Riding the Iron Rooster

"It is a mistake," she said, ambiguously, and led me to a compartment that held a man, a woman and an infant.

"How old is that baby?"

"Two weeks."

The baby was snoring. After a while it began to cry. The man took a bottle out and fed it, and the child's mother left the compartment.

That was how it went. The man did everything for this baby, which was wrapped in a thick quilt like a papoose. The man fed it, changed it and dandled it. The woman hung around and lazed, and several times I saw her sleeping in the Hard Class coach that adjoined ours. Perhaps the woman was ill. I did not want to ask. The man took charge.

"It's a boy," he said, when he was feeding it.

I hadn't asked.

He was a doctor. His wife was also a doctor. He worked in Peking, his wife in Canton; and he had gone to Canton to be present for the birth. Now they were all going back to Peking for a few months—the woman's maternity leave. There were feeding bottles, baby powder and cans of soluble milk formula all over the compartment. They used disposable diapers, which they discarded in a bucket under my bed. I did not mind; I like the milky smell of babies, and I was very touched by the love and attention that this man gave the child.

I read on my bunk while the man burped his baby and the woman looked on. I drank Cantonese sherry. It was like being in a cabin in the woods with this little family. For dinner I had the speciality of this train, "iron dish chicken pieces"—a hot iron platter of chicken, sizzling in fat. The dining car was very congenial—steam, shouting, beer fizzing, cigarette smoke, waiters banging dishes down and snatching empty plates away.

The two men at my table were young and half-drunk. I liked these crowded dining cars rushing through the night, and the food being dished out, and people stuffing themselves.

"We sell light bulbs and light fittings," one of the men said. "We are heading home after a week's selling."

"Where is home?" I asked.

"Harbin."

"I am going there," I said. "I want to see the ice festival and the forest."

"It's too cold to see anything," the other man said. "You will just want to stay in your room."

"That's a challenge," I said. "Anyway—how cold is it?"

"Thirty below—centigrade," he said, and he poured me some of his beer and clinked glasses.

By then I had taken for granted the friendliness of the Chinese. Their attentions were sometimes bewildering, as when they leaned over my shoulder trying to read what I was scribbling in my notebook, or pressed their damp faces against my book, fascinated by the English words. But their curiosity and good will were genuine.

"Do you travel much?" I asked.

"Yes. All over. But not outside," the first man said. "I'd like to but I can't."

"Where would you go?"

"Japan."

That surprised me. My reaction must have shown on my face, because the Chinese salesman wanted to know what I thought of his choice of country. I said, "I find the Japanese can be very irritating."

"The Americans dropped an atomic bomb on them."

"That was too bad, but they started the war by bombing Pearl Harbor, didn't they, comrade?"

"That's true!" the second man said. "The same day they captured Shanghai."

It was considered bad manners in China to say disparaging things about any foreign country, particularly to someone who was himself a foreigner. That was why the men cackled. It was naughty to run down the Japanese! It was fun! We sat there yakking until the rest of the people left the dining car. Then we stopped by Xinyang. We had gone from Hubei Province into Henan. This station was covered in black ice and slushy snow—quite a change from the palm trees and dragonflies of Canton a few days ago.

In my compartment the man was snuggled up with his infant son, and his wife lay sleeping in the upper berth. All night the man attended to the infant. They slept together, the child snickering and snorting the way babies do. From time to time the man swung his legs over and mixed a batch of Nestle's Lactogen, using hot water from the tea thermos and an enamel cup. He was considerate: he did not switch on the light—he used the light from the corridor. The baby's fussing increased, and then the father eased the bottle into the baby's mouth and there came a satisfied snorting. The father was very patient. The train stopped and started, was delayed at sidings, waiting for a southbound express to go through, and then rattled on to the whistles of lonely freight trains. In the darkness, the man spoke softly to his child, sang to him, and when the child grew sleepy he tucked him into the berth and crept in beside him.

The muffled sounds in the morning, and the cold drafts—and there was something eerie about the daylight, too—were all produced by the falling snow. The train was battling through this snowstorm: it was beautiful—just as though the train were plowing through surf in a stormy ocean.