Mr. Jiang struggled to tell me something, but he was only twenty-two. He said he didn't have a very clear memory of the Cultural Revolution.
"I know my father was regarded as too right wing," he said. "My family was sent for reeducation, to a remote place, to plant rice. My father had been an English teacher in a middle school. The family worked on the land, learning from peasants, for six years. It was very hard for them. I was too young to notice. For the first year we had no house. We lived in a sort of barn—a place where grain was stored. We had no crops. We ate the local leaves and roots, living like animals."
"Is your father angry about it?"
"He doesn't talk about it," Mr. Jiang said.
"Never?"
"Never. Nothing. He doesn't say anything."
"Why not?"
"Because it was a bitter period."
Mr. Fang said, "He is making a mistake. He should talk about it. He should tell these people what it was like." And with his sad, swollen face turned on me, Mr. Fang said, "Disaster."
It was a few days before I saw Mr. Jiang again, and in that time I walked the streets and browsed in the market (it was full of exotic birds and pretty turtles, all languishing in cages). I took a tourist boat down the river Li to Yangshuo, past the droopy, dumpy limestone hills—more like cones and camel humps than hills—that rise straight out of their dull reflections in the green river. The boat was crowded, the tourists were bumptious—"What a place for a condo!" 'They should call that one 'Dolly Parton Hill'!"—but the place was so weirdly pretty nothing else mattered. Among these blunt hills and bamboos, there were children swimming, and men fishing, and buffalos wading in the river up to their noses, occasionally ducking and snaffling weeds off the bottom.
Even in the rain, even with rambunctious tourists, it was sixty miles of magnificence. At Yangshuo the boat turned slowly, giving a sort of panning shot of the small town on the low bluff of the river. The stone landing stages had elegant roofs, and colorful Chinese stood waiting for the boat to put us ashore. But as the passengers disembarked, the town exploded, and we were mobbed by traders and marketeers and old women waving bamboo back scratchers. They had been waiting for two days for the boat to arrive, and time was of the essence: tourists did not linger in Yangshuo.
Wrinkled Chinese men in black pajamas and lamp-shade hats balanced shitting cormorants on their shoulders, and when tourists took their picture they demanded a fee of one yuan. There were people selling kites, pot holders, aprons, napkins, fans and carved salad bowls. I was attracted by pairs of handmade eyeglasses, the kind that transform anyone who wears them into a Chinese scholar. I bought a pair. I bought a silver box and an old wooden puppet's head. It was a typical tourist market—mostly junk, some charming handicrafts, and a few treasures from damp attics, being sold illegally. The tourists seemed surprised by the Chinese ferocity in pricing and bargaining. Surely after decades of isolation and communism these people ought to be a little naive? They had no right to know the real value of the stuff in their stalls. As was frequently the case in China, it was the tourists who were naive. The traders hardly budged from their prices, and when the tourists shouted at them, the Chinese hissed back. There were no bargains, even in this distant bend in the river Li, on the muddy riverbank. It was true of China in general, and was perhaps a key to their survival. I thought: The Chinese wake up quickly.
That night Mr. Jiang emerged from behind a potted palm at my hotel to introduce me to a small monkeylike man.
"Our driver," Mr. Jiang said.
"Qi," the man said, and smiled. But it was not a smile. He was only saying his name.
"I have fixed everything you requested," Mr. Jiang said. "The driver will take us to Taohua—Peach Flower restaurant."
The driver slipped on a pair of gloves, and whipped the door open for me. Mr. Jiang got into the front seat, beside the driver. The driver adjusted his mirror, stuck his hand out of the window to signal—although we were in a parking lot and there were no other cars in sight—and drove into the empty road. After perhaps fifty yards he stopped the car.
"Is there anything wrong?" I said.
Mr. Jiang imitated a fat man laughing: Ho! Ho! Ho! And then in a bored voice added, "We have arrived."
"There wasn't much point in taking a car, was there?"
"You are an honored guest! You must not walk!"
I had learned that guff like this was a giveaway in China. When anyone spoke to me in this formal and facetious way I knew I was being taken for a ride.
Before we entered the restaurant, Mr. Jiang took me aside and said, "We will have snake soup. We will have pigeon."
"Very nice."
He shook his head. "They are not unusual. They are regular."
"What else are we having?"
"I will tell you inside."
But inside there was a fuss over the table, a great deal of talk I did not understand, and finally Mr. Jiang said, "This is your table. A special table. Now I will leave you. The driver and I will eat in the humble dining room next door. Please, sit! Take no notice of us. Enjoy yourself!"
This was also an unmistakable cue.
"Why don't you join me?" I said.
"Oh, no!" Mr. Jiang said. "We will be very comfortable at our little table in the humble dining room reserved for Chinese workers."
This was laying it on a bit thick, I thought; but I was feeling guilty about this meal, and eating good food alone made me feel selfish.
I said, "There's room at my table. Please sit here."
"Okay," Mr. Jiang said, in a perfunctory way, and indicated that the driver should follow his example.
It was quite usual for the driver to be included—in fact, it is one of the pleasures of Chinese life that on a long trip the driver is one of the bunch. If there is a banquet he is invited, if there is an outing he goes along, and he is present at every meal along the road. It is a civilized practice, and thinking it should be encouraged, I made no objection, even though the driver had taken me only fifty yards.
"Special meal," Mr. Jiang said. "We have crane. Maybe a kind of quail. We call it anchun. We have many things. Even forbidden things."
That phrase had lost its thrill for me. It was a hot night, this young man seemed unreliable, and I was not particularly hungry.
"Have some wine," Mr. Jiang said, pouring out three glasses. "It is osmanthus wine. Guilin means 'City of Osmanthus Trees.' "
We gulped our wine. It tasted syrupy and medicinal.
The food was brought in successive waves—many dishes, but the portions were small. Perhaps sensing that it would go quickly, the driver began tonging food onto his plate.
"That is turtle," Mr. Jiang said. "From the Li River."
"And that is forbidden," he said, lowering his voice. "Wawa fish— baby fish. Very rare. Very tasty. Very hard to catch. Against the law."
The fish was excellent. It was a stew of small white lumps in fragrant sauce. The driver's chopsticks were busily dredging for the plumpest fillets.
Mr. Jiang crept closer and mumbled a word in Chinese. "This is muntjac. From the mountains. With onions. Forbidden."
"What is a muntjac?" I asked.
"It is a kind of rabbit that eats fruit."
As all the world knows, a muntjac is a small deer. They are regarded as pests. You see them on golf courses outside London. Marco Polo found them in The Kingdom of Ergunul and wrote, 'The flesh of this animal is very good to eat." He brought the head and feet of a muntjac back to Venice.
I sampled the pigeon, the snake soup, the muntjac, the crane, the fish, the turtle. There was something dreadful and depressing about this food, partly because it tasted good and partly because China had so few wild animals. These creatures were all facing extinction in this country. And I had always hated the Chinese appetite for rare animals—for bear's paws and fish lips and caribou's nose. That article I had read about the Chinese killing their diminishing numbers of tigers to prepare—superstitiously—remedies for impotence and rheumatism had disgusted me. I was disgusted now with myself. This sort of eating was the recreation of people who were rich and spoiled.