The Trail to Buddha's Mirror (28 page)

“Why not just fly me out tomorrow? Why go touring?”

Peng was good. Peng didn’t miss a beat.

“We wish to establish a strong identity for you. It is more safe.”

Boys, boys, boys. I’ve been running scams on people most of my life, so I know one when it’s run across my nose. What is it you need from me? What is there in Sichuan that I have to see? Or that has to see me?

“How long will it take me to complete my research?” Neal asked.

“Perhaps a month.”

A month on display, Neal thought. Okay, pick your metaphor. They’re going fishing and you’re the bait. They’re going birdhunting and you’re the dog. Well, you owe them one, and anyway, what choice do you have? Besides, maybe it’s not a “what” they want you to see. Maybe it’s a “who.”

Maybe it’s Li Lan.

“When do I start?” he asked.

Wu’s face broke into a relieved grin. Peng was satisfied with a narrow smile and another drag on his cigarette. Then he spoke to Wu. “Would you feel well enough to start tomorrow?” Wu asked. “Fuck yes.”

“He says his health is much improved.”
Fuck yes.

15

Chengdu is the New Orleans of China.

In the States, you go to New York if you want to work. But if you want to play, you go to New Orleans. In China, you go to Beijing if you want to get something done. But if you want to do nothing, you go to Chengdu.

The people of Chengdu have the easy bonhomie common to southerners worldwide, and, like the denizens of New Orleans, they consider their city not so much a municipality within a country as a land of its own. There is considerable justification for this sentiment in Chengdu, which was the capital of the ancient land of Shu some four hundred years before the unification of China. The state of Shu rose again after the fall of the Tang Dynasty, leaving Chengdu and the whole province of Sichuan with an attitude of autonomy considerably frustrating to its would-be rulers in Beijing.

Chengdu has always attracted poets, painters, and artisans. Maybe it’s the warm weather or the sunshine. Maybe it’s the lush bamboo, or the hibiscus, or the surrounding countryside of fertile rice paddies and wheatfields. Maybe it’s the broad boulevards or the black-tiled houses with the carved wood balconies, or the wide sidewalks or the promenades that flank the river called the Silk Brocade. Maybe it’s all those things combined with a spirit of independence, but Chengdu loves its artists with a ferocious pride.

And its food. Like New Orleans, people go there to eat, and the natives are always eager to take you places that serve the “real thing.” In Chengdu that means outdoor stands that dish up hot noodles, a crowded restaurant that serves bean curd in forty-two different sauces, or a place on the outskirts that makes a hot chicken with peanuts that has inspired poets.

And tea. Before the Cultural Revolution pronounced them decadent, tea pavilions dotted the city. Often in the open air, or under bamboo leave roofs, the teahouses were neighborhood places where the locals gathered to consume vast quantities of green tea, play some mah-jongg, and carry on the exuberant conversations for which Chengdu was famous. They were places where poets sat in corners to write, and where artists sketched and painted. Here in the tea pavilions the natives escaped the summer’s afternoon rains and listened to the great storytellers hold forth for hours with much-loved tales from the golden past, stories about flying dragons, or runaway princesses, or the flight of the emperor Tang Hsuan Tsung into the vast wilderness of the western Sichuan mountains.

Of course, Chengdu changed with the revolution, and many of the city’s older neighborhoods were sacrificed to the new god of industrialization. A new generation of artists arrived, but their sketches became not paintings but blueprints, and their poetry could only be found in the dull symmetry of utilitarian factories and exhibition halls. The population swelled to a million workers, with three million more laboring in the surrounding industrial suburbs. The city that had once been famous for its silk became renowned for its metals, and the silky softness of the Chengdu spirit was muted with factory soot.

The new regime collectivized the surrounding countryside, replacing the efficient, highly productive estates and small family farms with huge, unwieldy communes. For the first time within memory or legend, the province knew hunger. During the Great Leap Forward the city itself avoided mass famine, but, ironically, the roads to the countryside were clogged with starving refugees from the Rice Bowl districts outside the city. Mao himself visited in 1957 to discuss his economic strategy with local agricultural experts. He told them to meet their quotas.

After a brief respite of normality, the Cultural Revolution erupted, first in Beijing, then in Shanghai, and then in Guangzhou, as Mao sought to destroy his government and replace it with the “permanent revolution.” It seemed to happen overnight in Chengdu; its urbane, insouciant people awoke one morning to find the “big character posters” in the schools, then in the streets, and then in government hallways. A Chengdu unit of the Red Guard formed, tore down the ancient city walls as atavistic reminders of feudalism, destroyed the decadent exhibitions of paintings, vandalized the park dedicated to the great poet Du Fu, and then closed the teahouses. The city’s trademark smile became a rictus of paranoia as friend betrayed friend, son betrayed father, daughter betrayed mother, and the community betrayed itself. In the darker corners of the narrower streets the mutterings of secession started as the Red Guard splintered into competing factions. The city smoldered.

The fire exploded in 1967, when the rival groups of Red Guards waged pitched battles for possession of factories, post offices, and train stations. Machine-gun fire flashed across the Silk Brocade River, tanks rumbled down the boulevards, gasoline bombs tumbled from the carved balconies. The older people stayed inside and left the city to its youth, who fought each other in a frenzy of violence to determine who loved Chairman Mao the most. The city burned.

Even Mao had seen enough, and he ordered his young worshipers to cease fighting and respect authority. They had a hard time squaring this request with “permanent revolution” and decided that Mao was being coerced by treasonous bureaucrats, so they took the revolution up a couple of notches and attacked police stations and government buildings. Mao sent the army, and the People’s Liberation Army rolled into Chengdu to put down the insurgency. The Red Guard resisted. Thousands were killed. Many of the survivors were sent to prison, or sentenced to labor camps, or packed off into the countryside to learn firsthand about the life of the masses. The city put on the ashes of mourning.

Years of sullen silence followed. Artists stopped painting, poets produced no verse, the great storytellers were either wise enough to tell no stories or told them to themselves inside their cells. The once-unbuttoned city buttoned itself up tightly and waited for this long afternoon rain to end.

Neal Carey heard a lot about Chengdu’s history from Xiao Wu. Xiao Wu talked nonstop for three straight days as he took Neal around to every sight of any possible significance in the greater Chengdu area. It was marathon tourism, an endurance event. Neal wondered if Wu was just that proud of his hometown, or whether it was William Frazier that was on display and not the city. Maybe Wu was just drunk with the power of having a car, a driver, and the chance to practice his English.

Not that Neal minded all that much. Cooped up as he had been for three months, it felt great to be out in the warm sun, and if the sultry summer air wasn’t exactly invigorating, it wasn’t exactly painful either. And it felt wonderful to walk. At first his leg muscles sent him messages in the form of pins and needles, and he needed to rest a lot. But after the first morning he found that he and Xiao Wu were taking longer jaunts away from the government car, and that his legs seemed to be waking up from their long sleep.

And they did cover some ground, because Wu seemed unwilling for his guest to miss a single temple, shrine, park, panda, or rare bamboo plant in the city.

Some of it was great, like on that first wonderful morning. He had sprung out of bed like a kid at Christmas, bolted breakfast down, and was dressed and ready half an hour before Wu knocked on the door. Wu was excited also. This was his first important assignment, he explained, and he also confessed that it would be only the second time he had ever ridden in a private automobile. He hurried Neal through the hotel lobby and into the waiting car. The driver was a middle-aged man in a green Mao jacket, and he went to such great lengths not to appear to be listening that Neal made him for a fink right off the bat.

Wu launched into his soliloquy right away.

“You can now see the outside of the Jinjiang Guest House,” he said before the driver started the engine.

“It’s nice to see the outside of something,” Neal said. Even the Jinjiang Guest House, which was a boring rectangular concrete box.

“The Russians designed it,” Wu said, as if reading Neal’s mind. He leaned over the seat and gave some directions to the driver, then looked at Neal with an expression that could only be described as “thrilled.” It occurred to Neal that he thought of Xiao Wu as a kid, even though they were roughly the same age.

That first morning they drove west along the north bank of the Nan River to Caotang Park, “home of the great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu,” Wu explained as they got out of the car in a small parking lot surrounded by tall bamboo trees. They walked for few minutes and came to a small shrine beside a narrow creek. Wu explained that the shrine had been built to honor Du Fu, and that the only reason it wasn’t torn down by the Red Guard was that Mao had once written two lines of verse honoring the ancient poet.

“He was born in 712 and died in 770, but the shrine was not built until sometime around the year 1100.”

Neal flipped through his mental reference cards. Du Fu was writing poetry around the time of Charlemagne, and this shrine had been built to honor him around the time William the Conqueror had fought the battle of Hastings. When my Irish ancestors were running around in skins, Wu’s people were building a shrine to a poet because they had been reciting his work for four hundred years.

They lingered in the shrine for an hour, looking at a collection of landscape paintings that had been “lost” during the Cultural Revolution and had just recently been “found” and put on display. Neal thought briefly about Li Lan and wondered if she had ever stood here looking at these paintings. He shoved the thought out of his head and asked Wu to translate some of the other poems that were inscribed on wooden plaques. Wu did, and it turned out that old Du Fu was a dour fellow who wrote mostly about war, loss, and dislocation.

“He lived in a time of great chaos,” Wu said.

They wandered around the park for the rest of the morning. Wu dutifully recited the name of every plant and bird, although Neal could tell it didn’t interest him much. After a quick alfresco lunch of noodles, they got back into the car and drove to another park.

“Nanjiao Park,” Wu said. “Site of the shrine to Zhu Geliang.”

Neal knew his cue.

“Who was Zhu Geliang?”

“Come see.”

They walked a path through a lush garden to a large, imperial red shrine where a large painted statue of a soldier sat complacently.

“Zhu Zeliang was a great military strategist during the Three Kingdoms era that followed the demise of the Han Dynasty. Chengdu was the capital city of one of the Three Kingdoms, the state of Shu Han.”

“When was this?”

“Zhu lived from 181 to 234, but the shrine was not built until the Tang Dynasty.”

“About the time Du Fu was writing.”

“You have a good memory. Yes, that is correct. Chairman Mao had the shrine completely repaired in 1952. He was a great admirer of Zhu Geliang’s military thought, and he would send young officers here to learn from Zhu’s writings.”

Sure enough, Neal thought as he looked around, there were a number of PLA officers scribbling earnestly in their notebooks from plaques on the wall. Neal found himself staring at them and getting sidelong glances in return. But there they were, he marveled, taking notes directly from writings that were almost two thousand years old.

Wu walked him around the park, again pointing out the various flora and fauna. They strolled the edges of ponds that had fallen into disrepair and were just now being revived. Then they stopped for tea at a newly reopened pavilion that needed some roof patching and a good cleaning. But the few customers who were there on this working day didn’t seem to care. It was enough to get a cup of green tea and sit at the bamboo tables as a waitress came along with a kettle of hot water for refills.

Wu let the water steep in his lidded cup for a minute or so, and then poured the contents on the ground. The dark green tea leaves stuck to the bottom of the cup. The waitress refilled it, and Wu waited another minute before repeating the process. After the next refill, he let the cup sit for a few more minutes, removed the lid, and took a deep sip. Then he smiled with satisfaction.

“The first time, it’s water,” he said. “The second time, it’s garbage. The third time, it’s tea.”

They drank a few cups, talked about
Huckleberry Finn
and
Innocents Abroad,
complained about the vicissitudes of college life. Turned out that Wu was a recent graduate of Sichuan University, where he had studied tourism. His father had been a professor of English, had been in jail for it, and was now a room service waiter in a Chengdu hotel. But the authorities, realizing that they would need English-speakers to service the tourist trade they now coveted, pulled Wu’s file from a thousand others and admitted him to university. A job with CITS, the China International Travel Service, followed straight away. Wu’s great ambition was to become a “National Guide,” one of the elite cadre who escorted tourist groups for their entire stay in the country.

“Right now,” he explained, “I am just a local guide, authorized for Sichuan only. But I would very much like to see the rest of China, especially Beijing and Xian.”