Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China

First Mariner Books edition 2006

Copyright © 1988 by Paul Theroux

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Theroux, Paul.

Riding the iron rooster : by train through China / Paul Theroux.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York : Putnam’s, c1988.

ISBN-13: 978-0-618-65897-8 (pbk.)

ISBN-10; 0-618-65897-1 (pbk.)

1. Theroux, Paul—Travel—China. 2. China—Description and travel. 3. Railroad travel—China. I. Title.

DS712.T446 2006

915.1'0458—dc22 2006028745

eISBN 978-0-547-52699-7

v6.0617

To Anne

A peasant must stand a long time

on a hillside with his mouth open

before a roast duck flies in.

—CHINESE PROVERB

The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on a hillside.

—JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses

1:

The Train to Mongolia

The bigness of China makes you wonder. It is more like a whole world than a mere country. All beneath the sky (Tianxia) was one Chinese expression for their empire, and another was All between the four seas (Sihai). These days people go there to shop, or because they have a free week and the price of a plane ticket. I decided to go because I had a free year. And the Chinese proverb We can always fool a foreigner I took to be a personal challenge. To get to China without leaving the ground was my first objective. And then I wanted to stay for a while—in China, on the ground, going all over the place.

The railway was the answer. It was the best way of traveling to Peking (Beijing) from London, where I happened to be. Every modern account of Chinese travel I had read seemed weakened by jet lag—an unhappy combination of fatigue and insomnia. We were very tired there, is a common remark by travelers to China, the gasping sightseers and bargain hunters. This desire to sit down could be maddening in a country where everyone else was full of beans. Wasn’t that the whole point of the Chinese—that they were always on the go? Even after five thousand years of continuous civilization they were still at it. And one of the lessons of Chinese history is that they never know when to stop.

I had seen China in the winter of 1980. It looked bleak and exhausted, all baggy blue suits and unconvincing slogans on red banners. If you said, Surely these people ought to be wearing something more than cloth slippers in this snow and ice, you were told how lucky they were and that they used to go barefoot. The whole country was dark brown from the soot and dust. There were few trees. I went bird-watching but saw only crows and sparrows and the sort of grubby pigeons that look like flying rats. The rarer birds the Chinese stuff into their mouths.

The Chinese, then, would point through the drizzle to where a factory was coughing up smoke at the end of a muddy lane; where bent-over people were dragging wooden carts loaded with pig iron. And they would say, This was once all prostitutes and bad elements and gambling and bright lights and dance halls. You were supposed to be glad this sinful frivolity was gone, and fascinated by the factories, but I just sighed. I saw young women destroying themselves in mills, smashing their pretty fingers on wooden looms, or blinding themselves doing finicky forbidden-stitch embroidery. An official Chinese statistic said that there were seventy million portraits of Chairman Mao on Chinese walls. People whispered when they mentioned his name. Stricken and overworked, they said, Owing to the success of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution . . . And they served me bowel-shattering meals.

Americans came back from China saying, Acupuncture! No flies! No tipping! They give you your used razor blades back! They work like dogs! They eat cats! They’re so frisky! And Americans even praised Chairman Mao, unaware that many Chinese were privately sick of him.

But that was the past, my brother Gene said, and he told me that I would be a fool not to go now. China had become a different place, and it was changing from day to day. He knew what he was talking about: he had traveled to China 109 times since 1972, as a lawyer—one of the new taipans. I planned to go in the spring this time. I kept telling myself: New people, new scenes—fresh air and the pleasure of anonymity. There were two ways of doing it—the way of the English poet Philip Larkin, who said, I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day. And there was total immersion.

My idea was to take a train in London, go to Paris, keep going, head for Germany and Poland, maybe stop in Moscow, take the Trans-Siberian, get off in Irkutsk, take the Trans-Mongolian, and spend May Day in Ulan Bator. Essentially the way to China was the train to Mongolia. It was traveling slowly across Asia’s wide forehead and then down into one of its eyes, Peking.

Going to Mongolia that way ought to be relaxing, I thought. And it ought to give me a feeling of accomplishment. I would read a little and make notes and eat regular meals and look out of the window. I pictured myself in a sleeping compartment, reading Elmer Gantry and hearing the hoot of the train whistle echoing on the steppes, and thinking: Pretty soon I’ll be there—as I drew the blanket up to my chin. And then one day I would snap up the blind and see a yak standing in an immensity of brown sand and I would know it was the Gobi Desert. A day or so later, the landscape would be green and people would be standing knee-deep in rice fields, wearing lamp-shade hats—all of that—and I would step off the train into China.

It was not that simple. It never is, and so an explanation is necessary—this book. It was my good fortune to be wrong: being mistaken is the essence of the traveler’s tale. What I had thought of as the simplest way of getting there—eight trains from London to the Chinese border—turned out to be odd and unexpected. Sometimes it seemed like real travel, full of those peculiar discoveries and satisfactions. But more often it was as if I had lost my footing in London and had fallen down a long flight of stairs, perhaps one of those endless staircases designed by a surrealist painter, and down I went, bump-bump-bump, and across the landing, and down again, bump-bump-bump, until I had fallen halfway around the world.

I was not alone—perhaps that was why. I joined a tour in London—twenty-odd people, old and young. I thought: I’ll be invisible, just slip into this crowd of people—and off we’ll go, smiling and chatting quietly as the sleet hits the windows. I had not had much experience of tours. I did not know the most elementary things—that the English go on tours to save money, and elderly couples like the Cathcarts would say, We had ever such a nice time going overland to India last year, and in Eye-ran we’d make cups of tea in the back of the bus. I did not know that English youths went to places like the Bratsk Hydroelectric Dam on package tours in order to get drunk on cheap vodka, and that Eastern Europe was uproarious with nurses from Birmingham.

Americans took these tours to meet other people, and showed me snapshots from other trips.

The ones in the straw hats are the Watermules, from San Diego. Lovely couple. We still get Christmas cards from them. That was the Galápagos trip. They’re grandparents now. That’s their son, Ricky. He’s very big in semiconductors.

Americans also went on these tours to shop. Shopping seemed to be the whole point of their travel. I honestly had not known that. It seemed as good a reason as anything else, and much better than going to Russia to get drunk. And there were Australians, but wherever you see Australians in the world they always seem to be on their way home.

The other thing about tours I had not known was their utter lack of privacy. It was all swapping names and information, almost from the first moment, and if you forgot their names they reminded you. It was mostly couples—the Cathcarts, the Scoonses, Cyril and Bug Winkle, the Westbetters, the Wittricks, the Gurneys; and the single people, who all seemed a little sad and uncertain and too eager, Wilma Perrick, Morris Least and his friend Kicker, an old Californian who called himself Blind Bob, a smiling cockney called Ashley Relph and a man known only as Morthole. There was Miss Wilkie, who stood no nonsense: she was from Morningside in Edinburgh. There was the leader, Mr. Knowles. He was Chris. I was Paul. They preferred first names and never asked me my surname.

In London Ashley Relph said he was dead keen to get to Hong Kong, and blinked, and whispered, I hear you can get a life-sized latex model of your dick somewhere in Hong Kong. One of these Chinese places. Costs about a fiver.

Morris Least was from Arizona, traveling with his old army buddy, a loud-voiced man who urged us to call him Kicker. Kicker had been in the war. He had a metal plate in his skull. Morris and Kicker had matching jackets and shoes. They wore the same sort of crushproof hat. The two American veterans were in their late sixties, and although they were bad-tempered, they agreed on everything. It seemed to me that these two men had entered into a profound sort of marriage.

Kicker said, I’ve never been to Europe before. Amazing, huh? Like I was in the Marines for twenty-two years and never saw Europe. I was in China, though. Back in forty-six. Chingdow.

He had crooked teeth—a cruel smile. I asked him what he wanted to do most in Europe.

See the Mona Lisa, he said. And try the beer.

I hear China’s clean as a whistle, Rick Westbetter said.

Miss Wilkie said, I’ve heard it’s filthy.

Hoping to please her, Rick said, But London’s clean!

London’s a shambles, Miss Wilkie said, and reminded him that she came from Edinburgh.

London looks clean to us, Rick said, taking his wife’s hand. Her name was Millie. She was sixty-three and wore track shoes. They were one of those oldish hand-holding couples who you’re never quite sure are being happy or defiant.

Of course it looks clean to you, Miss Wilkie said. Americans have lower standards than we do.

Bella Scoons said in her Western Australian whine, How far are you going, Miss Wilkie?

Hong Kong, the old lady said.

Then everyone thought: Ten thousand miles and six weeks of this. Good lord.

At least I did.

The Scoonses were from Perth—the other side of Australia. Bella always measured distances by comparing them to the trip to Kalgoorlie. The distance from London to Paris was to Kalgoorlie and back. The trip to Berlin was To Kalgoorlie, and back, and back again to Kalgoorlie. Moscow was seven trips to Kalgoorlie. And once I heard her mumbling, working out the distance to Irkutsk, in Siberia, and I heard her finish, and back to Kalgoorlie.

When we set off from Victoria Station that rainy Saturday in April, Bella said to her husband Jack, It’s less than to Kalgoorlie. She was referring to the distance to Folkestone.

We had eaten breakfast at the Grosvenor Hotel. The Americans sat together, and the Australians were at another table; the British were at two tables, and three old men were silently eating alone. At a solitary table there was a couple in hiking gear—knapsacks and sling bags and cameras. I was eating my breakfast thinking: Is this a mistake? One of the old men was staring at me. It made me very uneasy, the way he was gaping, but then I noticed that his glasses were very thick, and thought that perhaps he was not staring at me, but only looking out of his glasses, the way people look out of windows on rainy days.

When we got on the train, I sat next to him. He said, ‘This trip is kind of a big thing for me. My oculist told me I’m going blind and if there was anything I wanted to do before I went blind I should do it this year. So I’m going to China, and boy am I going to keep my eyes open. I figure, hey, it’s my last chance, and hey, I’m going to enjoy it."

Then he told me his nickname was Blind Bob and that he was from Barstow in California. When I looked around this train I realized that I was one of a large group and that I did not know any of these people. All I had to go on were their faces. But faces say a great deal. Theirs certainly did. The sight made me very apprehensive.

They stared out of the train windows at the houses, and the houses returned the stares. One of the disconcerting aspects of a railway journey is that the houses near the line seem to have their backs turned to the traveler—you see rear entrances and drains and kitchens and laundry. But these are more telling than porticoes and lawns. The depressing thing about the London suburbs is not that they look seedy, but rather that they also look eternal. It is a relief to look inside those houses and see lives being lived—the man redecorating the bathroom, the woman feeding the cat, the girl upstairs combing her hair, the boy fiddling with his radio, the old lady with her nose in the Express. It is wrong to pass by in a train and not wish them well. They are unaware that they are being scrutinized. It is one of the paradoxes of railway lines that the passengers can see the people in the houses, but those people cannot see anything of the train passengers.

We were ferried across the Channel. Morris and Kicker reminisced about D Day and the Normandy landings and how the American troops got the worst of it.

The water was leaden looking and it slopped against the ferry. The wind from the northeast was cold. It blew hard across the quay when we landed, and we shuffled through customs to have our passports examined. Our luggage was searched.

At Boulogne, the people in the tour amused each other by calling out, All aboard! All aboard! and I discovered myself next to an English woman who was fat and entirely bald and wore mittens and said she was planning to immigrate to New Zealand. Her name was Wilma Perrick and she was about thirty-two. She said she had just lost her job. She seemed very sad, and I was on the point of sympathizing with her about her baldness when she leaned over and said, What are you writing?

When the Paris train started, the man known as Morthole said, You were probably wondering what I was doing in the train yard on those tracks.

No one had been wondering. No one had seen him. Anyway, who was Morthole talking to?

I was collecting rocks, he said. I collect rocks from every country. Listen, in a lot of places it’s illegal—the South Pole for example. I’ve got some rocks from the South Pole. They could put me in jail for that. I’ve got them from everywhere. Canada. Ohio. London. Each one is the size of a golf ball. I’ve got hundreds. I’m a kind of geologist, I guess.

In Elmer Gantry I read, Set in between the larger boulders [of the fireplace] were pebbles, pink and brown and earth-colored, which the good bishop had picked up all over the world. This pebble, the bishop would chirp, guiding you about the room, was from the shore of the Jordan; this was a fragment of the Great Wall of China . . .

The east wind that had blown coldly across the Channel that morning had brought a dusting of snow to Picardy. Snow in April! It lay in a thin covering on hillsides, like long, torn bed sheets, the earth showing through in black streaks. It made the ordinary-looking landscape seem dramatic, the way New Jersey looks in bad weather, made houses and fences emphatic, and brought a sort of cubism to villages that would otherwise have been unmemorable. Each place became a little frozen portrait in black and white.

It seemed to me that railway lines like this needed a little variation. It was almost as if these hills and villages had been seen by so many people passing by that they had been worn away from being looked at. One of the attractions of China to me was that it had been closed to outsiders for such a long time that even the most hackneyed sight of a pagoda would seem fresh, and in distant Xinjiang a traveler might feel like Marco Polo, because no foreigner had been there for years. But this part of heavily traveled France had been rubbed away by the eyes of sightseers and railway passengers: most landscapes near busy railway lines had that same look of simplification, as if in a matter of time they would disappear from being looked at so much.

The people on the tour were still getting acquainted with each other. They asked me questions, too. Where was I from? What did I do? Was I married? Did I have children? Why was I taking this trip? What was that book in my lap? What were my plans in Paris? First time in China?

I was Paul, I was unemployed, I was evasive, and—how does Baudelaire put it?—The real travelers are those who leave for the sake of leaving, and something about not knowing why but always saying Allons! An appropriate sentiment here in the environs of Amiens.

What I wanted to reply to these questions was something I heard a man say to an inquisitive woman at a dinner party in London.

Please don’t ask, he said softly.I don’t have anything interesting to tell you. I’ve made a terrible mess of my life.

What kept me from saying that was that it was a sad memory, because about six months later that man killed himself. It seemed unlucky, and unkind to his memory, to repeat it.

The sad man called Blind Bob fumbled with the flap of his valise—his eyesight was terrible: his nose was against the hasp—and brought out two rolls of toilet paper.

People asked him what it was for—surely not Europe?

For China, he said.

I decided not to say that the great sinologist Professor Joseph Needham had proven that the Chinese invented toilet paper. In the fourteenth century they were making perfumed toilet paper (it was three inches square) for the Imperial family, and everyone else used any paper they could lay their hands on. But some Chinese knew where to draw the line. In the sixth century a scholar, Yen Chih-t’ui, wrote, "Paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from the Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes."

Ashley Relph said, He’s taking bog-roll to China!

Mr. Cathcart said, I think they’ve heard of loo paper in China.

Sure, they’ve heard of it. Lots of people have heard of it. But do they have any, is the question. I’ll bet they don’t have any on the Trans-Siberian, and how much do you think they’ll have in Mongolia, huh?

No one was laughing at Blind Bob now. The thought of crossing Asia without toilet paper made everyone thoughtful; there was a sort of hum of reflection in the carriage after he had spoken.

We came to Paris and were met by a bus and brought to a hotel. This was in the 14th arrondissement, near the end of the Métro line, in a district that was indistinguishable from the outskirts of Chicago or South Boston. It was mainly postwar apartment blocks that had once been light stucco and were now gray. There were too many of them, and they were too close together, and people said: Is this Paris? Is this France? Where’s the Eiffel Tower? The center of Paris is a masterpiece of preservation, but the suburbs such as this one are simple and awful. The brutal pavements and high windows of St.-Jacques seemed designed to encourage suicide.

Then I was told (funnily enough) that Samuel Beckett lived in one of those apartment houses and indeed had been in it for years. That was where he wrote his stories and plays about the sheer pointlessness and utter misery of human existence. I thought, No wonder! I was told that he often came over to our hotel, the Hôtel St.-Jacques, to have a morning coffee. The hotel was a newish spick-and-span place that resembled the lonely hotels that are found just outside American airports, where people stay because there is nowhere else. Beckett came here for pleasure?

I walked the streets, I lurked in the coffee shop, I prayed for him to appear; but, nothing. It was a lesson though. When people read Samuel Beckett lives in exile in Paris they did not know that it meant a poky little apartment on the fifth floor of No. 32—a tall gray building in which residents waited for Godot by watching television. And it was a dozen stops on the Métro from the center of Paris, the Left Bank, the museums.

We went to the Jeu de Paume, the museum devoted to the Impressionists. I wandered behind the group, listening and looking at pictures.

In a room full of Sisleys, Richard Cathcart said, I don’t like any of these.

We passed Monet’s series of Rouen Cathedral, bluish and purply and rose tinted.

Now I would not mind having something like them in my home, Mrs. Wittrick said, and the Gurneys agreed and said they’d like to cart them back to Tasmania, except that they’d probably be arrested!

Of Rousseau’s La Guerre. La Chevauchée de la Discorde, Rick Westbetter said, Hey, I like these. These are good. These are more like American pictures.

A child staggering behind his parents in the Van Gogh room said, "But why was he mad?"

A little crowd formed around a Monet of Venice.

Bud Wittrick was saying, That’s the Grand Canal. That’s Saint Mark’s. That’s where the Bridge of Sighs is—down that canal. And see, that’s the hotel we stayed at. Of course it wasn’t a hotel in those days. That’s where we walked, and there’s where we had the spaghetti, that’s where I bought the postcards.

It rained, it snowed, and the snow silenced both pedestrians and traffic. Early one morning we left for Berlin.

It was a wet, black morning in Paris, the street sweepers and milkmen doing their solitary rounds by the light of the street lamps, and just as dawn broke over the eaves and chimney pots we plodded out of the Gare de l’Est. I thought we had left the suburbs behind in the Rue St.-Jacques, but there were more, and they were deeper and grimmer. The people in the group, with their faces at the windows of the train, were shocked and disillusioned. It wasn’t gay Paree, it wasn’t even Cleveland. The Americans looked very closely. We were unused to this. We put up suburbs too quickly and cheaply for them to wear well. We expected them to decline and collapse and be replaced; they weren’t built to last, and they look temporary because they are temporary. But French suburbs—villas, terrace houses and apartment blocks—are solid and fairly ugly, and their most horrific aspect is that they look as though they will last forever. It had been the same in outer London: How could houses so old look so awful?

‘That was a battlefield, Morris said, as we crossed into Belgium. He had been telling war stories since we crossed the Channel. Some buddies of mine died there."

—And over there, too, Morris said, looking at a map, and meaning more dead buddies in a wartime battlefield.

He was smirking at the bare trees, the young poplars standing like switches and whips; the dark sludge and stained froth in the black canals.

I was still reading Sinclair Lewis and scribbling notes on the flyleaf.

Making notes? Mrs. Wittrick said.

I denied it.

Keeping a diary?