Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (13 page)

I concluded that the seat number on my ticket was a mere ruse and that trains in China, particularly hard-seat-only trains like the one I was about to board, operate on a first-come basis. Nothing else could explain such a lunging, shove-the-kids-aside, leap-over-grandpa stampede. Grimly, I joined the horde and was sucked through, only to find that the train hadn’t yet arrived. On the platform, guards checked our tickets and pointed to where each of us were to line up. Other guards were holding signs with numbers—1, 2, 3, 4, and so on—and I deduced that each number was meant to match the number of the individual train cars. I studied my ticket—seat 17 in car 4—and found the appropriate line. The train approached. The crowd tensed. The woman next to me began to vomit, extravagantly and copiously. Poor thing, I thought as I made a mental note to never, ever dine on the gloppy offerings of a train station lunch cart. Things can always be worse, however, and then, as the train pulled into the station, they grew so at an alarming pace.

As the train rolled by, conductors stood in the open doorways holding numbered signs, and as I watched them pass, I came to the startling realization that each train car was randomly numbered. 1 was not followed by 2 and then 3. There went train car 7 followed by train car 2, and was that train car 4 rolling ever farther down the platform? Again, pandemonium ensued. Hundreds of people were now running like headless chickens, chaotically dragging their bags up and down the platform, desperately seeking their car before the train departed. I leapt over the pool of vomit and raced down the platform. When at last I tumbled toward car 4, I was dismayed to discover a hundred or so others urgently trying to clamber aboard, the preferred method being to shove and toss aside anyone who might be in front. For someone coming from a culture where people are taught to wait their turn at an early age, to never push, to magnanimously insist that ladies go first, the spectacle of watching people board a train in China is a jarring, breathtaking sight to behold.

I clutched my ticket before me and noticed with some curiosity that the woman squeezed beside me carried a ticket with the same seat number. “I guess I’ll be sitting on your lap,” I noted with as much cheeriness as I could muster, given that my rib cage was being pummeled by a dozen elbows. I hadn’t really expected to be understood, of course. I was in a provincial town in Shandong Province, and to escape the conversational dead zone caused by my linguistic limitations, I’d developed the admittedly peculiar habit of sharing my random musings with strangers, just to keep the old vocal cords humming. Typically, this was met with stony silence, and then their eyes began to flicker with the realization that they have a deranged
laowai
on their hands.

But, apparently, she had understood, and she leaned over to look at my ticket. “Is same,” she agreed, and then she was swept onward into the train. By the time I boarded, all hope of obtaining a seat had long ago been lost. I wedged myself in the fetid, airless space between two cars, and as the train began the six-hour journey to Qingdao, I had a brief glimpse of harried police officers on the platform slugging it out with a passenger who had been left behind. Then, as the train began to rumble through Tai’an, the dozen men around me lit up cigarettes, and soon I was enveloped in a thick blue haze.

Excellent, I thought. I was finally having an authentic Chinese experience.

It was miserable, and as I reflected on my many attempts at quitting smoking, it occurred to me that this experience right here, stuck in a cramped, airless corner of an overflowing train next to a filthy squat toilet, breathing in the lung-searing smoke of Chinese tobacco, had I had it years ago, would have cured me instantaneously of any tobacco cravings, saving me the hundreds—no, thousands of dollars—I’d spent on nicotine patches and gum.

Soon, a conductor slipped through. I handed him my ticket. Regrettably, he felt the need to ask me a question.

“Uh…” I said.
“Duibuqi. Wo tingbudong.”
This was my guidebook attempt at explaining that I didn’t have the remotest idea of what he had just said. Sadly, however, I could not even convey my lack of understanding and be understood in China. The conductor barked something else at me.

“I’m sorry. I don’t speak Chinese. You wouldn’t happen to speak English, would you? No?
Parlez-vous française? Sprechen zie Deutsche? Español? Nederlandse? Cesky? Rusky?
”

So useless, these European languages. I recalled my time in Melanesia.

“Me no save Chinese. Yu tok tok Pidgin?”

Finally, my interlocutor gave up, and as he moved on he muttered something that made my train companions laugh hard and merrily until they were seized by lung-splattering hacks and coughs.

And so it went, my journey through Shandong Province. Every hour or two, the train would pull into a station, and I’d count the number of people getting off the train and compare them with the number boarding, until finally I sensed that there was a reasonable likelihood of an empty seat and I leapt into the cabin, only to discover that not only were there no free seats, but that I had lost my place among the smokers, where at least there had been a wall to lean on, and that the remainder of the trip would be spent lurching and swaying in a narrow aisleway, periodically apologizing to the people around me as the shifting train sent my elbow into their faces. Soon, the sun descended behind the murky haze outside and we rolled on toward Qingdao in the darkness. I was lost in the fog of my mind, doing everything I could to resist the urge to look at my watch yet again, when suddenly I felt someone tapping on my arm.

“Come,” she said.

It was the woman whose ticket I’d noticed back on the platform in Tai’an. I followed her as she led me to an open seat across from her.

“Thank you,” I said. “I mean,
Xie xie.
”

“I’m sorry,” she said with fluttering hands. “My English is very bad.”

“No need to apologize,” I said, trying to imagine an American apologizing for his poor Mandarin to a befuddled Chinese tourist in New York. “It’s me who should apologize. I probably should have learned a little more Chinese before deciding to travel through your country.”

Not that it would have mattered. Every attempted utterance I’d made in Chinese was met with quizzical glances.

“Your ticket?” she asked. “May I see it?”

I passed it to her.

“Yes,” she said, glancing at the piece of paper. “Your ticket is for tomorrow.”

“Ah…so that’s what everyone’s been trying to tell me.” I reflected for a moment. Apparently, people did have assigned seats, then. So why the mayhem of boarding? As I was pondering this question, my rescuer tapped me on my knee.

“My name is Cinderella,” she said.

Another curiosity! Many young Chinese had assumed Western names, but I hadn’t yet encountered one quite so evocative as Cinderella. I glanced at this Cinderella, who, unique in my experience in China, had inexplicably decided to subject her hair to a perm, and tried to remember the name of the prince in the fairy tale. If the Chinese can assume new names, perhaps I could too, and then all sorts of red flags popped into my brain and I introduced myself as the man I am.

“Maarten,” she repeated, uncomfortably rolling the word in her mouth. There was that pesky
r
in the middle. “What do you do?”

“Do you mean for a job? I’m, uh, a real estate investor,” I offered, inwardly chuckling in a demented manner.

The train rolled on through a black night and I spent the time in stilted conversation with my new friend Cinderella. She was from Tai’an and worked in a factory in Qingdao, where she made handbags, an occupation she called “very boring.” I asked her to teach me Chinese phrases like
I’ll have the dog special
and
I think President Hu Jintao is very sexy,
but when it became apparent that vocalizing the Chinese language was clearly a physiological impossibility for my mouth, we settled on learning how to count to ten with my hands, which is completely different than the Western way, and learning it left me feeling giddy and triumphant.

It was nearly midnight when we pulled into Qingdao. Outside the train station, the air was cool and a mist hinted of the sea.

“Well, it was very nice meeting you, Cinderella,” I said at the taxi stand.

“You are going to your hotel?” she asked. “I will go with you.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I can manage.”

“You are a
laowai.
He will overcharge you,” she said, hopping into the taxi and immediately beginning to haggle with the driver. Well, okay, I thought. Did I really seem so utterly incapable? Yes, probably.

As we pulled into the hotel driveway, I paid the driver and turned to Cinderella. “Well, thanks so much and good luck to you at the handbag factory.” But she had leapt out and marched onward to the check-in counter.

I checked in. The front-desk attendant fetched the key and I turned to Cinderella. “Well, thanks so much for all your help…” But Cinderella had taken the key and had forged toward the elevator. Now this was getting to be a little awkward. Surely, I could be trusted to find my room.

“Well, thanks so much,” I said again as we reached the door to my room. She used the key to open the door.

“This is a nice room,” Cinderella noted. She turned to me, her perm billowing on her head. “It is very late.”

“It sure is.”

“I am locked out of my room. I have no key.”

“Oh, well, I see,” I stammered, trying very hard to understand the Chinese context of this particular situation. Perhaps she regarded it as auspicious that we shared a seat number on the train. Perhaps she’d concluded that her destiny lay with this
laowai
from the West who would sweep her off the factory floor and take her onward to a life of romantic intrigue. Or perhaps this was normal, accompanying a random foreigner from a train all the way to his evening hearth. Are Chinese women really so very helpful? And Cinderella was nothing if not helpful. Should I chivalrously offer to sleep on the floor while she claimed the bed? In the Chinese context, would this be the right thing to do? I had planned on calling my wife.
Hi, Honey. I’m in my hotel room in Qingdao with my new friend Cinderella.
No, I reflected. I probably didn’t want to make that call.

“Listen, Cinderella,” I said, reaching for my wallet. “Let me help you find a room in another hotel.”

Cinderella batted her eyelashes. “No,” she sighed. “I will stay with friends. But I want to see you tomorrow. What is your cell phone number?”

“I don’t have a cell phone.”

“No cell phone? Everyone in China has a cell phone.”

This was true. Imagine tens of millions of people screaming into their handsets—
Can you hear me now?
—and you have an idea what urban China is like. It’s true.
Wei
is the standard greeting when answering a cell phone in China, and it does indeed mean
Can you hear me?
This alone struck me as a compelling argument for the return of the rotary phone.

“This is my cell phone number,” Cinderella said, writing it down. “And this is my e-mail address. Will you call me tomorrow? I will show you Qingdao.”

“Absolutely. Look forward to it. Good night. Thanks so much for your help,” I said as she left.

Then I bolted the door.

Now, what was that about? I wondered. I was very perplexed. Was Cinderella just a particularly helpful young woman? Or was she a seductress? I had no idea. Perhaps I was just a little dense. It wouldn’t be the first time. So mysterious, this country.

In any event, I did not call Cinderella. It was a curious choice for a name. I’d observed that many Chinese had assumed Western names. At first, I’d thought that this was just the Chinese solution to a sweeping epidemic of multiple-personality disorders. I imagined people waking up in the morning and, as they settled down with a cup of warm bean-curd milk and picked at their steamed buns, they’d decide who, exactly, they were going to be that day. Would they be Suyin, the factory worker in Lanzhou? Or was it time for
Lola
?

But, as always in China, things are not what they seem. It turns out that people in China choose Western names because there are so very few Chinese names. Like Western names, Chinese names are toponyms. They are essentially descriptive. The reason we have so many Smiths is that a long time ago blacksmiths were apparently irresistible, extremely hunky mates. And so, too, it is with Chinese names. But in China, of course, everything is magnified by the sheer number of Chinese. Li, Wang, and Zhang are the most common names. There are 88 million people in China named Zhang. There are more people called Chen in China than there are Canadians in Canada. Go to a typical school in China and ask to see Zhang Li and you will likely to be greeted by a half-dozen kids. It’s become so problematic that no one knows Hu’s Hu in China (Ha Ha Ha). And thus the Western names.