15: The Slow Train to Langxiang: Number 295

"Is it cold outside?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

"It is the Chinese way," I said.

"Very much so," he replied.

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

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

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

"I like it," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Near Boston."

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

"How did you know that?"

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

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

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

"Paul Revere."

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm cold," I said.

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

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

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

"What food do they have?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"Do you want noodles?" I asked.

"Anything but noodles," Mr. Tian said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Tian opened his mouth and a crowlike complaining came out of it.Ah goon Scamba Fey!


Party say roomee tie!


Renmanbee da warn hoo-day…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you eat these?" I asked.

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

"These rats are medicine?"

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

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

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

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

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

"It will get warmer."

"When?"

"In three or four months."

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

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

I was jumping up and down to restore my circulation.

Mr. Tian was simply standing patiently.

"What about a room?" I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Did the peasants go away?"

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

"Do you think that's better?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Let's go today."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do Koreans marry Han people?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he kept doing it just the same.

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sing something else."

He suddenly snatched his woolly cap off and shrieked: Oh, Carol!


I am but a foooool!


Don't ever leave me—


Treat me mean and croool…

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

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

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

"What are you doing?"

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

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

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

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

"Are you going to eat this bird?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What are you doing?"

"It is our lunch break!"

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

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

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

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

"This is wonderful."

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

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

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

"Maybe have four children."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The government sometimes tells lies," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What if you don't lose face?"

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

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

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

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

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

"What was the worst thing that happened?"

"That people died."

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

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

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

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