Riding the Iron Rooster (31 page)

We were joined by his assistant, Mr. Jie, who—because he was an underling—did not say very much. After the formalities ("We are honored to have you") I realized that this would be a large meal. The cold dishes were set out and ignored; that meant there were about a dozen more courses to come.

I asked Mr. Jiao about the railway. What were the problems in building and maintaining it? He said the worst problem was the sandstorms, the wind that often grew to force 9 or 10. A cold wind met a hot wind in the
gobi
and caused great turbulence. And then there were the tunnels through the Tian Shan—they had taken years to cut.

"You see, we did all this by ourselves. We had no help."

"I thought the Soviets helped," I said.

"They planned the line to Urumchi. They did the survey—but it was an aerial survey. They didn't foresee all the difficulties. And of course our friendship with them was broken in 1960."

"So you were on your own then?"

"Yes. And what made it especially hard was that they took all their materials away. The tracks, the equipment, the wood, everything. Just loaded it and took it across the border. And they took their plans, too! Rolled up their plans and went home with them. No one helped us!"

"But you stuck to the original plans?"

"We had no choice. We kept to the same route and finished the line in 1963."

I said, "The line is headed straight for the Soviet border."

"That was the idea," Mr. Jiao said. "And we're still building."

"You're going to connect the line to one in the Soviet Union?"

"Yes. At Alataw Shankou [the Dzungarian Gate]. We have built as far as Usu. There's some dispute about who is supposed to build the connecting line, but we expect it to be done by 1990."

Then Mr. Jie piped up, "There used to be a slogan, This year Urumchi, next year the border!'"

"When was that?"

"Nineteen fifty-eight."

Meanwhile, dishes of food were being put on the table, and sampled, and replaced with others. There was peppery Xinjiang chicken, and lamb, and cucumbers with red peppers, and mushrooms and white fungus, and the best dish I had in China, which was chili duck smoked in jasmine tea, rubbed with rice wine, air dried, sprinkled with scallions, steamed and then deep fried. I made a note of the name:
zhang cha yazi.

"You like the duck," Mr. Jie said, noticing my greed and heaping my plate with more.

I said, "If I met someone who could make that dish I would marry her."

The two men stared at me and nodded, which was probably what I deserved for the silly remark.

To change the subject, I said, "Do Hans ever marry Uighurs?"

"Very seldom. You see, the Uighurs are afraid that if they marry outside their people it will reduce their numbers. They try to avoid it. Of course, sometimes a Uighur man marries a Han girl. But a Han man cannot marry a Uighur girl."

"What do you mean 'cannot'?"

"It is against the law. The government forbids it."

I guessed that he meant the Xinjiang Uighur government. This was an autonomous region, with its own peculiar laws and its own parliament in Urumchi.

"Anyway, they're Muslims and we're not," Mr. Jiao said.

He said that he had been in Urumchi for twenty-eight years—had come as a sort of pioneer in a voluntary Maoist scheme. I asked him whether he spoke Uighur.

"Very little," he said.

"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.

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?"

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.

Yet whatever objections I could devise against the trains, they were nothing compared to the horrors of air travel in China. I had a small dose of it when I left Urumchi for Lanzhou—there was no point in retracing my steps on The Iron Rooster. I was told to be at the airport three hours early—that is, at seven in the morning; and the plane left five hours late, at three in the afternoon. It was an old Russian jet, and its metal covering was wrinkled and cracked like the tinfoil in a used cigarette pack. The seats were jammed so closely together my knees hurt and the circulation to my feet was cut off. Every seat was taken, and every person was heavily laden with carry-on baggage—big skull-cracking bundles that fell out of the overhead rack. Even before the plane took off people were softly and soupily vomiting, with their heads down and their hands folded, in the solemn and prayerful way that the Chinese habitually puke. After two hours we were each given an envelope that contained three caramel candies, some gum and three sticky boiled sweets; a piece of cellophane almost concealed a black strand of dried beef that looked like oakum and tasted like decayed rope; and (because the Chinese can be optimistic) a toothpick. Two hours later a girl wearing an old mailman's uniform went around with a tray. Thinking it might be better food, I snatched one of the little parcels—it was a key ring. The plane was very hot and then so cold I could see my breath. It creaked like a schooner under sail. Another two hours passed. I thought, I am out of my mind. An announcement was made, saying in a gargling way that we would shortly be landing. At this point everyone except the pukers stood up and began yanking their bundles out of the racks; and they remained standing, pushing, tottering and vaguely complaining—deaf to the demands that they sit down and strap themselves in—as the plane bounced, did wheelies on the runway and limped to Lanzhou terminal. Never again.

"What you think of Chinese airplane?" Mr. Fang asked in a rare burst of English.

"Lamentable."

"Thank you!" he said. "Maybe we take plane to Xian?"

"You take the plane. I'll take the train."

"Tomorrow?" he said hopefully.

"Tonight."

Mr. Fang seemed weary. If I tired him out he might leave me alone. He was not actively offensive; but it made me uneasy always to see him ten steps behind me, silently looking on, clutching his dictionary, and now probably looking up the meaning of the word
lamentable.

There was a dwarf at Lanzhou Station—an exceedingly small dwarf, less than three feet tall. At first I thought he was a child, but he had a wrinkled face and a sort of frowning and anxious expression; a tiny hat, tiny slippers. He walked very briskly. That was the first giveaway—children never walk with such conviction. And then people began to stare. I followed this dwarf through the station.

People pointed, some shrieked and called out. A Chinese man fumbled with a camera but was not quick enough to take a picture. A child saw the dwarf and yelled to his mother. And then, strangest of all, he was seen by a group of about fifteen deaf-and-dumb people. They were enthusing noiselessly and wildly signaling—pointing at the stern little man. They tried to surround him as they gesticulated and mimed their fascination, not realizing how grotesque they were in their dumb-show ridicule and that this dwarf was just a person on his way home. Then there were hoots of laughter, from Chinese who found the deaf-and-dumb people funny and the dwarf hilarious. The dwarf hurried away, while the crowd stared at these handicapped people who were speaking to each other like Siamese dancers, flicking their fingers. The Chinese never seemed to hide their interest in anything. They stared frankly—they put their faces against my book as I read it; when I opened my wallet, they peered in; when I unzipped my bag, a crowd gathered to look at my laundry. Chinese were seldom alone; usually they were part of a watching crowd, which made it all possible. They were riveted by the freakish and the pathetic.