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Train Interlude
This story is supposed to involve train travel, and so I now dutifully report to you that on this first leg of my Chinese journey I passed the man with the fat crutch, walked around the X-ray machine that no one respected, showed my ticket to the keeper of the waiting room, bought some hard cookies shaped like washers, and presently, serenaded by Chinese music, took up my station on the lower berth of the soft sleeper car.
Chinese trains are divided into four descending classes: soft sleeper, hard sleeper, soft seat and hard seat. Across the aisle from me lay a young plump mother, feeding her little boy noodles from a disposable plastic bucket, and occasionally bringing the chopsticks to her own mouth. While her husband shouted into his cell phone, the train slowly began to move, almost exactly on time, and the air-conditioning gushed. Already we had departed Nanning. Slithering along a grassy hillside, we passed a strip of gravel on which orange-helmeted workers sat; other workers stared dully out of woven grass shacks. In China one never sees the massive concretions of human beings which one does in India; rather, one enters the countryside and keeps finding crew after crew of industrious toilers. Only gradually does the magnitude of it all begin to register.
I went back to my sleeper. The woman was combing out her little boy's queue. His fingernails were painted purple-red. Passing concrete cities, gray mist and red gorges in the green landscape, the train arrived in Xi'an after a journey of about 36 hours.
Xi'an
Once upon a time, in the middle of the eighth century, the Tang dynasty Emperor Xuanzong became enthralled by Lady Yang Yuhuan, who was a prince's concubine at the time. No matter, Lady Yang rapidly became the prized consort. "Tresses like cloud, face like a flower," is how the poet Bo Juyi describes her in his "Song of Lasting Pain." When she craved dragon's eye fruit, the Emperor established a chain of post-horses to rush them to her fresh. Soon all her relatives were noble and rich. It is no surprise that after her uncle became rightly or wrongly implicated in a rebellion, Lady Yang's execution was demanded. "His Majesty knew that it could not be avoided," writes the ninth century author Chen Hong, "and yet he could not bear to see her die, so he turned his sleeve to cover his face as the envoys dragged her off."
This story, which in many versions concludes with a sadly supernatural reunion by proxy between the two lovers, took place around Xi'an, whose narrow high-walled streets remind me of Peshawar's with their stones, bricks and lack of signage. The old notched wall is replete with arches, the streets are quieter and dirtier than Nanning's. Elderly people sit in chairs on the sidewalk, while men stand sweaty and stripped to the waist. It is late afternoon and men are carrying cases of beer in an air-conditioned restaurant. The waitresses are laughing, lazing and flirting. One of them is sleeping with her dark head tucked down on the table between her crimson-clad shoulders. In this extremely modern-looking place of new tables and polished granite tiles, everybody is engaging in what a Westerner would call doing nothing. Because Xi'an dreams and dreams—its pillow is the dust of its past. Ask any and all about Lady Yang and they know her. Without surprise or excitement they answer my questions and express their views of her behavior; it is as if she were a very recent victim of politics. The long past of China seems far more present here than does last year's war for Americans. I would have expected Maoism to have obliterated traditional memory more successfully from the group mind. Of course in Xi'an's case, the past is not only a pillow, it's bread and butter (or, let's say, a bowl of noodles). Nanning's main industry is skyscrapers. Xi'an's is the Terracotta Warriors, who stand eastward, far down a dusty road whose tire shops bear dusty ideograms. We are getting close when we see billboards for this or that wonder from the Shaanxi Tourism Group; vendors, cars and buses next to the China Typical Sewing Machine Group; and the Cultural Relic Copy Factory with its various imitators, all offering as many Terracotta Warrior replicas as barbershop girls offer massages in Nanning, and for the same reason. Now here's the real thing: long, whitish trenches in the ground, with the white figures within, some headless, some attended by horses of the same color, or colorlessness as I should say, for centuries have licked away the vivid glaze. Ranks and ranks of them, each one stunningly individual, the best toy soldiers of all time. This sight is what most tourists think of when Xi'an gets mentioned. But a quarter-hour away by car lie the royal baths, and it is there, in the 12-sided Crabapple Pool, that Lady Yang used to bathe in the sight of the emperor. Far down within the lacquered red railings lies the dry cavity where, according to the mural one sees at her tomb, her pale and chubby nakedness drowsed within a gold-rimmed border. Now there is no gold. A tour guide gripping a yellow flag speaks into a microphone, and tourists gaze dully down into the emptiness.
It would be as wrong to say that China's past lives on in the Terracotta Warriors as to say that China's past is a waterless bathtub soon to get buried by a skyscraper. In Xi'an, antiquity modulates itself into our time through as many gradations as the jars of fragrant leaves, black to dark green to emerald, in the tea shops of the Muslim quarter (all marked prices negotiable, needless to say). I walk down a covered alley where they try to sell me a Mao watch, miniature bottles carved from bone, Chinese Famous Amorous Feelings poker cards, paintbrushes and inkstones of all sizes and colors. These Muslim ladies with whom I slowly bargain (they wear china-blue cloaks and white hijabs) are selling the recent past, the Cultural Revolution symbolized by Mao's arm incessantly waving on a watch. The ladies wait and fan themselves, another century will pass before we know it.
Once I was discussing Chinese character with an English student named Tao Xue. We were in Dandong but she had studied in Xi'an. She said, "I think the most deep part for me is China's history. You must see the Terracotta Warriors and the Great Wall."
"How do Chinese think about those things?"
"They think to earn money, to earn money, just to earn money. Students study just so they can earn money, earn money ... " she bitterly replied. "They think those places prove that Chinese people are clever, but I don't believe many people care about the Terracotta Warriors. Many people in Xi'an destroy the Terracotta Warriors and sell them to earn money. I don't think the Chinese people are great and clever. At that time, the prince treated the people so bad, killed so many, so I hate that time."
"When you see the Terracotta Warriors, are you sad?"
"Yes, because the people worked very, very hard, all day, and a lot of soldiers behind them."
History is "a lot of soldiers behind them," that's for sure. When time and art transform those soldiers into terracotta fossils, what are we to make of them? Lady Yang was a pawn, a corrupting influence, or both; now her corruption's over, and she is a flock of poems.
By taxi (a taxi with a red and silver talisman hanging from the mirror, and a Chairman Mao song on the cassette player), it is about an hour to the town of Ma Mei Zhen, and in Ma Mei Zhen is Ma Wei Po, where Lady Yang is buried. The flickering of a flashlight reveals the pale, white female figurines of representative grave gods, but none of them come from Lady Yang's tomb. That is a beehive-shaped mound covered with bricks because women kept coming here to steal the earth which enclosed her, on account of its reputed beauty-working properties. By the tomb stands her marker itself, like a black tongue engraved with gold. A marble statue depicts her as uncharacteristically slender, with her mushroom-gill hair and her trademark tree peony in it. The smell of stone in the rain, then the mound, then the town far away, blue-green with fields and noisy with engines and horns whose sounds rise up like incense—all this comprises another one of China's multitudinous islands of tranquil antiquity. Lady Yang may be dead, but the poems she inspired still thrive here. She will inspire others.
The taxi was waiting. Soon we were back in the city, passing white-clad minions in the greenery below the wall, where they exercise in unison every morning; then came the train station with its two giant red characters for Xi'an, and a flag in between them. The driver said, "Anyhow, Lady Yang had body odor. The history says this. But the Emperor liked it."
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