Travels with Herodotus Read online

  Chuang Tzu is beset by doubts and uncertainties: “Speech is not only the exhaling of air. Speech is meant to convey something, but what that is has not been fully determined. Is there really something like speech, or is there nothing at all like it? Can one see it as distinct from the warbling of birds, or not?”

  I wanted to ask Comrade Li how a Chinese would interpret these fragments, but I was afraid that they might sound too provocative in the face of the ongoing campaign to study the sayings of Mao. So I picked something innocent, about a butterfly: “Once Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and flittering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Tzu. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Tzu. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu. Between Chuang Tzu and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.”

  I asked Comrade Li to explain the meaning of this story to me. He listened, smiled, and carefully noted it down. He said he would have to consult someone and then would give me the answer.

  He never did.

  • • •

  I finished volume one of Mao Tse-tung and started on volume two. It is the end of the 1930s, the Japanese army already occupies a large portion of China and is advancing further into the interior. The two adversaries, Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek, enter into a tactical alliance in order to make a stand against the Japanese invader. The war drags on, the occupier is savage, and the country devastated. In Mao’s opinion, the best tactic in the struggle against a prevailing enemy is an adroit elasticity and ceaseless tormenting of the opponent. He speaks and writes about this constantly.

  I was reading a lecture about the lengthy war with Japan which Mao delivered in the spring of 1938 in Yunnan when Comrade Li, having finished a telephone conversation in his room, put down the receiver and came in to announce that tomorrow we would be going to the Great Wall. The Great Wall! People come from the ends of the earth to see it. It is one of the wonders of the world, a unique, almost mythical, and in some sense unfathomable creation. The Chinese constructed it, with interruptions, over the course of two thousand years. They commenced when the Buddha and Herodotus were alive and were still building it when Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and Johann Sebastian Bach were at their labors in Europe.

  The wall is variously estimated as being from three to ten thousand kilometers long. Variously, because there is no single Great Wall—there are several of them. And they were built at different times, in different places, and from different materials. They had one thing in common, however: the originating impulse. As soon as one dynasty came to power, it immediately set about erecting the Great Wall. The idea of a wall possessed China’s rulers. If they ceased construction for a while, it was only because of a lack of means—they were right back at it the instant their finances improved.

  The Chinese built the Great Wall to defend against invasions by the restless and expansionist nomadic tribes of Mongolia. These tribes, in great armies, hordes, legions, emerged from the Mongolian steppes, from the Altai mountains and the Gobi desert, and attacked the Chinese, constantly menacing their nation, sowing terror with the threat of slaughter and enslavement.

  But the Great Wall was only a metaphor—a symbol and a sign, the coat of arms and the escutcheon of what had been a nation of walls for millennia. The Great Wall demarcated the empire’s northern borders; but walls were also erected between warring principalities, between regions and even neighborhoods. The structures defended cities and villages, passes and bridges. They guarded palaces, government buildings, temples, and markets. Barracks, police stations, and prisons. Walls encircled private homes, separated neighbor from neighbor, family from family. If one assumes that the Chinese built walls uninterruptedly for hundreds, even thousands of years, and if one factors in the population—enormous throughout the national history—their dedication and devotion, their exemplary discipline and antlike purposefulness, then one reckons with hundreds upon hundreds of millions of hours spent building walls, hours which in this poor country could have been spent learning to read, acquiring a profession, cultivating new fields, and breeding robust cattle.

  That is how the world’s energy is wasted. In complete irrationality! Complete futility! For the Great Wall—and it is gigantic, a wall-fortress, stretching for thousands of kilometers through uninhabited mountains and wilderness, an object of pride and, as I have mentioned, one of the wonders of the world—is also proof of a kind of human weakness, of an aberration, of a horrifying mistake; it is evidence of a historical inability of people in this part of the planet to communicate, to confer and jointly determine how best to deploy enormous reserves of human energy and intellect.

  In these parts, the idea of coming together was but a chimera: The very first reflex in the face of potential trouble was to build a wall. To shut oneself in, fence oneself off. Because whatever comes from without, from over there, can only be a threat, an omen of misfortune, a harbinger of evil—perhaps the most genuine evil there is.

  And the wall is not merely motivated by exterior considerations. Protecting against foreign menaces, it also allows one to control what is happening internally. There are passages in the wall, doors and gates, and guarding them, of course, one could control who entered and exited. One could question, one could check for valid papers, one could take down names, look at faces, observe, commit to memory. And thus such a wall is simultaneously a shield and a trap, a veil and a cage.

  The worst aspect of the wall is to turn so many people into its defenders and produce a mental attitude that sees a wall running through everything, imagines the world as being divided into an evil and inferior part, on the outside, and a good and superior part, on the inside. A keeper of the wall need not be in physical proximity to it; he can be far away and it is enough that he carry within himself its image and pledge allegiance to the logical principles that the wall dictates.

  The Great Wall is one hour’s drive north of Peking. At first, we pass through parts of the city. An ice-cold wind is blowing. Pedestrians and bicyclists lean forward, struggling with the gale. There are rivers of bicyclists everywhere. Each of these rivers halts when the lights turn red, as if a lock had suddenly been closed, then resumes its flow until the next set of lights. Only the wind disrupts this otherwise monotonous, laborious rhythm: If it picks up too violently, the river begins to surge and billow, spinning some bicyclists around and forcing others to stop and dismount. Confusion and chaos erupt in the ranks. But as soon as the wind subsides, everything continues once again in its proper place and dutiful movement forward.

  The sidewalks in the center of the city are full of people and one frequently sees columns of schoolchildren clad in school uniforms. They walk in pairs waving little red flags, and the one at the head of the procession carries either a red banner or a portrait of the Good Uncle—Chairman Mao. The children enthusiastically call, sing, or cry out in unison. What are they saying? I ask Comrade Li. “They want to study the thoughts of Chairman Mao,” he replies. The policemen, whom one sees on every corner, always give these processions the right-of-way.

  The city is all yellow and navy blue. The buildings fronting the streets are yellow and the clothes everyone wears are navy. “These uniforms are an achievement of the Revolution,” explains Comrade Li. “Before, people had nothing to wear and died of cold.” Men have their hair cut like military recruits, and women, be they girls or old ladies, wear theirs in a short pageboy style with bangs. One has to look closely to distinguish one individual from another—an awkwardness, since it is considered impolite to stare.

  If someone is carrying a bag, then that bag is identical to all the rest. What happens when there is a large gathering and everyone must leave their caps and bags in a cloakroom? How do they distinguish their belongings from those of thousands of others? I have no idea—and yet they appear to do so. It is proof that
real differences can indeed dwell not only in large things, but in the smallest of details—in the way, for instance, that a button has been sewn on.

  One mounts the Great Wall through one of its abandoned towers. The wall is bristling with massive crenellations and turrets, and wide enough for ten people to walk along it side by side. From our vantage point, the wall serpentines into infinity, each end disappearing somewhere beyond mountains and forests. It is deserted, not a soul around, and the wind tears at us. I take it all in, touch the boulders dragged here centuries ago by people dropping from exhaustion. To what end? What sense does it make? Of what use is it?

  With each passing day I thought of the Great Wall more and more as the Great Metaphor. I was surrounded by people with whom I could not communicate, encircled by a world I could not fathom. I was supposed to write—but about what? The press was exclusively in Chinese, so I understood nothing of it. At first I asked Comrade Li to translate for me, but every article, in his translation, began with the words: “As Chairman Mao teaches us,” or “Following the recommendations of Chairman Mao,” etc., etc. Is that what was actually written? My only link to the outside world was Comrade Li, and he was the most impenetrable barrier of all. To my every request for a meeting, a conversation, a trip, he responded, “I will convey this to the newspaper.” And I would hear nothing more on the matter. Nor could I go out alone, without Comrade Li. But where could I have gone anyway? To see whom? I did not know the city, I knew no one, I had no telephone (only Comrade Li had one).

  Above all, I did not know the language. Yes, I did try studying it, right from the start. I attempted to tear my way through the thickets of hieroglyphs and ideograms only to come up against the dead end of each character’s maddening multiplicity of meanings. I had just read somewhere that there exist more than eighty English translations of the Tao Te Ching (the bible of Taoism), all of them competent and reliable—and all utterly different! My legs buckled beneath me. No, I thought to myself, I cannot cope with this, I cannot manage. The characters flickered before my eyes, shimmered and pulsated, changed shape and position, relations and connections, proportions and patterns; they multiplied and divided, formed rows and columns, exchanged places, the shapes for “ao” appeared who knows how in the character for “ou,” or suddenly I confused the notation for “eng” with the notation for “ong”—which was a truly horrendous error.

  CHINESE THOUGHT

  I had a lot of time on my hands and spent much of it reading the books about China which I had purchased in Hong Kong. They were so absorbing that I would momentarily forget about Herodotus and the Greeks.

  I still believed that I would be working here, and therefore wanted to learn as much as possible about this country and its people. I didn’t realize that the majority of correspondents reporting on China were based in Hong Kong, Tokyo, or Seoul, that they were either Chinese or at least fluent in the language, and that there was something impossible and unreal about my situation in Peking.

  I constantly felt the presence of the Great Wall; not the one I had seen several days ago in the mountains to the north, but the much more formidable and insurmountable one for me—the Great Wall of Language. How desperately I yearned for my gaze to alight on some recognizable letter or expression, to hold on to it, breathe a sigh of relief, feel at home. All in vain. Everything was illegible, obscure, inscrutable.

  It was actually not dissimilar to how I had felt in India. There too I could not penetrate the thicket of the local Hindu alphabet. And were I to travel farther still, would I not encounter similar barriers?

  Where did this linguistic-alphabetical Tower of Babel come from, anyway? How does a particular alphabet arise? At some primal point, at the very beginning, it had to start with a single sign, a single character. Someone made a mark in order to remember something. Or to communicate something to someone else. Or to cast a spell on an object or a territory.

  But why do different people describe the same object with so many completely different notations? All over the world a man, a mountain, or a tree look much alike, and yet in each alphabet different symbols, images, or letters correspond to them. Why is it that the very first individual who wanted to describe a flower made a vertical line in one culture, a circle in another culture, and in a third decided on two lines and a cone? Did these first scribblers make these decisions on their own, or collectively? Did they talk them over beforehand? Discuss them around the fire at night? Request endorsement during a family council? At a tribal gathering? Did they seek counsel from the elders? From charlatans? From soothsayers?

  It would be good to know, because later, once the die has been cast, one cannot turn back. Matters acquire their own momentum. From that first, simplest decision—to make one line to the left and one to the right—all the rest will follow, increasingly ingenious and intricate, because by the alphabet’s fiendish evolutionary logic the alphabet with time grows more and more complex, less and less legible to the uninitiated, even to the point of finally becoming, as has occurred more than once, utterly indecipherable.

  Although the Hindi and the Chinese writing systems caused me equal difficulty, the behavior of people in the two countries could not have been more different. The Hindu is a relaxed being, while the Chinese is a tense and vigilant one. A crowd of Hindus is formless, fluid, slow; a crowd of Chinese is formed before you know it into disciplined marching lines. One senses that above a gathering of Chinese stands a commander, a higher authority, while above the multitude of Hindus hovers an Areopagus of innumerable and undemanding deities. If a throng of Hindus encounters something interesting, it stops, looks, and begins discussing. In a similar situation, the Chinese will walk on, in close formation, obedient, their eyes fixed on a designated goal. The Hindus are significantly more ritualistic, mystical, religious. The realm of the spirit and its symbols is always close at hand in India, present, perceptible. Holy men wander along the roads; pilgrimages head for temples, the seats of the gods; masses gather at the feet of holy mountains, bathe in holy rivers, cremate the dead on holy pyres. The Chinese appear spiritually less ostentatious, significantly more discreet and closed. Instead of paying homage to gods, they concern themselves with observing proper etiquette; instead of holy men, works march along the roads.

  Their faces, too, I found are different. The face of a Hindu contains surprise; a red dot on a forehead, colorful patterns on cheeks, or a smile that reveals teeth stained dark brown. The face of a Chinese holds no such surprises. It is smooth and has unvarying features. It seems as if nothing could ruffle its still surface. It is a face that communicates that it is hiding something about which we know nothing and never will.

  One time Comrade Li took me to Shanghai. What a difference from Peking! I was stunned by the immensity of this city, by the diversity of its architecture—entire neighborhoods built in the French style, or the Italian, or the American. Everywhere, for kilometers on end, shaded avenues, boulevards, promenades, arcades. The scale and energy of urban development, the metropolitan bustle, the cars, the rickshaws, the untold multitudes of pedestrians. Many stores and even the occasional bar. It is much warmer here than in Peking and the air is gentle—one senses the proximity of the sea.

  As we drove one day through a Japanese neighborhood, I noticed the heavy, squat columns of a Buddhist temple. “Is this temple open?” I asked Comrade Li. “Here, in Shanghai, certainly so,” he answered, with a mixture of irony and scorn, as if Shanghai were China but not 100 percent so, not fully a China according to Mao Tse-tung.

  Buddhism did not flower in China until the first millennium of our era. For some five hundred years prior to that time, two parallel spiritual currents, two schools, two orientations dominated the region: Confucianism and Taoism. Master Confucius lived from 560 to 480 B.C.E. There is no consensus among historians as to whether the creator of Taoism—Master Lao-tzu—was older or younger than Confucius. Many scholars even maintain that Lao-tzu did not exist at all, and the only little book which he is said to
have left behind him—the Tao Te Ching—is simply a collection of fragments, aphorisms, and sayings gathered by anonymous scribes and copyists.

  If we accept that Lao-tzu did exist and was older than Confucius, then we can also believe the story, often repeated, about how young Confucius made a journey to where the wise man Lao-tzu lived and asked him for advice on how to conduct his life. “Rid yourself of arrogance and desire,” the old man answered, “rid yourself of the habit of flattery and of excessive ambition. All this causes you harm. That is all that I have to say to you.”

  But if it was Confucius who was older than Lao-tzu, then he could have passed on to his younger countryman these three great thoughts. The first: “How can you know how to serve gods if you do not know how to serve people?” The second: “Why do you pay back evil with good? How then will you pay back good?” And third: “Till you know about the living, how are you to know about the dead?”

  The philosophies of Confucius and of Lao-tzu (if indeed he existed) arose in the twilight of the Chou dynasty, at around the Epoch of the Warring Kingdoms, when China was torn asunder, divided into numerous states waging fierce, population-decimating war with one another. A man who managed momentarily to escape the carnage is still haunted by uncertainty and fear of tomorrow, and perforce asks himself: How does one survive? This is the question that Chinese thought attempts to answer. It is perhaps the most practical philosophy the world has ever known. In contrast to Hindu thought, it rarely ventures into the realms of transcendence, and tries instead to offer the ordinary man advice on enduring the situation in which he finds himself for the simple reason that, without either his will or consent, he was born into this cruel world of ours.