Dog Fights

CHANGSHA, China – Translating a Chinese name into Roman characters can obscure personality traits. Guo Sanjun, or Sanjun Guo, written in letters means little. But 郭三军 goes a long way towards explaining why this man seemed so happy to explain the advantages of Russian fighter jets at a quarter past midnight.

San or 三 means three, jun or 军 an all-purpose character for military things. Take together "三军" is Third Army. What a presumptuous name! Did his parents know that he would grow up to be a towering giant, over six feet tall with a wide frame? That he job would require him to participate in meetings with Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao and other members of China's crème de la crème?

I could have asked Mrs. Guo, but the timing seemed wrong. She appeared in the hallway of the soft sleeper train car in her pink nightgown. When her mouth opened to speak there were only four teeth, each one a solitary piece of enamel in an empty quadrant. Like many older Chinese women she seemed timeless: I would have accepted her age
being 55 or 90. She appeared annoyed.

"Why are you still awake?" she said to her son. "You talk too much. These people aren't interested. Come to bed."

Sanjun, the largest man in the compartment, bigger than a billion of his countryman, at first responded to the rebuke with sheepishness, his face pointed down at the floor. But then, perhaps realizing that he is 35-years-old and no longer 12, lashed out.

"I'm talking to these foreigners!" He gestured toward Zach and I. "We're discussing things!"

Mrs. Guo didn't looked impressed. Her son meekly ended his tirade by promising to come back to the sleeping cabin soon.

The pair was returning from a vacation in Yunnan, to see the Old Town in Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge, by some measurements the deepest gorge in the world. When the T-62 finished its 38 hour journey from Kunming to Beijing, Mr. Guo would resume his job at the Ministry of Athletics. He introduced himself as a secretary, playing off the duel meanings of the word. He supervised Olympic preparations but served as a stenographer when high Communist Party officials held meetings.

He works, in his own words, like a dog. Six days is a short week, seven is a long one (the Chinese are striving, but have not yet succeeded in creating an eighth day). As the Olympics get closer there are more of the latter than the former.
"I am serving my country," he said. "This is my chance to be in the history."

That last quote featured a bit of Chinglish because this conversation took place mostly in English, the first since crossing the Laos border. At the hospital, on the bus, on the train, I used Chinese. I mention this because this man's education (at People's University, the third best school in Beijing) and language abilities ("I'd better know English," Sanjun said. "I paid a fucking lot of money to learn it.") set him apart from the ordinary Chinese I have been meeting on this trip. This is a man of some privilege, and his blunt opinions surprised me.

We met in the dining car. Zach and I played a card game called "500," a variation of Gin Rummy. At Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, six armed policemen escorted a pregnant woman with child off the train. Later in the evening, after the fuyuans pushed us out of the dining car to make way for overflow passengers and we went into the soft sleeper car's hallway to converse, Sanjun told us the woman had been caught smuggling drugs.

They found 470 grams of heroin hiding against her swollen belly. She would get 10 years, Sanjun said, and then told us about Chinese drug law. At the national level, getting caught with 500 grams – a little more than a pound – is a death sentence. Some municipalities are tougher. In Beijing 100 grams buys a free bullet, the same in
Shanghai. But Chinese are not without compassion; a pregnant woman is not killed.

Sanjun explained that drug traffickers take advantage of this loophole, luring hundreds of pregnant peasants as mules from the Burmese border of Yuannan Province toward the major shipping ports along the Southeastern coastline. The Third Army man had little sympathy.

"They're all dogs," he said. "Fucking bitches."

Then Sanjun brought out the military hardware, a thick pile of Chinese military magazines. He held me read through the latest issue, one with a line of Russian soldiers on the front. The F-18 is now outdated. There are mechanical problems with some Israeli equipment deployed in the West Bank. The magazine's longest article was a profile of three "Heroes of the Nation," a family of physicists. Readers are breathlessly told how California Institute of Technology staff said they would rather shoot the brilliant scientists than allow them to return home to the Motherland. But they did, and they proved key when China's hydrogen and nuclear bomb programs.
Sanjun helped me translate with relish, filling in words such as "advantage," "traitor," and "celebration," quickly. I liked this man, his clearly drawn sense of morality and crisp humor. If he believed I belonged to a class of American devils, he didn't let on.

“Third Army” isn’t a ridiculous name in the People’s Republic of China. The Third Army fought bravely in both the Chinese Civil War and Second World War (known here as The War to Resist Japanese Aggression. Edgar Snow’s classic Maoist account of the Revolution mentions a failed mutiny right here in Changsha. “However, the revolt was quickly suppressed, due to the loyalty of the Third Army,” he writes.

With his name carrying such a history, Sanjun’s unfettering support of the state is not a surprise: it’s foretold in his characters. He justified his militarism to me with a joke: "Other people do drugs. Some people like pussy. I read this." I laughed and accepted this position. When we parted shortly after the appearance of his nightgown-clad mother and did the customary exchange of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, I thought this time I might actually hang out with this man and argue military tactics among the dogs of Beijing.