Riding the Iron Rooster

After several hours of this train crossing flat snowfields it entered a mountainous region. The settlements were small—three or four short rows of bungalows, some of brick and some of mud and logs. They were the simplest of slant-roofed dwellings and looked like the sort of houses that children draw in the first grade, with a narrow door and a single window and a blunt chimney with a screw of smoke coming out of it.

The toilet on the train looked as though a child had designed it, too. It was a hole in the floor about a foot across. Well, I had seen squat toilets before; but this one was traveling at about fifty miles an hour through the ice and snow of northern China. There was no pipe or baffle. If you looked down you saw ice streaking past. A gust of freezing air rushed out of the hole. Anyone fool enough to use this thing would be frostbitten on a part of the body that is seldom frostbitten. And yet the passengers trooped into this refrigerated bum-freezer. When they came out their eyes were tiny and their teeth were clenched, as though they had just been pinched very hard.

"People ski here," Mr. Tian said at the town of Taoshan, where we arrived at noon. Some passengers got off. They looked like lumberjacks, not skiers. But there were white mountains to the northwest, and the most Siberian touch of all, groves of silver birches.

The train grew colder. What was the point in heating it if it kept stopping and opening its doors? That was the Chinese argument. The same went for the toilet. If a toilet was a hole in the floor with freezing air pouring into the room, there was no point heating the room. If you couldn't heat a room efficiently there was no point heating it at all. That was why the people in this region never took off their long underwear, and why they ate wearing their fur hats.

I was rigid in my seat, reading A Hero of Our Time with my mittens on, and turning the pages with my nose. Perhaps the Chinese were thinking, So that's what they do with those long noses! In spite of the shortness of this book I had never finished reading it. I had started it many times. But the hero, Pechorin, is a sort of romantic punk with a death wish, and the story is told in fits and starts. I came across one of Pechorin's characteristic opinions as we rode along. "I confess I have a strong prejudice against people who are blind, one-eyed, deaf, mute, legless, armless, hunchbacked, and so forth. I have observed that there always exists some strange relationship between the appearance of a man and his soul, as if with the loss of a limb, the soul lost one of its senses."

This was nonsense. The opposite seemed to me much more likely, that the soul gained a new sense with the loss of a limb, or blindness, deafness or whatever. In H. G. Wells's story "The Country of the Blind" it is the sighted man who is truly handicapped. I was also struck by this passage in the book because there were cripples on the train, and I thought of it again in Langxiang where I met a hunchback who had built his own house, all by himself, and fitted it so that he could carry on his two jobs as a radio repairman and a studio photographer.

We were still jogging along, stopping frequently. And the doors opened and closed with the same pneumatic gasp as those on a refrigerator, each time producing a cold blast through the coach. I hated having to get up because when I sat down again my seat froze me.

It surprised me to see children standing outside of their houses, watching the train go by. They wore thin jackets, no hats or gloves. Many of them had bright red cheeks. They had spiky unwashed hair and they wore cloth slippers. They looked very hardy, and they yelled at the train as it passed their icebound villages.

The mountains in the distance were the southernmost peaks of the Lesser Khingan Range, and the foreground was all forest. Most of these settlements were simply overgrown lumber camps. One of the centers of logging activity is Langxiang. But I had also chosen it because it has a narrow-gauge railway that goes deep into the forest and carries logs back to town to be milled.

It was hardly a town. It was a sprawling one-story village with an immense lumberyard at its center and a main street where people with scarves wrapped around their faces stood all day in the cold selling meat and vegetables. One day in Langxiang I saw a man standing behind a square of cloth which held six frozen rats and a stack of rats' tails. Were things so bad in Langxiang that they ate rats and rats' tails?

"Do you eat these?" I asked.

"No, no," came the muffled voice through the frosted scarf. "I sell medicine."

"These rats are medicine?"

"No, no!" The man's skin was almost black from the cold and the dry air.

And then he began speaking again, but I had no idea what he was saying in this local dialect. As he spoke the ice crystals thawed on his scarf.