"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."
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 it tasted like chicken. "What does he think?" I asked.
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 clawlike chopsticks.
Afterwards, slightly nauseated from the forbidden food, I felt like a Hindu who has 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 bilclass="underline" 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 a night at The Great Wall Sheraton. It represented a good radio. It was two years' rent on 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, a foreigner (wei-guo ren) one of those whom the Chinese regard as the yokels of the world. We lived in crappy little countries that were squeezed at the edges 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 we 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.
12: The Slow Train to Changsha and Shaoshan "Where the Sun Rises"
I boarded the Changsha train at Guilin Station and found it rather empty and haunted looking. It was an old-fashioned train with antiquated coaches. It had come from a strange place, too—Zhazhang on the coast of Guangdong, heading for Wuhan on the Yangtze. It was just after sundown, but very hot. I put on my pajamas, started reading Kidnapped and went to sleep dreaming that I was on this very train.
In my dream the train stopped at a station in a darkening landscape among leafless trees. It was a big wooden building, not like any I had seen, with high rooftops and balconies. I knew this was not my destination and yet I got off the train and went inside the place. The walls were whitewashed, there were potted palms here and there, and the tracks went across the lobby—two or three platforms near the ticket windows. I found this very confusing.
"What station is this?" I said, meaning to make a note for my diary.
A Chinese man said, "Ask the people here."
There were workers in greasy overalls, hammering the tracks. They were black—or rather, half Chinese, half black.
Someone near them said, "This station was built by the British."
None of the black workers spoke English. In Chinese one of them said, "Zhe shi shenme difang Kong Fuzi."
This made no sense to me. I looked closely at the men. They were like the blacks in old Hollywood movies, light skinned, with pale eyes and a penetrating gaze.
I realized that I had been there too long and that my train was leaving. I became panicky. Some tourists blocked my way. A stout woman confronted me.
"Are you Paul Theroux?"
"No," I said, and slid past her.
I went in the wrong direction, to Track Seven. My train was on Track Five. I ran back and forth.
One of the tourists was laughing at me, and another said, "The British named this station after Confucius."
In the nick of time I caught my train, and I woke up perspiring in the rocking berth. It was midnight. The coal smoke and clanging at the window was the coal smoke and clanging from my dream.
The train arrived in Changsha before dawn. The wide streets were hot and dark. Mr. Fang was just behind me, murmuring.
"What's wrong, Mr. Fang?"
"Trains!" he said, and he laughed. At that hour of the morning it was a terrifying laugh. He made the noise again and said, "Trains!"
He was weakening.
It was not only the train that bothered Mr. Fang; it was also Changsha itself. The city was associated in the minds of all Chinese with the memory of Chairman Mao. Mao had been born nearby, at Shaoshan. He had been educated here. He had taught school here. He had helped found the Communist Party in Changsha, and had given speeches and recruited Party members. Changsha was his city and Hunan his province. For years and years, whenever the Chinese had permission to travel they came here in a pious way, in homage to Mao, and they finished the tour by journeying to Shaoshan.
Mr. Fang was sick of Mao, sick of political talk, disgusted with political emblems and songs. He was not interested in the Party either. He wanted to get on with his job—he had work to do in Peking. It would have been the height of rudeness for him to say that he was sick of following me around on this trip, but I knew he was at the end of his tether. He groaned when we boarded trains these days, and his cry of Trains! at Changsha Station convinced me that he was on the point of surrender.
Another train and more Mao: that was Fang's nightmare.
His distress put me into a fairly good frame of mind. And I was glad to be here. All along I had intended to visit Mao's birthplace and interrogate the pilgrims. No one seemed to have a good word for Mao these days; but what did they think in Changsha?
"He made very few mistakes, and the mistakes were very small," Mr. Ye said, showing me the Mao statue at the birthplace of Chinese communism. The statue was gigantic—Mao in an overcoat and cap, waving.
"Are you proud of him?"
"Yes!" Mr. Ye said defiantly. "We are proud of many things he did."
Mr. Shao said, "Most of the Chinese people are proud of him. A few don't agree."
"Deng Xiaoping called him a great man!" Mr. Ye protested.
I said, "Shall we go to the Mao Museum?"
"It is closed," Mr. Shao said.
"Really? Why is it closed?"
The men fell silent, and their silence meant: Don't ask.
"What about the middle school where Mao taught?" I said.
Mr. Ye frowned and said, "It is ten kilometers from the city. We can drive by it, but we cannot go in. It is not very interesting."
People used to make pilgrimages here!
"I suggest we go to the Hunan Museum of History," Mr. Shao said. "There is a woman in it who is two thousand years old."