The rest of Lanzhou looked as though it had been built the day before yesterday, in the 1950s, when the railway west was also built, under Russian guidance. The city did not have a prosperous air, and yet the stores were full of merchandise and the markets piled with vegetables. This was a railway junction to which trains came from every direction in China. Lanzhou had fish from the China Sea and fruit from Guangdong, meat from the north and dried apricots and raisins and prunes and nuts from Xinjiang in the west. It also had televisions and refrigerators, the two most coveted appliances in China.
I read a story in Lanzhou in the magazine Chinese Literature (Autumn 1986). It was by a well-known short-story writer and minister of culture, Wang Meng, and was called 'The Wind on the Plateau." It was clumsy but enlightening, a story about a family in the new consumption-conscious China. Zhao the teacher has changed his life from the austere one he was living in the sixties and seventies. He has bought property and owns a TV and a refrigerator. He believes his life is just about perfect. Yet his son was far from satisfied with things as they were. He wanted video equipment, a musical door-chime, a motorcycle and a rubber dinghy. Why not go out and get an air-conditioner made in Australia?
This seemed to me one of the oddest shopping lists I could imagine, but it was a fairly accurate picture of the current state of craving. But I kept thinking, A rubber dinghy?
Meanwhile, Mr. Fang was still traipsing after me, and when I sauntered, so did he, and when I lollygagged, he just stood nearby looking futile and sorrowful. But one day in Lanzhou he came in very handy. I was passing a public toilet and saw a number of large plastic drums on the sidewalk outside. They stank so badly I asked what was in them. No one seemed to know, but then Mr. Fang materialized behind me and spoke one of the few English words he knew.
"Urine," he said.
There were sixty-three five-gallon drums arranged in rows, waiting to be collected. This hardly noticed feature of Chinese life — urine collection — puzzled me. Mr. Fang was pitifully eager to help me understand its purpose. He knew nothing about it himself, but between us, and using his dictionary, we tried to unravel the mystery.
Inside this public toilet, over the urinal, was a sign: We would like good quality urine, so please do not put anything in — no spitting, no paper, no cigarette butts. And another sign said, This urine is used for medicinal purposes.
Mr. Fang and I accosted a man coming out of the john and asked him what it was all about.
"They are saving this urine for medicine," he said. "I don't take it myself, but it's very good medicine."
What was this medicine intended to cure?
"I don't know," he said.
I asked him whether it was used for fertilizer.
"Oh, yes," he said. 'That too."
As we talked, passersby threaded their way through the 315 gallons of human piss that reeked in sticky drums on the sidewalk.
I thought Mr. Fang would feel useful if I gave him a job to do. He had been looking very demoralized. I asked him to find out what this urine collection was all about. He went away and returned with a ragged scrap of paper on which was written the single word enzyme. He said a doctor had written it down. But I was still dissatisfied.
I subsequently discovered that it was used in endocrinology, and that hormone crystals were sublimated from it. The Chinese had been using human urine in sophisticated medicine for a thousand years and in ancient China used it to treat a number of conditions, including impotence, hypogonadism and dysmenorrhea. These urine hormones also straightened out hermaphrodites. Steroids and pituitary hormones were also isolated from the urine. It was also news to me that present-day fertility drugs are extracted from the urine of menopausal Italian nuns.
The trouble was that my having enlisted Mr. Fang's help made him believe that I had softened towards him, and he was eager for more work on my behalf. Was there anything more I wanted him to do? he wondered. I couldn't think of anything until the day I went to Lanzhou Station to buy tickets for Turfan and Urumchi and saw a squabbling crowd of people, and rather insolent and sneering ticket sellers, and one man told me he had been at the station all day (it was now four in the afternoon) and still didn't have a ticket. So I asked Mr. Fang if he would buy the tickets. He said: Gladly! and gave me his chattering laugh — it called attention to his relief — and he went to work. Later, in his Confidential Memo titled Theroux, Paul, Mr. Fang perhaps scratched with his quill pen: Very interested in urine.
We left Lanzhou at about midnight — the best time of day for catching a long-distance train. You board, hand over your ticket and go to bed; and within a few minutes you're jogging along, sound asleep. When you wake up you've gone 500 miles.
This was the train that the man in Peking had called The Iron Rooster, which was like calling it "the cheapskate express," because the people who ran it were penny-pinchers. But that was just prejudice, a way of maligning a minority, a dig at the Uighurs. In most respects the train was no better or worse than any of the others I had taken in China. And the penny-pinching was not unusual — austerity, and mending and patching had long been among the commonest features of Chinese life. Luxury, even simple comfort, had been condemned as decadent, and so inconvenience, plainness, and roughing it had come to be accepted as virtues. Only recently — within a few years — had anyone confessed to wanting creature comforts and pretty colors. But that did not strike me as immoderate. It was a society that was pledged to austerity that was probably the most prone to going on binges.
So, philosophically, the name didn't fit. But in every other respect this thing was an Iron Rooster. It squawked and crowed and seemed to flap, as steam shot out of its black boiler and it shook itself along the tracks. It was a big, clattering thing, with bells and whistles, that went its noisy and cocksure way westward, into the desert of what used to be called Turkestan.
I slept like a log. The train was not particularly crowded. Mr. Fang was installed in another compartment. I had expected a stifling coach, but it was chilly on the train. I needed the China Railways' horse blanket.
I woke at six, in darkness. All of China is on Peking time. It had been light until nine at night in Lanzhou. I read Mildred Cable on the Gobi Desert and realized that I was just passing a point the Chinese had once called The Gate of Demons because beyond it was the howling wind and wasteland of which they had an acute terror. ("Some told of rushing rivers cutting their way through sand, of an unfathomable lake hidden among the dunes, of sand-hills with a voice like thunder, of water which could be clearly seen and yet was a deception.") I read for an hour. At seven it was still dark, the sun behind the distant mountains. We came to a small station called Shagoutai, where the only living things were a muleteer and his mule — the animal loaded with water bags and waiting behind the grade crossing.
The mountains were dark, treeless, grassless ranges and they were folded like thick quilts. They were black, because they were backlit by the unrisen sun. Near Lanzhou, I thought the mountains were like shuijiao (water dumplings). The same smoothness, and folds, and crimp marks. I loved the sight of the wilderness of dumplings. But in this semidesert, with far-off hills, no image came so easily to mind. The nearer hills all had cave entrances in them — the arched doorways of the cave dwellers of Gansu. It was a strange, rocky province, and so long and narrow I knew I would be traveling through it still tomorrow. Like Qinghai, the adjoining province to the south, Gansu was notorious for being a place where political prisoners were sent, the Chinese Siberia. Security was a simple matter because there was no escape through the desert. Only forty years ago travelers on this route — and at just about this spot in Gansu — were met by a large stone tablet with the inscription Earth's Greatest Barrier. Meaning the Gobi.