Riding the Iron Rooster

But the stingy reference was its real meaning, because until recently this accident-plagued line was run by the Xinjiang government. Technically, Xinjiang is a vast reservation of Uighur people—romantic desert folk with a Mongolian culture quite distinct from the Han Chinese. And this remote railway ministry in the autonomous region would neither surrender control of the railway nor would they maintain it. This was more than I wanted to know about the Iron Rooster, but the name made me more than ever eager to climb aboard.

When lunch was over Mrs. Lord invited me to say something. The formal progress of a Chinese banquet depends on little speeches: a word of welcome from the host, followed by something grateful from the guest—that is at the beginning; and afterwards, more formal pleasantries, some toasts, and a very abrupt end. No one lingers, no one sits around and shoots the bull. All the Chinese banquets I attended concluded in a vanishing act.

I made my little speech. I said my thanks and sat down. But Mrs. Lord needled me. Hadn't I been to China before? And shouldn't I say something to compare that visit with this?

So I stood up again and said frankly that even six years ago people had been very reluctant to talk about the Cultural Revolution. It was worse than bad manners: it was unlucky, it marked you, it was a political gesture, it wasn't done. And when people had referred to it they had spoken of it in euphemisms, like the British referring to World War Two as "the recent unpleasantness." But these days people talked about those ten frenzied years, and when they called it the Cultural Revolution they usually prefixed the phrase "so-called" (suowei), or they renamed it The Ten Years' Turmoil. Surely it was a good thing that people talked about it in a critical way?

"Is that all you've noticed?" Mrs. Lord said, encouraging me to continue.

I said that the tourists and business people seemed to constitute a new class and that such privileged and bourgeois people might be demoralizing to the much poorer Chinese.

"We have never taken foreigners seriously," one of the guests said. He was a man at the end of the table. 'The most-quoted proverb these days is: We can fool any foreigner."

"I think that's a very dangerous proverb," I said.

Mrs. Lord said, "Why 'dangerous'?"

"Because it's not true."

Mrs. Lord said, "The Chinese don't know what goes on in the hotels—they don't go in."

"We're not allowed in," the bluestocking said. "But no one actually stops you. I went into a big hotel a few months ago. There was a bowling alley and a disco and a bookstore. But I didn't have any foreign exchange certificates, so I couldn't buy anything."

Someone said, "I think that regulation forbidding Chinese from going into tourist hotels is going to change very soon."

Mrs. Lord said, "My friends talk about this privilege thing. Of course it's a problem. My Chinese friends tend to be pessimistic, but I'm an optimist. I think things will go on improving. And I want to help. I feel I owe it to this country. I've had everything."

I said, "Oddly enough, I was affected by the Cultural Revolution. It was the sixties upheaval, and I was in Africa when China was seeking influence there. I read the Thoughts of Mao and the Peking Review. I felt like a revolutionary."

"I had one of those Thoughts of Mao books," a man said. "1 put it away. I don't know where it is. I suppose I've lost it. You don't actually mean you read it?"

To prove my point, I recited, "A revolution is not a dinner party"—from the Little Red Book; and another saying that I often thought of in my traveling through China: "Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it."

A sigh of exasperation went up.

"He set us back thirty years," someone said.

"If you go to the inner part of Peking University you'll see a statue of Mao," one of the scholars said. "But there aren't many around. And on the base where it once said 'Long Live The Thoughts of Mao Zedong' there is nothing but his name."

It was not for me to tell them they were out of touch with the thinking of the Central Committee, which had recently met (September 1986) and passed a resolution that reaffirmed "The Four Cardinal Principles: keeping to the socialist road, upholding the people's democratic dictatorship, upholding the leadership of the Communist Party, and upholding Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought."