Riding the Iron Rooster

Her hair was black as a raven's plumage; her eyebrows mobile as the kingfisher and as curved as the new moon. Her almond eyes were clear and cool, and her cherry lips most inviting.... Her face had the delicate roundness of a silver bowl. As for her body, it was as light as a flower, and her fingers as slender as the tender shoots of a young onion. Her waist was as narrow as the willow, and her white belly yielding and plump. Her feet were small and tapering; her breasts soft and luscious. One other thing there was, black-fringed, grasping, dainty and fresh, but the name of that I may not tell ... it had all the fragrance and tenderness of fresh-made pastry, the softness and appearance of a new-made pie.

Those tiny feet are interesting. In another chapter, Hsi-men is beguiled by the sight of another woman's bound feet—the so-called "lily-feet."

Old woman Hsueh found an opportunity to lift Mistress Meng's skirt slightly, displaying her exquisite feet, three inches long and no wider than a thumb...

I mention this because after we left Shandong and crossed the Grand Canal (Da Yunhe) we came to the city of Xuzhou (formerly Tong-shan), where I saw an old woman with small, stumpy feet on the platform, and she was walking painfully on these deformities that had once been thought to be so ravishing.

It was at Xuzhou in the yellow light of early morning that I saw the first real greenery since leaving London over a month before—fields of ripening rice, and young trees in leaf by the roadside, and large blowing poplars. It was the flat plain of eastern China, once a conglomeration of communes and now a region of smallholdings—an immensity of vegetables, cabbage as far as the eye could see, with big black pigs balanced neatly on their trotters in the foreground. I saw puddles and streams, and farmers plowing with tractors or bullocks, and people carrying heavy loads with a shoulder pole used as a yoke to carry a pair of baskets; white swimming ducks and fluttering geese, a small girl in a blue tunic sitting astride a buffalo, and field-workers sleeping off their breakfast against an embankment like drunken peasants in a Flemish painting. And there was a dark sow so heavily pregnant her teats grazed the dusty earth of the farmyard as she plodded.

Some rice was already being harvested. China is proud of the fact—as well it should be—that it not only feeds itself but for the first time in its history now exports more grains than it imports (generally speaking it sells rice and buys wheat). All this activity is dramatized by the fact that for the past few years field-workers have begun to wear bright clothes, and so they are highly visible as they hoe and harvest. From time to time, however, the rigid thing you take to be a scarecrow turns out to be a comrade either leaning on his shovel or practicing wushu or t'ai chi with his arms stuck out.

A few hours later the train pulled into Bengbu, a railway junction in the middle of Anhui Province. Our train was needed there for a little while because a movie scene was being shot at Bengbu Station—a young man and woman seeing someone off on our train, probably an irritating relative. A great crowd had gathered to watch the action, and the film crew and the railway police struggled to shift the mob out of the shot. There was no rough stuff. Everyone—even the police—was interested in the movie. There was no pushing, no anger; and I was impressed by the good humor. But unless they had a brilliant editor, I was sure the result would show the two actors waving good-bye, watched by 2000 goggling Chinese.

In any event there was only one take. When the Shanghai Express pulled out of Bengbu, that was the end of the shot.

Then we were in the green fields again. I was sure that the main difference between this visit and my previous one six years before, when I had sailed down the Yangtze, was that before, I had come in the middle of winter, when everything had been bleak. Then, a Chinese landscape seemed to me to be composed of rain, smoke, fog; and collapsing houses on a muddy road; and people with their hands shoved into their sleeves; and all those fat-faced pictures of Mao on the wall. And whenever I asked someone a question the answer was always either "Maybe" or "You think so?"