Riding the Iron Rooster

People also go to Kunming to visit the stone forest ("We call this one Chicken Tree—can you see why?") and to see the polluted lake and the temples above it, which are so relentlessly visited they are practically worn away from the successive waves of trampling feet, and those temples that aren't are buried under ice-cream sticks and candy wrappers and half-eaten moon cakes.

I went for walks. I even managed to lose Mr. Fang for a few days. I went to an exhibition commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Zhou Enlai. There was a sort of Zhou Enlai cult growing in China. It was also the tenth anniversary of the death of Mao, but no such exhibition had been mounted for him. Of the thirty-odd photographs in the Zhou exhibition, only one showed Mao Zedong—in 1949, Liberation Year: Mao very small, Zhou very large.

At an antique shop near the exhibit I saw a very shapely bronze incense burner—a water buffalo. It stood among the junk jewelry, the broken pocket watches, the old forks with twisted tines, the Yunnanese tobacco pouches. I asked how much?

The price he quoted was seventeen thousand dollars.

I was still laughing as I strolled through the market in the Kunming back streets. It was there that I worked out a way of eating Chinese dumplings without risking infectious hepatitis or cholera or bubonic plague (there had been recent outbreaks of this medieval life-shortener in northern Yunnan and Qinghai). There are few dishes tastier than freshly fried or steamed Chinese dumplings, and they were tastiest in the open-air markets. But the plates they were served in were washed in dirty water, and the chopsticks were simply wiped off and reused.

My hygienic answer was to ask for them in a piece of paper—and to provide my own paper. And the chopsticks could be made safe by scorching them in the cooking fire—holding them in the flames for a few moments to kill the germs. But as a matter of fact many travelers in China carry their own chopsticks.

My favorite spot in Kunming was the park at Green Lake—though it was an unprepossessing park, with a go-cart track, a children's football field, and a pathetic circus in two brown tents (the star attraction was a tortured-looking bear pacing in a tiny cage). The lake itself had disappeared, dried out, grown weeds and grass: there was no water at all in it.

But that area had become the meeting place for people who wanted to kill time by singing, putting on plays or operas, or making music. It seemed very odd to me at first, the people in little groups—twenty or thirty such groups scattered throughout the park; and each gathering of people producing a play or listening to someone singing. There were duets, there were trios, and many were accompanied by men playing violins. Often the duet was an old man and an old woman.

"They are singing a love song," a bystander told me. His name was Xin. He agreed with me that it was very touching to see these people performing.

He said, "For ten years we hated each other and were very suspicious. We hardly spoke to each other. It was terrible."

He meant during the Cultural Revolution but didn't say it. Like many people he could not bear uttering the mocking words.

"This is like a dream to these people. The old ones can hardly believe it. That's why they are here. To talk and to remember. They don't want to forget the old songs. This is their way of remembering."

What made these musical performances especially unusual was their exuberance, because the Chinese are very shy and rather self-conscious, and find it an agony to be set apart and stared at (which was why the Red Guards' struggle sessions were so painful and so often ended in the suicide of the person "struggled"). The fact that some were performing solo was a measure of their energy and confidence. It is a great deal easier to stand alone and sing if you are happy.

Some of the people were telling stories in dialogue form, others were playing traditional songs. At least half the groups of old people were performing the Yunnan version of Peking opera, called dian xi. The most ambitious one I saw involved four or five singers who stood under the trees and acted out a sad love story from Zhejiang called Flower Lamp (Hua Deng).

"This is known all over China," Xin said, and he explained it.

It concerned a young man Liang Shanbo and his lover, Zhu Yingtai. The plot was not unlike that of Romeo and Juliet. The lovers' families were so opposed that it was impossible for the two to meet without using a subterfuge. Liang had the clever idea of dressing up as a woman (the man playing Liang in the park used a fan to suggest this), and in this way gained access to the lovely Zhu. The romance blossoms, but both families are against the marriage. After some complications ("The plot zigzags," Xin said) they realize they cannot marry. Zhu kills herself. Liang sings a pathetic love song on her grave, and then he kills himself. The end.