Mr. Fang followed me everywhere, in his hesitant way, hanging back apprehensively, and smiling when I caught his eye. But it was always a smile of fear.
I walked past a family-planning poster—a large billboard near the center of Chengdu. It showed a Chinese leader welcoming the birth of one baby girl (the parents handing it over for approval). The slogan underneath said, China Needs Family Planning.
When I turned around and addressed Mr. Fang, the poor man yelped. Then he recovered himself and laughed. His laugh said Sorry for screaming!
"That man looks familiar," I said. "Is that Zhou Enlai?"
"Yes. It is Zhou."
"Why him on a family-planning poster?"
"People like him. People respect him."
"Why not Mao Zedong?"
"On a family-planning poster!" Mr. Fang said. He was right to find it absurd. After all, Mao had encouraged the Chinese to breed like rabbits. "Not so good," Mr. Fang said.
I asked him whether people had a more respectful attitude towards Mao or Zhou these days.
"For myself, I prefer Zhou. And I think many others do, too. But 1 cannot speak for them."
"Why do you prefer Zhou, Mr. Fang?"
"He was honest. He was a good man. Also during the Cultural Revolution he suffered much."
"Was he criticized?"
"Not in public, but within. It was worse. People know that."
Before I set off again, I said, "Mr. Fang, why don't you go back to the hotel and rest? It's not necessary to follow me."
"It is the Chinese way," Mr. Fang said.
The parks in Chengdu attracted the newer sort of Chinese youth.
Observe the young couple entering People's Park in a suburb of Chengdu one June afternoon. The first thing that strikes you about the man is that he does not look anything like the man in the family-planning poster. He is smoking a king-size cigarette—it dangles from his lips—and in his hand he has a suitcase-style cassette recorder and radio, and the screechy music (probably a Hong Kong tape) thumps against it and drowns conversation and frightens the dusty starlings. The fellow wears a T-shirt saying Cowboy, and the motif on the shirt is a long-nosed man in a ten-gallon hat. He also wears tight blue jeans and platform shoes with womanish high heels. His hair has been professionally curled—the Canton fashion spread to Shanghai and has recently reached Chengdu. He wears sunglasses. He swings his radio and puffs his cigarette.
His girlfriend (if she were his wife he would not be trying so hard to impress her) wears a pink dress. It is light and fluttery. She might have made it herself. She also wears the nylon knee socks that younger women favor, and high-heeled shoes, and sunglasses with rhinestones on the frames.
This is their day off. They are spending it in the park. Later on they will look for a tree and hide behind it for a session of old-fashioned smooching. The parks and the boulevards are full of such couples. They are the new people in the People's Republic—the inheritors. But their motto is Get it while you can.
I asked Mr. Fang whether he had seen them. He said he had. He was very disapproving of these youngsters.
"It is the fault of the Cultural Revolution," he said. "They saw that it was a disaster. For that whole time there was disruption. No one obeyed. That is why, now, these young people have no manners, no discipline and no ideas."
"You sound angry, Mr. Fang."
He did not reply. He laughed—a sharp stuttering and explosive laugh that meant he was very angry.
He had said he disliked modern Chinese stories. He meant he was out of sympathy with them. Who were these spoiled brats and spendthrifts who appeared in the pages of Beijing Literature and Harvest and Monthly Literary Miscellany? Actually they were just the sort of youngsters you saw every day in the public parks, trying to be cool, which meant mimicking Western ways—sunglasses, curled hair, platform shoes, knee socks, flared trousers, blue jeans, transistor radios, earphones, and for a lucky few, motorcycles. The girls even had to have a fancy brassiere, probably the most superfluous garment in China.
In Xu Naijian's recent (1985) story, "Because I'm Thirty and Unmarried," the so-called spinster is told by her girl cousin, "What kind of bra is this you're wearing, so big and ungainly? Get yourself one of those bras from Xinjiekou. They're a nice shape—made in Guangzhou. You're so out of date..."
The puzzling conflict that arises when a Chinese person is faced with choosing between the East and the West was expressed by the Chinese traveler Liang Ch'i-ch'ao. "Of course we may laugh at those old folks among us," he wrote in Travel Impressions of Europe (1919), "who block their own road of advancement and claim that we Chinese have all that is found in Western learning. But should we not laugh even more at those who are drunk with western ways and regard everything Chinese as worthless, as though we in the last several hundred years have remained primitive and have achieved nothing?"
As Mr. Fang walked along with me (but a few steps behind), we passed a refreshment stand and heard loud singing—one uproarious voice trying to manage a twangling Chinese song. The singer, a man, was seated at a table, his back turned to us. His two companions, who were sober, wore terrified smiles. The man was at the final stage of Chinese drunkenness: red faced, singing and drooling. Another bottle of beer and his eyes would swell up, he would gasp for breath and soon be out cold.
"That is also a result of the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Fang said. "What does he care? He has lost all discipline. He has no pride. It is bad behavior."
Then the man stood up, still singing, and staggered a little. He turned aside. He did not see me, but I saw him. It was Cheung, the taxi driver from Kowloon.
10: The Halt at Emei Shan: Train Number 209 to Kunming
The biggest statue of Buddha in the world, and probably the ugliest, is three hours down the main Chengdu-Kunming line at Leshan, a riverside town. The Buddha and the surrounding temples make it a place of pilgrimage. The statue sits in a niche as big as a gorge, at the confluence of three rivers. It is said that this Buddha was erected there 1200 years ago because the turbulence created by the meeting rivers had drowned so many boatmen. Even now I could see men battling through the suds in their sampans as I watched.
But this Buddha was less an object of veneration than an example of the Chinese fascination with freakishness—the very big, the very weird, the highly unusual. This Buddha's ears were twelve feet long. Chinese tourists frolicked on his feet. You could park a car on the nail of his big toe. Close up he was Brobdingnagian—big, plain, disproportionate—with weeds growing from his cracks. I imagined he did not look so grotesque from the river. There were dragon-boat races on the river that week: more freakishness—oarsmen throwing panicky ducks into the water and then chasing them in the luridly painted boats.
There were dragon-boat men in the restaurant at Leshan. They were singing and swilling beer and engaged in drinking contests (the loser had to clip clothespins to his ears so that he would look like a total jackass). For lunch I had the specialties of this pleasant town—frogs' thighs and green bean seeds, and then I went to the holy mountain at Emei. Like Leshan, Emei is also a place of pilgrimage. It is considered an act of piety to climb the mountain—holiness at 10,000 feet, on this penultimate staging post to even holier Tibet.
I met a group of eight elderly pilgrims at Emei. They were all in their seventies and carried backpacks—ingenious wicker baskets—and walking sticks and food bundles. They were the classic instance of smiling and portable pilgrims.
"Where do you come from?"
"From Xitang."
Over three hundred miles away, in the northeast of Sichuan.
"Why did you come here?"