River Town (30 page)

On the first day, a young man from Hebei province came and sat across from me, watching the Gansu hills slip past. He was twenty-five years old, and he had worked in Xinjiang for two years, and he did not like it. Xinjiang was too extreme, he said—too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. He had just finished four months of vacation, and it was not pleasant to take a forty-eight-hour train trip and know that at its conclusion you had to start work again in a place like Xinjiang. His job involved safety management for an oil company.

“Every year, two or three workers are killed,” he said. “Especially on the roads in the desert. The transportation is terrible in Xinjiang, and that's why workers die every year. There's not much we can do about it.”

I told him that my younger sister was looking for oil near Turpan. He shrugged, as if to say: She can have it. Outside there was a dusty streak of low hills and the land was getting steadily drier as the train rocked west.

He was bright and it wasn't the sort of rote conversation that I often had in China. There was something quietly sharp about his eyes—he had a heavy-lidded gaze but I could see that he took careful notice of everything around him. He saw that I was jotting in my notebook, but unlike most people he didn't ask what I was writing, probably because he guessed the truth. Usually I told people that it was my diary, or sometimes I simply said, “I'm writing my foreign language.” That was enough to satisfy nearly everyone—if you knew a foreign language, it was obvious that you would spend a great deal of time
writing it. Nobody seemed to realize that in fact I was writing about them and everything else around me, but the man from Hebei watched my pen skim impulsively over the pages and I sensed that he knew that he was being described. But he still spoke freely; we talked lightly about politics, and the Communist Party, and I asked him if he was a member.

“No,” he said. “I don't want to be.”

“Why not?”

“Too much trouble. My friends—and most young people—all of us are the same. We're not interested in that. It's not the same as your America. We only have one party in our China.”

The differences between these countries interested him. “All Chinese like Americans,” he said, a while later. “But many Americans think there are problems with human rights here. In fact, Old Hundred Names doesn't care about that. Old Hundred Names worries about eating, about having enough clothes. Look out there.”

He pointed out the window—a dusty village, garbage beside the tracks, a skinny donkey followed by a peasant in blue. Old Hundred Names.

“Do you think people like that worry about democracy?” he said. “They need to improve their living standard and then they can start thinking about other things. That's the problem with America and China—you can't compare them in the same breath.”

We slipped away from politics; he talked of marriage and how after three more years he would find a wife. There were often schedules like this for the young Chinese I knew; they were pragmatists about love as well as politics and nearly everything else. The young man explained his reasons—in three years he would be twenty-eight years old, which was neither too old nor too young, and by then he should have enough money to get married. It took a great deal of money to marry, he said, and it wasn't something you wanted to do in a place like Xinjiang. In three years he hoped to live in Hebei, or perhaps Qingdao, the former German concession on the east coast. He spoke lovingly of Qingdao, of the beautiful red roofs and the clean streets, the friendly people and the calm sea; and meanwhile our train rocked steadily west into the desert.

It was a long, empty day—nothing to see out the window, nothing
to do on the train. I sat and talked with people for a couple of hours, and then I climbed up to my bunk. We passed through Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, where the smog hung limp above the sullen stain of the Yellow River, and I fell asleep. When I awoke everything had changed—we were in a bright landscape of green grass and yellow rapeseed, and dune-shaped hills rolled off toward the horizon.

A fertilizer salesman materialized and began to ask me questions about money. How much is a new car in America? A used car? What about the license fee? Taxes? Insurance? In a notebook he scrawled my responses—guesses, all of them—and I was glad to see that somebody else on this train was writing. But what were they growing in this desolate place that required fertilizer?

“Wheat and corn,” he said. “Of course, there are grapes as well, and other fruit, but there are grain crops near Urumqi. But the fertilizer we make is shipped back into the interior.” He returned to the money questions: How much is a house in America? What are the unemployment benefits? What kind of insurance does the government give you?

After that was finished we sat in silence, looking out the window. I felt I should continue the conversation, but there were only so many questions you could ask about fertilizer. I asked him when he had come to Xinjiang.

“I was born here,” he said.

“When did your parents come?”

“My parents came to Xinjiang in the 1950s, after Liberation. They came to help build the country. It was like America.”

We stared at the scene outside: a shepherd with his flock in a green field, a man in blue riding a bicycle along a dusty road, a row of mud houses surrounded by earth-colored walls, a range of craggy white peaks to the south, and, westward, a broad empty horizon of the sort I had rarely seen in China. There were no trees for miles.

“Go west, young man,” said the fertilizer salesman, remembering a phrase from history class long ago.

 

SOMETIME DURING THE SECOND NIGHT
our train passed Jiayu Pass, the westernmost fort of the Great Wall. I didn't see that barrier, but in the morning it was clear that a line had been crossed. There
were no villages or walls, only rocks and dust and low rugged hills that were sharply shadowed by the desert sun.

We had come to the edge of China—or rather, a figurative edge of China, because you could continue westward for another thousand miles and still be within the country's borders. But this was the end of where the Han, or ethnic Chinese, traditionally lived, and now we were reaching the uncertain regions of the Silk Road. The Chinese called this province the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region; the Uighurs were the indigenous people, and they called this land Turkistan or Uighurstan, and they wanted it for themselves.

Xinjiang means New Frontier, and for more than two thousand years it had slipped in and out of China, until at last the Communists took firm control of the region in 1949. But it was a difficult place to govern—it bordered Tibet, India, Pakistan, Tajikstan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia; it composed one-sixth of China's total land area, containing a wealth of oil and minerals; and the majority of its residents, the Uighurs, were Muslims who spoke a Turkish tongue and had nothing in common with the Han Chinese. All of these factors made Xinjiang a complex place, and in February of that year there had been violence in the northern reaches of the province. For them the most immediate issue was keeping the Han out—four decades ago, only 15 percent of the region's population had been Chinese, but now that figure had swelled to nearly 50 percent. The Han came to do many jobs—to work as soldiers, as government cadres, as fertilizer salesmen—and they kept coming, arriving on trains like this. In my car there was not a single Uighur, but there were plenty of Han who were heading west to work.

The tension was something that nobody on the train wanted to talk about—a few times I asked about the problems of the spring, but everybody was evasive. A woman in her forties told me that she didn't understand the issue, because she was simply Old Hundred Names. That was the best part of being Old Hundred Names—they were never responsible for anything. It was the same way in any country where the citizens spoke of themselves as the “common people,” but in China there was a much higher percentage of Old Hundred Names than in most places. Virtually everybody you met described himself as such, and none of them claimed to have anything to do with the way things worked.

After establishing herself as Old Hundred Names, the woman
started asking me Da Shan questions. Da Shan was a Canadian who spoke Chinese fluently and appeared frequently on television, and he was without a doubt the most famous
waiguoren
in China. He was what people called a
Zhongguotong
—a foreigner who “knew about China,” or, essentially, a China hand. On good language days people referred to me as a
Zhongguotong
, but I knew it was only flattery. I had a long way to go before I could be accepted a China hand, and from what I had seen of Da Shan, this wasn't a particularly appealing goal. Probably he was a nice enough person, but in his “cross-talk” comedy routines and opera singing there was more than a touch of the trained monkey.

People everywhere asked me about Da Shan, and his fame testified to how badly foreigners did with the Chinese language. It was the equivalent of Americans becoming fascinated with a Chinese person simply because he spoke idiomatic English.

“Do you know Da Shan?” the woman asked. “You speak our Chinese well, but you're not as good as Da Shan.”

“Yes, he speaks much better than me.” This was why most
waiguoren
in China hated Da Shan: the more your Chinese improved, and the more you chatted with Old Hundred Names, the more you heard about Da Shan and how much better than you he was.

“Do you know him?” the woman asked. This was another common assumption—that all
waiguoren
who studied Chinese knew each other, maintaining contact through an intricate nationwide system, like the Freemasons.

“No,” I said. “I have never met Da Shan.”

“He's very good at the cross-talk—he's very funny.”

“
Dui
. I've seen him do it. Indeed he is very good.”

“Da Shan speaks Mandarin better than most Chinese,” the woman said.

“Yes. That is what many people tell me.”

“And he can sing our traditional Chinese songs. Is he from your America?”

“No. He's from their Canada.”

“What do people in your America think of Da Shan?”

“We don't have Da Shan on television in our America. Nobody in our America knows who he is.”

“So he's only on television in their Canada?”

“He's not on television in their Canada, either. The only place where he is on television is China.”

For the woman, like many of the Chinese that I met, this was a great disappointment. It was tragic for a nation to produce somebody as gifted as Da Shan and allow a foreign country to monopolize his skills. But in fact, as I explained to the woman, this is a common pattern in Canada, where all talent leaves the country as soon as possible, just like NHL franchises. She thought about this for a while and then continued talking about Da Shan.

“He has a Chinese wife,” she said. “Have you heard that?”

“Yes,” I said. I had heard every theory there was about Da Shan. Occasionally people said that his grandmother was Chinese, which seemed unlikely given that he was blond. His Chinese teacher had also become famous, and sometimes people recommended that I move to the east of China and seek out this pedagogue, the way itinerant scholars had done more than two thousand years ago during the Spring and Autumn Period. I had a good start in Chinese, they said, and it was a shame to waste that in a place like Sichuan, where even the locals couldn't speak the language.

“Do you know what Da Shan's salary is?” I asked. I wanted to talk about anything else, and money sounded promising.

“He makes thousands of yuan every month,” the woman said with certainty. “He has a very good salary. How much do you make?”

“One thousand yuan.”

“That's not as much as Da Shan.”

“No,” I said. “It's not as much as Da Shan.”

“But it's enough,” she said. “For a young man who is single, one thousand yuan is enough.”

“Yes. It's a better salary than most people in Fuling, where I live. Have you heard of Fuling? It's in Sichuan.”

She thought hard and shook her head.

“I'm sure you've heard of Fuling hot pickled mustard tuber,” I said. “It's very famous in China. Have you seen the advertisements on television?” And I sang the jingle:

It sounded much better in Chinese than it does in English, and the woman recognized it immediately. All of the Chinese were familiar with Fuling hot pickled mustard tuber and that was the easiest way to tell people where I was from. The woman and I talked for a while longer, and then she said something tactful about our China becoming more open to foreign countries. I thanked her and she returned to her part of the car.

The train grew hotter as we passed into the Turpan-Hami Basin, where the earth beside the tracks was cracked by the sun. The hills in the distance dropped steadily, and with them the horizon fell lower and lower, until at last the land was perfectly flat and the clear sky sat like a great dome of blue stretched taut above the black earth.

We stopped for an hour in the oasis city of Hami, where the station signs were in Arabic script as well as Chinese. It was the first place on this journey where I saw Uighurs; they were standing on the station platform, selling grapes and melons. The Uighurs had long sun-browned noses, and their features would have been at home in Saudi Arabia, or Turkey, or even Italy. Centuries ago many of them were caravan people, nomads who bought and sold along the Silk Road, and even today some spark of that same spirit inspires them to travel across China in search of business. Uighurs often work as black-market moneychangers in big cities, where they also sell raisins and fruitcake. Even in Fuling it is common for a couple of them to set up a fruitcake and raisin stand on a downtown street. They follow the Yangtze with their bushel baskets, drifting east, stopping in a city for a few weeks and then moving on. Of all the small entrepreneurs I saw in China, the Uighurs were the most remarkable—you'd find them two thousand miles away from home, and yet all they had was a basket of raisins and a tray of fruitcake. I had no idea how they made money.