Riding the train to northwest China

Riding the train to northwest China

The train left Nanjing at 4 pm on Tuesday.

7 am on Wednesday, 15 hours in:

After a fitful night’s sleep accompanied by some terrifying and vivid dreams, I’m woken up by bright sunshine glaring through the train car window. My back aches and I think to myself, “I’m getting too old for this…” I’ve taken many an overnight train in China and I’ve never had a problem with my back before. I lay in bed listening to a loud conversation between a middle-aged man and elderly woman in the pair of bunks next to mine. I can tell from their accents that they are both Han Chinese, though they speak Mandarin with a heavy accent. I know they are not from the Beijing area, but are probably from somewhere in the middle of the country.

My throat tickles, nose smarts, and eyes water as I smell cigarette smoke trickling in and spreading throughout the train car. Although people aren’t supposed to smoke in the train car itself, men frequently meet to smoke in groups in the area between the train cars, the rickety and unstable platform where the two cars connect. The smoke inevitably leaks into the main passenger cars and aggravates my nasal passages. Throughout the day, waves of smoke waft past my nose, and cause my throat to tickle and tighten, making me sneeze and cough.

I spend an indeterminable amount of time gazing out of the window. We’re going through a green, hilly region and passing through tunnels frequently. When we exit a tunnel, the scenery usually comprises a small village situated in a valley between mountains. Small, squat houses with riveted roof tiles are clustered together in one group. The mountains that surround the villages are partially forested, but show ugly scars of deforestation: large, brown patches scatter the hills where groups of trees have been removed.

In one village that we pass, I see a group of about 20 school children lined up in neat rows in the playground outside of their school doing their morning exercises: the ones mandated by Beijing that every school child does every morning for all 12 years of their grade school education.

We pass through another tunnel and I am enveloped in darkness. When we emerge, we are again passing by a village tucked into a valley. This one has a lake, and three men in blue suits (I don’t know if they are Mao suits or just work uniforms) are squatting next to a lake and fishing. In the next, I see someone on a ladder picking orange fruit off of a tree in what seems to be an apricot orchard. In another, neat rows of green vegetables grow in small plots of land.

Faded propaganda messages painted on brick walls encourage people, “Obey the One Child Policy!” and “Treasure Girl Children as Much as Boy Children!" On the walls facing toward the train passengers, advertisements by China Mobile and other companies encourage people to “buy smart phones and get on the internet right away!” And also, “buy household appliances to make your life more convenient,” and “buy motorbikes to smoothly glide across town!”

Vendors walk by every 10 minutes or so, selling alcohol, cigarettes, soda, and slippers, announcing their products loudly to the train passengers, “Fruit for sale! Only 5 kuai per package! Get it now before it sells out! Last chance! Fruit for sale!”

As I sit and look out the window, a lady sits on the chairs opposite the beds and gazes out the window, rapidly eating shelled sunflower seeds. She puts the shell in her mouth, cracks it with her teeth, eats the seed inside and spits out the shell on the metal tray on the table. She does this with such speed that it creates a consistently loud cadence of “crack crack crack crack.” I’ve always been impressed by this. Chinese people, especially women, often eat sunflower seeds during the Chinese New Year or at other social gatherings. They tell me it’s a social activity and something to do with your hands as a kind of a nervous habit, one that also satisfies urges to munch on something  while actually intaking minimal calories.

Obnoxious elevator music plays loudly from the speakers, penetrating even my headphones as I try to listen to an audio book. Then fast-paced and electronic beats from Chinese pop music starts to emanate loudly from speakers on the ceiling. A loop of the same Chinese songs plays over and over - soft, sad love song melodies, alternating with fast pop/rock songs. They sound like the pop music from the 90s in America: boy bands with fast, catchy, and superficial beats, with a steady electric bass in the background, singing about love and heartbreak. The music reminds me of Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus and NSYNC. The one English-language song that plays? The song “Let it Go,” from the Frozen soundtrack.

The music is broken up by periodic public service announcements urging people to watch over their kids (“Young children are quite curious, but this curiosity can lead to dangerous situations like getting burned by the boiling water machine, and don’t let them run around the train car screaming and throwing trash everywhere”). At one point, a cartoon voice of the favorite kid’s character Xiyangyang comes on at one point, urging children to behave themselves and be good citizens by throwing their trash away and keeping your voices low (though the “inside voice” that American children are raised on is very clearly nonexistent in China… kids scream inside and their parents don’t blink an eye). A man comes on once each day with the same announcement, claiming to be the head of some kind of security bureau, telling us to firmly oppose criminals, and also don’t share food and drink or your bank account information or cell phone number with strangers. Before bed on the first night, a woman gave us “healthy sleeping tips” for getting a good night’s sleep.

During a period of rare and brief silence, a reprieve from the obnoxious Chinese music and announcements, the guy in the seat opposite her starts watching a movie on high volume without headphones. A train attendant comes by announcing, “There are a lot of people that are relatively za (mixed up and complicated), so make sure you are watching over your valuables, like your phone and wallet!”

It hits 12 noon and like clockwork, a train attendant walks by with a cart on wheels full of packaged lunches with rice and various stir fried meat and vegetable sides. The boxed lunches are expensive, 3 times more than you would pay elsewhere, but worth it. I would rather eat real, hot meals than just eat snacks for 48 hours, which is what most of the people around me seem to prefer. People have brought huge plastic bags full of instant ramen noodles, packaged chicken feet, hot dogs, and spicy tofu. People are starting to fill their paper bowls up with boiling water and covering them in preparation for their lunch of ramen.

I eat a boxed lunch of rice, potatoes, and egg and tomato, and a green vegetable that I find absolutely horrid. I ask the guy across from me what they’re called: suantai, and I realize it’s garlic stalks. Ugh, no wonder I can’t eat them. The rest of the food is quite tasty. I mix the rice in with the oily and savory sauce from the meat dish.

As I eat, the guy across from me stares unabashedly and curiosity bursts forth in a stream of eager and unending questions: Do you like Chinese food? Can you cook? Can you use chopsticks? Are you used to the food here yet? You Americans, once you turn 18 you just go off and do whatever you want, don’t you?

Somehow the conversation takes a turn into American politics. “You guys have an election coming up, don’t you?” I say yes, next year. And he says, “I saw that formidable and strong lady is up, Hillary Clinton! Are you going to vote? Are all Americans required to vote? Clinton… she’s the wife of that other President Clinton, isn’t she? They’re all aristocrats, huh? An aristocratic family in power for years…” Finally the conversation ends with his declaration of love for the NBA, rattling off the Chinese transliterations of the NBA teams and cities that are incomprehensible for me (the Chinese name for Cleveland is "Kelifulan" and the Chinese name for the Cavaliers is "Qishi," the Chinese word for a "horseman" and LeBron James is "Lebulang Zhanmusi"). I tell him I don’t understand what he’s saying and that I don’t like basketball.

My purple Camelbak water bottle is empty, so I grab it and walk to the shifting platform between two cars. Two men are standing by the car entrance and smoking. I can tell by the accents that one of them is not Han, and that he is probably one of the Turkish minorities. I take a peek at the men’s faces and see that he is indeed from a minority. I turn the faucet on the water-boiler machine and boiling water pours out of the spout into my water bottle. My American water bottle isn’t built for boiling water the way Chinese thermos bottles are, and the bottle quickly becomes hot to the touch, almost too hot for me to carry, so I walk quickly back to my bed and set it on the mini-table next to my bed. A train attendant walks by and seeing my water bottle full of steaming hot water, and thinking that I don’t speak Chinese, pantomimes to me that I need to screw the top on securely.

I then grab my package of Kleenex (trademark that) and head to the bathroom. I find an empty stall, and walk in, locking the door behind me. The toilet is a “squat pot:” a filthy metal bowl built into the ground with treaded sides to secure the feet from slipping. I squat over the bowl and grab the metal handle conveniently positioned on the wall in front of me, with a sign below it reading, “Don’t throw random stuff (zawu) in the toilet and don’t forget to flush when you’re done.” When I traveled in China before, the toilets were literally just a hole in the ground-- you could actually see the train tracks going by and your pee landing on them-- but they must have realized that this was incredibly bad for spreading disease in the groundwater, so in the last couple years they’ve instituted a new sewage system where you actually flush. This keeps the sewage on the train and then a truck comes by and empties it out for cleaning (which I witnessed once last summer).

I return to my bed. People around me play on their phones, and crack sunflower seeds, reading and looking out the window. A man walks past in black spandex leggings that look comfortable. I smell feet.

We arrive at 9:15 am on Thursday, 41 hours after leaving Nanjing.