Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  Their husbands were lumberjacks and storekeepers. It was just like the Chinese to single them out as a special category. The Chinese were great makers of ethnic distinctions and could spot a cultural difference a mile away. Muslims have been in China for well over a thousand years and yet they are still regarded as strange and inscrutable and backward, and politically suspect.

  All the while in Langxiang my feet and hands were frozen—stinging and painful. My eyes hurt. My muscles were knotted. There was an icy moaning in my head. Mr. Tian asked me whether I wanted to see the ski slopes. I said yes, and we drove four miles outside town just as the sun slipped below the distant mountains and an even greater cold descended with the darkness.

  There on the black and white mountains were ten sluices—frozen chutes cut into the slope. People hauled small boxes up the mountain—they were like little coffins; and then they placed them into a chute and went banging down, cracking from side to side and screaming. I hopped up and down in the cold and said I wasn't interested.

  Mr. Tian went thrashing up the slope with a splintery coffin and came down showing his teeth. He did it again. Perhaps he was developing a taste for this.

  "Don't you like skiing?" he said.

  "This isn't skiing, Mr. Tian."

  In a shocked voice he said, "It's not?"

  But he kept doing it just the same.

  I walked down the path and found a shed, a sort of watchman's shack. There was a stove inside. This was a vivid demonstration of heating in Langxiang. The stove was so feeble that there was a half an inch of frost on the walls of the shed. The walls (wood and mud bricks) were entirely white.

  I kept a record of temperatures. Minus thirty-four centigrade on the main street, freezing in the lobby, just above freezing in the dining room. The food went cold a minute after it was plunked down, and the grease congealed. They served fatty meat, greasy potatoes, rice gruel, great uncooked chunks of green pepper. Was this Chinese food? One day I had cabbage stuffed with meat and rice, and gravy poured over it. I had eaten such dishes in Russia and Poland, where they were called golomkis.

  It was very tiring to be cold all the time. I began to enjoy going to bed early. I listened to the BBC and the Voice of America under my blankets. After a few hours I took one of my sweaters off, and one layer of socks, and by morning I was so warm in the sack that I forgot where I was. Then I saw the layer of frost on the window that was so thick I could not see outside, and I remembered.

  No one spoke of the cold. Well, why should they? They reveled in it—literally, dancing and sliding on the ice. I saw children after dark one evening pushing each other off a shelf of ice onto the frozen surface of the town's river. (Other people chopped holes in this ice and drew water from it.) Those children frolicking in the darkness in the perishing cold reminded me of penguins frisking on the ice floes through the long Antarctic night.

  When I travel I dream a great deal. Perhaps that is one of my main reasons for travel. It has something to do with strange rooms and odd noises and smells; with vibrations; with food; with the anxieties of travel—especially the fear of death; and with temperatures.

  In Langxiang it was the low temperatures that gave me long, exhauscing dreams. The cold kept me from deep sleep, and so I lay just beneath the surface of consciousness, like a drifting fish. I offer one of my Langxiang dreams. I was besieged in a house in San Francisco, but I realized I would have to escape or I would be killed. I first fired out of the window and then ran from the front door shooting a machine gun and wearing headphones. I boarded a passing cable car—that was part of my escape route: I was now safe. President Reagan was on it, standing and straphanging. I found a seat near him and started talking to him. He told me his right ear was useless and that I should talk into his left. I was asking him whether he was having a tough time as president. He said, "Terrible." So I gave him my seat, and we were still talking when I woke up feeling very cold.

  That was not the end. I went back to sleep and dreamed that I was at a Christmas party. I didn't know any of the people. It was a large and fashionable house, and the people seemed like houseguests, staying for the weekend. One man startled me: he looked like a gnome, with a tanned, leathery face, completely bald, and wearing an earring. In his hand was a small plastic model of himself, just as ugly but only six inches high, which he was giving as a Christmas present.

  Nancy Reagan was at the party. Her hair was in big white rollers. She had very thin arms and popping eyes. We talked about the weather for a while, and then she said, "I have to call home"—she was too embarrassed to say "the White House." After she made her phone call, we went onto the porch, which was like a conservatory with a view of the sea. She said she had a bad ear—"My trump ear," she said, meaning she needed an ear trumpet for it. She said, "You're so lucky co come from here." When she said that I realized that we were on Cape Cod, and perhaps in an idealized version of my own house. She said pathetically, "I was so poor when I was growing up."

  When she finished, I said, "I've just had a dream about the president"—and I began to describe my earlier dream within this dream.

  Before I got very far, Mr. Tian banged on my door and woke me up.

  "We are going to the primeval forest," he said.

  We drove about thirty miles, and Mrs. Jin joined us. The driver's name was Ying. The road was icy and corrugated and very narrow; but there were no other vehicles except for an occasional army truck. When we arrived at a place called Clear Spring (Qing Yuan), where there was a cabin, we began hiking through the forest. There was snow every where, but it was not very deep—a foot or so. The trees were huge and very close together—great fat trunks crowding each other. We kept to a narrow path.

  I asked Mrs. Jin about herself. She was a pleasant person, very frank and unaffected. She was thirty-two and had a young daughter. Her husband was a clerk in a government department. This family of three lived with six other family members in a small flat in Langxiang—nine people in three rooms. Her mother-in-law did all the cooking. It seemed cruel that in a province which had wide open spaces, people should be forced to live in such cramped conditions at close quarters. But this was quite usual. And it was an extended family under one roof. I often had the feeling that it was the old immemorial Confucian family that had kept China orderly. Mao had attacked the family—the Cultural Revolution was intentionally an assault on the family system, when children were told to rat on their bourgeois parents. But that had faltered and failed. The family had endured, and what were emerging with Deng's reforms were family businesses and family farms.

  Kicking through the forest, I asked whether it was possible to buy Mao's Little Red Book of Selected Thoughts.

  "I have thrown mine away," Mr. Tian said. "That was all a big mistake."

  "I don't agree with him," Mrs. Jin said.

  "Do you read Mao's Thoughts?" I asked.

  "Sometimes," she said. "Mao did many great things for China. Everyone criticizes him, but they forget the wise things he said."

  "What is your favorite thought? The one that you most associate with his wisdom?"

  "'Serve the People,'" Mrs. Jin said. "I can't quote it all to you, it is too long. It is very wise."

  "What about 'A Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party'—can you sing it?"

  "Oh, yes," she said, and did so as we marched through the woods. It was not a catchy tune, but it was perfect for walking briskly, full of iambics: Geming bushi qingke chifan...

  Meanwhile I was bird-watching. It was one of the few places in China where the trees were full of birds. They were tiny flitting things, and very high in the branches. My problem was that I could only use my binoculars with bare hands, so that I could adjust the focus. The temperature was in the minus thirties, which meant that after a few minutes my fingers were too cold to use for adjustments. Yet even in this bitter cold there was bird song, and the whole forest chattered with the tapping of woodpeckers.

  "Mr. Tian, can you sing something?" I asked.

&nb
sp; "I can't sing Mao's Thoughts."

  "Sing something else."

  He suddenly snatched his woolly cap off and shrieked:

  Oh, Carol!

  I am but a foooool!

  Don't ever leave me—

  Treat me mean and croool...

  He sang it with extraordinary passion and energy, this old Neil Sedaka rock-and-roll song, and when he was done, he said, "That's what we used to sing at Harbin University when I was a student!"

  There was no wind, and the only sound in the forest was that of the birds—chirping, twittering, pecking the trunks. Mr. Tian and Mrs. Jin saw some smoke on a hill not far away and decided to go investigate it. I carried on plodding and bird-watching. I saw a number of Marsh Tits and three kinds of woodpecker. I was looking for the chicken-sized Great Black Woodpecker. I saw a pair of treecreepers making their way up a trunk, their feathers fluffed out. It delighted me to see these tiny birds were impervious to the cold.

  Then I heard the unmistakable crack of a gun going off. I turned around and saw Ying, the driver, rushing into a thicket and retrieving a dead bird. He had a gun! I tramped back along the path just as he was cramming the bird into his pocket.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Look, a bird," he said, fairly pleased with himself. His rifle was a single shot .22, straight out of a shooting gallery.

  "What are you going to do with that bird?"

  It was a rosefinch. I had it in my hand now. It was very soft and very tiny, and in this region of dull smoldering cold, the dead bird was still warm. It was like holding an extravagant hors d'oeuvre.

  Mr. Ying perhaps detected a hostility in my voice. He did not reply.

  "Are you going to eat this bird?"

  He looked down and kicked the snow like a scolded child.

  There was nothing to eat. I was sure he was killing the birds for the fun of it.

  "Why are you shooting birds, Mr. Ying?"

  He did not look at me; he was sulking, losing face.

  "I don't like killing birds," I said. "This is a nice bird. This is a pretty bird. And now it's a dead bird."

  And I was angry, too, because I had not known this gunslinger was behind me, blasting away. I had thought I was in the wilderness. But I had already said too much. Mr. Ying looked as though he wanted to shoot me. I put the tiny rosefinch into his hand and I walked away. When I looked back I saw him stamping on the path, making his way to the road. I could not see Mr. Tian or Mrs. Jin, though I saw what they had been chasing—a tree burning on a hillside, a great thrill, a useless fire.

  I went deeper into the forest on my own and saw more birds—great flitting clusters of woodpeckers. You would see as many birds on an average day in Sandwich, Mass., but this was tamed, poisoned, unsentimental and ravenous China, the most populous and domesticated country on earth: on seeing a wild bird the Chinese person invariably licked his lips.

  It was an unusual place for China. Pretty birds singing and skittering among tall, thick trees, and no other human in sight.

  There was no danger in carrying on here. My footprints in the snow made it impossible for me to get lost. I kept on for another hour or so and saw a plume of smoke. Even when I was near it I could not make out what it was. It seemed to be an underground fire. When I was on top of it I saw that it came from a deep hole in the ground. In the bottom of the hole three Chinese girls were warming themselves over a fire. I said hello and they looked up at a long-nosed barbarian in a silly hat and mittens and a coat bulging with layers of sweaters. They looked truly startled, as though I might be a Siberian who had wandered over the border, which was indeed only about eighty miles away. They emitted the characteristic Chinese gasp, Ai-yaaaah.

  "What are you doing?"

  "It is our lunch break!"

  They climbed out of the hole to look at me. They were wearing padded jackets and felt boots, and scarves over their heads and faces.

  They said they were working here, and showed me where they were planting seedlings behind windbreaks. The loggers had come and gone, and whole hillsides had been cut down. The idea was that in another three hundred years or so the forest would be replaced and ready for recutting. With China's record for acid rain this prospect seemed unlikely. But the windbreaks were elaborate, like many rows of hedges lying parallel on the hillside; the overall impression was one of lines on a contour map.

  Before I headed back I jumped into the hole and warmed myself before the fire, as the three girls knelt at the edge of the hole, looking in at me. When I got out, they got in.

  I found Mr. Tian tramping towards me. He said, "So you like it here, eh?"

  "This is wonderful."

  "Primeval forest," he said. "Original forest."

  "Wouldn't you like to build a house here and live alone with your wife?"

  "Yes," he said. "Have a family and write something—poems and stories."

  "Maybe have four children."

  "It is not permitted," he said. Then he smiled."But this is so far they wouldn't know. It wouldn't matter. Yes. I would like that."

  We walked to where the lumberjacks were working. Few of them wore gloves or hats. They wore rather thin jackets and glorified sneakers. It amazed me that they could endure this cold so skimpily dressed. They were dragging bundles of freshly cut logs into stacks to be loaded onto trucks. Some of the younger ones stopped to stare at me—perhaps because I was so warmly dressed; but the foreman barked at them, and all these ragged tree cutters went back to work. The human voices and the chugging tractors sounded bizarre and unpleasant in this dense forest, perhaps among the last forested wildernesses in China.

  Mrs. Jin had wandered back to the road. When we caught up with her it was already growing dark. Walking to the car we talked about capital punishment. Mr. Tian agreed with it—kill them all, he said. It was the only way. Mrs. Jin disagreed. Forget the death penalty for embezzlers and pimps, she said; just execute murderers.

  This led to a discussion about the true numbers that had been executed.

  "Most Chinese people don't believe the news they hear on the radio," Mr. Tian said, when I asked whether the government broadcast such figures.

  Mrs. Jin frowned, probably wondering whether it was wise for Mr. Tian to be telling me this. But Mr. Tian pressed on, clawing his hair and gabbling.

  "The government sometimes tells lies," he said.

  "Then how do people know what's going on in the country?"

  "Foreign broadcasts. The students listen to the BBC and Voice of America. That's how I found out about the demonstrations in Peking. It was not until two or three days later that the government said what was happening."

  I was very touched by his talking to me in this candid way, although sensing Mrs. Jin's disapproval I decided not to ask too many questions. In spite of the cold, I was in a good mood. I felt I had reached a part of China that was hard to get to but worth the trouble. It was not a sense of achievement, but rather a hopeful feeling, because it was a place I would gladly return to: that was something to look forward to.

  I ate at five and then got into bed and listened to my radio under the blankets. And the next day at dawn Mr. Tian and I left the town by train. It was so cold I felt parts of me would break off if I bumped into anything. And this was another morning of razor-slashing wind. The sky was gray. It had never been anything but cloudy here. Some of the clouds glowed slightly. That was the sun, that blur—just a crude suggestion of what a sun might be, if there were such a thing.

  I read, I slept, I gritted my teeth in the cold. This was an open train, each coach crammed with wooden seats. It stopped at all the stations on the line, and at each station all the doors opened, and for a few minutes the wind blew through the train, freezing it. Then the doors closed, and just as the coach became almost bearable, the train stopped again, the doors opened, and the wind picked up.

  The meal on the train only cost twenty cents, but it was one dish with rice. It was a northern Heilongjiang vegetable, called "yellow flower," lik
e a chopped heap of lily stalks.

  Thinking of the driver, and how I had bawled him out for shooting birds, I asked Mr. Tian about losing face. The phrase in Chinese means exactly that: lose face (diulian).

  I quoted my friend Wang in Shanghai and said, "Foreigners have no face."

  "But we have face," Mr. Tian said."It is the Chinese way."

  "What if you don't lose face?"

  "There is an expression; lianpi hou—a face with thick skin. But that is a bad thing. It means you're insensitive. A shy person loses face."

  That was good, or at least desirable, because it was human.

  Mr. Tian said, "If someone criticizes you and you don't lose face you're not a good person."

  "During the Cultural Revolution a lot of people were criticized. Did they all lose face?"

  "The Cultural Revolution was a total mistake," he said.

  "What was the worst thing that happened?"

  "That people died."

  Later, the dining-car attendant came by and sat with us. He said I should wear two pairs of long underwear, not one, and that it should be the thick Chinese kind (I was wearing skier's long johns). He was from Jiamusi. It was a good day in Jiamusi, only minus thirty-four degrees centigrade. Usually it was minus thirty-eight. He laughed and slapped me on the back and went back to work.

  Mr. Tian had not said anything. He was thinking. He was nodding.

  "That was a good idea," he said. "Build a house in the forest. Have some children. Write something." He sat there in the cold, in his threadbare coat, twisting his wool cap. He was still nodding, his hair spiky, his sleeves in the soy sauce. "That's what I'd like to do."

  16: The Boat Train to Dalian: Number 92

  It was monotonously cold—always, everywhere—inside and out in Harbin, and so the only way to get warm was to leave the city and the province and head south. Seven hundred miles away in Dalian, a port on the Bohai Gulf, the weather was pleasant, judging by the reports in China Daily. Mr. Tian told me again that warm weather made him feel sick.