Riding the Iron Rooster

I went into the desert to look at camels, and then northeast to the Bogda Shan, with their peaks like rocky steeples, and then to Tianchi (The Heavenly Pool), a lake about 2000 feet up a mountainside. Above it, the snowy peak of Bogda Feng (18,000 feet) and the other peaks in the range looked like the lower jaw of a wolf, white and black fangs in a long, angular jaw. There were noodle stalls and Young Pioneers and Chinese tourists at the end of the road, but fifty feet beyond that there was no one—nothing but whispering pines and birds singing. I had not seen anything prettier than this, and while such a piney wilderness did not look Chinese, it did not look European either: the settlements on the road and in the woods were Mongolian yurts and cabins and tiny villages, with those same bowlegged horsemen in boots and women wearing shawls and red-cheeked children. I spoke Chinese to a man who might have been a Kazakh and he just laughed.

I met a Chinese man named Mr. Cheng near the lake. He had given himself the English name "Tom" after reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and when he had done so everyone in his office decided to do the same thing—take on an English first name. He worked in The Agricultural Bank in Altay, in the distant north of Xinjiang, in a little corner of China that was pinched by Russia on one side and Outer Mongolia on the other.

In that place (the bank), Tom Cheng said, "We have Mike, Julian, Jan, Wayne and Bob."

Tom said he was thirty-four, which was just the age of the generation that had been involved in the Cultural Revolution—he would have been about sixteen at the height of it. But had the Cultural Revolution penetrated to the remote town of Altay?

"Oh, yes!" Tom said. "We had it there. I was in middle school."

"Did you have Red Guards?"

"Yes. I was a Red Guard! In my own school! I was an organizer!"

Tom Cheng wore a yellow sweater and Chinese blue jeans and white sneakers. He carried a portable radio and a plastic holdall stenciled Shanghai. All this was regarded as stylish. All he lacked was sunglasses.

I said, "Did you criticize your teachers for being rightists?"

"Yes!" he said eagerly.

"Did you have a Little Red Book?"

"Yes. The Thoughts of Chairman Mao."

"Did you sing songs?"

"Oh, yes. 'The East Is Red' and the others—all the songs."

"Did you criticize running dogs and people who took the capitalist road?"

"Yes!" Why was he smiling?

"Did you break things in Altay?"

His face fell. He paused a moment and peered at me, looking sheepish, and took a deep breath. He said, "You were in China then, eh?"

8. Train Number 104 to Xian

Chinese trains could be bad. In twelve months of traveling—almost forty trains—I never saw one with a toilet that wasn't piggy. The loudspeakers plonked and nagged for eighteen hours a day—a hangover from the days of Maoist mottos. The conductors could be tyrants, and the feeding frenzy in the dining car was often not worth the trouble. But there were compensations—the kindly conductors, the occasional good meal, the comfortable berth, the luck of the draw; and, when all else failed, there was always a chubby thermos of hot water for making tea.