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Interpreters, guides and Responsible Persons (i.e., bosses) have received the message: Be nice to our Foreign Friends; they are our guests. In the villages and factories and back streets that are visited without advance notice, the people are as warmly receptive as any on the scheduled tour. Only in these places, in small takes, can the visitor fight free of Instamatic Blur. He/she will not begin to understand China; even the Chinese do not profess to understand China. However, by osmosis and ingestion one can return home with vivid brush strokes on the mind.
China is ... China, the ancient Middle Kingdom, the world's oldest continuous civilization, a people and a nation that for 4,000 years has regarded the rest of the planet with condescension, if not contempt. China is at the same time a modern country of exquisite civility and, for now, past its sanguinary internal disruptions, of eminent practicality. The People's Republic, urgently in need of foreign funds, technology and support, has only in recent months begun to lift the Bamboo Curtain for Americans; 15,000 U.S. tourists will have visited the mainland by year's end.
The average visitor today does not venture far beyond two dozen cities, though the Chinese promise access next year to such regions as Szechwan, Inner Mongolia, even Tibet, all hitherto denied the ordinary voyager. Though the Foreign Friend's days are rigorously ordained —factory, school, temple, tomb, museum, commune, clinic, department store and garden—any early-rising, enterprising F.F. can roam at will, sniffing, savoring, snapping, visiting and, with the help of an interpreter, freely conversing.
The Chinese are dismally housed, for the most part, with one of the world's densest urban populations. Yet in Shanghai or Canton, there is little sense of the tensions and frictions so close to the surface of American, European or other Asian cities. One explanation is that the citizenry is governed by a public ethic that was not evident before the 1949 Revolution, or Liberation, as the Chinese prefer to call it. If, for example, a young person comes home with a wristwatch or a transistor radio that has obviously been stolen or otherwise illicitly acquired, he must not only surrender it; he must also undergo a somewhat Orwellian regimen of "self-criticism."
Life in China begins before dawn. On city streets, which are the patios and front yards of the oppressively cramped worker, mothers braid daughters' lustrous black hair in time for school, sisters hang out the laundry on poles, grannies mold patties of coal dust and mud, fuel for the evening meal. Aunties hurry home with the rice ration in open bowls. Fathers split wood, small children chop vegetables. Good ole boys play Chinese chess or pai-fen, a complicated poker.
People of all ages stop to buy rice porridge or yu-t'iao, a deep-fried cruller that sells for 20. Others, in every available space, are somberly engaged in t'ai-chi-ch'uan, the balletic, trancelike exercise that is supposed to tone all muscles and compose the soul.