by Paul Theroux
That was how I felt until I reached Yunnan. Then I saw the more familiar situation—and one I found more subtle and energizing—people dwarfed by nature, crowded by jungle, hemmed in by the elements, rained on and battered by the unpredictable tantrums of heaven and earth.
I saw such landscapes on my way to Vietnam. Kunming is only two hundred miles from the Vietnam border. Looking at a map one day, I saw a railway line leading south, and I looked for Mr. Fang to arrange for me to travel on it. Wasn't he shadowing me in order to offer Chinese hospitality? Hadn't he urged me to give him something to do? How thrilled he was when I asked him to translate for me, or commiserated with him about the spivs and the louts and said, "I blame their parents!"
But when I asked him to get me permission to take the narrow-gauge railway to the border, he turned ashen.
"It is forbidden," he said.
"The line is open as far as Bao Xiu," I said. I had checked in the railway timetable—there were two trains a day.
"But you are a foreigner."
"You said that you would help me. If you don't help me, what is the point of your being with me, Mr. Fang?"
"I will try." I knew he meant it, because he seemed very rattled: he was steeling himself to see a higher official.
That same night Mr. Fang came to me and said that permission had been granted for me to take the train south. But the line into Vietnam had been severed in 1979, so I would have to content myself with a journey about a third of the way—to Yiliang—and then come straight back. I said that was fine with me.
"Mr. Wei will go with you."
"Who is Mr. Wei?"
"You will see tomorrow."
The train left at seven in the morning: Mr. Wei was at the station. He had already bought the tickets, and before I could say anything, he was apologizing for the train—just a little one, he said, tiny coaches, steam engine, uncomfortable seats, no dining car. Mr. Wei was a small malnourished-looking man in his thirties. But he was not as sulky as he seemed—he was merely nervous. He said he hated these little trains and these jungly places.
I wanted to tell him that I liked seeing examples of man's insignificance beside the greater forces of nature. But I decided not to. I had brought a pound of peanuts (35 cents in Kunming market) and spent the early part of the trip eating those until Mr. Wei relaxed.
The French had built this line. At about the turn of the century, after they had consolidated their hold on Indochina, they decided to open up the interior. There was money to be made by selling French products in these Chinese provinces. And there was a great deal the French wanted to buy—silks, minerals, furs, leather goods, precious stones. And they had a vague idea of extending their influence into China. The railway was finished in 1910, and until fairly recently it was easier to ship goods to Kunming from Shanghai via Hanoi than it was cross-country.
Mr. Wei didn't think much of this train, but to me it was practically ideal—like the best kind of sleepy branch-line train that creaked through the countryside. Europe and America had gotten rid of them, but they still sauntered through China. People played checkers and smoked the pipes that were big lengths of bamboo that looked like drainpipes. They were all farmers—no sunglasses or platform shoes here, no Guangzhou brassieres or cassette recorders.
After a while, Mr. Wei began talking. He said, "I missed out on my education," and I knew he was referring to the Cultural Revolution, so we talked about that. "I hated it," he said. "It was bad in Kunming."
"Because they smashed the temples?"
"Not only that. They fought. One factory fought another factory. They fought in the streets—people screaming. They had sticks, they had guns. They set fires. People died."
"Hundreds or thousands?"
"I don't know. Hundreds maybe."
"Were you a Red Guard?" He was just the right age—about thirty-five now.
"No," he said, almost vehemently. "I didn't like them."
"Do you think they are bad men when you see them now, the ones who were Red Guards?"
"Now? No, I don't. They are not bad men. They weren't protecting Mao. That's what they said. Each one thought he could do a better job. That's why they fought."
"They killed people, though."
"We can't blame them for that. That is the responsibility of the leaders."
That was the usual line, and a useful one too: all the blame had been put on the Gang of Four. Having such scapegoats was probably another example of Chinese economy. What was the point in tearing the country apart when in a ritualistic way (the trial had been televised) all the blame could be put on four people who were then promptly purged.
When we had gone ten miles, Mr. Wei (whom I now realized was no lackey) relaxed and pointed out the sights. That was Running Horse Hill (Pao Ma Shan), where there was a complex of buildings called the Fire-Bury Works (Huozang Chang): the local crematorium.
"People send their dead body to the works," Mr. Wei said. "The men put gasoline on the body. They burn it. They get ashes. They put the ashes in a small box. The people take it home and put it on a desk."
"Everybody does this?"
"Most people do it. A few take the ashes to the mountains—to a Buddhist temple. But we take it home. I have my mother's sister in a box."
These burial rites of the Chinese were bad news to American entrepreneurs of the 1970s who tried to export coffins to the People's Republic. In the same fortune-hunting spirit, in the nineteenth century the Sheffield Silver Company sent vast shipments of forks and spoons to China, hoping to tempt the Chinese away from their chopsticks.
Beside the rail line were beehive huts which, when I looked closer, I saw were actually tombs. Mr. Wei said that thirty or forty years ago people were buried like that; but no more.
I saw people walking through the cool, yellow woods, and farmers on their way to market who had stopped near the railway to wash their vegetables in the ditch water—which was foul. In a shady spot a man was unhurriedly tearing open a buffalo's throat, slaughtering it. The creature was on its back, with its legs in the air, and its wounded neck was bright red, with a bib of flesh hanging down, and its blood running into the railway ditch.
An old woman got on the train at one of the many small stations. She had a little girl with her, and then a younger woman joined her. She had a baby slung on her back.
We fell into conversation—Mr. Wei translating their rustic Yunnanese dialect. It seemed that the young woman had given birth to a little girl. But she and her husband were disappointed. They decided to take the drastic step of having another child. As soon as the woman became pregnant she was fined 1000 yuan, a penalty called a fa kuai; but she paid up willingly in the hope that the child would be a boy. It was indeed a boy.
These were the poorest people imaginable—lined faces, threadbare clothes, cracked hands, and wearing bonnets and broken slippers. And this woman had stumped up what was for most city dwellers a year's wages to have a second child. (The fact that the second child in China is nearly always a boy leads many people to conclude that female infanticide is quite common.)
"The city people don't have extra children," Mr. Wei said. "They are happy with one. But the country people want more children—to help them with their farming and also to look after them when they are old."
The one-child policy was instituted in 1976, and seemed to work well, although the population has continued to grow at unanticipated rates. The fear these days is that there will be a great number of old people in China at the end of the century—a sort of mushroom effect; and that the one-child family will create a nation of small spoiled brats. Already there is a creature in China which has appeared for the first time in vast numbers: the fat, selfish little kid with rotten teeth, sitting in front of a television set, whining for another ice cream.
The train was traveling in a narrow groove cut just below the summit of these pretty hills, and buttresses had been built to prevent landslides. They hadn't worked. Man was insignificant here. Nature gave him
a very hard time. Well, that was the way of the world, wasn't it? It was unnatural that other Chinese people had turned a dramatic landscape into a cabbage patch.
Mr. Wei said that he had managed to get a few years' education in the technical institute in Changsha. His Cultural Revolution job had involved mending boxcars in a factory in Kunming. He said he hated the work and was no good at it. He had always wanted to go to university and he had spent all those years holding a welder's torch and cursing.
I said that I planned to go to Changsha myself and wanted very much to visit Mao's birthplace, Shaoshan, near that city. Had he been there?
"I went ten years ago. In 1976." He made a face.
"What did you think?"
"I didn't like it," he said. "It is not good for the people. It is a bad place."
"But Chairman Mao was born there."
"I know," he said, enigmatically.
"Wasn't he a good leader?"
"Mao did harm. The Cultural Revolution delayed our development. Shaoshan is not a good place."
He told me that with such solemnity that I was determined to go there.
"Which Chinese leader do you respect the most?"
"Deng is not dead yet, so he might make mistakes. Better to mention a dead one. Zhou Enlai is liked by many people."
"Do you like him?"
"Yes. Very much."
"Where is his village?"
"It is Huai'an, in Jiangsu Province"—far away, in the east, some distance north of Shanghai.
"What do you think of Zhou's village?"
"In my heart I like it. I would like to go there."
"Why do so many people respect Zhou?"
"Because he worked hard for the Chinese people."
"Isn't Deng Xiaoping working for the Chinese people?"
Mr. Wei frowned. "As I said, he is not dead yet. There is still time for him to make mistakes."
As the sun climbed towards noon and the foliage thickened by the tracks, the landscape became tropical—bamboos and bird squawks. And some houses came into view. They were not Chinese houses. They were stucco, with green shutters and heavy verandahs—just the sort of houses that you see in the French towns of Vietnam. I had seen such houses in Hue and Da Nang and in the back streets of Saigon: it was French government housing, for the colonial officers—in this case, railway personnel. It was so strange, this touch of Frenchness, deep in the hills of Yunnan, still intact—still lived in—after almost a century.
And that was Yiliang. A sign at the station said, the people's railway is for the people (Renmin Tielu Wei Renmin).
"I am hungry," I said.
"You cannot eat here," Mr. Wei said.
What?
Before I could complain, he rushed me out of the coach and onto the platform. My feet had hardly touched the ground before I was on my way back to Kunming—I was still breathless when we were under way. I had scarcely seen Yiliang. And I had wanted to stroll around the old French town, look into the houses, talk to the people, loiter in the market.
Mr. Wei said he had just been following orders. It was Mr. Fang who explained. I had insisted on taking this train, although the train was off limits to foreigners. Foreigners were not allowed in the deep south of Yunnan because it was a security risk—the Chinese were fighting the Vietnamese on the border. But Mr. Fang had explained that it was the train I was interested in, not the towns. And so the railway authorities had said that, as long as I did not stop in any of the towns to look around or eat, I could take the train. But at a certain stage of the journey I had to stop and be spun round and sent straight back to Kunming, without looking left or right. That was how I took the train without violating the law. It was a very Chinese solution.
11: The Fast Train to Guilin: Number 80
The young girl and boy entered the railway compartment holding hands, which was very unusual. But they had a Chinese explanation.
"We got married this morning," the boy said. "We are going to Guilin for a few days."
Honeymooners! He was in his twenties—very thin, rather furtive, but stylishly dressed in a leather jacket and pointy shoes. She wore a dress. In a train a dress was just as unusual as hand-holding. It was blue satin, with a fringe of lace, and though it matched strangely with her yellow ankle socks and red shoes, the hemline was high enough so that I could see her legs. It was not their shapeliness that interested me, it was their very existence. Women's legs are a rare enough sight in China for them to be a complete novelty.
"Do you want me to go into a different compartment?" I asked. "I'd be glad to."
"Why?" the boy said.
"So that you can be alone."
"We can be alone up here," the boy said, flinging his bag on the upper berth and hoisting his bride on the one opposite.
And there they sat until long after we left Kunming Station. It was late evening, about nine, and this was perhaps their first night together. It was certainly their first as man and wife. Was I sincere in saying that I'd be glad to leave them alone in the compartment? Of course I wasn't. I was trying to get the measure of this place; but it's bigness often baffled me. I needed luck in trying to uncover the truth, which was why I looked into women's handbags when they opened them just to see what was inside; and opened drawers in people's houses, and read their mail, and searched their cupboards. When a man took out his billfold, I tried to count his money. If a taxi driver had his sweetheart's snapshot pinned to his dashboard, I scrutinized it. If I saw someone reading a book or magazine, I noted down the title. I compared prices. I copied down graffiti and slogans that I saw on walls. I got people to translate wall posters, particularly the ones that gave the sordid details of a criminal's career (these details were set out and advertised just before the doomed man was shot). I memorized the contents of refrigerators, of travelers' suitcases, I remembered the labels in their clothes (White Elephant tools and Pansy brand men's underwear and Typical sewing machines stick in my mind). I searched brochures for solecisms and collected Rules of the Hotel for Guests (example: "Guests may not perform urination in sink basin"). And just for the record, I asked endless pestering questions. So, really, would I willingly pass up a chance to spend the night with a honeymoon couple?
They smoked, they muttered a little, they rattled magazines. I wrote: 10:16 P.M. No activity from the honeymooners. Contented breathing. Could be snores. One might be asleep. Anticlimax.
The cigarette smoke bothered me, and on this banged-up train of the Shanghai Railway Board, nothing worked. The fan was dead, the lock had been torn off the door, the arms had been twisted off the seats, the luggage rack was broken, and the window could not be raised. This last matter was the most serious: the compartment was now very hot and smoky. It was a good thing that the honeymooners were either asleep or else ignoring me, because I took out my Swiss Army knife and unscrewed the window locks, removed the window frame, levered the window up six inches, then put the hardware back on, so that no one would suspect I had tampered with it. Dire punishments were threatened for anyone who messed with the train, and if you so much as chipped your Chinese Railways teacup you were charged for it.
There was silence all night in the upper berths. Nothing to report except that I seemed to have more proof that the Chinese were very phlegmatic.
I woke to find myself in the rocky province of Guizhou, all pyramidal limestone hills and granite cliffs. The landscape was green and stony, like Ireland, and the people lived in rugged Irish-looking stone cottages, and houses with rough-hewn beams. They were the strongest houses I saw in China, and around them, marking the limits of their land, were beautifully built dry-stone walls, symmetrical and square.
Among these great slanting slablike hills, there was very little arable land and not many flat places for farming. The gardens were made by balancing walls and building terraces, and by all the other useful things that could be made from the chunks of stone—bridges, aqueducts, roads, dikes and dams. The villages were thick with villas and two-story houses (it was
rare in the country to find more than one floor), all of them stone-built, with slate roofs. And their grave mounds were just as solid and built with the same granite confidence: the cemeteries were miniature versions of the villages.
While the honeymooners nipped down to the dining car for the breakfast of rice gruel and noodles, I ate some bananas I had bought in Kunming and drank my green tea. We passed Anshun ("once the center of the opium trade") and we stopped a while at Guiyang, where I met Mr. Shuang.
Mr. Shuang was in his late sixties, plum faced and whiskery, with a shapeless cap and a red armband that showed he was a railway worker. But he was a retired man who, out of boredom, had gone back to be a platform supervisor.
"I was sick of staying at home," he said. "I've been doing this job for half a year. I like it. But I don't need the money."
He said he earned 130 yuan a month.
"What do you spend it on?"
"I don't have children or a family, so I buy music." He smiled and said, "I love music. I play the harmonica."
"Do you buy Chinese or Western music?"
"Both. But I like Western very much."
"What kind?"
He said in a neatly enunciating way, "Light orchestral music."
That was the kind that was played in the train and in the railway stations when they weren't playing Chinese songs. They played "The Skaters Waltz" and "Flower of Malaya" and selections from Carmen.
"Do you get many travelers in Guiyang?"
"Unfortunately, very few people come here. This province was closed to foreigners until 1982. Some people pass through but they don't stop. And yet we have many places to see—some very nice temples, and the Huangguoshu Falls and the hot springs. Please come back to Guiyang and I'll show you around."
It seemed that the more remote and countrified the place in China, the more hospitable the people were.
For the onward journey the honeymooners had changed their clothes: he wore a jacket and sunglasses, she wore a tweed skirt. They smoked and slumbered. Maybe this fatigue meant it was the end of their honeymoon?