Legends and Politics of China

WHAT THE RAMS BROUGHT

Poets and painters say that landscape controls the mood of a people, and there were times in China when I almost agreed. Northern China, for instance, had its ancient grandeur. Clouds of dust blew in off the prairies, painting Ming turrets and Stalinist highrises a single grim mustard color. Locust trees like wads of thorn studded the gullies, and narrow roads snaked through the bluffs, with bicycles and donkey carts plodding below a sky that was dark and folded like stone. Landscape that stark had suggested an epic, the world of Guan Yu or Tiananmen, where final conflicts were fought. A year later, however, I was a thousand miles south, and Canton could have been another world. Here endless sunshine met endless rain above gray dirt from the mouth of the Pearl River, and everything seemed to flourish. There was a rainbow of flowers, and even a dozen kinds of butterflies.

I tried to count them. A white kind, like our cabbage butterfly, flew so low that it seemed to be strolling along the sidewalk. A middle-sized orange thing had the pointed edges which you expect from a leaf. One swallowtail was big and black and yellow like its American cousin, but another had panes of iridescent green. The tint was bright and perfect, the intense color of a nightlight which stands in the hall and reminds small children of the land before birth.

Land has a mystical importance in China, and this dirt, thick and black and loose, was as kind as California. Delicate Norfolk pines without a thorn or a spike grew three stories high by the overpasses. Cocoa plants stacked themselves like jointed toys in the yard, and people cut down banana trees because the fruit would ripen and then just hang on the bough, looking untidy.

It was not always like this. Time is long, and the butterfly cannot imagine that the oak was once a nut; but there was a time when this delta hardly flourished, and the people were hungry. In fact, before mere history began, they were starving, and the tears of dying babies moved even Heaven, the way a flood may jostle the biggest lump of granite.

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