Riding the Iron Rooster

"This is my grandmother. This is my sister. My mother. My father..."

We went through the stack twice. I got to recognize the porcelain figures on the mantelpiece at Alain's grandmother's, and a particular cushion, and his father's blue sweater. Alain loved looking at them. He said he missed home.

"What do you miss most?"

"Beef," he said. That was what the man had told me in Harbin. What was it about beef? Alain said, "But I have this."

He brought out a bulging knapsack. It contained a stock of canned goods. Alain called it his emergency kit. He had brought it from Antwerp. He had canned carrots, canned mackerel, cans of sardines, and a brand of cocktail sausages called TV Meat. They were for nibbling in front of a television. Alain also had one of those, a twelve-inch set, for playing his video tapes. He had more luggage than anyone I had ever seen on a train. "My landlord in Antwerp told me I could not leave my things in my apartment, so I took it all to China." He also had many cans of beef chunks in gravy, packages of a pemmican-looking substance called Bifi, a can of chocolate paste called Choco that he spread on bread, and a dozen chocolate bars.

It had been my intention to get off this train at Xuzhou, in a remote corner of Jiangsu Province, and to make my way, somehow, about a hundred miles southeast to the little town of Huai'an, which was on the Grand Canal. In that town, in 1898, Zhou Enlai was born. I wanted to see his house. Had it been made into a shrine, like Mao's in Shaoshan? And if so, was it now as deserted as Mao's birthplace, or was it teeming with well-wishers? It was whispered by many people that Zhou was the secret hero of the Chinese Revolution. Of course he had written very little, and he was no theorist; but he was urbane and compassionate. He was a gentleman—the sort described and praised by Confucius: temperate, kind, magnanimous, and so forth.

The trouble with the stop in Xuzhou was that it occurred at three in the morning. At that hour the whole of China is asleep. I would be emerging from the train at this ridiculous hour on a winter night, and have six hours to kill before knowing whether it was possible to find a bus or a car to Zhou Enlai's homestead.

I decided to stay in bed.

Alain and Li got off at Bengbu at five in the morning to transfer to a Hefei train. Before we turned in they piled their boxes and suitcases outside in the corridor. The Head of the Train complained about Alain's trunk, but Mr. Li explained that it contained the foreign expert's worldly goods from Belgium.

"Regulations, regulations," the Head said. "You must register it."

They didn't bother. More people knocked on the door in the night to complain about it, but I was asleep at five when they got up. I woke up when one of them sat on my foot, but then they were gone. That was the way with trains—something dreamlike in the way people came and went. By eight there was someone else in Alain's berth, reading a comic book. It was a young woman, with a veil drawn tight over her face because of the dust.

"The Great River," she said, using the Chinese name for the Yangtze.

I decided to piss into it. I went to the toilet. On the door was a long Chinese word, TINGCHESHIQINGWUSHIYONG, which was seven characters run together, meaning, "While the train is stopped, please don't use this room." But it hadn't stopped; it was crossing the long railway bridge over the Yangtze. I entered the room, peered into the open hole and let fly.

Having seen Xinjiang and the northeast and the open spaces of Inner Mongolia, I now knew that this eastern part of classical China was the least interesting to look at. It was brown factories and black canals separated by flat cabbage fields. It had been plowed and fertilized and planted for thousands of years, but it was no miracle that anything at all grew here. The secret is revealed every morning, as men with long-handled dippers scoop human shit out of dark barrels and fertilize the fields. It was the flattest, ugliest and most populous part of China; but its shifters kept it in business. Shanghai residents produced 7 500 tons of human shit a day. It was all used. Farm yields were high, but the place epitomized drudgery. Everyone's energy was expended in simply existing there, and every inch of land had been put to use. Why grow flowers when you can grow spinach? Why plant a tree when you can use the sunshine on your crop? And the untillable soil was perfect for a factory. People praised Wuxi's Lake Tai, but the lake was dead, and Wuxi was simply awful looking, part of the sprawl of Shanghai, although it was seventy-five miles from the Bund.