Riding the Iron Rooster

I was reading Chinese Lives, which had been put together as a series of interviews by Sang Ye and Zhang Xinxin. I had met Sang in Peking just after I started my China trip. The book was a pleasure, and it was ingeniously simple and revealing. It also confirmed my feeling that the Chinese, who are supposed to be so enigmatic, can be blunt and plainspoken and candid to the point of utter tactlessness. That was why the book was so fresh.

All night the compartment door opened and closed, as people came and went. One sleeper snored for hours. Someone in an upper berth kept his light on. The door banged. There was always chatter in the passageway. The lights of stations made yellow stripes in the compartment, and then we were in the darkness again. In the morning, a man sat on the lower berth, sipping tea.

"Where you are going?" he asked.

"Xining. And then Tibet." I used the Chinese name for Tibet, Xizang.

"You'll be gasping in Tibet. It is very hard to breathe there because of the altitude."

"I'll do my best."

We were in the yellow, rubbly gorges of Gansu, one of the roughest looking landscapes in the whole of China—I knew that now. There were no trees, there was very little water except for the muddy Yellow River, which the train followed for part of the way into Lanzhou. The soil was crumbly, the color and texture of very old cheddar cheese—the sort that has remained untouched in a mousetrap all winter.

I woke hungry and decided to "register" for breakfast. For about twenty cents I bought a breakfast coupon. I was told to report at seven-thirty. I did as I was told. On the dot of seven-thirty the dining car filled with people, who sat rather impatiently. A girl in a nightcap and apron went through the car with a tray, plonking bowls down. There was a sudden hush; a silence; and then a tremendous slurping. The chopsticks clicked like knitting needles for a minute or so, and then the people stood and shoved their chairs back and went away. That was breakfast.

Towards midmorning, the Yellow River widened in the cheesey gorge, and we arrived at Lanzhou. I had been here before; I had no desire to stop. I bought some peanuts to eat and walked along the platform while the locomotive's boilers were filled with fresh water. I noticed that most of the people got out at Lanzhou, and very few boarded. It had rained slightly. Chinese rain often made a city look filthier and sometimes much dustier. It had had that effect on Lanzhou, which looked very dismal and rather parched after the sprinkle. The steam engine was reconnected, and we set off again, slowly, with many stops on the way.

After about fifty miles we entered the province of Qinghai. "There is nothing in Qinghai," the Chinese had told me, which gave me an appetite for the place. We were soon among big smooth mountains of mud—great heaps and stacks of hard-packed dirt. It had the look of an endless dump. It was the most infertile place I had seen in China—less fertile than Inner Mongolia, more arid even than the Turfan depression and the ravines of Gansu. The river, which seemed to have the name "the Yellow Water," looked poisonous, so the water was not a source of life; it was another way of ridding the landscape of vegetation.

But people had figured a way of living here. They had made bamboo frames and stretched plastic sheeting over them. Inside these crude greenhouses they grew vegetables. The only produce in Qinghai is grown in these things. At night the people cover them with straw mats because it is below freezing. The daytime sun warms the plants through the plastic. In ditches I could see ice, even though it was noon.

The people were so poor here they could not afford to feed donkeys or buffalos. They plowed, using two people to pull the plow and one to guide it. There they were, in the middle of the whirling dust, dragging the thing. It was the first time in my life I had seen human beings pulling a plow. They also pulled carts and wagons in Qinghai, and had totally replaced animal labor with their own. I had the impression that after the field was plowed a system of plastic greenhouses was erected over the furrows.

The mountains and heaps of mud reddened, grew brown and then gray, and became clawed with eroded gullies; and then they became rocky, and stonier. But they never looked less barren. It was odd, then, to see people preparing the ground for crops—digging, plowing, raking; and to see lives being lived—schoolkids frolicking in the playground under the red flag; other kids carrying water in buckets and picking coal out of the rubble. And in the middle of nowhere I saw a man strolling along and smiling, with a monkey skittering on a leash.