Riding the Iron Rooster

I said yes and was taken upstairs to see a restaurant decorated to resemble a cave. It had fiberglass walls, bulging brown plastic rocks, lights shining through plastic stalactites, and each table was fixed in a greeny-black cleft, with fake moss and boulders around it. The idea was perhaps not a bad one, but this was a vivid example of the Chinese not knowing when to stop. It was shapeless, artless, grotesquely beyond kitsch; it was a complicated disfigurement, wrinkled and stinking, like a huge plastic toy that had begun to melt and smell. You sat on those wrinkled rocks and bumped your head on the stalactites and ate fish cheeks with fresh ginger.

Cherry Blossom said, "Do you think it's romantic?"

"Some people might find it romantic," I said. And I pointed out the window. "That's what I find romantic."

The tangerine sun had settled into the Gulf of Bohai, coloring the little islands and the cliffs of Dalian and the long stretch of empty beach.

Cherry Blossom said, "Let your imagination fly!"

We left the Dragon Cave (and I thought: It must have a counterpart in California). I said, "I understand there are recuperation tours. People come to this province to try out Chinese medicine."

"Yes. It is like a fat farm."

"Where did you learn that, Cherry Blossom?"

"My teachers at the institute were Americans. They taught me so many things!"

She had loved her years at the Dalian Foreign Languages Institute. She was now only twenty-two, but she intended to go on studying and working. She had no intention of getting married, and in explaining why, she lost her jokey manner and became distressed.

Her decision not to marry was the result of a trip to Peking. She had taken a group of visiting doctors to see a Chinese hospital—how it worked, how the patients were treated, the progress of surgical procedures, and so forth. The doctors expressed an interest in seeing a delivery. Cherry Blossom witnessed this and, so she said, almost went into shock at the sight of the baby, with its squashed head and its bloody face, issuing forth and streaming water. The mother had howled and so had the baby.

In all respects it was a completely normal birth.

"It was a mess," she said, and touched her plump cheeks in disgust. "I was afraid. I hated it. I would never do it—never. I will never get married."

I said, "You don't have to have babies just because you get married."

She was shaking her head. The thought was absurd—she couldn't take it in. The whole point of marriage these days was to produce one child. Even though the Party was now stressing that the best marriages were work related, the husband and wife joint members of a work unit, a busy little team, Cherry Blossom could not overcome the horror of what she had seen in the delivery room of Capital Hospital in Peking. She said she intended to remain in the dormitory of the Working Women's Unit and go on knitting.

It was late at night when we crossed Dalian to get to the harbor, where I intended to take the ship to Yantai. We passed through the old bourgeois suburbs that had been built by the Japanese and the Russians. On the sloping streets of these neighborhoods there were seedy semidetached villas and stucco bungalows under the bare trees. I had not seen anything quite like them in China. They were appropriate to the suburban streets, the picket fences and the brick walls; and then I saw the laundry in the front yards and the Chinese at the windows.

I often passed down streets like this, seeing big gloomy villas with gables and jutting eaves and mullioned windows; but always in nightmares. They were the sort of houses that first looked familiar in the dream, and then I saw evil faces at the windows, and I realized that I was no longer safe. How often in nightmares I had been chased down streets like these.

"I am sorry to see you go," Cherry Blossom said, when we arrived at the boat.

She was the only person in China who ever said that to me. In her old-fashioned way, with her old-fashioned clichés, she was very nice. I wished her well, and we shook hands. I wanted to tell her that I was grateful to her for looking after me. I started to say it, but she cut me off.

"Keep the wind at your back, Paul," she said, and giggled again, delighted with her own audacity.

17: On the Lake of Heaven to Yantai

This ship, the Tian Hu (Lake of Heaven), made a nightly journey across the Bohai Gulf to Yantai, on the coast of Shandong Province. It carried over a thousand passengers, mostly in steerage, and some in six-berth cabins. Seen from this ship Dalian was merely black hills and a black harbor, and Yantai was under the moon somewhere, a hundred-odd nautical miles away.

The Tian Hu was full of spitters—something to do with the sea air, perhaps, and the wish to have a good hawk. I had resolved that I was going to ignore them, but it was on this ship that I realized what had been bothering me about Chinese spitting. It was, simply, that they were not very good at it.