From the utter boredom on Mr. Tian's face—but his boredom was a form of serenity—I could tell that Mr. Cong and Mr. Tian had nothing at all in common. In China, the generation gap has a specific meaning and is something to be reckoned with.
I asked Mr. Cong what had happened to his commune.
"It was canceled," he said. "It was dissolved."
"Did the peasants go away?"
"No. Each was given his own plot to till."
"Do you think that's better?"
"Of course," he said, but it was impossible for me to tell whether he meant it. "Production is much greater. The yields are larger."
That seemed to settle it. Any policy that increased production was a good thing. I thought: God help China if there's a recession.
The town was in darkness. The hotel was very cold. My room was cold. What to do? Although it was only six-thirty, I went to bed—anyway, I got inside with most of my clothes on, and I listened to my shortwave radio under the blankets. That was how I was to spend all of my nights in Langxiang.
I went up the logging line on the narrow-gauge railway the next day, but I was disappointed in the forest. I had expected wilderness, but this was filled with lumberjacks cutting and bulldozing trees.
"One day we will go to the primeval forest," Mr. Tian said.
"Let's go today."
"No. It is far. We will go another day."
We went to the locomotive shed, where we met Mrs. Jin, a local guide. The shed was full of smoke and steam, and it was dark; but it was also warm because the boilers were being stoked and the fire in the forge was blazing. As I walked along, Mrs. Jin threw herself at me and pushed me against the wall, and then she laughed hysterically, a kind of chattering—one of the more terrifying Chinese laughs. I saw that she had saved me from stepping into a deep hole in which I would almost certainly have broken my back.
I was so rattled by this I had to go outside and take deep breaths. All over this town the snow was packed hard. No street or sidewalk was clear of ice. The Chinese habitually pedaled on the ice, and they had a way of walking—a sort of shuffle—that prevented them from slipping.
"This town is forbidden," Mr. Tian boasted. "You are very lucky to be here."
"Are there minorities in Langxiang?" I asked. I was thinking of Buryats, Mongolians, Manchus, and native Siberians.
"We have Hui people," Mrs. Jin said. "And we have Koreans."
We found some Hui people—China's Muslims—slitting a cow's throat behind a butcher shop. I could not watch, but being Muslims, they were doing it the ritual way, covering their heads and bleeding it so that it would be halal, untainted.
Before the town darkened and died for the day, we went to a Korean restaurant. It was just a wood-frame house, with a stone floor and a fire burning in an open fireplace that was also used for cooking. Four Korean women sat around it eating. All were relatives of the owner, who was a younger woman. They wore fur hats and pretty scarves. They were short, and rather dark and square faced, with big, even teeth.
"I can't tell the difference between Koreans and Han Chinese," Mr. Tian said to me.
There were only a few hundred Koreans in town, though there are two million of them in China.
"When people come to this restaurant they speak Korean," one of the women said.
All these women had been born in China and were married to Koreans, but their parents had been born in Korea. The eldest was about forty and the youngest no more than twenty or so. I wanted to ask them whether they always wore such pretty scarves and hats—and even their coats were stylish—but I did not want to sound patronizing, and in a rare moment of tactfulness I remained silent.
"I'd like to visit Korea," one of the women said. "But I don't know where to go. We have no idea where our parents were born."
"Do Koreans marry Han people?"
"Sometimes. But none of us has done so."
They were whispering and laughing to themselves as they ate, and they asked me questions, too—where was I from? Was I married? Did I have children? How old was I? They were smiley types—less phlegmatic and dour than the Chinese. They said they were proud of being Koreans, although all that remained of their culture was their cooking and their language.
Their husbands were lumberjacks and storekeepers. It was just like the Chinese to single them out as a special category. The Chinese were great makers of ethnic distinctions and could spot a cultural difference a mile away. Muslims have been in China for well over a thousand years and yet they are still regarded as strange and inscrutable and backward, and politically suspect.
All the while in Langxiang my feet and hands were frozen—stinging and painful. My eyes hurt. My muscles were knotted. There was an icy moaning in my head. Mr. Tian asked me whether I wanted to see the ski slopes. I said yes, and we drove four miles outside town just as the sun slipped below the distant mountains and an even greater cold descended with the darkness.
There on the black and white mountains were ten sluices—frozen chutes cut into the slope. People hauled small boxes up the mountain—they were like little coffins; and then they placed them into a chute and went banging down, cracking from side to side and screaming. I hopped up and down in the cold and said I wasn't interested.
Mr. Tian went thrashing up the slope with a splintery coffin and came down showing his teeth. He did it again. Perhaps he was developing a taste for this.
"Don't you like skiing?" he said.
"This isn't skiing, Mr. Tian."
In a shocked voice he said, "It's not?"
But he kept doing it just the same.
I walked down the path and found a shed, a sort of watchman's shack. There was a stove inside. This was a vivid demonstration of heating in Langxiang. The stove was so feeble that there was a half an inch of frost on the walls of the shed. The walls (wood and mud bricks) were entirely white.
I kept a record of temperatures. Minus thirty-four centigrade on the main street, freezing in the lobby, just above freezing in the dining room. The food went cold a minute after it was plunked down, and the grease congealed. They served fatty meat, greasy potatoes, rice gruel, great uncooked chunks of green pepper. Was this Chinese food? One day I had cabbage stuffed with meat and rice, and gravy poured over it. I had eaten such dishes in Russia and Poland, where they were called golomkis.
It was very tiring to be cold all the time. I began to enjoy going to bed early. I listened to the BBC and the Voice of America under my blankets. After a few hours I took one of my sweaters off, and one layer of socks, and by morning I was so warm in the sack that I forgot where I was. Then I saw the layer of frost on the window that was so thick I could not see outside, and I remembered.
No one spoke of the cold. Well, why should they? They reveled in it—literally, dancing and sliding on the ice. I saw children after dark one evening pushing each other off a shelf of ice onto the frozen surface of the town's river. (Other people chopped holes in this ice and drew water from it.) Those children frolicking in the darkness in the perishing cold reminded me of penguins frisking on the ice floes through the long Antarctic night.
When I travel I dream a great deal. Perhaps that is one of my main reasons for travel. It has something to do with strange rooms and odd noises and smells; with vibrations; with food; with the anxieties of travel—especially the fear of death; and with temperatures.
In Langxiang it was the low temperatures that gave me long, exhauscing dreams. The cold kept me from deep sleep, and so I lay just beneath the surface of consciousness, like a drifting fish. I offer one of my Langxiang dreams. I was besieged in a house in San Francisco, but I realized I would have to escape or I would be killed. I first fired out of the window and then ran from the front door shooting a machine gun and wearing headphones. I boarded a passing cable car—that was part of my escape route: I was now safe. President Reagan was on it, standing and straphanging. I found a seat near him and started talking to him. He told me his right ear was useless and that I should talk into his left. I was asking him whether he was having a tough time as president. He said, "Terrible." So I gave him my seat, and we were still talking when I woke up feeling very cold.