Riding the Iron Rooster

I slept, but fitfully, for each time the train entered a tunnel, the compartment howled with its noise and filled with smoke and steam from the engine. In the morning we were among bulgier, wetter mountains—the Yunnan valleys are cool throughout the year, because most of the province is at a high altitude.

A bad-tempered attendant banged at the door at seven. But knocking was only a formality. After a few knocks she used her own key to open the door, and she demanded the bedding. Hurry up! Get out of bed! Give me the sheets! Do it now! I thought: What nags these people can be.

"Why are the fuwuyuans in such a hurry to collect the bedding?" I ask the Head of the Train, Mr. He.

He said, "Because the train does not stay long in Kunming. Just a matter of hours, and then we turn around and go back to Chengdu."

That was why they were nags: they were overworked.

Mr. He had risen through the ranks. He had been a luggage handler, a conductor and a cook—all jobs at roughly the same salary level, about 100 yuan a month. He had joined when he was twenty—he said he hadn't had any education ("not much chance of it in the sixties") and I took that to mean that he was a casualty of the Cultural Revolution. He had chosen the railways because his father had been a railwayman. Now he was in total charge of this train.

"I was promoted by being appointed," he said. "I didn't apply for it. One day they simply came to me and said, 'We want you to be the Head of the Train,' and I agreed."

I asked him about travelers, because it seemed to me that one of the features of China now was the large numbers of people going cross-country.

"Yes," he said. "Especially in the last three or four years. Many travelers, of all kinds."

"Do they give you problems?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do they drink too much? Do they shout, or quarrel, or make disturbances?"

"No. They keep order. We don't have those sorts of problems. In fact, we don't have many problems. My job is easy. The Chinese obey the rules, on the whole. That's our nature."

"What about foreigners?"

"They obey the rules," Mr. He said. "Very few people break them."

"Are you a member of a union, Mr. He?"

"Of course. The Railway Workers' Union. Every worker is a member."

"What does the union do?"

"It offers opinions about conditions of work, and it discusses problems."

"Does the union discuss money?"

"No," he said.

"If conditions of work are bad—let's say if you're not given time for a nap or for meals—and if the union's opinions are not respected, would you consider going on strike?"

After a long pause, Mr. He said, "No."

"Why not? Railway workers go on strike all the time in Britain and the United States. There is a right to strike in China—it's in the constitution."

He rubbed his chin and became very serious.

"We are not serving capitalists," he said. "We are serving the people. If we go on strike the people won't be able to travel, and that will hurt them."

"That's a good answer, Mr. He. But now there are capitalists in China. Not only tourists from Western countries, but also the Chinese themselves are accumulating wealth."

"To me they are all passengers."

"I'm a capitalist myself, I suppose," I said.

"On my train you are a passenger, and you are welcome. Ha!" This Ha meant Enough of this line of questioning!

"Mr. He, you mentioned you have a son." A child of six, in a school in Chengdu, was what he had said. "Would you like him to follow you and your father and work on the railway?"

"I'll tell you frankly—I would. But it's not my choice. It's up to him. I can't tell him what to do. At the moment, he wants to be a soldier in the army."

In the corridor the passengers were flinging their luggage out of the windows onto the platform at Kunming.

The Chinese flock to Kunming to gape at the colorful natives—twenty-three separate minorities, all gaily dressed in handsomely stitched skirts and quilted jackets, boots and headdresses. They come from the far-flung parts of Yunnan to sell their pretty embroidery and their baskets. They are attractive and a bit wild, and they look uncompromisingly ethnic. Mao's stern, gray policies were merely a hiccup in their technicolor tribalism. For the Chinese, the minorities in Yunnan are somewhere between hillbillies and zoo animals.

What exactly do these minority people themselves think? Are they rebellious or downtrodden? Do they crave autonomy? Their numbers are very small: only 5000 Drung people in Yunnan, only 12,000 Jinuos and twice that number of Pumis. The Uighurs and the Yi people were another matter—there were millions of them. At about the time I was in Yunnan there were uprisings and riots among Soviet minorities—in Kazakhstan and Kirghizia. I could imagine that happening in China—perhaps a Muslim rebellion like the one that raged through Xinjiang in the nineteenth century. And I could imagine the same result: it would be ruthlessly suppressed.