Riding the Iron Rooster

In this darkness, huddled groups of people waited in the empty street for buses. That seemed a grim pastime, a long wait at a Harbin bus stop in winter. And, by the way, the buses were not heated. In his aggrieved account of his Chinese residence, the journalist Tiziano Terzani, writing about Heilongjiang ("The Kingdom of the Rats"), quotes a French traveler who said, "Although it is uncertain where God placed paradise, we can be sure that he chose some other place than this."

The wind dropped but the cold remained. It banged against my forehead and twisted my fingers and toes; it burned my lips. I felt like Sam McGee. I entered the station waiting room, and a chill rolled against me, as if my face had been pressed on a cold slab. The waiting room was unhealed. I asked Mr. Tian how he felt about this.

"Heat is bad," he said."Heat makes you sleepy and slow."

"I like it," I said.

Mr. Tian said, "I once went to Canton. It was so hot I felt sick."

Mr. Tian was twenty-seven, a graduate of Harbin University. There was humor in the way he moved. He was self-assured. He didn't fuss. He was patient. He was frank. I liked him for these qualities. The fact that he was incompetent did not matter very much. Langxiang was a day's journey by train—north, into the snow. He seemed an easy companion, and I did not think he would get in my way.

He had no bag. He may have had a toothbrush in his pocket, where he kept his woolly cap and his misshapen gloves. He was completely portable, without any impedimenta. He was an extreme example of Chinese austerity. He slept in his long johns and wore his coat to meals. He rarely washed. Being Chinese he did not have to shave. He seemed to have no possessions at all. He was like a desert Bedouin. This fascinated me, too.

The loudspeakers in the waiting room were broadcasting the dragon voice of the Peking harridan who gave the news every morning. In China the news always seemed a peculiar form of nagging.

"You are listening to that?" Mr. Tian inquired.

"Yes, but I can't make it out."

"'We must absolutely not allow a handful of people to sabotage production,'" Mr. Tian translated the duckspeak from the broadcast.

The announcer was reading a front-page editorial from the Workers' Daily. It was the first public acknowledgment that the Chinese Communist Party condemned the student demonstrations. There were other people in the waiting room but they were talking among themselves instead of listening. They were warmly dressed, in fur hats, mittens and boots. They smoked heavily and from time to time got up to use the spittoon which was the centerpiece of the railway waiting room.

The shrewish voice was still blaring from the loudspeaker, and Mr. Tian blandly helped me to understand it.

'"Bourgeois liberalism has been rampant for several years. It is a poison in some people's minds. Some people make trips abroad and say capitalism is good, and paint a dark picture of socialism.'"

I said, "Mr. Tian, is anyone else listening to this?"

"No," he said, and watched a man dribbling saliva onto the floor and scuffing it with his felt boot. "They are occupied with other-matters."

"Demonstrations have been held in a number of cities," the voice nagged. 'They are unpatriotic, unlawful, disorderly and destructive. In some cases they have been provoked by foreign elements. They must cease. The Chinese people will not stand by and let lawless students take over. Bourgeois liberalization is something that must be stamped out—"

It went on and on, at such length that it was clear that the government was very worried. The broadcast was full of thinly veiled threats of retribution.

I said, "What do you think of the demonstrations, Mr. Tian?"

"I think they are good," he said, nodding quietly.

"But the government has condemned them. Don't you think they represent bourgeois liberalism and poisonous influences?"

He shook his head and smiled. His hair stuck up like a roadrunner's. He said, "These demonstrations show how the Chinese people are thinking."

"But it's just students," I said, still playing devil's advocate.

"In some cases there were factory workers," he said. "In Shanghai, for example."

"Some people think that these demonstrations might lead to a conflict between capitalism and communism."

"We will choose what is best for us," he said. He had become a trifle enigmatic.

I said, "Do you ever suspect that you might be a secret capitalist-roader?"

"There is a good and a bad side to everything," he said.

He did not smile, which was why I suspected him of being humorous. He could be very mysterious. In other respects he was totally ineffectual. "Do you want me to do anything?" he said, but when I made a suggestion—get a ticket, make a phone call, establish a fact—he invariably failed. And yet he went on offering to help me.