To the Ends of the Earth

The toilet on the train looked as though a child had designed it, too. It was a hole in the floor about a foot across. Well, I had seen squat toilets before, but this one was traveling at about fifty miles an hour through the ice and snow of northern China. There was no pipe or baffle. If you looked down it you saw ice streaking past. A gust of freezing air rushed out of the hole. Anyone fool enough to use this thing would be frostbitten on a part of the body that is seldom frostbitten. And yet the passengers trooped into this refrigerated bum-freezer. When they came out their eyes were tiny and their teeth were clenched, as though they had just been pinched very hard.

We were still jogging along, stopping frequently. And the doors opened and closed with the same pneumatic gasp as those on a refrigerator, each time producing a cold blast through the coach. I hated having to get up, because when I sat down again my seat froze me.

It surprised me to see children standing outside their houses, watching the train go by. They wore thin jackets, no hats or gloves. Many of them had bright red cheeks. They had spiky unwashed hair and they wore cloth slippers. They looked very hardy, and they yelled at the train as it passed their icebound villages.

The mountains in the distance were the southernmost peaks of the Lesser Khingan Range, and the foreground was all forest. Most of these settlements were simply overgrown lumber camps. One of the centers of logging activity is Langxiang. But I had also chosen it because it has a narrow-gauge railway that goes deep into the forest and carries logs back to town to be milled.

It was hardly a town. It was a sprawling one-story village with an immense lumber yard at its center and a main street where people with scarves wrapped around their faces stood all day in the cold selling meat and vegetables. One day in Langxiang I saw a man standing behind a square of cloth which held six frozen rats and a stack of rats’ tails. Were things so bad in Langxiang that they ate rats and rats’ tails?

“Do you eat these?” I asked.

“No, no,” came the muffled voice through the frosted scarf. “I sell medicine.”

“These rats are medicine?”

“No, no!” The man’s skin was almost black from the cold and the dry air.

And then he began speaking again, but I had no idea what he was saying in this local dialect. As he spoke the ice crystals thawed on his scarf.

Mr. Tian said, “He doesn’t sell rats. He sells rat poison. He shows these dead rats as proof that his poison is good.”

We had arrived at Langxiang in the middle of the afternoon, just as it was growing dark. This was a northern latitude in winter: night came early. I stepped from the cold train onto the freezing platform, and then we went to the guest house, which was also cold—but the clammy indoor cold that I found harder to bear than the icy outdoors. With curtains over the windows and the lights dim, it was like being in an underground tomb.

“It’s very cold in here,” I said to Mr. Cong, the manager.

“It will get warmer.”

“When?”

“In three or four months.”

“I mean, in the hotel,” I said.

“Yes. In the hotel. And all over Langxiang.”

I was jumping up and down to restore my circulation. Mr. Tian was simply standing patiently.

“What about a room?” I said.

He said something very rapidly to Mr. Cong.

“Do you want a clean room or a regular one?” Mr. Tian asked.

“I think I’ll have a clean one for a change.”

He did not remark on my sarcasm. He said, “Ah, a clean one,” and shook his head, as if this were a tall order. “Then you will have to wait.”

The wind blew through the lobby and when it hit the curtain that had been hung across the main door it filled it like a spinnaker.

“We can have dinner,” Mr. Cong said.

“It’s not even five o’clock,” I said.

“Five o’clock. Dinnertime. Ha-ha!” This ha-ha meant: Rules are rules. I don’t make them, so you should not be difficult.

The dining room in the Langxiang Guesthouse was the coldest room I had entered so far in the whole of Heilongjiang Province. I yanked my hat tight and then sat on my hands and shivered. I had put my thermometer on the table: thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit.

Mr. Cong said he was used to the cold. He was not even wearing a hat! He was from the far north, where he had gone as a settler in the fifties to work on a commune that produced corn and grain. Although he was not very old, he was something of an antique in Chinese terms. As a commune worker in one of the remotest parts of China he found the new reforms bewildering. And he had four children, now regarded as a shameful number. “They punish us for having more than two,” he said, and seemed very puzzled. “You might lose your job, or be transferred, as punishment.”

From the utter boredom on Mr. Tian’s face—but his boredom was a form of serenity—I could tell that Mr. Cong and Mr. Tian had nothing at all in common. In China, the generation gap has a specific meaning and is something to be reckoned with.