Raw China

By Jocko Weyland

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For a couple of months I’d been watching the pigeons circling over the rooftops through the window while Mike and I sat at the desk in his bedroom on the 5th floor. This was during his regular hour-and-a-half long English lesson. Their hypnotic synchronized movement touched something deep down inside, reminding me of pigeons coming home to their lofts in Brooklyn in the evening sky, so one day I asked Mike if he knew whose birds they were. “Yes,” he said. “They are the Birdman’s.”

A few more classes went by as the summer progressed, and each time I’d see the birds I’d fall into a reverie while Mike wrote out sentences for me. He was 12 years old at the time, with an unfailingly enthusiastic appetite for learning and everything connected with military hardware; his English was already pretty advanced. One Sunday during this ritual I asked Mike if he knew the Birdman, explaining that I wanted to interview him with Mike as my interpreter. If he could arrange this, it would count as our class for one week. “I will try,” he said.

Two weeks later at our regular 6 PM appointment time Mike met me in the courtyard and we went to see the Birdman. His pigeons inhabited a small coop in a stairwell window of a building across the way. The Birdman was about 50, a no-nonsense Beijinger wearing a knockoff red short-sleeved Pierre Cardin shirt with a mean comb-over and one eye that was bit lazy. As the three of us talked, the pigeons cooed and fluttered around their home.

Mike related that I said in New York people had pigeons and raced them, and that I was wondering how long he’d kept pigeons. “Twenty years,” Mike replied, “and he likes the birds very much.” How did he start? “When he was 20 he started keeping the pigeons.” Was it through his father? How’d he get interested in keeping pigeons? “He liked them.” Maybe there was more to it, but that was his answer according to Mike. The lack of nuance was a bit frustrating but there was no way to tell if it had to do with Mike’s somewhat strained grasp of the English language or the Birdman’s inherent reticence, or a combination of both or maybe neither and he just liked pigeons.

So when does he let them out? “He lets the pigeons to fly every morning at 6 o’clock. He lets them out to fly at 6 AM and also in the evening.” Do they have names? “The man, the bird is very good, and the man’s very lucky.” All right, we’ll get back to that question. Sometimes Mike and I seemed so in synch, sometimes not—it varied according to many, many possibly ultimately unknowable factors. How many does he have? “Thirty.” How do you tell the man pigeons from the lady pigeons? “The pigeons like the man.” No, I know the pigeons like him, but which pigeons are the man pigeons and which are the lady pigeons? “The head is smaller than the man’s and the woman looks pretty,” Mike translated. He pronounced “woman” as “wooo-man.”

Does he race the birds? “There’s a bird club and a race that’s 500 meters long, and 400, and 600.” That seemed off and too short because races are usually around 200 miles, but I let it slide. “The man puts the pigeon in the car, and they come back.” So who times it? “The best pigeons can fly 1-4-0-0, in one minute and forty seconds.” So maybe it was 500 meters, and Beijing pigeon races were more like sprints. Are there other people in the apartment complex who also have pigeons? “Upstairs, there’s another bird man. His pigeons are better than his.”

Does he have a favorite? With that question the Birdman laughed and then said his favorite was taking a bath, in a bowl. In a bowl here, or in his apartment? Because no pigeon was taking a bath as far as I could tell. Leaving the mystery the favorite bird’s possibly private bathing quarters unanswered, I tried again. He has 30 birds—isn’t one of them his favorite? Does he like one bird really a lot? “Yes,” and the Birdman pointed at a pigeon that looked like all the others and most certainly wasn’t taking a bath. So why? “That pigeon won races.” Then Mike excitedly added, “Wait a moment, the Birdman will give you a cup.”

When the Birdman went upstairs we opened the window that he had kept opening and closing as we spoke so we could get a closer look at the birds. They just continued their fluttering, eyeing us impassively, while a neighbor with a dog walked down the stairs and regarded us with a touch of annoyance. Then the Birdman returned holding a trophy. A cup is a trophy. Ahhh, a trophy. As an aside I said to Mike, “Remember we talked about trophies?” Because the week before Mike and I had read an article that referred to the under-construction CCTV headquarters as a “trophy” in China’s ambitions. This cup-trophy appeared to be for 25th place, or maybe it was 15th.

How often do they race? “Twenty times a year.” What about his neighbors, what do they think of the birds? Do they like the birds? “Some of them like, some of them don’t.” We laughed about that, the three of us in the stairwell. That’s the way it goes, I said. Does he know about the history of keeping pigeons? Have they been doing it for hundreds of years in China? “No.” No? OK, start again: in the past, in China, have people been keeping pigeons? “Some of the people keep the birds.” How long do the birds live? “Six or seven years.” Back to history, I tried to use a contemporary comparison. You know, in China, people keep little birds in cages? Because if there’s one thing you can’t miss in Beijing it’s the old men taking their little multi-colored birds for walks in their cages. That is, the old men are taking walks; the birds are just getting a ride while staying in their small wire prisons. This is different—have people been doing this for a long, long time? “Three hundred years ago, in other countries. England. In Holland, in French.” You know the pigeons sent messages, right? “Yes,” Mike perked up, since he’s a military history buff. “In World War One they sent messages.”

Guo Huong Tao was the Birdman’s name. He seemed proud of his birds and also good-naturedly bemused by the “interview.” The pigeons cooed almost imperceptibly, jumped around, did their bird thing. So, what’s his job? “His job is to protect the apartment.” Oh, he’s the superintendent? “Yes, superintendent.” So he takes care if things break, and how long has he be doing that job? “Thirteen years.” What did he do before that? “Nothing.” OK. Is he from Beijing? “He’s a Beijinger.”

I wanted to get at Guo Huong Tao’s motivations. Why does somebody keep pigeons? Is there some deeper meaning, a metaphysical, existential, philosophical, or psychological basis for keeping birds in cages and then taking them far away to mysteriously, invariably come home? If there is, Guo Huong Tao wasn’t offering any. He just liked his birds. But I persisted. Why

these

birds, why not the little birds old guys take for walks in their cages? I groped for a reason beyond just “liking.” You know Mike, you like tanks because they’re cool, right, so why does he like pigeons? “He was interested.” But what is it that he likes? Are they loyal? What’s so great about pigeons? Why pigeons instead of a dog or a cat? Mike came around, sensing a level of commitment and passion beyond “like” and “interest.” “Why does the birdman like pigeons?” he repeated. Right, what makes them special? “Why pigeons?” Right. “Ah, in the man’s home he has a dog, and he likes the dog, and he likes the pigeons.” Well, he likes the dog for some reasons, and he likes the pigeons for different reasons, and that’s what I want to know. By then though I was wondering if there really was an answer beyond that he just liked birds. A cigar is sometimes just a cigar and that’s that.

We moved from the stairwell to the street level. Young girls played badminton in the courtyard; others stood around chatting. We sat on a bench and watched a set of pigeons, not Guo Huong Tao’s, flying in formation above a nearby building. I asked about the coop and said it was called a “loft” in English, wondering if there was a specific Chinese word. “It’s called the bird’s nest.” Michael and I smiled at each other, since it is a real bird’s nest instead of the Olympic stadium that’s also called the “Bird’s Nest.”

Does Guo Huong Tao get together with other men who have pigeons? “To talk, yes, I know. Yes, they talk about how to keep the birds.” Back to what was starting to become an obsessive strain in the conversation: What about the ubiquitous little birds, the ones in cages, what does he think of those? “The man thinks those birds, they have to protected.” So is he saying the pigeons are stronger? “No, but we cannot hurt them.” No, that wouldn’t be good. “Sometimes the little bird comes into the bird’s nest and eats the food and the man never, never, lets them out.” Let them out? Or let them in? That was confusing. Oh well.

He’s married and has children? “Yes, and he has a 21-year-old daughter.” So what do they think about his pigeons? “When the man isn’t at home his daughter will take care of them, but she don’t like.” In the waning light the sounds of children playing wafted across the square. Mike’s parents came by to say hello, and then I told Mike to tell Guo Huong Tao about a young girl from Massachusetts I’d read about who at age thirteen is an accomplished pigeon racer. She’s kind of famous. It was hard to tell what the Birdman thought of that disclosure.

So, what’s the word in Chinese for the sound they make? In English it’s “cooing.” “A voice,” Mike said. The tape ended and I turned it over in my vintage tape recorder, saying, “It’s not MP3, it’s from the old days.”

“MP2,” Mike joked.

Then we talked about the dirty verminous pigeons you have in New York, the descendents of Rock Doves that nobody seems to like except for old folks on park benches feeding them bread. There are two different kinds, those, and the racing ones, and in Beijing you don’t see the common variety at all, which is a bit strange. On racing, again, you said 1,000 meters and that seems very short. Mike got all excited, “No, 2,000 meters.” The metric system causes a lot of misunderstandings. “Oh, I was wrong, the club takes the birds 100 kilometers away for the races.”

Had the Birdman read books about this? How did he learn how he should treat his birds? “Sometimes he must let the pigeons take the medicine, and the water and food.” Further questioning on this got the response, “He likes, nobody tells him.” So he’s a self-made, autodidact birdman. “Yes, by himself.” Then I told him in America it’s only in big cities where there isn’t much space and it’s often in poorer neighborhoods that people have lofts. “Yes, yes, yes!” I don’t know why that struck such a cord with Mike. Does he buy the birds? “The friends give to each other, but one cost 40,000 Yuan.” Really? Numbers are always hard, so I traced “40,000” on my palm. “Yes! One pigeon.” That’s a pretty expensive pigeon, I said thoughtfully, and then we all nodded in assent.

The mosquitoes were starting to become a nuisance, and I instructed Mike to ask him if anyone else ever asked him about his pigeons. “No.” One last question: Why does he think they always know to come back? “Do you know in the Army, they use the internet, to protect?” You mean radar, or sonar. “Yes, yes, the birds use this, they can know and find the way home.” Oh, and does he have any other hobbies? Writing, though that doesn’t mean writing in the typical sense; it means calligraphy. Mike offered some personal experience on that topic. “I do this when I was young, six years old, on Sundays. It’s very hard.”

Mosquitoes were biting, kids were yelling, and the Birdman smiled as we shook hands. I asked Mike to tell him I appreciated his time. We said goodbye and left Guo Huong Tao sitting on the bench. Walking away, we talked about how it had been fun and a “good class.” So keeping pigeons in China is really not that different than keeping pigeons anywhere else in the world, and if there’s anything to be gleaned from all this it is that there’s something about superintendents and pigeons. Men, usually, who are tethered to one specific building keep birds that can fly hundreds of miles at 60 miles an hour and always find their way home. The supers stay grounded and the birds fly far away, and even though they have at least two chances a day to escape they rarely do. Maybe there’s some deeper import to it all, maybe not. In the end, the Birdman likes his birds very much.