Riding the Iron Rooster

This annoyed him, because I deliberately twisted his words. He yelled at me, "It's a picnic!"

A few nights later I dreamed of walking through the ravines that I had seen earlier that week in the hills of Fujian. I was captured by some Mongolian-looking men who were led by a small and very fierce woman. They all had curved knives that they kept jabbing into me, as if impatient to kill me.

"Empty your bag!" the woman shrieked.

Only then did I realize that I had a bag and that I was carrying some little antique statues that I had bought in a Chinese market.

"Show your certificate!"

"Here," I said, finding a piece of paper in my bag. It was the wrong certificate, but I thought: The Gurkhas will save me.

The woman read my mind and replied, "We are the Gurkhas!"

That was probably more a nightmare of buying trinkets illegally than a nightmare of traveling on the open road in China and encountering strangers—nothing was safer than that, judging from my experience of traipsing up and down in China.

The wonderful market in Xiamen, and the dry-goods stores under the shop-houses, reminded me that the best buys in China are not in the souvenir shops and the Friendship Stores—not jade carvings, cork sculpture, ivory letter openers, stuffed pandas, turquoise jewelry, cloisonné, brassware, plastic chopsticks, lacquerware, bone bracelets, or the really dull and derivative paintings on scrolls. If I were to recommend anything special in China that was a bargain—good quality, one of a kind, worth bringing home—I would say: socket wrenches, screwdrivers, watercolor paints and brushes, pencils, calligraphy, sturdy brown envelopes, padlocks, plumber's tools, wicker baskets, espadrilles, T-shirts, cashmere sweaters, bonsai trees, silk carpets and silk cushion covers, tablecloths, terra-cotta pots, thermos jugs, illustrated art books, herbs, spices, and tea by the pound. Bamboo bird cages are also lovely, though the thought of keeping a bird in them is depressing. China may also be the only country in the world where you can buy a cricket cage—made either of a gourd or of porcelain.

A number of these items are made in Xiamen, in the Huli Industrial Area. In more revolutionary times this area was part of a land-reclamation scheme. Mao had said (this was during the early years of the Cultural Revolution), "China must learn to feed itself! People have one mouth but they have two hands!" And so forth. The Red Guards and work gangs decided to build a causeway linking Xiamen to the west side of the harbor, and then to fill in the land behind the causeway and plant rice. But the land was poor and salty. Rice would not grow. And time passed. Now the area is a stronghold of money-making ventures—banks, light industry, factories—as well as the city's new municipal buildings.

There had once been a commune here. There had been agricultural communes all around Xiamen. I had been interested by the ones I had seen elsewhere, by the way they had developed into cooperatives and family farms, so I visited what had been the Cai Tang Commune, in the countryside northwest of Xiamen, to see what had happened.

Walking through the fields at Cai Tang, I came across an ancient grave. Two eight-foot guardian figures, a man and a woman, had been placed at the entrance of the gravesite. This was behind a hill, at the margin of a field of carrots. A bird—perhaps a flycatcher—was flitting back and forth. And buried to their necks were stone animals—a horse, a ram, lions and other broken beasts. There was an altar, too, with carved tablets. It was all unnoticed and it had not been seriously vandalized. In an earlier period a traveler would have taken the figures and crated them and shipped them to the Fogg Museum at Harvard. The tablets said (according to Mr. Wei) that it was a Qing Dynasty grave of the Hu family. And it was so far off the beaten track that no one had disturbed it.

A farmer and his wife were working nearby, hurrying back and forth in the carrot field, each one of them wearing a yoke with a balanced pair of watering cans. A loudspeaker at the far side of the field played a Chinese opera.

"This was once part of the Cai Tang Commune," the man said. "We planted rice, because they wouldn't let us plant anything else. And we listened to the Thoughts of Mao Zedong on that loudspeaker all day."

I had to follow him through the carrot field. He would not stop watering in order to chat. But he said he didn't mind my questions.

"This is my family's land. I never liked the commune idea. I would rather work in my own fields."

"Do you think about freedom to do as you want?"

"Yes. I have more freedom now," he said. "I can plant what I like. They used to say 'Plant rice' whether it was a good idea or not. Know what the trouble was before? Too many officials."

He squelched through the mud to the standpipe, filled his buckets, filled his wife's buckets and off they went again through the plumelike carrot tops.

"You have a healthy crop of carrots," I said.