To the Ends of the Earth

I sampled the pigeon, the snake soup, the muntjac, the crane, the fish, the turtle. There was something dreadful and depressing about this food, partly because it tasted good and partly because China had so few wild animals. These creatures were all facing extinction in this country. And I had always hated the Chinese appetite for rare animals—for bear’s paws and fish lips and caribou’s nose. That article I had read about the Chinese killing their diminishing numbers of tigers to use—superstitiously—as remedies for impotence and rheumatism had disgusted me. I was disgusted now with myself. This sort of eating was the recreation of people who were rich and spoiled.

“What do you think of this?” I asked Mr. Jiang.

“I like the turtle with bamboo,” he said. “The muntjac is a bit salty.”

“You’ve had this before?”

“Oh yes.”

“What does the driver think?” I said. I was trying to describe to myself the taste of the snake and the crane and the pigeon. I laughed, thinking that whenever someone ate something exotic they always said “chicken.”

The silent driver, endlessly stuffing himself, made a dive for the turtle, tonged some into his bowl, and gobbled it. He did the same to the wawa fish.

“He likes the fish,” Mr. Jiang said.

The driver did not glance up. He ate like a predator in the wild—he paused, very alert, his eyes flicking, and then he darted for the food and ate it in one swift movement of his claw-like chopsticks.

Afterward, slightly nauseated from the forbidden food, I felt like a Hindu who had just eaten hamburger. I said I would walk home. Mr. Jiang tried to drag me into the car, but I resisted. Then, hiding his sheepishness in hearty guffaws, he handed me the bill: 200 yuan.

That was four months’ salary for these young men. It was a huge amount of money. It was the foreigner’s airfare from Guilin to Peking. It was the price of two of the best bicycles in China, the Flying Pigeon Deluxe. It was more than a night at the Great Wall Sheraton. It represented a good radio. It was two years’ rent of a studio apartment in Shanghai. It was the cost of an antique silver bowl in the bazaar at Turfan.

I paid Mr. Jiang. I wanted a reaction from him. There was none. That was for form’s sake. The Chinese make a practice of not reacting to any sort of hospitality. But I persisted.

“Is the driver impressed with this meal?”

“Not at all,” Mr. Jiang said. “He has eaten this many times before. Ha! Ha!”

It rang in my ears—one of the few genuine laughs I heard in China.

It meant, We can always fool a foreigner.

I was the hairy, big-nosed devil from the back of beyond, one of those foreigners (wei-guo ren), whom the Chinese regard as the yokels of the world. We lived in crappy little countries that were squeezed at the edge of the Middle Kingdom. The places we inhabited were insignificant but bizarre. Once the Chinese believed that we tied ourselves into bunches so that we would not be snatched away by eagles. Some of our strange societies were composed entirely of women, who became pregnant by staring at their shadows. We had noses like anteaters. We were hairier than monkeys. We smelled like corpses. One odd fenestrated race had holes in their chests, through which poles were thrust when they carried one another around. Most of these notions were no longer current, but they had given rise to self-deceiving proverbs, which sometimes seemed true. And then the laughter was real.

Shaoshan: “Where the Sun Rises”

“UNTIL NOW VISITORS DID NOT COME HERE TO LOOK AT the scenery,” Mr. Li had said. How true. They had come as pilgrims, first to walk the seventy-five miles west to Shaoshan, and then—after the railway line was built in the late sixties—to take the strangest train in China. They had come believing the Cultural Revolution slogan THE SUN RISES IN SHAOSHAN (TAIYANG CONG SHAOSHAN SHENGQI), which was a metaphor for Mao Zedong’s having been born there. The Chinese had once named themselves “Shaoshan” in Mao’s honor, and I ran into at least one Li Shaoshan.

In the sixties there were several trains every hour. Now there is one train a day. It leaves at six in the morning from Changsha and arrives three hours later at Shaoshan. It returns from Shaoshan in the evening, just an old puffer on a forgotten branch line, which had outlived its purpose.