Riding the Iron Rooster

In Xu Naijian's recent (1985) story, "Because I'm Thirty and Unmarried," the so-called spinster is told by her girl cousin, "What kind of bra is this you're wearing, so big and ungainly? Get yourself one of those bras from Xinjiekou. They're a nice shape—made in Guangzhou. You're so out of date..."

The puzzling conflict that arises when a Chinese person is faced with choosing between the East and the West was expressed by the Chinese traveler Liang Ch'i-ch'ao. "Of course we may laugh at those old folks among us," he wrote in Travel Impressions of Europe (1919), "who block their own road of advancement and claim that we Chinese have all that is found in Western learning. But should we not laugh even more at those who are drunk with western ways and regard everything Chinese as worthless, as though we in the last several hundred years have remained primitive and have achieved nothing?"

As Mr. Fang walked along with me (but a few steps behind), we passed a refreshment stand and heard loud singing—one uproarious voice trying to manage a twangling Chinese song. The singer, a man, was seated at a table, his back turned to us. His two companions, who were sober, wore terrified smiles. The man was at the final stage of Chinese drunkenness: red faced, singing and drooling. Another bottle of beer and his eyes would swell up, he would gasp for breath and soon be out cold.

"That is also a result of the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Fang said. "What does he care? He has lost all discipline. He has no pride. It is bad behavior."

Then the man stood up, still singing, and staggered a little. He turned aside. He did not see me, but I saw him. It was Cheung, the taxi driver from Kowloon.

10: The Halt at Emei Shan: Train Number 209 to Kunming

The biggest statue of Buddha in the world, and probably the ugliest, is three hours down the main Chengdu-Kunming line at Leshan, a riverside town. The Buddha and the surrounding temples make it a place of pilgrimage. The statue sits in a niche as big as a gorge, at the confluence of three rivers. It is said that this Buddha was erected there 1200 years ago because the turbulence created by the meeting rivers had drowned so many boatmen. Even now I could see men battling through the suds in their sampans as I watched.

But this Buddha was less an object of veneration than an example of the Chinese fascination with freakishness—the very big, the very weird, the highly unusual. This Buddha's ears were twelve feet long. Chinese tourists frolicked on his feet. You could park a car on the nail of his big toe. Close up he was Brobdingnagian—big, plain, disproportionate—with weeds growing from his cracks. I imagined he did not look so grotesque from the river. There were dragon-boat races on the river that week: more freakishness—oarsmen throwing panicky ducks into the water and then chasing them in the luridly painted boats.

There were dragon-boat men in the restaurant at Leshan. They were singing and swilling beer and engaged in drinking contests (the loser had to clip clothespins to his ears so that he would look like a total jackass). For lunch I had the specialties of this pleasant town—frogs' thighs and green bean seeds, and then I went to the holy mountain at Emei. Like Leshan, Emei is also a place of pilgrimage. It is considered an act of piety to climb the mountain—holiness at 10,000 feet, on this penultimate staging post to even holier Tibet.

I met a group of eight elderly pilgrims at Emei. They were all in their seventies and carried backpacks—ingenious wicker baskets—and walking sticks and food bundles. They were the classic instance of smiling and portable pilgrims.

"Where do you come from?"

"From Xitang."

Over three hundred miles away, in the northeast of Sichuan.

"Why did you come here?"

"To pray to our God."

"And we are now going to Wuhou Temple in Chengdu," one old woman said. "To pray."

The women wore a sort of nun's cap—a starched white cloth carefully folded and pinned; and they had thick socks, like leg warmers, and like the men they leaned on hiking staffs. They were bluff and hardy and very good humored. Some of the women smoked pipes, and one chomped on a cigar. The men wore cloaks with big sleeves. They said they had climbed to the top of the mountain. None of them wore anything sturdier than sandals or cloth slippers.