Riding the Iron Rooster

Mr. Tian had not said anything. He was thinking. He was nodding.

"That was a good idea," he said. "Build a house in the forest. Have some children. Write something." He sat there in the cold, in his threadbare coat, twisting his wool cap. He was still nodding, his hair spiky, his sleeves in the soy sauce. "That's what I'd like to do."

16: The Boat Train to Dalian: Number 92

It was monotonously cold—always, everywhere—inside and out in Harbin, and so the only way to get warm was to leave the city and the province and head south. Seven hundred miles away in Dalian, a port on the Bohai Gulf, the weather was pleasant, judging by the reports in China Daily. Mr. Tian told me again that warm weather made him feel sick.

We were having an animated conversation, Mr. Tian and I. He was describing how the various Red Guard factions had battled each other on the streets of Harbin—school against school, factory against factory, each group claiming that they were the purest Maoists. At the station, Mr. Tian told me how the walls had been daubed with slogans and Mao portraits. "It was a total waste," he said. Chinese candor always touched me and made me grateful. When the whistle of my approaching train blew I took off my sheepskin mittens, my scarf, and the winter hat I had bought for this cold place. I handed them to Mr. Tian.

"I won't need them in Dalian," I said.

Mr. Tian shrugged, shook my hand, and without another word walked off. It was the Chinese farewell: there was no lingering, no swapping of addresses, no reminiscence, nothing sentimental. At the moment of parting they turned their backs, because you ceased to matter and because they had so much else to worry about. It was like the departure after a Chinese meal, the curtain falling abruptly with a thud and everyone vanishing. I did not mind that such rituals were perfunctory—it certainly kept them from being hypocritical. Mr. Tian was soon a little blue figure in a mob of blue figures.

But I should never have given him my gloves and scarf. This was another unheated train. Did they ever heat anything? It was in the low forties (Fahrenheit) in the compartment and even colder in the dining car. There was ice on all the floors and frost on the windows. It was too cold to sit still, so I walked back and forth, from one end of the train to the other.

But what was I complaining about? Outside, people were digging and repairing fences and walking to work and hanging laundry outside their small huts in the snowfields. And the strong wind that battered the windows of the train was yanking at these people, too. They looked plump in their winter clothes, like stuffed dolls, and their faces were crimson—visible from a long way off. Knowing what their lives must be like, I resolved not to grumble about my lunch of dried fish and gristly meat.

Changchun, which we reached in the early afternoon, was full of vaporous locomotives. The freezing weather made them immensely steamy, and great gusts billowed from the fourteen engines shunting at the station. Icicles hung from their black wheels, and smoke came out of their chimneys, and shrieks of steam from their pistons. It was impressive for being a study of fire and ice, and also for its tones of black and white, the engines bowling along the snowy tracks.

One of China's major film studios is in Changchun, and at that moment a coproduction about the life of China's last emperor was being made. If the film had concerned his time as emperor it could have been a very short film. He was only three years old when he took the throne and he abdicated three years later, in 1912. His name was Pu Yi, but he took the name Henry when he was older. His main recreation was watching Harold Lloyd movies. And later, when the Japanese formed the puppet state of Manchukuo and needed a puppet to run it, they chose Henry and worked his strings in Changchun until the silly state collapsed and Henry was arrested as a war criminal by the Russians. His life ended in the same violent confusion as it began, when he died of cancer at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Henry Pu Yi represented everything that Mao set his face against: the decadent Manchus, the ruling class, wealth, privilege, Japanese collaboration and the humiliations of Chinese history. No wonder when the time came they seized Henry Pu Yi and had his guts for garters.

I debated whether to stay in Changchun; but it was an easy decision. Changchun was very cold, so I moved on. The ice thickened on the walls of the train. Time passed slowly. I put on all my clothes, bit by bit, until by the middle of the afternoon I was sitting with my hands up my sleeves, reading the The Analects of Confucius and turning the pages with my nose.