A few hours into the trip, one of the attendants came around to collect our tickets. The 12- or 13-year-old girl in the bunk below mine had apparently lost hers sometime after boarding the train, and, from what I understood, the staff suspected a scam and wanted to kick her off. The woman in the bunk opposite hers, a feisty Chongqing local, butted heads ferociously with the staff and the situation escalated into an ongoing saga that had the woman fielding phone calls every few minutes while various attendants and managers visited our bunk repeatedly to engage in yet another heated discussion with her. I gathered she wasn’t related to the girl, and possibly didn’t know her at all, but they were going to the same place and she decided to take charge of the situation. Between the Chinese-speaking foreigner, the silent, ticketless mystery girl, the fierce Chongqing lady and the loud drunk, ours was definitely the most interesting bunk in the car. As we neared Beijing and the situation with the ticketless girl was still not resolved, the staff became more agitated and began taking other passengers aside to press them for information that might help them decide whether or not the girl was scamming them for a free ride across the country. Eventually, they came for me.
After nearly a whole day listening to my bunkmates discuss every angle of the matter (and overhearing everyone else on the car gossiping about it), I’d pretty much tuned out the drama unfolding around me and was just keeping to myself, listening to the Cocteau Twins, and watching the poor farming villages go by. Then one of the attendants, a young girl with a mean, catty look behind her polite smile, came and told me they’d like to ask me some questions. Not knowing what else to do, I agreed, and she grabbed me by the arm and marched me through seven or eight cars to the dinner car, where several more attendants were waiting at a table. The ticketless girl was sitting alone at a table behind ours, looking blankly out the window. They obviously weren’t letting her leave.
They asked me to sit down and introduced me to the boss, a woman who appeared to be in her 30’s. They started asking me questions about the ticketless girl and the woman who’d taken on the role of her advocate, but I couldn’t make out the meaning of anything they said through my nervousness and their heavy Sichuan accents. They seemed intent on getting certain information. When it became clear to them that I had no idea what that information was and I could tell them nothing helpful, they thanked me with exasperated smiles and the mean-looking one grabbed me by the arm again and escorted me back to my car.
In the end, they never resolved the issue with the ticketless girl. She and the woman stayed on the train till we got to Beijing, where everyone wordlessly went on their way and the temporary relationships formed on the train dissolved as quickly as they’d formed. I arrived feeling like I’d just reached my second destination on the trip instead of my first. The train ride was a trip in itself.
Chinese lesson of the day:
奇怪
qí guài
Strange (adj)
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