Riding the Iron Rooster

He handed me an envelope of pemmican, as a sort of get-acquainted gift, shared his tea with me, and accepted a chocolate bar in return. I thought he might be exhaustingly friendly, but he slept through most of the trip and snored loudly. The Willy Loman character also slept a great deal, but woke at four in the morning and did lazy calisthenics, wagging his head and slapping his forearms. He was in feedstuffs and cereals. His luggage—both boxes and suitcases—filled the luggage shelf. He was very solemn except when I caught his eye. Then he broke into a laugh and gave me a broad smile. His laugh was urgent and meant: No questions, please! As soon as he turned away he frowned. That was also very Chinese.

The first night there was a tremendous amount of snoring in our compartment. From time to time it woke me with its flapping wind. It was louder than the clanging wheels of the train. But I slept soundly the rest of the time and didn't get up until nine.

The train was so cold that morning the windows were streaming with condensation. I shaved in cold water—but it was always cold—and in midmorning we arrived at Changsha, where I had been some months before on my way to Mao's birthplace. It had been steamy and dismal in the summer. In the winter it was smoggy and brown and much uglier. The words a Chinese city had acquired a peculiar horror for me, like Russian toilet, or Turkish prison, or journalist's ethics. In the cold rain of winter, with the cracked and sooty apartment houses, the muddy streets, the skinny trees and dark brown sky, Chinese cities are at their very worst.

But this city was the signal for the attendants to stoke the fires, and as soon as the coach was reasonably warm the passengers threw their clothes off and clomped around in plastic shoes and wrinkled pajamas. They propped themselves in the draft between the coaches and brushed their teeth. Some practiced t'ai chi in the corridors.

The dining car was crowded at lunchtime. Although there were no tourists on the train and everyone wore old clothes—shouting and spitting and blowing smoke into each other's faces—they were also flinging money around. I guessed that they were mainly Cantonese, on this profitable business route: Guangdong was a producer of goods and Peking a lucrative outlet. These scruffy passengers were all in business. The man next to me paid almost 20 yuan for a meal for himself and his wife. Call it five bucks and it doesn't seem much; but for a Chinese it was nearly a week's pay. He was a grizzled man with matted hair. He smoked and ate at the same time—chopsticks in one hand, cigarette in the other. His small boy did not eat. This little irritant dug out all the toothpicks from the plastic holder and threw them on the floor; then tipped over a glass of water; and then began smacking an ashtray against the table and squawking. He was about five or six. His father laughed at this obstreperousness—very un-Chinese. But that was not the only uncharacteristic behavior in this rowdy train. It was also full of drunks, and not only beer drinkers, but also old men getting plastered on the rice wine they had brought with them.

I read and dozed and woke up in the north of Hunan, at the city of Yueyang, which was a gray town surrounded by fat, shadowy mountains. A few hours later we came to Wuhan. I had been there once before, in 1980. It had seemed to me a nightmare city of muddy streets and black factories, pouring frothy poisons into the Yangtze. It was bigger than I remembered it, but not so black. There were dozens of high-level cranes putting up new buildings, including a hospital.

The Yangtze is almost a mile wide at Wuhan, and on its banks it has landing stages and flights of steps that resemble the ghats on the Ganges. On the Hankou side there were also many new buildings, and there were cars in the streets—I remembered the wagons and carts, pulled by old women. The buildings and the traffic jams were not necessarily improvements, but they made a difference. Modernization did not make any Chinese city look less horrific; many cities looked more so as a result of building schemes.

It was cold enough in Wuhan for people to be wearing mittens and boots. That was what the salesmen in my compartment were wearing when they got out, pulling their suitcases through the windows. They did it clumsily. They were bemused by the sight of a girl walking along the platform, carrying a dead fish.

Before we pulled out of Wuhan the sleeping-car attendant roused me and said I had to move.

"You are in the wrong berth," she said.

"I am in the right berth," I said. I knew she wanted to move me, but I saw no reason she should put me in the wrong. I made her compare my ticket with the berth number, and I created a hoo-hah so that I would have the satisfaction of hearing her apologize.