Riding the Iron Rooster (51 page)

By the time the train reached Shenyang, after thirteen hours of travel from Harbin, I decided that I had had enough. I could get another train tomorrow and continue on my way. In the meantime I could look at Shenyang.

It was a Chinese city, and therefore a nightmare, and tonight it was thirty below in Shenyang—tiny needles and etchings of ice on every surface. The streets were practically deserted, and on this dark night, in the glare of its few lights, Shenyang had the look of a city depicted in an old black-and-white photograph. It was perfectly still. My problem was that when I exhaled, my glasses became opaque with frost.

It is an official Chinese government statistic that one-third of all Chinese travelers on trains are going to meetings in distant cities. It is one of the bonuses of any job. The pay is lousy but the meetings are held in tourist spots, and so what is supposed to be a business trip is actually a sort of holiday. The same system operates when American companies hold sales conferences in places like Acapulco or the Bahamas.

So many Chinese people travel, even in sub-zero winter weather like this, that one is never sure of getting a hotel room. But in Shenyang I had no problem. The 500-room Phoenix Hotel had only six other guests. It was only seven-thirty at night, but already the dining room was closed. I begged them to open it, and they said I could eat providing I did not require anything very fancy. The specialities of the Phoenix were bear's paw (350 yuan), moose nose, and "fillet of pork in the shape of a club." I had crunchy chicken and cabbage. It was no good, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that for the first time in weeks I was warm. This hotel was heated. My room was full of light fixtures. There was imitation fur on the walls. The toilet didn't work, but the room had a television.

I needed help getting a ticket to Dalian because (but how was I to know this?) the trains to Dalian were always full and tickets were almost unobtainable at short notice. That was how I met Mr. Sun.

Mr. Sun was self-educated. He had spent what should have been his school days on a farm, another casualty of the Cultural Revolution. But he still believed in self-reliance and serving the people, and in order and obedience. In the course of his getting me a train ticket we had several illuminating conversations, and I was glad he was a frank hard-liner, because I sometimes had the feeling that everyone I met resented the past and felt that Mao had created a society of jackasses.

"I think the students have no right to criticize the government," Mr. Sun said, and then launched into a harangue. "I had to teach myself English. I had no chance to go to any university. The government has given these students the right to go to university. It is paying for their education. And what do the students do? They demonstrate against the government! I don't agree with them at all. If they demonstrate they should be removed."

Mr. Sun showed me the gigantic epoxy-resin statue of Mao in Shenyang. It is the apotheosis of Mao the founding father, surrounded by fifty-eight figures that represent all phases of the Chinese revolution. I did not have to be told that it was erected during the Cultural Revolution. Like the Mao statue in Chengdu, it showed the old man beaming his benediction down upon the proletariat. Such statues were expensive. The money for the Chengdu statue had been earmarked for a sports stadium, and the Shenyang one had been built with civic funds.

I asked Mr. Sun whether he thought it was all a waste of public money.

"No," he said.

"Do you think the statue should be pulled down and destroyed like the other Mao statues?"

"There is no need to pull down the statue just because it was put up during the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Sun said. "Mao was a great man and we must not forget his achievement."

There was no question that Mao had been a remarkable man. He had said that he had pondered for years a means by which he might shock the Chinese people, and then he had hit upon the idea of the Cultural Revolution as the perfect shock. But he had overdone it: no one had known when to stop.

Mr. Sun was an interpreter. He was not a very good one—we spoke a mixture of Chinese and English in order to carry on an intelligible conversation. But he surprised me by saying that he would soon be going to Kuwait in the Persian Gulf to be an interpreter for a Chinese work gang.

One of China's newest money-making schemes was the export of skilled laborers on construction projects. They were putting up buildings in Saudi Arabia, and indeed all over the Middle East. It seems very odd that the Chinese are hired as architects and builders, since their own buildings are so undistinguished, not to say monstrosities. It was rather as though Poland were exporting chefs, and Australia sending elocution teachers to England, and Americans running classes in humility or the Japanese in relaxation techniques. Post-1949 Chinese buildings were among the very worst and shakiest and ugliest I had ever seen in my life.

"Won't you have to speak Arabic in Kuwait?"

"No. The other workers are Germans and Koreans and Pakistanis and Americans. Everyone speaks English. That's why I am needed."

I asked him whether he was apprehensive about the new job.

"My friend just came back and he told me the weather is bad."

"It's not much like Shenyang"—minus twenty-eight degrees today, by the way. "What are the people like?"

"Not friendly."

"And the housing?"

"Everyone sleeps in the same room."

"What about the food?"

"He just ate tins."

"Cans of Ma Ling cow's tendon, and White Lotus pigs' trotters in gelatin, and Sunflower pork luncheon meat, and China National Foodstuffs boneless chicken pieces in spicy broth—that kind of thing?"

"Yes. And noodles. I think so."

I imagined crates and cartons stacked to the ceiling of the dormitory where this team of workers lived.

"Is there any advantage to living that way and eating out of cans in the sandstorms of Kuwait?"

"You can buy some things."

"What did your friend buy?"

"One refrigerator. Three television sets—one had remote control. A radio. A video recorder. An oven for the kitchen—microwave. Cassette recorder. And a Honda motorcycle. All Japanese."

It was as if the fellow had won the jackpot on a game show.

"It must have cost him a lot of money," I said.

"He earned one hundred and seven U.S. dollars every month."

And lived on cans of Ma Ling loquats in syrup and Double Happiness dried noodles for two years—pass the Lucky Eagle can opener, Abdul.

"What will he do with all those televisions?"

"One for his mother, one for his brother, and one for himself."

"What are you planning to buy in Kuwait?"

"A Japanese refrigerator."

"What will you do with it?" I asked, because Mr. Sun had already told me that he lived with his parents.

"I will need it, because after two years in Kuwait I will be of marriageable age."

He told me that the legal age for marriage in the north of China is twenty-six for a man and twenty-four for a woman; and that in the south it is a year lower. But I bought a pamphlet of the Chinese marriage laws a few weeks later and it seemed to dispute what Mr. Sun had said.

"Is that all you want—a refrigerator?"

"I also want a video camera. I want to take pictures of Kuwait and of different places in China. Then I can show these pictures to my mother. She has never been anywhere except Shenyang."

It was smoggy in Shenyang that day—a brown sky and icy streets; and it was as cold as Harbin.

Mr. Sun said, "You should stay longer here."

"It's too cold," I said. "I want to go south."

"Where do you come from in the United States?"

"Not very far from Portsmouth, New Hampshire."

He looked puzzled. He didn't have a clue. Why did so many Chinese have an intimate knowledge of ancient history, the legendary Yellow Emperor and the Tang Dynasty, and have no information at all about more recent Chinese history?

I said, "Does the Treaty of Portsmouth mean anything to you?"

It was the treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War and that gave Shenyang—then called Mukden—to the Japanese. It was only eighty years ago, probably in the lifetime of Mr. Sun's mother. This treaty was suggested by Teddy Roosevelt and signed in that little town—actually in the Portsmouth Naval Yard, which happens to be just over the state line, in Kittery, Maine, but I felt that would only confuse Mr. Sun.

He didn't know anything about it. He wanted me to see what Shenyang was famous for now—not only its "three great treasures" (ginseng, sable pelts and furry antlers), but its factories and its automobile assembly plant. Just as the Chinese make steam engines and spittoons and quill pens, so they also make brand-new old cars—the Red Flag is a slightly bloated and swollen version of an old Packard. I declined a visit to Fushun, to see China's largest open-pit mine—more than four miles across and a thousand feet deep. In this smog and frosty air it would be impossible to see the bottom, much less get a glimpse of the other side of the mine. I wanted to leave this great dark city.

Mr. Sun persisted. Did I know that the Liaoning Tourist Board offered specialist tours? There were cycling tours. There were "local dishes tasting tours." There were "convalescence tours," and "recuperation tours"—"traditional Chinese physical therapies are applied for better treatment and recuperation results." Far from visiting Shenyang to get well, it seemed to me a place where even the healthiest person would end up with bronchitis.

These tours were a consequence of the brisk competition among the various provincial tourist boards. Mr. Sun also mentioned one called a "lawyers' tour."

"Any foreign friend who is interested in Chinese laws and our legal system can come on this tour, attend courts in session and can visit prisons," he said. "This provides them a chance to understand another aspect of China."

That was one I would have taken, but I could not do it at short notice. We talked about the legal system for a while, and I asked Mr. Sun—as I had other Chinese—about capital punishment. He was an enthusiast. But he claimed that the condemned prisoner was shot in the head, while I maintained the bullet was aimed at the back of the neck.

I asked him to reflect on capital punishment in China, the 10,000 corpses that had accumulated in the past three years (and they had just added prostitution to the list of capital crimes, so there would be many more).

"Capital punishment in China," he said, and paused, "is swift."

I was overcome by the cold weather, by the sight of people cycling through the snow with frost on their faces, by the bitter air, by temperatures that made me feel bruised.

Mr. Sun got me a ticket out of town, but when we took the car to the station, he twisted his face and said, "That driver is ominous. The last time I was with him he crashed his taxi."

It was seven-thirty on a frosty morning in sooty old Mukden. We had half an hour to get to the station. We immediately confronted a traffic jam (trolleybus with its poles off the wires blocking the road) and were held up for fifteen minutes. Then we started again, and a rumble and thump from the rear wheel slewed the car: a flat tire.

"I told you. This driver is ominous."

"How will I get to the station?"

"You can walk," he said. "But first you must pay the driver."

"Why should I pay him? He didn't get me to the station. I might miss the train!"

"In this case you pay ten yuan, not fifteen. Cheaper! You save money!"

I threw the money at the ominous driver and hurried to the station, slipping on the ice. I caught the train with a minute to spare—another refrigerated train, but at least it was going south.

On this train I met Richard Woo, who worked for Union Carbide, and had been in and around Shenyang for almost two years. I asked him what his qualifications were for this assignment.

"I was in Saskatchewan."

Ah, that explained everything. He also knew all the lingo. "We sell them the design package.... We provide input on the plant." But Union Carbide did not get involved in the construction of the plants. He had views on Chinese workers.

"The work mentality is quite different from that in Europe or America. They are slow, the pay is little. The Chinese are not bad workers, but the system is bad. If they have incentives they perform better."

I was not planning to ask him what Union Carbide was making in Shenyang, because I did not think I would understand it; but I was bored, so I asked.

"Antifreeze," Mr. Woo said.

The train continued through the flat, snowy fields, all of them showing plow marks and furrows and stubble beneath the ice crust. There were factories, and they looked beautiful, blurred and softened and silvered by frost and the vapor from their chimneys.

There might have been berths on this train, but if so, I didn't see them. I was afraid that if I got up someone would snatch my seat—I had seen it happen. I did not want to stand for six hours—it was almost 300 miles more to Dalian. As it was we were jammed in, shoulder to shoulder—the smokers, the noodle eaters, the spitters, the bronchial victims, the orange peelers.

There was no dining car. A woman wearing a nightcap came around with a pushcart, selling dried fish and heavy blobs of sponge cake—the favorite snacks of the Chinese traveler. I chose the fish. It was tough and tasted (and looked) like an old innersoie—a Chinese innersole, and a minority one at that. On the wrapper it was described as "Dried Fish With Minority Flavor."

I was still cold. The cold was mystifying. I hated it like boredom or bad air. It was like aches and pains—perhaps a fear of death informed my feeling and made the cold frightening, because degree zero is death. I found it dehumanizing, and my heart went out to the people who had to live and work in Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning. And yet it is well known that the spirit among the people in these provinces is especially bright—the hinterland of China is famous for having high morale, the people regarding themselves as pioneers.