Around ten, the steward of Sleeper Train Four stepped into my cabin to tell me that my girlfriend was waiting for me in Sleeper Train Six. I thanked him, finished a chapter of The Glass Bead Game, then I put on my backpack and wandered down the aisle to see just whom he could possibly be talking about. I envisioned a veiled oriental temptress reading the Tao Te Ching in an opium cloud. Or it could be some girl from Pittsburgh with an abundance of chin hair. There was no way to tell.
Sleeper Train Six reeked of baijiu and I followed the scent to a cabin full of Han Chinese businessmen who were sitting on the edges of their bunks, grinning and listening intently to a conversation taking place in the cabin next to them. It took me a moment to realize the voices were speaking Australian English. The Chinese men shoved me next door where I belonged.
There were six Aussie girls and a guy from Colorado. I waved and lingered in the hall for a moment, feeling rather creepy.
"Do you mind if I sit down?" I asked. "The steward told me to come see you."
"Hey, that's how I got here," said the guy from Colorado.
It doesn't take long to become an old hand in China. Foreigners tend not to stick around very long. When I told the Australians I'd been in China for seven months, they collectively gasped.
"That's a long time," one of them offered.
I shrugged. I'll be in China for at least another year and a half, I said, and that's when they really began to worry about me.
Before long, the businessmen next door got drunk enough to break up our conversation. I wound up with a cigarette in my mouth, one behind each ear, and several more tucked in my breast pocket. The ringleader invited me to his hometown in Yunnan to slaughter pigs, sheep, and chicken. I accepted the offer and another cigarette.
One of the Aussies and I snuck out to the smoking car and one of the businessmen tagged along. As the Aussie was lighting up, he pulled me aside and pointed at her.
"How old is she?" he asked.
"She told me she was twenty."
"Twenty? Twenty?"
I nodded. The man began giggling convulsively, covering his mouth, giggling some more.
"You're sure she's twenty?"
"That's what she told me," I said.
Again with the giggling. Finally, he regained enough composure to explain himself.
"It's just – she's twenty and she smokes cigarettes!"
A shade of genuine embarrassment seeped into his booze-reddened cheeks.
"In the West, many younger women smoke cigarettes," I said. "It doesn't mean the same thing."
"What is he saying about me?" asked the Aussie.
"He says you're very beautiful."
At 10:30, the lights went out, so I bid the foreigners adieu and crept back to my sleeper cabin. I lay awake for several hours, knowing that on the other side of sleep I would be in Yunnan. There was sun in Yunnan. Sun, and minorities, and midgets in Yunnan. Matriarchal societies where the women tilled the fields while the men strummed lutes and picked tangerines and got pickled on homemade plonk. In Yunnan. Yunnan. Gradually, the name had a soporific effect on me and despite my excited nerves, I fell asleep. I awoke the next morning to a strange gilded light coming in through the window. I shielded my eyes and backed away. Cautiously, I placed my hand under it. It was sun. I had arrived in Yunnan.
Showing posts with label trains. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trains. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Monday, December 21, 2009
A Very Laowai Christmas
I'm finally on the bus, en route to A Very Laowai Christmas in Wanzhou. It took me the better part of two days to get to the bus station because Nanchong has six of them, and I can never remember the name of the one I want to go to. I asked my barber last night, but he thought I was just making chit-chat: yeah, Wanzhou, snip-snip, mm-hmm, bus station, snap-snap. I asked three different convenience store clerks, each of whom insisted that the bus was no way to travel and refused to tell me the name of the bus station. But I wasn't going to take the train this time around, nosiree. Chinese trains are dead to me. Owing to my last trip to Wanzhou, the train is a sensory cocktail of squawking junk vendors, screaming children, and feces.
I went home, went to bed, and redoubled my efforts this morning: I put my fate in the hands of a Nanchong Toyotavan driver. She took me to two different bus stations before consulting the cabby oracle, a tubby dude in a Russian hat who gave me a cigarette and bellowed directions that got me, at last, to the bus station I wanted to get to in the first place, whatever it's called.
If I am a C-List celebrity on campus, I am a jailhouse debutante down by the bus station. The college kids shout HELLO! - the bus station riffraff chants FRESH FISH! Cabbies, trishaw pilots, ticket scalpers, shoeshiners, whores, gigolos, warty old men in fake leather jackets flogging air filters for mid-sized Suzuki mopeds ... you wave your hands and run in the opposite direction, but your disinterest only succeeds in convincing the riffraff that you're secretly interested in their wares.
Claustrophobic and famished, I ducked into an alleyway that reeked promisingly of MSG. I wound up in the Nanchong toilet district and walked for blocks looking for a place to eat, finding naught but places to shit. Then I passed through Nanchong's J-shaped pipe district, responsible for the manufacture and distribution of every single J-shaped pipe in the world. Then I came upon the door district: street after street of doorless shops filled with doors, like something out of Borges ... I keep hoping that someday I will stumble across the Oriental Trading Company's Sichuan headquarters, where I would show the boss my old business card - Keith Petit, Freelance Copywriter - and maybe he'd hook me up with some complimentary "Over the Hill" koozies, hot off the press. But these wanderings seldom lead anywhere, just into the bowels of some kafkaesque/borgesian industrial labyrinth and, eventually, the realization that China is a very large place that I will never understand.
Now, on the bus, we are passing Nanchong's industrial labyrinths at warp speed. There goes the Fargo-sized-woodchipper district, the neon light district, the ginseng district, and then we're out in the industrial hintergrund: vast swathes of fenced-off mudpits marked with imposing Chinglish signs, mustard gas hanging thick in the air. The hintergrund stretches for miles. This is part of Nanchong, too, the part where no one lives and no one goes voluntarily - and it is probably the biggest part of the city. The area I am familiar with - my college campus and a couple of half-pleasant streets lined with what pass for bars in this country - is the cherry sitting atop a monstrous slag heap of hard work, noxious gases, and heavy industry.
My bus companion does not seem to care that I am a foreigner, so it's just me and the scenery and Robert M. Pirsig for four hours. Gradually, Zen and the Art puts me in a zenlike trance, then a fullblown coma. When I regain consciousness, we're pulling into a rest stop just outside of Liangping. I pop out for some noodles and a smoke. All the passengers who were hitherto unaware of the laowai on board are henceforth aware. They speculate (loudly) as to whether I can understand Chinese or not. The Mandarin words for "to understand" and "to not understand" are ting de dong and ting bu dong, respectively, so an odd chorus of Chinese bell chimes fills the air as I'm waiting in line for noodles. Ting de dong, ting bu dong, ting de dong ...
"What do you want? You want a hardboiled pigeon egg? Corn on the cob? Wiener on a stick?"
"I'd like some noodles," I say.
... ting de dong, ting de dong! A thrill sweeps through the crowd: he understands!
"Noodles!" shouts the vendor. "That guy over there sells noodles."
I head in the direction of the noodle man.
"Wait! You need to buy a ticket from me first."
I pause and scratch my head.
... ting bu dong, ting bu dong! Heads shaking all around: he doesn't understand!
"So, let me get this straight," I say. "I need to buy a ticket from you so I can get noodles from him?"
"You don't understand?"
"I understand," I say, "but I don't understand."
I hand the middleman seven kuai. He hands me a ticket.
One of my fellow passengers tells the noodle man to go easy on the spice.
"Laowais can't handle spice," he explains.
"What do I look like? A baby?" I ask. Approving laughter from my entourage. "Extra spice, please."
... ta chi la, ta chi la! A miracle: the laowai eats spicy!
I hand the noodle man my ticket. The noodle man hands me a bowl of noodles heaped high with chili pepper. I sit and no fewer than ten grown men huddle around the table to watch me eat.
Our Very Laowai Christmas turns out to be very laowai, indeed. Not since August have I found myself in the company of more than five Americans at once. I'm not sure how to act. I have no idea who Lady Gaga is. I keep reverting to Special English - "The weather in Nanchong is very, very cloudy!" - and using the sign language I rely on to communicate with my students. We eat burritos and drink spiced wine until, at seven sharp, China knocks at the door. In comes a man named Kingway, wielding a toddler in split pants. Some old timers arrive with a portable mahjongg table. A ten-year-old boy shows up with an erhu and performs for us. Dear Santa, earplugs make a perfect stocking-stuffer for the sensory-overloaded laowai on your list.
Fair warning: if you throw a Halloween party, your Chinese guests will turn it into a Mid-Autumn Festival party, and if you throw a Christmas party, they will turn it into a Spring Festival party. We sit around listening to the locals talk about Spring Festival. By now, of course, we are well-versed in the nuances of the Chinese New Year: four generations of Zhangs gather in the living room to watch CCTV for days on end, glutinous rice balls for breakfast, there is footwashing involved, etc., etc. But our guests don't seem all that curious about our own annual pagan ritual, about the droll-mouthed fat man cutouts on the wall, the plastic fir tree in the corner or the row of giant red socks arrayed in the hall. And why should they be? The Lunar New Year is upon us! Spring Festival is only a month away! This is China. Welcome to our China. Red lanterns are hanged to banish the evil beasts. You had better eat the black algae to engender prosperity and industrious well-being. Wash the feets at midnight for produce colorful life ...
Our guests leave at exactly nine PM, and it is once again a very laowai Christmas. We sit and drink and talk until dawn turns the Yangtze a healthy shade of cyan. I fall asleep in mid-sentence, refuting Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like To Be A Bat? The next afternoon, I'm back at the Wanzhou bus station, but there aren't any buses to Nanchong, so I catch a cab to the train station.
I'm smoking on the steps, waiting for the 8:00 train, when the Chinese Howard Beale comes swaggering towards me. "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymo'!" he screams to no one in particular, then his eyes focus on mine and he rests his hand on my shoulder. "Laowai, have you eaten?" Not in a couple hours, I say. "Let's go!" he shouts.
We wind up in a seedy dive across the street. Beale is visibly and olfactorily drunk. He orders three dishes: sauteed green peppers, the MSG cabbage platter, sweet-and-sour bitter melon. Then he fetches a couple of beers from the fridge, shoots a cigarette my way, and sits there watching me eat, drink, and smoke.
"Laowais are humans," he observes. "Chinese people are humans."
"That's right!" I nod. "We are all humans on this planet."
"You are a human. I am a human."
"Ha ha! You are correct, sir."
"Different minds," he says, pounding his chest, "same heart!"
He is shouting. By now the people around us are staring at him and not at me, a bad sign.
At home and especially abroad, I am a magnet for schizophrenics and raging drunks. When I'm at the pearly gates, I'll be escorted to St. Peter's podium by a ragged army of derelicts and winos who will inform St. Peter in broken English punctuated with OK!s and the occasional thumbs-up that I am a human, that I have a colorful heart, that I once gave them the equivalent of 17 U.S. cents for a hipflask of rice vodka, and for this good deed and many others I should be admitted to the massage parlor at the end of the neon pink tunnel.
"So, er, what kind of work do you do?" I ask.
What Beale describes involves too many hand gestures, seems too intricate and shady for my liking. I ask no further questions. He demands two more beers and tells the waitress to hurry up when the beers don't materialize instantaneously. The woman at the next table comes over to sit with us. She orders a dish of stir-fried mushrooms and watches me eat them. She mentions that she lives in Nanchong and that she has a son. She wants me to teach him English. Howard Beale pulls me into his trenchcoat.
"Do you understand what she's asking you?"
I nod.
"But do you really understand?" he asks.
"She wants me to teach her son English."
"Yes," he nods. "She wants you to teach her 'son' English."
Oh, Christ. Not this again.
"Sorry, ma'am," I say. "I'm a volunteer, so I'm not allowed to teach for money."
"Oh, you don't have to do it for money," she says.
Beale nudges me in the ribs. He toasts the young woman and me and we empty our glasses. Beale stuffs a hundred-kuai note into the waitress's fanny pack on the way out the garage door.
The three of us walk to the train station. I try to lose them in the crowd, but Howard Beale clings to my backpack and keeps pushing me into the woman from Nanchong. He hands me a cigarette.
"Can I smoke here?" I ask. There is a sign above my head depicting a cigarette with an X through it. It says, confusingly, "SMOKING PERMITTED."
"We can't," Beale says, "but you can."
I light my cigarette and start throwing elbows in an effort to dissolve myself. Beale gets held up at the turnstile. The woman from Nanchong has a ticket for a different compartment, but tells me to wait for her when we get to Nanchong. I noncommittally agree and climb aboard.
I'd sworn off Chinese trains after my last trip to Wanzhou, but this time I manage to score a middle bunk in a sleeper cabin. My cabinmates are from Chengdu, so they don't even blink when a foreigner barges into their quarters with a beer in his hand and an Intro to Philosophy volume tucked under his arm. Someone has an especially cute three-year-old granddaughter who is too bashful to say hello to me. She is clamoring for her imaginary friend, a black scarf with skulls on it, whom she addresses as "Skully." As I'm climbing up to my bunk, one of the pins on my field jacket falls off. The little girl's grandma hands it back to me: it is my Poodleface pin.
"What does it mean?" she asks, staring into the poodle face on the pin.
"My friend gave it to me," I explain. "He was on American television once."
She squints at the poodle face, then back at me, as though Poodleface, American television, and my very laowai existence are as imaginary as Skully, whom she is stuffing into a burlap sack full of radishes while her granddaughter weeps and pees her pants simultaneously.
I went home, went to bed, and redoubled my efforts this morning: I put my fate in the hands of a Nanchong Toyotavan driver. She took me to two different bus stations before consulting the cabby oracle, a tubby dude in a Russian hat who gave me a cigarette and bellowed directions that got me, at last, to the bus station I wanted to get to in the first place, whatever it's called.
If I am a C-List celebrity on campus, I am a jailhouse debutante down by the bus station. The college kids shout HELLO! - the bus station riffraff chants FRESH FISH! Cabbies, trishaw pilots, ticket scalpers, shoeshiners, whores, gigolos, warty old men in fake leather jackets flogging air filters for mid-sized Suzuki mopeds ... you wave your hands and run in the opposite direction, but your disinterest only succeeds in convincing the riffraff that you're secretly interested in their wares.
Claustrophobic and famished, I ducked into an alleyway that reeked promisingly of MSG. I wound up in the Nanchong toilet district and walked for blocks looking for a place to eat, finding naught but places to shit. Then I passed through Nanchong's J-shaped pipe district, responsible for the manufacture and distribution of every single J-shaped pipe in the world. Then I came upon the door district: street after street of doorless shops filled with doors, like something out of Borges ... I keep hoping that someday I will stumble across the Oriental Trading Company's Sichuan headquarters, where I would show the boss my old business card - Keith Petit, Freelance Copywriter - and maybe he'd hook me up with some complimentary "Over the Hill" koozies, hot off the press. But these wanderings seldom lead anywhere, just into the bowels of some kafkaesque/borgesian industrial labyrinth and, eventually, the realization that China is a very large place that I will never understand.
Now, on the bus, we are passing Nanchong's industrial labyrinths at warp speed. There goes the Fargo-sized-woodchipper district, the neon light district, the ginseng district, and then we're out in the industrial hintergrund: vast swathes of fenced-off mudpits marked with imposing Chinglish signs, mustard gas hanging thick in the air. The hintergrund stretches for miles. This is part of Nanchong, too, the part where no one lives and no one goes voluntarily - and it is probably the biggest part of the city. The area I am familiar with - my college campus and a couple of half-pleasant streets lined with what pass for bars in this country - is the cherry sitting atop a monstrous slag heap of hard work, noxious gases, and heavy industry.
My bus companion does not seem to care that I am a foreigner, so it's just me and the scenery and Robert M. Pirsig for four hours. Gradually, Zen and the Art puts me in a zenlike trance, then a fullblown coma. When I regain consciousness, we're pulling into a rest stop just outside of Liangping. I pop out for some noodles and a smoke. All the passengers who were hitherto unaware of the laowai on board are henceforth aware. They speculate (loudly) as to whether I can understand Chinese or not. The Mandarin words for "to understand" and "to not understand" are ting de dong and ting bu dong, respectively, so an odd chorus of Chinese bell chimes fills the air as I'm waiting in line for noodles. Ting de dong, ting bu dong, ting de dong ...
"What do you want? You want a hardboiled pigeon egg? Corn on the cob? Wiener on a stick?"
"I'd like some noodles," I say.
... ting de dong, ting de dong! A thrill sweeps through the crowd: he understands!
"Noodles!" shouts the vendor. "That guy over there sells noodles."
I head in the direction of the noodle man.
"Wait! You need to buy a ticket from me first."
I pause and scratch my head.
... ting bu dong, ting bu dong! Heads shaking all around: he doesn't understand!
"So, let me get this straight," I say. "I need to buy a ticket from you so I can get noodles from him?"
"You don't understand?"
"I understand," I say, "but I don't understand."
I hand the middleman seven kuai. He hands me a ticket.
One of my fellow passengers tells the noodle man to go easy on the spice.
"Laowais can't handle spice," he explains.
"What do I look like? A baby?" I ask. Approving laughter from my entourage. "Extra spice, please."
... ta chi la, ta chi la! A miracle: the laowai eats spicy!
I hand the noodle man my ticket. The noodle man hands me a bowl of noodles heaped high with chili pepper. I sit and no fewer than ten grown men huddle around the table to watch me eat.
Our Very Laowai Christmas turns out to be very laowai, indeed. Not since August have I found myself in the company of more than five Americans at once. I'm not sure how to act. I have no idea who Lady Gaga is. I keep reverting to Special English - "The weather in Nanchong is very, very cloudy!" - and using the sign language I rely on to communicate with my students. We eat burritos and drink spiced wine until, at seven sharp, China knocks at the door. In comes a man named Kingway, wielding a toddler in split pants. Some old timers arrive with a portable mahjongg table. A ten-year-old boy shows up with an erhu and performs for us. Dear Santa, earplugs make a perfect stocking-stuffer for the sensory-overloaded laowai on your list.
Fair warning: if you throw a Halloween party, your Chinese guests will turn it into a Mid-Autumn Festival party, and if you throw a Christmas party, they will turn it into a Spring Festival party. We sit around listening to the locals talk about Spring Festival. By now, of course, we are well-versed in the nuances of the Chinese New Year: four generations of Zhangs gather in the living room to watch CCTV for days on end, glutinous rice balls for breakfast, there is footwashing involved, etc., etc. But our guests don't seem all that curious about our own annual pagan ritual, about the droll-mouthed fat man cutouts on the wall, the plastic fir tree in the corner or the row of giant red socks arrayed in the hall. And why should they be? The Lunar New Year is upon us! Spring Festival is only a month away! This is China. Welcome to our China. Red lanterns are hanged to banish the evil beasts. You had better eat the black algae to engender prosperity and industrious well-being. Wash the feets at midnight for produce colorful life ...
Our guests leave at exactly nine PM, and it is once again a very laowai Christmas. We sit and drink and talk until dawn turns the Yangtze a healthy shade of cyan. I fall asleep in mid-sentence, refuting Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like To Be A Bat? The next afternoon, I'm back at the Wanzhou bus station, but there aren't any buses to Nanchong, so I catch a cab to the train station.
I'm smoking on the steps, waiting for the 8:00 train, when the Chinese Howard Beale comes swaggering towards me. "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymo'!" he screams to no one in particular, then his eyes focus on mine and he rests his hand on my shoulder. "Laowai, have you eaten?" Not in a couple hours, I say. "Let's go!" he shouts.
We wind up in a seedy dive across the street. Beale is visibly and olfactorily drunk. He orders three dishes: sauteed green peppers, the MSG cabbage platter, sweet-and-sour bitter melon. Then he fetches a couple of beers from the fridge, shoots a cigarette my way, and sits there watching me eat, drink, and smoke.
"Laowais are humans," he observes. "Chinese people are humans."
"That's right!" I nod. "We are all humans on this planet."
"You are a human. I am a human."
"Ha ha! You are correct, sir."
"Different minds," he says, pounding his chest, "same heart!"
He is shouting. By now the people around us are staring at him and not at me, a bad sign.
At home and especially abroad, I am a magnet for schizophrenics and raging drunks. When I'm at the pearly gates, I'll be escorted to St. Peter's podium by a ragged army of derelicts and winos who will inform St. Peter in broken English punctuated with OK!s and the occasional thumbs-up that I am a human, that I have a colorful heart, that I once gave them the equivalent of 17 U.S. cents for a hipflask of rice vodka, and for this good deed and many others I should be admitted to the massage parlor at the end of the neon pink tunnel.
"So, er, what kind of work do you do?" I ask.
What Beale describes involves too many hand gestures, seems too intricate and shady for my liking. I ask no further questions. He demands two more beers and tells the waitress to hurry up when the beers don't materialize instantaneously. The woman at the next table comes over to sit with us. She orders a dish of stir-fried mushrooms and watches me eat them. She mentions that she lives in Nanchong and that she has a son. She wants me to teach him English. Howard Beale pulls me into his trenchcoat.
"Do you understand what she's asking you?"
I nod.
"But do you really understand?" he asks.
"She wants me to teach her son English."
"Yes," he nods. "She wants you to teach her 'son' English."
Oh, Christ. Not this again.
"Sorry, ma'am," I say. "I'm a volunteer, so I'm not allowed to teach for money."
"Oh, you don't have to do it for money," she says.
Beale nudges me in the ribs. He toasts the young woman and me and we empty our glasses. Beale stuffs a hundred-kuai note into the waitress's fanny pack on the way out the garage door.
The three of us walk to the train station. I try to lose them in the crowd, but Howard Beale clings to my backpack and keeps pushing me into the woman from Nanchong. He hands me a cigarette.
"Can I smoke here?" I ask. There is a sign above my head depicting a cigarette with an X through it. It says, confusingly, "SMOKING PERMITTED."
"We can't," Beale says, "but you can."
I light my cigarette and start throwing elbows in an effort to dissolve myself. Beale gets held up at the turnstile. The woman from Nanchong has a ticket for a different compartment, but tells me to wait for her when we get to Nanchong. I noncommittally agree and climb aboard.
I'd sworn off Chinese trains after my last trip to Wanzhou, but this time I manage to score a middle bunk in a sleeper cabin. My cabinmates are from Chengdu, so they don't even blink when a foreigner barges into their quarters with a beer in his hand and an Intro to Philosophy volume tucked under his arm. Someone has an especially cute three-year-old granddaughter who is too bashful to say hello to me. She is clamoring for her imaginary friend, a black scarf with skulls on it, whom she addresses as "Skully." As I'm climbing up to my bunk, one of the pins on my field jacket falls off. The little girl's grandma hands it back to me: it is my Poodleface pin.
"What does it mean?" she asks, staring into the poodle face on the pin.
"My friend gave it to me," I explain. "He was on American television once."
She squints at the poodle face, then back at me, as though Poodleface, American television, and my very laowai existence are as imaginary as Skully, whom she is stuffing into a burlap sack full of radishes while her granddaughter weeps and pees her pants simultaneously.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Hard Sleeper
My first Chinese train ride - such romance! such bohemian squalor! Stepping aboard the general admission car, I was swatted in the face by the fetid stink of latex and feces. I slugged my way to seat number 87 and sat. Avoiding the stares of the people around me, I took in the crowd. This was an exotic bunch: Mongolians, Tibetans, Uighurs, and other Chinese minorities I could not readily identify. Some of them looked as though they had been living in trains for weeks. It was 2:30 AM and many of the passengers were asleep, but those who weren't sat forward in their seats with duffel bags stowed between their legs, gawking at me. This wasn't the usual big-city curiosity I've learned to ignore: this was genuine astonishment. I must have been the first white devil these peasants had ever lain eyes upon.
With six hours 'til Wanzhou, I cracked open my writing notebook. "NOTEBOOK," it says on the front cover. "Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow." For a long time, I thought those words were just gratuitous Chinglish wisdom, until I discovered they were a direct quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I started writing. My neighbors craned their necks to watch.
"His handwriting is too messy," said the man across from me. "I can't read it."
"Many foreigners have bad penmanship," said another. "Even in English."
"Do you think he understands us?"
"No. I don't think so."
"But maybe he does. Sometimes they do."
Before long, my scribbling had drawn a crowd, which wasn't helping my writer's block one bit. I put my notebook away, tucked my head into my lap, and pretended to sleep until I fell asleep. I was jolted awake some hours later by a man barking into a megaphone. Had we arrived already? No. I saw that the man was carrying a basket full of boxes. He was hawking something. I checked my phone. It was 5 AM. The peddler strode up and down the aisle, barking and squawking until the passengers groaned into wakefulness. My stomach reminded me that I hadn't eaten in twelve hours: was this breakfast? No. The peddler opened a box and pulled out a Super Happy Fun Color-Change LED Spinning Top. He flipped a switch and set the thing loose. It whirled down the aisle and coasted under my seat, where it bleeped and tooted and screeched at a maddening volume.
"It's fun! It's high-tech! It will make your life colorful! It even sings a song!" As he passed, the peddler slowed to aim the cone of his megaphone into the inner ear canals of what few passengers remained sleeping. "Only fifty kuai to bring hours of happy playtime to your child's life!"
As the peddler stooped to fetch the runaway gizmo from under my seat, a tense American frequency was buzzing in my brain. Someone was going to do something. I could sense it. Someone was going to get up from their seat, march right down the aisle, snatch the megaphone from the peddler's hand and stomp it to bits. This is what would happen in America. But as your students will constantly remind you, T.I.C.: This Is China. The crowd drank in the peddler's rap. They were intrigued by the gizmo. They wanted personal demonstrations. What else can it do? Does it play any other songs? What kind of batteries does it use? Thirty kuai is all I've got; will you take thirty kuai? After twenty minutes of lo-fi squawking, the peddler had completely sold out of gizmos. He switched off his megaphone. I was drifting off into a befuddled slumber when I noticed a brownish-yellow pool oozing towards my sneakers. The man next to me pointed at it.
"Is that poop or pee?" he asked.
"It looks like pee," said his companion, "but it smells like poop."
The peddler stepped over the spreading puddle as he passed, riffling the bills in his hand. The stench multiplied. A stewardess stepped in the puddle - splash! - and let out a noise of mild disgust, but did not return to clean it up. I picked my bag up off the floor and sat with my nose tucked into my armpit to ward off the stench. I napped that way for fifteen minutes until the peddler returned, this time with hand-powered flashlights, which sold like mooncakes. And he came back a half hour later, flogging what looked to be imitation Nickelodeon Gak. The purgatory of public transportation had turned very quickly to hell. I pulled my hood over my head and curled up on the bench, and for two hours, amidst all the stinking and squawking, I pretended to sleep.
When I removed my hood, the first thing I saw was a boot. My eyes followed the boot upward to find that it was connected to a stockinged calf, which was connected to an unusually luscious thigh: a woman's leg. I blinked and shook my head. This was a woman's leg! Who was this woman, and what was she doing in China? Then I glanced up to see a very pretty face watching me sleep. She smiled. I squinted. Then, like a startled turtle, I pulled my hood back over my head and rolled over on my side.
A few stops later, two new guys took the seats across from me and started placing bets as to whether I could understand them.
"I bet he can't."
"I bet he can."
"I bet he can't."
"He can," said the woman. "I know he can. I heard him speaking earlier."
One of the guys leaned forward and slapped my thigh.
"Hey. If I speak Chinese, can you understand me?"
I sat up and de-hooded.
"More or less," I said.
He crowed triumphantly and collected a couple cigarettes from the peasant next to him.
A few days ago, I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity, and since then I have been able to understand and produce much more Chinese than I could a week ago. This Is Chinese: weeks of frustration and regression, moments of insight and comprehension. So I cleared one conversational hurdle after another with the man across from me - a clean-shaven sleazeball in a shiny silk suit - and eventually, with the unbelievably voluptuous woman across the aisle. She was sitting with a much older man: her father? her grandpa? her husband? The train passed through a tunnel. I gazed out the window into the darkness and saw that the woman was smiling at my reflection. My eyes shot down towards the floor and lingered on the dried poop-pee puddle under my feet. I have not been in China long enough to understand what constitutes normal Chinese behavior, but the woman across the aisle was behaving mighty unorthodoxically, indeed.
We chatted. The sleaze in the suit, at one point, turned to the woman across the aisle and said, "You should make a foreigner friend." He paused for emphasis. "I mean - make a foreigner friend." He grinned. She smiled.
We arrived. The Mongol hordes wrestled their way down the aisle and off the train. I waited until the car was empty and stepped out onto the platform. The woman was reverse following me, trailing behind her uncle, or coworker, or husband, or whoever he was. When I'd caught up to her, she drew me close and whispered in my ear, "Do you have a phone?"
"Yes," I said, "but it's dead at the moment."
"Then I'll give you my number."
She wrote it on the back of her ticket and slipped it into my hand. No mention of English lessons and no "foreigner friend" spiel. Just a phone number. Call me sometime. There was something indescribably sexy about the gesture, something very un-Chinese. The old man caught her by the arm and they melted into the crowd together. I put her number in my wallet. But I don't think I'll call. My marital status is confusing enough without steamy train station affairs thrown into the mix.
Two days later, I was back at the Wanzhou Train Station. The moment I stepped out of the cab, I was assailed by barkers and floggers and hecklers: do you want to eat? do you want to relax? do you want to go to Nanchong? I take you to Nanchong!
"Bu yao, bu yao, dou bu yao!" I shouted those magic words with my newly acquired Chinese gravitas and the sea of urchins parted before me. "I don't want, I don't want, I don't want any of it!"
I fished out my wallet. According to my fuzzy calculations, after the bus and the cab ride to the station, I should have had 50 kuai left over for a hard sleeper bunk. But my wallet served up 34 kuai and two mao. I'd have to ride coach again. I paced back and forth, racking my mind for the exact moment the swindle had taken place. In China, your pockets seem to hemorrhage money, a phenomenon that will often drive you into a sweaty rage, before you realize that you've been gypped the equivalent of three U.S. dollars. I bought a ticket.
"34 kuai," said the clerk.
I slid my last 34 kuai across the counter, and stared at the two mao in my palm as though there were an ominous portent therein.
Boarding the train to Wanzhou had been a surprisingly civilized affair, but boarding the train back to Nanchong was like being thrown into the throes a Gwar show. The instant the gates opened, the hordes forearm shivered their way out onto the platform. I stood on the outskirts for a few minutes to catch my breath, then I surged into the pit. We were so much cattle; we were turn-of-the-century mobs rioting in the wake of a Stravinsky concert; we were 500 human beings eroding each other to a polished sheen. For a moment, western rationality strained against the bars of my skull: isn't there a better, a smoother way to go about this? Must we cross-check grandmothers into plexiglas walls so we can get to our assigned seats first? Well, shit, I shrugged: as far as excitement goes, this beats the hell out of waiting in line for half an hour. I headbutted someone in the chest and Rodmanned my way through the turnstile.
China will shake you and rattle you sometimes. Other times, it will grin mischievously while you sit and wait for chaos to strike. Nothing happened on the train ride back to Nanchong. It was six hours of purgatory. I reread Brave New World. I wrote. Nobody seemed to notice me. I snuck out to the smoking car for a cigarette. The train ride was uncomfortable, smelly, and cramped. The peddler swept through at midnight to flog bottles of nerve tonic. But it wasn't as maddening or as tedious as I had anticipated. We coasted into Nanchong thirty minutes early. For the first time, I felt like I was coming home. I was relieved to be back in Nanchong, with its familiar peculiarities, its incomprehensible dialect, its distinctly drab architecture; the twiggy girls at the shishkebab joint asking me for English lessons; back to my sterile modern campus, the cold squareness of my apartment, and finally, after a meditative cigarette or two, to the Keithish musk of my hard, well-slept-in bed.
With six hours 'til Wanzhou, I cracked open my writing notebook. "NOTEBOOK," it says on the front cover. "Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow." For a long time, I thought those words were just gratuitous Chinglish wisdom, until I discovered they were a direct quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I started writing. My neighbors craned their necks to watch.
"His handwriting is too messy," said the man across from me. "I can't read it."
"Many foreigners have bad penmanship," said another. "Even in English."
"Do you think he understands us?"
"No. I don't think so."
"But maybe he does. Sometimes they do."
Before long, my scribbling had drawn a crowd, which wasn't helping my writer's block one bit. I put my notebook away, tucked my head into my lap, and pretended to sleep until I fell asleep. I was jolted awake some hours later by a man barking into a megaphone. Had we arrived already? No. I saw that the man was carrying a basket full of boxes. He was hawking something. I checked my phone. It was 5 AM. The peddler strode up and down the aisle, barking and squawking until the passengers groaned into wakefulness. My stomach reminded me that I hadn't eaten in twelve hours: was this breakfast? No. The peddler opened a box and pulled out a Super Happy Fun Color-Change LED Spinning Top. He flipped a switch and set the thing loose. It whirled down the aisle and coasted under my seat, where it bleeped and tooted and screeched at a maddening volume.
"It's fun! It's high-tech! It will make your life colorful! It even sings a song!" As he passed, the peddler slowed to aim the cone of his megaphone into the inner ear canals of what few passengers remained sleeping. "Only fifty kuai to bring hours of happy playtime to your child's life!"
As the peddler stooped to fetch the runaway gizmo from under my seat, a tense American frequency was buzzing in my brain. Someone was going to do something. I could sense it. Someone was going to get up from their seat, march right down the aisle, snatch the megaphone from the peddler's hand and stomp it to bits. This is what would happen in America. But as your students will constantly remind you, T.I.C.: This Is China. The crowd drank in the peddler's rap. They were intrigued by the gizmo. They wanted personal demonstrations. What else can it do? Does it play any other songs? What kind of batteries does it use? Thirty kuai is all I've got; will you take thirty kuai? After twenty minutes of lo-fi squawking, the peddler had completely sold out of gizmos. He switched off his megaphone. I was drifting off into a befuddled slumber when I noticed a brownish-yellow pool oozing towards my sneakers. The man next to me pointed at it.
"Is that poop or pee?" he asked.
"It looks like pee," said his companion, "but it smells like poop."
The peddler stepped over the spreading puddle as he passed, riffling the bills in his hand. The stench multiplied. A stewardess stepped in the puddle - splash! - and let out a noise of mild disgust, but did not return to clean it up. I picked my bag up off the floor and sat with my nose tucked into my armpit to ward off the stench. I napped that way for fifteen minutes until the peddler returned, this time with hand-powered flashlights, which sold like mooncakes. And he came back a half hour later, flogging what looked to be imitation Nickelodeon Gak. The purgatory of public transportation had turned very quickly to hell. I pulled my hood over my head and curled up on the bench, and for two hours, amidst all the stinking and squawking, I pretended to sleep.
When I removed my hood, the first thing I saw was a boot. My eyes followed the boot upward to find that it was connected to a stockinged calf, which was connected to an unusually luscious thigh: a woman's leg. I blinked and shook my head. This was a woman's leg! Who was this woman, and what was she doing in China? Then I glanced up to see a very pretty face watching me sleep. She smiled. I squinted. Then, like a startled turtle, I pulled my hood back over my head and rolled over on my side.
A few stops later, two new guys took the seats across from me and started placing bets as to whether I could understand them.
"I bet he can't."
"I bet he can."
"I bet he can't."
"He can," said the woman. "I know he can. I heard him speaking earlier."
One of the guys leaned forward and slapped my thigh.
"Hey. If I speak Chinese, can you understand me?"
I sat up and de-hooded.
"More or less," I said.
He crowed triumphantly and collected a couple cigarettes from the peasant next to him.
A few days ago, I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity, and since then I have been able to understand and produce much more Chinese than I could a week ago. This Is Chinese: weeks of frustration and regression, moments of insight and comprehension. So I cleared one conversational hurdle after another with the man across from me - a clean-shaven sleazeball in a shiny silk suit - and eventually, with the unbelievably voluptuous woman across the aisle. She was sitting with a much older man: her father? her grandpa? her husband? The train passed through a tunnel. I gazed out the window into the darkness and saw that the woman was smiling at my reflection. My eyes shot down towards the floor and lingered on the dried poop-pee puddle under my feet. I have not been in China long enough to understand what constitutes normal Chinese behavior, but the woman across the aisle was behaving mighty unorthodoxically, indeed.
We chatted. The sleaze in the suit, at one point, turned to the woman across the aisle and said, "You should make a foreigner friend." He paused for emphasis. "I mean - make a foreigner friend." He grinned. She smiled.
We arrived. The Mongol hordes wrestled their way down the aisle and off the train. I waited until the car was empty and stepped out onto the platform. The woman was reverse following me, trailing behind her uncle, or coworker, or husband, or whoever he was. When I'd caught up to her, she drew me close and whispered in my ear, "Do you have a phone?"
"Yes," I said, "but it's dead at the moment."
"Then I'll give you my number."
She wrote it on the back of her ticket and slipped it into my hand. No mention of English lessons and no "foreigner friend" spiel. Just a phone number. Call me sometime. There was something indescribably sexy about the gesture, something very un-Chinese. The old man caught her by the arm and they melted into the crowd together. I put her number in my wallet. But I don't think I'll call. My marital status is confusing enough without steamy train station affairs thrown into the mix.
Two days later, I was back at the Wanzhou Train Station. The moment I stepped out of the cab, I was assailed by barkers and floggers and hecklers: do you want to eat? do you want to relax? do you want to go to Nanchong? I take you to Nanchong!
"Bu yao, bu yao, dou bu yao!" I shouted those magic words with my newly acquired Chinese gravitas and the sea of urchins parted before me. "I don't want, I don't want, I don't want any of it!"
I fished out my wallet. According to my fuzzy calculations, after the bus and the cab ride to the station, I should have had 50 kuai left over for a hard sleeper bunk. But my wallet served up 34 kuai and two mao. I'd have to ride coach again. I paced back and forth, racking my mind for the exact moment the swindle had taken place. In China, your pockets seem to hemorrhage money, a phenomenon that will often drive you into a sweaty rage, before you realize that you've been gypped the equivalent of three U.S. dollars. I bought a ticket.
"34 kuai," said the clerk.
I slid my last 34 kuai across the counter, and stared at the two mao in my palm as though there were an ominous portent therein.
Boarding the train to Wanzhou had been a surprisingly civilized affair, but boarding the train back to Nanchong was like being thrown into the throes a Gwar show. The instant the gates opened, the hordes forearm shivered their way out onto the platform. I stood on the outskirts for a few minutes to catch my breath, then I surged into the pit. We were so much cattle; we were turn-of-the-century mobs rioting in the wake of a Stravinsky concert; we were 500 human beings eroding each other to a polished sheen. For a moment, western rationality strained against the bars of my skull: isn't there a better, a smoother way to go about this? Must we cross-check grandmothers into plexiglas walls so we can get to our assigned seats first? Well, shit, I shrugged: as far as excitement goes, this beats the hell out of waiting in line for half an hour. I headbutted someone in the chest and Rodmanned my way through the turnstile.
China will shake you and rattle you sometimes. Other times, it will grin mischievously while you sit and wait for chaos to strike. Nothing happened on the train ride back to Nanchong. It was six hours of purgatory. I reread Brave New World. I wrote. Nobody seemed to notice me. I snuck out to the smoking car for a cigarette. The train ride was uncomfortable, smelly, and cramped. The peddler swept through at midnight to flog bottles of nerve tonic. But it wasn't as maddening or as tedious as I had anticipated. We coasted into Nanchong thirty minutes early. For the first time, I felt like I was coming home. I was relieved to be back in Nanchong, with its familiar peculiarities, its incomprehensible dialect, its distinctly drab architecture; the twiggy girls at the shishkebab joint asking me for English lessons; back to my sterile modern campus, the cold squareness of my apartment, and finally, after a meditative cigarette or two, to the Keithish musk of my hard, well-slept-in bed.
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