Riding the Iron Rooster

But I liked old coastal China. It had been influenced by its traders and occupiers, and because of its seagoing communities it was outward looking. The dutiful and pious tycoons who had made millions overseas had obeyed the Confucian precepts and become philanthropic. The houses and schools they built blended with the Romanesque church with its sign, Ecclesia Catholica, and the old German consulate which might have been designed by Joseph Conrad. The philanthropoids had built villas in a section of Gulangyu called Sea View Gardens, and there they lived among foreign compradors and tea merchants and petty consular officials, each on his own colonnaded verandah, under the palm trees.

The building regulations on Gulangyu are unique in China for their fastidiousness. No building may be higher than three stories, all had to be made of red brick and carved stone, and all designs had to be approved by the Architectural Commission. They were good old-world designs, and even the newest buildings—the vegetable market and the museum—were being put up with great care. Restoration work was being carried out on the villas in order to turn them into hotels and guest houses without losing their character. It was odd for the Chinese, so practical and penny pinching, to spend extra time and money to make a thing look right. The magnificent city wall around Peking, with its forty-four bastions and sixteen gates had simply been bulldozed by Mao's goonish philistines, chanting, "Down with the Four Olds! Up with the Four News! New Thinking! New Customs! New Habits! New—!" In this same spirit, two miles of the Great Wall were pulled down between 1970 and 1974 by an army unit at Gubeikou; the ancient stone blocks of the wall were used to build army barracks.

But this vandalism of China's recent past did not extend to Gulangyu except in the form of big-character graffiti (Long Live the Thoughts of Mao Zedong! was still legible in two-foot characters on the walls of a villa) and in selective desecration. The Catholic church was turned into a factory, hate meetings were held in the Protestant ("Three-in-One") church, and the Buddha statues were smashed in the temples—a quarter of Xiamen is Buddhist.

I asked Mr. Wei the reason for the meticulous restoration of Gulangyu.

"Because the government wants to turn this into a tourist island," he said. He also said that he was relieved that the government had not decided to tear the place down, as they had so much else.

We were walking towards Sunlight Rock and ran into a junkman on a back street. He was a fat boy with a pole across his shoulders, carrying loads of wastepaper. I stopped him, and because his dialect was incomprehensible to me, Mr. Wei helped me quiz him.

The boy said that if the wastepaper was good quality, like old, neatly stacked newspapers, he would pay 50 fen for one kilo—about 6 cents a pound. That seemed to me pretty fair. But for other paper he paid less than a penny a pound.

How was business?

"No good," he said. "This is hard work for very little money."

Off he went, his pole bouncing from the weight of the wastepaper bundles.

"Why are you so interested in the Cultural Revolution?" Mr. Wei asked me.

"Because it influenced me at the time—twenty years ago when I was in Africa," I said. "I thought of myself as a revolutionary."

Mr. Wei smiled. He was twenty-one. His father was my age.

I said, "What did your father do during the Cultural Revolution?"

"He just stayed in the house."

"For how long?"

"Six or seven years."

We climbed to the top of Sunlight Rock. In 1982, at the age of seventy-eight, the chain-smoking Mr. Deng Xiaoping climbed to this summit. He was followed by a flunky with an oxygen bottle, but he didn't need it.

Looking across the harbor to Xiamen city I could see how the areas of light industry and banking had expanded westward. This was said to be one of the busiest boomtowns in China. Once upon a time they made paper umbrellas and firecrackers and chopsticks for export. These days they manufactured bicycles, toys, Camel cigarettes, and microchips. And the Kodak Company was installing a filmmaking plant at great expense.

The harbor was full of freighters and fishing boats. Beyond it, in the lanes and streets, there were stalls—people selling fried noodles, fruit, sweets, vegetables, fish soup. One of the happiest pastimes of people in south China is eating out—at greasy little restaurants or at stalls—by lantern light. I could not forgive them for stuffing rare birds into their mouths, but very few had the money for such delicacies. They were great noodle eaters, and because of the pleasant climate, they liked milling around the town and eating when the mood took them, a habit they had exported to Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia.

Xiamen was the only place in China were I was repeatedly accosted by pretty girls. They sneaked up behind me and snatched my arm. "Shansh marnie?" they said, and pinched me delightfully and held on. Was that all they wanted?