The wind dropped but the cold remained. It banged against my forehead and twisted my fingers and toes; it burned my lips. I felt like Sam McGee. I entered the station waiting room, and a chill rolled against me, as if my face had been pressed on a cold slab. The waiting room was unhealed. I asked Mr. Tian how he felt about this.
"Heat is bad," he said."Heat makes you sleepy and slow."
"I like it," I said.
Mr. Tian said, "I once went to Canton. It was so hot I felt sick."
Mr. Tian was twenty-seven, a graduate of Harbin University. There was humor in the way he moved. He was self-assured. He didn't fuss. He was patient. He was frank. I liked him for these qualities. The fact that he was incompetent did not matter very much. Langxiang was a day's journey by train—north, into the snow. He seemed an easy companion, and I did not think he would get in my way.
He had no bag. He may have had a toothbrush in his pocket, where he kept his woolly cap and his misshapen gloves. He was completely portable, without any impedimenta. He was an extreme example of Chinese austerity. He slept in his long johns and wore his coat to meals. He rarely washed. Being Chinese he did not have to shave. He seemed to have no possessions at all. He was like a desert Bedouin. This fascinated me, too.
The loudspeakers in the waiting room were broadcasting the dragon voice of the Peking harridan who gave the news every morning. In China the news always seemed a peculiar form of nagging.
"You are listening to that?" Mr. Tian inquired.
"Yes, but I can't make it out."
"'We must absolutely not allow a handful of people to sabotage production,'" Mr. Tian translated the duckspeak from the broadcast.
The announcer was reading a front-page editorial from the Workers' Daily. It was the first public acknowledgment that the Chinese Communist Party condemned the student demonstrations. There were other people in the waiting room but they were talking among themselves instead of listening. They were warmly dressed, in fur hats, mittens and boots. They smoked heavily and from time to time got up to use the spittoon which was the centerpiece of the railway waiting room.
The shrewish voice was still blaring from the loudspeaker, and Mr. Tian blandly helped me to understand it.
'"Bourgeois liberalism has been rampant for several years. It is a poison in some people's minds. Some people make trips abroad and say capitalism is good, and paint a dark picture of socialism.'"
I said, "Mr. Tian, is anyone else listening to this?"
"No," he said, and watched a man dribbling saliva onto the floor and scuffing it with his felt boot. "They are occupied with other-matters."
"Demonstrations have been held in a number of cities," the voice nagged. 'They are unpatriotic, unlawful, disorderly and destructive. In some cases they have been provoked by foreign elements. They must cease. The Chinese people will not stand by and let lawless students take over. Bourgeois liberalization is something that must be stamped out—"
It went on and on, at such length that it was clear that the government was very worried. The broadcast was full of thinly veiled threats of retribution.
I said, "What do you think of the demonstrations, Mr. Tian?"
"I think they are good," he said, nodding quietly.
"But the government has condemned them. Don't you think they represent bourgeois liberalism and poisonous influences?"
He shook his head and smiled. His hair stuck up like a roadrunner's. He said, "These demonstrations show how the Chinese people are thinking."
"But it's just students," I said, still playing devil's advocate.
"In some cases there were factory workers," he said. "In Shanghai, for example."
"Some people think that these demonstrations might lead to a conflict between capitalism and communism."
"We will choose what is best for us," he said. He had become a trifle enigmatic.
I said, "Do you ever suspect that you might be a secret capitalist-roader?"
"There is a good and a bad side to everything," he said.
He did not smile, which was why I suspected him of being humorous. He could be very mysterious. In other respects he was totally ineffectual. "Do you want me to do anything?" he said, but when I made a suggestion—get a ticket, make a phone call, establish a fact—he invariably failed. And yet he went on offering to help me.
The train pulled in, steaming and gasping, just as the sun came up. It had come from Dalian, 600 miles away, and it stopped everywhere. So it was sensationally littered with garbage—peanut shells, apple cores, chewed chicken bones, orange peels and greasy paper. It was very dirty and it was so cold inside the spit had frozen on the floor into misshapen yellow-green medallions of ice. The covering between coaches was a snow tunnel, the frost on the windows was an inch thick, the doors had no locks and so they banged and thumped as a freezing draft rushed through the carriages. It was the Heilongjiang experience: I crept in out of the cold, and once inside I felt even colder. I found a small space and sat hunched over like everyone else, with my hat and gloves on. I was reading Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time and I scribbled on the flyleaf, In the provinces every train is like a troop train. This is like one returning from the front, with the sick and wounded.
Even with three pairs of socks and thermal-lined boots my feet were cold; nor did I feel particularly cozy in my heavy sweater, Mongolian sheepskin vest and leather coat. I felt like an idiot in my hat and fleece-lined mittens, but it annoyed me that I was still cold, or at least not warm. How I longed for the summer trains of the south and the sweltering trip on The Iron Rooster, when I had lounged in my blue pajamas.
Mr. Tian said, "You come from which city in the States?"
"Near Boston."
"Lexington is near Boston," Mr. Tian said.
"How did you know that?"
"I studied American history in middle school. All Chinese study it."
"So you know about our war of liberation, Mr. Tian?"
"Yes. There was also a Paul who was very important."
"Paul Revere."
"Exactly," Mr. Tian said. "He told the peasants that the British were coming."
"Not just the peasants. He told everyone—the peasants, the landlords, the capitalist-roaders, The Stinking Ninth, the minorities and the slaves."
"I think you're joking, especially about the slaves."
"No. Some of the slaves fought on the British side. They were promised their freedom if the British won. After the British surrendered, these blacks were sent to Canada."
"I didn't read about that," Mr. Tian said, as the door blew open.
"I'm cold," I said.
"I'm too hot," Mr. Tian said.
The cold put me to sleep. I was wakened later by Mr. Tian, who asked me whether I wanted to have breakfast. I thought some food might warm me up so I said yes.
There was frost on the dining-car windows, ice on the dining-car floor, and a bottle of water on my table had frozen and burst. My fingers were too cold to hold any chopsticks. I hunched over with my hands up my sleeves.
"What food do they have?" I asked.
"I don't know."
"Do you want noodles?" I asked.
"Anything but noodles," Mr. Tian said.
The waiter brought us cold noodles, cold pickled onions, diced Spam that looked like a shredded beach toy, and cold but very tasty black fungus—a specialty of the province. Mr. Tian ate his noodles. It was the Chinese way. Even if it was not to your taste, when there was nothing else on the menu, you ate it.
"What is that music?" I asked. A tune was playing over the train's loudspeaker. I had heard it before, on other trains.
"It is called, The Fifteenth Moon,'" Mr. Tian said.
I asked him to explain the incomprehensible words. It was about a soldier who was fighting on the Vietnamese border—just south of where I had taken the train in Yunnan. The soldier was married, but his wife was not with him. And yet the soldier thought about his wife a great deal and realized that he was fighting for her—he was triumphant and heroic because she inspired him. That was a change. A few years ago he would have been fighting for Chairman Mao. It made a little more sense to fight for your spouse and the sentiment was that of "Keep the Home Fires Burning."