Riding the Iron Rooster

They spat all the time. They cleared their throats so loudly they could drown conversation—they could sound like a Roto-Rooter or someone clearing a storm drain, or the last gallon of water leaving a Jacuzzi. With their cheeks alone they made the suctioning: hhggaarrkh! And then they grinned and positioned their teeth, and they leaned. You expected them to propel it about five yards, like a Laramie stockman spitting over a fence. But no, they never gave it any force. They seldom spat more than a few inches from where they stood. They did not spit out, they spat down: that was the essential cultural difference that it took me almost a year in China to determine. It was not one clean shot with a ping into the spittoon, but a series of dribbles that often ran down the ouside of the revolting thing. They bent low when they spat, there was a certain bending of the knees and crooking of the back that was a preliminary to Chinese spitting. It was not aggressive propulsion. It was almost noiseless. They just dropped it and moved on. Well, it was a crowded country—you couldn't just turn aside and hock a louie without hitting someone. But after the snarkings, the mucus streaking through their passages with a smack, Chinese spitting was always something of an aimless anticlimax. ^*

I had just about settled into my bunk for the voyage, and had begun to dream, when a bell clanged and a foghorn sounded. We had arrived in Yantai. It was four-thirty in the morning. The pier was shrouded in freezing fog, there was ice on the gantries, and I could hear the sea lapping the docking posts, but I could not make anything out—fog and ocean were mingled. The lack of visibility did not deter or slow the passengers. All one thousand of them plunged into the sea fog and shuffled across the quay to—where? There were no buses or taxis at this hour of the morning, and few of these people lived in this small town. They had to wait for morning, when the big broken-down buses would come and take them away.

It is a melancholy fact that Chinese transportation is almost always full—seldom a spare seat, never a spare coach. Every train, every bus, every ship—no matter what the day, the time, the season. It was interesting to me that on a weekday night in a month when people normally did not travel, the Tian Hu was full. The train to Dalian had been full, and so had the train to Shenyang. It was never possible to be sure of a seat, and in these conditions even if you got the seat you were crammed in. Transportation in China is always crowded; it is nearly always uncomfortable; it is often a struggle. The pleasures are rare, but they are intense and memorable. Travel in China, I suspected, would give me a lasting desire for solitude.

I had been traveling steadily south for a number of days, and so I took a day off in Yantai. It was unseasonably cold, with a sleety wind blowing off the sea and icy snow spread thinly on the town. It was a bleak and battered place, of low rubble-strewn hills and bouldery beaches. It was full of abandoned brick huts on which Maoist slogans had been defaced. After a day of sitting listening to the wind and drinking tea and writing, and mooching in the town, I had dinner (scallops in egg white with rancid spinach: vegetables in winter could be dire). And I conceived a plan.

For months I had wanted to see a commune. I had wondered what had happened to the commune outside Canton that I had seen in 1980. This province of Shandong was famous for its agricultural communes—or at least it had been. And the Chinese had always boasted about them before; so, now that the communes had been reformed, what did they look like?

Mr. Hu, my guide in Yantai, tried to dissuade me from seeing a commune. He said wouldn't I be happier seeing the padlock factory, the embroidery and needlepoint factory, or the place where they made grandfather clocks. I wanted to say, And you make steam engines and hat racks and quill pens and doilies and chamber pots. Who does your market research?

"A commune is what I would really like to see," I said.

"They were canceled in 1979. There are none. So you see it is impossible."

"Then what about a village or a cooperative that used to be a commune? I'm sure they didn't just burn them down, Mr. Hu."

"I will find one for you."