Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux

Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux

Author:Paul Theroux
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780618658978
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-10-04T04:25:09+00:00


The Chinese flock to Kunming to gape at the colorful natives—twenty-three separate minorities, all gaily dressed in handsomely stitched skirts and quilted jackets, boots and headdresses. They come from the far-flung parts of Yunnan to sell their pretty embroidery and their baskets. They are attractive and a bit wild, and they look uncompromisingly ethnic. Mao's stern, gray policies were merely a hiccup in their technicolor tribalism. For the Chinese, the minorities in Yunnan are somewhere between hillbillies and zoo animals.

What exactly do these minority people themselves think? Are they rebellious or downtrodden? Do they crave autonomy? Their numbers are very small: only 5000 Drung people in Yunnan, only 12,000 Jinuos and twice that number of Pumis. The Uighurs and the Yi people were another matter—there were millions of them. At about the time I was in Yunnan there were uprisings and riots among Soviet minorities—in Kazakhstan and Kirghizia. I could imagine that happening in China—perhaps a Muslim rebellion like the one that raged through Xinjiang in the nineteenth century. And I could imagine the same result: it would be ruthlessly suppressed.

People also go to Kunming to visit the stone forest ("We call this one Chicken Tree—can you see why?") and to see the polluted lake and the temples above it, which are so relentlessly visited they are practically worn away from the successive waves of trampling feet, and those temples that aren't are buried under ice-cream sticks and candy wrappers and half-eaten moon cakes.

I went for walks. I even managed to lose Mr. Fang for a few days. I went to an exhibition commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Zhou Enlai. There was a sort of Zhou Enlai cult growing in China. It was also the tenth anniversary of the death of Mao, but no such exhibition had been mounted for him. Of the thirty-odd photographs in the Zhou exhibition, only one showed Mao Zedong—in 1949, Liberation Year: Mao very small, Zhou very large.

At an antique shop near the exhibit I saw a very shapely bronze incense burner—a water buffalo. It stood among the junk jewelry, the broken pocket watches, the old forks with twisted tines, the Yunnanese tobacco pouches. I asked how much?

The price he quoted was seventeen thousand dollars.

I was still laughing as I strolled through the market in the Kunming back streets. It was there that I worked out a way of eating Chinese dumplings without risking infectious hepatitis or cholera or bubonic plague (there had been recent outbreaks of this medieval life-shortener in northern Yunnan and Qinghai). There are few dishes tastier than freshly fried or steamed Chinese dumplings, and they were tastiest in the open-air markets. But the plates they were served in were washed in dirty water, and the chopsticks were simply wiped off and reused.

My hygienic answer was to ask for them in a piece of paper—and to provide my own paper. And the chopsticks could be made safe by scorching them in the cooking fire—holding them in the flames for a few moments to kill the germs.



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