Riding the Iron Rooster

I was overcome by the cold weather, by the sight of people cycling through the snow with frost on their faces, by the bitter air, by temperatures that made me feel bruised.

Mr. Sun got me a ticket out of town, but when we took the car to the station, he twisted his face and said, "That driver is ominous. The last time I was with him he crashed his taxi."

It was seven-thirty on a frosty morning in sooty old Mukden. We had half an hour to get to the station. We immediately confronted a traffic jam (trolleybus with its poles off the wires blocking the road) and were held up for fifteen minutes. Then we started again, and a rumble and thump from the rear wheel slewed the car: a flat tire.

"I told you. This driver is ominous."

"How will I get to the station?"

"You can walk," he said. "But first you must pay the driver."

"Why should I pay him? He didn't get me to the station. I might miss the train!"

"In this case you pay ten yuan, not fifteen. Cheaper! You save money!"

I threw the money at the ominous driver and hurried to the station, slipping on the ice. I caught the train with a minute to spare—another refrigerated train, but at least it was going south.

On this train I met Richard Woo, who worked for Union Carbide, and had been in and around Shenyang for almost two years. I asked him what his qualifications were for this assignment.

"I was in Saskatchewan."

Ah, that explained everything. He also knew all the lingo. "We sell them the design package.... We provide input on the plant." But Union Carbide did not get involved in the construction of the plants. He had views on Chinese workers.

"The work mentality is quite different from that in Europe or America. They are slow, the pay is little. The Chinese are not bad workers, but the system is bad. If they have incentives they perform better."

I was not planning to ask him what Union Carbide was making in Shenyang, because I did not think I would understand it; but I was bored, so I asked.

"Antifreeze," Mr. Woo said.

The train continued through the flat, snowy fields, all of them showing plow marks and furrows and stubble beneath the ice crust. There were factories, and they looked beautiful, blurred and softened and silvered by frost and the vapor from their chimneys.

There might have been berths on this train, but if so, I didn't see them. I was afraid that if I got up someone would snatch my seat—I had seen it happen. I did not want to stand for six hours—it was almost 300 miles more to Dalian. As it was we were jammed in, shoulder to shoulder—the smokers, the noodle eaters, the spitters, the bronchial victims, the orange peelers.

There was no dining car. A woman wearing a nightcap came around with a pushcart, selling dried fish and heavy blobs of sponge cake—the favorite snacks of the Chinese traveler. I chose the fish. It was tough and tasted (and looked) like an old innersoie—a Chinese innersole, and a minority one at that. On the wrapper it was described as "Dried Fish With Minority Flavor."

I was still cold. The cold was mystifying. I hated it like boredom or bad air. It was like aches and pains—perhaps a fear of death informed my feeling and made the cold frightening, because degree zero is death. I found it dehumanizing, and my heart went out to the people who had to live and work in Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning. And yet it is well known that the spirit among the people in these provinces is especially bright—the hinterland of China is famous for having high morale, the people regarding themselves as pioneers.

But the cold affected me. It is a blessing that cold is hard to describe and impossible to remember clearly. I certainly have no memory for low temperatures. And so afterwards I had no memorable sensations of the month-long freeze I had been through—only the visual effects: frosty faces, scarves with frozen spit on them, big bound feet, and mittens, and crimson faces, flecks of ice on that crow-black Chinese hair, the packed snow, the vapor that hung over the larger cities and made even the grimmest city magical, and the glittering frost—the special diamondlike shimmer that you get when it's thirty below.

After a few hundred miles the snow grew thinner and finally with an odd abruptness, at the town of Wangfandian there was none. The landscape had the shabby and depressed look that places have when you are used to seeing them covered with snow. There was something drastic about there being no more snow.

The symmetry and twiggy patterns of bare, brown orchards below the Qian Shan, and the stone cottages not far from Dalian, gave these hills the look of Scotland and its ruined crofts.

A young Chinese woman smiled at me as I stepped onto the platform at Dalian. She was very modern, I could see. Her hair had been waved into a mass of springy curls. She wore sunglasses. Her green coat had a fur collar—rabbit. She said she had been sent to meet me. Her name was Miss Tan.

"But please call me Cherry."

"Okay, Cherry."

"Or Cherty Blossom."