Riding the Iron Rooster (38 page)

The train was traveling in a narrow groove cut just below the summit of these pretty hills, and buttresses had been built to prevent landslides. They hadn't worked. Man was insignificant here. Nature gave him a very hard time. Well, that was the way of the world, wasn't it? It was unnatural that other Chinese people had turned a dramatic landscape into a cabbage patch.

Mr. Wei said that he had managed to get a few years' education in the technical institute in Changsha. His Cultural Revolution job had involved mending boxcars in a factory in Kunming. He said he hated the work and was no good at it. He had always wanted to go to university and he had spent all those years holding a welder's torch and cursing.

I said that I planned to go to Changsha myself and wanted very much to visit Mao's birthplace, Shaoshan, near that city. Had he been there?

"I went ten years ago. In 1976." He made a face.

"What did you think?"

"I didn't like it," he said. "It is not good for the people. It is a bad place."

"But Chairman Mao was born there."

"I know," he said, enigmatically.

"Wasn't he a good leader?"

"Mao did harm. The Cultural Revolution delayed our development. Shaoshan is not a good place."

He told me that with such solemnity that I was determined to go there.

"Which Chinese leader do you respect the most?"

"Deng is not dead yet, so he might make mistakes. Better to mention a dead one. Zhou Enlai is liked by many people."

"Do you like him?"

"Yes. Very much."

"Where is his village?"

"It is Huai'an, in Jiangsu Province"—far away, in the east, some distance north of Shanghai.

"What do you think of Zhou's village?"

"In my heart I like it. I would like to go there."

"Why do so many people respect Zhou?"

"Because he worked hard for the Chinese people."

"Isn't Deng Xiaoping working for the Chinese people?"

Mr. Wei frowned. "As I said, he is not dead yet. There is still time for him to make mistakes."

As the sun climbed towards noon and the foliage thickened by the tracks, the landscape became tropical—bamboos and bird squawks. And some houses came into view. They were not Chinese houses. They were stucco, with green shutters and heavy verandahs—just the sort of houses that you see in the French towns of Vietnam. I had seen such houses in Hue and Da Nang and in the back streets of Saigon: it was French government housing, for the colonial officers—in this case, railway personnel. It was so strange, this touch of Frenchness, deep in the hills of Yunnan, still intact—still lived in—after almost a century.

And that was Yiliang. A sign at the station said, the people's railway is for the people
(Renmin Tielu Wei Renmin).

"I am hungry," I said.

"You cannot eat here," Mr. Wei said.

What?

Before I could complain, he rushed me out of the coach and onto the platform. My feet had hardly touched the ground before I was on my way back to Kunming—I was still breathless when we were under way. I had scarcely seen Yiliang. And I had wanted to stroll around the old French town, look into the houses, talk to the people, loiter in the market.

Mr. Wei said he had just been following orders. It was Mr. Fang who explained. I had insisted on taking this train, although the train was off limits to foreigners. Foreigners were not allowed in the deep south of Yunnan because it was a security risk—the Chinese were fighting the Vietnamese on the border. But Mr. Fang had explained that it was the train I was interested in, not the towns. And so the railway authorities had said that, as long as I did not stop in any of the towns to look around or eat, I could take the train. But at a certain stage of the journey I had to stop and be spun round and sent straight back to Kunming, without looking left or right. That was how I took the train without violating the law. It was a very Chinese solution.

The young girl and boy entered the railway compartment holding hands, which was very unusual. But they had a Chinese explanation.

"We got married this morning," the boy said. "We are going to Guilin for a few days."

Honeymooners! He was in his twenties—very thin, rather furtive, but stylishly dressed in a leather jacket and pointy shoes. She wore a dress. In a train a dress was just as unusual as hand-holding. It was blue satin, with a fringe of lace, and though it matched strangely with her yellow ankle socks and red shoes, the hemline was high enough so that I could see her legs. It was not their shapeliness that interested me, it was their very existence. Women's legs are a rare enough sight in China for them to be a complete novelty.

"Do you want me to go into a different compartment?" I asked. "I'd be glad to."

"Why?" the boy said.

"So that you can be alone."

"We can be alone up here," the boy said, flinging his bag on the upper berth and hoisting his bride on the one opposite.

And there they sat until long after we left Kunming Station. It was late evening, about nine, and this was perhaps their first night together. It was certainly their first as man and wife. Was I sincere in saying that I'd be glad to leave them alone in the compartment? Of course I wasn't. I was trying to get the measure of this place; but it's bigness often baffled me. I needed luck in trying to uncover the truth, which was why I looked into women's handbags when they opened them just to see what was inside; and opened drawers in people's houses, and read their mail, and searched their cupboards. When a man took out his billfold, I tried to count his money. If a taxi driver had his sweetheart's snapshot pinned to his dashboard, I scrutinized it. If I saw someone reading a book or magazine, I noted down the title. I compared prices. I copied down graffiti and slogans that I saw on walls. I got people to translate wall posters, particularly the ones that gave the sordid details of a criminal's career (these details were set out and advertised just before the doomed man was shot). I memorized the contents of refrigerators, of travelers' suitcases, I remembered the labels in their clothes (White Elephant tools and Pansy brand men's underwear and Typical sewing machines stick in my mind). I searched brochures for solecisms and collected Rules of the Hotel for Guests (example: "Guests may not perform urination in sink basin"). And just for the record, I asked endless pestering questions. So, really, would I willingly pass up a chance to spend the night with a honeymoon couple?

They smoked, they muttered a little, they rattled magazines. I wrote:
10:16
P.M.
No activity from the honeymooners. Contented breathing. Could be snores. One might be asleep. Anticlimax.

The cigarette smoke bothered me, and on this banged-up train of the Shanghai Railway Board, nothing worked. The fan was dead, the lock had been torn off the door, the arms had been twisted off the seats, the luggage rack was broken, and the window could not be raised. This last matter was the most serious: the compartment was now very hot and smoky. It was a good thing that the honeymooners were either asleep or else ignoring me, because I took out my Swiss Army knife and unscrewed the window locks, removed the window frame, levered the window up six inches, then put the hardware back on, so that no one would suspect I had tampered with it. Dire punishments were threatened for anyone who messed with the train, and if you so much as chipped your Chinese Railways teacup you were charged for it.

There was silence all night in the upper berths. Nothing to report except that I seemed to have more proof that the Chinese were very phlegmatic.

I woke to find myself in the rocky province of Guizhou, all pyramidal limestone hills and granite cliffs. The landscape was green and stony, like Ireland, and the people lived in rugged Irish-looking stone cottages, and houses with rough-hewn beams. They were the strongest houses I saw in China, and around them, marking the limits of their land, were beautifully built dry-stone walls, symmetrical and square.

Among these great slanting slablike hills, there was very little arable land and not many flat places for farming. The gardens were made by balancing walls and building terraces, and by all the other useful things that could be made from the chunks of stone—bridges, aqueducts, roads, dikes and dams. The villages were thick with villas and two-story houses (it was rare in the country to find more than one floor), all of them stone-built, with slate roofs. And their grave mounds were just as solid and built with the same granite confidence: the cemeteries were miniature versions of the villages.

While the honeymooners nipped down to the dining car for the breakfast of rice gruel and noodles, I ate some bananas I had bought in Kunming and drank my green tea. We passed Anshun ("once the center of the opium trade") and we stopped a while at Guiyang, where I met Mr. Shuang.

Mr. Shuang was in his late sixties, plum faced and whiskery, with a shapeless cap and a red armband that showed he was a railway worker. But he was a retired man who, out of boredom, had gone back to be a platform supervisor.

"I was sick of staying at home," he said. "I've been doing this job for half a year. I like it. But I don't need the money."

He said he earned 130 yuan a month.

"What do you spend it on?"

"I don't have children or a family, so I buy music." He smiled and said, "I love music. I play the harmonica."

"Do you buy Chinese or Western music?"

"Both. But I like Western very much."

"What kind?"

He said in a neatly enunciating way, "Light orchestral music."

That was the kind that was played in the train and in the railway stations when they weren't playing Chinese songs. They played "The Skaters Waltz" and "Flower of Malaya" and selections from
Carmen.

"Do you get many travelers in Guiyang?"

"Unfortunately, very few people come here. This province was closed to foreigners until 1982. Some people pass through but they don't stop. And yet we have many places to see—some very nice temples, and the Huangguoshu Falls and the hot springs. Please come back to Guiyang and I'll show you around."

It seemed that the more remote and countrified the place in China, the more hospitable the people were.

For the onward journey the honeymooners had changed their clothes: he wore a jacket and sunglasses, she wore a tweed skirt. They smoked and slumbered. Maybe this fatigue meant it was the end of their honeymoon?

By midafternoon we were in the southeast of Guizhou, among greener hills showing the scars and broken terraces of having once been farmed. The route to Guilin was roundabout because of all the mountains. They were an obstruction, but they were very pretty—velvety and shaggy with grass and trees. It was much hotter now, and most of the train passengers were asleep, barely stirring at Duyun; that place looked like Mexico, with a big yellow-stucco station and palm trees under a clear blue sky.

Farther south the landscape changed dramatically: the gray hills here were shaped like camel humps and chimney stacks, and stupas with sheer sides. They were the oddest hills in the world, and the most Chinese, because these are the hills that are depicted in every Chinese scroll. It is almost a sacred landscape—it is certainly an emblematic one. It had happened all at once: the hills looked squarish and ancient, like a petrified city. We had entered a new province, Guangxi, and from here to the city of Guilin, two hundred miles or more, it was all the landscape of the Chinese classical paintings.

It was a rice-growing area, but there wasn't much water available. This was probably the reason I saw such ingenious pumps and irrigation in Guangxi. I saw about ten different kinds of water movers. I saw the chain pump being pedaled by two children. This pump, Professor Needham says, is unchanged in its design since its invention in the first century A.D. All the pumps I saw were mechanical—no motors, no hoses even. The largest and weirdest was a gigantic spoon, about ten feet long and made of wood, which a woman used to move water from a lower field to a higher one. She didn't simply lift and dump the water; she scooped and splashed very quickly, and it was like a laborious form of playing.

Amid these limestone stacks and buttes there was a limestone village with the same look of eruption. But there was no railway station to serve these stone houses—not even a platform, nor a grade crossing. The village was in a low place, and its muddy streets were in shadow. What was remarkable was the number of horses in the place. People were buying and selling them, riding them, tethering them to trees, hitching them to carts. It was market day, late afternoon, and the traders were winding things up. For the next little while, along the railway tracks, I saw pony carts making their way home. It was unusual to see Chinese horsemen, but I inquired and discovered that these were people of the Miao minority, who are fairly numerous in Guangxi—there are five million of them altogether. The Chinese are respectful of such people, but are more mystified by their customs and habits than they are by those of Westerners. They stared, fascinated, but still they didn't understand. They never seemed to understand the strengths of these little nations in their autonomous prefectures (Guangxi had two minority states within its borders), and so they never seemed to take the minorities seriously. They treated them like exotic pets.

An eerie sight in Guangxi were the caves in those gray limestone hills. The hills had come to look like fat columns and towers, and the caves made them seem hollow. Later I learned that Guangxi is full of caves. Some are underground dripping caverns, but these above-ground things—many of them at any rate—had been converted into homes. The strangest ones looked like gaping mouths, with white stalactites showing like teeth.

In a shallow pool among those towerlike hills there was a gray and white crane, the sort the Chinese regard as an auspicious bird, representing long life. The train startled the bird, and off it went, soaring and circling, as we rumbled on through a painting of mountains that was being endlessly unrolled.