Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux Page B

flung the door open, switched on the lights and demanded the blankets and sheets. I turned over, trying to return to my dream—tacking in a light breeze across Lewis Bay. The sleeping-car attendant in a white pastrycook's hat and apron dug her fingers into my hip and yelled at me to get up.
    "The train doesn't arrive until seven-fifteen!"
    "Get up and give me the bedding!"
    "Let me sleep!"
    A young man sitting on the berth opposite said to me, "They want you to get out of bed. They are folding the sheets."
    "What's the hurry? We won't arrive for almost two hours. I want to sleep."
    The sleeping-car attendant took hold of the blankets, and I knew she was going to do the Mongolian trick of snapping the bedding off me in one stroke.
    My Chinese was functional and unsubtle. I said to the young man, "Do me a favor. Translate this. If they're eager to do a good job, tell them to go clean the toilet. It was so disgusting last night I couldn't use it. The floor's dirty. The windows are dirty. There's no hot water in the thermos jug. What's so important about the blankets?"
    He shook his head. He wouldn't translate. He knew—and so did I—that if the blankets and sheets were folded the sleeping-car attendants could go straight home as soon as we arrived in Peking Central Station. They were not paid overtime for folding laundry.
    Shhlloooppp:
she whipped the bedding off me and left me shivering in my blue pajamas in the predawn darkness.
    "I couldn't tell them," the young man said. "They wouldn't listen."
    He meant they would lose face. After all, they were only doing their job. His name was Mr. Peng. He was reading
Huckleberry Finn
to improve his English. I always softened to people I saw reading books, but I told him that one would not do much for his English. He was twenty-seven, a native of Datong. He was married. His wife was a secretary. He said she was a simple girl—that was what had attracted him to her. They had no children. "We are only allowed to have one, so we're waiting a little while."

    Dawn came up on Peking. It was immediately apparent that this sprawling and countrified capital was turning into a vertical city. It was thick with tall cranes, the heavy twenty-story variety that are shaped like an upside-down L. I counted sixty of them before we reached Peking Central Station. They were building new apartment blocks, towers, hotels, office buildings. There were overpasses and new tunnels, and most of the roads looked recent. The traffic choked some of these streets. The city was bigger, noisier, brighter, more prosperous—it amazed me, because I had seen it in thinner times. And of course I was thinking also of the Russian gloom and Mongolian deprivation and Polish anger; the self-denial and rapacity, the food shortages, the banged-up cars. Peking was being transformed, as if someone had simply sent out a decree saying, "Build this city." In a way, that was exactly what had happened. This new mood, this boom, was less than five years old. In Chinese history that is no more than an eye-blink, but it was clear that the city was rising.
    That was my first impression—of newness: new taxis, new buildings, clean streets, bright clothes, billboards. It was not a lived-in looking city, but rather one for visitors—tourists and businessmen. There were nine new hotels going up, and more restaurants and department stores. No new theaters or parks. The new schools specialized in languages and offered courses in tourism; and one of the larger new schools did nothing but train taxi drivers. Some movie houses had reopened, but there were no new orchestras. Peking had stopped being an imperial city and had begun to be a tourist attraction. The most disturbing sign of its transformation was that it was full of foreign bankers and accountants.
    It is probably true to say that any nation that is passionate about putting up new buildings is equally passionate about pulling old ones down. For a thousand years