A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [38]
“Now that I have your attention,” Prudoe went on, preening, “let me talk about the Xian that really interests us, or Changan, as it was called then.”
Stratton slurped his tea loudly enough to draw annoyed glances and an unspoken reprimand from Prudoe himself. Pompous ass. Stratton tuned out.
They had arrived before dawn, twenty hours from Peking. Twice Stratton had walked through the train looking for Kangmei. Twice guards had turned him back from the hard-class section of the train reserved for Chinese only.
But she found him on the platform at Xian. They had shared a few quiet minutes in a corner of the terminal as the train disgorged its passengers with billowing steam and a slumbering pace.
“I have come to help,” Kangmei had said.
“But …”
“You want to know what happened to make my father fight with my American uncle. So do I. Alone you will never find out. I can help.”
“How? How can you even be here? Don’t you need a special pass?”
“Listen to me, Thom-as,” she said with sober, almost childlike earnestness. “In China, many things are possible for Chinese. Not for foreigners”—she tapped him lightly on the chest—“but for Chinese.”
Stratton smiled. She was proud of herself.
“China is the most wonderful land on earth, Thom-as, but it has been betrayed too many times. Everywhere there are old men who rule only because they are old, or cruel, or because they are friends of other stupid old men.”
The crowd on the platform was beginning to thin. From somewhere near the terminal entrance, Stratton heard a petulant woman—it could only be Alice Dempsey—in full bay. “Now where can he have gotten himself to?”
“The old men sit on the young,” Kangmei continued. “They are jealous because we have studied and they have not. They cling to power, betraying China and their own Communist ideals. These tired old men are everywhere, Thom-as. And everywhere there are also angry young people who believe in the New China. There are millions of us. We talk not to the stupid old men, not to the government, or the Party. We talk to one another. In Peking, in Shanghai, in Canton, here in Xian—everywhere. My friends and the friends of my friends. They will help me to help you.”
“Stratton? Ah, there you are. Will you come on, please? Everyone is waiting. How can you be so rude?” Alice Dempsey’s bray carried across half a hundred Chinese heads and echoed off the vaulted terminal roof.
Kangmei grabbed his arm.
“Go, Thom-as. In two hours, I will come to your hotel. Be ready.”
With an empty smile for Alice, Stratton had docilely ridden the bus to the tourist hotel.
“…at Ban Po, a few miles out of town, we will see a well-preserved village belonging to the Yang Shao culture from about 6000 B.C. Xian did not come into its own, though, until the third century before Christ. The famous Emperor Qin, who unified China and built the Great Wall, had his capital here. We’ll visit the new digs around his tomb east of the city …”
It certainly was something to think about, Stratton reflected. If anybody could actually harness the energies of the educated Chinese young people … no, “harness” was a bad word. “Unfetter” would be better. Unfetter the young millions, let them think and act and build without the constraints of a revolution grown old before its time. Would they yank China headlong, breathless and excited, into the twenty-first century, or would they produce some monstrous new revolution? The last time the young had been mobilized, it had been by Mao, and that little adventure—the Cultural Revolution—had cost China a decade of development and a generation of young people who discovered too late that being revolutionary too often meant being uneducated as well.
Two thoughts occurred to Stratton simultaneously. The first was that if Kangmei was willing to help him, then she was openly at odds with her own father. The second was more chilling than revealing: If Kangmei’s network of disaffected young people was any more than a nebulous and idealistic dream, if it had any form at all, any organization that