Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  In the sixties there were several trains every hour. Now there is one train a day. It leaves at six in the morning from Changsha and arrives three hours later at Shaoshan. It returns to Changsha in the evening, just an old puffer on a forgotten branch line that had outlived its purpose.

  The road had always been popular, even after the train was running regularly. It was not only the best way for Red Guards and revolutionaries to prove their ardor, but long walks were part of Mao's political program—the Forge Good Iron Foot Soles scheme. The idea was that all Chinese citizens were to have sturdy feet during the Cultural Revolution, because when the Nameless Enemy tried to invade China the evacuation of cities might be necessary. Mao filled the people with a war paranoia—that was the reason they were required to make bricks, dig trenches and bunkers and bomb shelters. They were also ordered to have hard feet and to take twenty-mile hikes on their days off in order to give themselves iron foot soles ("All I got were blisters," my informant, Wang, told me). It was to this end that they trekked for four days on the road from Changsha to Shaoshan, sleeping in peasants' huts and singing "The East Is Red," "The Sun Rises in Shaoshan." They also sang ditties that had been set to music from the Selected Thoughts, such numbers as "People of the world, unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs!" with its stirring last line, "Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed." My favorite song from the Selected Thoughts, one I was assured had enlivened the marches along the Shaoshan road with its syncopation, went as follows:

  A revolution is not a dinner party,

  Or writing an essay, or painting a picture,

  or doing embroidery:

  It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle,

  So temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.*

  A revolution is an insurrection,

  An act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

  They sang the songs on the trains, too. They flew flags. They wore Mao buttons and badges, and the red armband. It was not a trivial matter. It compared in size and fervor to Muslims making the hajj to Mecca. On one day in 1966, a procession of 120,000 Chinese thronged the village of Shaoshan to screech songs and perform the qing an with their Little Red Book.

  Twenty years later I arrived at Shaoshan in an empty train. The station was empty. The unusually long platform was empty, and so were the sidings: There was not a soul in sight. The station was tidy, but that only made its emptiness much odder. It was very clean, freshly painted in a limpid shade of blue, and entirely abandoned. No cars in the parking lot, no one at the ticket windows. A large portrait of Mao hung over the station, and on a billboard the epitaph in Chinese, Mao Zedong was a great Marxist, a great proletarian revolutionary, a great tactician and theorist.

  That was delicate: nothing about his being a great leader. Mao's dying wish (obviously ignored) was to be remembered as a teacher.

  I walked through the village, reflecting on the fact that nothing looks emptier than an empty parking lot. There were many here, designed for buses; they were very large, and nothing was parked in them. I went to the hotel that was built for dignitaries and I sat in the almost-empty dining room, under a Mao portrait, eating and listening to people spitting.

  The tide was out in Shaoshan; it was the town that time forgot—ghostly and echoing. And so it fascinated me. It was actually a pretty place, a rural retreat, with lovely trees and green fields, and a stream running through it that topped up the lotus ponds. In any other place an atmosphere of such emptiness would seem depressing; but this was a healthy neglect—what is healthier than refusing to worship a politician?—and the few people there had come as picnickers, not as pilgrims.

  Mao's house was at the far end of the village, in a glade. It was large, and its yellow stucco and Hunanese design gave it the look of a hacienda—very cool and airy, with an atrium and a lovely view of its idyllic setting. Here Mao was born in December 1893. The rooms are neatly labeled: Parents' Bedroom, Brother's Room, Kitchen, Pigsty, and so forth. It is the house of a well-to-do family—Mao's father was "a relatively rich peasant," clever with money and mortgages, and he was a moneylender of sorts. There was plenty of space here— a big barn and a roomy kitchen. Mrs. Mao's stove was preserved (Do Not Touch) and a placard near it read In 1921 Mao Zedong educated his family in revolution near this stove. And in the sitting room, In 1927 meetings were held here to discuss revolutionary activities.

  It was not like visiting Lincoln's log cabin. It wasn't Blenheim. It wasn't Paul Revere's house. For one thing it was very empty. The few Chinese nearby seemed indifferent to the house itself. They sat under trees listening to a booming radio. There were girls in pretty dresses. Their clothes alone were a political statement. But this handful of people were hardly visible. The emptiness meant something. Because when it was heavily visited Shaoshan had represented political piety and obedience; now that it was empty it stood for indifference. In a sense, neglect was more dramatic than destruction because the thing still existed as a mockery of what it had been.

  It had the musty smell of an old shrine. It had outlived its usefulness, and it looked a little absurd, like a once-hallowed temple of a sect of fanatics who had run off, tearing their clothes, and had never returned. Times have changed. Towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, the pseudonymous Simon Leys visited China, and in Chinese Shadows, his gloomy and scolding account of his trip, he wrote that Shaoshan "is visited by about three million pilgrims every year." That's 8000 a day. Today there were none.

  If Shaoshan was embarrassing to the Chinese it was because the whole scheme had been to show Mao as more than human. There was an obnoxious religiosity in the way his old schoolhouse had been arranged to show little Mao as a sanctified student. But the building was empty, and there was no one walking down the lane, so it didn't matter. I had the impression that the Chinese were staying away in droves.

  One stall sold postcards. There was only one view: Mao's Birthplace (the house in the glade). And there were a few Mao badges. It was the only place in China where I saw his face on sale, but even so, it was just this little badge. There were also towels and dishcloths, saying Shaoshan.

  There was a shop in the Mao Museum.

  I said, "I would like to buy a Mao badge."

  "We have none," the clerk said.

  "How about a Mao picture?"

  "We have none."

  "What about a Little Red Book—or any Mao book?"

  "None."

  "Where are they?"

  "Sold."

  "All of them?"

  "All."

  "Will you get some more to sell?"

  The clerk said, "I do not know."

  What do they sell, then, at the shop in the Mao Museum? They sell key chains with color photos of Hong Kong movie actresses, bars of soap, combs, razor blades, face cream, hard candy, peanut brittle, buttons, thread, cigarettes and men's underwear.

  The museum did try to show Mao as more than human, and in its eighteen rooms of hagiography Mao was presented as a sort of Christ figure, preaching at a very early age (giving instructions in revolution by his mother's stove) and winning recruits. There were statues, flags, badges and personal paraphernalia—his straw hat, his slippers, his ashtray. Room by room, his life is displayed in pictures and captions: his school days, his job, his travels, the death of his brother, the Long March, the war, his first marriage...

  And then, after such languid and detailed exposition, an odd thing happens in the last room. In No. 18, time is telescoped, and the years 1949-1976, his entire chairmanship, his rule, and his death, are presented with lightning speed.

  There is no mention of his two other marriages, nothing about Jiang Qing. Nonpersons like Jiang Qing and Lin Biao have been airbrushed out of photographs. The 1960s are shown in one picture, the mushroom cloud of China's first atomic bomb in 1964. The rest of the decade does not exist. There has been no Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, though the Mao Museum was founded in 1967, at the height
of it.

  But by omitting so much and showing time passing so quickly, the viewer is given a bizarre potted history of Mao's final years. In the previous rooms he looks like a spoiled child, a big brat, scowling and solemn. In this final room he develops a very unusual smile, and on his pumpkin face it has a disturbing effect. After 1956 he seems to be gaga. He starts wearing baggy pants and a coolie hat, and his face is drawn from a sag into a mad or senile grimace. He looks unlike his earlier self. In one picture he is lumberingly playing Ping-Pong. In 1972 and after, meeting Nixon, Prince Sihanouk, and East European leaders, he's a heffalump; he looks hugely crazy or else barely seems to recognize the visitor grinning at him. There is plenty of evidence here to support what the Chinese say about him all the time—that after 1956 he was not the same.

  Mao had set out to be an enigma and had succeeded. "The anal leader of an oral people," the sinologist Richard Solomon had said. Mao can be described but not summed up. He was patient, optimistic, ruthless, pathologically anti-intellectual, romantic, militaristic, patriotic, chauvinistic, rebellious in a youthful way, and deliberately contradictory.

  Shaoshan said everything about Mao, his rise and fall; his position today. I loved the empty train arriving at the empty station. Was there a better image of obscurity? As for the house and village—they were like many temples in China where no one prayed any longer; just a heap of symmetrical stones representing waste, confusion and ruin. China was full of such places, dedicated to the memory of someone or other and, lately, just an excuse for setting up picnic tables and selling souvenirs.

  Mr. Fang was sitting in the hotel lobby with his head in his hands. He did not look up when a man near him hoicked loudly, spat a clam onto the floor and scuffed it with his foot.

  "I'm leaving, Mr. Fang."

  He raised his head and looked at me with his swollen eyes.

  "Where are you going?"

  "Canton for a while. Then Peking."

  He groaned. "By train?" he asked. His lips were dry.

  "The People's Railway is for the people," I said, recalling the slogan I had seen in the Yunnan town of Yiliang.

  This made him wince. He said, "I am fifty-six years old. I have traveled a great deal. I was a Russian interpreter. I have been to Leningrad and other places. But I have never taken so many trains all at once. I have never slept on so many trains—I don't sleep at all. Trains, trains."

  "A train isn't a vehicle," I said. "A train is part of the country. It's a place."

  "No more," he said, not listening.

  "I'm going to Canton."

  "I must go with you," he said. "But we can take a plane."

  "Sorry, no planes. Chinese planes frighten me."

  "But the train—"

  "You take the plane," I said. "I'll go by train."

  "No. I go with you. It is the Chinese way."

  He looked miserable, but I had very little sympathy for him. He had been sent to nanny me and breathe down my neck. He had been discreet—he had not gotten in my way; but who had asked him to come? Not me.

  "Go back to Peking," I said. "I can go to Canton by myself."

  "After Canton," he said, "are you taking more trains?"

  "I don't know."

  "Planes are quicker."

  "I'm not in a hurry, Mr. Fang."

  He said nothing more. I was glad: without even trying, I had outlasted him. He was at his wit's end, he hated trains now, he had suffered the torture of sleep deprivation. He was dying to go home.

  And yet he followed me onto the express to Canton the following night, and he sat behind me in the dining car. He looked physically ill, and to make matters worse the dining car quickly filled up with some high-spirited tourists whose plane had been canceled.

  They were the sort of good-hearted Americans who, at an earlier time in the history of American tourism, used to go to Pike's Peak. Now it was China. They went shopping. They were bussed to temples, where they also shopped. They talked a great deal, but not about Chinese culture. They said, "Joe senior died and she remarried twice more. She was an awful alcoholic." They said, "Bananas are good for you. They feed on carbohydrates." When someone among them mentioned Canton they said, "You can go bowling in Canton!"

  But they were not more talkative than the Cantonese in the dining car, nor were they any louder. In a circumspect way they were appreciative.

  The waiter put down a dish of green vegetables.

  "Who's going to eat this?" a hearty woman said.

  "What is it?" another woman asked.

  "My son would eat that," said a third woman, peering at it.

  "Is it spinach?"

  "It's a type of spinach," a man said.

  "Never mind!" a man from Texas cried. "The streets are safe! My poor wife's from west Texas and she didn't see a city until she was twenty-three years old. But I could put ten thousand dollars worth of gold on her and send her into the street and she'd be perfectly all right. Because this is China, not Texas." *

  "But don't touch the water," the hearty woman said.

  "It tastes like L.A. water," someone said. "I'm not used to it."

  "It tastes like Saginaw water," a young woman said. "It's the chlorine. I had a cup of coffee there once and it was awful. I says, 'What's wrong with this coffee?' But it wasn't the coffee. It was the water."

  Her friend—or perhaps husband—said, "Outside Saginaw, in hick towns like Hemlock, the water's real nice."

  "Boy am I glad I didn't bring nylons!" the hearty woman said. "Did you think China was going to be this hot?"

  "It's hot here, sure," said the man from Texas. "But up north it's freezing. It's all snow and ice. That's a fact."

  "He's bringing more food," someone said.

  "Jesus, do you think that has a name?"

  A woman said in an announcing voice, "I'm going to tell all my friends who are going on a diet to go to China—I mean, the ones that are real picky about their food. They'd slim down good!"

  "But the real picky ones wouldn't go to China," the young woman said.

  As I left the dining car I heard someone say in an anxious voice, "My question is, what do they do with all these leftovers?"

  A Cantonese man had entered my compartment. He was panting, fossicking in his knapsack. He looked simian and strange. He spoke no language but his own. He climbed into the upper berth and rattled his bags. I turned the light out. He turned it back on. He slurped tea out of his jam jar and harumphed. He noisily left the compartment and returned wearing striped pajamas. It was midnight and yet he was still leaping back and forth, once narrowly missing my glasses with his prehensile foot as he used the table as a foothold. I went to sleep and woke at about three in the morning. The man was reading, using a flashlight, and muttering softly. I slept very little after that.

  I felt just as grouchy as Mr. Fang in Canton, and so I decided to stay awhile and not make any onward bookings. It is wrong to see a country in a bad mood: you begin to blame the country for your mood and to draw the wrong conclusions.

  I had once laughed to think that there were luxury hotels in Canton, with delicatessens and discotheques. The Chinese there had taken up weight lifting; they had body-building magazines. The White Swan Hotel had hamburgers and a salad bar. The China Hotel had an air-conditioned bowling alley. Now it did not seem odd to think that people would go to China to shop, to eat, or to go bowling.

  Mr. Fang said nervously, "No more trains?"

  "Not at the moment."

  "Maybe you will go home?"

  "Maybe."

  Was he smiling?

  "I will take you to the station," he said. "Chinese custom. Say good-bye."

  "That's not necessary, Mr. Fang. Why not take the plane back to Peking?"

  "There is one leaving tomorrow morning," he said. He was eager.

  "Don't worry about me," I said.

  He seemed reluctant, but he said no more. I bought him a picture book about Guilin, and that evening, spotting him in the lobby, I gave it to him.
He did not unwrap it. He slipped it under his arm, then gave me his sad sea-lion stare and said, "Yes," and shook my hand. "Bye-bye," he said, in English, and then abruptly turned away. It is not a reminiscing race, I thought. He kept walking. He did not look back.

  Then, because this was Canton, I went bowling.

  13: The Peking Express: Train Number 16

  And then there were a number of public events that shocked the country. I did not set off immediately. It is so easy to be proven wrong in China. No sooner had I concluded that China was prospering and reforming, that people were freer and foreign investment rising, than the country was in crisis. True, some aspects of China never changed—the rice planters bent double, the weeder on his stool, the boy pedaling his 2000-year-Old irrigation pump, the buffalo man, the duck-herd. But in the months before I left Canton to resume my Chinese travels, the yuan was devalued by thirty percent—instead of three to the dollar there were now almost four—and the black market in hard currency was very brisk, and the most common greeting "Shansh marnie?" People were criticized for wanting to go abroad, and a law was passed requiring potential students to post a bond of 5000 yuan—an enormous sum—before they could study in another country. Foreign investment dropped by twenty percent, and Deng Xiaoping criticized Chinese manufacturers for producing shoddy goods that no one wanted.

  And the students demonstrated, for the first time since the Cultural Revolution. The demonstrations were orderly, but the defiance implicit in such illegal gatherings was seen to be a sign of chaos. The Chinese horror of disorder made them seem important, though I felt the parades and demands were mostly half-baked. Traditionally, December and January have been regarded by the Chinese as appropriate months for disruption, and so there was a ritual end-of-term element in the demonstrations—high spirits, funny hats, a measure of farce. The grievances were numerous, and on posters and in their chanting, the students demanded press freedom, electoral re-form, a multiparty system, and official permission to demonstrate. Banners reading We Want Democracy were flown. They demanded sexual freedom and better food in the university cafeterias. Eight cities were affected, and the size of the demonstrations varied from a few hundred students in Canton to well over 100,000 (and an equal number of spectators) in Shanghai, which came to a standstill for a full day.