As we passed from Ningxia into Gansu I talked to them. Some where shy and some frisked like kittens and others just glowered at my nosey questions. I asked most of them whether they believed in life after death. All of them said firmly no.
"But most Americans do," one said, and the rest of them agreed that this was so.
I had asked them that because we had begun by talking about dreams. They told me dreams they had—about guilt, persecution, being naked, being pursued.
"Everyone has those dreams," I said. "I used to dream about being chased by a monster that looked like a huge potato. And I still have dreams about suddenly realizing that I have to take an important exam that I'm unprepared for."
We were talking in English, which they spoke very well. In fact, one of the boys—unusual for a college student—was Westernized (in the Chinese way) to the extent that he had had his hair curled. It was the fashion in large Chinese cities that summer, among people who had money—men and women. Taxi drivers affected a Liberace coif, their hair permed and fluffed up, and sometimes lightly tinted. But it was not so common as to go unnoticed. Outside The Phoenix Beauty Salon in Shanghai, and Peking's Golden Flower Perma Parlor there were always baffled people pressed against the front windows, watching the dandified young men getting their hair curled.
The curly-haired student said he didn't have any dreams at all, presumably on the assumption that dreaming was too old-fashioned a preoccupation for a stylish trendsetter like him.
Anyway, I left the subject, and left their coach, but later when I was looking at the rubbly landscape I was joined by one of the girls, who said that she had had a dream that was worrying her.
"Three dreams, I mean. But all of them were about my father and my brother." She had a delicate face and anxious eyes, and she spoke in a shy but determined way. Obviously she had not wanted to tell me this dream in front of all the other students. "In the first dream my father killed my brother with a stick. In the second, he hanged my brother. In the third, he shot him. What does it mean?"
"Is your father violent?"
"Very violent," she said.
"What about your mother?"
"My mother passed away six months ago."
"When did you start having these dreams?"
"After she died."
"You live in Peking?"
"No. I study in Peking, but my home is in a country area, near Wuhan. It is a very large house—nine rooms, in a very remote place. It is also a very strange place. There are groves of bamboo all around it. Do you know the sound that bamboo makes?"
I nodded: it was one of the creepiest sounds in the world, the wind making the bamboo stalks rub and mutter.
"It is an old house," she said. "My mother died in it, and my father lives there with my younger brother. My father is not only violent. He is also very unhappy. I am afraid. Do you think my dream will come true?"
I said that she probably felt guilt for having gone to Peking to study. Her mother had been a restraining influence on her father, and she wanted to protect her brother.
'The last time I saw my brother he was unfriendly. It was Spring Festival. I was glad to see him, but he refused to go for a walk with me."
This was all very gloomy, and I tried to think of something to say, but before I could she spoke again.
"I think something terrible is going to happen," she said. "My father is going to kill my brother."
Actually I felt the same thing, but I didn't say so. I told her not to worry but to go home fairly soon, to see her brother and try to gain his confidence.
She said, 'This dream is telling me that I must get a job in Wuhan, near my home."
This corner of Gansu had the look of a landscape that had been bombed. But the craters and foxholes and exploded-looking ravines were the work of wind and water—wind, mostly, because this was semidesert. The Yellow River was motionless and soupy, and the hills were the color of corn bread and just as crumbly.
Once when I was talking with the students I saw Mr. Fang eyeing me. I knew he had been sent to keep me in line, and I was waiting for a chance to ditch him; but I felt a little sorry for him, in whatever report he had to write about my behavior or the subjects of my whispered conversations on the trains, because the poor man spoke no English. His sea-lion face often made him seem sad.
I found one of the teachers and discovered her to be just about my age. Her name was Professor Shi. In 1967, when she was a student, she was an ardent supporter of the Cultural Revolution and volunteered to travel from Peking to Anhui Province to work on a tea plantation. She abandoned all ideas of further study and picked tea for six years.
"I think it was like the Peace Corps," she said.
"No," I said. "The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient, and we weren't under any pressure to join. But going into the countryside in China was a big Maoist campaign."
"I asked to go," Professor Shi said, somewhat avoiding my point about her being pressured. "I wanted to live like a peasant."
"Did you succeed?" I asked. In Africa, in the sixties, I had had the vague idea of going native and living in a mud hut, and to that end I left my Peace Corps house and moved to an African township and into a two-room hut. But it hadn't worked. My African students thought it was undignified and my neighbors were afraid of me. Foreigners who moved into huts were either crackpots or spies.
Professor Shi said, "In the beginning it was wonderful. We had competitions to see who could pick the most tea. The hard part was not the picking or the bending. It was that you had to carry a heavy bag the whole time, full of tea leaves."
There were no lights at this tea plantation. But there was a stream, so these youngsters from the city decided to build a dam and put in a generator. This certainly resembled a Peace Corps project—the outsiders deciding that what these peasants needed were some of the comforts of home, juice—especially.
"We worked very hard for a year building the dam. At the end of that time, when it was finished, we set aside one night for the lights to be turned on and for the electricity to flow. I remember it very well. That night, when the electricity came on, I stood and cried—I was so happy. Others were crying too.
"The old electrician from the work unit said, 'You're tough Peking boys and girls. Why are you crying? This is just a simple dam and simple electric power and a few flickering bulbs.'
"He was wrong. We had done it all ourselves, with our own hands. Like picking the tea. That was why we cried."
I was affected by her story, although I had been somewhat annoyed by her comparison between the displaced intellectuals and the Peace Corps. But I saw that there was a connection, and both had emerged at the same time.
She had fallen silent. She had told me her good memory. She then said, "Later it was different. I became a teacher in 1974, and the Red Guards came to check up on us. They told us what to teach. They bullied us, and they were very tough. I was trying to teach English. They didn't like it. They said it was bourgeois and useless. That's when I changed my mind about the Cultural Revolution."
As an English teacher, she said, she understood Mao because she had read Percy Bysshe Shelley. I said, What?
"Mao was a political revolutionary," she said. "But he was also a romantic poet. That was the problem."
She saw the Old Man as a sort of dreamer in baggy pants, scratching out his poems with his goose-quill pen and leading shiny-faced youths into the fields to harvest rice and grain. But the old romantic, perhaps like all romantics, was not only impractical, but also selfish and egotistical, and by the sixties he was around the bend, too. This was a far cry from the young idealist Shelley, and not much like the old leech gatherer, Willy Wordsworth.
"He was also a tyrant, wasn't he?"
She said she didn't know about that. It was painful to think about recent history. She too wanted to go to the United States—to study, and for a change of pace.