Riding the Iron Rooster

Before I headed back I jumped into the hole and warmed myself before the fire, as the three girls knelt at the edge of the hole, looking in at me. When I got out, they got in.

I found Mr. Tian tramping towards me. He said, "So you like it here, eh?"

"This is wonderful."

"Primeval forest," he said. "Original forest."

"Wouldn't you like to build a house here and live alone with your wife?"

"Yes," he said. "Have a family and write something—poems and stories."

"Maybe have four children."

"It is not permitted," he said. Then he smiled."But this is so far they wouldn't know. It wouldn't matter. Yes. I would like that."

We walked to where the lumberjacks were working. Few of them wore gloves or hats. They wore rather thin jackets and glorified sneakers. It amazed me that they could endure this cold so skimpily dressed. They were dragging bundles of freshly cut logs into stacks to be loaded onto trucks. Some of the younger ones stopped to stare at me—perhaps because I was so warmly dressed; but the foreman barked at them, and all these ragged tree cutters went back to work. The human voices and the chugging tractors sounded bizarre and unpleasant in this dense forest, perhaps among the last forested wildernesses in China.

Mrs. Jin had wandered back to the road. When we caught up with her it was already growing dark. Walking to the car we talked about capital punishment. Mr. Tian agreed with it—kill them all, he said. It was the only way. Mrs. Jin disagreed. Forget the death penalty for embezzlers and pimps, she said; just execute murderers.

This led to a discussion about the true numbers that had been executed.

"Most Chinese people don't believe the news they hear on the radio," Mr. Tian said, when I asked whether the government broadcast such figures.

Mrs. Jin frowned, probably wondering whether it was wise for Mr. Tian to be telling me this. But Mr. Tian pressed on, clawing his hair and gabbling.

"The government sometimes tells lies," he said.

"Then how do people know what's going on in the country?"

"Foreign broadcasts. The students listen to the BBC and Voice of America. That's how I found out about the demonstrations in Peking. It was not until two or three days later that the government said what was happening."

I was very touched by his talking to me in this candid way, although sensing Mrs. Jin's disapproval I decided not to ask too many questions. In spite of the cold, I was in a good mood. I felt I had reached a part of China that was hard to get to but worth the trouble. It was not a sense of achievement, but rather a hopeful feeling, because it was a place I would gladly return to: that was something to look forward to.

I ate at five and then got into bed and listened to my radio under the blankets. And the next day at dawn Mr. Tian and I left the town by train. It was so cold I felt parts of me would break off if I bumped into anything. And this was another morning of razor-slashing wind. The sky was gray. It had never been anything but cloudy here. Some of the clouds glowed slightly. That was the sun, that blur—just a crude suggestion of what a sun might be, if there were such a thing.

I read, I slept, I gritted my teeth in the cold. This was an open train, each coach crammed with wooden seats. It stopped at all the stations on the line, and at each station all the doors opened, and for a few minutes the wind blew through the train, freezing it. Then the doors closed, and just as the coach became almost bearable, the train stopped again, the doors opened, and the wind picked up.

The meal on the train only cost twenty cents, but it was one dish with rice. It was a northern Heilongjiang vegetable, called "yellow flower," like a chopped heap of lily stalks.

Thinking of the driver, and how I had bawled him out for shooting birds, I asked Mr. Tian about losing face. The phrase in Chinese means exactly that: lose face (diulian).

I quoted my friend Wang in Shanghai and said, "Foreigners have no face."

"But we have face," Mr. Tian said."It is the Chinese way."

"What if you don't lose face?"

"There is an expression; lianpi hou—a face with thick skin. But that is a bad thing. It means you're insensitive. A shy person loses face."

That was good, or at least desirable, because it was human.

Mr. Tian said, "If someone criticizes you and you don't lose face you're not a good person."

"During the Cultural Revolution a lot of people were criticized. Did they all lose face?"

"The Cultural Revolution was a total mistake," he said.

"What was the worst thing that happened?"

"That people died."

Later, the dining-car attendant came by and sat with us. He said I should wear two pairs of long underwear, not one, and that it should be the thick Chinese kind (I was wearing skier's long johns). He was from Jiamusi. It was a good day in Jiamusi, only minus thirty-four degrees centigrade. Usually it was minus thirty-eight. He laughed and slapped me on the back and went back to work.