Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Sichuan-Tibet Episode Six: Chinese Tex-Mex And The World’s Greatest Tiny Museum

It was not until I reached Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province and the last stop on my trip, that I realized how odd my trip had been. In a nation of 1.3 billion people I had managed to travel for nearly three weeks without once setting foot in a city larger than 100,000 people. Residents of sparsely populated countries may scoff, but in China, where nearly 200 cities boast over 1,000,000 people, this isn't as easy as it seems.

The rural nature of my trip ended abruptly upon my arrival in Chengdu. With a population exceeding 10 million, Chengdu is a giant even by Chinese standards. As the bus from Emei Shan dropped us off on a sidewalk near the bus station, I knew I wasn't in Kansas anymore. I jostled with locals for space on the sidewalk as vehicle after vehicle cruised by blaring their horns for no particular reason. Skyscrapers stood in every direction, street vendors sold sundries, and intermittently I heard the familiar "hoiking" noise of a man spitting on the ground near my feet. The usual urban scene in China.

A busy intersection in central Chengdu

My objective in Chengdu was clear: eat Western food, preferably something unhealthy. A portly Peace Corps volunteer on an earlier bus trip recommended a Tex-Mex grill called Peter's, and so once settled into my guesthouse I set off in search for some good fried all-American fatty grub.

I imagined Peter would be a transplanted Texan who opened his own restaurant in an attempt to cater to the many foreigners who come to Chengdu to see the pandas. I was wrong. "Peter" happened to be the English name of a local Chinese man not much older than me who happened to befriend a middle-aged Texan woman who taught him the ins and outs of tex-mex. Apparently, his business has done so well that he has opened a second restaurant in Chengdu and even one up in Beijing, all in the space of two years.

I ordered a Carlsberg beer and the chimichangas. When the food didn't arrive, I ordered a second beer and managed to preserve it long enough to wash down the Texas-sized helping I was given just moments later. Feeling gluttonous, I ordered an ice cream sundae (with whipped cream!) and gobbled that up, too.

As the waitress prepared the bill, I realized I had consumed more calories in one sitting than I had in the previous six days. My stomach, to my amazement, handled the onslaught of food better than I had expected. I was able to walk back to the guesthouse, though I had to avert my eyes at people dining al-fresco for fear that viewing food would make me nauseous. I hadn't been this full in a long time.

Back at the guesthouse I found BBC on satellite television and opened my novel, content to lie still on my bed while my great haul of the evening digested. Nothing I had done that day was remotely Chinese. But given my state of mind, that was perfectly OK. After all, if the world is becoming flat (as Thomas Friedman famously says), who am I to stop it?

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I knew the museum I was looking for was tiny (after all, that's what it was called) but I didn't think it was going to be that difficult to find. Chengdu's system of assigning street addresses would have confused Isaac Newton. After walking in circles for what seemed like hours, I finally came to my senses and asked someone for help.
"Oh, it's right next door," an elderly woman said.

Perhaps what women say about us is right, after all.

Wang's Tiny Museum has no facade. In fact, had its address not been written in a brochure I found at my guesthouse, I'd have assumed it was just another anonymous dwelling. Its owners, Mr Wang and his wife, are both elderly. Mr Wang in fact wears a hearing aid that whistles, and even its presence doesn't stop his wife from shouting at him just inches from his head. Mrs Wang, the more spry of the two, showed great interest in me. She was delighted I could speak Chinese, and asked me where I came from.
"America"
"Ooh!," she exclaimed, "very good!".

See? Not everyone hates us.

The museum was in truth just the basement of their home, in which the Wangs had spent nearly a lifetime collecting memorabilia featuring Chairman Mao. The helmsman's mug appeared everywhere in the museum: on posters, pins, in photographs alone and with other luminaries, in drawings, and even on busts no bigger than my fist. One could see Mao at various stages of his life: as a young, idealistic revolutionary, as a corpulent yet still imposing head of state, and finally as a feeble old dictator meeting the American President Nixon in the waning years of his life. A Mao drawing (which the Wangs had acquired soon after the 1949 revolution) showed the Chinese leader next to Stalin and Lenin, fellow Communist leaders whose excesses (in the case of Stalin) Mao would eventually embrace.

Mrs. Wang acted as docent, and whenever I turned away she directed my attention to yet another piece of memorabilia she wanted to show me. At various points, she and her husband would pose like prom dates for a photo, clearly enjoying having foreign guests in their museum. All of my questions- and there were many- she answered patiently. In the corner, I spotted a small photo of Deng Xiaoping, Mao's successor and the man responsible for implementing China's successful economic reforms.

"Why not have a museum for Deng?," I asked. She laughed, and walked on.

My question was mostly rhetorical. After all, there very well might be a museum dedicated to him, and I suppose if it existed a logical place would be in Chengdu, capital of Deng's own Sichuan. From a Western perspective, Deng is more worthy of veneration than the hated Mao.

Yet Mao's museum did not reflect a collection lovingly put together by an enthusiast so much as the fact that, well, there was simply a lot of Mao stuff here in China. His reign represented a cult of personality in the extreme sense: a book of his thoughts became the second most published book in history (behind the Bible). Statues more than 100 feet high adorn the central squares of many Chinese cities, even those in minority-dominated parts of the country. Posters with his smiling, corpulent mug urging revolution were ubiquitous adornments during the Cultural Revolution. Given his positive reception among gullible Western radicals, Mao's face was one of the best-known in the world. Andy Warhol, who could spot an icon better than anyone, certainly thought so.

The Chinese, for their part, have gone in an entirely different direction from the one Mao would have chosen, yet find themselves curiously unable to dismiss their former leader. In Beijing, his face adorns Tiananmen Square less than a kilometer from where a Starbucks once stood in the Forbidden City. The Chinese have embraced entepreneurship, market economics, consumerism, globalization, and cultural openness, all things Mao denounced. China has changed so fast that it's almost impossible to imagine what life must have been like here even forty years ago. As Westerners generally were kept out, few independently-made films from the Cultural Revolution days exist- the Chinese themselves certainly don't promote it and in fact have discouraged artistic representation of those miserable days. As such, a time period that shook China to its core seems to exist only in the memories of its survivors, many of whom only reluctantly raise the subject with outsiders.

So what made Wang's museum remarkable, to me, weren't the rare items in his collection but rather the common ones. I found posters and the little red book and gold pins all equally fascinating, as they would have been as banal then as the Golden Arches sign is now.

Before I left, Mrs. Wang asked me to sign the guestbook. As I did, I noticed I was hardly the first foreigner to have visited the place. In fact, I wondered just how many managed to squeeze in a visit to both the museum and to Pete's Tex-Mex grill on the same visit to Chengdu.