Flowers, Books and a Bucket

Flowers

Isn’t it remarkable how many things you can consider bourgeois if you really set your mind to it? The ideological brains behind the Cultural Revolution were very good at this. The hua wang (flower king), the much respected gardener, became the hua gong (flower worker), and all of China’s gardens fell into disrepair. Teams of women would walk round Beijing’s parks with besom brooms sweeping the packed dirt where the grass once grew, and a uniform greyness fell upon everything. It was so grey that in 1975 when we watched a movie about Beijing, it took us a long time to work out whether it was in colour or black-and-white.

You can’t totally suppress all beauty. On our way to work we would pass a lone plum tree and, one April morning when it finally flowered, its effect on us was like that of an electric shock. It had been so long since we’d seen any colour.

In July 1976 we took a holiday at the old missionary and new cadre resort of Beidaihe. This involved idyllic days on the beach and nights drinking beer with friends. Even the Chinese who had been detailed to see that we didn’t get into trouble were relaxed, and when we tried to swim along during the liturgical celebrations of the tenth anniversary of Chairman Mao’s famous swim in the Yangtse, nobody seemed to mind.

There wasn’t a lot to amuse yourself with in those days. All attempts to buy a television set had been met with blank stares and the universal reply to sales enquiries, “No stock”. And even if we’d succeeded, there was limited appeal in watching night after night of Albanian war movies and worker-peasant-soldier panels discussing the Right Deviationist Wind to Reverse Correct Verdicts. So it was with some interest that we received the notice from the Rest Sanatorium for Diplomatic Guests that there was to be a flower opening.

It appeared that there was a rare plant named Queen of the Night. This plant opened only once in seven years and emitted a glorious fragrance. The gardener of a resort used by the senior government ministers had one which he had been carefully cultivating. And tonight was the night!

We checked our diaries. They were free of engagements that night. So we dutifully filed up the hill to a pavilion. Rows of seats were laid out around an elaborate flower display whose centrepiece was something large and tropical with pregnant-looking buds. The gardener stood stiffly to attention beside it. His Mao suit had been specially ironed for the occasion. Tonight there was no question of him being the flower worker. He was the flower king.

The diplomatic corps milled around and mingled with the uncharacteristically relaxed Party cadre contingent. Conversation flowed in English and French. But after an hour or so, diplomatic topics ran out and the talk lapsed into Swahili, Albanian, Polish, whatever. Then silence. Nothing was happening. A look of concern started to appear on the faces of the cadres. People had been diverted to Learn from the Experience of the Masses for much less than an unopening flower. Then …

A slight smile appeared on the pursed lips of the gardener. Slowly it spread. The flower began to open. Soon the room was infused with a rich heady perfume. Yes. It was as good as they’d said. Cadres breathed sighs of relief. The gardener’s face was wreathed in smiles. The scent filled the room. We all clapped loudly. Then the flower closed again. We made polite noises. Then we went home to bed.

Books

We have form where books in China are concerned. When we first came to China more than thirty years ago, China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. There were books, but only in a certain sense. There was a New China (Xinhua) Bookshop in Beijing’s Wangfujing Street. A sad institution, it consisted of long high-ceilinged halls, empty of both customers and books … no, there were a few books. You could buy the beautifully bound works of not only Chairman Mao, but also Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Kim Il-sung and Enver Hoxha.

You may never have heard of Enver Hoxha. Not surprising. He was the Stalinesque leader of Albania and, in his capacity as the head of China’s sole ally in the world, received possibly disproportionate attention in the world’s largest country. There was a Foreign Language Bookshop which contained English, French, Russian, Albanian and Romanian versions of … well, we’ve already enumerated them.

Occasionally there was a thaw and little gems indicative of future political joy would sneak in. We still treasure the only two foreign books available in the whole of China at that time. These were Albanian versions of Gore Vidal’s Washington DC (Vashington DK) and Macbeth (Makbethi). It was sad to reflect that even Stalinist Albania was more liberal than Mao’s China.

One day in 1976, the news gradually leaked out that a sex manual called Hygiene for Youth had made a triumphant appearance on the Xinhua bookshelves. Deeply curious as to what such a tome could contain, we quickly hied to Wangfujing. We were greeted by the usual gloomy halls until we found ourselves on the third floor, until then virgin territory to us. There stood a line of soldiers patiently awaiting their turn at a glass-topped 1950s-style counter where a Mao-suited attendant doled out copies of the book in plain brown paper packages.

The book was a classic, with chapters along the lines of why you should save yourself for marriage. We found the chapter on masturbation particularly resonant. The problem, it appeared, was that masturbation, although an excellent practice in all other respects, had the fatal flaw that it caused lapses in Revolutionary Fervour. To remedy this it was necessary to Take Steps, including not wearing tight underwear. This was not simple in the days when only cotton cloth was available and, in winter, this involved wearing up to ten layers of clothes. And, as a final talisman against evil, when tempted, you should read Chairman Mao’s works.

One other book moment from those days remains deeply etched in our minds because we have to admit that it shocked us, even though it was completely in character and predictable.

Like all other foreigners, we were automatically members of the International Club, an institution which allowed us a small degree of amusement and from which all Chinese were excluded—by the Party, that is, not by the foreigners.

On its notice board the club boasted a library, but we had never been able to find it. It was in the basement and it was made quite clear to us that although it was entirely open, we’d better not try. One day the usual thug at the top of the stairs was missing. In those days the bonus for turning up to work had been declared capitalist so a lot of people didn’t bother. We took advantage of his absence to sneak down to the library.

At first we could see nothing terribly unusual: Marx, Lenin, the ever-present Chairman. But in a corner was a glass-fronted cabinet with a curtain drawn across its front. Through the curtain we could just make out that it contained the sort of stuff that communists like: Jack London, Dickens, Gorky and a bit of Shakespeare. In Maoist China this was a real treasure trove. But it had been nailed closed.

We were horrified at the time and wondered what sort of biblioclast would do such a thing. Time and age have since moderated our views; the simple act of nailing up the bookcase probably saved this small collection from the fate which befell so many other books during this tumultuous period. The man with the hammer was actually, in a small way, probably a hero of culture.

A Bucket

Our first shopping expedition in China was in 1975. Things were different then. We’d read our Marx and our Hegel, you know, scientific dialectical materialism, from those who had to those who needed; something like that. The only problem was that for a theoretically materialistic society there wasn’t much material.

It was always the same. You’d wander into a lofty shop hall with dusty shelves which were empty. A scowling woman with plaits or a revolutionary bob would eventually acknowledge your presence and spit out “Yao shemma!” (Whaddaya want!) You would stutter out your small request and as often as not the snarled answer would be “Mei huo” (no stock)—the most useful phrase of classical Marxist economics.

Then one day a number of stars came into alignment. We had a new baby. In China, after a birth mother and child are confined to the house for the first month. People look askance at mothers and babies who are seen in public before this magic month is up. Our newborn reached the one-month mark. This meant we had achieved guo yue and could leave the house. We also had access to a car. And we needed a new bucket—you know, an ordinary plastic bucket for mopping floors. We’d read in the People’s Daily that, firmly grasping class struggle and opposing the Right Deviationist Wind of Reversing Correct Verdicts, plastic bucket quotas had been overfulfilled by 70 per cent this year. But there was nary a bucket to be had in the whole of Beijing.

We decided to grasp the nettle and try to find a bucket during an expedition to Tianjin, seventy miles from Beijing. We wrapped China’s only blonde-haired blue-eyed baby in swaddling clothes and set out. Nowadays this is a sixty- to ninety-minute trip by super-fast train or freeway but then it was a major expedition. Road routes were a national secret so there were no street signs. To further complicate the matter, the two-lane road was frequently blocked by peasants spreading grain across the road to dry or something mysterious. But after several hours of laborious travel we arrived.

Tianjin was a city of seven million people, but none of them were abroad. In a city once famed for its beautiful buildings and gardens, we drove along broad, dusty, empty streets lined with rows of dilapidated apartments and bleak trees which had been vandalised for firewood. Broken panes of dirt-encrusted glass, rolls of barbed wire around every ground-floor flat. Hadn’t Mao abolished burglary?

Then we made a mistake. We stopped. A few people suddenly appeared, mainly men. Our car was a 1975 Toyota Crown. They were relatively common in Beijing but didn’t seem to have made the seventy-mile trip to Tianjin. Scruffy Mao-suited men poked at the tyres and tried to look under the bonnet. Then somebody saw the baby.

We had miscalculated. Fulfilling the month meant that the mother could go out, not the baby, who still had several weeks of being indoors. The crowd swelled to heroic proportions. They hadn’t seen a foreigner before, let alone a blonde-haired blue-eyed baby who was seriously under-aged. Soon the crowd was numbered in the thousands and the car was beginning to rock. Our driver, Lao Mao, was getting nervous and suggested that we keep going to our final destination. We gingerly moved off, scattering admirers as we went.

Finally we arrived at the Tianjin Number One Department Store, a large building on the banks of the Hai River. But word had spread. A crowd of thousands surged around us. The panicked management of the department store closed the gates and started removing people bodily. Peace was restored. Like royalty in Harrods, we were given the run of the store to ourselves.

We wandered through the empty halls looking in vain over the empty shelves. And finally! There it shone, our holy grail. The store manager knew that it was a model for display only, but sending us out empty-handed through the seething throngs could well be enough to start a riot. So several orders were written, we went to several desks and handed over a small sum of money, watched as the bills were duly stamped several times, and took delivery of a small red plastic bucket.