Riding the Iron Rooster

  Jim Koch had recently been married to Jill and had been looking forward to this post. But after three months in Xiamen he admitted to being rather doubtful. He was not pessimistic, but he was certainly cautious. What had surprised him most was Chinese ineptness.

  "They're used to working with their hands," he said. "That's the problem. They can rig up something with a piece of wire and a stick. But they have never relied on sophisticated machinery or high tech. I have to show them every detail about a hundred times."

  "But the young Chinese must be teachable."

  "They're the worst. The laziest, the slowest, the most arrogant. The older workers are the best—the over fifties. The ones from thirty to forty seem to have a chip on their shoulder, as if they were cut out for better things."

  "They were in the Cultural Revolution, so perhaps they're feeling cheated."

  "Maybe. But I thought this was going to be pretty straightforward. Maybe eight months. The Chinese said twelve. But it will take longer."

  "What is the biggest problem?" I asked.

  "Cleanliness," Jim said. "If a floor looks clean they think it's clean. They use these bunches of twigs and straw to sweep. But that's not good enough. For this kind of equipment you need an absolutely dust-free environment, otherwise particles get into the film and wreck it. So now we have to seal the plant and install an air-conditioning system."

  "Are you sorry you came to China?"

  "No. But I thought it was going to be different. You know, the Chinese are supposed to be so clever. But a lot of these projects in Xiamen have had problems. That's why there are so many empty factories here." His voice dropped and he added, "It's going to be a long haul."

  But it did not strike me as a tragedy if Xiamen's factories were working at half strength. There would always be money flowing into the city from her native sons and daughters who had prospered overseas. And Xiamen was a pretty place precisely because it had not developed heavy industry, and because—pressured by the romantics and the retirees—it had not vandalized its old buildings and elaborate gardens.

  The Lunar New Year came. The whole country was on the move, and people threw firecrackers into the streets. It was impossible to travel in the crush of passengers enacting the yearly ritual of going home. I could not buy train tickets. So I did nothing but wait until the festival ended, and then I resumed my travels, heading westward.

  21: The Qinghai Local to Xining: Train Number 275

  On my way to Xian to catch the Qinghai local I ran into the mountaineer Chris Bonington. He said he was in China to climb Menlungtse, a mountain near Everest and almost as high.

  "We're also looking for a yeti," he said.

  His good health and his courage and his tigerish way of turning his head made him seem very youthful. He had a look of smiling innocence and strength, a happy man whose life was devoted to adventuring up mountains.

  He was serious about the Abominable Snowman. A previous Everest expedition had photographed a yeti footprint on the Menlung Glacier.

  "Are you going to bring one back in a cage?"

  He smiled. Was that a twinkle in his eye? He said, "No, all we want is a picture."

  Presumably that was worth money. There was no profit in climbing a 23,ooo-foot mountain and risking your neck; but if you managed to get a picture of the great hairy monster of the Himalayas you were newsworthy and bankable. Money to finance expeditions was always a problem in mountaineering. Bonington's small team of four or five climbers had forty cases of supplies among them, which entailed hiring numerous sherpas and yaks to transport them.

  Along with bear hunting in Xinjiang, and sport fishing in Liaoning, equipping mountain-climbing expeditions was another enterprise of the Chinese.

  Bonington said that ninety percent of China's mountains had not been climbed and that many of them were over 20,000 feet. But it was expensive to climb in China, he said.

  "For example, a yak costs thirty yuan a day to rent," he said. "I wonder how much of that goes to the owner?"

  I said that I would ask someone in Qinghai, where many of the yak herds were found.

  That was the first of March. In Xian I read in a China Daily that Deng Xiaoping told the visiting American secretary of state that the recent trouble in China had been caused by "a leadership crisis." It was a euphemism for a power struggle. "It is now over," he said, and added cryptically, "but it may continue for a while in the minds of the Chinese people."

  Xian lay under winter mist, denuded and dusty. In sunlight it was stark, a flat city of plain buildings inside a city wall that was powerful and elegant, with great roofed gates. Xian's city wall actually looks as though it could repel an invading army. I visited the terra-cotta warriors a second time. They cast the same spell, with their eerie artistry and bizarre, half-human and buried-alive look, like an army that has been petrified by time. The curio sellers were frenzied, because this was the off-season, a winter month in which few foreign tourists visited. The Chinese are more like threadbare pilgrims than tourists. They are not spenders. They have no money. Their work units rent beat-up buses and pack them with employees, and off they go, hundreds of miles to look at a pagoda or the warriors. They also regard the hotels for foreign visitors as worth gaping at. They stood at the gates of Xian's Golden Flower Hotel ($100 a day) watching foreigners come and go. The Chinese in their innocence still regard their looking at foreigners as a form of sight-seeing.

  Like many other Chinese cities, Xian was not clean, but it was very bare. The Chinese are not scrubbers, but they are inexhaustible sweepers. Sweeping doesn't freshen a city. It gives it a dis-—416—concerting baldness. The effect is of a place that has been trampled.

  I walked in the back lanes of the city, among the little tumbled compounds, and the stinks of dampness and dust, and the fragrant smells of cooking. I lingered near the windows of lighted rooms, where children were doing homework and women were working at kitchen tables. I saw a restaurant—tiny; filthy; people with steamers and pots on the table. I longed to go in, but every seat was taken. On my morning walks I bought the Chinese pedestrian's winter breakfast, "fried sticks" (you tiao)—deep-fried dough, which resembled elongated pieces of Yorkshire pudding. They were fried outdoors in a wok. People on their way to the factory bought little bundles of them and ate them on the way.

  On this second visit to Xian I saw that the city prospered without tourists. It had a life of its own, and its economy was that of an inland capital, dealing in industrial and agricultural products. The discovery of the terra-cotta army had given a boost to the tourist trade, but the tourist economy was parallel to the existing economy. The Chinese government had a policy of being brisk with tourists—shipping them in, squiring them around and shipping them out. They hated people who lingered and found cheap rooms and simply strolled around looking through people's windows. They really didn't want me there at all. But what could they do? I didn't have a nanny anymore. They could not keep track of travelers. It was possible to arrive in China and more or less vanish. I had now managed this, and I saw people like me all the time. Their reference point was always the local post office. I saw tall, dusty long-nosed foreigners. We exchanged glances—and there was little more than that—but I recognized them as kindred souls. Were they writing books about China? Probably. Everyone seemed to be doing that. The only justification was that any travel book revealed more about the traveler than it did about the country.

  Even late on a Thursday night in clammy March the main railway station was crowded—and more than crowded. It was almost impossible for me to make my way from one side to another. I could not understand the density—the people sleeping on benches, making noodles in the corner, milling around, sitting on their luggage, nursing babies. It was a huge station and yet there was nowhere for me to sit—no spare room. There were about eight trains departing within a few hours, and they were long trains; but that still did not explain the mobs. It was amazing to see so many people on the move, and it was useful to me, becaus
e I could lose myself in the crowd.

  In the sleeping-compartment lottery I was assigned with three soldiers. Even wearing thick long underwear they were much too small for their uniforms. They were young, about twenty or so, and had sweet faces. They began making tea, and remarking politely on what luck it was for them to be traveling with an American friend, and so forth.

  I said, "I'd like to know whether you call yourselves 'soldiers' (bing) or 'fighters' (zhanshi)."

  It was a Maoist distinction that had been introduced into the People's Liberation Army—I had been told that "fighters" was the accepted word. They agreed with this and said that "fighters" was the usual word, but that no one worried about the difference anymore. And by the way, the word "comrade" (tongzhi) was not very commonly used.

  The soldiers snuggled into their berths and pulled out romantic novels; they read and dozed.

  "This is very good tea," one of the soldiers said later on, lifting my can of Dragon Well Tea.

  "I like green tea," I said.

  "We are red-tea people," he said. "I lived on a commune that grew tea. I was too young to pick it, but my parents did."

  "Were they sent there during the Cultural Revolution?"

  "It was during the Cultural Revolution, but they went willingly," he said.

  Farther down the sleeping car, a man was smoking a Churchillian-sized cigar. The man himself was very small, and I saw this cigar smoking as a form of aggression. The whole coach was filled with this smoke, and although the cigar was truly noxious, no one told him to lay off.

  "I hate that smoke," I told the soldier. "I want to tell that man to stop smoking his cigar."

  The soldier became twitchy when I said this.

  "Better not," he said, and laughed—his laugh signifying, Let's pretend that cigar smoker doesn't exist.

  The next time I walked past the cigar smoker I saw he had an army uniform on a hook over his berth. Officers were said not to exist in the PLA, but it was obvious that he was one—superior to the three fighters in my compartment.

  I was reading Chinese Lives, which had been put together as a series of interviews by Sang Ye and Zhang Xinxin. I had met Sang in Peking just after I started my China trip. The book was a pleasure, and it was ingeniously simple and revealing. It also confirmed my feeling that the Chinese, who are supposed to be so enigmatic, can be blunt and plainspoken and candid to the point of utter tactlessness. That was why the book was so fresh.

  All night the compartment door opened and closed, as people came and went. One sleeper snored for hours. Someone in an upper berth kept his light on. The door banged. There was always chatter in the passageway. The lights of stations made yellow stripes in the compartment, and then we were in the darkness again. In the morning, a man sat on the lower berth, sipping tea.

  "Where you are going?" he asked.

  "Xining. And then Tibet." I used the Chinese name for Tibet, Xizang.

  "You'll be gasping in Tibet. It is very hard to breathe there because of the altitude."

  "I'll do my best."

  We were in the yellow, rubbly gorges of Gansu, one of the roughest looking landscapes in the whole of China—I knew that now. There were no trees, there was very little water except for the muddy Yellow River, which the train followed for part of the way into Lanzhou. The soil was crumbly, the color and texture of very old cheddar cheese—the sort that has remained untouched in a mousetrap all winter.

  I woke hungry and decided to "register" for breakfast. For about twenty cents I bought a breakfast coupon. I was told to report at seven-thirty. I did as I was told. On the dot of seven-thirty the dining car filled with people, who sat rather impatiently. A girl in a nightcap and apron went through the car with a tray, plonking bowls down. There was a sudden hush; a silence; and then a tremendous slurping. The chopsticks clicked like knitting needles for a minute or so, and then the people stood and shoved their chairs back and went away. That was breakfast.

  Towards midmorning, the Yellow River widened in the cheesey gorge, and we arrived at Lanzhou. I had been here before; I had no desire to stop. I bought some peanuts to eat and walked along the platform while the locomotive's boilers were filled with fresh water. I noticed that most of the people got out at Lanzhou, and very few boarded. It had rained slightly. Chinese rain often made a city look filthier and sometimes much dustier. It had had that effect on Lanzhou, which looked very dismal and rather parched after the sprinkle. The steam engine was reconnected, and we set off again, slowly, with many stops on the way.

  After about fifty miles we entered the province of Qinghai. "There is nothing in Qinghai," the Chinese had told me, which gave me an appetite for the place. We were soon among big smooth mountains of mud—great heaps and stacks of hard-packed dirt. It had the look of an endless dump. It was the most infertile place I had seen in China—less fertile than Inner Mongolia, more arid even than the Turfan depression and the ravines of Gansu. The river, which seemed to have the name "the Yellow Water," looked poisonous, so the water was not a source of life; it was another way of ridding the landscape of vegetation.

  But people had figured a way of living here. They had made bamboo frames and stretched plastic sheeting over them. Inside these crude greenhouses they grew vegetables. The only produce in Qinghai is grown in these things. At night the people cover them with straw mats because it is below freezing. The daytime sun warms the plants through the plastic. In ditches I could see ice, even though it was noon.

  The people were so poor here they could not afford to feed donkeys or buffalos. They plowed, using two people to pull the plow and one to guide it. There they were, in the middle of the whirling dust, dragging the thing. It was the first time in my life I had seen human beings pulling a plow. They also pulled carts and wagons in Qinghai, and had totally replaced animal labor with their own. I had the impression that after the field was plowed a system of plastic greenhouses was erected over the furrows.

  The mountains and heaps of mud reddened, grew brown and then gray, and became clawed with eroded gullies; and then they became rocky, and stonier. But they never looked less barren. It was odd, then, to see people preparing the ground for crops—digging, plowing, raking; and to see lives being lived—schoolkids frolicking in the playground under the red flag; other kids carrying water in buckets and picking coal out of the rubble. And in the middle of nowhere I saw a man strolling along and smiling, with a monkey skittering on a leash.

  The settlements were clusters of square, squat houses with mud-walled courtyards. Walls were the rule here. And there was some irrigation, some vegetable gardens exposed to the wind and weather. But the clearest impression I had, early on in Qinghai, was of every village looking like a prison farm. Indeed, that is how many of them started out, with the villagers sent to Qinghai as punishment. They were to be reformed through labor, as the saying went, and turned from prisoners into pioneers.

  The station signs were written in three scripts—Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan. I had no idea how far we had come. We were traveling very slowly still. The province was bigger than the whole of Europe, but it was empty. The trees were stark and dead, like symbols of trees, the six lines that a child might draw with a crayon. The ground was bare, the houses and mountains brown, the river gray and the ice at its edges was filthy. The valley was twenty miles wide. Having seen Xinjiang, I suspected that these fields might be green in the summer and that it might not be the dreary place it seemed. But it was odd to be in this brown and lifeless world, where there is nothing visible that can be eaten. It looked like a dead planet. This is the sort of landscape that frightens visitors to China—frightens the Chinese, too. To the Chinese this was not part of the world: it was the edge of it, so it was nothing.

  By talking to the other passengers I established that the mountains to the north were the Dabanshan. Gansu was on the other side. Cave dwellers inhabited some of those mountainsides, and in some cases the caves were elaborate, with windows and doors and crude plumbing. I could see on s
ome of them a sort of superstructure protruding, a balcony which made a facade.

  The train was creaking along, gaining altitude. We were now at about 7000 feet—it was chilly, the air was thin, the wind was strong. In the cliffs above the track there were caves, an opening on every cliff face, with its own shelf and precarious stairs cut into the rock. Some cave dwellers were sitting in the sunshine, others hanging laundry, hacking at troughlike gardens that seemed magnetized to the mountainside. They were cooking, too. Why think of this as a mountain when you could just as easily think of it as a tenement? That wasn't a cliff—it was the west wing, and that summit was a penthouse. There was a whole world of troglodytes here in Qinghai.

  Only its altitude made Xining breathtaking. In other respects it looked like what it was, a frontier town: square brown buildings on straight streets, surrounded by big brown hills. All the water on the creeks and streams had turned to ice. It was an ugly, friendly place, and its bantering people had chafed red cheeks, like bruised peaches. Its terrible weather gave it drama. Its rain was black and very cold. But it did not rain long. Most of the time it was notoriously dry—too arid for growing vegetables outside the plastic greenhouses. Snow also fell, in big, wet plopping flakes. And the wind had torn off all the topsoil. Inside of a week I experienced all those conditions—rain, dust storms, blinding sunlight and snow. If I climbed stairs too quickly, I had to stop and get my breath. I developed a plodding way of walking that enabled me to keep going. There were Muslims all over town, wearing a sort of chef's cap and side-whiskers, and there were also spitting Hans, and Tibetans who favored cowboy hats and frock coats.

  "What's that music?" I asked the driver, as we traveled to the hotel from the station.

  The driver said nothing, but his pal said, "Beethoven."