Riding the Iron Rooster

Golden Lotus was frightened. She hastily gave him some red dates. Blood followed semen, and the blood was followed by freezing air. Golden Lotus was terrified. She threw her arms around him and cried, "Darling, how do you feel?"

Readers, there is a limit to our energy, but none to our desires. A man who sets no bounds to his passion cannot live more than a short time...

This book is a sort of phantom in China. Everyone knows of it; no one has seen it. I don't think there would be a counterrevolution if it were published. Banning it has made it notorious. It was only when Lady Chatterley was published freely that people realized what a silly and unreadable book it is. Anyway, Jin Ping Met was better railway reading than Red Star Heroes or We Fight Best When We March Our Hardest.

Outside Danyang, but in the middle of nowhere, a tractor rolled down a steep road and collided with the train. We came to a screeching halt ("Where are we?" "Is this a station?" "No, it's an accident—I think someone's killed") and there was a flurry of activity. No one dared to get off the train for fear of being left behind. A railway official plugged a portable phone into a trackside socket and described in detail what had happened. We all listened carefully.

"He says it's a broken tractor. He says we should call the police. He says no one is hurt. He says it was the farmer's fault. He says we can't go until the responsibility is decided."

The smashed tractor lay near the train, beside the tracks. A crowd gathered—all of them field-workers, rather sullenly watching the more prosperous travelers at the train windows. A railway crew appeared with walkie-talkies and notebooks, and a long discussion ensued over the nub of every Chinese problem: who is to blame? That was always another way of saying: Who is paying for this mistake? A man was hurt and yet after twenty minutes of argument the matter was determined to be too trivial to hold up this train—the fastest long-distance train in China, no stops except to take on fuel, from Peking to Shanghai. The peasants were guilty of allowing one of their tractors to ram the train—and as for the injured man, it was his own fault. We started on our way once again.

The fat young man, Deng, chased his thin wife into her berth and thrashed her with a pair of trousers. She sank her teeth into his ankle and bit him, and he howled. They were playing. The old woman snored in a soft, punctured way, and her son came in and gazed on her, didn't wake her, just smiled as she snored.

In order to get Deng to stop horsing around, I asked him what he was doing in China.

"I come here every six months," he said. "I do business."

He was a mechanical engineer. He had been educated in Toronto. He made rather an issue about his having come back from Canada. It was a sacrifice—"Lee Kwan Yew ruined the Singapore economy. There's eight percent unemployment. I could have stayed in Canada and made a lot of money."

I said I thought it was interesting that the little prosperous island of Singapore had started to fail, just as China was mightily rising—and the overseas Chinese were starting again to see China as a homeland.

'This is a useless place," Deng said, jerking his thumb out the train window. It was soon clear what he was pointing at. "China," he said. "It spends too much money on hi tech that it can't use. They have twenty-eight thousand computers that they can't use. Only ten percent are functioning. They buy things just to have them, so they can look good, and then they let them gather dust."

"You're saying that they have a kind of primitive pride that makes them irrational about spending," I said. "But it seems to me that the Chinese are very frugal—that they don't invest and spend enough. They are always sort of cheating themselves and muddling through and making a virtue of not complaining."

"Sure, they work hard—especially the farmers," Deng said. "And they can feed themselves. That's a good thing."

"So what's the problem?"

Deng glanced around and, seeing the old woman asleep, he said confidentially that the problem was in their heads.

Tapping his head he said, 'They're backward. They're peasants. They're ignorant. They go crazy. They're not like us."

"Who's 'us'?" I asked.

Deng laughed. Did he mean me? He didn't reply. He took his wife on his lap and tickled her until her shirttail came loose. Her stomach was the pale floury color of a steamed bun and her small breasts hardly dented her bra. I found this tormenting.

Pretty soon the old woman's son came in and woke her. We were arriving in Shanghai.