Riding the Iron Rooster

  "What do you think of the guest house?" Mr. Fang asked me.

  "Excellent," I said. "I want to stay longer."

  But the cook sized me up and did one of the cruelest things any cook can do in rural China: he made me Western food—what he conceived to be Western food. Undercooked potatoes, pink chicken, boiled cabbage, and something so odd I had to ask its name.

  "Bean—"

  His English was like his cooking: strange mimicry. But I eventually found out what he was trying to tell me: wiener schnitzel.

  Yet I enjoyed the place. I had felt the same in Inner Mongolia, at Jaiyuguan, Turfan and Urumchi—the wilder and emptier parts of China. I had had enough of Chinese cities. But this was pleasant, and it was possible to take long walks through the countryside, watching people hoeing or pigs wallowing, and in the far-off villages, the little kids doing homework in copybooks in front of the thatch-roofed huts.

  ***

  The railway halt at Emei was at the end of a long, muddy road, and a market nearby sold fruit and peanuts to the pilgrims, who waited patiently, leaning on their walking sticks, for the train. And then, above the sound of sparrows and the whispers of bamboos, a train whistle blew. I liked these country stations, and it seemed perfect to sit there among the rice fields in the hills of Sichuan until, right on schedule, the big, wheezing train arrived to take me away, south into Yunnan. It was twenty-four hours to Kunming, and the train was uncharacteristically empty: I had a compartment to myself, and this one—because of the intense and humid heat—had straw mats instead of cushions.

  "There are two hundred tunnels between here and Kunming," the conductor said when he clipped my ticket. No sooner had he gotten the words out of his mouth than we were standing in darkness: the first tunnel.

  We were among tall conical hills that were so steep they were terraced and cultivated only halfway up. That was unusual in China, where land economy was almost an obsession. And the day was so overcast that waterfalls spilled out of the low cloud, and paths zigzagged upwards and disappeared in the mist.

  So many tunnels meant that we would be among mountains the whole way—and hills and valleys, and narrow swinging footbridges slung across the gorges. The ravines were spectacular and steep, and the mountains were close together, so the valleys were very narrow. All of these magnificent geographical features had meant that the railway line had been difficult to build. In fact many of the engineering problems had been regarded as almost insurmountable until the early seventies when, with a combination of soldiers and convicts—a labor force that could be shot for not working—the line was finally finished.

  The line could not go through the mountains of the Daxue range, and so it crept around their sides, pierced their flanks, and rose higher and circled until it had doubled back upon itself. Then you looked down and saw the tunnel entrances beneath you and realized that you had not advanced but had only climbed higher. Soon the train was in a new valley, descending to the river once again. The river was called the Dadu He (Big Crossing). It was wide and grayer than the sky above it. For most of its length it was full of boulders. Fishermen with long poles or ancient fish traps sat on its banks.

  These were the densest, steepest mountains I had seen so far, and the train was never more than a few minutes from a tunnel. So, in order to read or write, I had to leave the lights burning in the compartment. One moment there was a bright valley with great white streaks of rock down its sides, and gardens near the bottom and vegetable patches sloping at a forty-five degree angle, and the next moment the train would be roaring through a black tunnel, scattering the bats that hung against the walls. This was one of the routes where people complained of the length of the trip. But it was easily one of the most beautiful train trips in China. I could not understand why tourists went from city to city, on a forced march of sight-seeing. China existed in all the in-between places that were reachable only by train.

  "What do you want for lunch?" the chef said. This dining car was empty too.

  "This is a Sichuan train, right?"

  "It is."

  "I will have Sichuan food then."

  He brought me Sichuan chicken, hot bean curd, pork and green peppers, green onions stir-fried with ginger, soup and rice—a one-dollar lunch—and I went back and had a siesta. There were countries where train journeys were no more than a period of suspense, waiting to arrive; and there were countries where the train journey was itself an experience of travel, with meals and sleep and exercise and conversation and scenery. This was the latter. When I woke up in midafternoon I saw that the mist and cloud had dispersed. The long, hooting train had passed from low steep mountains into higher, broader ones.

  I sat by the window and watched the world go by. Four black pigs, each one a different size, trotting in a file along a hill path. Some hills scarred with eroded gullies and others covered with scrub pine. Deep red valleys, the soil laid bare, and green bushy hills. The river was now the same red as that clayey soil. There were junipers at railway stations, fluttering and bowing, for it had now become windy. And five ranges of mountains visible, each with its own shade of gray, according to its distance. In a pretty valley town called Sham-alada, beyond the solid houses and tiled roofs, ten naked children turned somersaults on a mudbank and plunged into the red river. It was not late, but the sun slipped beneath the mountains, and then the valleys were full of long, cold shadows, as if the slopes had dragging cloaks.

  Just before darkness fell, at the head of one valley, I saw a terrace below the rail line—a cemetery. It had a big stone gateway and a red star over the gate. That red star usually meant it had something to do with the People's Liberation Army. This one had fifty graves—rectangular stone boxes with flowers beside them. Except in the Muslim regions—like Xinjiang, or the Hui province of Ningxia—it was unusual to see cemeteries in China—new ones, at any rate. A cemetery is regarded as a waste of space. The dead are cremated and the ashes are put on a shelf in the family house, along with the tea leaves, the vase of plastic flowers, the photograph of Su Lin at the factory outing to Lake Hong, the combination thermometer-and-calendar and the needlepoint portrait of a white kitten playing with a ball of yarn.

  I inquired about the cemetery.

  The Head of the Train (Heche zhang), a man named Mr. He, said, "Those are the graves of the men who died while building the railway. It took ten years, you see."

  Those ten years, from the early sixties to the early seventies, coincided with the period of patriotic fervor and intense jingoism. It not only had the largest number of self-sacrificing soldiers and workers, but also an enormous number of political prisoners. The efforts of these passionate people produced the Chengdu-Kunming line.

  I slept, but fitfully, for each time the train entered a tunnel, the compartment howled with its noise and filled with smoke and steam from the engine. In the morning we were among bulgier, wetter mountains—the Yunnan valleys are cool throughout the year, because most of the province is at a high altitude.

  A bad-tempered attendant banged at the door at seven. But knocking was only a formality. After a few knocks she used her own key to open the door, and she demanded the bedding. Hurry up! Get out of bed! Give me the sheets! Do it now! I thought: What nags these people can be.

  "Why are the fuwuyuans in such a hurry to collect the bedding?" I ask the Head of the Train, Mr. He.

  He said, "Because the train does not stay long in Kunming. Just a matter of hours, and then we turn around and go back to Chengdu."

  That was why they were nags: they were overworked.

  Mr. He had risen through the ranks. He had been a luggage handler, a conductor and a cook—all jobs at roughly the same salary level, about 100 yuan a month. He had joined when he was twenty—he said he hadn't had any education ("not much chance of it in the sixties") and I took that to mean that he was a casualty of the Cultural Revolution. He had chosen the railways because his father had been a railwayman. Now he was in total charge of this train.

  "I
was promoted by being appointed," he said. "I didn't apply for it. One day they simply came to me and said, 'We want you to be the Head of the Train,' and I agreed."

  I asked him about travelers, because it seemed to me that one of the features of China now was the large numbers of people going cross-country.

  "Yes," he said. "Especially in the last three or four years. Many travelers, of all kinds."

  "Do they give you problems?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Do they drink too much? Do they shout, or quarrel, or make disturbances?"

  "No. They keep order. We don't have those sorts of problems. In fact, we don't have many problems. My job is easy. The Chinese obey the rules, on the whole. That's our nature."

  "What about foreigners?"

  "They obey the rules," Mr. He said. "Very few people break them."

  "Are you a member of a union, Mr. He?"

  "Of course. The Railway Workers' Union. Every worker is a member."

  "What does the union do?"

  "It offers opinions about conditions of work, and it discusses problems."

  "Does the union discuss money?"

  "No," he said.

  "If conditions of work are bad—let's say if you're not given time for a nap or for meals—and if the union's opinions are not respected, would you consider going on strike?"

  After a long pause, Mr. He said, "No."

  "Why not? Railway workers go on strike all the time in Britain and the United States. There is a right to strike in China—it's in the constitution."

  He rubbed his chin and became very serious.

  "We are not serving capitalists," he said. "We are serving the people. If we go on strike the people won't be able to travel, and that will hurt them."

  "That's a good answer, Mr. He. But now there are capitalists in China. Not only tourists from Western countries, but also the Chinese themselves are accumulating wealth."

  "To me they are all passengers."

  "I'm a capitalist myself, I suppose," I said.

  "On my train you are a passenger, and you are welcome. Ha!" This Ha meant Enough of this line of questioning!

  "Mr. He, you mentioned you have a son." A child of six, in a school in Chengdu, was what he had said. "Would you like him to follow you and your father and work on the railway?"

  "I'll tell you frankly—I would. But it's not my choice. It's up to him. I can't tell him what to do. At the moment, he wants to be a soldier in the army."

  In the corridor the passengers were flinging their luggage out of the windows onto the platform at Kunming.

  The Chinese flock to Kunming to gape at the colorful natives—twenty-three separate minorities, all gaily dressed in handsomely stitched skirts and quilted jackets, boots and headdresses. They come from the far-flung parts of Yunnan to sell their pretty embroidery and their baskets. They are attractive and a bit wild, and they look uncompromisingly ethnic. Mao's stern, gray policies were merely a hiccup in their technicolor tribalism. For the Chinese, the minorities in Yunnan are somewhere between hillbillies and zoo animals.

  What exactly do these minority people themselves think? Are they rebellious or downtrodden? Do they crave autonomy? Their numbers are very small: only 5000 Drung people in Yunnan, only 12,000 Jinuos and twice that number of Pumis. The Uighurs and the Yi people were another matter—there were millions of them. At about the time I was in Yunnan there were uprisings and riots among Soviet minorities—in Kazakhstan and Kirghizia. I could imagine that happening in China—perhaps a Muslim rebellion like the one that raged through Xinjiang in the nineteenth century. And I could imagine the same result: it would be ruthlessly suppressed.

  People also go to Kunming to visit the stone forest ("We call this one Chicken Tree—can you see why?") and to see the polluted lake and the temples above it, which are so relentlessly visited they are practically worn away from the successive waves of trampling feet, and those temples that aren't are buried under ice-cream sticks and candy wrappers and half-eaten moon cakes.

  I went for walks. I even managed to lose Mr. Fang for a few days. I went to an exhibition commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Zhou Enlai. There was a sort of Zhou Enlai cult growing in China. It was also the tenth anniversary of the death of Mao, but no such exhibition had been mounted for him. Of the thirty-odd photographs in the Zhou exhibition, only one showed Mao Zedong—in 1949, Liberation Year: Mao very small, Zhou very large.

  At an antique shop near the exhibit I saw a very shapely bronze incense burner—a water buffalo. It stood among the junk jewelry, the broken pocket watches, the old forks with twisted tines, the Yunnanese tobacco pouches. I asked how much?

  The price he quoted was seventeen thousand dollars.

  I was still laughing as I strolled through the market in the Kunming back streets. It was there that I worked out a way of eating Chinese dumplings without risking infectious hepatitis or cholera or bubonic plague (there had been recent outbreaks of this medieval life-shortener in northern Yunnan and Qinghai). There are few dishes tastier than freshly fried or steamed Chinese dumplings, and they were tastiest in the open-air markets. But the plates they were served in were washed in dirty water, and the chopsticks were simply wiped off and reused.

  My hygienic answer was to ask for them in a piece of paper—and to provide my own paper. And the chopsticks could be made safe by scorching them in the cooking fire—holding them in the flames for a few moments to kill the germs. But as a matter of fact many travelers in China carry their own chopsticks.

  My favorite spot in Kunming was the park at Green Lake—though it was an unprepossessing park, with a go-cart track, a children's football field, and a pathetic circus in two brown tents (the star attraction was a tortured-looking bear pacing in a tiny cage). The lake itself had disappeared, dried out, grown weeds and grass: there was no water at all in it.

  But that area had become the meeting place for people who wanted to kill time by singing, putting on plays or operas, or making music. It seemed very odd to me at first, the people in little groups—twenty or thirty such groups scattered throughout the park; and each gathering of people producing a play or listening to someone singing. There were duets, there were trios, and many were accompanied by men playing violins. Often the duet was an old man and an old woman.

  "They are singing a love song," a bystander told me. His name was Xin. He agreed with me that it was very touching to see these people performing.

  He said, "For ten years we hated each other and were very suspicious. We hardly spoke to each other. It was terrible."

  He meant during the Cultural Revolution but didn't say it. Like many people he could not bear uttering the mocking words.

  "This is like a dream to these people. The old ones can hardly believe it. That's why they are here. To talk and to remember. They don't want to forget the old songs. This is their way of remembering."

  What made these musical performances especially unusual was their exuberance, because the Chinese are very shy and rather self-conscious, and find it an agony to be set apart and stared at (which was why the Red Guards' struggle sessions were so painful and so often ended in the suicide of the person "struggled"). The fact that some were performing solo was a measure of their energy and confidence. It is a great deal easier to stand alone and sing if you are happy.

  Some of the people were telling stories in dialogue form, others were playing traditional songs. At least half the groups of old people were performing the Yunnan version of Peking opera, called dian xi. The most ambitious one I saw involved four or five singers who stood under the trees and acted out a sad love story from Zhejiang called Flower Lamp (Hua Deng).

  "This is known all over China," Xin said, and he explained it.

  It concerned a young man Liang Shanbo and his lover, Zhu Yingtai. The plot was not unlike that of Romeo and Juliet. The lovers' families were so opposed that it was impossible for the two to meet without using a subterfuge. Liang had the clever idea of dressing up a
s a woman (the man playing Liang in the park used a fan to suggest this), and in this way gained access to the lovely Zhu. The romance blossoms, but both families are against the marriage. After some complications ("The plot zigzags," Xin said) they realize they cannot marry. Zhu kills herself. Liang sings a pathetic love song on her grave, and then he kills himself. The end.

  The motley groups in the park in Kunming liked this one best of all. It was performed among the bamboos, and accompanied by old violinists in faded blue jackets and caps. But even the skinniest old men and the most elderly women wore animated expressions—and they were all playful. Of all the people I saw in China, they were the happiest.

  The trouble with China was that it was overrun with people and—except for the occasional earthquake or sandstorm—I rarely saw examples of man's insignificance beside the greater forces of nature. The Chinese had moved mountains, diverted rivers, wiped out the animals, eliminated the wilderness; they had subdued nature and had it screaming for mercy. If there were enough of you it was really very easy to dig up a whole continent and plant cabbages. They had built a wall that was the only man-made object on earth that could be seen from the moon. Whole provinces had been turned into vegetable gardens, and a hill wasn't a hill—it was a way of growing rice vertically. Some of the ruination was not deliberate; after all, in Chinese terms prosperity always spelled pollution.