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LISE SARFATI/MAGNUM FOR TIME
A young girl waits for her family at the Nanning train station
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Nanning
I remember long shady afternoons in the almost empty park, where young couples, not many of them, walk together, their sandals softly clasping and unclasping the sidewalks beneath the "dragon's eye" trees, whose round fruit is still too hard to eat this early in the season. Birds and cicadas sing ever more urgently with the increasing heat until they too fall overwhelmed. This enervation, perfumed with drowsiness, is precisely what gives Nanning (Southern Tranquility) its paradisiacal character. Here in People's Park, the old ladies fan themselves and smile as they play mah-jongg beneath the umbrellas and the palm trees with the hot, aromatic breeze from the botanical garden blowing into their faces. Leaning forward, waving their woven-leaf fans as gracefully and slowly as catfish move their flippers in restaurant aquariums, they clash down their tiles to win or lose. At intervals they form their games anew on the faded green table, building what appear to be green-roofed double rows of white tofu or coconut slices. Each lady peers behind her own secret wall, awaiting her turn to slam a tile down. Maybe she'll get doubles, which they call the eyes. Time hangs in the air like the hot perfume from the lotus pond, whose dark leaves are almost as coarse as cabbages. Soon the temperature will rise even more. People's clothes will stick to their bodies, the parasol-carrying women will dab at their foreheads. And then the haze of heat, plant breath and motor breath will press down upon the white skyscrapers, tree-lined streets, whitish, grubbyish roof tiles, gridlocked traffic and construction skeletons—more towers month by month, more and more, which thrills the majority in Nanning.
My interpreter, a young hotel administrator who is too busy for boyfriends, ranks among the majority. As with countless numbers of Chinese these days, her mind is on money. When I started my China journey from across the border in Hanoi, my interpreter there kept saying, "No, please don't pay me, I'm just your friend." I had to physically force the $20 into her hand. But Xiaomin, who spells her chosen English name as she pronounces it—"Mishal"—commences negotiations thus: "From 8:00 to 6:00 $20 is okay, but if you want me to show you Nanning by night, you must pay me more." When she signs the receipt book, I tell her that for using my pen she must pay me $20 and she laughs, "No way!" This slender efficiency expert, this hard banterer, who is exceptionally good at boring her way to the head of a queue on my behalf, proves to be a genius at buying my train ticket, bargaining taxi drivers down, dealing with strange charges on the hotel bill and guiding me busily amid Nanning's white skyscrapers and matching white apartment towers. For me she comes to symbolize Nanning's unswerving pride in its own development. In the other Asian countries I have visited, Chinese get stereotyped, often negatively, as commercialists. There is indeed a brusqueness about China. It is not as consistent or extreme as the Korean kind, but it definitely makes itself known: as in the trains when the blue-and-white-striped attendants push their way indifferently through clumps of passengers; or when in the observation lounge of the long, fancy air-conditioned hotel, I finish my snack, and the waitress, instead of bowing and softly thanking me as she takes the plate (which is how things would have gone in Japan), crabbily points instead, making me hand the plate to her. I feel nothing personal in this, Chinese are in a hurry, that's all. Chinese mothers sternly slap their children for almost nothing, then just as quickly comfort them. Well, come to think of it, sometimes it does get personal, like the pouting of the Hunanese child singers when you won't hire them: they rap you sharply with their song sheets, then spitefully pinch your arm black-and-blue. By and large though, the Chinese character, like the American, remains more admiring than jealous of fortune. In Nanning, one says farewell to storekeepers by wishing them how mai—"good business." And fortune has certainly come to Nanning these days, fortune permeates Nanning's hot gray air.
Michelle says these wide pale streets and white-tiled apartments are mainly one or two years old. Concrete streets, concrete walks, everything is new. "I think Nanning is a green city, a green pearl," she says proudly. A retired road mender, standing smiling in his straw hat and worn blue shirt, sometimes touching the white stubble on his chin, gazes into the tarry foulness of the Chaoyang River and says, "Now it is better and better. All this grass, all the trees, they are new. There are no more wooden buildings like before. This river is becoming clean. Before, at home we had to cover our noses all day, but not anymore." He is plausible, the smell not being much worse than that of burned rubber. With his happily whirling, squint-wrapped eyeballs, the old man beams and says, "Communists have helped the Chinese people to the right way. They help us better and better. I thank Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping very much."
That was what they all said, oh yes, it was. But on Wangzhou Road, in the dreary district called Africa on account of its poverty, there was a hillside of clinking rubble, largely made up of bricks and brick shards, upon whose shifting surface men and women in sandals slowly gleaned. All these houses had been demolished six weeks ago for the sake of a forthcoming road. Through the men's open shirts I saw they were almost skeletally thin. They said that the government had recompensed them for their houses to the tune of 170 yuan ($20) per square meter, but the IOUs had not yet been honored, it was up to the road developer to do that. They were not very happy, they had lived in these houses for 30 years. Seven hundred families had been thus dispossessed. I asked them how and where they now live and got no answer. One of them, not yet as poor as the others, took me into the high-roofed, grungy white corridor that lay behind his storefront, which would be bulldozed very soon; they had not told him when. He showed me the property deeds which the Maoist government had given to these people; later on, the deeds became worthless, and one had to purchase a new certificate of ownership, which few of his neighbors could afford. Still, even he granted that everyone in Nanning was richer than in the old days of grass houses. Sitting barefoot and wrinkled in that cool hall he had built with his own hands, his eyes glowing with sadness (and beside him, a woman shouting at me, hysterically holding up a photograph of her pretty two-story house now smashed under), he said, "Everything is better and better, but ..." What did they really think? I have a feeling they were so used to centralism that they simply tried to believe whatever they hoped.
Thanking everyone for their trouble, I left behind that sea of white and red brick with a few mournful figures picking it over. I asked Michelle whether she had liked those people, and she replied, "So-so." She was the daughter of professionals, a settled believer in the wisdom of Chairman Mao. She thought that the Tibetans were basically content with Chinese rule because they were simple people; needing only enough food to be happy, they didn't need music. If any of them had negative feelings, that was the result of outside agitation. Michelle had long since accepted the notion that "in China, every state and every country must be united, for the sake of a strong China. If everyone has independence, there can be no development."
"When you see these houses being broken, do you feel sad?"
"The government must attract the company somehow. I think for the sake of development they must give up something. If they don't give up the old thing, they cannot be developed."
"What if they don't want to give up the old thing?"
Smiling, Michelle said to me, "The little party must obey the great party."
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