Riding the Iron Rooster

The ships that were involved in the Boston Tea Party had come from here. The English word tea is Xiamen-dialect Chinese. Xiamen's style of building is found in Canton and also in old Singapore and rural Malaysia—the tall shop-house with an overhang, and the sidewalk running underneath that second story. It is associated with Straits Chinese—the shopkeepers of Southeast Asia. It is not found elsewhere in China. It is practical and pretty, and I cannot think of it without seeing men in flapping pajamas, and women measuring out rice from sacks, and young Chinese girls with soulful faces gazing out of shuttered upstairs windows.

The villas—big stout houses with high ceilings and wraparound verandahs—also resembled the old houses of Singapore and Malaysia that were torn down to make room for the banks and hotels. Until recently they were kept in Xiamen because no one had the money to tear them down or to replace them; but then they were valued for aesthetic and historical reasons, and a preservation order was placed upon them. The new buildings of Xiamen are in a suburb beyond the Causeway, where they belong.

I found it almost impossible to find fault with Xiamen. Because it is in the south, the fruit is wonderful and cheap—all kinds: haws, oranges, tangerines, apples, pears, persimmons, grapes. And because it is on the sea fish and seafood are plentiful and various—all sorts of eels, and big garoupas, and prawns. The best and most expensive were the lobster-sized crayfish. They were kept in tanks in the restaurants—the southern Chinese habit (because of a lack of refrigeration) of keeping food alive until the last moment. In other tanks were frogs, eels, fish, and ducks—and even ducklings. You were invited to point out your proposed entrée, and they cut its throat.

On a back street in Xiamen, at a grubby little restaurant, I saw two cages, one containing a baby owl and the other holding a scowling hawk. There was hardly enough meat on either of them to fill a dumpling. They perched unsteadily, confined by the small cages, and they trembled with anxiety. When I stopped to look at them, a crowd gathered. I asked the owner how much he wanted to make them into a meal. He said 20 yuan for the owl ($5.50) and 15 yuan for the hawk ($4).

"Why not let them go?"

"Because I paid for them," he said.

"But they're unhappy."

His laugh meant You are a fool.

He said, "They taste very nice."

"They are small," I said. "One mouthful and that's it."

"The meat of this bird is very good for your eyes," he said.

"That is not true," I said. "Only savages believe that."

He was offended and angry. His mouth went strange, and he said nothing.

"It's a superstition," I said. "It is old thinking. Like eating rhino horn for your dick. Listen"—he was now turning away—"This bird eats mice. It is helpful. You should let it go."

The man began to hiss at me, a sort of preliminary to blowing up in my face. I had no money. I went back to the hotel and got 35 yuan out of my room, but by the time I walked back to the restaurant, the cages were empty. I had imagined holding a little revival of the festival called The Liberation of Living Creatures, in which birds were released from cages. But I was too late today. The owl and the hawk had been eaten.

As a consolation I went to Xiamen market, bought two mourning doves for about a dollar a bird, and let them go. They flapped over the harbor, past the hooting boats, to the nearby island of Gulangyu. Believing it might be a sign, I followed them the next day.

***

Gulangyu was a small island containing a lovely settlement in which no wheeled vehicles were allowed—no cars, no bicycles, no pushcarts. It was a five-minute free ferry ride across the harbor, and from its highest point—Sunlight Rock—it looked like Florence, or a Spanish city, a tumbled expanse of tiled roofs, all terra-cotta and green trees and church steeples. There were three Christian churches at the center of the settlement: this island had once held only foreigners—Dutch, Portuguese, English, Germans. It was Japanese until the end of the war, and then there were a number of tough battles against the Nationalists, who ultimately took Quemoy, which is quite visible to the northeast.

"Enemy territory?" I asked.

"We are all Chinese brothers," Mr. Wei said.

"Then why the trenches and foxholes?"

The east coast of Xiamen was all military earthworks and gun emplacements.

"Because sometimes they shoot at us," Mr. Wei said.