Riding the Iron Rooster

We discussed the Chinese proposition We can always fool a foreigner. Zhu said it was true, while I maintained that it was gloating and self-delusion. It was not even half true, but I had yet to meet a Chinese person who did not believe it deep down. I said that most foreigners suspect that the Chinese believe this, which makes the Chinese misapprehension even worse. "Consider the China pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind," Thoreau wrote at the end of Walden.

Later, at Yingde, under the wrinkled mountains there were pools of lotus flowers and shaggy green slopes of bamboo. You might mistake this for wilderness, but no: the bamboo is eaten and used for baskets and building houses; and the lotuses are not growing wild, they are farmed and harvested for their roots. That was another Dish of the Day: dessert of sliced lotus root in syrup.

All day, beside this track, another track was being laid: a new one, for heavy freight, to Hong Kong, in anticipation of 1997.

I sat by the window and looked out through the flickering rain. A boy was riding his buffalo home, and the sound of the train made pigs scatter under the banana trees, and it was so lush the train brushed against the tall tasseled weeds that grew beside the track. I saw clusters of deep-green bamboos, and women chopping firewood, and men smearing the wooden frames of houses with mud to make walls. And peeling blue gums, and a herd of buffalos under some lofty cliffs of orange clay. It was a very wet province, Guangdong, and very distinctive for not looking exhausted: it was fertile, orderly and energetic, and yet everything and everyone I saw had a specific purpose, which seemed to me very tiring to the eye—nothing random or accidental. Some minutes before we reached Canton the train stopped, and a large blue dragonfly hovered near my window. That was perfect—the Chinese dragonfly shimmering in the lushness of Guangdong.

It was very hot in the train, in the nineties, with high humidity. Some passengers had collapsed, others were gasping. I hated arriving in Canton, because it meant I had to change out of my pajamas. It was raining hard. Cyclists in plastic shrouds darted through the downpour. I had not been prepared for the traffic or the commerce—all the radio and television shops, the taxi drivers who listened to Hong Kong rock music on their radios, the luxurious hotels—the White Swan where Chinese went to look at the waterfall in the lobby; the 1147-room Garden Hotel, the biggest in China; the China Hotel (its motto: "For the Merchant Prince of Today"), advertising "A well-steaked reputation ... succulent jet-fresh prime U.S. and New Zealand corn-fed beef.... Our steaks have a delicious reputation"—which also goes to show how far the Chinese will go to please foreigners, since the Chinese on the whole find a simple cooked steak a barbarous and tasteless meal that is appreciated only by primitive folk like Mongolians and Tibetans.

No one I met remarked much on Canton. They spoke of Hong Kong and how it was going to be radically altered by Chinese control. I did not believe that. I did not think it would change. My feeling was that Canton was quickly turning into Hong Kong, and in most respects it was impossible to tell the difference.

The Chinese in Canton seemed well aware that making money and hustling in the Hong Kong manner was what mattered most. They could be mocking, too, about the government's solemn pretensions. One of the Party slogans—written on billboards in Canton—was Look to the Future! {Xiang qian kari). But the word for future (qian) sounds the same as the word money (qian) even though the character is radically different. So the current pun in Canton was Look to the Money!

Some Chinese in Canton asked me what I wanted to see there. I said, "How about a commune?" and they almost split their sides laughing. The Chinese laugh is seldom a response to something funny—it is usually Ha-ha, we're in deep shit or Ha-ha, I wish you hadn't said that or Ha-ha, I've never felt so miserable in my life—but this Cantonese boffo was real mirth. The idea of visiting a commune anywhere in Guangdong province was completely ridiculous. There were none! And didn't I know that Deng Xiaoping had officially declared the commune experiment to have been a failure? Didn't I know that everyone was paddling his own canoe now?

I said, "I was here six years ago and went to a huge commune outside Canton. Everyone said it was a model commune. It was a success. Factories. Rice fields. Fruit trees. A canning industry. I went to a woman's house and she had a radio, a television, a refrigerator—"

"She was the only person in the commune who had those things! It was a trick to impress you!"

"I just want to know what's there now," I said.