Riding the Iron Rooster (39 page)

In the kitchen of the dining car, a young woman was scrubbing pots and singing in Chinese.

I know that you love me
I am waiting
But where do you want me to go?

The pot she scrubbed with a stiff brush was nearly as big as she was. And the kitchen was a primitive thing: it was black, with a black coal stove, and a cracked sink. At mealtimes it looked more like a blacksmith's forge than a kitchen. The meals on this train had been terrible. Lunch had been bad dried fish, disgusting fatty ham, rancid prawns and rubbery rice. But I had my bananas, and I still had peanuts I had bought back in Sichuan.

As I loitered, listening to the kitchen girl singing, a young man introduced himself. He was Chen Xiangan, from Shanghai. He worked in the dining car. He spoke no English at all. He asked me, Could I help him with his problem?

"Gladly," I said.

"I want you to give me a name—an English one."

That was not an unusual request. English names were coming back into fashion, now that people were reasonably sure they wouldn't be attacked by Red Guards as bourgeois capitalist-roaders and harbingers of revisionism for calling themselves Ronnie and Nancy.

"It must sound like my Chinese name," he said, and that was when he told me he was called Xiangan.

I pondered this. Xiangan sounded Irish to me—like Sean or Shaun. I suggested that but then told him that Sam was simpler, and Sam Chen seemed like a good Shanghai name to me.

He thanked me, and later I saw him pushing a food trolly. He wore only a T-shirt and blue underpants and an apron. He was saying over and over again, "Sam Chen, Sam Chen, Sam Chen."

In her nasal, twanging voice, the kitchen girl was still singing her love song.

I know that you love me
I am waiting...

We came to Mawei, a station amid the limestone stacks and dark pine trees. There was no town. There were villages scattered nearby. The passengers dashed off the train and rushed outside the station where, at tables, about fifty people were selling fresh plums—yellow and purple ones—and dusty bananas and round watermelons. This was the longest stop I ever made at such a small place, and I was sure it was deliberate—a fruit-buying stop.

The honeymooners bought a watermelon. They crawled into one berth and cut it open with a jackknife and ate it with a spoon, taking turns and slurping. It was like sex. For once the girl had stopped chain-smoking her Gold Medal cigarettes, and once they were together, eating this watermelon on the rumpled bunk, they stayed together.

The kitchen girl was still singing, plonkingly and with feeling.

I know that you love me
I am waiting...

At sundown we entered the heights above a wide valley that was darkened and in shadow because of the setting sun. The valley's rim was all rounded peaks that were slowly blackening, but the other side was distant, perhaps thirty miles away. The sky slumped into this space as the sun passed behind the last hill, and the valley was so deep I couldn't see its floor, only its shadows, which made it look bottomless. We were still climbing, but before we got all the way up, the orange and all the flamboyant Are of the sunset had vanished. Then night fell and we were traveling in darkness.

I lay on my mat in the heat and read
Kidnapped,
and dropped off to sleep at about eleven. The lights were still on when I woke again and fixed the sliding door with a rubber band. The lights went out. I heard that melon-eating sound again from the berth above, where the honeymooners were lying together. But I knew it wasn't that—they had finished their melon hours ago. And yet this was a rich, satisfying sound, with a deep breath, like the sigh you hear from someone with a hearty appetite. They were devouring each other in the dark.

They were still at it, at four in the morning, when the train arrived at Guilin.

"In China, we have a saying," Mr. Jiang Le Song said. "
Chule feiji zhi wai, yangyang dou chi.
" Looking very pleased with himself, he added, "It rhymes!"

"We call that a half-rhyme," I said. "What does it mean? Something about eating planes?"

"'We eat everything except planes and trains.' In China."

"I get it. You eat everything on four legs except tables and chairs."

"You are a funny man!" Mr. Jiang said. "Yes. We eat trees, grass, leaves, animals, seaweed, flowers. And in Guilin even more things. Birds, snakes, turtles, cranes, frogs and some other things."

"What other things?"

"I don't even know their names."

"Dogs? Cats?" I looked at him closely. I had overheard a tourist objecting to the Chinese appetite for kittens. "You eat kittens?"

"Not dogs and kittens. Everybody eats those."

"Raccoons?" I had read .in a guidebook that raccoons were also popular in Guilin.

"What is that?"

Raccoon was not in his pocket English-Chinese dictionary.

He became very confidential, glancing around and drawing me close to him. "Maybe not lackeys. I have never heard of eating lackeys. But many other things. We eat"—and he drew a meaningful breath—"forbidden things."

That had rather a thrilling sound:
We eat forbidden things.

"What sort of forbidden things?"

"I only know their Chinese names—sorry."

"What are we talking about?" I asked. "Snakes?"

"Dried snakes. Snake soup. They are not forbidden. I mean an animal that eats ants with its nose."

"Scaly anteater. Pangolin. I don't want to eat that. Too many people are eating them," I said. "It's an endangered species."

"Would you like to eat forbidden things?"

"I would like to eat interesting things," I said, equivocating. "How about sparrows? Pigeons? Snakes? What about turtles?"

"Those are easy. I can arrange it."

Mr. Jiang was young. He was new to the job. He was a little too breezy. He had the jokey and insincere manner of someone who has been dealing with elderly foreigners who enjoy being joshed as they are being deferred to. I felt his obsequiousness was a deliberate ploy to undermine me.

I had told him I didn't want to go sight-seeing, and yet within an hour of our meeting he took me to the caves outside Guilin, where there were hundreds of shuffling Chinese tourists.

"What are we doing here?" I asked.

"I am so sorry," he said. "We will leave immediately. I thought you might want to see our famous Reed Flute Cave."

What was the point of looking at these humdrum and hackneyed marvels? And having just come through hundreds of miles of Guizhou and Guangxi I had seen enough rock formations to last me a lifetime. I had liked them because I had felt I'd discovered them for myself—I hadn't been led there by someone burbling, "Look!"

"Let's look at them," I said.

Like so much in China on the tourist route—like the terra-cotta warriors and the Ming tombs, the Reed Flute Cave was discovered by a man digging a well. This fellow's shovel opened the way to a vast limestone cave, with chambers and corridors and grottoes. That was in 1959. Lights, signposts, balconies and stairways were installed, and then it became domesticated and acceptable to the Chinese.

It looked grotesque and Disneyish, a piece of natural vulgarity—a tasteless act of God. It could have been made out of polyester or papier-machi. It dripped. It glugged. Chunks of slimy limestone dropped from the ceiling. It was the spelunker's version of Sunset Strip or the Shanghai Bund. People crowded through it, skidding on the greasy floor, listening to a guide explaining its variety of crazy shapes.

"We call this the lotus rock. This is the conch shell. This is the elephant's foot—can you see why? This is the carp..."

I ditched Mr. Jiang—and Mr. Fang, who was still with me—and went down to the river Li to look at the boats. Some of the houseboats were for hire, so I took one that was owned by two old women. We floated downstream, past some lumpy and lovely stone hills and temples. After some time they said they couldn't go any farther or else they wouldn't be able to pole the boat back. But the river winds south, to other rivers, the Gui Jiang and Xi Jiang, and then to Canton. I asked them whether they had been that far.

"Yes, but not in a boat like this." They had the gargling and quacking Cantonese accent, and their Mandarin was nearly as bad as mine. "We went in a big boat."

"Why not this one?"

"You would never get back in this one." She meant you couldn't pole upstream from Canton to Guilin. Well, that was reasonable.

But I became possessed by the idea of taking a small boat—say, a collapsible kayak—to China, and setting it up in a place like Guilin and paddling from river to river, and sleeping under trees. It would be a way of seeing the country from an entirely different angle, and of avoiding people like Fang and Jiang. And when I got sick of it I would simply go gurgling into the estuary of one of these muddy rivers, and then into the South China Sea.

Taking a break from the arduous poling the old women moored our boat to the south bank of the Li, near a fishing village. In the shallows were simple raftlike boats made of six or seven big curved bamboos lashed together, and also sampans and houseboats. There were cormorants on many of the boats. The women called the birds
wang
and also
yu-ying.

The first Western traveler after Marco Polo described these birds. This man was the missionary Friar Odoric, from Friuli in Italy. He left his Franciscan convent in Udine in the year 1321 to travel in the East for three years. He went barefoot. He was very tough, very pious, and severe with himself. He wore a hair shirt the whole time.

After traveling thirty-six days
from
the coastal town of Fuzhou, he stayed with a man who said to him, "Sir, if you would see any fish being caught, go with me."

That was over 660 years ago, but the Chinese haven't changed their methods of using cormorants for fishing; and so Friar Odoric's description still stands.

"Then he led me to the bridge, carrying in his arms with him certain dive-doppers or water-fowls [cormorants], bound to perches, and about every one of their necks he tied a thread, lest they should eat the fish as fast as they took them... He loosened the dive-doppers from the pole, which presently went into the water, and within less than the space of one hour, caught as many fish as filled his three baskets; which being full, my host untied the threads from about their necks, and entering the second time into the river they fed themselves with fish, and being satisfied they returned and allowed themselves to be bound to their perches, as they were before."

A boat near ours had seventeen of these birds roosting on it. A young boy sluicing out a muddy bucket said that the birds cost 300—400 yuan each, but the two old women said the true figure was closer to a thousand. Whatever it was, between $150 and $300, it was a huge amount, and so the birds must really earn their keep. These fishermen used them by placing a ring, instead of a thread, around the birds' necks to prevent them from swallowing the fish.

So far, I had felt the Chinese were rather cruel to animals; but they are also practical. It was not just cruel but also very stupid to abuse these valuable creatures. It was all right to torment pigs by stacking them in carts when you took them to market, or to herd buffalos into freight cars and ignore their piteous moos when they were being sold, or to tie chickens into bundles, so that the buyer could carry them home; but an expensive cormorant had to be coddled. A man on one boat was scratching his bird like a cat and playing with it affectionately, and another man was feeding his flock and stroking their feathers and nuzzling them.

All these birds were exiles. They are the Great Cormorant
(Phal-acrocorax carbo),
the only one used for fishing, and are caught in the distant coastal province of Shandong. They had been brought here in baskets on a freight train.

When we continued on our way, poling the houseboat, I took the port side with one of the poles. But the boat slid into a fast current, and although I was twice as big as my poling partner, I wasn't much use. The other old woman relieved me, and when I was out of their way, they propelled the boat harmoniously and swiftly back to town.

The next day I saw another side to Mr. Fang. I was asking Mr. Jiang my usual questions about the Cultural Revolution and he was replying in a rather bland and noncommital way when Mr. Fang began speaking very fast. I was sure he was reprimanding the young man.

"What did you say?" I asked.

"I told him to tell the truth," Mr. Fang said. "It is important to know the truth about the Cultural Revolution. Foreigners must be told. We must face the facts. It was a disaster, so what is the point of smiling and pretending we don't care?"

That was very good. In a quiet way, Mr. Fang was stubborn and truthful, and I knew that he despaired of the vacillating yuppies like Mr. Jiang.

Mr. Jiang struggled to tell me something, but he was only twenty-two. He said he didn't have a very clear memory of the Cultural Revolution.

"I know my father was regarded as too right wing," he said. "My family was sent for reeducation, to a remote place, to plant rice. My father had been an English teacher in a middle school. The family worked on the land, learning from peasants, for six years. It was very hard for them. I was too young to notice. For the first year we had no house. We lived in a sort of barn—a place where grain was stored. We had no crops. We ate the local leaves and roots, living like animals."

"Is your father angry about it?"

"He doesn't talk about it," Mr. Jiang said.

"Never?"

"Never. Nothing. He doesn't say anything."

"Why not?"

"Because it was a bitter period."

Mr. Fang said, "He is making a mistake. He should talk about it. He should tell these people what it was like." And with his sad, swollen face turned on me, Mr. Fang said, "Disaster."

It was a few days before I saw Mr. Jiang again, and in that time I walked the streets and browsed in the market (it was full of exotic birds and pretty turtles, all languishing in cages). I took a tourist boat down the river Li to Yangshuo, past the droopy, dumpy limestone hills—more like cones and camel humps than hills—that rise straight out of their dull reflections in the green river. The boat was crowded, the tourists were bumptious—"What a place for a condo!" 'They should call that one 'Dolly Parton Hill'!"—but the place was so weirdly pretty nothing else mattered. Among these blunt hills and bamboos, there were children swimming, and men fishing, and buffalos wading in the river up to their noses, occasionally ducking and snaffling weeds off the bottom.