Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  "Beethoven," the driver said. "I like Beethoven."

  The driver's name was Mr. Fu. He said he could drive me to Tibet. It would be about five days to Lhasa, through the Qinghai desert and then into the mountains. Sleep in army camps on the way. How about it?

  I said I was very interested.

  Mr. Li, his pal, said, "I think it's Symphony Number Two."

  "Isn't it Six—the Pastorale?"

  Mr. Li laughed. He had yellow teeth. His laugh simply meant Wrong! It was a barklike noise. He said, "The Pastorale goes dum-dum-dee-dee-dum. No, this isn't Number Two. I know Two, Five, Six, Seven and Nine. This isn't a symphony. It is an overture."

  Mr. Fu went fossicking in his glove compartment. He brought out the cassette holder and showed us. It was the Coriolan Overture. Mr. Fu said it was a Beethoven work he particularly liked.

  "This is the best hotel in Xining," Mr. Fu said.

  Mr. Li laughed in a stern correcting way. "This is the only hotel in Xining."

  This hotel reminded me of something I could not quite place—a building I had known in the distant past. It had been built by the Russians, and it retained its fiftyish look. It was very musty, it was mildewed. Why did all Chinese carpets stink with decay? I hated the hotel hours. Dinner at six, no hot water until eight at night. The room girl kept the keys. The toilet didn't flush until you emptied two buckets of water into it—and that bucket was the wastebasket.

  And then I remembered the old Northampton Hospital, where I had worked as a student, and thought, Of course! The Xining Guest Hotel was exactly like a madhouse. The tiny rooms, the smells of food and disinfectant and sewage, the sudden squawks from locked rooms, the TV no one watched, the scarred walls suggesting violence, the bars on the windows, the eternal figure down the shadowy corridor slowly toiling with a mop, the silent inmate squatting on a chairseat, roosting like a chicken. It was all a reenactment of life inside the old-fashioned hospital I had known. Even the room girls were more like fearless, untalkative madhouse orderlies than they were compliant Chinese fuwuyuan. And in this loony-bin-like hotel, I could not decide whether I was a patient or a visitor; but I sometimes suspected that I would be like one of those poor creatures who is taken in for observation and somehow forgotten, and twenty years later discovered behind a bolted door, driven totally insane by the place.

  These anxieties impelled me to make plans for Tibet. I told Mr. Fu I wished to discuss this matter.

  "My father went to Tibet," Mr. Li said.

  But I asked him more questions and realized that the man had gone there twenty years ago, on horseback, as a volunteer teacher.

  "There was no road then," Mr. Li said.

  "There's a good road now," Mr. Fu said. "I've driven to Lhasa a few times."

  But my questions elicited only vague answers from Mr. Fu, and I could not tell whether he really had driven there or not.

  "And it's a lovely drive from here to Golmud," Mr. Fu said.

  "I can take the train to Golmud."

  I had wanted to do that. The train to Golmud was the ultimate Chinese train. The line had been constructed as far as this town, and then because of the impossibility of penetrating the Tibetan plateau, it had been abandoned, in the middle of nowhere. I would not have missed that ride for anything.

  "It's a horrible train," Mr. Fu said. "It's a steam locomotive. It goes through the desert. It is very slow."

  That was music to my ears.

  "You drive to Golmud," I said. "I'll meet you there and we'll both go to Tibet. We'll stop on the way. I'll bring some food. We'll listen to Beethoven."

  Mr. Fu did some figuring and presented me with a bill for the Chinese equivalent of $600. That included his little Japanese car and his labor as driver and all the gas. I would pay for meals.

  "It's a deal," I said, and we shook on it.

  The car seemed rather fragile for such a difficult trip—1200 miles across the bleakest part of Tibet. It was a Galant. I hated the name. It was a car you saw on scrap heaps. When the wind blew through Xining, Mr. Fu's Galant swayed. It was not a vehicle for Tibet. Mitsubishi said another plate. It looked like a Dodgem car.

  "You think it'll make it?"

  "This is a good car," Mr. Fu said.

  "Remember to bring two spare tires," I said.

  He swore that he would. There was something in the heartiness of his assurance that made me think he was lying to me.

  After that I decided to spend my time in Xining making preparations for the journey. I bought dry noodles and canned goods and fruit and soup. I bought storage containers and canteens and thermos jugs. I bought another hat. I found a place that sold jars of quails' eggs and bought a case. The food was so cheap I did not bother keeping track of the cost—it was a few dollars, no more. In my wandering around town I discovered that a special sort of dumpling was made in Xining. It was a stuffed pancake, fried in a wok—a dough bun crammed with scallions, and they served them fresh out of the pan, hot and dripping, just the thing for a snowy day in Qinghai.

  Xining was the sort of simple ramshackle place I had come to like in China. It was not pretty, but that didn't matter. The food was delicious in an unremarkable way: not fancy but good to eat. The weather was full of surprises. The people said hello to me and were pleasant to each other. I liked Xining as I had liked Langxiang in Heilongjiang—and for the same reason: it was a country town. By degrees I realized that I was the only barbarian in the place. It was off-season, the middle of March in the back of beyond. That was also the reason people talked to me. It was a novelty to see a barbarian so far from his home.

  Xining had department stores—of a kind. It had movie theaters—at least two. It had an enormous mosque. But Mr. Fu's was one of only about twenty cars in the place, and as the main streets were four lanes wide, one had the impression of almost no traffic at all. The buses were the broken, rusted kind found in all parts of rural China.

  It was alarming to be told by people in Xining that Golmud was horrible and primitive. Bring warm clothes, they said. Bring food. Bring water. Tea, too. Bring everything you need. Nothing is stranger than being in a fairly bad place and being told that another place—your destination—is a great deal worse. But such warnings also made me deeply curious.

  They grew potatoes here. They ate french fries. The fries were thin, crunchy, greasy and unappetizing, like the ones sold at McDonald's—exactly like those.

  I met a young recent convert to Buddhism, Mr. Xun, who was studying English. I told him how much I liked the stuffed pancakes. He somewhat dismissed this, as Chinese do when you mention your liking for peasant food like dumplings, or lotus roots, or fried noodles, or steamed buns. Meat was the thing.

  Mr. Xun said, "Sheep vein. Yak vein. Mongolian hot pot. Caterpillar fungus. And stir-fried camel's foot. That's what I like."

  There was also a variety of black moss from the mountains called "hair grass" that was tasty. They made it into soup. It was indistinguishable from seaweed. But the fact was that west of Xining, and through the whole of Qinghai and the whole of Tibet, there is only one vegetable (barley) and only one kind of meat (yak). As might be supposed, faced with only two ingredients the people of these regions have learned to cook them a number of different ways. But that is no more than a gesture. The taste is unvarying. It is the taste of yak.

  Mr. Xun the Buddhist convert went with me to the Taer'si, a monastery about fifteen miles southwest of Xining. The founder of the Virtuous Order (Gelukpa), a pure form of Buddhism, was born here over 500 years ago. This man, Zong Kapa, went to Lhasa and preached at the Ganden Monastery there. He was the founder of the Yellow Sect. After he had been away for some years, his mother wrote, imploring him to return. He said no, but added: If you want to do something useful, build a temple in my honor. Before the old woman could act, a pipal tree sprang up on the spot where Zong Kapa was born—the same sort of bodhi tree under which the Buddha received enlightenment. The mother built a pagoda over the tree, and then built a temple. Later, in 1
560, the monastery was built. Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas have visited here. The present Dalai Lama was born nearby, in the hills. The white horse of the 9th Panchen Lama dropped dead soon after bearing his master here in 1903. This animal was stuffed and is venerated in one of the temples. So Mr. Xun said.

  What Mr. Xun did not say was that this monastery, recently reopened by the Chinese, had the stuffings kicked out of it, and not only in the predictable battering of the Cultural Revolution. In 1958, Mao issued the edict of Religious Reform. It began as a political program; it became religious persecution. But now, thirty years later, the Kumbum Jampa Ling—the Tibetan name of the Taer'si—is growing again. There had been 3600 monks. This was reduced to none at all. In the past few years 500 monks have established themselves, and there are Rapjung—novice monks: grinning little red-cheeked boys who trot around combining high spirits and mischief with their chores.

  "In three months these people will believe in communism," Mao had said thirty years ago, as he defrocked the monks. But the monastery has re-formed, and it is vigorously Buddhist. It seemed to me that it was so far off the beaten track that it had not received the pestering attentions of the bureaucrats. The complex of temples, stupas, courtyards, the printing works, hospital, medical college (for teaching herbal remedies), and dwellings (housing thirteen Living Buddhas and their mothers), is scattered on the brown lower slopes of the valley. A small town has grown to one side of it, down the road.

  Having Mr. Xun with me was a help, and being at Taer'si on a cold winter day meant that I was seeing the place with its prayer wheels turning. We followed a procession of Tu people, who wore black hats with upturned brims, and padded jackets and high boots.

  The pilgrims prostrated themselves and then entered The Lesser Temple of the Golden Roof. In its courtyard they hung little swatches of sheep's wool. For a good harvest, Mr. Xun said; but this was contradicted by my guidebook, which claimed that about-to-be-slaughtered animals received grace in this way ("similarly, sheep and cows may be led clockwise around a monastery, as their final act on earth"). In this temple, children with runny noses and wild hair were snatching at the barrellike prayer wheels. A man with a shrieking voice was chanting and beating a drum inside a locked room; the incense burners were crammed with cypress leaves and smoking fiercely, and pilgrims had glued Chinese coins to the burner's side (there was a pot of fish glue next to it). On the balconies to the right and left were two large stuffed yaks draped with gauze offerings, two stuffed goats and a stuffed brown bear—they were propped up on the rails to look like judges surveying the pilgrims below, and they had wild grinning faces, due to their stretched skin and glass eyes. It was the sort of holy place which could look only bizarre to an unbeliever, and there hung about it the stink of rancid yak butter.

  That is the smell of monasteries from Mongolia to Tibet, the sour, cruddy hum of yak butter. It resembles the smell of an American family's refrigerator after a long midsummer power cut. It is the reek of old milk. But yak butter is not just a ceremonial fuel. It is used for cooking, for lamps, for sculpting, and it is good for greasing axles. Yak butter is Tibetan lubricant in a spiritual and also in an industrial sense. The pilgrim who had just finished lubricating his wagon wheels brings a can of it and deposits fat yellow lumps of it in a vat near the temple altar.

  Mr. Xun said there had been lots of miracles here—not just the bodhi tree that sprouted on Zong Kapa's birthplace, but clusters of trees that appeared at the Flower Temple. They were miraculous, Mr. Xun insisted. Messages had appeared on them.

  "I must see them," I said.

  Mr. Xun was delighted by my fervor. He introduced me to the monk at the Flower Temple.

  The monk said, "Look at the trunks of these trees. Look closely."

  I looked closely. There were small scratchings, like worm tracks on the flaky bark.

  "Tibetan characters," the monk said.

  "Read them, please," I said.

  "I cannot."

  "Do they say anything?"

  "We do not know. But I will tell you this. They are not man-made."

  He did not mean worms. He meant something supernatural.

  He saw some Chinese tourists smoking.

  "Do not smoke!" he said in his Tibetan-accented Mandarin. "It's all wood, and if this catches fire, who's responsible? This temple is seven hundred years old"—it wasn't, actually, but I felt he wanted to make them feel bad—"and you don't care! All this yak butter would go right up in smoke!"

  After the Chinese tourists left, the monk said, "They don't care. They smoke all the time. They throw cigarettes everywhere—even under these holy trees."

  It was fairly obvious that the Tibetan monks disliked the Chinese, but they shrugged and grumbled rather than revolted. At the monastery printing works several monks told me that during the Cultural Revolution they had been sent to work at a power station.

  "How did you like that?"

  "It was a waste of time," one said.

  This printing works was medieval in its way of working. The monk inked a slab of script and then pressed a rectangle of rough paper over it. He peeled this off and hung it to dry, a finished page of text.

  One page was a ribbon of writing.

  "Stick that over your door and thieves will never come in."

  "What does it say?"

  "It is Indian writing, Sanskrit. We don't know."

  He inked another slab and printed a new piece of paper.

  "If you put that on your house your guests will always be happy."

  But as with the first one, the message was incomprehensible to him.

  I went to the Meditation Hall and was almost overcome from the smell of yak butter. I went to the kitchen. It had the look of a tannery—full of deep vats, each one about seven feet across.

  "This kitchen was last used in 1958," Mr. Xun said. "Those cauldrons could cook thirteen yaks at a time. The whole monastery could be fed in this kitchen."

  The remains of the 3rd Dalai Lama are at this monastery, in a temple called The Nine-Roomed Hall. This man, Bsod-nams-rgya-mtsho, was the first to be called "Dalai." The Mongol chief Altan Khan conferred this title on him when he visited the Khan's court in the sixteenth century. Dalai means ocean in Mongol and it implies boundless wisdom. But the special features of The Nine-Roomed Hall are not the bones of this holy man. Interest in the place is usually centered on two tall demons.

  "Notice the curtains?" Mr. Xun said.

  Dusty drapes covered the bases of the statues.

  "They have put them there so that you cannot see the figures beneath them."

  "Why would they cover those figures?" I asked.

  "One is an ox having sexual intercourse with a lady," Mr. Xun said.

  "What sort of lady would have intercourse with an ox?"

  "I don't know," Mr. Xun said, "because it is covered up."

  The buildings were not beautiful, nor even pretty, but they had a rough mountain charm, and some of the carved pillars looked both godly and weird. The attractiveness of the place was in its life, its pilgrims and monks, the novice monks fetching water and eating Popsicles, and penitents draping the white and yellow gauze on the statues, and burning butter, and whirling prayer wheels, and prostrating themselves in a sort of religious athleticism that was very impressive—they are required to flatten themselves against the ground 100,000 times a year. It is not a fastidious kowtowing but a calisthenic so vigorous they wear mitts and knee pads to prevent bruising.

  Mr. Xun and I walked down the road, past the souvenir stalls and the little shops, and had lunch in a restaurant that was otherwise empty. We had grilled yak meat, melon, squash, pig fat, buns, seaweed soup and french fries. The yak meat stuffed into the buns was my Dish of the Day, and I entered it into my notebook under dumplings and smoked duck and all the rest of the dishes I had favored.

  We were sitting near a Franklin stove with a ten foot tin chimney. Mr. Xun said that he had visited the United States the previous year. He had been an interp
reter for a trade delegation. In order to secure this job he had had to pass a competitive exam in English. He said he had traveled all over.

  "I went to San Francisco," he said, and smiling, he told me how much he had hated Chinatown. He regarded the very word as insulting, but also he had found it all hackneyed, ridiculous and embarrassing. "And the food was bad," he said.

  "What did you think the first time you saw New York?"

  "Not as nice as Vancouver."

  I then asked him what he had bought in the United States to take back to China.

  "A pen. A book of stories. A photograph album."

  He had no money. But what things he would have bought if he had had the cash! A refrigerator, a motorcycle, a television, an electric noodle maker!

  We talked about Tibetans.

  "They have black and red faces," Mr. Xun said. "The Hans are white and red. You can tell the Hans by their red cheeks. And the Tibetans are very dirty."

  "There isn't much water around here," I said.

  "On the grasslands in the west of Qinghai there is no water at all. The people wash their hands in yak's milk. And they never take a bath in their whole life."

  "How about the Hans?"

  "We wash once a week."

  Mr. Xun said he usually went to a public bathhouse in Xining for a bath—on Fridays. He lived in a three-room apartment on the outskirts of the town, with his family.

  Without warning, Mr. Xun said, "'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife...' "

  "You read Jane Austen, Mr. Xun?"

  "My favorite book is Pride and Prejudice."

  A very Chinese title, when you come to think of it. He also liked Dickens and Thackeray. There was apparently plenty of time out here on the high plains of central Asia for the plump and populous English novel. He said that he also read religious texts. After middle school he had decided to become a Buddhist. "I wanted good fortune in my life," he said. He was now a firm believer.

  "Want one of these?"

  "Oh, yes," he said, gratefully accepting a portrait of the exiled Dalai Lama.