Keeps on rolling along, loess and all
Richard West
r HINA'S SORROW: JOURNEYS ...ROUND THE YELLOW RIVER
by Lynn Pan
Century, £1 1.95
0
bought a visit to Shanghai last year, I °ought what at first glance seemed to be a Mundane guide book, In Search of Old S.Panghai, by Pan Ling, expecting to read, if not communist propaganda, certainly a denunciation of what was a wicked city. It soon became clear, from Pan Ling's racy, exuberant venture into the past, that she Was more than half in love with that world of gangsters, sing-song girls, White Rus- si r,ans, and opium dens, where Marlene uietrich remarked that 'It took more than One man to change my name to Shanghai t1-11.r. Moreover, Pan Ling gloried in the fact that much of the old Shanghai sur- v,!yes; the mock-Tudor residence of the Kothschilds, the bustling shops of Nanking Road, the restaurants serving lake crab and glutinous soup — even the con-men. She wrote of the sibillant Shanghai dialect, Nor have the slangy expressions thrown 11P by the preoccupations. of the old ;_ociety — gambling, whoring, European- bashing and ripping people off — been totally blotted out by having to honour the values of a socialist and strait-laced society.' This was a quite extraordinary book to find on sale at the main hotel of a °,..tuurnunist city; an extraordinary book to and anywhere. I learned that the authoress days left Shanghai as a small girl in the early ,u,ays of the revolution, afterwards living in 13orneo and in London, where she first studied psychiatry and then Chinese his- tory. She worked as a journalist in Hong Kong, from where she began a series of Journeys back to Shanghai and other parts of the mainland. Now, under the anglicised name Lynn Pan, she has published her first 1200k in Britain, a splendid account of ,Tree journeys along the Yellow River, 'nut aorta of the Chinese body politic, the source of its agricultural wealth and also of 00.d and famine; hence its nickname, Chinas Sorrow'. The river itself, bearing Whorls of tons of loess as mud and silt, and man's efforts to harness it, are the central theme of this narrative. The author had to endure visits to river installations, but she is never dull, and spotted much that amused her. At an oil station, she met a girl mechanic in overalls, cap and wel- lington boots, whose body nevertheless 'undulated slowly and with such femininity it might have been a movement of veils and bustles and skirts.'
Every ruler of China over the last 30 centuries has stood or fallen by his ability to control the Yellow River. As recently as 1938, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, in an effort to halt the Japanese, deliberately broached the dykes, flooding the homes of 121/2 million people, of whom nearly a million died. The communist megaloma- niac Mao Z,edong once declared that 'the work on the Yellow River must be done well', banal words that nevertheless be- came one of his most repeated 'sayings'; and Lynn Pan saw a plaque: 'From this spot on 3 October 1952, Chairman Mao ascended the hill to inspect the river.' Thirty years later:
The impression it made on me was of the Pallid sepia of an old photograph. There were brown reeds sprouting from between the tiles on the roofs, and in the flower-bed a straggly bamboo strained to hold its own against a tangled undergrowth. Forgotten or repudiated, how many faiths had been buried there? That clarion call, the injunc- tion to best nature, all those barrages and hydro-electric power-stations, those hun- dreds of culverts, siphons, sluice-gates, re- servoirs and pumps tripling or even quadru- pling the area under irrigation, the dykes getting higher and thicker, the mass mobi- lisation, the sense of nationhood, of elevated purpose — all that immensity of actions, far from inspiring awe, nowadays produces any number of shrugs. 'Which leader was it now, who came in person to look over the river?'
Although she regards Mao Zedong with contempt, Lynn Pan is not a political ideologist. She wishes mainland China well, as do most of the exile Chinese, she says, even those from Taiwan. I was surprised to hear that the Peking govern- ment actually favours the Taiwanese over all kinds of foreigners, rather than looking upon them as counter-revolutionaries. If Lynn Pan has a prejudice it is regional rather than ideological: she is a southerner, whose people did not enter into the scheme of Chinese history until it was two-thirds past, somewhere around the 12th century AD. It was about that time, she implies, that the northerners lost their power to govern, their sense of purpose. Some of us western reactionaries would like to leap at a bound into the 13th century; a Chinese reactionary would think of the 13th century as one of decadence, flawed by progressive ideas. Lynn Pan agrees with a teacher who says that over the last thousand years, the energy of the race has been exhausted. 'The teacher and I were agreed, too, on the fallacy of the common persuasion that the root of China's troubles is communism, believing, as we both do, that a nation gets the government it deserves.'
Most of the book is made up of encoun- ters, often amusing, sometimes poignant but always telling, with people along the Yellow River. There is a mad detective, who models himself on a Hollywood pri- vate eye. There is the innocent Miss Fu: Oh no, thank you, she won't have an ice lolly because she had ten at the cinema the other night and they gave her insomnia. She is sorry she is too unwell to accompany us on our excursion to Shapotou — her stool was dry and hard that morning. Once she swam in the Yellow River, in emulation of Chair- man Mao's feat of swimming the Yangste.
Some crooks offer to put Lynn Pan in business, monopolising the export of garlic.
As a Chinese with a British passport, Lynn Pan is qualified to explain how China seems to the outside world, and vice versa. She meets a 'terrifyingly determined American girl in a striped T-shirt, who could not see why she shouldn't be allowed to go to Xi'ning. A student at Peking University, she spoke Chinese, but with the intonation of one whose voice is better adapted to cope with words like,_ "Hi, there"; "Listen, man"; "C'mon" and "asshole" '. The Germans appear as ill- mannered. The Japanese want to follow the Silk Route 'as seen on TV'. The British are invisible, 'in keeping with their eclipse in the eyes of the world', but the mainland Chinese are obsessed with Hong Kong.
'So you've come across the border from Hong Kong, have you?', the young musician broke in at one point [of a funeral service in .Changsha]. 'That dazzling world with its myriad temptations. He was repeating a cliché, a variation on the theme of Hong Kong's gold-paved streets, brothel-stuffed alleys, and mugger-infested corners. And then looking into my face, his eyes steady and faintly mirthful, he said, 'That place where everything is said to be better than it is here: tell me, do they have services like this there? Do people even die there, or do they go on living forever?'
This book is most informative on the Chinese attitudes towards sex, marriage, children, above all the 'one child policy'. When asked, as she often was, why she herself had never married, Lynn Pan could not reply like Shanghai Lily, but used the chance to steer the conversation on to the haunting problem of numbers. 'China sor- rows, crushed by its own people, for whom so little can be done because they are so many'. The words close this remarkable book.
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