Riding the Iron Rooster

It is an official Chinese government statistic that one-third of all Chinese travelers on trains are going to meetings in distant cities. It is one of the bonuses of any job. The pay is lousy but the meetings are held in tourist spots, and so what is supposed to be a business trip is actually a sort of holiday. The same system operates when American companies hold sales conferences in places like Acapulco or the Bahamas.

So many Chinese people travel, even in sub-zero winter weather like this, that one is never sure of getting a hotel room. But in Shenyang I had no problem. The 500-room Phoenix Hotel had only six other guests. It was only seven-thirty at night, but already the dining room was closed. I begged them to open it, and they said I could eat providing I did not require anything very fancy. The specialities of the Phoenix were bear's paw (350 yuan), moose nose, and "fillet of pork in the shape of a club." I had crunchy chicken and cabbage. It was no good, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that for the first time in weeks I was warm. This hotel was heated. My room was full of light fixtures. There was imitation fur on the walls. The toilet didn't work, but the room had a television.

I needed help getting a ticket to Dalian because (but how was I to know this?) the trains to Dalian were always full and tickets were almost unobtainable at short notice. That was how I met Mr. Sun.

Mr. Sun was self-educated. He had spent what should have been his school days on a farm, another casualty of the Cultural Revolution. But he still believed in self-reliance and serving the people, and in order and obedience. In the course of his getting me a train ticket we had several illuminating conversations, and I was glad he was a frank hard-liner, because I sometimes had the feeling that everyone I met resented the past and felt that Mao had created a society of jackasses.

"I think the students have no right to criticize the government," Mr. Sun said, and then launched into a harangue. "I had to teach myself English. I had no chance to go to any university. The government has given these students the right to go to university. It is paying for their education. And what do the students do? They demonstrate against the government! I don't agree with them at all. If they demonstrate they should be removed."

Mr. Sun showed me the gigantic epoxy-resin statue of Mao in Shenyang. It is the apotheosis of Mao the founding father, surrounded by fifty-eight figures that represent all phases of the Chinese revolution. I did not have to be told that it was erected during the Cultural Revolution. Like the Mao statue in Chengdu, it showed the old man beaming his benediction down upon the proletariat. Such statues were expensive. The money for the Chengdu statue had been earmarked for a sports stadium, and the Shenyang one had been built with civic funds.

I asked Mr. Sun whether he thought it was all a waste of public money.

"No," he said.

"Do you think the statue should be pulled down and destroyed like the other Mao statues?"

"There is no need to pull down the statue just because it was put up during the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Sun said. "Mao was a great man and we must not forget his achievement."

There was no question that Mao had been a remarkable man. He had said that he had pondered for years a means by which he might shock the Chinese people, and then he had hit upon the idea of the Cultural Revolution as the perfect shock. But he had overdone it: no one had known when to stop.

Mr. Sun was an interpreter. He was not a very good one—we spoke a mixture of Chinese and English in order to carry on an intelligible conversation. But he surprised me by saying that he would soon be going to Kuwait in the Persian Gulf to be an interpreter for a Chinese work gang.

One of China's newest money-making schemes was the export of skilled laborers on construction projects. They were putting up buildings in Saudi Arabia, and indeed all over the Middle East. It seems very odd that the Chinese are hired as architects and builders, since their own buildings are so undistinguished, not to say monstrosities. It was rather as though Poland were exporting chefs, and Australia sending elocution teachers to England, and Americans running classes in humility or the Japanese in relaxation techniques. Post-1949 Chinese buildings were among the very worst and shakiest and ugliest I had ever seen in my life.

"Won't you have to speak Arabic in Kuwait?"

"No. The other workers are Germans and Koreans and Pakistanis and Americans. Everyone speaks English. That's why I am needed."

I asked him whether he was apprehensive about the new job.

"My friend just came back and he told me the weather is bad."

"It's not much like Shenyang"—minus twenty-eight degrees today, by the way. "What are the people like?"

"Not friendly."

"And the housing?"

"Everyone sleeps in the same room."

"What about the food?"

"He just ate tins."