Riding the Iron Rooster

I had four of them. They were not bad. The meat was dark and tough, with a strong smoky taste.

When I got back to the compartment it was full of men—the man from Kowloon, the Red Guard and three others. The corridor was crowded with men in pajamas, and children squawking, and some cardplayers. The fans rattled and buzzed; so did the train.

"He is from Xinjiang," the man from Kowloon said. "He is a student. He wants to know your name."

"My name is Paul. He is sitting on my bed. I want to go to sleep."

This disapproving tone had the effect of emptying the compartment very quickly. We turned the lights out, but the three others—a new man had joined us—went on shouting at each other in the darkness.

There was no dawn. The mist grew lighter, thinned slightly, and as we passed at that early hour from Shaanxi into the vast, populous province of Sichuan, small knobby trees became visible, and so did the faint outlines of mountains and hills; and people appeared as small dark brush strokes in this simple Chinese watercolor.

The mist hung over the mountains, and as the sun heated it and made it thinner, a greenness came into it, and there was a lushness, the rice fields, beneath it. It was like looking at a landscape through etched glass, seeing everything blurred, and now and then getting a clear glimpse of the beautiful contours of mountains, of fields and valleys. The sharpest line was the path that always led around the hillside, a packed narrowness that looked bright and baked. In this blur, people were hoeing, and cycling, and leading hairy pigs to market.

The landscape was softened by the mist, but when the mist all burned away what had seemed idyllic looked senile. And the farmers had a hard routine this humid summer morning. Chinese farming is backbreaking, but it is some consolation to know that these days the farmers are well-off—much better off than any teacher or factory worker. The free market has helped them by guaranteeing them good prices: they no longer have to sell at fixed and punitive prices to the state. We had only gone a few hundred miles, from Shaanxi into Sichuan, but we had moved from a wheat-growing region to paddy fields. It was more southerly here, and wetter and warmer.

That was another virtue of traveling by train in China. It allowed one to make visual connections in a place that was otherwise full of shocks and bafflements. Every other mode of travel made the country seem incomprehensible. Well, even on a train it was incomprehensible at times. But doing it this way helped. It wasn't one countryside: it was a thousand landscapes and hundreds of crops. Sometimes, only an hour passed and everything was different.

Now there were cornfields, and harvesters flinging ears of corn into gunnysacks; and browsing buffaloes; and a brownish goose with an orange beak standing in the middle of a flooded field; and women yoked to buckets; and a human scarecrow—a boy frightening birds by waving a long stick with blue streamers on it; and a man on the bank of a canal, fishing Chinese-style, a fishing pole in each hand.

I could not understand the Red Guard's Chinese, so I asked the man from Kowloon whether he would translate my questions.

He said, "I am interested myself!"

"What does he do for work?"

The Red Guard was sulking in his bed.

"He works in an institute—agricultural. No. Language institute. In Urumchi."

"I was in Urumchi."

"He says, many people go to Urumchi."

I said, "What language does he teach at this institute?"

"He doesn't know the answer to your question."

"Does he speak foreign languages?"

"He says he works there—"

The Red Guard was gabbling in his berth.

"—he is not a teacher."

"What is his job?"

"He is a cadre."

An official. Why did they use this French word? Probably because they hated the word official—it smacked of feudalism and the class system.

"Is he a member of the Chinese Communist Party?"

"He is."

One of the few.

"Ask him when he joined."

"When he was eight years old."

"That's impossible."

Gabble, gabble.

"When he was sixteen, he says. He joined the Party then."

"Ask him if he was a Red Guard."

"Yes, he was a Red Guard."

I was pleased that I had spotted him. But why did he still look like one.

"Ask him if he was in the Gang of Rebellion." These brutes, the Zaofan Pai, were said to be the toughest, most thuggish of the Red Guards. They did battle with the Bao Huang Pai (Emperor's Gang) until long after the Cultural Revolution ended.

The question was translated, but with a mutter that meant That's enough questions, the Red Guard slid off his berth and hurried into the corridor, clacking his plastic sandals.

Nearer Chengdu, the man from Kowloon said that this was his first trip to China. His name was Cheung. He was exactly my age—he showed me his passport so that I would see his name written: we had the same birthday.

"The Year of the Snake," I said.