Riding the Iron Rooster

Only six years before, I had copied down an inscription under the photograph of a Catholic church in Nanjing. Its tone was very fierce. It read in part, American imperialism took preaching as its cover. All over China they erected churches like this and carried out destructive activities.... The American missionaries joined up with the Qing Dynasty troops and attacked the Small Sword Society troops, and the church acted as a stronghold.

I asked Mr. Hu what he thought of this difference in official attitudes.

"If people know about Lottie Moon and other missionaries in Yantai, they will visit here and enjoy themselves."

By "people" he meant foreign tourists. His attitude was characteristic of the Chinese in general: if it brought in tourists and was not immoral, it was to be encouraged, whether it was missionaries, rebuilt churches, or city tours of the bourgeois suburbs of old Shandong. But there were obvious dangers in tourism. After the complete eradication of venereal disease (the fifty-year personal struggle of an idealistic doctor from Buffalo, New York, George Hatem, who became Chinese, transmogrifying himself into Ma Haiteh), the VD clinics were reopened in 1987, to cope with new outbreaks of the disease. But antibiotics were not to be the only remedy. The Chinese also recently decreed that the punishment for engaging in prostitution would be a bullet in the neck.

18: The Slow Train to Qingdao: Number 508

On these one-day railway trips, the Chinese could practically overwhelm a train with their garbage. Nearly everyone on board was befouling the available space. While I sat and read I noticed that the people opposite, after only a few hours, had amassed on their table (I scribbled the details on my flyleaf): duck bones, fish bones, peanut shells, cookie wrappers, sunflower-seed husks, three teacups, two tumblers, a thermos, a wine bottle, two food tins, spittings, leavings, orange rinds, prawn shells and two used diapers.

The Chinese could be very tidy, but there was also something sluttishly comfortable about an accumulation of garbage, as though it were a symbol of prosperity. The coaches were smoky, and so crowded it was an effort to make my way down the aisle. The train was full of shrieks and stinks. The loudspeaker played a Chinese version of "Flower of Malaya" ("Rose, Rose, I love you, with an aching heart..."). Some big card games were in progress. Passengers read The Yantai Workers' Daily, and romantic novels (People's Liberation Army soldier and his gal back home in Wuhan), and a Chinese magazine I had not seen before, called World Screen, with a portrait of Roger Moore (as James Bond) on the cover.

It was not an old railway line. At a time when steam trains were being phased out in the United States, and rail lines closed, this line from Yantai to Qingdao was being built. It was 1950, and a few years later a brand-new old-fashioned steam engine went gasping down the track with red flags flying from its boiler. It should have happened sooner, but it was not in the interests of the Germans or the Japanese (who had occupied this province) to build the line. In any case, the vision and altruism that are espoused by colonialists are not readily apparent in China. Unlike in Africa and India, the imperialists in China set themselves up in competition against the Chinese, which was another reason Mao execrated them. They were not all racketeers, but they all thrived on China's disunity.

This train still had a fifties feel—a little grim. Most of the passengers had boarded at Yantai and begun eating. They ate noodles, buckets of rice, seaweed, and nuts, fruit and everything else. They did not stop until we arrived at Qingdao in the evening. Unusually for a Chinese train, there were plenty of drinkers—and drunks, spitting, wheezing, puffy faced.

Only a half a dozen of the passengers used the dining car for lunch. They were picking at Chinese spinach and another sinister-looking vegetable.

"What will you have?" the supervisor asked.

"How about some of that?" I said, pointing to the other people's dishes.

"You don't want that stuff," he said. "We have many dishes. Different prices. Do you want the two, the four, the five, the eight or the ten?"

"Which is the best one?"

"The ten," he said. "You won't be sorry."