Riding the Iron Rooster

This featureless brown farmland with its ditches and its telephone poles and its tile-roofed houses looked as dreary as Belgium. From the farmers' point of view it was the worst time of year. The muddy lanes, the ruts, the puddles, the cold, the January drizzle. There was nothing to eat yet. The people labored along on bikes, they thrashed their oxen, they pushed carts that rolled uncertainly on big, wobbly wheels.

There was a Belgian man in my compartment. After we got acquainted I nerved myself and asked him the question I had been rehearsing.

"Does this part of Shandong look like Belgium?"

We looked at the ditches, the plowed fields, the puddles, the poles.

"Yes. Is similar."

So I had not been imagining it. These winter journeys in China were tiring, and I sometimes suspected that my weariness blurred my perceptions—or else made me giddy and fanciful. And these long stretches of brown, plowed China could be depressing. The whole of this overpopulated region was like that. And, like Belgium, it tired my eyes.

Alain was from Antwerp. He was traveling with his Chinese counterpart, Li. They were going to Hefei, but they did not know that Hefei was the new center of student protest. They had no interest in politics. They were telephone engineers in a Belgian-Chinese joint venture to upgrade the telephone system. Alain said, "I think we arrive here just in time."

It was well known that Chinese phones were hopeless. It was impossible to direct dial any Chinese city, and it was very hard to make even a local call. And when you got through you often heard five other voices—or more—holding simultaneous conversations. A Chinese phone was like Chinese life: it was full of other people, close together, doing exactly what you were trying to do. Often the phone went dead. You could wait eight hours to be connected. Occasionally a whole city would be cut off. For several days it might be impossible to make a call outside Shanghai. In Taiyuan, the provincial capital of Shanxi, any calls, other than local ones, were out of the question: the city was isolated, though it could be reached by telegraph, using Morse code. The old Chinese phones were of heavy black Bakelite that shattered or chipped if they were struck; the new phones were lightweight plastic, like toys, and were usually a color that did not inspire confidence, such as flamingo pink or powder blue. It was possible to imagine how the Chinese felt about them from the way they shrieked into them. It was always shrieks. No one ever chatted on a telephone in China.

I told Alain these things. He knew them, he said. He was aware that his task was monumental. Fortunately he had a sense of humor, or at least a sense of silliness, that made life bearable. His English was shaky. He said things like, "Will you traduce her for me?" and "I feel happy as a roy" and "The Chinese has good formation but bad motivation."

He was the complete Foreign Expert. He did not speak Chinese. He had no interest in politics. Chinese art to him was the enameled ashtrays and bamboo back scratchers they sold at the Friendship Stores. Apart from Qingdao and Hefei and Shanghai, he had not traveled anywhere. He said he knew Belgium intimately, though. He was fluent in both Flemish and French. He tried to teach me to pronounce the almost unpronounceable Flemish word schild (shield), but I could do no more than approximate it and sounded as though I were swallowing a quahog.

We played capitals to kill the time. Mr. Li knew little more than Alain, who failed on Hungary, India and Peru (Mr. Li knew Hungary). Alain did not read. He amused himself with his video camera, for which he had paid $1200 in a duty-free shop. He sent tapes home—tapes of Shandong looking horribly like Belgium.

Mr. Li was somewhat similar.

"Think of a country," I said.

He was baffled. "I cannot think of one."

"Any country," I said. "Like Brazil, or Zambia, or Sweden."

He made a face: nothing. He did not know any geography at all. He was not just geocentric; he was ignorant.

Their field was telephones—wiring, systems, satellites, exchanges, linkups, computers. They had this very narrow but very deep area of expertise, and it was all they cared about. They could talk animatedly about computer telephone systems, but about nothing else. Mention the rain in Guangdong or the snow in Harbin and they looked blank. Don't mention books.

They were the new people in the world, the up-and-comers, the only employable folks: they had technical skills, they were problem solvers, and they were willing to travel. In every other respect they were stupid, but their stupidity did not matter. I found them very friendly because they were enthusiastic about their work.

"My boss is not happy with me today," Alain said. "But the fault is the workers. Chinese workers like to sleep."

Mr. Li agreed with this.

We looked at Alain's snapshots—a great stack of cozy Belgian interiors. Fat people in bright clothes. People eating or sitting in small parlors.