The Train and Beijing

Soft sleepers really are the best way to travel.

After I hauled my two over-sized suitcases up the platform, then dragged them on to the train, I found my berth on the second car. There were four beds: two bottoms, two tops. I had the lower left and an older, middle-aged woman had the bottom right. The two tops were to get on at the next stop. Both men. Obvious jokes came to mind.

I read for the first hour while the woman across from me watched me with a strange interest. At one point, she actually reached over, grabbed one side of my book, and twisted it towards her to see what it was. I knew she couldn’t read English, but she could immediately recognize by the form of the writing that it was a book of poems.

“Poetry,” I said. She nodded as if she understood, then went back to staring while I continued to read on. It didn’t occur to me until after I finished the book and set it down in front of me that her interest might have had something to do with the cover of the collection, which prominently features an ink-brush drawing of a nude woman embracing a larger-than-life-sized penis. I was reading “Harlot,” by Jill Alexander Essbaum.

After the hour with the penis-book (which is what I’m sure the woman was secretly calling it to herself), the two men arrived and our berth was full. It didn’t take long for my three train companions to fall asleep, so I switched off the light and sat in darkness, watching China float by in the night.

What I saw passing by were rail-side homes, shops closed and locked up for the night, concrete highway bridges, so many factories and their adjoining barracks, street lamps in their amber sentry, night-rider taxis, and enormous high-rises that looked like monsters after midnight.

There is something incredibly soothing about trains. The hum, the roll of the tracks, the slight rocking, and the steady pace of the railway as it pacifies your voyeuristic desires, all easily lull you to a trance. I’ve never been so comfortable when traveling as I was last night. And the most surprising thing of all may just be that the toilets were western and not squatters.

When my train finally arrived in Beijing, the sun was shining in the early morning traffic. I have not seen sunshine in over two months; Hangzhou has been consistent in its rainy season. Now that I am in the north, I can enjoy colder and drier temperatures along with more of the natural vitamin D. The feeling was incredible and made the twenty-minute taxi ride all the more likable. I sat in the cab, amazed at the sheer size and volume of this city. Beijing goes on and on.

Arriving at my new accommodations (my aunt and uncle’s apartment), I plopped my bags in the street and stared up at a Pepto-Bismol Pink building: home for the next six months. I have my own room at the end of the hall, adjacent to the master bedroom. Two twin beds and a mattress softer than any mattress I’ve felt in the south of China. Down the hall, on the other side of the living room – now decorated in Chinese red ornaments and white snowflakes on a six-and-a-half foot tree for Christmas – and next to the biggest kitchen I’ve seen in China, is my cousin’s room that he shares with his girlfriend. This apartment is a great size and feels like home already.

The neighborhood is its own foreign city central. Just around the corner is a delightful little market called April Gourmet, where I promptly snatched up the best food I have seen since my two-week visa stint to Wyoming in September. Across the street from this was a little Italian restaurant where we all had lunch. I’ve basked in the goodness of a palate cleansing and it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours yet. Already, I love this city.

My aunt M and my cousin’s girlfriend, J, took me shopping in the silk markets this afternoon. Our goal was a specific Christmas-shopping list. I had a few things in mind. The main events: a sweater for my cousin Z, and his brother, JET, who will arrive from Canada on Christmas Eve. I bargained with every stall in the first, second, and third floors of the market. Today was not a successful bartering day. I did manage, however, to buy a nice Hilfiger knock-off for my uncle E. One present down. Four to go. Tomorrow I’m going to work on the others.

As I suspected, life in Beijing is far better than it has been in Hangzhou. Compared to this capital city of twelve million people, Hangzhou may as well have been the countryside. It’s a whole new ball game.