The trouble with the stop in Xuzhou was that it occurred at three in the morning. At that hour the whole of China is asleep. I would be emerging from the train at this ridiculous hour on a winter night, and have six hours to kill before knowing whether it was possible to find a bus or a car to Zhou Enlai's homestead.
I decided to stay in bed.
Alain and Li got off at Bengbu at five in the morning to transfer to a Hefei train. Before we turned in they piled their boxes and suitcases outside in the corridor. The Head of the Train complained about Alain's trunk, but Mr. Li explained that it contained the foreign expert's worldly goods from Belgium.
"Regulations, regulations," the Head said. "You must register it."
They didn't bother. More people knocked on the door in the night to complain about it, but I was asleep at five when they got up. I woke up when one of them sat on my foot, but then they were gone. That was the way with trains — something dreamlike in the way people came and went. By eight there was someone else in Alain's berth, reading a comic book. It was a young woman, with a veil drawn tight over her face because of the dust.
"The Great River," she said, using the Chinese name for the Yangtze.
I decided to piss into it. I went to the toilet. On the door was a long Chinese word, TINGCHESHIQINGWUSHIYONG, which was seven characters run together, meaning, "While the train is stopped, please don't use this room." But it hadn't stopped; it was crossing the long railway bridge over the Yangtze. I entered the room, peered into the open hole and let fly.
Having seen Xinjiang and the northeast and the open spaces of Inner Mongolia, I now knew that this eastern part of classical China was the least interesting to look at. It was brown factories and black canals separated by flat cabbage fields. It had been plowed and fertilized and planted for thousands of years, but it was no miracle that anything at all grew here. The secret is revealed every morning, as men with long-handled dippers scoop human shit out of dark barrels and fertilize the fields. It was the flattest, ugliest and most populous part of China; but its shifters kept it in business. Shanghai residents produced 7 500 tons of human shit a day. It was all used. Farm yields were high, but the place epitomized drudgery. Everyone's energy was expended in simply existing there, and every inch of land had been put to use. Why grow flowers when you can grow spinach? Why plant a tree when you can use the sunshine on your crop? And the untillable soil was perfect for a factory. People praised Wuxi's Lake Tai, but the lake was dead, and Wuxi was simply awful looking, part of the sprawl of Shanghai, although it was seventy-five miles from the Bund.
In any kind of travel there is a good argument for going back and verifying your impressions. Perhaps you were a little hasty in judging the place? Perhaps you saw it in a good month? Something in the weather might have sweetened your disposition? In any case, travel is frequently a matter of seizing a moment. It is personal. Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine. Our accounts of the journeys would be different. You would notice how I provoked people with questions, and how I loitered in the market, and my fear of Chinese water that amounted almost to hydrophobia. I might mention your impatience, or your liking for dumplings, or the way you wilted in the heat. You would write about the kinds of Chinese food, and I about the way they wolfed it. If you spoke about Mao, I would contradict you.
On a second visit to Shanghai I was startled by its crowds and traffic — people and cars vying for the right of way; and by its contrasts of horror and beauty; and by its neurotic energy, a sort of frenzy that was unique to Shanghai.
The Shanghainese have a sense of belonging to the city that resembles the New Yorker's strong identification with New York. It is not chauvinism or civic pride. It is a sense of shared experience, the same headaches and complaints, a sort of it's-awful-but-I-love-it attitude. It is also a sense of being possessed by the place, locked in its embrace and embattled at the same time. Speaking as someone from out of town, I find both Shanghai and New York pretty dreadful. The noise alone is cause enough to regard them as uninhabitable. I grew up in the big-enough city of Boston, and when people talk about New York's (or Shanghai's) vitality, I simply see a lot of frantic pedestrians. And writers who celebrate cities always seem laughable to me, because every city dweller, in order to keep sane and survive, invents his own city. Your New York is not my New York. On the other hand, my Shanghai would probably be yours. It is simple but dense; it is horizontal; and it has remarkably few landmarks. New York is vertical, a city of interiors — and secrets; but Shanghai is its streets. There is not enough room for so many people indoors, and so people work, talk, cook, play and carry on their businesses on the sidewalks. There is no other way for the city to cope with its overpopulation. It is the most visible and obvious of cities, and perhaps therein lies its charm for those who praise it: that its modes of life and work are so apparent to even the casual stroller. There is also a strong sense of old China in the sidewalk life, and such sights seem to give it "atmosphere." But I would rather live in a place where I could walk without incessantly bumping into people, or dodging traffic, or where I could hear myself think.
But the sense of urban solidarity that characterizes Shanghai had a marked effect on the student demonstrations. It was the only city where factory workers linked arms with students. And the numbers were so great (they varied from 100,000 to 200,000) that the city came to a halt — no buses, no taxis, and no one was able to work.
I went out to Fudan University on the outskirts — and wretched-looking outskirts at that — where I talked with students about the demonstrations.
One student told me, "We held meetings, but we wanted to disassociate ourself from the Party, so we insisted that student cadres had to leave the hall. These cadres are appointed by the Party — we didn't want them."
"Did the cadres join the march?"
"No," the student said. "We put their names on our posters, but we printed their names upside down or in slanted characters."
"What was the point of that?"
"It is disrespectful to print someone's name upside down."
True, a Chinese person's name is everything to him. It represents himself, his parents, his extended family and even his village. The worst, most insulting curse anyone can utter in China against a Chinese person is Cao ni de xing! "Fuck your name!"
The student said that the term running dogs was used in the demonstrations, for the first time since the Cultural Revolution. And big-character posters were another artifact from that time that had been pressed into service, but they now read More Freedom and We Want Democracy. Rising prices, low salaries, poor public transportation, byzantine election procedures, and difficult rules governing studying abroad were other grievances.
I carefully noted these down, and then a young man named Mr. Hong said, "You know about the Jan and Dean concert?"
Jan and Dean? "Baby Talk," "Surf City" and "Ride the Wild Surf"? The early sixties, Southern California, totally tubular surfer duo? That Jan and Dean? I had been under the impression that after Jan wrapped his car around a tree in 1966, suffering paralysis and brain damage, this group was no longer operational.
But I was wrong. This American group, which outdated the Beach Boys (who were their sometime collaborators), had undergone a recrudescence and were yapping to beat the band, actually singing "Surf City" in Shanghai, twenty-nine years after they had released their first record. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. After all, Mr. Tian had sung me a Neil Sedaka song in the Langxiang wilderness only a month before.