Riding the Iron Rooster

The gulping, wheezing steam engine, with its characteristic rattles and shakes, released a dragon of black smoke and it steamed onward through Ningxia. And once from the upraised track I saw a town that was all bungalows and yards—like a parody of an American suburb; indeed, like my hometown, Medford, made out of mud.

In the dining car the wind made a low, fuzzy moan through the rusty window screens. It was lunchtime, and we all had our snouts in the rice bowls. It was greasy spinach today, and little withered worms of pork, and knuckles of nameless meat.

I shared my table with Mr. Lu, on his way to Lanzhou. He was in his twenties and college educated. Perhaps it was because we were in the dining car that he began saying how people behaved very greedily and selfishly these days.

"They say, 'Everyone else is doing it—why shouldn't I?'"

I said, "Presumably it's because the lid is off, and people have more freedom." And I said that I had read that it was usually the case that when tyranny was relaxed people behaved more recklessly—sometimes sudden freedom brought chaos. But that wasn't an argument against freedom.

"I don't know," Mr. Lu said. "But we have never seen this sort of thing before. The Chinese even in bad times behaved very responsibly so as not to shame their families. But now it's every man for himself."

I said that on the whole I had found the Chinese very polite and helpful.

"It depends on how old they are," Mr. Lu said. 'The worst ones are those who were about ten or fifteen at the start of the Cultural Revolution. They were robbed of everything. They had no childhood, no education, no family, no training, no happiness at all. They are about thirty or forty years old now, and they are very angry—angry with everyone. They feel cheated. I know a woman in Lanzhou who said, 'If the city council doesn't give me an apartment I'll go find one, and I'll move in, and I won't budge.' I told her that was illegal. She said, 'I don't care.' That's not Chinese. But she was about thirty-five. She had lost everything in the Cultural Revolution. We are living in a very strange time."

"This train isn't so strange," I said.

He smiled at me. He said, "Not long ago on this train I saw an incident. A man in Hard Class was lying across one seat. That means he was taking up three sitting places. The other passengers were angry. But the man would not move. Finally, they got a policeman, who told the man to move.

"The man said no. The policeman said, 'Move.'

"'What are you going to do about it?' the man said.

"Of course, the policeman could do nothing if the man didn't cooperate. But that was very unusual—very un-Chinese. This man was thirty or so—that explained it to me. The lost generation. The interesting thing is that he did not move. The policeman went away. He had failed. He had even tried to use logic. 'You bought one ticket, but you are using three seats'—that sort of thing.

"'I don't care,' the man said. 'So what?' That's the attitude among that age group."

"Do you think it's serious?"

"Yes. And it frightens me," Mr. Lu said.

Mr. Lu asked me where I was going. I told him that I was headed into Xinjiang, and he made a face—a slight smile of pain. He said he had no desire to go into the desert. The cities of Turfan and Urumchi held no interest for him.

"If I had the time and the money I would go to Hangzhou or Suzhou," he said, expressing the common Chinese wish to go to a place where there were a million other tourists. "Or Guangzhou," he added—another Disneyland.

But to the question Where would you go? the Chinese I spoke to rarely named a place that was outside the Great Wall, reflecting the ancient fear and prejudice that it was all monkeys and hairy bastards and savages beyond the Wall.

There were two dozen Chinese college students on the train, going to Lanzhou from Peking to take part in a swimming meet. They were going Hard Class, and they seemed to enjoy being tumbled together in the dormitory coaches. At their technical college they lived just like this, eight to a room, with laundry hanging everywhere, and they slept on shelves that went up the wall.

As we passed from Ningxia into Gansu I talked to them. Some where shy and some frisked like kittens and others just glowered at my nosey questions. I asked most of them whether they believed in life after death. All of them said firmly no.

"But most Americans do," one said, and the rest of them agreed that this was so.

I had asked them that because we had begun by talking about dreams. They told me dreams they had—about guilt, persecution, being naked, being pursued.

"Everyone has those dreams," I said. "I used to dream about being chased by a monster that looked like a huge potato. And I still have dreams about suddenly realizing that I have to take an important exam that I'm unprepared for."