CONVERSATIONS 12

 PUTIAN: Down With Flu

A nasty, virulent flu, it was said, had begun to spread south down the coast from Shanghai with cases already reported in Fuzhou; so I had decided on discretion and taken a train south and inland to Putian. To no avail. I woke in the night, just after 3 AM, the Hour of the Tiger, ironically, as the tiger symbolizes renewed energy, very yang, corresponding to the lung meridian in Chinese medicine, and my lungs were congested and my head ached, feverish with cold sweats, nausea, and a lump in my back.

I had begun to regret this entire venture. The beach in Santa Cruz was looking better with each dry cough.

Putian, also known as Puyang and Puxian, historically known as Hinghwa, Hinghua, or Henghua; and its reputation comes from two rather disparate claims: the city is, apparently, the global hub of athletic footwear manufacturing as well as the spiritual birthplace of Mazu, not the Chan monk, but the revered Chinese goddess of the sea. Located in Fujian Province, it sits opposite the Taiwan Strait's Xinghua Bay to the east while the Mulan River still manages to flow through the bustling downtown. It is also celebrated for its centuries-old traditional woodcarving, unique local cuisine, and rich regional folk culture. Population: 3.18 million.

Mazu, Goddess of the Sea

I was surviving on what was known as the city's 'crown jewel': a masterful, comforting braised noodle dish served in a rich, flavorful pork-and-seafood broth packed with seasonal greens, scallops, prawns, and oysters known as Putian Lor Mee (莆田卤面). Room service brought it to my door.

The lump in my back became, oddly enough, a Bible stuffed between a thin  mattress and a slabberdashed box spring, an old version in fairly simple characters based on the King Jame's version. Technically legal in modern China, the book was still something of a surprise. I thumbed through Genesis, the logograms reading '创世记', and found a highlighted  section with a translation printed in small block letters down the margin: why regretted Yahweh? when made man?

Nice to have something in common with Elohim, me and my regret.

I pushed the book under the bed, took three aspirin, slurped soup, and settled back on the bed to read, thumbing through David Hinton's The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, and found this:

You haven't seen how bones from ancient times lie, bleached and unclaimed along the shores of Sky-Blue Seas—how the weeping of old ghosts is joined by new voices, the gray sky by twittering rain.

My croaking new voice, my complaints? The old voices of Genesis? The sentiments of Tu Fu? A lot to think about in that bunch. So I did; I thought about all the misery in the world, past, present, and future. I tried to list all the wars I could remember by name; barely scratched the surface. Collateral damage, that euphemism coined to hide the bloody fact that the majority of people killed were civilians, noncombatants.

I had read, somewhere or other, that the first conflict between members of our dysfunctional species took place about 13,000 years ago along the Egypt-Sudan border. It is believed that this little tiff was fought over a water supply; but I have my doubts about its primacy. As soon as humans were capable of distinguishing between this and that, as soon as dualistic thought became the single most divisive element of hunter gathers, conflict it would seem, became inevitable. 13,000 years ago? In northeastern Uzbekistan, arrowheads were found that date to 80,000 years ago. Just for hunting? You pays your money and … 

Cheery thoughts. Didn't feel so bad then. Did wonder about Tu Fu. Had he been exiled, or had he taken himself off to Chengdu to escape the chaos of the north leaving his family to their fate? Mixed verdict on that one. I like to think he had little choice in the matter.

My choice was to head further south, to visit Hainan Island where another poet, Su Tung-p'o, was, in fact, exiled. To cloud hop to the late Tang Dynasty in search of Huang Po was problematic, to say the least. China, since the An Lushan Rebellion of 755, was in the midst of its great decline. The civil war had fractured the central government as the Emperor and his cohorts struggled with regional warlords, political corruption, and agrarian revolts until the Tang was officially overthrown in 907. And while the early Tang was well known to be both cosmopolitan and congenial, the late Tang became a period that saw the violent persecutions of foreigners. This xenophobia was largely driven by the enduring economic crises brought on by the civil war in which foreigners became the easily targeted scapegoats

Three incidents give ample evidence of the conditions:

The initial attempt by General An Lushan to overthrow the Emperor  lasted, specifically, between 755 A.D. and 763 A.D. Although it is difficult to accurately report the death toll, census reports taken in the years following the war suggest that around 36 million people were killed, or about two-thirds of China's population. Even if many of those were displaced rather than killed, the number is still staggering.

Yangzhou, a city just north and west of Shanghai, was once a focal point for China's salt trade. With a large foreign population, it became a target for the growing anti-foreign sentiment. The so-called Yangzhou Massacre of 760, part and parcel of the An Lushan Rebellion though well to the south, culminated in Chinese forces under Tian Shengong massacring thousands of wealthy foreign merchants (primarily Arab and Persian) effectively ending the nation's salt trade.

The Edict of 845 by Emperor Wuzong instituted the Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution. Although targeting a religion, this decree deeply impacted foreigners, as it banned 'foreign' faiths like Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, and Manichaeism, destroying temples and forcing tens of thousands of monks and nuns to return to secular life.

Huang Chao (835 - 884)

In 878,  during a later rebellion, a rebel army led by Huang Chao marched into southern China and sacked the city of Guangzhou, a major international port just to the west of Hong Kong. In the process they slaughtered an estimated 120,000 to 200,000 foreign merchants—including entire Arab, Persian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Christian communities—permanently shattering the Tang Dynasty's international trade network.

The polymath actor and film producer Orson Welles, never short of the bon mot, once ad libbed a line in a film (The Third Man) on the juxtaposition of the infamous thirty years that the Borgis's controlled northern Italy and the culturally significant creations of the time. His character, Harry Lime, says: “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed – that produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!” Though patently untrue (the cuckoo clock was invented in Bavaria), the line became fodder for humorists. Was there a grain of truth in the notion that hard times make for heady art? Might American poet Wallace Stevens' phrase 'Death is the mother of beauty' (from his poem 'Sunday Morning') have captured the same sentiment? And perhaps it is not too farfetched to ascribe the brilliant cultural achievements of the Tang Dynasty to the energy and awareness that turbulent times seem to produce in a country at war.

Just a thought.

I would go to Hainan Island. Consider my options. As soon as my fever broke, I would bus to Quanzhou and see if I could get a flight south. Not taking any chances with my errant cloud hopping abilities.