Riding the Iron Rooster, by Paul Theroux
Paul Theroux is your old-fashioned sort of travel writer. Not only does he travel by train - the way real travel writers get around - but he makes a point of finding ordinary people and asking them direct questions. Someone doing this in the UK would be considered incredibly rude, but in China no-one seems to mind. They like his directness, they respond to it with direct answers. In a crowded society like theirs, values of rudeness are very different.
At almost 500 pages, this book is long and did start to drag a bit in the middle. Theroux makes a point of describing every train, and every fellow traveller, in extraordinary detail. There are things that occur often on the different journeys - people spitting in public, awful food being served (which Theroux just gets on with and eats), astounding scenery to describe. After a few of these encounters, the stories get a little repetitive.
But there’s some repetition to treasure. Theroux remarks that the Chinese often laugh, but the way they laugh means something specific. Every laugh he gets is translated into English, often hilariously:
His face became very thin with a chattering laugh that meant: “You have just asked me a tactless question but nevertheless I shall answer it.”
And there’s a lot to learn. China, being so huge, has remarkable climate variations. I didn’t know there were parts of the country that suffered such remarkable low temperatures. Theroux endures endless weeks of cold trains, cold hotels with no hot running water, cold meals served up in cold restaurant cars. He’s cold more than he’s warm.
The repetition is broken in the final chapter, in which Theroux travels to Lhasa, the capital of Chinese-occupied Tibet, in a car - because at the time there was no rail line that went there (that’s all changed now). His nervous driver, Mr Fu, causes the car to crash spectacularly in the snowy Tibetan plains, miles from anything or anyone. Theroux’s description of the crash and its aftermath, followed by his adventures in Lhasa, make for a fascinating and very different end to the book.
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