Riding the Iron Rooster (32 page)

In front of Lanzhou Station there were about thirty young people standing in a long line, just at the exit door. They carried red banners with gold characters inscribed on them, and long streamers and placards and flags. They were silent, standing patiently, like mourners. And I thought perhaps they
were
mourners, awaiting a catafalque from Train 104. It was eleven at night, and as this was Lanzhou, very chilly and damp.

"What are they doing, Mr. Fang?"

"They are welcoming the delegates," he said, without hesitation.

"Which delegates?"

"From the conference."

"Which conference?"

"There are so many conferences," he said.

I felt I was being fobbed off with a lame explanation. I pressed Mr. Fang a bit harder.

"Perhaps an agricultural conference," he said.

His
perhaps
made me suspicious. I then suspected that they were striking, protesting, making some sort of fuss. If so, that was interesting, because fusses and strikes were never reported in the
China Daily.
In fact, the demand of most demonstrations—when they occurred, which was rare—was that the demonstration be reported in the Chinese news media.

"What do those signs say, Mr. Fang?"

"I can't read them without my glasses."

"Please put on your glasses," I said. "I am very curious."

"Hah! Hah! Hah!" he howled, pushing his glasses on and leaning forward. "Hah! Hah! Hah!"

This grunting mirthless laugh meant:
I have just made a jackass of myself.

Then he removed his glasses and became very solemn. Chinese laughter often had a sobering effect. It was more than explanatory; it was also cathartic.

'They are advertising a hotel."

"One hotel?"

"Many hotels."

"How many?"

"Many, many," he said sadly. "When the passengers come out of the station they will look up and see the banners. This hotel offers good food, that one offers good rooms, this one is nearby. They are in competition. They are doing it for business."

Mr. Fang was surprised that such go-ahead commercial sense existed in distant Gansu. And I think it was news to him so many restaurants, guest houses and hotels were available in Lanzhou. It suggested more than the free market; it hinted at bourgeois ideas and competitive instincts.

I said, 'They are taking the capitalist road!"

Mr. Fang replied coldly, "We do not use that expression any more."

He always winced when I trotted out expressions such as "class enemy"
(jieji diren)
and "running dog"
(zou gou).

We bypassed the clamor of two hundred travelers trying to push through the Hard Sleeper turnstile, and we knocked at the Soft Sleeper Waiting Room door. The room attendant admitted us and showed us to the overstuffed chairs. I made a mental note to add antimacassars to my list of antiquated Chinese manufacturing (washboards, quill pens, corsets, backscratchers, fish glue, spittoons, steam locomotives, etc.), and I asked Mr. Fang for his dictionary.

Capitalist road
was in it under
road,
and so was
running dog
("a lackey, a flunky, a stooge"). I looked up
ziyou,
"freedom, liberty," and found a series of definitions, each with its own explanatory sentence. I copied the most interesting ones into my notebook.

Citizens of China enjoy freedom of speech, correspondence, the press, assembly, association, procession, demonstration, and the freedom to strike.

Bourgeois ideas must not be allowed to spread unchecked.

The petty [sic] bourgeoisie's individualistic aversion to discipline.

Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective.

We can't decide this matter for ourselves; we must ask the leadership for instructions.

This official Chinese dictionary, reprinted by the state publishing house in 1985, contained definitions and illustrations that all contradicted life in China in fundamental ways. I thought: When that book is revised and rewritten I will believe that China has changed. It was clearly out-of-date, but like much else that was said—the guff about Marxism-Leninism and the guiding spirit of Mao's Thought—it was ineffectual. Such sentiments were dead but they wouldn't lie down.

Around midnight, the train drew in. There was a commotion outside as the hotel touts and agents jostled for attention. I went to the sleeping car. Mr. Fang vanished. I found my berth and discovered that no one else was going to Xian. The sleeper was empty. This was the rarest situation on a Chinese train, and one to be relished. Such circumstances were almost luxurious and definitely cozy. My own gooseneck lamp, plastic flowers, thermos, pillow, quilt and comforter. There was a tablecloth on the little side table, and a five-foot crocheted antimacassar on the seat back.

The only disquieting part of it was the music. I couldn't twist the knob with my rubber-band trick, so I took out my Swiss army knife and unscrewed the loudspeaker from the ceiling, disconnected it, replaced the plate and was able to read in silence. I was reading Lu Xun's "The True Story of Ah Q" because a Chinese woman had said that the story revealed the Chinese national character. So far it was about Ah Q's pompousness, foolishness, pretense and cowardice—and he had the farcical misapprehension of Mr. Pooter. Was that the point?
^*

I read on, soothed by the ponderous motion of the train and the melancholy cry of the steam whistle.

There had been a bucket of dead eels next to the hopper in the toilet cubicle. I had glimpsed the creatures in the middle of the night. That was memorable—and a good thing, too, because the next morning I went to the dining car and asked what was on the menu, and the chef said, "Eels!"

He said the train was operated by the Qingdao Railway Board and had just come from the coast. It made a great loop through China, bringing with it Shandong specialties—seafood, jelly candy and China's best beer.

We were still in Gansu, going southeast towards Shaanxi Province (not to be confused with Shanxi, a bit northeast), and we had just left the town of Tianshui. The landscape was unlike anything I had seen in Xinjiang or even the rest of Gansu. It was the carefully constructed Chinese landscape of mud mountains sculpted in terraces which held overgrown lawns of ripe rice. The only flat fields were far below, at the very bottom of the valleys. The rest had been made by the people, a whole countryside that had been put together by hand—stone walls shoring up the terraces on hillsides, paths and steps cut everywhere, sluices, drains and carved-out furrows. There was even more wheat than rice here, and bundles of it were piled, waiting to be collected and threshed—probably by that black beast up to his nose in the buffalo wallow.

The whole landscape had been possessed and shaped and put to practical use. It was not pretty, but it was symmetrical. You couldn't say "Look at that hillside," because it was all terraces—mud-walled ditches and fields, and mud-walled houses and roads. What the Chinese managed in miniature with a peach stone, carving it into an intricate design, they had done with these honey-colored mountains. If there was an outcrop of rock, they balanced a rice paddy on it, and the steps and terraces down the steep hills gave them the look of Mayan pyramids. There had not been much of that in the west of China. It was huge, the sort of complicated mud kingdom that insects created, and it was both impressive and appalling that everything visible in this landscape was man-made. Of course you could say that about any city in the world, but this wasn't a city—it was supposed to be the range of hills above the river Wei; and it looked as though it had been made by hand.

The river itself was muddy, flat, shallow, full of sandbanks this time of year.

"There are no fish in the Wei," a man told me at Baoji, the railway junction where we stopped at noon. And then he loudly cleared his throat and spat a gob on the platform and in a reflex of politeness scuffed it with his shoe.

Everyone hawked, everyone spat, sometimes dribbling, sometimes in a trajectory that ran like candlewax down the side of a spittoon. They tended to spit in wastebaskets or against tree trunks; but not even a government campaign restrained some from spitting on floors, and I saw people spit on carpets, always remembering politely to grind it in with the sole of their foot.

I noticed on the platform at Baoji how they walked scuffingly, sort of skating, with their arms flapping, with narrow jogging shoulders, or else hustling puppetlike, with their limbs jerking. They minced, they plodded, they pushed, keeping their hands out—straight-arming their way—and their heads down. They could look entirely graceless—unexpected in Chinese.

And they talked very loudly in that deaf, nagging and interrupting way, as if no one ever listened to them and they had to shout to be heard. The radios and televisions were always turned too loud, too, the volume at maximum. Why? Was there a national deafness, or was it just a rather unfortunate habit?

The Chinese left doors open—that was a national habit. And they liked sitting in their underwear on the train. They were naturals for relaxation, and could turn even the shortest journey into a pajama party. They were very tidy in the way they dressed and packed their bags, but they were energetic litterers, and they were hellish in toilets. It was strange seeing a neatly dressed mob leaving a railway car that they had befouled.

They spat, they shouted, they stared and undressed in public; and yet with all this they seldom quarreled. They were extremely shy—timid even—modest and naive. "Modesty helps one to go forward," Mao said, "whereas conceit makes one lag behind." On trains they often looked contemplative.

We were now through the Wei Gorges, and after Baoji the land opened up and became flatter. It was spread with wheat fields in which people were scything and bundling and carting away the stalks. It had grown very hot and hazy, and though it was humid, too, this midafternoon the fields were full of people, because of the harvest. They stood chest-high in the wheat, and they disappeared when they bent over with their sickles.

The villages here were tumbledown, but even the poorest houses had tall TV antennas. In some countrified places there was that other Chinese conundrum, of ugly tenements and barracklike buildings in a pastoral setting. We stopped at Xianyang, where China's first emperor had 460 of his critics buried alive, and then we crossed the Wei again—two shallow here for even the smallest boat—and through more wheat fields to the city of Xian.
^*

The first sign of the city proper is the high wall around it, like a medieval fortification, built in the Ming Dynasty, fourteenth century, and recently restored. It has crenellations and sentry posts and towers with windows designed (like those on the Great Wall) for the width of crossbows. And like the Great Wall, it was built as much to keep some people in as to keep others out. The Xian city wall was high and bulky, and the train passed the North Gate, which looked like a temple, with red beams and a large arched roof. Near it was a big banner with two-foot characters, saying,
Be Disciplined and Obey the Law.

Xian Station was new, the streets were broad, the city was well organized; it was as though it had been designed to be visited. As the capital of the brilliant but brief Qin empire and the starting point of the Silk Road, Xian had always been regarded as a visitable city. Even 8000 years ago, people lived here in reasonable comfort—the proof was at the excavated neolithic site at Banpo, nearby. Xian's most glorious associations are with the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, the man who unified China, burned the books; built the Great Wall; standardized the laws, currency, roads, weights, measures, axle lengths and written language; and ordered the now famous terra-cotta warriors to be made. That was well over 2000 yeats ago, and the warriors weren't uncovered again until twelve years ago.

"When I was young, no tourists came to Xian," Mr. Xia told me, as we walked around town. He was thirty-two years old, a local guide, one of the many I hired en route. "There were some visitors and foreign experts from East European countries. But we never saw Americans."

"When did they start coming?"

"Obviously, after the terra-cotta army was found. Then, people were very interested. More and more things were unearthed. In 1980 some diggers found the bronze horse and chariot. People wanted to see these things."

That was wonderful for the Chinese. They probably realized that the value of a tourist lies in his attention span. Sight-seeing is perfect for a dictatorship—China is surely not anything else, politically speaking. The tourist visits, sees the sights, and when they've all been seen, it's time to go. The nonsightseer lingers, ignores the museums, asks awkward questions, fills people with alarm and despondency and has to be deported. Also, typically, the nonsightseer is not a big spender and, in his or her unregulated way, is quite a dangerous person to have around.

I hated sight-seeing in China. I felt the Chinese hid behind their rebuilt ruins so that no one could look closely at their lives. And the rebuilding was poor—usually botched and too sloppily painted. The places were always impossibly crowded and noisy. The Chinese were so desperate in their courtships that they went on tourist outings in order to hide and canoodle. Every holy mountain and famous pagoda had more than its share of motionless couples hugging and (sometimes) smooching. It was no good saying a particular place was hideous or pointless. It was the ritual of visiting—the outing—that mattered.

Xian was one of the few exceptions I found. It was genuinely interesting and pretty, and rather a stately and dignified place—different in that respect from most other Chinese cities, which were sooty and badly made and industrial. But Xian knows it is important. Hotels were being put up quickly to accommodate tourists, and in what had been for hundreds of years a very provincial city, off the beaten track, people seemed aware of the city's new celebrity as a tourist attraction.

The stall holders of Xian's market are relentless in their hectoring. They plead, they beg, they bargain. They hawk cast figures of the warriors, and mats, and puppets cut out of cowhide, and horrible little coasters, and they push them in your face and shriek, "Ming Dynasty!"