Hunger had made them ingenious. At Jinhua the train stopped for a while, and I saw a three-decker van for carrying pigs: animals in China always seemed to be kept in a space their own size. What could be crueler? I suppose the answer was: lots of things — an intellectual forced to shovel chicken shit, a Muslim forced to keep pigs, a physicist ordered to assemble radios, an historian in a dunce cap, a person beaten to death for being a teacher. Next to these Cultural Revolution atrocities, keeping a pig in a poke was not really very bad, though it may have contributed to other forms of heartlessness. It was a very hot and humid day, and the pigs were whimpering in their racks as the train passed.
The background was mountainous, the foreground as flat as Holland — square pools of rice shoots, and the roads no more than long narrow tracks. This landscape had no date — the people dressed as they always had; and it was impossible to date it by looking closely at tools and implements. I saw a thresher that looked like the first thresher in the world: a rigged-up whacking paddle hinged to a stick; and the buffalo yokes, the wooden plow, the long-fingered rakes and the fishermen's nets were all of ancient design. By sundown we had done 400 miles, and we had never been out of sight of bent-over farmers or cultivated fields. Every surface had been cultivated, but it was spring and so even these cabbages had beauty.
I began talking with a Chinese man named Zhao who had just visited his girlfriend in Shanghai and was heading back to Changsha in Hunan.
"I took her out to a restaurant and I ordered dishes to impress her. Duck, chicken, fish — everything. It cost me twenty yuan!"
That was about six dollars, and for a moment I thought So what? and didn't understand the anguish on his face.
Then Zhao said, 'That's a week's pay for me! I couldn't eat. I went to bed that night and I couldn't sleep." He clenched his fists and hammered with them. "Twenty yuan! I was cursing. I still feel bad."
"I'm sure she appreciated it." I said.
"Yes," he said. "She is a simple girl. She is a country girl. She is pure."
Just as the landscape altered and became hillier, the sun went down. A couple from Macau — Manuel was Portuguese, Veronica was Chinese — were in my compartment. Veronica was skinny, with a small schoolboy's face and a schoolboy's haircut. She pouted for a while in the upper berth, and then we all went to sleep. But I had never really got used to sleeping among strangers and so I woke up in the middle of the night and read my Jin Ping Mei and noticed once again that it was packed with foot fetishism and bondage games. I glanced up and saw Veronica staring down at me from the upper berth.
At dawn, under a pink sky, the train stopped at Zhuzhou, and Zhao got out to change for the train to Changsha.
I said good-bye to him. I was grateful for something he had told me — that on a railway line outside Changsha was Shaoshan, the village where Mao Zedong had been born.
"Everyone used to visit that village," he said. "Now no one does."
One of these days I'll go there, I thought. Zhao had given me careful directions.
This Canton train now turned south. With mountains always in the distance, we tracked across the rice terraces to Hengyang, where the railway divides — one line to Guangxi (Kwangsi), the other to Guangdong (Kwangtung) — The Two Kwangs, as they were once known.
The landscape had changed since Shanghai — not only its configuration (we were now among steep hills), but the methods of farming (these teetering, brimful terraces). The people here wore large wheel-like hats and lived in brick houses with porches, about six families to a house. And some of the houses looked grand and ambitious, with columns supporting the porch roofs and dragons molded on the waterspouts of the eaves.
Every available flat space was planted. Beans grew at the margins of the rice terraces, and there were cabbages on the hillsides, and spinach and greens at the edges of the roads. The earth had been moved and maneuvered so that everything — and especially the crumpled hills — looked man-made. The hills seemed a way of growing food vertically, like having fields on ledges and shelves to economize on space. The trees were tall and spindly, as if to take up the least amount of room.
"Was that Hengyang?" Manuel said.
I told him it was.
"That was the place where Li Si — the Emperor Shi Huangdi's minister — was sawed in half, for burning the books in 213 B.C." He smiled into his bristly beard. "The interesting thing is, he was sawed in half lengthwise."
He had left Portugal and had planned to be in Macau for about two years; but five years later he was still there. He wondered whether he would still be there when Macau was handed back to the Chinese in 1999. He said he was impressed with what he had seen in China — it was his first visit. But he smiled again.
"Maybe after five years all this could be turned upside down."
"Are you optimistic?"
"You know the saying? An optimist speaks — what?"
"Chinese," Veronica said.
"No. An optimist speaks Russian. A pessimist speaks Chinese." Then he frowned. "That doesn't sound right. I think it's An optimist speaks Chinese, a pessimist speaks Russian. That doesn't sound right either."
We debated this. I said, "Have you heard of the man who said, 'I speak English to my valet, French to my mistress, and German to my horse'?"
"And Chinese to my laundryman," Manuel said.
"And Portuguese to my cook," Veronica said.
With the whole day to kill, we tried to devise the itinerary for the longest railway journey in the world. It began in Portugaclass="underline" Braganqa-Lisbon — Barcelona — Paris — Moscow — Irkutsk — Peking — Shanghai — Hong Kong.
We came to Chenzhou, an industrial city in a mountain valley, with high sharp gray-green peaks all around it. And at noon we passed through Pingshi, on the Hunan-Guangdong border. The cliffs had the look of temples, with vertical sides that might have been fluted and carved. But they weren't; this was simply the pattern in the basalt. Here the boulders were as huge as hills, and there were pagodas on them.
"Pagoda is a Portuguese word," Manuel said. "We say pagode in Portuguese — it means noise. I suppose they associated noise with these structures."
Mandarin was also Portuguese, he said — from mandar (to be in charge); and the Japanese arrigato (thank you) had come from obrigado.
I went to the dining car and took a seat next to a Chinese man in order to avoid Kicker ("First thing I do when I go home is have a big steak…"). We were passing through low jungle, but even so, rice and corn were being grown under the thin trees. I thought: There are no old trees in China — at least I hadn't seen any.
The food was not good, but to give my meals a point I invented a system for nominating a Dish of the Day. I had spent too many days eating unmemorably. This was a Cantonese train, with the distinctively wet and sticky cuisine — mushrooms, chicken, sweet-sour fish, greasy vegetables. I chose the eels as my Dish of the Day.