Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux Page A

who engage in such activities are regarded by the Politburo—indeed, by chain-smoking, "Westernized" Mr. Deng—as hippie scum whose only cure is a bullet in the neck.
    Every railway station in China (I passed through hundreds of them in every province and region) displayed portraits of executed people: there they were on the wall, the haggard faces of the condemned, looking doomed. A red X over the face meant the person had been dispatched. I was told that many were students, and that roughly three thousand malefactors a year were executed.
    I decided in my book to keep away from the Forbidden City, to give short shrift to the Great Wall, and to talk to the Chinese—workers, officials, and students. The working people complained about inflation, the officials complained about students, and the students said reforms were not happening quickly enough. "There will be more demonstrations," one student told me, referring to student protests in six Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, that had taken place only weeks before. "Many more." This was in early 1987.
    Meanwhile, American television crews were filming the grand opening of the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Tiananmen Square, and the fashion shows, the Japanese cars, the terra-cotta warriors, the mass-produced back scratchers, the arrival of American business executives, the bowling alleys in Canton, and so forth. What else could they do? Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, an angle, a sound bite. So television did not prepare us for the massacre of the students in Tiananmen Square.
    Nor did the American businessmen, junketing politicians, accountants, lawyers, or bankers. They were making deals, not trying to capture a mood. The poor jet-lagged tourists couldn't do much either: they were being hauled from one repainted monument to another and told that this or that Disneylandish place was an ancient tomb or temple.
    I believe I have a sunny disposition and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler. But a travel writer must report faithfully on what he or she encounters in a country, and
Riding the Iron Rooster
is full of the voices and complaints of Chinese students, who seemed to me very similar in outlook to American students of the 1960s, of whom I was one: alienated and impatient for change. I also faithfully reported official cant, the fall of Hu Yaobang, the rise of Zhao Ziyang, and the dismissal of Fang Lizhi (who, confined to the American embassy in Beijing, looked more and more like Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty, the Hungarian prelate who spent fifteen years in the American embassy in Hungary). In China, I felt I was seeing one paradox after another. To understand the country, you need to write about more than its pseudo-spiritualism or its clumsily reconstructed temples. Nor is it a question of liking or disliking the Chinese. The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, make voluminous notes, and tell the truth. There is immense drudgery in the job. But the book ought to live, and if it is truthful, it ought to be prescient without making predictions.
    With the events of Tiananmen Square, I saw that the travel book performs a unique function. A book has the capacity to express a country's heart, as long as it stays away from vacations, holidays, sightseeing, and the half-truths in official handouts; as long as it concentrates on people in their landscape, the dissonance as well as the melodies, the contradictions, and the vivid trivia—the fungi on the wet boots.

Part Two
Fresh Air Fiend

Fresh Air Fiend
    N ORMAL, HAPPY , well-balanced individuals seldom become imaginative writers, and generally writers tend to be notoriously unhealthy. There are reasons for this, the most compelling of which are that a writer works alone, indoors, in a room, on a chair, with the door shut. Any