Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux

Author:Paul Theroux [Theroux, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Adhere to Marxist Leninism

Adhere to the Socialist Road

Adhere to Proletarian Dictatorship

Adhere to Party Leadership

"Do people repeat these things?" I asked a man in Xiamen.

I liked his answer: "Yes. Like the Bible."

I thought, Exactly, because that clearly reminded me of all the cant and hypocrisy that goes under the name of Christianity. And it was no different for the Chinese, who were able to parrot Party slogans while at the same time hustling on the black market or trying, as one man did, to run me down in his BMW while he talked on his cellular phone.

Xiamen was the third of the three Special Economic Zones, and in its way the prettiest, the least ruined, with more open space than the others. Modernity elsewhere in China had seemed slightly ridiculous and imitative, looking out of place and foolish. Much of Xiamen was unmodernized, and consequently retained its dignity. It had shop houses and hawkers, beggars, hookers, Buddhist nuns, rickshaws, and general confusion, as well as chugging ferries in the harbor. The old town remained—I had thought of it when I went there the first time as being one of the most attractive in China, with a busy waterfront and a lovely island, Gulangyu, just offshore, where venerable mansions of returned Chinese had been preserved and cars were forbidden. The island was marred only by its billboards (for Coca-Cola, Marlboro, and eighteen other products). These days even Chinese flocked to see it, to take the ferry and climb its ancient hill.

Xiamen was now five times bigger, both in area and population, than it had been five years ago, when I had first passed through. It had a McDonald's now, and while this fast-food place and a Hamburger City were just across the road from the traditional Fujianese restaurants that had menageries out front (live snakes, lizards, eels, frogs, and rabbits trapped in cages, waiting for diners to single them out to have their throats cut before they were skinned and cooked), the dull fact was that the mass of people did not eat either snakes or Big Macs. They went to bun and dumpling shops, to noodle stalls; they stuffed themselves with cheap candy and boiled rice and crackers; they slurped stewed vegetables at home, with their elbows on wobbly wooden tables.

I had been told that the large town of Shishi ("Stone Lion"), in the hinterland, was the center of the Fujianese yellow trade—not only prostitutes but contraband. I spent a whole day getting there, and it did seem odd for this large, prosperous place to be in the middle of nowhere. That was the point: Shishi flourished because it was off the map. You could buy anything in Shishi's markets, and its bars were far more louche than their counterparts in Xiamen. But what I remembered afterward was the long drive there: the pretty preserved town of Jimei with its handsome buildings, the brand-new walled-in eighteen-hole golf course surrounded by rice fields, vegetable gardens, and barefoot peasants. Every five miles or so we passed a school or college.

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