Riding the Iron Rooster

  Wrinkled Chinese men in black pajamas and lamp-shade hats balanced shitting cormorants on their shoulders, and when tourists took their picture they demanded a fee of one yuan. There were people selling kites, pot holders, aprons, napkins, fans and carved salad bowls. I was attracted by pairs of handmade eyeglasses, the kind that transform anyone who wears them into a Chinese scholar. I bought a pair. I bought a silver box and an old wooden puppet's head. It was a typical tourist market—mostly junk, some charming handicrafts, and a few treasures from damp attics, being sold illegally. The tourists seemed surprised by the Chinese ferocity in pricing and bargaining. Surely after decades of isolation and communism these people ought to be a little naive? They had no right to know the real value of the stuff in their stalls. As was frequently the case in China, it was the tourists who were naive. The traders hardly budged from their prices, and when the tourists shouted at them, the Chinese hissed back. There were no bargains, even in this distant bend in the river Li, on the muddy riverbank. It was true of China in general, and was perhaps a key to their survival. I thought: The Chinese wake up quickly.

  That night Mr. Jiang emerged from behind a potted palm at my hotel to introduce me to a small monkeylike man.

  "Our driver," Mr. Jiang said.

  "Qi," the man said, and smiled. But it was not a smile. He was only saying his name.

  "I have fixed everything you requested," Mr. Jiang said. "The driver will take us to Taohua—Peach Flower restaurant."

  The driver slipped on a pair of gloves, and whipped the door open for me. Mr. Jiang got into the front seat, beside the driver. The driver adjusted his mirror, stuck his hand out of the window to signal—although we were in a parking lot and there were no other cars in sight—and drove into the empty road. After perhaps fifty yards he stopped the car.

  "Is there anything wrong?" I said.

  Mr. Jiang imitated a fat man laughing: Ho! Ho! Ho! And then in a bored voice added, "We have arrived."

  "There wasn't much point in taking a car, was there?"

  "You are an honored guest! You must not walk!"

  I had learned that guff like this was a giveaway in China. When anyone spoke to me in this formal and facetious way I knew I was being taken for a ride.

  Before we entered the restaurant, Mr. Jiang took me aside and said, "We will have snake soup. We will have pigeon."

  "Very nice."

  He shook his head. "They are not unusual. They are regular."

  "What else are we having?"

  "I will tell you inside."

  But inside there was a fuss over the table, a great deal of talk I did not understand, and finally Mr. Jiang said, "This is your table. A special table. Now I will leave you. The driver and I will eat in the humble dining room next door. Please, sit! Take no notice of us. Enjoy yourself!"

  This was also an unmistakable cue.

  "Why don't you join me?" I said.

  "Oh, no!" Mr. Jiang said. "We will be very comfortable at our little table in the humble dining room reserved for Chinese workers."

  This was laying it on a bit thick, I thought; but I was feeling guilty about this meal, and eating good food alone made me feel selfish.

  I said, "There's room at my table. Please sit here."

  "Okay," Mr. Jiang said, in a perfunctory way, and indicated that the driver should follow his example.

  It was quite usual for the driver to be included—in fact, it is one of the pleasures of Chinese life that on a long trip the driver is one of the bunch. If there is a banquet he is invited, if there is an outing he goes along, and he is present at every meal along the road. It is a civilized practice, and thinking it should be encouraged, I made no objection, even though the driver had taken me only fifty yards.

  "Special meal," Mr. Jiang said. "We have crane. Maybe a kind of quail. We call it anchun. We have many things. Even forbidden things."

  That phrase had lost its thrill for me. It was a hot night, this young man seemed unreliable, and I was not particularly hungry.

  "Have some wine," Mr. Jiang said, pouring out three glasses. "It is osmanthus wine. Guilin means 'City of Osmanthus Trees.' "

  We gulped our wine. It tasted syrupy and medicinal.

  The food was brought in successive waves—many dishes, but the portions were small. Perhaps sensing that it would go quickly, the driver began tonging food onto his plate.

  "That is turtle," Mr. Jiang said. "From the Li River."

  "And that is forbidden," he said, lowering his voice. "Wawa fish— baby fish. Very rare. Very tasty. Very hard to catch. Against the law."

  The fish was excellent. It was a stew of small white lumps in fragrant sauce. The driver's chopsticks were busily dredging for the plumpest fillets.

  Mr. Jiang crept closer and mumbled a word in Chinese. "This is muntjac. From the mountains. With onions. Forbidden."

  "What is a muntjac?" I asked.

  "It is a kind of rabbit that eats fruit."

  As all the world knows, a muntjac is a small deer. They are regarded as pests. You see them on golf courses outside London. Marco Polo found them in The Kingdom of Ergunul and wrote, 'The flesh of this animal is very good to eat." He brought the head and feet of a muntjac back to Venice.

  I sampled the pigeon, the snake soup, the muntjac, the crane, the fish, the turtle. There was something dreadful and depressing about this food, partly because it tasted good and partly because China had so few wild animals. These creatures were all facing extinction in this country. And I had always hated the Chinese appetite for rare animals—for bear's paws and fish lips and caribou's nose. That article I had read about the Chinese killing their diminishing numbers of tigers to prepare—superstitiously—remedies for impotence and rheumatism had disgusted me. I was disgusted now with myself. This sort of eating was the recreation of people who were rich and spoiled.

  "What do you think of this?" I asked Mr. Jiang.

  "I like the turtle with bamboo," he said. "The muntjac is a bit salty."

  "You've had this before?"

  "Oh, yes."

  I was trying to describe to myself the taste of the snake and the crane and the pigeon. I laughed, thinking that whenever someone ate something exotic they always said it tasted like chicken. "What does he think?" I asked.

  The silent driver endlessly stuffing himself, made a dive for the turtle, tonged some into his bowl and gobbled it. He did the same to the wawa fish.

  "He likes the fish," Mr. Jiang said.

  The driver did not glance up. He ate like a predator in the wild— he paused, very alert, his eyes flicking, and then he darted for the food and ate it in one swift movement of his clawlike chopsticks.

  Afterwards, slightly nauseated from the forbidden food, I felt like a Hindu who has just eaten hamburger. I said I would walk home. Mr. Jiang tried to drag me into the car, but I resisted. Then, hiding his sheepishness in hearty guffaws, he handed me the bill: 200 yuan.

  That was four months' salary for these young men. It was a huge amount of money. It was the foreigner's airfare from Guilin to Peking. It was the price of two of the best bicycles in China, The Flying Pigeon Deluxe. It was a night at The Great Wall Sheraton. It represented a good radio. It was two years' rent on a studio apartment in Shanghai. It was the cost of an antique silver bowl in the bazaar at Turfan.

  I paid Mr. Jiang. I wanted a reaction from him. There was none. That was for form's sake. The Chinese make a practice of not reacting to any sort of hospitality. But I persisted.

  "Is the driver impressed with this meal?"

  "Not at all," Mr. Jiang said. "He has eaten this many times before. Ha! Ha!"

  It rang in my ears—one of the few genuine laughs I heard in China.

  It meant We can always fool a foreigner.

  I was the hairy, big-nosed devil from the back of beyond, a foreigner (wei-guo ren) one of those whom the Chinese regard as the yokels of the world. We lived in crappy little countries that were squeezed at the edges of the Middle Kingdom. The places we
inhabited were insignificant but bizarre. Once, the Chinese believed that we tied ourselves into bunches so that we would not be snatched away by eagles. Some of our strange societies were composed entirely of women, who became pregnant by staring at their shadows. We had noses like anteaters. We were hairier than monkeys. We smelled like corpses. One odd fenestrated race had holes in their chests, through which poles were thrust, when we carried one another around. Most of these notions were no longer current, but they had given rise to self-deceiving proverbs, which sometimes seemed true And then the laughter was real.

  12: The Slow Train to Changsha and Shaoshan "Where the Sun Rises"

  I boarded the Changsha train at Guilin Station and found it rather empty and haunted looking. It was an old-fashioned train with antiquated coaches. It had come from a strange place, too—Zhazhang on the coast of Guangdong, heading for Wuhan on the Yangtze. It was just after sundown, but very hot. I put on my pajamas, started reading Kidnapped and went to sleep dreaming that I was on this very train.

  In my dream the train stopped at a station in a darkening landscape among leafless trees. It was a big wooden building, not like any I had seen, with high rooftops and balconies. I knew this was not my destination and yet I got off the train and went inside the place. The walls were whitewashed, there were potted palms here and there, and the tracks went across the lobby—two or three platforms near the ticket windows. I found this very confusing.

  "What station is this?" I said, meaning to make a note for my diary.

  A Chinese man said, "Ask the people here."

  There were workers in greasy overalls, hammering the tracks. They were black—or rather, half Chinese, half black.

  Someone near them said, "This station was built by the British."

  None of the black workers spoke English. In Chinese one of them said, "Zhe shi shenme difang Kong Fuzi."

  This made no sense to me. I looked closely at the men. They were like the blacks in old Hollywood movies, light skinned, with pale eyes and a penetrating gaze.

  I realized that I had been there too long and that my train was leaving. I became panicky. Some tourists blocked my way. A stout woman confronted me.

  "Are you Paul Theroux?"

  "No," I said, and slid past her.

  I went in the wrong direction, to Track Seven. My train was on Track Five. I ran back and forth.

  One of the tourists was laughing at me, and another said, "The British named this station after Confucius."

  In the nick of time I caught my train, and I woke up perspiring in the rocking berth. It was midnight. The coal smoke and clanging at the window was the coal smoke and clanging from my dream.

  The train arrived in Changsha before dawn. The wide streets were hot and dark. Mr. Fang was just behind me, murmuring.

  "What's wrong, Mr. Fang?"

  "Trains!" he said, and he laughed. At that hour of the morning it was a terrifying laugh. He made the noise again and said, "Trains!"

  He was weakening.

  It was not only the train that bothered Mr. Fang; it was also Changsha itself. The city was associated in the minds of all Chinese with the memory of Chairman Mao. Mao had been born nearby, at Shaoshan. He had been educated here. He had taught school here. He had helped found the Communist Party in Changsha, and had given speeches and recruited Party members. Changsha was his city and Hunan his province. For years and years, whenever the Chinese had permission to travel they came here in a pious way, in homage to Mao, and they finished the tour by journeying to Shaoshan.

  Mr. Fang was sick of Mao, sick of political talk, disgusted with political emblems and songs. He was not interested in the Party either. He wanted to get on with his job—he had work to do in Peking. It would have been the height of rudeness for him to say that he was sick of following me around on this trip, but I knew he was at the end of his tether. He groaned when we boarded trains these days, and his cry of Trains! at Changsha Station convinced me that he was on the point of surrender.

  Another train and more Mao: that was Fang's nightmare.

  His distress put me into a fairly good frame of mind. And I was glad to be here. All along I had intended to visit Mao's birthplace and interrogate the pilgrims. No one seemed to have a good word for Mao these days; but what did they think in Changsha?

  "He made very few mistakes, and the mistakes were very small," Mr. Ye said, showing me the Mao statue at the birthplace of Chinese communism. The statue was gigantic—Mao in an overcoat and cap, waving.

  "Are you proud of him?"

  "Yes!" Mr. Ye said defiantly. "We are proud of many things he did."

  Mr. Shao said, "Most of the Chinese people are proud of him. A few don't agree."

  "Deng Xiaoping called him a great man!" Mr. Ye protested.

  I said, "Shall we go to the Mao Museum?"

  "It is closed," Mr. Shao said.

  "Really? Why is it closed?"

  The men fell silent, and their silence meant: Don't ask.

  "What about the middle school where Mao taught?" I said.

  Mr. Ye frowned and said, "It is ten kilometers from the city. We can drive by it, but we cannot go in. It is not very interesting."

  People used to make pilgrimages here!

  "I suggest we go to the Hunan Museum of History," Mr. Shao said. "There is a woman in it who is two thousand years old."

  She lies naked in a Lucite coffin filled with formaldehyde, her face is hideous from decay and dissection, her flesh is pruney white and her mouth gapes open. She died in the Han Dynasty after eating a watermelon. The seeds taken from her stomach are on view. Indeed, her stomach is on view—all her internal organs are in jars. The Chinese throng this museum for much the same reason that, as a schoolboy, I used to go to the Agassir Museum at Harvard. I was fascinated by the pickled head of a gorilla in a big jar and the way one of his jellylike eyes had come loose and floated to the top of the jar. Horror-interest.

  One of the pitfalls of long journeys is the tendency of the traveler to miniaturize a big city—not out of malice or frivolity, but for his own peace of mind. Confronted with a stony-faced and charmless Chinese city I tried to simplify it and make it interesting to me. Changsha was a good example of that. I knew it had several universities, a number of technical institutes, hospitals and medical schools—most Chinese cities were equally well equipped. They are a tribute to China's determination to be self-sufficient, healthy and literate. And such projects and institutions are seen as so necessary that the Chinese cannot understand why African and other Third World countries indulge themselves in meretricious enterprises like luxury airports or super highways. The Chinese are contemptuous of showy projects and regard aid recipients who spend money this way as pathetic and backward. On the whole, the Chinese are baffled by people who are unwilling to make sacrifices. That is admirable. But it is very tiring constantly to be subjected to Chinese sacrifice. After the twentieth hospital and fortieth university campus, I began to give them a miss.

  So Changsha was rather more than Maoist memories and the two-thousand-year-old pickled woman; but the rest was not compelling. I found it hard to distinguish the hotels from the colleges and the hospitals from the prisons. Chinese architecture, which is all-purpose and excruciating, makes it almost impossible to tell these places apart. One of the most common experiences a foreigner has in China (outside of the three or four major cities) is of waking in a dreary room, seeing the water-stained ceiling, torn curtains, dented thermos bottle and rotting carpet and not knowing whether he is a student, a guest, a patient or a prisoner.

  That is changing. I met four men from the Hunan Provincial Tourism Bureau in Changsha, and when one of them—Mr. Sun Bing—said, "We are the Selling and Marketing Department of this outfit," I was convinced it was changing fast.

  "We want foreign friends to know what a wonderful province this is," Mr. Li said.

  "Because of Chairman Mao?"

  "Not only that," Mr. Zhang said. "Our great secret is Wuling Yang."

&nb
sp; "Another politician?"

  "A region. More beautiful than anything in Guilin."

  "Limestone hills?"

  "Of course, but better shapes," Mr. Sun said. "More interesting. Bigger. Plus woods and birds."

  "And minority people," Mr. Chen said.

  "Very colorful minority people," Mr. Sun added. "Altogether a most attractive package."

  Rap on, I thought. I loved this. Four new Chinese, selling their province's scenic wonders. And again I thought, The Chinese wake up quickly.

  "People know nothing about this now," Mr. Zhang said. "It is a secret. No one goes there."

  "Why not?"

  "Because there is no hotel. But one is being built. And when it is, this region will be famous all over the world."

  Mr. Li said, "Hunan is a lovely province. People must know it better. We compete with other provinces, but we have everything: Until now visitors did not come here to look at the scenery, but they are starting to."

  And saying this he led me to a table, where we had a long meal of Hunanese dishes—the best food in China, in my opinion. This banquet consisted of frogs' legs, turtle, duck, tripe, sea cucumbers (which are actually sea slugs), soup and vegetables—no rice, no noodles: that sort of stodge was for people with cruder palates. I knew that it was a blatant attempt to win my approval, and I was touched by their innocent belief in the dynamics of feasting the foreign devil. The Chinese can be deeply unsubtle, stage-managing a bowel-shattering banquet before asking a favor. Or is that subtle? Anyway, they have found that it works. But I would gladly have praised the hills of Hunan without a third helping of frogs' legs.

  Until now visitors did not come here to look at the scenery, Mr. Li had said. How true. They had come as pilgrims, first to walk the 120 kilometers west to Shaoshan, and then—after the railway line was built in the late sixties—to take the strangest train in China. They had come believing the Cultural Revolution slogan, 'The sun rises in Shaoshan" (Taiyang cong Shaoshan shenggi), which was a metaphor for Mao Zedong's having been born there. The Chinese had once named themselves "Shaoshan" in Mao's honor, and I ran into at least one Li Shaoshan.