Riding the Iron Rooster

This Canton train now turned south. With mountains always in the distance, we tracked across the rice terraces to Hengyang, where the railway divides—one line to Guangxi (Kwangsi), the other to Guangdong (Kwangtung)—The Two Kwangs, as they were once known.

The landscape had changed since Shanghai—not only its configuration (we were now among steep hills), but the methods of farming (these teetering, brimful terraces). The people here wore large wheel-like hats and lived in brick houses with porches, about six families to a house. And some of the houses looked grand and ambitious, with columns supporting the porch roofs and dragons molded on the waterspouts of the eaves.

Every available flat space was planted. Beans grew at the margins of the rice terraces, and there were cabbages on the hillsides, and spinach and greens at the edges of the roads. The earth had been moved and maneuvered so that everything—and especially the crumpled hills—looked man-made. The hills seemed a way of growing food vertically, like having fields on ledges and shelves to economize on space. The trees were tall and spindly, as if to take up the least amount of room.

"Was that Hengyang?" Manuel said.

I told him it was.

"That was the place where Li Si—the Emperor Shi Huangdi's minister—was sawed in half, for burning the books in 213 B.C." He smiled into his bristly beard. "The interesting thing is, he was sawed in half lengthwise."

He had left Portugal and had planned to be in Macau for about two years; but five years later he was still there. He wondered whether he would still be there when Macau was handed back to the Chinese in 1999. He said he was impressed with what he had seen in China—it was his first visit. But he smiled again.

"Maybe after five years all this could be turned upside down."

"Are you optimistic?"

"You know the saying? An optimist speaks—what?"

"Chinese," Veronica said.

"No. An optimist speaks Russian. A pessimist speaks Chinese." Then he frowned. "That doesn't sound right. I think it's An optimist speaks Chinese, a pessimist speaks Russian. That doesn't sound right either."

We debated this. I said, "Have you heard of the man who said, 'I speak English to my valet, French to my mistress, and German to my horse'?"

"And Chinese to my laundryman," Manuel said.

"And Portuguese to my cook," Veronica said.

With the whole day to kill, we tried to devise the itinerary for the longest railway journey in the world. It began in Portugal: Braganqa-Lisbon - Barcelona - Paris - Moscow - Irkutsk - Peking - Shanghai - Hong Kong.

We came to Chenzhou, an industrial city in a mountain valley, with high sharp gray-green peaks all around it. And at noon we passed through Pingshi, on the Hunan-Guangdong border. The cliffs had the look of temples, with vertical sides that might have been fluted and carved. But they weren't; this was simply the pattern in the basalt. Here the boulders were as huge as hills, and there were pagodas on them.

"Pagoda is a Portuguese word," Manuel said. "We say pagode in Portuguese—it means noise. I suppose they associated noise with these structures."

Mandarin was also Portuguese, he said—from mandar (to be in charge); and the Japanese arrigato (thank you) had come from obrigado.

I went to the dining car and took a seat next to a Chinese man in order to avoid Kicker ("First thing I do when I go home is have a big steak..."). We were passing through low jungle, but even so, rice and corn were being grown under the thin trees. I thought: There are no old trees in China—at least I hadn't seen any.

The food was not good, but to give my meals a point I invented a system for nominating a Dish of the Day. I had spent too many days eating unmemorably. This was a Cantonese train, with the distinctively wet and sticky cuisine—mushrooms, chicken, sweet-sour fish, greasy vegetables. I chose the eels as my Dish of the Day.

While I was eating I remembered another occasion, six years before, when I was eating with a Chinese youth—a pompous one who was the son of a well-placed official, a so-called cadre kid.

I had talked politics with him and he had said in one of his rebuttals, "I am a member of the proletariat—and you are not. You are bourgeois."

I mentioned this to my fellow diner, Mr. Zhu.

"What does 'proletariat' mean?"

I explained it.

He shook his head. "No. I am a higher class than that. I am a white-collar worker."

We talked about foreigners, because the dining car was full of tourists. Zhu said that, unlike Chinese, all foreigners were very excitable. We also had very loud voices. And we were gullible.