The Great Train Bloggery

Grab a cup of coffee or a stiff drink. It’s story time!

Before beginning, I might like to take a moment to give the reader a brief explanation, as I see it, of what might be called my motives for such a trip. Besides my increasing frustration at finding gainful employment stateside, and my conceited attraction for such an exotic and remote locale, I suppose I felt somewhat foolishly upon leaving that the proper mix of daring, will, aim, and fear might make a virtuous man of me. I feel acutely a sense which perhaps we all feel, and which may even constitute the fundamental expectation of our lives, that the circumstances in which we find ourselves daily are incidental only, and that if we were to find ourselves in a novel and unfamiliar environment we would, through the action of some physical or even chemical process, be rendered utterly transformed. As I young man, I’m still held by this delusion, and as such have naively gone forth to catalyze it myself.

Having bought two days previously the only ticket I could find at such a late and inopportune date, I arrived at the train station expecting something like the worst. While I had dreamed of a soft sleeper car (complete with compartment door and writing table) furnished at the university’s expense, my tardiness guaranteed me only a hard seat, the rather proletarian means of domestic transit “enjoyed” by the majority of Chinese. My uneasiness was compounded by my irrational fear of thieves (the seeds of which were planted by my Lonely Planet guide and nourished by two days alone in a hotel room). As such, I was able to enjoy the deliciously unreasonable practice of cleverly making little stacks of 100RMB notes, and stashing them shrewdly throughout notebooks, socks, and, much to my delight, atop the title page of “The Sweet Cheat Gone” in the middle of the two volume edition of Proust that I’ve deemed it necessary to bring along. (Never has the weight of pretension been so tangible. Incidentally, if you detect in my blogs particularly byzantine or torturous sentences, stuffed with every sort of clause and circumlocution, you’ll know that it is certainly due to the fact that my own writing voice follows, though quite unconsciously, with the utmost obsequiousness the rhythms and tones of whomsoever I am at the moment reading. I would have done well to tote along a slim volume of Hemingway, if only for medicinal purposes). After a light lunch of some surprisingly tasty dumplings, I went to the waiting area.

The room was completely packed. If you’ve ever seen Hitchcock’s The Birds and remember the famous scene in which the characters exit the house and are surrounded by a swarm of menacing, though apparently harmless crows, you’ll have some sense of the awkwardness and trepidation with which I entered this supposed hive of rogues and cutpurses. I found a spot to sit and wait for a few hours, and was quickly approached by what I thought was a rather kindly looking old woman, who promptly snatched my book from my hands and began looking at it with the utmost intensity. The young man sitting next to me pointed to his head and shook it balefully, the universal sign, it would seem, for crazy. Luckily a station attendant came to my aid, ensuring I’d have at least something to read for the long trip ahead.

Soon enough, the train began boarding, affording me the too-brief pleasure of looking out over the platforms, with their steaming trains and well-dressed porters, all of which evoked for me something of another world and another century. I, like most Americans, I think, continue to be allured by the romantic prospect of train travel (a national distinction, I believe, kept firmly intact by the absurdities of Amtrak’s price policies). I quickly entered, however, the chaos of crowding bodies shifting and hoisting luggage, of porters arguing over seats, and was happy to finally find my compartment and meet the people who, for the next few days I was sure, would be sizing me up and digging through my baggage, leaving poor Proust in tatters, and finally ferreting out of my well-guarded messenger bag my passport and visa while I slept. That these people happened to be a handsome young couple, my age, a family of three and their friend, and a father and his young daughter, was therefore beside the point. They informed me that this was the slow car and would take upwards of 60 hours, confirming my worst fear, and that while we were in fact sitting on the hard sleeper car, we would not be able to sleep on the bunks above, which were crowded with blankets and hot water thermoses.

It was a slow train indeed. We not only seemed to stop at even the smallest of stations, but frequently would be stalled on designated sections in the middle of the countryside for upwards of half an hour in order to let other trains pass. The view outside was generally quite interesting, and while I was beginning to grow extremely excited by the prospect of such a leisurely trip and of the many months of adventure that lay ahead, and thereby dismissive of my earlier fears, the threat of exhaustion seemed to grow with the setting sun, leaving me wondering how, just a few moments earlier, I could have had such a bright outlook. I began to regard my circumstances as a prisoner might regard his own; escape, while possible, would be unthinkably inconvenient. While a few mischievous souls tried to climb to the top bunk where they might hide beneath the piles of blankets to catch a night’s sleep, most, though not all, were rather hastily, and I might say cruelly, removed by the perambulating guards. Nonetheless, I tried to make the best of it, and, by trying to see in the discomfort and unpleasantness an opportunity for some ascetic development, I ceded the compartment seats to the others, and made myself uncomfortable on the fold-down aisle jump seat, and rather quickly fell asleep.

Rather proud of myself for having the wherewithal to sleep in such an absurd position, I felt fine the next morning, and quite confident in my ability to endure the trip. The train was then winding through Henan Province, characterized mostly, it seemed, by factories and pollution. We passed through Xi’an after lunch time and then began to wind through the remarkably mountainous yellow soil terraces of western Shaanxi Province. By this point my panic of the night before seemed a chimera, and I began conversing in earnest with the people in my compartment, for whom I became the cynosure and the entertainment. The dollar bill in my wallet provoked near-endless conversation about American culture and values, the general mood of which was characterized by a sort of impassioned insecurity (“Everyone in America has a car. In China there are lots more cars today, too! Everything is very modern and developed now!”) We made fast friends. I also met, though wordlessly, the Uyghur family in the next compartment. I am somewhat sheepish to admit that their looks fascinated me, and I found myself staring at them more than was probably polite, though the gaze was frequently returned. The couple was traveling with two young children who provided me with a lighthearted diversion from staring out the window. The little boy, no more than two, donned a sweatshirt with two little piglets and a pair of maroon legwarmers, and despite some initial hesitation, smiled continuously at the funny faces I presented him. His sister was a girl of six with cropped hair and dark eyes, and a pink sweater with a strawberry on it.

For the most part, people spent the day loafing, reading, chatting, and eating. Carts periodically rolled down the aisles selling sunflower seeds, instant noodles (a steady diet of which seemed to sustain virtually everyone on board), and packaged sausages, as well as beer, water, and sweat tea. Other carts also came by selling airline-esque meals out of Styrofoam containers that no one seemed to buy. Despite the drop in price on each additional pass (down to a measly 2RMB), I refused to touch the meals myself, the logic being that if the Chinese people would not eat them, then they must have been truly inedible. Additionally, the tedium of sitting in one spot was not infrequently punctuated by the many pointless whistle stops which our slow train afforded us, giving passengers a chance to catch a breath of “fresh” air, smoke a cigarette, or buy noodles from the many touts crowding the platform. By the beginning of the second night we had entered Gansu province, with dusty, towering peaks encircled by tunnels and tracks on which puttered distant, toy-like freight trains. As the sun set, I wrapped myself up in my jacket and, with a desperate, physical craving for a horizontal surface, crawled beneath the bench for a nap. I was not disturbed by any of the attendants.

The next morning we awoke to the dry scrubland of central Gansu, including the westernmost section of the Great Wall. The landscape reminded me quite a bit of Texas, or the American Southwest, with long, flat stretches of arid vegetation giving way to distant plateaus. The mood on the train seemed rather more positive than in the days previous, and it began to occur to me that despite all of the discomfort, most of the people on the train were just as excited about the journey as I was. It was a great, long road trip, all the way across the nation, and I think that while the necessity and discomfort rendered it banal for some, for many the journey contained all of the dynamism and romance that a car trip from New York to San Francisco might have for an American. I got to thinking, as I’m wont to do, what Walt Whitman might think. As I got to know and become friendly with my fellow riders, I began to find in their attitude and character an unstudied casualness not stifled by politeness or compunction. This is not to say that there was any rudeness. But one does not see in America the sort of warmth and physical effortlessness with other people. Food is offered around as a matter of course, people chat idly and openly, perfect strangers lean upon one another to take naps with utter carelessness. Could it be that Whitman would have admired something in this national character as well, in this loafing, embodied natural ease? It is something like how Whitman imagined and sang of himself, and something that one finds ironically lacking in the American character. There isn’t much celebration of the self, certainly, but then it might be the case that a real celebration needn’t be announced with the sort of artificial triumph that a cynic might be able to detect in the ecstatic enumerations of waltzing Walter. Such an attitude might be easily made manifest in the simple self-confidence that this culture seems to afford one, and it lacks the violence and perversion so often detected in Whitman, who was, while surely a tremendous lover, also a hell of a fighter. Here one is afforded a certain casual intimacy as birthright for living amongst so many others. It should also be noted that while Whitman was intoxicated with his own scent and longed to be near to it, the Chinese make no great deal of the matter, and don’t cover up with deodorant either.

Later that day I was introduced through the young man in my compartment to a couple of students from Tarim University who he had just met, and who were returning to school for the second semester just as I was. I was a bit startled by the reverence with which the two regarded me, bowing slightly as they talked and calling me laoshi, or teacher. The young woman (I might say girl) seemed to think that my Chinese was much better than it was, and upon their departure for their own car, I had the general idea that they were taking me under their wing, and that we would have a better chance of buying a ticket to Akesu if we got off in Turpan. They left me with a pouch of some impossibly sweet miniature tangerines, and a vague sense that I was some young British officer on his way to the Great Game.

That night, after a furtive nap on the top bunk (the security of which was provided for by my new friends), I sat on the aisle jump seat watching the darkness of what was by then surely Xinjiang. It was pitch black except for factory lights far off in the distance, and small orange dots that were either campfires on the plains or the flaming caps of oil derricks. The scenery was beginning to please the Romantic in me, a part which, somewhat to my surprise, seemed to have atrophied somewhat from disuse. While some part of me still marveled at the distances that were behind me and my home, I by and large regarded the Romantic conceit of the trip in much the same way as one might look with disbelief at a pair of one’s own baby clothes, recently rediscovered in some fusty drawer, the scent and touch of which immediately stir old affections, but which, if we were to try and put them on, would be positively ludicrous. I felt somewhat wistful at the loss, but felt none of the same frustration and desperation that may have impelled me to travel this far in the first place. A larger part of me than I thought existed now wanted simply to travel to the University to begin teaching, a part of the trip to which I had hitherto, I’m embarrassed to admit, given little thought. The frantic romance was gone, and I felt as though I’d unshouldered some kind of needless burden.

After saying goodbye to my new friends in the compartment, I got off early that morning in Turpan. The five University students insisted on carrying my bags, and generally trying to make me uncomfortable by being as effusive and helpful as possible. It was cold and black, and the train station was swarming with touts and taxi drivers. I quickly imagined myself alone, and felt tremendously grateful to have so many of “my students” around. Since the train we were to take to Akesu didn’t leave until six that evening, the six of us rented a room for the day in the train station’s hotel to get out of the cold and put down our bags. After a spirited card game, and a nap, we took a walk around town, stopping for a nice lunch of bai mian, a traditional Xinjiang noodle dish. The shops in town were rather exciting. Butchers sold whole pig heads and live chickens, the front of the dry goods stores were decorated with attractive piles of golden raisins and almonds, and the Uyghur gift shops sold real sheep leather jackets and traditional hats, as well as some impressive ornamented jackknives. The town was hazy with coal smoke, and I wondered whether the smell of it must be like what most of the world used to smell like a century ago. It seemed that the farther out I traveled, the further back in time I went as well.

That evening we stepped outside to get our train. The station, with its hazy afternoon light, made me feel as though I were positioned at some tremendous altitude (Turpan is, ironically, located in one of the lowest places on earth) and that the trains now hissing on the platforms were bound towards some enchanted country in the clouds. The platform was positively packed, and the train was even worse. People with standing room only tickets crowded the aisles, and everyone shouted and pushed. I was lucky enough to have a window seat, and even luckier to have endured the trials of train travel thus far. I would not be able to stand, let alone go to the bathroom, for at least the next twelve hours. My new friends and I talked well into the night before we finally, and awkwardly, fell asleep.

After a bleary night, I awoke to a somewhat less crowded train, and the bright landscape of the northern part of the Taklamakan Desert, the names of old Silk Road cities such as Kuqa and Korla ringing in the air. The stark desert soon gave way to some more developed areas of mud houses, with long roads lined with poplars that stretched off into the pale blue distance. While everything was covered with dust, the effect was not to deaden the landscape and its flora, but rather to enhance something like their inner spirit, just as pastel colors might strike us even stronger than radical and affronting saturated ones, if we are in a mood to receive them. Indeed, I felt generally that the dust gave to the scrubby bowers and lime-ringed poplars a somewhat magical aspect, a sort of bluish haze that one associates with moonlight, giving to the environment as a whole a dreamlike unfamiliarity such as one might wake up to see when the first snow of the season has cast the world outside our windows with the charmed character of a fairy tale. There are certain paintings by Gauguin that capture and express, with even deeper effect, the emotion that such places bring up in me, and I can understand the artist’s need to escape from his own habitat in order to enjoy the secrets of another.

We arrived in Akesu at last around one o’clock, almost 100 hours after I’d arrived at the Beijing train station. I quickly bid good-bye to the students, thanking them profusely for all of their help and friendship and assuring them that I would “see them in class,” before meeting the much imagined Ma Ming, the foreign affairs officer with whom I’ve been corresponding for almost a year to secure visa papers. He’s a casual and friendly young man with a soft face and dark, wet eyes behind a pair of surprisingly hip square glasses, the type of person I generally find agreeable. After a lunch of bai mian in Akesu, we met with the driver who was to take us to Ala’er and the University. We piled into the sporty SUV and began chatting about life at Tarim University, about which I was very anxious to learn (and about which the reader will have to wait for subsequent blog posts). The school and the city are located about 130 kilometers from Akesu down a dry and tree-lined road. The area is characterized, as is all of Xinjiang, I suppose, by dust and sand, though here certain patches of soil were pure white with salt. Cotton fields lay fallow for the winter, and the flora generally called to mind a dried up bouquet from some special occasion tied up with straw that one might find in warm, yellow sunlight in a forgotten corner of one’s attic. The driver chain smoked and blasted Uyghur-style karaoke on the dashboard DVD player, and proceeded to pass into oncoming traffic every sort of vehicle imaginable: truck, car, motorcycle, bike, donkey cart, and even a camel. We arrived at the enormous gray administration building of Tarim University much quicker than we probably should have.

I’d like to say that my trip out here gave me the confidence or self-possession that I believed such an intentional endeavor into unfamiliarity might bestow upon the brave, and that by placing myself in a completely foreign environment I would by necessity come to control more completely my own actions, and earn that emulsion of character I’ve always admired, and thought to be the very qualification for manhood, or something like it. In a word, I came to be independent, and to see what I might learn about myself when truly “all alone.” What a surprise, then, that I found myself depending, as it were, on the kindness of strangers for not only the success and ease of the trip, but for the pleasure and character of the experience as a whole. Should I be disappointed in myself for lacking the wherewithal to stick to my guns, to suffer for my virtue? Or is true independence the ability to reach out to others in any situation, even when you’re half-way across the world? In America, the notion of dependence is positively sodden with a kind of sickness, with a character of protracted immaturity. However, it might be the case that there is more maturity, more virtue, more integrity to be found in refusing the stubborn independence that I have always felt could be cultivated in such a way that my actions would naturally emanate from its source. While I have long admired those who are capable of such rocky isolation, and have struggled in spite of myself to tailor my actions to such an attitude, I’m beginning to learn that such rigid adherence to a personal code of non-interference seems to emerge, in myself at least, not from any inward identity, but from a kind of artificial and immature posing, composed of puerility and stubborn cowardice. Harder by far it is to reach out to a stranger than to suffer inwardly, and it requires much more of the daring, the adult, and the virtuous character that I had previously misidentified in those who reach out to others not at all.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for our next installment: A Stately Pleasure Dome