Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  "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 familie
s. 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."