A Return Trip on the Iron Rooster

The train’s pulse - click-cluck, click-cluck - resounded in the tunnel and into the window below my berth, accompanied by a heady brew of exhaust fumes. I put down Paul Theroux’s “Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China” and rose from my top-shelf bed to climb down and shut the window. Whack! My forehead met the coat hook for the third time in as many hours. Falling back, rubbing the welt, I narrowly avoided the bare blades of the electric fan that was doing its best buzz-saw imitation inches from the pillow.

Theroux never hurt his head in “Rooster” and fans never snared his hair, but that may be because he rode the rails through China in a soft sleeper, the most luxurious class and the only one open to foreigners in the 1980s. I was riding in a hard sleeper, a class better suited to my schoolteacher income but not my 6-foot-2-inch American frame.

We were five hours out of Chengdu on the 20-hour ride northeast to Xian. When nothing but the flat, boring wheat fields of Sichuan could be seen outside, everybody in my compartment had climbed into their bunks for a group xiuxi (siesta).

I wasn’t the only one napping with his feet angled over the aisle. As I walrus-flopped my way out of my berth, with its 10 inches of clearance between my torso and the ceiling, I saw nothing but feet hanging over the sides of bunks, all sheathed in the thin nylon hose favored by Chinese men and women.

Theroux’s book, published in 1988, is still required reading for Americans interested in China, and retracing some of his steps had seemed like a good idea: Measure how far China had come by comparing his train-riding experience and mine. I had seen China and long-distance travel evolve between 1995, when I arrived here to work in the Peace Corps, and 1999, when I left to resume life in the States. Now I was back on personal business with some time to kill mid-trip. Footloose and fancy free. That was the first big difference: Theroux had been stuck with a handler assigned by the Railway Board. I could go anywhere.

When the train emerged from the tunnel into a plush valley hugged by jagged peaks, the stockinged feet bounced up in unison. Light from a fading orchid sunset swept into the open window along with ash. I spilled down from the bunk and leaned out the window and into what looked like a different country.

The Min River spun far below, the color of jade and completely still, save for a flock of white geese and its gentle wake. Behind them, a man in a pointed straw hat poled a skiff so smoothly on the water that he made no ripples. Rice paddy terraces scaled the mountainsides, illuminated by bonfires of burning stalks. A temple stood high above the valley, keeping watch over a girl tending a row of waddling ducks. Ahead, the train’s engine entered a curve, allowing a perspective of the 25 cars behind us as they emerged from the tunnel and onto this rice-paper painting of agrarian life.

I thought: China shows itself best in the passing glance, in the stumbled-upon encounter, in the unplanned moments between destinations. It is a country where getting to a place is all the fun and where moments of tranquillity like this are savored and squirreled away in memory to soothe the frazzles of daily life.

A tap on my shoulder broke my reverie. A man behind me demanded: “Hey, how tall are you? Foreigner, hey! How tall are you?”

The smell of feet filled the air. The click-cluck of the wheels grew louder, and the train plunged back into darkness, roaring and smoking all the way.

I was glad to be out of Beijing. The city I had left less than a year earlier felt more Americanized now, more choreographed, less authentic. The automobile had triumphed over the bicycle, and street-widening was mowing down the city’s few islands of charm. Marketing was the new propaganda, and “socialism with Chinese characteristics” the buzz phrase; in practice, it looked like something concocted at the Dairy Queen built where the Democracy Wall once stood. I once spotted a banner proclaiming, “Serve the people all over the world wholeheartedly!” It turned out to be an advertisement for vacuum flasks.

Cities aren’t inert; like all living things, they change. I understand. I just wish Beijing’s transformation hadn’t happened so fast. I began dogearing the particularly crabby passages of Theroux’s book, which I, when living in China, had dismissed as well-researched misanthropy. Since then, I’ve shed the influence of Peace Corps training, which absolves Chinese annoyances such as public phlegm-hawking, staring and catcalls of “Big Nose!” with, “It’s their culture.” Now Theroux’s assessment of a cultural corruption seemed remarkably prescient.

Theroux spent a year and rode about 40 trains in China. I didn’t have the same luxury of time. Or bank account, for that matter, though travel in China is cheap by any standard (except the Chinese one). The phrase “iron rooster” (tie gongji) comes from a saying about stinginess, as in, “He yields as many feathers as . . . “ In Theroux’s day, it referred to an uncomfortable, accident-prone line in western Xinjiang, home of the minority Uighur people. When the majority Han spoke of the “cheapskate express,” it was an ethnic slur.

Even in today’s China, the new paragon of conspicuous consumption, trains are regarded as the most pragmatic means of travel. They are affordable for almost all, come with four classes of seating, and run around-the-clock to every region except Tibet. Buses take too long, and airplanes are expensive, while trains are economical, safe and punctual.

If train travel remains the great leveler, did it still induce the heady spirit of comradeship? I thought it might. More than any other part of Chinese culture, riding a train seemed the most unchanged. You still sat facing others - in my case, touching knees - in the coach cars. You still shared tea leaves. You still were encouraged by the anonymity of strangers to talk about family, work and politics. I used to be seriously annoyed by the questions put to me: “Can you use chopsticks? Do you eat spicy food? How tall are you?” Now I looked forward to them.

With the selectivity of hindsight, some of my fondest memories of China involve trains. The night the police festooned my arm with a red band and deputized me to keep order in Car 17, which I did only by astonishing everyone with my telegraphic Chinese. Waking one morning to the sound of a loudspeaker announcing Deng Xiaoping’s death. Having a tryst with a woman, keeping one nervous eye on the closed but unlockable door. Being cornered and propositioned by a pudgy conductor, his hand down my shirt, his skeleton key wedged in the door’s lock. Precious memories. I was ready for more.

Theroux put it well: “The journey itself was a great sluttish pleasure for everyone - a big middle-aged pajama party, full of reminiscences. . . . They liked the crowded compartments and all the chatter; they liked smoking and slurping tea and playing cards and shuffling around in their slippers - and so did I. We dozed and woke and yawned and watched the world go by.”

All aboard!

“The only bad moment the train passenger has is on the platform, when the other passengers are boarding,” Theroux observed. “Which ones will be in your compartment? It is a much more critical lottery than a blind date, because these people will be eating and sleeping with you.” And more.

The layout of the hard sleeper is economical. Along one wall is a single row of backless seats that fold down beneath the windows. Across the narrow aisle are 10 to 12 doorless compartments of two tiers of three bunks each, with a window and small table between them.

As I made my way through the cars of Train 530, I passed grandmothers and old men and children, all smiling warmly at me, and I at them, hoping they were my bunkmates. Instead, I found myself billeted with five slimy-looking men smoking Famous Dog cigarettes. If this were a lottery, I would have a losing ticket.

I put my backpack up on the shelf of steel bars and sat on a fold-out chair under a window. “Sure is hot,” a man said. “Sure is,” I replied. “Your Chinese is great!” he exclaimed, and the four others turned eagerly to me. Where was I from, what was I doing in China, did I want a smoke, did I play cards, how many beers could I drink, how much money did I make, what did I think of Chinese girls, and would I trade my lower bunk for the top one? The questions were punctuated with a symphony of beeper and cell phone rings in tinny renditions of “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

The train creaked into motion, and we pulled out of Chengdu as women railroad workers saluted us stiffly from the platform.

I looked into the lavatory. After one full minute of travel, the floor toilet was clogged with a collage of feces, sanitary napkins and a 40-watt lightbulb.

Theroux might have been describing it when he wrote: “[The Chinese] were very tidy in the way they dressed and packed their bags, but they were energetic litterers, and they were hellish in toilets. It was strange seeing a neatly dressed mob leaving a railway car that they had befouled.”

My bunkmates settled into a routine of loud hawking, arguing over money, screaming into their phones and opening beer bottles with their teeth. They dressed alike, wearing the uniform of second-class businessmen all across China: nylon socks, khaki pants, tucked-in sports shirt and designer black belt sagging with clipped-on telecommunication devices. They played poker with cards depicting naked women, and they chain-smoked Famous Dogs. The package, featuring a cocker spaniel, sat upright on the small table between the bunks; above it was a “No Smoking” sign.

We chatted about unimportant things and got along fine. I told them I was a teacher, as benign, boring and impoverishing a profession as you can have in China but one that allows a comfortable distance between you and others. I could read a book or write in my journal quietly if I chose to, exhibiting classic antisocial, snobbish teacher behavior. But if I chose to play cards or have a beer, I would be a rebel, one of the guys, and open to discussions of money, cell phones and girls.

A conductor wearing a uniform two sizes too big came around and exchanged our paper tickets for plastic chits. Everybody took off their shoes. I filled the thermos with hot water and made tea. I stared out the window. The click-cluck click-cluck of the wheels became the soundtrack for a film of water buffaloes, smokestacks, rickety bicycles and children waving at the train while grown-ups waded in paddies planting rice. A moped puttered along a thin road, a huge hog lashed on its back to the frame between the driver and the handlebars.

Our compartment was humming with chitchat, movement, smoking and tea slurping. The pajama party had begun. Nineteen hours to go. The first stop was Deyang, and as the train slowed I felt the car’s energy subside. My favorite moment of a trip is when you finally shove off, clear the city and roll onto the open road. Slowing down, especially for a dump like Deyang, squelched that momentum. We crept past concrete buildings covered in white tile and into a characterless station whose loudspeakers blared a dirge-like tune. Railroad women saluted us as we pulled in, and soon food vendors crowded each train window, selling beer, hot dumplings and fruits. Passengers bargained fiercely, and as we left the station, vendors ran alongside, panting behind their carts, trying to close one more sale, tossing bananas into the windows.

I felt a sore throat coming on, and the shared Famous Dog air wasn’t helping. I thought about trying to upgrade my ticket to soft sleeper, but experience had taught me that inhaling secondhand Famous Dogs in an open compartment peopled with average folk beats inhaling secondhand Marlboros in a closed-door compartment shared with three Communist Party officials.

Instead, I spied an open top bunk in a compartment at the end of the car. It was a fortunate move. I was trying it out for size when a demure man on the lower bunk introduced himself to me in cheerful Chinese. He was a software developer, going home to Xian after visiting the holy Buddhist mountain Emei near Chengdu. He wore glasses and a long-sleeved cotton shirt tucked into blue jeans. He didn’t want to know how much money I made. He wanted to know if I could explain the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism. I decided to climb down and sit next to him.

This man had won the seating lottery. In his six-bunk compartment was a young woman with pink-tinted hair wearing pink clothes, pink platform shoes and a pink plastic purse. Across from her sat an old man wearing a mesh baseball cap with a logo reading “Welcome back Macao.” The old man stared quietly out the window. His only luggage was a small knapsack with a hand towel tied to the outside. The towel had a picture of a yellow duck walking with an umbrella under raindrops. Next to him sat a thin man in a tank top undershirt with a bad case of bed head. He gave me an open-palmed salute and said in English, “Hello, my American friend,” and giggled.

The last character in the scene was a stocky man with glasses who extended his hand and gave mine a firm shake. “Bob Chen,” he declared. “That’s my English name. Computer engineering. Would you help me with my English?” He dug out a thick tome titled “e-Business 2.0: Roadmap for Success” and read, “ ‘supplier integration’ - how do you say that in Chinese?”

“I’m just a history teacher,” I said apologetically. All five of them turned to me.

The train rushed along out of the plains and into a landscape of steppes. There was nothing to see out the window but kids playing basketball on a dirt court with backboards but no hoops. The man with bed head wanted to know how much money I made, but Bob Chen looked up from his book and scolded him for being rude. I said it was OK. Bob Chen studied me for a moment, then asked, “How do you say ‘aggregation of information assets’ in Chinese?” Bed Head giggled. The girl in pink had fallen asleep, snoring softly. The old man stared out the window.

The train bounced on. We rolled through rough terrain that nonetheless was bursting with those bumper harvests the Communist press reports every year. I wondered what these farmers, whose technology was limited to a water buffalo, put on their crops to get them this lush. I flipped through a Chinese dictionary, trying to find the word for “fertilizer.” The Buddhist interrupted me. “Do you want to look on a Web site? I know a good online dictionary.” Sure, I said, but I didn’t have a computer. No sooner had the words left my mouth than he had dug out his laptop and dialed up the Internet. Bob Chen sprang up and dug out his. They were both scanning dictionary pages and quizzing each other about their machines.

“How big is your battery?” “How much memory does yours have?” “You got a big processor in that thing?”

I found the word I was looking for in the book, but it seemed rude to interrupt. Bob and the Buddhist showed me their favorite Web pages, including ones they had designed. We checked for www.famousdogs.com but came up empty. I made a note to register the domain.

The food cart rattled past us, selling three kinds of cigarettes, one kind of instant noodle and five kinds of beer. The press cart followed, pitching state-run newspapers and a pirated novel whose cover had a photo of a sexy woman touching her mouth, $100 bills and smoke. We declined. Bob and the Buddhist found they both had Chinese chess programs. They played 15 minutes on one machine before the battery conked out, then moved to the other; that, too, was soon drained of power. The Buddhist dug into his suitcase and produced a chess set of round wooden pieces and a paper board, the kind that Chinese have been playing on for thousands of years. They spread the game out on a lower bunk and lost themselves in the competition.

I caught the girl in pink staring at me. Her blush matched her clothing as she murmured, “You understand foreign language?”

I explained that my hometown of Old Gold Mountain (San Francisco in Chinese) is a city of immigrants and many people there speak foreign languages. She wanted to know where my family came from. I answered, “France,” and Bob Chen praised it as a cultured place. “I have read Rousseau and Voltaire,” he said.

The girl in pink grew frisky. She was awake now and ready to join the group, stretching her body over the men playing chess, asking questions and sighing. Her midriff was bare and her voice coquettish, but on a train, she was everybody’s sister.

The ride was growing monotonous. Bed Head, Bob Chen, the Buddhist and the girl in pink flopped into their bunks. The old man was still sitting up, but his eyes were closed.

I climbed up to my berth and squeezed in underneath what could have been the same horse blanket that Theroux complained about more than a decade ago. The open window, the noise in the tunnel, the fan, the orchid sunset all passed.

By 8 p.m. the compartment had found its second wind. Everyone was awake, the card playing and tippling were underway, and people were roaming the aisles from car to car, looking for new folks to meet.

In the fading light I saw only wheat, growing thickly and forever, ripe for harvest. We had made it to the loess plateau of northern Sichuan. The homes became lean and red-tiled, and I was relieved to be away from prefab concrete and blue-tinted windows. For the first time I saw flying birds, small black sparrows darting toward the full moon that had sprung into the night sky.

At 10 o’clock Bed Head handed me a book he’d borrowed, saying, “Thank you, my good foreign friend.” Bob Chen and I resumed talking about human rights and the Falun Gong spiritual movement. The old man was staring out the window, and the girl in pink was still asleep. Then the lights clicked off, and everyone climbed back to bed.

“Hey, why didn’t you change your ticket? Hey!”

A train conductor had a hold on my toe.

We had stopped in some anonymous town, and a new passenger wanted the bunk I was in. “I’m sorry, I’m sick,” I mumbled. “They’re smoking. I’m allergic to smoke.”

“Why didn’t you change your ticket?” the conductor insisted.

“I’m sick. They’re smoking. I’m a teacher. . . . “ Why wasn’t anyone sticking up for me? Bed Head? Bob? Were they all really sleeping through this racket?

“Give me your chit,” the bully rasped. Then, apparently deciding it was too much bother to persecute me, he made a decision.

“Idiot! OK, you stay.” Pointing to the smoking end of the car, he said, “New passenger goes there.”

The bully stomped away, ignoring the smoking and loud talking still going on. The quintet at the other end of the car kept it up in the dark, arguing about the exchange rate for U.S. dollars and other money matters. I felt terrible, consigning the new passenger to that. I rose to use the toilet and banged my head on the coat hook yet again. Karma.

Nighttime on a Chinese train is a cacophony. The snoring is interrupted only by the throaty “whrrick!” of coughed-up phlegm. I covered my ears with the pillow and the beach towel of a sheet and the horse blanket and my Walkman, but I still could feel the throaty vibrations.

I awoke at 5 a.m. and found that I was the only one up. I flopped down from my bunk and landed on a floor littered with beer bottles, cigarette butts, seed husks, orange peels and gobs of spit. The lavatory looked even worse.

The view outside, however, was spectacular: dawn, seen for 20 seconds at a time through a screen of mist hanging over mountains as the train exited tunnel after tunnel. Plump drops of rain ricocheted off the car’s roof, and cascades tumbled off the mountains into the fog and forever. “Excuse . . . me, . . . what . . . is . . . your . . . name?”

The old man was looking up at me and enunciating his Chinese slowly and loudly to help me understand. I was relieved to see him alive and told him my Chinese name, Mei Ying Dong, or Heroic Eastern Plumblossom.

“Heroic Eastern Plumblossom, good friend, good friend,” he replied. He flashed a smile empty of teeth and asked me to bring him some hot water.

His name was Mr. Li. He was 77. He had been watching me write and wanted to show me that he wrote too. On every page of his tattered notebook was an entry headed by the date, weather condition, place and a one-word description of how he felt. Then he described what he saw. He helped me pour my bottle of tea and a glass of hot water for him - “careful, Heroic Eastern Plumblossom, careful” - and we looked out the window together and wrote in our journals. I could see the top of his entry: “Fine.”

Mr. Li was dying. His wife had died the year before, he said, and now he was fading too. This was his last tour of China. He had begun in Shanghai and then had gone to Guilin, then to the holy mount Emei and now was stopping in Xian to see the terra-cotta warriors before ending his trip in Beijing. He was really looking forward to Beijing. He wanted to get a look at Chairman Mao in his sarcophagus.

He sat on the edge of his berth with his hands on his knees, dressed in a faded Mao suit and plastic mesh hat. When it was time to drink his hot water from his tin cup, he blew on it tenderly, like a child. I fell in love with him.

I liked Mr. Li because he looked me in the eye when he talked, and he touched me to make a point. “Heroic Eastern Plumblossom, you come with me when we get to Xian. We’ll see the terra-cotta warriors together.” I flash-forwarded and pictured our adventures. We’d be a sort of a bilingual version of Harold and Maude.

At 8 a.m. the lights flicked back on and everybody woke up in unison. Within minutes the men had Famous Dogs going and were hacking phlegm, breaking wind and lining up to further insult the lavatory.

A dainty woman in tight black capris and hair bundled neatly in a beehive stared at me. I thought she was preparing to ask me about the stock market or something, but instead she deposited a thick wad of yellow spit at my feet.

I stayed next to Mr. Li, and we stared out at broad fields of wheat planted on reddish soil. “So bitter, Heroic Eastern Plumblossom,” he said. It took me a minute to understand. I thought the scenery was breathtaking. But it’s one thing to look at it, another to eke a living off it.

We crossed a tributary of the Yellow River, just a trickle of muddy water. It was Sunday morning, a day off for most workers, and no one was out and about. I liked that, the idea of people sleeping in. There was nothing to see except the smoke from a few cooking fires and the reflection of light on rain-slicked roads.

The breakfast cart rattled by, selling rice gruel with peas. The train passed through an orchard and past inhabited caves dug into hillsides. I pointed out birds to Mr. Li; he pointed out modern farm equipment to me. The rain stopped, and the sun broke through the clouds. We had settled into a rhythm, a rhythm we six passengers created, and one different from the compartment next door. The ride’s momentum had grown, and I didn’t want the trip to end.

But outside the trees began growing in straight lines, a sign that we were entering a city. As we creaked into the station at Xian, Mr. Li tucked his duck towel into his knapsack and straightened his baseball cap. The others were disembarking later. Bob Chen, the Buddhist and I exchanged cards. Bed Head didn’t have a card, and so just saluted me with an open palm and smiled. The girl in pink was still asleep.

I helped Mr. Li off the train and onto the platform. All around us, ticket holders zigged and zagged as they battled to board the train. Railroad women stood in a rigid rank, and barkers pushed carts of beer, steaming dumplings and cigarettes from window to window of the iron rooster. Mr. Li grabbed my hand and held on tightly. He looked a little unsure, and I was exhausted. Nobody paid any attention to us as we tried to get our bearings. The train rumbled back to life and blew its whistle.

“Ready, Heroic Eastern Plumblossom?” Mr. Li whispered. We walked together slowly, into the tunnel marked “Exit.”

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Mike Meyer, who lives in San Francisco, last wrote about Limerick, Ireland, for the Travel section of The Times.

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Guidebook

Riding the Rails in China

Prices: All prices are approximate and are computed at a rate of 8.3 yuan to the dollar. Getting there: China Eastern Airlines and Air China International fly nonstop to Beijing from Los Angeles International Airport. China Eastern has direct flights to Shanghai. Cathay Pacific Airways offers connecting service to Chengdu (via Dragonair) from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. And China Southern Airlines flies to Chengdu from Los Angeles, stopping in Guangzhou.

What to know: Chinese trains are divided into four classes: hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper and soft sleeper. Hard seat is the cheapest; you sit at a 90-degree angle on a thinly padded bench with three others and across from four more travelers. Leg room is minimal, as is privacy, quiet or fresh air. In a soft seat, there can be carpeting on the floor, and you sit in your own comfy seat, next to one other traveler and across from two more. You have access to the table separating the seats and also to the window, which has curtains. There’s usually a thermos with hot water for tea or noodles.

Hard sleeper is the class of the masses in China. Padded bunks are stacked facing one another in groups of six, with 10 to 12 groupings per car. Lower bunks are the most expensive, followed by decreases for the middle and upper bunks. There’s an aisle with fold-down seats perfect for staring out the window, and a thermos for hot water is provided.

Soft sleeper has four plush bunks (stacked two high) in a carpeted compartment with air conditioning and your own light and radio volume controls. Meals are served in a dining car. The drawback to this class is that it’s expensive (often just a bit less than a plane ticket), and you’ll be grouped with China’s elite, often government officials or business people.

I rode train 522 from Chengdu to Xian, a 523-mile trip on a “direct express” train, which makes many stops. A hard seat cost $6.63; the hard sleeper ranged from $13.61 to $14.70; the soft sleeper cost $22.17 to $23.25.

Getting tickets: Foreigners in a major city such as Beijing or Shanghai get to skip the queues and head inside to the Foreign Guests Ticket Office. (It’s usually marked with signs in both English and Chinese.) The ticket agents might not speak English, but if you approach them with your destination scribbled in Chinese characters (or point to the printing in your guidebook) and the date and time you wish to leave, you’ll probably score a ticket. There is no extra charge for this service, and you can book as early as three days in advance.

China Travel Service is ubiquitous in hotels and stations across China and can usually, for a small per-ticket fee ranging from $2.50 to $5, book your train trip a day or two before your departure date. It does not book individual train tickets in the United States. CTS has two California offices: CTS Los Angeles, 119 S. Atlantic Blvd., Suite 303, Monterey Park, Calif. 91754; (626) 457-8668 or toll free (800) 890-8818, fax (626) 457-8955. Or CTS San Francisco, 575 Sutter St., San Francisco, Calif. 94102; (415) 398-6627 or (800) 332-2831, fax (415) 398-6669. Internet for both is www.chinatravelservice.com.

For more information: A free train schedule in China is available from the China National Tourist Office, 600 W. Broadway, Suite 320, Glendale, Calif. 91204; (818) 545-7507, fax (818) 545-7506; www.cnto.org.