While I was waiting for my own trip to begin I watched the city empty out. Traffic unsnarled. Strange apparitions usually hidden behind the veil of commerce revealed themselves. Shops I liked to patronize retreated behind roll-down accordion metal doors. Firework stores appeared overnight and the sound of their wares exploded constantly, making it seem as if we all were under attack. Under attack by the Year of the Snake. The city buses that travel major roads during rush hour are usually so crowded they would evoke a sardine’s pity were half full. Red lanterns were strung everywhere. Relatives, returning to visit my neighbors, were unused to me, and stared and pointed—laowai.
I asked a friend what she thought of the empty city and her only comment was that there was less spit on the sidewalk. And so there was.
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I drained the last of the bad KFC coffee boarding the 7:40 a.m. train and scoped out the seats laid out two across, then aisle, then two more, realizing I had a 50/50 chance of scoring a window seat. I was going to Jiayuguan, 7 hours and 770 km away, and had paid 160 RMB (approx. $25) for a first class seat but it didn’t come with the guarantee of a window. Everyone knows ADHD redheads need windows, especially when they are traveling. Car 17, seat 57 . . . c’mon, c’mon . . . oh . . . aisle. I hesitated for a moment and sat at the window anyway. Then, “excuse me”—clear as day. I turned and a woman was showing me her ticket, pointing to the window. I must have sighed—I’m sure I sighed, then moved to a vacant window seat. Less than 10 minutes later, the train stopped in West Lanzhou and the car filled up. I went back and sat in my aisle seat before I was rousted, humiliated, revealed as a shameful laowai seat shifter. Shortly thereafter, a man was standing beside me, motioning me to take the now vacant window seat. In my surprise, I blurted out, “you sure,” as if he could understand me, but he just smiled and kept motioning with his hands toward the window. As I got up to move, I saw the woman now sitting behind me with her husband? Brother? Secret lover? Then it hit me—while I was gone they had gotten together and moved their seats around so that I could have a window seat. These kinds of courtesies happen to me all the time in China. I stood up to bow, hands clasped in front of me, and I could see them smiling, knowing I had indeed figured it out, then they looked away quickly as if to forget the whole thing. Now, we were on our way through a long green valley, up into adobe-green hills cut with lots of tunnels. It was---------tunnel, Jonah dark, light--free-free-free, JonahJonahJonah, free, JonahJonah, free for a second, then more Jonah, a smear of crusty cut banks, a hallucination of a manmade lake with dam, then a long Jonah, and free at last, rolling now through flat farmland of sectioned cornfields bordered by swaths of sunflowers, and every now and then bent over workers gathering cut hay into golden mats they could roll up and carry by hand. Eventually the landscape dried out, and I recognized it, familiar yet foreign. Where have I seen those same broad, flat plains, the occasional tree lined windbreaks, distant dry hills, hovering snowcapped peaks, the brief green patch of irrigated field, then the return to brown dirt, when the synaptic oracle lit up and suddenly spoke; it said: Praise be and welcome to . . . Utah! Yes indeed, I was unstuck in time and Balling the Jack through the Beehive State. As I was sitting back and noting the similarities, I saw a very un-Utah-like thing: a herd of wild camels. Then some more. And even more. I got out my camera and stood up, poised to get a wild camel pic. I waited and waited but all I got was a blurry, boulder-stained rubble of a photograph with absolutely no camels present. They were there, I swear. Really. All that camel hunting made me hungry, so I got up and staggered through the train cars looking for a dining car. A helpful passenger said something in English that was either, “Straighten up and fly right,” or maybe, “This damn train has no fried rice.” There was no way I could be certain. I returned to my seat and when the snack cart came by, I scrutinized its offerings. Mostly plastic containers of tea and brightly colored bottles of sugary drinks, with an assortment of vacuum-packed unidentifiable things I’d seen people eat and live to tell about it. I chose a too red package containing what appeared to be a chicken leg that looked like those imitation crab legs made in Korea by robots. I held it in my hand for a long time gathering the courage to open it. Hunger won. Although a little bit slimy from being encased in its vacuum package, it smelled real, and tasted real, but it will always be one of those things I will forever wonder about. Like: from an evolutionary standpoint, why is a panda colored black and white? It is certainly not for camouflage, they stick out like a sore thumb in bamboo groves. Maybe—is it to let you know they are there, so you can avoid them? . . . And why do pigeons, out of all the diverse creatures on this planet, have the greatest ability to detect colors? Is that what drove them to cities? Just then, something flashed by and it wasn’t a camel, and this time I managed to snap off a photo. I had scrutinized enough photographs of the remnants of the Great Wall in Gansu to recognize this bit of crumbling adobe brick. Without warning, more sections appeared, (Gansu Great Wall) and I wanted to shout out, “Stop the train, I want to get off,” but of course I didn’t know how to say that in Chinese, and even so, it wouldn’t have happened. Instead, I stood up and steadied my camera against the window, snapping off photo after photo, saying, “Oh my god, look at that, right there, the Great Wall!” The other passengers, alerted by my manic frenzy looked out, saw nothing, and shook their heads as if to say ‘there is just no understanding foreigners.’ But there it was, crumbling, eroding, and I wanted it to be fenced off, preserved somehow, protected, I wanted to shout out, “Take a look at one of the greatest engineering projects ever undertaken on this planet, or at least acknowledge its magnificence, ‘ooh’ and ‘aaah’ at its proximity just outside the window, or at least note its decay as a symbol of China’s opening, but just don’t sit there and not see anything.” For the rest of the trip, my face was glued to the window, and I saw the Great Wall in every aberration of the landscape, every knoll, rise, bump or arroyo, though mostly they were false alarms. Still, the train was following the ancient Silk Road route through the Hexi Corridor and I was absorbing the vibrations of countless travelers. When I gathered my things to get off the train, a woman spoke to me in English, telling me there was one more stop to go, and everyone around nodded their head in reassurance. And while there may not be any understanding of foreigners, they at least wouldn’t let one get off at the wrong stop. I smiled in my innocent idiocy and rode the train to the last stop on the line: Jiayuguan City. Jiayuguan: Beyond Lay the Barbarian Lands, Part 2 |
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