Yellow River Odyssey. Bill Porter
several times to ask directions. I finally found the lane I was looking for and then the plaque for Lu Hsun’s home. The two-story brick house was normally open to the public, but it was closed that day. A man across the lane saw me and said the caretaker kept the place closed whenever it rained in order to keep people from tracking mud inside. The man’s name was Li Hou. He said he was an artist, and he invited me to join him for a cup of tea. While I sat in an armchair in his living room, he showed me his paintings, unrolling them one by one on the room’s cement floor. The long paper scrolls of black ink and colored washes made me think Lu Hsun had simply packed up and moved across the lane and exchanged the realism of youth for the abstraction of old age.
I would have stayed longer, but I didn’t have time to linger. I thanked my host and headed back to the hotel. By the time I got back, it was dark. I looked outside my window again at the Bund. All the buildings were lit up. “Bund” was a Hindi word for a river embankment or promenade. The English picked up the word when they colonized India. And they brought the word with them to Shanghai along with opium. And that night their descendents had paid the city US$5,000 to turn on the lights normally reserved for special holidays, such as Lunar New Year and National Day.
In the distance, I could see taxis pulling up to the Peace Hotel and partygoers getting out. I walked down and crossed the bridge that spanned Suchou Creek and joined them. I entered the hotel’s revolving door along with several couples. And as we did so, we were greeted by a gauntlet of young Chinese girls wearing white ballet tutus and waving bouquets. We walked past them and waved back and crowded into an elevator. Eight floors later, we were swept into the ballroom. At the door, the maitre d’ was collecting invitations, and I didn’t have one. And my purple parka did not exactly match the formal attire of the other guests. He motioned me aside. But I was prepared. I had a camera hanging from my neck, and I showed him my Hong Kong journalist ID. It was for Metro News, the English-language radio station where I worked. It didn’t occur to the man that radio journalists didn’t use cameras. But he waved me in anyway, and I joined a throng of more than 500 gowned and tuxedoed expatriates who were there to party. Just in case someone was looking, I took a few photos. But mostly I danced.
The music was supplied by the Peace Hotel’s Old Time Jazz Band, whose members were in their seventies and eighties. They had managed to survive the Cultural Revolution, and they could still play the “Chatanooga Choo-choo.” Fortunately, their age soon caught up with them, and they were replaced by a Chinese rock-and-roll band that blew out two sets of speakers playing Jimi Hendrix. The party lasted all night, and at noon the next day I boarded a coastal steamer heading north.
The Bund, Shanghai
CHINGTAO
The ship was listing badly, and I was surprised it left at all. It even left on time and without fanfare. No one waved goodbye. I was on a ship full of migrant workers heading home. They watched silently from the ship’s railing as we moved slowly down the Huangpu River past factories and shipyards and the Paoshan Steel Mill and into the muddy Yangtze and finally into the equally muddy East China Sea.
I shared a second-class cabin with seven other passengers. Third-class had twenty bunks to a cabin. And fourth-class had no bunks at all, just an empty floor. You had to bring your own bedding, or at least some cardboard. There was no first-class, not on a ship like this. But outside on the main deck, we were all equal. Outside, there were easily a hundred other passengers, and we all watched the sun go down and the sky fill with stars. Then we all went to bed. One of the crew members came by and dimmed the cabin lights. He said the lights were never turned completely off to prevent thefts. Somewhere in the night the sea turned green, and I spent the next day stretched out on a hatch cover basking in the sun and from time to time reading a few lines of the Diamond Sutra, thinking maybe this trip I would understand it.
Chingtao Brewery
We finally reached Chingtao in the late afternoon. Although that part of the coast had been used for centuries to offload grain for transshipment to North China, a major port wasn’t established there until Germany occupied the area after two German priests were killed in 1897. Since then, Chingtao had become a city of a million residents. And they were joined by ten million tourists every summer on the city’s beaches – or beach. As many as 250,000 people a day crowded 600-meter-long First Beach. Second and Third Beach were not open to the public. They were reserved for senior party members and government officials. It was a town where Chinese VIPs came to relax.
It was too cold to go swimming in March, but Chingtao didn’t mean beaches to me, it meant beer. I drank my first Chingtao in 1977 on the Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona. China’s Cultural Revolution had just ended, and the Apaches, as always, were trying to annoy the US government (bless their hearts). So they started importing Chingtao. It was a great hit with all of us who were working in the Forest Service, and we often went miles out of our way to stop at the reservation store on the way home after a day of working in the woods to enjoy a cool one from China.
Camellia tree at Taichingkung
And there I was at the Chingtao Brewery at nine o’clock the next morning, listening to the official in charge of visitors point out how the foam clung to the sides of the glass – a sign, he said, of a superior beer. I drank four superior beers and followed him into the bottling plant. The brewery, he said, was founded in 1903 by German and English brewers, and the beer was made with hops from Central Asia, grain from Australia and Canada, and water from nearby Laoshan. After fermenting for sixty days, it went to the bottling plant, where I watched a labyrinth of bottles being steamed, cooled, filled, capped, labeled and sent off to my friends in the White Mountains of Arizona. Sufficiently primed for the day, I went back to my hotel and hired a taxi to take me to the mountain that supplied the water for the beer, not to mention the water for the tea drunk by some of China’s most famous Taoist masters. Over 2,200 years ago, one of them convinced China’s first emperor that the Island of the Immortals was in the ocean just east of Laoshan. The emperor gave him a ship, rich presents, 500 servants (to attend the immortals) and orders to bring back the elixir.
From Chingtao, the road to Laoshan hugged the coast and led past beds of kelp and mussels and several small harbors of fishing boats. Along one stretch of beach, I asked the driver to stop so I could see the place where the ship bound for the Island of the Immortals sailed from but to which it never returned. Despite such failure, Laoshan had remained a center of Taoist practice, and not far from that strangely vacant beach, I arrived at Taichingkung Temple and the residence of one of China’s most famous living Taoist masters, K’uang Ch’ang-hsiu.
Master K’uang lived at the foot of Laoshan in one of the temple’s courtyards. Tourists were not allowed inside that part of the temple, but someone had left a side gate open, and I slipped through it. I saw Master K’uang in a reception hall talking to a young man. But when the Master’s attendants saw me, they waved for me to leave. As I turned to go, the young man said something to Master K’uang, and the attendants called me back. Master K’uang motioned for me to come inside the hall and sit beside him. The young man turned out to be a Taoist priest I had met a year earlier in the Chungnan mountains a thousand kilometers to the west. Adding one surprise on top of another, he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the name card I had given him the year before. Even Master K’uang laughed at the serendipity.
He was eighty-eight, with a foot-long white beard, a top-knot of silver hair sticking through his black hat, and he was holding onto a cane of twisted wood. When I asked him about Taoist practice, he said it wasn’t easy, but anyone could do it, but that was all he would say. His attendants hurried him off to lunch, and I went outside with the young Taoist I had met the year before. I asked him why he wasn’t wearing his robes. He said Taoist temples were no longer good places to practice. He was going