Riding the Iron Rooster

This was mostly paddy fields, and green shoots standing stiffly in black goop. It was an open, almost treeless landscape of bumpy ground and sharp-featured hills and greeny-blue mountains; tea, and rice, and bursting blue vegetables, reeking canals, tile-roofed huts, trampled dirt roads, coolie hats, and everyone dressed in the same style of pajamas. I saw two boys working a treadwheel that ran a chain-driven water pump, a machine that has been in continuous use in China since the first century A.D. according to Professor Needham.

The Zhejiang hills—the Kuocang Shan—were streaky: slashes of white and green, with claw marks and jagged ridges. There were no shade trees. Shade is an unnecessary luxury in an agricultural country and stunts the crops. In the unhindered sunshine, the landscape was austerely tended and harshly fertile, and familiar things like trees and huts were so out of scale the people looked miniaturized.

Everything they did was connected with food—planting it, growing it, harvesting it. The woman who looks as though she is sitting is actually weeding; those children are not playing, they are watering plants; and the man up to his shoulders in the creek is not swimming but immersed with his fishnet. The land here has one purpose: to provide food. The Chinese are never out of sight of their food, which is why as a people arrested at the oral stage of development (according to the scholar of psycho-history Sun Longji) they take such pleasure in fields of vegetables. I found the predictable symmetry of gardens very tiring to the eye, and I craved something wilder. So far, China seemed a place without wilderness. The whole country had been made over and deranged by peasant farmers. There was something unnatural and neurotic in that obsession. They had found a way to devour the whole country.

Hunger had made them ingenious. At Jinhua the train stopped for a while, and I saw a three-decker van for carrying pigs: animals in China always seemed to be kept in a space their own size. What could be crueler? I suppose the answer was: lots of things—an intellectual forced to shovel chicken shit, a Muslim forced to keep pigs, a physicist ordered to assemble radios, an historian in a dunce cap, a person beaten to death for being a teacher. Next to these Cultural Revolution atrocities, keeping a pig in a poke was not really very bad, though it may have contributed to other forms of heartlessness. It was a very hot and humid day, and the pigs were whimpering in their racks as the train passed.

The background was mountainous, the foreground as flat as Holland—square pools of rice shoots, and the roads no more than long narrow tracks. This landscape had no date—the people dressed as they always had; and it was impossible to date it by looking closely at tools and implements. I saw a thresher that looked like the first thresher in the world: a rigged-up whacking paddle hinged to a stick; and the buffalo yokes, the wooden plow, the long-fingered rakes and the fishermen's nets were all of ancient design. By sundown we had done 400 miles, and we had never been out of sight of bent-over farmers or cultivated fields. Every surface had been cultivated, but it was spring and so even these cabbages had beauty.

I began talking with a Chinese man named Zhao who had just visited his girlfriend in Shanghai and was heading back to Changsha in Hunan.

"I took her out to a restaurant and I ordered dishes to impress her. Duck, chicken, fish—everything. It cost me twenty yuan!"

That was about six dollars, and for a moment I thought So what? and didn't understand the anguish on his face.

Then Zhao said, 'That's a week's pay for me! I couldn't eat. I went to bed that night and I couldn't sleep." He clenched his fists and hammered with them. "Twenty yuan! I was cursing. I still feel bad."

"I'm sure she appreciated it." I said.

"Yes," he said. "She is a simple girl. She is a country girl. She is pure."

Just as the landscape altered and became hillier, the sun went down. A couple from Macau—Manuel was Portuguese, Veronica was Chinese—were in my compartment. Veronica was skinny, with a small schoolboy's face and a schoolboy's haircut. She pouted for a while in the upper berth, and then we all went to sleep. But I had never really got used to sleeping among strangers and so I woke up in the middle of the night and read my Jin Ping Mei and noticed once again that it was packed with foot fetishism and bondage games. I glanced up and saw Veronica staring down at me from the upper berth.

At dawn, under a pink sky, the train stopped at Zhuzhou, and Zhao got out to change for the train to Changsha.

I said good-bye to him. I was grateful for something he had told me—that on a railway line outside Changsha was Shaoshan, the village where Mao Zedong had been born.

"Everyone used to visit that village," he said. "Now no one does."

One of these days I'll go there, I thought. Zhao had given me careful directions.