Another man entered the compartment. This coming and going was quite usual. Travelers sauntered through the train looking for empty berths and free seats. When they located one they paid a surcharge on their ticket and claimed the place. An empty compartment did not stay empty for long; and the coming and going went on all night, too.
This new man was youngish and rather tough looking, beefy faced, with a big belly and big feet.
"I want to sleep here," he said, slapping the berth on which I was sitting.
"This is mine," I said. "I am sleeping here."
He didn't like my saying that. He was in a sort of uniform — army pants and a khaki jacket. He had the look of a pushy, bullying Red Guard. There was no question in my mind but that he was a Party hack.
I ignored him and continued to write in my diary, pleasant thoughts about Xian. This Red Guard grumbled to the man from Kowloon.
"He says he has to sleep there," the man from Kowloon said.
"Sorry," I said.
Because I had been in the compartment first, and this was my berth, I had the use of the table, and this corner seat. I knew he coveted it when the man from Kowloon said, "He has to write his report."
"I have to write my report," I said.
"His is very important."
"So is mine."
"His report is for the government."
"Then it must be a load of crap."
"He is not writing about a road," the man from Kowloon said.
The two men took out cigarettes and filled the compartment with smoke. I told them to cut it out — a recent ruling on Chinese railways had said that people could smoke only with the consent of other passengers. It was late, and "hot, and stifling in this small compartment.
"It's against the rules," I said.
They put their cigarettes away and began to talk — very loudly, shouting in fact, because the man from Kowloon had the Hong Konger's characteristically poor command of Mandarin, and the Red Guard was from Urumchi and spoke a rather debased version of Mandarin. This language problem didn't stop them yakking, but it meant that most of the time they were interrupting each other and repeating things constantly. I opened the window because of the heat. Smoke from the engine blew in and gagged me, and the chik-chik-chik made my teeth rattle.
"He says he has to write his report."
"First I have to finish mine," I said.
"He wants to smoke."
"Smoking isn't allowed in the compartment unless everyone agrees," I said. "I don't agree."
"He wants to know why there is a smoking box on the wall," said the man from Kowloon, clicking an ashtray on the wall.
"Why not ask the fuwuyuan or the lieche yuan?" I said, because these room attendants were passing our door.
"Each room has smoking boxes," the Red Guard said to me, in an intimidating way. "What are they for?"
"For putting out cigarettes," I said, trying to stare him down.
"We must have cooperation," he said.
This meant: Stop being a pain in the ass.
"For the sake of friendship," he said.
This little formula was spoken through gritted teeth.
"I am minding my own business, so why don't you mind yours?" I said. "Fish face."
I went back to my diary, but their shouting back and forth made it impossible to concentrate, so I went to the dining car. It was past eight o'clock, late by Chinese standards (they usually ate dinner before six-thirty or seven), but the menu was recited to me in the usual way, and I ordered. No food came. I asked why.
"There are some foreigners on board," the waiter said.
"I'm a foreigner."
"But you are alone," he said. "We must wait for the group."
We stopped at Baoji, the junction we had passed through a week before; but this time we turned south towards Sichuan. No food came. It was after eight-thirty. The waiter said, "Foreigners… Group."
I told him I was hungry and to bring the food soon. "Dying of hunger" was a phrase sounding like ursula. Still no food came.
Then the group of foreigners appeared: fourteen chunky Swedes, with sunburned arms and whitish hair. One had a video camera. As he poked it and whirred it, the others put their elbows on the sticky dining-car tables. Their guide bought all the beer, before I could order any. Then the food came — to them and finally to me. It was after nine o'clock. The Swedes ate slowly, trying to pincer their slippery noodles. Then the train stopped at Liangkou with such a jolting halt the noodle bowls shot into the Swedes' laps.
"I'm still hungry," I said to the waiter. "Is there any more food?"
"We have some sausages."
"Pork?"
"No. Horse."
I had four of them. They were not bad. The meat was dark and tough, with a strong smoky taste.
When I got back to the compartment it was full of men — the man from Kowloon, the Red Guard and three others. The corridor was crowded with men in pajamas, and children squawking, and some cardplayers. The fans rattled and buzzed; so did the train.
"He is from Xinjiang," the man from Kowloon said. "He is a student. He wants to know your name."
"My name is Paul. He is sitting on my bed. I want to go to sleep."
This disapproving tone had the effect of emptying the compartment very quickly. We turned the lights out, but the three others — a new man had joined us — went on shouting at each other in the darkness.
There was no dawn. The mist grew lighter, thinned slightly, and as we passed at that early hour from Shaanxi into the vast, populous province of Sichuan, small knobby trees became visible, and so did the faint outlines of mountains and hills; and people appeared as small dark brush strokes in this simple Chinese watercolor.
The mist hung over the mountains, and as the sun heated it and made it thinner, a greenness came into it, and there was a lushness, the rice fields, beneath it. It was like looking at a landscape through etched glass, seeing everything blurred, and now and then getting a clear glimpse of the beautiful contours of mountains, of fields and valleys. The sharpest line was the path that always led around the hillside, a packed narrowness that looked bright and baked. In this blur, people were hoeing, and cycling, and leading hairy pigs to market.
The landscape was softened by the mist, but when the mist all burned away what had seemed idyllic looked senile. And the farmers had a hard routine this humid summer morning. Chinese farming is backbreaking, but it is some consolation to know that these days the farmers are well-off — much better off than any teacher or factory worker. The free market has helped them by guaranteeing them good prices: they no longer have to sell at fixed and punitive prices to the state. We had only gone a few hundred miles, from Shaanxi into Sichuan, but we had moved from a wheat-growing region to paddy fields. It was more southerly here, and wetter and warmer.
That was another virtue of traveling by train in China. It allowed one to make visual connections in a place that was otherwise full of shocks and bafflements. Every other mode of travel made the country seem incomprehensible. Well, even on a train it was incomprehensible at times. But doing it this way helped. It wasn't one countryside: it was a thousand landscapes and hundreds of crops. Sometimes, only an hour passed and everything was different.
Now there were cornfields, and harvesters flinging ears of corn into gunnysacks; and browsing buffaloes; and a brownish goose with an orange beak standing in the middle of a flooded field; and women yoked to buckets; and a human scarecrow — a boy frightening birds by waving a long stick with blue streamers on it; and a man on the bank of a canal, fishing Chinese-style, a fishing pole in each hand.
I could not understand the Red Guard's Chinese, so I asked the man from Kowloon whether he would translate my questions.