Riding the Iron Rooster

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."

"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.

In the sixties there were several trains every hour. Now there is one train a day. It leaves at six in the morning from Changsha and arrives three hours later at Shaoshan. It returns to Changsha in the evening, just an old puffer on a forgotten branch line that had outlived its purpose.

The road had always been popular, even after the train was running regularly. It was not only the best way for Red Guards and revolutionaries to prove their ardor, but long walks were part of Mao's political program—the Forge Good Iron Foot Soles scheme. The idea was that all Chinese citizens were to have sturdy feet during the Cultural Revolution, because when the Nameless Enemy tried to invade China the evacuation of cities might be necessary. Mao filled the people with a war paranoia—that was the reason they were required to make bricks, dig trenches and bunkers and bomb shelters. They were also ordered to have hard feet and to take twenty-mile hikes on their days off in order to give themselves iron foot soles ("All I got were blisters," my informant, Wang, told me). It was to this end that they trekked for four days on the road from Changsha to Shaoshan, sleeping in peasants' huts and singing "The East Is Red," "The Sun Rises in Shaoshan." They also sang ditties that had been set to music from the Selected Thoughts, such numbers as "People of the world, unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs!" with its stirring last line, "Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed." My favorite song from the Selected Thoughts, one I was assured had enlivened the marches along the Shaoshan road with its syncopation, went as follows:

A revolution is not a dinner party,

Or writing an essay, or painting a picture,

or doing embroidery:

It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle,

So temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.^*

A revolution is an insurrection,

An act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

They sang the songs on the trains, too. They flew flags. They wore Mao buttons and badges, and the red armband. It was not a trivial matter. It compared in size and fervor to Muslims making the hajj to Mecca. On one day in 1966, a procession of 120,000 Chinese thronged the village of Shaoshan to screech songs and perform the qing an with their Little Red Book.

Twenty years later I arrived at Shaoshan in an empty train. The station was empty. The unusually long platform was empty, and so were the sidings: There was not a soul in sight. The station was tidy, but that only made its emptiness much odder. It was very clean, freshly painted in a limpid shade of blue, and entirely abandoned. No cars in the parking lot, no one at the ticket windows. A large portrait of Mao hung over the station, and on a billboard the epitaph in Chinese, Mao Zedong was a great Marxist, a great proletarian revolutionary, a great tactician and theorist.

That was delicate: nothing about his being a great leader. Mao's dying wish (obviously ignored) was to be remembered as a teacher.

I walked through the village, reflecting on the fact that nothing looks emptier than an empty parking lot. There were many here, designed for buses; they were very large, and nothing was parked in them. I went to the hotel that was built for dignitaries and I sat in the almost-empty dining room, under a Mao portrait, eating and listening to people spitting.

The tide was out in Shaoshan; it was the town that time forgot—ghostly and echoing. And so it fascinated me. It was actually a pretty place, a rural retreat, with lovely trees and green fields, and a stream running through it that topped up the lotus ponds. In any other place an atmosphere of such emptiness would seem depressing; but this was a healthy neglect—what is healthier than refusing to worship a politician?—and the few people there had come as picnickers, not as pilgrims.

Mao's house was at the far end of the village, in a glade. It was large, and its yellow stucco and Hunanese design gave it the look of a hacienda—very cool and airy, with an atrium and a lovely view of its idyllic setting. Here Mao was born in December 1893. The rooms are neatly labeled: Parents' Bedroom, Brother's Room, Kitchen, Pigsty, and so forth. It is the house of a well-to-do family—Mao's father was "a relatively rich peasant," clever with money and mortgages, and he was a moneylender of sorts. There was plenty of space here— a big barn and a roomy kitchen. Mrs. Mao's stove was preserved (Do Not Touch) and a placard near it read In 1921 Mao Zedong educated his family in revolution near this stove. And in the sitting room, In 1927 meetings were held here to discuss revolutionary activities.

It was not like visiting Lincoln's log cabin. It wasn't Blenheim. It wasn't Paul Revere's house. For one thing it was very empty. The few Chinese nearby seemed indifferent to the house itself. They sat under trees listening to a booming radio. There were girls in pretty dresses. Their clothes alone were a political statement. But this handful of people were hardly visible. The emptiness meant something. Because when it was heavily visited Shaoshan had represented political piety and obedience; now that it was empty it stood for indifference. In a sense, neglect was more dramatic than destruction because the thing still existed as a mockery of what it had been.

It had the musty smell of an old shrine. It had outlived its usefulness, and it looked a little absurd, like a once-hallowed temple of a sect of fanatics who had run off, tearing their clothes, and had never returned. Times have changed. Towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, the pseudonymous Simon Leys visited China, and in Chinese Shadows, his gloomy and scolding account of his trip, he wrote that Shaoshan "is visited by about three million pilgrims every year." That's 8000 a day. Today there were none.

If Shaoshan was embarrassing to the Chinese it was because the whole scheme had been to show Mao as more than human. There was an obnoxious religiosity in the way his old schoolhouse had been arranged to show little Mao as a sanctified student. But the building was empty, and there was no one walking down the lane, so it didn't matter. I had the impression that the Chinese were staying away in droves.

One stall sold postcards. There was only one view: Mao's Birthplace (the house in the glade). And there were a few Mao badges. It was the only place in China where I saw his face on sale, but even so, it was just this little badge. There were also towels and dishcloths, saying Shaoshan.

There was a shop in the Mao Museum.

I said, "I would like to buy a Mao badge."

"We have none," the clerk said.

"How about a Mao picture?"

"We have none."

"What about a Little Red Book—or any Mao book?"

"None."

"Where are they?"

"Sold."

"All of them?"

"All."

"Will you get some more to sell?"

The clerk said, "I do not know."

What do they sell, then, at the shop in the Mao Museum? They sell key chains with color photos of Hong Kong movie actresses, bars of soap, combs, razor blades, face cream, hard candy, peanut brittle, buttons, thread, cigarettes and men's underwear.

The museum did try to show Mao as more than human, and in its eighteen rooms of hagiography Mao was presented as a sort of Christ figure, preaching at a very early age (giving instructions in revolution by his mother's stove) and winning recruits. There were statues, flags, badges and personal paraphernalia—his straw hat, his slippers, his ashtray. Room by room, his life is displayed in pictures and captions: his school days, his job, his travels, the death of his brother, the Long March, the war, his first marriage...

And then, after such languid and detailed exposition, an odd thing happens in the last room. In No. 18, time is telescoped, and the years 1949-1976, his entire chairmanship, his rule, and his death, are presented with lightning speed.

There is no mention of his two other marriages, nothing about Jiang Qing. Nonpersons like Jiang Qing and Lin Biao have been airbrushed out of photographs. The 1960s are shown in one picture, the mushroom cloud of China's first atomic bomb in 1964. The rest of the decade does not exist. There has been no Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, though the Mao Museum was founded in 1967, at the height of it.

But by omitting so much and showing time passing so quickly, the viewer is given a bizarre potted history of Mao's final years. In the previous rooms he looks like a spoiled child, a big brat, scowling and solemn. In this final room he develops a very unusual smile, and on his pumpkin face it has a disturbing effect. After 1956 he seems to be gaga. He starts wearing baggy pants and a coolie hat, and his face is drawn from a sag into a mad or senile grimace. He looks unlike his earlier self. In one picture he is lumberingly playing Ping-Pong. In 1972 and after, meeting Nixon, Prince Sihanouk, and East European leaders, he's a heffalump; he looks hugely crazy or else barely seems to recognize the visitor grinning at him. There is plenty of evidence here to support what the Chinese say about him all the time—that after 1956 he was not the same.

Mao had set out to be an enigma and had succeeded. "The anal leader of an oral people," the sinologist Richard Solomon had said. Mao can be described but not summed up. He was patient, optimistic, ruthless, pathologically anti-intellectual, romantic, militaristic, patriotic, chauvinistic, rebellious in a youthful way, and deliberately contradictory.

Shaoshan said everything about Mao, his rise and fall; his position today. I loved the empty train arriving at the empty station. Was there a better image of obscurity? As for the house and village—they were like many temples in China where no one prayed any longer; just a heap of symmetrical stones representing waste, confusion and ruin. China was full of such places, dedicated to the memory of someone or other and, lately, just an excuse for setting up picnic tables and selling souvenirs.

Mr. Fang was sitting in the hotel lobby with his head in his hands. He did not look up when a man near him hoicked loudly, spat a clam onto the floor and scuffed it with his foot.

"I'm leaving, Mr. Fang."

He raised his head and looked at me with his swollen eyes.

"Where are you going?"

"Canton for a while. Then Peking."

He groaned. "By train?" he asked. His lips were dry.

"The People's Railway is for the people," I said, recalling the slogan I had seen in the Yunnan town of Yiliang.

This made him wince. He said, "I am fifty-six years old. I have traveled a great deal. I was a Russian interpreter. I have been to Leningrad and other places. But I have never taken so many trains all at once. I have never slept on so many trains—I don't sleep at all. Trains, trains."

"A train isn't a vehicle," I said. "A train is part of the country. It's a place."

"No more," he said, not listening.

"I'm going to Canton."

"I must go with you," he said. "But we can take a plane."

"Sorry, no planes. Chinese planes frighten me."

"But the train—"

"You take the plane," I said. "I'll go by train."

"No. I go with you. It is the Chinese way."

He looked miserable, but I had very little sympathy for him. He had been sent to nanny me and breathe down my neck. He had been discreet—he had not gotten in my way; but who had asked him to come? Not me.

"Go back to Peking," I said. "I can go to Canton by myself."

"After Canton," he said, "are you taking more trains?"

"I don't know."

"Planes are quicker."

"I'm not in a hurry, Mr. Fang."

He said nothing more. I was glad: without even trying, I had outlasted him. He was at his wit's end, he hated trains now, he had suffered the torture of sleep deprivation. He was dying to go home.

And yet he followed me onto the express to Canton the following night, and he sat behind me in the dining car. He looked physically ill, and to make matters worse the dining car quickly filled up with some high-spirited tourists whose plane had been canceled.

They were the sort of good-hearted Americans who, at an earlier time in the history of American tourism, used to go to Pike's Peak. Now it was China. They went shopping. They were bussed to temples, where they also shopped. They talked a great deal, but not about Chinese culture. They said, "Joe senior died and she remarried twice more. She was an awful alcoholic." They said, "Bananas are good for you. They feed on carbohydrates." When someone among them mentioned Canton they said, "You can go bowling in Canton!"

But they were not more talkative than the Cantonese in the dining car, nor were they any louder. In a circumspect way they were appreciative.

The waiter put down a dish of green vegetables.

"Who's going to eat this?" a hearty woman said.

"What is it?" another woman asked.

"My son would eat that," said a third woman, peering at it.

"Is it spinach?"

"It's a type of spinach," a man said.

"Never mind!" a man from Texas cried. "The streets are safe! My poor wife's from west Texas and she didn't see a city until she was twenty-three years old. But I could put ten thousand dollars worth of gold on her and send her into the street and she'd be perfectly all right. Because this is China, not Texas." ^*

"But don't touch the water," the hearty woman said.

"It tastes like L.A. water," someone said. "I'm not used to it."

"It tastes like Saginaw water," a young woman said. "It's the chlorine. I had a cup of coffee there once and it was awful. I says, 'What's wrong with this coffee?' But it wasn't the coffee. It was the water."

Her friend—or perhaps husband—said, "Outside Saginaw, in hick towns like Hemlock, the water's real nice."

"Boy am I glad I didn't bring nylons!" the hearty woman said. "Did you think China was going to be this hot?"

"It's hot here, sure," said the man from Texas. "But up north it's freezing. It's all snow and ice. That's a fact."

"He's bringing more food," someone said.

"Jesus, do you think that has a name?"

A woman said in an announcing voice, "I'm going to tell all my friends who are going on a diet to go to China—I mean, the ones that are real picky about their food. They'd slim down good!"

"But the real picky ones wouldn't go to China," the young woman said.

As I left the dining car I heard someone say in an anxious voice, "My question is, what do they do with all these leftovers?"

A Cantonese man had entered my compartment. He was panting, fossicking in his knapsack. He looked simian and strange. He spoke no language but his own. He climbed into the upper berth and rattled his bags. I turned the light out. He turned it back on. He slurped tea out of his jam jar and harumphed. He noisily left the compartment and returned wearing striped pajamas. It was midnight and yet he was still leaping back and forth, once narrowly missing my glasses with his prehensile foot as he used the table as a foothold. I went to sleep and woke at about three in the morning. The man was reading, using a flashlight, and muttering softly. I slept very little after that.

I felt just as grouchy as Mr. Fang in Canton, and so I decided to stay awhile and not make any onward bookings. It is wrong to see a country in a bad mood: you begin to blame the country for your mood and to draw the wrong conclusions.

I had once laughed to think that there were luxury hotels in Canton, with delicatessens and discotheques. The Chinese there had taken up weight lifting; they had body-building magazines. The White Swan Hotel had hamburgers and a salad bar. The China Hotel had an air-conditioned bowling alley. Now it did not seem odd to think that people would go to China to shop, to eat, or to go bowling.

Mr. Fang said nervously, "No more trains?"

"Not at the moment."

"Maybe you will go home?"

"Maybe."

Was he smiling?

"I will take you to the station," he said. "Chinese custom. Say good-bye."

"That's not necessary, Mr. Fang. Why not take the plane back to Peking?"

"There is one leaving tomorrow morning," he said. He was eager.

"Don't worry about me," I said.

He seemed reluctant, but he said no more. I bought him a picture book about Guilin, and that evening, spotting him in the lobby, I gave it to him. He did not unwrap it. He slipped it under his arm, then gave me his sad sea-lion stare and said, "Yes," and shook my hand. "Bye-bye," he said, in English, and then abruptly turned away. It is not a reminiscing race, I thought. He kept walking. He did not look back.

Then, because this was Canton, I went bowling.

13: The Peking Express: Train Number 16

And then there were a number of public events that shocked the country. I did not set off immediately. It is so easy to be proven wrong in China. No sooner had I concluded that China was prospering and reforming, that people were freer and foreign investment rising, than the country was in crisis. True, some aspects of China never changed—the rice planters bent double, the weeder on his stool, the boy pedaling his 2000-year-Old irrigation pump, the buffalo man, the duck-herd. But in the months before I left Canton to resume my Chinese travels, the yuan was devalued by thirty percent—instead of three to the dollar there were now almost four—and the black market in hard currency was very brisk, and the most common greeting "Shansh marnie?" People were criticized for wanting to go abroad, and a law was passed requiring potential students to post a bond of 5000 yuan—an enormous sum—before they could study in another country. Foreign investment dropped by twenty percent, and Deng Xiaoping criticized Chinese manufacturers for producing shoddy goods that no one wanted.

And the students demonstrated, for the first time since the Cultural Revolution. The demonstrations were orderly, but the defiance implicit in such illegal gatherings was seen to be a sign of chaos. The Chinese horror of disorder made them seem important, though I felt the parades and demands were mostly half-baked. Traditionally, December and January have been regarded by the Chinese as appropriate months for disruption, and so there was a ritual end-of-term element in the demonstrations—high spirits, funny hats, a measure of farce. The grievances were numerous, and on posters and in their chanting, the students demanded press freedom, electoral re-form, a multiparty system, and official permission to demonstrate. Banners reading We Want Democracy were flown. They demanded sexual freedom and better food in the university cafeterias. Eight cities were affected, and the size of the demonstrations varied from a few hundred students in Canton to well over 100,000 (and an equal number of spectators) in Shanghai, which came to a standstill for a full day.

The Chinese government, with its liking for scapegoats (so much more economical than a full-scale witch-hunt), blamed one man for the country-wide outbreak. This was Dr. Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist and vice president of the National Science and Technical University in Hefei. He had been very busy. He had written articles in China Youth News criticizing students for having "low democratic consciousness." He lectured his own students at Hefei, and just a month before the demonstrations he had addressed students at Jiaotong University in Shanghai.

Dr. Fang's message was a mixture of noble sentiments and platitudes. Among other things, he said, "Men are born with rights—to live, to marry, to think, to receive an education," and that the only way for China "to transform the feudalistic ideas and gradually approach modern standards in thinking" was for its intellectuals "to demonstrate the strength they possess." He replied that government leaders were not above criticism.

"Democracy can be achieved only gradually through consistent effort," he said. "There is nothing to be afraid of. Criticizing government leaders is a symbol of democracy. I hold the view that we may criticize leaders."

The abusive term for such sentiments is "bourgeois liberalism"—a sort of selfish and privileged complaining. Soon after Dr. Fang gave the speech, the People's Daily attacked "the trend towards bourgeois liberalization." In the Chinese mind a person who holds liberal views is a rightist and a person who toes the Party line most strictly is a leftist.

Dr. Fang was vilified. Taiwan was blamed for fomenting trouble. The government papers said it was partly the work of "professional hooligans." In Shanghai a worker at a lacquerware factory was arrested as a counterrevolutionary for establishing his own political party, the Weimin (Defend the People) Patty. He was the only member of this party, but still it was no joke. Starting your own party meant that you intended to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party. That was treason, and the penalty for it was a bullet in the neck.

The very fact that the demonstrations were mentioned in the news was a sign that the government was alarmed. It was fairly well known that one of the demands of the Peking students was that the demonstrations would be reported in the newspapers. Disturbances of any kind had been hushed up in the past. At first, the government sent water trucks to Peking's Tiananmen Square at four in the morning. The paving stones were drenched, and the ice that resulted seemed like a guarantee that the students would fall down when they tried to march. But 3000 students appeared later that morning and kept their footing, and when 34 were arrested and hauled off to be interrogated another demonstration was mounted; more signs, more slogans, and the 34 were released.

The most worrying thing for the government was that in Shanghai both factory workers and students—not natural allies—had come together and marched in the same parade. To ingratiate themselves with the factory workers, the government blamed the students. The mayor of Shanghai addressed a large gathering of students and was heckled. "Who elected you?" a student called out. That was regarded as very shocking, because it is a total lapse of taste to suggest that someone like the mayor (who is appointed by the Central Government) is a Party hack.

The demonstrations were peaceful. Furthermore, they were essentially supporting Deng's policies of reform. "Bourgeois liberalization" was just what the government had been encouraging. But the government did not want to be seen this way, permitting arch-unrepentent capitalist-roaders, behind-the-scenes reactionaries, harbingers of feudalism, running dogs, those left in form but right in essence and promoters of the right-deviationist wing—to use the convenient Chinese categories—to flourish. It was, as far as I could see, the most recent example of the Chinese not knowing when to stop—first the government, then the students.

There was a suspicion that behind it all was a power struggle in the Chinese leadership. The students were being manipulated, not by Dr. Fang (who was fired from his university job and then expelled from the Party), but by leftists who wanted to discredit the reforming rightist Mr. Deng. Or was it the rightists who were inciting the students in order to provoke the leftists into overreacting?

I decided to find out for myself.

On a hot muggy winter day in Canton I went to Zhongshan University, south of the city on the opposite bank of the Pearl River, to see whether the students were still rioting. They were not. It was very placid under the eucalyptus trees. The students were cycling and punching volleyballs and jogging. They were doing their laundry, they were smooching, they were studying. Some of them stared at me. They had few inhibitions. They even talked about the demonstrations. They said their own professors were critical of the government and especially the official policy of suppressing or misreporting the news.

"How do they know it's misreported?" I asked.

"Because we know the truth," a student said. "We listen to Hong Kong news here."

The Hong Kong stations came in loud and clear in Canton, and some Hong Kong newspapers circulated in the city, as well.

A student who called himself Andrew—he was a Cantonese fellow named Hen To—said, "I'll tell you anything you want to know about the demonstration here."

I liked his attitude, but there was not much to tell. He said the students in the south were complacent and money minded, not furiously political as in the north.

"We only had two hundred students in our demonstration," he said. "After they made a fuss here they marched to the government offices in town and sang songs. It wasn't much—not as big as Shanghai or Peking."

"What did the students say they wanted?"

"Democracy and reform," Andrew said.

"But China is changing very fast," I said.

"That's what the old people think," he said. "We young people say it is changing too slowly. But that is the government policy. They want China to look stable so that foreign investment will be encouraged. No one will put money into China if there are riots."

I asked him his plans.

"I'd like to take up business," he said. "Import and export."

"You might make a lot of money."

"I hope so."

"Then you'll become a capitalist-roader."

"Maybe," he said, and snickered. "I think we have a lot to learn. We want to use the good features of capitalism but not the bad ones."

"Is that possible?"

"We can try."

That was the new thinking—"To be rich is glorious," was a politically okay slogan. It was the philosophy of the young, of the rising students, and even of many farmers. It was the essence of Deng's thinking, too. It was in total opposition to Mao's philosophy, and it was one of the reasons Shaoshan had no visitors.

Andrew saw himself as an individual, with his own needs and desires. He didn't say what every student had said for the past thirty-five years when asked about their ambitions: "Serve the people." He said "business," "money," "import-export." He was fairly open-minded. He studied hard. He liked his fellow students. He lived in a room with seven others and did his homework in the library. His favorite author was Mark Twain. In the movie theater on campus (built by a Hong Kong tycoon named Leung) he had seen On Golden Pond, Superman and Rambo.

I said that Rambo represented everything that I loathed.

"But he is strong," Andrew said. "His body is interesting. The way he looks. The things he does."

That was a point, the freakishness of it; but I said, "Do you realize that it was about Vietnam?"

"Yes."

"So doesn't that make it a reactionary, bourgeois, violently imperialistic movie?"

Andrew shrugged and said, "We don't take it that seriously."

He was twenty-one years old. His parents, as teachers, had been singled out during the Cultural Revolution.

I said, "They were The Stinking Ninth."

"Yes," he said. He knew exactly what I meant. Mao decreed nine categories of enemy: landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, foreign agents, capitalist-roaders, and—The Stinking Ninth—intellectuals. It is a strange list, because it seems to embrace the whole of humanity.

His parents had been rusticated—sent shoveling. They had fared better than the brother of my friend Miss Zhong, who had been locked in a broom cupboard right here at Zhongshan University by Maoists. His crime was that he was the son of a man who had once been a Guomindang politician. He was kept in the broom cupboard for two years and, after a severe interrogation, he hanged himself.

I told Andrew the tale. He said that it was not an unusual story. Well, that was true enough, but it made me feel once again that wherever I was in China I was among ghosts.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" I asked.

"No," Andrew said, and I could tell that he meant it.

He wasn't superstitious, he wasn't spiritual, and he certainly wasn't political—there was no future in Chinese politics. He was practical. His was the first generation in China to grow up with no dogma—no emperor, no gods, no chairman; no Taoism, no Maoism, no Buddhism. Nor had Andrew's generation been touched in the least by Christianity. Democracy was such a long shot that Andrew had not bothered to take part in the student demonstrations. His realism was a kind of glumness.

That night I wondered what would become of him. But of course it was very obvious. If he went into business and made some money he would prosper in a small way and raise a one-child family. He would not use expressions like Serve the people. He would regard himself as an intellectual (zhishi fenzi), the grandiose term the Chinese use for anyone who does not work with their hands. If he was self-employed, as he wanted to be, he would probably work hard. On holidays he would visit hotels like mine, where they had "holiday specials"—Christmas banquets, New Year's parties ("free hats, favors, racket-makers") and a "New Year's Day Champagne Brunch Buffet" at 28 yuan a throw.

One of the worst aspects of living in brisk, dictatorial China is that you seldom have an accurate idea of what is really going on. It is not that the Chinese government is inscrutable. Lazy travelers and visitors love Chinese mysteries, but the Chinese are quite knowable. And Chinese bureaucrats are among the most scrutable and obvious on earth. And yet anyone must find the Chinese média obfuscatory and unforthcoming. The Chinese people manage to keep abreast of events by depending on telepathy and whispers, and by the politburo hyperbole: if a high official is said to have a cold he's likely been fired; if he is "convalescing" he has been exiled; and if he is "extremely ill" he is about to be murdered.

And liberal does not mean liberal or open-minded. The connotations of the term, which is based on the Chinese characters for freedom (ziyou), are entirely negative, implying license or licentiousness. A Chinese official and most American Republicans would agree on what the word liberal implies. For Mao it was a term of abuse.

Meanwhile, the fuss over the students had not died down—the government was still ranting. But there was no public defiance. The Chinese had that squinting wind-in-the-face expression that they assumed when they were at their most resigned. No one on earth is more silent than a silent Chinese. I asked my usual provocative questions, but made little headway. I was sure a power struggle was in progress, because the eighty-three-year-old Deng Xiaoping had still not named his successor.

A Hong Kong student at Canton Station told me, "The government has denied that there is any problem."

"Then there must be a problem," I said. "Never believe anything in China until it has been officially denied."

We were waiting for the Peking Express on this humid winter night in Canton. It was said to be one of the best trains in China. It was the old Huguang Railway line. This was a thirty-six-hour trip—two nights on the train, which went 1500 miles, passing through five provinces, bisecting China from bottom to top and crossing the Yangtze River at Wuhan.

Some visitors to China laugh when you tell them you're taking a two-day trip on a train, and then they are delayed for five days at a Chinese airport, waiting for the fog to lift. Everyone who takes a plane in China has an airplane tale of woe.

The only bad moment the train passenger has is on the platform, when the other passengers are boarding. Which ones will be in your compartment? It is a much more critical lottery than a blind date, because these people will be eating and sleeping with you. I had seen lepers on trains, and bratty children and, on the way to Guilin, a man traveling with five parrots and no cage.

I watched the people boarding. The old woman in the padded jacket, carrying a lunch tin—some pungent stuff in there, chicken-foot stew, Cantonese cow tendon, and highly prized rotten eggs wrapped in seaweed. There was a spiv in sunglasses with a radio, a man with three suitcases and a crate of bananas; a salesman with his case of samples—rubber bungs, probably; three ornery mustached men wearing high-heeled shoes; a small family—haggard father, mother with pin-curl perm, and spoiled child snatching at things that moved. The harassed spiky-haired student; the fat-faced Party hack in the Mao suit; the secret drinker with swollen eyes; the pretty girl traveling with her dragonlike grandmother; the plump boys in new eyeglasses from Hong Kong; the physics prof on his way to a conference; the loud-voiced Chinese-American who speaks only a few words of Cantonese but uses them on everyone; the middle-aged Japanese couple, looking wrinkle-proof but anxious; the students returning from overseas loaded with duty-free presents, Western clothes and a musical suitcase; the skinny, smiling and lovably ineffectual-looking soldiers of the People's Liberation Army—it is impossible to feel threatened by soldiers whose uniforms are four sizes too big.

I was assigned to a compartment with some salesmen. One was the Chinese version of Willy Loman, and another was a frisky man who smiled too much and said, "I'm in machine tools," just as his American counterpart would do. There was a third man who was practically invisible, reminding me of how the Chinese to a large extent have perfected the art of living at close quarters.

Mr. Yeo, the machine-tool man, admired my sweater ("Nice one. Good quality. Very warm. You'll need it in Peking") and was full of direct questions: "You're—what? About thirty-five? Any children?"

He handed me an envelope of pemmican, as a sort of get-acquainted gift, shared his tea with me, and accepted a chocolate bar in return. I thought he might be exhaustingly friendly, but he slept through most of the trip and snored loudly. The Willy Loman character also slept a great deal, but woke at four in the morning and did lazy calisthenics, wagging his head and slapping his forearms. He was in feedstuffs and cereals. His luggage—both boxes and suitcases—filled the luggage shelf. He was very solemn except when I caught his eye. Then he broke into a laugh and gave me a broad smile. His laugh was urgent and meant: No questions, please! As soon as he turned away he frowned. That was also very Chinese.

The first night there was a tremendous amount of snoring in our compartment. From time to time it woke me with its flapping wind. It was louder than the clanging wheels of the train. But I slept soundly the rest of the time and didn't get up until nine.

The train was so cold that morning the windows were streaming with condensation. I shaved in cold water—but it was always cold—and in midmorning we arrived at Changsha, where I had been some months before on my way to Mao's birthplace. It had been steamy and dismal in the summer. In the winter it was smoggy and brown and much uglier. The words a Chinese city had acquired a peculiar horror for me, like Russian toilet, or Turkish prison, or journalist's ethics. In the cold rain of winter, with the cracked and sooty apartment houses, the muddy streets, the skinny trees and dark brown sky, Chinese cities are at their very worst.

But this city was the signal for the attendants to stoke the fires, and as soon as the coach was reasonably warm the passengers threw their clothes off and clomped around in plastic shoes and wrinkled pajamas. They propped themselves in the draft between the coaches and brushed their teeth. Some practiced t'ai chi in the corridors.

The dining car was crowded at lunchtime. Although there were no tourists on the train and everyone wore old clothes—shouting and spitting and blowing smoke into each other's faces—they were also flinging money around. I guessed that they were mainly Cantonese, on this profitable business route: Guangdong was a producer of goods and Peking a lucrative outlet. These scruffy passengers were all in business. The man next to me paid almost 20 yuan for a meal for himself and his wife. Call it five bucks and it doesn't seem much; but for a Chinese it was nearly a week's pay. He was a grizzled man with matted hair. He smoked and ate at the same time—chopsticks in one hand, cigarette in the other. His small boy did not eat. This little irritant dug out all the toothpicks from the plastic holder and threw them on the floor; then tipped over a glass of water; and then began smacking an ashtray against the table and squawking. He was about five or six. His father laughed at this obstreperousness—very un-Chinese. But that was not the only uncharacteristic behavior in this rowdy train. It was also full of drunks, and not only beer drinkers, but also old men getting plastered on the rice wine they had brought with them.

I read and dozed and woke up in the north of Hunan, at the city of Yueyang, which was a gray town surrounded by fat, shadowy mountains. A few hours later we came to Wuhan. I had been there once before, in 1980. It had seemed to me a nightmare city of muddy streets and black factories, pouring frothy poisons into the Yangtze. It was bigger than I remembered it, but not so black. There were dozens of high-level cranes putting up new buildings, including a hospital.

The Yangtze is almost a mile wide at Wuhan, and on its banks it has landing stages and flights of steps that resemble the ghats on the Ganges. On the Hankou side there were also many new buildings, and there were cars in the streets—I remembered the wagons and carts, pulled by old women. The buildings and the traffic jams were not necessarily improvements, but they made a difference. Modernization did not make any Chinese city look less horrific; many cities looked more so as a result of building schemes.

It was cold enough in Wuhan for people to be wearing mittens and boots. That was what the salesmen in my compartment were wearing when they got out, pulling their suitcases through the windows. They did it clumsily. They were bemused by the sight of a girl walking along the platform, carrying a dead fish.

Before we pulled out of Wuhan the sleeping-car attendant roused me and said I had to move.

"You are in the wrong berth," she said.

"I am in the right berth," I said. I knew she wanted to move me, but I saw no reason she should put me in the wrong. I made her compare my ticket with the berth number, and I created a hoo-hah so that I would have the satisfaction of hearing her apologize.

"It is a mistake," she said, ambiguously, and led me to a compartment that held a man, a woman and an infant.

"How old is that baby?"

"Two weeks."

The baby was snoring. After a while it began to cry. The man took a bottle out and fed it, and the child's mother left the compartment.

That was how it went. The man did everything for this baby, which was wrapped in a thick quilt like a papoose. The man fed it, changed it and dandled it. The woman hung around and lazed, and several times I saw her sleeping in the Hard Class coach that adjoined ours. Perhaps the woman was ill. I did not want to ask. The man took charge.

"It's a boy," he said, when he was feeding it.

I hadn't asked.

He was a doctor. His wife was also a doctor. He worked in Peking, his wife in Canton; and he had gone to Canton to be present for the birth. Now they were all going back to Peking for a few months—the woman's maternity leave. There were feeding bottles, baby powder and cans of soluble milk formula all over the compartment. They used disposable diapers, which they discarded in a bucket under my bed. I did not mind; I like the milky smell of babies, and I was very touched by the love and attention that this man gave the child.

I read on my bunk while the man burped his baby and the woman looked on. I drank Cantonese sherry. It was like being in a cabin in the woods with this little family. For dinner I had the speciality of this train, "iron dish chicken pieces"—a hot iron platter of chicken, sizzling in fat. The dining car was very congenial—steam, shouting, beer fizzing, cigarette smoke, waiters banging dishes down and snatching empty plates away.

The two men at my table were young and half-drunk. I liked these crowded dining cars rushing through the night, and the food being dished out, and people stuffing themselves.

"We sell light bulbs and light fittings," one of the men said. "We are heading home after a week's selling."

"Where is home?" I asked.

"Harbin."

"I am going there," I said. "I want to see the ice festival and the forest."

"It's too cold to see anything," the other man said. "You will just want to stay in your room."

"That's a challenge," I said. "Anyway—how cold is it?"

"Thirty below—centigrade," he said, and he poured me some of his beer and clinked glasses.

By then I had taken for granted the friendliness of the Chinese. Their attentions were sometimes bewildering, as when they leaned over my shoulder trying to read what I was scribbling in my notebook, or pressed their damp faces against my book, fascinated by the English words. But their curiosity and good will were genuine.

"Do you travel much?" I asked.

"Yes. All over. But not outside," the first man said. "I'd like to but I can't."

"Where would you go?"

"Japan."

That surprised me. My reaction must have shown on my face, because the Chinese salesman wanted to know what I thought of his choice of country. I said, "I find the Japanese can be very irritating."

"The Americans dropped an atomic bomb on them."

"That was too bad, but they started the war by bombing Pearl Harbor, didn't they, comrade?"

"That's true!" the second man said. "The same day they captured Shanghai."

It was considered bad manners in China to say disparaging things about any foreign country, particularly to someone who was himself a foreigner. That was why the men cackled. It was naughty to run down the Japanese! It was fun! We sat there yakking until the rest of the people left the dining car. Then we stopped by Xinyang. We had gone from Hubei Province into Henan. This station was covered in black ice and slushy snow—quite a change from the palm trees and dragonflies of Canton a few days ago.

In my compartment the man was snuggled up with his infant son, and his wife lay sleeping in the upper berth. All night the man attended to the infant. They slept together, the child snickering and snorting the way babies do. From time to time the man swung his legs over and mixed a batch of Nestle's Lactogen, using hot water from the tea thermos and an enamel cup. He was considerate: he did not switch on the light—he used the light from the corridor. The baby's fussing increased, and then the father eased the bottle into the baby's mouth and there came a satisfied snorting. The father was very patient. The train stopped and started, was delayed at sidings, waiting for a southbound express to go through, and then rattled on to the whistles of lonely freight trains. In the darkness, the man spoke softly to his child, sang to him, and when the child grew sleepy he tucked him into the berth and crept in beside him.

The muffled sounds in the morning, and the cold drafts—and there was something eerie about the daylight, too—were all produced by the falling snow. The train was battling through this snowstorm: it was beautiful—just as though the train were plowing through surf in a stormy ocean.

The loudspeaker had come on. The morning exercises were over. The comedy program with its canned laughter had ended. It was now playing music. The selections from Carmen were followed by "Rhinestone Cowboy," "Green, Green Grass of Home," "Ave Maria," and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"

I drank green tea and watched the storm abate, but as it did the weather seemed to turn colder. The ground was that pale brown of hard frozen earth, the trees stark and slender against the snow. The towns and cities lost their nightmarishness beneath the snow. But nothing else changed; nothing stopped because of the storm. There were donkeys pulling hay carts, workers crowding into factories, children tramping through fields on their way to school (wearing wool caps and carrying book bags), and lots of people cycled through the snow, down partly cleared roads.

The sky was the color of ashes. For a few minutes the sun appeared, materializing into a perfectly round but very dim orange, like an old light bulb that is about to blow. It hung there and then trembled and withdrew into the rags of cloud.

The train was still very noisy. A man was shouting—he wasn't angry, just carrying on a normal conversation. It occurred to me that this is how many prisons must be. The voice of authority was always barking over the loudspeaker, there was always a crush of people, never any privacy. It made travel in China a strange experience for anyone used to silence and privacy.

As we approached Peking, the frozen fields and furrows were emphasized by the snow, and in the coal yards beside the line, men were hacking at coal piles with picks and shovels. The snow wasn't deep—just a few inches of hard-packed stuff, because of the high winds. And then in the distance, through the smoky air, I could see the cranes and derricks of the rising city.

Because it is a flat, dry, northern city, at the edge of Mongolia, Peking has beautiful skies. They are bluest in the freezing air of winter. China's old euphemism for itself was Tianxta, "All Beneath the Sky"—and, on a good day, what a sky! It was limpid, like an ocean of air, but seamless and unwrinkled, without a single wavelet of cloud;endless uncluttered fathoms of it that grew icier through the day and then, at the end of the winter afternoon, turned to dust.

Thinking it would be empty, I went to see the Great Wall again. Doctor Johnson told Boswell how eager he was to go to China and see the Wall. Boswell was not so sure himself. How could he justify going to China when he had children at home to take care of?

"Sir," Doctor Johnson said, "by doing so [going to China] you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a lustre reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the Wall of China. I am serious, sir."

The Wall is an intimidating thing, less a fortification than a visual statement, announcing imperiously: I am the Son of Heaven and this is the proof that I can encircle the earth. It somewhat resembles, in intention, the sort of achievement of that barmy man who gift wrapped the Golden Gate Bridge. The Wall goes steeply up and down mountainsides. To what purpose? Certainly not to repel invaders, who could never cling to those cliffs. Wasn't it another example of the Chinese love of taking possession of the land and whipping it into shape?

Anyway, the Wall was not empty. It swarmed with tourists. They scampered on it and darkened it like fleas on a dead snake.

That gave me an idea. "Snake" was very close, but what it actually looked like was a dragon. The dragon is the favorite Chinese creature ("just after man in the hierarchy of living beings"), and until fairly recently—eighty or a hundred years ago—the Chinese believed dragons existed. Many people reported seeing them alive, and of course fossilized dragon skeletons had been unearthed. The dragon was a good omen and, especially, a guardian. It is one of China's friendliest and most enduring symbols. The marauding dragon and the dragon-slayer are unknown in China. And I found a bewitching similarity between the Chinese dragon and the Great Wall of China—the way it flexed and slithered up and down the Mongolian mountains; the way its crenellations looked like the fins on a dragon's back, and its bricks like scales; the way it looked serpentine and protective, undulating endlessly from one end of the world to the other.

On the way back from the Wall I decided to stop at Peking University, where there had been student disruption. The campus was at the edge of the city, in a parklike setting, with pines and little man-made hills and a lovely lake. The lake was frozen. Skinny, panting students, with red cheeks and bobbing earflaps, slipped and skated on the ice.

I watched them with an American teacher named Roy who said, "They do have grievances. They want to believe what they read in the papers and hear on the news. At the moment, they get it all from the VOA and BBC. They want to trust their own government—and they don't. They want to believe that the reforms that have begun with Deng are going to continue."

There were three theories to explain the sudden student discontent. One: that, as Roy said, the students really did have grievances. Two: that the government was divided and the students were being used by the liberal elements to test the conservatives. Three: that the disruptions were the work of conservative elements who wanted to discredit the liberals.

I was persuaded that the students had demonstrated on their own initiative. Their grievances were genuine bur muddled.

"They were really frightened," Roy said. "They didn't think they'd be arrested, but some were. They didn't think the police would push them around—but the police beat some of them and abused others. They know that if it happens again they will be arrested and not released. That scares them. It means they'll be kicked out of the university."

"The right to demonstrate is written into the constitution," I said.

"Sure, but it requires five days' notice, and the students have to submit their names in advance," Roy said. "So the government will know exactly who the ringleaders are."

The students were going around and around on the ice, shrieking and skidding.

"There won't be any more demonstrations," Roy said. "They're too scared. But it was interesting. They tested their freedoms and discovered they didn't have any."

The students would not tell me their names—well, who could blame them for being suspicious? They stood on the ice of Weiming Hu and became circumspect when I changed the subject from the weather to their discontent.

One boy told me he was "a small leader." He said he was a philosophy student and had been in the demonstration as well as its aftermath, when about 500 students had returned to Tiananmen Square and held a vigil from the night of January first until the early morning of January second, when the news came of their fellow students' release from police custody.

"Our teachers support us but they are afraid to say so," he said. "Officially they are said to condemn us. But the government misreports everything. They said there were three hundred students in the first demonstration when there were actually three thousand."

I said, "Do you think this repression is an effect of socialist policies?"

"I am not allowed to answer that," he said. "But I can tell you that the trouble with a lot of Chinese students is that they don't have a will to power."

Perhaps he was quoting Nietzsche from his readings in philosophy. And then I asked whether he thought that the students were too frightened, as Roy had said, to hold any more demonstrations.

"There will be more," he said. "Many more."

A moment later he was gone, and I talked with other students. They were jolly, frozen-faced youngsters on old, floppy skates. To ingratiate myself with them I borrowed a pair of skates, and seeing me fall down and make an ass of myself, they became very friendly. What did I think of China? they asked. How did American students compare with Chinese students? Did I like the food? Could I use chopsticks? What was my favorite city in China? They were goofy and lovable, with crooked teeth and cold, white hands. When I asked them whether they had girlfriends they averted their faces and giggled. They did not seem like counterrevolutionaries.

I had repeatedly requested a High-Level Meeting—that is, a chance to talk with an important government official. In the past my request had done nothing more than make certain people suspicious. What was I doing in China? they demanded to know. They had asked me for my itinerary. Using an extremely clever if somewhat fanciful Chinese technique for ensnaring awkward visitors, they insisted that I was too important to travel alone and so stuck me with Mr. Fang. He had gone back to his desk in Peking: he did not know that I was still in China. Now I was traveling on my own.

I risked asking for a High-Level Meeting once more, hoping that they would not pounce on me and give me another nanny or babysitter. I received a message telling me to report to Comrade Bai at the well-known Ministry of Truth. I was told that I could ask anything I liked.

Before I left for the ministry I asked a Chinese friend what questions I should put to the official. He said, "No matter what you ask him you will find his answers in the People's Daily"

The taxi driver who took me to the Ministry of Truth was impressed by the address I had given him. He said, "Can you meet American officials as easily as this?"

I told him truthfully that I had never met a really high government official in Washington—that I had never gotten the urge to meet one. It was only in foreign countries that such things seemed important. But the fact was that I had spent all my time talking to people on trains, or farmers, or market traders, or kids playing in parks, or students. They were the people who really mattered; but it was absurd to spend a year going up and down in China and not talk with an official and hear the Party line.

"What would you ask this official if you could?"

The driver said, "About the future."

"What about the future?"

"Will I be all right? Will the reforms continue? Will we have more democracy? What about prices? And"—he started to laugh—"how can I get a new license for my taxi?"

I was met by Comrade Bai, a little fellow in a blue Mao suit. He explained that he was not the official—certainly not the high official, he added anxiously, and he breathed noisily through his clenched teeth. Then he laughed. It was the Chinese laugh of warning.

Comrade Bai led me to a ministerial reception room, and then he went to tell the high official that I had arrived.

Comrade Hu entered with a flourish, gesturing for me to return to my plump armchair. He was about fifty or so, and had Deng Xiaoping's broad, tomcat face and unblinking eyes. It was obvious that he was a Party man in the new mold: he wore a gray Western-style suit and speckled tie in the manner of the rising Mr. Zhao Ziyang. He seemed brisk and even a bit impatient, but he was candid, and his English was fluent.

After our opening pleasantries I asked him about the relations between China and the Soviet Union. He said there was trade between the two countries, but that there were political obstacles— Soviet aid to Vietnam, the Afghanistan business, and troops in Mongolia.

"The Soviets make a big mistake in thinking that their kind of socialism can be exported to other countries," he said. "It doesn't work."

"Can Chinese socialism be exported?" I asked.

"We do not force our ideas on other people," he said.

I then asked him a roundabout question, wondering whether the government was alarmed by the recent disturbances.

"Perhaps you are referring to the events in Peking and elsewhere caused by the students," he said, and he explained, "China is in the first stage of socialism—we are just beginning to develop. In some ways, we are underdeveloped and we are proceeding slowly and carefully. In the countryside the reforms have gone smoothly. But in cities much remains to be done."

"How long will this stage of socialism last?"

"Until we achieve our target," he said. He told me the statistics, the income figures and projections; but in an uncertain world such numbers seemed meaningless to me. It was not just inflation that he seemed to be ignoring but the rising expectations of the Chinese people.

I said, "Does it seem to you that the Chinese people are too impatient for changes to come about?"

"Some are very impatient," he said. "Especially the students. What do these students know about democracy? They are speaking in a very abstract way. They lack concrete ideas."

"Do you think the students don't understand democracy?"

"In each country there is a strict definition of democracy," he said. "You have yours in the United States. We must have ours in China."

"So you think student demonstrations are really dangerous?"

"Some elements could get out of hand," Comrade Hu said. "They could bring disorder. If there is no control there could be chaos—everyone doing as he likes. That could produce another Cultural Revolution."

I did not see the logic in this. Wasn't it the other way around? If the government kept the lid on and the so-called ultraleftists succeeded in suppressing the students, a Cultural Revolution was much more likely. He was using the Cultural Revolution as a frightener. But I got nowhere in trying to pursue this with him.

"You must read more," he said. "You must examine our Four Guiding Principles."

"I have read them," I said. That particular pamphlet, in five languages (including one of China's favorites, Esperanto) was in the waiting room of most railway stations. I had plenty of opportunities to read it. "I meant to ask you about that. Guiding principle number four mentions Marxism-Leninism and Mao's thought."

Comrade Hu's eyes were fixed upon me. The name Mao in China always concentrated people's attention. It was probably the single most powerful syllable in China.

I said, "I was wondering which of Mao's thoughts seemed especially pertinent today."

"One cannot summarize Mao's thought," he said smoothly. "It is too subtle and wide ranging. Mao wrote about everything." But when I pressed him, he said, "His essay 'On Practice' is one which contains the essence of his thought, and that is something we can be guided by these days."

That essay is an argument for action, I found, when I read it later. It is about learning by doing; and "practice" is like a synonym for living, in this down-to-earth approach to running a society. It is a tract against handbooks, against bookishness of any kind—Mao loved literature but hated books. Mao seemed to sum up the essay when he wrote, "All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience." It was a struggler's motto, and rather a good one, I thought: action was everything. It was also a good motto for a traveler.

"You must remember that China is unique," Comrade Hu said. "There is no model for China. We have to solve our problems in our own way."

I said, "Do you think it's a problem that China seeks the West's technology but not its ideology or influence?"

"No problem at all," he said breezily.

"But surely there have been negative influences that have come to China with the new technology."

"We have to educate people to make a distinction between what is good and what is bad influence."

The word educate in China always seemed to me somewhat ambiguous. Education was sometimes classroom work; but just as often it was prison, the workhouse, exile or even (as Deng had frankly emphasized) a bullet in the back of the neck.

"What do you think is especially decadent about Western culture?" I asked, hoping to provoke him.

"The music of Beethoven is good, and so are many other things," Comrade Hu said. "And I don't think drugs or violence are specifically Western. They are by-products. We can do without them—and prostitution, too."

Remembering what the taxi driver had said, I asked, "Will the reforms continue to increase or might they diminish?"

"They will continue as they are," Comrade Hu said. "We want to keep our open policy. We want trade with the United States to expand. We believe in reform—we want a growth rate of seven or eight percent."

There was an idea current among Chinese bureaucrats that the sole purpose of political reform was to produce economic growth. It had nothing to do with enlightenment, or people's minds, or the happy imagination. If liberalization did not yield material prosperity—a chicken in every pot—they would just put the screws on again. I talked around this subject but I was not sure where Comrade Hu stood on the issue, and indeed I had begun to be rather careful in my questions, for what they revealed about me.

He made me feel young, somewhat reckless and sceptical in just the same way my father had when I was sixteen. We were uneasily like father and son. There is something in the very nature of Chinese authority that makes anyone who asks questions seem childishly naive and credulous, not to say dangerous.

We talked about travel in China. He asked me about my experiences, and were they favorable? I said yes they were, and I gave him a few examples from the various trains I had ridden.

Comrade Hu said, "You have been to more places in China than I have."

"I'm sure that's not true," I said.

"It's true," he said. "I haven't traveled much."

"Have you been to Urumchi?"

"No."

"What about Langxiang in Heilongjiang?" It was a small logging town in the far north that I aimed to visit.

"I have never heard of it," Comrade Hu said.

"Tibet?"

He shook his head: No. "But I have traveled abroad a great deal."

He clawed his cuff in an obvious way and conspicuously consulted his watch. So I said that I was grateful for his valuable time, but that I had to go. He rose and took me to the door.

"You have interesting views," I said. "I am sure people will be fascinated by them."

"No, no, no," he said, smiling for the first time since I had entered the room—but it was of course a smile of anxiety. "Don't quote me."

"Not at all?"

"No. This is a private conversation."

"What about your mention of Mao's essay. 'On Practice'? I thought that was rather pertinent."

"Nothing," he said, and the feline look left his face. "And don't mention my name."

When he left me, Comrade Bai materialized among the sofas and the teacups. Comrade Bai escorted me to my taxi. "You heard what he said"—how did he know?—"Don't use his name. And don't mention the Ministry of Truth."

I said, "But what the official said was interesting. Why doesn't he want me to write it? You know I'm a writer!"

"Yes. You can write it. But just say, 'A Chinese official.'"

What was this, the Ming Dynasty, with all the mandarins scurrying around, whispering and shifting blame and doing it with mirrors? It was not a question of being bold but simply of not wishing to be held accountable.

"Okay," I said. "Can I quote you—that you said that?"

"Ha-ha! Better not!"

I changed the names, but as you can see I left that part in. As the Great Helmsman had said, All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.

14: The International Express to Harbin: Train Number 17

I wanted to see Harbin at its most characteristic: in the middle of winter, frozen solid. It is in the far northeastern province—part of what used to be called Manchuria. Now it is Heilongjiang, Land of the Black Dragon River. The Russians refer to the river as the Amur. It is one of the disputed frontiers between the two countries, and over the past twenty years has been the scene of armed conflict as well as low farce—the Chinese soldiers provoking incidents by dropping their pants and presenting their bare bums northward, mooning the Soviet border guards.

The train I took was going on to the border town of Manzhouli and then into Siberia to connect with the Trans-Siberian. I took it because it was the quickest way to Harbin, and also because I wanted to see who was continuing into the Soviet Union. In the event I discovered that very few people were crossing the border. It is the most roundabout route to Moscow, and no one ever goes to Vladivostok.

I left Peking on a cold afternoon, the train traveling through a landscape of black and white—trees and light poles and furrows set into relief by the snow. The countryside looked like a steel engraving, and it grew sharper and fresher, for the dusty snow of Peking gave way to a snow of intense brightness in the clearer air of the Chinese hinterland. It was exciting to be heading north in the winter, and I intended to keep going, beyond Harbin to the forests in the north of the province. I had been told there was wilderness there—real trees and birds.

Three swarthy Hong Kong Chinese joined me in the compartment. They said they were cold. They wore thick nylon ski suits that screeched when they walked or moved their arms, and the noise of the rubbing fabric set my teeth on edge. This sleeping car was all Hong Kongers in screechy ski suits. They had traveled nonstop from Kowloon. They had never before been to China, had never seen snow; their English was very poor—and yet they were colonial subjects of the British Crown. They did not speak Mandarin. Like most Hong Kongers I had met, they were complete provincials, with laughable pretensions. Was it the effect of colonialism? They were well fed and rather silly and politically naive. In some ways Hong Kong was somewhat like Britain itself: a bunch of offshore islands with an immigrant problem, a language barrier and a rigid class system.

"Going skiing?" I said.

They said no—they had picked these ski suits up at a cut-price department store in Causeway Bay.

They were looking out of the window at a fat woolly sheep that was nibbling at a hank of brown stubble it had found sticking out of the snow. The sheep glanced up and stared back at them.

What did they think of China so far?

"It's thirty years behind," one said. This from a person who lived in one of the last colonies on earth. In a political sense Hong Kong had hardly changed since the time of the Opium War.

"Thirty years behind what?" I asked.

He shrugged. It was probably something he had read.

"Do you think there's any difference between a Chinese person here and one from Hong Kong?"

"Oh, yes!" several of them said at once, and they were incredulous that I should ask such an ignorant question. But I pressed forward nonetheless.

"Can you recognize a Hong Kong person when you see one?"

"Very easily."

"And a person from the People's Republic?"

"Yes," he said. And when I asked for details, he went on, "The Chinese here have rough faces."

"What sort of faces do Hong Kong people have?"

"Gentle."

He said the way they talked and dressed were dead giveaways. Well, even I knew that. The Hong Kongers were either overweight or else stylishly skinny. They yelled a lot and wore brand-new clothes and trendy eyeglasses. They fancied themselves up-to-date, and they believed in the myth of their modernity. They were often all elbows, very impatient and demanding. They fussed over each other, they were philistines. A great number of their traits were the result of being British colonials. The colonial system really is paternal in an almost literal way. By treating the people like children it turns into a messy family, and some of the children are favored, others become spoiled brats, and still others delinquents and rebels.

I did not bore my compartment-mates with this reflection. I simply sat there wondering why they didn't take off their ski suits.

One of them was engrossed in a palmist's manual. Before dinner, he read my palm.

"That is your star line," he said. "Notice it is connected? You are very emotional. That is your life line. You will live to be about eighty or eighty-five."

"Tell me more."

"I cannot," he said. "I am only on chapter five." And he went back to his manual.

Dinner in the big steamy dining car was a noisy affair. At first it was full of Hong Kongers, but they hated the food, found it uneatable, and left in a huff. There were about forty of them altogether on the train. They screeched back to their compartments and stuffed themselves with chocolate cookies.

Their mistake had been in ordering the expensive 20 yuan meal. The one for 10 yuan was better—no boney fish, no fatty pork, no canned Spam; just vegetables and soup. I liked the mob, the nagging waiters, the spilled food, the people stuffing themselves. It seemed like chaos, but really a strict routine was being observed: the progress of the courses could not be interrupted. Most waiters on trains had a sort of surly friendliness. They weren't ill-natured, merely bad-tempered because they worked so hard. They were not servile, they weren't hustling for tips—there weren't any; they were single-minded and offhand without being actually rude. If someone barked at them, they barked back.

We stopped at Shenyang and Changchun in the night, and I woke because of the cold and the noise. The attendant had given me a quilted bedroll and a horse blanket, and yet the train was very drafty. There was snow tracked into the corridor and thick frost on all the windows. When I pissed into the Chinese toilet, which was just a hole in the floor of the train, a great gust of steam shot up, as if I had pissed on a hot stove.

The young men from Hong Kong shivered in the compartment like prisoners in a dungeon. They drank hot water. I offered them some of my green tea (Zhulan brand: "A tea from ancient kings for those with kingly tastes") but they said no; they preferred drinking hot water. "White tea," the Chinese call it, bai cha.

At five-thirty in the morning the door banged open and the attendant came in, put down a thermos of water and yelled, "Get up. Time for breakfast."

When she had gone I switched off the light and crawled into bed again.

She returned a few minutes later.

"Who turned off that light?" she demanded, switching it on. She stood in the doorway, breathing hard—steam was coming out of her nose and mouth. "I want the bedding. Now hand it over!"

But the young men from Hong Kong were too cold to surrender it, and I saw no reason to—we weren't due at Harbin for four more hours. It was the usual rigmarole: they wanted to have everything folded and accounted for long before we arrived.

"They need the bedding," one of the young men said.

"Maybe she wants to wash it," another said.

"No," the third one said. Were they talking in English for my benefit or did they normally converse in this almost incomprehensible way (Dey nee da baydeen, and so forth)? He explained, "A Chinese guy told me they only wash it every fourth day, even if four different people use it."

Later I inquired about this and found it to be a fact. That was why they were so finicky about giving every passenger a clean towel to place over the pillow.

The train attendant came back several more times and eventually just snatched the bedding in the usual way. It struck me that these attendants—usually women—would have made wonderful matrons at English boarding schools. They were bossy, they were nags, they were know-it-alls; they had piercing voices and no sense of humor; they were inflexible about the rules. They were more than tough—they were indestructible. They kept the trains running.

It was not yet dawn in Heilongjiang, but people were hurrying through the darkness, along snowy paths. I saw about fifty black figures moving through the snow, all bundled up and roly-poly. They were big and small, going to work and to school.

When the sun came up—fire crackling through frost—the sky was clear and the snow a pale northern blue. People cycled through the snow and ice on the uncleared roads, and men drove wagons pulled by shaggy horses. The great flat snowfields all had stubble showing through. That was the main difference between this province and Siberia, which was just next door (we were farther north than Vladivostok). This was all farmland, and Siberia was mostly forest and uncleared land. The trip to Harbin was essentially a trip across plowed fields. The snow was not deep enough to hide the furrows.

In some villages and little towns the houses had the look of Russian bungalows. And their most un-Chinese feature (as peasant huts) was their roof, steeply pitched because of the snow. Some of them were big brick houses with fat chimneys, like old American homesteads, and others were the sort of snug bungalows that I had seen along the route of the Trans-Siberian, made out of wood, and with stovepipes sticking from the eaves. Not much smoke was coming out of these chimneys. The reason was pretty simple. The frugal Chinese, even in this freezing place, always skimp on fuel, and take a certain pleasure in living in a cold house. Why waste coal, they say, when all you really need is another pair of long underwear?

In this land of red wind-chafed cheeks and runny noses, Harbin seemed an unlikely city. It looked Russian (onion-domed churches, villas with turrets and gables, office blocks with pompous colonnades), and it had that strange fossilized appearance that cities have in very cold countries—a sort of dead and petrified shabbiness. Its Russian ornateness was overlaid with soot and frozen slush. Here and there was a Japanese roof or a Chinese ministry or statue—mostly monstrosities, which added to the weirdness of the place, because in addition to their odd proportions, they were also hung with long, gnarled icicles. I liked the city best in the early morning, when it glittered with frost—little prismatic pinpoints on its ugly face.

It was not much more than a hundred years old. It was a fishing village on the Songhua River that had been turned by the Russian tsar into a railway junction when he extracted permission from the decadent Qing Dynasty in the 1890s to make a shortcut through Manchuria to Vladivostok. The city went on rising and the various railway lines kept running after the Russo-Japanese War (1904), and the Russian Revolution. The greedy Japanese presence was powerful—they had planned to take over Asia, beginning here—but their puppet state of Manchukuo lasted only from 1931 until 1945, when the Russians reasserted themselves after the Second World War. Harbin's boast had always been that it was only nine days, by train, from Paris; so it got the fashions and the music and the latest papers long before Shanghai. The striptease and the Charleston and Dixieland jazz were introduced to China in Harbin in the 1920s because of the Trans-Siberian link with Paris.

Times had changed. Harbin's sister city was now Edmonton, Alberta. You guessed that somehow, when you looked at Harbin. There was something in its severity and its dark and funless nights that resembled a remote city in Canada.

And yet in Canada people joke and gloat about the cold. In Harbin and in Heilongjiang in general no one mentioned it except outsiders, who never stopped talking about it. I bought a thermometer so that I would not bore people by asking them the temperature, but the damn thing only registered to the freezing point—zero centigrade. The first time I put it outside the red liquid in the tube plunged into the bulb and shriveled into a tiny bead. So I had to ask. It was midmorning: minus twenty-nine centigrade in the sparkling sunshine. By nighttime it would be ten degrees colder than that—so cold in the more familiar figures of Fahrenheit that I didn't want to think about it.

I wore mittens and long underwear and thermal boots and a hat with earflaps and two sweaters under my leather jacket. One overcast day of paralyzing cold I wore more than that, put on all the clothes I had with me; I turned myself into a big padded and bulging fool, and yet I was still so cold I had to rush inside occasionally and jump up and down. The Chinese were well wrapped up, and some wore face masks, but on their feet many wore no more than corduroy rubber-soled slippers. Why didn't their feet fall off? They were enthusiasts for heavy knitted underwear that gave them elephantine legs, which contrasted oddly with their skinny frostbitten faces.

They didn't wash, for many reasons, the main one being that they did not have hot water or bathrooms. It hardly mattered: stinks are seldom obvious in icy northern lands. They did not take their clothes off, even indoors—neither their hats or coats, even when they ate. It was easy to see why. The heating was turned to an absolute minimum—the Maoist doctrine of saving fuel and regarding heating and lighting as luxuries except where they affected production of something like pig iron or cotton cloth. This constant wearing of coats and hats, inside and out, had given them some very bad habits. The worst was that they never seemed to close doors, and wherever you went there was a door ajar and wind like a knife coursing through it.

My hotel was so cold I always wore three or four layers of clothes. It was called the Swan—I thought of it as the Frozen Swan. It had a rock garden and ornamental pool in the lobby, but the lobby was so cold the fish had died and the plants were stiff and brown. Manchus and Hans sat in thick coats and fur hats on the lobby sofas, smoking and yelling. I was told there was a warmer hotel in Harbin, called the International, but it did not seem to matter to anyone in Heilongjiang whether a hotel was heated or not. The great boast of the hotels was their cuisine, and they vied with each other in offering grilled bear's paw, stewed moose nose with mushroom, Mongolian hot pot, white fungus soup and monkey-leg mushrooms and pheasant shashlik.

I arrived on Christmas Eve—the Russian Orthodox Christmas Eve, at the end of the first week in January. I went to one of the churches, where a shivering mustached man—possibly Russian; he was certainly not Chinese—was draping pine boughs upon the holy pictures and the statues. The interior of the church was sorry looking and very cold. The next day there was a Christmas service, twenty people chanted, sang and lit candles. They were all Russians, and most of them were old women. They had the furtive look of Early Christians, but it was obvious that no one persecuted them. They went about the Christmas service in a morose way and wouldn't talk to me afterward—just crunched away in the icy snow.

Even in January most events take place in the open air. The market is outdoors in the thirty-below temperatures. People shopped, bought frozen food (melons, meat, bread) and licked ice cream. That was the most popular snack in Harbin—vanilla ice cream. And the second most popular was small cherry-sized "haws" (hawthorns) which they coated with red goo and jammed on twigs. The market traders were cheery souls with rags wound around their faces and wearing mittens and fur hats. It went without saying that they spent the whole day outside, and when they saw me they cackled and called out, "Hey, old-hair!"

It was the Harbin expression for light-haired foreigners (lao mao zi), because old people are associated with light-colored hair. In this regard they have a special phrase for Russians, "second-class light-hairs" (er mao zi), which is intended as a term of disrespect.

A few days after I arrived the Harbin Winter Festival opened. It was a gimmick to attract tourists to this refrigerator, but it was a good gimmick. Most of it was an exhibition of ice sculpture. The Chinese expression bing deng is more accurate: it means "ice lanterns," and these ice sculptures usually had electric lights frozen inside them.

The whole city of Harbin was involved in it. A sculptor would stack blocks of ice around a lamppost and then chip away and shave the ice until it resembled a pagoda or a rocket ship or a human being. There was an ice sculpture on every street corner—lions, elephants, airplanes, acrobats, bridges; some of them were thirty or forty feet high. But the most ambitious ones were in The People's Park—there were eighty acres of them. Not only a Great Wall of China in ice, but a smaller version of the Taj Mahal, a two-story Chinese pavilion, an enormous car, a platoon of soldiers, an Eiffel Tower, and about forty more displays, all cut out of ice blocks in which fluorescent tubes had been frozen. Because of the lights these ice sculptures had to be seen at night, when it was nearly forty below. But no one minded. They shuffled around, they slipped and fell, they ate ice cream and goggled at these wonderful examples of deep-frozen kitsch.

'The Russians introduced these ice sculptures," a Japanese man told me. 'This is not an ancient Chinese art. But the Chinese liked them and developed the knack of making them. And it was their idea to put lights inside them."

Mr. Morioka in his tam-o'shanter and miracle fibers had taken a sentimental journey back to Harbin. He said you had to come to Harbin in the winter to see it as it really is. The pity was that so few foreigners dared to visit in the winter months.

I said it might have something to do with the stupefying cold.

"Oh, yes!" he said. "I was here in the thirties. I was a student. This was a wonderful place—full of Russian nobility who had no money. Some of them brought jewels and sold them here to keep themselves going. A few lived in style, in those villas that you see in town. But most of the Russians were poverty-striken émigrés. It was a Japanese city."

We were strolling through the ice sculptures; through an ice tunnel, down the main street of an ice village, past a pair of ice lions.

Mr. Morioka said, "As you pined for Paris, we pined for Harbin."

"We pined for sex and romance in Paris," I said.

"What do you think we had in Harbin? We had strippers, nightclubs, Paris fashions, the latest styles—books, songs, everything. This was like Europe to us. That's why our boys used to yearn for the bright lights of Harbin."

That seemed a very unusual way of describing this Chinese refrigerator, but of course he was talking about Manchukuo, Land of the Manchus, owned and operated by the Sons of Nippon.

"The strippers were Russian. That was the attraction. Some of them had been very grand, but they were down on their luck. So they danced and they performed in the cabaret—"

And as he spoke I could see a roomful of libidinous Japanese with their mouths open, transfixed by a wobbling pair of Russian knockers.

"—and you know, Russian women are very beautiful until they are about thirty or so," Mr. Morioka said. "These were fine women. Very lovely. I tell you, some of these women were aristocrats. I remember one cabaret singer telling me how she had gone to great parties and fancy balls in country houses in Russia."

This was an interesting story from the Old World, even though it did stink of exploitation. He said that in a Harbin nightclub there would be eighty percent Japanese and twenty percent rich Chinese. "Almost no Russians," he said. "They couldn't afford it. In Shanghai in the thirties it was fifty-fifty, Japanese and Chinese."

I wanted to talk to him a bit more, but my feet were so cold I was seriously worried about frostbite. I apologized and said I had to get out of this park and into a warmer place.

"There isn't much more to tell," he said. "It all ended in August 1945. when the Japanese front collapsed. The Russian soldiers, who had all been criminals and prisoners, were unmerciful. They took this city and began raping and murdering. That's another story!"

There were more ice carvings and ice monuments at Stalin Park on the riverbank—walls, fences, lions, turrets, and especially slides and sluices down which people rocketed in sleds onto the Songhua River. There were iceboats with sails and runners, and horse-drawn sleighs. Not many takers—no one had money. But there were plenty of people bruising their ankles on the ice-block helter-skelter, a spiral slide around a tower.

That made me think that of all the foreign companies that might soon start up in China the unlikeliest was an insurance company. I thought, Who would insure these people? I saw a man skidding at the ice sculptures. He slipped and cracked his head and was dragged into the snow, where he remained inert. It was a country of bare wires and potholes. Tourists have been known to disappear down elevator shafts and the claims by tourists against the China International Travel Service for injuries, missed cities and sickness are astronomical. The average Chinese factory is a death trap, and yet the Chinese blithely escort visitors through them and past machines that snatch at your hair and poke you in the eye, past gaping holes in the floor, and pools of toxic substances and crackling furnaces. Hard hats are not common, and few welders I saw wore masks.

My hotel was very cold but very hospitable. It was so friendly it actually aroused my suspicions—like the man who is such a glad-hander you suspect he is picking your pocket. I was on the eleventh floor. Welcome to Our Floor! the signs said. That was very unusual. Good health! more said. And many said, Prosperity and Long Life!

I asked the floor attendant what was up. He just grinned and said, "Welcome to our floor!"

"Why are you welcoming me to your floor?"

"I want you to be happy."

"No one has ever welcomed me to their floor in China," I said.

"It is a very good floor."

His insistence in his squawking voice only made me anxious, and so I looked deeper into this and discovered that the previous year there had been a terrible fire in the hotel in which two people died. The eleventh floor had been burned out. The man who had started it was an American businessman. He was said to have been smoking in bed. He was detained by the Chinese and—so I was told—confined to a hotel for quite a while because his company refused to pay the $70,000 damages that the Chinese demanded. And yet no security precautions were taken after the fire. No fire stairs, no smoke detectors, no fireproof furnishings. All the Chinese had done was print hundreds of cardboard signs to be placed in every hotel room. The sign said Do Not Smoke in Bed.

One day in Harbin I met a Canadian who surprised me by saying that he was delighted to be here. His name was Scotty. He was of course from Edmonton, Alberta, the sister city.

"But I'm the only Edmontonian here," he said.

He was a stout and good-humored man and this was his first time in China. He could hardly believe the notoriety it had given him. He had been to a banquet with the governor and he had met many high Party officials in the province. He was the superintendent of a steel forge, on a two-year assignment, and was perhaps on the verge of believing in his importance to the future of Chinese industry. "It's hard to describe," he said. "But I'm a kind of unofficial celebrity."

"I hope it lasts," I said, because the Chinese were known to be rather brisk with foreigners they no longer needed. The philosophy of learning from foreigners was spelled out in the nineteenth century by Feng Gui-fen. Feng was an adviser to statesmen, and a teacher and advocate of reform. He regarded all foreigners as barbarians but said it was necessary to use them to learn various mechanical skills (shipbuilding and gunsmithing in particular). "A few barbarians should be employed," he said, "and Chinese who are good in using their minds should be selected to receive instruction so that in turn they may teach many craftsmen." He went on to say, "We should use the instruments of the barbarians, but not adopt the ways of the barbarians. We should use them so that we can repel them." These are to a large extent the sentiments of the Chinese government today and the reason for the large number of so-called foreign experts in China. A foreign expert is a barbarian with a skill to impart, but he should never make the mistake of believing that he is being invited to stay for an indefinite length of time. The experts are in China to be used, and when they are no longer useful, to be sent home.

I asked Scotty whether he got homesick. He said he had only been in Harbin four months—not long enough.

"My wife misses grocery shopping and she hates her kitchen," he said. "Me? I miss beef. There's no beef here."

I had not noticed that, but then you usually had to be told what was in a Chinese dish. The Chinese had a way of drawing a culinary veil over even the most obvious ingredients.

"How is your steel forge?" I asked.

"Old-fashioned," Scotty said. "So I have to be tough. I'll tell you frankly—I'm cruel. I have to be, to get the quality up. Take today. What did I do? I rejected a whole order. It was worth twenty thousand U.S. Hey, it worried them!"

"Why did you reject the order?"

Scotty became suddenly very enthusiastic about his work, and as he talked about forging steel, I was convinced that he was the perfect man to send to China—a hard hat with a mission. He didn't seem the sort of person who suffered fools gladly. If they called him a barbarian I was sure he would return the compliment.

"Every piece of steel has to have a heat number stamped on it. These didn't have a heat number. I just sent them back and said no." He smiled mischievously and added, "I'll accept the order eventually, when we get the number on it. But they don't know that. That's my secret. Let them stew for a while. Let them think about the foul-up."

"Was it important, this steel?"

"Sure!" he said. "Buncha pipe flanges!"

We talked about pipe flanges for a while. It is true that there's not much about pipe flanges to bewitch the imagination, but we were in one of the downtown hotels where it was warm. When it is minus thirty-eight degrees centigrade outside, it can be counted a pleasant experience to stand in a warm place talking with a fat Canadian about pipe flanges.

All this time in Harbin I was trying to make arrangements to go farther north into the greater desolation of Heilongjiang. I had not known that my destination, Langxiang, was closed to foreigners. But I prevailed upon the Chinese. I said I would behave myself and would not stay long. They said they would consider my request.

While I waited I rummaged in the shops. I bought a pair of gloves, but not a fur hat. Such lovely furs (ermine, sable, fox, mink); such hideous hats and coats. And how awful for a stag to be killed so that its noble forking antlers could be made into buttons for auntie's old coat. I found an ivory object at the Harbin Antiquities Store. "It is an ancient carving," the clerk said. "Of the earth."

"Impossible."

How did I know it could not be an ancient Chinese carving of the round earth? Elementary. Until about 1850 the Chinese believed the earth was flat.

It was a prewar Russian billiard ball, but I bought it just the same.

15: The Slow Train to Langxiang: Number 295

"Is it cold outside?" I asked.

"Very," said Mr. Tian. His eyeglasses were opaque with frost.

It was five-thirty on a Harbin morning, the temperature at minus thirty-five degrees centigrade and a light snow falling—little grains like seed pearls sifting down in the dark. When the flurry stopped, the wind picked up, and the wind was murderous. With it full on my face it was like being slashed with a razor. We were on our way to the railway station.

"And you insist on coming with me?" I asked.

"Langxiang is forbidden," Mr. Tian said. "So I must."

"It is the Chinese way," I said.

"Very much so," he replied.

In this darkness, huddled groups of people waited in the empty street for buses. That seemed a grim pastime, a long wait at a Harbin bus stop in winter. And, by the way, the buses were not heated. In his aggrieved account of his Chinese residence, the journalist Tiziano Terzani, writing about Heilongjiang ("The Kingdom of the Rats"), quotes a French traveler who said, "Although it is uncertain where God placed paradise, we can be sure that he chose some other place than this."

The wind dropped but the cold remained. It banged against my forehead and twisted my fingers and toes; it burned my lips. I felt like Sam McGee. I entered the station waiting room, and a chill rolled against me, as if my face had been pressed on a cold slab. The waiting room was unhealed. I asked Mr. Tian how he felt about this.

"Heat is bad," he said."Heat makes you sleepy and slow."

"I like it," I said.

Mr. Tian said, "I once went to Canton. It was so hot I felt sick."

Mr. Tian was twenty-seven, a graduate of Harbin University. There was humor in the way he moved. He was self-assured. He didn't fuss. He was patient. He was frank. I liked him for these qualities. The fact that he was incompetent did not matter very much. Langxiang was a day's journey by train—north, into the snow. He seemed an easy companion, and I did not think he would get in my way.

He had no bag. He may have had a toothbrush in his pocket, where he kept his woolly cap and his misshapen gloves. He was completely portable, without any impedimenta. He was an extreme example of Chinese austerity. He slept in his long johns and wore his coat to meals. He rarely washed. Being Chinese he did not have to shave. He seemed to have no possessions at all. He was like a desert Bedouin. This fascinated me, too.

The loudspeakers in the waiting room were broadcasting the dragon voice of the Peking harridan who gave the news every morning. In China the news always seemed a peculiar form of nagging.

"You are listening to that?" Mr. Tian inquired.

"Yes, but I can't make it out."

"'We must absolutely not allow a handful of people to sabotage production,'" Mr. Tian translated the duckspeak from the broadcast.

The announcer was reading a front-page editorial from the Workers' Daily. It was the first public acknowledgment that the Chinese Communist Party condemned the student demonstrations. There were other people in the waiting room but they were talking among themselves instead of listening. They were warmly dressed, in fur hats, mittens and boots. They smoked heavily and from time to time got up to use the spittoon which was the centerpiece of the railway waiting room.

The shrewish voice was still blaring from the loudspeaker, and Mr. Tian blandly helped me to understand it.

'"Bourgeois liberalism has been rampant for several years. It is a poison in some people's minds. Some people make trips abroad and say capitalism is good, and paint a dark picture of socialism.'"

I said, "Mr. Tian, is anyone else listening to this?"

"No," he said, and watched a man dribbling saliva onto the floor and scuffing it with his felt boot. "They are occupied with other-matters."

"Demonstrations have been held in a number of cities," the voice nagged. 'They are unpatriotic, unlawful, disorderly and destructive. In some cases they have been provoked by foreign elements. They must cease. The Chinese people will not stand by and let lawless students take over. Bourgeois liberalization is something that must be stamped out—"

It went on and on, at such length that it was clear that the government was very worried. The broadcast was full of thinly veiled threats of retribution.

I said, "What do you think of the demonstrations, Mr. Tian?"

"I think they are good," he said, nodding quietly.

"But the government has condemned them. Don't you think they represent bourgeois liberalism and poisonous influences?"

He shook his head and smiled. His hair stuck up like a roadrunner's. He said, "These demonstrations show how the Chinese people are thinking."

"But it's just students," I said, still playing devil's advocate.

"In some cases there were factory workers," he said. "In Shanghai, for example."

"Some people think that these demonstrations might lead to a conflict between capitalism and communism."

"We will choose what is best for us," he said. He had become a trifle enigmatic.

I said, "Do you ever suspect that you might be a secret capitalist-roader?"

"There is a good and a bad side to everything," he said.

He did not smile, which was why I suspected him of being humorous. He could be very mysterious. In other respects he was totally ineffectual. "Do you want me to do anything?" he said, but when I made a suggestion—get a ticket, make a phone call, establish a fact—he invariably failed. And yet he went on offering to help me.

The train pulled in, steaming and gasping, just as the sun came up. It had come from Dalian, 600 miles away, and it stopped everywhere. So it was sensationally littered with garbage—peanut shells, apple cores, chewed chicken bones, orange peels and greasy paper. It was very dirty and it was so cold inside the spit had frozen on the floor into misshapen yellow-green medallions of ice. The covering between coaches was a snow tunnel, the frost on the windows was an inch thick, the doors had no locks and so they banged and thumped as a freezing draft rushed through the carriages. It was the Heilongjiang experience: I crept in out of the cold, and once inside I felt even colder. I found a small space and sat hunched over like everyone else, with my hat and gloves on. I was reading Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time and I scribbled on the flyleaf, In the provinces every train is like a troop train. This is like one returning from the front, with the sick and wounded.

Even with three pairs of socks and thermal-lined boots my feet were cold; nor did I feel particularly cozy in my heavy sweater, Mongolian sheepskin vest and leather coat. I felt like an idiot in my hat and fleece-lined mittens, but it annoyed me that I was still cold, or at least not warm. How I longed for the summer trains of the south and the sweltering trip on The Iron Rooster, when I had lounged in my blue pajamas.

Mr. Tian said, "You come from which city in the States?"

"Near Boston."

"Lexington is near Boston," Mr. Tian said.

"How did you know that?"

"I studied American history in middle school. All Chinese study it."

"So you know about our war of liberation, Mr. Tian?"

"Yes. There was also a Paul who was very important."

"Paul Revere."

"Exactly," Mr. Tian said. "He told the peasants that the British were coming."

"Not just the peasants. He told everyone—the peasants, the landlords, the capitalist-roaders, The Stinking Ninth, the minorities and the slaves."

"I think you're joking, especially about the slaves."

"No. Some of the slaves fought on the British side. They were promised their freedom if the British won. After the British surrendered, these blacks were sent to Canada."

"I didn't read about that," Mr. Tian said, as the door blew open.

"I'm cold," I said.

"I'm too hot," Mr. Tian said.

The cold put me to sleep. I was wakened later by Mr. Tian, who asked me whether I wanted to have breakfast. I thought some food might warm me up so I said yes.

There was frost on the dining-car windows, ice on the dining-car floor, and a bottle of water on my table had frozen and burst. My fingers were too cold to hold any chopsticks. I hunched over with my hands up my sleeves.

"What food do they have?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"Do you want noodles?" I asked.

"Anything but noodles," Mr. Tian said.

The waiter brought us cold noodles, cold pickled onions, diced Spam that looked like a shredded beach toy, and cold but very tasty black fungus—a specialty of the province. Mr. Tian ate his noodles. It was the Chinese way. Even if it was not to your taste, when there was nothing else on the menu, you ate it.

"What is that music?" I asked. A tune was playing over the train's loudspeaker. I had heard it before, on other trains.

"It is called, The Fifteenth Moon,'" Mr. Tian said.

I asked him to explain the incomprehensible words. It was about a soldier who was fighting on the Vietnamese border—just south of where I had taken the train in Yunnan. The soldier was married, but his wife was not with him. And yet the soldier thought about his wife a great deal and realized that he was fighting for her—he was triumphant and heroic because she inspired him. That was a change. A few years ago he would have been fighting for Chairman Mao. It made a little more sense to fight for your spouse and the sentiment was that of "Keep the Home Fires Burning."

"I like this song, but I don't like Chinese music," Mr. Tian said.

"What do you like?" I asked, abandoning my chopsticks and eating the black fungus with my fingers.

"Beethoven. The Ninth Symphony. And I like this."

Mr. Tian opened his mouth and a crowlike complaining came out of it.

Ah goon Scamba Fey!

Party say roomee tie!

Renmanbee da warn hoo-day...

"The tune's familiar," I said. But I could not place it. He was staring at me, challenging me to remember. I said, "I give up."

After a while he told me that it was "Scarborough Fair," sung by his favorite musicians, Simon and Garfunkel. They were very popular at Harbin University and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" was a much-coveted tape.

After several hours of this train crossing flat snowfields it entered a mountainous region. The settlements were small—three or four short rows of bungalows, some of brick and some of mud and logs. They were the simplest of slant-roofed dwellings and looked like the sort of houses that children draw in the first grade, with a narrow door and a single window and a blunt chimney with a screw of smoke coming out of it.

The toilet on the train looked as though a child had designed it, too. It was a hole in the floor about a foot across. Well, I had seen squat toilets before; but this one was traveling at about fifty miles an hour through the ice and snow of northern China. There was no pipe or baffle. If you looked down you saw ice streaking past. A gust of freezing air rushed out of the hole. Anyone fool enough to use this thing would be frostbitten on a part of the body that is seldom frostbitten. And yet the passengers trooped into this refrigerated bum-freezer. When they came out their eyes were tiny and their teeth were clenched, as though they had just been pinched very hard.

"People ski here," Mr. Tian said at the town of Taoshan, where we arrived at noon. Some passengers got off. They looked like lumberjacks, not skiers. But there were white mountains to the northwest, and the most Siberian touch of all, groves of silver birches.

The train grew colder. What was the point in heating it if it kept stopping and opening its doors? That was the Chinese argument. The same went for the toilet. If a toilet was a hole in the floor with freezing air pouring into the room, there was no point heating the room. If you couldn't heat a room efficiently there was no point heating it at all. That was why the people in this region never took off their long underwear, and why they ate wearing their fur hats.

I was rigid in my seat, reading A Hero of Our Time with my mittens on, and turning the pages with my nose. Perhaps the Chinese were thinking, So that's what they do with those long noses! In spite of the shortness of this book I had never finished reading it. I had started it many times. But the hero, Pechorin, is a sort of romantic punk with a death wish, and the story is told in fits and starts. I came across one of Pechorin's characteristic opinions as we rode along. "I confess I have a strong prejudice against people who are blind, one-eyed, deaf, mute, legless, armless, hunchbacked, and so forth. I have observed that there always exists some strange relationship between the appearance of a man and his soul, as if with the loss of a limb, the soul lost one of its senses."

This was nonsense. The opposite seemed to me much more likely, that the soul gained a new sense with the loss of a limb, or blindness, deafness or whatever. In H. G. Wells's story "The Country of the Blind" it is the sighted man who is truly handicapped. I was also struck by this passage in the book because there were cripples on the train, and I thought of it again in Langxiang where I met a hunchback who had built his own house, all by himself, and fitted it so that he could carry on his two jobs as a radio repairman and a studio photographer.

We were still jogging along, stopping frequently. And the doors opened and closed with the same pneumatic gasp as those on a refrigerator, each time producing a cold blast through the coach. I hated having to get up because when I sat down again my seat froze me.

It surprised me to see children standing outside of their houses, watching the train go by. They wore thin jackets, no hats or gloves. Many of them had bright red cheeks. They had spiky unwashed hair and they wore cloth slippers. They looked very hardy, and they yelled at the train as it passed their icebound villages.

The mountains in the distance were the southernmost peaks of the Lesser Khingan Range, and the foreground was all forest. Most of these settlements were simply overgrown lumber camps. One of the centers of logging activity is Langxiang. But I had also chosen it because it has a narrow-gauge railway that goes deep into the forest and carries logs back to town to be milled.

It was hardly a town. It was a sprawling one-story village with an immense lumberyard at its center and a main street where people with scarves wrapped around their faces stood all day in the cold selling meat and vegetables. One day in Langxiang I saw a man standing behind a square of cloth which held six frozen rats and a stack of rats' tails. Were things so bad in Langxiang that they ate rats and rats' tails?

"Do you eat these?" I asked.

"No, no," came the muffled voice through the frosted scarf. "I sell medicine."

"These rats are medicine?"

"No, no!" The man's skin was almost black from the cold and the dry air.

And then he began speaking again, but I had no idea what he was saying in this local dialect. As he spoke the ice crystals thawed on his scarf.

Mr. Tian said, "He doesn't sell rats. He sells rat poison. He shows these dead rats as proof that his poison is good."

We had arrived at Langxiang in the middle of the afternoon, just as it was growing dark. This was a northern latitude in winter: night came early. I stepped from the cold train onto the freezing platform, and then we went to the guest house, which was also cold—but the clammy indoor cold which I found harder to bear than the icy outdoors. With curtains over the windows and the lights dim it was like being in an underground tomb.

"It's very cold in here," I said to Mr. Cong, the manager.

"It will get warmer."

"When?"

"In three or four months."

"I mean, in the hotel," I said.

"Yes. In the hotel. And all over Langxiang."

I was jumping up and down to restore my circulation.

Mr. Tian was simply standing patiently.

"What about a room?" I said.

Mr. Tian said something very rapidly to Mr. Cong.

"Do you want a clean room or a regular one?" Mr. Tian asked.

"I think I'll have a clean one for a change."

He did not remark on my sarcasm. He said, "Ah, a clean one," and shook his head, as if this was a tall order. "Then you will have to wait."

The wind blew through the lobby and when it hit the curtain that had been hung across the main door it filled it like a spinnaker.

"We can have dinner," Mr. Cong said.

"It's not even five o'clock," I said.

"Five o'clock. Dinnertime. Ha-ha!" This ha-ha meant: Rules are rules. I don't make them, so you should not be difficult.

The dining room in the Langxiang guest house was the coldest room I had entered so far in the whole of Heilongjiang Province. I yanked my hat tight and then sat on my hands and shivered. I had put my thermometer on the table: thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit.

Mr. Cong said he was used to the cold. He was not even wearing a hat! He was from the far north, where he had gone as a settler in the fifties to work on a commune that produced corn and grain. Although he was not very old, he was something of an antique in Chinese terms. As an ex-commune worker in one of the remotest parts of China, he found the new reforms were bewildering to him. And he had four children, now regarded as a shameful number. "They punish us for having more than two," he said, and seemed very puzzled."You might lose your job, or be transferred, as punishment."

From the utter boredom on Mr. Tian's face—but his boredom was a form of serenity—I could tell that Mr. Cong and Mr. Tian had nothing at all in common. In China, the generation gap has a specific meaning and is something to be reckoned with.

I asked Mr. Cong what had happened to his commune.

"It was canceled," he said. "It was dissolved."

"Did the peasants go away?"

"No. Each was given his own plot to till."

"Do you think that's better?"

"Of course," he said, but it was impossible for me to tell whether he meant it. "Production is much greater. The yields are larger."

That seemed to settle it. Any policy that increased production was a good thing. I thought: God help China if there's a recession.

The town was in darkness. The hotel was very cold. My room was cold. What to do? Although it was only six-thirty, I went to bed—anyway, I got inside with most of my clothes on, and I listened to my shortwave radio under the blankets. That was how I was to spend all of my nights in Langxiang.

I went up the logging line on the narrow-gauge railway the next day, but I was disappointed in the forest. I had expected wilderness, but this was filled with lumberjacks cutting and bulldozing trees.

"One day we will go to the primeval forest," Mr. Tian said.

"Let's go today."

"No. It is far. We will go another day."

We went to the locomotive shed, where we met Mrs. Jin, a local guide. The shed was full of smoke and steam, and it was dark; but it was also warm because the boilers were being stoked and the fire in the forge was blazing. As I walked along, Mrs. Jin threw herself at me and pushed me against the wall, and then she laughed hysterically, a kind of chattering—one of the more terrifying Chinese laughs. I saw that she had saved me from stepping into a deep hole in which I would almost certainly have broken my back.

I was so rattled by this I had to go outside and take deep breaths. All over this town the snow was packed hard. No street or sidewalk was clear of ice. The Chinese habitually pedaled on the ice, and they had a way of walking—a sort of shuffle—that prevented them from slipping.

"This town is forbidden," Mr. Tian boasted. "You are very lucky to be here."

"Are there minorities in Langxiang?" I asked. I was thinking of Buryats, Mongolians, Manchus, and native Siberians.

"We have Hui people," Mrs. Jin said. "And we have Koreans."

We found some Hui people—China's Muslims—slitting a cow's throat behind a butcher shop. I could not watch, but being Muslims, they were doing it the ritual way, covering their heads and bleeding it so that it would be halal, untainted.

Before the town darkened and died for the day, we went to a Korean restaurant. It was just a wood-frame house, with a stone floor and a fire burning in an open fireplace that was also used for cooking. Four Korean women sat around it eating. All were relatives of the owner, who was a younger woman. They wore fur hats and pretty scarves. They were short, and rather dark and square faced, with big, even teeth.

"I can't tell the difference between Koreans and Han Chinese," Mr. Tian said to me.

There were only a few hundred Koreans in town, though there are two million of them in China.

"When people come to this restaurant they speak Korean," one of the women said.

All these women had been born in China and were married to Koreans, but their parents had been born in Korea. The eldest was about forty and the youngest no more than twenty or so. I wanted to ask them whether they always wore such pretty scarves and hats—and even their coats were stylish—but I did not want to sound patronizing, and in a rare moment of tactfulness I remained silent.

"I'd like to visit Korea," one of the women said. "But I don't know where to go. We have no idea where our parents were born."

"Do Koreans marry Han people?"

"Sometimes. But none of us has done so."

They were whispering and laughing to themselves as they ate, and they asked me questions, too—where was I from? Was I married? Did I have children? How old was I? They were smiley types—less phlegmatic and dour than the Chinese. They said they were proud of being Koreans, although all that remained of their culture was their cooking and their language.

Their husbands were lumberjacks and storekeepers. It was just like the Chinese to single them out as a special category. The Chinese were great makers of ethnic distinctions and could spot a cultural difference a mile away. Muslims have been in China for well over a thousand years and yet they are still regarded as strange and inscrutable and backward, and politically suspect.

All the while in Langxiang my feet and hands were frozen—stinging and painful. My eyes hurt. My muscles were knotted. There was an icy moaning in my head. Mr. Tian asked me whether I wanted to see the ski slopes. I said yes, and we drove four miles outside town just as the sun slipped below the distant mountains and an even greater cold descended with the darkness.

There on the black and white mountains were ten sluices—frozen chutes cut into the slope. People hauled small boxes up the mountain—they were like little coffins; and then they placed them into a chute and went banging down, cracking from side to side and screaming. I hopped up and down in the cold and said I wasn't interested.

Mr. Tian went thrashing up the slope with a splintery coffin and came down showing his teeth. He did it again. Perhaps he was developing a taste for this.

"Don't you like skiing?" he said.

"This isn't skiing, Mr. Tian."

In a shocked voice he said, "It's not?"

But he kept doing it just the same.

I walked down the path and found a shed, a sort of watchman's shack. There was a stove inside. This was a vivid demonstration of heating in Langxiang. The stove was so feeble that there was a half an inch of frost on the walls of the shed. The walls (wood and mud bricks) were entirely white.

I kept a record of temperatures. Minus thirty-four centigrade on the main street, freezing in the lobby, just above freezing in the dining room. The food went cold a minute after it was plunked down, and the grease congealed. They served fatty meat, greasy potatoes, rice gruel, great uncooked chunks of green pepper. Was this Chinese food? One day I had cabbage stuffed with meat and rice, and gravy poured over it. I had eaten such dishes in Russia and Poland, where they were called golomkis.

It was very tiring to be cold all the time. I began to enjoy going to bed early. I listened to the BBC and the Voice of America under my blankets. After a few hours I took one of my sweaters off, and one layer of socks, and by morning I was so warm in the sack that I forgot where I was. Then I saw the layer of frost on the window that was so thick I could not see outside, and I remembered.

No one spoke of the cold. Well, why should they? They reveled in it—literally, dancing and sliding on the ice. I saw children after dark one evening pushing each other off a shelf of ice onto the frozen surface of the town's river. (Other people chopped holes in this ice and drew water from it.) Those children frolicking in the darkness in the perishing cold reminded me of penguins frisking on the ice floes through the long Antarctic night.

When I travel I dream a great deal. Perhaps that is one of my main reasons for travel. It has something to do with strange rooms and odd noises and smells; with vibrations; with food; with the anxieties of travel—especially the fear of death; and with temperatures.

In Langxiang it was the low temperatures that gave me long, exhauscing dreams. The cold kept me from deep sleep, and so I lay just beneath the surface of consciousness, like a drifting fish. I offer one of my Langxiang dreams. I was besieged in a house in San Francisco, but I realized I would have to escape or I would be killed. I first fired out of the window and then ran from the front door shooting a machine gun and wearing headphones. I boarded a passing cable car—that was part of my escape route: I was now safe. President Reagan was on it, standing and straphanging. I found a seat near him and started talking to him. He told me his right ear was useless and that I should talk into his left. I was asking him whether he was having a tough time as president. He said, "Terrible." So I gave him my seat, and we were still talking when I woke up feeling very cold.

That was not the end. I went back to sleep and dreamed that I was at a Christmas party. I didn't know any of the people. It was a large and fashionable house, and the people seemed like houseguests, staying for the weekend. One man startled me: he looked like a gnome, with a tanned, leathery face, completely bald, and wearing an earring. In his hand was a small plastic model of himself, just as ugly but only six inches high, which he was giving as a Christmas present.

Nancy Reagan was at the party. Her hair was in big white rollers. She had very thin arms and popping eyes. We talked about the weather for a while, and then she said, "I have to call home"—she was too embarrassed to say "the White House." After she made her phone call, we went onto the porch, which was like a conservatory with a view of the sea. She said she had a bad ear—"My trump ear," she said, meaning she needed an ear trumpet for it. She said, "You're so lucky co come from here." When she said that I realized that we were on Cape Cod, and perhaps in an idealized version of my own house. She said pathetically, "I was so poor when I was growing up."

When she finished, I said, "I've just had a dream about the president"—and I began to describe my earlier dream within this dream.

Before I got very far, Mr. Tian banged on my door and woke me up.

"We are going to the primeval forest," he said.

We drove about thirty miles, and Mrs. Jin joined us. The driver's name was Ying. The road was icy and corrugated and very narrow; but there were no other vehicles except for an occasional army truck. When we arrived at a place called Clear Spring (Qing Yuan), where there was a cabin, we began hiking through the forest. There was snow every where, but it was not very deep—a foot or so. The trees were huge and very close together—great fat trunks crowding each other. We kept to a narrow path.

I asked Mrs. Jin about herself. She was a pleasant person, very frank and unaffected. She was thirty-two and had a young daughter. Her husband was a clerk in a government department. This family of three lived with six other family members in a small flat in Langxiang—nine people in three rooms. Her mother-in-law did all the cooking. It seemed cruel that in a province which had wide open spaces, people should be forced to live in such cramped conditions at close quarters. But this was quite usual. And it was an extended family under one roof. I often had the feeling that it was the old immemorial Confucian family that had kept China orderly. Mao had attacked the family—the Cultural Revolution was intentionally an assault on the family system, when children were told to rat on their bourgeois parents. But that had faltered and failed. The family had endured, and what were emerging with Deng's reforms were family businesses and family farms.

Kicking through the forest, I asked whether it was possible to buy Mao's Little Red Book of Selected Thoughts.

"I have thrown mine away," Mr. Tian said. "That was all a big mistake."

"I don't agree with him," Mrs. Jin said.

"Do you read Mao's Thoughts?" I asked.

"Sometimes," she said. "Mao did many great things for China. Everyone criticizes him, but they forget the wise things he said."

"What is your favorite thought? The one that you most associate with his wisdom?"

"'Serve the People,'" Mrs. Jin said. "I can't quote it all to you, it is too long. It is very wise."

"What about 'A Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party'—can you sing it?"

"Oh, yes," she said, and did so as we marched through the woods. It was not a catchy tune, but it was perfect for walking briskly, full of iambics: Geming bushi qingke chifan...

Meanwhile I was bird-watching. It was one of the few places in China where the trees were full of birds. They were tiny flitting things, and very high in the branches. My problem was that I could only use my binoculars with bare hands, so that I could adjust the focus. The temperature was in the minus thirties, which meant that after a few minutes my fingers were too cold to use for adjustments. Yet even in this bitter cold there was bird song, and the whole forest chattered with the tapping of woodpeckers.

"Mr. Tian, can you sing something?" I asked.

"I can't sing Mao's Thoughts."

"Sing something else."

He suddenly snatched his woolly cap off and shrieked:

Oh, Carol!

I am but a foooool!

Don't ever leave me—

Treat me mean and croool...

He sang it with extraordinary passion and energy, this old Neil Sedaka rock-and-roll song, and when he was done, he said, "That's what we used to sing at Harbin University when I was a student!"

There was no wind, and the only sound in the forest was that of the birds—chirping, twittering, pecking the trunks. Mr. Tian and Mrs. Jin saw some smoke on a hill not far away and decided to go investigate it. I carried on plodding and bird-watching. I saw a number of Marsh Tits and three kinds of woodpecker. I was looking for the chicken-sized Great Black Woodpecker. I saw a pair of treecreepers making their way up a trunk, their feathers fluffed out. It delighted me to see these tiny birds were impervious to the cold.

Then I heard the unmistakable crack of a gun going off. I turned around and saw Ying, the driver, rushing into a thicket and retrieving a dead bird. He had a gun! I tramped back along the path just as he was cramming the bird into his pocket.

"What are you doing?"

"Look, a bird," he said, fairly pleased with himself. His rifle was a single shot .22, straight out of a shooting gallery.

"What are you going to do with that bird?"

It was a rosefinch. I had it in my hand now. It was very soft and very tiny, and in this region of dull smoldering cold, the dead bird was still warm. It was like holding an extravagant hors d'oeuvre.

Mr. Ying perhaps detected a hostility in my voice. He did not reply.

"Are you going to eat this bird?"

He looked down and kicked the snow like a scolded child.

There was nothing to eat. I was sure he was killing the birds for the fun of it.

"Why are you shooting birds, Mr. Ying?"

He did not look at me; he was sulking, losing face.

"I don't like killing birds," I said. "This is a nice bird. This is a pretty bird. And now it's a dead bird."

And I was angry, too, because I had not known this gunslinger was behind me, blasting away. I had thought I was in the wilderness. But I had already said too much. Mr. Ying looked as though he wanted to shoot me. I put the tiny rosefinch into his hand and I walked away. When I looked back I saw him stamping on the path, making his way to the road. I could not see Mr. Tian or Mrs. Jin, though I saw what they had been chasing—a tree burning on a hillside, a great thrill, a useless fire.

I went deeper into the forest on my own and saw more birds—great flitting clusters of woodpeckers. You would see as many birds on an average day in Sandwich, Mass., but this was tamed, poisoned, unsentimental and ravenous China, the most populous and domesticated country on earth: on seeing a wild bird the Chinese person invariably licked his lips.

It was an unusual place for China. Pretty birds singing and skittering among tall, thick trees, and no other human in sight.

There was no danger in carrying on here. My footprints in the snow made it impossible for me to get lost. I kept on for another hour or so and saw a plume of smoke. Even when I was near it I could not make out what it was. It seemed to be an underground fire. When I was on top of it I saw that it came from a deep hole in the ground. In the bottom of the hole three Chinese girls were warming themselves over a fire. I said hello and they looked up at a long-nosed barbarian in a silly hat and mittens and a coat bulging with layers of sweaters. They looked truly startled, as though I might be a Siberian who had wandered over the border, which was indeed only about eighty miles away. They emitted the characteristic Chinese gasp, Ai-yaaaah.

"What are you doing?"

"It is our lunch break!"

They climbed out of the hole to look at me. They were wearing padded jackets and felt boots, and scarves over their heads and faces.

They said they were working here, and showed me where they were planting seedlings behind windbreaks. The loggers had come and gone, and whole hillsides had been cut down. The idea was that in another three hundred years or so the forest would be replaced and ready for recutting. With China's record for acid rain this prospect seemed unlikely. But the windbreaks were elaborate, like many rows of hedges lying parallel on the hillside; the overall impression was one of lines on a contour map.

Before I headed back I jumped into the hole and warmed myself before the fire, as the three girls knelt at the edge of the hole, looking in at me. When I got out, they got in.

I found Mr. Tian tramping towards me. He said, "So you like it here, eh?"

"This is wonderful."

"Primeval forest," he said. "Original forest."

"Wouldn't you like to build a house here and live alone with your wife?"

"Yes," he said. "Have a family and write something—poems and stories."

"Maybe have four children."

"It is not permitted," he said. Then he smiled."But this is so far they wouldn't know. It wouldn't matter. Yes. I would like that."

We walked to where the lumberjacks were working. Few of them wore gloves or hats. They wore rather thin jackets and glorified sneakers. It amazed me that they could endure this cold so skimpily dressed. They were dragging bundles of freshly cut logs into stacks to be loaded onto trucks. Some of the younger ones stopped to stare at me—perhaps because I was so warmly dressed; but the foreman barked at them, and all these ragged tree cutters went back to work. The human voices and the chugging tractors sounded bizarre and unpleasant in this dense forest, perhaps among the last forested wildernesses in China.

Mrs. Jin had wandered back to the road. When we caught up with her it was already growing dark. Walking to the car we talked about capital punishment. Mr. Tian agreed with it—kill them all, he said. It was the only way. Mrs. Jin disagreed. Forget the death penalty for embezzlers and pimps, she said; just execute murderers.

This led to a discussion about the true numbers that had been executed.

"Most Chinese people don't believe the news they hear on the radio," Mr. Tian said, when I asked whether the government broadcast such figures.

Mrs. Jin frowned, probably wondering whether it was wise for Mr. Tian to be telling me this. But Mr. Tian pressed on, clawing his hair and gabbling.

"The government sometimes tells lies," he said.

"Then how do people know what's going on in the country?"

"Foreign broadcasts. The students listen to the BBC and Voice of America. That's how I found out about the demonstrations in Peking. It was not until two or three days later that the government said what was happening."

I was very touched by his talking to me in this candid way, although sensing Mrs. Jin's disapproval I decided not to ask too many questions. In spite of the cold, I was in a good mood. I felt I had reached a part of China that was hard to get to but worth the trouble. It was not a sense of achievement, but rather a hopeful feeling, because it was a place I would gladly return to: that was something to look forward to.

I ate at five and then got into bed and listened to my radio under the blankets. And the next day at dawn Mr. Tian and I left the town by train. It was so cold I felt parts of me would break off if I bumped into anything. And this was another morning of razor-slashing wind. The sky was gray. It had never been anything but cloudy here. Some of the clouds glowed slightly. That was the sun, that blur—just a crude suggestion of what a sun might be, if there were such a thing.

I read, I slept, I gritted my teeth in the cold. This was an open train, each coach crammed with wooden seats. It stopped at all the stations on the line, and at each station all the doors opened, and for a few minutes the wind blew through the train, freezing it. Then the doors closed, and just as the coach became almost bearable, the train stopped again, the doors opened, and the wind picked up.

The meal on the train only cost twenty cents, but it was one dish with rice. It was a northern Heilongjiang vegetable, called "yellow flower," like a chopped heap of lily stalks.

Thinking of the driver, and how I had bawled him out for shooting birds, I asked Mr. Tian about losing face. The phrase in Chinese means exactly that: lose face (diulian).

I quoted my friend Wang in Shanghai and said, "Foreigners have no face."

"But we have face," Mr. Tian said."It is the Chinese way."

"What if you don't lose face?"

"There is an expression; lianpi hou—a face with thick skin. But that is a bad thing. It means you're insensitive. A shy person loses face."

That was good, or at least desirable, because it was human.

Mr. Tian said, "If someone criticizes you and you don't lose face you're not a good person."

"During the Cultural Revolution a lot of people were criticized. Did they all lose face?"

"The Cultural Revolution was a total mistake," he said.

"What was the worst thing that happened?"

"That people died."

Later, the dining-car attendant came by and sat with us. He said I should wear two pairs of long underwear, not one, and that it should be the thick Chinese kind (I was wearing skier's long johns). He was from Jiamusi. It was a good day in Jiamusi, only minus thirty-four degrees centigrade. Usually it was minus thirty-eight. He laughed and slapped me on the back and went back to work.

Mr. Tian had not said anything. He was thinking. He was nodding.

"That was a good idea," he said. "Build a house in the forest. Have some children. Write something." He sat there in the cold, in his threadbare coat, twisting his wool cap. He was still nodding, his hair spiky, his sleeves in the soy sauce. "That's what I'd like to do."

16: The Boat Train to Dalian: Number 92

It was monotonously cold—always, everywhere—inside and out in Harbin, and so the only way to get warm was to leave the city and the province and head south. Seven hundred miles away in Dalian, a port on the Bohai Gulf, the weather was pleasant, judging by the reports in China Daily. Mr. Tian told me again that warm weather made him feel sick.

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.

I asked him to reflect on capital punishment in China, the 10,000 corpses that had accumulated in the past three years (and they had just added prostitution to the list of capital crimes, so there would be many more).

"Capital punishment in China," he said, and paused, "is swift."

I was overcome by the cold weather, by the sight of people cycling through the snow with frost on their faces, by the bitter air, by temperatures that made me feel bruised.

Mr. Sun got me a ticket out of town, but when we took the car to the station, he twisted his face and said, "That driver is ominous. The last time I was with him he crashed his taxi."

It was seven-thirty on a frosty morning in sooty old Mukden. We had half an hour to get to the station. We immediately confronted a traffic jam (trolleybus with its poles off the wires blocking the road) and were held up for fifteen minutes. Then we started again, and a rumble and thump from the rear wheel slewed the car: a flat tire.

"I told you. This driver is ominous."

"How will I get to the station?"

"You can walk," he said. "But first you must pay the driver."

"Why should I pay him? He didn't get me to the station. I might miss the train!"

"In this case you pay ten yuan, not fifteen. Cheaper! You save money!"

I threw the money at the ominous driver and hurried to the station, slipping on the ice. I caught the train with a minute to spare—another refrigerated train, but at least it was going south.

On this train I met Richard Woo, who worked for Union Carbide, and had been in and around Shenyang for almost two years. I asked him what his qualifications were for this assignment.

"I was in Saskatchewan."

Ah, that explained everything. He also knew all the lingo. "We sell them the design package.... We provide input on the plant." But Union Carbide did not get involved in the construction of the plants. He had views on Chinese workers.

"The work mentality is quite different from that in Europe or America. They are slow, the pay is little. The Chinese are not bad workers, but the system is bad. If they have incentives they perform better."

I was not planning to ask him what Union Carbide was making in Shenyang, because I did not think I would understand it; but I was bored, so I asked.

"Antifreeze," Mr. Woo said.

The train continued through the flat, snowy fields, all of them showing plow marks and furrows and stubble beneath the ice crust. There were factories, and they looked beautiful, blurred and softened and silvered by frost and the vapor from their chimneys.

There might have been berths on this train, but if so, I didn't see them. I was afraid that if I got up someone would snatch my seat—I had seen it happen. I did not want to stand for six hours—it was almost 300 miles more to Dalian. As it was we were jammed in, shoulder to shoulder—the smokers, the noodle eaters, the spitters, the bronchial victims, the orange peelers.

There was no dining car. A woman wearing a nightcap came around with a pushcart, selling dried fish and heavy blobs of sponge cake—the favorite snacks of the Chinese traveler. I chose the fish. It was tough and tasted (and looked) like an old innersoie—a Chinese innersole, and a minority one at that. On the wrapper it was described as "Dried Fish With Minority Flavor."

I was still cold. The cold was mystifying. I hated it like boredom or bad air. It was like aches and pains—perhaps a fear of death informed my feeling and made the cold frightening, because degree zero is death. I found it dehumanizing, and my heart went out to the people who had to live and work in Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning. And yet it is well known that the spirit among the people in these provinces is especially bright—the hinterland of China is famous for having high morale, the people regarding themselves as pioneers.

But the cold affected me. It is a blessing that cold is hard to describe and impossible to remember clearly. I certainly have no memory for low temperatures. And so afterwards I had no memorable sensations of the month-long freeze I had been through—only the visual effects: frosty faces, scarves with frozen spit on them, big bound feet, and mittens, and crimson faces, flecks of ice on that crow-black Chinese hair, the packed snow, the vapor that hung over the larger cities and made even the grimmest city magical, and the glittering frost—the special diamondlike shimmer that you get when it's thirty below.

After a few hundred miles the snow grew thinner and finally with an odd abruptness, at the town of Wangfandian there was none. The landscape had the shabby and depressed look that places have when you are used to seeing them covered with snow. There was something drastic about there being no more snow.

The symmetry and twiggy patterns of bare, brown orchards below the Qian Shan, and the stone cottages not far from Dalian, gave these hills the look of Scotland and its ruined crofts.

A young Chinese woman smiled at me as I stepped onto the platform at Dalian. She was very modern, I could see. Her hair had been waved into a mass of springy curls. She wore sunglasses. Her green coat had a fur collar—rabbit. She said she had been sent to meet me. Her name was Miss Tan.

"But please call me Cherry."

"Okay, Cherry."

"Or Cherty Blossom."

It was hard to include those two words in an ordinary sentence. "What is the fare to Yantai, Cherry Blossom?" But I managed, and she always had a prompt reply, usually something like, "It will cost you one arm and one leg." She had a fondness for picturesque language.

She led me outdoors, and as we stood on the steps of Dalian Station, she said, "So what do you think of Dalian so far?"

"I have only been here seven minutes," I said.

"Time flies when you're having fun!" Cherry Blossom said.

"But since you asked," I went on, "I am very impressed with what I see in Dalian. The people are happy and industrious, the economy is buoyant, the quality of life is superb. I can tell that morale is very high. I am sure it is the fresh air and prosperity. The port is bustling, and I'm sure the markets are filled with merchandise. What I have seen so far only makes me want to see more."

"That is good," Cherry Blossom said.

"And another thing," I said. "Dalian looks like South Boston, in Massachusetts."

It did, too. It was a decaying port, made out of bricks, with wide streets, cobblestones and trolley tracks, and all the paraphernalia of a harbor—the warehouses, dry docks and cranes. I had the impression that if I kept walking I would eventually come to The Shamrock Bar and Grill. It was also Boston weather—cold and partly sunny under blowing clouds—and Boston architecture. Dalian was full of big brick churches that had probably once been called Saint Pat's, Saint Joe's and Saint Ray's—they were now kindergartens and nurseries, and one was the Dalian Municipal Library. But reform had come to Dalian and with it such businesses as The Hot Bread Bakery and the Hong Xing (Red Star) Cut and Perma.

"And also men hurry to Hong Xing to get a perma," Cherry Blossom said. "They go lickety-split."

The streets looked like Boston's streets. Never mind that the main thoroughfare in Dalian was called Stalin Road (Sidalin Lu). It looked like Atlantic Avenue.

At the turn of the century the Russians had schemed to make Dalny (as they called it; it means "far away" in Russian) a great port for the tsar's ships. It was valuable for fighting the Japanese because, unlike Vladivostok, it would not freeze in the winter. After the Russo-Japanese war, when the Japanese flew kites in Dairen—each kite saying The Russians Have Surrendered!—this port city was handed to the Japanese. They simply completed the Russian plan for turning what had been a fishing village into a great port. It prospered until the Second World War, and when the Japanese were defeated, the Russians were given the city under the Yalta terms. The Russians remained until well after he Chinese Liberation, when the Chinese renamed the city Dalian (Great Link). I liked it for its salt air and sea gulls.

"What desires do you entertain in Dalian?" Cherry Blossom said.

I told her that I had come here to get warm after the freeze in Dongbei, the Northeast. And I needed a ticket on the ship that traveled from Dalian across the Bohai Gulf to Yantai. Could she get that for me?

"Keep your fingers crossed," she said.

She vanished after that. I found an old hotel—Japanese prewar baronial; but I was turned away. I was accepted at the dreary new Chinese hotel, a sort of Ramada Inn with a stagnant fish pond in the lobby. I spent the day looking for an antique shop, and the only one I found was disappointing. A man tried to sell me a trophy awarded to the winner of a schoolboys' javelin competition in 1933 at a Japanese high school. "Genuine silver," he whispered. "Qing Dynasty."

The next day I saw Cherry Blossom. She had no news about my ticket.

"You will just have to keep your hopes up!"

We agreed to meet later, and when we did she was smiling.

"Any luck?" I asked.

"No!" She kept smiling. And with this bad news I noticed that she had a plump and slightly pimply face. She was wearing an arsenic-green wool scarf to match the wool cap she herself had knitted in the dormitory (she had four roommates) at the Working Women's Unit.

"I have failed completely!"

Then why was she smiling? God, I hated her silly hat.

"But," she said, wiggling her fingers, "wait!"

She had a sharp way of speaking that made every sentence an exclamation. She reached into her plastic handbag.

"Here is the ticket! It has been a total success!"

Now she wagged her head at me and made her tight curls vibrate like springs.

I said, "Were you trying to fool me, Cherry Blossom?"

"Yes!"

I wanted to hit her.

"Is that a Chinese practical joke?"

"Oh, yes," she said, with a giggle.

But then aren't all practical jokes exercises in sadism?

I went to the free market—open since 1979. Every sort of fish, shellfish and seaweed was on display—a pound of big, plump prawns was five dollars, but that was the most expensive item. They also sold squid, abalone, oysters, conch, sea slugs and great stacks of clams and flatfish. The fishermen did not look Chinese; they had a flat-headed Mongolian appearance and might have been Manchus, of whom there are five or six million in this peninsula and in the north. The market gave me an appetite, and that night I had abalone stir-fried in garlic sauce: delicious.

Cherry Blossom said that foreign cruise ships stopped in Dalian in the summer. The tourists stayed for half a day.

"What can you see in Dalian in half a day?"

She said they all got on a bus and visited the shell-carving factory, the glassware factory, a model children's school (the kids sang songs from The Sound of Music) and then it was back to the ship and on to Yantai or Qingdao.

"I'd like to see Stalin Square," I said.

We went there. In the center of it was a statue to the Russian army, which had occupied the city after the war.

"There are no Stalin Squares in the Soviet Union, Cherry Blossom. Did you know that?"

She said, no, she was surprised to hear it. She asked why.

"Because some people think he made a few mistakes," I said, though I did not mention the pogroms, the secret police, purges, or the mustached brute's ability to plan large-scale famines in order to punish dissenting regions.

"Is there a Mao Zedong Square in Dalian, Cherry Blossom?"

"No," she said, "because he made a few mistakes.^* But don't cry over spilled milk!"

I told her that I had read somewhere that the evil genius Lin Biao—China's Trotsky—had lived in Dalian. She said no, this was not so. She had lived her whole life in Dalian, and no one had ever mentioned Lin's connection.

But the driver was older. He said yes, Lin Biao had lived there in Dalian. Lin Biao, a great military tactician, was now maligned because he had done so much to build up Mao—it was Lin who devised the Little Red Book and chose all the quotations; and in the end (so it was said) he had plotted to assassinate Mao, when Mao was weak and at his heffalump stage; and Lin, in trying to flee the country by plane ("seeking protection from his Moscow masters ... as a defector to the Soviet revisionists in betrayal of the Party and the country"), had crashed in dear old Undur Khan, in the People's Republic of Mongolia. Foul play was never mentioned. It was regarded as natural justice that this heliophobe should meet an untimely death.

It was his heliophobia that made me want to see his house. This weedy little man had a horror of the sun. I thought his house might not have any windows, or perhaps special shutters; or maybe he lived in a bomb shelter in the basement.

Cherry Blossom was saying in Chinese to the driver, "I did not know that Lin Biao lived in Dalian," and then to me in English, "It's too dark to find his house. Let's go to the beach instead."

We headed for the south part of Dalian, to a place called Fu's Village Beach. Because of the cliffs and the winding road, the driver went very slowly.

Cherry Blossom said, "This car is as slow as cold molasses in January."

"You certainly know a lot of colorful expressions, Cherry."

"Yes. I am queer as a fish." And she giggled behind her hand.

"You should be as happy as a clam," I said.

"I like that one so much! I feel like a million dollars when I hear that."

These colloquial high jinks could have been tiresome, but it was such a novelty for a Chinese person to be playful I enjoyed it. And I liked her for not taking herself too seriously. She knew she was mildly excruciating.

Meanwhile we were descending to Fu's Village—great rocky cliffs and an empty beach of yellow sand, with the January wind off the sea beating the waves against it. Offshore there were five bloblike islands floating blackly on the gulf. A couple was canoodling on the beach, out of the wind—the Chinese do it standing up, usually behind a rock or a building, and they hug each other very tightly. It is all smooching. These two ran away when they saw me. A drunken fisherman staggered across the beach, towards his big wooden rowboat that was straight off an ancient scroll: a sharply rockered bottom, very clumsy, the shape of a wooden shoe, probably very seaworthy.

I asked Cherry Blossom whether she took her tourists here. She said there wasn't time.

"Some of the people have funny faces," she said.

"What is the funniest face you have ever seen, Cherry?'

She shrieked "Yours!" and clapped her hands over her eyes and laughed.

"Another of your saucy jokes, Cherry Blossom!"

She became rather grave and said, "But truly, the Tibetans have the funniest faces. They are so funny I get frightened."

"What about American faces?"

"Americans are wonderful."

We had tea at a vast, empty restaurant. We were the only customers. It was at the top of one of Fu's cliffs, with a panoramic view.

"Do you want to see the Dragon Cave?"

I said yes and was taken upstairs to see a restaurant decorated to resemble a cave. It had fiberglass walls, bulging brown plastic rocks, lights shining through plastic stalactites, and each table was fixed in a greeny-black cleft, with fake moss and boulders around it. The idea was perhaps not a bad one, but this was a vivid example of the Chinese not knowing when to stop. It was shapeless, artless, grotesquely beyond kitsch; it was a complicated disfigurement, wrinkled and stinking, like a huge plastic toy that had begun to melt and smell. You sat on those wrinkled rocks and bumped your head on the stalactites and ate fish cheeks with fresh ginger.

Cherry Blossom said, "Do you think it's romantic?"

"Some people might find it romantic," I said. And I pointed out the window. "That's what I find romantic."

The tangerine sun had settled into the Gulf of Bohai, coloring the little islands and the cliffs of Dalian and the long stretch of empty beach.

Cherry Blossom said, "Let your imagination fly!"

We left the Dragon Cave (and I thought: It must have a counterpart in California). I said, "I understand there are recuperation tours. People come to this province to try out Chinese medicine."

"Yes. It is like a fat farm."

"Where did you learn that, Cherry Blossom?"

"My teachers at the institute were Americans. They taught me so many things!"

She had loved her years at the Dalian Foreign Languages Institute. She was now only twenty-two, but she intended to go on studying and working. She had no intention of getting married, and in explaining why, she lost her jokey manner and became distressed.

Her decision not to marry was the result of a trip to Peking. She had taken a group of visiting doctors to see a Chinese hospital—how it worked, how the patients were treated, the progress of surgical procedures, and so forth. The doctors expressed an interest in seeing a delivery. Cherry Blossom witnessed this and, so she said, almost went into shock at the sight of the baby, with its squashed head and its bloody face, issuing forth and streaming water. The mother had howled and so had the baby.

In all respects it was a completely normal birth.

"It was a mess," she said, and touched her plump cheeks in disgust. "I was afraid. I hated it. I would never do it—never. I will never get married."

I said, "You don't have to have babies just because you get married."

She was shaking her head. The thought was absurd—she couldn't take it in. The whole point of marriage these days was to produce one child. Even though the Party was now stressing that the best marriages were work related, the husband and wife joint members of a work unit, a busy little team, Cherry Blossom could not overcome the horror of what she had seen in the delivery room of Capital Hospital in Peking. She said she intended to remain in the dormitory of the Working Women's Unit and go on knitting.

It was late at night when we crossed Dalian to get to the harbor, where I intended to take the ship to Yantai. We passed through the old bourgeois suburbs that had been built by the Japanese and the Russians. On the sloping streets of these neighborhoods there were seedy semidetached villas and stucco bungalows under the bare trees. I had not seen anything quite like them in China. They were appropriate to the suburban streets, the picket fences and the brick walls; and then I saw the laundry in the front yards and the Chinese at the windows.

I often passed down streets like this, seeing big gloomy villas with gables and jutting eaves and mullioned windows; but always in nightmares. They were the sort of houses that first looked familiar in the dream, and then I saw evil faces at the windows, and I realized that I was no longer safe. How often in nightmares I had been chased down streets like these.

"I am sorry to see you go," Cherry Blossom said, when we arrived at the boat.

She was the only person in China who ever said that to me. In her old-fashioned way, with her old-fashioned clichés, she was very nice. I wished her well, and we shook hands. I wanted to tell her that I was grateful to her for looking after me. I started to say it, but she cut me off.

"Keep the wind at your back, Paul," she said, and giggled again, delighted with her own audacity.

17: On the Lake of Heaven to Yantai

This ship, the Tian Hu (Lake of Heaven), made a nightly journey across the Bohai Gulf to Yantai, on the coast of Shandong Province. It carried over a thousand passengers, mostly in steerage, and some in six-berth cabins. Seen from this ship Dalian was merely black hills and a black harbor, and Yantai was under the moon somewhere, a hundred-odd nautical miles away.

The Tian Hu was full of spitters—something to do with the sea air, perhaps, and the wish to have a good hawk. I had resolved that I was going to ignore them, but it was on this ship that I realized what had been bothering me about Chinese spitting. It was, simply, that they were not very good at it.

They spat all the time. They cleared their throats so loudly they could drown conversation—they could sound like a Roto-Rooter or someone clearing a storm drain, or the last gallon of water leaving a Jacuzzi. With their cheeks alone they made the suctioning: hhggaarrkh! And then they grinned and positioned their teeth, and they leaned. You expected them to propel it about five yards, like a Laramie stockman spitting over a fence. But no, they never gave it any force. They seldom spat more than a few inches from where they stood. They did not spit out, they spat down: that was the essential cultural difference that it took me almost a year in China to determine. It was not one clean shot with a ping into the spittoon, but a series of dribbles that often ran down the ouside of the revolting thing. They bent low when they spat, there was a certain bending of the knees and crooking of the back that was a preliminary to Chinese spitting. It was not aggressive propulsion. It was almost noiseless. They just dropped it and moved on. Well, it was a crowded country—you couldn't just turn aside and hock a louie without hitting someone. But after the snarkings, the mucus streaking through their passages with a smack, Chinese spitting was always something of an aimless anticlimax. ^*

I had just about settled into my bunk for the voyage, and had begun to dream, when a bell clanged and a foghorn sounded. We had arrived in Yantai. It was four-thirty in the morning. The pier was shrouded in freezing fog, there was ice on the gantries, and I could hear the sea lapping the docking posts, but I could not make anything out—fog and ocean were mingled. The lack of visibility did not deter or slow the passengers. All one thousand of them plunged into the sea fog and shuffled across the quay to—where? There were no buses or taxis at this hour of the morning, and few of these people lived in this small town. They had to wait for morning, when the big broken-down buses would come and take them away.

It is a melancholy fact that Chinese transportation is almost always full—seldom a spare seat, never a spare coach. Every train, every bus, every ship—no matter what the day, the time, the season. It was interesting to me that on a weekday night in a month when people normally did not travel, the Tian Hu was full. The train to Dalian had been full, and so had the train to Shenyang. It was never possible to be sure of a seat, and in these conditions even if you got the seat you were crammed in. Transportation in China is always crowded; it is nearly always uncomfortable; it is often a struggle. The pleasures are rare, but they are intense and memorable. Travel in China, I suspected, would give me a lasting desire for solitude.

I had been traveling steadily south for a number of days, and so I took a day off in Yantai. It was unseasonably cold, with a sleety wind blowing off the sea and icy snow spread thinly on the town. It was a bleak and battered place, of low rubble-strewn hills and bouldery beaches. It was full of abandoned brick huts on which Maoist slogans had been defaced. After a day of sitting listening to the wind and drinking tea and writing, and mooching in the town, I had dinner (scallops in egg white with rancid spinach: vegetables in winter could be dire). And I conceived a plan.

For months I had wanted to see a commune. I had wondered what had happened to the commune outside Canton that I had seen in 1980. This province of Shandong was famous for its agricultural communes—or at least it had been. And the Chinese had always boasted about them before; so, now that the communes had been reformed, what did they look like?

Mr. Hu, my guide in Yantai, tried to dissuade me from seeing a commune. He said wouldn't I be happier seeing the padlock factory, the embroidery and needlepoint factory, or the place where they made grandfather clocks. I wanted to say, And you make steam engines and hat racks and quill pens and doilies and chamber pots. Who does your market research?

"A commune is what I would really like to see," I said.

"They were canceled in 1979. There are none. So you see it is impossible."

"Then what about a village or a cooperative that used to be a commune? I'm sure they didn't just burn them down, Mr. Hu."

"I will find one for you."

He kept his word, and the next day we drove to what had once been the Xi Guan (Western Pass) Commune. It was now called the Bright Pearl Cooperative. Its new name had come from a newspaper article that had been written praising it as "The Pearl of Shandong." It had 500 households—about 1500 people. It looked like a small township and was about twenty miles outside Yantai; it seemed an unprepossessing place. But as soon as I arrived, Party Secretary Ma Weihong told me that it was now an extremely wealthy cooperative. In 1971 the per capita income had been 100 yuan a year; this figure was now, in 1986, 9000 yuan. People had more money than they needed, and so each person was given a thousand a year and the rest was invested in the village.

How had they managed this phenomenal increase in their fortunes? Mr. Ma gave me a long explanation, but in effect he was saying that everything changed after the government got off the people's backs.

"During the Cultural Revolution this cooperative was a commune with a one-crop economy—wheat. That's all. We were capable of doing more, but we couldn't because the Parry would not permit it. After 1979 we began to diversify—new crops, a nursery, various industries, transport, commerce and a hotel. These projects were all profitable."

"You have more money, but do you have more purchasing power?" I explained the term to him.

Mr. Ma said, "It's true that prices are higher. But we have more than compensated for the rise."

"Couldn't you have achieved that high income with one crop if you had worked hard?"

"We worked hard," he said. "But the policy of one crop was incorrect."

"At the time, did you know that you were working to carry out an incorrect policy?"

"Yes, but it was the Cultural Revolution. We could not do anything about it," Mr. Ma said. "But now we have changed all that. We have more relationships with the free market. We are rich now."

It was so strange to hear a Chinese person utter this dangerous word.

I said, "Is it good to be rich?"

"Yes. Very good." He hadn't blinked. He was sitting with his arms folded. His expression said, Next question.

"But isn't that a capitalistic attitude?"

"No. You and I are on different roads, but we are going to the same place."

"Which place?"

"To more richness and wealth," Mr. Ma said, uttering more heresies. "Listen, we used to have a slogan, 'We should be rich together or we should be poor together.'"

"Do you still believe that?"

"Not exactly. I think if you can be rich your own way you should do it."

"Then you'll be bourgeois."

"There is absolutely no danger of that."

He spoke with such conviction that I could not think of any more questions. He was an older man. He had been in this place twenty years ago when it had been a poor commune. Who could blame him for gloating a little about the success of the place today? And I liked him for never saying /. He nearly always replied saying we; but it was a socialist we, not a royal we.

"What would you do if things continued to improve and you ended up with an enormous amount of money?"

"We would donate it to a poor village, or we would give it to the government in taxes."

I had met him in the big, drafty meeting room, and he had offered me some apples to eat that had been grown on the cooperative—one of the newer projects. They were firm and juicy. Mr. Ma said they were sent all over China. We walked ouside—Mr. Hu bringing up the rear—and he showed me the other money-making projects. This commune grew and sold mushrooms. It seemed a modest business, but I later learned that mushroom sales to the United States are phenomenal: most Pizza Hut mushrooms are from China.

I said, "During the Cultural Revolution, were intellectuals sent to work here on this commune?"

He shook his head. "No. Even this place was considered too good for them. Most intellectuals were sent into the countryside—to farms and into the mountains. They went to the most backward provinces, like Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu. And Mongolia. Lots of intellectuals ended up in Mongolia. They had to suffer. That's what we said."

"Do you think the suffering did them any good?"

Mr. Ma said, "The policy was incorrect."

And yet it was so natural. I thought of all the upstarts, know-it-alls, teachers, critics and book reviewers that I would love to have seen herded onto a train to Mongolia to shovel pig shit and live in barns. But of course I would be among them. In China, an intellectual is usually just someone who does not do manual labor. And there we would all be, digging holes, as a punishment for being so boring. It was an awful fate, but it was easy to imagine how the policy had come about. Everyone in his life has wished at one time or another for someone he disliked to be trundled off to shovel shit—especially an uppity person who had never gotten his hands dirty. Mao carried this satisfying little fantasy to its nasty limit.

Mr. Ma showed me his hotel. Two years ago this building was put up on the theory that it couldn't fail because there were only two hotels in Yantai. The Bright Pearl Cooperative Hotel had forty rooms, it was painted green and yellow, and by Chinese standards it was a bargain. It was drafty but clean. It was not expensive. I said I would not mind moving in, but Mr. Ma said that they could not take foreigners yet.

There was a slimy pool in the lobby, and over the waterfall (which worked in spurts) a mural of the Great Wall and a stuffed tortoise. These were standard items of interior decoration in the newer Chinese hotels. The only variables were the size of the pool, the dimensions of the tortoise, the depth of the algae, and was the Great Wall painted or embroidered? This one was painted, and a wall fixture—a light socket—had been included in the mural.

"Hu Yaobang visited us last year," Mr. Ma said, referring to the high-spirited party secretary who had been regarded as Deng Xiaoping's successor. "He held a briefing in here."

We entered the conference room. There was no commemorative photo of Hu Yaobang, but there were other knickknacks: an ivory sculpture of a small dragon, a statue of a Chinese poet, sixteen tiny Buddhas, lots of ashtrays, a palm tree, and a stuffed penguin in a glass case, with a plaque saying, Presented by the Chinese Antarctic Expedition.

"Does everyone in the cooperative get an equal amount of money?" I asked.

"No. Our income is determined by the number of people in our household, and our productivity."

"How do you keep track of productivity?"

"It would take too long to explain."

We went to the mayor's house. He was a sort of figurehead, appointed by the committee. He was not at home, but I was allowed to wander around his house. Two things interested me in his house. He had a number of books—novels, stories, poems—all sorts; not political tracts. And he had old-style Chinese furniture—black wooden chairs and rosewood tables, a carved settee and several elegant cabinets. They were antiques, but they were being used as ordinary household furniture.

Mr. Ma said that the cooperative was especially proud of their hospital. They had built it themselves. This was the only cooperative in China that had raised the money and then built and staffed its own hospital. It had cost 400,000 yuan—less than $100,000—and it was not just an acupuncture parlor. It had modern equipment and qualified doctors. It had electrocardiographs, an X-ray unit, an operating theater and a family-planning consulting room (the abortion clinic: probably the busiest department in any Chinese hospital). There was an acupuncturist on the staff, and also a full-time herbalist (who ran the department, dispensing from his stock of 300 herbs). It was a clean hospital. It did not smell. Its charges were low. In fact it had been built because the people at the cooperative hated going into Yantai to the county hospital and paying what they regarded as excessive amounts. It had cost 20 yuan to have a baby at the county hospital, it cost half that here—less than $3.

"Our motto is Serve the people," Mr. Ma said.

It was a Maoist phrase, but he made it sound as friendly and eager as a supermarket slogan.

Yantai was a sorrowful-looking town, like a gray windswept place on the coast of Ulster. It had had a large foreign community, so it was more than the wind and weather—it was the architecture, the oversized detached houses, the rather forbidding hospital, the villas made of granite blocks and red bricks, and the low stone cottages. These were all from the turn of the century, but they had lasted well. The dwellings built for a single family were hives—a family in each of the twelve rooms. The black and stony seashore was Irish, and so was the tangle of tide wrack, the overturned rowboats, the coils of nets and the people carrying baskets of mussels. The only un-Irish feature was a pictorial sign showing a Chinese couple and saying Late Marriage and Late Childbirth Are Worthy. To make the point, the woman (a new mother) was shown with swatches of gray hair. Since the Chinese don't normally get gray hair until they are in their sixties, this was a remarkable birth.

I liked the people of Yantai for complaining about the weather. It had turned from wet and windy to stormy—it was pelting freezing snow that hardened the mud in the streets, and plastered the sides of buildings with ice. There was none of the bewildering indifference to cold that characterized the people in Shenyang and Harbin. Here people bitched and groaned and squinted at the sleet and said, "What's this supposed to be?" They kicked it in the streets and developed an angry way of walking, a sort of exasperated shuffle, so that they wouldn't fall down. They hardly stopped commenting on it, and they apologized for it to me. All these reactions made me feel warm.

But the truth was that a little snow improved Yantai. It was not a pretty place. It looked stricken, random, exploited, Irish. The snow gave gentle contours to the big dry hills. The hills of Shandong lost their topsoil years ago. Nothing grows on them. They are heaps of mud and loose stones, like rubble piles and slag heaps. It is not an ugly landscape but an exhausted one.

To the manufacture of quill pens and chamber pots and grandfather clocks, Yantai had added the making of tapestries. The Chinese made eighteenth-century products in nineteenth-century factories, and so it was not odd that they should reach even further back in time and revive a medieval art form. It is obvious to anyone who travels even a little in China that the Chinese can be painstaking in their production of kitsch. The Yantai Woollen Needlepoint Tapestry Factory was an extreme example of this effort, which had its counterpart in the hobbyist who makes a model of the Spanish Armada with glue and toothpicks, or (as I saw once in New Hampshire) the front of a large building faced with old bottle caps.

I asked the manager whether they would do me a copy of the Bayeux Tapestry, and even after I had described it he unhesitatingly said yes. There were women picking out copies of the Mona Lisa, Vermeer's lute player and at least one Rembrandt. They were also doing generic birds and flowers, and the creature that is the unmistakable emblem of Chinese kitsch, the fluffy white kitten playing with a ball of yarn or worrying a goldfish. It is nearly impossible to travel in China at all without seeing this white kitten, and if you are especially valued as a foreign friend or compatriot you will be given one, under glass in needlepoint, as a present. Orville Schell, in one of his later and less enthusiastic books about the Chinese, mentions this white kitten and implies that its tastelessness signals the decline of Chinese culture. But surely it is merely a bit of harmless fun and misplaced artistry; nothing looks more like kitsch to the Chinese than our crazed production of chinoiserie—little fake pagodas and portraits of yellow-faced mandarins with silly pigtails. I did not mind the cat (made in huge quantities by the Yantai needlepointers) but I was unspeakably grateful no one gave me one.

These days the call was for needlepointing snapshots of favorite aunts and uncles, or fat children. At their needlepoint frames the women at the tapestry factory were doing large portraits of Roger and Betty Landrum in front of their piano in a suburb of Sydney, Australia; Mr. and Mrs. Chew Lim Hock, wincing at a bowl of flowers; two spoiled-looking Japanese kids on a seesaw, and the mayor of Timaru, New Zealand, Yantai's sister city. The likenesses and colors are surprisingly exact, and for about $400 they will do a needlepoint copy of that picture you took last summer of Uncle Dick waving from the porch. But why anyone wants to pay that money for a small and slightly blurry snapshot made into a gigantic tapestry wall hanging I cannot imagine.

In the end I was less interested in the fishing and manufacturing side of Yantai than I was in the recent history of Mr. Hu. After a few days he disclosed to me that he had been married for just two weeks. That information was like catnip to me; I asked him ceaseless questions. But he did not mind. He was a jaunty, thin man, with two distinct sides to his head. He was also very pleased with himself and happily talkative; with an air of a man of the world. He was proud of the fact that he had traveled out of Yantai—he had been as far as Qingdao and Qufu (the birthplace of Confucius). And, in his telling, his wedding had been quite an event.

Two years before, in one of the pebbly and decrepit Yantai parks, he had met a girl who was out walking with her friends. Mr. Hu was captivated by her. Her name was Mu. After a year of taking her for walks and buying her noodles and watching TV with her at her parents' apartment, Mr. Hu decided to get to the point.

He said, "What do you say, Mu—shall we register?"

Mu was excited. She could hardly speak. Shall we register? was an unambiguous proposal of marriage. Registering leads in only one direction. Article 7 of The Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China (1986) specifies, "Both the man and the woman desiring to contract a marriage shall register in person with the marriage registration office."

Mr. Hu was twenty-six, and Mu was twenty-five. Article 5 states: "No marriage shall be contracted before the man has reached 22 years of age and the woman 20 years of age."

When the couple's ages, status, jobs and addresses were verified, a marriage certificate was issued. Other clauses in the marriage law explain that cousins cannot marry, nor can lepers. Mr. Hu had expected that his work unit would give him a place to live—a room in Yantai. He put in several requests, but was bypassed.

Mu told him to forget it. If they waited for a place to live they might never get married. She urged him to consider going through with the marriage. Could they live with his parents?

Mr. Hu said okay—let's do it. But there was another problem. January was deemed an unlucky month, according to an old tradition, for the way it falls just before Spring Festival. Both sets of parents implored the couple not to get married in an inauspicious month.

I said, "Did you agree that the month is unlucky?"

"Not really," Mr. Hu said, but he seemed uncertain. "But for their sakes, we changed the date."

"Are you superstitious?"

His face became very thin with the chattering laugh that meant You have just asked me a tactless question, but I will nevertheless answer it. He said, "I don't think so."

"Do you believe in God?" I asked.

"Sometimes," he said. He did not laugh.

By pretending to satisfy the old folks he could calm himself. He chose to get married just after Christmas. Chinese who study English rend to make a thing of Christmas—the eating, drinking, card-sending and gift-giving part: all its heathen elements.

Mr. Hu bought basins of food and cartons of wine and beer. His school friend Hua did the cooking. On the big day he rented a taxi—something he had never before done on his own—and he was driven to Mu's house. He wore a Western suit and necktie. He picked up Mu and proceeded to his parents' house, and on his arrival there strings of firecrackers were unleashed. That was eleven in the morning. The guests arrived at noon, and everyone ate and drank until ten that night.

At that point Mr. Hu and Mu went upstairs. They did not go to work for two days, nor did they stir out of the house. Their romantic tryst was sporadic, and this was not exactly a love nest, because seven people lived in the three-room apartment, and the TV set was in the room occupied by Mr. Hu and Mu. Occasionally members of the household wanted to watch their favorite programs.