noses like anteaters. We were hairier than monkeys. We smelled like corpses. One odd fenestrated race had holes in their chests, through which poles were thrust when they carried one another around. Most of these notions were no longer current, but they had given rise to self-deceiving proverbs, which sometimes seemed true. And then the laughter was real.
Shaoshan: “Where the Sun Rises”
“UNTIL NOW VISITORS DID NOT COME HERE TO LOOK AT the scenery,” Mr. Li had said. How true. They had come as pilgrims, first to walk the seventy-five miles west to Shaoshan, and then — after the railway line was built in the late sixties — to take the strangest train in China. They had come believing the Cultural Revolution slogan THE SUN RISES IN SHAOSHAN (TAIYANG CONG SHAOSHAN SHENGQI), which was a metaphor for Mao Zedong’s having been born there. The Chinese had once named themselves “Shaoshan” in Mao’s honor, and I ran into at least one Li Shaoshan.
In the sixties there were several trains every hour. Now there is one train a day. It leaves at six in the morning from Changsha and arrives three hours later at Shaoshan. It returns from Shaoshan in the evening, just an old puffer on a forgotten branch line, which had outlived its purpose.
The road had always been popular, even after the train was running regularly. It was not only the best way for Red Guards and revolutionaries to prove their ardor, but long walks were part of Mao’s political program — the “Forge Good Iron Footsoles” scheme. The idea was that all Chinese citizens were to have sturdy feet during the Cultural Revolution, because when the Nameless Enemy tried to invade China the evacuation of cities might be necessary. Mao filled the people with a war paranoia — that was the reason they were required to make bricks, dig trenches and bunkers and bomb shelters. They were also ordered to have hard feet and to take twenty-mile hikes on their days off in order to give themselves “iron footsoles” (“All I got were blisters,” my informant Wang told me). It was to this end that they trekked for four days on the road from Changsha to Shaoshan, sleeping in peasants’ huts and singing “The East Is Red,” “The Sun Rises in Shaoshan.” They also sang ditties that had been set to music from the Selected Thoughts, such numbers as “People of the World, Unite and Defeat the U.S. Aggressors and All Their Running Dogs!” with its stirring last line, “Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.” My favorite song from the Selected Thoughts, one I was assured had enlivened the marches along the Shaoshan road with its syncopation, went as follows:
A revolution is not a dinner party,
Or writing an essay, or painting a picture,
or doing embroidery;
It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle,
So temperate, kind, courteous, restrained
and magnanimous.”*
A revolution is an insurrection,
An act of violence by which one class
overthrows another.
They sang them on the trains, too. They flew flags. They wore Mao buttons and badges, and the red armband. It was not a trivial matter. It compared in size and fervor to Muslims making the Hadj to Mecca. On one day in 1966, a procession of 120,00 °Chinese thronged the village of Shaoshan to screech songs and perform the qing an with the Little Red Book.
Twenty years later I arrived at the station in an empty train. The station was empty. The unusually long platform was empty, and so were the sidings. There was not a soul in sight. The station was tidy, but that only made its emptiness seem much odder. It was very clean, freshly painted in a limpid shade of blue, and entirely abandoned. No cars in the parking lot, no one at the ticket windows. A large portrait of Mao hung over the station and on a billboard was the epitaph in Chinese: MAO ZEDONG WAS A GREAT MARXIST, A GREAT PROLETARIAN REVOLUTIONARY, A GREAT TACTICIAN AND THEORIST.
That was delicate: nothing about his being a great leader. Mao’s dying wish (obviously ignored) was to be remembered as a teacher.
I walked through the village, reflecting on the fact that nothing looks emptier than an empty parking lot. There were many here, designed for buses; they were very large and nothing was parked in them. I went to the hotel that was built for dignitaries and I sat in the almost-empty dining room, under a Mao portrait, eating and listening to people spitting.
The tide was out in Shaoshan; it was the town that time forgot — ghostly and echoing. And so it fascinated me. It was actually a pretty place, a rural retreat, with lovely trees and green fields, and a stream running through it that topped up the lotus ponds. In any other place an atmosphere of such emptiness would seem depressing, but this was a healthy neglect — what is healthier than refusing to worship a politician? — and the few people there had come as picnickers, not as pilgrims.
Mao’s house was at the far end of the village, in a glade. It was large and its yellow stucco and Hunanese design gave it the look of a hacienda — very cool and airy, with an atrium and a lovely view of its idyllic setting. Here Mao was born in December 1893. The rooms are neatly labeled: PARENTS’ BEDROOM, BROTHER’S ROOM, KITCHEN, PIGSTY, and so forth. It is the house of a well-to-do family — Mao’s father was “a relatively rich peasant,” clever with money and mortgages, and he was a moneylender of sorts. There was plenty of space here — a big barn and roomy kitchen. Mrs. Mao’s stove was preserved (DO NOT TOUCH), and a placard near it read: IN 1921 MAO ZEDONG EDUCATED HIS FAMILY IN REVOLUTION NEAR THIS STOVE. And in the sitting room: IN 1927 MEETINGS WERE HELD HERE TO DISCUSS REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES.