1988; 481 pages. Full Title: Riding
the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China. New Author? : Yes. Genres : Travel; China; Railroad Travel; Non-Fiction. Laurels: 1989
Thomas Cook Travel Book Award (winner).
Overall Rating : 5½*/10.
China. 1986. Mao Zedong died ten years earlier, and Deng
Xiaoping now heads the country. Under
his guidance, the dreaded Cultural Revolution has died out, and the subsequent economic reforms and the opening of Chinese
markets have led to dozens of Western corporations vying to form joint ventures
there.
Enter the American author,
Paul Theroux, with the aim of traveling around in China and writing a book about it. That's no small feat, since China is freaking
huge. You can freeze in the north, with
winter temperatures dropping to as low as -40°C. You can swelter in the south along the tense border
with Vietnam. Western China is
incredibly dry and barren, and eastern China is incredibly crowded.
To boot, Paul Theroux isn’t
satisfied with being a sightseer and going on a bunch of tours with other
westerners. He wants to see the “real”
China – the out of the way places, and talk with the “real” citizens. But traveling by car would take forever, and
you can’t get to most of the remote places by plane. That leaves one other option, but fortunately it is probably Theroux’s
favorite means of transportation.
Traveling by train.
What’s To Like...
Paul Theroux loves trains so much that instead of flying to China to start his odyssey, he takes a train clear across Europe and Asia (England to France to Germany to Poland to Russia to Mongolia) to get there. The first chapter in Riding The Iron Rooster is devoted to that journey, highlighted by the fact that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred while he was traversing Russia, meaning he possibly got zapped by the escaping radiation.
There are 21 more chapters,
most of them covering the various train trips he took during his yearlong stay in
China. I noted at least 28 cities that he
visited, including hitting two of them, Canton and Shanghai, twice. The book’s title refers to a
grueling 4½-day (one way) train trip
from Beijing to Urumchi, a city in the middle of nowhere in the deserts of western China.
I delighted in Paul Theroux's vocabulary choices. Some of my favorite (English) words are given in the next section, but Theroux also shares lots of Mandarin Chinese words and phrases in pinyin (without the
tonal marks, but we’ll cut him some slack on that). There’s even one Tibetan phrase. You’ll find lots of the useful travelogue
information about the quality (or lack thereof)
of the food, accommodations, touristy trinkets, weather, local populace, and transportation in the various cities, hotels, and railcars wherein the author
stayed.
You get a fair amount of
history (the sad plight of Pu Yi, the last
Chinese emperor), trivia (“Ulan
Bator” means “Red Hero”), handy railroading tips (they change the bedding very early and very forcefully
in sleeper cars), interesting folk remedies (medicinal urine), and the slew of books
that Paul Theroux read while getting from place to place, including one titled The Golden Lotus, a 500-year-old Chinese book of erotica that makes 50 Shades of Grey look tame. I learned what the universal phrase “Shansh marnie” means, and in light of our present Covid pandemic, was sobered by the fact that the Yunnan and Qinghai
sections of northern China were just recovering from a serious outbreak of the bubonic plague when the Theroux was visiting there.
My favorite trip was the visit to the Harbin Ice-Sculpting Festival, which took my (figuratively) and the author’s (literally, since it was -30°C) breath
away. The list of Chinese inventions
amazed me. I was tickled that
“heffalumps” get mentioned twice, and had to wiki Sam McGee to understand that
reference. It was neat to see “Om
mani padme hum” mentioned; it's my favorite Tibetan Buddhist mantra, although I
learned it with an aspirated “hrih” added to
it.
Kewlest New Word ...
Fossick (v.) : to rummage; to search through (Aussieism).
Others: Importune (v.), Tumuli (n., plural), Twee (adj.), Stodge
(n.), Solecism (n.), Meretricious (adj.), Spiv (n.), Recrudescence
(n.), Comprador (n.).
Ratings…
Amazon:
4.5/5
based on 183 ratings.
Goodreads: 4.03/5 based on 8,574
ratings and 343 reviews
“Things That Sound Wrong, But Aren’t…
“I
have my mother’s sister in a box.”
(loc. 4135)
Excerpts...
The following day I sneaked downstairs,
skipped breakfast, and was on my way out the front door of the hotel when Mr.
Fang hurried towards me, making a noise.
It was a kind of laughter. By now
I was able to differentiate between the various Chinese laughs. There were about twenty. None of them had the slightest suggestion of
humor. Some were nervous, some were
respectful, many were warnings. The loud
honking one was a sort of Chinese anxiety attack. Another, a brisk titter, meant something had
gone badly wrong. Mr. Fang’s laugh this
morning resembled the bark of a seal. It
meant Hold on there! and it stopped me in my tracks. (loc. 2778)
In Canada people joke and gloat about the
cold. In Harbin and in Heilongliang in
general no one mentioned it except outsiders, who never stopped talking about
it. I bought a thermometer so that I
would not bore people by asking them the temperature, but the damn thing only
registered to the freezing point – zero centigrade. The first time I put it outside the red
liquid in the tube plunged into the bulb and shriveled into a tiny bead. So I had to ask. It was midmorning: minus twenty-nine
centigrade in the sparkling sunshine. By
nighttime it would be ten degrees colder than that. (loc. 5130)
It is wrong to see
a country in a bad mood: you begin to blame the country for your mood and to
draw the wrong conclusions. (loc.
4667)
Sadly, there’s a lot to quibble about in Riding The Iron Rooster. From least important to most:
There are more than a dozen typos, although most of them looked like scanner errors, so maybe they’re only
in the e-book version. I don’t expect
the author to catch these, but the proofreaders should be fired.
There’s a very handy 2-page
map at the start of the e-book, with a very annoying page margin down the middle
that blotted out critical parts of the map.
Surely a better one could’ve been found.
There’s a smattering of footnotes that are quite enlightening, but seem
to be only used in chapters 8, 12, and 16.
There is a small amount of cussing, and discussion of some weird things like penile
reattachments. There’s also a steamy
excerpt from The Golden Lotus, but hey, you've already been warned about that.
Twice we have to endure the
author telling us about his dreams, and he seems to have a thing having Ronald and Nancy Reagan in them. He also insists
on using the anglicized spellings of Chinese proper nouns, the most glaring being choosing “Peking” over “Beijing”.
But this was 1986, and maybe "Peking" was the preferred linguistic choice for western writers back then.
Finally, and most egregious,
the author seems to have a predetermined crappy attitude about China, its
government, its food, its weather and almost all of its citizens, and it shows throughout the
book. 1986 was a relatively joyous time
for the Chinese: Mao Zesong and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were things of the past. The people who Theroux
meets and talks with are happy and outgoing, yet he’s fixated on making them
recount and relive those awful days of internal terrorism from ten years earlier.
The Chinese government eventually
gets wind of the Theroux’s sentiments and assign a chaperone to accompany him in
his travels. They are polite and full of
information, but Theroux delights in ditching them every chance he gets and quizzing everyone about one topic only: how bad they had it during the Cultural Revolution.
In the final chapter Theroux
journeys to Tibet, and unsurprisingly he’s completely enamored by everything Tibetan. They may not bathe, but he doesn’t mind. They may yearn for independence and for the
Dalai Lama to return, and he heartily supports that. The weather may be just as cold as in Harbin (except that the here altitude here is above 7,000 feet and it’s hard to
breathe), but he rejoices in the brisk conditions. If only all the Chinese would pack up and
leave Tibet, Theroux would be completely happy.
5½ Stars. For the record, I totally sympathize with the Chinese government and their decision to assign a chaperone to monitor Theroux's travels and interviews.
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