To the Ends of the Earth

She said they all got on a bus and visited the shell-carving factory, the glassware factory, and a model children’s school (the kids sang songs from The Sound of Music), and then it was back to the ship and on to Yantai or Qingdao.

“I’d like to see Stalin Square,” I said.

We went there. In the center of it was a statue to the Russian army, which had occupied the city after the war.

“There are no Stalin Squares in the Soviet Union, Cherry Blossom. Did you know that?”

She said no, she was surprised to hear it. She asked why.

“Because some people think he made a few mistakes,” I said, though I did not mention the pogroms, the secret police, the purges, or the mustached brute’s ability to plan large-scale famines in order to punish dissenting regions.

“Is there a Mao Zedong Square in Dalian, Cherry Blossom?”

“No,” she said, “because he made a few mistakes. But don’t cry over spilled milk!”^*

I told her that I had read somewhere that the evil genius Lin Biao had lived in Dalian. She said no, this was not so. She had lived her whole life in Dalian and no one had ever mentioned Lin’s connection.

But the driver was older. He said yes, Lin Biao had lived there in Dalian. Lin Biao, a great military tactician, was now maligned because he had done so much to build up Mao—it was Lin who devised the Little Red Book and chose all the quotations; and in the end (so it was said) he had plotted to assassinate Mao, when Mao was weak and at his heffalump stage; and Lin in trying to flee the country (“seeking protection from his Moscow masters … as a defector to the Soviet revisionists in betrayal of the party and the country”) had crashed in dear old Undur Khan, in the People’s Republic of Mongolia. Foul play was never mentioned. It was regarded as natural justice that this heliophobe should meet an untimely death.

It was his heliophobia that made me want to see his house. This weedy little man had a horror of the sun. I thought his house might not have any windows, or perhaps special shutters; or maybe he lived in a bomb shelter in the basement.

Cherry Blossom was saying in Chinese to the driver, “I did not know that Lin Biao lived in Dalian,” and then to me in English, “It’s too dark to find his house. Let’s go to the beach instead.”

We headed for the south part of Dalian, to a place called Fu’s Village Beach. Because of the cliffs and the winding road, the driver went very slowly.

Cherry Blossom said, “This car is as slow as cold molasses in January.”

“You certainly know a lot of colorful expressions, Cherry.”

“Yes. I am queer as a fish.” And she giggled behind her hand.

“You should be as happy as a clam,” I said.

“I like that one so much! I feel like a million dollars when I hear that.”

These colloquial high jinks could have been tiresome, but it was such a novelty for a Chinese person to be playful I enjoyed it. And I liked her for not taking herself too seriously. She knew she was mildly excruciating.

Meanwhile we were descending to Fu’s Village—great rocky cliffs and an empty beach of yellow sand with the January wind off the sea beating the waves against it. Offshore there were five blob-like islands floating blackly on the gulf. A couple was canoodling on the beach—the Chinese do it standing up, out of the wind, usually behind a rock or a building, and they hug each other very tightly. It is all smooching. These two ran away when they saw me. A drunken fisherman staggered across the beach toward his big wooden rowboat that was straight off an ancient scroll: a sharply rockered bottom, very clumsy, the shape of a wooden shoe, probably very seaworthy.

I asked Cherry Blossom whether she took her tourists here. She said there wasn’t time.

“Some of the people have funny faces,” she said.

“What is the funniest face you have ever seen, Cherry?”

She shrieked, “Yours!” and clapped her hands over her eyes and laughed.

“Another of your saucy jokes, Cherry Blossom!”

She became rather grave and said, “But truly the Tibetans have the funniest faces. They are so funny I get frightened.”

“What about American faces?”

“Americans are wonderful.”

We had tea at a vast empty restaurant. We were the only customers. It was at the top of one of Fu’s cliffs, with a panoramic view.

“Do you want to see the Dragon Cave?”

I said yes, and was taken upstairs to see a restaurant decorated to resemble a cave. It had fiberglass walls, bulging brown plastic rocks, and lights shining through plastic stalactites, and each table was fixed in a greeny-black cleft, with fake moss and boulders around it. The idea was perhaps not a bad one, but this was a vivid example of the Chinese not knowing when to stop. It was shapeless, artless, grotesquely beyond kitsch; it was a complicated disfigurement, wrinkled and stinking, like a huge plastic toy that had begun to melt and smell. You sat on those wrinkled rocks and bumped your head on the stalactites and ate fish cheeks with fresh ginger.

Cherry Blossom said, “Do you think it’s romantic?”