On the Train

     People talk on trains in China. I remember this being very strange to me after living in Japan where people don't talk much at all in public. I think Vancouver lies somewhere in the middle of the talking spectrum between Japan and China. People are also quite friendly on trains in China. Some people sit in the seats that face each other around a small table each other, maybe slurping on some instant noodles they bought from the food cart going up and down the aisle of the train; some stand beneath the luggage rack, waiting to take someone's seat when they stand to go to the toilet or have a smoke between the cars, only to give the seat back when they return; or they'll lay newspaper on the floor, half in the aisle, and half under a row of seats, and lay down to sleep as much as they can before the next meal cart passes through the aisle.
  
    They seats that we bought were cheap, so they were also crowded. When we bought our tickets a few days prior, we wondered just how hard our "hard seats" were going to be. The train itself turned out to be much nicer than we expected. It was very clean, the seats were a decent size, they were also padded, and there were different kinds of music that played through speakers during most of the trip. What is meant by "hard seat," is that the seats don't recline -- instead, they're one piece of fixed hard plastic with a cushioned material over top. This is because the seats are placed back to back so that four seats will face each other around a small table. Janice and i had seats on one side of the table, and on the other were two Chinese men who would be our traveling companions for the next 20 or so hours.
    One of the first things that the guy across from me did when the train started to move, was put his feet up onto the side of my seat. When I looked at him, he nodded at me with a big smile on his face. "I guess so," I thought to myself. For the rest of the journey, they picked their noses, lift their shirts up over their bellies and pick the lint from inside their bellybuttons. They brought their own grocery bag full of shrink-wrapped meats -- usually some kind of sausage or chicken's feet, that they chewed with their mouths open and drank beer with big smiles on their faces. Then one of them used a toothpick to pick his teeth, which he also used to pick his ear and his bellybutton. When one of them would get up to go for a smoke between the cars, one of the standing passengers would come to sit in the seat while he was gone, but the other guy would shoo him away and stretch himself out across both the seats, and his legs would hang into the aisle where the food cart came and pushed his legs aside.
    The two of them spoke no English at all, so most of our communication was limited to nodding, smiling, and pointing at the things that interested us. I would point at his tea container on the table that was full of yellow and orange flowers -- every once in a while a steward would come and fill it up. He pointed at my book on the history of China. We'd smile and nod, and then return our eyes to the hazy landscape outside our window.
    Even though we were far from the major city centres, passing by villages made from brick or cratered concrete, into farm country where we often couldn't see much because there were tall trees and brush that grew alongside the track, still, there was always a haze of smog.
    Someone told me once that ten percent of California's air pollution comes from China.
    At one point during the ride, I had my camera out, taking pictures out the window, I turned to the two fellows across from us. I pointed at them and then gestured with my camera as i put it to my eye. The one on the right shook his head at me, but the other had an unsure grin on his face, sat himself strait, and then nodded his head quickly. Sitting there in his blue collared polo shirt, I snapped the shutter and now I'll never forget him.
    Afterward I turned the camera around to show him the image I got and both of them smiled. He was disappointed though, when he asked for a copy of the photo (he thought it was a Polaroid camera) and I couldn't give it to him. I tried to ask him if he had an email address, but this didn't register with him.

    Something I haven't mentioned yet is that the night before embarking on our 20 hour train ride, I got quite sick. I was up most of the night with my arms wrapped around the toilet and in the morning, i wasn't sure if I was able to transport my body to the station on time without having to expel some sort of bodily substance. Janice looked into buying plane tickets for the next day because if we didn't make our train, we'd be stuck in Shanghai for a few more days. At the last minute, I figured that I had finished purging everything from my body, and I said, lets go.
    On the train, I hadn't used the toilets yet, but I knew that even under the best of situations, I didn't want to have to stick my face into a public toilet. So for the 20 hour ride, I drank about 200 ml of water and ate about 4 sesame crackers. If nothing went in, then nothing could come out. I ended up making a short trip to the toilets at some point, but it wasn't anything that I couldn't stand up for. I was glad because the toilet was nothing more than a hole in the floor that opened out to the tracks outside. And there was a sink just outside the door, but a couple of people were sprawled across the counter and pressed into the basin.

    Despite feeling awful for most of the trip, the experience was very rewarding. Most of my traveling in Asia had been in planes or bullet trains, or even buses, where everybody sits facing forward. Aside from looking out the window at the passing landscape, there's not much to see other than the back of the seat in front of you. We would end up taking a sleeper train from Xi'an to Beijing, and then a flight from Beijing to Guangzhou. Although they were more comfortable, they were not very memorable.
    Walking around the streets of a city, or sitting in a restaurant or bar, our glimpses of people are very superficial and brief. When you sit on a train for 20 hours with someone, or with a family, you get to see them open up a lot with each other. Even sitting across for a person, watching them sleep, can be very intimate as their heads bob up and down and their eyes flickering beneath the eyelids. It's a side you don't often see as people push and shove through busy intersections or crowded subways.
    The two men across from us spoke no English, but there were other people in the train who spoke some. We received the odd, "hello" from somewhere on the train. It was usually someone curious to try a few words of English. Often mothers would encourage their sons to try some of the English that they had leared in school, but they were often shy. We would say hello to them, and we'd be all smiles, but they would hid behind their seats or jump into their mother's arms. I had some paper with me, so we took to drawing pictures with simple greetings and then passed them to some of the children around us. This seemed to win us a bit of celebrity amongst the people around us. People would turn their heads towards us as they passed the papers around, reading the small messages aloud and laughing. I remembered that i had printed some photos from Vancouver to show family in China, so I took them out and passed them around. At this point, even the older men who sat stone-faced, trying not to show interest, had to turn their heads and reach for the photos.
    Somewhere around this time we made friends with a man named Liu Ziyang, or Kyle Lau as was his self-professed 'English name.' He was a graduate student from somewhere in the west who was doing research for a professor on the coast. His English was pretty good and he said that he read a lot of English books, but i think our tastes were a bit different, because we didn't recognize any of the titles that we offered each other. I felt bad because at about the 15 hour mark, Janice and I were both pretty fatigued and our upright seats becoming torturous. Kyle wanted to talk, but our ability to communicate by this point was minimal. We did our best, and Kyle made sure that we got off at the correct station.