I felt a sort of giddy depression at the sight of so many students toiling in the semidarkness of this haunted-looking building. The light was poor, the chalk squeaked, the desks creaked, the textbooks were greasy and frayed, and the dictionaries were crumbling. The youngest student was eight, the oldest seventy-four. All of them worked during the day, if not at a salary-paying job then at an impromptu stall at the free market, boosting cassette tapes, or toys, or clothes that were sent up from Canton, where they had been made cheaply—there was a thirty percent markup on clothes, but even so they were very cheap.
I taught from a book called
"You're lucky to have me. I'm a modern American and I speak English," I said. They thought this was incredibly funny.
I was filling in for their regular teacher, Miss Bao, whose mother was being treated for hypertension at the Peking Capital Hospital near the duck restaurant (thus its nickname, "The Sick Duck").
It took us three days to deal with the lesson about health care.
"Excuse me," Miss Lin said, "what is 'glaucoma'?"
"Excuse me," Mr. Zhao said, "what is 'Blue Cross'?"
"Excuse me," Mr. Li said, "but some weeks ago your president ordered the bombing of Libya. Did you agree with that?"
I said no, and explained why. And then I asked them whether they agreed with everything their government did. They said no, and giggled nervously, but didn't elaborate.
Each night, the students gathered in the twilight and then sat sleepily in the hot dusty classrooms for two hours; they went home in the dark.
When I finished my stint I made a farewell speech.
"People always tell you that night school is a good thing," I said. "But they are the same people who go home after a day's work and eat and snooze and listen to the radio. You students are doing one of the hardest things in the world—studying at night, when you're tired. It's hard to remember things when you're tired. And everyone else is resting. Doing this and also doing a job is like having two jobs."
This struck a responsive chord. They nodded and urged me to continue.
"You may get discouraged and wonder why it's so hard for you to study at night school," I said. "Believe me, it's hard for everyone. It takes courage to do it. I am very proud of you, and you should be proud. If you weren't tough you wouldn't be here. I wish you all the very best of luck."
They applauded softly and, because we had overstayed the time, they were shooed into the night by the janitor, who wanted to lock the place. On the page the night-school folk might seem a little dim and wraithlike, eagerly waiting to become substantial in daylight, but with no vice or peccadillo to give them color. What can one do except to say that they are worthy and that they are doing all they can to find their way through the Chinese mob? It is always difficult for a writer to make virtuous people interesting.
4. The Shanghai Express
But even though that's true—that it is difficult to make virtuous people interesting—it is also true that it is fairly easy to make the unvirtuous memorable and sometimes fascinating.
It was not just those folks in the flesh—the short buttocky young man and his androgynous bride, my companions in the compartment on the Shanghai Express, and all those hustlers at Peking Central Station, pestering travelers to use their hotels or their taxis or to eat at their restaurants. (It is not enough that the Chinese have relaxed the ban on commercial advertising; they are not content with putting up a billboard or a sign. They tend to the personal touch—buttonholing Chinese tourists, badgering yokels who have just arrived from distant Gansu, yelling into megaphones, wagging banners in their faces, and installing screaming jingles and advertisements on the loudspeakers in the trains themselves.) But to complete my study of Chinese vices, 1 had chosen as reading material the erotic novel that had been whispered about in Peking,
