Riding the Iron Rooster

"And that is forbidden," he said, lowering his voice. "Wawa fish— baby fish. Very rare. Very tasty. Very hard to catch. Against the law."

The fish was excellent. It was a stew of small white lumps in fragrant sauce. The driver's chopsticks were busily dredging for the plumpest fillets.

Mr. Jiang crept closer and mumbled a word in Chinese. "This is muntjac. From the mountains. With onions. Forbidden."

"What is a muntjac?" I asked.

"It is a kind of rabbit that eats fruit."

As all the world knows, a muntjac is a small deer. They are regarded as pests. You see them on golf courses outside London. Marco Polo found them in The Kingdom of Ergunul and wrote, 'The flesh of this animal is very good to eat." He brought the head and feet of a muntjac back to Venice.

I sampled the pigeon, the snake soup, the muntjac, the crane, the fish, the turtle. There was something dreadful and depressing about this food, partly because it tasted good and partly because China had so few wild animals. These creatures were all facing extinction in this country. And I had always hated the Chinese appetite for rare animals—for bear's paws and fish lips and caribou's nose. That article I had read about the Chinese killing their diminishing numbers of tigers to prepare—superstitiously—remedies for impotence and rheumatism had disgusted me. I was disgusted now with myself. This sort of eating was the recreation of people who were rich and spoiled.

"What do you think of this?" I asked Mr. Jiang.

"I like the turtle with bamboo," he said. "The muntjac is a bit salty."

"You've had this before?"

"Oh, yes."

I was trying to describe to myself the taste of the snake and the crane and the pigeon. I laughed, thinking that whenever someone ate something exotic they always said it tasted like chicken. "What does he think?" I asked.

The silent driver endlessly stuffing himself, made a dive for the turtle, tonged some into his bowl and gobbled it. He did the same to the wawa fish.

"He likes the fish," Mr. Jiang said.

The driver did not glance up. He ate like a predator in the wild— he paused, very alert, his eyes flicking, and then he darted for the food and ate it in one swift movement of his clawlike chopsticks.

Afterwards, slightly nauseated from the forbidden food, I felt like a Hindu who has just eaten hamburger. I said I would walk home. Mr. Jiang tried to drag me into the car, but I resisted. Then, hiding his sheepishness in hearty guffaws, he handed me the bill: 200 yuan.

That was four months' salary for these young men. It was a huge amount of money. It was the foreigner's airfare from Guilin to Peking. It was the price of two of the best bicycles in China, The Flying Pigeon Deluxe. It was a night at The Great Wall Sheraton. It represented a good radio. It was two years' rent on a studio apartment in Shanghai. It was the cost of an antique silver bowl in the bazaar at Turfan.

I paid Mr. Jiang. I wanted a reaction from him. There was none. That was for form's sake. The Chinese make a practice of not reacting to any sort of hospitality. But I persisted.

"Is the driver impressed with this meal?"

"Not at all," Mr. Jiang said. "He has eaten this many times before. Ha! Ha!"

It rang in my ears—one of the few genuine laughs I heard in China.

It meant We can always fool a foreigner.

I was the hairy, big-nosed devil from the back of beyond, a foreigner (wei-guo ren) one of those whom the Chinese regard as the yokels of the world. We lived in crappy little countries that were squeezed at the edges of the Middle Kingdom. The places we inhabited were insignificant but bizarre. Once, the Chinese believed that we tied ourselves into bunches so that we would not be snatched away by eagles. Some of our strange societies were composed entirely of women, who became pregnant by staring at their shadows. We had noses like anteaters. We were hairier than monkeys. We smelled like corpses. One odd fenestrated race had holes in their chests, through which poles were thrust, when we carried one another around. Most of these notions were no longer current, but they had given rise to self-deceiving proverbs, which sometimes seemed true And then the laughter was real.

12: The Slow Train to Changsha and Shaoshan "Where the Sun Rises"

I boarded the Changsha train at Guilin Station and found it rather empty and haunted looking. It was an old-fashioned train with antiquated coaches. It had come from a strange place, too—Zhazhang on the coast of Guangdong, heading for Wuhan on the Yangtze. It was just after sundown, but very hot. I put on my pajamas, started reading Kidnapped and went to sleep dreaming that I was on this very train.