"This train isn't so strange," I said.
He smiled at me. He said, "Not long ago on this train I saw an incident. A man in Hard Class was lying across one seat. That means he was taking up three sitting places. The other passengers were angry. But the man would not move. Finally, they got a policeman, who told the man to move.
"The man said no. The policeman said, 'Move.'
"'What are you going to do about it?' the man said.
"Of course, the policeman could do nothing if the man didn't cooperate. But that was very unusual — very un-Chinese. This man was thirty or so — that explained it to me. The lost generation. The interesting thing is that he did not move. The policeman went away. He had failed. He had even tried to use logic. 'You bought one ticket, but you are using three seats'—that sort of thing.
"'I don't care,' the man said. 'So what?' That's the attitude among that age group."
"Do you think it's serious?"
"Yes. And it frightens me," Mr. Lu said.
Mr. Lu asked me where I was going. I told him that I was headed into Xinjiang, and he made a face — a slight smile of pain. He said he had no desire to go into the desert. The cities of Turfan and Urumchi held no interest for him.
"If I had the time and the money I would go to Hangzhou or Suzhou," he said, expressing the common Chinese wish to go to a place where there were a million other tourists. "Or Guangzhou," he added — another Disneyland.
But to the question Where would you go? the Chinese I spoke to rarely named a place that was outside the Great Wall, reflecting the ancient fear and prejudice that it was all monkeys and hairy bastards and savages beyond the Wall.
There were two dozen Chinese college students on the train, going to Lanzhou from Peking to take part in a swimming meet. They were going Hard Class, and they seemed to enjoy being tumbled together in the dormitory coaches. At their technical college they lived just like this, eight to a room, with laundry hanging everywhere, and they slept on shelves that went up the wall.
As we passed from Ningxia into Gansu I talked to them. Some where shy and some frisked like kittens and others just glowered at my nosey questions. I asked most of them whether they believed in life after death. All of them said firmly no.
"But most Americans do," one said, and the rest of them agreed that this was so.
I had asked them that because we had begun by talking about dreams. They told me dreams they had — about guilt, persecution, being naked, being pursued.
"Everyone has those dreams," I said. "I used to dream about being chased by a monster that looked like a huge potato. And I still have dreams about suddenly realizing that I have to take an important exam that I'm unprepared for."
We were talking in English, which they spoke very well. In fact, one of the boys — unusual for a college student — was Westernized (in the Chinese way) to the extent that he had had his hair curled. It was the fashion in large Chinese cities that summer, among people who had money — men and women. Taxi drivers affected a Liberace coif, their hair permed and fluffed up, and sometimes lightly tinted. But it was not so common as to go unnoticed. Outside The Phoenix Beauty Salon in Shanghai, and Peking's Golden Flower Perma Parlor there were always baffled people pressed against the front windows, watching the dandified young men getting their hair curled.
The curly-haired student said he didn't have any dreams at all, presumably on the assumption that dreaming was too old-fashioned a preoccupation for a stylish trendsetter like him.
Anyway, I left the subject, and left their coach, but later when I was looking at the rubbly landscape I was joined by one of the girls, who said that she had had a dream that was worrying her.
"Three dreams, I mean. But all of them were about my father and my brother." She had a delicate face and anxious eyes, and she spoke in a shy but determined way. Obviously she had not wanted to tell me this dream in front of all the other students. "In the first dream my father killed my brother with a stick. In the second, he hanged my brother. In the third, he shot him. What does it mean?"
"Is your father violent?"
"Very violent," she said.
"What about your mother?"
"My mother passed away six months ago."
"When did you start having these dreams?"
"After she died."
"You live in Peking?"
"No. I study in Peking, but my home is in a country area, near Wuhan. It is a very large house — nine rooms, in a very remote place. It is also a very strange place. There are groves of bamboo all around it. Do you know the sound that bamboo makes?"
I nodded: it was one of the creepiest sounds in the world, the wind making the bamboo stalks rub and mutter.
"It is an old house," she said. "My mother died in it, and my father lives there with my younger brother. My father is not only violent. He is also very unhappy. I am afraid. Do you think my dream will come true?"
I said that she probably felt guilt for having gone to Peking to study. Her mother had been a restraining influence on her father, and she wanted to protect her brother.
'The last time I saw my brother he was unfriendly. It was Spring Festival. I was glad to see him, but he refused to go for a walk with me."
This was all very gloomy, and I tried to think of something to say, but before I could she spoke again.
"I think something terrible is going to happen," she said. "My father is going to kill my brother."
Actually I felt the same thing, but I didn't say so. I told her not to worry but to go home fairly soon, to see her brother and try to gain his confidence.
She said, 'This dream is telling me that I must get a job in Wuhan, near my home."
This corner of Gansu had the look of a landscape that had been bombed. But the craters and foxholes and exploded-looking ravines were the work of wind and water — wind, mostly, because this was semidesert. The Yellow River was motionless and soupy, and the hills were the color of corn bread and just as crumbly.
Once when I was talking with the students I saw Mr. Fang eyeing me. I knew he had been sent to keep me in line, and I was waiting for a chance to ditch him; but I felt a little sorry for him, in whatever report he had to write about my behavior or the subjects of my whispered conversations on the trains, because the poor man spoke no English. His sea-lion face often made him seem sad.
I found one of the teachers and discovered her to be just about my age. Her name was Professor Shi. In 1967, when she was a student, she was an ardent supporter of the Cultural Revolution and volunteered to travel from Peking to Anhui Province to work on a tea plantation. She abandoned all ideas of further study and picked tea for six years.
"I think it was like the Peace Corps," she said.
"No," I said. "The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient, and we weren't under any pressure to join. But going into the countryside in China was a big Maoist campaign."
"I asked to go," Professor Shi said, somewhat avoiding my point about her being pressured. "I wanted to live like a peasant."
"Did you succeed?" I asked. In Africa, in the sixties, I had had the vague idea of going native and living in a mud hut, and to that end I left my Peace Corps house and moved to an African township and into a two-room hut. But it hadn't worked. My African students thought it was undignified and my neighbors were afraid of me. Foreigners who moved into huts were either crackpots or spies.
Professor Shi said, "In the beginning it was wonderful. We had competitions to see who could pick the most tea. The hard part was not the picking or the bending. It was that you had to carry a heavy bag the whole time, full of tea leaves."