Paul Soru is the "godfather of modern travel literature" and a writer of sharp and humorous poisonous tongues. In the 1980s, he traveled through China for a year-long journey through 22 train routes spanning the east, west, south, and north, capturing the collective character and changes of the times, both calmly analyzing and being mean.
"It seems he doesn't like China"
In October 2005, the Golmud to Lhasa section of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway was completed. In July 2006, this "Sky Road" was officially opened to traffic. In the past year or so, I have seen the same sentence countless times in various newspapers and magazines: "Paul Tyru, an American modern train traveler, wrote in his book "Traveling in China": 'With the Kunlun Mountains, the railway will never reach Lhasa.'" ”
If you have read Paul Theroux's 1988 travelogue "Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China", it is not difficult to recognize that the sentence quoted by the media is from the book "Riding the Iron Rooster", and "Paul Tyru" is Paul Soru. In 2006, the "godfather of contemporary travel literature" among English-language writers was still little known in China, and his masterpieces such as "Riding an Iron Rooster – Crossing China by Train", "Railway Grand Bazaar – Crossing Asia by Train", and "Old Patagonia Express – Crossing the Americas by Train" have not yet been translated into Chinese, but "Paul Tayru" has been screened in the Chinese media because of a comment he made about the Qinghai-Tibet Railway twenty years ago. I remember that there were only two kinds of Soru's works translated into Chinese on the market at that time: "The Man Who Loves Fresh Air" (the author's name is translated as "Paul Solox", published by Hainan Publishing House in 2003) and "The Shadow of Sir Vidia" (the author's name is "Paul Soru", published in 2005 by Chongqing Publishing House), the former is a collection of essays, containing dozens of travel articles written by the author between 1985 and 2000, and the latter is a literary memoir. It recounts the three-decade friendship between Soru and naipaul, the writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.
After 2010, some of Soru's important works were translated into Chinese published. In 2020, after years of being whipped by the media, "Riding the Iron Rooster" was finally translated and published in China, and the word "Iron Rooster" was removed from the title and changed to "On the Land of China - Travel by Train". Perhaps because there are many "obstructions" in the book, the Chinese Simplified edition is a "clean book", while the Chinese Traditional edition of "Riding the Iron Rooster - Crossing China by Train" published by Marco Polo in Taiwan in 2016 is a full translation. In fact, whether in Taiwan or the mainland, this book has been neglected for too long. The book recounts Soru's train travels in China between 1986 and 1987, Chinese readers two or three decades late to have the opportunity to read it. The changes in China over the years are obvious, the railway not only leads to Lhasa, but also extends to Shigatse, the high-speed rail has covered a large area of the country, and the "iron rooster that kept gasping, dripping water and smoking" (referring to the steam locomotive) that Soru used to ride has long been eliminated. So, what is the point of reading this "outdated" Chinese travelogue in the present? This is going to be an interesting question.
"In the Land of China: Traveling by Train", by Paul Soru, translated by Chen Yuanyuan, Houlang 丨 Kyushu Publishing House, December 2020
Known for his "poisonous tongue", Soryusu can see his complaints and sarcasm about the people, things, and environment around him when you open any chapter. On the 508 slow train from Yantai to Qingdao, he recorded the behavior of passengers: "Even on this short-distance train that can reach the end point on the same day, Chinese still has the ability to fill the entire train with garbage." Almost every passenger is busy soiling the limited space. As I sat and read, I noticed that the person across from me had piled up all sorts of things on the small table in just a few hours, and I scribbled on the blank page: duck bones, fish bones, peanut shells, biscuit bags, sunflower seed shells, three tea cups, two glass glasses, a thermos, a wine bottle, two can boxes, food scraps, orange peels, shrimp shells, and two used diapers. ”
Even more disgusting than littering is spitting, and I have to admire the fact that he can find cultural differences between China and the United States in the matter of spitting: Americans always spit phlegm far away neatly, but Chinese "not spit outwards, but downwards", "phlegm is not a 'pop' hit the spittoon, but a tick, often falling on the edge of the disgusting container, and then continue to flow down". Ordinary people must not look at this picture too much and do not want to look at it carefully, but Soru seriously said that he finally observed this detail after nearly a year of traveling in China, like a great discovery.
I sometimes felt that he wrote too much spitting and too fine, too eye-catching, and there was no need for naturalistic bad taste, but I soon found that it was not so simple, and the author was often not satisfied with photorealism, but also formed further comparisons and judgments, pushing his meanness further. For example, when he saw an old man wearing a red armband in Shanghai criticizing the spitting people on the street, he could not help but ponder in addition to praise: "However, the habit of spitting on the ground Chinese is far less disgusting than the sound of clearing their throats before spitting, and the muddy throat sound can be heard tens of meters apart, like the sucking sound emitted when draining the flood sewers." By contrast, spitting itself is nothing more than a disappointing end to orgasm. The same conclusion is repeated in the chapter "The 'Tianhu' Ferry to Yantai": "I had made up my mind to turn a blind eye to spitpers, but on this ship I understood one thing: the habit of spitting Chinese deeply troubled me for the simple reason that they were not good at spitting. ”
First edition cover
Soru's vitriol, often reflected in this kind of inductive comparison based on observation, sometimes appears subjective, sometimes not without reason. After he entered China by international train through Siberia and Outer Mongolia, he saw the locals smiling at the train at the port station Erenhot, and the foreigners in the same car were a little excited, because the Soviets they saw along the way were all face-to-face. But Soru's meanness was not idle for a moment, and he wondered if the gang was really smiling at them, perhaps just squinting at the sun, or laughing at the foreigners in the car with big noses.
After traveling in China for a while, when he was in Hohhot, he had realized that "there are about twenty kinds of laughter Chinese", there are nervous laughter, respectful laughter, warning laughter, desperate laughter; there is a kind of high-pitched laughter like a trumpet to hide the sudden sense of anxiety, there is a kind of brisk snickering that indicates that something bad has happened, and there is also a kind of laughter that is actually a frightened cough, meaning "Oh my God what should I do". In Shanghai, he talked to a college student who was going to the United States to participate in the drama "Camel Xiangzi" about Lao She's death, and the other party responded with an embarrassing "Ha! Ha! After two sounds, Soru understood that this laughter was meant to say, "Don't mention that!" Another time, on the 16 express trains from Guangzhou to Beijing, I met a salesman with a serious expression, and once the two met each other, the person would smile brightly, and then immediately turned his face and frowned, and this "full Chinese" expression change was interpreted by Soru as "please don't talk to me." He was confident that he could tell the subtext in Chinese of laughter, "none of which is a truly humorous laugh."
I think Chinese I can't laugh out loud or feel offended when I read these descriptions of "laughter," and even Mark Salzman, the author of "Iron and Wire," said in a book review that "it seems that Mr. Soru doesn't like China very much." Chinese unhygienic and unorganized behavior, so mr. Soru has written about it, and he has attacked China's poor food shortages — "gorgeous names but in fact the same", "can make the stomach turn upside down", and repeatedly commented on the ugliness of Chinese cities - "when you think of 'Chinese cities', there is a specific sense of terror, like talking about "Soviet toilets", 'Turkish prisons' or 'journalistic ethics'" and other specific word combinations. He hates China's attractions even more – "For travelers, sightseeing in China is the most useless activity, a complete waste of energy, but rarely enjoyed, and it brings no less exhaustion than pilgrimage ceremonies, but it does not give people a little spiritual satisfaction." So the question is, why do you want to travel to China like a masochist, take nearly forty trains in twelve months, complain and tirelessly travel all over China?
Photographs of the period when Soru published "Riding the Iron Rooster" on the back cover of the first edition (1988)
"Foreigners are best to cheat"
Solu also wrote of another kind of laughter, he was fooled into eating wild animals in Guilin, and paid 200 yuan at checkout, which was a sky-high price at the time. The money collector laughed heartily, and Soru commented: "It is rare to hear such pure laughter in China, which means that it is too easy to fool foreigners." ”
After reading the whole book, I felt that Sorru was always fighting with the phrase "foreigners are best deceived". At the beginning, he said: "Chinese always like to say 'foreigners are very good at cheating', then I want to challenge it." There is no doubt that Chinese trick, he is not convinced: "Chinese know how to manipulate foreigners in a simple way, and their approach is actually a bit clumsy, like a bunch of children are almost with another bunch of kids." We might as well look at Susan Sontag's 1984 reflections on travel: "In the early 1970s, many Westerners who visited China took the Chinese hosts seriously to believe what their Hosts told them: There is no theft, homosexuality, and premarital sex in China. "As more and more people have visited China, people find their itineraries much the same, or even identical — the same tea-producing commune near Hangzhou, the same bicycle factory in Shanghai, the same 'Hutong Neighborhood Committee' in a certain area of Beijing." Despite these similarities, a large number of people still went to China with undiminished enthusiasm, and the records of their observations and stories written after returning to China were the same. ”
Sontag himself visited China in the early 1970s, bringing in a variety of politicians, academics and entertainers, such as Hollywood star Shirley McLean, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Professor Vogel revealed in the introduction to The Age of Deng Xiaoping that Shirley McLean told Deng Xiaoping at a state dinner in Washington in January 1979 that she had met an intellectual who had been sent down during the Cultural Revolution in China, and that he was grateful for the experience of growing tomatoes in the countryside and had benefited greatly. Deng Xiaoping immediately interrupted the female star: "He is lying. I think the reason why Soru hates "Chinese sightseeing" is because "Chinese sightseeing" usually has only formulaic and cramming itineraries. Of course, some people do not think that there is any problem, "Riding the Iron Rooster" wrote about several tourists who came to China in a group, one of whom was keen to pick up stones during the trip, and summed up the Chinese trip in a sarcastic and indifferent tone as nothing more than "ancient tombs, chopsticks and stupas". Shirley McLean apparently didn't think there was anything wrong with "Chinese-style sightseeing", and she made a documentary about her 1973 visit to China, "Half the Sky", which was also nominated for an Oscar, which influenced many ignorant people.
But Soru clearly belongs to the category of people who refuse to be brainwashed by "Chinese-style sightseeing." His first visit to China was in November 1980, when he and a group of American tourists set off from Chongqing to visit the Three Gorges on the "Dongfanghong 39" river ferry, and then transferred to the "Kunlun" luxury passenger ferry in Yichang and went down the river to Nanjing. The journey was written by Soru in a thin pamphlet, Sailing Through China, and later included in the travel essay collection Fresh Air Fiend, along with two other essays on Guangdong and Hong Kong. When the simplified Chinese translation of the book was published, three articles related to China, such as "Crossing China by Boat", were deleted, and the Chinese Traditional edition published by Marco Polo in Taiwan was the full translation, and the title of the book was changed to "Travel Addicts".
The Taiwanese version of "Travel Addicts", translated by Yu Youlan, including "Boat Trip to China".
From today's point of view, Soru's trip to the Yangtze River is a "private" ultra-luxury itinerary, with a total of 33 people in the tour group, 102 crew and waiters, and all the members except Soru are millionaires, and the travel cost is as high as 10,000 US dollars per person. Their Kunlun, originally a Chinese cruise ship designed to host foreign (such as Albanian) leaders, was built directly by Jiang Qingdu and decorated in a style that Soru described as a "Chinese Waldorf Astoria" — an Art Deco design that blends traditional Ming furniture with the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. In foreign countries, the "Kunlun" is known as "Mao Zedong's yacht", it is said that the guest room bathtub is blue, the sofa is wide enough to sit seven people side by side, and the bar is as large as the grand piano to be put in and only accounts for a fraction of the total area. The ten-day voyage to the Yangtze River did not leave a good impression on Soru, and it was likely that the author had already seen through the boredom of this way of traveling, so when he came to China again in 1986, he made up his mind to make his own itinerary, "silently recording, talking less, walking non-stop, letting the train take itself to all corners of China, to the highest, lowest places of the country, to the hottest, coldest, driest, wettest, most empty and most crowded places." "I think it is undoubtedly this oath that sustains him to travel across China like a masochist." What made him vigorously challenge the "Chinese proverb" of "foreigners are best deceived" is probably also it.
When he was in Beijing, Soru was invited to attend the family banquet of Bao Baiyi, the wife of the US ambassador to China Lorde (the author of the novel "Spring Moon"), during which a Chinese intellectual said that Chinese never seriously took foreigners seriously, and one of the most popular sayings today is that "foreigners are good at fooling." Soru immediately retorted: "It's dangerous to say that, it's not. A few days later, on the train from Shanghai to Guangzhou, he quarreled with a Chinese arguing that "foreigners are easy to be deceived." Soru believes that "foreigners are good at cheating" is completely Chinese self-intoxicated, self-deceptive idea, and he thinks of the previous American writer Thoreau at the end of "Walden" to warn the world of "Chinese arrogance and human stagnation complacency" - this can be said to be a rather harsh comment on the Chinese.
At the end of "Riding the Iron Rooster," the author concludes: "I disagree with the statement that 'Chinese unfathomable and profound.' I think they, like many other people on the planet, are readable, even more understandable than most. After more than thirty years, this contrary to "foreigners are confused" has finally returned to China, and I am interested in seeing how it will be reacted to among Chinese readers.
If nothing else, Soru's stubbornness is still very funny, and his hard work can be said to be very inspirational. I've always had a doubt, Solu wrote so many conversations in the book, even "iron rooster, porcelain crane, glass rat glass cat" such as the city slang can be remembered clearly, how did it? Later, I found the answer in "Feelings about the World: Interviews with Famous Travel Writers". Soru told reporters that he has always been excited during the journey, and every time he communicates with strangers, he rushes to his bunk as soon as the other party disappears in front of him, and writes down the content of the conversation in great detail. In chapter 11, he laments that China is so big that in order to understand China, he does not miss any opportunity to explore secrets: when he sees a woman around him opening a leather bag, he will try to use the corner of his eye to look inside and see what is in the bag; when he visits someone else's house, he will secretly open the drawers and cupboards to see what is inside; when he walks on the street, he does not forget to pay attention to various slogans, posters, and ask people to translate the text, especially the shooting announcement, he wants to figure out what the specific crimes of the prisoners listed above are - travel writers should be on this page. It's no different from spying.
His name was "Railway"
Taking the train is Sauru's methodology and foothold in understanding China: "One of the benefits of traveling by train in China is that the country is full of shocking and confusing things, and trains can help travelers make visual connections. Any other way of traveling would make the country seem puzzling. Of course, even observing the country on a train can sometimes be just as difficult to understand, but taking the train will help you somewhat. ”
I counted the Chinese railways he walked through in "Riding the Iron Rooster": Ji'er Line, Beijing-Baotou Line, Beijing-Shanghai Line, Shanghai-Hangzhou Line, Zhejiang-Gan Line, Beijing-Guangzhou Line, Guangjiu Line, Baolan Line, Lanxin Line, Longhai Line, Baocheng Line, Chengkun Line, Kunhe Line, Guikun Line, Qiangui Line, Xianggui Line, Shaoshan Line, Beijing-Harbin Line, Hajia Line, Shenda Line, Blue Smoke Line, Jiaoji Line, Yingxia Line, Lanqing Line, Qinghai-Tibet Line, this is a considerable report card, except that the three eastern provinces with dense railway networks are not thin enough. The important trunk lines before the first major speed-up of China's railways almost let him run everywhere, only the Jiaozhi Line, the Tongpu Line, the Chengdu-Chongqing Line, the Anhui-Gansu Line, the Hangzhou-Ningbo Line and other "second-line" railways were not involved.
If I had the chance, I would love to go back to 1986-1987 and recommend to Soru a train he missed— the 315 Hopsha Express I used to ride that year. The train departs from Hefei at 15:18 p.m. and arrives at Wuhu North Station on the north bank of the Yangtze River along the Huainan Line, is split into several sections and pushed on the ferry side by side, crosses the Yangtze River at dusk, and reassembles into a complete train after reaching Wuhu Station on the south bank, arriving in Xiamen via the Anhui-Gansu Line, the Zhejiang-Gansu Line, and the Yingxia Line. In the mid-1980s, this was the only passenger train ferry on the Yangtze River, which was very special. If Soru knew it existed, he probably wouldn't want to miss it, right? Within a few years, the train ferry line was suspended, and 315 detours around the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge (from Hefei to Bengbu via Huainan Line, to Nanjing via Beijing-Shanghai Line, and then to Wuhu via Ningtong Line to Continue to Anhui-Gansu Line) immediately became ordinary.
The train is the window of the observation era, and the railway itself becomes a fleeting landscape. Neither the Yangtze River train ferry I have taken nor the Yunnan meter-gauge train that Soru has taken no longer exist, and can only be glimpsed during the window of a particular era. When I first started travel writing, I once wrote about the feeling of crossing the Yangtze River on a snowy day in January 1987 on the 315th train, that winter Soru took a train from the cold and bone-chilling Harbin to Dalian, and then took a boat across the Bohai Bay to Yantai, and he and I invariably wrote about the chaos and order of the railway trip, and also wrote about what happened in China that winter - of course, posterity can understand China from 1986 to 1987 by reading history books, such as Shi Jingqian's "In Pursuit of Modern China". But I would like to say that "Riding the Iron Rooster" is far more direct and vivid and more faceted than "In Search of Modern China", which is a benefit of travel literature.
In 1988, Mark Salzman wrote in The New York Times criticizing "Riding the Iron Rooster" for scandalizing China, and a year later, Soru published an article in the New York Times entitled "Travel Writing: What's the Point" (later included in the essay collection "The Man Who Loves Fresh Air"), acknowledging that he "until recently had a comfortable way to treat travel writing as an unclassifiable creation, like a journey out of touch with reality", but the changing times forced him to re-examine this genre. Instead, it is believed that all travel writing should have some kind of historical foresight, otherwise it is a failed writing. "I think that all truths have precursors, and as long as you accurately narrate everything you see and use your imagination to inject life into words, then what you write will have lasting value." This has nothing to do with the emotions that flow from the text. ”
Solu mentioned that when he was in China, the mainstream media in the United States was keen to cover the first KFC in Beijing, fashion shows, bowling alleys in Guangzhou, etc., and he was not interested in such "new trends" and did not want to see tourist attractions, but preferred to talk to ordinary travelers on the train. The college students he met in China were very similar to the young Americans in the 1960s, which made him feel the turmoil of the times and see many contradictions. All this is not something that can be figured out by "liking" or "not liking" China, all he can do is record: "The job of a travel writer is to go as far and as far as possible, to write a lot of notes, to tell the truth." It's hard work, but the book it's written has its own life. Soru confidently believes that "Riding the Iron Rooster", although it does not deliberately predict anything, it also constitutes a kind of prophecy, speaking entirely on the facts it records. Readers are free to judge this. This Chinese travelogue sold more than half a million copies a year after its publication, which is also a response to the bad reviews of Salzmann and others.
He heard the writer Sang Ye (who had co-authored "Peking people: a self-description of 100 ordinary people") say that there was a section of railway track in Beijing that was the scene of high incidence of sleepy rail cases during the "ten years of turmoil", and he couldn't help but be curious to see what was going on. "This place looks ordinary, it's just a track, but all the horrors are hidden in the plain."
He saw on the map that there was a narrow-gauge railway in Yunnan, and the train timetable showed that the train had passed until Baoxiu (the station had disappeared from the official website of the 12306 railway for many years), and immediately became interested. The railway was cut off in 1979 after the outbreak of the Sino-Vietnamese self-defense counterattack, but in 1986 it was still one-third of the way from Kunming to Yiliang. Soru was approved and allowed to board the train — "the ideal trip would be to take a creaky train through the countryside on such a sleeping railway branch line." When he arrived in Yiliang, his feet just touched the ground, and before he could look at the place in Yiliang, have a meal, and talk to the locals, he was urged to immediately get on the return train back to Kunming.
He had heard that some people called the train to Urumqi "Iron Rooster", because some people clung to the management of the railway and refused to repair it, which was considered a dime. Sorru wanted to sit down as soon as he heard it. He was warned that the westward railroad was extremely tedious, but he saw it with his own eyes and thought that it was precisely the most empty place that was the most beautiful. Others say that the Qinghai-Tibet Railway is terrible, but to him the "terrible" places sound like fairy music: steam locomotives, crossing the desert, very slow. He believes that "low rail" is better than high-speed rail, driving too fast to capture the ever-changing scenery, and the speed of 50 kilometers per hour is just right. And the best thing to enjoy is walking around in a non-hurried train in pajamas, with a cheap beer of "15 cents a cup" in your hand.
Just as some people are well-versed in art collections, wine, or fine food, Soru is a train connoisseur—"Traveling by train is both an adventure and a relaxation; I am obsessed with its comfort, its solitude, and its freedom." He argues that "a bad train will take you to magical places" and that "if the train is spacious and comfortable enough, you don't even need a destination" because "the train is not just a means of transportation, it is part of the country in itself." He feels that catching a train in China is always as stressful as a fire drill, but the journey itself is full of untrimmed happiness, like a "middle-aged pajama party." This is one of the many contradictory phenomena in China, which makes him lament that "Chinese have lived a monotonous life without choice all their lives, so the train journey has become a rare happy time for them." Not long after entering China from Mongolia, he joined the "party" in his pajamas on the 90th direct express train from Datong to Beijing.
Soru said he was shocked whenever he heard someone say the word "railway" in China because his surname Theroux, pronounced in French, resembled the Chinese word for "railway" and thought someone was calling him or talking about him.
One of his favorite books about his train travels is The Great Railway Bazaar, published in 1975. At the beginning of the book, it is said that every time he hears the sound of a distant train passing by, he is eager to sit on the train himself. That's the "railroad mania" mentality, and I resonate with it. The Grand Bazaar of the Railway writes that he set out from London, took various eastbound trains one after another, and only took a plane when there was no train to sit, all the way to India, Myanmar, Singapore and Japan, and finally returned home along the Trans-Siberian Railway. There is no reason to just want to sit on the train and see the world. Even if Vietnam is still at war and the railway line is blown into pieces, he will find the remaining sections that are still open to traffic, from A to B, and then from C to D. I believe that there is a certain nostalgic "calling" in the heart of the travel writer; for Soru, his calling is the imagination of the train planted in his youth.
The Grand Bazaar: The Trans-Eurasian Train Journey, by Paul Soru, translated by Susie, Peanut Library 丨Huangshan Book Club, August 2012
Revisit Soru's trails and book trails
Soru claimed several times that he had been in China for a year, and I found that this was not the case. From his departure from London in April 1986 to the end of his journey in Lhasa in March 1987, he did not travel uninterruptedly. A closer look at the context of his journey can be divided into four stages.
Chapter 1 "The Train to Mongolia" to Chapter 5 "Express Train to Guangzhou" is the first unit. Soru set off from London, through the divided East and West Germany, socialist Poland and the Soviet Union where the Chernobyl nuclear leak was occurring, and followed the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Mongolian Trans-Railway eastward into China, reaching Datong, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. He actually applied for an international tour group, and I guess it ended in Hong Kong. At the end of chapter 5, he wrote that he had a "Chinese nightmare" on the eve of leaving Guangzhou, not mentioning where he went after leaving Guangzhou—most likely Hong Kong. In the 1980s and 1990s, when it was easy for a foreigner to obtain a Chinese visa in Hong Kong, he could recuperate in the comfort of the British colonial island, renew his visa, and prepare for "infiltrating" the mainland again. On the Erenhot-Datong-Beijing-Shanghai section of the road, Solu managed to break out of the group until he took the 49 express trains from Shanghai to Guangzhou. Since he hates sightseeing, why should he join the group, there must be realistic considerations. In chapter 1, all kinds of tour group members have become the object of his observation and ridicule (from which it can also be seen that the author's "poisonous tongue" is an indiscriminate attack regardless of nationality, not only for Chinese), and at the same time brings him trouble, so much so that he wrote down the very cinematic, nightmarish metaphor: I thought that the group could worry about it, mix in the crowd, change eight trains, sleep for more than a dozen nights to Go to China, even if you know that you just went out and did not step on it and rolled down a staircase. Like the kind of staircase that never ends designed by a surreal painter, it falls one after another, stumbling all the way, until it gets up on the other side of the world.
Chapter 6 "324 Express Trains to Hohhot and Lanzhou" (the original text is wrong, the number of westbound trains from Beijing to Hohhot and Lanzhou should be odd, not 324) to Chapter 12 "Slow Train to Changsha and Shaoshan – 'Where the Red Sun Rises'" is the second unit. Solu wrote from his meeting with the officials of the Railway Bureau in Beijing, there is a clear gap between chapters 5 and 6, there is no explanation of how he got from Guangzhou to Beijing, only that he needed to seek official support in order to travel across China by train, so a retinue surnamed Fang appeared, and followed Soru all the way: Beijing - Hohhot - Lanzhou - Turpan - Urumqi - Lanzhou - Xi'an - Chengdu - Leshan - Emeishan - Kunming - Guilin - Changsha - Guangzhou. Except for urumqi to Lanzhou by plane (the averse to flying Solu described the Soviet civil aviation plane as like a cigarette smoked the remaining tin foil packaging), the same metaphor he also used in the "Railway Grand Bazaar", describing the plane from Saigon to Can Tho as "crumpled, like tin foil in an old cigarette box"), the rest of the road is by train. As soon as Mr. Fang took the train, he couldn't sleep, he was miserable, he almost collapsed, and Soru was troubled by not being able to get rid of this poor and nasty "nanny". In fact, it was entirely him who asked for trouble, who let him take the initiative to seek official assistance and make himself unfree. This unit ends again in Guangzhou, which is noticeably more difficult than the previous one, and I guess Soru once again fled back to the comfortable capitalist world of Hong Kong to rest for a while, and even to somewhere farther away, and he avoided talking about it. While in Guangzhou, he realized that "it is not advisable to continue traveling when you are in a bad mood, and you will mistakenly blame the country for your bad mood, and thus come to the wrong conclusion." "Bowling in Guangzhou can't soothe the tired body and mind, so he evaporates from Guangzhou again, disappears for several months (according to my calculations, from mid-to-late June to early December), takes a long vacation, and when he appears again in Guangzhou in chapter 13, it is already winter.
Chapter 13 "Beijing Express: 16 Trains" to Chapter 20 "Night Train to Xiamen: 375 Express Trains" are the third unit. This time, Solu learned to be obedient, sneaking inland alone, going south and north like a stealth spy. Another factor that came from the outside world, as it says at the beginning of chapter 13, "a series of public events that shook Chinese society during these days" made him excited again and found fresh motivation to continue traveling in China. This phase was more arduous than the previous one, and It is not surprising that Soru wrote about the bitter cold of the three eastern provinces, which I think is a more literary part of the book, and it is not surprising that Soru said in his article "My Reader's Career" (included in the essay collection "The Man in the Landscape") that one of his favorite travel books of his life was Apsley Cherry-Gerrard's "The World's Worst Trip" on polar expeditions. In many of Soru's works, you can see that he has a very good set of descriptions of bad weather, such as "Boat Crossing China" about Shanghai's air pollution, and "Riding the Iron Rooster" can be seen as a Chinese travelogue with the theme of "looking for the wilderness". The focus of this unit is on the north: Guangzhou - Beijing - Harbin - Langxiang - Harbin - Shenyang - Dalian - Yantai - Qingdao - Shanghai - Xiamen. When he was in Xiamen, due to the approaching Spring Festival, he could not buy a train ticket, and the journey was once again interrupted, and it is estimated that he went to Hong Kong again.
The last two chapters, "The Slow Train to Xining, Qinghai: Train 275" and "The Train to Tibet" are the fourth units. In order to take the train to Xining, the author first went to Xi'an, but neither said where to go nor how to go, I guess it was a direct flight from Hong Kong. At this time, it was the beginning of March 1987, solu took the "slow train" (the original text is wrong, the 275 trains from Xi'an to Xining are not slow trains, in fact, "straight fast") to Xining, then transferred to the real slow train along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway (Phase I) opened in 1984 to Golmud, and then chartered a car to Lhasa, and the whole book ends in Lhasa.
Deducing the timeline of his trip, I realized that although Soru's "Iron Rooster Grand Tour" spanned nearly a year, the actual travel time was only about six months. This discovery answered a puzzle when he first read this book: he took so many books to read on the road, and there were no e-books but only paper books in those years. Just by counting, his travel readings include Sinclair Lewis's "The Ghost of the Sea of Iniquity" and "The Great Road", Balzac's "The Tall Old Man", and Lan Lingxiao's "Golden Plum" (up to 2,000 pages thick!). Gai Qunying's "Gobi Desert", Lu Xun's "A Q Zheng Biography", Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapping", Lermontov's "Contemporary Heroes", Arthur Morrison's "Hole in the Wall", Confucius's "Analects", Zhang Xinxin and Sang Ye's "Beijingers: Self-Descriptions of 100 Ordinary People" and so on. Now that I know that these books don't have to be all with him, Soru runs back to Hong Kong three times in a year, and in addition to recuperating, he can also update and replace his spiritual food stocks.
Soru is a practitioner of reading thousands of books, and it is difficult for him to keep his hands on the books and not drop the bag, so it is a pleasure to see what books he reads and how to read them. He had read Mao Zedong's "Theory of Contradictions", Needham's tome "History of Science and Technology in China" had read at least part of it, and Liang Qichao's "Ou Youxin Video" was not necessarily read by many Chinese, he had read it. On the 80 express trains from Kunming to Shanghai, he pondered the stereotypes of foreigners in the eyes of Chinese, and associated with the descriptions of the Jingren Kingdom, the Daughter Kingdom, the Mao Republic of China, and the Chest-Wearing Country in the old novel, indicating that he knew "Mirror Flower Edge". On the way to Xinjiang, while stopping in Lanzhou, he read Wang Meng's novel "The Wind of the Plateau". He painstakingly read the Analects on the green-skinned train from Harbin to Shenyang, there was no heating in the car, the walls of the carriage were frozen, and he put his hands into his sleeves and turned the book with his nose.
We Chinese regard "reading banned books behind closed doors on snowy nights" as a happy thing in life, and I think Soru must feel happier to read banned books in pajamas on the bunk of the soft sleeper of the train. Professor Dong Leshan talked to him about the two "dangerous" forbidden books of "Meat Futon" and "Golden Plum Bottle", and then he took out the "Golden Bottle Plum" on the 21st Beijing-Shanghai direct express train to study it. Solu's "Golden Plum Bottle" is an unabridged version of Clement Egerton's translation into English with the help of Lao She, and it is said that the translator translated the overly obscene part into Latin to raise the reading threshold and narrow the readership, which is also a kind of "house arrest", but Soru excerpted the erotic description of "Golden Plum" in a large paragraph in "Riding the Iron Rooster", perhaps the diligent Soru personally translated from Latin.
Another recurring title is Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Dong Leshan, the translator of the Chinese edition, told Soru that the "gloomy" novel happened to be translated in 1984, and as a "internal reference" reading, like "Jin Ping Mei", only a few people were allowed to read it. Soon after, Soru met a 24-year-old young man in the "English Corner" of Shanghai People's Park, who had actually read the English versions of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and "Animal Farm", and had a lot of experience. A few months later, Solu accidentally saw Dong Leshan's translation of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" in the library of the Xiamen Workers' Cultural Palace, and the administrator told him that anyone could borrow the book publicly. "Does it look good?" She asked Soru. Soru said, "It's so good-looking, you'll love it." So she said, "Then I'll take it home tonight!" "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is undoubtedly a work that Soru attaches great importance to, and the "Ministry of Truth" in chapter 13 of "Riding the Iron Rooster" pays tribute to it, and it is also mentioned in "Ship To China", and when the American rich tour group arrived in Nanjing, the Chinese tour guide let them watch the live broadcast of the "Gang of Four" tv, and Soru thought of Orwell's "Hate Week".
"China has cured the Disease of China"
Many people do not know that the 1980s before Peter Hessler was actually a peak period for foreigners to write about China, and almost every famous travel writer has come to and written about China. In addition to Soru's "Riding the Iron Rooster," Colin Thubron's "Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China" (1988) and "The Silk Road: Beyond the Celestial Kingdom" (1989), William Dallingp .e Dalrymple's In Xanadu: A Quest (1989), Vikram Seth's From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983), and Tiziano Terzani's La.) Porta Proibita (published in 1985) and Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk (1986) are influential works of travel literature, but most of them have not been translated into Chinese published.
In addition, there are several famous short stories: Jan Morris published Shanghai and Beijing's "Very Strange Feeling: A Chinese Journey" in Rolling Stone magazine in 1983, and Pico Iyer's famous video Night in Kathmandu Published in 1988) with two chapters on his travels in Guangzhou, Beijing and Lhasa, Bruce Chatwin wrote a 1986 travelogue to Yunnan, "In China, Rock's Kingdom." Lijiang's "Snow Mountain Doctor" and Shi Xiu became international celebrities because of Chatvin's reports, and the Guangzhou Railway Station was immortalized by Picco Eyre's article, just as Beijing's Yabao Road was immortalized by He Wei in "Oracle".
British writer L. P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between famously says, "Once upon a time, like a foreign nation, its people acted differently from their natives." ”（The past is a foreign country; They do things differently there.) Looking back at the eighties, it feels like looking exotic, and the crowded community of travel writers record the style of that "country" in words, which is both familiar and strange. If I hadn't read Ride the Iron Rooster, I wouldn't have known that Lhasa and Yunnan were once hippies' paradises (Chapter 22), that the Xinghuayuan Bathhouse in Qianmen Xianyukou, Beijing, was a meeting place for gay men (Chapter 3), and that there were sex workers in Shanghai in 1986—both men and women (Chapter 4). None of this is heard of, but other details that accurately provoke my memory, such as the "guarantee fee" mentioned at the beginning of chapter 13, which I clearly remember has doubled when it was my turn to pay, no longer the five thousand dollars mentioned in the book.
I found the sentence quoted in unison in the major media from 2005 to 2006: "Paul Tyru, a modern American train traveler, wrote in his book Traveling through China: 'With the Kunlun Mountains, the railway will never reach Lhasa.'" In fact, it was excerpted from a report in the British "Guardian" about the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. Interestingly, the citations are incomplete. I tried to translate the original text as follows:
"As the great train traveler Paul Soru wrote in his book Riding the Iron Rooster – Crossing China by Train, 'With the Kunlun Mountains, the railway will never reach Lhasa.' That's probably a good thing. I thought I liked the railway; but when I saw Tibet, I realized that I loved the wilderness far more.'" It's worth noting the second half of the sentence that was omitted: "This may be a good thing." I thought I liked the railway; but when I saw Tibet, I realized that I loved the wilderness far more. ”
The last chapter of "Riding the Iron Rooster," "The Train to Tibet," is the most bizarre chapter in the book. The whole book is about train travel, but in this chapter the author leaves the railway and charters a car to go to Lhasa (although the flight from Urumqi-Lanzhou in chapter 8 " To Xi'an " and the dalian-Yantai voyage in chapter 17 " The 'Tianhu Ferry to Yantai' are exceptions, but the author's purpose of going to Lanzhou and Yantai is still to take the train). This is because in the mid-1980s, the 1956-kilometer Qinghai-Tibet Railway only completed the first phase of the project from Xining to Golmud (814 kilometers long), and the 1142 kilometers from Golmud to Lhasa were still on the drawings. As a result, the "great train traveler" had to condescend to take a car, and there was a car accident on the road, fortunately not seriously injured.
Cover of the first edition of The Grand Bazaar of the Railway
Look at the author's previous copy of the Grand Railway Bazaar to see how much he hated travel outside of the railway. Due to the unstable situation in the Balochistan region on the border between Iran and Pakistan, Soru had to pass through Afghanistan, which is a country without railways and has no other way but to cross the country by two taxis and two buses and one plane. Other travelers may find Afghanistan an exciting place, but Soru only wants to get through quickly. He said that "taking the train makes people feel a sense of accomplishment", and that Afghanistan, a country with no inch of rail, was dismissed in just over one page, and that a single sentence of "Afghanistan is a trouble" seemed to sum up the whole country. By comparison, he wrote 25 pages on the Qinghai-Tibet Highway from Golmud to Lhasa. I think it is precisely because Soru was a "great train traveler" that the phrase is even more intriguing: "This may be a good thing." I thought I liked the railway; but when I saw Tibet, I realized that I loved the wilderness far more. "I am convinced that sometimes the onlooker sees more clearly than the person who is in it. There's a sentence at the end of "Riding the Iron Rooster" that makes me unable to agree more: "Only by seeing Tibet with your own eyes can you truly understand China." "In my own experience, it is true that I only began to really know my country after I went to Tibet.
Soru said: "The trip to China has cured my Chinese disease. "How to understand? In 1973, Soru set out from England on various eastbound trains in an attempt to reach the most distant parts of eastern Asia. The result of that trip was the Grand Railway Bazaar – Crossing Asia by Train. However, the Asia in the book is asia without China, and Soru is not as fortunate as Susan Sontag, Shirley McLean, or Antonioni to have the opportunity to visit Red China in the early seventies. China's temptations are like a kind of "hunger marketing" that gave birth to "Riding the Iron Rooster – Crossing China by Train". He came straight to China and used nearly forty railway journeys at once to completely cure the hunger that had accumulated for many years, so there is a saying that "The Chinese disease has been cured".
At the end of the journey, Soru confessed to himself: "This trip to China was so long that I was exhausted, so in the end, it was no longer a journey, but another stage of my life." At the end of this trip, I felt that what I was about to embark on was not a way back, but a parting road, and my heart was full of reluctance. "China is the kind of place that can make travelers feel humble, the more they walk, the more humble they are, and there is no place in the whole of China that can push the ratio of man to heaven and earth to the limit like Tibet." The conclusion of "Riding the Iron Rooster" is very interesting, and I see several paradoxes: one is about trains, the other is about travel, and the third is about China. First, this is a book dedicated to taking the train, but in the end it is found that the railway is not the author's favorite, he loves the wilderness that the railway cannot reach; second, travel cannot replace life, it should be outside of life, but when the author ends the trip, he finds that the trip has injected his own life; third, the trip to China has cured the author's "Chinese disease", which could have been put down and left, but when he left, he felt that his heart was full of reluctance.
Travelers are the contradictions in walking, and the state is also a contradiction in change. Behind a country's railway dream looms the subjective will of the modern nation-state, "with the Kunlun Mountains, the railway will never reach Lhasa" forces Soru to be involved in the nationalist debate of "whether Chinese has the ability to build the railway to Tibet", which involves another delicate nationalist narrative because of the particularity of Tibet. The wonderful bridge section that was copied by newspapers and periodicals at that time seemed wonderful, but it was not necessarily so reasonable. "With the Kunlun Mountains, the railway will never reach Lhasa", in fact, from the level of cognition in the 1980s. Borrow L. P. Hartley's words: Once upon a time, it has become a foreign country!