Read Online Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions by Martin Amis - Free Book Online
Authors: Martin Amis
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psychotic good cheer. It was in this charabanc of Laughing Policemen and Jimmy Tarbuck soundalikes that I made the journey to the Shanghai ground, past lean-tos and go-downs, bamboo department stores and buses packed with waving arms and beaming, steel-flecked dentition, through streets latticed by plane-tree fronds, tram cables and wet washing.
The stadium was an elegant ruin, a shallow bowl of bleached and flaking stonework. The ballboys sat slumped beneath their sleepy coolie hats. 'Shanghai audiences are good audiences and this is a Shanghai audience,' cackled the loudspeaker. This was a Shanghai audience all right, but it wasn't such a good one. When the home team went one up, there were fire-crackers and cherry bombs — practically a counter-revolution. When Watford equalised and then took the lead (both goals created out of nothing by the Shanghai goalkeeper), there was an experimental riot in one bank of the stadium - fomented, it turned out, by the Gang of Four, who were feeding Watford souvenirs through the steel netting. Like the crowd, however, the game soon fizzled out in the impossible humidity. At half-time Taylor marched into the dressing-room. He drew in his breath to denounce his team, then burst out laughing. Several players sat with icepacks on their heads and jets of steam billowing from their ears.
* China now toils through her sixth Five Year Plan, and is rolling up her sleeves for the seventh. There are smiles, handshakes, spurned gratuities; there are the new incentives of the Responsibility System, the crusades of Social Public Morality; there are colour TVs. You also sense a hidden life of impatience and frustration, a resented exclusion from the world of freedom and reward. (Recent attempts at Western marketing show the full gulf of naivety: a lipstick called 'Fang Fang', a type of battery called 'White Elephant', a range of men's underwear called 'Pansy'.) Football is part of this interchange, and China seeks inclusion here as feelingly as she seeks it elsewhere.
China only just missed out on qualification for the 1982 World Cup. They now have a four-year plan on the go, looking to Mexico in 1986. The national side performed well in its first match against Watford, and hopes were high for the second game in Peking. Yet China played a spoiling game, and were thrashed 5-1. Towards the end, the climbing anger of the crowd took a surprising form: Watford's black stars were booed whenever they touched the ball. One tried hard to resist this conclusion, since it attacked everything one wanted to believe about China. 'No, no,' said our suavest interpreter. 'They're just trying to put them off because the black players are so good.' But the aggression was selective and unmistakable, an incensed submission to the worst instincts.
Out on the concourse I searched anxiously for the Tourists' coach, which had taken the precaution of killing its lights as the hoards swirled sullenly round the ground. Cursed, barracked and gestured at, the humble motorcade of the China squad crept abjectly through the gates.
'I wanna go home,' sang the Gang. 'I wanna go home. This is the worst trip, I've ever been on . . .'
The tour now petered out in pleasant anti-climax, with celebrations, sightseeing and some predatory shopping. Elton John spent forty times the local per-caput income in a single spree. His purchases included replicas of the stone lions beneath Mao's portrait, which gaze across the square at the Great Hall of the People. That night, with eyes like two lumps of sweet-and-sour pork, Elton mastered his exhaustion and took to the piano to crown the farewell shindig. When Elton sang (not for a multitude but for his team) you felt the force, and proximity, of his talent; you didn't want it to end. The high point of his tour, he said, had come at the Children's Festival in Zhongshan Park, when a ten-year-old girl prodigy presented him with a painting of a flock of gambolling kittens. Elton was moved —
The stadium was an elegant ruin, a shallow bowl of bleached and flaking stonework. The ballboys sat slumped beneath their sleepy coolie hats. 'Shanghai audiences are good audiences and this is a Shanghai audience,' cackled the loudspeaker. This was a Shanghai audience all right, but it wasn't such a good one. When the home team went one up, there were fire-crackers and cherry bombs — practically a counter-revolution. When Watford equalised and then took the lead (both goals created out of nothing by the Shanghai goalkeeper), there was an experimental riot in one bank of the stadium - fomented, it turned out, by the Gang of Four, who were feeding Watford souvenirs through the steel netting. Like the crowd, however, the game soon fizzled out in the impossible humidity. At half-time Taylor marched into the dressing-room. He drew in his breath to denounce his team, then burst out laughing. Several players sat with icepacks on their heads and jets of steam billowing from their ears.
* China now toils through her sixth Five Year Plan, and is rolling up her sleeves for the seventh. There are smiles, handshakes, spurned gratuities; there are the new incentives of the Responsibility System, the crusades of Social Public Morality; there are colour TVs. You also sense a hidden life of impatience and frustration, a resented exclusion from the world of freedom and reward. (Recent attempts at Western marketing show the full gulf of naivety: a lipstick called 'Fang Fang', a type of battery called 'White Elephant', a range of men's underwear called 'Pansy'.) Football is part of this interchange, and China seeks inclusion here as feelingly as she seeks it elsewhere.
China only just missed out on qualification for the 1982 World Cup. They now have a four-year plan on the go, looking to Mexico in 1986. The national side performed well in its first match against Watford, and hopes were high for the second game in Peking. Yet China played a spoiling game, and were thrashed 5-1. Towards the end, the climbing anger of the crowd took a surprising form: Watford's black stars were booed whenever they touched the ball. One tried hard to resist this conclusion, since it attacked everything one wanted to believe about China. 'No, no,' said our suavest interpreter. 'They're just trying to put them off because the black players are so good.' But the aggression was selective and unmistakable, an incensed submission to the worst instincts.
Out on the concourse I searched anxiously for the Tourists' coach, which had taken the precaution of killing its lights as the hoards swirled sullenly round the ground. Cursed, barracked and gestured at, the humble motorcade of the China squad crept abjectly through the gates.
'I wanna go home,' sang the Gang. 'I wanna go home. This is the worst trip, I've ever been on . . .'
The tour now petered out in pleasant anti-climax, with celebrations, sightseeing and some predatory shopping. Elton John spent forty times the local per-caput income in a single spree. His purchases included replicas of the stone lions beneath Mao's portrait, which gaze across the square at the Great Hall of the People. That night, with eyes like two lumps of sweet-and-sour pork, Elton mastered his exhaustion and took to the piano to crown the farewell shindig. When Elton sang (not for a multitude but for his team) you felt the force, and proximity, of his talent; you didn't want it to end. The high point of his tour, he said, had come at the Children's Festival in Zhongshan Park, when a ten-year-old girl prodigy presented him with a painting of a flock of gambolling kittens. Elton was moved —
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