Riding the Iron Rooster

"It's a very hard language," Mr. Jie said. He had been in the region for thirty-one years—he was also from the east, Dalian, on the Gulf of Bohai.

Both men shared the Han conceit, like the British in India, which this Chinese rule in Xinjiang strongly resembled: better that these local folks learn to speak Chinese than that we should grapple with their language.

We were still eating. It was local food, they boasted. And I realized as we reached the last of the dishes that they were paying me the highest possible compliment: it was a meal without rice or noodles or bread. Such stodge was usually offered to plump out a poorer meal; but this was all delicacies.

"Will you go back home when you retire?"

"No, I'm staying here," Mr. Jiao said. "My children are here. This is my home now. I will die here."

We talked about the best railway routes through China. They said they liked going to Xian because that route took in the most interesting parts of China and was the most atmospheric.

"You're talking about the Silk Road," I said. "Ancient history."

Mr. Jiao said, "Yes. Recent history is not very interesting."

Remembering what Mr. Yang said about the Cultural Revolution in Urumchi, I asked whether it was true that it had been violent here.

"It was very bad," Mr. Jiao said. His eyes had become very red and tiny. He made a sweeping gesture with his dark hand. "Very bad."

"Did it disrupt the trains?"

"Yes! For twenty-four days at one time. That was in 1968. But there were lots of disruptions and much worse things. You see, the Red Guards were not one group. There were a number of different factions. Two factions were fighting in Urumchi."

"Fighting in what way? You mean arguing?"

"First it was arguing—over the correct interpretation of what Mao had said. One work unit claimed to be better Maoists than the other. They accused the others of being rightists. And then, after the arguments got them nowhere, they fought with guns. Yes, guns. Bang-bang. People died." His eyes went weepy looking, but it was the wine. "It was very bad."

"Do you think it will come back—a second Cultural Revolution?"

"Absolutely not!" he thundered. "Never!"

"Did Mao ever visit Urumchi?"

"No. Too busy, I think," he said, and glanced at Mr. Jie. "But Zhou Enlai came here and traveled all over." He said it in the affectionate way that Chinese always referred to Zhou. "And recently Deng Xiaoping visited here. He had a good time. He was really impressed."

By now we were all drunk enough to talk about war and friendship. I mentioned the Japanese and said I thought they were planning to take over the world by dominating the world economy because they had failed to do so by military means. And how did it feel as a Chinese to be occupied again by a nation that had been driven out in the 1940s?

"We have a saying in China," Mr. Jiao said. "'You can't attack everyone, so you have to be careful of everyone.'"

The last dishes were taken from the table. Mr. Jiao stood up a little unsteadily and we thanked each other. There were no other formalities; no small talk; no lingering. Nothing is more abrupt than the end of a Chinese banquet.

In succeeding days I discovered that this part of Xinjiang was being opened up for oil exploration. Already it was producing an enormous amount of oil—some oil was being exported to the United States. To the southeast, in the Lop Nor Desert, atom bombs were being tested. There had even been a noisy protest in Peking by university students, but the police had put a stop to that, and the atomic testing had continued.

Most of China's minerals came from Xinjiang, and from the numerous radar dishes on the mountains it was easy to conclude that, strategically, it was an important area. I went to factories and became gloomy, seeing women painstakingly making silk carpets with very ordinary designs: one square yard a month, a whole year to make a not-very-pretty carpet. And there were jade carvers in Urumchi who were doing something similar, taking weeks to make fifty-dollar grinning Buddhas in jade, or six months of cutting and polishing to make a jade dish. I had the impression the stuff didn't even sell particularly well.

No one seemed to mind. Urumchi was in a little time warp, everything happening late. Breakfast was at nine-thirty, dinner at nine at night. At about ten-thirty every night the sun broke through the clouds and shone brilliantly until after eleven, and then at midnight the whole place suddenly went cold.