Riding the Iron Rooster

"Were you a Red Guard?" He was just the right age—about thirty-five now.

"No," he said, almost vehemently. "I didn't like them."

"Do you think they are bad men when you see them now, the ones who were Red Guards?"

"Now? No, I don't. They are not bad men. They weren't protecting Mao. That's what they said. Each one thought he could do a better job. That's why they fought."

"They killed people, though."

"We can't blame them for that. That is the responsibility of the leaders."

That was the usual line, and a useful one too: all the blame had been put on the Gang of Four. Having such scapegoats was probably another example of Chinese economy. What was the point in tearing the country apart when in a ritualistic way (the trial had been televised) all the blame could be put on four people who were then promptly purged.

When we had gone ten miles, Mr. Wei (whom I now realized was no lackey) relaxed and pointed out the sights. That was Running Horse Hill (Pao Ma Shan), where there was a complex of buildings called the Fire-Bury Works (Huozang Chang): the local crematorium.

"People send their dead body to the works," Mr. Wei said. "The men put gasoline on the body. They burn it. They get ashes. They put the ashes in a small box. The people take it home and put it on a desk."

"Everybody does this?"

"Most people do it. A few take the ashes to the mountains—to a Buddhist temple. But we take it home. I have my mother's sister in a box."

These burial rites of the Chinese were bad news to American entrepreneurs of the 1970s who tried to export coffins to the People's Republic. In the same fortune-hunting spirit, in the nineteenth century the Sheffield Silver Company sent vast shipments of forks and spoons to China, hoping to tempt the Chinese away from their chopsticks.

Beside the rail line were beehive huts which, when I looked closer, I saw were actually tombs. Mr. Wei said that thirty or forty years ago people were buried like that; but no more.

I saw people walking through the cool, yellow woods, and farmers on their way to market who had stopped near the railway to wash their vegetables in the ditch water—which was foul. In a shady spot a man was unhurriedly tearing open a buffalo's throat, slaughtering it. The creature was on its back, with its legs in the air, and its wounded neck was bright red, with a bib of flesh hanging down, and its blood running into the railway ditch.

An old woman got on the train at one of the many small stations. She had a little girl with her, and then a younger woman joined her. She had a baby slung on her back.

We fell into conversation—Mr. Wei translating their rustic Yunnanese dialect. It seemed that the young woman had given birth to a little girl. But she and her husband were disappointed. They decided to take the drastic step of having another child. As soon as the woman became pregnant she was fined 1000 yuan, a penalty called a fa kuai; but she paid up willingly in the hope that the child would be a boy. It was indeed a boy.

These were the poorest people imaginable—lined faces, threadbare clothes, cracked hands, and wearing bonnets and broken slippers. And this woman had stumped up what was for most city dwellers a year's wages to have a second child. (The fact that the second child in China is nearly always a boy leads many people to conclude that female infanticide is quite common.)

"The city people don't have extra children," Mr. Wei said. "They are happy with one. But the country people want more children—to help them with their farming and also to look after them when they are old."

The one-child policy was instituted in 1976, and seemed to work well, although the population has continued to grow at unanticipated rates. The fear these days is that there will be a great number of old people in China at the end of the century—a sort of mushroom effect; and that the one-child family will create a nation of small spoiled brats. Already there is a creature in China which has appeared for the first time in vast numbers: the fat, selfish little kid with rotten teeth, sitting in front of a television set, whining for another ice cream.

The train was traveling in a narrow groove cut just below the summit of these pretty hills, and buttresses had been built to prevent landslides. They hadn't worked. Man was insignificant here. Nature gave him a very hard time. Well, that was the way of the world, wasn't it? It was unnatural that other Chinese people had turned a dramatic landscape into a cabbage patch.

Mr. Wei said that he had managed to get a few years' education in the technical institute in Changsha. His Cultural Revolution job had involved mending boxcars in a factory in Kunming. He said he hated the work and was no good at it. He had always wanted to go to university and he had spent all those years holding a welder's torch and cursing.

I said that I planned to go to Changsha myself and wanted very much to visit Mao's birthplace, Shaoshan, near that city. Had he been there?