Riding the Iron Rooster (50 page)

"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," like 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."

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.

We were having an animated conversation, Mr. Tian and I. He was describing how the various Red Guard factions had battled each other on the streets of Harbin—school against school, factory against factory, each group claiming that they were the purest Maoists. At the station, Mr. Tian told me how the walls had been daubed with slogans and Mao portraits. "It was a total waste," he said. Chinese candor always touched me and made me grateful. When the whistle of my approaching train blew I took off my sheepskin mittens, my scarf, and the winter hat I had bought for this cold place. I handed them to Mr. Tian.

"I won't need them in Dalian," I said.

Mr. Tian shrugged, shook my hand, and without another word walked off. It was the Chinese farewell: there was no lingering, no swapping of addresses, no reminiscence, nothing sentimental. At the moment of parting they turned their backs, because you ceased to matter and because they had so much else to worry about. It was like the departure after a Chinese meal, the curtain falling abruptly with a thud and everyone vanishing. I did not mind that such rituals were perfunctory—it certainly kept them from being hypocritical. Mr. Tian was soon a little blue figure in a mob of blue figures.

But I should never have given him my gloves and scarf. This was another unheated train. Did they ever heat anything? It was in the low forties (Fahrenheit) in the compartment and even colder in the dining car. There was ice on all the floors and frost on the windows. It was too cold to sit still, so I walked back and forth, from one end of the train to the other.

But what was I complaining about? Outside, people were digging and repairing fences and walking to work and hanging laundry outside their small huts in the snowfields. And the strong wind that battered the windows of the train was yanking at these people, too. They looked plump in their winter clothes, like stuffed dolls, and their faces were crimson—visible from a long way off. Knowing what their lives must be like, I resolved not to grumble about my lunch of dried fish and gristly meat.

Changchun, which we reached in the early afternoon, was full of vaporous locomotives. The freezing weather made them immensely steamy, and great gusts billowed from the fourteen engines shunting at the station. Icicles hung from their black wheels, and smoke came out of their chimneys, and shrieks of steam from their pistons. It was impressive for being a study of fire and ice, and also for its tones of black and white, the engines bowling along the snowy tracks.

One of China's major film studios is in Changchun, and at that moment a coproduction about the life of China's last emperor was being made. If the film had concerned his time as emperor it could have been a very short film. He was only three years old when he took the throne and he abdicated three years later, in 1912. His name was Pu Yi, but he took the name Henry when he was older. His main recreation was watching Harold Lloyd movies. And later, when the Japanese formed the puppet state of Manchukuo and needed a puppet to run it, they chose Henry and worked his strings in Changchun until the silly state collapsed and Henry was arrested as a war criminal by the Russians. His life ended in the same violent confusion as it began, when he died of cancer at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Henry Pu Yi represented everything that Mao set his face against: the decadent Manchus, the ruling class, wealth, privilege, Japanese collaboration and the humiliations of Chinese history. No wonder when the time came they seized Henry Pu Yi and had his guts for garters.

I debated whether to stay in Changchun; but it was an easy decision. Changchun was very cold, so I moved on. The ice thickened on the walls of the train. Time passed slowly. I put on all my clothes, bit by bit, until by the middle of the afternoon I was sitting with my hands up my sleeves, reading the
The Analects
of Confucius and turning the pages with my nose.

Beyond the glittering rime on the window, small padded moon-people went slowly across the snow. And so did cyclists and ox carts and school kids carrying knapsacks. I saw horses hopelessly foraging for food among blunt spikes of stubble. Sometimes there was a great whiteness, its only identifiable feature a row of telephone poles—the Chinese variety, mile upon mile of tragic-looking crosses. We were in the province of Jilin now, and a cloud of frozen vapor hovered close to the snowy ground.

Few people in the train looked out of the window. They were eating noodles out of tin cups, guzzling tea, shouting or sleeping. Many were taking advantage of the recent relaxation of the rules governing card games. They were actually gambling in Hard Class, and some groups were playing mah-jongg.

As I walked along from coach to coach I said hello and after a few exchanges, "It's cold."

They just smiled, or shrugged. They were indifferent to the icicles in the toilet, the ice on the floor, the wind whipping through the dining car, the igloo that had formed between the coaches. I admired them for not caring. I had seen plenty of wimps in China, but the predominating characteristic of the Chinese was stoicism.

Everyone winced when a man waved his arms at me in a kind of aimlessly dangerous way and began screaming, "America! Kissinger! Nixon!"

He went on chanting this and following me.

Someone said, "He's drunk."

"He's been drinking wine," someone else said.

But he wasn't drunk—he was crazy. A Chinese person who was solitary and aggressive had to be unbalanced.

He kept following me, so I shouted back. "I hear you, comrade, but I don't understand."

People laughed at that, because it was a stock phrase for stonewalling someone and pretending to be dim. He got off the train at Siping, on the border of the province of Liaoning. He was still raving.

In the early winter sunset, all the villages were smoking because it was mealtime—all the stoves alight. The tiny huts lay like simple blocks on the hillsides, toy towns in the snow, and rising from them were symmetrical cones of smoke.

In my rambles through the train I met a Frenchman, Nicolas, who was on his way back to Peking. He was a carpenter from Nice. He had no idea where he was. He did not speak Chinese, and he was trying to teach himself English. He said he was not enjoying China at all. The food was disgusting, he said. The hotels were filthy. Had I been to Harbin?

"I am in Harbin," he said. "I am very cold. I go into a cinema to get warm. It is not a cinema! It is a big room. With shares. Chinese people in the shares. And they are all watching a small television. I sat there all day. It was not warm, but it was better than the street."

We swapped stories of low temperatures in Manchuria.

He was reading a textbook titled
Easy Steps to English,
but he was only on chapter three.

"How can you say this word?" he asked, putting his mitten on the vocabulary list.

"Believe."

"Booleeve," he said.

"Want an English lesson?" I said, because I saw a way of asking him a number of personal questions in this way. He gladly agreed.

I explained the verb
believe
and then said we were going to practice a number of drills.

"Nicolas, do you believe in God?"

"Non. I do not booleeve een Gott."

"Do you believe that Klaus Barbie is guilty of Nazi war crimes?"

"Maybe."

"You have to repeat the whole sentence."

"Maybe I booleeve ..."

I asked him about the Chinese, the French, the Americans; about his travels, his ambitions, his family. But his answers weren't interesting, and eventually I abandoned the effort and suggested that he should try to learn Chinese.

The lights in the train were dim. The snow on the floor had not melted. I was stiff from the cold. Nicolas said he wished he were back in Nice. I tried to think where I wanted to be. I considered the possibilities and reached the conclusion that I wanted to be right here, doing what I was doing—heading south towards Dalian on the China coast. Perhaps it was a simple choice—of being home or being elsewhere. Surely this was elsewhere?