Riding the Iron Rooster

6. Train Number 324 to Hohhot and Lanzhou

It had been a very bad month on China's western railway, where wild yaks on the line accounted for some delays, and sandstorms were frequent. Just before I set off I read in the China Daily that 330 miles of track had been buried by the worst sandstorms for twenty years. The report was precise in its tale of woe: a "force 12 gale" had raged for forty-eight hours, and the "eye-blinding sandstorm" had dumped 100,000 tons of sand on the tracks, stranding forty-seven trains and closing the line for nine days, during which 10,000 rail passengers were evacuated. People died in the storm. People were injured. Vast prefectures of Gansu and Xinjiang were cut off.

But in the way it was ignored by the world, and even ignored by most Chinese (it was just a tiny news item), and in the way it was quickly remedied, it was a very Chinese disaster. (The 1976 earthquake in China, hardly noticed by the world, killed more than 2 50,000 people, and the famines of the late 1950's killed as many as 16 million people.) After the death and destruction, shovels were distributed, the trains were dug out, the tracks disinterred and new sand barriers erected — fences this time, instead of grass clumps. The Chinese had their political dilemmas, and the technological side of Chinese society was a mess ("communications" was an inappropriate word for toy telephones, Morse code and scribbled notes), but if it was possible for the Chinese to shovel themselves out of trouble, they succeeded brilliantly. Digging was a national preoccupation, and during the Cultural Revolution — as my friend Wang said — everyone had his own hole, in case of war. Come to think of it, the Great Wall too was a sort of digger's masterpiece. And the old fable that Mao always cited, "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains," was the digger's gospel — the point was that the old man was not foolish at all and that the Chinese could move mountains (even the metaphorical ones of imperialism and feudalism) by digging.

When the line was clear, I left for Hohhot, in Inner Mongolia. I was not alone. A small portly gentleman had been assigned to me. He had the face of a sea lion — not an unusual face in China. Speaking English was not one of his skills, but he was fluent in Russian, a language that mystifies me. His name was Mr. Fang. We were traveling together as a result of a discussion I had had with the Railway Board, but these discussions were more in the nature of struggle sessions.

A delegation had come to my hotel and delayed me with politeness and abused me with flattery, blackmailing me with such phrases as "famous writer," "important person" and "foreign friend." Indeed, I was so important and dignified that I could not possibly travel alone on this journey to the west, but would have to be provided with an entourage.

I said that I usually traveled alone, and that I made a virtue of it, and I refrained from saying that if I was in need of a traveling companion it certainly would not have been a huge, goofy man like Mr. Zhong, with his sinister laugh and his slurping way of eating.

We were in the restaurant of my hotel, Mr. Zhong, Mr. Fang, Mr. Chen and I. Mr. Zhong blew on the surface of his tea, then sucked it in, gurgled it inside his cheeks and gulped it. And his way with noodles was worse, and noisier: he made his mouth into a suck-hole and woofed them through it in a wet, twisted hank. His gasps made me feel violent towards him.

So far, Mr. Fang had not said anything; and Mr. Chen only put in a word now and then to be helpful.

"There is no earthly reason why anyone should come with me."

Mr. Zhong went schhhllooopp with his tea, and chewed it loudly, and then said, "To give you correct information."

"I think I'm capable of getting correct information on my own," I said. "I've done a little traveling, you know."

"But not in China."

"In China, as a matter of fact. Six years ago. Down the Yangtze."

"The Chang Jiang," he said, giving me correct information, as if I didn't know what the Chinese called the damned thing. Like all pedants, at heart he was just being stubborn and obstructive.

"And Peking and Canton."

"Beijing and Guangzhou," he said, woofing noodles.

"I'm giving you their English names, Mr. Zhong. We don't say Hellas for Greece, or Roma for Rome, or Paree, if we're speaking English. So I don't see the point—"

"I must come with you," Mr. Zhong said.

Never, I thought.

"We will leave tonight," he said.

Over my dead body, I thought.

"I will help you," he said.

"Believe me, it's extremely kind of you to offer," I said, "but I don't need your help."

His face was big and pale. He smiled at me and said, "I can carry your bag."

I said, "Did you go to a university?"

"Oh, yes. Jiaotong University. I studied engineering."

"So you're trained for a different job — not for carrying bags."

"My English is very good. I can be your interpreter."

"I want to improve my Chinese."

"I can help you with that," he said. "And you can teach me some more English, and about literature, and about your country."

"I'm afraid that's out of the question," I said.

"You must be looked after properly."

"I don't want to be looked after," I said. "I just want to take the train and stare out the window."

"Oh, no," he said. "We must do our best. You are our responsibility. And we can talk."

Why wasn't Mr. Fang saying anything?

"I may not want to talk," I said. "I may want to sit and read. I may want to look out of the window."

Mr. Zhong put his face against his tea cup, everted his pale lips, and whooshed at it. I had taken a dislike to him very early in the discussion — as soon as we were introduced, in fact — because he was a person whose banter sounded to me like a reprimand. I had left some papers in my room and he had said, "Don't get lost!" and "Don't disappear!"

"You are very generous to offer to look after me, but I can manage alone," I said. "I may not want to talk to anyone. And I don't want any of your kind assistance."

There followed a rapid conversation in Chinese, Mr. Fang doing most of the talking. I had been fascinated by his sea lion's face, his sorrowful eyes and down-turned mouth. He spoke with insistence and authority, and he had seemed very intelligent when he had been listening.

Fattish and insolent-looking Mr. Zhong went on slurping his noodles and sucking his tea as Mr. Fang spoke. One of Mr. Zhong's slurps was actually a form of reply. I decided that he looked brattish and spoiled, and I guessed that he had been a Red Guard, from the way he nagged.

He said quietly, "Mr. Fang says he will go with you."

"Why?"

"Because he does not speak English."

"I don't want to walk around with him either," I said, imagining Mr. Fang breathing down my neck.

"He will simply sit," Mr. Zhong said.

"But in another compartment," I said, "because I would like to meet other people."

"He will occupy another compartment," Mr. Zhong said.

"If he doesn't talk to me, and he doesn't walk around with me, and he doesn't travel in the same compartment," I said, "I don't understand why he wants to come with me."

'To make sure you are comfortable. Hospitality. You are our guest. Ha-ha!" Mr. Zhong's shouting laughter was cruel and accusing.

I said, "Mr. Fang is head of the department. He is obviously very busy. He has a desk, a chair, and work to do. He has to write reports. He has a family — right? Wife? Children?"

'Two females."

"Okay. So wouldn't it be a lot more convenient if he didn't come with me? I can hire local guides — it's cheap enough."

"Perhaps. But this is the Chinese way."

Mr. Chen was becoming anxious. He signaled to me with his eyes, Enough, no more, leave off.

That was how I came to be traveling with this small, silent man on the train to Hohhot. The fact was that the authorities had gotten wind that I was traveling in China, and afraid that I would snoop and that I'd rat on them afterwards, they stuck me with Mr. Fang. Interestingly, this episode was probably the most irritating thing that happened to me in China, and they could have made me very happy if they had decided not to haunt me in this way and attempt to obstruct me with this nannylike official.

When we were alone on the train and rolling through Hebei Province and its endless rice fields, I asked Mr. Fang in Chinese whether he spoke English.

"Not well," he said in Chinese, and it was then that he divulged his fluency in Russian. He had taught Russian literature and language at a technical college in Peking.

"Evgeny Onegin," he said. "Pushkin. Chekhov. Gogol. Dostoyevski."

"Turgenev. Tolstoy," I said, and he nodded. "Bulgakov. Mayakovsky."

Saying these names was like holding a conversation. But it was a short conversation. I had made a thing about not wanting to sit around talking English, and so they had called my bluff by sending this Russian speaker.

I was grateful that I had been spared Mr. Zhong. I had not wanted to travel with any official, but at least Mr. Fang was a gentle soul. He offered to carry my bag, and then he offered to heave it into the luggage rack; I said I could manage. His own bag was very small. Because the Chinese don't own much, they travel light. And Mr. Fang's bag contained a large book and not much else.

"Pushkin?" I said.

He laughed and showed me. It was an English-Chinese Dictionary. I tried to look up a few obscene words, but there were none in it. I riffled the pages and saw a word, a definition, and a sample sentence in italics: Because of the calumnies of the enemy, Lu Xun was compelled to fight harder.

It was a twelve-hour journey to Hohhot, but this was a long-distance train, going on to Lanzhou, so we left at midnight. We were joined by two jolly Cantonese who were going to Datong to change trains for the Taiyuan line. They were going, they said, to Pinghe, to an open-cast mine — one of the largest in China.

I looked on the map.

"I can't find Pinghe."

"It's not on the map yet."

That was another Chinese conundrum — that they could build cities faster than they could print them on maps, and build railways quicker than they could show them with black lines.

'The whole province of Shanxi is a coal seam," one of the men said. Heavy equipment was his specialty. He said that two thousand men were digging and that there would be coal being produced soon.

"What sort of a place is Pinghe?"

"It is a horrible place," the second man said, with a smile. "It is flat and windy. There are no trees. There is dust. It is desert."

They were traveling with enormous amounts of luggage, but they explained that most of it was food, since there was no food in Pinghe. There was nothing in Pinghe except coal.

They dragged themselves and their provisions off the train early the next morning, and soon after we entered Inner Mongolia — a bare dusty landscape, with low, stunted-looking trees, and square-sided settlements made of smooth mud, and goats, and mongrels, and people hacking at furrows and bashing weeds, and here and there, the occasional horseman. It was one of the regions the Chinese described by wincing and calling it "the grasslands" — and they prayed they would not be sent to work in such a region. On the other hand, it was a fact that the Hans had displaced the Mongolians here — the expatriates and exiles had taken over.

Rounding a bend, the engine came into view — a big black locomotive, squawking and blowing out smoke and steam, a fat kettle on wheels. The air was so still on the Mongolian plain that on the straighter stretches the smoke from the engine passed my windows and left smuts on my face, and I was eighteen coaches from the smokestack.

By hot, yellow noon, the landscape had wrinkled mountains behind it, but they were bare and blue, and some nearer hills were only slightly mossy. There were no trees. There were plowed fields everywhere, but nothing sprouting. In the villages there was a mud wall around every house. You would not have to be told you were in Mongolia — this was about as Mongolian as a place could possibly be.

I found Mr. Fang staring dejectedly out the window, and feeling sorry for him, I asked him about his Russian teaching.

"I liked it," he said, "except for the Red Guard period."

"What happened then?"

"From 1966 until 1972 there were no classes. I stayed at home and read books."

"Why? Had you been criticized?"

Criticize—that could mean forty-six of them howling at you or even beating you.

"Yes. They said I was a revisionist." In a plaintive way, he said, "Maybe it was true. I did not understand Marxist-Leninist theory." He turned to me and added, 'They didn't understand it either."

"Afterwards, did you feel bitter?"

"No. I said nothing. They were young. They didn't know anything. That whole period was a disaster."

He was upset by the memory, so I left him alone. But my curiosity impelled me to go back, because I couldn't understand how it was that he had spent all those years at home, reading books. I said, "You mean, you were just sitting there, turning pages?"

He shook his head. "I was carrying rocks."

It was forced labor, he explained. The whole technical college had been moved to a remote place called Mengjin, just north of Luoyang, in Henan Province; and there they had built a bridge over the Yellow River.

"Most of these railways were built by intellectuals who were sent to the countryside," he explained. 'That's why they took so long. What did we know about it?"

He was disgusted, he said. In the fifties, Japan and China were about equal, he went on. In the sixties Japan developed and China went backward. "Now look at the difference!"

I did not agree with his analysis, but instead of contradicting him I asked, "Would you like China to resemble Japan?"

"Frankly, no."

We were still at the window. As the mountains receded into the distance, the houses became more frequent and piled up and became uglier — the unmistakable sign in China that a city is not far off. There was a wide dry riverbed, a depleted tributary of the Dahei River, and tall gawky trees — Mongolian trees, like fakes, unconvincing because they are wholly out of place and too feeble to serve any purpose. Most trees I had seen in China seemed purely symbolic. I saw distant watertowers and chimneys, and not far off, a dust cloud. Beneath that dust cloud was Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia.

It was not really a city — it was a garrison that had been plonked down in the Mongolian prairie, and every building in it looked like a factory. It had been planned and much of it built by the Russians, but even its newer structures looked horrible — the hotel, the guest house, the department stores. I wondered whether it looked this way because of the Mongols themselves — what did tent-dwelling nomads know about city planning? But, no, it was not inhabited by Mongols. It was all Hans in short-sleeved shirts, pouting as they cycled on Hohhot's streets.

"What do you want to see?" Mr. Fang said.

"I want to see a Mongol," I said.

'There isn't time."

He explained that all the Mongols were over there, in the grasslands, in the rugged range they called the "Great Green Mountains." The horsemen, the wrestlers, the archers, the yak herds, were absent from Hohhot. They lived in the wild, which was their right these days as a so-called minority.

I declined a visit to Yijinhuoluo, the tomb of Genghis Khan (1162–1227), which the Chinese built recently as a sop to Mongolian national pride. It is a whitewashed yurt, in concrete, in the middle of nowhere.

"I want to see how people live here," I said.

Mr. Fang took me to the Five Pagoda Temple, which was a stack of defaced Buddhas, still showing traces of Cultural Revolution vandalism. But it was high enough for seeing the roofs of the old town, and the crooked lanes, and the minarets of the mosque.

"Let's go there," I said, pointing.

But Mr. Fang maneuvered me into the car, and we drove out of town to the tomb of Wang Zhaojun ("an imperial concubine who crossed the desert 2000 years ago to marry a minority chief in an effort to secure peace between the Han Dynasty and the native Xiongnus"). It was a man-made hill 150 feet high. He urged me to admire the ingenuity of the hill — think of all the digging!

"I would like to see some people," I said.

He took me to a pagoda, a lamasery, and then to the mosque.

"How many Muslims are there here?" I asked a man in a skullcap.

"Thousands."

"Have any been to Mecca?"

"One," he said. 'The government sent him last year."

The mosque was decorated in the Chinese style, with curved-tile roofs and red-painted eaves. In the center of the main building, high above the door, there was a clock face — a large one, that gave the mosque the look of a railway station. But this was all painted, and even the time was painted on it. The time was perpetually 12:45. No one knew why.

The following day I sneaked downstairs, skipped breakfast, and was on my way out the front door of the hotel when Mr. Fang hurried towards me, making a noise. It was a kind of laughter. By now I was able to differentiate between the various Chinese laughs. There were about twenty. None of them had the slightest suggestion of humor. Some were nervous, some were respectful, many were warnings. The loud honking one was a sort of Chinese anxiety attack. Another, a brisk titter, meant something had gone badly wrong. Mr. Fang's laugh this morning resembled the bark of a seal. It meant Hold on there! and it stopped me in my tracks.

"Where are you going, Mr. Paul?"

"For a walk."

Mr. Fang conferred with his Hohhot deputy. My walk was given official sanction, and I was driven about a hundred yards to the People's Park and released. It was not a large park. It was surrounded by high walls. Its artificial lake had dried up. It was very dusty. Here, I walked. Even at this early hour there were Chinese couples smooching. The poor things have nowhere else to go in China except public parks. I said to myself: It is wrong to expect too much from a Mongolian city.

Mr. Fang and his deputy were waiting for me by the turnstile at the exit gate.

"You enjoyed your walk?"

"Very much," I said.

"Now what would you like to do?"

"I think I'll go back and wash up," I said. "I need a shave."

Mr. Fang laughed in consternation and told me to wait. And he held another conference with his Hohhot deputy, while I stood, frowning at the city. There were no clouds overhead. The sky was blue, the earth brown, the air smelled of dust. It was a typical Mongolian day.

Mr. Fang gestured for me to get into the car. We drove across town to what I first took to be a factory and then realized was a hotel. It smelled of peeling paint and rotting carpets. I was escorted to a room where there were barber chairs and sinks. A young man approached holding a towel and twitching it.

Mr. Fang said, "He is very young and inexperienced, but he will try."

The young man smiled and worked open the cutthroat razor that he had been concealing with his towel.

"I can shave myself," I said, and did so, at one of the sinks.

Mr. Fang laughed: nervous admiration and a sort of pent-up anxiety. I could tell he was worried by what I would ask to do next. I spent the rest of the day trying to elude him and his deputy, and at last, in the market, I succeeded. It was late in the afternoon. We were all (Mr. Fang, his deputy, the driver and I) admiring a stack of vegetables, and when I saw they were transfixed by a shaggy mound of blue cabbages I slipped away.

I found the bird sellers and had an urge to buy every one of their birds and let the poor things go. There was once a Chinese festival — The Liberation of Living Creatures — that encouraged such practices. The Chinese are bird-mad. They pay large sums for the rarest birds, and they keep them in tiny ornate cages, or else they eat them. This is not bird fancying exactly; they covet the birds but they are not sentimental about them. At the Hohhot bird market there were people carrying home finches that had been stuffed into small plastic bags, and the new owners simply clutched them in their sweaty hands. I said it was a little hard on the birds, but they showed me that they had compassionately poked holes in the plastic bags.

There were rosefinches and hawks, and the most popular bird looked like a plover, with a ringed neck and brownish wings. But when I heard it sing I knew it was not a plover. One of the bird sellers wrote down its name, and I discovered later it was a Mongolian lark. It seemed a hell of a fate for such a musical bird to be snatched from its freedom in the immense grasslands and clapped into a tiny bamboo cage. But there are worse fates. One of the culinary perversions of France is making larks into pâté and spreading them on toast.

Later, when Mr. Fang found me, he introduced me to several officials. They had been sent to Hohhot from Peking. Everyone I had met in Hohhot, except the Muslims, had been sent from Peking. Hohhot was just another unpopular post, but no one complained. I did find it odd that after two and a half days in Mongolia I still had not met an ethnic Mongolian. Everyone I asked had the same explanation — a vague wave of the hand and a mutter, "Over there," meaning somewhere in the yellow emptiness of the grasslands.

When we left Hohhot, and were waiting for the train to arrive, I reminded Mr. Fang of our agreement not to travel together in the same compartment. He said that was fine with him. There was a commotion behind us — fifteen shuffling men escorting a high official across the platform. They were seeing him off. He was a stern, skinny man in a blue cap and baggy blue suit; his shapeless clothes alone marked him out as a hard-liner — the conservatives (always referred to in China as "leftists") still have not abandoned their Maoist look of austerity, and this one had an unusually fearsome look, as if daring anyone to laugh at his flappy pants.

His underlings were effusive in the insincerely solicitous way that arouses either contempt or pity — or indifference, as in the case of this official. All this bootlicking hardly made him blink, and he turned his back on them as they slurpingly said good-bye.

When I found my compartment, this man was in it, already seated and making tea. I had come to see that there was even a "leftist" way of making tea. The real hard-liners carried old chubby jam jars and reused the tea leaves again and again, seldom changing them but letting them pile up until the jar was half full of sodden leaves. I put a pinch of green tea into the teacup that was provided free by China Railways — surely he knew that? — and poured the hot water from the thermos, also provided free of charge.

"Hello," I said. "How are you?"

He nodded, saying nothing.

"Are you going to Yinchuan or Lanzhou?"

He stared at me.

"I'm going to Lanzhou," I said, and in English, "God, you're a friendly guy. But don't mind me — I'm just going to curl up with this book."

It was The Gobi Desert, by Mildred Cable, an account of her Chinese travels in the twenties, when she went up and down the deserts of Turkestan in a horse-drawn cart.

The sun reddened and dissolved into the dust of the Mongolian plain as we set off, jogging westward. In the morning the blue baggy man was gone, and I guessed he had gotten off in the Mongolian city of Baotou.

We followed the course of the Yellow River, its big loop in Mongolia and its straighter progress in the stricken province of Ningxia. No one had a good word for Ningxia, and I could see why. It was a parched and windblown place, with a tiny population, many of them the tenaciously backward-looking Hui people — Muslims. Privately, the Chinese regarded them as filthy and superstitious, but publicly they praised their quaint habits. The Chinese felt rather guilty about the Hui people. Knowing of the Hui horror of pigs and pork, officials in the time of Cultural Revolution put Huis in charge of pigsties and made them swineherds and bacon slicers.

We had left the sparse plains and grassy mountains of Mongolia and were now among big, bulky, Irish-looking mountains, scattered with sheep and goats. All the slopes were worn down and stony, with gullies and ravines and chopped-out sluices and quarries — as if sometime in the remote past water had rushed through this place and taken every live thing away, and the topsoil too. It was spectacular desolation.

The plain returned again and was as flat as a billiard table. The railway tracks were dead straight, and the steam locomotive pulling the train poured soot behind it. I kept the window closed when I realized that the black flakes were accumulating on me and Mildred. I decided that this landscape of straight lines had inspired people to build houses with lots of right angles — flat roofs and straight square walls. There seemed something melancholy in such enormous distances, and yet nearly everything that was plowable had been plowed. But I did not see anyone in those hot fields. The sun moved slowly through the high blue sky, and beneath it everything looked torpid, in tones of light brown. There were very few towns, but each one was a dismal anticlimax: square factories, square houses.

The gulping, wheezing steam engine, with its characteristic rattles and shakes, released a dragon of black smoke and it steamed onward through Ningxia. And once from the upraised track I saw a town that was all bungalows and yards — like a parody of an American suburb; indeed, like my hometown, Medford, made out of mud.

In the dining car the wind made a low, fuzzy moan through the rusty window screens. It was lunchtime, and we all had our snouts in the rice bowls. It was greasy spinach today, and little withered worms of pork, and knuckles of nameless meat.

I shared my table with Mr. Lu, on his way to Lanzhou. He was in his twenties and college educated. Perhaps it was because we were in the dining car that he began saying how people behaved very greedily and selfishly these days.

"They say, 'Everyone else is doing it — why shouldn't I?'"

I said, "Presumably it's because the lid is off, and people have more freedom." And I said that I had read that it was usually the case that when tyranny was relaxed people behaved more recklessly — sometimes sudden freedom brought chaos. But that wasn't an argument against freedom.

"I don't know," Mr. Lu said. "But we have never seen this sort of thing before. The Chinese even in bad times behaved very responsibly so as not to shame their families. But now it's every man for himself."

I said that on the whole I had found the Chinese very polite and helpful.

"It depends on how old they are," Mr. Lu said. 'The worst ones are those who were about ten or fifteen at the start of the Cultural Revolution. They were robbed of everything. They had no childhood, no education, no family, no training, no happiness at all. They are about thirty or forty years old now, and they are very angry — angry with everyone. They feel cheated. I know a woman in Lanzhou who said, 'If the city council doesn't give me an apartment I'll go find one, and I'll move in, and I won't budge.' I told her that was illegal. She said, 'I don't care.' That's not Chinese. But she was about thirty-five. She had lost everything in the Cultural Revolution. We are living in a very strange time."

"This train isn't so strange," I said.

He smiled at me. He said, "Not long ago on this train I saw an incident. A man in Hard Class was lying across one seat. That means he was taking up three sitting places. The other passengers were angry. But the man would not move. Finally, they got a policeman, who told the man to move.

"The man said no. The policeman said, 'Move.'

"'What are you going to do about it?' the man said.

"Of course, the policeman could do nothing if the man didn't cooperate. But that was very unusual — very un-Chinese. This man was thirty or so — that explained it to me. The lost generation. The interesting thing is that he did not move. The policeman went away. He had failed. He had even tried to use logic. 'You bought one ticket, but you are using three seats'—that sort of thing.

"'I don't care,' the man said. 'So what?' That's the attitude among that age group."

"Do you think it's serious?"

"Yes. And it frightens me," Mr. Lu said.

Mr. Lu asked me where I was going. I told him that I was headed into Xinjiang, and he made a face — a slight smile of pain. He said he had no desire to go into the desert. The cities of Turfan and Urumchi held no interest for him.

"If I had the time and the money I would go to Hangzhou or Suzhou," he said, expressing the common Chinese wish to go to a place where there were a million other tourists. "Or Guangzhou," he added — another Disneyland.

But to the question Where would you go? the Chinese I spoke to rarely named a place that was outside the Great Wall, reflecting the ancient fear and prejudice that it was all monkeys and hairy bastards and savages beyond the Wall.

There were two dozen Chinese college students on the train, going to Lanzhou from Peking to take part in a swimming meet. They were going Hard Class, and they seemed to enjoy being tumbled together in the dormitory coaches. At their technical college they lived just like this, eight to a room, with laundry hanging everywhere, and they slept on shelves that went up the wall.

As we passed from Ningxia into Gansu I talked to them. Some where shy and some frisked like kittens and others just glowered at my nosey questions. I asked most of them whether they believed in life after death. All of them said firmly no.

"But most Americans do," one said, and the rest of them agreed that this was so.

I had asked them that because we had begun by talking about dreams. They told me dreams they had — about guilt, persecution, being naked, being pursued.

"Everyone has those dreams," I said. "I used to dream about being chased by a monster that looked like a huge potato. And I still have dreams about suddenly realizing that I have to take an important exam that I'm unprepared for."

We were talking in English, which they spoke very well. In fact, one of the boys — unusual for a college student — was Westernized (in the Chinese way) to the extent that he had had his hair curled. It was the fashion in large Chinese cities that summer, among people who had money — men and women. Taxi drivers affected a Liberace coif, their hair permed and fluffed up, and sometimes lightly tinted. But it was not so common as to go unnoticed. Outside The Phoenix Beauty Salon in Shanghai, and Peking's Golden Flower Perma Parlor there were always baffled people pressed against the front windows, watching the dandified young men getting their hair curled.

The curly-haired student said he didn't have any dreams at all, presumably on the assumption that dreaming was too old-fashioned a preoccupation for a stylish trendsetter like him.

Anyway, I left the subject, and left their coach, but later when I was looking at the rubbly landscape I was joined by one of the girls, who said that she had had a dream that was worrying her.

"Three dreams, I mean. But all of them were about my father and my brother." She had a delicate face and anxious eyes, and she spoke in a shy but determined way. Obviously she had not wanted to tell me this dream in front of all the other students. "In the first dream my father killed my brother with a stick. In the second, he hanged my brother. In the third, he shot him. What does it mean?"

"Is your father violent?"

"Very violent," she said.

"What about your mother?"

"My mother passed away six months ago."

"When did you start having these dreams?"

"After she died."

"You live in Peking?"

"No. I study in Peking, but my home is in a country area, near Wuhan. It is a very large house — nine rooms, in a very remote place. It is also a very strange place. There are groves of bamboo all around it. Do you know the sound that bamboo makes?"

I nodded: it was one of the creepiest sounds in the world, the wind making the bamboo stalks rub and mutter.

"It is an old house," she said. "My mother died in it, and my father lives there with my younger brother. My father is not only violent. He is also very unhappy. I am afraid. Do you think my dream will come true?"

I said that she probably felt guilt for having gone to Peking to study. Her mother had been a restraining influence on her father, and she wanted to protect her brother.

'The last time I saw my brother he was unfriendly. It was Spring Festival. I was glad to see him, but he refused to go for a walk with me."

This was all very gloomy, and I tried to think of something to say, but before I could she spoke again.

"I think something terrible is going to happen," she said. "My father is going to kill my brother."

Actually I felt the same thing, but I didn't say so. I told her not to worry but to go home fairly soon, to see her brother and try to gain his confidence.

She said, 'This dream is telling me that I must get a job in Wuhan, near my home."

This corner of Gansu had the look of a landscape that had been bombed. But the craters and foxholes and exploded-looking ravines were the work of wind and water — wind, mostly, because this was semidesert. The Yellow River was motionless and soupy, and the hills were the color of corn bread and just as crumbly.

Once when I was talking with the students I saw Mr. Fang eyeing me. I knew he had been sent to keep me in line, and I was waiting for a chance to ditch him; but I felt a little sorry for him, in whatever report he had to write about my behavior or the subjects of my whispered conversations on the trains, because the poor man spoke no English. His sea-lion face often made him seem sad.

I found one of the teachers and discovered her to be just about my age. Her name was Professor Shi. In 1967, when she was a student, she was an ardent supporter of the Cultural Revolution and volunteered to travel from Peking to Anhui Province to work on a tea plantation. She abandoned all ideas of further study and picked tea for six years.

"I think it was like the Peace Corps," she said.

"No," I said. "The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient, and we weren't under any pressure to join. But going into the countryside in China was a big Maoist campaign."

"I asked to go," Professor Shi said, somewhat avoiding my point about her being pressured. "I wanted to live like a peasant."

"Did you succeed?" I asked. In Africa, in the sixties, I had had the vague idea of going native and living in a mud hut, and to that end I left my Peace Corps house and moved to an African township and into a two-room hut. But it hadn't worked. My African students thought it was undignified and my neighbors were afraid of me. Foreigners who moved into huts were either crackpots or spies.

Professor Shi said, "In the beginning it was wonderful. We had competitions to see who could pick the most tea. The hard part was not the picking or the bending. It was that you had to carry a heavy bag the whole time, full of tea leaves."

There were no lights at this tea plantation. But there was a stream, so these youngsters from the city decided to build a dam and put in a generator. This certainly resembled a Peace Corps project — the outsiders deciding that what these peasants needed were some of the comforts of home, juice — especially.

"We worked very hard for a year building the dam. At the end of that time, when it was finished, we set aside one night for the lights to be turned on and for the electricity to flow. I remember it very well. That night, when the electricity came on, I stood and cried — I was so happy. Others were crying too.

"The old electrician from the work unit said, 'You're tough Peking boys and girls. Why are you crying? This is just a simple dam and simple electric power and a few flickering bulbs.'

"He was wrong. We had done it all ourselves, with our own hands. Like picking the tea. That was why we cried."

I was affected by her story, although I had been somewhat annoyed by her comparison between the displaced intellectuals and the Peace Corps. But I saw that there was a connection, and both had emerged at the same time.

She had fallen silent. She had told me her good memory. She then said, "Later it was different. I became a teacher in 1974, and the Red Guards came to check up on us. They told us what to teach. They bullied us, and they were very tough. I was trying to teach English. They didn't like it. They said it was bourgeois and useless. That's when I changed my mind about the Cultural Revolution."

As an English teacher, she said, she understood Mao because she had read Percy Bysshe Shelley. I said, What?

"Mao was a political revolutionary," she said. "But he was also a romantic poet. That was the problem."

She saw the Old Man as a sort of dreamer in baggy pants, scratching out his poems with his goose-quill pen and leading shiny-faced youths into the fields to harvest rice and grain. But the old romantic, perhaps like all romantics, was not only impractical, but also selfish and egotistical, and by the sixties he was around the bend, too. This was a far cry from the young idealist Shelley, and not much like the old leech gatherer, Willy Wordsworth.

"He was also a tyrant, wasn't he?"

She said she didn't know about that. It was painful to think about recent history. She too wanted to go to the United States — to study, and for a change of pace.

It was now late afternoon, and damp and gray. The crumbly hills had caves cut into them, and every slope looked like a prehistoric settlement. It was not an optical illusion; this province was full of troglodytes knuckle-walking along these ledges and into the caverns they had chopped out of the hillside.

A young man was watching them with me. I took him to be one of the students on the swimming team, but he said no, rubber was his business — he made tires. Lanzhou was a center of rubber manufacturing.

I said, 'That's interesting," and he seemed rather sceptical, and smiled at me as if defying me to find anything interesting at all about tires or rubber.

"What about contraceptives?" I asked.

And then he asked me to explain what the word meant. This required gestures as well as a delicate description, but he got the point.

"I don't make them," he said. "But we have these things in China — for birth control. One-child policy, you know?"

I did not say so, but it seemed to me that people living five to a room was a form of birth control. In a country without any privacy and with very few trees, it was a wonder that any children were conceived.

But this subject reminded him — his name was Mr. Zhang — of an experience he had had in Peking.

Mr. Zhang said, "I was walking down the street. A man stopped me and said, 'Want a girl?'

"I told him no.

"'She's very nice. Five yuan.'

"'I am not interested,' I said.

"He said, 'I can get you a very dark and private corner in the park, so that you can be alone with her.'

"I said that I did not want her, but what about my friend? You see, I was looking after an American delegation of rubber dealers. One of them even asked me if there were girls. It is forbidden. But there are girls.

"'That is out of the question. We do not want an American.'

"I said, 'Why not?'

"'They are too big in their penis. The girl is Chinese. She is very small. It will hurt her too much.'

"I told him to think about it."

Mr. Zhang giggled, perhaps wondering whether he had gone too far — after all, I had told him I was an American. It was also very unusual that he should tell me this story. He covered himself by telling it in a disapproving way — son of pious and lurid at the same time.

The pimp told him not to go away while he consulted the girl.

"And then he came back and said, 'She says she will do it with the American, but it will cost twenty kuai.'"

Then Mr. Zhang looked very worried. Would I take him for a pimp? After all, it seemed as though he had been negotiating with this sleazy man — and pimping was a capital offense: a bullet in the back of the neck.

Very angrily, Mr. Zhang said, "We must rid China of such people!"

Already the train was slowing down in the deep ravine, and ahead Lanzhou lay smoking and steaming on both banks of the Yellow River.