Riding the Iron Rooster

Beyond the glittering rime on the window, small padded moon-people went slowly across the snow. And so did cyclists and ox carts and school kids carrying knapsacks. I saw horses hopelessly foraging for food among blunt spikes of stubble. Sometimes there was a great whiteness, its only identifiable feature a row of telephone poles—the Chinese variety, mile upon mile of tragic-looking crosses. We were in the province of Jilin now, and a cloud of frozen vapor hovered close to the snowy ground.

Few people in the train looked out of the window. They were eating noodles out of tin cups, guzzling tea, shouting or sleeping. Many were taking advantage of the recent relaxation of the rules governing card games. They were actually gambling in Hard Class, and some groups were playing mah-jongg.

As I walked along from coach to coach I said hello and after a few exchanges, "It's cold."

They just smiled, or shrugged. They were indifferent to the icicles in the toilet, the ice on the floor, the wind whipping through the dining car, the igloo that had formed between the coaches. I admired them for not caring. I had seen plenty of wimps in China, but the predominating characteristic of the Chinese was stoicism.

Everyone winced when a man waved his arms at me in a kind of aimlessly dangerous way and began screaming, "America! Kissinger! Nixon!"

He went on chanting this and following me.

Someone said, "He's drunk."

"He's been drinking wine," someone else said.

But he wasn't drunk—he was crazy. A Chinese person who was solitary and aggressive had to be unbalanced.

He kept following me, so I shouted back. "I hear you, comrade, but I don't understand."

People laughed at that, because it was a stock phrase for stonewalling someone and pretending to be dim. He got off the train at Siping, on the border of the province of Liaoning. He was still raving.

In the early winter sunset, all the villages were smoking because it was mealtime—all the stoves alight. The tiny huts lay like simple blocks on the hillsides, toy towns in the snow, and rising from them were symmetrical cones of smoke.

In my rambles through the train I met a Frenchman, Nicolas, who was on his way back to Peking. He was a carpenter from Nice. He had no idea where he was. He did not speak Chinese, and he was trying to teach himself English. He said he was not enjoying China at all. The food was disgusting, he said. The hotels were filthy. Had I been to Harbin?

"I am in Harbin," he said. "I am very cold. I go into a cinema to get warm. It is not a cinema! It is a big room. With shares. Chinese people in the shares. And they are all watching a small television. I sat there all day. It was not warm, but it was better than the street."

We swapped stories of low temperatures in Manchuria.

He was reading a textbook titled Easy Steps to English, but he was only on chapter three.

"How can you say this word?" he asked, putting his mitten on the vocabulary list.

"Believe."

"Booleeve," he said.

"Want an English lesson?" I said, because I saw a way of asking him a number of personal questions in this way. He gladly agreed.

I explained the verb believe and then said we were going to practice a number of drills.

"Nicolas, do you believe in God?"

"Non. I do not booleeve een Gott."

"Do you believe that Klaus Barbie is guilty of Nazi war crimes?"

"Maybe."

"You have to repeat the whole sentence."

"Maybe I booleeve ..."

I asked him about the Chinese, the French, the Americans; about his travels, his ambitions, his family. But his answers weren't interesting, and eventually I abandoned the effort and suggested that he should try to learn Chinese.

The lights in the train were dim. The snow on the floor had not melted. I was stiff from the cold. Nicolas said he wished he were back in Nice. I tried to think where I wanted to be. I considered the possibilities and reached the conclusion that I wanted to be right here, doing what I was doing—heading south towards Dalian on the China coast. Perhaps it was a simple choice—of being home or being elsewhere. Surely this was elsewhere?

By the time the train reached Shenyang, after thirteen hours of travel from Harbin, I decided that I had had enough. I could get another train tomorrow and continue on my way. In the meantime I could look at Shenyang.

It was a Chinese city, and therefore a nightmare, and tonight it was thirty below in Shenyang—tiny needles and etchings of ice on every surface. The streets were practically deserted, and on this dark night, in the glare of its few lights, Shenyang had the look of a city depicted in an old black-and-white photograph. It was perfectly still. My problem was that when I exhaled, my glasses became opaque with frost.