To the Ends of the Earth

by Paul Theroux

  “It’s very cold in here,” I said to Mr. Cong, the manager.

  “It will get warmer.”

  “When?”

  “In three or four months.”

  “I mean, in the hotel,” I said.

  “Yes. In the hotel. And all over Langxiang.”

  I was jumping up and down to restore my circulation. Mr. Tian was simply standing patiently.

  “What about a room?” I said.

  He said something very rapidly to Mr. Cong.

  “Do you want a clean room or a regular one?” Mr. Tian asked.

  “I think I’ll have a clean one for a change.”

  He did not remark on my sarcasm. He said, “Ah, a clean one,” and shook his head, as if this were a tall order. “Then you will have to wait.”

  The wind blew through the lobby and when it hit the curtain that had been hung across the main door it filled it like a spinnaker.

  “We can have dinner,” Mr. Cong said.

  “It’s not even five o’clock,” I said.

  “Five o’clock. Dinnertime. Ha-ha!” This ha-ha meant: Rules are rules. I don’t make them, so you should not be difficult.

  The dining room in the Langxiang Guesthouse was the coldest room I had entered so far in the whole of Heilongjiang Province. I yanked my hat tight and then sat on my hands and shivered. I had put my thermometer on the table: thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit.

  Mr. Cong said he was used to the cold. He was not even wearing a hat! He was from the far north, where he had gone as a settler in the fifties to work on a commune that produced corn and grain. Although he was not very old, he was something of an antique in Chinese terms. As a commune worker in one of the remotest parts of China he found the new reforms bewildering. And he had four children, now regarded as a shameful number. “They punish us for having more than two,” he said, and seemed very puzzled. “You might lose your job, or be transferred, as punishment.”

  From the utter boredom on Mr. Tian’s face—but his boredom was a form of serenity—I could tell that Mr. Cong and Mr. Tian had nothing at all in common. In China, the generation gap has a specific meaning and is something to be reckoned with.

  I asked Mr. Cong what had happened to his commune.

  “It was canceled,” he said. “It was dissolved.”

  “Did the peasants go away?”

  “No. Each was given his own plot to till.”

  “Do you think that’s better?”

  “Of course,” he said, but it was impossible for me to tell whether he meant it. “Production is much greater. The yields are larger.”

  That seemed to settle it. Any policy that increased production was a good thing. I thought: God help China if there’s a recession.

  The town was in darkness. The hotel was very cold. My room was cold. What to do? Although it was only six-thirty I went to bed—anyway, I got inside with most of my clothes on, and I listened to my short-wave radio under the blankets. That was how I was to spend all of my nights in Langxiang.

  I went up the logging line on the narrow-gauge railway the next day, but I was disappointed in the forest. I had expected wilderness, but this was filled with lumberjacks cutting and bulldozing trees.

  “One day we will go to the primeval forest,” Mr. Tian said.

  “Let’s go today.”

  “No. It is far. We will go another day.”

  We went to the locomotive shed, where we met Mrs. Jin, a local guide. The shed was full of smoke and steam, and it was dark; but it was also warm, because the boilers were being stoked and the fire in the forge was blazing. As I walked along Mrs. Jin threw herself at me and pushed me against the wall, and then she laughed hysterically, a kind of chattering—one of the more terrifying Chinese laughs. I saw that she had saved me from stepping into a deep hole in which I would almost certainly have broken my back.

  I was so rattled by this I had to go outside and take deep breaths. All over this town the snow was packed hard. No street or pavement was clear of ice. They habitually pedaled on the ice, and they had a way of walking—a sort of shuffle—that prevented them from slipping.

  “This town is forbidden,” Mr. Tian boasted. “You are very lucky to be here.”

  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 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, when 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 VOA under my blanket. 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 in the 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 and 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 exhausting dreams. The cold kept me from deep sleep, and so I lay just beneath the surface of consciousness, like a drifting fish. In one of my Langxiang dreams I was besieged in a house in San Francisco. I ran from the front door shooting a machine gun and wearing headphones. I escaped on a passing cable car—President Reagan was on it, strap-hanging. I was asking him whether he was having a tough time as president. He said, “Terrible.” We were still talking when I woke up feeling very cold.

  I went back to sleep. 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 everywhere 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 that 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 a 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 them 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 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 gingke 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 birdsong, and the whole forest chattered with the tapping of woodpeckers.

  “Mr. Tian, can you sing something?” I asked.

  “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!”

  Cherry Blossom

  A YOUNG CHINESE WOMAN SMILED AT ME AS I STEPPED onto the platform at Dalian. She was very modern, I could see. Her hair had been waved into a mass of springy curls. She wore sunglasses. Her green coat had a fur collar—rabbit. She said she had been sent to meet me. Her name was Miss Tan.

  “But please call me Cherry.”

  “Okay, Cherry.”

  “Or Cherry Blossom.”

  It was hard to include those two words in an ordinary sentence. “What is the fare to Yantai, Cherry Blossom?” But I managed, and she always had a prompt reply, usually something like, “It will cost you one arm and one leg.” She had a fondness for picturesque language.

  She led me outdoors and as we stood on the steps of Dalian Station, she said, “So what do you think of Dalian so far?”

  “I have only been here seven minutes,” I said.

  “Time flies when you’re having fun!” Cherry Blossom said.

  “But since you asked,” I went on, “I am very impressed with what I see in Dalian. The people are happy and industrious, the economy is buoyant, the quality of life is superb. I can tell that morale is very high. I am sure it is the fresh air and prosperity. The port is bustling, and I’m sure the markets are filled with merchandise. What I have seen so far only makes me want to see more.”

  “That is good,” Cherry Blossom said.

  “And another thing,” I said. “Dalian looks like South Boston, in Massachusetts.”

  It did, too. It was a decaying port, made out of bricks, with wide streets, cobblestones, and trolley tracks, and all the paraphernalia of a harbor—the warehouses, dry docks, and cranes. I had the impression that if I kept walking I would eventually come to the Shamrock Bar and Grill. It was also Boston weather—cold and partly sunny under blowing clouds—and Boston architecture. Dalian was full of big brick churches that had probably once been called St. Pat’s, St. Joe’s, and St. Ray’s—they were now kindergartens and nurseries, and one was the Dalian Municipal Library. But reform had come to Dalian and with it such businesses as the Hot Bread Bakery and the Hong Xing (Red Star) Cut and Perma.

  “And also men hurry to Hong Xing to get a perma,” Cherry Blossom said. “They go lickety-split.”

  The streets looked like Boston’s streets. Never mind that the main thoroughfare in Dalian was called Stalin Road (Sidalin Lu). It looked like Atlantic Avenue.

  At the turn of the century the Russians had schemed to make Dalny (as they called it; it means “far away” in Russian) a great port for the tsar’s ships. It was valuable for fighting the Japanese, because unlike Vladivostok it would not freeze in the winter. After the Russo-Japanese war, when the Japanese flew kites in Dairen (as they called it)—each kite saying THE RUSSIANS HAVE SURRENDERED!—this port city was handed to the Japanese. They simply completed the Russian plan for turning what had been a fishing village into a great port. It prospered until the Second World War, and when the Japanese were defeated the Russians were given the city under the Yalta terms. The Russians remained until well after the Chinese Liberation, when the Chinese renamed it Dalian (“Great Link”). I liked it for its salt air and seagulls.

  “What desires do you entertain in Dalian?” Cherry Blossom said.

  I told her that I had come here to get warm after the freeze in Dongbei, the northeast. And I needed a ticket on the ship that traveled from Dalian across the Bohai Gulf to Yantai. Could she get that for me?

  “Keep your fingers crossed,” she said.

  She vanished after that. I found an old hotel—Japanese pre-war baronial—but I was turned away. I was accepted at the dreary new Chinese hotel, a sort of Ramada Inn with a stagnant fish pond in the lobby. I spent the day looking for an antique shop, and the only one I found was disappointing. A man tried to sell me a trophy awarded to the winner of a schoolboys’ javelin competition in 1933 at a Japanese high school. “Genuine silver,” he whispered. “Qing Dynasty.”

  The next day I saw Cherry Blossom. She had no news about my ticket.

  “You will just have to keep your hopes up!”

  We agreed to meet later, and when we did she was smiling.

  “Any luck?” I asked.

  “No!” She was smiling. And with this bad news I noticed that she had a plump and slightly pimply face. She was wearing an arsenic-green wool scarf to match the wool cap she herself had knitted in the dormitory (she had four roommates) at the Working Women’s Unit.

  “I have failed completely!”

  Then why was she smiling? God, I hated her silly hat.

  “But,” she said, wiggling her fingers, “wait!”

  She had a sharp way of speaking that made every sentence an exclamation. She reached into her plastic handbag.

  “Here is the ticket! It has been a total success!”

  Now she wagged her head at me and made her tight curls vibrate like springs.

  I said, “Were you trying to fool me, Cherry Blossom?”

  “Yes!”

  I wanted to hit her.

  “Is that a Chinese practical joke
?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, with a giggle.

  But then aren’t all practical jokes exercises in sadism?

  I went to the Free Market—open since 1979. Every sort of fish, shellfish, and seaweed was on display—a pound of big plump prawns was roughly $4, but that was the most expensive item. They also sold squid, abalone, oysters, conch, sea slugs, and great stacks of clams and flatfish. The fishermen did not look Chinese; they had a flatheaded Mongolian appearance and might have been Manchus, of whom there are five or six million in this peninsula and in the north. The market gave me an appetite and that night I had abalone stir-fried in garlic sauce: delicious.

  Cherry Blossom said that foreign cruise ships stopped in Dalian in the summer. The tourists stayed for half a day.

  “What can you see in Dalian in half a day?”

  She said they all got on a bus and visited the shell-carving factory, the glassware factory, and a model children’s school (the kids sang songs from The Sound of Music), and then it was back to the ship and on to Yantai or Qingdao.

  “I’d like to see Stalin Square,” I said.

  We went there. In the center of it was a statue to the Russian army, which had occupied the city after the war.

  “There are no Stalin Squares in the Soviet Union, Cherry Blossom. Did you know that?”

  She said no, she was surprised to hear it. She asked why.

  “Because some people think he made a few mistakes,” I said, though I did not mention the pogroms, the secret police, the purges, or the mustached brute’s ability to plan large-scale famines in order to punish dissenting regions.

  “Is there a Mao Zedong Square in Dalian, Cherry Blossom?”

  “No,” she said, “because he made a few mistakes. But don’t cry over spilled milk!”*

  I told her that I had read somewhere that the evil genius Lin Biao had lived in Dalian. She said no, this was not so. She had lived her whole life in Dalian and no one had ever mentioned Lin’s connection.

  But the driver was older. He said yes, Lin Biao had lived there in Dalian. Lin Biao, a great military tactician, was now maligned because he had done so much to build up Mao—it was Lin who devised the Little Red Book and chose all the quotations; and in the end (so it was said) he had plotted to assassinate Mao, when Mao was weak and at his heffalump stage; and Lin in trying to flee the country (“seeking protection from his Moscow masters … as a defector to the Soviet revisionists in betrayal of the party and the country”) had crashed in dear old Undur Khan, in the People’s Republic of Mongolia. Foul play was never mentioned. It was regarded as natural justice that this heliophobe should meet an untimely death.