Riding the Iron Rooster

"Then he led me to the bridge, carrying in his arms with him certain dive-doppers or water-fowls [cormorants], bound to perches, and about every one of their necks he tied a thread, lest they should eat the fish as fast as they took them... He loosened the dive-doppers from the pole, which presently went into the water, and within less than the space of one hour, caught as many fish as filled his three baskets; which being full, my host untied the threads from about their necks, and entering the second time into the river they fed themselves with fish, and being satisfied they returned and allowed themselves to be bound to their perches, as they were before."

A boat near ours had seventeen of these birds roosting on it. A young boy sluicing out a muddy bucket said that the birds cost 300—400 yuan each, but the two old women said the true figure was closer to a thousand. Whatever it was, between $150 and $300, it was a huge amount, and so the birds must really earn their keep. These fishermen used them by placing a ring, instead of a thread, around the birds' necks to prevent them from swallowing the fish.

So far, I had felt the Chinese were rather cruel to animals; but they are also practical. It was not just cruel but also very stupid to abuse these valuable creatures. It was all right to torment pigs by stacking them in carts when you took them to market, or to herd buffalos into freight cars and ignore their piteous moos when they were being sold, or to tie chickens into bundles, so that the buyer could carry them home; but an expensive cormorant had to be coddled. A man on one boat was scratching his bird like a cat and playing with it affectionately, and another man was feeding his flock and stroking their feathers and nuzzling them.

All these birds were exiles. They are the Great Cormorant (Phal-acrocorax carbo), the only one used for fishing, and are caught in the distant coastal province of Shandong. They had been brought here in baskets on a freight train.

When we continued on our way, poling the houseboat, I took the port side with one of the poles. But the boat slid into a fast current, and although I was twice as big as my poling partner, I wasn't much use. The other old woman relieved me, and when I was out of their way, they propelled the boat harmoniously and swiftly back to town.

The next day I saw another side to Mr. Fang. I was asking Mr. Jiang my usual questions about the Cultural Revolution and he was replying in a rather bland and noncommital way when Mr. Fang began speaking very fast. I was sure he was reprimanding the young man.

"What did you say?" I asked.

"I told him to tell the truth," Mr. Fang said. "It is important to know the truth about the Cultural Revolution. Foreigners must be told. We must face the facts. It was a disaster, so what is the point of smiling and pretending we don't care?"

That was very good. In a quiet way, Mr. Fang was stubborn and truthful, and I knew that he despaired of the vacillating yuppies like Mr. Jiang.

Mr. Jiang struggled to tell me something, but he was only twenty-two. He said he didn't have a very clear memory of the Cultural Revolution.

"I know my father was regarded as too right wing," he said. "My family was sent for reeducation, to a remote place, to plant rice. My father had been an English teacher in a middle school. The family worked on the land, learning from peasants, for six years. It was very hard for them. I was too young to notice. For the first year we had no house. We lived in a sort of barn—a place where grain was stored. We had no crops. We ate the local leaves and roots, living like animals."

"Is your father angry about it?"

"He doesn't talk about it," Mr. Jiang said.

"Never?"

"Never. Nothing. He doesn't say anything."

"Why not?"

"Because it was a bitter period."

Mr. Fang said, "He is making a mistake. He should talk about it. He should tell these people what it was like." And with his sad, swollen face turned on me, Mr. Fang said, "Disaster."

It was a few days before I saw Mr. Jiang again, and in that time I walked the streets and browsed in the market (it was full of exotic birds and pretty turtles, all languishing in cages). I took a tourist boat down the river Li to Yangshuo, past the droopy, dumpy limestone hills—more like cones and camel humps than hills—that rise straight out of their dull reflections in the green river. The boat was crowded, the tourists were bumptious—"What a place for a condo!" 'They should call that one 'Dolly Parton Hill'!"—but the place was so weirdly pretty nothing else mattered. Among these blunt hills and bamboos, there were children swimming, and men fishing, and buffalos wading in the river up to their noses, occasionally ducking and snaffling weeds off the bottom.