Riding the Iron Rooster

He said there were bomb shelters all over Shanghai that had been built on Mao's orders ("for the coming war"), and of course they had never been used. I asked him to show me one. We found this sub-terreanean vault—it was just like a derelict subway station—at 1157 Nanjing Road, and it had been turned into an ice-cream parlor. The fascinating thing to me was that it was now obviously a place where young men went to kiss their girlfriends. It was full of Chinese youths locked in the half nelson they regard as an amorous embrace. The irony was not merely that these kids were making out and feeling each other up in a place that had been built by frantic and paranoid Red Guards in the 1960s, but also that it was now called the Dong Chang Coffee Shop and owned and operated by the government.

I was talking to Wang one day about my trip through the Soviet Union when I mentioned how the scarcity of consumer goods there meant the Russians were always pestering foreigners for blue jeans, T-shirts, track shoes and so forth.

'That never happens in China," I said.

"No," Wang said. "But that reminds me. About three years ago there was a Russian ballet dancer at a hotel in Shanghai. I went to see the ballet—fabulous! And this dancer was very handsome. I recognized him, and he smiled at me. Then he pointed to my track shoes and pointed to himself. He wanted them, I understood that. They were expensive shoes—Nike, cost me fifty yuan. But I don't care much about money. We measured feet, side by side. Exact fit. I don't speak a word of Russian, but I could tell he really wanted those shoes."

"Did you sell them to him?"

"I gave them to him," Wang said, and frowned at the triviality of it. "I felt sorry for someone who just wanted a pair of shoes. It seemed sad to me that he couldn't get them in his own country. I took them off and walked to my office barefoot! He was really happy! I thought, He'll go back to Russia. He'll always remember this. He'll say, 'Once I was in China. I met a Chinese man and asked him for his shoes, and he gave them to me!'"

A moment later he said, "You can get anything you want in China. Food, clothes, shoes, bicycles, motorbikes, TVs, radios, antiques. If you want girls, you can find girls." And then in a wide-eyed way. "Or boys—if you want boys."

"Or fashion shows."

"They have fashion shows on television almost every week," Wang said. "Shanghai is famous for them."

I asked him what the old people made of these developments—hookers and high fashion in a country where just a few years ago foreign decadence was condemned and everyone wore baggy blue suits.

'The old people love life in China now," Wang said. "They are really excited by it. Very few people object. They had felt very repressed before."

A few days later I had an occasion to test that reaction. I was invited to the house of a former civil servant, recently retired—the Chinese use the French term cadre to describe these officials. This man, Ning Bailuo, was sixty-seven and a passionate Maoist. He'd had no formal education; he had risen through the ranks of the New Fourth Army, from 1940 to 1949, mainly organizing political programs and collecting food and money for the troops, first in their fight against the Japanese and then against the forces of Chiang Kai-shek. One of his earliest memories was of missing the ferry late one night to cross the Huangpu in Shanghai and a japanese soldier beating him with a stick for being out too late. He soon joined an anti-Japanese organization and later the army.

"Don't your experiences make you hate the Japanese?"

"No," he said, "it is only the generals we hate."

Chinese blaming is always reserved for higher-ups: underlings are always innocent. That was how they had been able to cope with the monstrous guilt in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. The entire horror show, the whole ten years of it, in every city and town in China, from Mongolia to Tibet, had been the work of four skinny demons: the Gang of Four. No Red Guard was ever held personally responsible for any act of terror—there were no trials, and I never heard any recrimination other than loud clucking.

Comrade Ning—as I thought of him—was thin and bony, with a Bogart face and long creases on his cheeks, and the same Bogart slurring of speech as his tongue snagged against his teeth. It was easy to see that he was a hard-liner, the tough and puritanical official who had known the privations of the 1930s, and all the phases that had led to this present boom. He still wore blue. He seemed to me the perfect person to ask about developments.

Although he was personally rather ascetic looking, his apartment was very large by Chinese standards—four spacious rooms, as well as a kitchen and a foyer. In accordance with Chinese practice there were beds in every room. Comrade Ning shared this apartment with his wife, his unmarried daughter, his son, his son's wife and two grandchildren.