By the summer of 1980 the China of Mao Zedong's Communist Party was the result of 30 years of applied radical ideology. Every aspect of life had been relentlessly re-thought and restructured to conform to an ideal concept as exacting as a religion. The concept was that “the people” own all the land and its industries and use them to produce a standard of living that everyone can enjoy equally. There would be a government at first to organize things and then it would just wither away when no longer necessary. So here is what that looked like in August 1980 when I woke up in the Taishan Overseas Chinese hotel and walked out into it:
Everybody was wearing the same kind of clothing, not uniforms exactly, but there were only three colors of clothes. Army green, navy blue and gray. White cotton shirts. Loose fitting pants. Plastic sandals or shoes. But the pleasantly shocking thing was no personal artifice. No makeup. No jewelry. Straight black hair cut short for men. Women had two hairstyles: unmarried wore uncut hair in braids usually looped in back to be out of the way, married cut hair off at just below the ears. Everyone was completely natural. Dressed simply without style or colors. They were beautiful. (Under our paint and posturing we are beautiful too.) And nobody, not one person of any age, was overweight. Bad judgment by Mao and company in 1958 had caused widespread famine. If you were not emaciated you must be hoarding food, so being fat was a sin if not a crime. Just stop and think about that for a moment. We have been adorning ourselves in one way or another since we were throwing sharp sticks at animals for a living. Have you ever been in a place where nobody had any personal adornment? No cute hair, no earrings, no logos, no tattoos, no rings, no facial hair, no caps, no bamboo splinter through the nose, no fingernail polish, no nothing. Now imagine what kind of government power it would take to create that reality for a billion people in a country the same size as ours.
This was Chinese Communism.
No pets. Mao had decreed that people should spend their love and energy on other people. A goldfish was OK. Taishan's glass factory had a side income making aquariums from waste material. Some old men kept prize songbirds in ornate cages. No dogs, no cats. Animals were workers and food. Something good began every morning. Men congregated in tea houses. Hundreds of men from work groups or neighbors or just friends drink tea and eat dim sum together. The room is roaring with laughter, gossip and stories. It's a powerful way to start the work day; everyone a part of this social solidarity. Then they disperse to their various jobs.
I loved the way they sounded. Cantonese is a tonal language with soft vowel word endings. Old men playing cards in the dusk were a musical treat as they kidded each other. There were a few TVs but only one station which was a government broadcast and was about the successful sorghum harvest in Hebei Province or the need to conserve fuel.
But there was a storyteller. In the park, an evening a crowd of all ages was held spellbound by a man with an expressive voice and face. There was Cantonese opera. Lots of sports, none rough. Taishan's volleyball teams were famous. There was a movie theater showing only Chinese-made films. One time the police marched five young men roped together up onto the stage to publicly shame them in front of everybody for being unruly.
The stone buildings were the same dirty gray as Chicago from the same coal smoke. The only vehicles were army green trucks acting as freighters, crowded buses and single-cylinder diesel walking tractors all of them loud and smoky. Bicycles were copies of English Raleigh bikes from the 40s. Narrow tires, hand brakes, bell, one-speed, black. But even here there was prestige; the Flying Pigeon brand made in Shanghai was the one to have.
Larry insisted that we keep a good relationship with the recently established American Consulate located in the Dong Feng Hotel in Guangzhou. He figured that if we had to make a run for it they could get us out. (I would have fled down to the border with Macao and got out by using a carton of Marlboros). But the Consul turned out to be a cool guy and we became friends. The Americans were quarantined in Guangzhou so they couldn't leave the city. They had to ask us about what was going on outside. They found it fascinating that Anne and I were actually living there. And spending lots of time out in the communes. Most amazing to them was that the government had given my family long stay visas. Henry Kissinger couldn't have gotten a residential visa in 1981. Of course, this was an experiment. The Taishan County government certainly couldn't cause the national government to issue long-stay visas. The Chinese system was to try experiments in remote localities. So if they were successful they could be replicated; if not, buried. Be sure that the locals weren't acting alone. Beijing just wanted to see what would happen. We Taishan folks were very aware of the situation and tried to be at our best so it could continue.
At first the whole system seemed so strange I couldn't figure out what the roles were and what the tities of the men I was negotiating with meant. Who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs? What did “a leading cadre” mean? Then one day someone mentioned that the lake that our Stone Flower Mountain Inn was being constructed on was controlled by the Department of Public Works and the whole thing snapped into focus. This was a county government! I was very involved with my own county government in Ukiah and now I felt right at home.
I wound up being inside the Taishan County government in the same way I was inside my county government (as 5th District Planning Commissioner). A useful person, but powerless. The Chinese had a derogatory word for us which loosely translated means “everything upside down.” They wear red for weddings and white for funerals. Tractors were never used on farm fields because they would compact the soil. In the Fall I saw women processing hemp plants just like their sisters in Comptche were. Only the Chinese women were stripping off the leaves and flowers and feeding them to livestock. The lovely stems were what they were after. In Comptche the leaves and flowers were saved and the stems were burned. Lo Fan, indeed.
The food. I ate Cantonese food every day for months and could eat it every day forever. South China is blessed with a semitropical climate, productive agriculture and a sophisticated cuisine which maximizes both nutrition and pleasure. Without refrigeration, food was shopped for in farmer's markets every day. Fresh vegetables locally grown were standard. A much larger variety of animals alive or dead were on offer. Oil was expensive. Things we take for granted were absent: no bread, no dairy products, no potatoes, no coffee and no canned or frozen food. There was good beer. Tolerable orange soda. Tea and tobacco were coarse and low quality.
Service and retail workers were not required to be anything but there. You want to buy a shirt. You go to the department store cashier and give her the price of a shirt which you haven't seen. She gives you a receipt. You ask the clerk behind the counter for a shirt. She looks at your receipt. She estimates your size and throws a shirt down on the counter. She is not required to smile or wish you a nice day or thank you and so she doesn't. She has been assigned to this job. This job is to hand you a shirt.
Miss Anne appeared so otherworldly to them that women sometimes looked at her like they were hallucinating. Not just for her long light brown hair and beautiful blue eyes. Anne is a skillful seamstress who designs and makes her own classic long dresses. Perfect fit and fall, flattering neckline, high quality fabrics, rich muted colors. A queen. Like them, she wore no jewelry and had no artifice. She was a stunning vision of a woman.
So exactly when did Communism end in Taishan, China? 1982. The end was signified by a chrome cone. Remember those beauty parlor hair dryers? One day a street-level living room was converted into a beauty parlor. Suddenly, and I mean suddenly, women had hairstyles. Perms, shag cuts. Skirts came next. Then sheer white hose. No lipstick yet or jewelry but this revolution was started by women. Mao was over.
Be First to Comment