I Stand Corrected Read online

  IF PROUST WAS right and the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes, I am that literal interpretation. It was a fifty-year-old man—killed not in holiday traffic but by a brain tumor—who returned my vision. My eyes have now accumulated more than a century of sight on behalf of both genders, and I am fortunate to be able to see clearly that which lies ahead of me, including China’s antithetical pathways for the blind.

  THERE WERE OTHER, more lighthearted discoveries made in the immediate area of the St. Regis Hotel.

  One was a neighborhood called Yabaolu. The name means “elegant treasure road” and had been beautified from the original Yaba Hutong, or “mute man’s alley.” Business signs there are in Russian written in Cyrillic. The ethnic enclave consists predominately of fur traders from Siberia, but there are also Poles and Ukrainians who owned pelt stalls on what is appropriately named Alien Street.

  Directly across from Alien Street is the relative quiet of Ritan Park. One of four royal shrines, it was built in 1530 as a place of worship for the Ming and Qing imperial courts. Within its walls is an eleven-hundred-year-old cypress with twisting, upwardly pointing branches. Not far from the ancient tree, old women practice traditional dance and old men do tai chi in the mornings. Skulking around the periphery are feral cats.

  In preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing’s homeless were shipped away and the thousands of cats roaming the city were rounded up. Both the homeless and the cats returned, and though it is not accepted practice among the Chinese to feed the homeless, cats are another matter. In the late afternoons—before it becomes dark—legions of cats tentatively emerge from the city’s nooks to be fed by the old people. Their increasing numbers in the park might explain the corresponding decrease in the number of squirrels, and the reason cameras come out whenever a lone squirrel is spotted.

  Unlike the Chinese, I am not charmed by squirrels, the result of an unattractive encounter with one years ago in New York.

  Admittedly, I made the mistake of feeding the squirrel when he first appeared on the windowsill of my brownstone apartment. A shelled walnut gave the squirrel an excellent reason to reappear the next morning. Summarily ignoring our cat on the other side of the glass, the squirrel stood on his hind legs in order to make eye contact with me. He waited expectantly for a repeat of the walnut. When it wasn’t offered, he defecated on the sill. His effrontery disgusted me and appalled the cat.

  On the third morning, the squirrel scratched furiously at the windowpane, and the darker implications began to sink in.

  By the fourth morning—when I realized I was being prevented from cracking the window to let in fresh air—the squirrel lost all charm.

  I opened the window and sprayed him in the face with glass cleaner. He staggered backward and fell off the sill.

  Having survived my frontal attack, the squirrel launched a devastating one of his own. I came home from work to discover he’d dug up all three of my carefully cultivated window boxes. It was brazen destruction of personal property, and I was left with no choice but to call an exterminator.

  “What will it take to get rid of him?” I asked.

  “He has to be caught and moved,” he said.

  “Fine,” I agreed. “But I don’t want him killed. Once you’ve caught the squirrel, throw a sheet over the trap, walk it across the street, and let him out in Central Park.”

  “It’s not that simple,” said the exterminator. “Squirrels have incredible homing instincts. He’ll need to be relocated on the other side of a body of water so he doesn’t find his way back.”

  “Jesus, this sounds more complicated than the witness protection program. What about the other side of the Turtle Pond behind the zoo?”

  “That’s too close.”

  “How about the reservoir on Ninetieth Street?”

  “That will work,” said the exterminator. “I’ll be at your apartment Monday morning.”

  “Is that the soonest you can come? I can’t crack any of the windows. The damn thing will squeeze through.”

  “We don’t work on weekends. Monday morning, I’ll set the trap. You’ll find him in it by the time you come home. Store it in your basement overnight and I’ll pick it up Tuesday morning.”

  “Wait, do you mean I store the trap with the squirrel in it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Overnight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I’m not going to store the squirrel in the basement of a brownstone building. I’ll meet you at the apartment at three o’clock on Monday. I promise, if food is involved, the squirrel will show up.”

  On the designated day, at the designated time, I left the office to watch someone charge me a small fortune to bait a squirrel cage with a tablespoon of peanut butter. The trap was placed on the window ledge. Not one minute later, the squirrel appeared. So nonchalant was he that when the trap door shut, he didn’t bother looking up.

  “Will you drive your car up in front of the building?” asked the exterminator as he lifted the trapped but unconcerned squirrel through the open window and into my apartment.

  “I don’t keep a car in the city,” I said.

  “Well, how am I supposed to get the squirrel to the reservoir?”

  “Are you telling me that you took public transportation to get here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You never said anything about a car. And I have to get back to the office for a four o’clock meeting. I’ll put you in a cab.”

  “Lady, not even a New York cabdriver will pick me up when he sees what I’m carrying.”

  “Well, just what do you suggest we do?” I asked, restraining my temper.

  “What about a car service?” he suggested.

  Twenty minutes later, a town car arrived in front of my apartment to transport the squirrel, along with his real estate broker, to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

  The expense of my New York encounter with the squirrel did not endear me to the few that appeared in Ritan Park. But I do share the Chinese people’s fondness for ducks. Tucked in one of the pathways behind the park was a makeshift storefront no larger than a phone booth belonging to an old man who fixed bags, belts, and shoes. I brought all of my leather items under the pretense of repair so that I could check the progress of an orphaned duckling that trailed behind the man’s small dog—small because owning a not-small dog is technically illegal in China, though Chairman’s family had two extremely large Labrador retrievers in snow white.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  In the opposite direction of the leather man, his dog, and his duckling was the Silk Market. Its eponymous product is sold on the third floor and takes up only a very small part of the large market, which contains some seventeen hundred retail stalls filled to the brim with knockoffs of Western brands of clothing, makeup, suitcases, toys, ties, digital cameras, mobile phones, binoculars, and everything in between. China’s stance on the issue of trademark infringement appears on an enormous red sign at the main entrance, which states—without the slightest trace of parody—that all goods in the market are guaranteed to be authentic and of good quality. Unprepared tourists are seen reduced to tears as they try to fend off aggressive salesgirls accosting them in the aisles. With no set prices, bargaining is a process of one-upmanship played out on calculators.

  Less chaotic is Panjiayuan, Beijing’s giant flea market. Known as the “dirt market” because it was exaggeratedly claimed that peasants would cart in objects they’d unearthed, it features every imaginable curio and antique, including snuff bottles, porcelain bowls, Tibetan beads, white jade, bronze wares, and paintings of landscapes on long rolls of silk and paper. My regular sojourns to Panjiayuan were in the company of Roger, a colleague since my days at Hearst. His Saturday visits to the market had stretched over twenty years.

  Roger appeared to have stepped out of a Graham Greene novel. He wrote poetry, spoke several Asian languages, possessed a Homeric knowledge of Asia-related m
atters, had belonged to the Australian foreign service, and had at one point very likely been a spy. By the time we met, he held a senior post at Phoenix Satellite Television, a major TV station in China not owned or run by the state.

  Adding to Roger’s aura of mystery was his impressively large collection of Chinese erotica. That he was a gentleman provided us with the unspoken understanding that I would never see this collection. It also allowed me an unencumbered friendship not only with him but with his delightful wife and daughter.

  Erotica in China can be traced to the first century. It featured an infinitely diverse range of sexual prospects performed in ambitiously acrobatic positions often by more than two people. Chinese erotica flourished in the tenth century, when it drew its influence from the courtesan culture of the imperial courts. At some point in the seventeenth century, China adopted an extreme prudishness and erotica was forbidden.

  In the Confucian Analects, it reads, “The Master said, ‘I have never met a man who loves ethics more than he does sex,’ ” which presupposes that the former precludes the latter. The Cultural Revolution renounced sexual impulses and demanded they be redirected to the political cause. Mao institutionalized the separation of the sexes, an instinct that still remains among young people in China. In general, sex has been relegated to the functional purpose of reproducing and—to a measured degree—reserved for physical gratification within marriage. Premarital sex is not considered an aspiration of women’s liberation. However, I’ve seen sex shops in China, even though pornography is illegal there.

  There is sex and there is love, and, in China, it seems the two are not well known to each other. Love poetry in classical Chinese literature never achieved the same sublime rank it did in Western literature. Even with their low-tide approach, romance poems were reinterpreted as moral allegories by Confucius. Centuries later, communism assigned the idea of love a devotional purpose, grounded in sociopolitical issues.

  Roger’s attitude toward his erotica collection was in keeping with China’s tradition of discretion. I was never shown the artifacts he considered purchasing at Panjiayuan, and we sought common ground in the market’s erotica-free zone of the bookstalls.

  Points of interest beyond Beijing’s various markets required me to learn the city’s metro stops. One brought me to the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution, a war museum, featuring row upon row of antiquated tanks, each with a sign: MADE IN CHINA. Cutting across Tiananmen Square afterward, I stopped to study an enormous obelisk that is the Monument to the People’s Heroes. Not far from the monument was a conclave of young men lingering around something I was unable to make out. As a foreigner, I would impart validity to whatever it was that was being deliberately obscured by the crowd, and so those standing next to me urged those standing in front to give way so I might see.

  In the center was a young man holding a long calligraphy brush. I watched as he dipped the brush in a sawed-off plastic Coke bottle filled with dirty water and wrote hurriedly on the pavement. The approach of an army officer scattered the crowd. I was left standing over words of dissent compressed into a few quick characters. Flung fearlessly on the pavement, they lasted the short time it took for them to be absorbed by the cement.

  China has come by its reputation for censorship without apology. Logging on to any public server in mainland China—including those at the increasing number of Starbucks coffeehouses—requires your cell phone number. Newsstands do not carry English-language newspapers or magazines, and even publications sold at the airports are tampered with. I realized just how hands-on the censors are with their vetting process when I purchased The Economist at Guangzhou’s airport and discovered pages missing. From the cover line, I assumed what had been ripped out was an article on China’s Politburo, the nerve center of the government. When I returned the magazine to the vendor and asked for another copy, he told me that all of the magazines featured the same omission and that the pages were torn out on the loading dock before the magazines had been delivered. Visualizing the logistics of what that entailed was enough for me to realize the Ministry of Information’s maniacal level of operational efficiency. Recently, it has required that some 307,000 Chinese reporters, editors, and broadcasters attend a mandatory two-day course on Marxism, presumably a prerequisite to keep their press passes.

  Although privately and publicly held media companies exist in China, the Western ones are limited to a minority ownership, and those run by the state retain a significant market share. The State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television and the General Administration of Press and Publication set strict regulations on taboo subjects. Topics disallowed coverage in the media are not dissimilar to those banned from debate in universities.

  Paper, printing, and dictionaries—all Chinese inventions—have been subordinated by the Internet and its wraparound influence. How long China’s newly empowered citizens—most of whom have access to the web on handheld devices—will continue to cooperate with their one-party government, which operates on its own timetable and according to its own needs, is another question entirely.

  In addition to my work with Chairman, I had a consulting arrangement with another Chinese businessman. In a grand gesture to impress the Chinese delegation he was traveling to London with, he purchased a British cable station during the course of their trip. Returning to Beijing a week later, the man had no idea what to do with the station. At his request, I met with a senior officer in China’s State Council Information Office, a government agency that now includes the Internet Affairs Bureau. I was impressed with the young man in charge, but he gave me no way of knowing whom, exactly, he was representing: the government or my client.

  Both, it turns out.

  The State Council Information Office has been mandated by the party to ensure that news from China is justly represented in Western markets. Impressive inroads have been made. China Daily began to appear in various foreign editions during the time I was writing The Tao of Improving Your Likability. Since then, its management has entered into co-ventures with cash-strapped non-Chinese media companies. Censored news from China is now distributed by Western newspapers, which are coproducing—and inserting in their pages—special sections of China Daily.

  While China’s narrow version of the news is widening its global distribution, Western hotels are the only local outlets selling the Financial Times and The New York Times. Those same hotels, along with diplomatic compounds, have access to the BBC, CNN, and Bloomberg News, but it is believed that CNN’s broadcast agreement with China stipulates that the network’s signal must first pass through a Chinese-controlled satellite. Blacked-out content comes in broad strokes: reports of unrest in Tibet, tainted food, and Chinese dissidents are three of the usual suspects. When warranted, China’s censorship can drill down to specifics. During the state-run China Central Television’s coverage of President Obama’s first inaugural address, there was no audio when he spoke of how “earlier generations faced down fascism and communism.”

  In addition to censoring information, China manages its own news. Though that process lacks subtlety when dealing with political criticism, it is an effective means of covering natural disasters in China, of which there are many. Immediately after a horrific earthquake while I was there, all Western broadcast stations were blocked in Western hotels and compounds. For three days, I watched identical footage, appearing simultaneously on all channels, of the Chinese army rescuing devastated villagers. No broadcast advertising was allowed for those same three days, and print advertising was banned from showing people smiling.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  China Central Television, CCTV, is the nation’s largest network. The sequential launch of its various channels speaks for the nation’s cultural agenda. CCTV-1, its general programming channel, was launched in 1958, followed by CCTV-2, its finance channel, in 1963. Six years later came the arts-focused CCTV-3. Launched in 1992, CCTV-4, the network’s international channel, spawned CCTV channels for Europ
e and America. Subsequent channels were devoted to sports, the military and agriculture, and Chinese opera. The most recent channel—and a personal favorite—is the Chinese version of an entertainment channel. It airs soap operas and game shows.

  One of China’s more popular soap operas is a historical romance that tells the story of Zhenhuan, an imperial concubine during the Qing dynasty. Possessing unmatched beauty and fierce intelligence, Zhenhuan manages to rise above the other concubines—and even the empress—to become the emperor’s favorite and the most powerful woman at court.

  Women prevailing against the odds seems to offer universal appeal, for I have viewed variations on that theme on television screens wherever I’ve traveled, including the unlikely location of Santiago de Compostela.

  The name of this city in Galicia in northwestern Spain means St. James in the Field of Stars, and it has a long history of drawing travelers from distant parts of the world. Legend has it that the bones of the Apostle James made their way to the Iberian Peninsula for burial and were eventually discovered by a Galician shepherd who was guided to the spot by a star. A church built over the relics was later replaced by the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, which became the destination of the medieval pilgrimage route known as the Way of St. James.

  “How did the bones get to Spain in the first place?” asked Gilliam when he was a boy and I suggested a trip there.

  It was a fair question. Before I could consider it, he was already on to the next.

  “What proof is there that they’re actually his bones? And I don’t believe the part about the star. It’s always used to move the plot ahead when they can’t explain the story.”

  “It’s a legend,” I pointed out. “Legends require a leap of faith.”

  “Just how far of a leap?” he asked.