When we left Hohhot, and were waiting for the train to arrive, I reminded Mr. Fang of our agreement not to travel together in the same compartment. He said that was fine with him. There was a commotion behind us—fifteen shuffling men escorting a high official across the platform. They were seeing him off. He was a stern, skinny man in a blue cap and baggy blue suit; his shapeless clothes alone marked him out as a hard-liner—the conservatives (always referred to in China as "leftists") still have not abandoned their Maoist look of austerity, and this one had an unusually fearsome look, as if daring anyone to laugh at his flappy pants.
His underlings were effusive in the insincerely solicitous way that arouses either contempt or pity—or indifference, as in the case of this official. All this bootlicking hardly made him blink, and he turned his back on them as they slurpingly said good-bye.
When I found my compartment, this man was in it, already seated and making tea. I had come to see that there was even a "leftist" way of making tea. The real hard-liners carried old chubby jam jars and reused the tea leaves again and again, seldom changing them but letting them pile up until the jar was half full of sodden leaves. I put a pinch of green tea into the teacup that was provided free by China Railways—surely he knew that?—and poured the hot water from the thermos, also provided free of charge.
"Hello," I said. "How are you?"
He nodded, saying nothing.
"Are you going to Yinchuan or Lanzhou?"
He stared at me.
"I'm going to Lanzhou," I said, and in English, "God, you're a friendly guy. But don't mind me—I'm just going to curl up with this book."
It was The Gobi Desert, by Mildred Cable, an account of her Chinese travels in the twenties, when she went up and down the deserts of Turkestan in a horse-drawn cart.
The sun reddened and dissolved into the dust of the Mongolian plain as we set off, jogging westward. In the morning the blue baggy man was gone, and I guessed he had gotten off in the Mongolian city of Baotou.
We followed the course of the Yellow River, its big loop in Mongolia and its straighter progress in the stricken province of Ningxia. No one had a good word for Ningxia, and I could see why. It was a parched and windblown place, with a tiny population, many of them the tenaciously backward-looking Hui people—Muslims. Privately, the Chinese regarded them as filthy and superstitious, but publicly they praised their quaint habits. The Chinese felt rather guilty about the Hui people. Knowing of the Hui horror of pigs and pork, officials in the time of Cultural Revolution put Huis in charge of pigsties and made them swineherds and bacon slicers.
We had left the sparse plains and grassy mountains of Mongolia and were now among big, bulky, Irish-looking mountains, scattered with sheep and goats. All the slopes were worn down and stony, with gullies and ravines and chopped-out sluices and quarries—as if sometime in the remote past water had rushed through this place and taken every live thing away, and the topsoil too. It was spectacular desolation.
The plain returned again and was as flat as a billiard table. The railway tracks were dead straight, and the steam locomotive pulling the train poured soot behind it. I kept the window closed when I realized that the black flakes were accumulating on me and Mildred. I decided that this landscape of straight lines had inspired people to build houses with lots of right angles—flat roofs and straight square walls. There seemed something melancholy in such enormous distances, and yet nearly everything that was plowable had been plowed. But I did not see anyone in those hot fields. The sun moved slowly through the high blue sky, and beneath it everything looked torpid, in tones of light brown. There were very few towns, but each one was a dismal anticlimax: square factories, square houses.
The gulping, wheezing steam engine, with its characteristic rattles and shakes, released a dragon of black smoke and it steamed onward through Ningxia. And once from the upraised track I saw a town that was all bungalows and yards—like a parody of an American suburb; indeed, like my hometown, Medford, made out of mud.
In the dining car the wind made a low, fuzzy moan through the rusty window screens. It was lunchtime, and we all had our snouts in the rice bowls. It was greasy spinach today, and little withered worms of pork, and knuckles of nameless meat.
I shared my table with Mr. Lu, on his way to Lanzhou. He was in his twenties and college educated. Perhaps it was because we were in the dining car that he began saying how people behaved very greedily and selfishly these days.
"They say, 'Everyone else is doing it—why shouldn't I?'"
I said, "Presumably it's because the lid is off, and people have more freedom." And I said that I had read that it was usually the case that when tyranny was relaxed people behaved more recklessly—sometimes sudden freedom brought chaos. But that wasn't an argument against freedom.
"I don't know," Mr. Lu said. "But we have never seen this sort of thing before. The Chinese even in bad times behaved very responsibly so as not to shame their families. But now it's every man for himself."
I said that on the whole I had found the Chinese very polite and helpful.
"It depends on how old they are," Mr. Lu said. 'The worst ones are those who were about ten or fifteen at the start of the Cultural Revolution. They were robbed of everything. They had no childhood, no education, no family, no training, no happiness at all. They are about thirty or forty years old now, and they are very angry—angry with everyone. They feel cheated. I know a woman in Lanzhou who said, 'If the city council doesn't give me an apartment I'll go find one, and I'll move in, and I won't budge.' I told her that was illegal. She said, 'I don't care.' That's not Chinese. But she was about thirty-five. She had lost everything in the Cultural Revolution. We are living in a very strange time."
"This train isn't so strange," I said.
He smiled at me. He said, "Not long ago on this train I saw an incident. A man in Hard Class was lying across one seat. That means he was taking up three sitting places. The other passengers were angry. But the man would not move. Finally, they got a policeman, who told the man to move.
"The man said no. The policeman said, 'Move.'
"'What are you going to do about it?' the man said.
"Of course, the policeman could do nothing if the man didn't cooperate. But that was very unusual—very un-Chinese. This man was thirty or so—that explained it to me. The lost generation. The interesting thing is that he did not move. The policeman went away. He had failed. He had even tried to use logic. 'You bought one ticket, but you are using three seats'—that sort of thing.
"'I don't care,' the man said. 'So what?' That's the attitude among that age group."
"Do you think it's serious?"
"Yes. And it frightens me," Mr. Lu said.
Mr. Lu asked me where I was going. I told him that I was headed into Xinjiang, and he made a face—a slight smile of pain. He said he had no desire to go into the desert. The cities of Turfan and Urumchi held no interest for him.
"If I had the time and the money I would go to Hangzhou or Suzhou," he said, expressing the common Chinese wish to go to a place where there were a million other tourists. "Or Guangzhou," he added—another Disneyland.
But to the question Where would you go? the Chinese I spoke to rarely named a place that was outside the Great Wall, reflecting the ancient fear and prejudice that it was all monkeys and hairy bastards and savages beyond the Wall.
There were two dozen Chinese college students on the train, going to Lanzhou from Peking to take part in a swimming meet. They were going Hard Class, and they seemed to enjoy being tumbled together in the dormitory coaches. At their technical college they lived just like this, eight to a room, with laundry hanging everywhere, and they slept on shelves that went up the wall.