Riding the Iron Rooster

And there they sat until long after we left Kunming Station. It was late evening, about nine, and this was perhaps their first night together. It was certainly their first as man and wife. Was I sincere in saying that I'd be glad to leave them alone in the compartment? Of course I wasn't. I was trying to get the measure of this place; but it's bigness often baffled me. I needed luck in trying to uncover the truth, which was why I looked into women's handbags when they opened them just to see what was inside; and opened drawers in people's houses, and read their mail, and searched their cupboards. When a man took out his billfold, I tried to count his money. If a taxi driver had his sweetheart's snapshot pinned to his dashboard, I scrutinized it. If I saw someone reading a book or magazine, I noted down the title. I compared prices. I copied down graffiti and slogans that I saw on walls. I got people to translate wall posters, particularly the ones that gave the sordid details of a criminal's career (these details were set out and advertised just before the doomed man was shot). I memorized the contents of refrigerators, of travelers' suitcases, I remembered the labels in their clothes (White Elephant tools and Pansy brand men's underwear and Typical sewing machines stick in my mind). I searched brochures for solecisms and collected Rules of the Hotel for Guests (example: "Guests may not perform urination in sink basin"). And just for the record, I asked endless pestering questions. So, really, would I willingly pass up a chance to spend the night with a honeymoon couple?

They smoked, they muttered a little, they rattled magazines. I wrote: 10:16 P.M. No activity from the honeymooners. Contented breathing. Could be snores. One might be asleep. Anticlimax.

The cigarette smoke bothered me, and on this banged-up train of the Shanghai Railway Board, nothing worked. The fan was dead, the lock had been torn off the door, the arms had been twisted off the seats, the luggage rack was broken, and the window could not be raised. This last matter was the most serious: the compartment was now very hot and smoky. It was a good thing that the honeymooners were either asleep or else ignoring me, because I took out my Swiss Army knife and unscrewed the window locks, removed the window frame, levered the window up six inches, then put the hardware back on, so that no one would suspect I had tampered with it. Dire punishments were threatened for anyone who messed with the train, and if you so much as chipped your Chinese Railways teacup you were charged for it.

There was silence all night in the upper berths. Nothing to report except that I seemed to have more proof that the Chinese were very phlegmatic.

I woke to find myself in the rocky province of Guizhou, all pyramidal limestone hills and granite cliffs. The landscape was green and stony, like Ireland, and the people lived in rugged Irish-looking stone cottages, and houses with rough-hewn beams. They were the strongest houses I saw in China, and around them, marking the limits of their land, were beautifully built dry-stone walls, symmetrical and square.

Among these great slanting slablike hills, there was very little arable land and not many flat places for farming. The gardens were made by balancing walls and building terraces, and by all the other useful things that could be made from the chunks of stone—bridges, aqueducts, roads, dikes and dams. The villages were thick with villas and two-story houses (it was rare in the country to find more than one floor), all of them stone-built, with slate roofs. And their grave mounds were just as solid and built with the same granite confidence: the cemeteries were miniature versions of the villages.

While the honeymooners nipped down to the dining car for the breakfast of rice gruel and noodles, I ate some bananas I had bought in Kunming and drank my green tea. We passed Anshun ("once the center of the opium trade") and we stopped a while at Guiyang, where I met Mr. Shuang.

Mr. Shuang was in his late sixties, plum faced and whiskery, with a shapeless cap and a red armband that showed he was a railway worker. But he was a retired man who, out of boredom, had gone back to be a platform supervisor.

"I was sick of staying at home," he said. "I've been doing this job for half a year. I like it. But I don't need the money."

He said he earned 130 yuan a month.

"What do you spend it on?"

"I don't have children or a family, so I buy music." He smiled and said, "I love music. I play the harmonica."

"Do you buy Chinese or Western music?"

"Both. But I like Western very much."

"What kind?"

He said in a neatly enunciating way, "Light orchestral music."