Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 252

 

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China," by Paul Theroux.

 

 

 

It seems comic and perhaps absurd to most Westerners; but it is not a joke—not in a society where they fish in rivers using nets designed 2000 years ago. China has suffered more cataclysms than any other country on earth. And yet it endures and even prospers. I began to think that long after the computers had exploded and the satellites had burned out and all the jumbo jets had crashed and we had awakened from the hi-tech dream, the Chinese would be chugging along in choo-choo trains, and plowing the ancient terraces, and living contentedly in caves, and dunking quill pens in bottles of ink and writing their history.

The passengers mobbed the corridors and hogged the windows just after eleven, and when I asked what was up, they said we would be crossing the Yangtze River soon. But they didn’t call it that—the word “Yangtze” hardly exists in Chinese—they called it Chang Jiang, The Long River. Crossing it is an event because it is China’s equator, the north-south divide. The Chinese in the north are different from the Chinese in the south. In the north, the Chinese say, they are imperious, quarrelsome, rather aloof, political, proud noodle-eaters; and across the river they are talkative, friendly, complacent, dark, sloppy, commercial-minded and materialistic rice-eaters.

There is a Chinese conundrum. If a place has a reputation for being beautiful, the Chinese flock to it, and its beauty is disfigured by the crowd. If a train is very fast, like the Shanghai Express from Peking, everyone tries to take it, and it is impossible to get a seat. The same is true for restaurants: the good ones are jammed. And hotels. Reservations are unthinkable, and the worst of it is that you are sometimes laughed at for ever believing that you had a chance: the Chinese can be extremely rude in turning you away—the Chinese elbow is very sharp. 

This conundrum is constant in Shanghai. For example, Shanghai is known to be a city of sidewalks—wonderful for pedestrians, an excellent city for perambulating. Therefore, everyone walks; and the mobs are impenetrable. 

None the less, if you push—as the Chinese do—it is possible to walk around Shanghai. Long ago, the Chinese overcame the natural human horror of being touched. The crowd reduces your progress to a shuffle, but it seemed to me that anything was preferable to a Shanghai bus.

The only bad moment the train passenger has is on the platform, when the other passengers are boarding. 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. I had seen lepers on trains, and bratty children and, on the way to Guilin, a man traveling with five parrots and no cage.

It was well known that Chinese phones were hopeless. It was impossible to direct dial any Chinese city, and it was very hard to make even a local call. And when you got through you often heard five other voices—or more—holding simultaneous conversations. A Chinese phone was like Chinese life: it was full of other people, close together, doing exactly what you were trying to do.