Riding the Iron Rooster

She smiled beguilingly and led me on. When we passed the Friendship Store she steered me in, and at the door she began to hug me. She was still hugging in a sort of newlywed's embrace as we looked at chairs ("These look comfortable") and crockery ("Don't you think they have anything cheaper?"). This seemed very pleasant. I had no idea what I would say if 1 met someone I knew, but it hardly mattered.

I said, "What is your honorable surname?"

"Ma," she said, and giggled. There are so many different Ma's in Chinese that a nineteen-word tongue twister has been made from them.

We looked at the tea section. They had no peppermint tea—indeed, had never heard of it.

"I have never tasted it," Miss Ma said.

Or perhaps Mrs. Ma, because a moment later she let go of me and ran ahead and embraced a young Chinese man. He was not surprised to see her. I assumed they had arranged to meet. The trouble was that, being an ordinary comrade, she felt she would have been stopped from entering this store unless she was in the company of a foreigner.

What disturbed me was that her affection towards me had seemed unforced. Yet in a split second I was forgotten: she didn't look back.

I had been on my way to meet a Chinese teacher named Chen. When I told him what had happened, he said, "The security guards can be very harsh with us sometimes."

Still, that didn't bother the importuning money changers who lurked near the tourist hangouts pestering foreigners to change hard currency into local currency, offering about twenty percent more than the official rate. They sidled up and said, "Shansh marnie?"

I said to Chen that I did not understand why so many years of the Cultural Revolution hadn't made people more socially and politically aware. A few years ago it was "Serve the people," and now it was "Change money?"

Chen said that it was because of the Cultural Revolution that people had started a free-for-all, because that political convulsion had discredited politicians.

He said, 'The so-called Cultural Revolution was wonderful in teaching us never to follow blindly. Now we will never trust what politicians say."

Chen and I were drinking tea at a stall. He held up his white cup.

He said, "If Mao said, 'This is black,' we would all agree and say, 'Very black.' Now, we'd never do that. A spokesman in the government said recently The Japanese are our friends.' Everyone laughed. The Japanese—let's be frank—are no one's friends."

I asked him whether he felt humiliated by the memory of the Cultural Revolution.

'That's the word—humiliated. So many of the Red Guards who went to the countryside got married there, gave up being intellectuals and became farmers. Now they can't come back—and they want to. It would be a loss of face to come back."

"Were you a Red Guard?"

"Yes," he said promptly. "School three days, learning from a peasant farmer the other three days, and reading the Thoughts of Mao on our day off. We harvested and planted rice. It's a good thing I was young, because I didn't take it very seriously. I treated it like a game. But it was no game."

He went on to say that he was surprised by how liberated the young people were these days in Peking. They criticized the Party. They talked about democracy and free speech. He said, "I'm amazed by some of the things they say."

"In the past," he said, "the intellectuals and the scholars were discredited. No one really wanted to go to school, and only the secure Party officials advanced. You had a choice of being a worker or a peasant."

"What do people want now?"

"Now that we are no longer judged by our political consciousness, people have begun to be fanatical about education. That's the biggest single change in this country."

"But these former Red Guards and the refugees from the Cultural Revolution—surely they're out of school?"

"No," Chen said. 'There's a whole army of night-school students."

I wanted to leave for Shanghai and then to rattle around China on trains as the mood took me. But, inspired by Chen, before I set off I decided to offer my services as a night-school teacher, just to see whether what Chen had said was true. I took classes at the Peking Sun Yat-sen Spare-Time School, which was housed in a big gloomy high school in central Peking. My subject was English, which was the most popular subject in the school; but the students—there were 3000 of them—also studied business methods, typing, accounting and computer science. One of the computer teachers was from the United States, but I didn't meet him.