The first five hundred kilometers of the journey from Urumqi to Kashgar took ten hours.
So said the man who shared my cabin on the train. He had the berth opposite mine, the mirror image of my wide padded bench, upholstered in a pink patterned fabric, with a coat hanger and a luggage rack fit for a child’s schoolbag at one end and a table at the other, near the window, that swung up on a hinge and bore an unhemmed tablecloth and a Thermos for our shared use. Small speakers were embedded in the corners of the cabin. These played a continuous stream of music, entertainment, announcements. I didn’t realize there was a way to opt out until I saw, in the thirteenth hour of the trip, the man opposite me turn a dial over his head that trebled the volume of an entertainment show in which every phrase the host uttered was followed by a cartoonish sound effect, the
boinga-boinga of wolf eyes bulging, a slide whistle dropping a register, the
ka-ching of a till closing a sale. We were also provided with pillows and blankets, and switches to control the overhead light and the ceiling fan.
The man said the landscape we traveled through did not permit travel at faster than 50 kilometers an hour because of the winding climb through the mountains between Turpan and Hejing. The train took us first in the wrong direction, east to Turpan, across the barren landscape I had crisscrossed earlier in the week, gray gravel stretching in every direction to the horizon. The sun must kill everything, for there was nothing on the ground except that gray gravel, and electrical poles running parallel to the train tracks a few hundred meters away, and occasionally a windfarm or an oil derrick and the trucks and gravel paths that serviced them. No tuft of green or side of flesh; energy harvested from the land could fuel life in a big city, far away, but could do nothing for life here. For long stretches there was not even topography to break up the monotony. Just gravel, gravel, gravel…
After Turpan, this moonscape went on another few hours. I alternated between reading the Virginia
Woolf novel I could barely understand, at a pace to match our unhurried passage through the mountains, also out of necessity rather than leisure, because I found the multiplicity of voices around the pageant at Pointz Hall so difficult to follow, especially over the stream of Chinese and Uighur babble from the cabin speakers; listening to electronic music; and sleeping. On occasion I would look out the window and find that nothing had changed. Once there was a gravel berm running alongside the tracks. Another time we passed hundreds of giant white whirligigs – I couldn’t fix an exact number because they faded into three-fingered apparitions as they approached the dusty horizon and then disappeared altogether. I stood in the throughway at the end of my car and did calisthenics – squats, lunges – while we passed them. Yet another time there was a fence that carried on for miles, but large sections of it lay flat against the ground. The Xinjiang sun is too passionate, too sideways, too wan, too something, maybe because its diffusion through the hot dust blown in the air or because of the decision of the Communist state to give the 4,000 mile breadth of China only one time zone, unremarkable for the big cities clustered in the east but one that gives the far western border a mid-autumn dawn at 8:30 a.m. and sunset at 9 p.m. The quality of light made me feel especially alienated; or heightened somehow; or I am just a traveler, and everything looks irregular to my eyes, even the plain vents on the ceiling and the plain booths in the dining car, and I can be trusted only to absorb sensations with my mouth slightly open but not to comprehend.
Around this time, I attracted the attention of the man opposite me by writing in my journal. I saw him looking. Then he leaned across his berth and scrutinized the words in my spiral-bound book. “What language is that?” he asked. “English,” I said. He looked at my face, puzzled. We had already gone through the niceties in Chinese: where are you going, what are you doing, what time does the train arrive, what kind of work do you do on the railroad, I’m a tourist, I’d like to learn about the relations between Uighurs and Han Chinese people in Kashgar, where is Aksu, how does one get to Karakul Lake, would you like to share my golden raisins? Hadn’t I had this conversation a dozen times since arriving in Urumqi? I said I was American.
It gives me pleasure to no end to be mistaken for a Chinese citizen. It’s what makes travel in China so unique for me. All this time I have fixated on passing as a man, I have forgotten to write about passing as
Chinese. I blend in, and blending in lets me eavesdrop and participate in activities with locals and walk down the street unmolested by other people’s curiosity – luxuries an international traveler in China doesn’t always have. I look the part: my stature and broad shoulders aren’t as anomalous here as they are in the south or in Taiwan, where people are smaller, or perhaps I am just registered as an invisible teen boy. My unusual clothes are not that far out of the range of reason. I also sound the part: I am fluent enough, at least in the first ten minutes of conversations one has with strangers, and China is linguistically diverse enough that my accent is just understood as a Zhejiang flavor. It is until conversation goes deeper and my mind draws blanks that I have to confess my citizenship. Please explain, sir, what you mean by
something something law in America, because my speech bears a blush of intelligence but my language comprehension is actually like Swiss cheese – no, like Swiss cheese which has been first melon-balled then jackhammered and then chopped to pieces and half the pieces thrown to the camels in the Xinjiang desert – and then after a comedy of circumlocution the open-mouthed party understands that the man opposite her is asking about
employment law in America.
I had to show my passport to get into an Internet café a few days ago, which caused this conversation between me and the man and woman attending the cash register:
Woman: She’s American.
Man: You look Chinese.
Me: I’m a Chinese person born in America.
Man: What? When did you move there?
Me: I was born there. I’m a Chinese person born in America.
Man: So you have a green card?
Me: No. I’m a citizen. You’re holding my passport. I’m a Chinese person. I was born in America.
Woman: So you’re – half Chinese?
Me: No, my family is from Zhejiang. I’m all Chinese. But I’m American. Look at the passport.
Woman: Yeah, because you look all Chinese.
Man: When did you move back here?
Me: I never lived here so there’s nothing to move back to. I’m traveling. I’m Chinese. I’m American.
I had also called the woman “xiao jie” when trying to get her attention. She was ignoring me for the chat window open on her computer. I understand xiao jie to be a polite way to address a young woman, like “miss,” or “ma’am.” She looked up in shock. Later I learned that xiao jie means “prostitute” in Xinjiang.
Another conversation, with a woman selling me postage-prepaid postcards:
Me: Can these be sent to America?
Woman: I don’t know. Who do you know in America?
Me: I’m American.
Woman: Wah! You seem Chinese.
Me: I am Chinese. I’m an American-born Chinese. My old home is Zhejiang.
Woman: What’s America like?
Me: A lot like China.
Woman: Which is better, your country or China?
Me: Well, I’m Chinese, so China is my country too, isn’t it?
She beamed. I beamed. Then I paid probably three times what those postcards were worth and we went on our merry ways.
Handling other people’s cognitive dissonance is still fun and not yet tedious. People are so curious about America. Maybe it’s rare to probe an American traveler who looks and speaks Chinese and is willing and able to engage in long conversations about the difference between America and China. Once I opened the door with the man opposite me on the train, he had so many questions: What do Americans think of China? Do Americans drink hot water, like Chinese people, or do they prefer cold water? Is it true there are laws governing every aspect of life in America? How much does a car cost? A Toyota Yaris? A Jeep? How much is a bottle of water? A meal? How much does an average household need to earn to live comfortably? Isn’t law a difficult and prestigious profession? How old are you? Are you married? Do Americans like peanuts? Are there deserts in America? Can you see sights like these? We would sit in silence for hours – me preoccupied with Virginia Woolf, him listening to the radio program – and then he would reopen the conversation with a question starting “In America . . .”
Questions others have asked me: What is it like to study abroad in America? Do Americans consider having the number of children they want a human right? Do all Americans treat each other fairly? Are all taxi drivers in America black? In America, if a rich person runs over a poor person with their car, can they get away with it? Because in China they can.
And I ask in return: What do Chinese people think about America? What is the relationship between Uighurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang? Is it safe? Have the bombings kept Chinese tourists away? Do people speak putonghua in Kashgar? What do you think about not being able to get on certain websites? Do you trust the news? Do you trust your government? Do you read blogs? How do you say “bleak and infertile land” in Chinese? Is it lonely to live in the countryside? Are those camels being raised for eating or riding? What does camel meat taste like? What kind of work do you do? At what age do you retire? Does the government provide libraries, hospitals, and free primary schooling? How is your life going to change once your wife gives birth to you child? Are you afraid of the change? How does one get a bus to Karakul Lake? And would you like to share my golden raisins?
He did. The man opposite me gave me yogurt and I gave him golden raisins and roasted peanuts. The later left a circumference of husks fluttering around the trash bin.
Before we reached Hejing, that landscape started to rise. Life, too – a ten-foot wide river wound near the tracks for miles, and alongside there were stands of birch and elm trees, very small settlements, land that had been furrowed, the occasional boy on a motorcycle – but the view was still mostly monochromatic, as the land was brown-yellow and the leaves on the trees had turned yellow for the season. The homesteads ran right up to the base of black granite mountains that rose hundreds of feet steeply, all rock, no growth, mountain after mountain overlapping into a range. We went through tunnels that plunged us into darkness for five minutes at a time; I knew because I would set
Between the Acts down and do timed plank exercises in the dark, on my padded plank, while waiting for my reading light to return. Just before Kurla, it began to snow.
My preoccupations were few but they felt rich. I read my book and underlined passages I thought skillful. I wrote in my journal. I turned from side to side when lying in one position too long felt hot. I listened to electronic music, because I needed ambient noise to drown out the cackling hosts of the radio programs, or because it was easy to fall asleep to the repetitiveness of the music, or because it reminded me of a very late night I spent with an architect very far away. Ooonce ooonce ooonce goes the music: then I doze. I looked out the window. I did squats in the throughway, totaling four hundred over the course of the day. I wandered up and down the cars and noted where people were playing cards, where men stood to smoke, where the Uighur boys entertained themselves making faces at me and clomping around in their mother’s high heels. What if there had been hard sleeper tickets left instead of only soft sleepers? I imagined how I would cope penned in six bunks to a six by six foot space, with another person’s legs dangling in my face the entire night.
Then there was the bathroom. I had had a delicious but ultimately regretful honeydew melon the night before my trip. My bowels liquefied instantly – not exaggerating, the moment I swallowed my first bite, noises like muffled fireworks started to sound from my abdomen. So I spent some time on the train in the closet squat toilet. I had a regimen: button wallet into back right pocket to prevent disastrous loss of important documentation and ATM cards to the hole that emptied directly on the tracks; stuff tissues into front pocket, soap into back left pocket; change from slippers into hiking boots for courage and protection; trundle to end of car; wait in line; close and lock door behind me; square stance over squat, pull down pants; clutch sides of closet; attempt not to piss into my pants or onto my shoes; attempt not to touch shit-encrusted scrub brush hanging inches from my face; empty bowel explosion; attempt not to press my own fingers against my own dirty asshole while using palimpsestic facial tissues to wipe debris from bowel explosion; exit closet; wash hands in the washroom; return to cabin, remove hiking boots, and eat Uighur bread and peanuts with my hands. Looking forward to killing the parasites that are surely eating my insides with toxic Western medicine as soon as I return. Strangely, despite all of the wet surfaces, the squat toilet smelled very strongly of artificial oranges.
The man opposite me left at six this morning at Akesu. I never learned his name. A dour woman came to take his place. I have not offered her golden raisins.
Then we were in another sort of desert – not gray gravel anymore, but tan sand dotted with bunches of scrub. Long, low, flat, all sand to the horizon.
At 8, I ate a meal of rice porridge, mixed pickled greens and peanuts, and a hardboiled egg in the dining car. The man who handed me my meal through a slot in the kitchen wall did not look Chinese – he had the pale skin, dark hair, and big, coarse features of a central Asian race. He peered at me through the slot and said, “Take your meal, champ.” Today I’m wearing a sports bra, and I’m glad the squat toilets are unisex because I wouldn’t know which to choose. I would say breakfast was disappointing, but I never had expectations that it would be anything but watery slop with cold amuse bouches. I only went because I was brainwashed by the morning broadcast, a minute-long loop extolling the health benefits of eating breakfast (preventing headaches, feeling energetic, tasting delicious rice porridge pickled vegs eggs) that reminded me of the busybody public service exhortations that feel so typically Chinese, like my cab driver in Urumqi telling me that travel alone was boring and pointless and I would killed by a bus and nobody would know, so why didn’t I find a friend or a partner to travel with?
We are now at the penultimate station. The ticket taker came by with the news. There are structures and cornfields. We must be nearing Kashgar.
