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VISIT CHINA ’92: THE GOLDEN TIME

 

                        “…almost every Beijing hotel manager works long hours these days. They know the golden time has come: 

                         this is the year of Visit China ’92, and the number of tourists has surpassed the 1988 peak.”

 

 

1. Welcome to Beijing

 

On the road out of the airport, an unbroken line of buses and cars is snuffling its way into the city. To each side of the motor traffic, a stream of bicycles broadens and floods, until we are swept up into its river. Beyond the banks lie crop fields, and tree nurseries, and strips of land about as thin as splinters, where laborers in hats like bamboo lampshades burn beneath a subtropical sun. Construction crews stand poking at a swath of bare ground; next year’s new highway. Above their heads greet us in both Mandarin and an unfamiliar brand of English: WELCOME TO BEIJING, they say. VISIT CHINA ’92: HAPPY FRIENDSHIP PROPITIOUS.

 

In China ’92, a teeming, cluttered country, the signs thrust themselves in your face and cry out, Read me! As in a Brueghel painting, or a folksy Howard Finster, there’s something going on in every scene, collectively playing tricks with perspective. The place may be backward, and notoriously not quite scrutable, but it so wants you to admire it—to see how implacably it’s getting somewhere. Armed with loaded cameras and half-full suitcases, in June 1992 we came, five teachers on travel grants, all eager for trophies—and at the swell of every horizon, the People’s Republic teemed and cajoled, no less eager to claim its share of us.

 

The longer we stayed, in fact, the more China’s brisk, rough energy beguiled me, but that first day all I really saw was the shabbiness. Construction was rampant, yet the new buildings, as dingy a grey as the old ones, were squinched and shoddy. There was virtually no grass. Trees, part of whose function in this flat city is to fend off the Pacific and low plain winds, seemed about as plentiful as people, but the ground between them was stripped to dirt. (A legacy of Mao’s late years, apparently, when he decided that grass was decadent and bred vermin.) On the road to the hotel, I saw stone shacks with holes for windows and a flimsy tin roof, a few bricks tossed up on top to dissuade it from defecting. I saw walls of stacked bricks without benefit of mortar, leaning into each other in virtuoso zigzags—surely they couldn’t endure? I saw new pre-slums. Three  twenty story high rises—workers’ dormitories, built to spare the residents a commute—encircled a Panasonic factory, with laundry dangling from the balconies in the dirty breeze. No parking lots, but in front of every edifice hundreds of bicycles stood slotted into metal racks. As our ribbon of high road unspooled into the city, the merging streets made a tangle of us, thickening the strands, weaving us into the bustle and squalor, to the jangle of bells and horns.

 

And then somehow we found ourselves pulling into a luxury hotel. The lobby stopped us in our tracks. The Great Wall Sheraton was opulent without apology. In the acre or so between the entrance and the reception counters, two score flowering shrubs yawned from the mouths of giant Ming vases; a dozen glossy pillars shimmered with reflected light. By a set of glass doors where twelve foot ceilings gave way to thirty foot ones, green streamers of ivy leaned over the balustrade, to trail away in mid-air above us.  The carpets and the furnishings were a deep classical red, the exact shade we would soon see gracing the walls of the Forbidden City: the Imperial Red of Happiness.

 

For in the hotels of Beijing—of tourist China—the Westerner is a credit card king. Our happy smiling staff greeted us in good English. Their lapel tags declared their names to be Donald, Sylvia, and George. Each evening a deferential porter left chocolate medallions on our pillows. Attendants in spiffy suits hovered in the palatial restrooms to turn on and off the faucets and to offer warm washcloths; in one WC I found myself outnumbered four to one. Which was intrusive and creepy enough as a policy, but what unsettled me more was the sneer I sensed behind their broad, subservient smiles. In this mock-Western enclave of an alien Communist city, our appointed lackeys crossed and re-crossed the line between pampering and sycophancy, service and servility as if it were invisible—as if it were all the same to them. I felt like a Capitalist Imperialist Stereotype being put in my crass place. We were here to be welcomed to Beijing in the style to which upper caste types like us were no doubt accustomed—and of course to pay for it. Without tipping please. Tipping, except to tour guides and tour bus drivers, was demeaning.

 

(This was made explicit, in the brand of English particular to official signs: No upping in this hotel. Well, our ti and u no doubt look as alike to them as Chinese logograms do to me.)

 

Throughout our stay in China, we would be royally nudged and herded from 5 star hotel to 5 star landscape to 5 star antiquity. Every meal was a banquet: three twelve course extravaganzas a day. Fortunately for our daunted appetites, we were expected to sample, not clean our plates; after all, we had deadlines to meet. We became skilled speed-viewers: twenty minutes in Tiananmen Square; two hours for the Forbidden City; ten minutes (pandas only) at the Beijing Zoo. If the five of us had not arrived two days before our tour group, and spent time wandering through the city on our own, I may have been unable to laugh off this regimen. In other cities, the pace did sometimes leave all five of us shaken. It was a matter of debate among us who was to blame—the tour company was the betting favorite. My own hunch was that our hosts encouraged the policy, which limited fraternization: I spotted no slow, leisurely tour groups anywhere. Occasionally, I felt as if my foot-dragging was holding up a production line; in Xi’an, our local guide had to bite her lip to keep from chiding me.

 

Whether to protect the country’s reputation or our sensibilities—or both—there were certainly times when we felt we were being kept at arm’s length from daily life. Normally, the hotel shops took care of our mail; in Guangzhou, a guide expressed frank disbelief when I asked directions to the post office. “Oh no,” she said. “Not possible. Many people.” In Suzhou, our American tour director was told that we would not, after all, be permitted to cruise down the Grand Canal: the boat, it had been decided, was “not ideal.” On the wall of a dilapidated public toilet outside Xi’an was displayed this tetchy warning: NO PHOTO OR VIDEO OR YOU WILL PAY FINE.

 

Still, we really weren’t monitored that closely. There were slack spots in our schedule, and on our two days before the commercial tour began we were barely scheduled at all. I routinely got up early and roamed the streets before breakfast. In Suzhou, we were allowed two free hours after lunch; in Hangzhou, one whole afternoon. The republic seemed much the same at such times as it did under the watchful eyes of our guides. On our pre-tour group days, for example, the model school we visited officially and the obscure college we arranged on our own to see were impressive in the same way: not for facilities or equipment, but for their clear seriousness of purpose.

 

At the first of these institutions we were presented to teachers, resourceful and assured; at the second we spoke with students, personable and emphatically bright. The openness of both groups pleased us, without blinding us to how much of this enormous country we had no access to—but what remained hidden was not, whatever the official efforts, the breadth of its poverty. Anyway, the more dinginess and deprivation we saw, the more that that particular problem seemed temporary; the more irresistible seemed the urge to progress beyond it, as the Chinese work at ways to make their great leap forward. Their modernization may not yet constitute a great leap, but they’ve been clearing the way for one, with implacable rough vigor, and the momentum is building.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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2. On the Move

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In Tiananman Square one feels the shiver of ghosts. To linger, eyes closed, and listen is to hear a far chanting; a rumble of tanks. Rumor has it that during the first week of June, 1989, five to ten thousand students died here. The official tally is eighteen. In the summer of 1992, the world’s attention has moved on, and we tourists are back. We scan the square for traces of what erupted three years ago, and we find none; whatever there once was has been scrubbed clean.

 

A vast cement plain whose distances trick the eye until one begins to cross them, Tiananmen Square is once again a place of holiday spirits, wherein to conduct great and small ceremonies or to stroll for pleasure. It was one of the first sites we visited. Around us, tourists both foreign and domestic disgorged to snap sunlit photographs. On the stone steps of the Monument to the People’s Heroes a group of schoolchildren paraded, carrying flags. The paving slabs aren’t uniform in color—some are whiter and some seem newer than others; rumor has it that the new ones mark the heavy paths of the tanks, where the damage was more severe than mere bloodstains. We didn’t hear that rumor until later. We did spot a surveillance camera perched up a pole, gazing back at us. Or I suppose not just at us, but looking where we and the rest of the invading hordes were looking, at the milling lack of unrest; at the cheerfully unremarkable crowd.

 

Sober singles and smartly colorful young families were out and about taking the air. Observe any family group in China, and it is clear that its single child is both adorable and adored. Rather than diapers, the smallest wear pants with a slit in the seat, where anyone who cares to may see the smooth bare bottom mooning through. Flanked by their adoring parents, or perhaps a parent and a grandparent, they waddled by us in their Sunday best, hand in hand in hand, and it was impossible not to smile. Even the soldiers in the square smiled and sported cameras; I watched a pair slouching and grinning like the boys they still were, right until they posed before the portrait of Mao, whose benevolent huge presence crowns the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The two straightened their uniforms, wiped the joy from their faces, and solemnly shot each other.

 

In Beijing when we tried to discuss politics our guides changed the subject. In cities farther from the governmental center, they sometimes talked, carefully, when there was privacy. Down south in Guilin, one made a casual public joke. (Water buffalo blocking the road, he said, were “demonstrating in favor of democracy.”) I heard, many times, never directly from anyone Chinese, that the younger generations were biding their time, waiting for the old men in charge to die out. This may be so or it may be wishful thinking. (How is it possible to gauge the scale of dissent when there is no freedom of dissent? How might a three week tourist even guess at it?) What is obvious at even the most cursory distance, though, is the pace of change: this is a country on the move. From the bottom up, from the Special Economic Zone down south around Guangzhou, north to Shanghai, all the way to the capital and beyond, it seems to be a country on the move toward the market vitality of Hong Kong.

 

For whatever the mainlanders’ drive to reclaim Hong Kong as culturally intrinsic to China, it is clearly Hong Kong the regional capital of capitalism that they most covet. Five years before the 1997 handover, the fervor of China’s free market economy is startling. Just count the MADE IN CHINA labels in your American closets. Or come tour Shanghai and Beijing: see how every store in Wangfujing Street bursts at the thin walls with customers and with merchandise. Resist if you can the official tourist shops they will bus you to twice daily, treasure troves of brand-new cloisonné, silk, and jade; stroll with the locals through the mobbed stalls of the free markets, where you can buy anything that ever caught sun in a vegetable patch or crawled out from under a rock, dodge the souvenir sellers who have every tourist mecca surrounded; run the gauntlet of their hundred voices cooing, “Hello, hello!”—or less subtly, “Hello, money!” Among natives and foreigners, see the yuan notes pass from hand to hand; watch the abacus dance.

 

Out on the streets, bamboo scaffolding is swallowing neighborhoods whole. Waking from sleep, you will hear construction crews toiling through the night. Ten years ago, they tell me, there were few automobiles even in the cities, and still less Western plumbing; beggars were unheard of; airplanes were ancient prop jets with not always emptied vomit bags and folding chairs for seats. That China is already being left in the reconstructed dust. In every city we visited I was fascinated by the traffic—its mass transience came to feel like a metaphor for the country. My photographs failed to capture the scope of it, and came out fuzzed with motion. I suspect that whatever I set down in description will prove similarly inadequate—even as I write the words, they are shifting out of focus; wilting out of date.

 

The rules of the road right now are simple, because they are essentially a matter of consensus. There are traffic police, there are some traffic lights, there are still a few streetmasters (retirees with red flags who station themselves at intersections and act as human stoplights), but none of them rule the road in the way that consensus does. Consensus decrees, as its number one commandment, that Whoever is bigger has the right of way. Pedestrians yield to cyclists, who yield to cars, who yield to trucks and buses, and so on, with pedicabs, donkey carts, tractors and the like squeezing in where they can assert a claim to fit. Whoever is faster or pushier may get where they want to be first, before the rule kicks in, but once it kicks in, there are no disputes or hesitations. One sounds one’s bell or one’s horn to let the smaller traffic know one is coming, and one proceeds; the larger surges about the slower like water about a rock. Bell and horn are a courtesy, a matter of discretion; the smoothest operators employ them sparingly. Despite the zeal with which some others, less suave, indulge their wish to honk or tinkle, I heard no one do so after the event, in indignation or retribution. Is the tide indignant? Does the river glance back and scowl? Does the rock not know its place?

 

Which brings me to the second commandment: Never flinch. To flinch would be to hesitate, disrupting the flow; it would be dangerous. The one time I saw this rule broken was at night. Daytime traffic came to seem almost mystically safe to me, and the daytime accident rates in China are, in fact, very low. The one exception is for motorcycles, which seem not to have established a place in the traffic hierarchy. Our Shanghai guide claimed to be the only person in town who had owned a motorcycle ten years before, in 1982, who was still alive. (He had survived by reselling it immediately after his first jaunt.) Nighttime traffic, while not motorbike lethal, was made more hazardous by a secondary rule which our Beijing guide explained to us: After dark the cops go home and there are no speed limits. One evening we took a taxi piloted by a youth of about twenty. For 24 yuan, the trip was a bargain carnival ride. As he stamped down on the gas (hunched over the wheel, his rapturous eyes scanning for the barest gap to slip through), a portrait of Mao dangling from his dashboard danced quick jigs of somber glee. Mao jigged as we drag-raced and lost, braking hard as a bus turned smack in front of us. As we took squealing corners, Mao jigged. A cyclist whose planted foot we passed with a beep within two hairs’ breadth of merely watched us, bored; but another one, whom we skirted by a good six inches, plain lost his nerve. We all saw it. He flinched. Lucky for him it was after dark; the cops may have flung the coward into a labor camp.

 

A fourth rule of the road, my favorite, applies especially to cyclists: Embody grace. A rush hour salmon run of them negotiating the city bends spins into a dance of tightrope walkers: it has the daring and the inevitability of something choreographed. In addition, many of them take on burdens that would seem to make balance barely possible: three cages of chickens; two hampers of watermelons; a hillock of bundled rags. These may be trailed in a cart or piled up front in a basket or slung about the bike rider’s person. Very often, the burden will be alive and human. Grown men read books while perched sidesaddle on a luggage rack; girls in skirts dangle their fashionable legs and sightsee; children up too early doze off on the handlebars. It’s not actually legal to carry passengers (other than small children, in many localities), but neither the fine—it amounts to about twenty cents—nor the attitude of most traffic policemen is much of a deterrent. It’s apparently considered good form for the miscreant to dismount when in full view of such an officer, but I never saw anyone do so. Whereas I did see entire one-child families on a single bike, arranged in configurations of their choice. And whatever the load he or she was carrying, never did I observe any cyclist showing signs of strain. Or any who appeared to be putting out strenuous effort.

 

The secret, I was informed is to keep steadily pedaling. Not to rush, but to maintain an even unhurried pace, forcing nothing. The ease with which this was accomplished quite frankly shook me: it’s a failing of mine sometimes to take metaphor too devoutly. What I noted may say much about the Chinese temperament, but what large truth can it really convey about the state and eventual fate of the People’s Republic? Still, this is how it filtered through my head: they are on the move; they will not stop nor flinch; in the dark, when no one is looking, they play by different rules; they achieve the near impossible with the grace of acrobats; and they are bigger than us. Whoever is bigger has the right of way. Look out, Western world, they’re coming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. The Golden Time

 

Behind the surface propaganda, all that HAPPY FRIENDSHIP PROPITIOUS huzzah, China has some very dark corners. I’ve read about them. Most of what we saw, however, fit neither that darkness nor the false brightness of the slogans. We were treated, rather, and why not, to the genuinely spectacular; along the way, we gaped with equal fascination at the unfamiliar yet commonplace. At the moment, China’s golden time may be mere tourist gold, there for no one but hotel managers and the likes of us, but it glittered.

 

Some of what I’ll remember most fondly I had read about in the brochures and the guidebooks: the exhilarating, exhausting Great Wall; the Summer Palace at Beijing, misty in the rain; the gorgeous tranquil gardens of Suzhou; the fantastic dreamscape of Guilin’s Li River, miles of hollow, sun-patched mountains lifting from the banks like great knock-knees.

 

Mostly, though, what delights me about far-flung travel is to see how the people there live—how they find other ways to be. In China, the scope and sheer number of them, their phlegmatic poise and hustle, quite took my breath. There are 56 “nationalities,” we were instructed, that make up modern China; to this whole range of tribes and types, we were smilingly assured, Westerners all look alike. I began by seeing the Chinese, collectively, as alien and unreadable, but soon enough the individuals whom we met, their different faces and temperaments, the lively warmth of their intelligence, their plain human ordinariness, made that lie impossible.

 

There are lessons we must learn and relearn which only experience can teach. To feel a guidebook world begin to open inside you and feel familiar may be most of what makes travel matter, yet the effect can be so quiet and gradual it is barely perceptible.

 

From Suzhou—the quietest and smallest city we visited (population 600,000), and in some ways the loveliest—we had been scheduled to take the boat northwest to Wuxi, and from there a bus south to Hangzhou. Suzhou to Wuxi is the standard, vetted tourist route. The Grand Canal runs officially from Beijing to Hangzhou, but half of its course, after twelve plus centuries, is no longer navigable, and the stretch that is is the equivalent of a truck route. When scheduling difficulties arose, we were informed that we would go the whole way by road. Our tour director protested; the authorities shrugged; she doubled down and insisted; and to my surprise, they relented. We were offered an alternative route, more direct on the map but much slower. We would lose some scheduled time in Hangzhou; it would mean five hours on the canal instead of two, and a ninety minute stop at a place called Jiaxing. From there, via winding back roads, a bus would get us to Hangzhou. For eleven hours, the upshot was, we would see no other Westerners at all.

 

Bless the tour director. In this country too populous for privacy, halfway around the world from home, that Grand Canal ride proved to be a gift. At this stage of the tour there were fourteen of us—the group had split in half before Suzhou. We boarded, and found the accommodations good. At each horizon, a sky of haze settled over a smudge of grey water, effacing equally the dock we slipped away from and the distances before us. A captain and two or three crew ran the little boat without fuss; their young chef served us the best meal of our three weeks. If the air was a touch polluted, it was certainly not much worse than in any of the cities we had visited. We breathed a little, and we found it good. For once, there was only the unrushed present.

 

In typical Chinese fashion, our local tour guide had brought her young son along. She spent the trip at a cabin table, chatting intimately and at length with three or four of our group, while her son entertained two others. The rest of us found a quiet corner to watch the river go by. At each side of the boat there was a guard rail and a narrow gangway, where the wash from the passing barges tossed up handfuls of spray, and an occasional tongue of water licked across the planks. My spot was at one end of the portside passage; no one disturbed me. Flat-bottomed barges, working boats, as variously and as amply laden down as the working bicycles of the cities, filtered by us with a hoot and a squirt of steam, disappearing to starboard or looming large beside me. Offshore, at docks and inlets, other barges loaded and unloaded; fishing boats drifted a little, rocking, between us and the banks, which were never more than thirty feet away on either side. In the fields, young women in slacks and long shirts bent low to turn every square foot of earth into something green and profitable; as often as not, small children, a no less precious resource, sat quietly nearby among the stalks of wheat. The boats, for that matter, were often crewed by young couples. It became a game to spot the small child who was no doubt somewhere with them, peeking out from the dimness of the cabin, or placidly encircled by a coil of rope.

 

I took photographs, as the ones who caught my eye smiled back at my smile and nodded. I began to tag on a cautious wave. With a few exceptions, Chinese strangers had not before now so readily acknowledged us; these people, well off the tourist circuit, did so with the warmth and dignity of ambassadors. As I stood and waved, they waved back. Encouraged, I began to flap my arm at shore workers, at pedestrians on bridges, at cyclists along the banks, even at truckers as we ran parallel to a high road. To my delight, everywhere I waved, someone waved back…

 

In a few hours, we would be in Jiaxing, where our new local guides, calling themselves Simon and Daniel, would seize the bus microphone to serenade us with choruses of “Edelweiss” and “Yesterday.”  There might be no other Western tourists in town with us, but it turned out that we were to be joined by a whole host of Communist true believers. In this very town, out on this very lake we were approaching, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, posing as vacationers, had met with their co-conspirators to plot the overthrow of three millennia of Chinese history. We were about to shuffle aboard the Red Boat with the red hordes, to touch the very paneling that the two heroes had leaned their firebrand heads against. [*See my closing footnote.]

 

An hour after collecting us at Jiaxing’s Grand Canal wharf, Simon and Daniel would be bidding us their effusive goodbyes. Daniel would caress my beard (so exotic!), and declare it beautiful. The pair would be taking turns to flirt with each of the women, declaring this one with Doris Day and that one with Madonna. Our bus would pull out, leaving the birthplace of revolutionary China in its wake, and the rain would move in, as we threaded between tea plantations and the casually terrifying maneuvers of our fellow traveler tourists, none of their vehicles big enough to daunt or deter our driver. And before too long, we would be in Hangzhou; then two days after that, for two days more, in Guilin. Until finally, after half a day in Guangzhou, we would fly over the Hong Kong border, to land in what will remain, for a few years yet, a separate country.

 

A wave is such a simple thing. To coax a poker face into a smile is a small and simple triumph; to make eyes at a child, and watch the child’s stern parents chuckle and play along, giggling at the crease of puzzlement around the tiny eyes, bending to tease the smile out, showing the arm how to waggle and teaching the fingers to flutter—relearning together the gestures of human friendship—this is an ordinary and easy thing. What about it could possibly be so difficult? Yet nothing this summer has given me as much pleasure; has elated me more. On the Grand Canal, between Suzhou and Jiaxing, between grey horizon and grey horizon, I stood on June 30th behind the rail of a flat-bottomed river boat, with handfuls of spray confettiiing about my ankles, and I waved and was waved at. A country opened up to me, and I to it, and for a while, the world moved without strain or haste into balance, and gradually, imperceptibly, grew larger.

 

Richmond, Virginia, August 1992; revised January 1993.

 

 

4. Postscript, July 1993

 

As I am organizing my photographs and slides from a year earlier, and have begun to reread these pages, the mail arrives with a postcard from my head of department, Barbara Robertson. She’s in Beijing; it’s her third stay. She likes to spend her summers studying Mandarin, and even flew over in 1990, for her second visit. She writes that “China has changed so much I can’t believe my eyes. The traffic is incredible. Cars and taxis have replaced the bikes. Most people are dressing in Western style, and in general things seem to be out of control. A little frightening to think how things might turn in the next few years…”

 

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* Footnote, 2024. Back in 1921? Or was our Red Boat a sacred replica of the very boat and its very paneling? I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere that it was, but that must have been much, much later. And it was certainly treated with the reverence accorded an authentic shrine. I also seem to have been wrong about the presence of Zhou Enlai. Of the thirteen delegates to the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party—for that was the 1921 event Jiaxing is famed for—only Mao and Dong Biwu were still around and in positions of party leadership by 1949, when the People’s Republic was founded. It was harder to fact-check such details back in 1992-93—no internet yet and no Wikipedia—but I thought it best to preserve the original essay as written. To let the piece stand, with its accompanying matter, in its time capsule form. I have, however, allowed myself to rephrase a few times for style; and to add this footnote.