Majesty, squalor, civility and smiles in a gee whiz Instamatic Blur
And I only wrote half of what I saw...
— Marco Polo, recalling his travels in China, A.D. 1324
The People's Republic of China is as much a land of paradox and poesy, blood, sweat, glory and incongruity as the riven country that greeted Marco Polo. The temples and tombs, palaces and pagodas and gardens, majestic mountains and mighty rivers, art and artifacts as old as civilization: they are all there, glittering, tangible and not quite believable. Off the usual tourist track are the ramshackle tenements, mud-walled village cottages and the grinding labor of the peasant, equally hard for the Westerner to comprehend. They will all become picture postcards of the mind, but on first encounter they are closer to hallucination than reality.
A tourist is prepared for the pyramids or the Parthenon. But the Great Wall of China? More than 2,480 mortised miles of esplanade, built over the bodies of 300,000 serfs and some of the world's ruggedest mountain terrain, to no ultimate military purpose. On a windswept turret of the wall completed in 214 B.C., in a 500-year-old pavilion of the Forbidden City or Soochow's leaning Tiger Hill Pagoda (it has a 3¾° tilt), the visitor is not so much awed as numbed. Who were—and are — the people who could construct such fantasies? What else have they wrought? Are there other such marvels and monstrosities to be seen or expected? The Foreign Friend, as he is designated today, faces the same quandary that confronted the great Italian: Can I record half the things I have witnessed? Will anyone believe me if I describe them?
The latter-day Polo, the F.F., comes with camera, tape recorder and ballpoint pen. Thus he returns with certain authenticated truths. He comes also with the knowledge that he is visiting the world's most populous nation, perhaps a billion people inhabiting a land mass only slightly larger than the U.S. It is of course a Communist nation long opposed to America. It is an authoritarian society in which the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung's sayings, statue or visage (often today paired with that of Chairman Hua Kuo-feng) dominates every public place—though Mao buttons and the once ubiquitous little Red Book of Mao's quotations are seldom seen today. The people professedly live and work by Mao-Marxist cliches insisting that everyone's labor is for the greater good of socialism. In reality, as in any other country in the world, that means work hard and make a buck.
Descending from ship or train or plane, with a minimum of immigration fuzzbuzz, the F.F. sees the world's most intensively cultivated fields, wheat and rice and sorghum and countless vegetables, pressing to the edge of every road, rail and airport runway. He sees the back streets of cities, busy from dawn to dusk, where every human activity save copulation is conducted alfresco. Then occurs the gee whiz Instamatic Blur. The people smiling and waving and clapping from city sidewalks and country lanes. The painfully hand-inscribed WARMLY WELCOMING boards. The impression, away from every preprogrammed and official event, that this is an extraordinarily relaxed, amiable and open society.