Riding the Iron Rooster Read online

  Kicker said ironically, "How about a tomb? We haven't seen a tomb today!"

  "I'd like to show that fucker a tomb," Ashley said.

  They were all tired and crabby. You need a good night's sleep, I wanted to say. It was like school, like an outing; it had gone on too long. Day Thirty-seven, Miss Wilkie was writing in her journal.

  "It's ten thousand miles we've done," she said. 'Ten thousand miles. And believe me, it hasn't been a picnic."

  This was Zhejiang Province, the old eternal China—no fashion shows here, no spivs, no "Shansh marnie?" no talk of microchips and reforms.

  This was mostly paddy fields, and green shoots standing stiffly in black goop. It was an open, almost treeless landscape of bumpy ground and sharp-featured hills and greeny-blue mountains; tea, and rice, and bursting blue vegetables, reeking canals, tile-roofed huts, trampled dirt roads, coolie hats, and everyone dressed in the same style of pajamas. I saw two boys working a treadwheel that ran a chain-driven water pump, a machine that has been in continuous use in China since the first century A.D. according to Professor Needham.

  The Zhejiang hills—the Kuocang Shan—were streaky: slashes of white and green, with claw marks and jagged ridges. There were no shade trees. Shade is an unnecessary luxury in an agricultural country and stunts the crops. In the unhindered sunshine, the landscape was austerely tended and harshly fertile, and familiar things like trees and huts were so out of scale the people looked miniaturized.

  Everything they did was connected with food—planting it, growing it, harvesting it. The woman who looks as though she is sitting is actually weeding; those children are not playing, they are watering plants; and the man up to his shoulders in the creek is not swimming but immersed with his fishnet. The land here has one purpose: to provide food. The Chinese are never out of sight of their food, which is why as a people arrested at the oral stage of development (according to the scholar of psycho-history Sun Longji) they take such pleasure in fields of vegetables. I found the predictable symmetry of gardens very tiring to the eye, and I craved something wilder. So far, China seemed a place without wilderness. The whole country had been made over and deranged by peasant farmers. There was something unnatural and neurotic in that obsession. They had found a way to devour the whole country.

  Hunger had made them ingenious. At Jinhua the train stopped for a while, and I saw a three-decker van for carrying pigs: animals in China always seemed to be kept in a space their own size. What could be crueler? I suppose the answer was: lots of things—an intellectual forced to shovel chicken shit, a Muslim forced to keep pigs, a physicist ordered to assemble radios, an historian in a dunce cap, a person beaten to death for being a teacher. Next to these Cultural Revolution atrocities, keeping a pig in a poke was not really very bad, though it may have contributed to other forms of heartlessness. It was a very hot and humid day, and the pigs were whimpering in their racks as the train passed.

  The background was mountainous, the foreground as flat as Holland—square pools of rice shoots, and the roads no more than long narrow tracks. This landscape had no date—the people dressed as they always had; and it was impossible to date it by looking closely at tools and implements. I saw a thresher that looked like the first thresher in the world: a rigged-up whacking paddle hinged to a stick; and the buffalo yokes, the wooden plow, the long-fingered rakes and the fishermen's nets were all of ancient design. By sundown we had done 400 miles, and we had never been out of sight of bent-over farmers or cultivated fields. Every surface had been cultivated, but it was spring and so even these cabbages had beauty.

  I began talking with a Chinese man named Zhao who had just visited his girlfriend in Shanghai and was heading back to Changsha in Hunan.

  "I took her out to a restaurant and I ordered dishes to impress her. Duck, chicken, fish—everything. It cost me twenty yuan!"

  That was about six dollars, and for a moment I thought So what? and didn't understand the anguish on his face.

  Then Zhao said, 'That's a week's pay for me! I couldn't eat. I went to bed that night and I couldn't sleep." He clenched his fists and hammered with them. "Twenty yuan! I was cursing. I still feel bad."

  "I'm sure she appreciated it." I said.

  "Yes," he said. "She is a simple girl. She is a country girl. She is pure."

  Just as the landscape altered and became hillier, the sun went down. A couple from Macau—Manuel was Portuguese, Veronica was Chinese—were in my compartment. Veronica was skinny, with a small schoolboy's face and a schoolboy's haircut. She pouted for a while in the upper berth, and then we all went to sleep. But I had never really got used to sleeping among strangers and so I woke up in the middle of the night and read my Jin Ping Mei and noticed once again that it was packed with foot fetishism and bondage games. I glanced up and saw Veronica staring down at me from the upper berth.

  At dawn, under a pink sky, the train stopped at Zhuzhou, and Zhao got out to change for the train to Changsha.

  I said good-bye to him. I was grateful for something he had told me—that on a railway line outside Changsha was Shaoshan, the village where Mao Zedong had been born.

  "Everyone used to visit that village," he said. "Now no one does."

  One of these days I'll go there, I thought. Zhao had given me careful directions.

  This Canton train now turned south. With mountains always in the distance, we tracked across the rice terraces to Hengyang, where the railway divides—one line to Guangxi (Kwangsi), the other to Guangdong (Kwangtung)—The Two Kwangs, as they were once known.

  The landscape had changed since Shanghai—not only its configuration (we were now among steep hills), but the methods of farming (these teetering, brimful terraces). The people here wore large wheel-like hats and lived in brick houses with porches, about six families to a house. And some of the houses looked grand and ambitious, with columns supporting the porch roofs and dragons molded on the waterspouts of the eaves.

  Every available flat space was planted. Beans grew at the margins of the rice terraces, and there were cabbages on the hillsides, and spinach and greens at the edges of the roads. The earth had been moved and maneuvered so that everything—and especially the crumpled hills—looked man-made. The hills seemed a way of growing food vertically, like having fields on ledges and shelves to economize on space. The trees were tall and spindly, as if to take up the least amount of room.

  "Was that Hengyang?" Manuel said.

  I told him it was.

  "That was the place where Li Si—the Emperor Shi Huangdi's minister—was sawed in half, for burning the books in 213 B.C." He smiled into his bristly beard. "The interesting thing is, he was sawed in half lengthwise."

  He had left Portugal and had planned to be in Macau for about two years; but five years later he was still there. He wondered whether he would still be there when Macau was handed back to the Chinese in 1999. He said he was impressed with what he had seen in China—it was his first visit. But he smiled again.

  "Maybe after five years all this could be turned upside down."

  "Are you optimistic?"

  "You know the saying? An optimist speaks—what?"

  "Chinese," Veronica said.

  "No. An optimist speaks Russian. A pessimist speaks Chinese." Then he frowned. "That doesn't sound right. I think it's An optimist speaks Chinese, a pessimist speaks Russian. That doesn't sound right either."

  We debated this. I said, "Have you heard of the man who said, 'I speak English to my valet, French to my mistress, and German to my horse'?"

  "And Chinese to my laundryman," Manuel said.

  "And Portuguese to my cook," Veronica said.

  With the whole day to kill, we tried to devise the itinerary for the longest railway journey in the world. It began in Portugal: Braganqa-Lisbon - Barcelona - Paris - Moscow - Irkutsk - Peking - Shanghai - Hong Kong.

  We came to Chenzhou, an industrial city in a mountain valley, with high sharp gray-green peaks all around it. And at noon we passed through Ping
shi, on the Hunan-Guangdong border. The cliffs had the look of temples, with vertical sides that might have been fluted and carved. But they weren't; this was simply the pattern in the basalt. Here the boulders were as huge as hills, and there were pagodas on them.

  "Pagoda is a Portuguese word," Manuel said. "We say pagode in Portuguese—it means noise. I suppose they associated noise with these structures."

  Mandarin was also Portuguese, he said—from mandar (to be in charge); and the Japanese arrigato (thank you) had come from obrigado.

  I went to the dining car and took a seat next to a Chinese man in order to avoid Kicker ("First thing I do when I go home is have a big steak..."). We were passing through low jungle, but even so, rice and corn were being grown under the thin trees. I thought: There are no old trees in China—at least I hadn't seen any.

  The food was not good, but to give my meals a point I invented a system for nominating a Dish of the Day. I had spent too many days eating unmemorably. This was a Cantonese train, with the distinctively wet and sticky cuisine—mushrooms, chicken, sweet-sour fish, greasy vegetables. I chose the eels as my Dish of the Day.

  While I was eating I remembered another occasion, six years before, when I was eating with a Chinese youth—a pompous one who was the son of a well-placed official, a so-called cadre kid.

  I had talked politics with him and he had said in one of his rebuttals, "I am a member of the proletariat—and you are not. You are bourgeois."

  I mentioned this to my fellow diner, Mr. Zhu.

  "What does 'proletariat' mean?"

  I explained it.

  He shook his head. "No. I am a higher class than that. I am a white-collar worker."

  We talked about foreigners, because the dining car was full of tourists. Zhu said that, unlike Chinese, all foreigners were very excitable. We also had very loud voices. And we were gullible.

  We discussed the Chinese proposition We can always fool a foreigner. Zhu said it was true, while I maintained that it was gloating and self-delusion. It was not even half true, but I had yet to meet a Chinese person who did not believe it deep down. I said that most foreigners suspect that the Chinese believe this, which makes the Chinese misapprehension even worse. "Consider the China pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind," Thoreau wrote at the end of Walden.

  Later, at Yingde, under the wrinkled mountains there were pools of lotus flowers and shaggy green slopes of bamboo. You might mistake this for wilderness, but no: the bamboo is eaten and used for baskets and building houses; and the lotuses are not growing wild, they are farmed and harvested for their roots. That was another Dish of the Day: dessert of sliced lotus root in syrup.

  All day, beside this track, another track was being laid: a new one, for heavy freight, to Hong Kong, in anticipation of 1997.

  I sat by the window and looked out through the flickering rain. A boy was riding his buffalo home, and the sound of the train made pigs scatter under the banana trees, and it was so lush the train brushed against the tall tasseled weeds that grew beside the track. I saw clusters of deep-green bamboos, and women chopping firewood, and men smearing the wooden frames of houses with mud to make walls. And peeling blue gums, and a herd of buffalos under some lofty cliffs of orange clay. It was a very wet province, Guangdong, and very distinctive for not looking exhausted: it was fertile, orderly and energetic, and yet everything and everyone I saw had a specific purpose, which seemed to me very tiring to the eye—nothing random or accidental. Some minutes before we reached Canton the train stopped, and a large blue dragonfly hovered near my window. That was perfect—the Chinese dragonfly shimmering in the lushness of Guangdong.

  It was very hot in the train, in the nineties, with high humidity. Some passengers had collapsed, others were gasping. I hated arriving in Canton, because it meant I had to change out of my pajamas. It was raining hard. Cyclists in plastic shrouds darted through the downpour. I had not been prepared for the traffic or the commerce—all the radio and television shops, the taxi drivers who listened to Hong Kong rock music on their radios, the luxurious hotels—the White Swan where Chinese went to look at the waterfall in the lobby; the 1147-room Garden Hotel, the biggest in China; the China Hotel (its motto: "For the Merchant Prince of Today"), advertising "A well-steaked reputation ... succulent jet-fresh prime U.S. and New Zealand corn-fed beef.... Our steaks have a delicious reputation"—which also goes to show how far the Chinese will go to please foreigners, since the Chinese on the whole find a simple cooked steak a barbarous and tasteless meal that is appreciated only by primitive folk like Mongolians and Tibetans.

  No one I met remarked much on Canton. They spoke of Hong Kong and how it was going to be radically altered by Chinese control. I did not believe that. I did not think it would change. My feeling was that Canton was quickly turning into Hong Kong, and in most respects it was impossible to tell the difference.

  The Chinese in Canton seemed well aware that making money and hustling in the Hong Kong manner was what mattered most. They could be mocking, too, about the government's solemn pretensions. One of the Party slogans—written on billboards in Canton—was Look to the Future! {Xiang qian kari). But the word for future (qian) sounds the same as the word money (qian) even though the character is radically different. So the current pun in Canton was Look to the Money!

  Some Chinese in Canton asked me what I wanted to see there. I said, "How about a commune?" and they almost split their sides laughing. The Chinese laugh is seldom a response to something funny—it is usually Ha-ha, we're in deep shit or Ha-ha, I wish you hadn't said that or Ha-ha, I've never felt so miserable in my life—but this Cantonese boffo was real mirth. The idea of visiting a commune anywhere in Guangdong province was completely ridiculous. There were none! And didn't I know that Deng Xiaoping had officially declared the commune experiment to have been a failure? Didn't I know that everyone was paddling his own canoe now?

  I said, "I was here six years ago and went to a huge commune outside Canton. Everyone said it was a model commune. It was a success. Factories. Rice fields. Fruit trees. A canning industry. I went to a woman's house and she had a radio, a television, a refrigerator—"

  "She was the only person in the commune who had those things! It was a trick to impress you!"

  "I just want to know what's there now," I said.

  "It's all been broken up into geti hu."

  Single-unit households, that is: every family for itself, or the family business.

  "Is it working?"

  "Yes, much better than before."

  "So if I go out there and ask the people how things are, they'll say, 'Wonderful.'"

  'That is correct."

  I said, "How will I know they're not trying to impress me? Maybe that's a trick, too."

  "No, no, no," this Chinese man said. "Nowadays, people tell you what is in their hearts. They are not afraid anymore."

  "But they swore to me that the model commune I saw was running perfectly."

  "What did you expect them to say?"

  That was a good point. Why should they belittle it to a foreigner, especially when it was such a loss of face to do so?

  "That commune was so large," my Chinese friend said, "that a person had to take a train to see the head of the committee."

  "Is that a figure of speech?"

  "Yes. It is a joke."

  For uninteresting reasons I was unable to visit the commune and compare my impressions with what I had seen in 1980. What I remembered best was visiting the woman who had the big dusty television (with a red shawl over it: cloth television covers are still very popular in China), and listening to her spiel about this being a workers' paradise, and then going outside and watching children feeding white ducks in a green creek. But I swore that the first chance I got I would visit a commune and look at it closely for changes.

  The changes were obvious in Canton. For one thing it was full of tourists. Some of these people were extremely elderly and infirm. They said they were looking forward to the Gr
eat Wall.

  "Is there wheelchair access on the Great Wall?" they asked each other. "Is there a ramp? Is there Disabled Parking? Is there a Handicapped Entrance?"

  It amazed me that people so frail should have risked being so far from home. But they were confident and curious, and I admired their pluck.

  On the other hand, Canton was one of those places in the world where the hotels are so good and so all-encompassing that a guest need never leave: all the shops, events, colorful clothes, rugs, restaurants and everything else are right there in various parts of the air-conditioned building. And it is one of the facts of life in China today that the hotels are as great a tourist attraction as any of the temples or museums.

  People went to Canton for many reasons, but the most interesting one I heard was from seven skinny youths who had come from Hong Kong to go tenpin bowling.

  I didn't laugh. Brainlessly banging cannonballs down a varnished ramp and watching the pins go bopping seemed like fun to me. It was a hot afternoon, and Canton was a big screechy place.

  I loitered at the bowling alley but didn't play. I met an American named Barton, an oilman, who was supervising the drilling of wells. Were they offshore? He didn't say; he was rather circumspect, rather Chinese in fact, as if he suspected me of being engaged in industrial espionage.

  Barton had been in Canton for four years, and before that had been in the Persian Gulf, which he had hated. But he hated China, too—his test wells had not paid off, though some others had. And the oil price was so low it hardly seemed worthwhile looking. It was certainly proving expensive. He told me several things I had not known—that China was a huge oil producer, that it had a surplus because there were so few motor vehicles in China (and the power plants and most of the trains were fueled by Chinese coal), and that China exported crude oil and gasoline to the United States. (Gasoline and fireworks are China's biggest exports to the U.S.)