Riding the Iron Rooster

Mr. Tian said, "He doesn't sell rats. He sells rat poison. He shows these dead rats as proof that his poison is good."

We had arrived at Langxiang in the middle of the afternoon, just as it was growing dark. This was a northern latitude in winter: night came early. I stepped from the cold train onto the freezing platform, and then we went to the guest house, which was also cold—but the clammy indoor cold which I found harder to bear than the icy outdoors. With curtains over the windows and the lights dim it was like being in an underground tomb.

"It's very cold in here," I said to Mr. Cong, the manager.

"It will get warmer."

"When?"

"In three or four months."

"I mean, in the hotel," I said.

"Yes. In the hotel. And all over Langxiang."

I was jumping up and down to restore my circulation.

Mr. Tian was simply standing patiently.

"What about a room?" I said.

Mr. Tian said something very rapidly to Mr. Cong.

"Do you want a clean room or a regular one?" Mr. Tian asked.

"I think I'll have a clean one for a change."

He did not remark on my sarcasm. He said, "Ah, a clean one," and shook his head, as if this was a tall order. "Then you will have to wait."

The wind blew through the lobby and when it hit the curtain that had been hung across the main door it filled it like a spinnaker.

"We can have dinner," Mr. Cong said.

"It's not even five o'clock," I said.

"Five o'clock. Dinnertime. Ha-ha!" This ha-ha meant: Rules are rules. I don't make them, so you should not be difficult.

The dining room in the Langxiang guest house was the coldest room I had entered so far in the whole of Heilongjiang Province. I yanked my hat tight and then sat on my hands and shivered. I had put my thermometer on the table: thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit.

Mr. Cong said he was used to the cold. He was not even wearing a hat! He was from the far north, where he had gone as a settler in the fifties to work on a commune that produced corn and grain. Although he was not very old, he was something of an antique in Chinese terms. As an ex-commune worker in one of the remotest parts of China, he found the new reforms were bewildering to him. And he had four children, now regarded as a shameful number. "They punish us for having more than two," he said, and seemed very puzzled."You might lose your job, or be transferred, as punishment."

From the utter boredom on Mr. Tian's face—but his boredom was a form of serenity—I could tell that Mr. Cong and Mr. Tian had nothing at all in common. In China, the generation gap has a specific meaning and is something to be reckoned with.

I asked Mr. Cong what had happened to his commune.

"It was canceled," he said. "It was dissolved."

"Did the peasants go away?"

"No. Each was given his own plot to till."

"Do you think that's better?"

"Of course," he said, but it was impossible for me to tell whether he meant it. "Production is much greater. The yields are larger."

That seemed to settle it. Any policy that increased production was a good thing. I thought: God help China if there's a recession.

The town was in darkness. The hotel was very cold. My room was cold. What to do? Although it was only six-thirty, I went to bed—anyway, I got inside with most of my clothes on, and I listened to my shortwave radio under the blankets. That was how I was to spend all of my nights in Langxiang.

I went up the logging line on the narrow-gauge railway the next day, but I was disappointed in the forest. I had expected wilderness, but this was filled with lumberjacks cutting and bulldozing trees.

"One day we will go to the primeval forest," Mr. Tian said.

"Let's go today."

"No. It is far. We will go another day."

We went to the locomotive shed, where we met Mrs. Jin, a local guide. The shed was full of smoke and steam, and it was dark; but it was also warm because the boilers were being stoked and the fire in the forge was blazing. As I walked along, Mrs. Jin threw herself at me and pushed me against the wall, and then she laughed hysterically, a kind of chattering—one of the more terrifying Chinese laughs. I saw that she had saved me from stepping into a deep hole in which I would almost certainly have broken my back.

I was so rattled by this I had to go outside and take deep breaths. All over this town the snow was packed hard. No street or sidewalk was clear of ice. The Chinese habitually pedaled on the ice, and they had a way of walking—a sort of shuffle—that prevented them from slipping.

"This town is forbidden," Mr. Tian boasted. "You are very lucky to be here."

"Are there minorities in Langxiang?" I asked. I was thinking of Buryats, Mongolians, Manchus, and native Siberians.

"We have Hui people," Mrs. Jin said. "And we have Koreans."

We found some Hui people—China's Muslims—slitting a cow's throat behind a butcher shop. I could not watch, but being Muslims, they were doing it the ritual way, covering their heads and bleeding it so that it would be halal, untainted.