"Do you think it will come back — a second Cultural Revolution?"
"Absolutely not!" he thundered. "Never!"
"Did Mao ever visit Urumchi?"
"No. Too busy, I think," he said, and glanced at Mr. Jie. "But Zhou Enlai came here and traveled all over." He said it in the affectionate way that Chinese always referred to Zhou. "And recently Deng Xiaoping visited here. He had a good time. He was really impressed."
By now we were all drunk enough to talk about war and friendship. I mentioned the Japanese and said I thought they were planning to take over the world by dominating the world economy because they had failed to do so by military means. And how did it feel as a Chinese to be occupied again by a nation that had been driven out in the 1940s?
"We have a saying in China," Mr. Jiao said. "'You can't attack everyone, so you have to be careful of everyone.'"
The last dishes were taken from the table. Mr. Jiao stood up a little unsteadily and we thanked each other. There were no other formalities; no small talk; no lingering. Nothing is more abrupt than the end of a Chinese banquet.
In succeeding days I discovered that this part of Xinjiang was being opened up for oil exploration. Already it was producing an enormous amount of oil — some oil was being exported to the United States. To the southeast, in the Lop Nor Desert, atom bombs were being tested. There had even been a noisy protest in Peking by university students, but the police had put a stop to that, and the atomic testing had continued.
Most of China's minerals came from Xinjiang, and from the numerous radar dishes on the mountains it was easy to conclude that, strategically, it was an important area. I went to factories and became gloomy, seeing women painstakingly making silk carpets with very ordinary designs: one square yard a month, a whole year to make a not-very-pretty carpet. And there were jade carvers in Urumchi who were doing something similar, taking weeks to make fifty-dollar grinning Buddhas in jade, or six months of cutting and polishing to make a jade dish. I had the impression the stuff didn't even sell particularly well.
No one seemed to mind. Urumchi was in a little time warp, everything happening late. Breakfast was at nine-thirty, dinner at nine at night. At about ten-thirty every night the sun broke through the clouds and shone brilliantly until after eleven, and then at midnight the whole place suddenly went cold.
I went into the desert to look at camels, and then northeast to the Bogda Shan, with their peaks like rocky steeples, and then to Tianchi (The Heavenly Pool), a lake about 2000 feet up a mountainside. Above it, the snowy peak of Bogda Feng (18,000 feet) and the other peaks in the range looked like the lower jaw of a wolf, white and black fangs in a long, angular jaw. There were noodle stalls and Young Pioneers and Chinese tourists at the end of the road, but fifty feet beyond that there was no one — nothing but whispering pines and birds singing. I had not seen anything prettier than this, and while such a piney wilderness did not look Chinese, it did not look European either: the settlements on the road and in the woods were Mongolian yurts and cabins and tiny villages, with those same bowlegged horsemen in boots and women wearing shawls and red-cheeked children. I spoke Chinese to a man who might have been a Kazakh and he just laughed.
I met a Chinese man named Mr. Cheng near the lake. He had given himself the English name "Tom" after reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and when he had done so everyone in his office decided to do the same thing — take on an English first name. He worked in The Agricultural Bank in Altay, in the distant north of Xinjiang, in a little corner of China that was pinched by Russia on one side and Outer Mongolia on the other.
In that place (the bank), Tom Cheng said, "We have Mike, Julian, Jan, Wayne and Bob."
Tom said he was thirty-four, which was just the age of the generation that had been involved in the Cultural Revolution — he would have been about sixteen at the height of it. But had the Cultural Revolution penetrated to the remote town of Altay?
"Oh, yes!" Tom said. "We had it there. I was in middle school."
"Did you have Red Guards?"
"Yes. I was a Red Guard! In my own school! I was an organizer!"
Tom Cheng wore a yellow sweater and Chinese blue jeans and white sneakers. He carried a portable radio and a plastic holdall stenciled Shanghai. All this was regarded as stylish. All he lacked was sunglasses.
I said, "Did you criticize your teachers for being rightists?"
"Yes!" he said eagerly.
"Did you have a Little Red Book?"
"Yes. The Thoughts of Chairman Mao."
"Did you sing songs?"
"Oh, yes. 'The East Is Red' and the others — all the songs."
"Did you criticize running dogs and people who took the capitalist road?"
"Yes!" Why was he smiling?
"Did you break things in Altay?"
His face fell. He paused a moment and peered at me, looking sheepish, and took a deep breath. He said, "You were in China then, eh?"
8. Train Number 104 to Xian
Chinese trains could be bad. In twelve months of traveling — almost forty trains — I never saw one with a toilet that wasn't piggy. The loudspeakers plonked and nagged for eighteen hours a day — a hangover from the days of Maoist mottos. The conductors could be tyrants, and the feeding frenzy in the dining car was often not worth the trouble. But there were compensations — the kindly conductors, the occasional good meal, the comfortable berth, the luck of the draw; and, when all else failed, there was always a chubby thermos of hot water for making tea.
Yet whatever objections I could devise against the trains, they were nothing compared to the horrors of air travel in China. I had a small dose of it when I left Urumchi for Lanzhou — there was no point in retracing my steps on The Iron Rooster. I was told to be at the airport three hours early — that is, at seven in the morning; and the plane left five hours late, at three in the afternoon. It was an old Russian jet, and its metal covering was wrinkled and cracked like the tinfoil in a used cigarette pack. The seats were jammed so closely together my knees hurt and the circulation to my feet was cut off. Every seat was taken, and every person was heavily laden with carry-on baggage — big skull-cracking bundles that fell out of the overhead rack. Even before the plane took off people were softly and soupily vomiting, with their heads down and their hands folded, in the solemn and prayerful way that the Chinese habitually puke. After two hours we were each given an envelope that contained three caramel candies, some gum and three sticky boiled sweets; a piece of cellophane almost concealed a black strand of dried beef that looked like oakum and tasted like decayed rope; and (because the Chinese can be optimistic) a toothpick. Two hours later a girl wearing an old mailman's uniform went around with a tray. Thinking it might be better food, I snatched one of the little parcels — it was a key ring. The plane was very hot and then so cold I could see my breath. It creaked like a schooner under sail. Another two hours passed. I thought, I am out of my mind. An announcement was made, saying in a gargling way that we would shortly be landing. At this point everyone except the pukers stood up and began yanking their bundles out of the racks; and they remained standing, pushing, tottering and vaguely complaining — deaf to the demands that they sit down and strap themselves in — as the plane bounced, did wheelies on the runway and limped to Lanzhou terminal. Never again.
"What you think of Chinese airplane?" Mr. Fang asked in a rare burst of English.
"Lamentable."
"Thank you!" he said. "Maybe we take plane to Xian?"
"You take the plane. I'll take the train."