Riding the Iron Rooster

I declined a visit to Yijinhuoluo, the tomb of Genghis Khan (1162–1227), which the Chinese built recently as a sop to Mongolian national pride. It is a whitewashed yurt, in concrete, in the middle of nowhere.

"I want to see how people live here," I said.

Mr. Fang took me to the Five Pagoda Temple, which was a stack of defaced Buddhas, still showing traces of Cultural Revolution vandalism. But it was high enough for seeing the roofs of the old town, and the crooked lanes, and the minarets of the mosque.

"Let's go there," I said, pointing.

But Mr. Fang maneuvered me into the car, and we drove out of town to the tomb of Wang Zhaojun ("an imperial concubine who crossed the desert 2000 years ago to marry a minority chief in an effort to secure peace between the Han Dynasty and the native Xiongnus"). It was a man-made hill 150 feet high. He urged me to admire the ingenuity of the hill—think of all the digging!

"I would like to see some people," I said.

He took me to a pagoda, a lamasery, and then to the mosque.

"How many Muslims are there here?" I asked a man in a skullcap.

"Thousands."

"Have any been to Mecca?"

"One," he said. 'The government sent him last year."

The mosque was decorated in the Chinese style, with curved-tile roofs and red-painted eaves. In the center of the main building, high above the door, there was a clock face—a large one, that gave the mosque the look of a railway station. But this was all painted, and even the time was painted on it. The time was perpetually 12:45. No one knew why.

The following day I sneaked downstairs, skipped breakfast, and was on my way out the front door of the hotel when Mr. Fang hurried towards me, making a noise. It was a kind of laughter. By now I was able to differentiate between the various Chinese laughs. There were about twenty. None of them had the slightest suggestion of humor. Some were nervous, some were respectful, many were warnings. The loud honking one was a sort of Chinese anxiety attack. Another, a brisk titter, meant something had gone badly wrong. Mr. Fang's laugh this morning resembled the bark of a seal. It meant Hold on there! and it stopped me in my tracks.

"Where are you going, Mr. Paul?"

"For a walk."

Mr. Fang conferred with his Hohhot deputy. My walk was given official sanction, and I was driven about a hundred yards to the People's Park and released. It was not a large park. It was surrounded by high walls. Its artificial lake had dried up. It was very dusty. Here, I walked. Even at this early hour there were Chinese couples smooching. The poor things have nowhere else to go in China except public parks. I said to myself: It is wrong to expect too much from a Mongolian city.

Mr. Fang and his deputy were waiting for me by the turnstile at the exit gate.

"You enjoyed your walk?"

"Very much," I said.

"Now what would you like to do?"

"I think I'll go back and wash up," I said. "I need a shave."

Mr. Fang laughed in consternation and told me to wait. And he held another conference with his Hohhot deputy, while I stood, frowning at the city. There were no clouds overhead. The sky was blue, the earth brown, the air smelled of dust. It was a typical Mongolian day.

Mr. Fang gestured for me to get into the car. We drove across town to what I first took to be a factory and then realized was a hotel. It smelled of peeling paint and rotting carpets. I was escorted to a room where there were barber chairs and sinks. A young man approached holding a towel and twitching it.

Mr. Fang said, "He is very young and inexperienced, but he will try."

The young man smiled and worked open the cutthroat razor that he had been concealing with his towel.

"I can shave myself," I said, and did so, at one of the sinks.

Mr. Fang laughed: nervous admiration and a sort of pent-up anxiety. I could tell he was worried by what I would ask to do next. I spent the rest of the day trying to elude him and his deputy, and at last, in the market, I succeeded. It was late in the afternoon. We were all (Mr. Fang, his deputy, the driver and I) admiring a stack of vegetables, and when I saw they were transfixed by a shaggy mound of blue cabbages I slipped away.

I found the bird sellers and had an urge to buy every one of their birds and let the poor things go. There was once a Chinese festival—The Liberation of Living Creatures—that encouraged such practices. The Chinese are bird-mad. They pay large sums for the rarest birds, and they keep them in tiny ornate cages, or else they eat them. This is not bird fancying exactly; they covet the birds but they are not sentimental about them. At the Hohhot bird market there were people carrying home finches that had been stuffed into small plastic bags, and the new owners simply clutched them in their sweaty hands. I said it was a little hard on the birds, but they showed me that they had compassionately poked holes in the plastic bags.