There were sixty-three five-gallon drums arranged in rows, waiting to be collected. This hardly noticed feature of Chinese life—urine collection—puzzled me. Mr. Fang was pitifully eager to help me understand its purpose. He knew nothing about it himself, but between us, and using his dictionary, we tried to unravel the mystery.
Inside this public toilet, over the urinal, was a sign:
Mr. Fang and I accosted a man coming out of the john and asked him what it was all about.
"They are saving this urine for medicine," he said. "I don't take it myself, but it's very good medicine."
What was this medicine intended to cure?
"I don't know," he said.
I asked him whether it was used for fertilizer.
"Oh, yes," he said. 'That too."
As we talked, passersby threaded their way through the 315 gallons of human piss that reeked in sticky drums on the sidewalk.
I thought Mr. Fang would feel useful if I gave him a job to do. He had been looking very demoralized. I asked him to find out what this urine collection was all about. He went away and returned with a ragged scrap of paper on which was written the single word
I subsequently discovered that it was used in endocrinology, and that hormone crystals were sublimated from it. The Chinese had been using human urine in sophisticated medicine for a thousand years and in ancient China used it to treat a number of conditions, including impotence, hypogonadism and dysmenorrhea. These urine hormones also straightened out hermaphrodites. Steroids and pituitary hormones were also isolated from the urine. It was also news to me that present-day fertility drugs are extracted from the urine of menopausal Italian nuns.
The trouble was that my having enlisted Mr. Fang's help made him believe that I had softened towards him, and he was eager for more work on my behalf. Was there anything more I wanted him to do? he wondered. I couldn't think of anything until the day I went to Lanzhou Station to buy tickets for Turfan and Urumchi and saw a squabbling crowd of people, and rather insolent and sneering ticket sellers, and one man told me he had been at the station all day (it was now four in the afternoon) and still didn't have a ticket. So I asked Mr. Fang if he would buy the tickets. He said: Gladly! and gave me his chattering laugh—it called attention to his relief—and he went to work. Later, in his Confidential Memo titled
We left Lanzhou at about midnight—the best time of day for catching a long-distance train. You board, hand over your ticket and go to bed; and within a few minutes you're jogging along, sound asleep. When you wake up you've gone 500 miles.
This was the train that the man in Peking had called The Iron Rooster, which was like calling it "the cheapskate express," because the people who ran it were penny-pinchers. But that was just prejudice, a way of maligning a minority, a dig at the Uighurs. In most respects the train was no better or worse than any of the others I had taken in China. And the penny-pinching was not unusual—austerity, and mending and patching had long been among the commonest features of Chinese life. Luxury, even simple comfort, had been condemned as decadent, and so inconvenience, plainness, and roughing it had come to be accepted as virtues. Only recently—within a few years—had anyone confessed to wanting creature comforts and pretty colors. But that did not strike me as immoderate. It was a society that was pledged to austerity that was probably the most prone to going on binges.
So, philosophically, the name didn't fit. But in every other respect this thing was an Iron Rooster. It squawked and crowed and seemed to flap, as steam shot out of its black boiler and it shook itself along the tracks. It was a big, clattering thing, with bells and whistles, that went its noisy and cocksure way westward, into the desert of what used to be called Turkestan.
I slept like a log. The train was not particularly crowded. Mr. Fang was installed in another compartment. I had expected a stifling coach, but it was chilly on the train. I needed the China Railways' horse blanket.
