Riding the Iron Rooster

16: The Boat Train to Dalian: Number 92

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

We were having an animated conversation, Mr. Tian and I. He was describing how the various Red Guard factions had battled each other on the streets of Harbin — school against school, factory against factory, each group claiming that they were the purest Maoists. At the station, Mr. Tian told me how the walls had been daubed with slogans and Mao portraits. "It was a total waste," he said. Chinese candor always touched me and made me grateful. When the whistle of my approaching train blew I took off my sheepskin mittens, my scarf, and the winter hat I had bought for this cold place. I handed them to Mr. Tian.

"I won't need them in Dalian," I said.

Mr. Tian shrugged, shook my hand, and without another word walked off. It was the Chinese farewell: there was no lingering, no swapping of addresses, no reminiscence, nothing sentimental. At the moment of parting they turned their backs, because you ceased to matter and because they had so much else to worry about. It was like the departure after a Chinese meal, the curtain falling abruptly with a thud and everyone vanishing. I did not mind that such rituals were perfunctory — it certainly kept them from being hypocritical. Mr. Tian was soon a little blue figure in a mob of blue figures.

But I should never have given him my gloves and scarf. This was another unheated train. Did they ever heat anything? It was in the low forties (Fahrenheit) in the compartment and even colder in the dining car. There was ice on all the floors and frost on the windows. It was too cold to sit still, so I walked back and forth, from one end of the train to the other.

But what was I complaining about? Outside, people were digging and repairing fences and walking to work and hanging laundry outside their small huts in the snowfields. And the strong wind that battered the windows of the train was yanking at these people, too. They looked plump in their winter clothes, like stuffed dolls, and their faces were crimson — visible from a long way off. Knowing what their lives must be like, I resolved not to grumble about my lunch of dried fish and gristly meat.

Changchun, which we reached in the early afternoon, was full of vaporous locomotives. The freezing weather made them immensely steamy, and great gusts billowed from the fourteen engines shunting at the station. Icicles hung from their black wheels, and smoke came out of their chimneys, and shrieks of steam from their pistons. It was impressive for being a study of fire and ice, and also for its tones of black and white, the engines bowling along the snowy tracks.

One of China's major film studios is in Changchun, and at that moment a coproduction about the life of China's last emperor was being made. If the film had concerned his time as emperor it could have been a very short film. He was only three years old when he took the throne and he abdicated three years later, in 1912. His name was Pu Yi, but he took the name Henry when he was older. His main recreation was watching Harold Lloyd movies. And later, when the Japanese formed the puppet state of Manchukuo and needed a puppet to run it, they chose Henry and worked his strings in Changchun until the silly state collapsed and Henry was arrested as a war criminal by the Russians. His life ended in the same violent confusion as it began, when he died of cancer at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Henry Pu Yi represented everything that Mao set his face against: the decadent Manchus, the ruling class, wealth, privilege, Japanese collaboration and the humiliations of Chinese history. No wonder when the time came they seized Henry Pu Yi and had his guts for garters.

I debated whether to stay in Changchun; but it was an easy decision. Changchun was very cold, so I moved on. The ice thickened on the walls of the train. Time passed slowly. I put on all my clothes, bit by bit, until by the middle of the afternoon I was sitting with my hands up my sleeves, reading the The Analects of Confucius and turning the pages with my nose.

Beyond the glittering rime on the window, small padded moon-people went slowly across the snow. And so did cyclists and ox carts and school kids carrying knapsacks. I saw horses hopelessly foraging for food among blunt spikes of stubble. Sometimes there was a great whiteness, its only identifiable feature a row of telephone poles — the Chinese variety, mile upon mile of tragic-looking crosses. We were in the province of Jilin now, and a cloud of frozen vapor hovered close to the snowy ground.

Few people in the train looked out of the window. They were eating noodles out of tin cups, guzzling tea, shouting or sleeping. Many were taking advantage of the recent relaxation of the rules governing card games. They were actually gambling in Hard Class, and some groups were playing mah-jongg.

As I walked along from coach to coach I said hello and after a few exchanges, "It's cold."

They just smiled, or shrugged. They were indifferent to the icicles in the toilet, the ice on the floor, the wind whipping through the dining car, the igloo that had formed between the coaches. I admired them for not caring. I had seen plenty of wimps in China, but the predominating characteristic of the Chinese was stoicism.

Everyone winced when a man waved his arms at me in a kind of aimlessly dangerous way and began screaming, "America! Kissinger! Nixon!"

He went on chanting this and following me.

Someone said, "He's drunk."

"He's been drinking wine," someone else said.

But he wasn't drunk — he was crazy. A Chinese person who was solitary and aggressive had to be unbalanced.

He kept following me, so I shouted back. "I hear you, comrade, but I don't understand."

People laughed at that, because it was a stock phrase for stonewalling someone and pretending to be dim. He got off the train at Siping, on the border of the province of Liaoning. He was still raving.

In the early winter sunset, all the villages were smoking because it was mealtime — all the stoves alight. The tiny huts lay like simple blocks on the hillsides, toy towns in the snow, and rising from them were symmetrical cones of smoke.

In my rambles through the train I met a Frenchman, Nicolas, who was on his way back to Peking. He was a carpenter from Nice. He had no idea where he was. He did not speak Chinese, and he was trying to teach himself English. He said he was not enjoying China at all. The food was disgusting, he said. The hotels were filthy. Had I been to Harbin?

"I am in Harbin," he said. "I am very cold. I go into a cinema to get warm. It is not a cinema! It is a big room. With shares. Chinese people in the shares. And they are all watching a small television. I sat there all day. It was not warm, but it was better than the street."

We swapped stories of low temperatures in Manchuria.

He was reading a textbook titled Easy Steps to English, but he was only on chapter three.

"How can you say this word?" he asked, putting his mitten on the vocabulary list.

"Believe."

"Booleeve," he said.

"Want an English lesson?" I said, because I saw a way of asking him a number of personal questions in this way. He gladly agreed.

I explained the verb believe and then said we were going to practice a number of drills.

"Nicolas, do you believe in God?"

"Non. I do not booleeve een Gott."

"Do you believe that Klaus Barbie is guilty of Nazi war crimes?"

"Maybe."

"You have to repeat the whole sentence."

"Maybe I booleeve…"

I asked him about the Chinese, the French, the Americans; about his travels, his ambitions, his family. But his answers weren't interesting, and eventually I abandoned the effort and suggested that he should try to learn Chinese.

The lights in the train were dim. The snow on the floor had not melted. I was stiff from the cold. Nicolas said he wished he were back in Nice. I tried to think where I wanted to be. I considered the possibilities and reached the conclusion that I wanted to be right here, doing what I was doing — heading south towards Dalian on the China coast. Perhaps it was a simple choice — of being home or being elsewhere. Surely this was elsewhere?

By the time the train reached Shenyang, after thirteen hours of travel from Harbin, I decided that I had had enough. I could get another train tomorrow and continue on my way. In the meantime I could look at Shenyang.

It was a Chinese city, and therefore a nightmare, and tonight it was thirty below in Shenyang — tiny needles and etchings of ice on every surface. The streets were practically deserted, and on this dark night, in the glare of its few lights, Shenyang had the look of a city depicted in an old black-and-white photograph. It was perfectly still. My problem was that when I exhaled, my glasses became opaque with frost.

It is an official Chinese government statistic that one-third of all Chinese travelers on trains are going to meetings in distant cities. It is one of the bonuses of any job. The pay is lousy but the meetings are held in tourist spots, and so what is supposed to be a business trip is actually a sort of holiday. The same system operates when American companies hold sales conferences in places like Acapulco or the Bahamas.

So many Chinese people travel, even in sub-zero winter weather like this, that one is never sure of getting a hotel room. But in Shenyang I had no problem. The 500-room Phoenix Hotel had only six other guests. It was only seven-thirty at night, but already the dining room was closed. I begged them to open it, and they said I could eat providing I did not require anything very fancy. The specialities of the Phoenix were bear's paw (350 yuan), moose nose, and "fillet of pork in the shape of a club." I had crunchy chicken and cabbage. It was no good, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that for the first time in weeks I was warm. This hotel was heated. My room was full of light fixtures. There was imitation fur on the walls. The toilet didn't work, but the room had a television.

I needed help getting a ticket to Dalian because (but how was I to know this?) the trains to Dalian were always full and tickets were almost unobtainable at short notice. That was how I met Mr. Sun.

Mr. Sun was self-educated. He had spent what should have been his school days on a farm, another casualty of the Cultural Revolution. But he still believed in self-reliance and serving the people, and in order and obedience. In the course of his getting me a train ticket we had several illuminating conversations, and I was glad he was a frank hard-liner, because I sometimes had the feeling that everyone I met resented the past and felt that Mao had created a society of jackasses.

"I think the students have no right to criticize the government," Mr. Sun said, and then launched into a harangue. "I had to teach myself English. I had no chance to go to any university. The government has given these students the right to go to university. It is paying for their education. And what do the students do? They demonstrate against the government! I don't agree with them at all. If they demonstrate they should be removed."

Mr. Sun showed me the gigantic epoxy-resin statue of Mao in Shenyang. It is the apotheosis of Mao the founding father, surrounded by fifty-eight figures that represent all phases of the Chinese revolution. I did not have to be told that it was erected during the Cultural Revolution. Like the Mao statue in Chengdu, it showed the old man beaming his benediction down upon the proletariat. Such statues were expensive. The money for the Chengdu statue had been earmarked for a sports stadium, and the Shenyang one had been built with civic funds.

I asked Mr. Sun whether he thought it was all a waste of public money.

"No," he said.

"Do you think the statue should be pulled down and destroyed like the other Mao statues?"

"There is no need to pull down the statue just because it was put up during the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Sun said. "Mao was a great man and we must not forget his achievement."

There was no question that Mao had been a remarkable man. He had said that he had pondered for years a means by which he might shock the Chinese people, and then he had hit upon the idea of the Cultural Revolution as the perfect shock. But he had overdone it: no one had known when to stop.

Mr. Sun was an interpreter. He was not a very good one — we spoke a mixture of Chinese and English in order to carry on an intelligible conversation. But he surprised me by saying that he would soon be going to Kuwait in the Persian Gulf to be an interpreter for a Chinese work gang.

One of China's newest money-making schemes was the export of skilled laborers on construction projects. They were putting up buildings in Saudi Arabia, and indeed all over the Middle East. It seems very odd that the Chinese are hired as architects and builders, since their own buildings are so undistinguished, not to say monstrosities. It was rather as though Poland were exporting chefs, and Australia sending elocution teachers to England, and Americans running classes in humility or the Japanese in relaxation techniques. Post-1949 Chinese buildings were among the very worst and shakiest and ugliest I had ever seen in my life.

"Won't you have to speak Arabic in Kuwait?"

"No. The other workers are Germans and Koreans and Pakistanis and Americans. Everyone speaks English. That's why I am needed."

I asked him whether he was apprehensive about the new job.

"My friend just came back and he told me the weather is bad."

"It's not much like Shenyang" — minus twenty-eight degrees today, by the way. "What are the people like?"

"Not friendly."

"And the housing?"

"Everyone sleeps in the same room."

"What about the food?"

"He just ate tins."

"Cans of Ma Ling cow's tendon, and White Lotus pigs' trotters in gelatin, and Sunflower pork luncheon meat, and China National Foodstuffs boneless chicken pieces in spicy broth — that kind of thing?"

"Yes. And noodles. I think so."

I imagined crates and cartons stacked to the ceiling of the dormitory where this team of workers lived.

"Is there any advantage to living that way and eating out of cans in the sandstorms of Kuwait?"

"You can buy some things."

"What did your friend buy?"

"One refrigerator. Three television sets — one had remote control. A radio. A video recorder. An oven for the kitchen — microwave. Cassette recorder. And a Honda motorcycle. All Japanese."

It was as if the fellow had won the jackpot on a game show.

"It must have cost him a lot of money," I said.

"He earned one hundred and seven U.S. dollars every month."

And lived on cans of Ma Ling loquats in syrup and Double Happiness dried noodles for two years — pass the Lucky Eagle can opener, Abdul.

"What will he do with all those televisions?"

"One for his mother, one for his brother, and one for himself."

"What are you planning to buy in Kuwait?"

"A Japanese refrigerator."

"What will you do with it?" I asked, because Mr. Sun had already told me that he lived with his parents.

"I will need it, because after two years in Kuwait I will be of marriageable age."

He told me that the legal age for marriage in the north of China is twenty-six for a man and twenty-four for a woman; and that in the south it is a year lower. But I bought a pamphlet of the Chinese marriage laws a few weeks later and it seemed to dispute what Mr. Sun had said.

"Is that all you want — a refrigerator?"

"I also want a video camera. I want to take pictures of Kuwait and of different places in China. Then I can show these pictures to my mother. She has never been anywhere except Shenyang."

It was smoggy in Shenyang that day — a brown sky and icy streets; and it was as cold as Harbin.

Mr. Sun said, "You should stay longer here."

"It's too cold," I said. "I want to go south."

"Where do you come from in the United States?"

"Not very far from Portsmouth, New Hampshire."

He looked puzzled. He didn't have a clue. Why did so many Chinese have an intimate knowledge of ancient history, the legendary Yellow Emperor and the Tang Dynasty, and have no information at all about more recent Chinese history?

I said, "Does the Treaty of Portsmouth mean anything to you?"

It was the treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War and that gave Shenyang — then called Mukden — to the Japanese. It was only eighty years ago, probably in the lifetime of Mr. Sun's mother. This treaty was suggested by Teddy Roosevelt and signed in that little town — actually in the Portsmouth Naval Yard, which happens to be just over the state line, in Kittery, Maine, but I felt that would only confuse Mr. Sun.

He didn't know anything about it. He wanted me to see what Shenyang was famous for now — not only its "three great treasures" (ginseng, sable pelts and furry antlers), but its factories and its automobile assembly plant. Just as the Chinese make steam engines and spittoons and quill pens, so they also make brand-new old cars — the Red Flag is a slightly bloated and swollen version of an old Packard. I declined a visit to Fushun, to see China's largest open-pit mine — more than four miles across and a thousand feet deep. In this smog and frosty air it would be impossible to see the bottom, much less get a glimpse of the other side of the mine. I wanted to leave this great dark city.

Mr. Sun persisted. Did I know that the Liaoning Tourist Board offered specialist tours? There were cycling tours. There were "local dishes tasting tours." There were "convalescence tours," and "recuperation tours" — "traditional Chinese physical therapies are applied for better treatment and recuperation results." Far from visiting Shenyang to get well, it seemed to me a place where even the healthiest person would end up with bronchitis.

These tours were a consequence of the brisk competition among the various provincial tourist boards. Mr. Sun also mentioned one called a "lawyers' tour."

"Any foreign friend who is interested in Chinese laws and our legal system can come on this tour, attend courts in session and can visit prisons," he said. "This provides them a chance to understand another aspect of China."

That was one I would have taken, but I could not do it at short notice. We talked about the legal system for a while, and I asked Mr. Sun — as I had other Chinese — about capital punishment. He was an enthusiast. But he claimed that the condemned prisoner was shot in the head, while I maintained the bullet was aimed at the back of the neck.

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

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

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

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

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

"I told you. This driver is ominous."

"How will I get to the station?"

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

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

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

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

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

"I was in Saskatchewan."

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

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

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

"Antifreeze," Mr. Woo said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But please call me Cherry."

"Okay, Cherry."

"Or Cherty Blossom."

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

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

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

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

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

"That is good," Cherry Blossom said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Keep your fingers crossed," she said.

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

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

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

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

"Any luck?" I asked.

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

"I have failed completely!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes!"

I wanted to hit her.

"Is that a Chinese practical joke?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Another of your saucy jokes, Cherry Blossom!"

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

"What about American faces?"

"Americans are wonderful."

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

"Do you want to see the Dragon Cave?"

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

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

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

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

Cherry Blossom said, "Let your imagination fly!"

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

"Yes. It is like a fat farm."

"Where did you learn that, Cherry Blossom?"

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

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

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

In all respects it was a completely normal birth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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