Riding the Iron Rooster

Most of them had been born in the first years of the Cultural Revolution, so they had no memory of it. They regarded it the way I had regarded the Great Depression in America, or the Second World War. They seemed episodes from the past—not very remote, but what mattered was that they were over. The depression had had an end, and so had the war. People with college degrees sold apples on the street, went one of my father's depression stories. The neighborhood air-raid warden yelled "Put that light out!" That for me, was the war. The young Chinese had the same sort of exemplary stories of the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Mr. Bai, they had not even tagged along after the Red Guards. Theirs were always stories of disappearances, of neighbors and relatives sent into the countryside.

Their sharpest memories were of Mao's death, the Gang of Four, and Deng and his reforms, but even so they were more impatient than hopeful.

"If you live through these changes they seem very slow," one said. "It is only because you are a foreigner, on the outside, that the changes seem dramatic. For us they are very ponderous."

When I considered that it was still illegal for a foreigner to talk at random with any Chinese citizen—the old rule was seldom enforced, but it was a well-known rule nonetheless—I was grateful for this frankness. The healthiest sign in China was this straight talk.

Because the students were not of the Maoist years they were ambivalent about the Old Man. Indeed, I sometimes found talking to the young that I was more enthusiastic about Mao than they were. I admired his military brilliance, his subtle mind, his wit and charisma, his ingenuity and toughness. Who could not admire the Long March, or his tenacity against the Japanese, his voluminous writing, his ability to unify this enormous country? Of course, Confucianism also kept these people unified and family minded, but Mao, who loved contradiction (and even wrote a long essay on the subject), remained for me the most fascinating and ambiguous figure in Chinese history.

For these students he was an uninteresting riddle. He had cast a long shadow, yes; but they were still living in that shadow, and they didn't like it very much.

"He was a strange man," a student in Qingdao told me.

I asked who he resembled, because Chinese life is full of models, like the heroic soldier, Lei Feng, the inspired worker, Iron Man Wang (Wang Jinxi), and the Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains.

"He was unlike any other Chinese man," the student said. "I think he read too many books and began to make a place for himself in Chinese history. He was an arrogant and self-important man. He behaved like an emperor."

My reaction was Yes, but—yet why bother to sell them on Mao? They had to live the rest of their lives here. I could leave any time I liked. In the end it was for them to deal with his memory, not me.

"When Mao died, I knew I had to cry," another student said. "We had been required to love him. I was just a little kid at school. I didn't feel anything, but the teachers were watching. I had to force myself to cry."

Ice was packed into the bays and inlets. It was January, after all. But it was sunny, and during the day it was almost warm. The rocks on the promontories of Qingdao were fluted with ice, too, and some were ringed by glassy skirts of ice crust. I wondered whether it was because it was out of season that the place was so pleasant. There was a swimmer on Beach Number Two one day. He strolled down and plunged in, as people were said to do in freezing Harbin in the winter, breaking ice in the river to go for a dip. But it wasn't swimming. It was a rather pointless act of willpower, like holding a lighted match under your finger (a loony pastime advocated by the convicted Watergate flunky Gordon Liddy, by the way). Would people do such things if no one were watching, or if they couldn't tell someone about it later on?

I had arrived in Qingdao on a freezing night, feeling I had stepped into a nightmare made up of old German movies and winter storms, steam locomotives and fog, and the black station with the hands missing from its clock face. I left on a dazzling springlike day, and now in the sunshine I could see that the station was a relic, with the red star of China planted on its conical roof. The loud whistle blew, and a moment later the train was tracking past the islands and lighthouse and breezy streets, into the open country of Shandong that was so flat it had the look of a floodplain.

19: The Shandong Express to Shanghai: Train Number 234