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Train Interlude
"Why do you like the Great Wall?" I asked a schoolteacher in Dandong.
"Because I am Chinese girl!" she replied with her ecstatic smile.
Time to see the Great Wall.
This time the view was of the enamel-painted train ceiling with its grille and two pairs of dirty fluorescent tubes about 45 centimeters from my nose as I lay there in my upper berth, back in hard sleeperville. I also had a splendid view of the luggage rack. If I contorted myself a little I could see the heads of the people who were standing in the corridor below me, and I could even spy a little scenery: rails, gravel, the lower halves of trees, twilight on asphalt. Once in a while, the upper half of a certain lady in orange would come disconcertingly into view. Staring diagonally away from me, into her own berth, she clambered up the common ladder and suddenly swung herself out of sight behind the bulkhead. Her entrances and exits were the high point of those 15 hours. Next came Beijing Station, down whose swarming, echoing passageways, demarcated by side tunnels and by tables of men with literature and bullhorns, I steadily came. Now I was in the heart of the universe.
Beijing
One of my interpreters in Nanning said that she didn't like the Beijing ladies, because they acted as though they were better than women from anywhere else. I admit to running into indifference and contempt more often in Beijing than in other places I visited in China, but most people were perfectly friendly. What did cause me to feel belittled was not the people, but the towering construction cranes all around me, each one with its red flag. From my hotel window I could count 19 cranes in plain view, and others farther away. Directly below me lay a football-stadium-sized concrete bathtub which sported ever so many connect-the-dot rebar grids. Workers in red helmets and yellow helmets toiled on this late into each night. By the third day they were already pouring concrete. I could see building materials in gigantic bundles between the trees and apartment towers. American cities sprawl, Chinese cities swell. I read a forecast that 230 or 240 million square meters of new residential space will rise up in Beijing within the next 10 years. This figure is so huge that I cannot understand it, but the following statistic helps me to get the drift: in the next 10 years, new buildings will comprise half of all residences in Beijing. Business is good, the Chinese are confident. They flow into courtyard after courtyard in the Forbidden City, many of them in tour groups, wearing red caps or yellow caps. When they come to the Hall of Great Harmony they peer over each other's shoulders into the dimness. They are happy tourists, these Chinese; they are proud of their Forbidden City, they tell me so. At dusk they go by in hordes on bicycles. In the discount stores they join the foreign tourists, crowding each other so thickly that it is almost impossible to walk the length of the jewelry counter. In spite of all this, here is another park where old men with their shorts off sit around a table playing cards. People bring their caged birds to give them air, hanging their cages from tree branches; the birds begin to sing to each other at once. A man is massaging a fat woman's belly as she lies on a bench. A woman is cutting a man's hair, the sidewalk around them heaped with dark clippings. And now men are beginning to pull their shirts back over their heads with the first coolness of dusk. China still has its islands of peace, no matter that agribusiness, industrial parks and forthcoming skyscrapers go much of the way to the Great Wall whose squarish brick watchtowers, arched, roofed and piss-stained, transform that hot mountain ridge into a notched rampart. Here is more history, but, like the Beijing Opera, it is mainly for tourists and for weary old Chinese ladies trying desperately to sell the odd postcard. China is the Great Wall, but China is too busy to care.
This Han monoculture which we now call China stretches on for thousands of miles and more than a billion people, homogenizing itself and developing itself ever more efficiently—as persistent as the workmen laying rebar outside my hotel window in Beijing on a Sunday night, as the crane operator I could see out my window every night in Dandong, as the highrise builders of Nanning, not to mention the barbershop girls of Xi'an. How many decades would it be before my poor America would be beaten by this immense conglomeration of confidence?
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