Riding the Iron Rooster

"It is a horrible place," the second man said, with a smile. "It is flat and windy. There are no trees. There is dust. It is desert."

They were traveling with enormous amounts of luggage, but they explained that most of it was food, since there was no food in Pinghe. There was nothing in Pinghe except coal.

They dragged themselves and their provisions off the train early the next morning, and soon after we entered Inner Mongolia—a bare dusty landscape, with low, stunted-looking trees, and square-sided settlements made of smooth mud, and goats, and mongrels, and people hacking at furrows and bashing weeds, and here and there, the occasional horseman. It was one of the regions the Chinese described by wincing and calling it "the grasslands"—and they prayed they would not be sent to work in such a region. On the other hand, it was a fact that the Hans had displaced the Mongolians here—the expatriates and exiles had taken over.

Rounding a bend, the engine came into view—a big black locomotive, squawking and blowing out smoke and steam, a fat kettle on wheels. The air was so still on the Mongolian plain that on the straighter stretches the smoke from the engine passed my windows and left smuts on my face, and I was eighteen coaches from the smokestack.

By hot, yellow noon, the landscape had wrinkled mountains behind it, but they were bare and blue, and some nearer hills were only slightly mossy. There were no trees. There were plowed fields everywhere, but nothing sprouting. In the villages there was a mud wall around every house. You would not have to be told you were in Mongolia—this was about as Mongolian as a place could possibly be.

I found Mr. Fang staring dejectedly out the window, and feeling sorry for him, I asked him about his Russian teaching.

"I liked it," he said, "except for the Red Guard period."

"What happened then?"

"From 1966 until 1972 there were no classes. I stayed at home and read books."

"Why? Had you been criticized?"

Criticize—that could mean forty-six of them howling at you or even beating you.

"Yes. They said I was a revisionist." In a plaintive way, he said, "Maybe it was true. I did not understand Marxist-Leninist theory." He turned to me and added, 'They didn't understand it either."

"Afterwards, did you feel bitter?"

"No. I said nothing. They were young. They didn't know anything. That whole period was a disaster."

He was upset by the memory, so I left him alone. But my curiosity impelled me to go back, because I couldn't understand how it was that he had spent all those years at home, reading books. I said, "You mean, you were just sitting there, turning pages?"

He shook his head. "I was carrying rocks."

It was forced labor, he explained. The whole technical college had been moved to a remote place called Mengjin, just north of Luoyang, in Henan Province; and there they had built a bridge over the Yellow River.

"Most of these railways were built by intellectuals who were sent to the countryside," he explained. 'That's why they took so long. What did we know about it?"

He was disgusted, he said. In the fifties, Japan and China were about equal, he went on. In the sixties Japan developed and China went backward. "Now look at the difference!"

I did not agree with his analysis, but instead of contradicting him I asked, "Would you like China to resemble Japan?"

"Frankly, no."

We were still at the window. As the mountains receded into the distance, the houses became more frequent and piled up and became uglier—the unmistakable sign in China that a city is not far off. There was a wide dry riverbed, a depleted tributary of the Dahei River, and tall gawky trees—Mongolian trees, like fakes, unconvincing because they are wholly out of place and too feeble to serve any purpose. Most trees I had seen in China seemed purely symbolic. I saw distant watertowers and chimneys, and not far off, a dust cloud. Beneath that dust cloud was Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia.

It was not really a city—it was a garrison that had been plonked down in the Mongolian prairie, and every building in it looked like a factory. It had been planned and much of it built by the Russians, but even its newer structures looked horrible—the hotel, the guest house, the department stores. I wondered whether it looked this way because of the Mongols themselves—what did tent-dwelling nomads know about city planning? But, no, it was not inhabited by Mongols. It was all Hans in short-sleeved shirts, pouting as they cycled on Hohhot's streets.

"What do you want to see?" Mr. Fang said.

"I want to see a Mongol," I said.

'There isn't time."

He explained that all the Mongols were over there, in the grasslands, in the rugged range they called the "Great Green Mountains." The horsemen, the wrestlers, the archers, the yak herds, were absent from Hohhot. They lived in the wild, which was their right these days as a so-called minority.