Riding the Iron Rooster

  We were having an animated conversation, Mr. Tian and I. He was describing how the various Red Guard factions had battled each other on the streets of Harbin—school against school, factory against factory, each group claiming that they were the purest Maoists. At the station, Mr. Tian told me how the walls had been daubed with slogans and Mao portraits. "It was a total waste," he said. Chinese candor always touched me and made me grateful. When the whistle of my approaching train blew I took off my sheepskin mittens, my scarf, and the winter hat I had bought for this cold place. I handed them to Mr. Tian.

  "I won't need them in Dalian," I said.

  Mr. Tian shrugged, shook my hand, and without another word walked off. It was the Chinese farewell: there was no lingering, no swapping of addresses, no reminiscence, nothing sentimental. At the moment of parting they turned their backs, because you ceased to matter and because they had so much else to worry about. It was like the departure after a Chinese meal, the curtain falling abruptly with a thud and everyone vanishing. I did not mind that such rituals were perfunctory—it certainly kept them from being hypocritical. Mr. Tian was soon a little blue figure in a mob of blue figures.

  But I should never have given him my gloves and scarf. This was another unheated train. Did they ever heat anything? It was in the low forties (Fahrenheit) in the compartment and even colder in the dining car. There was ice on all the floors and frost on the windows. It was too cold to sit still, so I walked back and forth, from one end of the train to the other.

  But what was I complaining about? Outside, people were digging and repairing fences and walking to work and hanging laundry outside their small huts in the snowfields. And the strong wind that battered the windows of the train was yanking at these people, too. They looked plump in their winter clothes, like stuffed dolls, and their faces were crimson—visible from a long way off. Knowing what their lives must be like, I resolved not to grumble about my lunch of dried fish and gristly meat.

  Changchun, which we reached in the early afternoon, was full of vaporous locomotives. The freezing weather made them immensely steamy, and great gusts billowed from the fourteen engines shunting at the station. Icicles hung from their black wheels, and smoke came out of their chimneys, and shrieks of steam from their pistons. It was impressive for being a study of fire and ice, and also for its tones of black and white, the engines bowling along the snowy tracks.

  One of China's major film studios is in Changchun, and at that moment a coproduction about the life of China's last emperor was being made. If the film had concerned his time as emperor it could have been a very short film. He was only three years old when he took the throne and he abdicated three years later, in 1912. His name was Pu Yi, but he took the name Henry when he was older. His main recreation was watching Harold Lloyd movies. And later, when the Japanese formed the puppet state of Manchukuo and needed a puppet to run it, they chose Henry and worked his strings in Changchun until the silly state collapsed and Henry was arrested as a war criminal by the Russians. His life ended in the same violent confusion as it began, when he died of cancer at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Henry Pu Yi represented everything that Mao set his face against: the decadent Manchus, the ruling class, wealth, privilege, Japanese collaboration and the humiliations of Chinese history. No wonder when the time came they seized Henry Pu Yi and had his guts for garters.

  I debated whether to stay in Changchun; but it was an easy decision. Changchun was very cold, so I moved on. The ice thickened on the walls of the train. Time passed slowly. I put on all my clothes, bit by bit, until by the middle of the afternoon I was sitting with my hands up my sleeves, reading the The Analects of Confucius and turning the pages with my nose.

  Beyond the glittering rime on the window, small padded moon-people went slowly across the snow. And so did cyclists and ox carts and school kids carrying knapsacks. I saw horses hopelessly foraging for food among blunt spikes of stubble. Sometimes there was a great whiteness, its only identifiable feature a row of telephone poles—the Chinese variety, mile upon mile of tragic-looking crosses. We were in the province of Jilin now, and a cloud of frozen vapor hovered close to the snowy ground.

  Few people in the train looked out of the window. They were eating noodles out of tin cups, guzzling tea, shouting or sleeping. Many were taking advantage of the recent relaxation of the rules governing card games. They were actually gambling in Hard Class, and some groups were playing mah-jongg.

  As I walked along from coach to coach I said hello and after a few exchanges, "It's cold."

  They just smiled, or shrugged. They were indifferent to the icicles in the toilet, the ice on the floor, the wind whipping through the dining car, the igloo that had formed between the coaches. I admired them for not caring. I had seen plenty of wimps in China, but the predominating characteristic of the Chinese was stoicism.

  Everyone winced when a man waved his arms at me in a kind of aimlessly dangerous way and began screaming, "America! Kissinger! Nixon!"

  He went on chanting this and following me.

  Someone said, "He's drunk."

  "He's been drinking wine," someone else said.

  But he wasn't drunk—he was crazy. A Chinese person who was solitary and aggressive had to be unbalanced.

  He kept following me, so I shouted back. "I hear you, comrade, but I don't understand."

  People laughed at that, because it was a stock phrase for stonewalling someone and pretending to be dim. He got off the train at Siping, on the border of the province of Liaoning. He was still raving.

  In the early winter sunset, all the villages were smoking because it was mealtime—all the stoves alight. The tiny huts lay like simple blocks on the hillsides, toy towns in the snow, and rising from them were symmetrical cones of smoke.

  In my rambles through the train I met a Frenchman, Nicolas, who was on his way back to Peking. He was a carpenter from Nice. He had no idea where he was. He did not speak Chinese, and he was trying to teach himself English. He said he was not enjoying China at all. The food was disgusting, he said. The hotels were filthy. Had I been to Harbin?

  "I am in Harbin," he said. "I am very cold. I go into a cinema to get warm. It is not a cinema! It is a big room. With shares. Chinese people in the shares. And they are all watching a small television. I sat there all day. It was not warm, but it was better than the street."

  We swapped stories of low temperatures in Manchuria.

  He was reading a textbook titled Easy Steps to English, but he was only on chapter three.

  "How can you say this word?" he asked, putting his mitten on the vocabulary list.

  "Believe."

  "Booleeve," he said.

  "Want an English lesson?" I said, because I saw a way of asking him a number of personal questions in this way. He gladly agreed.

  I explained the verb believe and then said we were going to practice a number of drills.

  "Nicolas, do you believe in God?"

  "Non. I do not booleeve een Gott."

  "Do you believe that Klaus Barbie is guilty of Nazi war crimes?"

  "Maybe."

  "You have to repeat the whole sentence."

  "Maybe I booleeve ..."

  I asked him about the Chinese, the French, the Americans; about his travels, his ambitions, his family. But his answers weren't interesting, and eventually I abandoned the effort and suggested that he should try to learn Chinese.

  The lights in the train were dim. The snow on the floor had not melted. I was stiff from the cold. Nicolas said he wished he were back in Nice. I tried to think where I wanted to be. I considered the possibilities and reached the conclusion that I wanted to be right here, doing what I was doing—heading south towards Dalian on the China coast. Perhaps it was a simple choice—of being home or being elsewhere. Surely this was elsewhere?

  By the time the train reached Shenyang, after thirteen hours of travel from Harbin, I decided that I had had enough. I could get another train tomorrow and continue on my way.
In the meantime I could look at Shenyang.

  It was a Chinese city, and therefore a nightmare, and tonight it was thirty below in Shenyang—tiny needles and etchings of ice on every surface. The streets were practically deserted, and on this dark night, in the glare of its few lights, Shenyang had the look of a city depicted in an old black-and-white photograph. It was perfectly still. My problem was that when I exhaled, my glasses became opaque with frost.

  It is an official Chinese government statistic that one-third of all Chinese travelers on trains are going to meetings in distant cities. It is one of the bonuses of any job. The pay is lousy but the meetings are held in tourist spots, and so what is supposed to be a business trip is actually a sort of holiday. The same system operates when American companies hold sales conferences in places like Acapulco or the Bahamas.

  So many Chinese people travel, even in sub-zero winter weather like this, that one is never sure of getting a hotel room. But in Shenyang I had no problem. The 500-room Phoenix Hotel had only six other guests. It was only seven-thirty at night, but already the dining room was closed. I begged them to open it, and they said I could eat providing I did not require anything very fancy. The specialities of the Phoenix were bear's paw (350 yuan), moose nose, and "fillet of pork in the shape of a club." I had crunchy chicken and cabbage. It was no good, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that for the first time in weeks I was warm. This hotel was heated. My room was full of light fixtures. There was imitation fur on the walls. The toilet didn't work, but the room had a television.

  I needed help getting a ticket to Dalian because (but how was I to know this?) the trains to Dalian were always full and tickets were almost unobtainable at short notice. That was how I met Mr. Sun.

  Mr. Sun was self-educated. He had spent what should have been his school days on a farm, another casualty of the Cultural Revolution. But he still believed in self-reliance and serving the people, and in order and obedience. In the course of his getting me a train ticket we had several illuminating conversations, and I was glad he was a frank hard-liner, because I sometimes had the feeling that everyone I met resented the past and felt that Mao had created a society of jackasses.

  "I think the students have no right to criticize the government," Mr. Sun said, and then launched into a harangue. "I had to teach myself English. I had no chance to go to any university. The government has given these students the right to go to university. It is paying for their education. And what do the students do? They demonstrate against the government! I don't agree with them at all. If they demonstrate they should be removed."

  Mr. Sun showed me the gigantic epoxy-resin statue of Mao in Shenyang. It is the apotheosis of Mao the founding father, surrounded by fifty-eight figures that represent all phases of the Chinese revolution. I did not have to be told that it was erected during the Cultural Revolution. Like the Mao statue in Chengdu, it showed the old man beaming his benediction down upon the proletariat. Such statues were expensive. The money for the Chengdu statue had been earmarked for a sports stadium, and the Shenyang one had been built with civic funds.

  I asked Mr. Sun whether he thought it was all a waste of public money.

  "No," he said.

  "Do you think the statue should be pulled down and destroyed like the other Mao statues?"

  "There is no need to pull down the statue just because it was put up during the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Sun said. "Mao was a great man and we must not forget his achievement."

  There was no question that Mao had been a remarkable man. He had said that he had pondered for years a means by which he might shock the Chinese people, and then he had hit upon the idea of the Cultural Revolution as the perfect shock. But he had overdone it: no one had known when to stop.

  Mr. Sun was an interpreter. He was not a very good one—we spoke a mixture of Chinese and English in order to carry on an intelligible conversation. But he surprised me by saying that he would soon be going to Kuwait in the Persian Gulf to be an interpreter for a Chinese work gang.

  One of China's newest money-making schemes was the export of skilled laborers on construction projects. They were putting up buildings in Saudi Arabia, and indeed all over the Middle East. It seems very odd that the Chinese are hired as architects and builders, since their own buildings are so undistinguished, not to say monstrosities. It was rather as though Poland were exporting chefs, and Australia sending elocution teachers to England, and Americans running classes in humility or the Japanese in relaxation techniques. Post-1949 Chinese buildings were among the very worst and shakiest and ugliest I had ever seen in my life.

  "Won't you have to speak Arabic in Kuwait?"

  "No. The other workers are Germans and Koreans and Pakistanis and Americans. Everyone speaks English. That's why I am needed."

  I asked him whether he was apprehensive about the new job.

  "My friend just came back and he told me the weather is bad."

  "It's not much like Shenyang"—minus twenty-eight degrees today, by the way. "What are the people like?"

  "Not friendly."

  "And the housing?"

  "Everyone sleeps in the same room."

  "What about the food?"

  "He just ate tins."

  "Cans of Ma Ling cow's tendon, and White Lotus pigs' trotters in gelatin, and Sunflower pork luncheon meat, and China National Foodstuffs boneless chicken pieces in spicy broth—that kind of thing?"

  "Yes. And noodles. I think so."

  I imagined crates and cartons stacked to the ceiling of the dormitory where this team of workers lived.

  "Is there any advantage to living that way and eating out of cans in the sandstorms of Kuwait?"

  "You can buy some things."

  "What did your friend buy?"

  "One refrigerator. Three television sets—one had remote control. A radio. A video recorder. An oven for the kitchen—microwave. Cassette recorder. And a Honda motorcycle. All Japanese."

  It was as if the fellow had won the jackpot on a game show.

  "It must have cost him a lot of money," I said.

  "He earned one hundred and seven U.S. dollars every month."

  And lived on cans of Ma Ling loquats in syrup and Double Happiness dried noodles for two years—pass the Lucky Eagle can opener, Abdul.

  "What will he do with all those televisions?"

  "One for his mother, one for his brother, and one for himself."

  "What are you planning to buy in Kuwait?"

  "A Japanese refrigerator."

  "What will you do with it?" I asked, because Mr. Sun had already told me that he lived with his parents.

  "I will need it, because after two years in Kuwait I will be of marriageable age."

  He told me that the legal age for marriage in the north of China is twenty-six for a man and twenty-four for a woman; and that in the south it is a year lower. But I bought a pamphlet of the Chinese marriage laws a few weeks later and it seemed to dispute what Mr. Sun had said.

  "Is that all you want—a refrigerator?"

  "I also want a video camera. I want to take pictures of Kuwait and of different places in China. Then I can show these pictures to my mother. She has never been anywhere except Shenyang."

  It was smoggy in Shenyang that day—a brown sky and icy streets; and it was as cold as Harbin.

  Mr. Sun said, "You should stay longer here."

  "It's too cold," I said. "I want to go south."

  "Where do you come from in the United States?"

  "Not very far from Portsmouth, New Hampshire."

  He looked puzzled. He didn't have a clue. Why did so many Chinese have an intimate knowledge of ancient history, the legendary Yellow Emperor and the Tang Dynasty, and have no information at all about more recent Chinese history?

  I said, "Does the Treaty of Portsmouth mean anything to you?"

  It was the treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War and that gave Shenyang—then called Mukden—to the Japanese. It was only eighty years ago, probably in
the lifetime of Mr. Sun's mother. This treaty was suggested by Teddy Roosevelt and signed in that little town—actually in the Portsmouth Naval Yard, which happens to be just over the state line, in Kittery, Maine, but I felt that would only confuse Mr. Sun.

  He didn't know anything about it. He wanted me to see what Shenyang was famous for now—not only its "three great treasures" (ginseng, sable pelts and furry antlers), but its factories and its automobile assembly plant. Just as the Chinese make steam engines and spittoons and quill pens, so they also make brand-new old cars—the Red Flag is a slightly bloated and swollen version of an old Packard. I declined a visit to Fushun, to see China's largest open-pit mine—more than four miles across and a thousand feet deep. In this smog and frosty air it would be impossible to see the bottom, much less get a glimpse of the other side of the mine. I wanted to leave this great dark city.

  Mr. Sun persisted. Did I know that the Liaoning Tourist Board offered specialist tours? There were cycling tours. There were "local dishes tasting tours." There were "convalescence tours," and "recuperation tours"—"traditional Chinese physical therapies are applied for better treatment and recuperation results." Far from visiting Shenyang to get well, it seemed to me a place where even the healthiest person would end up with bronchitis.

  These tours were a consequence of the brisk competition among the various provincial tourist boards. Mr. Sun also mentioned one called a "lawyers' tour."

  "Any foreign friend who is interested in Chinese laws and our legal system can come on this tour, attend courts in session and can visit prisons," he said. "This provides them a chance to understand another aspect of China."

  That was one I would have taken, but I could not do it at short notice. We talked about the legal system for a while, and I asked Mr. Sun—as I had other Chinese—about capital punishment. He was an enthusiast. But he claimed that the condemned prisoner was shot in the head, while I maintained the bullet was aimed at the back of the neck.