Riding the Iron Rooster

None the less, if you push—as the Chinese do—it is possible to walk around Shanghai. Long ago, the Chinese overcame the natural human horror of being touched. The crowd reduces your progress to a shuffle, but it seemed to me that anything was preferable to a Shanghai bus.

Following Comrade Ning's suggestion I walked to Suzhou Creek and looked at the Spiritual Civilization sign—Cling to The Four Beauties. Then I walked farther, to the docks, a tangled, greasy, busy place of warehouses and the storerooms that the Chinese call godowns, and little indoor factories of tinsmiths and lock-makers and box-assemblers and rope-twisters. I came to the Shanghai Seamen's Club, a venerable building with teak-wood paneling and art-deco lamps and fluted cornices and a serviceable billiard room. It was a big old building and covered with soot, but it was attractive in a gloomy and indestructible way.

Inside, among the souvenirs and seamen's necessities like gloves and twine and sunglasses and slippers, there was political crap and propaganda about Chinese soldiers fighting in Vietnam, but masked as "Frontier Guards in South China." I noted down the captions. Comrade Hu Yaohang was wielding his writing brush [photo of Politburo member posing with big writing brush] to write a few words calling on the officers and fighters of the frontier guards "to be able to wield both the pen and the gun to make our country and people rich"-, and under a different photograph, showing five soldiers squinting at some bushes, All officers and fighters of the "Heroic Hard Sixth Company" rendering battle achievement in defending Laoshan battle.

I had a beer and kept walking and thought: These people were giving us a hard time over Vietnam? They were still fighting the Vietnamese—and probably getting their asses kicked, because nothing is more indicative of a war going badly than valiant propaganda like this. If a country shouted that it would fight to the last drop of blood that usually meant that it was ready to surrender; and in China, as a general rule, you could regard nothing as true until it had been denied. Anything officially denied was probably a fact.

I continued walking, across the metal bridge in front of what had once been Broadway Mansions, and over the creek to Huangpu Park, on the Bund, where the rest of the 1920s buildings still stood. I fantasized that there were certain cities in the world that could only succeed by becoming gross parodies of what they were—or of what people expected them to be (like a tall person who has no choice but to learn basketball), and that Shanghai was one of them.

The sign on the gate of the park gave a historical note: This park was guarded by police of the International Settlement and Chinese wen refused admittance. To add insult to injury the imperialists in 1885 put up at the gate a board with the words "No Admittance to Dogs and Chinese." This aroused among Chinese people popular indignation and disgust which finally compelled the imperialists to remove the board.

In another place the popularity of the park was remarked on: Admissions total over 5 million a year. On holidays it sometimes has a sight-seer density of 3 persons to the square meter. In Chinese terms this crowd-praise was wonderful: in the West, people are stifled by a crowd, but in China they feel propped up, and only the worthiest attractions have millions of visitors.

But that was not for me. I walked on and took shelter in a cool building beyond the Bund that had stained-glass windows—not a church, but a bank or counting house, because the windows showing Burne-Jones-like maidens were labeled Truth and Wisdom and Prudence. The foyer had a dome and a vaulted ceiling and onyx pillars, and a black marble floor. I thought: This is just the sort of place that would have had the shit kicked out of it during the Cultural Revolution.

To test my suspicion I asked a man—Mr. Lan Hongquan—who worked there. It was now a government office.

I said, "Isn't it amazing that this place survived the Cultural Revolution."