Riding the Iron Rooster

They go to the Great Mosque, Qinzhen Si, where many people still do have religious ideas. This mosque was founded 1200 years ago, and enlarged, vandalized, demolished and rebuilt many times since. It was in the process of being restored when I visited. I asked an old man how many believers there were in Xian. He said there were hundreds and that a few dozen had been to Mecca. He also said that during the Cultural Revolution the mosque had housed animals—pigs, mainly—which seemed the most popular way of insulting Muslims. When I left him he said, "We are Sunni. Not Shi'ites. No Khomeini. Ha-ha!"

That was a ha-ha I hadn't heard before, and seemed to mean Death to the infidels.

Walking among the gates and pillars with their Arabic inscriptions, I saw an old man.

"Salaam aleikum," I said. "Peace and blessing be upon you."

"Wa-aleikum salaam," he replied, returning the greeting. "Are you from Pakistan?"

"No. America."

"Are there Muslims in America?" he asked, using the word Mussulmen in his Chinese.

"Yes. Quite a few," I said. "Why did you think I was from Pakistan? Did you think I looked like a Pakistani?"

"Maybe," he said, and shrugged. "I don't know. "I've never seen one."

9. The Express to Chengdu

I became sad, looking at Mr. Fang's lopsided expression of longing, one eye screwed up and one spiky patch of his hair sticking up. He could be so silent. He merely followed me, perhaps hoping that I would do something wrong. He looked so grateful when I asked for his help. Now we were in the Soft Class Waiting Room at Xian Station, killing time with magazines, and I became sadder when I saw him trying to work out with a dictionary a page in China Products Monthly. I had the same magazine, and that page was an ad for "Jiangsu Ceramics"—small, ugly statues of angels, Santa Clauses, snow-covered churches, Mickey Mouses, choirboys with lyres; and what Mr. Fang was trying to read, described the ceramics as "Ingeniously conceived! Vividly modeled! Freshly colored! Boundlessly interesting!"

He looked up and smiled at me, which depressed me even more, because I suspected that he was sad. Then I decided that he was not sad at all. He was like so many other Chinese—reserved and fatalistic and steeling themselves against disappointment. Yes, the Great Wall was a masterpiece and the Tang Dynasty had been glorious and they had managed to thrash the Japanese, and they invented poison gas, toilet paper and the decimal point; but they also had a long history of convulsions and reverses. Never mind that they forgot they invented the mechanical clock. Look at the upheavals that had taken place in just the past hundred years or so: the Taiping revolt, the humiliating colonialism of Europe and Japan, the Boxer Rebellion, the fall of the empire in 1911, the republic of Sun Yat-sen, the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the battling between Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang and Mao's communists, The Great Leap Forward and all the other witch-hunts and hysterical purges that followed the emergence of the People's Republic, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Who wouldn't be uneasy? And these sudden agonies were undoubtedly the reason that few people ever showed confidence in the future. It was better not to think about it. And it was a loss of face to seem disappointed, which was another reason the Chinese never opened presents in front of the giver (nor commented on the gift, no matter how large or small), and why their impulse when startled was always to laugh.

Mr. Fang, who was a Russian specialist, who had lectured on Pushkin and acted as interpreter in Moscow and Leningrad at a time when the Russians and the Chinese had been comrades, had been howled at in the 1960s for teaching a bourgeois foreign language and forced to carry boulders in a sort of chain gang. And now he was shadowing an ungrateful American through central Sichuan. Instead of screaming What next! he looked up and shyly smiled.

He pretended not to see me board the train, but I called out to him, "I'll see you in Chengdu."

The train pulled out at about five-thirty in the bright early evening, and passed the wheat fields and the harvesters. It also passed a great number of mounds and tombs and tumuli, probably all of them looted (though no one took treasures to the Government Antique Exchange anymore, where they were paid a pittance for the object which was then sold for a high price at a state shop). I had heard at my hotel that another pit near Xian had just been excavated and was full of yet more terra-cotta figures. I asked for information on this, but either no one knew about it or else they had decided to keep it a secret.

As the sun drooped and the steam train went chik-chik-chik-chik- chisssss at a siding, a dark, perspiring Chinese man threw the compartment door open and entered, dragging four big bags.

"I am from Kowloon," he said.