Riding the Iron Rooster

The bean curd was flavored with oil and onion and chopped pork and flakes of red pepper the size of a thumbnail. The fried dumplings were filled with spinach. The rice was damp and lumpy, but that didn't matter—Chinese rice was made in huge tureens, so it was always stodgy. This was the Chinese equivalent of a fast-food joint. People popped in for a quick meal and they hurried away. Near me a blind man sat with his guide boy—the blind man had a tight grip on the boy's wrist. And satisfied eaters, having finished, were blowing their noses in their fingers, or hawking loudly, or spitting onto the floor.

Turning away from the sight of a man taking aim at a spittoon—was I a silly ethnocentric old fussbudget for finding a brimming spittoon unwelcome in a restaurant?—I saw a woman watching me.

"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.