Change Money! Change Money! - Zigzagging in the Middle Kingdom (Excerpt 2)

Guangzhou. August 29, Friday

Just before eight I stepped aboard a large motorized catamaran that in three hours took me to the capital of the Guangdong Province, Guangzhou, or Canton as it was once called. Most of the time I sat leaning back in a vinyl seat looking at the Pearl River where the traffic got thicker as we got closer to the city. At my side was Collin, an Englishman who like me was on his first journey to China. We got along well and decided to travel together for a day or so.

Getting through the customs went surprisingly easy. I asked a customs officer to not x-ray my films since I was going to fly many times. There was a sign reading “film safe,” but I didn’t want to take even the smallest risk. He said okay and that was that.

We quickly found a taxi, a well-kept red Volvo 142, whose uniformed driver wore white gloves. He took us to the giant luxury hotel Dongfang, where there were no rooms available. That didn’t matter so much to us since even the least expensive room was too expensive for us – about 40 US dollars.

We had a cup of tea in the lobby cafeteria before continuing to the Guangzhou Hotel, where there were also no rooms available. We then jumped into a third taxi heading southwest to the Shamian Island where we found an inexpensive hotel right next to The White Swan luxury hotel. It used to be called Government Service Workers’ Hostel but had been renamed the Guangzhou Youth Hostel. We shared a nice and cheap room which had a bathroom with a toilet, and large beds with mosquito nets. I opened the bottle of Johnny Walked Red that I had bought tax-free at the customs area and toasted Guangzhou, which had received us without too much fuss.

We were both curious and eager to take a look at the city, so we left the Shamian Island and took a walk along the canal north of the island, which once was the only part of Canton where foreigners were allowed to stay and conduct trade. Along the canal were large trees that provided shade, but one huge tree had been flipped over, maybe by a typhoon.

The streets were full of cars, buses, hand-drawn carts and lorries, bicycles, and motor cycles, all hectically maneuvering and honking to get ahead as fast as possible. A short distance from this urban cacophony a man dressed in a blue Mao jacket squatted with a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

We had walked about a mile when we turned north into a dark and narrow market street which was covered to give shield against sun and rain. There was not a lot of commerce going on since it was late in the afternoon, but at one stand they were still selling fish. Under the strong electrical lights, we could see fishes lined up in rows, or maybe it would be more correct to say that it was remains of fish, since it was only fish heads, entrails, and tails besides the skeleton. Collin, who is a vegetarian pointed to one of the fishes where the entrails were still moving. One stand had baskets with hundreds of frogs crawling on top of each other and  cats were waiting for their destiny at another stand. Next to it was a man who grabbed for something in a basket. Finally, he pulled out a terrified owl, which he carefully began to feed.

We continued along bigger and noisier streets looking for a place to eat. Most streets were lined by severely worn-down houses, dirty from dust, smoke, and oil. People are poor and live in crowded buildings, but here and there you can see faintly lit shops selling television sets, video cassettes and tape recorders. 

September 1, Monday

On Sundays, crowds of Cantonese invade the White Swan Hotel. They come here to marvel at this temple of modernity and have their family photos taken with the large artificial waterfall as a backdrop. A guest I talked to said that nobody is excluded from visiting the fancy new hotels, and it has become a form of Sunday entertainment, like visiting the park. 

* 

It’s eight in the morning and it’s with shaky hands I write this. I'm having a European breakfast at the White Swan Hotel while watching the traffic on the Pearl River through the restaurant’s long panorama window. In the east, boats appear as gray silhouettes in the morning haze while birdsong descends from the large brass cage in the restaurant one level above only to be blended with soft piano music and the ambient noise from the waterfall.

It’s only a couple of hours since I and my new friends, Fredrik and Mr. Li, returned to our hotel for an hour of sleep before we had to get up again to meet a beautiful girl we saw at one of Guangzhou’s new discotheques. I ran into them after Collins had left and I was looking for a new roommate. They were out in the same errand, and we quickly decided to share a three bedroom and then go out for dinner together.

Mr. Li is a businessman from Hong Kong and Fredrik is a twenty-four-year-old Swede on his first China trip. As we walked around we saw a man by a small food stand. Mr. Li asked what he was serving and was told that it was snake soup. I had never tried snake so I ordered a small bowl and got a teacup with steaming mao-tai with the soup, which looked and tasted like chicken strips.

After dinner, we sat down at a café and talked about going to a discotheque. Mr. Li asked a young girl at the table next to ours if she knew of a good discotheque, and she recommended one in the western part of central Guangzhou.

It took us until eleven thirty before we found the place which didn’t look much seen from the street. Mr. Li helped us buy tickets. Once inside Fredrik and I discovered that we were the only “big noses” in the place. Both the music and the dancing were polite in the beginning, but around two in the morning, they began to play pop from Hong Kong and Taiwan. A couple of young men started to do break-dance and the cool girls became more daring.

The hottest girl had long, black hair, a short and tight dress, high heels, and fishnet stockings. I talked to her in-between dances with Mr. Li as interpreter. She was twenty years old and had her own fashion store. I thought this could become an article, so I asked if I could interview her the next day.

Fredrik and I was wondering if it wasn’t time for us to dance too, but a girl must have read our minds and intercepted our move. She invited me to dance, and I followed her to the dance floor, but then she got nervous and pulled her friend up on the floor too. That was okay, but when I looked around, I discovered that we were now surrounded and that my “Western technique” was studied closely. Before long they started to copy my style, which certainly wasn’t ready for export!

I soon got another invitation, but this time by a guy in a black jeans costume and dark sunglasses. Now it was I that felt embarrassed, since I wasn’t used to dancing with men. The temperature in the room rose when what I had taken as an innocent invitation turned out to be a break-dance duel. I managed to get out of the pickle by dancing disco while he did break-dance. After one song, I thanked him and returned to our table.  

It was three thirty and the spirit was high when we noticed a couple of adults in the room. Mr. Li later told me that they had asked about us and that he had told them that we were computer engineers and hence important foreign guests. They were satisfied with his answer and didn’t bother us anymore. On the way out we were met by elegantly dressed young people arriving in a taxicab. It was four thirty on a Monday morning. 

* 

“Are you an actor?” asked the girl who take takes dinner reservations at White Swan’s elegant Silk Road Restaurant, which is one of Deng Xiaoping’s favorite restaurants according to the South China Morning Post. (Deng had learned to appreciate French food during his time as a student in Paris in the 1920’s.)

“No, why do you think so?” I answered.

“You are so tall and handsome,” she said.

“Is Holland a poor country,” she asked a bit later.

“No, it’s a rich country. Why do you think it is poor?”

“There was a group of tourists from Holland here and they were poorly dressed.”

“Maybe they thought it more practical to travel in plain clothes.”

“Maybe he was a millionaire,” she continued, seemingly having one person in mind, adjusting her bowtie which was not crooked at all. 

*

 “When people are fairly young, and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (…), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.”

 (Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984.)

  September 2, Tuesday night

Q is a young man saying that he is on the run, has spent fourteen years in prison and planned to make his way to Hong Kong even if it means that he could die trying. I met him outside my hotel where I was watching a calligrapher working under electrical spotlights. I also talked to a translator who worked at a factory making electrical fans.

Q didn’t approach me until the conversation had petered out. He then asked me in German if I was a German and we chatted for a bit in German. He spoke so fast that I had trouble following him. He then said that he also spoke French and a little Japanese. We then switched to English.

“Are you a student?”, I asked.

 “No, I’m a street sweeper. I belong the fourth class of workers, but I am actually on the run,” he said and laughed while covering his mouth with his hand.

I suggested that we sit down over a beer, and he showed me the way to an inconspicuous place a couple of blocks away. It was a small and recently opened bar with simple wood furniture painted in light colors.

Q said that he was 29 years old and that his parents had been teachers. They had spoken freely in 1956 during Mao’s “Hundred Flowers Campaign” when people were encouraged to speak out, only to be subsequently punished for “bourgeois liberalism.”

His parents were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution while he was sent to a labor camp on the Chongming Island outside Shanghai.

Q says that he had to work hard at the camp which officially was a state farm.

“There were sixteen people in my room. I was the youngest. The oldest was 34,” he said.

In 1970 he was suddenly released without any motivation. Two months later he was brought back to the island, but now to another camp where the work was even harder. He was forced to stay there for twelve years without ever being told why.

“I found a textbook in German and began to study on my own in the evenings. We were twenty people in the room, both criminals and people like me. In other departments there were prostitutes. An English teacher from Shanghai’s Teachers College taught me English. He slept next to me. You slept on mats on the floor.

He was 52 years old and had been unfaithful to his wife with a younger woman. His crime was to have seduced a young woman.

“We were only allowed visits twice a year and only ten minutes each time. Our relatives were not even allowed to touch us. I had one visit in those twelve years. It was from my grandmother. Relatives were afraid of visiting their imprisoned kin during the Cultural Revolution.”

According to Q, there were about twenty state farms on the Chongming Island, half of which were forced labor camps.

“Every prisoner had to write a self-critique. If they didn’t like it, you were beaten up by the guards who were brutal and uneducated.”

He told of the corruption in China, how the children of the higher-ups get away easy when they commit serious crimes, while ordinary people are severely punished. He seemed to be well informed about China’s recent history. I asked how he could know so much when he had been imprisoned for such a long time.

“The wife of the English teacher smuggled in books during her visits.”

(But he had earlier said that the English teacher didn’t stay for a long time at the camp.)

“Which was the most important time for you during all these years in prison?”

“That was when I was sixteen and started to read books. Before that I was naive. I discovered that I had energy left that I wanted to use.”

In December 1982 he was suddenly released, also this time without any motivation given.

“They just said ‘leave!’”

He returned home only to find out by his grandmother that his parents had committed suicide in their prison. He went to the local police station to become registered as living in Shanghai so that he could be assigned a job. At first, he became a street sweeper and then a “temporary worker” loading and unloading trucks. His fellow workers were physically or developmentally disabled.

“I soon got in trouble at work. I didn’t like my boss and he feared me as I knew more than him. I told him that he was incompetent. He took revenge by lowering my salary from 40 to 36 yuan per month. You have to be a ’follower’ to be accepted.”

“I reacted by not doing anything and by arguing with him. Then he went to the police, and they sentenced me for refusing to work for the Four Modernizations. That was in the summer of 1985. I was sent to a prison in northern Qinghai. Life there was very hard, much worse than in the Soviet.”

“How do you know that?” I asked since he had never heard of Solzhenitsyn or the Gulag Archipelago.

“It’s the same system as in China, but China is more severe,” he said.

As a test, I asked him to draw a sketch of the prison, which he did. The prison only had one level, and there were about fifty rooms and there were 25 prisoners in his cell.

Qinghai, which sometimes is called China’s Siberia, is a sparsely populated and desolate part of the country and it is an area where it’s very hard to survive on your own.

“Death waited outside the prison. There were tigers and other dangerous animals, but I became good friend with a truck driver who transported cotton to the prison, and he helped me escape. He drove me to his hometown and gave me money for a bus ticket to Xining, the capital of the province. It took eighteen days,” he said (which sounds too much.)

“From Xining I stole a ride on the train to Shanghai.”  

He said that it was one month since his escape. He sought out a friend in Shanghai who gave him some money. Then he continued to steel train rides. He said that he had been in Guangzhou for a couple of days and slept at the railway station. He now planned to continue to Hong Kong.

“What are you going to do there?”

“Business. I want to smuggle weapons into China to overturn the regime!”

He believed fully in this plan and said that he wished that the US would invade China and help liberate its people. I said that it was unrealistic given the balance of power in the world, but he didn’t want to accept this way of thinking.

“Maybe England could at least occupy the area around Guangzhou?”

During our conversation I soon began to think that he was telling me a tale so that he could ask me for money, but he didn’t mention money when we split. Did he tell the truth or was he maybe a mythomaniac, or a flipped-out student? I don’t know.

September 3

I came to talk to a Japanese poet and businessman who had traveled in Burma, Nepal, Tibet, and Qinghai. Neither he believed that it would take eighteen days to travel to Xining. He suggested that Q could be one of all these students who during the cultural revolution were sent to the countryside, and in some cases all the way to Qinghai to “learn from the poor peasants” as the euphemism went. 

September 4

A 10,000-ton ship lies at anchor waiting to be unloaded. I see rusty old cargo ships, many who double as homes for the skipper and his family. On one boat you can see clothes hanging to dry on a clothesline and a dog is sniffing around the foredeck. Half-naked men with skinny sinewy bodies force their old sampans upstream using long wooden oars. Ferries filled to the brim are crisscrossing the wide river while the sun slowly sets in the west. I see all this, but the only thing I hear is the artificial waterfall and the music from a grand piano. River Garden Cafe is like a cinema where the movie never ends. The film is called the Pearl River and shows people earning their livelihood exchanging goods with each other. 

* 

The Cultural Park lies right north of the Shamian Island. I had stopped by to take pictures of children and teenagers amusing themselves at a roller-skate rink when an old man asked me in perfect English if I wanted to talk to him, which I of course wanted to. We walked over to a tea house in the park where we sat down in a pair of robust bamboo chairs. He had glasses and were dressed in dark pants and a shirt with thin blue stripes. He asked for my name and then said slowly.

”Wǒ de míngzì shì Deng Xiuli.” (Mitt namn är Deng Xiuli)

Then he continued in English.

”I was born in 1913, so I am 73 years old.”

I told him that I was Swedish and planned to travel in China for three months. Then I asked him to tell me about his life.

“My story is not that important, but I can tell you something briefly. I visited many places when I was young, Beijing, Tianjin, Nanjing, and Shanghai. At that time the Guomindang was in power, the nationalist party. China have experienced all these wars. I was only a child during the first world war and then I experienced the second world war.” 

He studied to become a history teacher at the National Central University i Nanjing, which was founded in 1902, and was the oldest university in the Jiangsu province. Eventually he became the principal at a school, but now and then he would step in as a teacher if one of the teachers were sick.

He retired twelve years ago.

Deng said that he besides English and six Chinese dialects knew French, German, Japanese and had once known Russian. He had never been outside China, but he hoped to be able to go France to study.

I asked him about his life since China had gone through such big changes during his lifetime.

“We’ve had so many wars, civil wars and catastrophes, so many catastrophes.”

I asked which time was the worst.

“It was very bad during the wars, but the cultural revolution was a very, very bad time. People suffered a lot, but today it is much better. People have much more freedom today. You can own anything, except land. You can own a car if you have money to buy it. You can own a house and you can build a house. There is no problem with that, but private citizens are not allowed to own land.”

“You are also free to believe, but I can tell you that China doesn’t strictly speaking have any religion. People say that Daoism is Chinese, but Daoism has to to with Buddhism, and Buddhism comes from India. You have the freedom to believe, but the Churches are not allowed to be under influence of foreign powers. China does not allow missionaries like under colonialism.” 

I said that foreign experts point to the fact that China’s politics have swung back and forth, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left. The Chinese leaders reassures us that the reform policy will continue, but can we trust that it will?

“Not only China changes. So does other countries. China may have changed more than other countries during the past decades, but if the change has been from something bad to something good, that’s a good thing. If it was the opposite, that would of course have been a terrible thing.

The change from the Old China to the Red China was good for the people. I lived during this entire time, so I have experienced this change. But later there were mistakes, especially during the cultural revolution, which were very bad. To be fair, one has to say that Mao’s intentions were not bad. He thought his ideas… he wanted to see his ideas implemented. He started the cultural revolution, but he didn’t use military power. If he had done that, we would have had a civil war. He knew that and didn’t do it, which was a very good thing. So, he did mistakes, especially in his old days.”

“Now we have the new policy with more freedom, and it is very popular, but when people get used to freedom, they demand more freedom. I believe that the new policy will continue since it is so popular. Of course, the leaders can’t be successful in everything they do, and they are trying to avoid things that were not that good, like the cult of personality, which was a very bad thing. Today you don’t see any portraits of the leaders, but before they were all over. The leaders are also trying to get older leaders to make space for young people. It’s not good if people have their job or position for their entire life.”

I asked what he thought of China’s youth today.

“They are very lucky, During the cultural revolution, young people were unlucky, but today’s generation have it much better than during any other time in China’s modern history. You have a future if you work hard. It doesn’t matter in what field, whether you are an acrobat, can jump high or good at ping pong. During the cultural revolution, it didn’t matter if you were good at something. People looked at you as if you were useless, but that is not the case anymore.” 

Guilin. September 6, Saturday

It took 36 hours by boat up the Pearl River (Zhu Jiang) and the Western River (Xi Jiang) before we reached the city Wuzhou. We spent most of the time in our cots that all faced the river. There were no cabins, so all passengers shared one and the same space filled with rows of bunk beds on each side of the boat. You could lie on your stomach in your bed, open the window and study the landscape and the life on and by the river. On the rice fields I saw large water buffaloes and people working with their hand using simple tools.

It turned out to be a memorable journey, not only because of the view, but also thanks to an ordinarily looking girl with lively and friendly eyes. She got herself an intensive course on English by engaging us Westerners in conversations. She was as charming as indefatigable, and we worked in shifts to train her. She was lucky, because on-board were a couple of Berkeley professors who spoke fluent Chinese.

The next leg after the river boat was an eleven hour long and shaky journey by bus from Wuzhu to Guilin. The road was bad and full of people, creatures, and all kind of vehicles. The driver kept honking, but other than that, it was a fantastic trip through a story-land full of green hills that looked like sugar cones, which shot up hundreds of meters from the rice fields and sometimes from the middle of the Li River where men in straw hats were fishing from their narrow bamboo canoes with the help of cormorants. The birds are excellent at catching fish, but they have a rope around their necks so they cannot swallow their catch. 

September 7, Sunday

Sellers are peddling their wares on the main street Zhongshan Lu, which is lined by small restaurants. “Hello!” people call out to tourists passing by, trying to entice them. And everywhere you here the mantra of the new era: ”Change money, change money!” 

September 8

I visited the city Xingan together with Huang Xie, who is from Shanghai. We went there to admire the dam that is part of the Linqu Canal, which was built in 214 BCE under the first Qin emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi. He wanted to increase the trade between northern and southern China by linking several small rivers that were connected to the Yangtze River and the Pearl River Delta. This river traffic would dominate the transports between north and south until 1939 when the railways took over.

I first noticed Huang Xie as he stood in the lobby to the Lijian Hotel, wearing thick glasses and dressed in a trench coat that was too big. We began to talk and soon found out that we were colleagues since he, besides his job as a teacher, free lanced for the large Shanghai newspaper Wen Hui Bao. As we stood there getting to know each other he got a call from his editors who wanted him to do a story about the Linqu Canal. He asked if I wanted to join him, which I of course wanted to, but I asked if I could, since Xingan was not open for foreigners. He just laughed and said, “no problem.”

We missed the train, so we had to catch a bus instead. Once in Xingan we walked on a tree-lined street that followed the Linqu Canal through the city. My friend stopped at an antique stone plaque and enthusiastically copied down the inscription. Eventually we reached the plow shaped weir that made it possible to direct the flow of the water into either of two canals. The long leg of the weir is 380 meters and the short leg us 140 meters. On the way there, we were accompanied by a young boy with a fine face and a beautiful voice. He entertained us by singing folk songs and had his English textbook rolled up in his pocket.

Ducks were swimming in the river and old men with thin furrowed faces walked in the river with the water reaching up to their necks as they checked their nets. In the distance, behind green trees and rice fields we could see silhouettes of the Guanxi Provine’s strange karst mountains. On a little island in the middle of the canal, there was an inscription by Guo Muoro, a communist leader and poet that died a couple of years before at a very advanced age. 

Northern China has the Great Wall
Southern China has the Linqu Canal
From here you have the most beautiful view in the world

 September 9, Tuesday

I’m sitting in a Boeing 737 on the way from Guilin to the capital of the Yunnan Province, Kunming, which has two million inhabitants from many different ethnic groups. It’s geographical location on a plateau in the southwest 2,000 meters above the sea level gives the city spring-like weather all year around. 

Kunming

I went to Beijing Fandian, a restaurant marked on the tourist map. How to order? By the entrance was a table with bowls containing noodles, nuts, and sauces. I pointed to one, but the girl behind the table shook her head and pointed to the other side of the room. I tried pointing again, and she kept pointing in the other direction. Finally, I discovered a small opening in the opposite wall. Nobody spoke English there either, but I managed to get a girl to follow me to the table by the entrance where I pointed to the noodles, a bowl with eggs and a plate with peanuts. She took a couple of egg slices with her fingers, placed them in a bowl. There were no set tables, so I had to clear a table from plates and teacups used by the previous guests. In the middle of the table was a can with chopsticks. When the food finally arrived, it was served cold. I prayed for my belly while washing my pair of chopsticks in hot tea water. 

* 

I had a lousy dinner at my hotel. The only consolation was Rebecca, a beautiful Jewish woman who sat next to me. We came to talk quite a bit and eventually she let me know that she was not together with the man she was traveling with. I proposed that we take a walk after dinner, which she accepted. We walked down to the large square in Kunming where the commerce was in full swing. In the southwestern corner of the square, we made our way into a dark place from which we had heard music. A beautiful Chinese woman sang accompanied by traditional Chinese instruments. The conferencier wore a bright red qipao dress and had her hair in a ponytail starting high up on the right side of her head. Rebecca thoroughly appreciated the performance. I asked her if she liked Chinese opera. She said no, but added that she loved classical music and had danced ballet for sixteen years.

We returned to the hotel and took a seat at the bar where they played Western disco music. Rebecca shared her impressions from Lhasa in Tibet. She said that she was shocked at the poverty and misery, but impressed by the Tibetans' lifestyle and art. She had witnessed a funeral where the body was chopped up into small parts that were mixed with wheat and then laid out on a rock for the birds to eat. It was creepy, she said, but she overcame her revulsion and observed the ceremony. She is intelligent and beautiful, but she will unfortunately fly to Xian tomorrow morning. 

I read a couple of poems by Tomas Tranströmer including this one: 

”In the middle of life it happens that death comes

and takes your measurements. This visit

is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit is

sewn in the silence.”

(Tranströmer, Dikter, 1984, p 178.
Tr. in Selected Poems, 1987, p 168.) 

Thus, we meet death in the middle of life. The ceremony helps us handle the difficult, the things we fear, by bringing death into the middle of the social life. 

September 10, Wednesday

At the Foreign Languages Bookstore, I met a 25-year-old guy who spoke excellent English. He had been a factory worker and studied English by following TV-courses and Voice of America. He was hoping to become a researcher, but to get there he would first take university classes on his free time and that is hard. 

* 

Kunming seems to be a well-ordered city with relatively high living standard and modern apartment buildingss. The contrast is sharp compared to Guangzhou’s rundown houses and narrow lanes. The shops and department stores are well stocked, and you see many soldiers walking around in the city in their newly pressed green uniforms.

At one street corner I see a police officer and a girl who was selling shoes. He inspects a document that must be her permit to engage in trade. There is order in Kunming and the black market is not as obvious as in Guilin and Guangzhou. The order is also reflected in the straight avenues and the Kunming equivalent of the Square of the Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen) in Beijing, but there are also meandering market streets with picturesque houses with green roof tiles, which makes you think of the time when this was the end station of the smuggling route, “The Burma Road.” During the Japanese naval blockade, this was the only supply lane for the Chinese government, which had relocated its capital to Chongqing during the Japanese occupation. The Japanese would however cut off the Burma Road in 1942, which led the allied forces under the American general Stilwell to expand an old route from Ledo in the Indian state Assam so that necessities and war supplies could be transported to Kunming. The route would later be named The Stilwell Road. 

* 

Is it the orderliness behind the fact that I see people queuing in Kunming? At one supermarket there was a fifty-meter-long line. It was still there half a day later. 

* 

There are plenty of photo shops, hair salons, and clothing stores. The radio shops display copies of Japanese cassette decks, which seems to be one of the more popular items for the consumers. And recorded cassette tapes are sold everywhere. A few shops and department stores feature videotape recorders. I saw a National at 9,500 yuan. Who can afford that? In one store they sold a motorized Nikon for 12,500. That is a huge sum, almost 45,000 Swedish kronor (or 8,000 US dollars.) Who buys that? However, a black and white TV only cost 400 yuan.

There is a lot of building going on and I saw many active building sites even on May 1. Like in Guangzhou and Guilin, one can see people working late in the evening to finish a new shop. Everybody is working and the energy is high. Are these small business owners who are starting their own shops with the help of family and friends? 

* 

I’m sitting in the home of the university teacher William listening to John Denver while he and his daughter is preparing dinner. We had picked up the food at a free market. He had brought a small plastic basked and a large enamel mug with a lid during our bicycle ride in the afternoon. We tasted grilled beef that a street vendor was selling, and it tasted well. She sliced the meet in thin strips which she deposited in the mug. Then he bought bean curd and placed the jellylike piece in the lid which he had turned upside down. He placed the cup in the middle of the basket, and put squash, green onions, and other vegetables around. I bought a bottle of Chinese wine as my contribution to the dinner. 

We had met in a small shop, and he had asked me in good English if I needed help with anything, and it didn’t take long before we had decided to meet again the next day. He showed up at my hotel just before two in the afternoon and once I had rented a bicycle, we pedaled off to the University of Yunnan. He told me to act as if I were a student and not a reporter if anybody asked, but nobody asked us and we could wander around freely at the charming university campus, and even visit its library.

Later we visited the bath house he used to go to and were allowed in by promising that we would not use the shower. We took a seat in a cabin and were treated to tea. The shower stalls were located on the bottom floor, while the top floor consisted of a large hall full of lounge chairs. There was room for maybe fifty people there, but today there were only five. An old man lay half naked, half asleep, covered by a bath towel. Young men relaxed with their towels nonchalantly thrown over their waist.

When we got to William’s home, he started by apologizing.

“My home is very small and dirty. Please, don’t laugh at me,” he said repeatedly.

“Don’t worry,” was the only thing I could come up with as an answer.

The apartment was small and the houses in his neighborhood severely worn-down. His home was spread over both sides of a narrow street. On one side was the kitchen and the daughters’ bedroom, and one flight up on the other side William and his wife had a bedroom that was three by four meters in size, and a small balcony.

They had little furniture, but owned a cassette deck, and a bookcase with dictionaries and a language lexicon.

The dinner was excellent. We had beef with vegetables and duck eggs. The latter were orange with a brown filling, and they were covered by a jelly. One bowl contained fried onion and another pickled cucumber. We tried the red wine I had bought, but it was way too sweet.

After dinner, we biked to the English Speakers Corner, where young people would gather every Thursday evening to practice their English. There were about a hundred people there and I was immediately surrounded and asked questions about everything between heaven and earth. Everybody was very polite and curious about Sweden. After a while, William guided me to another place where we med his colleagues. It turned into another hour of questioning, but I didn’t mind, because everybody seemed genuinely interested in the world beyond China. 

September 11, Thursday

The Chinese worship the freshness of the food, which explains why many fish restaurants have aquariums full of fish, eels, and turtles. On the way home from our excursion to the park, William bought five live fish from an old woman and wrapped them in a handkerchief that he tied to the handlebars. The fishes gasped for breath while his son sat behind the handlebars in a bamboo seat worrying that they would jump into the brook on our side. William repeatedly pointed out that they were alive and fresh, and as soon as we got inside the door, he placed them in a bowl of water. He once again showed that they were alive, and then began to scale them with a vegetable axe. 

* 

In the morning I met two Swedes at a café that besides good coffee had a French bakery and sold good baguettes. We walked to the second floor where an old man in a blue Mao jacket sat together with an old woman who spoke English. He offered us 165 RMB (yuan renminbi) for 100 FEC (Foreign Exchange Certificates, the special currency that tourists must use.) In Guilin the rate was 170 and in Guangzhou you could get even more, about 180.

After dinner I spent some time talking to William’s brother-in-law, and a friend who works at the province’s organization for foreign trade. He was only 22 but had a good job. He said that he was hoping to become a businessman at some point. At nine, we left for a newly opened “discotheque.” Our company had now grown to be eight people.

The discotheque was located on the roof of the warehouse where William’s wife worked. It reminded me of a local “Folkets Park” (entertainment venue) in the Swedish countryside. Except that no alcohol was served. There were strings of colored lamps and in the middle of the place a small crew was shooting a video where a sexy girl walked around holding a Coca Cola while being followed by a slightly fat middle-aged man wearing a mustache, a cap, and black leather jacket. He looked a bit like a Uighur. The band was playing Western dance music from the 1950’s, and the guests, who were in their 30’s, neatly danced waltz and foxtrot. It didn’t take long before my new friends showed that they wanted to see me dance. I tried to avoid the whole thing by saying that I wanted to wait until they played disco music, but in the end, I had to dance “dissico” to old film music. It wasn’t easy, but they were happy. Exactly at ten o’clock the dance stopped, and everybody went home.   

September 12

I’m sitting at the hotel’s roof restaurant on the 14th floor, having a Carlsberg and listening to Country & Western music from the bar. It’s sunny and nice and I have a view of Kunming’s many modern five- or six story apartment houses. In the distance I can see tall mountains floating in the blue haze.

William took me on a bicycle tour to the Green Lake Park, and after that we had lunch at a local restaurant. We had pierogies, grilled chicken and soup. Everything was good except the beer, which was flat despite William assuring me that it was ”very fresh.” He knew the chef who was 45 years old, deaf-mute and had a mild facial expression. One of the employees told me later that the chef was a very unhappy man. His father had hung himself during the cultural revolution after having committed a political mistake and his wife had left him. 

September 13, Saturday

I arrived in Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan Province, after 24 hours on a crowded train full of chain-smoking tea drinkers who spat on the floor as naturally as they threw garbage out the window or dumped it on the station platform. The spectacular views I read about, you could unfortunately not see much of due to 427 tunnels and 653 bridges, whose iron beams made it hard to take photos of the landscape. The construction of the railway from Kunming to Chengdu started during the Great Leap Forward in 1958 and took twelve years to complete, a process in which 2,000 workers died. There were three alternative routes for the railroad, but Zhou Enlai chose the hardest one, even though his Soviet advisers warned that it would fail due to the risk for landslides and flooding. 

* 

It was a tired and somber traveler who received the message that there were no rooms at the inn where he had hoped to stay, which forced him to take a long taxi ride to Chengdu Hotel in the outskirts of the city. 

September 14, Sunday

I woke up feeling weak and nauseated after a night when I struggled with a violent diarrhea. Despite that I forced myself to get up and managed to check out from the hotel. I dragged myself to the bus stop only to find out that there was no chance to get on the crowded bus with my heavy suitcase. Fortunately, I caught a bicycle rickshaw that took me to a hotel where I paid the equivalent of 5 dollar for a bed in a three-bed room instead of 20 at Chengdu Hotel.

I read in the welcome folder that it is forbidden to play cards or “other dirty games” in the room.

Jin Jiang Hotel is old-fashioned, but comfortable and for two yuan renminbi, you can eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner. That is at least the student price for five small dishes plus rice and tea. The dining hall is large, maybe 20 by 40 meters and the young and pretty waitresses are dressed in white blouses and short red skirts. Many are shy and struggle with their English, but a couple of them came to my table driven by curiosity of the tall stranger who was sitting their studying Chinese with the help of small cards with Chinese characters on one side and English explanations on the other. One of the waitresses studied the cards closely and began to help me with the pronunciation.

Wo ai Chengdu! 

* 

As I walked by the tea house on the southern side of the river, an old man in Mao uniform, a cap and glasses called out to me.

“Would you like to drink tea with me?”

His name was Lee Yan and he worked as a translator of English texts to Chinese. He had learned English in the 1930’s.

He was sympathetic and laughed while holding a cigarette holder of bamboo in one hand. He was born in Chengdu and had worked at the Chengdu Post Office during the war. Like Mr. Deng in Guangzhou, he had many friends, even Swedes. He knew that Palme had been murdered and many events in world politics. He owned a short-wave radio and listens to “VA,” i.e., Voice of America, and to BBC. He also reads China Daily. From his bag he took out a worn copy of Fox Butterfield’s book about Mao’s China, Alive in the Bitter Sea.

“Is it good? Is it true?”

“Yes, yes, very,” he answered.

“How did you get hold of it?”

“I got it by mail from an American friend.”

I asked him to compare then and now. He said that the free peasant markets were forbidden during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and you could of course not listen to foreign radio or meet with foreigners.

“But when Deng came to power, he decided that we should have one country with two systems, that is blend socialism and capitalism. People are much happier now!”

Finally, he asked if I had any FEC to exchange for Renminbi. He said that there were things he wanted to buy in the Friendship Store. I was a bit disappointed and said that I didn’t carry any money. 

* 

The English Speakers Corner is very close to the northern abutment, on the eastern side. There were a couple of hundred Chinese youth standing there, having conversations in the dark. Next was a billiard room, where people were playing from early in the morning to late at night.

The Chinese society seems to be dominated by traditionally female traits, above all the desire for safety. It is also a trait of poverty that you become less willing to take risks if your life is at stake. For somebody to risk their job, one needs to have saved up at least enough to survive one or a couple of years. The Chinese collectivism with its desire for safety demands of the individual that it stays loyal to the group, yes, it requires an extensive depersonalization. There is little room for developing your individuality, which is why children are not allowed mature and grow up to become independent and responsible citizens even if they are aging biologically. This “childishness” makes the culture appear asexual. The sexuality is after all the most individual thing we have. In the West we are shy about our sex: We hide it and are embarrassed about revealing it, while Chinese learn to expose their sex and rear end to the collective as small children through their pants, which are open at the bottom. Their sex is revealed and neutralized. It has become a shared property and hence no one’s. This nudity is then paired with a strong puritanism in adulthood. 

* 

I had talked to Ara and Nina about going to a discotheque tonight, but they didn’t know if they were free, since their Tibetan student friend wanted to take them to the university in the evening. So, there I sat in the lobby bar when one smartly dressed Chinese young person after the other walked by to take the elevator to the discotheque on the ninth floor. This was worse than anything I had seen in Guangzhou. The girls wore elegant coats and tight-fitting, half-length skirts.

The entrance fee was ten yuan, and the place was full when I arrived around ten. The sound and light equipment were certainly up to par and the music wasn’t that bad, Chinese soft rock.

The dance floor was crowded, almost exclusively with Chinese youth. They danced well. One girl was dressed in a black stitched body stocking. She was pretty, had sexy make-up and her straight hair in a pigtail starting out from the top of her head. Add to that a red band around her forehead. She danced expressively with her whole body. She turned me on.

I had just taken a seat when I guy sat down at my table and poured me a glass of Coca Cola. His English was about as good as my Chinese, so the conversation was soon done with. He and his friend, who also was from Guangzhou, asked me to dance. I asked them if there were many from Guangzhou at the place, but he said that most were from Chengdu.

It was nice to not attract too much attention. Young people here don’t become as paralyzed when they spot a big nose.

A pretty girl with alert eyes sat down and chatted with my new “friend.” I asked her to dance, and she led me over to her friend who was the girl in the black body stocking. The two guys followed us. People didn’t dance in pairs, but each one separately, like in some hot discos in the West, but for a different reason. Here it is the hostile attitude to sex and personal freedom (I don’t mean licentiousness) that lies behind this. It’s like a school dance for twelve-year-old children with adults in the room to make sure that nothing happens. A uniformed guard sat next to the dance floor monitoring the event. Exactly at eleven the lights were turned on, the music came to a complete halt and the place emptied out in no time. 

September 15, Monday

I called the Chengdu Foreign Affairs Office to get help in setting up interviews. A Ms. Xiao answered politely and offered to discuss my request at my hotel room, but soon called back and said that I was not on the list of foreign correspondents.

“I’m sorry, but our rules don’t allow us to help you,” she said.

“Isn’t that a bit bureaucratic?”

“Who invited you?” she asked after a moment of silence.

“Nobody,” I said.

She consulted with somebody in Chinese and referred to what I had told her.

The call ended. 

* 

Ms. Xiao called back at three. She had arranged an interview with the head of Sichuan’s economic reforms. He will be at my hotel room tomorrow morning at ten. 

* 

I’m reading in Social Sciences in China about a Tang Dynasty collection of laws. Early on, China developed a comprehensive and very well thought out bureaucratic structure that lived on until the 1911 revolution and reminds us of today’s communist system. The author, a professor from Nanjing, condemns both the feudal authoritarianism and the legalistic bureaucracy. I wonder what he thinks of today’s system. 

September 16

I took a walk after breakfast, but then hurried back to my hotel where Ms. Xiao waited together with the head of economic reforms. We went to my room for the interview. He gave a good overview of the reforms in Sichuan but stuck to the party line. 

* 

In the evening I took the elevator to the ninth floor, which had a bar, a video-game room, a billiard room, plus two outside terraces with views to the east and south. I took a seat at the former and ordered a cold beer. It was a warm and pleasant evening and I thought that it would be nice to stay here for a week or two if it wasn’t that I felt so lonely.

I wrote a long letter to Ann and while I sat there a man came up to me and asked if he could take a seat at the table next to mine.

“You are writing intensively,” he said when I was finished.

We began to talk and soon connected. His name was Zhao Renping and he had an intelligent face with friendly eyes. On his business card it said that he was professor in Environmental Technology at the Chengdu University.

“My view is that China should not only send students abroad to study technology, but also send humanists and social scientists so that we can learn from the West in other areas too,” he said.

“What do you think about the development in China today? Are you optimistic?”

“Yes, I am, but people of my age have learned to be cautious and not stray too far from the pattern, whatever we really believe in our hearts.”

When we split up, he said that he regretted that he had to travel to Beijing in two days and could therefore not invite me home to meet his family. 

* 

“It is absolutely forbidden to criticize different opinions as being 'not in line with the party'.

(China Daily, September 17, 1986)

 September 19, Friday 

”Chairman Mao cares for us all.

There is place for everyone of us in his heart.”

”All the wounded soldiers looked up with surprise and joy as Chairman Mao walked into the room.”

”Tears came to his eyes as Chairman held his hand.”

”A few minutes later the soldier died with a smile on his lips. Then Chairman Mao went to see the other wounded soldiers in the hospital. He was interested in everything they told him.” 

(English lesson on TV.) 

* 

Behind the giant white Mao statue on the main square lies the Chengdu Exhibition Hall, which has been converted to a department store. From a giant poster on the back wall in the large hall Mao overlooks TV-sets, sofas, and other temptations of modern life. On the opposite wall hang large portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, while Brooke Shields smiles at us from the top shelf of the photography department.

Just to the entrance of the exhibit hall is an entrance leading down to “The Underground Market” which used to be a bomb shelter when Mao called on his countrymen to dig tunnels to protect them from a Soviet attack. I walked down the sloped entrance and ended up in a corridor with merchant stalls along one side. One couldn’t see the end of it as the tunnel just went on and on. There were clothes for sale, perfumes, cigarette lighters with bathing beauties on, cassette decks, cassettes, cameras and so on.

I walked for a long time in the underground corridor where the small shops followed one another in a seemingly endless repetition. A mile or so into my walk I was accompanied by a girl in a black coat, a black body stocking, and black pumps. She was not bad. I looked at her when I passed her, and she looked at me. Our expressions didn’t reveal anything, but from then on, we walked in a tandem of sorts. Now she stopped at a shop, and I passed her by, then I stopped and looked at cassettes while she passed me by.

Eventually the corridor bent slightly to the left, only to continue as straight as before. We passed an underground movie theater, a billiard room, a cafe, and a hair salon. Often there were two parallel corridors. The ventilation was good and there were plenty of bathrooms.

Suddenly the corridor stopped. Behind a fence I could sense a continuation, but it was closed off. We turned around and continued back in the same way.

There was a big cafe close to the southern entrance. In it sat four Tibetans in their traditional dark-brown clothes.

I walked up to the street level and continued east. I checked if the girl was still there but couldn’t see her. She must have lost track of me I thought and continued but spotted her again just a short distance ahead of me, looking at wares in a glass display.

I passed her, crossed the street and lost sight of her again, permanently I thought. As seven past seven I arrived at the Bank of China, which had just closed. On the way back she appeared again, biking on the same side of the road where I was. She biked past me and then slowed down. I stopped and waited for her to reappear behind the tree where she parked her bicycle. There she was. She saw me and walked into a store. She must have seen that I was walking west but could not turn around without overstepping the innocence of the game we had been engaged in up to that point. I continued and we never saw each other again. 

Chengdu Airport. September 20, Saturday

The morning fog lies so thick that no planes can land or take off. My Italian friend Leonardo has fallen asleep on the floor behind me and I’m tired too, but still excited after the adventure of the past two days. Chengdu became a fantastic experience, but that was not as much because of the city as a gorgeous Swiss beauty. Her name is Nicolette, and she has brown eyes, shining black hair and the most endearing dimples. She is traveling with an older relative.

My most private Sichuan operetta began on Wednesday when a girl asked if she could join me at my table in the hotel’s dining hall. Her name was Sabrina, and she came from Italy. After lunch we walked to the railway station to book train tickets and that’s where we met Leonardo, who struggled to get a ticket to Chongqing. In the next moment I discovered an elegant woman who spoke to him in French. Leonardo explained that she said that there was a counter further down where they spoke English, but not even the friendly woman there could get us a ticket for the next day.

It didn’t take long before all of us became friends and decided to rent bicycles and spend the day together. I asked if they were interested in seeing a Sichuan Opera and they were.

We had a lighthearted bike tour with Leonardo gesticulating and shouting at people on the sidewalks. As for me, I biked either next to or behind Nicolette. I tried to avoid ignoring Sabrina but was getting more and more attracted to Nicolette. Our first stop was the CAAC booking office where Leonardo and I bought two tickets to Chongqing. After that we bought tickets to the Sichuan Opera and continued north to a small temple we’ve heard of. I kept close to Nicolette and at a couple of times we brushed lightly against each other as we took a break to check out the map, but Leonardo got suspicious and asked Sabrina to take a photo of him and Nicolette.

After the excursion to the temple, we returned to the hotel to shower and change before meeting up in the lobby.

We took three bike rickshaws to the square with the giant white Mao statue and walked the last distance to Chengdu Restaurant where we for 30 yuan had more food and drink than we could finish. Everything was very good and spiced in the Sichuan way. I had Nicolette to my right, and we talked a lot during dinner, which annoyed Leonardo who at the bus back made sure that he sat next to her, but I had a surprise ready when we arrived at the opera house, because I had made sure that I would sit to the right of my beauty. Unfortunately, my rival ended up on her left side.

The performance offered an explosion of colors, and the singing was surprisingly accessible even though we didn’t understand a word.

Leonardo conversed with her in French and a bit too much to my taste, so I interjected something in English now and then, and often she whispered something in my ear. To better hear her whispers, I had to lean towards her which caused my heart to beat faster every time we got close. Sometimes we touched each other to stress something we had just said. Now and then I placed my hand on her arm as if to call on her attention and she responded by doing the same thing.

My rival opened the second act by placing his arm around Nicolette as if resting it on the backrest. She withdrew and were not as available anymore, not even to me. He also stole her attention by conversing with her lively in French, while I on my side carefully and gradually tried to establish contact, but I was soon interrupted by what seemed to be a local TB colony in the row behind us. That was at least what it sounded like since behind us sat a handful of old and bent men and ladies in their well-worn blue Mao jackets and they were clearing their throats and spitting ever more intensively the more the drama on stage proceeded.

Halfway into the second act the russlings became louder and were followed by coughs and the sound of gobs of phlegm slowly descending to on the floor right behind our backs, hitting it with a clicking sound. Nicolette looked back after a particularly violent cough attack and showed med with her thumb and index finger that the gob had barely missed my shirt.

Back in the street Leonardo managed to link arms with Nicolette while I held her hand. We had not walked long when she complained that her feet hurt. Her sandals were uncomfortable, but it was late in the evening and hard to find either a bus, taxi or a bike rickshaw. When she half-jokingly pushed me towards a cart and once again complained about her feet I lifted her and carried her in my arms.

“You’re so strong,” she said.

Back at the hotel we took the elevator to the roof terrace on the ninth floor. Leonardo sat down next to Nicolette, and I took a seat opposite her so that I could keep eye contact. We sat there chatting until it was so late that the elevators had been turned off when left for our rooms. My room was on the fifth floor, so I was the first one to split from the company, something Leonardo happily let me know, but there was of course no chance that I could seduce her as she shared the room with her aunt. She gave me a hug as we parted for the night, and I gave her a kiss on her cheek. The first kiss! She received it and wished me sweet dreams.

The next morning, I went down to the dining room to have breakfast and took a seat next to Leonardo, Sabrina, and Nicolette’s aunt. After a couple of minutes, the beautiful showed up dressed in a red cotton dress. I complimented her and she appreciated it.

“Were you alone in the room,” she asked referring to the fact that I had not had to share the room with anybody.

“Yes, unfortunately. I lay there waiting all night, but no one came to knock on my door,” I whispered to her.

“Oh, you men have your fantasies, and then you get disappointed,” she said.

 

We took the bus to Xindu north of Chengdu to visit the Baoguang temple (the temple of the holy light). Leonardo was aggressive and sat right behind Nicolette, while I ended up several rows back. I consoled myself by the fact that she now and then turned towards me and smiled. On the way out of Chengdu we got stuck in a traffic jam and the heat and humidity became depressing. Fortunately, I had brought an orange that I peeled and shared with Nicolette and her aunt. My score!

I took several photos of her inside the temple garden while she posed for me. How beautiful she was! 

For twelve yuan the temple’s vegetarian restaurant served a magnificent seven-course meal which not even the five of us could finish. I had Nicolette on my left side, while Leonardo was seated at a safe distance between her aunt Nancy and Sabrina. During the meal I served her and made sure she had everything she needed. Now and then we touched each other.

After the lunch we visited the Hall of Luohan which has 500 Buddha statues in natural size, all of them painted in bright colors, and with personalized poses and facial expressions.

Nicolette and I walked together through the faintly lit path reflecting on what we saw, but time had caught up with us and they had a train to catch. We hurried to the bus stop and began to wait. I bought a bottle of a cider-like drink and shared it with her.

“Why don’t you stay her for a couple of days more? I have a weakness and that is that I easily fall in love.”

“I noticed that you are a very intensive person when we first met at the railway station,” she said.

“How so?”

“It was your way of moving. You came off as an energetic person who didn’t want to wait.”

We sat next to each other on each side of the middle aisle during the bus trip back and she allowed me to caress her hand, but then Leonardo suggestion that we step off the bus and switch to buss No. 1 which goes down to the square with the Mao statue. He feared that we other ways would be delayed by traffic jams, but the bus never arrived, so we had to start to walk, which irritated both Nicolette and her aunt who were both tired. When we finally saw a bus approaching at a distance, Leonardo rushed us so that we would make it in time to the next stop, while I stayed at Nicolette’s side. He ran ahead and signaled to us to hurry up, which was not exactly the way to gain sympathy from a woman whose feet hurt.

When we finally reached the bus stop, the bus was gone and Leonardo annoyed, but not as annoyed as the ladies. While the rest of them waited at the bus stop, I walked over to an intersection where a rickshaw driver with black sunglasses sat and listened to his Walkman. I waved at him so that he would follow me to the bus stop and offered Nicolette and her mom to enter. Soon after another rickshaw appeared, and I let Leonardo and Sabrina take it while I began to walk. 

“What about you?” Nicolette called out.

“No problem. I’ll manage. It’s you who are in a rush,” I said.

She waived sweetly and gratefully to her hero.

It didn’t take long before I caught my own rickshaw, pedaled by a large, bald man with a friendly face. We overtook Nicolette’s equipage which had lost speed as its driver were not as strong and besides had a problem with a pedal. My guy saw that and turned back to help. I arranged for us to swap equipages so that they could ride faster, while their driver got it easier by only having one passenger. 

But now I was then one who ended up behind. Nicolette saw that and shot sympathetic looks in my direction, to which I responded by acting out a little comedy. I held my heart and then reach out my arms towards her playing the yearning lover. She picked up on the act and stretched out her arms as if saying “come here, come to me!” And I really did since my driver now picked up speed and I came close enough that I could lean forward, and touch Nicolette’s stretched out hand. For a moment we held each other’s hands and even managed to get so close that we could exchange a kiss while the drivers laughed.

There were several such kisses before the trip returned to the normal pace, but Nicolette and I kept exchanging looks during the rest of the way. At the hotel Leonardo tried to resume the battle even though he knew that he had lost. We walked on each side of Nicolette, held her and laughed at our folly. So did the hotel staff at the entrance.

We still had some time before they had to leave for the train, so we sat down in the lobby to say goodbye and exchange addresses. Nicolette’s aunt said that I was welcome to visit them. Leonardo acknowledged his defeat and complained about the terrible Vikings. Then the taxi came, and we got ready for a final goodbye. I took Nicolette round the waist and led her to the car, but Leonardo was soon there and embraced her. He wanted to be the last one to say goodbye, but I followed her into the car and leaned towards her where she sat in the backseat and I was rewarded with a kiss.

Zigzagging in the Middle Kingdom is the fourth part of  novel with the working title Shifting Passions.