Riding the Iron Rooster

Article 9 of the Marriage Law states, "Husband and wife enjoy equal status in the home." This was a bit tricky in the house owned by Mr. Hu's parents, because his mother did all the cooking—Mu could not cook—and "home" was really just a euphemism for the TV room with its convertible bed.

A unique feature of the Chinese Marriage Law is its unambiguous treatment of birth control. That is Article 12: "Husband and wife are in duty bound to practice family planning."

I did not ask Mr. Hu how they managed this aspect, though I was deeply curious. I simply asked him how he was enjoying marriage.

"So far, very nice," he said.

He said it did not bother him that his wife kept her own name. The law allowed children in China to adopt the name of either parent. The law insists that parents be kind and that they act responsibly. This is spelled out in specific detail: "Infanticide by drowning and any other acts causing serious harm to infants are prohibited."

If Mr. Hu's marriage did not work out, and Mu was of the same mind, a divorce could be very speedy. There were restrictions, of which the most interesting was Article 27: "The husband is not allowed to apply for a divorce when his wife is pregnant or within one year after the birth of a child." However, Mu could apply and could be granted a divorce, even though she happened to be pregnant. That seemed an enlightened and considerate way of looking at divorce. In general, the Marriage Law was as straightforward as a driver's manual.

The snow did not let up. The sleet accumulated in Yantai. It was a grim place, with the wind blowing from Siberia.

One snowy day a large group of pilgrims appeared in the hotel, wearing the smile that one instantly associates with people in possession of the Christian message. These were Americans, from Texas. They had come in search of a missionary who had been in this part of Shandong a hundred years ago. Her name was Lottie Moon. The group had discovered the ruins of Miss Moon's house about forty miles away at the coastal hamlet of Penglai. I was told that they regarded this woman as a saint and that they had volunteered to reconstruct the house and the church using their own money, and the Chinese government was on the point of agreeing to this. In Mao's China that would have been unthinkable.

Only six years before, I had copied down an inscription under the photograph of a Catholic church in Nanjing. Its tone was very fierce. It read in part, American imperialism took preaching as its cover. All over China they erected churches like this and carried out destructive activities.... The American missionaries joined up with the Qing Dynasty troops and attacked the Small Sword Society troops, and the church acted as a stronghold.

I asked Mr. Hu what he thought of this difference in official attitudes.

"If people know about Lottie Moon and other missionaries in Yantai, they will visit here and enjoy themselves."

By "people" he meant foreign tourists. His attitude was characteristic of the Chinese in general: if it brought in tourists and was not immoral, it was to be encouraged, whether it was missionaries, rebuilt churches, or city tours of the bourgeois suburbs of old Shandong. But there were obvious dangers in tourism. After the complete eradication of venereal disease (the fifty-year personal struggle of an idealistic doctor from Buffalo, New York, George Hatem, who became Chinese, transmogrifying himself into Ma Haiteh), the VD clinics were reopened in 1987, to cope with new outbreaks of the disease. But antibiotics were not to be the only remedy. The Chinese also recently decreed that the punishment for engaging in prostitution would be a bullet in the neck.

18: The Slow Train to Qingdao: Number 508

On these one-day railway trips, the Chinese could practically overwhelm a train with their garbage. Nearly everyone on board was befouling the available space. While I sat and read I noticed that the people opposite, after only a few hours, had amassed on their table (I scribbled the details on my flyleaf): duck bones, fish bones, peanut shells, cookie wrappers, sunflower-seed husks, three teacups, two tumblers, a thermos, a wine bottle, two food tins, spittings, leavings, orange rinds, prawn shells and two used diapers.

The Chinese could be very tidy, but there was also something sluttishly comfortable about an accumulation of garbage, as though it were a symbol of prosperity. The coaches were smoky, and so crowded it was an effort to make my way down the aisle. The train was full of shrieks and stinks. The loudspeaker played a Chinese version of "Flower of Malaya" ("Rose, Rose, I love you, with an aching heart..."). Some big card games were in progress. Passengers read The Yantai Workers' Daily, and romantic novels (People's Liberation Army soldier and his gal back home in Wuhan), and a Chinese magazine I had not seen before, called World Screen, with a portrait of Roger Moore (as James Bond) on the cover.

It was not an old railway line. At a time when steam trains were being phased out in the United States, and rail lines closed, this line from Yantai to Qingdao was being built. It was 1950, and a few years later a brand-new old-fashioned steam engine went gasping down the track with red flags flying from its boiler. It should have happened sooner, but it was not in the interests of the Germans or the Japanese (who had occupied this province) to build the line. In any case, the vision and altruism that are espoused by colonialists are not readily apparent in China. Unlike in Africa and India, the imperialists in China set themselves up in competition against the Chinese, which was another reason Mao execrated them. They were not all racketeers, but they all thrived on China's disunity.

This train still had a fifties feel—a little grim. Most of the passengers had boarded at Yantai and begun eating. They ate noodles, buckets of rice, seaweed, and nuts, fruit and everything else. They did not stop until we arrived at Qingdao in the evening. Unusually for a Chinese train, there were plenty of drinkers—and drunks, spitting, wheezing, puffy faced.

Only a half a dozen of the passengers used the dining car for lunch. They were picking at Chinese spinach and another sinister-looking vegetable.

"What will you have?" the supervisor asked.

"How about some of that?" I said, pointing to the other people's dishes.

"You don't want that stuff," he said. "We have many dishes. Different prices. Do you want the two, the four, the five, the eight or the ten?"

"Which is the best one?"

"The ten," he said. "You won't be sorry."

He meant the 10 yuan lunch. It was a worker's week's pay. The dishes kept coming, the food was good, and there was so much food I made a tally of it. It was the largest meal I had on any Chinese train and might have been the best one. How odd that it should be served on this slow train in this out-of-the-way place. There was first a cold dish, sliced meat and white seaweed; and then shredded pork with carrot and bamboo slivers; shrimp and Chinese cabbage; diced chicken and celery; reconstituted dried fish; deep-fried eggs; Chinese spinach; egg-drop tomato soup, and a big basin of rice. I ate some of it and I marveled at the remainder of the $2.70 meal.

My ticket had cost me less than $2. This was all a bargain. But there were other prices to pay. It took seven hours to go the 150 miles, so our average speed was about 20 miles an hour. We stopped every five minutes, literally that. Steam trains have a sort of jerky clanking way of stopping and starting—an indecisive motion—and all day, to this slow conga, clouds of smoke from the stack tumbled past the windows, as we crossed the flatness of Shandong in a reddening winter sun. We traveled through all the daylight hours, slowly, like a branch-line train moving through a backward shire in rural England, the train full of bumpkins, everyone talking and eating and enjoying themselves, and we stopped everywhere.

We had crossed the peninsula—it had the shape of a turtle's head, and Qingdao lay on the south coast, the bottom of the beak. They said it was the coldest night of the year. There were frost crystals glittering in the air under the glaring lights. And in the swirling steam of the engine, the German station and its tower and its stopped clock produced that nightmare feeling I got in China when I was among European buildings in dramatic weather. After all, a nightmare is the world turned upside down, and thousands of Chinese mobbing a German railway station on a frosty night is a good example of that. It was a tangle of the familiar and the absurd to produce fear. And all around it was very dark.

At the edge of the darkness, braving the cold, young men and women with flags and loud-hailers and megaphones called out, "Come to our hotel—!" "You are welcome at our guest house!" "We have good food and hot water!" They tried to outshout each other, in the spirit of competition and free enterprise, as they touted for business among the arriving passengers.

The irrational dreamlike quality of Qingdao did not vanish when the sun came out the next day. It looked almost as odd in the daylight as at night, though less menacing. I don't feel at home in non-European cities that have been heavily influenced by European buildings. When homesick imperialists put up granite mansions and Baptist churches and Catholic cathedrals with spires, and semidetached houses with prim front gardens, I find it all a bit scary. It is out of place, it disorients me; anyway, what are all these Chinese doing here? I think. Or what is that stately Lutheran church doing near those noodle stalls? I am fascinated by such architectural capriccios (the gothic spires among the pagodas, the Chinese faces at the windows of the English-style bungalows), but it is no more relaxing than the bad dream it strongly seems to mimic.

It is intensely reassuring to imperialists to build versions of their fat and monumental buildings, whether they fit the place or not. The Germans used a feeble pretext in the 1890s to threaten the Chinese and finally to force them to hand over various valuable concessions. In 1898 the Germans stuck a German town onto a small fishing village. One of the strangest buildings in China is in Qingdao, the former residence of the German governor, modeled on the Kaiser's palace. I went inside and looked around until the caretakers chased me away. It is palatial; it has ramparts, granite and stucco balconies, Tudor-style beams, glazed tiles, circular staircases, porticoes and galleries (on the inside, under the high vaulted ceiling) and a conservatory. It was built in 1906. It is in perfect condition. It looks as though it will last forever. Chairman Mao stayed in it when he visited Qingdao in 1958. For that reason, the Red Guards, who had a field day smashing up the evidence of diabolical foreign influences in Qingdao, left the governor's palace alone. It remains unoccupied. It serves no useful purpose.

The Chinese in 1898 were browbeaten into granting the Germans a ninety-nine-year lease, but less than twenty years later—just after the outbreak of the First World War, in 1914—the Japanese occupied Qingdao. It is amazing that the Germans managed to accomplish so much in such a short time. Virtually all their buildings still stand, the railway still runs to Jinan, and the brewery produces the best beer in China—and sticks to the old spelling, Tsingtao beer.

The Chinese guidebook to Qingdao begins, "Qingdao is a relatively young city with only eighty years of history. It used to be a small village. Since 1949, rapid developments have been made." So much for the imperial designs, the foreign occupation and two world wars. Even the U.S. Marines and the American Seventh Fleet had a spell in Qingdao. None of these humiliations is forgotten; they are simply not mentioned. The city is actually overrun with Japanese businessmen. I met Germans in my hotel (I asked them what they thought of the German buildings; they said, "Too old, too hard to heat"), and the Seventh Fleet was invited back in 1986, forty years after it had backed the wrong side (it had helped Chiang Kai-shek), and was given a warm welcome.

The Chinese history of Qingdao was available, but the German history was obscure. I asked Mr. Ling, a university student, what he knew about it—how big was the German settlement, what was the population, how did they put up all these large buildings and suburbs?

"There are no figures," said Mr. Ling.

"There must be," I said.

"Yes. But the authorities do not release these figures. It might seem too humiliating if we knew how few Germans there were occupying the town. It is bad history—that's what we think."

"Do you really think it is bad history?"

"No," he said. "I am interested in knowing the truth, but we have no books."

That was a Chinese phenomenon. There was the distant past, the glorious anecdotal history; and there was the recent past, mostly Mao. In between, a thousand years of Chinese history, everything was obscure. Perhaps it was politically questionable, or humiliating, or contradictory, or, like the years that had been expunged from the Mao Museum in Shaoshan, a hideous embarrassment.

In its way, Qingdao was as weird in its monuments and structures as the lost city of Gaocheng, in the boondocks of Xinjiang. Instead of a mud monastery or a crumbling mosque in the desert, Qingdao's counterparts were churches. The largest of them was the Catholic cathedral, built in a sort of twilight period in the early 1930s, when the city was under the control of the Nanking government and abounded with missionaries.

It was a big bare church, made of gray stucco, with two spires. It had been completely renovated—freshly painted, regilded statues and crosses, the Stations of the Cross newly touched up, the ornamented nave picked out in gold—everything bright and pious looking, with baskets of fresh flowers on the altar. There was room for 600 people here and it was said to be full on Sunday, but there were only 3 people praying on the day I went. It was midafternoon on a weekday; the kneeling people whispering their prayers were elderly. Over the high altar was a scroll painted on the wall: Venite Adoremus Domine. The Mass in Qingdao is said in Latin.

"I remember when they tore the crosses off the steeples of this church, during the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Bai said. He was a young man who had recently graduated from Shandong University. He had been only nine years old in 1967, but he had a very clear memory of the Cultural Revolution, which had been fierce in Qingdao: this city was full of poisonous foreign influences, and such malignant and feudalistic harbingers of the right-deviationist wind (so to speak) had to be smashed by the vanguard of Mao Zedong's shining thought. It was well known that the Red Guards had kicked the shit out of foreign-looking Qingdao.

But the steeples on the cathedral were very high.

"How did they get up there?" I could not understand how they had scaled these steeples. And the crosses towered eight feet above them, so that was another problem.

Mr. Bai said, "The Red Guards held a meeting, and then they passed a motion to destroy the crosses. They marched to the church and climbed up to the roof. They pulled up bamboos and tied them into a scaffold. It took a few days—naturally they worked at night, and they sang the Mao songs. When the crowd gathered they put up ladders and they climbed up and threw a rope around the Christian crosses, and they pulled them down. It was very exciting!"

After that, they did the same thing to the other three churches, a sort of Venetian-looking one and a vast, solid Lutheran one with a witch's hat for a steeple. They stacked the crosses at the Red Guard headquarters, but pious people stole them and took them away, burying them in the hills east of the city. These crosses were only disinterred a few years ago, when the reforms came into force. But the change is dramatic. For example, I bought a locally made crucifix—they were mass-producing them now in Qingdao—for seventy-five cents.

Mr. Bai said he had vivid memories of the Cultural Revolution because he had not had to go to school. He chased after the Red Guards, watching them destroy houses and persecute people; he had found it all thrilling, and he had always been part of the crowd when some spectacular piece of vandalism was unleashed.

He had even watched persecutions nearer home.

"There was a man in our compound whom we called 'The Capitalist.' He lived on the far side of the courtyard. We had a label or a name for everyone there. One we called 'The Carpenter,' and another 'The Scholar.' We paid rent to The Capitalist'—he owned the houses."

I said, "If you were only nine years old, how did you know what was going on?"

"There was nothing else for me to do except watch. And it was like a fever. All day, for years, I watched and listened." He smiled, remembering. "One day in 1967, the Red Guards held a meeting—"

I saw Mr. Bai, a little raggedy-assed urchin, peering through the window at the screaming youths with their red armbands.

"They decided to criticize The Capitalist. There were about eight or nine of us following them—we were just little kids. We made a paper dunce cap for The Capitalist. His name was Zhang. We went into his house—pushed the door open without knocking. He was in bed. He was very sick—he had stomach cancer. We shouted at him and denounced him. We made him confess to his crimes. We forced him to lower his head so that we could put on the dunce cap—lowering the head was a sort of submission to the will of the people, you see."

"Did you parade him through the streets?"

"He had cancer. He could not walk. We mocked him in his bed. Then the neighbors came in. They also accused him—but not of being a capitalist. I remember one woman shouted, 'You borrowed cooking pots and materials and never gave them back!' She was very angry about something he had done many years ago. Others said, 'You tried to squeeze people' and 'You took money.'"

"What did the man say?"

"Nothing. He was afraid. And we found a great thing. On one of his old chairs there was a tiny emblem of the Guomindang. That proved he was a capitalist and a spy. Everyone was glad about that. We screamed at him, 'Enemy! Enemy!' He died soon after."

This had almost taken my breath away. I said, "That's a really terrible story."

"Sure," Mr. Bai said, but without much force. "It is terrible."

But it was by the book. Mao said, "To right a wrong it is necessary to exceed proper limits, and the wrong cannot be righted without the proper limits being exceeded."

That was turning a compassionate Chinese proverb on its head, one about the evil of going beyond proper limits to right a wrong. But Mao said that it was necessary to parade landlords down the street in dunce caps, and to sleep in their beds, and take their grain, and humiliate them, "to establish the absolute authority of the peasants."

This little treatise "On Going Too Far" was written in 1927. It was part of the script for the Cultural Revolution. The Old Man was greatly in favor of going too far ("going too far" has "a revolutionary significance"). "To put it bluntly," he went on, "it was necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror..."

But this German imperial outpost on the Chinese shore, which had been besieged at various times, and occupied by successive waves of Japanese, Americans and Nationalist Chinese, as well as the fiercest Red Guards (maddened by the city's look of European feudalism and all these Christian nests of superstition), had in the end turned out to be that quaintest of settlements, the seaside retirement town. The houses would not have disgraced the streets of Bexhill-on-Sea, on England's geriatric coast. Qingdao even had a breezy promenade, and slowly strolling oldies. It had a pier. It had ice-cream sellers. But it wasn't raffish and blowsy, a place for day-trippers. It was like its English counterpart—just as bungaloid.

High Party officials—secretaries, directors and deputies longed to get a room or an apartment in Qingdao and spend the rest of their days in the sea air with its snap and tang. It was perhaps a bourgeois dream, but who could blame them? It was more a town than a city. It was not heavily industrialized. The weather was lovely most of the year—pleasant in the summer, bracing in the winter. There was only the occasional typhoon, but it was obvious that Qingdao was able to withstand such storms. It was not a congested place. It was almost unique among Chinese towns for having a unity of architectural style—it just so happened that it was German and not Chinese unity, but so what? That was the luck of its youth and the fact that it had been planned and built in such a short time. It wasn't the centuries-old accretion of monuments, pagodas, ruins, factories, apartment blocks, political boondoggling and bad ideas that made up the average Chinese city. It was not only a pretty place—the familiar and absurd its strongest features—but it was manifestly prosperous. Yantai was not a patch on it. It looked well-to-do. Its food was excellent—fresh seafood, Shandong vegetables. Its beaches were clean. There were plovers strutting on them. And those old folks you took to be members of the cleanup brigade, grubbing around the rocks and poking in the sand, stuffing sea urchins and black kelp into their bags, were actually market traders who were selling this stuff to eat; but the result of their gathering left the beaches of Qingdao bright and tidy. No wonder the Chinese wanted to retire here.

I walked around, wishing I could stay longer. Generally speaking, it was not an ambition I had very often in China. I would visit a place and get hold of it, and after three or four days I would want to let go and move on. The Chinese themselves were always telling me that I should go here or there—see this garden or that pavilion. In Qingdao they said, "You should go to Mount Tai"—the holy mountain on the east of the peninsula. But I was happy in beautiful, breezy Qingdao, and it was a bonus that after dark it looked slightly nightmarish.

It had been perfectly placed on the shore, taking full advantage of the cliffs. With the sea in front, and the apple orchards behind it, and the heavy industry well hidden, it seemed well planned. It also had a number of colleges and universities; it had several technical schools and an oceanographic institute. So, in addition to the vacationers and retired people, it also had a great number of students.

Qingdao was one of the pleasantest Chinese cities for walking in—I guessed that that had been part of the scheme to make it habitable. I met students on my walks. I asked them everything and I justified my interrogations by the observation about Confucius in the Analects: "When The Master entered the Grand Temple he asked questions about everything."^*

There had been no demonstrations here. One girl said, "A few years ago I would have demonstrated, but now I have too much to lose. The government would destroy me."

She was twenty-one and was about to become a student teacher. She shrugged when she told me that, as though it was not quite what she had wanted.

"Is there anything wrong with being a teacher?" I asked.

"No. It's good work. But, you know, factory workers earn more than teachers because they get bigger bonuses."

Another girl said, "I feel old"—she was twenty-two. And she explained, "It is as if my life is all decided and mapped out. Nothing unexpected will happen. I will graduate. I will get an M.A. The government will say that I must become a teacher. I will spend my life that way."

"What would you do if you had your choice?"

"I would travel—not necessarily to foreign countries," she said. "I would wander, just wander, in China. Have you noticed that no one wanders here? No one is open-minded and aimless. Everyone has a purpose. But I would go here and there, talking to people, and I would choose out-of-the-way places, like Gansu and Xinjiang."

The male students I talked to were much less adventurous than the women; much more conventional. The women seemed a little giggly, but that was only shyness. They could be very direct.

"When did you first feel old?" one asked me.

I answered truthfully. "When I was six or seven, in the first grade. And then when I graduated from high school. And when I turned thirty. Since then I have felt fairly young—that is, until you asked me that question."

Most of them had been born in the first years of the Cultural Revolution, so they had no memory of it. They regarded it the way I had regarded the Great Depression in America, or the Second World War. They seemed episodes from the past—not very remote, but what mattered was that they were over. The depression had had an end, and so had the war. People with college degrees sold apples on the street, went one of my father's depression stories. The neighborhood air-raid warden yelled "Put that light out!" That for me, was the war. The young Chinese had the same sort of exemplary stories of the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Mr. Bai, they had not even tagged along after the Red Guards. Theirs were always stories of disappearances, of neighbors and relatives sent into the countryside.

Their sharpest memories were of Mao's death, the Gang of Four, and Deng and his reforms, but even so they were more impatient than hopeful.

"If you live through these changes they seem very slow," one said. "It is only because you are a foreigner, on the outside, that the changes seem dramatic. For us they are very ponderous."

When I considered that it was still illegal for a foreigner to talk at random with any Chinese citizen—the old rule was seldom enforced, but it was a well-known rule nonetheless—I was grateful for this frankness. The healthiest sign in China was this straight talk.

Because the students were not of the Maoist years they were ambivalent about the Old Man. Indeed, I sometimes found talking to the young that I was more enthusiastic about Mao than they were. I admired his military brilliance, his subtle mind, his wit and charisma, his ingenuity and toughness. Who could not admire the Long March, or his tenacity against the Japanese, his voluminous writing, his ability to unify this enormous country? Of course, Confucianism also kept these people unified and family minded, but Mao, who loved contradiction (and even wrote a long essay on the subject), remained for me the most fascinating and ambiguous figure in Chinese history.

For these students he was an uninteresting riddle. He had cast a long shadow, yes; but they were still living in that shadow, and they didn't like it very much.

"He was a strange man," a student in Qingdao told me.

I asked who he resembled, because Chinese life is full of models, like the heroic soldier, Lei Feng, the inspired worker, Iron Man Wang (Wang Jinxi), and the Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains.

"He was unlike any other Chinese man," the student said. "I think he read too many books and began to make a place for himself in Chinese history. He was an arrogant and self-important man. He behaved like an emperor."

My reaction was Yes, but—yet why bother to sell them on Mao? They had to live the rest of their lives here. I could leave any time I liked. In the end it was for them to deal with his memory, not me.

"When Mao died, I knew I had to cry," another student said. "We had been required to love him. I was just a little kid at school. I didn't feel anything, but the teachers were watching. I had to force myself to cry."

Ice was packed into the bays and inlets. It was January, after all. But it was sunny, and during the day it was almost warm. The rocks on the promontories of Qingdao were fluted with ice, too, and some were ringed by glassy skirts of ice crust. I wondered whether it was because it was out of season that the place was so pleasant. There was a swimmer on Beach Number Two one day. He strolled down and plunged in, as people were said to do in freezing Harbin in the winter, breaking ice in the river to go for a dip. But it wasn't swimming. It was a rather pointless act of willpower, like holding a lighted match under your finger (a loony pastime advocated by the convicted Watergate flunky Gordon Liddy, by the way). Would people do such things if no one were watching, or if they couldn't tell someone about it later on?

I had arrived in Qingdao on a freezing night, feeling I had stepped into a nightmare made up of old German movies and winter storms, steam locomotives and fog, and the black station with the hands missing from its clock face. I left on a dazzling springlike day, and now in the sunshine I could see that the station was a relic, with the red star of China planted on its conical roof. The loud whistle blew, and a moment later the train was tracking past the islands and lighthouse and breezy streets, into the open country of Shandong that was so flat it had the look of a floodplain.

19: The Shandong Express to Shanghai: Train Number 234

This featureless brown farmland with its ditches and its telephone poles and its tile-roofed houses looked as dreary as Belgium. From the farmers' point of view it was the worst time of year. The muddy lanes, the ruts, the puddles, the cold, the January drizzle. There was nothing to eat yet. The people labored along on bikes, they thrashed their oxen, they pushed carts that rolled uncertainly on big, wobbly wheels.

There was a Belgian man in my compartment. After we got acquainted I nerved myself and asked him the question I had been rehearsing.

"Does this part of Shandong look like Belgium?"

We looked at the ditches, the plowed fields, the puddles, the poles.

"Yes. Is similar."

So I had not been imagining it. These winter journeys in China were tiring, and I sometimes suspected that my weariness blurred my perceptions—or else made me giddy and fanciful. And these long stretches of brown, plowed China could be depressing. The whole of this overpopulated region was like that. And, like Belgium, it tired my eyes.

Alain was from Antwerp. He was traveling with his Chinese counterpart, Li. They were going to Hefei, but they did not know that Hefei was the new center of student protest. They had no interest in politics. They were telephone engineers in a Belgian-Chinese joint venture to upgrade the telephone system. Alain said, "I think we arrive here just in time."

It was well known that Chinese phones were hopeless. It was impossible to direct dial any Chinese city, and it was very hard to make even a local call. And when you got through you often heard five other voices—or more—holding simultaneous conversations. A Chinese phone was like Chinese life: it was full of other people, close together, doing exactly what you were trying to do. Often the phone went dead. You could wait eight hours to be connected. Occasionally a whole city would be cut off. For several days it might be impossible to make a call outside Shanghai. In Taiyuan, the provincial capital of Shanxi, any calls, other than local ones, were out of the question: the city was isolated, though it could be reached by telegraph, using Morse code. The old Chinese phones were of heavy black Bakelite that shattered or chipped if they were struck; the new phones were lightweight plastic, like toys, and were usually a color that did not inspire confidence, such as flamingo pink or powder blue. It was possible to imagine how the Chinese felt about them from the way they shrieked into them. It was always shrieks. No one ever chatted on a telephone in China.

I told Alain these things. He knew them, he said. He was aware that his task was monumental. Fortunately he had a sense of humor, or at least a sense of silliness, that made life bearable. His English was shaky. He said things like, "Will you traduce her for me?" and "I feel happy as a roy" and "The Chinese has good formation but bad motivation."

He was the complete Foreign Expert. He did not speak Chinese. He had no interest in politics. Chinese art to him was the enameled ashtrays and bamboo back scratchers they sold at the Friendship Stores. Apart from Qingdao and Hefei and Shanghai, he had not traveled anywhere. He said he knew Belgium intimately, though. He was fluent in both Flemish and French. He tried to teach me to pronounce the almost unpronounceable Flemish word schild (shield), but I could do no more than approximate it and sounded as though I were swallowing a quahog.

We played capitals to kill the time. Mr. Li knew little more than Alain, who failed on Hungary, India and Peru (Mr. Li knew Hungary). Alain did not read. He amused himself with his video camera, for which he had paid $1200 in a duty-free shop. He sent tapes home—tapes of Shandong looking horribly like Belgium.

Mr. Li was somewhat similar.

"Think of a country," I said.

He was baffled. "I cannot think of one."

"Any country," I said. "Like Brazil, or Zambia, or Sweden."

He made a face: nothing. He did not know any geography at all. He was not just geocentric; he was ignorant.

Their field was telephones—wiring, systems, satellites, exchanges, linkups, computers. They had this very narrow but very deep area of expertise, and it was all they cared about. They could talk animatedly about computer telephone systems, but about nothing else. Mention the rain in Guangdong or the snow in Harbin and they looked blank. Don't mention books.

They were the new people in the world, the up-and-comers, the only employable folks: they had technical skills, they were problem solvers, and they were willing to travel. In every other respect they were stupid, but their stupidity did not matter. I found them very friendly because they were enthusiastic about their work.

"My boss is not happy with me today," Alain said. "But the fault is the workers. Chinese workers like to sleep."

Mr. Li agreed with this.

We looked at Alain's snapshots—a great stack of cozy Belgian interiors. Fat people in bright clothes. People eating or sitting in small parlors.

"This is my grandmother. This is my sister. My mother. My father..."

We went through the stack twice. I got to recognize the porcelain figures on the mantelpiece at Alain's grandmother's, and a particular cushion, and his father's blue sweater. Alain loved looking at them. He said he missed home.

"What do you miss most?"

"Beef," he said. That was what the man had told me in Harbin. What was it about beef? Alain said, "But I have this."

He brought out a bulging knapsack. It contained a stock of canned goods. Alain called it his emergency kit. He had brought it from Antwerp. He had canned carrots, canned mackerel, cans of sardines, and a brand of cocktail sausages called TV Meat. They were for nibbling in front of a television. Alain also had one of those, a twelve-inch set, for playing his video tapes. He had more luggage than anyone I had ever seen on a train. "My landlord in Antwerp told me I could not leave my things in my apartment, so I took it all to China." He also had many cans of beef chunks in gravy, packages of a pemmican-looking substance called Bifi, a can of chocolate paste called Choco that he spread on bread, and a dozen chocolate bars.

It had been my intention to get off this train at Xuzhou, in a remote corner of Jiangsu Province, and to make my way, somehow, about a hundred miles southeast to the little town of Huai'an, which was on the Grand Canal. In that town, in 1898, Zhou Enlai was born. I wanted to see his house. Had it been made into a shrine, like Mao's in Shaoshan? And if so, was it now as deserted as Mao's birthplace, or was it teeming with well-wishers? It was whispered by many people that Zhou was the secret hero of the Chinese Revolution. Of course he had written very little, and he was no theorist; but he was urbane and compassionate. He was a gentleman—the sort described and praised by Confucius: temperate, kind, magnanimous, and so forth.

The trouble with the stop in Xuzhou was that it occurred at three in the morning. At that hour the whole of China is asleep. I would be emerging from the train at this ridiculous hour on a winter night, and have six hours to kill before knowing whether it was possible to find a bus or a car to Zhou Enlai's homestead.

I decided to stay in bed.

Alain and Li got off at Bengbu at five in the morning to transfer to a Hefei train. Before we turned in they piled their boxes and suitcases outside in the corridor. The Head of the Train complained about Alain's trunk, but Mr. Li explained that it contained the foreign expert's worldly goods from Belgium.

"Regulations, regulations," the Head said. "You must register it."

They didn't bother. More people knocked on the door in the night to complain about it, but I was asleep at five when they got up. I woke up when one of them sat on my foot, but then they were gone. That was the way with trains—something dreamlike in the way people came and went. By eight there was someone else in Alain's berth, reading a comic book. It was a young woman, with a veil drawn tight over her face because of the dust.

"The Great River," she said, using the Chinese name for the Yangtze.

I decided to piss into it. I went to the toilet. On the door was a long Chinese word, TINGCHESHIQINGWUSHIYONG, which was seven characters run together, meaning, "While the train is stopped, please don't use this room." But it hadn't stopped; it was crossing the long railway bridge over the Yangtze. I entered the room, peered into the open hole and let fly.

Having seen Xinjiang and the northeast and the open spaces of Inner Mongolia, I now knew that this eastern part of classical China was the least interesting to look at. It was brown factories and black canals separated by flat cabbage fields. It had been plowed and fertilized and planted for thousands of years, but it was no miracle that anything at all grew here. The secret is revealed every morning, as men with long-handled dippers scoop human shit out of dark barrels and fertilize the fields. It was the flattest, ugliest and most populous part of China; but its shifters kept it in business. Shanghai residents produced 7 500 tons of human shit a day. It was all used. Farm yields were high, but the place epitomized drudgery. Everyone's energy was expended in simply existing there, and every inch of land had been put to use. Why grow flowers when you can grow spinach? Why plant a tree when you can use the sunshine on your crop? And the untillable soil was perfect for a factory. People praised Wuxi's Lake Tai, but the lake was dead, and Wuxi was simply awful looking, part of the sprawl of Shanghai, although it was seventy-five miles from the Bund.

In any kind of travel there is a good argument for going back and verifying your impressions. Perhaps you were a little hasty in judging the place? Perhaps you saw it in a good month? Something in the weather might have sweetened your disposition? In any case, travel is frequently a matter of seizing a moment. It is personal. Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine. Our accounts of the journeys would be different. You would notice how I provoked people with questions, and how I loitered in the market, and my fear of Chinese water that amounted almost to hydrophobia. I might mention your impatience, or your liking for dumplings, or the way you wilted in the heat. You would write about the kinds of Chinese food, and I about the way they wolfed it. If you spoke about Mao, I would contradict you.

On a second visit to Shanghai I was startled by its crowds and traffic—people and cars vying for the right of way; and by its contrasts of horror and beauty; and by its neurotic energy, a sort of frenzy that was unique to Shanghai.

The Shanghainese have a sense of belonging to the city that resembles the New Yorker's strong identification with New York. It is not chauvinism or civic pride. It is a sense of shared experience, the same headaches and complaints, a sort of it's-awful-but-I-love-it attitude. It is also a sense of being possessed by the place, locked in its embrace and embattled at the same time. Speaking as someone from out of town, I find both Shanghai and New York pretty dreadful. The noise alone is cause enough to regard them as uninhabitable. I grew up in the big-enough city of Boston, and when people talk about New York's (or Shanghai's) vitality, I simply see a lot of frantic pedestrians. And writers who celebrate cities always seem laughable to me, because every city dweller, in order to keep sane and survive, invents his own city. Your New York is not my New York. On the other hand, my Shanghai would probably be yours. It is simple but dense; it is horizontal; and it has remarkably few landmarks. New York is vertical, a city of interiors—and secrets; but Shanghai is its streets. There is not enough room for so many people indoors, and so people work, talk, cook, play and carry on their businesses on the sidewalks. There is no other way for the city to cope with its overpopulation. It is the most visible and obvious of cities, and perhaps therein lies its charm for those who praise it: that its modes of life and work are so apparent to even the casual stroller. There is also a strong sense of old China in the sidewalk life, and such sights seem to give it "atmosphere." But I would rather live in a place where I could walk without incessantly bumping into people, or dodging traffic, or where I could hear myself think.

But the sense of urban solidarity that characterizes Shanghai had a marked effect on the student demonstrations. It was the only city where factory workers linked arms with students. And the numbers were so great (they varied from 100,000 to 200,000) that the city came to a halt—no buses, no taxis, and no one was able to work.

I went out to Fudan University on the outskirts—and wretched-looking outskirts at that—where I talked with students about the demonstrations.

One student told me, "We held meetings, but we wanted to disassociate ourself from the Party, so we insisted that student cadres had to leave the hall. These cadres are appointed by the Party—we didn't want them."

"Did the cadres join the march?"

"No," the student said. "We put their names on our posters, but we printed their names upside down or in slanted characters."

"What was the point of that?"

"It is disrespectful to print someone's name upside down."

True, a Chinese person's name is everything to him. It represents himself, his parents, his extended family and even his village. The worst, most insulting curse anyone can utter in China against a Chinese person is Cao ni de xing! "Fuck your name!"

The student said that the term running dogs was used in the demonstrations, for the first time since the Cultural Revolution. And big-character posters were another artifact from that time that had been pressed into service, but they now read More Freedom and We Want Democracy. Rising prices, low salaries, poor public transportation, byzantine election procedures, and difficult rules governing studying abroad were other grievances.

I carefully noted these down, and then a young man named Mr. Hong said, "You know about the Jan and Dean concert?"

Jan and Dean? "Baby Talk," "Surf City" and "Ride the Wild Surf"? The early sixties, Southern California, totally tubular surfer duo? That Jan and Dean? I had been under the impression that after Jan wrapped his car around a tree in 1966, suffering paralysis and brain damage, this group was no longer operational.

But I was wrong. This American group, which outdated the Beach Boys (who were their sometime collaborators), had undergone a recrudescence and were yapping to beat the band, actually singing "Surf City" in Shanghai, twenty-nine years after they had released their first record. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. After all, Mr. Tian had sung me a Neil Sedaka song in the Langxiang wilderness only a month before.

Mr. Hong said, "We liked Jan and Dean very much. The students were excited. Jan and Dean invited some students onto the stage to dance. They were dancing and enjoying themselves. But afterwards those students were accused by the police of being disruptive."

"What happened to them?"

"They were taken into custody. They were beaten."

This also fueled the students' enthusiasm for a demonstration. But there was a feeling that the students had been led into a trap, since the conservatives used the demonstrations as an excuse to call for a limiting of the reforms.

Everyone agreed that what was happening in China indicated a power struggle in the inner Party, between the reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping and the eight or ten so-called leftists, who were antireformers, led by Peng Zhen (chairman of the National People's Congress). In spite of his dogmatic Maoist views, Peng had never been purged. These puritanical old troopers, many of whom had shared the privations of the Long March, were outraged by students who were making demands. Their American counterparts might be the VFW, who also hated student protests. The problem was that there were also people in the inner Party who were pushing harder for reform.

I paid a call on Mr. Brooks, the American consul-general, who had impressed me so much a few months before by telling me that he didn't have the slightest idea of what would happen next in China.

"The Chinese will go on doing business," he said. "Foreign investors aren't concerned with student demonstrations. What would worry them is a return to Stalinism."

We then talked about Deng's successor. Would it be Hu Yaobang, Deng's bridge partner? Deng himself had indicated this.

Mr. Brooks said that Deng had hoped to step down, but that he wanted to make sure his policies would continue. When Deng went he wanted to take all the doubtful people with him.

"The trouble is," Mr. Brooks said, "Mr. Hu has disappeared from view. A foreign minister told a visiting Japanese delegation, 'He's tired.' In Chinese terms that means he can't do the work."

I listened to the radio that night and heard a news report that Hu Yaobang had been forced to resign after a session of self-criticism in which he said he had "made many mistakes."

So, just like that, Mr. Hu was gone, and Deng didn't have a successor.

Dr. Xie Xide, the president of Fudan University, was a member of the Central Committee. I saw her the following day and asked her how she had found out about Mr. Hu's resignation.

"I heard it on the Voice of America," she said. "But I was not surprised. He tended to make decisions without consulting anyone. For example, once he was on an official visit to Japan. He was very enthusiastic. He invited three thousand Japanese students to visit China."

"To study?"

"No. Just for a visit," Dr. Xie said. "But we are a poor country. We can't afford that sort of thing."

Mr. Hu had often had his foot in his mouth. He had begun to wear Western suits, and although he had been designated a sort of official greeter of Eastern Bloc delegations (the nine Poles in porkpie hats, the Rumanian wrestlers, the representatives of the Hungarian joint venture in making paprika), Mr. Hu's sympathies were with the Western capitalists. He became very excited at one stage about contagious diseases and he advocated the abandonment of chopsticks in favor of knives and forks. And why not have individual portions, he exclaimed, instead of the Chinese common dish in the middle of the table, and everyone shoving his chopsticks in? He had recently gone to Tibet and suggested that the Han people should leave the region forthwith and let the Tibetans run it themselves. (In itself it was a bold thought, but it would have set a disastrous example to other autonomous regions, like Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.) He had also said, rather tactlessly (considering his past as Party Secretary), "Marxism cannot solve China's problems."

The official version of Mr. Hu's departure was that at "an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China's Central Committee, Hu Yaobang made a self-criticism of his mistakes on major issues of political principles in violation of the Party's principle of collective leadership." This was reported by China's official mouthpiece, the Xinhua News Agency. Mr. Hu was further accused of having caused "a slackening of ideological control."

In a word, Mr. Hu was being blamed for the student protests. He was spineless, weepy, ideologically unsound. In the pantheon of modern Chinese goblins and enemies, which included a running dog, a paper tiger, a snake spirit and a cow demon, Mr. Hu had become one of the slimiest and least trustworthy, a bourgeois liberal. The Maoist view still stood: a liberal was a dangerous hypocrite.

He was not the only one to go. A day or so later, the writer Wang Ruowang was expelled from the Communist Party. Was this interesting, and did anyone care about such boring political ambushes? My feeling was that I would much rather have been bird-watching in Heilongjiang, yet these political events were not without their amusing ironies. For example, this man Wang had had his problems before. In 1957 he had been labeled "a rightist" in Mao's Anti-Rightist Campaign, a witch-hunt that had followed the Hundred Flowers Campaign (when the rightists had been suckered into making public criticisms of the Party). And then, in 1966, Mr. Wang had fallen again. He was "struggled" and finally charged with being "a cow demon." This he had to live with for ten years. He was then rehabilitated and made a council member of the Chinese Writers' Association and of the Shanghai Writers' Association. His crime (so Xinhua said) was that he "advocated bourgeois liberalization," and criticized the Party saying, "you [the Party] have nothing left to do now that the people have the freedom to write and to pick whatever theatrical performances they like."

Shanghai had just seen a Chinese run of the torrid O'Neill play Desire Under the Elms, so there was a grain of truth in that (it had been banned until recently). In a sense, the only heresy that Mr. Wang committed was that he said what everyone knew to be true.

It was very obvious that many people behaved like capitalists and petit-bourgeois traders. They had family businesses. They owned shops. Just the day before Wang fell, I had a ride in a privately owned taxi. "I own this car," the man said. It was a jalopy, but it was all his. People were changing jobs, making dresses, peddling their own wares, and selling their vegetables off their own pushcarts. But it was a great mistake for anyone to call this capitalism. You had to call it The Chinese Way. And it was an error for anyone to draw attention to the new freedoms. Hypocrisy was necessary. The government did not want to appear soft; and the Party preferred to live with the illusion that it was more repressive than it actually was.

It was another instance of the Chinese hating idle talk. It was a puritanical dislike for loose behavior and foolery. The Chinese attitude was, Get on with the job, don't talk so much, don't ask questions. It did not matter very much if someone was making a fat profit out of his cabbages, or if he was putting on a Western play, or if he believed in the hygienic value of the knife and fork. The error was in talking about such things, because that created conflict. I remember my Chinese friend in Peking, when I was protesting about Mr. Fang being my nanny. This knowledgeable Chinese fellow looked at me, closed his eyes, and shook his head, a gesture that meant: Don't say another word.

In the meantime, as long as you didn't gloat about it, you could do pretty much as you liked. These days no one breathed down my neck. They had forgotten that I was wandering through China. And one day in Shanghai I saw some students from Nankai University in Tianjin—about twenty of them—who were about to leave for a tour of the United States. They were a theatrical troupe, who were on their way to Minneapolis and St. Louis and a dozen other cities to perform a play adapted from the novel Rickshaw Boy.

They were friendly, eager students, very excited about their overseas tour. I took one aside and asked him about the production. The novel, by Lao She, is the story of a rickshaw puller in Peking in the 1930s.

I said, "Wasn't Lao She hounded to death by Red Guards?"

"Ha! Ha!" the student said, and the laugh meant emphatically Don't bring that up!

I stayed in Shanghai a while longer. I bought an old goldfish bowl at the antique shop. I saw a truly terrible Chinese movie: it was violent and thoroughly philistine. It rained. People talked about the power struggle in the inner Party. They were not cynical or indifferent to such big changes—the expulsions and resignations—but since they could do nothing about them they had to accept them. The rain began to leak into my soul. I walked through the rat's maze of back lanes near the cathedral and got glimpses of ancient China in the drizzle. I was happiest those nights, trudging alone in the rain, glancing into windows, seeing people ironing and making noodles and pasting up the red banners for the Chinese New Year, watching people roistering in cheap steamy restaurants and strangling chickens. It was wonderful to be anonymous those dark nights in Shanghai, when no one could see my face, and I heard a mother scolding a child with "Where have you been?"

20: The Night Train to Xiamen: Number 375

It was the familiar exit from Shanghai, the main line through the cabbagey province of Zhejiang and tarted-up Hangzhou, the haunt of tourists and nifty little Japanese; and as soon as the hills appeared the sun slid behind them and night fell. There were three Chinese in my compartment when I pulled the blanket over my head, but by morning only one remained. This was Mr. Ni. He explained that the others had gotten off at Yingtan, when the train turned left onto the spur line through Fujian, the coastal province that faces Taiwan. Mr. Ni was also going to Xiamen, and even referred to it (for my benefit) by its old name, Amoy.

He was beginning work on an offshore dredging operation. He explained that he was a surveyor and that he disliked south China. It was his sorry fate to have been posted here for two years. He was Shanghai born and bred and had all of that city's characteristic bumptiousness—he was blunt, offhand, presumptuous and fluent. He regarded himself as cultured. Southerners were yokels, in his view. They were greedy. That was why so many of them had left China. (It was true the world was full of spirited and hard-working Fujianese.) We were at Zhangzhou, where tangerines grow.

"In Shanghai we are sick for knowledge," Mr. Ni said. "But these Amoy people are only interested in making money. That is their main characteristic. They don't like reading or education. Just business."

A moment later, Mr. Ni asked me if I wanted to change money—my Foreign Exchange Certificates for his renminbi. Or did I want an interpreter in Xiamen? Or he could accompany me on my way. He had taught himself English and wanted to practice it. Also—he repeated—what about changing money?

Mr. Ni was invaluable to me that day in unraveling the news of the political confusion in the People's Daily. Such subtle news did not get into the English-language China Daily. The first interesting item quoted a high politburo member, Li Peng, as saying, "The Party has full confidence in intellectuals."

An intellectual in China is someone with a high-school education, doing a white-collar job. It is not a bespectacled nerd who sits around sipping tea and quoting Mencius. In the way that Chinese society is more easily defined by negatives, an intellectual is not a factory worker or a peasant farmer. He (or she) is a person who can read and write, who does not get his hands dirty.

The main report in the paper was of Zhao Ziyang: a strong implication that he had taken Hu Yaobang's place. He had been elevated by Deng. That was incontestable. He had met a Hungarian delegation—meeting such delegations had been Mr. Hu's old job. But the clearest sign that he had displaced Mr. Hu completely was his unambiguous criticism of Mr. Hu.

He said that Mr. Hu had been "incapable of fighting against Westernization"; that he had sought "to push political reforms too far," and—in an unusual burst of frankness from a Chinese leader—that Mr. Hu "had been warned several times over the years."

It was obvious that Mr. Zhao was in the ascendant and that Mr. Hu was on his way to becoming a nonperson. Mr. Zhao was a natty dresser—he nearly always wore a Western suit and tie. He jogged. But he was careful to distance himself from Westernization, which was almost synonymous with bourgeois liberalization. It had already taken hold, and seemed at the moment to be irreversible. And because its adherents—so-called intellectuals—were nervous, displeased and demoralized, Mr. Zhao had to be especially enigmatic.

Mr. Ni and I puzzled over the paper, and then I asked him what he thought would happen? Would Mr. Zhao ultimately replace Deng Xiaoping?

"I do not know," he said, and raised his hands in surrender: it was the Chinese funk when considering the future. After the shocks and reverses that had surprised the Chinese, only an ignoramus would risk making a fool of himself in speculating on what was to come.

But what about the Chinese liking for gambling? Wasn't that a sort of forecasting and speculation? I felt it was, but gambling in Chinese terms is not rational. It isn't a judicious indication of a possible outcome. It is a fling, something reckless, with a hint of hysteria in it. You might bet on the result of two fighting crickets (it is a popular pastime in China) or on a throw of the dice because triumph depends entirely on luck or good fortune—spiritual qualities. But politics wasn't moral and it certainly wasn't a lottery. It had to do with ambition, power seeking and greed, and it was not only unreadable but regarded as unsuitable as an occasion for a gamble. The Chinese would have a flutter on a cricket but never on a commissar.

Mr. Ni was cautious, but Mrs. Deng, who joined us, was talkative. She was also headed for the coast. She was thirty, she had one child, her husband was studying engineering. She worked in a government office. She wore her hair fashionably curled, and her bright yellow sweater had poppies embroidered on it. She also wore a skirt. "But it's cold!" she cried, smacking her knees. "I should put on my trousers."

I asked her whether she had been surprised when Mr. Hu had been forced to resign.

"Not surprised at all!" she said. She blinked fiercely. She had small teeth. She silenced Mr. Ni. "What a man! Did you hear about the way he invited all those Japanese people to visit China? The Japanese pay for thirty Chinese, but we pay for three thousand of them. It makes no sense!"

"Maybe he was being generous," I said.

She batted me on the arm.

"Ha! Generous! He doesn't know what he's talking! He once read a speech at a general's funeral. 'We are so sad,' he said. But he was smiling! He just talks and talks. We say, 'He's so happy he doesn't know his name.' You understand? Ask him his name and he says, 'Ha! Ha! I forget!'"

"Do you think it is bad that he talks a lot?" I asked, knowing full well that blabbing is seen in China as dangerous and stupid.

"It is just big talk," Mrs. Deng said. "You know the saying about the skinny face?"

"Sorry, I don't."

"If you have a skinny face you beat your cheeks"—she smacked her face with her stiff fingers—"to make your cheeks swell up."

"What's the point?"

"Your cheeks get fat because you beat them, and you try to make people think you're rich."

"I see. A pretense to make yourself look good."

"Hu Yaobang is like that. Can such a man be head of this big country of China? Never."

This made more sense than the People's Daily, which linked Mr. Hu with bourgeois liberalization and student protest. He simply talked too goddamned much.

Another fellow I met on the trip to Xiamen had a familiar request. Would I please give him an English name? His Chinese name was Li Guoqing—or "National Day" Li—because he had been born on an auspicious day in October. I was a little sceptical about the Chinese •who called themselves Ronnie and Julian, but Guoqing insisted, so I said, "How about George?"

He smiled and muttered it.

I asked him how much he was paying for his ticket from Shanghai to Xiamen. He said 40 yuan ($11). Mine had cost me 148 yuan ($41). If we had flown, his plane ticket would have cost 83 yuan ($23) and mine 173 yuan ($48). Foreigners in China always pay more. It is the policy. They also get better treatment, on the whole—though not necessarily in railway trains. I had heard of Chinese being bumped from Soft Class in favor of a foreigner, but I never saw it happen.

"Foreigners have more money," Guoqing said. "Why shouldn't they pay more?"

"If you come to America, do you think you should pay less because you're Chinese?" I asked.

But he wasn't listening. "Please call me George," he said.

***

Xiamen, on the hilly coast, had the reputation for being the richest city in China, for having the best houses and the happiest people. It also had the largest proportion of families with relatives living abroad. Stop anyone on the street in Xiamen, it was said, and they would tell you that they had an uncle in Manila, or a cousin in Singapore, or that a whole branch of the family was settled in California. They stayed in touch. In general when people left China for fresh pastures they left the poverty-stricken province of Fujian (Fukien)—this was in the nineteenth century—and most of them set sail from Xiamen (Amoy). They were seafaring people from one of the greatest Chinese ports: millions of them slipped away.

But they did not forget their homeland. They came back to marry. They sent money home. In many cases they returned and built large houses and retired here. Without question, Xiamen has the noblest houses, the grandest villas, the most elaborate walls and gardens, and the most magnanimous charitable and philanthropic enterprises. These are all the result of successful emigrants becoming rich overseas and for sentimental reasons remitting their funds.

The ships that were involved in the Boston Tea Party had come from here. The English word tea is Xiamen-dialect Chinese. Xiamen's style of building is found in Canton and also in old Singapore and rural Malaysia—the tall shop-house with an overhang, and the sidewalk running underneath that second story. It is associated with Straits Chinese—the shopkeepers of Southeast Asia. It is not found elsewhere in China. It is practical and pretty, and I cannot think of it without seeing men in flapping pajamas, and women measuring out rice from sacks, and young Chinese girls with soulful faces gazing out of shuttered upstairs windows.

The villas—big stout houses with high ceilings and wraparound verandahs—also resembled the old houses of Singapore and Malaysia that were torn down to make room for the banks and hotels. Until recently they were kept in Xiamen because no one had the money to tear them down or to replace them; but then they were valued for aesthetic and historical reasons, and a preservation order was placed upon them. The new buildings of Xiamen are in a suburb beyond the Causeway, where they belong.

I found it almost impossible to find fault with Xiamen. Because it is in the south, the fruit is wonderful and cheap—all kinds: haws, oranges, tangerines, apples, pears, persimmons, grapes. And because it is on the sea fish and seafood are plentiful and various—all sorts of eels, and big garoupas, and prawns. The best and most expensive were the lobster-sized crayfish. They were kept in tanks in the restaurants—the southern Chinese habit (because of a lack of refrigeration) of keeping food alive until the last moment. In other tanks were frogs, eels, fish, and ducks—and even ducklings. You were invited to point out your proposed entrée, and they cut its throat.

On a back street in Xiamen, at a grubby little restaurant, I saw two cages, one containing a baby owl and the other holding a scowling hawk. There was hardly enough meat on either of them to fill a dumpling. They perched unsteadily, confined by the small cages, and they trembled with anxiety. When I stopped to look at them, a crowd gathered. I asked the owner how much he wanted to make them into a meal. He said 20 yuan for the owl ($5.50) and 15 yuan for the hawk ($4).

"Why not let them go?"

"Because I paid for them," he said.

"But they're unhappy."

His laugh meant You are a fool.

He said, "They taste very nice."

"They are small," I said. "One mouthful and that's it."

"The meat of this bird is very good for your eyes," he said.

"That is not true," I said. "Only savages believe that."

He was offended and angry. His mouth went strange, and he said nothing.

"It's a superstition," I said. "It is old thinking. Like eating rhino horn for your dick. Listen"—he was now turning away—"This bird eats mice. It is helpful. You should let it go."

The man began to hiss at me, a sort of preliminary to blowing up in my face. I had no money. I went back to the hotel and got 35 yuan out of my room, but by the time I walked back to the restaurant, the cages were empty. I had imagined holding a little revival of the festival called The Liberation of Living Creatures, in which birds were released from cages. But I was too late today. The owl and the hawk had been eaten.

As a consolation I went to Xiamen market, bought two mourning doves for about a dollar a bird, and let them go. They flapped over the harbor, past the hooting boats, to the nearby island of Gulangyu. Believing it might be a sign, I followed them the next day.

***

Gulangyu was a small island containing a lovely settlement in which no wheeled vehicles were allowed—no cars, no bicycles, no pushcarts. It was a five-minute free ferry ride across the harbor, and from its highest point—Sunlight Rock—it looked like Florence, or a Spanish city, a tumbled expanse of tiled roofs, all terra-cotta and green trees and church steeples. There were three Christian churches at the center of the settlement: this island had once held only foreigners—Dutch, Portuguese, English, Germans. It was Japanese until the end of the war, and then there were a number of tough battles against the Nationalists, who ultimately took Quemoy, which is quite visible to the northeast.

"Enemy territory?" I asked.

"We are all Chinese brothers," Mr. Wei said.

"Then why the trenches and foxholes?"

The east coast of Xiamen was all military earthworks and gun emplacements.

"Because sometimes they shoot at us," Mr. Wei said.

But I liked old coastal China. It had been influenced by its traders and occupiers, and because of its seagoing communities it was outward looking. The dutiful and pious tycoons who had made millions overseas had obeyed the Confucian precepts and become philanthropic. The houses and schools they built blended with the Romanesque church with its sign, Ecclesia Catholica, and the old German consulate which might have been designed by Joseph Conrad. The philanthropoids had built villas in a section of Gulangyu called Sea View Gardens, and there they lived among foreign compradors and tea merchants and petty consular officials, each on his own colonnaded verandah, under the palm trees.

The building regulations on Gulangyu are unique in China for their fastidiousness. No building may be higher than three stories, all had to be made of red brick and carved stone, and all designs had to be approved by the Architectural Commission. They were good old-world designs, and even the newest buildings—the vegetable market and the museum—were being put up with great care. Restoration work was being carried out on the villas in order to turn them into hotels and guest houses without losing their character. It was odd for the Chinese, so practical and penny pinching, to spend extra time and money to make a thing look right. The magnificent city wall around Peking, with its forty-four bastions and sixteen gates had simply been bulldozed by Mao's goonish philistines, chanting, "Down with the Four Olds! Up with the Four News! New Thinking! New Customs! New Habits! New—!" In this same spirit, two miles of the Great Wall were pulled down between 1970 and 1974 by an army unit at Gubeikou; the ancient stone blocks of the wall were used to build army barracks.

But this vandalism of China's recent past did not extend to Gulangyu except in the form of big-character graffiti (Long Live the Thoughts of Mao Zedong! was still legible in two-foot characters on the walls of a villa) and in selective desecration. The Catholic church was turned into a factory, hate meetings were held in the Protestant ("Three-in-One") church, and the Buddha statues were smashed in the temples—a quarter of Xiamen is Buddhist.

I asked Mr. Wei the reason for the meticulous restoration of Gulangyu.

"Because the government wants to turn this into a tourist island," he said. He also said that he was relieved that the government had not decided to tear the place down, as they had so much else.

We were walking towards Sunlight Rock and ran into a junkman on a back street. He was a fat boy with a pole across his shoulders, carrying loads of wastepaper. I stopped him, and because his dialect was incomprehensible to me, Mr. Wei helped me quiz him.

The boy said that if the wastepaper was good quality, like old, neatly stacked newspapers, he would pay 50 fen for one kilo—about 6 cents a pound. That seemed to me pretty fair. But for other paper he paid less than a penny a pound.

How was business?

"No good," he said. "This is hard work for very little money."

Off he went, his pole bouncing from the weight of the wastepaper bundles.

"Why are you so interested in the Cultural Revolution?" Mr. Wei asked me.

"Because it influenced me at the time—twenty years ago when I was in Africa," I said. "I thought of myself as a revolutionary."

Mr. Wei smiled. He was twenty-one. His father was my age.

I said, "What did your father do during the Cultural Revolution?"

"He just stayed in the house."

"For how long?"

"Six or seven years."

We climbed to the top of Sunlight Rock. In 1982, at the age of seventy-eight, the chain-smoking Mr. Deng Xiaoping climbed to this summit. He was followed by a flunky with an oxygen bottle, but he didn't need it.

Looking across the harbor to Xiamen city I could see how the areas of light industry and banking had expanded westward. This was said to be one of the busiest boomtowns in China. Once upon a time they made paper umbrellas and firecrackers and chopsticks for export. These days they manufactured bicycles, toys, Camel cigarettes, and microchips. And the Kodak Company was installing a filmmaking plant at great expense.

The harbor was full of freighters and fishing boats. Beyond it, in the lanes and streets, there were stalls—people selling fried noodles, fruit, sweets, vegetables, fish soup. One of the happiest pastimes of people in south China is eating out—at greasy little restaurants or at stalls—by lantern light. I could not forgive them for stuffing rare birds into their mouths, but very few had the money for such delicacies. They were great noodle eaters, and because of the pleasant climate, they liked milling around the town and eating when the mood took them, a habit they had exported to Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia.

Xiamen was the only place in China were I was repeatedly accosted by pretty girls. They sneaked up behind me and snatched my arm. "Shansh marnie?" they said, and pinched me delightfully and held on. Was that all they wanted?

They were good-tempered people, but always in a flap. Inevitably there are squabbles among the Chinese, who live on top of each other. It is surprising that fighting is not more frequent. Fistfights are rare. Often children are beaten, and hit very hard. But the most common mode of conflict is the screaming out-of-hand row—two people screeching at each other, face to face. They are long and loud, and they attract large crowds of spectators. For face-saving reasons such disputes can only be resolved by a third party, and until that person enters the fray, the two squabblers go on shrieking.

I witnessed a barracking like this in Xiamen one day. All tourist sites have so-called Viewing Places, where the Chinese visitor is obliged to go—otherwise the trip is futile. The ritual element in tourism is carefully observed. In Xiamen there were the Eight Major Views, the Eight Minor Views and the Views Outside Views. It is customary to have your picture taken on the spot, and since few Chinese can afford to buy cameras, professional photographers stand around these Viewing Places and offer their services for one yuan a shot. The shouting match I saw was between one of these photographers and his dissatisfied customers.

Mr. Wei translated the screams. At first they were all about money—a man and wife claiming that the photographer had put the price up after they had agreed on a lower one. But for face-saving reasons, the screaming became more general and hysterical. It wasn't an argument. It was a random howling—everyone at once, the couple, the photographer and then the onlookers joined in. It started at the Viewing Place, moved down the path, flowed behind a rock and then continued in a shed. It was extremely loud and went on without a break, a remarkable torrent of abuse and exclamation.

"First we're told it's one kuai, and then the thief changes it to two!"

"I'm not speaking to anyone until the unit leader comes. But I've never been so insulted—"

"Someone get the unit leader!"

"This is ridiculous! All these people are liars!"

"We're being cheated!"

"Thieves—!"

They were almost certainly tourists, Mr. Wei said. He could tell from their northern accent. Shanxi, he thought. He was whispering, "The woman says that they are thieves. The man is saying liars. There is a child in the shed. The photographer is banging the table with his fist—"

Then there was a greater commotion and the child began to scream. Someone was howling at the child. Then everyone was howling at once.

"What happened, Mr. Wei?"

"The child cursed the worker."

"What did he say?"

"He called him a wang ba—a tortoise," Mr. Wei said, with some reluctance.

"Is that bad?"

"Yes. Very. If a wife sleeps with other men her husband is called a tortoise."

"Is that expression used all over China?"

"No. Mainly in the north. Northerners are very tough. North of the Chang Jiang they are loud and muscular. They use violent language. That's why the demonstrations in the north were large and noisy. But we are thin and small and very gentle. We don't use such language, calling someone a 'tortoise' because he overcharges you."

The screaming match was still in full cry fifteen minutes after it had started. I got bored and went away. Mr. Wei said he found it distasteful having to translate this abuse for me, but I told him I had to know these things in order to understand China. And I explained that our version of a tortoise is a cuckold, which (coming from cuckoo) is a more logical word. Female tortoises, I told him, are not great copulators. They only need one screw and they are able to lay fertile eggs for years!

"You are interested in arguments and also interested in biology."

"I'm interested in everything, Mr. Wei."

"In China we specialize in knowledge. One person studies agriculture, and another does engineering."

He went on in this vein until, soon after, we saw a child being beaten by its mother in a yard. I was riveted by it. The child was smacked so thoroughly that he became hysterical and could not be calmed. He went around hitting his mother and wetting himself and howling. He was about seven years old. The usual Chinese reaction to someone in distress is laughter, and soon Mr. Wei and the others watching began to find the tormented child an object of amusement.

Xiamen gave me vivid dreams, but the dreams were not of Xiamen or its ghosts—Marco Polo, foreign traders, Manichaeans, missionaries, pirates, or the compradors of old Amoy. I dreamed of home in one, and of Tadzhiks in another (was it a coincidence that the Tadzhiks were the only Indo-Europeans among China's minorities?). I dreamed of Ronald Reagan again. That was a lulu. The president appeared from behind a tree on the banks of the Potomac. He did a silly walk, waggling his legs, and said, "Come along to the picnic. You can do the cleaning up—okay, Paul?"

I slapped him on the back and said, "Wait till I tell my mother I'm cleaning up the White House!"

This annoyed him, because I deliberately twisted his words. He yelled at me, "It's a picnic!"

A few nights later I dreamed of walking through the ravines that I had seen earlier that week in the hills of Fujian. I was captured by some Mongolian-looking men who were led by a small and very fierce woman. They all had curved knives that they kept jabbing into me, as if impatient to kill me.

"Empty your bag!" the woman shrieked.

Only then did I realize that I had a bag and that I was carrying some little antique statues that I had bought in a Chinese market.

"Show your certificate!"

"Here," I said, finding a piece of paper in my bag. It was the wrong certificate, but I thought: The Gurkhas will save me.

The woman read my mind and replied, "We are the Gurkhas!"

That was probably more a nightmare of buying trinkets illegally than a nightmare of traveling on the open road in China and encountering strangers—nothing was safer than that, judging from my experience of traipsing up and down in China.

The wonderful market in Xiamen, and the dry-goods stores under the shop-houses, reminded me that the best buys in China are not in the souvenir shops and the Friendship Stores—not jade carvings, cork sculpture, ivory letter openers, stuffed pandas, turquoise jewelry, cloisonné, brassware, plastic chopsticks, lacquerware, bone bracelets, or the really dull and derivative paintings on scrolls. If I were to recommend anything special in China that was a bargain—good quality, one of a kind, worth bringing home—I would say: socket wrenches, screwdrivers, watercolor paints and brushes, pencils, calligraphy, sturdy brown envelopes, padlocks, plumber's tools, wicker baskets, espadrilles, T-shirts, cashmere sweaters, bonsai trees, silk carpets and silk cushion covers, tablecloths, terra-cotta pots, thermos jugs, illustrated art books, herbs, spices, and tea by the pound. Bamboo bird cages are also lovely, though the thought of keeping a bird in them is depressing. China may also be the only country in the world where you can buy a cricket cage—made either of a gourd or of porcelain.

A number of these items are made in Xiamen, in the Huli Industrial Area. In more revolutionary times this area was part of a land-reclamation scheme. Mao had said (this was during the early years of the Cultural Revolution), "China must learn to feed itself! People have one mouth but they have two hands!" And so forth. The Red Guards and work gangs decided to build a causeway linking Xiamen to the west side of the harbor, and then to fill in the land behind the causeway and plant rice. But the land was poor and salty. Rice would not grow. And time passed. Now the area is a stronghold of money-making ventures—banks, light industry, factories—as well as the city's new municipal buildings.

There had once been a commune here. There had been agricultural communes all around Xiamen. I had been interested by the ones I had seen elsewhere, by the way they had developed into cooperatives and family farms, so I visited what had been the Cai Tang Commune, in the countryside northwest of Xiamen, to see what had happened.

Walking through the fields at Cai Tang, I came across an ancient grave. Two eight-foot guardian figures, a man and a woman, had been placed at the entrance of the gravesite. This was behind a hill, at the margin of a field of carrots. A bird—perhaps a flycatcher—was flitting back and forth. And buried to their necks were stone animals—a horse, a ram, lions and other broken beasts. There was an altar, too, with carved tablets. It was all unnoticed and it had not been seriously vandalized. In an earlier period a traveler would have taken the figures and crated them and shipped them to the Fogg Museum at Harvard. The tablets said (according to Mr. Wei) that it was a Qing Dynasty grave of the Hu family. And it was so far off the beaten track that no one had disturbed it.

A farmer and his wife were working nearby, hurrying back and forth in the carrot field, each one of them wearing a yoke with a balanced pair of watering cans. A loudspeaker at the far side of the field played a Chinese opera.

"This was once part of the Cai Tang Commune," the man said. "We planted rice, because they wouldn't let us plant anything else. And we listened to the Thoughts of Mao Zedong on that loudspeaker all day."

I had to follow him through the carrot field. He would not stop watering in order to chat. But he said he didn't mind my questions.

"This is my family's land. I never liked the commune idea. I would rather work in my own fields."

"Do you think about freedom to do as you want?"

"Yes. I have more freedom now," he said. "I can plant what I like. They used to say 'Plant rice' whether it was a good idea or not. Know what the trouble was before? Too many officials."

He squelched through the mud to the standpipe, filled his buckets, filled his wife's buckets and off they went again through the plumelike carrot tops.

"You have a healthy crop of carrots," I said.

"These are for pigs," he said. "The price of carrots is low in the market at the moment, so instead of accepting a few fen I'll feed them to my pigs. It makes more sense. I can fatten ten pigs, get them up to a hundred kilos and sell each one for about a hundred yuan. When the price of carrots goes up, I'll sell the carrots at the market."

He was still splashing water and gasping up and down the field.

"This is much better business!" he called back.

From there I went to the eastern part of Xiamen, called "The Front Line" (Qian Xian) because Quemoy (Jinmen), which belongs to Taiwan, is just offshore. The east coast road had been closed for thirty-five years, because of the periodic hostilities, but just recently it was opened. There were trenches, pillboxes and fortifications everywhere, but there was also a lovely beach of palm trees and white sand and dumping surf—and not a soul on it.

I broad jumped a foxhole and made my way through the palms.

"Don't, Mr. Paul! You might get shot!"

Mr. Wei trembled at the edge of the road, calling me back.

"Who would shoot me?"

"The army!"

"Which army?"

"Maybe ours—maybe theirs."

He tried to console me—perhaps one day there would be peace between China and its easternmost province of Taiwan, and then I would be able to swim here. Because the area had been off-limits and dangerous (Quemoy had been bombarded from these gun emplacements in 1958, provoking an international incident), and because of the fear of retaliation that had aroused in the local Chinese, the beach was unspoiled and lovely.

One of the largest buildings in Xiamen was the Workers' Palace. Other Chinese cities had Soviet-inspired community centers like this—they had all been built in the 1950s—but I had never been inside one. Mr. Wei was bewildered by my interest, and he said it might be difficult to get permission to enter. I now knew enough about Chinese bureaucracy to realize that the quickest way to see the Workers' Palace would be to walk in and not bother with permission. It was such a dithering and buck-passing civil service that special requests were almost invariably turned down, while blatant trespassing was seldom challenged.

Once, this Workers' Palace had been all hate films and sessions of political indoctrination. Now the film theater was showing a documentary about the Dunhuang Caves, and the reading room was full of people perusing newspapers and magazines (among them, movie magazines and body-building monthlies); and in the drill hall there was an aerobics class. A dancing class had just ended.

I asked one of the women doing aerobics why she had decided to sign up.

"I do this for health and beauty," she said. "Also I have headaches."

It was in the library of this building that I found a copy of Dong Luoshan's translation of Orwell's 1984. It had been published in Canton in 1985. He had told me it was regarded as neican—circulated only to safe and unexcitable intellectuals. But obviously that was wrong. Anyone in Xiamen could come here and borrow it from the library—I specifically asked the librarian.

"Is it any good?" she asked.

"Excellent. You'll love it."

"I'll take it home with me tonight!"

Another room was lined with electronic games. I wondered whether anyone used them. Mr. Wei said they did, but that no one had spare cash to squander on them. I saw about eight children lurking near the machines and asked them whether they knew how these things worked. They said they did. Would they teach me? I asked. Oh, yes. So I pushed a few coins into these space-invader machines, and the children sprang into action, their fingers flying. They were as expert as any person in America, misspending his youth at the controls of an electronic game.

A young woman had just finished her dancing class and was on her way home when I accosted her. She was Wan Li, a cadre at the economics ministry. She had gone to the Dalian Foreign Language Institute (she hadn't met Cherry Blossom there, unfortunately) but she had been raised in the central Fujian town of Sanming. That town had the reputation in China of being somewhat Utopian. It had been developed by people from all over China, before the Cultural Revolution. Miss Wan claimed that everything that had been said about Sanming was true—no problems, no pollution, perfect integration, a model city.

"Any Tibetans in Sanming?"

"No," Miss Wan said. "They have to stay in Tibet and solve their own problems. But people in Sanming are very civilized. They are from all places. Like the United States!"

She was about twenty-five and seemed very frank beneath her nervous giggle. She came to the Workers' Palace every day, she said, because she liked meeting people here—she enjoyed talking to strangers.

Mr. Wei merely looked on, but I could see he was quite taken by this young woman's boldness.

I said, "Are you a member of the Chinese Communist Party?"

"You are the second American in Xiamen to ask me that!" she said. "There are three hundred people in my unit at the ministry. Only twenty are members of the Party."

"Why so few?"

"Because it is hard to be a member. You don't volunteer. You have to be asked to join the Party. You must first act very well and leave a good impression. Do your work diligently—work overtime, study, be obedient."

"Like Lei Feng, the model soldier," I said. Lei Feng had scrubbed floors all night because of his love for Mao. In China he was a joke or else a paragon, according to who you were talking to. Most Chinese I had spoken to had found Lei Feng a bit of a pain, if not an outright fake.

Miss Wan gave me a Chinese reply. "Not like Lei Feng. You have to be noticed."

Lei Feng had only been noticed after his death, when his diaries were found, containing such exclamations as "I have scrubbed another floor and washed more dishes! My love for Mao is shining in my heart!"

Miss Wan said, "You have to be selected for the Party. The Party needs the best people—not just anyone who wants to join. If the Party works well, the country will work. The Party needs high-quality people."

"I'm sure you're a high-quality person."

"I don't know."

"Do you have healthy Marxist-Leninist thoughts?"

"I am trying," she said, and laughed. "I also like dancing!"

After she left, Mr. Wei said, "She gave me her card. Did you see?"

"Are you glad?"

"Oh, yes. I hope I see her again. It is so hard to meet girls in China."

He said he probably would not get married for another five years. Twenty-six was a good age for marriage.

With the greatest tact I could muster I asked him whether he had ever slept with a woman. I put it obliquely. He proudly said no.

"It seems to be a problem in China. No sex for young people." It had been one of the issues in the student demonstrations.

"It's a problem. Even if you meet a girl there is no place to take her. But I don't mind."

"You mean you don't believe in sex before marriage?"

He looked slightly disgusted. "It is unlawful and against our traditions."

With that, 2000 years of sensuality went straight out the window. Mr. Wei seemed blind to the fact that Chinese culture was rooted in sexual allusions. The mythical Yellow Emperor had made himself immortal by sleeping with a thousand women; and even a common object like a piece of jade had sexual associations—it was said to be the petrified semen of the celestial dragon. The dragon was phallic, the lotus was a sort of icon for the vulva, and so forth.

"Would you be arrested if you were caught with a woman?"

"You might be. You would be criticized. You could be reported."

"But surely you could be very careful if you had a lover."

"Someone would know," Mr. Wei said. "And even if you didn't get caught, people would look down on you."

That seemed to settle it, but Mr. Wei equivocated when I asked him about Miss Wan.

"I will keep her card," he said, breathing hard.

That was the last I saw of Mr. Wei. But I had no trouble fending for myself in Xiamen. For one thing, Spring Festival was about to begin, and this the happiest of Chinese holidays put everyone in a good mood, as they bought greeting cards and calligraphy and red paper banners with New Year's greetings inked on them.

Just before I left Xiamen I met an American, Jim Koch, a Kodak employee who had been hired to supervise the installation of a coating machine. This sounded a fairly modest contraption, but it had cost the Chinese $70 million, and the entire project was costing $300 million. The object was for the Chinese to make their own film for cameras and not be dependent upon the Japanese for photographic supplies.

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

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

"But the young Chinese must be teachable."

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

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

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

"What is the biggest problem?" I asked.

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

"Are you sorry you came to China?"

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

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

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

21: The Qinghai Local to Xining: Train Number 275

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I like green tea," I said.

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

"Were they sent there during the Cultural Revolution?"

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

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

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

The soldier became twitchy when I said this.

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

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

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

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

"Where you are going?" he asked.

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

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

"I'll do my best."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Beethoven," the driver said. "I like Beethoven."

The driver's name was Mr. Fu. He said he could drive me to Tibet. It would be about five days to Lhasa, through the Qinghai desert and then into the mountains. Sleep in army camps on the way. How about it?

I said I was very interested.

Mr. Li, his pal, said, "I think it's Symphony Number Two."

"Isn't it Six—the Pastorale?"

Mr. Li laughed. He had yellow teeth. His laugh simply meant Wrong! It was a barklike noise. He said, "The Pastorale goes dum-dum-dee-dee-dum. No, this isn't Number Two. I know Two, Five, Six, Seven and Nine. This isn't a symphony. It is an overture."

Mr. Fu went fossicking in his glove compartment. He brought out the cassette holder and showed us. It was the Coriolan Overture. Mr. Fu said it was a Beethoven work he particularly liked.

"This is the best hotel in Xining," Mr. Fu said.

Mr. Li laughed in a stern correcting way. "This is the only hotel in Xining."

This hotel reminded me of something I could not quite place—a building I had known in the distant past. It had been built by the Russians, and it retained its fiftyish look. It was very musty, it was mildewed. Why did all Chinese carpets stink with decay? I hated the hotel hours. Dinner at six, no hot water until eight at night. The room girl kept the keys. The toilet didn't flush until you emptied two buckets of water into it—and that bucket was the wastebasket.

And then I remembered the old Northampton Hospital, where I had worked as a student, and thought, Of course! The Xining Guest Hotel was exactly like a madhouse. The tiny rooms, the smells of food and disinfectant and sewage, the sudden squawks from locked rooms, the TV no one watched, the scarred walls suggesting violence, the bars on the windows, the eternal figure down the shadowy corridor slowly toiling with a mop, the silent inmate squatting on a chairseat, roosting like a chicken. It was all a reenactment of life inside the old-fashioned hospital I had known. Even the room girls were more like fearless, untalkative madhouse orderlies than they were compliant Chinese fuwuyuan. And in this loony-bin-like hotel, I could not decide whether I was a patient or a visitor; but I sometimes suspected that I would be like one of those poor creatures who is taken in for observation and somehow forgotten, and twenty years later discovered behind a bolted door, driven totally insane by the place.

These anxieties impelled me to make plans for Tibet. I told Mr. Fu I wished to discuss this matter.

"My father went to Tibet," Mr. Li said.

But I asked him more questions and realized that the man had gone there twenty years ago, on horseback, as a volunteer teacher.

"There was no road then," Mr. Li said.

"There's a good road now," Mr. Fu said. "I've driven to Lhasa a few times."

But my questions elicited only vague answers from Mr. Fu, and I could not tell whether he really had driven there or not.

"And it's a lovely drive from here to Golmud," Mr. Fu said.

"I can take the train to Golmud."

I had wanted to do that. The train to Golmud was the ultimate Chinese train. The line had been constructed as far as this town, and then because of the impossibility of penetrating the Tibetan plateau, it had been abandoned, in the middle of nowhere. I would not have missed that ride for anything.

"It's a horrible train," Mr. Fu said. "It's a steam locomotive. It goes through the desert. It is very slow."

That was music to my ears.

"You drive to Golmud," I said. "I'll meet you there and we'll both go to Tibet. We'll stop on the way. I'll bring some food. We'll listen to Beethoven."

Mr. Fu did some figuring and presented me with a bill for the Chinese equivalent of $600. That included his little Japanese car and his labor as driver and all the gas. I would pay for meals.

"It's a deal," I said, and we shook on it.

The car seemed rather fragile for such a difficult trip—1200 miles across the bleakest part of Tibet. It was a Galant. I hated the name. It was a car you saw on scrap heaps. When the wind blew through Xining, Mr. Fu's Galant swayed. It was not a vehicle for Tibet. Mitsubishi said another plate. It looked like a Dodgem car.

"You think it'll make it?"

"This is a good car," Mr. Fu said.

"Remember to bring two spare tires," I said.

He swore that he would. There was something in the heartiness of his assurance that made me think he was lying to me.

After that I decided to spend my time in Xining making preparations for the journey. I bought dry noodles and canned goods and fruit and soup. I bought storage containers and canteens and thermos jugs. I bought another hat. I found a place that sold jars of quails' eggs and bought a case. The food was so cheap I did not bother keeping track of the cost—it was a few dollars, no more. In my wandering around town I discovered that a special sort of dumpling was made in Xining. It was a stuffed pancake, fried in a wok—a dough bun crammed with scallions, and they served them fresh out of the pan, hot and dripping, just the thing for a snowy day in Qinghai.

Xining was the sort of simple ramshackle place I had come to like in China. It was not pretty, but that didn't matter. The food was delicious in an unremarkable way: not fancy but good to eat. The weather was full of surprises. The people said hello to me and were pleasant to each other. I liked Xining as I had liked Langxiang in Heilongjiang—and for the same reason: it was a country town. By degrees I realized that I was the only barbarian in the place. It was off-season, the middle of March in the back of beyond. That was also the reason people talked to me. It was a novelty to see a barbarian so far from his home.

Xining had department stores—of a kind. It had movie theaters—at least two. It had an enormous mosque. But Mr. Fu's was one of only about twenty cars in the place, and as the main streets were four lanes wide, one had the impression of almost no traffic at all. The buses were the broken, rusted kind found in all parts of rural China.

It was alarming to be told by people in Xining that Golmud was horrible and primitive. Bring warm clothes, they said. Bring food. Bring water. Tea, too. Bring everything you need. Nothing is stranger than being in a fairly bad place and being told that another place—your destination—is a great deal worse. But such warnings also made me deeply curious.

They grew potatoes here. They ate french fries. The fries were thin, crunchy, greasy and unappetizing, like the ones sold at McDonald's—exactly like those.

I met a young recent convert to Buddhism, Mr. Xun, who was studying English. I told him how much I liked the stuffed pancakes. He somewhat dismissed this, as Chinese do when you mention your liking for peasant food like dumplings, or lotus roots, or fried noodles, or steamed buns. Meat was the thing.

Mr. Xun said, "Sheep vein. Yak vein. Mongolian hot pot. Caterpillar fungus. And stir-fried camel's foot. That's what I like."

There was also a variety of black moss from the mountains called "hair grass" that was tasty. They made it into soup. It was indistinguishable from seaweed. But the fact was that west of Xining, and through the whole of Qinghai and the whole of Tibet, there is only one vegetable (barley) and only one kind of meat (yak). As might be supposed, faced with only two ingredients the people of these regions have learned to cook them a number of different ways. But that is no more than a gesture. The taste is unvarying. It is the taste of yak.

Mr. Xun the Buddhist convert went with me to the Taer'si, a monastery about fifteen miles southwest of Xining. The founder of the Virtuous Order (Gelukpa), a pure form of Buddhism, was born here over 500 years ago. This man, Zong Kapa, went to Lhasa and preached at the Ganden Monastery there. He was the founder of the Yellow Sect. After he had been away for some years, his mother wrote, imploring him to return. He said no, but added: If you want to do something useful, build a temple in my honor. Before the old woman could act, a pipal tree sprang up on the spot where Zong Kapa was born—the same sort of bodhi tree under which the Buddha received enlightenment. The mother built a pagoda over the tree, and then built a temple. Later, in 1560, the monastery was built. Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas have visited here. The present Dalai Lama was born nearby, in the hills. The white horse of the 9th Panchen Lama dropped dead soon after bearing his master here in 1903. This animal was stuffed and is venerated in one of the temples. So Mr. Xun said.

What Mr. Xun did not say was that this monastery, recently reopened by the Chinese, had the stuffings kicked out of it, and not only in the predictable battering of the Cultural Revolution. In 1958, Mao issued the edict of Religious Reform. It began as a political program; it became religious persecution. But now, thirty years later, the Kumbum Jampa Ling—the Tibetan name of the Taer'si—is growing again. There had been 3600 monks. This was reduced to none at all. In the past few years 500 monks have established themselves, and there are Rapjung—novice monks: grinning little red-cheeked boys who trot around combining high spirits and mischief with their chores.

"In three months these people will believe in communism," Mao had said thirty years ago, as he defrocked the monks. But the monastery has re-formed, and it is vigorously Buddhist. It seemed to me that it was so far off the beaten track that it had not received the pestering attentions of the bureaucrats. The complex of temples, stupas, courtyards, the printing works, hospital, medical college (for teaching herbal remedies), and dwellings (housing thirteen Living Buddhas and their mothers), is scattered on the brown lower slopes of the valley. A small town has grown to one side of it, down the road.

Having Mr. Xun with me was a help, and being at Taer'si on a cold winter day meant that I was seeing the place with its prayer wheels turning. We followed a procession of Tu people, who wore black hats with upturned brims, and padded jackets and high boots.

The pilgrims prostrated themselves and then entered The Lesser Temple of the Golden Roof. In its courtyard they hung little swatches of sheep's wool. For a good harvest, Mr. Xun said; but this was contradicted by my guidebook, which claimed that about-to-be-slaughtered animals received grace in this way ("similarly, sheep and cows may be led clockwise around a monastery, as their final act on earth"). In this temple, children with runny noses and wild hair were snatching at the barrellike prayer wheels. A man with a shrieking voice was chanting and beating a drum inside a locked room; the incense burners were crammed with cypress leaves and smoking fiercely, and pilgrims had glued Chinese coins to the burner's side (there was a pot of fish glue next to it). On the balconies to the right and left were two large stuffed yaks draped with gauze offerings, two stuffed goats and a stuffed brown bear—they were propped up on the rails to look like judges surveying the pilgrims below, and they had wild grinning faces, due to their stretched skin and glass eyes. It was the sort of holy place which could look only bizarre to an unbeliever, and there hung about it the stink of rancid yak butter.

That is the smell of monasteries from Mongolia to Tibet, the sour, cruddy hum of yak butter. It resembles the smell of an American family's refrigerator after a long midsummer power cut. It is the reek of old milk. But yak butter is not just a ceremonial fuel. It is used for cooking, for lamps, for sculpting, and it is good for greasing axles. Yak butter is Tibetan lubricant in a spiritual and also in an industrial sense. The pilgrim who had just finished lubricating his wagon wheels brings a can of it and deposits fat yellow lumps of it in a vat near the temple altar.

Mr. Xun said there had been lots of miracles here—not just the bodhi tree that sprouted on Zong Kapa's birthplace, but clusters of trees that appeared at the Flower Temple. They were miraculous, Mr. Xun insisted. Messages had appeared on them.

"I must see them," I said.

Mr. Xun was delighted by my fervor. He introduced me to the monk at the Flower Temple.

The monk said, "Look at the trunks of these trees. Look closely."

I looked closely. There were small scratchings, like worm tracks on the flaky bark.

"Tibetan characters," the monk said.

"Read them, please," I said.

"I cannot."

"Do they say anything?"

"We do not know. But I will tell you this. They are not man-made."

He did not mean worms. He meant something supernatural.

He saw some Chinese tourists smoking.

"Do not smoke!" he said in his Tibetan-accented Mandarin. "It's all wood, and if this catches fire, who's responsible? This temple is seven hundred years old"—it wasn't, actually, but I felt he wanted to make them feel bad—"and you don't care! All this yak butter would go right up in smoke!"

After the Chinese tourists left, the monk said, "They don't care. They smoke all the time. They throw cigarettes everywhere—even under these holy trees."

It was fairly obvious that the Tibetan monks disliked the Chinese, but they shrugged and grumbled rather than revolted. At the monastery printing works several monks told me that during the Cultural Revolution they had been sent to work at a power station.

"How did you like that?"

"It was a waste of time," one said.

This printing works was medieval in its way of working. The monk inked a slab of script and then pressed a rectangle of rough paper over it. He peeled this off and hung it to dry, a finished page of text.

One page was a ribbon of writing.

"Stick that over your door and thieves will never come in."

"What does it say?"

"It is Indian writing, Sanskrit. We don't know."

He inked another slab and printed a new piece of paper.

"If you put that on your house your guests will always be happy."

But as with the first one, the message was incomprehensible to him.

I went to the Meditation Hall and was almost overcome from the smell of yak butter. I went to the kitchen. It had the look of a tannery—full of deep vats, each one about seven feet across.

"This kitchen was last used in 1958," Mr. Xun said. "Those cauldrons could cook thirteen yaks at a time. The whole monastery could be fed in this kitchen."

The remains of the 3rd Dalai Lama are at this monastery, in a temple called The Nine-Roomed Hall. This man, Bsod-nams-rgya-mtsho, was the first to be called "Dalai." The Mongol chief Altan Khan conferred this title on him when he visited the Khan's court in the sixteenth century. Dalai means ocean in Mongol and it implies boundless wisdom. But the special features of The Nine-Roomed Hall are not the bones of this holy man. Interest in the place is usually centered on two tall demons.

"Notice the curtains?" Mr. Xun said.

Dusty drapes covered the bases of the statues.

"They have put them there so that you cannot see the figures beneath them."

"Why would they cover those figures?" I asked.

"One is an ox having sexual intercourse with a lady," Mr. Xun said.

"What sort of lady would have intercourse with an ox?"

"I don't know," Mr. Xun said, "because it is covered up."

The buildings were not beautiful, nor even pretty, but they had a rough mountain charm, and some of the carved pillars looked both godly and weird. The attractiveness of the place was in its life, its pilgrims and monks, the novice monks fetching water and eating Popsicles, and penitents draping the white and yellow gauze on the statues, and burning butter, and whirling prayer wheels, and prostrating themselves in a sort of religious athleticism that was very impressive—they are required to flatten themselves against the ground 100,000 times a year. It is not a fastidious kowtowing but a calisthenic so vigorous they wear mitts and knee pads to prevent bruising.

Mr. Xun and I walked down the road, past the souvenir stalls and the little shops, and had lunch in a restaurant that was otherwise empty. We had grilled yak meat, melon, squash, pig fat, buns, seaweed soup and french fries. The yak meat stuffed into the buns was my Dish of the Day, and I entered it into my notebook under dumplings and smoked duck and all the rest of the dishes I had favored.

We were sitting near a Franklin stove with a ten foot tin chimney. Mr. Xun said that he had visited the United States the previous year. He had been an interpreter for a trade delegation. In order to secure this job he had had to pass a competitive exam in English. He said he had traveled all over.

"I went to San Francisco," he said, and smiling, he told me how much he had hated Chinatown. He regarded the very word as insulting, but also he had found it all hackneyed, ridiculous and embarrassing. "And the food was bad," he said.

"What did you think the first time you saw New York?"

"Not as nice as Vancouver."

I then asked him what he had bought in the United States to take back to China.

"A pen. A book of stories. A photograph album."

He had no money. But what things he would have bought if he had had the cash! A refrigerator, a motorcycle, a television, an electric noodle maker!

We talked about Tibetans.

"They have black and red faces," Mr. Xun said. "The Hans are white and red. You can tell the Hans by their red cheeks. And the Tibetans are very dirty."

"There isn't much water around here," I said.

"On the grasslands in the west of Qinghai there is no water at all. The people wash their hands in yak's milk. And they never take a bath in their whole life."

"How about the Hans?"

"We wash once a week."

Mr. Xun said he usually went to a public bathhouse in Xining for a bath—on Fridays. He lived in a three-room apartment on the outskirts of the town, with his family.

Without warning, Mr. Xun said, "'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife...' "

"You read Jane Austen, Mr. Xun?"

"My favorite book is Pride and Prejudice."

A very Chinese title, when you come to think of it. He also liked Dickens and Thackeray. There was apparently plenty of time out here on the high plains of central Asia for the plump and populous English novel. He said that he also read religious texts. After middle school he had decided to become a Buddhist. "I wanted good fortune in my life," he said. He was now a firm believer.

"Want one of these?"

"Oh, yes," he said, gratefully accepting a portrait of the exiled Dalai Lama.

I had brought fifty pictures of the Dalai Lama with me. I had been told that they were impossible to obtain in China and that I was likely to win friends among people in this region if I handed them over. It was a simple expedient. I had no personal objection to presenting pictures of this solemn bespectacled incarnation of Buddha; and it seemed to work.

On the way back to the monastery we ran into a pilgrim who said he was a yak herd—he had about thirty of them. They sold for about $100 each (but Chris Bonington was paying $8 a day just to rent them), and he had had to sell two of his yaks to pay for this pilgrimage to Taer'si with his wife and two small children. The Chinese word for yak meant "hairy cow" (mao niu). It is a lovely long-haired animal, like a cow on its way to the opera.

Taer Monastery is known for its butter sculptures, and as yak butter is the medium they are pungent works of art. A hall about forty yards long held statues and friezes of multicolored flowers, cherubs, trees, temples, little animals, and gods and goddesses. One of the largest statues was of Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy. But the Yellow Sect interprets this deity as having thirty-six forms, and in this yak-butter statue she was a mustached man.

The monk watching over the butter sculpture took the portrait of the Dalai Lama I offered him and folded it into his robes. Then he gave me a surreptitious blessing.

"You have made him happy," Mr. Xun said.

This present Dalai Lama, number fourteen, was born not far away from here at Hong Nei Village in Pingan County, in 1935. He came to Taer Monastery at the age of two, borne on a sacred white yak and guided by three lamas from Lhasa who had gone in search of him.

It happened in this way. After the death of the 13th Dalai Lama, the corpse was found to be facing east. The head was repositioned, but soon after, it moved again, to face northeast. The state oracle put on his mask and went into a trance and he too faced northeast. The three lamas set out for the northeast to find the new Dalai Lama. They interviewed the parents of three or four children. One was Lhamo Dhondrub. His family was very poor. But there had been portents at his birth, in particular the strange visitations of crows in a place where there had never been any crows. Still, the lamas were not convinced. It takes a while for a Dalai Lama to be proven. But this child passed all the crucial tests, chose the correct beads when they were offered, answered all the questions, and was physically the Holy One: had oversize ears, sorrowful eyes, "tiger stripes" on his legs, and the rest of the eight bodily marks. He was brought to Taer'si and then to Lhasa. He was named: Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshi Tenzin Gyatso—Holy Lord, Gentle Glory, Eloquent, Compassionate, Learned Defender of the Faith, Ocean of Wisdom.

"When he was here in Taer'si he stayed over there, in a house."

The monk was pointing at nothing.

"I don't see anything."

"His house was wrecked by the Red Guards."

This monk was one of the few people I met in China who refused to talk to me about the Cultural Revolution. He was not afraid; he was simply furious and disgusted. He lived in the stables of Taer'si, in a small cell, with another monk. On the walls of his cell were pictures of Buddha. He had a teapot, a little brazier, a pallet and a faded quilt. It was not austere, but it was very simple. Over his tiny bed was a poster of a tiger. This monk too had a large can of yak butter.

In the market outside Taer'si business was slow. There were no foreign tourists because it was winter, and there were very few Chinese tourists. The shops sold beads, brassware, wolf pelts, Tibetan cloaks and hats and horns, walking sticks, Buddhas, and trinkets. Also this—in one shop, cans of cooking fat for sale. The label on the can said,

Norwegian EDIBLE FAT Sandarit Brand—5 lbs.

Supplied by the World Food Programme

Gift of Norway

Produced by Jahres Fabrikker A/S Sandefjord Norway

"How much?" I asked.

"Fifteen yuan a can."

"How many cans do you have?"

"Plenty."

The cases were stacked in his shop. How had the stuff arrived here? Perhaps through India or Afghanistan. In any event, this free gift, courtesy of the Norwegian people, was generating income for a prosperous little shop in remote Qinghai.

In that same market, Tibeten men were haggling over gray otter pelts, and buying beads, and swapping silver for chunks of amber. There was a brisk trade in pretty ornaments, and some were trying on the Chinese-made cowboy hats that are so popular among Tibetans.

Remembering the cassette player in Mr. Fu's little car, and our impending trip to Lhasa by road, I went into a music shop and bought some tapes. When I went back to Xining I did the same, but the music shops and department stores were so well stocked, I emboldened myself and asked for tapes with political songs on them.

"What kind of songs?" the salesgirl asked. "Do you know the names."

"The East Is Red,"' I said. "And one that starts, 'I love Peking's Tiananmen Square.' The Liu River Song.' The White-haired Girl.'"

They were the Maoist revolutionary songs that had been sung for the past two or three decades.

"We don't have those."

Mr. Xun said, "We are sick of those songs."

But they had pop songs, they had Hong Kong rock, and they had tapes of Oklahoma! They also had Strauss, Mendelssohn, Bach, and the complete Beethoven symphonies, which I bought for the trip to Tibet.

A few days later, as I was walking through Xining in the middle of the day, the sky darkened. It began to snow, at first softly, and then blizzarding down. No one seemed to mind. There was hardly any traffic, anyway. And the place looked better under a few inches of snow. A blind boy was caught in it, and tapping his stick he squawked when there was no sound or echo—in just a few minutes he had lost his way because he could not hear his stick in the snow. But he turned his face up and as the snow hit it he licked the flakes from his lips. Then a troop of black-cloaked Muslims came by and rescued the blind boy. The Muslims were either old bearded patriarchs with severe eyes, or else bratty boys fooling with each other. I followed them to their mosque, which was the biggest one I had seen in China, but like every other religious building I had seen, it had a vandalized-and-renovated look.

I stayed in Xining longer than I had planned because I liked its stuffed pancakes and snowy skies, its red-cheeked Hans and the ragged Tibetans in their greasy cloaks, who went smiling down the street. I climbed all the nearby hills—to the Tao Monastery, with its cave-dwelling monks and its temples balanced on cliffs (the whole thing looks like a wooden fire escape)—and from the tops of these hills I could see that Xining was larger than I had imagined. But the rest of the town was merely brown shoe-box-shaped buildings that had no visible function. After the snow melted, the harsh wind from the mountains whirled dust into the air. It was a terrible-looking place, but it was friendly; and I liked being the only barbarous foreign devil (yang guedze) in town.

22: The Train to Tibet

In the more remote regions of China, where people are not trusted to be orderly, the authorities devise specific drills for boarding the trains. Xining had one of the cruelest I had seen. The Hard Class passengers were lined up in front of the station—perhaps a thousand cold, impatient people in a long, shuffling line. But it was a directionless line. It led nowhere. It was formed in the windy plaza in front of the station, behind an ugly statue depicting a dozen contending minorities. That was appropriate, because the line for the train was composed of the same minorities, contending for seats.

Ten minutes before the train left, a railway guard blew a whistle, and these people snatched up their bales and bundles, and ran. They went flapping two hundred yards across the plaza, panted another hundred around the station, and wheezed down the platform to where the train sat steaming. That race sorted them out, and so there was a gasping free-for-all for the seats, women and children last.

It was a horrible train. But that was not a bad thing. It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places. I had a strong feeling—and I was proved right—that I would be traveling through one of the most beautiful landscapes in China. This train was dirty, scruffy and extremely crowded. Before it set off there was a fight among the passengers, as five heavily laden Tibetans tried to get into the wrong coach. No punches were thrown. It was all push and pull, and some snarling. The Tibetans smilingly resisted. The most explicit sign that it was a bad train was that it ran out of water an hour after it started. No water—for tea more than for washing—is a catastrophe rather than a simple hardship in China. But no one got angry. No one even complained. They inquired in froggy voices, and then took it without further muttering. I was impressed but annoyed. Without hot water this long trip—thirty hours or so—would be unbearable. We were headed for Golmud, in the Qinghai desert, and there the train stopped. I planned to make my own way to Lhasa, with Mr. Fu.

There was no food either. I made noodles in a cup with the last few inches of hot water. People congregated in the dining car, but nothing was served. There was a certain amount of shouting and lots of abuse, but these sounds were drowned by the rattling and clanking steam engine. There were no lights on the train either. I was exasperated, then uncomfortable, and finally bored stiff. I couldn't eat, I couldn't read. I hated the friendly honks of passengers, the yells, the squawking kids. I dug out some of my food and ate it, and wished I had more. The floor was covered with spat-out sunflower seeds.

I was in a compartment with a young man and an old man. The young one smoked, the old one spat. But they were otherwise very courteous. They were also going to Golmud. As we went along in the trembling train it struck me that we were a great distance from what most people would regard as fruitful and bounteous China. We were over the edge, way past the old Chinese frontier, four days at least from civilization and its vast, stinking cities.

The scenery was lovely. The train had risen and snaked through the mountain passes west of Xining and then had traveled down to the cold valleys. The frozen river was a startling chalky white, and it showed up clearly even in twilight, like a road covered with snow, winding through the brown valleys.

"Going to Xizang?" the old man asked, meaning Tibet.

He assumed that no one would go to Golmud to stay, and of course he was right. That was why this was the train to Tibet.

The other passengers were Salars in embroidered jackets, and small brown people wearing stiff little felt bowls on their heads, and Kazakhs in boots and goatskin cloaks, Huis in skullcaps, and enormous Tibetans with ragged rucksacks and shaven heads and greasy robes. They were mostly country folk—shepherds and yak herds and tent dwellers—heading home after their pilgrimage to Taer'si or else their foray at Xining market. There were many soldiers, there were rowdies and spitters and shitters and oddballs in long underwear who loitered in the train's corridors and blew their noses on the curtains.

The mountains nearby had bright, sharp peaks and warm slopes, but beneath them in the shadows, the valleys were frozen and the square mud-walled villages looked like habitations left over from the Neolithic age. They had been built by Mao's pioneers in the 1950s, the Hans who left settled homes and headed west to bring order—as if it needed more order than Buddhism—to Tibet. Night came quickly, a sky of black and blue that was all cloud, and beneath it the brilliant whiteness of the ice on the river.

I lay in bed, cursing the lack of hot tea on this cold train and reading The Hole in the Wall, by Arthur Morrison. It was an old novel about the East End of London in its days of banditry. Leaving Xining, I had asked the young man what those quarries were. He said, "Lime pits." In the novel, lime figures in a hideous way. Blind George, having been assaulted by the bully Dan Ogle, takes his revenge by sneaking into Ogle's room and pressing lime into his eyes to blind him ("the thumbs still drove at the eyes the mess of smoking lime that clung and dripped about Ogle's head ... Blind George gasped, 'Hit me now you's as blind as me!'").

That gave me a nightmare, and its terror arose from my confusing snow and lime—they looked the same—and disfiguring myself as I slipped in it. But it was fitful sleep. The cold in the train increased and it woke me a number of times. In the morning there were mountains in the north, and sandy waste all around. It was the roughest land I had seen in China, wild and stony, and later on, towards noon on this overcast day, there was snow thinly covering the desert—it had an uneven, spilled look—and swatches of snow lay in the ridges of the far-off mountains. The wind blew hard on the ground, and though it was flat, all its boulders were exposed. There was no vegetation at all, no one lived here, and even the railway stations seemed pointlessly positioned, because no one got on or off the train; the stationmaster stood at attention with his green flag—no one else.

There was still no water. It amazed me that no one complained. I spoke to a man in the kitchen who was actually pouring water into a pot. He did not reply. He came over to me, smiled briefly, then slammed the door in my face.

A boy in a smock was selling tickets in the dining car. I asked what the tickets were for. Noodles, he said. So I bought some tickets and lined up at a window leading on to the kitchen. I waited ten minutes, and when nothing happened, I said, "What about the noodles?"

"No more left!" the ticket seller said. He was smiling, but it was an ambiguous smile.

I complained: "I just gave you some money—"

"Come back in an hour."

"I want my noodles or else my money back."

"Later."

It was like prison, or the army, or an old-fashioned nuthouse.

I said, "You are not being very friendly. There is no food, no heat, no water on this train. This is very bad."

The ticket seller was still smiling. I wondered what would happen to me if I hit him. They would probably regard this as a very serious breach of discipline and send me to a far-off place for reeducation; indeed, they would probably send me here, to Qinghai, where they had sent so many other rebels. So I had nothing to fear: I was already in exile.

"Yes. It's bad," the ticket seller said, when he realized I was angry.

"At least get me some water for tea."

"There is no water."

"There is water in the kitchen. I saw it."

You win, he seemed to say, and he brought me a thermos of hot water, much to the delight of the men in my compartment as we shared it.

The landscape became even wilder, though I had not thought that to be possible. It was colder, windier, more rubbly; the mountains blacker. This made bleak Xinjiang seem lush by comparison. A cold wind howled across stony ground. It was hellish and memorable. I thought how the corners of China were so strange and inhospitable and unearthly the Chinese had come to believe that they represented the edges of the flat world they knew as The Middle Kingdom.

The younger man in the upper berth was Mr. Zhao. He came from Liaoning and said he had never seen a place as bad as this. He was a factory supervisor, something to do with magnesium, and was going to be in Golmud for several weeks.

"I'd rather be somewhere else," he said.

But I was pleased to be here, in such a wilderness. I sat in the safety of the train and looked upon the desolation of the land with a sense of mounting excitement. In the Lop Nor Desert of Xinjiang, and in Hami and Turfan they say, "Marco Polo came through here," or "This was the Silk Road." But here in Qinghai no claim at all could be made. There was never anyone here. It was death to attempt a crossing. No one passed through. And it was always like this—just as empty.

Mr. Zhao was traveling with his father, who visited him from another part of the train. This old man sat and stared at me. I tried to speak with him, but he was deaf. He had a deaf man's bright smile. Whenever I wrote in my notebook the old man put his teacup down and pressed his nose against my notebook page, marveling at my handwriting.

At last, the mountains and hills utterly vanished and in their place there was a light brown desert. I looked closer and saw that it was all low snowdrifts covered with fine sand. Later in the day it was stony. Still later, it was dark and rubbly—but still a desert—and the brown twisted symmetry of the rubble made it seem like an immensity of dog turds.

There were stations every twenty miles, but a station here was three small square buildings, the same brown as the turdy desert, standing in the wind, with emptiness on every side, and clouds madly blowing over them.

"It is not good," Mr. Zhao said. Obviously he missed the traffic and drizzle of urban Liaoning.

"I like this place," I said.

He erupted in the short spitting laugh that in China means You must be out of your mind.

"I just wish we had some water," I said.

I asked the Head of the Train, who seemed very young, why there was no water.

"Because this is the desert."

He spoke English with a slight American accent.

"But you have boilers," I said.

"The water in the boilers is for the engine."

"Are people complaining about the lack of water?"

"You are complaining," he said, in a friendly way, "and other people are complaining, too. But I tell everyone it is a problem, and they understand."

"I don't understand."

"Because you are a foreign friend," he said, which was a polite Chinese way of saying that I was a Martian.

He said he was twenty-two. I asked him his name.

"My name is Gold Country," he said in English.

"Jinguo?" I asked.

"Yes. My father named me that because he wanted China to be prosperous."

He seemed rather ineffectual to hold such an important job—he was in complete charge of the train. But he was pleasant. He said he had not had much formal education and in fact had learned his English on the Voice of America.

Towards the end of the afternoon the rubbly desert gave way to rockier ground, and mountains appeared to the southwest. Two mountains were distinct and beautiful, and the snow was a luminous bluish color, covering the entirety of these slopes because they faced north and received no sun. They were the mountains (I could see from my map) Yagradagze and Har Sai, each of them just under 20,000 feet. They rose out of great flat snowfields, while in the foreground was rough desert and the chugging train.

"It has recently snowed," Jinguo said. "That is not unusual. It often snows heavily in March here. And in the passes it snows all year. Foreign friends like snow!"

As if in welcome a flock of eight gray cranes gathered themselves together and made off, just ahead of the train, rising and still folding as they flew, like large mechanical bumbershoots blown sideways by the stiff wind.

Golmud was hardly a town. It was a dozen widely scattered low buildings, some radio antennas, a water tower. One of the few cars in town was Mr. Fu's ridiculous Galant. There were some buses, but they were the most punished-looking vehicles I had seen in China—and no wonder, for they toiled up and down the Tibetan Plateau.

"Snow," Mr. Fu said—his first word.

I had not expected this snow, and it was clear from his gloomy tone that neither had he. The snow lay thinly in the town, but behind the town it was deep and dramatic—blazing in the shadows of the mountain range.

We were still at Golmud Station. Mr. Fu had driven from Xining, and had met me. But he was very subdued in the car.

When I asked him how he was he did not reply directly. He said, "We cannot go to Lhasa tomorrow. Maybe the day after, or the day after that, or—"

I asked him why.

'The snow. It is everywhere—very deep," he said. He did not even glance at me. He was driving fast through the rutted Golmud streets—too fast, but I had seen him drive in Xining and I knew this to be normal. At the best of times he was a rather frantic driver. 'The snow is blocking the road."

"You are sure?"

"Yes."

"Did you see it?"

He laughed: Ha-ha! You idiot! "Look at it!"

He pointed out the window. But I was not looking at the snow. I noticed that he was wearing a pair of elegant driving gloves. He never took the wheel without donning them. They seemed as old-fashioned as spats or gaiters.

"Did anyone tell you that the road was blocked with snow?"

He did not reply, so that meant no. We continued this sparring. The snow was bad news—it glittered, looking as though it was there forever. But surely someone had a road report?

"Is there is a bus station in Golmud?"

He nodded. He hated my questions. He wanted to be in charge, and how could he be if I was asking all the questions? And he had so few answers.

"People say the road is bad. Look at the snow!"

"We will ask at the bus station. The bus drivers will know."

"First we go to the hotel," he said, trying to take command.

The hotel was another prisonlike place with cold corridors and squawks and odd hours. I had three cactuses in my room, and a calendar and two armchairs. But there were no curtains on the windows, and there was no hot water. "Later," they said. The lobby was wet and dirty from the mud that had been tracked in. An ornamental pond behind the hotel was filled with green ice, and the snow was a foot deep on the path to the restaurant. I asked about food. "Later," they said. Some of the rooms had six or eight bunk beds. Everyone inside wore a heavy coat and fur hat, against the cold. Why hadn't my cactus plants died? The hotel cost $9 for a double room, and $2 for food.

"Now we go to the bus station," I said.

Mr. Fu said nothing.

"We will ask someone about the snow."

I had been told that buses regularly plied between Golmud and Lhasa, especially now that that there were no flights—the air service to Tibet had been suspended. Surely one of these bus drivers would put us in the picture.

We drove to the bus station. On the way, I could see that Golmud was the ultimate Chinese frontier town, basically a military camp, with a few shops, a market and wide streets. There were very few buildings, but since they were not tall, they seemed less of a disfigurement. It was a place of pioneers—of volunteers who had come out in the 1950s, as they had in Xining. They had been encouraged by Mao to develop the poor and empty parts of China; and of course, Tibet had to be invaded and subdued, and that was impossible without reliable supply lines—settlements, roads, telegraph wires, barracks. First the surveyors and engineers came, then the railway people and the soldiers, and then the teachers and traders.

"What do you think of Golmud, Mr. Fu?"

"Too small," he said, and laughed, meaning the place was insignificant.

At the bus station we were told that the snow wasn't bad on the road. A Tibetan bus had arrived just that morning—it was late, of course, but it was explained that all the buses were late, even when there was no snow.

Mr. Fu was not placated. He pointed south and said, "Snow!"

He was clearly apprehensive, although I was convinced that we should set off.

I said, "We will go tomorrow, but we will leave early. We will drive until noon. If the snow is bad we will turn back and try again another day. If it looks okay we will go on."

There was no way that he could disagree with this, and it had the additional merit of being a face-saving plan.

We had a celebratory dinner that night—wood-ear fungus, noodles, yak slices and the steamed buns called mantou that Mr. Fu said he could not live without (he had a supply for the trip to Tibet). There was a young woman at the table, sharing our meal. She said nothing until Mr. Fu introduced her.

"This is Miss Sun."

"Is she coming with us?"

"Yes. She speaks English."

Mr. Fu, who spoke no English at all, was convinced that Miss Sun was fluent in English. But at no point over the next four or five days was I able to elicit any English at all from Miss Sun. Occasionally she would say a Chinese word and ask me its English equivalent.

"How do you say luxing in English?"

"Travel."

Then her lips trembled and she made a choking sound, "Trow."

And, just as quickly, she forgot even that inaccurate little squawk.

Over the dinner, I said, "What time are we leaving tomorrow?"

"After breakfast," Mr. Fu said.

The maddening Chinese insistence on mealtimes.

"We should get an early start, because the snow will slow us down."

"We can leave at nine."

"The sun comes up at six-thirty or seven. Let's leave then."

"Breakfast," Mr. Fu said, and smiled.

We both knew that breakfast was at eight. Mr. Fu was demanding his full hour, too. I wanted to quote a Selected Thought of Mao about being flexible, meeting all obstacles and overcoming them by strength of will. But I couldn't think of one. Anyway, a Mao Thought would have cut no ice with young, skinny, frantic Mr. Fu, who played Beethoven and wore driving gloves and had a freeloading girlfriend. He was one of the new Chinese. He even had a pair of sunglasses.

"We can buy some food and eat it on the way," I said, as a last desperate plea for an early start.

"I must eat mantou when it is hot," Mr. Fu said.

That annoyed me, and I was more annoyed the next morning when at half past nine I was still waiting for Mr. Fu, who was himself waiting for a receipt for his room payment. At last, near ten, we left, and I sat in the backseat, wishing I were on a train, and feeling sour at the prospect of spending the whole trip staring at the back of Miss Sun's head.

Lhasa was a thousand miles away.

Looking towards Tibet I had a glimpse of a black and vaporous steam locomotive plowing through a dazzling snowfield under the blue summits and buttresses of the Tanggula Shan. It was one of the loveliest things I saw in China—the chugging train in the snowy desert, the crystal mountains behind it, and the clear sky above. Everything visible was jewellike, smoke and sparkle in a diamond as big as Tibet.

About twenty miles farther, at the first high pass in the mountain range, was the end of the line in China—though only soldiers were allowed to go that far by rail—and after that there was only the narrow road, on which Mr. Fu was now skidding in his Galant.

Mr. Fu, I could see, was terrified of the snow. He did not know its effect firsthand. He had only heard scare stories. That was why he had wanted to stay in Golmud for another week, until the snow melted. He believed that there was no way through it. But the snow was not bad. The road was fairly clear—anyway, two distinct ruts had been mashed into it by passing trucks. But they had created a ridge in the center of the road and this hard hump of snow and ice kept bumping and tossing the little car with its low clearance.

In the first passes, so narrow they were nearly always in shadow, there was ice. Mr. Fu took his time. He was a poor driver—that had been obvious in the first five minutes of driving with him—but the snow and ice slowed him and made him careful. The icy stretches looked dangerous, but by creeping along (and trying to ignore the precipitous drop into the ravine by the roadside), we managed. For miles there was slippery snow, but this too Mr. Fu negotiated. Two hours passed in this way. It was a lovely sunny day, and where the sun had struck it, some of the snow had melted. But we were climbing into the wind, and even this sun could not mask the fact that it was growing colder as we gained altitude.

In his terror, Mr. Fu did not speak a word for those hours, but his breathing—and his snorts and gasps—were like a monologue.

We passed the first range of mountains, and behind them—though it was cold—there was less snow than on the Golmud side. Mr. Fu began to increase his speed. Whenever he saw a dry patch of road he floored it and sped onward, slowing only when more snow or ice appeared. Twice he hit sudden frost heaves, and I was thrown out of my seat and bumped my head.

"Sorry!" Mr. Fu said, still speeding.

Most of the curves were so tight that Mr. Fu had no choice but to go slowly. And then I sipped tea from my thermos and passed cassettes to Miss Sun, who fed them into the machine. After a hundred miles we had finished with Brahms. I debated whether to hand her the Beethoven symphonies, as I listened to Mendelssohn. I drank green tea and looked at the sunny road and snowy peaks and listened to the music, and I congratulated myself on contriving this excellent way of going to Lhasa.

There was another frost heave.

"Sorry!"

He did not slow down. The road straightened, and he went even faster—about eighty, which seemed ridiculous for such a small car on such a narrow road. The only other traffic was trucks—big, rusted ones, loaded, with flapping tarpaulins and Tibetan drivers. Mr. Fu always leaned on his horn and passed them carelessly, not seeming to notice whether there was a curve ahead.

He was an awful driver. He could not have been driving long. He had probably gone to a state driving school and earned a certificate, and had been assigned to a Xining work unit. The driving gloves were merely an affectation. He ground the gears when he set off, he gave the thing too much gas, he steered jerkily, he went too fast; and he had what is undoubtedly the worst habit a driver can have—but one that is common in China: going downhill he always switched off the engine and put the gears into neutral, believing that he was saving gas.

I am not a retiring sort of person, and yet I said nothing. A person who is driving a car is in charge, and if you are a passenger you generally keep your mouth shut. I had an urge to say something, and yet I thought: It's going to be a long trip—no sense spoiling it at the outset with an argument. And I wanted to see just how bad a driver Mr. Fu was.

I soon found out.

He was rounding bends at such speed that I found myself clutching the door handle in order to prevent myself being thrown across the seat. I could not drink my tea without spilling it. He was going ninety—I could not tell whether the dial said kilometers or miles per hour, but did it matter? And yet if I said slow down, he would lose face, his pride would be hurt, and wasn't it true that he had gotten us through the snow? It was now about noon, with a dry road ahead. At this rate we would get to our first destination, the town of Amdo, before nightfall.

"Play this one, Miss Sun."

Miss Sun took the Chinese cassette of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. She rammed it into the machine and the first few bars played. The sun was streaming through the windows. The sky was clear and blue, and the ground was gravelly beneath the gray hills. There were snowy peaks to the left and right of us, just peeping over the hills. We were approaching a curve. I was a little anxious but otherwise very happy on the highest road in the world, the way to Lhasa. It was a beautiful day.

I remembered all of this clearly, because it was about two seconds later that we crashed.

There was a culvert on the curve, and a high bump in the road that was very obvious. But Mr. Fu was doing ninety, and when he hit the bump, we took off—the car leaped, I felt weightless, and when we came twisting down we were heading into an upright stone marker on the right. Mr. Fu was snatching at the steering wheel. The car skidded and changed direction, plunging to the left-hand side of the road. All this time I was aware of wind rushing against the car, a noise like a jet stream. That increased and so did the shaking of the car as it became airborne again and plowed into a powerful wind composed of dust and gravel. We had left the road and were careering sideways into the desert. Mr. Fu was battling with the wheel as the car was tossed. My clearest memory was of the terrific wind pressing against the twisted car, the windows darkened by flying dust, and of a kind of suspense. In a moment, I thought, we are going to smash and die.

I was hanging onto the door handle. My head was jammed against the front seat. I was afraid that if I let go I would be thrown out the opposite door. I thought I heard Miss Sun screaming, but the car noise and the wind were much louder.

This went on for perhaps seven seconds. That is an achingly long time in a skidding car; terror has everything to do with time passing. I had never felt so helpless or so doomed.

So I was surprised when the car finally stopped. It was on its side. Only the deep gravelly sand had prevented it from turning over completely. I had to push the door with my shoulder to open it. The dust was still settling. The rear tire on my side of the car had been torn off, and I could hear it hissing.

I staggered away to be as far as possible from the Galant and saw Mr. Fu and Miss Sun gasping and coughing. Miss Sun was twitching. Mr. Fu looked stunned and sorrowful because he saw the damage to the car. All its chrome had been torn off, the grille was smashed, the wheel rim twisted, the doors smashed; and we were fifty yards from the road, sunk in desert gravel. It seemed incredible that the sun was still shining.

Mr. Fu laughed. It was a cough of blind fear that meant God, what now!

No one spoke. We were wordlessly hysterical that we had survived. Mr. Fu tramped over to me and smiled and touched my cheek. There was blood on his finger. I had gotten out of the car not knowing whether I was hurt—I suspected I might have been. But I checked myself. My glasses had smashed and dug into my cheek, but the wound was not bad—anyway, not too deep. I had a bump on my forehead. My neck ached. My wrist hurt. But I was all right.

It infuriated me that this had happened on a dry road, under sunny skies, so early in the trip. Now we were stuck, and it was all because of the incompetence of Mr. Fu. He had been driving too fast. But it was also my own fault for having said nothing.

Mr. Fu had unpacked a shovel and was digging around the car. What good was that? We could not go anywhere on three wheels. It seemed hopeless. I debated whether to grab my bag and start hitchhiking; but in which direction? Mr. Fu had got himself into this mess; he could get himself out of it. I could not imagine how this car could ever be dragged onto the road. I looked around and thought: This is one of the emptiest places in the world.

We took turns digging for a while, but this merely seemed a cosmetic endeavor, unearthing the car. And the more we saw of the car, the more wrecked it seemed.

After twenty minutes or so, we were exhausted. Miss Sun was making little piles of broken bits of plastic that had been torn from the grille and scattered. These she intended to save, as if collecting them showed her deep concern.

Some brown trucks were laboring slowly down the road. We had passed them hours ago.

"Let's stop them," I said.

"No," Mr. Fu said.

Chinese pride. He shook his head and waved me away. He knew they were Tibetans. What a loss of face for him if these savages witnessed this piece of stupid driving. He had no excuses.

"Come back," Mr. Fu said. "Help me dig."

But I did not turn. I was waving to the approaching trucks, and I was delighted to see them slowing down. It was a three-truck convoy, and when they parked, the Tibetans came flapping slowly through the desert, laughing with pleasure at the tipped-over car and Mr. Fu on his knees digging, and Miss Sun squatting like a lunatic with her piles of broken plastic. There were seven Tibetans. They looked very greasy in their old clothes, but I was reassured by their laughter and their squashed hats and their broken shoes: their ordinariness gave them the look of rescuers.

I dug out my "List of Useful Tibetan Phrases" and consulted it. I said, "Tashi deleg!" (Hello—Good luck!)

They returned the greeting and laughed some more.

I pointed to the car. "Yappo mindoo." (That is not good.)

They nodded and replied. True, they were saying. That's not good at all.

"Nga Amayriga nay ray," I said. (I'm an American.)

They said, "Amayriga, Amayriga!"

I looked at my list again and put my finger on a phrase. I said, "Nga Lhasa la drogi yin." (I am going to Lhasa.)

By now one of them had taken the shovel from Mr. Fu, and another was digging with his hands. One was unloading the trunk—pulling boxes out, unbolting the spare tire. Several of them were touching the wound on my face and going tsk, tsk.

"Want a picture of the Dalai Lama?" I said.

They nodded. Yes, yes!

The others heard. They said, "Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama!"

They dropped what they were doing and surrounded me as I pulled out the roll of portraits I had brought for just such an emergency. They were tough men, but they took the pictures with great gentleness and reverence, each one touching the paper to his head and bowing to me. They marveled at the pictures, while Mr. Fu and Miss Sun stood to the side, sulking.

"Everyone gets a picture," I said. "Now you have a nice portrait of the Dalai Lama. You are very happy, right?"—they laughed, hearing me jabber in English—"And you want to help us. Now let's straighten that axle, and get the wheel on, and push this goddamned car back onto the road. Get some ropes and hitch it up"—they were laughing and nodding—"and push us over there, because Nga Lhasa la drogi yin, and if I don't I am going to be very annoyed. What do you say?"

They all said "Ya, ya!" and set to work.

It took less than half an hour for them to fix the wheel and dig out the car, and then, with eight of us pushing and Mr. Fu gunning the engine, we flopped and struggled until the car was back on the road. As the wheels spun and everyone became covered with dust, I thought: I love these people.

Afterwards they showed me little pictures of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama on the sun visors in the cabs of their trucks.

"Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama," they chanted.

Mr. Fu thanked them in Chinese. It meant that he had to swallow his pride to do that. They didn't care. They laughed at him and waved him away.

It was now early afternoon. It had all been a shock, and yet I was encouraged because we had survived it. It seemed miraculous that we were still alive. But Mr. Fu said nothing. When we set off again, he seemed both dazed and frenzied. His glasses had broken in the crash, and I could see that he was wild-eyed. He was also very dirty. Miss Sun was sniffing, whimpering softly.

The car was in miserable shape. It looked the way I felt. I was surprised that it had restarted; I was amazed that its four wheels were turning. That is another way of saying that it seemed logical to me, a few minutes after we set off again, that a great screeching came from the back axle. It was the sort of sound that made me think that the car was about to burst apart.

We stopped. We jacked up the car. We took a back wheel off to have a closer look. The brakes were twisted, and pieces of metal were protruding into the rim. At low speeds this made a clackety-clack, and faster it rose to a shriek. There was no way to fix it. We put the wheel back on, and while Mr. Fu tightened the nuts, I looked around. I had never in my life seen such light—the sky was like a radiant sea; and at every edge of this blasted desert with its leathery plants were strange gray hills and snowy peaks. We were on the plateau. It was a world I had never seen before—of emptiness and wind-scoured rocks and dense light. I thought: If I have to be stranded anywhere, this is the place I want it to be. I was filled with joy at the thought of being abandoned there, at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

"I think it is heating up," Mr. Fu said, after he had driven a hundred yards down the road.

He was breathing hard and noisily through his nose. He slammed on the brakes, ran around to the back wheel and spat on the rim. It wasn't frustration. It was his way of determining how hot the hub was.

He remained kneeling by the back wheel, his head bowed.

"Are you all right, Mr. Fu?"

He stood up and staggered, and then he grinned horribly at me. He seemed manic. He yelled that he was fine, and it was obvious from the way he said it that he wasn't.

"It is very high here!" he cried. There was dust on his face. His hair was bristly. His color had changed, too. He looked ashen.

After that, we kept stopping. The wheel noise was dreadful. But that was not the worst of it. Mr. Fu's driving changed. Usually he went fast—and then I told him clearly to slow down. (No one will ever make me sit still in a speeding car again, I thought: I will always protest.) Mr. Fu's overcareful slow driving unnerved me almost as much as his reckless driving.

This did not last long. We came to a pass that linked the Tanggula Shan with the Kunlun Shan. It was a Chinese belief that in a valley nearby there was a trickle that rose and became the great brown torrent that ended in Shanghai, the Great River that only foreigners know as the Yangtze. The river is one of the few geographical features that the Chinese are genuinely mystical about. But they are not unusual in that. Most people are bewitched by big rivers.

This pass was just under 17,000 feet. Mr. Fu stopped the car, and I got out and looked at a stone tablet that gave the altitude and mentioned the mountains. The air was thin, I was a bit breathless, but the landscape was dazzling—the soft contours of the plateau, and the long folded stretches of snow, like beautiful gowns laid out all over the countryside, a gigantic version of the way Indians set out their laundry to dry. I was so captivated by the magnificence of the place I didn't mind the discomfort of the altitude.

"Look at the mountains, Mr. Fu."

"I don't feel well," he said, not looking up. "It's the height."

He rubbed his eyes. Miss Sun was still whimpering. Would she scream in a minute?

I got in and Mr. Fu drove fifty yards. His driving had worsened. He was in the wrong gear, the gearbox was hiccuping; and still the rear wheel made its hideous ratcheting.

Without warning, he stopped in the middle of the road and gasped, "I cannot drive any more!"

He wasn't kidding. He looked ill. He kept rubbing his eyes.

"I can't see! I can't breathe!"

Miss Sun burst into tears.

I thought: Oh, shit.

"What do you want to do?" I asked.

He shook his head. He was too ill to contemplate the question.

I did not want to hurt his pride, especially here at a high altitude, so I said carefully, "I know how to drive a car."

"You do?" He blinked. He was very thin. He looked like a starving hamster.

"Yes, yes," I said.

He gladly got into the back. Miss Sun hardly acknowledged the fact that I was now sitting beside her. I took the wheel and off we went. In the past few hours the ridiculous little Nipponese car had been reduced to a jalopy. It was dented; it made a racket; it smoked; and the most telling of its jalopy features was that it sagged to one side—whether it was a broken spring or a cracked axle I didn't know. It had received a mortal blow, but it was still limping along. I had to hold tight to the steering wheel. The sick car kept trying to steer itself into the ditch on the right-hand side of the road.

Mr. Fu was asleep. This cycle of frenzy and fatigue was something I had seen before in China. It seemed a Chinese way of living: working very hard, with tremendous concentration or else flailing arms, and then stopping suddenly and going to sleep. Often in trains, two chattering and gesticulating people would crap out and begin to snore like bullfrogs.

I could see in the rearview mirror that Mr. Fu's color had changed, the sallowness had replaced his papery look of fear and illness. In sleep he looked calmer, and he had a bold snore. Miss Sun, too, was asleep. I pushed in Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 and continued towards Lhasa. I liked this. I liked listening to music. I liked the fact that the other passengers were asleep. I loved the look of Tibet. I might have died back there on the road; but I was alive. It was wonderful to be alive and doing the driving.

The road was oddly straight—few curves, no mountainside stretches, none of the alpine circling and hairpin bends I had expected. I had to force myself to keep my eyes on the road, because I kept wanting to look at the surrounding landscape. I was driving in a dry snow-flecked desert that was quite flat, and the snowy peaks at the edge were like the heads and shoulders of giant druids showing around an immense table. In the distance the mountains were vast and black, rather frightening, with sharp cliffs and flinty-looking slopes. But the road was even. It was innocent looking. No other vehicles appeared on it. It occurred to me that a person could easily travel down this Tibetan road on a bicycle, and I began to plan a trip that involved riding a bike around Tibet.

There were no people here that I could see. But there were yaks grazing on some of the hillsides—presumably the herds of the nomadic tent-dwelling Tibetans who were said to roam this part of the province. The yaks were black and brown, and some had white patches. They were ornamented with ribbons in their long hair, and they all had lovely tails, as thick as any horse's. In some places, herds of Tibetan gazelles grazed near the road.

Mr. Fu slept on, but Miss Sun woke up, and before I could change the cassette, she slipped in one of her own. It was the sound track of an Indian movie, in Hindi; but the title song was in English.

I am a disco dancer!

I am a disco dancer!

This imbecilic chant was repeated interminably with twangling from an electric guitar.

"That is Indian music," I said. "Do you like it?"

"I love it," Miss Sun said.

"Do you understand the words?"

"No," she said. "But it sounds nice."

It sounded awful. I kept driving. I had no idea where we were, but it hardly mattered. There was only one road. The accident had made me cautious. I was averaging about fifty miles an hour. And the car was making such ominous noises I thought that if I went any faster it would fly apart. Mr. Fu woke up, but he showed no inclination to drive. I was glad of that, because it was glorious to be bouncing down this Tibetan road in full sunshine, past the yaks and the gazelles, with mountains all around.

At about four we were almost out of gas. Mr. Fu said he had spare gas in the trunk, in big cans, but just as I noticed the gas gauge, we approached a small settlement.

"Stop here," Mr. Fu said.

He directed me to a shack, which turned out to be a gas station—old-fashioned gas nozzles on long hoses. It was, like all gas stations in Tibet, run by the People's Liberation Army.

"We should get the tire fixed, too."

Mr. Fu said, "No. They don't fix tires."

In Xining I had asked Mr. Fu to bring two spares. He had brought one, and it was being used. So we were traveling without a spare.

"Where will we get the tire fixed?"

He pointed vaguely down the road, towards Lhasa. It meant he didn't have the slightest idea.

I walked over to the soldier filling the tank.

"Where are we?"

"This is Wudaoliang."

Names look so grand on a map. But this place hardly justified being on a map. How could a gas station, some barracks and a barbed-wire fence even deserve a name? And the name was bad news, because Wudaoliang was not even halfway to our destination, which was Amdo.

As if to make the moment operatic, the weather suddenly changed. A wind sprang up, clouds tumbled across the sun, and the day grew very dark and cold. My map was flapping against the car roof. It would be night soon.

"When will we get to Amdo, Mr. Fu?"

"About six o'clock."

Wrong, of course. Mr. Fu's calculations were wildly inaccurate. I had stopped believing that he had ever been on this road before. It was possible that my map was misleading—it had shown roads that didn't exist, and settlements that were no more than ruins and blowing sand.

Mr. Fu had no map. He had a scrap of paper with seven towns scribbled on it, the stops between Golmud and Lhasa. The scrap of paper had become filthy from his repeatedly consulting it. He consulted it again.

"The next town is Yanshiping."

We set off. I drove; Mr. Fu dozed.

Miss Sun played "I am a disco dancer."

After an hour we passed a hut, some yaks and a ferocious dog.

"Yanshiping?"

"No."

In the fading light and freezing air this plateau no longer seemed romantic. "This country makes the Gobi seem fertile in comparison," a French traveler once wrote. It was true. Moonscape is the word most often applied to such a place; but this was beyond a moonscape—it was another universe entirely.

There were more settlements ahead. They were all small and all the same: huts with stained whitewashed square walls, flat roofs, and red, blue and green pennants and flags with mantras written on them, flying from propped-up bush branches. As these prayer flags flapped, so the mantras reverberated in the air, and grace abounded around them. There were more yaks, more fierce dogs.

"Yanshiping?"

"No."

It was nearly dark when we came to it. Yanshiping was twenty houses standing in mud on a curve in the road. There were children and dogs, yaks and goats. Several of the dogs were the biggest and fiercest I had ever seen in my life. They were Tibetan mastiffs—their Tibetan name means simply "watchdog." They lollopped and slavered and barked horribly.

"There is nowhere to stay here," Mr. Fu said, before I could ask—I was slowing down.

"What's the next town?"

He produced his filthy scrap of paper.

"Amdo. There is a hotel at Amdo."

"How far is Amdo?"

He was silent. He didn't know. After a moment, he said, "A few hours."

"Hotel" is a nice word, but China had taught me to distrust it. The more usual Chinese expression was "guest house." It was the sort of place I could never identify properly. It was a hospital, a madhouse, a house, a school, a prison. It was seldom a hotel. But, whatever, I longed to be there. It was now seven-thirty. We had been on the road for ten hours.

We continued in the dark. It was snowier here, higher and colder, on a winding road that was icy in places. There was another pass, choked with ice that never melts at any time in the year because of the altitude, another 17,000 footer.

Mr. Fu woke and saw the snow.

"Road! Watch the road!" he yelled. "Lu! Lu! Looooooo!"

The altitude put him to sleep, but each time he woke he became a terrible nag. I began to think that perhaps many Chinese in authority were nags and bores. He kept telling me to watch the road, because he was frightened. I wanted to say, You almost got us killed, Jack, but to save his face I didn't.

I often mistook the lights of distant trucks on the far side of this defile for the lights of Amdo. There was no vegetation at this altitude, and the freezing air was clear. In the darkness I saw these pinpricks of light.

"Is that Amdo?"

"Watch the road!" Mr. Fu's voice from the backseat set my teeth on edge. "Lu! Loooo!"

His nervousness made him nag. He was the passenger. I was the chauffeur. They were both in the backseat now—he and Miss Sun—she was whimpering still, he was chattering. "Keep your eyes on the road," he was saying. "Watch the road! That's not Amdo—it's a truck!"

Now and then he would tap me on the shoulder and cry, "Toilet!"

That was the greatest euphemism of all. It was usually Miss Sun who needed to have a slash. I watched her totter to the roadside and creep into a ditch, and there just out of the wind—and it was too dark even for the yaks to see her—she found relief.

Three more hours passed in this way. I wondered whether we might not be better off just pulling off the road and sleeping in the car. Midnight on the Tibetan Plateau, in the darkness and ice and wind, was not a good time to be driving. But the problem was the narrowness of the road. There was nowhere to pull off. There was a ditch on either side. If we stopped we would be rammed by one of the big army trucks that traveled by night.

I was glad we were still going. Why didn't the back wheel fall off? Why was the axle still screaming? Why didn't we get a flat tire? After all, we were traveling without a spare. Nothing bad happened. The moon came out from behind a cloud and showed me a snowy mountainside and the black pit of a valley beside the road.

I glanced at it and almost immediately Mr. Fu yelled at me.

Towards midnight I saw the sign saying Amdo. In the darkness it seemed a bleak and dangerous place. I did not know then that it would look much worse in daylight.

"We are staying at the army camp," Mr. Fu said.

To save face, Mr. Fu changed places with me and drove the last twenty feet to the sentry post. Then he got out and argued with the sentry.

He returned to the car trembling.

"They are full," he said.

"What now?"

"The guest house."

Miss Sun was sobbing quietly.

We drove across a rocky field. There was no road. We came to a boarded-up house, but before we could get out, a mastiff bounded into the car lights. It had a big square head and a meaty tongue, and it was slavering and barking. It was as big as a pony, something like the Hound of the Baskervilles, but vastly more sinister.

"Are you getting out?"

"No," Mr. Fu said, hoarse with fear.

Beyond the crazed and leaping dog there were yaks sleeping, standing up.

Mr. Fu kept driving across this rocky hillside, pretending he was on a road. Was he trying to prove something, after hours of yelling in the backseat?

There were more dogs. I could take the yak-meat diet; I could understand why the Tibetans didn't wash; I found the cold and the high altitude just about bearable; I could negotiate the roads. But I could not stand those fierce dogs. I was not angry or impatient. I was scared shitless.

"There is a guest house," Mr. Fu said, grinning at some dim lights ahead.

It was a dirty two-story building with bars on the windows. I guessed it was a prison, but that was all right. We checked for dogs, and while Miss Sun threw up next to the car, we went inside. A Tibetan sat on a ragged quilt on the floor, gnawing raw flesh off a yak bone. He was black with dirt, his hair was matted, he was barefoot in spite of the cold. He looked exactly like a cannibal, tearing shreds of red meat off a shank.

"We need a room," Mr. Fu said in Chinese.

The Tibetan laughed and said there was no room. He chewed with his mouth open, showing his teeth, and then with aggressive hospitality he pushed the bone into my face and demanded I take a bite.

I took out my "List of Useful Tibetan Phrases."

"Hello. I am not hungry," I said in Tibetan. "My name is Paul. What is your name? I am from America. Where are you from?"

"Bod," the cannibal said, giving me the Tibetan name for Tibet. He was grinning at my gloves. I was cold—it was way below freezing in this room. He gestured for me to sit with him on his quilt, and in the same motion he waved Mr. Fu away.

It is a Tibetan belief that all Tibetans are descended from a sexually insatiable ogress who had six children after copulating with a submissive monkey. It is just a pretty tale, of course; but looking at this man it was easy to see how the myth might have originated.

He batted away Mr. Fu's identity card, but he took a great interest in my passport. Then he put his juicy bone down and fingered the pages, leaving bloodstains on them. He laughed at my passport picture. He compared the picture with my gray, frozen face and the wound under my eye. He laughed again.

"I agree. It's not a very good likeness."

He became very attentive, hearing English spoken, like a dog listening to footsteps in the driveway.

"Do you have rooms?" I asked. I held out a picture of the Dalai Lama.

He mumbled a reply. His shaven head and big jaw made him look apelike. I switched to Chinese, because I couldn't understand what he was saying. He took the picture gently.

"One person—six yuan," he said, clutching the portrait.

"Oh, thank you, thank you," Mr. Fu said, abasing himself.

"Tea, tea," the cannibal said, offering me a tin kettle.

I drank some salty, buttery tea, and as I did, a truck pulled up outside. Twelve Tibetans, women and children, entered the room, went into the corridor, threw quilts on the floor and fell on them.

I paid my money, got my bag from the car and found an empty room on the second floor. The light on the stairwell had shown me what sort of a place it was. Someone had vomited on the landing. The vomit was frozen. There was worse farther on, against the wall. It was all icy, and so the smell wasn't bad. It was very dirty, a bare cement interior that was grimmer than any prison I had ever seen. But the real prison touch was that all the lights were on—not many of them, but all bare bulbs. There were no light switches. There were howls and murmurs from the other rooms. There was no water, and no bathroom. No toilet except the stairwell.

Not far away I heard Miss Sun berating Mr. Fu in an exasperated and whining sick-person's voice. I closed the door. There was no lock. I jammed an iron bed against it. There were three iron bedsteads in the room, and some reeking quilts.

I realized that I was shivering. I was cold, but I was also hungry. I ate half a jar of Ma Ling orange segments, and a banana, and I made tea from the hot water in the jug I had brought. I was light-headed and somewhat breathless from the altitude, and also nauseated from the frosty vomit in the corridors. Just as I finished eating all the lights went out: midnight.

I put on my gloves, my hat, my extra sweater, my coat, my third pair of socks and thermal-lined shoes; and went to bed. I had been cold in my life, but I had never worn a hat with earmuffs to bed before. I had a quilt over me and a quilt under me. Even so, I could not get warm. I could not understand why. My heart palpitated. My toes were numb. I tried to imagine what it must be like to be Chris Bonington. After a while I could see moonlight behind the thick frost on the window.

In the middle of the night I got up to piss. I used an enamel basin that I guessed was a chamber pot. In the morning the piss was frozen solid. So were the rest of my orange segments. So were my quails' eggs. Everything that I had that could freeze had frozen.

I had hardly slept, but I was gladdened by the sunlight. I found some peanuts and ate them. I ate my frozen banana. I visited the cannibal (he looked even dirtier in daylight) and drank some of my own tea with him. He did not want Chinese tea. He made a face as if to say, Disgusting stuff! How can you drink it?

The frail warmth of the morning sun only made the place worse by wakening the stinks on the stairs and in the corridors. There were dark clumps and little twists of human shit throughout the building. In this heavenly country, this toilet.

Mr. Fu was up and fussing. He said Miss Sun was not at all well. And he felt sick, too.

"Then let's go," I said.

"Breakfast first."

"Oh, God!"

But he insisted.

There was a dead dog lying at the entrance to the smoky hut where Mr. Fu and Miss Sun had their breakfast: eggs stir-fried in yak fat. Other dogs cowered and barked. An old dead sheep was flattened on the road, as stiff and worn as a hearth rug. Across a frozen pond was the army camp. A few scattered buildings stood in the rubble of the settlement. Tibetans with crimson headdresses watched me walk down the path. I kept walking until the dogs started barking, and then I headed back to the main road. It was full of dead animals that had been turned into flat, stiff corpses—gruesome little mats in the road.

Another late start. But this time I did calculations on my map, estimated the distances between towns, figured an average speed, and felt much better until I remembered the tire.

"Did you get the spare tire fixed, Mr. Fu?"

He had said that he would do it this morning, before breakfast. Although Amdo was a dump, there were garages here; and it was the only place of any size for miles.

"No. Better to get the tire fixed in Nagqu."

That was over a hundred miles away.

Mr. Fu took the wheel. A few miles down the road he stopped the car and clawed at his face.

"I cannot do it!" he shrieked. In Chinese it sounded like a pitiful surrender.

It was another attack of the wobblies. I welcomed it; I soothed Mr. Fu as he crept into the backseat. I slotted Brahms into the cassette player and drove south, under sunny skies.

I was feeling wonky myself. I had a bump on my head, a neck ache, and a deep cut on my face from the car crash. My right wrist hurt, probably a sprain, from my holding on during our careering. And the altitude affected me, too—I felt light-headed and nauseated, and my short walk in Amdo had given me heart palpitations. But this was nothing compared to Mr. Fu's agony. The color had drained from his face, his mouth gaped, and after a while he simply swooned. Miss Sun also went to sleep. Crumpled together on the seat, they looked like poisoned lovers in a suicide pact.

There were no more settlements until Nagqu, nothing except the windswept tableland, and it was so cold that even the drongs, the wild yaks, were squinting and the herds of wild asses did nothing but raise their heads and stare at the badly damaged Mitsubishi Galant. After a few hours the road ran out and was no more than loose rocks and boulders, and more wild asses. The boulders clunked against the chassis and hammered the tires. We had no spare tire. We were ridiculously unprepared for Tibet, but I did not mind very much. I felt, having survived that crash, that we had come through the worst of it. There is something about the very fact of survival that produces a greater vitality. And I knew I was much safer as long as I was driving. Mr. Fu was not really very good at all, and as a nervous new driver, he had no business to be in Tibet.

On some hillsides there were huts flying colored prayer flags. I was cheered by them, by the whiteness of whitewashed huts, by the smoke coming out of the chimneys, and by the clothes that people wore—fox-fur hats, silver buckles, sheepskin coats, big warm boots. Miles from anywhere I saw a mother and daughter in bright, blowing skirts and bonnets climbing a cliff side path, and a handsome herdsman sitting among his yaks, wearing a wonderful red hat with huge earflaps.

Mr. Fu was very annoyed that there was nowhere to eat at Nagqu. He was stiff and cranky from the altitude, and reluctant to stay, but I pestered him into finding someone to fix the spare. This was done in a shed, with fires and chisels; and while this primitive vulcanizing went on, I walked around the town. John Avedon's In Exile From the Land of Snows (1984), which is mainly an anti-Chinese account of the recent turmoil in Tibet, and pleasantly passionate on the subject of the Dalai Lama, claims that Nagqu is the center of the Chinese nuclear industry. The gaseous diffusion plants, the warhead assembly plants and the research labs have been moved here from the Lop Nor Desert. Somewhere in this vicinity—though you'd never know it from looking at it—there was a large repository of medium-range and intermediate-range nuclear missiles. But all I saw were yaks.

Snow came down like soap flakes, big damp things. It was only minus ten centigrade, but in the high wind and blowing snow it felt colder. I took shelter in a Chinese store and ate my jar of Golden Star pickled quails' eggs. I noted that a Tibetan woman was buying an orange plastic bag, and a middle-aged Tibetan man was trying out a blond doll. A metal key stuck out from between her buttocks, like an enema nozzle; he wound her up and her legs and arms moved. The man laughed and bought the thing.

On a back street of Nagqu I was accosted by some Tibetans who wanted to change money. They also had artifacts—copper tobacco tins and silver coins and Tibetan seals, for stamping messages or names onto documents. I bought a silver seal with a Tibetan motto that said, Worship the Sky for Enlightenment.

I wanted to hand out pictures of the Dalai Lama in this remote place, but to avoid attracting a crowd I followed individuals down the little icy lanes and, when there was no one else around, I whispered in phrase-book Tibetan, "Dalai Lama picture, Dalai Lama picture."

They hissed with pleasure as I handed over the pictures, and they always touched them to their foreheads before folding them into their quilted coats. They reacted to these pictures in a way that I found deeply moving. It was not their profuse thanks—though Tibetan gratitude was hardly ritualized: they were able to communicate great warmth in the simplest gestures. There was no question about their devotion to their god-king, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso.