Many of my most miserable moments in China have involved trains, train stations, or the impossibility of obtaining train tickets. During my first visit to China, not once, but twice, I burst into frustrated tears in a train station because I couldn't understand why I couldn't buy the tickets we wanted. During that same trip, on a "hard seat" train jammed with passengers spitting everything from watermelon seeds to phlegm and pushing ahead of me on lines to the toilet, I came to despise the unwashed billions in a way that doesn't make me proud. I know train travel sounds romantic, but that hadn't been my experience in China. When I told my friends in America that I was taking a 29-hour train trip to Guilin during the week-long holiday, many expressed sympathy for what would surely be less-than-amusing travel. In truth, I was dreading it myself.
With surprising ease, I had gotten "hard bed" tickets for my two travel companions. In reality, cushioning has very little to do with the difference between "hard beds" and "soft beds" on Chinese trains. Neither is notably hard or soft. The main difference is actually privacy, and, of course, price.
In our hard bed section, there were two triple-decker bunk beds to a cabin and no door or wall separating it from the corridor. Each bed had a top sheet, a quilt, a pillow, and a terry cloth towel placed upon the pillow. Actually using that towel to dry your hands or face is guaranteed to elicit looks of pure scorn from the Chinese passengers. What kind of uncivilized heathen doesn't know that towel protects the pillowcase from your greasy hair and possibly sweaty face and never, never accompanies you to the washroom? The linens appeared to be clean, but I thought it better not to examine them too closely.
Conventional wisdom has it that the middle bunk is best. If you have the lowest bed, everyone sits on it during daylight hours. The highest bunk is the cheapest because climbing up to the crow's nest does require some agility. I myself prefer the highest one because it offers slightly more privacy. From my high perch, under the guise of studying Chinese, I spied on my cabin mates. Each hard bed car had 3 toilets, one washroom with two sinks, and an endless supply of boiled water for each cabin's thermos. You bring your own cup.
The soft bed cabins had only a pair of double beds and somewhat more substantial bedding. More importantly, each cabin had a door.
Almost immediately after we left Kunming, the landscape became appealingly bucolic. This is rice harvest season so some fields were lush with golden grain while others sported a beige stubble and a neat knot of stalks exactly in the middle of each field. Cosmos bloomed along the train tracks and mountains undulated along the horizon. The countryside of our province appears so uncrowded that I can hardly blame the rural residents for ignoring China's one-child policy, or officials for failing to enforce it.
I was traveling with my two closest friends in Kunming, Zhou Xueying and Nancy Bloom. Zhou Xueying is an English teacher at my college and Nancy is a Bostonian working at another college in town. We spent the first afternoon chatting about everything from how we met our husbands to what we planned to buy in their absence. For me, the most interesting conversation had to do with guessing which of my Chinese colleagues were Communist Party members. It turns out I have quite the knack for picking party members. The giveaway sign is a gung-ho attitude, and I realized that had I been born Chinese, I probably would have become a member myself. But Zhou Xueying is a bit of a renegade, definitely not a party member; in fact, she's a member of the Democracy Committee. From her I learned who was Christian, who had been arrested for practicing Falun Gong, and who joined the party for career advantages rather than political conviction.
As the sun dipped behind the mountains, most of our neighbors pulled out instant noodles or purchased small plates of rice, topped with limp vegetables, slices of mystery meat, and an egg, but we headed for the dining car. Chinese railroad food tends to be rather pricey for the quality, but this was a pleasant surprise. We had spicy lotus root, yuxiang eggplant, and some meat and mushroom dish. While not cheap, it was actually pretty tasty and the fresh flowers on the table were a nice touch. We toasted the sunset with the local beer. The trip was off to a favorable start.
On Chinese trains, lights go out between 10 and 10:30, and just before then, there's a wild scramble for the toilets and sinks. Everyone travels with a small towel which is then hung from the bed rails or another rail over each window. The obviously compulsive cabin attendant went around straightening each towel, and then suddenly, it was dark. Snoring filled our cabin. I dug out my earplugs and was soon asleep.
When we awoke the next day, we had entered our neighboring province, Guangxi. While the fields resembled those of our own province, the mountains had changed. They seemed to rise straight up from flat ground and were often tufted with trees on top. The sides were craggy with caves. Think of lyrical Chinese paintings you've seen; those are the mountains. The rivers were a deep hunter green like the world's richest spinach soup. Naked boys dove into the water and water buffalo ambled along the banks. It was hard to reconcile the picturesque villages we passed with poverty; I had to keep reminding myself that I was viewing an unenviable lifestyle.
While our neighbors had noodles again for breakfast, we enjoyed muffins I'd baked in Kunming, plus fruit and tea. After a suitable period of admiring the scenery, we settled in for some work. Nancy corrected student essays, I studied Chinese, and Zhou Xueying read English. Then, to the great amusement of our neighbors, I read Chinese essays aloud while Zhou Xueying corrected my tones. Next, she read English aloud and I corrected her pronunciation. Nancy intermittently read her students' most hilariously bizarre sentences and we all tried to reconstruct them. A woman from an adjacent cabin called Zhou Xueying over to ask how much she was making as our interpreter, and with no small amount of pride, Zhou Xueying replied that she was our friend, not our employee. Before we knew it, it was lunchtime.
This time, while we had a simple meal of instant noodles, hard boiled eggs, and fruit, our neighbors opened a bottle of bai jiu (high proof rice wine) to go along with their noodles. This group had been quiet the night before, but lunch got pretty rowdy and nap time didn't start until 2:00. Needless to say, they slept soundly, more soundly than we did.
One's neighbors make all the difference in train travel and we were lucky. We were surrounded by a group of elementary school teachers who were also headed for Guilin. The more we talked, the more we discovered all we had in common. In fact, one guy's cousin is a teacher in our very own English department! They peeled apples for us, offered us candy, and borrowed my toilet paper.
During the last hour of the trip, they asked if I knew any Chinese songs. Despite my cold, I dutifully sang the first verse of "Dongfang Hong" ("The East is Red"). The applause was absurdly enthusiastic, enough to spur the three of us on to several verses of "We Shall Overcome" and "You Are My Sunshine." Then we did a trilingual version of "Frere Jacques" as our neighbors chimed in with the Mandarin lyrics. At that moment, we realized that were were traveling with some excellent singers, and from then on left the singing to them. People from nearby cabins crowded around to listen, and I don't think any of us was especially eager to get off when the train finally reached Guilin.
We flew back to Kunming from Guilin, and I have to admit, the plane wasn't half as much fun as the train.
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