Riding the Iron Rooster

"The government leaves us alone and lets us get on with the job. It was quite different during the Cultural Revolution," she said, daintily separating her butterfly prawn from its tail. "There were loudspeakers on the campus, and they were on all the time."

"Did you hate it?"

"At first, yes. And then I was bored by it. That was the worst of the Cultural Revolution. The boredom. One would wake to the loudspeakers. They would be saying very loudly, 'Never forget class struggle.' One would brush one's teeth and on the toothbrush was the slogan Never Forget Class Struggle. On the washbasin it said, Never Forget Class Struggle. Wherever one looked there were slogans. Most people hated them—it was really very insulting. I was thoroughly bored."

All this in her soft and rather fatigued English accent; and then she spoke up again.

"But there was very little that one could do."

Xiao Qian, listening quietly to this woman, was a man in his seventies who had spent the years 1939 to 1945 in Britain. Because of the war he had not been able to sail home; but he pointed out that because he had spent those war years in Britain he had seen the British at their best. He was wearing what looked like an old school tie. I asked him whether this was so. He said, yes, it was the tie of King's College, Cambridge, where he had read English.

"I don't think of China as being a tie-wearing society," I said, and I told him a story about a Frenchman I had once met. Had all the violence and turmoil in the sixties changed his way of thinking? I had asked. "Yes," he had said, "I no longer wear a cravat."

Mr. Xiao said, "People have started wearing them. And of course a tie is often necessary if you travel abroad."

He had recently been to Singapore, he said.

"I used to teach there," I said.

"It is an economic miracle," he said, and smiled, adding, "and a cultural desert. They have nothing but money. Their temples are like toys to us. They are nothing—they are not even real. Their Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew is an Oriental posing as a Westerner. But he is not all bad. For example, he has a Confucian idea of the family in politics. In Singapore if you take an old person into your household you get a reduction in taxes. There is something Confucian in that. It's a good idea."

"My students were bullied by the government of Singapore," I said. "If they studied English or political science they weren't given scholarships. The government only gave money to students who did economics or business—money-making subjects, it was thought. And some of the students at the University of Singapore were informers. Oddly enough, they were looking for Maoists and reporting on anyone sympathetic to the People's Republic."

"Now they are quite keen to do business with us," Mr. Xiao said. "But it is a very severe government. They are always watching and listening. People in Singapore are afraid."

It seemed very odd to hear a comrade in the People's Republic tut-tutting about authoritarianism and fear.

I said, "But is it so different here in China?"

"Even during our worst times," he said, "even during the Cultural Revolution, we did not have these—what do you call these machines that listen to your voice?"

"Bugging devices?"

"Exactly. No listening devices. But in Singapore, before anyone opens his mouth he feels with his hands under the table to see whether there is a device that is listening."

Mr. Xiao was not drinking, but others were, and downing glasses of wine they grew red faced and a bit breathless.

A young man next to Mr. Xiao asked me what I was doing in China.

"Just traveling around, taking trains," I said.

"Are you writing a report?"

"Not at all," I said, and I told him my motto: Grin like a dog and wander aimlessly.

He said that was precisely what he enjoyed doing. In fact, somewhat in the manner of Studs Terkel, he was cycling around the country tape-recording people's reminiscences. He was about to publish the transcripts in book form under the title Chinese Lives. He wondered whether there was anything I wished to ask him about the Chinese railways—he said he was an expert. His name was Sang Ye.

I told him that I was particularly looking forward to taking the train from Peking to Urumchi—the longest railway journey in China: four and a half days of mountains and desert.

"They call that train 'The Iron Rooster,'" he said.

He explained that iron rooster (tie gongji) implied stinginess, because "a stingy person does not give away even a feather—nor does an iron rooster." It also meant useless and was part of a larger proverb which included a porcelain crane, a glass rat, and a glazed cat (ciqi he, boli haozi, liuli mao). The list didn't include a white elephant but that was what was meant. There was also a bit of word play with iron rooster, because it included a pun on "engineering" and "engine."