"What is the biggest problem?" I asked.
"Cleanliness," Jim said. "If a floor looks clean they think it's clean. They use these bunches of twigs and straw to sweep. But that's not good enough. For this kind of equipment you need an absolutely dust-free environment, otherwise particles get into the film and wreck it. So now we have to seal the plant and install an air-conditioning system."
"Are you sorry you came to China?"
"No. But I thought it was going to be different. You know, the Chinese are supposed to be so clever. But a lot of these projects in Xiamen have had problems. That's why there are so many empty factories here." His voice dropped and he added, "It's going to be a long haul."
But it did not strike me as a tragedy if Xiamen's factories were working at half strength. There would always be money flowing into the city from her native sons and daughters who had prospered overseas. And Xiamen was a pretty place precisely because it had not developed heavy industry, and because — pressured by the romantics and the retirees — it had not vandalized its old buildings and elaborate gardens.
The Lunar New Year came. The whole country was on the move, and people threw firecrackers into the streets. It was impossible to travel in the crush of passengers enacting the yearly ritual of going home. I could not buy train tickets. So I did nothing but wait until the festival ended, and then I resumed my travels, heading westward.
21: The Qinghai Local to Xining: Train Number 275
On my way to Xian to catch the Qinghai local I ran into the mountaineer Chris Bonington. He said he was in China to climb Menlungtse, a mountain near Everest and almost as high.
"We're also looking for a yeti," he said.
His good health and his courage and his tigerish way of turning his head made him seem very youthful. He had a look of smiling innocence and strength, a happy man whose life was devoted to adventuring up mountains.
He was serious about the Abominable Snowman. A previous Everest expedition had photographed a yeti footprint on the Menlung Glacier.
"Are you going to bring one back in a cage?"
He smiled. Was that a twinkle in his eye? He said, "No, all we want is a picture."
Presumably that was worth money. There was no profit in climbing a 23,ooo-foot mountain and risking your neck; but if you managed to get a picture of the great hairy monster of the Himalayas you were newsworthy and bankable. Money to finance expeditions was always a problem in mountaineering. Bonington's small team of four or five climbers had forty cases of supplies among them, which entailed hiring numerous sherpas and yaks to transport them.
Along with bear hunting in Xinjiang, and sport fishing in Liaoning, equipping mountain-climbing expeditions was another enterprise of the Chinese.
Bonington said that ninety percent of China's mountains had not been climbed and that many of them were over 20,000 feet. But it was expensive to climb in China, he said.
"For example, a yak costs thirty yuan a day to rent," he said. "I wonder how much of that goes to the owner?"
I said that I would ask someone in Qinghai, where many of the yak herds were found.
That was the first of March. In Xian I read in a China Daily that Deng Xiaoping told the visiting American secretary of state that the recent trouble in China had been caused by "a leadership crisis." It was a euphemism for a power struggle. "It is now over," he said, and added cryptically, "but it may continue for a while in the minds of the Chinese people."
Xian lay under winter mist, denuded and dusty. In sunlight it was stark, a flat city of plain buildings inside a city wall that was powerful and elegant, with great roofed gates. Xian's city wall actually looks as though it could repel an invading army. I visited the terra-cotta warriors a second time. They cast the same spell, with their eerie artistry and bizarre, half-human and buried-alive look, like an army that has been petrified by time. The curio sellers were frenzied, because this was the off-season, a winter month in which few foreign tourists visited. The Chinese are more like threadbare pilgrims than tourists. They are not spenders. They have no money. Their work units rent beat-up buses and pack them with employees, and off they go, hundreds of miles to look at a pagoda or the warriors. They also regard the hotels for foreign visitors as worth gaping at. They stood at the gates of Xian's Golden Flower Hotel ($100 a day) watching foreigners come and go. The Chinese in their innocence still regard their looking at foreigners as a form of sight-seeing.
Like many other Chinese cities, Xian was not clean, but it was very bare. The Chinese are not scrubbers, but they are inexhaustible sweepers. Sweeping doesn't freshen a city. It gives it a dis-416—concerting baldness. The effect is of a place that has been trampled.
I walked in the back lanes of the city, among the little tumbled compounds, and the stinks of dampness and dust, and the fragrant smells of cooking. I lingered near the windows of lighted rooms, where children were doing homework and women were working at kitchen tables. I saw a restaurant — tiny; filthy; people with steamers and pots on the table. I longed to go in, but every seat was taken. On my morning walks I bought the Chinese pedestrian's winter breakfast, "fried sticks" (you tiao)—deep-fried dough, which resembled elongated pieces of Yorkshire pudding. They were fried outdoors in a wok. People on their way to the factory bought little bundles of them and ate them on the way.
On this second visit to Xian I saw that the city prospered without tourists. It had a life of its own, and its economy was that of an inland capital, dealing in industrial and agricultural products. The discovery of the terra-cotta army had given a boost to the tourist trade, but the tourist economy was parallel to the existing economy. The Chinese government had a policy of being brisk with tourists — shipping them in, squiring them around and shipping them out. They hated people who lingered and found cheap rooms and simply strolled around looking through people's windows. They really didn't want me there at all. But what could they do? I didn't have a nanny anymore. They could not keep track of travelers. It was possible to arrive in China and more or less vanish. I had now managed this, and I saw people like me all the time. Their reference point was always the local post office. I saw tall, dusty long-nosed foreigners. We exchanged glances — and there was little more than that — but I recognized them as kindred souls. Were they writing books about China? Probably. Everyone seemed to be doing that. The only justification was that any travel book revealed more about the traveler than it did about the country.
Even late on a Thursday night in clammy March the main railway station was crowded — and more than crowded. It was almost impossible for me to make my way from one side to another. I could not understand the density — the people sleeping on benches, making noodles in the corner, milling around, sitting on their luggage, nursing babies. It was a huge station and yet there was nowhere for me to sit — no spare room. There were about eight trains departing within a few hours, and they were long trains; but that still did not explain the mobs. It was amazing to see so many people on the move, and it was useful to me, because I could lose myself in the crowd.
In the sleeping-compartment lottery I was assigned with three soldiers. Even wearing thick long underwear they were much too small for their uniforms. They were young, about twenty or so, and had sweet faces. They began making tea, and remarking politely on what luck it was for them to be traveling with an American friend, and so forth.
I said, "I'd like to know whether you call yourselves 'soldiers' (bing) or 'fighters' (zhanshi)."