Last July, I took the high-speed train from Shanghai to Beijing. The trains in China were comparable to the Shinkansen in their speed and comfort. In the business class, the seats could apparently recline flat. Petite hostesses rushed by, offering bottles of water, and serving snacks and local juice brands. As the train hurtled forward, I stared outside the glass windows from my lofted perch of elevated rail-line. I saw divided highways and undivided farmlands, with their almost-prairie looks. Towns that zipped by the window, looked like well-kempt oversized matchboxes arranged carefully in a quadrilateral.
Where were the teeming masses, bazaars, and half-broken houses abutting the railway line? Where were the lazing shepherds, grazing animals, and old fishermen with their hobby nets? Where’s the buzz of chaotic life that I imagined seeing everywhere in China, the chaos that is so replete in its history?
It was an extraordinarily comfortable train, but I was disappointed with the charmless distance from the people. That’s probably when I determined to read Paul Theroux’s “Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China.” I wanted to understand how China and its trains were in the 80s.
Paul Theroux is an enthusiastic recluse and a borderline misanthrope: he loves to interact with people with cynical derision, keeping a studied distance from them. He is also introspective and forthright, which makes his curmudgeonly observations oddly lifelike and delightful.
He dove headlong into the painstaking travels, for a year, taking all sorts of trains in China. Wherever the rickety trains went, he went. He is so seriously committed to the exercise, that he enters China by train, starting his trip with a tour group in London, ambling his way through Poland, watching circuses and working girls in Moscow, taking the Trans-Siberian and pivoting through Mongolia.
Xian, Dalian, Guangdong (Canton), Guilin, Qingdao, Chengdu, Lanzhou, Harbin, Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen, and more — he crisscrosses everywhere, wiping his brow in the tropical heat of Southern China, and donning triple socks and shivering in multiple sweaters in the North. Along the way, he annoys his “handlers”, argues with the rail guards, and quizzes people on what they had lost in the cultural revolution. All of this occurs before the heady days of Tiananmen. Theroux’s travels are dated around 1986.
Theroux is an American at heart, relentlessly inclined towards notions of liberty, willing to criticize but also fully self-aware, annoyed at gentle nuisances (guards that pull the mattress from under him, eager couples sharing a berth) but also admiring of the hard labor and persistence of the teeming masses. He meets many people but strikes up a memorable friendship with Cherry Blossom, charmed by her outdated, unserious, idiomatic humor.
The trains hoot through 500 pages rolled out in a sequence of trips containing the occasional repetitive interactions, but Theroux has a knack of describing cities (reserving his choicest derision for Hong Kong), interpreting varieties in laughter (“you are an idiot”, “caught me”, “I am not telling you”, etc), exotic food, and mundane things such as spittoons, in fresh and entertaining ways. Theroux also makes a few predictions about how the system will fail and Guangdong will become more like Hong Kong. Over time, I think that opposite has transpired: Shenzhen has grown beyond belief, leaving HK in its dust.
The last chapters are worth waiting for — he takes a delightful rule-bending trip (the only driving trip done in the book) to Tibet. Remarkably, out of the blue, 80s Bollywood song (“I am a disco dancer”) from my Indian childhood, pops up. In Tibet, Theroux insists on (illegally) passing out portraits of Dalai Lama to the adulation of worshippers, while expressing the trenchant disappointment about Tibetan future, and grudging admiration of their fervent hope against hopelessness.
A wonderful book adorned with observant writing. It is truly amazing to see how far China has come.
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