Riding the Iron Rooster

  She saw the Old Man as a sort of dreamer in baggy pants, scratching out his poems with his goose-quill pen and leading shiny-faced youths into the fields to harvest rice and grain. But the old romantic, perhaps like all romantics, was not only impractical, but also selfish and egotistical, and by the sixties he was around the bend, too. This was a far cry from the young idealist Shelley, and not much like the old leech gatherer, Willy Wordsworth.

  "He was also a tyrant, wasn't he?"

  She said she didn't know about that. It was painful to think about recent history. She too wanted to go to the United States—to study, and for a change of pace.

  It was now late afternoon, and damp and gray. The crumbly hills had caves cut into them, and every slope looked like a prehistoric settlement. It was not an optical illusion; this province was full of troglodytes knuckle-walking along these ledges and into the caverns they had chopped out of the hillside.

  A young man was watching them with me. I took him to be one of the students on the swimming team, but he said no, rubber was his business—he made tires. Lanzhou was a center of rubber manufacturing.

  I said, 'That's interesting," and he seemed rather sceptical, and smiled at me as if defying me to find anything interesting at all about tires or rubber.

  "What about contraceptives?" I asked.

  And then he asked me to explain what the word meant. This required gestures as well as a delicate description, but he got the point.

  "I don't make them," he said. "But we have these things in China—for birth control. One-child policy, you know?"

  I did not say so, but it seemed to me that people living five to a room was a form of birth control. In a country without any privacy and with very few trees, it was a wonder that any children were conceived.

  But this subject reminded him—his name was Mr. Zhang—of an experience he had had in Peking.

  Mr. Zhang said, "I was walking down the street. A man stopped me and said, 'Want a girl?'

  "I told him no.

  "'She's very nice. Five yuan.'

  "'I am not interested,' I said.

  "He said, 'I can get you a very dark and private corner in the park, so that you can be alone with her.'

  "I said that I did not want her, but what about my friend? You see, I was looking after an American delegation of rubber dealers. One of them even asked me if there were girls. It is forbidden. But there are girls.

  "'That is out of the question. We do not want an American.'

  "I said, 'Why not?'

  "'They are too big in their penis. The girl is Chinese. She is very small. It will hurt her too much.'

  "I told him to think about it."

  Mr. Zhang giggled, perhaps wondering whether he had gone too far—after all, I had told him I was an American. It was also very unusual that he should tell me this story. He covered himself by telling it in a disapproving way—son of pious and lurid at the same time.

  The pimp told him not to go away while he consulted the girl.

  "And then he came back and said, 'She says she will do it with the American, but it will cost twenty kuai.'"

  Then Mr. Zhang looked very worried. Would I take him for a pimp? After all, it seemed as though he had been negotiating with this sleazy man—and pimping was a capital offense: a bullet in the back of the neck.

  Very angrily, Mr. Zhang said, "We must rid China of such people!"

  Already the train was slowing down in the deep ravine, and ahead Lanzhou lay smoking and steaming on both banks of the Yellow River.

  7. The Iron Rooster

  Lanzhou is a city in a valley of the Yellow River, and so it is long and narrow and hemmed in by mountains. There were hundreds of brickyards and smoking kilns on its outskirts, and it was brick colored, the same shade as its clayey landscape. It was damp and muddy this afternoon in early summer. Since ancient times it had been one of the gateways of China, the last place to change horses and buy provisions before heading for the outer limits of the empire. The next large settlements were in Turkestan, and beyond them was Europe. Lanzhou still looked like a city on the frontier, with the patched and botched appearance of all Chinese cities—no trees to speak of but plenty of tall factory chimneys and power lines. Most of the oil in Xinjiang was refined here, and it was whispered that in Lanzhou they made atomic bombs. If one accidentally went off in this remote mud-colored place, who would know?

  Some of those chimneys were the minarets of mosques. This was the eastern limit of the Muslim world that had its other centers in Turfan and Kashgar and Khotan, at the edges of China. The mountains were bare and stony. The city's bleakness gave it a tidy look. The river was so shallow there was no boat on it larger than a sampan, and the water was like cocoa, the same orangey brown. Some men on the banks flung nets in and dragged out tiddlers, which they pinched in their fingers and saved. Another group of men used the river banks for curing goatskins—dousing them and then jumping up and down on them on the rocks. The rocks and stones were smooth, some were flat, the sort you find on the seashore. This was once part of the inland sea that had flooded towards the Pacific and created the Yangtze Gorges and dumped its sediment to make the whole of east China.

  After a few days in Lanzhou I discovered that it had the same labyrinthine lanes in one section that Peking had—small cool courtyards, and tile roofs on which weeds had taken root, and carved doorways; and the squatting children and sweepers who always existed in those old neighborhoods. The temple at Five Spring Mountain was tended by a terrified monk, who stammered at my questions and pleaded with me to go away. At the base of the ancient but derelict pagoda there was a shooting gallery—kids with air pistols whacking away at tattered targets. In that same vandalized hillside, with its painted pavilions, there was a circus—daredevil motorcyclists speeding up the vertical walls of a jangling cage, while the Chinese gaped and refused to applaud.

  The rest of Lanzhou looked as though it had been built the day before yesterday, in the 1950s, when the railway west was also built, under Russian guidance. The city did not have a prosperous air, and yet the stores were full of merchandise and the markets piled with vegetables. This was a railway junction to which trains came from every direction in China. Lanzhou had fish from the China Sea and fruit from Guangdong, meat from the north and dried apricots and raisins and prunes and nuts from Xinjiang in the west. It also had televisions and refrigerators, the two most coveted appliances in China.

  I read a story in Lanzhou in the magazine Chinese Literature (Autumn 1986). It was by a well-known short-story writer and minister of culture, Wang Meng, and was called 'The Wind on the Plateau." It was clumsy but enlightening, a story about a family in the new consumption-conscious China. Zhao the teacher has changed his life from the austere one he was living in the sixties and seventies. He has bought property and owns a TV and a refrigerator. He believes his life is just about perfect.

  Yet his son was far from satisfied with things as they were. He wanted video equipment, a musical door-chime, a motorcycle and a rubber dinghy. Why not go out and get an air-conditioner made in Australia?

  This seemed to me one of the oddest shopping lists I could imagine, but it was a fairly accurate picture of the current state of craving. But I kept thinking, A rubber dinghy?

  Meanwhile, Mr. Fang was still traipsing after me, and when I sauntered, so did he, and when I lollygagged, he just stood nearby looking futile and sorrowful. But one day in Lanzhou he came in very handy. I was passing a public toilet and saw a number of large plastic drums on the sidewalk outside. They stank so badly I asked what was in them. No one seemed to know, but then Mr. Fang materialized behind me and spoke one of the few English words he knew.

  "Urine," he said.

  There were sixty-three five-gallon drums arranged in rows, waiting to be collected. This hardly noticed feature of Chinese life—urine collection—puzzled me. Mr. Fang was pitifully eager to help me understand its purpose. He knew nothing about it himself, but between us, and using his dictionary,
we tried to unravel the mystery.

  Inside this public toilet, over the urinal, was a sign: We would like good quality urine, so please do not put anything in—no spitting, no paper, no cigarette butts. And another sign said, This urine is used for medicinal purposes.

  Mr. Fang and I accosted a man coming out of the john and asked him what it was all about.

  "They are saving this urine for medicine," he said. "I don't take it myself, but it's very good medicine."

  What was this medicine intended to cure?

  "I don't know," he said.

  I asked him whether it was used for fertilizer.

  "Oh, yes," he said. 'That too."

  As we talked, passersby threaded their way through the 315 gallons of human piss that reeked in sticky drums on the sidewalk.

  I thought Mr. Fang would feel useful if I gave him a job to do. He had been looking very demoralized. I asked him to find out what this urine collection was all about. He went away and returned with a ragged scrap of paper on which was written the single word enzyme. He said a doctor had written it down. But I was still dissatisfied.

  I subsequently discovered that it was used in endocrinology, and that hormone crystals were sublimated from it. The Chinese had been using human urine in sophisticated medicine for a thousand years and in ancient China used it to treat a number of conditions, including impotence, hypogonadism and dysmenorrhea. These urine hormones also straightened out hermaphrodites. Steroids and pituitary hormones were also isolated from the urine. It was also news to me that present-day fertility drugs are extracted from the urine of menopausal Italian nuns.

  The trouble was that my having enlisted Mr. Fang's help made him believe that I had softened towards him, and he was eager for more work on my behalf. Was there anything more I wanted him to do? he wondered. I couldn't think of anything until the day I went to Lanzhou Station to buy tickets for Turfan and Urumchi and saw a squabbling crowd of people, and rather insolent and sneering ticket sellers, and one man told me he had been at the station all day (it was now four in the afternoon) and still didn't have a ticket. So I asked Mr. Fang if he would buy the tickets. He said: Gladly! and gave me his chattering laugh—it called attention to his relief—and he went to work. Later, in his Confidential Memo titled Theroux, Paul, Mr. Fang perhaps scratched with his quill pen: Very interested in urine.

  We left Lanzhou at about midnight—the best time of day for catching a long-distance train. You board, hand over your ticket and go to bed; and within a few minutes you're jogging along, sound asleep. When you wake up you've gone 500 miles.

  This was the train that the man in Peking had called The Iron Rooster, which was like calling it "the cheapskate express," because the people who ran it were penny-pinchers. But that was just prejudice, a way of maligning a minority, a dig at the Uighurs. In most respects the train was no better or worse than any of the others I had taken in China. And the penny-pinching was not unusual—austerity, and mending and patching had long been among the commonest features of Chinese life. Luxury, even simple comfort, had been condemned as decadent, and so inconvenience, plainness, and roughing it had come to be accepted as virtues. Only recently—within a few years—had anyone confessed to wanting creature comforts and pretty colors. But that did not strike me as immoderate. It was a society that was pledged to austerity that was probably the most prone to going on binges.

  So, philosophically, the name didn't fit. But in every other respect this thing was an Iron Rooster. It squawked and crowed and seemed to flap, as steam shot out of its black boiler and it shook itself along the tracks. It was a big, clattering thing, with bells and whistles, that went its noisy and cocksure way westward, into the desert of what used to be called Turkestan.

  I slept like a log. The train was not particularly crowded. Mr. Fang was installed in another compartment. I had expected a stifling coach, but it was chilly on the train. I needed the China Railways' horse blanket.

  I woke at six, in darkness. All of China is on Peking time. It had been light until nine at night in Lanzhou. I read Mildred Cable on the Gobi Desert and realized that I was just passing a point the Chinese had once called The Gate of Demons because beyond it was the howling wind and wasteland of which they had an acute terror. ("Some told of rushing rivers cutting their way through sand, of an unfathomable lake hidden among the dunes, of sand-hills with a voice like thunder, of water which could be clearly seen and yet was a deception.") I read for an hour. At seven it was still dark, the sun behind the distant mountains. We came to a small station called Shagoutai, where the only living things were a muleteer and his mule—the animal loaded with water bags and waiting behind the grade crossing.

  The mountains were dark, treeless, grassless ranges and they were folded like thick quilts. They were black, because they were backlit by the unrisen sun. Near Lanzhou, I thought the mountains were like shuijiao (water dumplings). The same smoothness, and folds, and crimp marks. I loved the sight of the wilderness of dumplings. But in this semidesert, with far-off hills, no image came so easily to mind. The nearer hills all had cave entrances in them—the arched doorways of the cave dwellers of Gansu. It was a strange, rocky province, and so long and narrow I knew I would be traveling through it still tomorrow. Like Qinghai, the adjoining province to the south, Gansu was notorious for being a place where political prisoners were sent, the Chinese Siberia. Security was a simple matter because there was no escape through the desert. Only forty years ago travelers on this route—and at just about this spot in Gansu—were met by a large stone tablet with the inscription Earth's Greatest Barrier. Meaning the Gobi.

  The landscape changed, all at once, into everything, at the town of Wuwei. The Iron Rooster was in a deep, cool valley, and there were wet mountains a few miles away, and beyond them a great ridge of brown mountains, and higher and farther still, on the distant horizon, a long range of snowy mountains. So blue and white were these mountains of ice that the range itself had the look of a sword blade. There were arid patches, too, between the snowy peaks in the distance and the green valley in which we were traveling.

  These mountains to the south were the Datong Shan, several of them 20,000 footers, in the province and sometime penal colony of Qinghai, which stretched beyond them to the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

  I had been warned that this train trip west would be barren and boring. It was not. I was beginning to understand that the empty parts of China are the most beautiful, and some of them—like these valleys—very fertile. It was a chain of oases along the northern arm of the Silk Road. Its utter emptiness was so rare in China that it seemed startling to me, and where there were gardens and trees it was almost lush. Large herds of sheep grazed along the stonier stretches, nibbling at hanks of grass; and there were mules and crows and mud-walled towns. In one place I saw six camels, big and small, placidly watching the train go by. The mules were indifferent to the train. They were braying, and biting and mounting each other, honking and showing their teeth as they hauled their hoses into place.

  The train was full but not crowded. The dining car was nearly always empty, perhaps because most of the passengers were Uighurs—Muslims—and the Chinese menu was about as porky as it could be. And the other dishes could not possibly have been halal, which is the Islamic version of kosher—implying ritual slaughter. Because business was so bad, the chef usually chatted, asking me what I wanted. How about some chicken and prawns? Or shredded pork? Or pork balls? Or diced pork and doufu (bean curd)? Or fish with ginger? Cauliflower with dried shrimp? Sauteed cucumber?

  Like many features of Chinese life, the food had glorious names, and each dish had its own identity and pedigree. But in practice they were almost impossible to tell apart, having not only the same taste, but the same color and stringiness.

  By midafternoon, the train was moving across a flat green plain between two ranges of low mountains, the Qilian Shan and the Helan Shan. In places I could see the crumbled sections of the Great Wall. Where the land was flat, it was
intensively cultivated, and in places there were tall, slender and rather redundant-looking poplars. The Chinese were averse to planting shade trees because it was impossible to plant crops under them. They favored the skinny symbolic tree that doubled as a fence. The idea of The Forest was alien to China. It only existed in northern Heilongjiang province—the Manchurian northeast; and I had heard that even the little that remained was being cut down and made into chopsticks and toothpicks and Ping-Pong paddles.

  In most other countries, a landscape feature was a grove of trees, or a meadow, or even a desert; so you immediately associated the maple tree with Canada, the oak with England, the birch with the Soviet Union, and desert and jungle with Africa. But no such thing came to mind in China, where the most common and obvious feature of a landscape was a person—or usually many people. Every time I stared at a landscape there was a person in it staring back at me.

  Even here in the middle of nowhere there were people and settlements. The villages were walled in, and most houses had walls around them: mud smeared over bricks. They were the sort of stockades that are frequent in Afghanistan and Iran—at the far end of this Silk Road—and probably a cultural hangover from the memory of marauders and Mongol hordes, the Central Asian nightmare.

  The day had turned very hot. It was now in the nineties. I saw eighteen sheep crowded into a little blot of shade under a frail hawthorn tree. Children cooled themselves by kicking water in a ditch. Farmers with lamp shade hats planted crops by pushing one sprout at a time into the ground, in a process that had a greater affinity to needlepoint than to farming, as though they were stitching a design into the furrows. And though there were black peaks and mountain ranges on both sides of the train, the land ahead fell away, and it was as if we were approaching the ocean—the land dipped and had the smooth, stony look of the seashore. It was the hottest part of the day, but even so the land was full of people. Hours later, in an immense and stony desert I saw a man in a faded blue suit, bumping over the stones on his bike.