Riding the Iron Rooster (48 page)

The train pulled in, steaming and gasping, just as the sun came up. It had come from Dalian, 600 miles away, and it stopped everywhere. So it was sensationally littered with garbage—peanut shells, apple cores, chewed chicken bones, orange peels and greasy paper. It was very dirty and it was so cold inside the spit had frozen on the floor into misshapen yellow-green medallions of ice. The covering between coaches was a snow tunnel, the frost on the windows was an inch thick, the doors had no locks and so they banged and thumped as a freezing draft rushed through the carriages. It was the Heilongjiang experience: I crept in out of the cold, and once inside I felt even colder. I found a small space and sat hunched over like everyone else, with my hat and gloves on. I was reading Lermontov's
A Hero of Our Time
and I scribbled on the flyleaf,
In the provinces every train is like a troop train. This is like one returning from the front, with the sick and wounded.

Even with three pairs of socks and thermal-lined boots my feet were cold; nor did I feel particularly cozy in my heavy sweater, Mongolian sheepskin vest and leather coat. I felt like an idiot in my hat and fleece-lined mittens, but it annoyed me that I was still cold, or at least not warm. How I longed for the summer trains of the south and the sweltering trip on The Iron Rooster, when I had lounged in my blue pajamas.

Mr. Tian said, "You come from which city in the States?"

"Near Boston."

"Lexington is near Boston," Mr. Tian said.

"How did you know that?"

"I studied American history in middle school. All Chinese study it."

"So you know about our war of liberation, Mr. Tian?"

"Yes. There was also a Paul who was very important."

"Paul Revere."

"Exactly," Mr. Tian said. "He told the peasants that the British were coming."

"Not just the peasants. He told everyone—the peasants, the landlords, the capitalist-roaders, The Stinking Ninth, the minorities and the slaves."

"I think you're joking, especially about the slaves."

"No. Some of the slaves fought on the British side. They were promised their freedom if the British won. After the British surrendered, these blacks were sent to Canada."

"I didn't read about that," Mr. Tian said, as the door blew open.

"I'm cold," I said.

"I'm too hot," Mr. Tian said.

The cold put me to sleep. I was wakened later by Mr. Tian, who asked me whether I wanted to have breakfast. I thought some food might warm me up so I said yes.

There was frost on the dining-car windows, ice on the dining-car floor, and a bottle of water on my table had frozen and burst. My fingers were too cold to hold any chopsticks. I hunched over with my hands up my sleeves.

"What food do they have?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"Do you want noodles?" I asked.

"Anything but noodles," Mr. Tian said.

The waiter brought us cold noodles, cold pickled onions, diced Spam that looked like a shredded beach toy, and cold but very tasty black fungus—a specialty of the province. Mr. Tian ate his noodles. It was the Chinese way. Even if it was not to your taste, when there was nothing else on the menu, you ate it.

"What is that music?" I asked. A tune was playing over the train's loudspeaker. I had heard it before, on other trains.

"It is called, The Fifteenth Moon,'" Mr. Tian said.

I asked him to explain the incomprehensible words. It was about a soldier who was fighting on the Vietnamese border—just south of where I had taken the train in Yunnan. The soldier was married, but his wife was not with him. And yet the soldier thought about his wife a great deal and realized that he was fighting for her—he was triumphant and heroic because she inspired him. That was a change. A few years ago he would have been fighting for Chairman Mao. It made a little more sense to fight for your spouse and the sentiment was that of "Keep the Home Fires Burning."

"I like this song, but I don't like Chinese music," Mr. Tian said.

"What do you like?" I asked, abandoning my chopsticks and eating the black fungus with my fingers.

"Beethoven. The Ninth Symphony. And I like this."

Mr. Tian opened his mouth and a crowlike complaining came out of it.

Ah goon Scamba Fey!
Party say roomee tie!
Renmanbee da warn hoo-day...

"The tune's familiar," I said. But I could not place it. He was staring at me, challenging me to remember. I said, "I give up."

After a while he told me that it was "Scarborough Fair," sung by his favorite musicians, Simon and Garfunkel. They were very popular at Harbin University and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" was a much-coveted tape.

After several hours of this train crossing flat snowfields it entered a mountainous region. The settlements were small—three or four short rows of bungalows, some of brick and some of mud and logs. They were the simplest of slant-roofed dwellings and looked like the sort of houses that children draw in the first grade, with a narrow door and a single window and a blunt chimney with a screw of smoke coming out of it.

The toilet on the train looked as though a child had designed it, too. It was a hole in the floor about a foot across. Well, I had seen squat toilets before; but this one was traveling at about fifty miles an hour through the ice and snow of northern China. There was no pipe or baffle. If you looked down you saw ice streaking past. A gust of freezing air rushed out of the hole. Anyone fool enough to use this thing would be frostbitten on a part of the body that is seldom frostbitten. And yet the passengers trooped into this refrigerated bum-freezer. When they came out their eyes were tiny and their teeth were clenched, as though they had just been pinched very hard.

"People ski here," Mr. Tian said at the town of Taoshan, where we arrived at noon. Some passengers got off. They looked like lumberjacks, not skiers. But there were white mountains to the northwest, and the most Siberian touch of all, groves of silver birches.

The train grew colder. What was the point in heating it if it kept stopping and opening its doors? That was the Chinese argument. The same went for the toilet. If a toilet was a hole in the floor with freezing air pouring into the room, there was no point heating the room. If you couldn't heat a room efficiently there was no point heating it at all. That was why the people in this region never took off their long underwear, and why they ate wearing their fur hats.

I was rigid in my seat, reading
A Hero of Our Time
with my mittens on, and turning the pages with my nose. Perhaps the Chinese were thinking, So that's what they do with those long noses! In spite of the shortness of this book I had never finished reading it. I had started it many times. But the hero, Pechorin, is a sort of romantic punk with a death wish, and the story is told in fits and starts. I came across one of Pechorin's characteristic opinions as we rode along. "I confess I have a strong prejudice against people who are blind, one-eyed, deaf, mute, legless, armless, hunchbacked, and so forth. I have observed that there always exists some strange relationship between the appearance of a man and his soul, as if with the loss of a limb, the soul lost one of its senses."

This was nonsense. The opposite seemed to me much more likely, that the soul gained a new sense with the loss of a limb, or blindness, deafness or whatever. In H. G. Wells's story "The Country of the Blind" it is the sighted man who is truly handicapped. I was also struck by this passage in the book because there were cripples on the train, and I thought of it again in Langxiang where I met a hunchback who had built his own house, all by himself, and fitted it so that he could carry on his two jobs as a radio repairman and a studio photographer.

We were still jogging along, stopping frequently. And the doors opened and closed with the same pneumatic gasp as those on a refrigerator, each time producing a cold blast through the coach. I hated having to get up because when I sat down again my seat froze me.

It surprised me to see children standing outside of their houses, watching the train go by. They wore thin jackets, no hats or gloves. Many of them had bright red cheeks. They had spiky unwashed hair and they wore cloth slippers. They looked very hardy, and they yelled at the train as it passed their icebound villages.

The mountains in the distance were the southernmost peaks of the Lesser Khingan Range, and the foreground was all forest. Most of these settlements were simply overgrown lumber camps. One of the centers of logging activity is Langxiang. But I had also chosen it because it has a narrow-gauge railway that goes deep into the forest and carries logs back to town to be milled.

It was hardly a town. It was a sprawling one-story village with an immense lumberyard at its center and a main street where people with scarves wrapped around their faces stood all day in the cold selling meat and vegetables. One day in Langxiang I saw a man standing behind a square of cloth which held six frozen rats and a stack of rats' tails. Were things so bad in Langxiang that they ate rats and rats' tails?

"Do you eat these?" I asked.

"No, no," came the muffled voice through the frosted scarf. "I sell medicine."

"These rats are medicine?"

"No, no!" The man's skin was almost black from the cold and the dry air.

And then he began speaking again, but I had no idea what he was saying in this local dialect. As he spoke the ice crystals thawed on his scarf.

Mr. Tian said, "He doesn't sell rats. He sells rat poison. He shows these dead rats as proof that his poison is good."

We had arrived at Langxiang in the middle of the afternoon, just as it was growing dark. This was a northern latitude in winter: night came early. I stepped from the cold train onto the freezing platform, and then we went to the guest house, which was also cold—but the clammy indoor cold which I found harder to bear than the icy outdoors. With curtains over the windows and the lights dim it was like being in an underground tomb.

"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.

Mr. Tian 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 was 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 guest house 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 an ex-commune worker in one of the remotest parts of China, he found the new reforms were bewildering to him. 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 shortwave 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 sidewalk was clear of ice. The Chinese 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."