Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  I wore mittens and long underwear and thermal boots and a hat with earflaps and two sweaters under my leather jacket. One overcast day of paralyzing cold I wore more than that, put on all the clothes I had with me; I turned myself into a big padded and bulging fool, and yet I was still so cold I had to rush inside occasionally and jump up and down. The Chinese were well wrapped up, and some wore face masks, but on their feet many wore no more than corduroy rubber-soled slippers. Why didn't their feet fall off? They were enthusiasts for heavy knitted underwear that gave them elephantine legs, which contrasted oddly with their skinny frostbitten faces.

  They didn't wash, for many reasons, the main one being that they did not have hot water or bathrooms. It hardly mattered: stinks are seldom obvious in icy northern lands. They did not take their clothes off, even indoors—neither their hats or coats, even when they ate. It was easy to see why. The heating was turned to an absolute minimum—the Maoist doctrine of saving fuel and regarding heating and lighting as luxuries except where they affected production of something like pig iron or cotton cloth. This constant wearing of coats and hats, inside and out, had given them some very bad habits. The worst was that they never seemed to close doors, and wherever you went there was a door ajar and wind like a knife coursing through it.

  My hotel was so cold I always wore three or four layers of clothes. It was called the Swan—I thought of it as the Frozen Swan. It had a rock garden and ornamental pool in the lobby, but the lobby was so cold the fish had died and the plants were stiff and brown. Manchus and Hans sat in thick coats and fur hats on the lobby sofas, smoking and yelling. I was told there was a warmer hotel in Harbin, called the International, but it did not seem to matter to anyone in Heilongjiang whether a hotel was heated or not. The great boast of the hotels was their cuisine, and they vied with each other in offering grilled bear's paw, stewed moose nose with mushroom, Mongolian hot pot, white fungus soup and monkey-leg mushrooms and pheasant shashlik.

  I arrived on Christmas Eve—the Russian Orthodox Christmas Eve, at the end of the first week in January. I went to one of the churches, where a shivering mustached man—possibly Russian; he was certainly not Chinese—was draping pine boughs upon the holy pictures and the statues. The interior of the church was sorry looking and very cold. The next day there was a Christmas service, twenty people chanted, sang and lit candles. They were all Russians, and most of them were old women. They had the furtive look of Early Christians, but it was obvious that no one persecuted them. They went about the Christmas service in a morose way and wouldn't talk to me afterward—just crunched away in the icy snow.

  Even in January most events take place in the open air. The market is outdoors in the thirty-below temperatures. People shopped, bought frozen food (melons, meat, bread) and licked ice cream. That was the most popular snack in Harbin—vanilla ice cream. And the second most popular was small cherry-sized "haws" (hawthorns) which they coated with red goo and jammed on twigs. The market traders were cheery souls with rags wound around their faces and wearing mittens and fur hats. It went without saying that they spent the whole day outside, and when they saw me they cackled and called out, "Hey, old-hair!"

  It was the Harbin expression for light-haired foreigners (lao mao zi), because old people are associated with light-colored hair. In this regard they have a special phrase for Russians, "second-class light-hairs" (er mao zi), which is intended as a term of disrespect.

  A few days after I arrived the Harbin Winter Festival opened. It was a gimmick to attract tourists to this refrigerator, but it was a good gimmick. Most of it was an exhibition of ice sculpture. The Chinese expression bing deng is more accurate: it means "ice lanterns," and these ice sculptures usually had electric lights frozen inside them.

  The whole city of Harbin was involved in it. A sculptor would stack blocks of ice around a lamppost and then chip away and shave the ice until it resembled a pagoda or a rocket ship or a human being. There was an ice sculpture on every street corner—lions, elephants, airplanes, acrobats, bridges; some of them were thirty or forty feet high. But the most ambitious ones were in The People's Park—there were eighty acres of them. Not only a Great Wall of China in ice, but a smaller version of the Taj Mahal, a two-story Chinese pavilion, an enormous car, a platoon of soldiers, an Eiffel Tower, and about forty more displays, all cut out of ice blocks in which fluorescent tubes had been frozen. Because of the lights these ice sculptures had to be seen at night, when it was nearly forty below. But no one minded. They shuffled around, they slipped and fell, they ate ice cream and goggled at these wonderful examples of deep-frozen kitsch.

  'The Russians introduced these ice sculptures," a Japanese man told me. 'This is not an ancient Chinese art. But the Chinese liked them and developed the knack of making them. And it was their idea to put lights inside them."

  Mr. Morioka in his tam-o'shanter and miracle fibers had taken a sentimental journey back to Harbin. He said you had to come to Harbin in the winter to see it as it really is. The pity was that so few foreigners dared to visit in the winter months.

  I said it might have something to do with the stupefying cold.

  "Oh, yes!" he said. "I was here in the thirties. I was a student. This was a wonderful place—full of Russian nobility who had no money. Some of them brought jewels and sold them here to keep themselves going. A few lived in style, in those villas that you see in town. But most of the Russians were poverty-striken émigrés. It was a Japanese city."

  We were strolling through the ice sculptures; through an ice tunnel, down the main street of an ice village, past a pair of ice lions.

  Mr. Morioka said, "As you pined for Paris, we pined for Harbin."

  "We pined for sex and romance in Paris," I said.

  "What do you think we had in Harbin? We had strippers, nightclubs, Paris fashions, the latest styles—books, songs, everything. This was like Europe to us. That's why our boys used to yearn for the bright lights of Harbin."

  That seemed a very unusual way of describing this Chinese refrigerator, but of course he was talking about Manchukuo, Land of the Manchus, owned and operated by the Sons of Nippon.

  "The strippers were Russian. That was the attraction. Some of them had been very grand, but they were down on their luck. So they danced and they performed in the cabaret—"

  And as he spoke I could see a roomful of libidinous Japanese with their mouths open, transfixed by a wobbling pair of Russian knockers.

  "—and you know, Russian women are very beautiful until they are about thirty or so," Mr. Morioka said. "These were fine women. Very lovely. I tell you, some of these women were aristocrats. I remember one cabaret singer telling me how she had gone to great parties and fancy balls in country houses in Russia."

  This was an interesting story from the Old World, even though it did stink of exploitation. He said that in a Harbin nightclub there would be eighty percent Japanese and twenty percent rich Chinese. "Almost no Russians," he said. "They couldn't afford it. In Shanghai in the thirties it was fifty-fifty, Japanese and Chinese."

  I wanted to talk to him a bit more, but my feet were so cold I was seriously worried about frostbite. I apologized and said I had to get out of this park and into a warmer place.

  "There isn't much more to tell," he said. "It all ended in August 1945. when the Japanese front collapsed. The Russian soldiers, who had all been criminals and prisoners, were unmerciful. They took this city and began raping and murdering. That's another story!"

  There were more ice carvings and ice monuments at Stalin Park on the riverbank—walls, fences, lions, turrets, and especially slides and sluices down which people rocketed in sleds onto the Songhua River. There were iceboats with sails and runners, and horse-drawn sleighs. Not many takers—no one had money. But there were plenty of people bruising their ankles on the ice-block helter-skelter, a spiral slide around a tower.

  That made me think that of all the foreign companies that might soon start up in China the unlikeliest was an insurance compa
ny. I thought, Who would insure these people? I saw a man skidding at the ice sculptures. He slipped and cracked his head and was dragged into the snow, where he remained inert. It was a country of bare wires and potholes. Tourists have been known to disappear down elevator shafts and the claims by tourists against the China International Travel Service for injuries, missed cities and sickness are astronomical. The average Chinese factory is a death trap, and yet the Chinese blithely escort visitors through them and past machines that snatch at your hair and poke you in the eye, past gaping holes in the floor, and pools of toxic substances and crackling furnaces. Hard hats are not common, and few welders I saw wore masks.

  My hotel was very cold but very hospitable. It was so friendly it actually aroused my suspicions—like the man who is such a glad-hander you suspect he is picking your pocket. I was on the eleventh floor. Welcome to Our Floor! the signs said. That was very unusual. Good health! more said. And many said, Prosperity and Long Life!

  I asked the floor attendant what was up. He just grinned and said, "Welcome to our floor!"

  "Why are you welcoming me to your floor?"

  "I want you to be happy."

  "No one has ever welcomed me to their floor in China," I said.

  "It is a very good floor."

  His insistence in his squawking voice only made me anxious, and so I looked deeper into this and discovered that the previous year there had been a terrible fire in the hotel in which two people died. The eleventh floor had been burned out. The man who had started it was an American businessman. He was said to have been smoking in bed. He was detained by the Chinese and—so I was told—confined to a hotel for quite a while because his company refused to pay the $70,000 damages that the Chinese demanded. And yet no security precautions were taken after the fire. No fire stairs, no smoke detectors, no fireproof furnishings. All the Chinese had done was print hundreds of cardboard signs to be placed in every hotel room. The sign said Do Not Smoke in Bed.

  One day in Harbin I met a Canadian who surprised me by saying that he was delighted to be here. His name was Scotty. He was of course from Edmonton, Alberta, the sister city.

  "But I'm the only Edmontonian here," he said.

  He was a stout and good-humored man and this was his first time in China. He could hardly believe the notoriety it had given him. He had been to a banquet with the governor and he had met many high Party officials in the province. He was the superintendent of a steel forge, on a two-year assignment, and was perhaps on the verge of believing in his importance to the future of Chinese industry. "It's hard to describe," he said. "But I'm a kind of unofficial celebrity."

  "I hope it lasts," I said, because the Chinese were known to be rather brisk with foreigners they no longer needed. The philosophy of learning from foreigners was spelled out in the nineteenth century by Feng Gui-fen. Feng was an adviser to statesmen, and a teacher and advocate of reform. He regarded all foreigners as barbarians but said it was necessary to use them to learn various mechanical skills (shipbuilding and gunsmithing in particular). "A few barbarians should be employed," he said, "and Chinese who are good in using their minds should be selected to receive instruction so that in turn they may teach many craftsmen." He went on to say, "We should use the instruments of the barbarians, but not adopt the ways of the barbarians. We should use them so that we can repel them." These are to a large extent the sentiments of the Chinese government today and the reason for the large number of so-called foreign experts in China. A foreign expert is a barbarian with a skill to impart, but he should never make the mistake of believing that he is being invited to stay for an indefinite length of time. The experts are in China to be used, and when they are no longer useful, to be sent home.

  I asked Scotty whether he got homesick. He said he had only been in Harbin four months—not long enough.

  "My wife misses grocery shopping and she hates her kitchen," he said. "Me? I miss beef. There's no beef here."

  I had not noticed that, but then you usually had to be told what was in a Chinese dish. The Chinese had a way of drawing a culinary veil over even the most obvious ingredients.

  "How is your steel forge?" I asked.

  "Old-fashioned," Scotty said. "So I have to be tough. I'll tell you frankly—I'm cruel. I have to be, to get the quality up. Take today. What did I do? I rejected a whole order. It was worth twenty thousand U.S. Hey, it worried them!"

  "Why did you reject the order?"

  Scotty became suddenly very enthusiastic about his work, and as he talked about forging steel, I was convinced that he was the perfect man to send to China—a hard hat with a mission. He didn't seem the sort of person who suffered fools gladly. If they called him a barbarian I was sure he would return the compliment.

  "Every piece of steel has to have a heat number stamped on it. These didn't have a heat number. I just sent them back and said no." He smiled mischievously and added, "I'll accept the order eventually, when we get the number on it. But they don't know that. That's my secret. Let them stew for a while. Let them think about the foul-up."

  "Was it important, this steel?"

  "Sure!" he said. "Buncha pipe flanges!"

  We talked about pipe flanges for a while. It is true that there's not much about pipe flanges to bewitch the imagination, but we were in one of the downtown hotels where it was warm. When it is minus thirty-eight degrees centigrade outside, it can be counted a pleasant experience to stand in a warm place talking with a fat Canadian about pipe flanges.

  All this time in Harbin I was trying to make arrangements to go farther north into the greater desolation of Heilongjiang. I had not known that my destination, Langxiang, was closed to foreigners. But I prevailed upon the Chinese. I said I would behave myself and would not stay long. They said they would consider my request.

  While I waited I rummaged in the shops. I bought a pair of gloves, but not a fur hat. Such lovely furs (ermine, sable, fox, mink); such hideous hats and coats. And how awful for a stag to be killed so that its noble forking antlers could be made into buttons for auntie's old coat. I found an ivory object at the Harbin Antiquities Store. "It is an ancient carving," the clerk said. "Of the earth."

  "Impossible."

  How did I know it could not be an ancient Chinese carving of the round earth? Elementary. Until about 1850 the Chinese believed the earth was flat.

  It was a prewar Russian billiard ball, but I bought it just the same.

  15: The Slow Train to Langxiang: Number 295

  "Is it cold outside?" I asked.

  "Very," said Mr. Tian. His eyeglasses were opaque with frost.

  It was five-thirty on a Harbin morning, the temperature at minus thirty-five degrees centigrade and a light snow falling—little grains like seed pearls sifting down in the dark. When the flurry stopped, the wind picked up, and the wind was murderous. With it full on my face it was like being slashed with a razor. We were on our way to the railway station.

  "And you insist on coming with me?" I asked.

  "Langxiang is forbidden," Mr. Tian said. "So I must."

  "It is the Chinese way," I said.

  "Very much so," he replied.

  In this darkness, huddled groups of people waited in the empty street for buses. That seemed a grim pastime, a long wait at a Harbin bus stop in winter. And, by the way, the buses were not heated. In his aggrieved account of his Chinese residence, the journalist Tiziano Terzani, writing about Heilongjiang ("The Kingdom of the Rats"), quotes a French traveler who said, "Although it is uncertain where God placed paradise, we can be sure that he chose some other place than this."

  The wind dropped but the cold remained. It banged against my forehead and twisted my fingers and toes; it burned my lips. I felt like Sam McGee. I entered the station waiting room, and a chill rolled against me, as if my face had been pressed on a cold slab. The waiting room was unhealed. I asked Mr. Tian how he felt about this.

  "Heat is bad," he said."Heat makes you sleepy and slow."

  "I like it," I s
aid.

  Mr. Tian said, "I once went to Canton. It was so hot I felt sick."

  Mr. Tian was twenty-seven, a graduate of Harbin University. There was humor in the way he moved. He was self-assured. He didn't fuss. He was patient. He was frank. I liked him for these qualities. The fact that he was incompetent did not matter very much. Langxiang was a day's journey by train—north, into the snow. He seemed an easy companion, and I did not think he would get in my way.

  He had no bag. He may have had a toothbrush in his pocket, where he kept his woolly cap and his misshapen gloves. He was completely portable, without any impedimenta. He was an extreme example of Chinese austerity. He slept in his long johns and wore his coat to meals. He rarely washed. Being Chinese he did not have to shave. He seemed to have no possessions at all. He was like a desert Bedouin. This fascinated me, too.

  The loudspeakers in the waiting room were broadcasting the dragon voice of the Peking harridan who gave the news every morning. In China the news always seemed a peculiar form of nagging.

  "You are listening to that?" Mr. Tian inquired.

  "Yes, but I can't make it out."

  "'We must absolutely not allow a handful of people to sabotage production,'" Mr. Tian translated the duckspeak from the broadcast.

  The announcer was reading a front-page editorial from the Workers' Daily. It was the first public acknowledgment that the Chinese Communist Party condemned the student demonstrations. There were other people in the waiting room but they were talking among themselves instead of listening. They were warmly dressed, in fur hats, mittens and boots. They smoked heavily and from time to time got up to use the spittoon which was the centerpiece of the railway waiting room.