Riding the Iron Rooster

If this was a time warp it was a very reassuring one. My hotel bedroom had a spittoon and a chamber pot. The armchairs had slipcovers and antimacassars, and the varnished desk was covered by an embroidered cloth, and it held a water jug, a propped-up calendar and a vase of plastic flowers. In the drawer was a small bottle of ink, and a penholder with a steel nib. None of it could be called modern, but most of it was unbreakable.

It seems comic and perhaps absurd to most Westerners; but it is not a joke—not in a society where they fish in rivers using nets designed 2000 years ago. China has suffered more cataclysms than any other country on earth. And yet it endures and even prospers. I began to think that long after the computers had exploded and the satellites had burned out and all the jumbo jets had crashed and we had awakened from the hi-tech dream, the Chinese would be chugging along in choo-choo trains, and plowing the ancient terraces, and living contentedly in caves, and dunking quill pens in bottles of ink and writing their history.

3. Night Train Number 90 to Peking

Never mind that their uniforms don't fit, that their caps slip sideways and their toes stick out of their sandals; what most Chinese officials illustrate is how bad-tempered and unbending Chinese bureaucracy is. They are in great contrast to the average person who doesn't wear a uniform, who is fairly flexible and who will probably be willing to make a deal. Such hustlers are found in the Free Market—as the new bazaars are called—and not on Chinese railways.

The glowering and barking woman at the gate at Datong Station at midnight was exactly like Cerberus. Three minutes before the Lanzhou train pulled out she slammed the entry gate and padlocked it, leaving a group of soldiers and many other latecomers clinging to the bars and making them miss their train. As a further indignity she switched off the overhead lights of the ticket barrier and left us all in the dark. She would not let me through until the Peking train pulled in. And then she slammed the gate again and made more latecomers watch while I boarded. It is not merely unbending; there is often a lot of sadism in bureaucracy.

It was almost midnight. I found my berth in the sleeping car and, ignoring the other occupants (was one a woman?), went to bed. At 5:30 in the morning, Chinese bureaucracy rose up again and flung the door open, switched on the lights and demanded the blankets and sheets. I turned over, trying to return to my dream—tacking in a light breeze across Lewis Bay. The sleeping-car attendant in a white pastrycook's hat and apron dug her fingers into my hip and yelled at me to get up.

"The train doesn't arrive until seven-fifteen!"

"Get up and give me the bedding!"

"Let me sleep!"

A young man sitting on the berth opposite said to me, "They want you to get out of bed. They are folding the sheets."

"What's the hurry? We won't arrive for almost two hours. I want to sleep."

The sleeping-car attendant took hold of the blankets, and I knew she was going to do the Mongolian trick of snapping the bedding off me in one stroke.

My Chinese was functional and unsubtle. I said to the young man, "Do me a favor. Translate this. If they're eager to do a good job, tell them to go clean the toilet. It was so disgusting last night I couldn't use it. The floor's dirty. The windows are dirty. There's no hot water in the thermos jug. What's so important about the blankets?"

He shook his head. He wouldn't translate. He knew—and so did I—that if the blankets and sheets were folded the sleeping-car attendants could go straight home as soon as we arrived in Peking Central Station. They were not paid overtime for folding laundry.

Shhlloooppp: she whipped the bedding off me and left me shivering in my blue pajamas in the predawn darkness.

"I couldn't tell them," the young man said. "They wouldn't listen."

He meant they would lose face. After all, they were only doing their job. His name was Mr. Peng. He was reading Huckleberry Finn to improve his English. I always softened to people I saw reading books, but I told him that one would not do much for his English. He was twenty-seven, a native of Datong. He was married. His wife was a secretary. He said she was a simple girl—that was what had attracted him to her. They had no children. "We are only allowed to have one, so we're waiting a little while."