Riding the Iron Rooster полностью

I liked his attitude, but there was not much to tell. He said the students in the south were complacent and money minded, not furiously political as in the north.

"We only had two hundred students in our demonstration," he said. "After they made a fuss here they marched to the government offices in town and sang songs. It wasn't much—not as big as Shanghai or Peking."

"What did the students say they wanted?"

"Democracy and reform," Andrew said.

"But China is changing very fast," I said.

"That's what the old people think," he said. "We young people say it is changing too slowly. But that is the government policy. They want China to look stable so that foreign investment will be encouraged. No one will put money into China if there are riots."

I asked him his plans.

"I'd like to take up business," he said. "Import and export."

"You might make a lot of money."

"I hope so."

"Then you'll become a capitalist-roader."

"Maybe," he said, and snickered. "I think we have a lot to learn. We want to use the good features of capitalism but not the bad ones."

"Is that possible?"

"We can try."

That was the new thinking—"To be rich is glorious," was a politically okay slogan. It was the philosophy of the young, of the rising students, and even of many farmers. It was the essence of Deng's thinking, too. It was in total opposition to Mao's philosophy, and it was one of the reasons Shaoshan had no visitors.

Andrew saw himself as an individual, with his own needs and desires. He didn't say what every student had said for the past thirty-five years when asked about their ambitions: "Serve the people." He said "business," "money," "import-export." He was fairly open-minded. He studied hard. He liked his fellow students. He lived in a room with seven others and did his homework in the library. His favorite author was Mark Twain. In the movie theater on campus (built by a Hong Kong tycoon named Leung) he had seen On Golden Pond, Superman and Rambo.

I said that Rambo represented everything that I loathed.

"But he is strong," Andrew said. "His body is interesting. The way he looks. The things he does."

That was a point, the freakishness of it; but I said, "Do you realize that it was about Vietnam?"

"Yes."

"So doesn't that make it a reactionary, bourgeois, violently imperialistic movie?"

Andrew shrugged and said, "We don't take it that seriously."

He was twenty-one years old. His parents, as teachers, had been singled out during the Cultural Revolution.

I said, "They were The Stinking Ninth."

"Yes," he said. He knew exactly what I meant. Mao decreed nine categories of enemy: landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, foreign agents, capitalist-roaders, and—The Stinking Ninth—intellectuals. It is a strange list, because it seems to embrace the whole of humanity.

His parents had been rusticated—sent shoveling. They had fared better than the brother of my friend Miss Zhong, who had been locked in a broom cupboard right here at Zhongshan University by Maoists. His crime was that he was the son of a man who had once been a Guomindang politician. He was kept in the broom cupboard for two years and, after a severe interrogation, he hanged himself.

I told Andrew the tale. He said that it was not an unusual story. Well, that was true enough, but it made me feel once again that wherever I was in China I was among ghosts.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" I asked.

"No," Andrew said, and I could tell that he meant it.

He wasn't superstitious, he wasn't spiritual, and he certainly wasn't political—there was no future in Chinese politics. He was practical. His was the first generation in China to grow up with no dogma—no emperor, no gods, no chairman; no Taoism, no Maoism, no Buddhism. Nor had Andrew's generation been touched in the least by Christianity. Democracy was such a long shot that Andrew had not bothered to take part in the student demonstrations. His realism was a kind of glumness.

That night I wondered what would become of him. But of course it was very obvious. If he went into business and made some money he would prosper in a small way and raise a one-child family. He would not use expressions like Serve the people. He would regard himself as an intellectual (zhishi fenzi), the grandiose term the Chinese use for anyone who does not work with their hands. If he was self-employed, as he wanted to be, he would probably work hard. On holidays he would visit hotels like mine, where they had "holiday specials"—Christmas banquets, New Year's parties ("free hats, favors, racket-makers") and a "New Year's Day Champagne Brunch Buffet" at 28 yuan a throw.