Going off the rails on a Chinese train

Once again, I’ve been slacking on my blog. Sorry about that. I wrote my exams about 2 weeks ago after a week of intense cramming, and I think I managed to pass, but I won’t know until next semester, if they ever tell me at all. During this time, I was also trying to salvage my travel plans for the Spring Festival, which were rapidly unravelling. Taking advantage of my six-week vacation to travel in China seemed like a good idea; I mean, I’m in China with nothing to do, so naturally I should travel, right? Well, Spring Festival is also the largest annual human migration in the world – the time when the millions of migrant workers who’ve left their hometowns for a better income in the cities go home to spend Chinese New Year with their families. It’s nearly impossible to get a train anywhere; plane tickets double or triple in price.

I’d originally planned to spend a few days in Beijing, then fly to Japan and spend a week or two there, and then fly back to my friend’s hometown in Xuzhou to spend Chinese New Year with his family. Afterward I’d hoped to hop a train to nearby Suzhou or Hangzhou to spend a day or two soaking in the famous scenery (Suzhou is famous for its gardens and Hangzhou is known as the “Venice of China”), and then continue south to Shenzhen or Hong Kong before flying back to Chongqing. Japan ended up being impossibly expensive, eating up almost my entire travel budget and paralyzing my plans until I could cancel everything – a very expensive, time-consuming and depressing task. By the time I got that worked out, I’d decided to just spend some time in Beijing and then take a train to Xuzhou at the end of January, and I thought I’d break up the long, long train ride to Beijing with a stopover in Xi’an. Poor train scheduling to Xi’an ended up making things more complicated when it was supposed to make them simpler, so I dropped that idea and decided to fly to Beijing; I’d found a cheap ticket that would get me there in two hours for just 100 RMB (15 CAD) more than the cost of a train ticket. The website was confusing and the prices were climbing by the second (I could watch the numbers go up as I sat and looked at the page), so by the time I had a friend come over to help me the ticket was more than double the price of a train. So, after another split second change of plans, I ran out and bought a train ticket straight to Beijing; 31 hours. I was actually really lucky to get it only five days in advance – tickets generally sell out the day sales open, which is ten days in advance. I found myself a cheap plane ticket to Chongqing from Shenzhen and my holiday began to take shape again. Meanwhile, Beibei had become unnaturally subdued as all the shops and street stalls I’ve come to know and love pulled down their heavy steel shutters or just packed up and disappeared completely for the holidays. The campus turned into a creepy, deserted ghost town. I was anxious to leave.

The train station was overflowing, but I managed to get onto the train without any trouble or confusion. I must be getting better at this whole “not being a clueless foreigner” thing. I’d booked a “hard sleeper,” which, so I’m told, is exactly the same as a “soft sleeper” except there are three beds to a bunk instead of two, so it’s a little more crowded. But, clocking in at 440 RMB (about 66 CAD), half the price of the soft sleeper, I decided it was money well saved. Of course, my bunk was in the middle of the car, and to get to it I had to walk past about 30 pairs of stunned eyes. Everyone watched, riveted, as I fumbled conspicuously with my overstuffed suitcase. Then a girl about my age approached me in the corridor and struck up a conversation. Of course, everyone listened in, and word spread quickly through the car that there was a “waiguoren” who could speak Chinese on the train. I could hear everyone talking about me, but they all seemed to be saying good things, so I relaxed a bit. People kept dropping by to participate in the conversation and exchange a few words with the foreigner. They were all quite friendly, although I couldn’t understand what they were saying half the time as they were all Sichuan/Chongqing locals and spoke with a heavy accent.

Eventually I went back to the little table next to my bunk to have some dinner and was followed by the crazy drunk guy who’d been blundering around making a scene ever since he arrived. He made lively conversation with me while I tried to review some vocabulary and eat my dinner, spraying me with flecks of chewed-up betel nut as he spoke. He told me repeatedly that I was beautiful and then he called his wife and told her he was talking to a “foreign beauty,” gleefully reporting afterward how jealous she was. My other bunkmates joined in and we all talked for a while – I’m always amazed at the social ease of the people over here. I guess in a country this crowded, where maintaining personal space is impossible, you don’t really have the option of being hesitant to talk to people. Chatting with strangers is both a way of life and an art form over here. It’s funny – when I see fellow foreigners now, my first instinct is to run over and strike up a conversation, ask where they’re from, what their story is, and then I realize that that’s a very Chinese response. It’d be the last thing I’d be likely to do back home. Being in China has fundamentally changed the way I view social interaction. Not only do I have no choice but to talk to strangers here, it’s basically my entire purpose for being here. And the social interactions I have here, in my horribly inadequate Chinese or in someone else’s faltering English, are completely different from the culturally nuanced, socially molded conversations I have in my native language. Every conversation I have here is useful to me in some way – it’s never worth it to avoid them (unless you’re talking to a crazy drunk who’ll just end up following you around all night). And it’s changed the way I view awkwardness in social interaction, too. No social interaction in the world can be as awkward or intimidating as being interrogated in a heavily-accented version of your second language.

…to be continued.

Chinese word of the day:
尴尬
gān gà
Awkward (adj.)