The news singer reciting, Linhuan, Anhui province, 2006.
A typical traditional tea house, full of men, Linhuan, Anhui province, 2006.
MR WU, aged seventy-five, a news singer from a traditional tea house, interviewed in Linhuan, northern Anhui province, a small town in central eastern China where tea drinking is the most popular leisure event among the locals even today. Fifty years ago in Linhuan there was no one who could read or write. Two or three men would be sent to the nearby town to get information or news; then they would come back to sing what they heard to the villagers in the tea house. Mr Wu became a news singer when he was ten. He continues to "sing his thoughts and news" in tea houses today. And Chen Lei, seventy-four, who has fought to preserve the ancient Linhuan and its tea houses.
My conversation with Tashi reminded me that I first heard about tiger stoves – these hot-water shops that double as tea houses – when I was in Shanghai on business in 1995. And by that time there was only one tiger stove left in the whole Shanghai area. The older locals told me that tiger stoves had been at their height in the early 1950s, with more than two thousand in the city. After that their numbers declined over the years as the water-supply systems improved, especially after the 1980s, when almost every Shanghainese home had a bathroom with a water heater. Nobody went to the tiger stoves any more, and the scenes of people chatting as they queued for water died out along with the tiger stoves. By the time I had a chance to investigate the subject, the last tiger stove had closed down in 2005, though the old people sipping cups of hot tea under the trees nearby told me that this habit was a relic of the tiger stoves. And this in turn reminded me that many folk customs are subject to history, and also that many folk customs will one day disappear with history.
In the course of my investigation and this "unearthing" of tiger stoves, I heard a story about a customer who used to wash at one. He had been a small trader all his life, and he had his fixed place in the tiger stove where he sat every day. All his fellow bathers jokingly referred to him as "Number XX", but nobody knew his real name. A few years ago "Number XX" became ill and he wanted a wash, so his son dutifully ran him a bath in his modern imported bathtub, but the old man flatly refused to take off his clothes. When the son finally understood what his father wanted, he took his arm and supported him to the one remaining tiger stove in Shanghai. The old man was helped to his accustomed place by all his old bathing buddies, like a crowd of stars surrounding the moon. He seemed to have come to life once again, whipping out a packet of cigarettes from his breast pocket and sitting down for a smoke, beaming. The following day, this old bathhouse customer left the world, with a smile on his face.
As we travelled northwards from Nanjing, the view outside the bus window was gradually changing from the scenery of the lower reaches of the Yangtze Delta to a landscape of "poor mountains and impoverished soil". Our driver told us that we were heading north by the side of an ancient canal running from north to south that could tell the story of three thousand years of China's transport history. The canal had been excavated in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770-221 BC), and was expanded many times in various dynasties. Up until ad 618 in the Sui dynasty it had been the main water-transport route of China's eastern region, which was the most densely populated part of China and remains so to this day. The Grand Canal went as far north as Beijing, linking it to the coastal city of Hangzhou, and sideways to connect China's three great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Huai. It had a total length of over 1,700 kilometres – twenty-one times the length of the Panama Canal – making it the longest canal in the world. Together with the Great Wall, it is one of the two most important engineering projects in ancient China. Because there had once been a branch of the ancient canal in the place we were driving through, the "Tongji Channel" that cut across Anhui province north of the Huai River, the area became a place of political, economic, cultural and military importance in the Tang and Song dynasties. Later on, the Yellow River flooded in 1194 in the Southern Song dynasty, and the Tongji Channel became silted up. The surrounding regions went into decline with the end of transport on the channel, and the area to the north of the Huai River gradually moved up the list of China's poorest places. This was our destination: Linhuan.
Linhuan is not even mentioned in tourist guides, but it is well known throughout China for its antiquity. Linhuan was first built in around 200 BC, and in due course it became a rest stop for merchants and travellers heading north or south along the Grand Canal. The tea houses of the village were in high fashion for a time, and even now most of the locals are habitual tea drinkers, preferring a kind of tea with no tea leaves that is called bangbang tea.
When we drove into Linhuan "town" (though in fact it is no more than a village), we saw a kind of modernised poverty: a street scene covered in the dust of a thousand years. There was a dustiness to everything, from little hammered earth houses a hundred years old, through the low brick and tile buildings of the fifties and sixties, to the two-storey peasant homes of the eighties. The whole street was full of builders' rubble – it seemed that everybody in Linhuan was "hurrying in the footsteps of international development" to build a house or pave a road – but the things that were being built were the scrap material of modern China. The people were neatly dressed but not clean. It appeared that they had no requirements beyond keeping themselves warm and fed, with no aspirations for enjoyment, and their skinny dogs lacked even the strength to bark a couple of times at strangers. It seemed that only the cocks and hens scavenging for food in the street had enough energy to keep their necks stretching out tirelessly, and a little freshness and brightness to their feathers.
Here, there was none of the speed of modernised production. The small donkey carts that had been used for over a hundred years and the old wooden handcarts that had been pulled for decades had been replaced by "bong-bong cars" – motor tricycles with a small cabin for passengers built on behind the driver's seat that had long since been banned in the cities – and old-style motorbikes that made a great deal of noise even when the wheels were not going round. Your instinctive responses go into slow motion here; it takes several minutes from the first puttering sound until the vehicle actually gets going. Our driver couldn't get the people blocking our way to move aside, even with loud blasts of his horn. Occasionally you could hear a voice shout something in tones of great urgency, followed by a long pause. You would almost have forgotten what you had heard, and then another voice would yell a response.
All of this reminded me of the works of Dalí, that strange, mad artistic genius whose work I have never understood. Perhaps there had been a similar rubble of modernisation in his life? Could that have been what gave him the ability to put together those strange works of art that smashed people's old habits of mind to fragments?
I made up my mind to visit a few tea houses before my interview with Chen Lei, the man I had come to see.
Most of Linhuan's tea houses have kept the original form in which they had first been built a hundred or so years before. The dim light inside the rooms comes mainly from a series of smallish skylights, there are rows and rows of great steaming iron or aluminium kettles standing on the big seven-or eight-hole linked stoves by the doorway, and by the side of the stove there is often a long bench which acts as a table for tea-making utensils, crowded with teacups, teapots and tea leaves. The remainder of the space is the tea-drinking area, which consists of several wooden tables, long benches and little wooden chairs. Some tea houses put out rows of small, low tables and chairs on the street. No matter how long you sit in the tea house, three jiao for a pot of tea will guarantee you a place from morning till night.
According to several tea-house owners, the biggest difference between tea houses now and in the past is that in the past people drank tea and listened to the news or storytelling, while now they drink tea and play mah-jong or cards. Another difference is that women come to the tea houses. Because most of the land has been compulsorily purchased by the government, the young and strong have all gone to the big cities to earn money. The older women in the family don't have to spend their time taking care of the young children, so they have started to become a part of tea-house culture.
Originally, I had thought that "listening to the news" meant villagers sitting clustered round a little radio listening to the news or Chinese opera. But this was not the case. Because the area had been poor not just for generations but for dynasties, many of its people were illiterate and had never been to school. In every generation, however, there would be a few men who ventured outside the village to find out news and interesting things; back in the village tea house they would then say and sing the news. After a while the "News Singer" became a special job in the area.
We were lucky enough to meet a "News Singer", Old Mr Wu, who had been "singing and telling the Revolution" for the Communist Party since he was ten years old. From our casual chat I could see that he was at ease and eager to perform, so I decided then and there to hold an extra interview.
XINRAN: Mr Wu, while we're waiting for the cameraman to get set up, can I make a request?
WU: Just say the word.
XINRAN: We'll only say what's in our hearts, no official talk – empty words or false words – and we'll just talk, without "singing". And please look only at me, not at other people. Is that all right?
WU: I'll do as you say.
XINRAN: Have you always lived here?
WU: I'm Linhuan-born and -bred.
XINRAN: So what year were you born?
WU: I'm seventy-five years old. I'm a little deaf, but I'll tell you no lies, even though I'm seventy-five. I'm not like some people, playing up their age to cheat their way to a pension, playing up their youth to get a young wife.
XINRAN: Don't worry about your hearing, I'll shout. When did you start drinking tea?
WU: My father ran a tea house. We couldn't buy good water. When I was very small I started to fetch spring water – at eleven or twelve I could carry water with a pole on both shoulders. When did I start to drink? I can't remember.
XINRAN: How long did your father run a tea house?
WU: Many years.
XINRAN: Do you still remember what the tea house was like? How many teapots and tea tables were there? Were there many people?
WU: A fair few teapots – they were all old, there were none of the little pots you get nowadays. In those days tea houses were important places hereabouts; anything that was too big for the family or couldn't be kept in the bag, they'd take to the tea house, and they always got a result. Arranging marriages, fights between husband and wife, differences between neighbours, disciplining youngsters… That was why women and children weren't allowed in. This was men's business. Unless, that is, one of the tea houses was short-staffed, then they'd have to let the owner's wife in to lend a hand. So I didn't see much either. What child would dare stick his nose into his own father's business back then? That would be challenging your father's authority!
XINRAN: Do you still remember what your mother did at home?
WU: She cooked. I just remember her cooking. That's what women do, isn't it? Cooking!
XINRAN: How many of you children were there?
WU: Just the one, I was the only one.
XINRAN: You were an only child? There was no one-child policy then, surely?
WU: There was just me. I didn't have any sisters, or any brothers either. Luckily I was a boy or the family line would have died out. I was the only one then, but now there are four generations of us.
XINRAN: How many sons, how many daughters?
WU: Eh?
XINRAN: HOW- MANY – SONS? HOW- MANY – DAUGHTERS?
WU: Me? Four sons and a girl.
XINRAN: How about grandchildren?
WU: Even my grandchildren's children are grown up!
XINRAN: How did you find your wife?
WU: The first one, I don't know. It was all fixed up by our parents, and after four years she had a child. It wouldn't do, so I found me another one. This one was good; she's a capable woman. I joined the Party in '54, she joined in '55; she's a capable woman.
XINRAN: So you had two wives? You were married twice?
WU: Let's not talk about that, I couldn't be doing with the first one; she didn't have any progressive thought at all, and she wasn't capable. So I got another wife. The second one, she could talk sense.
XINRAN: Is she a good cook?
WU: Pretty good – dumplings, flat pancakes on the stove, she can do the lot.
XINRAN: When your father was alive was his tea house called "the tea house", or did it have another name?
WU: It was just called the tea house. In the past there were storytellers and drum-singers in the tea houses. He sold his tea, you did your singing, he'd give you money every month, plus tips from the customers. Nowadays opera singers all sing on the stage. They turn their noses up at the tea houses – not enough space.
XINRAN: So tell me what you did all day, from when you got up in the morning to when you went to bed at night.
WU: I ran the tea house with my old man, I carried water. Every day was the same, what's to talk about? At first I went to school, until grade three. I was stupid so I stopped going. I said to my dad, "I'll do whatever you tell me to." He said, "You carry water, I'll run the tea house, and the place'll be full of the sound of slurping tea." I said, "What use is that?" He said, "What's good about running a tea house? I'm telling you, this tea house of ours is the place in the village where people talk sense. If anyone in the tea house says unreasonable things, the tea house will meet to pass judgement. The tea house is just like a court, it's like the law. And there's another good thing about a tea house: people get angry, and if they get angry at home, they fight with their sons or scold their daughters-in-law, but once they're in the tea house they don't stay angry, they chat and laugh – a trip to the tea house is a happy thing, a tea house is a good place. Besides, in the tea house you can hear about big matters from outside. Otherwise you'd be living in a dead end, wouldn't you?"
XINRAN: Then what time did you and your father start work every day, and when did you open?
WU: The tea house opened very early, six or so in winter, in summer a bit after five. We heated the water, and once the water was boiled we'd pour tea for the customers. We'd have customers as soon as it was light. As long as there was boiling water there'd be people coming to drink. People who were happy or angry would come early, and old people too. They would wake up early, while their family were still snoring away. There were no lights on at home, and no one to keep them company or talk about their dreams, so they came very early. And they drank until eight or nine in the evening. They used to come straight after supper, some from eight or ten li away. They all wanted to come and drink tea.
XINRAN: So in your opinion, now that life has changed so much for the better, and people in so many places don't want to run tea houses any more, why is it that here it seems everyone is competing to open tea houses?
WU: Who knows? In the past, before the Liberation, there were only two or three tea houses. They were quite rare and special. Now there are more tea houses, two or three with every step. A lot of people are running tea houses in Linhuan these days.
XINRAN: Are there more people drinking tea now, or before?
WU: I think there's even more than there used to be. In the past the tea drinkers were always old men, and that's the truth. Nowadays all the young people drink in the teahouses. Now it's three jiao to stay till eleven. That's three jiao a pot. It was cheaper before.
XINRAN: Did you drink tea when you were young?
WU: Yes, whenever I had time on my hands.
XINRAN: Are tea houses now the same as the one your father ran?
WU: My old man's tea house wasn't as pretty as this one.
XINRAN: Do you know how many pots the biggest tea house here has?
WU: The most? That would be two hundred or more.
XINRAN: In the biggest tea house here, what's the greatest number of people drinking tea together? A few dozen? A hundred? More?
WU: It could be 150, maybe more.
XINRAN: Can you still remember any of the words on the lucky couplets stuck to the door of the tea house?
WU: Not really. I know there are new lucky couplets for Spring Festival every year, but I can't read. I don't know, sometimes I ask people to read them out for me.
XINRAN: So what lucky couplets do you ask people to write for you at New Year?
WU: They're all to do with tea houses, places to drink tea and people who drink tea.
XINRAN: Do you know how your father got married to your mother?
WU: Someone introduced them. My dad was over fifty by the time he had me.
XINRAN: Did your father ever tell you his story?
WU: When he was telling me off he always used to say that he'd done all sorts of things, making lanterns, selling rice, keeping a tea house, but he'd never been black at heart. At any rate my old dad was a good man.
XINRAN: What did your father like to do?
WU: Make hurricane lanterns – he used to sell lanterns every year. Making lanterns, and running a tea house.
XINRAN: And what do you like to do?
WU: I do everything. I've sold rice, I've run a tea house, and sold peanuts. I've sold a lot of things.
XINRAN: Then in the Cultural Revolution was this tea house still open? Did the Red Guards drink tea too?
WU: In the Cultural Revolution they didn't let us watch opera, but tea houses could stay open. What law was there against drinking tea? The tea houses stayed open, business as usual.
XINRAN: Is the tea these days the same as before?
WU: In the past we didn't drink the kind with tea leaves. The tea now is better. In the past there weren't any proper buildings. Now there are buildings made specially for tea houses, made of bricks instead of beaten earth.
XINRAN: Do a lot of young people run tea houses now?
WU: Not many. They've gone away to make money. Most people who keep tea houses are sixty or over.
XINRAN: Do any of your children run a tea house? What do they do?
WU: Cut hair, sell rice, sell clothes, kill pigs. But none of them have a tea house.
XINRAN: And do you and your wife live by yourselves? Or do you live with your sons?
WU: By ourselves. It's the New Society now, the new family. Everybody makes their own money and spends it themselves.
XINRAN: Do your sons give you money to keep you going?
WU: They give me money, but I don't want it. My grandson's heading off to university. That's going to cost a lot of money.
XINRAN: So do your sons like drinking tea in the tea houses?
WU: Only one of them. He drinks every day. The rest of them don't like it. They say it's a waste of time.
XINRAN: You say you joined the Party in 1954. What were you doing at that time?
WU: In 1950, just after Liberation, I was a security officer. In 1951 I was made village head and then deputy head of the production brigade. I never took a penny. I joined the Party in 1954, my wife joined in 1955, and that's the truth, as I'm sitting here.
XINRAN: Have your sons joined the Party?
WU: My second son joined the Party while he was in the army.
XINRAN: You, your wife, and your son too. You must be regarded as a red family, with three Party members.
WU: That goes without saying!
XINRAN: Do you still have Party meetings?
WU: We don't now.
XINRAN: If you don't have Party meetings, do you still count as a Party member?
WU: I can't say for sure.
XINRAN: How many Party members are there in your village now?
WU: There are still a few dozen.
XINRAN: In the past we Chinese used to say that people who engaged in trade were capitalists. So, have any Party members opened a tea house?
WU: That's hard to say, there aren't that many of us.
XINRAN: You see, now we're starting to use electricity and lots of new technology. We're modernised. Are you worried that the tea houses will die out?
WU: There are people who drink tea in Hangzhou, I've seen 'em. When I went there to visit my son, I saw people sitting in tea houses drinking black tea. There's no one who can hold back tea drinkers. But people who drink tea together in the city can get AIDS, so nobody should dare to drink tea outside their house.
XINRAN: How do you know that tea can transmit AIDS?
WU: That's not what I said. To be honest, there are people like that, and diseases like that. They can spread. That's what infectious diseases are like.
XINRAN: So after you stopped running a tea house, apart from being an official, what job did you do?
WU: Well, these days I sell antiques. I go to small places to buy up old teapots. If I can get a bit for them, enough for spending money, that's all I need – the children don't want them. I'm a rough-and-ready, uneducated sort of chap. I can't read books or newspapers, but I remember everything I see and hear. If not, why would the Party have told me to "sing the Revolution"?
XINRAN: So how long have you been "singing the Revolution"?
WU: I started when I was ten. Everyone in the tea house liked to hear me sing. I could sing anything; whatever went into my ears, I could make into something to sing. I sang until the big loudspeakers came to the village. Things changed then. When the big loudspeakers from the broadcasting station started shouting, everyone could hear it. I couldn't sing the things that everybody knew, so I went looking for things the broadcasters didn't say. I kept on singing after I became a Party member and a cadre, but not as much as before.
XINRAN: How did you know what things the broadcasters never said?
WU: Need you ask? Everybody knows that they never talk about gods or fortune-telling; that's superstition. And they don't talk about the police doing bad things, right? Or about droughts or natural disasters either, or how the Yellow River drowned all those people. It was all "class struggle every day", but we were all poor here, we couldn't find a class enemy even if we wanted to. Those class enemies were all rich. Would you stay here if you were rich? That'd be like a man dying of hunger using a gold bowl for a pisspot!
XINRAN: So if you often spoke of those things, didn't anybody try to stop you?
WU: Nobody bothered about me, who comes here? If they came here to control us, what would they eat? Those officials who were so fond of class struggle wouldn't have been able to bear hunger!
XINRAN: You're seventy-five, and there are so many stories in your life, so let's narrow it down. Can you tell me about the three most painful things in your life and the three happiest?
WU: That's easy, I was happiest when I was selling rice. It was one yuan a bowl, and I could sell five hundred bowls in a day, and that's the truth. I made money from my zhuangmo as well – that's big hard steamed bread, the kind they eat in the north-east. That was my first happy thing. The second happy thing is that I've worked for the revolution all my life, but I've never taken a penny of public money. I want to be a decent person. I joined the Party in 1954. I went to the police station to be a public security worker, I wasn't scared. "A revolutionary must know no fear, no point in thinking of revolution if you're scared." There's no third happiest thing. Family matters like my sons and daughter don't count.
XINRAN: And the most unhappy thing?
WU: The most unhappy thing? There are people in the government who act recklessly. I don't say anything out loud, but in my heart I don't approve. The peasant cadres in the past were all better than the ones now. I've got no way to say it.
Judging by my experience of interviews in the countryside, I could feel that he was not being completely candid. There must have been other things that made him unhappy. But Old Mr Wu changed the subject, and his face immediately took on an actor's stage expression of "happiness".
WU: There's nothing to make me sad. I play, I sing. If a man's happy he'll have long life. The happier a man is the longer he lives; the more anxious a man is the quicker he'll die.
XINRAN: If you had your life over again, would you still live it this way?
WU: That's not easy to say. Me, live my life again – I would be hundreds of years old! That's not possible.
XINRAN: No, if you had your time over again, would you still stay here and run the tea house with your father, or would you go to live somewhere else? Do you regret your life, or do you think it was worth it?
WU: It was worth it.
XINRAN: Many foreigners say that China is very poor, and this place of yours is really very poor. You live in poverty here, is it worth it?
WU: This place doesn't count as poor. When Chairman Mao was alive, just after Liberation, it was very poor. Now? Not poor.
XINRAN: A lot of people here don't even earn three jiao a day, and you still don't think this is poor?
WU: It's not poor now, truly. Back in 1949, 1950 and 1951, we were poor. Chairman Mao was making revolution in those days. There were no buses, not many people; that was real poverty. Foreigners? I say the foreigners are poor. When I went to Hangzhou I saw the trousers the foreigners were wearing, holes all over, and their hair was all dirty. Isn't that poor? Why be like that?
XINRAN: Do you prefer Hangzhou or Linhuan?
WU: For living Hangzhou is better, of course. But it's not so bad here either. A peasant's lot has been bitter since ancient times. Who told you to be born into this life, born into a peasant family to spend all day working in the muck and mire?
XINRAN: Do you and your wife ever quarrel?
WU: I've never fought or quarrelled with her since the day we were married, not even sworn at her.
XINRAN: Comparing you and your wife, are you more successful than her, or the other way round? Who's more revolutionary, who's more successful?
WU: She's more capable than me. She's a model worker, the first female Party member in the village. She's a cut above me.
XINRAN: Can you still remember the ceremony when you two got married?
WU: It was raining that day – she came in a sedan chair.
XINRAN: Did you have a banquet?
WU: We were very poor then, we didn't have any land yet, or a house, we didn't have a thing, my family was the poorest.
XINRAN: Is there anything that you wanted to do that you haven't done yet?
WU: No, I've done it all, a man should have a conscience.
XINRAN: How old is the oldest person in the village?
WU: The oldest is over ninety.
XINRAN: Do a lot of people from outside come and see this place now?
WU: Yes, they do.
XINRAN: Do you know why they come?
WU: We've got a lot of historic sites here, but many of them have been dug up, like the temple of the Town God and the temple at the east of the walls. They've all gone. People come because they've heard about them, but actually there's not a lot for them to see.
XINRAN: If someone were to say that your tea house was too old, and wanted you to build a new one, would you be willing?
WU: If you had the choice between something old and something new, who would take the old one?
XINRAN: Do you like this kind of old-style tea house, or do you prefer the new style?
WU: Of course the old-style tea house is better than the new style. Those new ones don't look like tea houses.
XINRAN: And why did I come here? Do you know?
WU: No, I don't know.
XINRAN: Because Linhuan has preserved China's precious tea culture, tea-house culture and folk culture. Therefore, in future more and more people will come to visit your tea house. Would you like outsiders to come?
WU: I'd like that. I'd like even foreigners to come to our tea house! I'll sing a bit of history for you, and you'll believe it. I tell you no lies, they're really welcome. Listen carefully, I made this up myself.
Bamboo clappers, nine links in a chain,
Gather round, comrades, hear what I'm saying
I'll tell you about the Huaihai Campaign
That's what I'll tell you today…
In the first month, first day of the First
An army there was under Mao Zedong,
An army in Yan'an, two hundred thousand strong…
In the second month, the dragon raised his head,
To attack Xuzhou, Lin Bocheng his soldiers led.
In the third month, the third of the Third,
Deng Xiaoping's soldiers attacked Jinan,
His soldiers surrounded the city of Jinan
As his forces occupied Tianfushan.
In the fourth month, the eighth of the Fourth,
The Zaozhuang Station battle took off
They didn't just take Zaozhuang for their own,
But sent three regiments of foes to their final home.
…
In the sixth month the heat is hard to bear,
Chiang Kai-shek was consumed with fear,
And he took his troops and weapons out of there…
XINRAN: You sing so well! Let's all of us give you a round of applause to thank you!
The peasants drinking tea were taken aback at my suggestion: what're we supposed to clap for? What's to thank?
It was time for my interview with Chen Lei, so I took my leave of the tea house and the excitable Old Mr Wu. Before I left, I asked him where he lived and what time he got up every day, saying that I would drop by before I left. When he heard this, disbelief was plainly written on his face, but he said politely, "There's no need to put you to so much trouble, thank you!"
I sat in the yard of the village broadcasting station with Chen Lei, the hero who had preserved the ancient village of Linhuan. We talked for a long time, until darkness fell, and all we could see was in deep shadow.
During this time, the big loudspeakers of the broadcasting station came to life at their set times and interrupted our discussion. Once it was to remind the villagers to abide by the regulations in the following day's market, and once summoning a villager to the loudspeaker station to collect something. Another was a repeat news broadcast from the radio station, and then another programme of opera, which was turned off at a shout from Chen Lei that I couldn't understand. But none of this prevented us from speaking freely.
Chen Lei was dressed in a dark green polo shirt and a pair of fawn-coloured cotton trousers. There was a capable, vigorous look to him, but his forehead bore the marks of the trials and changes of many years. He had deep, thoughtful eyes, which held the dignity accumulated over seventy or eighty years.
XINRAN: People have told me that the name your parents gave you wasn't Chen Lei. You changed your name, is that right?
CHEN: In 1960, when I was working on the farm, I had this notion. I wanted people to know me, to be like thunder out of a clear sky, so I changed my name to Chen Lei, which means "thunder".
XINRAN: You changed your name without consulting your parents? We Chinese say that our parents gave us life, and our names are the symbol of life that our parents gave us. Changing your name on your own whim must have got you a terrible reputation, almost as if you'd committed some terrible crime?
CHEN: Well, it didn't. My parents must have felt uneasy, but when they saw I could achieve great things… And in any case the thing was done, there wasn't anything to get unhappy about.
XINRAN: Can you tell us what sort of people your parents were?
CHEN: Both my parents were from poor families. They were both artisans, mending bicycles for a living. At that time there were eight of us, five boys and three girls. Things were pretty hard for my family. We all depended on my father's bicycle repairs. Later on I went to middle school; my family couldn't afford to send me to senior school so I went to work. Actually there are lots of reasons why I changed my name to Chen Lei. In 1960 I had a lot of ideas. I wanted to change life for the better, to live life at a higher level. My time in the Nanjing artillery regiment had changed my thinking: how could I change the life of our poverty-stricken countryside?
XINRAN: So how could you change your home town?
CHEN: I didn't know at first. I worked my heart out, and I wasn't the only one, but Linhuan didn't get any better. It was too poor here, desperately poor.
XINRAN: Did none of your superiors help?
CHEN: Before the 1980s, my superiors didn't do anything but class struggle. If you weren't leftist there was no way to survive. Besides, everybody was poor; nobody thought we were poorer than anybody else! Afterwards, just a few years after Reform and Opening, a journalist came here. He didn't take any pictures of the new-built streets, houses and shops, but concentrated on the rickety old tea houses, and it dawned on me that we had an original culture of our own that was a draw among all the decrepitude, part of a culture that was disappearing in other places.
XINRAN: This was why you stood in front of the diggers of the government engineering team, determined to block their way? But for that, the Linhuan tea houses and old city walls would have been razed to the ground long ago, isn't that so?
CHEN: We have hundreds and thousands of years of history here in Linhuan, and culture from the Shang and Zhou dynasties. [8] In the northwest of the town we have the remains of an old beaten earth city wall from the Spring and Autumn Period. [9] It's square in shape, 1,550 metres long from east to west, 1,409 metres wide from north to south, seven to fifteen metres high, thirty-six to sixty metres wide in the base, and three to eight wide at the top, enclosing an area of 2.7 square kilometres. There are four gates in the wall and watchtowers and signal beacon towers on the top. Linhuan's earth wall is currently China's sole surviving earthen town wall. If we compare it to the Vatican in the West, it's big enough to hold six Vaticans! So Linhuan has several millennia of cultural history, but where is the living culture? How can all this history be reflected through the living culture? It's all about constant movement. It was movement up and down the Grand Canal that engendered Linhuan's tea culture. I started to wonder how to use the original tea culture we had preserved here to push Linhuan towards the culture of the rest of the world, so the Linhuan people can make a living through cultural exchange.
The old-fashioned tea houses we have here in the north of the country are completely different from southern tea houses. Northern-style tea houses serve big-bowl tea, the southern ones are for tasting tea. With us it's tea by the pot. In the past you could drink a whole day for five fen – go in as soon as it opened, and take some with you when you left. If there was a problem over land, a quarrel between wife and mother-in-law, or any other kind of dispute, they'd all say: "Come on, let's go to the tea house to talk it over!" The tea houses became news stations and cultural centres for local society.
The most important thing we do is protect the two old streets in the old town, Nail Street and Flagstone Street, and their two tea houses. The special feature of the buildings in these streets is the "single tile" roofs; the tiles are laid flush with no overlap at all. When the ancient-buildings people from the Architectural Institute saw them they said, "Don't these single-tile roofs leak?" We said, "No, they don't!" We usually start with a layer of ordinary overlapping tiles, which are then covered with another layer of single tiles. We've had single tiles here since ancient times. We told the Architectural Institute that it was vital to preserve those two streets. If we don't preserve them now they'll disappear, a bit at a time, and once they're gone there'll never be any more. We now have about 5,600 square metres of the old city left, all old houses made of small blue-green bricks baked from local clay. That in itself is a big museum of ancient architecture.
XINRAN: That's true. The city itself is a huge museum of ancient architectural culture, just like the city of Rome. Mr Chen, while you were talking I've been trying to picture it. Apart from the things that everyone knows, the ancient remains and culture that have survived here, what else is there? Is there anything else that can become a resource and a motive for opening up the daily life of the people of Linhuan? How large is the population of Linhuan?
CHEN: There are 88,500 people in the greater Linhuan district, and 21,000 in the ancient building area.
XINRAN: And what percentage of this population has been educated?
CHEN: Hard to say. There are several teachers, and there used to be an old xiucai scholar. We still have a hall here where the xiucai candidates used to take part in the national exams in the Ming and Qing dynasties.
XINRAN: Are there more young and middle-aged people in Linhuan or more old people?
CHEN: More old people.
XINRAN: So the old people are the tea houses' guarantee of survival?
CHEN: All the old people in Linhuan have something to say about history, true. That's the wealth of the tea houses.
XINRAN: Because I too once came under pressure from a different form of poverty, I know that poverty really does cause people's thinking to change. How many tea houses are there in Linhuan at present?
CHEN: Sixteen. They used to be called tiger stoves. Now we call them tongzao – connecting stoves. They're all linked together, for heating kettles – they used iron kettles earlier, now they use aluminium kettles. In the past someone noticed that lighting a fire in all these individual stoves was very wasteful, but if you have an iron bucket next to your heated stove, you can heat it using the excess heat from the others. You can save a lot like that. We've been poor here for a very long time. Didn't Chairman Mao say that "poverty makes people's thinking change"? That's true; if you don't come up with ideas it's impossible to survive.
XINRAN: Linhuan has four thousand years of history. Am I right in saying that it's impossible to bring back the original style of the ancient buildings along the Huai River using today's building materials?
CHEN: We've been thinking about this too. You need different materials to make different houses. In our part of the world we have a lot of fired bricks. At first they were all blue-green bricks, made in special kilns – the best kind of china comes from those kilns. Later on the quality of the clay was affected by pollution. Then there was large-scale flooding in the region along the Huai River. The river water was full of sand, and when it came washing over, it left behind a lot of sand. But if you're careful in the extraction process, it's still possible to find good-quality clay. You come and see next year, it'll be different again. It will basically all be back the way it was, and it'll be the genuine article. We're repairing the old to bring back the old.
XINRAN: In the past, did your connecting stoves include bathing, too, like the tiger stoves of Nanjing and Shanghai?
CHEN: No, it was all just drinking. They drink and chat, discussing old things and new, ordinary people talking about their own business. If you have conflicts, if you have unfilial sons or daughters, then you drag them to the tea house to mediate. Once you're at the tea house a resolution is guaranteed, and everything will be fine, and you don't have to pay lawyers' fees or bring an accusation to the court.
XINRAN: So what percentage of people in this place spend how much time in the tea house?
CHEN: I can't give you a definite figure, but at least half the middleaged people, and most of the old men, and boys start going to the tea houses for tea from a very young age – sometimes there are even small children. I used to go to the tea house when I was small to listen to the storytellers. We didn't have a word for news, but people who'd been to market far away would head for the tea house on their return to "sing the news". It was just like storytelling. You could hear all sorts of strange things in the tea houses. Old Mr Wu, who you interviewed, started "singing" the revolution in tea houses when he was ten years old. Our Linhuan tea houses were what our modern-day city people might call "news and media centres".
XINRAN: Did you have that sort of thing in the Cultural Revolution too?
CHEN: They sang news then too, but they didn't talk about politics – nobody dared. And every day there was someone reciting the works of Chairman Mao.
XINRAN: According to your understanding of the people who run the tea houses, what is the greatest hardship of their lives, and the greatest happiness?
CHEN: The hardship is opening at daybreak and staying open till midnight, spending all day constantly brewing tea and topping up people's pots, and slaving away all day for such a tiny income, just enough to keep body and soul together. But the joy for tea-house owners is that everybody goes there, they come into contact with people every day, they hear the news, and see a bit more of the world.
XINRAN: So do you think that there are any differences between tea houses before and after Liberation?
CHEN: They're pretty much the same. We're poor here. Nobody here wants to go messing around with these things. Almost all the old ways of doing things have been passed down from former generations.
XINRAN: Have they been influenced by all the changing governments and regimes?
CHEN: No, you reform your reform, they drink their tea. Nothing's changed.
XINRAN: Were there any cases in the Cultural Revolution of people being impeached or reported on because of things that they'd said in the tea houses?
CHEN: No, very few. At that time everybody was on their guard.
XINRAN: So are the tea-drinking utensils the same as when you were small?
CHEN: Basically they're still the same. But at that time the tables were long plank benches. Now they've started using little square tables. That has its advantages too. Small groups of people can drink tea and play cards together.
XINRAN: Do you worry that now people are surrounded by the material trappings of modern life the tea houses will be replaced by modern materialistic things too?
CHEN: Before the Cultural Revolution there were two tea houses; now there are sixteen. We can see from this change that tea culture has also changed. And there are more tea houses opening soon. Each one has two hundred teapots. Sixteen tea houses, that's over three thousand pots. It won't be easy to replace that many.
XINRAN: Might modern teapots and teacups influence the culture of the tea houses? Aren't you worried that the Chinese tea culture you've been talking about will be changed, and people will start using pretty teapots with foreign words printed on them?
CHEN: Definitely not. Foreign letters and tea just don't mix!
XINRAN: In your childhood did you use tea bowls or teacups?
CHEN: Little handleless teacups, little bowls.
XINRAN: What I was drinking just now was in a little bowl.
CHEN: There aren't any of the tiny bowls like eggcups that they once used left now – we have to order them specially. A lot of the little kilns that used to produce tea bowls and handleless cups have gone out of business. We're getting ready for a return to terracotta bowls. We want the real, earthy local culture, so earthy that you can see the mud dropping off it. We want to preserve that real, genuine, authentic tea culture.
XINRAN: Do you think the young people support your attitude? Are they calling out for this "so local it's dropping mud" tea culture?
CHEN: Some support it, others don't.
XINRAN: Are there any young people who say that these ideas of yours and the things you're doing are ignorant and foolish?
CHEN: Yes, lots! And that includes some of the local officials. They can't see that these ancient relics are our fortune. People talk about holding up a golden bowl begging for food, but we're holding up a golden bowl waiting for food. Why don't they find a way to develop our own cultural resources, and put them to good use? No, they want to run after the Westerners' rubbish culture.
XINRAN: What's your children's attitude to you risking your life to protect historic sites?
CHEN: They have their own opinions. I just think that our generation has a responsibility to preserve Linhuan's ancient things. We can't break off the family line, we must continue it. If we don't, then the line of inheritance will be cut off in this generation.
XINRAN: Have you thought that this knowledge and awareness of yours should be continued in the next generation, and not just the tea culture? That your ideas on keeping ancient monuments ought to be carried on too?
CHEN: It ought to be, but everybody's ideas are different, and everyone takes a different path.
XINRAN: Can you persuade your children?
CHEN: Before, nobody in the family supported me, old or young. Now they support me, but what it'll be like once I'm gone, I don't know.
XINRAN: Those old men drinking tea – I noticed that there is a kind of contentment on their faces that you don't see in other places. Modern people, Chinese and Westerners both, live surrounded by tension and rush, with everybody seeking a good life in the future, leaving themselves no time to "live" in their own environment as a human being. Your Linhuan old people are not rich – very poor, even – but they live very peacefully in "their own" good life. This makes me wonder: What is a good life? Our Chinese tea can settle one's feelings, isn't that right?
CHEN: Yes, Linhuan's bangbang tea can bring calm to people's hearts. Linhuan's old town wall can lead modern people to a dialogue with the spirits of ancient people from over a thousand years ago. And Linhuan people also want to understand the world.
XINRAN: To me, you seem to be a fulcrum for local history, and you have made a great contribution to all of this. Just talking about you personally, in your whole life, what were the happiest and the most painful things that happened to you?
CHEN: The old people say that being let down is good fortune, suffering is good fortune, but eating, drinking and idling away one's life in pleasure is not good fortune. There are many things that give me pain. For example, when I go outside the village for a meeting, and see all those people who work in architecture putting up tall buildings and skyscrapers next door to historic sites, vandalising the original scenery, I'm agitated and bitter inside. All those ancient places of culture have been pulled down, destroyed, never to be seen again!
XINRAN: What do you think is the biggest difference between children when you were young and children today?
CHEN: Will and values. Their sense of values is different from mine, my values are about changing our poor, backward state, or raising the standard of living. People these days are pretty good at their jobs, and they know how to live, but they have no work ethic. When I work, the hard part comes first, enjoyment and happiness come afterwards, I've just kept on fighting, fighting the heavens, fighting the earth and fighting people. Sometimes it's just fighting people. If I weakened I'd be finished.
XINRAN: How do you fight with the officials? I've heard a lot of interesting stories about you.
CHEN: It was all over this street. At the time there was a county road that was going to pass through here, and I was determined not to give in. I wrote our project manifesto, and I took it to the county head asking him to sign. Then I took it to the city, to the provincial capital, and asked the Office of Cultural Artefacts to support me. I went to the Construction Department too. People tried to persuade me not to make such a song and dance of it, but I persisted. To this day, this is a Historic Culture Preservation Area; you can't dig it up to build a road. Without the culture there'd be a road but no people. This is an ancient town, yet we're destroying it. We can't do this. The head of the Construction Bureau said that everything was in place for the road, it couldn't be changed, but I fought him with reason. They said this and they said that, but I said that an ancient town should have the face of an ancient town.
XINRAN: And you won!
CHEN: Yes, and it's not just that I don't like losing, I alerted the people around me too.
XINRAN: I've also heard a story that there's a difference between your real age and your age as it appears on your official record, what's that about?
CHEN: I don't know what all that's about! The people in the Construction Committee say that I'm a youthful OAP, they say the age in my records is very young, just forty-eight this year. I'm baffled. I didn't put that in there, so who did? Who told them to write it? I went to the City Construction Committee. They told me to go to the Provincial Construction Bureau, who said it was so I could work a few more years preserving these ancient ruins, so those local cadres could learn a thing or two from me. They couldn't let me walk away early.
XINRAN: So how much younger are you in the files than your real age?
CHEN: More than twenty years!
XINRAN: Just now you said that no matter how the country changes, or the government changes, no matter how the policy changes, apart from the Cultural Revolution, tea houses have always kept their folk culture, which includes discussing everything. So what do people say about Mao Zedong?
CHEN: To be honest, they very seldom discuss Mao Zedong. I believe they must have their own views, but a lot of people are sick with rage at the empty boasting, bribery and corruption we see nowadays. Compared to that, they believe that Mao Zedong did a better job.
XINRAN: So what are your views on Mao Zedong?
CHEN: I think that he was a national leader and also a human being. There's no such thing as a perfect human being, you have to be realistic. His contribution to the nation's development can never be erased: he overturned the Three Great Mountains of imperialism, feudalism and capitalism, and he built up the new China. At that time nobody but Mao Zedong could have brought stability to a chaotic country like China was then. But there were problems with him too. The Great Leap Forward in 1958 saw the beginning of a kind of empty boastfulness within the Communist Party and led to the hard years of the 1960s. And he created the Cultural Revolution, which led to ten years of chaos. Although these things were eventually put to rights, the price was too high. It's just like taking a wife – many people act on a strong impulse at the beginning and end up miserable all their lives, but they can't say that they were wrong.
XINRAN: That leads me to my next question: when did you meet your wife, and how did you get to know her?
CHEN: In 1960. I was quartermaster at the Leinongzhuang Farm, she worked in the office at the middle school. I was taken over to meet her, and we got married. In those days, marrying when you reached a certain age was as natural for people in the countryside as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. Nobody gave much thought to "feelings" or "sympathy" or "cherishing the same ideals and following the same path".
XINRAN: Can you remember your wedding?
CHEN: I can. It was five yuan. It was simple – we just bought a big box of cigarettes, a few sweets, and that was that. It was fine.
XINRAN: With a personality like yours, did you come under attack in the Cultural Revolution?
CHEN: No. In the Cultural Revolution there were loads of factions. They always made you join this or that faction, and whether you took part or not you always ended up in the wrong. Finally three of us put together a headquarters and set up on our own.
XINRAN: Have you talked to your children about these times?
CHEN: They know some of it.
XINRAN: When they heard, how did they react?
CHEN [laughs]: None of them took it in!
XINRAN: I've heard that you have a serious stomach illness. You ought to get yourself treated as soon as possible by a proper doctor. The old tea houses of Linhuan need you to retain the health of a forty-year-old!
CHEN: Mao Zedong once said, "You can only listen to half of what the doctors say – for the other half, they have to do what I tell 'em!"
That night I barely slept. A feeling of oppression, of having no space to stretch out, welled up in my heart. I was both moved by "the peace and kindliness in every cup of tea" that the Linhuan people had derived from their poor life, and awed by the persistence of generations of local people like Chen Lei, looking for a future for their town, seeking the true value of their native land. I muttered a lot of these things to all the cockroaches and midges that were ceaselessly "exploring new territory" up and down my body. I think the blood racing through my veins that night must have satiated many of the mosquitoes and cockroaches that have lived side by side with Chinese peasants down the ages.
The following day at five thirty in the morning, half an hour after the time Old Mr Wu had given me, I was knocking on his front door.
Old Mr Wu was in the middle of preparing breakfast, and plainly surprised that I had kept my word, but he excitedly ushered me into his home, a converted store shed. This room was just like an antique shop or a junk shop, full of curiosities from his years of news-gathering: a magnetic Buddha, a clay statue of the Bodhisattva Guanyin, metal biscuit tins, plastic peonies, a long opium pipe of white jade, an agate snuffbox, a coarse pottery tea set and a redwood dressing table. On the wall directly opposite was a big row of portraits from Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping to Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the God of Wealth, a laughing Buddha and his grandparents and parents. He said that all of these were "gods" in which he neither quite believed nor completely disbelieved. His wife kept off to one side, smiling but never speaking. It was hard to see her as the first female Party member of Linhuan or that frighteningly competent female brigade leader.
Old Mr Wu, his wife and I sat down on little square stools in the outer courtyard. I told them that I felt there had been words between the lines in our interview yesterday, and this was why I had made a special trip for an unofficial interview.
When Old Mr Wu heard this, he suddenly knelt down in front of me and burst into loud weeping.
"The government appropriated the 10.2 mu of land allocated to me. It was all agreed – I was going to get over 60,000 yuan for it, to be paid in full in ten years. That was the rule. They were going to give me six thousand every year, but it's been seven years now, and they haven't even given me six hundred. They don't give me money and they don't give me land. This is what makes me angry! I've gone to speak to the people in the township government, I've been to the county government, and I've been to see the head of the law court, but nobody would listen to me, only people with no real power, and when they'd heard me out, they just said: 'Plenty of people have this problem, your turn hasn't come yet.' To this day nobody's given me an explanation.
"Where's the money? It's in the hands of the production brigade. They say they're borrowing it. The production brigade's taken it to dig ditches and roads, and I haven't seen a fen! I'm a peasant, with no money and no land. I'm old, and I can't do much business. How are my old lady and I supposed to live? That's what hurts me most. I'd like to buy a gong and go up to Beijing to shout out my grievances! I've been treated so unfairly!
"I've had such a raw deal, fifty years a Party member, working all these years. Back in Land Reform they only allocated me three mu of land! It took another forty years, till Reform and Opening, before they gave me my ten mu, and I lived off that land. Seven years and no money! I've been treated so unjustly. I'm wronged! Officials these days aren't like in my day. If they'd done that, Chairman Mao would have had their heads chopped off!"
Sitting opposite Old Mr Wu, the "written complaint" he had paid someone to write on his behalf clutched in my hands, my heart ached. These peasants who thought that young Westerners in fashionable "begging jeans" were poor, and that doing hard, ill-regarded labour in the city was to "enjoy life and make big money", did not even have the basic information or understanding they needed to live in the same era. But they had never made demands for a better life to the rich and powerful who requisitioned them into bankruptcy. Yet those "mother and father officials" who have survived until today only because the peasants kept to their work instead of throwing down their hoes to make revolution and class struggle apparently never paused in their daily banquets to consider the price the peasants have paid with their blood and sweat.
China's peasants have been treated as a part of the 10,000 things of nature, a group that nobody notices. People are concerned about the melting of the ice caps, they fret over the disappearance of the Asian tigers, they fume at the desert swallowing up the green lands, they even have interminable discussions over the right combination of vitamins for every dish of food. But how many people are calling out for an improvement in the living conditions of the Chinese peasants? How many people pause to consider the bowls of weak vegetable soup in China's poverty-stricken villages, with just a few grains of rice added to stave off hunger? How many people would go to read a story like "The Gourd Children" or "The Monkey King" to the children of poor farmers who don't even know which end to open a book at or where to start reading from on the page, so that those hearts, whose first awareness was of days and nights of hunger, cold and disease, can have their share of goals and beautiful memories like the rest of us? How many people realise that helping those poverty-stricken, uneducated peasants begins with wresting power from local officials who in turn have no education and simply do not understand the law?
China has become strong, China has stood up, but we cannot stand on the shoulders of the peasants for the world to admire how tall we are. We cannot let the peasants' blood and sweat water the tree of our national pride.
<a l:href="#_ftnref8">[8]</a> Shang dynasty: 1600-1046 BC; Zhou dynasty: 1046-256 BC.
<a l:href="#_ftnref8">[9]</a> Spring and Autumn Period: 770-476 BC.