Mr. China Page 2
From any direction, the geography of Hong Kong draws the eye towards the mainland. The island seems to wrap itself around the tip of the peninsula opposite like a giant horseshoe, so that from any point the view focuses on the row of nine hills behind the mist on the other side. Whenever I went over to Tsim Sha Tsui, I took the Star Ferry and sat on the polished wooden seats with the spray on my face, taking in the smell of oil and the sound of the ropes creaking as they strained against the vast iron stubs anchoring the ferry to the quayside. As I sat there on the ferry, gazing ahead through the heat haze, I found myself wondering about China, wondering what it was like behind those nine hills beyond Kowloon on the other side.
Hong Kong had never really seemed English to me. Sure, there were the bars in Lan Kwai Fong where, if it weren’t for the heat, I might pretend that I was in Fulham. There might be the odd judge hurrying along in his wig and red coat-tails near the High Court and plenty of pinstriped bankers in Central, but that was only on the surface. Scratch below that and everything that mattered was Chinese.
The papers were full of stories about some huge power struggle up in Beijing but I couldn’t figure out exactly what had been going on. The names were all so similar (and back to front) that I could never quite see who had done what and to whom. There were photographs of a dour-looking man with thick glasses, an unconvincing smile and collars that were slightly too big who seemed to be the Prime Minister. But the country was ruled by an eighty-year-old recluse who did little but play card games; that and control the Army. I found an old guidebook in a second-hand bookshop in Hollywood Road and, as I thumbed through the disintegrating pages, I was amazed at the size of China: vast areas of uninhabited frozen wastelands in the west, huge deserts further north and then an incredible crush along the coast. The faded sepia pictures of pavilions and sweeping tiled roofs in the Forbidden City caught my imagination and I wanted to see them for myself. I knew that parts of China had been open to foreigners from the early 1980s and when I met the odd person who had been there I questioned them eagerly. Some seemed lost for words, almost annoyed by the place: ‘Don’t go there, it’s absolute chaos.’ Others seemed puzzled in an amused sort of way: ‘Of course, it was all very interesting, but the people were a bit odd. They always pretended that they didn’t have train tickets when you knew that they did, or that the restaurant was full when you could see that it was empty.’ But for some it was in their blood. They seemed possessed. And when they couldn’t explain exactly why, it fed my curiosity.
Slowly, an idea developed in my head: why not head back for England overland through China and take the Trans-Mongolian railway through Moscow on the way? So I started reading up about China and found that the pass over the mountains from northern Pakistan had been opened. I heard that it was possible to follow the Silk Road along the northern edges of the deserts in north-western China. There was also a southern route but no one knew whether it was open. I tried to learn the odd phrase of Chinese, for emergencies, but the words came out in a way that just drew blank stares. Still, I persisted and, the following spring, I set off for China.
I went in through the Karakoram Mountains, where Afghanistan, Pakistan and China meet. The mountains there are capped with thick glaciers and in places the road almost disappears. At last it descends towards the deserts in north-western China. Heading east towards Beijing, I followed a string of oasis towns on the edge of the desert. After ten days in a bus, aching and bruised, I reached the railhead and boarded a train for central China. Three months later and a stone and a half lighter, I slipped through the Wall and crossed the grasslands to Moscow.
As I sat on the train through Russia and watched the endless pine forests recede towards the east, I couldn’t assemble all the things that I had seen into any coherent form in my mind: the street urchin who pushed a knife through his wrist for a few coppers, the blind people’s massage parlour, the pickled human heads in an underground city, peasant villages and huge polluted cities, the crush of people in the stations. But I had a sense of something so vast and so old, so chaotic and so utterly foreign, that it took me right out of myself.
I knew that I had barely scratched the surface, but I could see that hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese were on the march for a better life. It was like Hong Kong but on a cosmic scale. I felt energized; there was such a sense of purpose in among the chaos. An age-old culture had somehow taken a wrong turn, but I could feel the determination to catch up.
And there was something else, something funny about China that told me not to take it all too seriously. I had just caught the tail end of the planned economy, where Beijing still tried to manipulate the minutiae of China’s vast economy. On the macro scale it was madness; how could the bureaucrats in Beijing coordinate the annual production of a billion pairs of trousers, or two billion pairs of socks across a country several times the size of Continental Europe? Even on the streets I often found that common sense seemed swamped by some vast nonsensical central plan. It completely inverted the normal relationships where the customer was king. Here the planners provided everything and the customer, it seemed, was supposed to be grateful. Huge arguments arose over the simplest of transactions. At times, for example, it might take half an hour to persuade a receptionist to let me stay in a hotel. She’d say that it was full and that there were no rooms available. At first I was puzzled and went away wondering where all the guests were. But I figured out that under the planned economy, it made no difference whether a hotel was full or empty and if there were guests there would be more work to do. Since everything was owned by the State no one cared; in fact, no one higher up even knew what was going on. So the receptionist would simply announce that they were full and wave people away so that she could go back to her newspaper.
The trick was to come back with objections until they finally agreed to let you in. It was the same in shops, at bus stations, in restaurants or when hiring bicycles. Sometimes I had to persuade a shop assistant to sell me something that I could see behind the counter; she’d say it had already been sold or that it was broken or that it was the last one and had to be kept for display. I’d go into a restaurant and they’d tell me that there was no rice or I’d go to a bar and they’d pretend to be out of beer. I even found a restaurant in Xi’an that closed for lunch. But after a while, I learnt to probe and question, cajole and persuade – and never to give in! So I barged into kitchens in restaurants to find something to eat and went upstairs in hotels in search of an empty room; I grabbed whatever I needed from behind shop counters and searched sheds for bicycles to hire. Even going to buy vegetables was a challenge but I sensed a rapport with the people I met; it was almost as if they enjoyed the game of wits and they often gave me a laugh or a smile once they finally gave in. I never felt any malice from them; it was more like a bad habit that no one seemed able to kick.
There were many other habits that could push a newcomer into either loving or hating China: the extreme curiosity towards foreigners in the 1980s, for example, or the dogged adherence to incomprehensible rules. When the attendant on a railway carriage woke you up in the middle of the night for the third time to clean under your feet with a filthy black mop, just because there was a regulation to sweep the floor every two hours, you would, as they say, either laugh or cry. There wasn’t much middle ground. On the other hand, ordinary things like hotel notices or restaurant menus were full of bizarre rules and mistranslations. There were signs everywhere that said ‘Beware of Smoking’ and ‘Stop Spitting!’ The regulations in the Shanghai Peace Hotel included restrictions on ‘bringing poisonous or radioactive substances into the hotel’ or ‘letting off fireworks in the room’, as if such matters were perfectly normal occurrences. Also banned was ‘fighting, gambling, drug taking, whoring or making of great noise’, and there was a rule that no guest was (sic) ‘allowed to up anyone in their room for the night’. Another hotel had a brochure which described its wonderful gardens and said that they hoped that ‘all our guests will be depr
essed by the flowers’; the Chinese version meant ‘impressed.’ Restaurant menus were similar; I found an upmarket restaurant in Guangzhou which served ‘camel’s hump in wonderful taste’, ‘double boiled deer’s tail in water duck soup’ and ‘roasted sausages in osmanthus flowers’. Another one down the road, which was slightly more modest and obviously trying to attract foreigners, had its menu in English offering ‘lunch on meat with egg’ and ‘scramfled egg with lunch on meat’, but it rather lost track with the ‘squid beard’ and ‘fried field snail in bear sauce’. I thought it must have meant ‘beer’ sauce, so I looked up the Chinese characters, but they seemed to mean something to do with ‘bell peppers’ so I was none the wiser.
Over and above the chaos on the streets, the mistranslations and endearing absurdity, there were huge changes under way that brought to mind the old aphorism attributed to Napoleon: ‘Let China sleep, for when she wakes up she will shake the world.’ True, China was starting from a low base but the vast majority of the changes was positive. The UN reported that in the 1980s alone over a hundred and twenty-five million people had been lifted out of absolute poverty. I became convinced that the country was on the way up as the shackles of the Communist system fell away. There was a sense of optimism everywhere, a feeling that things would continue to get better.
So, by the time that I left China after that first solo journey of three months back in 1988, I knew that I had found something that completely absorbed me. I felt that it might change my life; and it did. In retrospect, sixteen years on, I can recognize something common in many people new to China. I had become almost intentionally dazzled. I had set off wanting China to be something special and therefore it was. It was a kind of wilful infatuation.
Three
lf You Won’t Go into the Tiger’s Lair,
How Can You Catch the Cubs?
Han Dynasty Proverb, 202 BC–AD 220:
‘Nothing ventured nothing gained.’
When I got back to London, my head was still in China. I found myself straining to catch the odd Chinese character out of the corner of my eye from the top of a bus, or absent-mindedly wandering towards Chinatown to rummage in the bookshops and enjoy the familiar smells. I had found something new and exciting but in London little had changed. Two more years up the ladder, many of my colleagues were climbing a structure without ever pausing to wonder whether it ought to be climbed. I couldn’t reengage. I couldn’t take it seriously when, on the other side of the globe, an epic struggle was under way.
As I sat in an office dreaming of the chaos, the packed railway stations and crowded street markets, I toyed with schemes that might get me back there. Surely with changes on such a scale and at such a pace, there had to be a way back for anyone willing to take a risk? I spent hours every day dreaming about starting a business out there, building pagodas in the sky and scheming. Eventually, I went to see the senior partner of the firm to ask whether he’d send me back. I thought that I might be able to persuade him to set up an office in China to help clients invest, but the interview was a disaster. I had been shown into an office and my heart sank as I saw the figure behind the desk: late-fifties, perfect blue pinstripe, silver hair with not a strand out of place, hands resting palms down on the surface of a huge pine-wood desk in an office overlooking the Thames. There was something unnerving about the desk, that enormous clean expanse of bare wood; an uncluttered desk shows an uncluttered mind, I supposed dejectedly. So the interview went about as badly as it could have done; he clearly thought that I was a lunatic. So I went back to my desk to hide. But after a while I thought, ‘Sod it!’ I found a Mandarin course and handed in my notice.
About a week after I left my job, I suffered a momentary loss of confidence. The headline on the front page of The Times describing the crisis in Tiananmen Square read ‘Peking in flames as China slides into Chaos.’ My mind flew back to the last few hours I had spent in Beijing a year earlier, just before I got on to the train to Moscow. I had sat for a while on the steps of the huge monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of Tiananmen Square. The old men were flying their kites; beautiful yellow paper kites, with lions’ heads and dragons’ tails. I watched as they shuffled back and forth across the paving in their soft cloth shoes and the kites swooped and soared around the great stone obelisk. Everything had seemed so calm then, perfectly set into its allotted place. But a year on, after the tanks had rumbled on to the Square, the world had changed.
When I got back to China in the summer of 1990 the monument was all fenced off and surrounded by guards. As I stepped out on to the vast open surface of the square, people were tense, unwilling to engage, wary of contact with the few foreigners who had returned to China. The last rays of the setting sun caught the yellow tiled roofs of the Forbidden City. In the distance, I could see the faint smile of Mao Zedong on the Gateway of Heavenly Peace, the face in the giant portrait silently watchful. A smile just like the Mona Lisa’s: serene, humourless and utterly ambiguous – just right for a tyrant.
The atmosphere in the university where I had enrolled in a Mandarin course was just the same. People were cautious. It was no time to take risks or to stick out from the crowd, so it took several months before I was able to make Chinese friends.
I lived in the university for nearly two years. At times, I was the only white boy among a thousand Chinese. Foreign students were kept apart in a separate building. There was a campaign against ‘spiritual pollution’ but after a while Chinese students sought me out. Their natural curiosity soon got the better of the vague regulations designed to separate us. It was still a novelty for them to talk English to a foreigner rather than reading it from a book. When the first few students found that I was receptive, many more followed.
My time at the university was my first brush with the real China, the China from which you cannot escape. At first it was intimidating. For a start, I wasn’t used to the constant intrusion. There was never a second of privacy, never a moment of silence, a moment for repose, or an opportunity to gather one’s thoughts. I was bombarded with noise: at six o’clock the campus speakers blared out marching tunes for compulsory early morning exercises; at ten-thirty they announced lights out. I often came back to my room to find a line of students waiting. There was no escape from the endless, grinding requests for English lessons. I could see why there was no Chinese translation for ‘privacy’ in my dictionary; the concept didn’t exist.
I wasn’t used to all the restrictions imposed by the authorities and matters were made worse by the vagueness of the regulations. I was jumpy because I never really figured out what I could or could not do. Once my brother came to visit me in Beijing and slept on the floor in my room. The next morning the Dormitory Chief, in his blue overalls and thick glasses, arrived stony-faced at the door. He had been tipped off by one of the girls who delivered the hot-water thermoses that I had a guest in my room. He was furious because I hadn’t asked permission. I apologized and said that it had never occurred to me that I needed to ask; we weren’t doing anything harmful. But he wasn’t to be put off and it developed into an unpleasant row. My brother had to leave and find somewhere else to stay. A few days later I went back to the dormitory office; I wanted to avoid any more exhausting scenes like the last, so I called through the little hatch to the Dormitory Chief and politely asked for a copy of the rules. He said that I couldn’t have them so I asked, ‘Why not?
‘Those rules are internal and not to be told to the outside.’
‘What does that mean? If I don’t know what the rules are, how can I obey them?’
‘Our regulations are very clear.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, but that’s not my point,’ I replied. ‘If I don’t know what rules you have, I can’t follow them.’ After a few more rounds, I gave up. I never did get a copy. I discovered years later that this ‘internal rule’ concept was applied across the board in China, even to things like income tax. It’s hardly surprising that China’s tax system is so inefficient when no one knows
what they’re meant to be paying. At the university, the only thing I ever knew for sure was that it was lights out at ten-thirty with all the doors locked. If you were caught with a girl after hours, you’d be thrown out of the country.
Vast amounts of time seemed to be taken up by the most mundane tasks. I stood in endless queues at the university canteen, where they served only cabbage and rice for months on end in enamel bowls shoved through a hatch in a brick wall. I waited an hour and a half for a shower. But as the months rolled on, I settled into a semblance of routine.
The Beijing autumn is very short and after a few weeks of golden leaves and vermilion sunsets, winter howls in from Mongolia. My room, which faced north, was a stark concrete box on the second floor of a brick dormitory building. It came with an iron bedstead, a forty-watt bulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling – and not much else. In winter, the freezing wind blew straight through the metal-framed windows until I sealed them up with tape. The cold was bad enough, but the cruellest part of the winter was the dryness. Wood cracked, earth dried to powder and skin creased and aged in the desiccating cold. Every morning, as I scraped a thin layer of ice off the inside of my window, I tried to keep warm with a small electrical stove. Stoves were banned and the authorities soon found me out. They monitored the electricity on each floor. There was a search but I refused to hand the heater over. Then one day the electrical wire, which was far too thin for the current, burst into flames, leaving a large black hole in my bedcovers. After a huge row, my stove was confiscated and I took to wearing several layers of clothes.
Cleanliness suffered in the winter. The only hot water came in a green plastic thermos left outside the door each morning, and it was difficult to keep clean. For months on end, I felt grubby, as if I were on a camping holiday. Clothes became grimy because there was only a stone sink and a bucket for washing. I used to wash my jeans there, but in winter the water was so cold that the bones in my hands ached unbearably. Wringing out clothes was agony. Afterwards, when I hung them out to dry, they froze solid in minutes. I often carried them back inside clutched under my arm with the legs sticking straight out in front like a cardboard cut-out.