Riding the Iron Rooster

Their mistake had been in ordering the expensive 20 yuan meal. The one for 10 yuan was better—no boney fish, no fatty pork, no canned Spam; just vegetables and soup. I liked the mob, the nagging waiters, the spilled food, the people stuffing themselves. It seemed like chaos, but really a strict routine was being observed: the progress of the courses could not be interrupted. Most waiters on trains had a sort of surly friendliness. They weren't ill-natured, merely bad-tempered because they worked so hard. They were not servile, they weren't hustling for tips—there weren't any; they were single-minded and offhand without being actually rude. If someone barked at them, they barked back.

We stopped at Shenyang and Changchun in the night, and I woke because of the cold and the noise. The attendant had given me a quilted bedroll and a horse blanket, and yet the train was very drafty. There was snow tracked into the corridor and thick frost on all the windows. When I pissed into the Chinese toilet, which was just a hole in the floor of the train, a great gust of steam shot up, as if I had pissed on a hot stove.

The young men from Hong Kong shivered in the compartment like prisoners in a dungeon. They drank hot water. I offered them some of my green tea (Zhulan brand: "A tea from ancient kings for those with kingly tastes") but they said no; they preferred drinking hot water. "White tea," the Chinese call it, bai cha.

At five-thirty in the morning the door banged open and the attendant came in, put down a thermos of water and yelled, "Get up. Time for breakfast."

When she had gone I switched off the light and crawled into bed again.

She returned a few minutes later.

"Who turned off that light?" she demanded, switching it on. She stood in the doorway, breathing hard—steam was coming out of her nose and mouth. "I want the bedding. Now hand it over!"

But the young men from Hong Kong were too cold to surrender it, and I saw no reason to—we weren't due at Harbin for four more hours. It was the usual rigmarole: they wanted to have everything folded and accounted for long before we arrived.

"They need the bedding," one of the young men said.

"Maybe she wants to wash it," another said.

"No," the third one said. Were they talking in English for my benefit or did they normally converse in this almost incomprehensible way (Dey nee da baydeen, and so forth)? He explained, "A Chinese guy told me they only wash it every fourth day, even if four different people use it."

Later I inquired about this and found it to be a fact. That was why they were so finicky about giving every passenger a clean towel to place over the pillow.

The train attendant came back several more times and eventually just snatched the bedding in the usual way. It struck me that these attendants—usually women—would have made wonderful matrons at English boarding schools. They were bossy, they were nags, they were know-it-alls; they had piercing voices and no sense of humor; they were inflexible about the rules. They were more than tough—they were indestructible. They kept the trains running.

It was not yet dawn in Heilongjiang, but people were hurrying through the darkness, along snowy paths. I saw about fifty black figures moving through the snow, all bundled up and roly-poly. They were big and small, going to work and to school.

When the sun came up—fire crackling through frost—the sky was clear and the snow a pale northern blue. People cycled through the snow and ice on the uncleared roads, and men drove wagons pulled by shaggy horses. The great flat snowfields all had stubble showing through. That was the main difference between this province and Siberia, which was just next door (we were farther north than Vladivostok). This was all farmland, and Siberia was mostly forest and uncleared land. The trip to Harbin was essentially a trip across plowed fields. The snow was not deep enough to hide the furrows.

In some villages and little towns the houses had the look of Russian bungalows. And their most un-Chinese feature (as peasant huts) was their roof, steeply pitched because of the snow. Some of them were big brick houses with fat chimneys, like old American homesteads, and others were the sort of snug bungalows that I had seen along the route of the Trans-Siberian, made out of wood, and with stovepipes sticking from the eaves. Not much smoke was coming out of these chimneys. The reason was pretty simple. The frugal Chinese, even in this freezing place, always skimp on fuel, and take a certain pleasure in living in a cold house. Why waste coal, they say, when all you really need is another pair of long underwear?