Riding the Iron Rooster

9. The Express to Chengdu

I became sad, looking at Mr. Fang's lopsided expression of longing, one eye screwed up and one spiky patch of his hair sticking up. He could be so silent. He merely followed me, perhaps hoping that I would do something wrong. He looked so grateful when I asked for his help. Now we were in the Soft Class Waiting Room at Xian Station, killing time with magazines, and I became sadder when I saw him trying to work out with a dictionary a page in China Products Monthly. I had the same magazine, and that page was an ad for "Jiangsu Ceramics" — small, ugly statues of angels, Santa Clauses, snow-covered churches, Mickey Mouses, choirboys with lyres; and what Mr. Fang was trying to read, described the ceramics as "Ingeniously conceived! Vividly modeled! Freshly colored! Boundlessly interesting!"

He looked up and smiled at me, which depressed me even more, because I suspected that he was sad. Then I decided that he was not sad at all. He was like so many other Chinese — reserved and fatalistic and steeling themselves against disappointment. Yes, the Great Wall was a masterpiece and the Tang Dynasty had been glorious and they had managed to thrash the Japanese, and they invented poison gas, toilet paper and the decimal point; but they also had a long history of convulsions and reverses. Never mind that they forgot they invented the mechanical clock. Look at the upheavals that had taken place in just the past hundred years or so: the Taiping revolt, the humiliating colonialism of Europe and Japan, the Boxer Rebellion, the fall of the empire in 1911, the republic of Sun Yat-sen, the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the battling between Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang and Mao's communists, The Great Leap Forward and all the other witch-hunts and hysterical purges that followed the emergence of the People's Republic, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Who wouldn't be uneasy? And these sudden agonies were undoubtedly the reason that few people ever showed confidence in the future. It was better not to think about it. And it was a loss of face to seem disappointed, which was another reason the Chinese never opened presents in front of the giver (nor commented on the gift, no matter how large or small), and why their impulse when startled was always to laugh.

Mr. Fang, who was a Russian specialist, who had lectured on Pushkin and acted as interpreter in Moscow and Leningrad at a time when the Russians and the Chinese had been comrades, had been howled at in the 1960s for teaching a bourgeois foreign language and forced to carry boulders in a sort of chain gang. And now he was shadowing an ungrateful American through central Sichuan. Instead of screaming What next! he looked up and shyly smiled.

He pretended not to see me board the train, but I called out to him, "I'll see you in Chengdu."

The train pulled out at about five-thirty in the bright early evening, and passed the wheat fields and the harvesters. It also passed a great number of mounds and tombs and tumuli, probably all of them looted (though no one took treasures to the Government Antique Exchange anymore, where they were paid a pittance for the object which was then sold for a high price at a state shop). I had heard at my hotel that another pit near Xian had just been excavated and was full of yet more terra-cotta figures. I asked for information on this, but either no one knew about it or else they had decided to keep it a secret.

As the sun drooped and the steam train went chik-chik-chik-chik- chisssss at a siding, a dark, perspiring Chinese man threw the compartment door open and entered, dragging four big bags.

"I am from Kowloon," he said.

He looked very sick. He was out of breath, he fumbled with straps and zippers. He jangled a bunch of keys that hung on a chain from his thick leather belt. His track shoes stank. He constantly said sorry, both in Mandarin and English. His eyes were narrow wounds.

"I drink too much last night."

He abruptly left his bags and ran out of the compartment. When he returned, he cleared his throat and said, "I vomited in the toilet."

Another man entered the compartment. This coming and going was quite usual. Travelers sauntered through the train looking for empty berths and free seats. When they located one they paid a surcharge on their ticket and claimed the place. An empty compartment did not stay empty for long; and the coming and going went on all night, too.

This new man was youngish and rather tough looking, beefy faced, with a big belly and big feet.

"I want to sleep here," he said, slapping the berth on which I was sitting.

"This is mine," I said. "I am sleeping here."

He didn't like my saying that. He was in a sort of uniform — army pants and a khaki jacket. He had the look of a pushy, bullying Red Guard. There was no question in my mind but that he was a Party hack.

I ignored him and continued to write in my diary, pleasant thoughts about Xian. This Red Guard grumbled to the man from Kowloon.

"He says he has to sleep there," the man from Kowloon said.

"Sorry," I said.

Because I had been in the compartment first, and this was my berth, I had the use of the table, and this corner seat. I knew he coveted it when the man from Kowloon said, "He has to write his report."

"I have to write my report," I said.

"His is very important."

"So is mine."

"His report is for the government."

"Then it must be a load of crap."

"He is not writing about a road," the man from Kowloon said.

The two men took out cigarettes and filled the compartment with smoke. I told them to cut it out — a recent ruling on Chinese railways had said that people could smoke only with the consent of other passengers. It was late, and "hot, and stifling in this small compartment.

"It's against the rules," I said.

They put their cigarettes away and began to talk — very loudly, shouting in fact, because the man from Kowloon had the Hong Konger's characteristically poor command of Mandarin, and the Red Guard was from Urumchi and spoke a rather debased version of Mandarin. This language problem didn't stop them yakking, but it meant that most of the time they were interrupting each other and repeating things constantly. I opened the window because of the heat. Smoke from the engine blew in and gagged me, and the chik-chik-chik made my teeth rattle.

"He says he has to write his report."

"First I have to finish mine," I said.

"He wants to smoke."

"Smoking isn't allowed in the compartment unless everyone agrees," I said. "I don't agree."

"He wants to know why there is a smoking box on the wall," said the man from Kowloon, clicking an ashtray on the wall.

"Why not ask the fuwuyuan or the lieche yuan?" I said, because these room attendants were passing our door.

"Each room has smoking boxes," the Red Guard said to me, in an intimidating way. "What are they for?"

"For putting out cigarettes," I said, trying to stare him down.

"We must have cooperation," he said.

This meant: Stop being a pain in the ass.

"For the sake of friendship," he said.

This little formula was spoken through gritted teeth.

"I am minding my own business, so why don't you mind yours?" I said. "Fish face."

I went back to my diary, but their shouting back and forth made it impossible to concentrate, so I went to the dining car. It was past eight o'clock, late by Chinese standards (they usually ate dinner before six-thirty or seven), but the menu was recited to me in the usual way, and I ordered. No food came. I asked why.

"There are some foreigners on board," the waiter said.

"I'm a foreigner."

"But you are alone," he said. "We must wait for the group."

We stopped at Baoji, the junction we had passed through a week before; but this time we turned south towards Sichuan. No food came. It was after eight-thirty. The waiter said, "Foreigners… Group."

I told him I was hungry and to bring the food soon. "Dying of hunger" was a phrase sounding like ursula. Still no food came.

Then the group of foreigners appeared: fourteen chunky Swedes, with sunburned arms and whitish hair. One had a video camera. As he poked it and whirred it, the others put their elbows on the sticky dining-car tables. Their guide bought all the beer, before I could order any. Then the food came — to them and finally to me. It was after nine o'clock. The Swedes ate slowly, trying to pincer their slippery noodles. Then the train stopped at Liangkou with such a jolting halt the noodle bowls shot into the Swedes' laps.

"I'm still hungry," I said to the waiter. "Is there any more food?"

"We have some sausages."

"Pork?"

"No. Horse."

I had four of them. They were not bad. The meat was dark and tough, with a strong smoky taste.

When I got back to the compartment it was full of men — the man from Kowloon, the Red Guard and three others. The corridor was crowded with men in pajamas, and children squawking, and some cardplayers. The fans rattled and buzzed; so did the train.

"He is from Xinjiang," the man from Kowloon said. "He is a student. He wants to know your name."

"My name is Paul. He is sitting on my bed. I want to go to sleep."

This disapproving tone had the effect of emptying the compartment very quickly. We turned the lights out, but the three others — a new man had joined us — went on shouting at each other in the darkness.

There was no dawn. The mist grew lighter, thinned slightly, and as we passed at that early hour from Shaanxi into the vast, populous province of Sichuan, small knobby trees became visible, and so did the faint outlines of mountains and hills; and people appeared as small dark brush strokes in this simple Chinese watercolor.

The mist hung over the mountains, and as the sun heated it and made it thinner, a greenness came into it, and there was a lushness, the rice fields, beneath it. It was like looking at a landscape through etched glass, seeing everything blurred, and now and then getting a clear glimpse of the beautiful contours of mountains, of fields and valleys. The sharpest line was the path that always led around the hillside, a packed narrowness that looked bright and baked. In this blur, people were hoeing, and cycling, and leading hairy pigs to market.

The landscape was softened by the mist, but when the mist all burned away what had seemed idyllic looked senile. And the farmers had a hard routine this humid summer morning. Chinese farming is backbreaking, but it is some consolation to know that these days the farmers are well-off — much better off than any teacher or factory worker. The free market has helped them by guaranteeing them good prices: they no longer have to sell at fixed and punitive prices to the state. We had only gone a few hundred miles, from Shaanxi into Sichuan, but we had moved from a wheat-growing region to paddy fields. It was more southerly here, and wetter and warmer.

That was another virtue of traveling by train in China. It allowed one to make visual connections in a place that was otherwise full of shocks and bafflements. Every other mode of travel made the country seem incomprehensible. Well, even on a train it was incomprehensible at times. But doing it this way helped. It wasn't one countryside: it was a thousand landscapes and hundreds of crops. Sometimes, only an hour passed and everything was different.

Now there were cornfields, and harvesters flinging ears of corn into gunnysacks; and browsing buffaloes; and a brownish goose with an orange beak standing in the middle of a flooded field; and women yoked to buckets; and a human scarecrow — a boy frightening birds by waving a long stick with blue streamers on it; and a man on the bank of a canal, fishing Chinese-style, a fishing pole in each hand.

I could not understand the Red Guard's Chinese, so I asked the man from Kowloon whether he would translate my questions.

He said, "I am interested myself!"

"What does he do for work?"

The Red Guard was sulking in his bed.

"He works in an institute — agricultural. No. Language institute. In Urumchi."

"I was in Urumchi."

"He says, many people go to Urumchi."

I said, "What language does he teach at this institute?"

"He doesn't know the answer to your question."

"Does he speak foreign languages?"

"He says he works there—"

The Red Guard was gabbling in his berth.

"— he is not a teacher."

"What is his job?"

"He is a cadre."

An official. Why did they use this French word? Probably because they hated the word official—it smacked of feudalism and the class system.

"Is he a member of the Chinese Communist Party?"

"He is."

One of the few.

"Ask him when he joined."

"When he was eight years old."

"That's impossible."

Gabble, gabble.

"When he was sixteen, he says. He joined the Party then."

"Ask him if he was a Red Guard."

"Yes, he was a Red Guard."

I was pleased that I had spotted him. But why did he still look like one.

"Ask him if he was in the Gang of Rebellion." These brutes, the Zaofan Pai, were said to be the toughest, most thuggish of the Red Guards. They did battle with the Bao Huang Pai (Emperor's Gang) until long after the Cultural Revolution ended.

The question was translated, but with a mutter that meant That's enough questions, the Red Guard slid off his berth and hurried into the corridor, clacking his plastic sandals.

Nearer Chengdu, the man from Kowloon said that this was his first trip to China. His name was Cheung. He was exactly my age — he showed me his passport so that I would see his name written: we had the same birthday.

"The Year of the Snake," I said.

He was married, he had three children. He was a taxi driver in Kowloon and had come to China for the same sentimental reasons that so many overseas Chinese had for making the journey. And practical reasons, too: the discounts, the freebies, the brotherly goodwill, the ease in making arrangements as a Foreign Compatriot, and all the other angles that went under the general heading of ethnic nepotism. In Xian he had met some Chinese taxi drivers and they had bought him enough beer to get him plastered.

"In ten years you'll be able to drive your taxi from Kowloon into China."

"Yes," he said. "But I don't want to."

"Chinese taxi drivers make money — didn't they tell you that?"

And because no Chinese could afford to ride in a Chinese taxi, the customers were always foreigners. This was what the Party would call a pernicious influence, and I agreed. Chinese taxi drivers, as a breed, seemed to me stubborn and grasping. And they weren't particularly skillful drivers. It was very rare to spend any length of time in Chinese taxis and not experience an accident — usually your taxi crashing into a cyclist.

Cheung said, "They have to earn seventy yuan a day. After they make that amount on the meter they get a percentage of the rest. But they only have to work eight hours. In Hong Kong we all work twelve hours. It's a very hard life. Food is expensive, rent is expensive, everything costs too much."

"Maybe the Chinese government will straighten things out when they take over Hong Kong.

"No. They will ruin it. No democracy."

"There's no democracy there now. It's a British Colony. The governor-general is appointed. And the strange thing is," I said, because I had suddenly realized what a political anachronism Hong Kong was, "very few people actually speak English in Hong Kong."

"We speak Cantonese."

"That's the point. It's part of Guangdong province, really. British culture didn't sink in. It's all Cantonese."

Cheung did not want to argue. He said, "I don't care. I am going to the United States."

"You mean, for good?"

"Yes. I have a sister in San Francisco. I also am getting a visa from the American embassy in Hong Kong."

"Will you be driving a taxi in the States?"

"No. I will get a job in a restaurant."

"A Chinese restaurant?"

"Of course. There are many. In Chinatown."

"Have you ever been to the United States?" I asked.

"No," Cheung said. "But I have spoken to my friends. I can earn eight hundred dollars a week."

"Doing what?"

"Maybe cooking."

"What do you mean 'maybe'? Can you cook?"

"I am Cantonese. I can cook Cantonese food, I think."

"Why not stay in Hong Kong?" I said. "Are you really afraid that things will change when the Chinese take over?"

He thought a moment, then said, "In Hong Kong is too hard work. America is better. Better living."

"Why not England?"

"I don't want England. Not good living."

"Have you been to England?"

"No. But my friends tell me."

He was packing up his gear. It was near eleven in the morning, and rice fields slid by in this green, steamy place. We would be in Chengdu soon. Anyway, Cheung was sick of my questions. But I was fascinated by this man who had already decided to chuck his life in Hong Kong and immigrate to a wonderful new existence in America — a little paradise called Chinatown, where Chinese people fitted in, earned American salaries and never had to integrate or make any concessions to this big, sheltering republic. It also interested me that this British colonial had rejected Britain.

"Who is the prime minister of Britain?"

"I don't know."

"Who is the leader of the Chinese people?"

"Deng Xiaoping."

"Who is the president of the United States?"

This puzzled him for a moment, but only a moment. "President," he began thoughtfully, and drew a breath. "Nixon."

Nixon had been out of office for twelve years.

"You think Nixon is president of the United States right now?"

"Yes. I think so. I like him. Do you like him?"

"Not very much."

"Which party do you support? Liberty Party, or the other one?"

"Liberty Party," I said. "We call them Democrats." But Mr. Cheung was not listening. He had hoisted his bags for our arrival in Chengdu. I said, "By the way, who is the governor-general of Hong Kong?"

"Sir Something," Mr. Cheung said, and hurried off the train.

***

At a dark, noisy garagelike restaurant called Pockmarked Mother Chen's (Chen Ma Po, home of hot bean curd), I looked into a mirror and saw Mr. Fang staring at the back of my head. After my bowl of bean curd was served to me I was given a plate of hot dumplings. I liked them, but I hadn't ordered them. They weren't on the menu; they had been bought at a stall.

"That man bought them for you," the waiter said, pointing to the back of the room.

But by then Mr. Fang had gone. He had been very observant over these past weeks: he knew of my fondness for dumplings. But he had never mentioned it. I was touched by his gesture, but then I became suspicious. What else had he noticed about me?

The bean curd was flavored with oil and onion and chopped pork and flakes of red pepper the size of a thumbnail. The fried dumplings were filled with spinach. The rice was damp and lumpy, but that didn't matter — Chinese rice was made in huge tureens, so it was always stodgy. This was the Chinese equivalent of a fast-food joint. People popped in for a quick meal and they hurried away. Near me a blind man sat with his guide boy — the blind man had a tight grip on the boy's wrist. And satisfied eaters, having finished, were blowing their noses in their fingers, or hawking loudly, or spitting onto the floor.

Turning away from the sight of a man taking aim at a spittoon — was I a silly ethnocentric old fussbudget for finding a brimming spittoon unwelcome in a restaurant? — I saw a woman watching me.

"Are you an American?" she asked, hopefully, in English.

Her name was Mrs. Ji. She said she was pleased to meet an American because she had recently visited the United States — seeing relatives — and had had a wonderful time. She had spent most of her time in Seattle, but had also been to Los Angeles, San Francisco and even Las Vegas, where she had gambled and broken even.

In Shanghai I had met a Chinese woman who told me that the sight of Chinatown in Boston had depressed her. It seemed to her fatuous and antediluvian, a sort of Guangzhou ghetto. Didn't these people know better than to behave like sheep? I asked Mrs. Ji if she felt any of that exasperation.

"I know what she meant," Mrs. Ji said. "I don't like American food, so I ate at a lot of Chinese restaurants. They were all bad. And the so-called Sichuan restaurants — no good at all."

"But not much spitting," I said. 'These spittoons—"

"We spit too much," she said. "The government is trying to stop it."

The antispitting posters were everywhere, but it was really a campaign to encourage spitters to aim rather than to discourage spitting. The message was: Use a spittoon.

After a while — I was asking Mrs. Ji about her family — she told me that she was divorced.

"My husband met a younger woman a few years ago," she said, and volunteered the information that she herself was forty-eight years old.

"Was it easy to get a divorce?"

"Very easy."

"Are there many divorced people in China?"

"Many."

She didn't elaborate, and anyway it was a delicate subject. It was well known that there were a number of stresses in Chinese society: the shortage of money, the crowded households, the bureaucracy, the one-child family, and the husband and wife — quite a large proportion — who were separated for reasons of work: different factories, different cities, and sometimes different provinces. And many divorces resulted from the pairings-off between peasants and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution.

Perhaps my questions made Mrs. Ji self-conscious. After being so candid, she became quite prim and hurried away — had she seen someone watching? I paid for my lunch and went for a walk.

Chengdu had a number of Buddhist temples and pretty parks. It was one of the many Chinese cities which in the past twenty years had lost its city walls and battlements and beautiful gates; but conversely it was one of the few that had a towering statue of Chairman Mao on its main street. In the course of time, those statues would be broken up. Chengdu's Mao statue was one of the largest in China. It had not been vandalized or pulled down. Mao's liking for the poetry of Du Fu meant that the Tang poet's cottage in a Chengdu park is now a national shrine. But the city was oversized and charmless, and though some of its markets and shop-houses remained, too many of them had been torn down to make room for workers' barracks and tower blocks.

Encouraging people to live in big cities and tall buildings made it easier to control their lives. Of course Chinese cities had always been crowded, but the policies of the People's Republic had robbed them of any interest and made them plainer and reminded people that they were merely "screws" in the vast machine. I had an inkling of this walking around Chengdu, getting the railway-induced kinks out of my muscles. Chinese cities made me feel small and insignificant: they were not places to loiter in. They were the corners of the greater labyrinth, and it was impossible to go very far without coming upon a barrier — the road ended, or there was a roadblock, or a checkpoint. No wonder people mobbed the railway trains. And it was not surprising that when the Chinese visited places like Seattle or San Francisco their inclination was to stay.

I passed the Sichuan People's Hospital one day, walking on the outskirts of Chengdu. It was a busy place, or perhaps I had gotten there during visiting hours; anyway, a great number of people were coming and going. Fruit and vegetable stalls had been set up across the street from the hospital, where people could buy presents for the patients. But among those stalls were a half a dozen medicine men, selling potions that ranged from the outright quackery of antlers and birds' bills and snakeskins, to herbal remedies that were accepted in many Chinese hospitals. It was an appropriate place for the quacks, and they apparently operated on the assumption that if someone was not happy with his treatment at the state hospital he could supplement his medicine with lizards and powdered deer antlers.

Mr. Fang followed me everywhere, in his hesitant way, hanging back apprehensively, and smiling when I caught his eye. But it was always a smile of fear.

I walked past a family-planning poster — a large billboard near the center of Chengdu. It showed a Chinese leader welcoming the birth of one baby girl (the parents handing it over for approval). The slogan underneath said, China Needs Family Planning.

When I turned around and addressed Mr. Fang, the poor man yelped. Then he recovered himself and laughed. His laugh said Sorry for screaming!

"That man looks familiar," I said. "Is that Zhou Enlai?"

"Yes. It is Zhou."

"Why him on a family-planning poster?"

"People like him. People respect him."

"Why not Mao Zedong?"

"On a family-planning poster!" Mr. Fang said. He was right to find it absurd. After all, Mao had encouraged the Chinese to breed like rabbits. "Not so good," Mr. Fang said.

I asked him whether people had a more respectful attitude towards Mao or Zhou these days.

"For myself, I prefer Zhou. And I think many others do, too. But 1 cannot speak for them."

"Why do you prefer Zhou, Mr. Fang?"

"He was honest. He was a good man. Also during the Cultural Revolution he suffered much."

"Was he criticized?"

"Not in public, but within. It was worse. People know that."

Before I set off again, I said, "Mr. Fang, why don't you go back to the hotel and rest? It's not necessary to follow me."

"It is the Chinese way," Mr. Fang said.

The parks in Chengdu attracted the newer sort of Chinese youth.

Observe the young couple entering People's Park in a suburb of Chengdu one June afternoon. The first thing that strikes you about the man is that he does not look anything like the man in the family-planning poster. He is smoking a king-size cigarette — it dangles from his lips — and in his hand he has a suitcase-style cassette recorder and radio, and the screechy music (probably a Hong Kong tape) thumps against it and drowns conversation and frightens the dusty starlings. The fellow wears a T-shirt saying Cowboy, and the motif on the shirt is a long-nosed man in a ten-gallon hat. He also wears tight blue jeans and platform shoes with womanish high heels. His hair has been professionally curled — the Canton fashion spread to Shanghai and has recently reached Chengdu. He wears sunglasses. He swings his radio and puffs his cigarette.

His girlfriend (if she were his wife he would not be trying so hard to impress her) wears a pink dress. It is light and fluttery. She might have made it herself. She also wears the nylon knee socks that younger women favor, and high-heeled shoes, and sunglasses with rhinestones on the frames.

This is their day off. They are spending it in the park. Later on they will look for a tree and hide behind it for a session of old-fashioned smooching. The parks and the boulevards are full of such couples. They are the new people in the People's Republic — the inheritors. But their motto is Get it while you can.

I asked Mr. Fang whether he had seen them. He said he had. He was very disapproving of these youngsters.

"It is the fault of the Cultural Revolution," he said. "They saw that it was a disaster. For that whole time there was disruption. No one obeyed. That is why, now, these young people have no manners, no discipline and no ideas."

"You sound angry, Mr. Fang."

He did not reply. He laughed — a sharp stuttering and explosive laugh that meant he was very angry.

He had said he disliked modern Chinese stories. He meant he was out of sympathy with them. Who were these spoiled brats and spendthrifts who appeared in the pages of Beijing Literature and Harvest and Monthly Literary Miscellany? Actually they were just the sort of youngsters you saw every day in the public parks, trying to be cool, which meant mimicking Western ways — sunglasses, curled hair, platform shoes, knee socks, flared trousers, blue jeans, transistor radios, earphones, and for a lucky few, motorcycles. The girls even had to have a fancy brassiere, probably the most superfluous garment in China.

In Xu Naijian's recent (1985) story, "Because I'm Thirty and Unmarried," the so-called spinster is told by her girl cousin, "What kind of bra is this you're wearing, so big and ungainly? Get yourself one of those bras from Xinjiekou. They're a nice shape — made in Guangzhou. You're so out of date…"

The puzzling conflict that arises when a Chinese person is faced with choosing between the East and the West was expressed by the Chinese traveler Liang Ch'i-ch'ao. "Of course we may laugh at those old folks among us," he wrote in Travel Impressions of Europe (1919), "who block their own road of advancement and claim that we Chinese have all that is found in Western learning. But should we not laugh even more at those who are drunk with western ways and regard everything Chinese as worthless, as though we in the last several hundred years have remained primitive and have achieved nothing?"

As Mr. Fang walked along with me (but a few steps behind), we passed a refreshment stand and heard loud singing — one uproarious voice trying to manage a twangling Chinese song. The singer, a man, was seated at a table, his back turned to us. His two companions, who were sober, wore terrified smiles. The man was at the final stage of Chinese drunkenness: red faced, singing and drooling. Another bottle of beer and his eyes would swell up, he would gasp for breath and soon be out cold.

"That is also a result of the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Fang said. "What does he care? He has lost all discipline. He has no pride. It is bad behavior."

Then the man stood up, still singing, and staggered a little. He turned aside. He did not see me, but I saw him. It was Cheung, the taxi driver from Kowloon.