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F E A T U R E S Sleepless in L.A.
Giving good gnocchi
Meeting Moses
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Table Talk
Salon Taste
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- - - - - - - - E A R L I E R Tuesday April 15 My Favorite Flick
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the river A T T H E C E N T E R O F T H E W O R L D 
| e x c e r p t |
"The River
+ + + + + + + + Reviewed by Morris Dye there is a familiar literary impulse that has driven many a travel writer
to climb, traverse, circumnavigate, or otherwise negotiate the dimensions
of some significant topographical feature -- a continent, an ocean, perhaps
even the earth itself -- and to submit his or her journals to a publisher
so that all the world might share in the ordeal. In the wrong hands, such
pilgrimages can lead to gimmicky volumes that seem motivated less by true
journalistic inspiration than by the need to convince a tight-fisted
editor to hand over a generous book advance.
Not so in the case of Simon Winchester's epic account of a journey up the
Yangtze, which flows through 3,900 miles of geographically diverse
and culturally rich territory from the Tibetan highlands to the East
China Sea. Winchester brings impressive credentials to the undertaking: a
trained geologist's eye, a nose for history, a ruthless disregard for
Chinese bureaucrats and a damn-the-torpedoes attitude that propels him
headlong into the many obstacles -- physical, cultural and official -- that
lie in his path. The resulting narrative is a highly palatable blend of
history and geography, reflecting years of voracious research, woven
together with entertaining anecdotes and observations from the tortuous
excursion through modern China.
Winchester himself comes across in the book as a blithe spirit, and
something of a playboy who shows no restraint in his admiration for the
many attractive hotel clerks, waitresses, secretaries and peasant girls he
encounters. But his passion for the river and for the well-being of the
500 million people who live on its banks shines through, particularly in
his look at current controversies surrounding the construction of the
massive Three Gorges hydroelectric dam. When completed, the project will
flood the celebrated gorges all the way to Chongqing, displacing millions
of people and permanently altering the ecological balance of the entire
Yangtze basin.
Winchester's considerable skill as a spinner of yarns sometimes leaves
one wondering if he has taken certain liberties with the historical
record, or embellished certain facts of his journey for literary effect.
But before we condemn the author for stretching the truth, let us remember
that according to official Chinese policy, Chairman Mao was 70
percent right and only 30 percent wrong; if the engineer of the
disastrous Great Leap Forward and an effective proponent of the Three
Gorges dam can be judged so lightly, it seems only fair to tolerate a
touch of poetic license in this well-crafted and inspiring tale. | e x c e r p t | Crushed, torn and curled BY SIMON WINCHESTER | And so it was with a sense of mounting excitement that I eventually tracked down the gate to the Lushan Tea Research Institute. It had taken us two hours of patient searching along the butterfly-filled lanes of the hilltop -- past caves and waterfalls and beside cliffs that loomed high over the whorls of the distant Yangtze -- before I found what I wanted. It was three in the afternoon, pleasantly warm, the air filled with scents of late spring -- an appropriate time I thought to see the Lushan Institute, the cosmic center of whatever was left of the world of Chinese tea. "Go away!" was the first thing anybody said. "This place has nothing to do with tea." Three policemen were sprawled on the sun-dappled glass outside a decrepit mansion. One of them, the man who had shouted, got to his feet and started swinging a black-metal billy club. "Electric tip," warned Lily. She had pointed out clubs like this before, back in Shanghai. They had batteries and a coil inside, and were used for crowd control. They could inflict a nasty shock if the policeman didn't like you. I pointed to the brass plaque on the gate outside. "Not here," said the guard. "Next door." We walked next door, to a small outhouse of a building that connected to the old mansion by a low corridor. It seemed empty, except that in one office on the second floor we found one old woman asleep at her desk. Was this the research institute? we asked. No, she said. Over the road. We crossed the lane to a third building, Grecian style, overlooking gardens. There was a receptionist here. Tea institute? we said. Not here, she replied. Over the road. Building on the left. The very building, as it happened, from which we had been ejected in the first place. The policemen were still there, and this time they lay mutely as we marched past them. This building turned out to be empty too, although there was a poster showing a young woman picking tea on a misty hillside, which augured well. We peered into each office on all three of the floors. It had been a foreign-built club, by the look of things, perhaps a summertime chummery. There was no one there. On the way down the back staircase, however, we met a man -- middle-aged, smoking, sandals, a querulous look on his long and lugubrious face. He appeared to have been woken up, and he rubbed his eyes with surprise on seeing us. Tea institute, we asked again? "Yes, yes," he said, in a tone of sleepy exasperation. "This is the place. Come to my office, building across the road. I will telephone." He picked up an old black Bakelite telephone and bellowed into it, assuming that I wouldn't understand. "Ling! Wake up, Ling!" he said. "There's a blessed foreigner here. Round up everybody. Go to the meeting room!" Five minutes later and we were sitting in his office on pink polyester-ruched armchairs in a room furnished like a schoolroom. The lugubrious man, who introduced himself as a Dr. Ye, had by now assembled three equally sleepy-looking men, one of whom was Ling. The door kept opening to admit latecomers. None looked very good-tempered. A very old woman came in staggering under the weight of a huge iron kettle and did the rounds of the room, filling everyone's beakers with well-boiled tea. Most people lit cigarettes and sat staring at me. It was ten minutes before everyone was assembled, and then Dr. Ye looked across, waiting for a question. I said something about how sad it was that China's tea industry had withered away. Maybe -- maybe this august research institute was going to breathe new life into it, I ventured, hopefully. There was a long pause. "Rice," said Dr. Ye eventually. It was not exactly what I had been expecting. "Come again?" I inquired. "Rice. Jiujiang is a big rice exporting town." He looked around him. There were nods of approval, then silence again. One man was already falling asleep, his cigarette dangling dangerously. I tried to focus Dr. Ye's mind. "But wasn't this a big tea city, once upon a time?" There was a further long pause, broken only by snoring. His next declaration made me start. "They employ virgin girls," he said. "They used to pierce their tongues with needles. They were the best." This conversation was generating a sort of strange fog, although through it I could discern small dark objects that did seem to relate to tea, if peripherally. I had once heard an old story to the effect that the finest Lushan teas were picked only by virgin girls, and that the green leaves were sent by courier to the Emperor himself. Why the girls pricked their tongues with needles was never clear, and Dr. Ye did not choose to enlighten me. "We have developed a machine for picking." He let this remark hang in the smoky air. So this is where the conversation was going. It did have a certain time-lapse logic about it. Rice had supplanted tea as the region's major export; once virgin girls were used to pick the two-leaves-and-a-bud, and now the scientists of the Lushan Institute -- these sleepy, bad-tempered men assembled here, perhaps -- had developed a tea-plucking machine. If this was so, it was a clear breakthrough. The Georgians once tried to put a modified hedge-cutter to lop the leaves in their Caucasus foothills; and the Japanese made something that looked like a pelican. But both were disasters. Only humans -- young, agile, and willing to work for a pittance -- could pick tea properly. That was a reality the industry had been living with for hundreds of years, though the dreamers continued to dream. "Really," I said, suddenly interested. "Can I see it? Where is it?" Dr. Ye's knees suddenly started to vibrate in a most curious way, as though they were seismograph needles recording a distant earthquake. Several men closed their eyes -- meaning that, with the number already asleep, the whole room looked to be at prayer. But Dr. Ye, left alone to answer the question, looked uneasy. "It is not here," he replied. Where is it? I asked. "Nanchang," he said. Had he a picture of it? "The film is being developed." A paper I could glance at? An article? "It is in the office, but" -- and he brightened -- "there is no key!" So I tried to press him on what else the Lushan Institute did. "We have one hundred people here," he replied. His knees had stopped shaking. The quake was past. He said with evident pride: "They spread the knowledge of tea." The room fell silent again, except for some gentle snoring in a corner. So could I see some people picking tea? I asked. "It is not the season," said Dr. Ye, and laughed gently. Then -- could I perhaps look in on the processing plant? "So sorry. It is being cleaned. Maintenance time." The tea I was drinking today -- the tea in the big kettle which the aged woman was bringing around again, weaving her way unsteadily between the sprawled feet of the snoozing accidents -- was this Lushan Misty Clouds Green Tea? "I don't know," said Dr. Ye. "I think we don't have any. Maybe at the shop." Lily rolled her eyes, and suggested that we leave. We were learning little. We stood up. Immediately the room came alive, the men rubbing their eyes, lighting fresh cigarettes, smiling. Dr. Ye led us out. "We are so glad you could come. May we have your business card please. You are interested in investing here, maybe?" In the car I laughed, but Lily erupted. "This kind of thing makes me really ashamed of China, you know. That you should see such people. They are idiots. These fucking cadres." I hadn't heard her employ such colorful language before: I was starting to enjoy this. There was no stopping her now. "Old Communists, useless old men who get put into jobs like this where they do nothing, nothing. They just sit around and talk and smoke all day, and get paid fat salaries and live in nice houses. You think it's your fault that there's no China tea industry? Well maybe it is -- but it is also half the fault of idiots like that. "You know, the sad thing is -- there really is good tea here. Look at the hills, look at the weather. They could make it famous around the world. But I'll bet you can't get Lushan tea in your Macy's or your Bloomingdale's. You should be able to -- but you can't, and it's because of idiots like these. "You know the solutions? Make it private. Everything that is state run is useless. Everything that is private is better." She brightened suddenly. "I have an idea. Why not come and live here and run the tea business in Lushan?" She was joking, but only half. "You could be happy. You would make money. You would be living in a lovely place. The old British houses would make you comfortable, make you feel you were at home. And you could make people have work here. You could bring it back to life." She said later she had thought better of it; and I in turn told Lily about those old army couples who had stayed on in some of the Indian hill stations, long after the end of the British India, and how wretchedly most of the their stories turned out. I doubt if anyone from the old China days had ever wanted to stay on in Lushan, even if the Communists had agreed. It might still have the look of a colonial hill station, it might have the cool pine-tree smell of a hill station and on a crisp late afternoon like this it might look and feel a little like Perthshire in September, or Vermont in October. But only a little, in truth: just a little below the surface it still was China, very much so. Each time I mentioned Lushan to Lily in the weeks that followed she bristled at the memory. "Awful men!" she would say. "Their wretched machine. Of course they never made one. Cheats and liars, all of them. Pah!"
Excerpted with permission from "The River at the Center of the World," © 1996 by Simon Winchester. Select |
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