He became very confidential, glancing around and drawing me close to him. "Maybe not lackeys. I have never heard of eating lackeys. But many other things. We eat"—and he drew a meaningful breath—"forbidden things."
That had rather a thrilling sound: We eat forbidden things.
"What sort of forbidden things?"
"I only know their Chinese names—sorry."
"What are we talking about?" I asked. "Snakes?"
"Dried snakes. Snake soup. They are not forbidden. I mean an animal that eats ants with its nose."
"Scaly anteater. Pangolin. I don't want to eat that. Too many people are eating them," I said. "It's an endangered species."
"Would you like to eat forbidden things?"
"I would like to eat interesting things," I said, equivocating. "How about sparrows? Pigeons? Snakes? What about turtles?"
"Those are easy. I can arrange it."
Mr. Jiang was young. He was new to the job. He was a little too breezy. He had the jokey and insincere manner of someone who has been dealing with elderly foreigners who enjoy being joshed as they are being deferred to. I felt his obsequiousness was a deliberate ploy to undermine me.
I had told him I didn't want to go sight-seeing, and yet within an hour of our meeting he took me to the caves outside Guilin, where there were hundreds of shuffling Chinese tourists.
"What are we doing here?" I asked.
"I am so sorry," he said. "We will leave immediately. I thought you might want to see our famous Reed Flute Cave."
What was the point of looking at these humdrum and hackneyed marvels? And having just come through hundreds of miles of Guizhou and Guangxi I had seen enough rock formations to last me a lifetime. I had liked them because I had felt I'd discovered them for myself—I hadn't been led there by someone burbling, "Look!"
"Let's look at them," I said.
Like so much in China on the tourist route—like the terra-cotta warriors and the Ming tombs, the Reed Flute Cave was discovered by a man digging a well. This fellow's shovel opened the way to a vast limestone cave, with chambers and corridors and grottoes. That was in 1959. Lights, signposts, balconies and stairways were installed, and then it became domesticated and acceptable to the Chinese.
It looked grotesque and Disneyish, a piece of natural vulgarity—a tasteless act of God. It could have been made out of polyester or papier-machi. It dripped. It glugged. Chunks of slimy limestone dropped from the ceiling. It was the spelunker's version of Sunset Strip or the Shanghai Bund. People crowded through it, skidding on the greasy floor, listening to a guide explaining its variety of crazy shapes.
"We call this the lotus rock. This is the conch shell. This is the elephant's foot—can you see why? This is the carp..."
I ditched Mr. Jiang—and Mr. Fang, who was still with me—and went down to the river Li to look at the boats. Some of the houseboats were for hire, so I took one that was owned by two old women. We floated downstream, past some lumpy and lovely stone hills and temples. After some time they said they couldn't go any farther or else they wouldn't be able to pole the boat back. But the river winds south, to other rivers, the Gui Jiang and Xi Jiang, and then to Canton. I asked them whether they had been that far.
"Yes, but not in a boat like this." They had the gargling and quacking Cantonese accent, and their Mandarin was nearly as bad as mine. "We went in a big boat."
"Why not this one?"
"You would never get back in this one." She meant you couldn't pole upstream from Canton to Guilin. Well, that was reasonable.
But I became possessed by the idea of taking a small boat—say, a collapsible kayak—to China, and setting it up in a place like Guilin and paddling from river to river, and sleeping under trees. It would be a way of seeing the country from an entirely different angle, and of avoiding people like Fang and Jiang. And when I got sick of it I would simply go gurgling into the estuary of one of these muddy rivers, and then into the South China Sea.
Taking a break from the arduous poling the old women moored our boat to the south bank of the Li, near a fishing village. In the shallows were simple raftlike boats made of six or seven big curved bamboos lashed together, and also sampans and houseboats. There were cormorants on many of the boats. The women called the birds wang and also yu-ying.
The first Western traveler after Marco Polo described these birds. This man was the missionary Friar Odoric, from Friuli in Italy. He left his Franciscan convent in Udine in the year 1321 to travel in the East for three years. He went barefoot. He was very tough, very pious, and severe with himself. He wore a hair shirt the whole time.
After traveling thirty-six days from the coastal town of Fuzhou, he stayed with a man who said to him, "Sir, if you would see any fish being caught, go with me."
That was over 660 years ago, but the Chinese haven't changed their methods of using cormorants for fishing; and so Friar Odoric's description still stands.
"Then he led me to the bridge, carrying in his arms with him certain dive-doppers or water-fowls [cormorants], bound to perches, and about every one of their necks he tied a thread, lest they should eat the fish as fast as they took them... He loosened the dive-doppers from the pole, which presently went into the water, and within less than the space of one hour, caught as many fish as filled his three baskets; which being full, my host untied the threads from about their necks, and entering the second time into the river they fed themselves with fish, and being satisfied they returned and allowed themselves to be bound to their perches, as they were before."
A boat near ours had seventeen of these birds roosting on it. A young boy sluicing out a muddy bucket said that the birds cost 300—400 yuan each, but the two old women said the true figure was closer to a thousand. Whatever it was, between $150 and $300, it was a huge amount, and so the birds must really earn their keep. These fishermen used them by placing a ring, instead of a thread, around the birds' necks to prevent them from swallowing the fish.
So far, I had felt the Chinese were rather cruel to animals; but they are also practical. It was not just cruel but also very stupid to abuse these valuable creatures. It was all right to torment pigs by stacking them in carts when you took them to market, or to herd buffalos into freight cars and ignore their piteous moos when they were being sold, or to tie chickens into bundles, so that the buyer could carry them home; but an expensive cormorant had to be coddled. A man on one boat was scratching his bird like a cat and playing with it affectionately, and another man was feeding his flock and stroking their feathers and nuzzling them.
All these birds were exiles. They are the Great Cormorant (Phal-acrocorax carbo), the only one used for fishing, and are caught in the distant coastal province of Shandong. They had been brought here in baskets on a freight train.
When we continued on our way, poling the houseboat, I took the port side with one of the poles. But the boat slid into a fast current, and although I was twice as big as my poling partner, I wasn't much use. The other old woman relieved me, and when I was out of their way, they propelled the boat harmoniously and swiftly back to town.
The next day I saw another side to Mr. Fang. I was asking Mr. Jiang my usual questions about the Cultural Revolution and he was replying in a rather bland and noncommital way when Mr. Fang began speaking very fast. I was sure he was reprimanding the young man.
"What did you say?" I asked.
"I told him to tell the truth," Mr. Fang said. "It is important to know the truth about the Cultural Revolution. Foreigners must be told. We must face the facts. It was a disaster, so what is the point of smiling and pretending we don't care?"
That was very good. In a quiet way, Mr. Fang was stubborn and truthful, and I knew that he despaired of the vacillating yuppies like Mr. Jiang.