Apologies to My Censor (21 page)

16

Chasing the Iron Rooster

T
he old lady was asleep on the berth beside me, snoring. It was a guttural snore, a snore that came from the soul. It rose up from the gut, through the lungs and throat, with a brief layover in the nasal cavity and was then released with a thunder. It was an epic snore, one that might provoke thoughts of violence. Thoughts of violence within me. Toward her.

I lay in my bunk, consumed by the noise. Not just the snoring; sounds were everywhere. It was seven in the morning and the train was alive. Old men climbed down from their berths, stretching and yawning. Young women shuffled to the steel sinks at the end of each car to brush their teeth and hair. The televisions mounted to the walls of each cabin were soon turned on—at full volume—playing a low-budget Chinese historical epic. Before long, the grumpy attendants were out, pushing carts down the aisle, selling fruit, toothbrushes, and fried chicken in vacuum-sealed packages.

Sleep was futile. Outside my window was southern China's Guangxi province. As staccato images of rocky outcroppings, rice paddies, and half-built brick homes flashed by, I rolled out of bed and mixed myself a cup of instant coffee I'd brought with me.

Rule number one of Chinese train travel: bring coffee.

I
had been commissioned by the
Globe and Mail
to write a travel story about riding the rails in China. The paper gave me a budget for more than a week's worth of travel. From Beijing, I'd take the twenty-eight-hour train to Guilin, in Guangxi, and spend a few days exploring the karst peaks of Yangshuo Valley. From there I would travel to Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the southern Chinese boomtown. After Shenzhen, I would take the night train to Shanghai for a day before returning to the capital.

It was a much-needed break from Beijing. For months, I had been consumed with just one thought. One word, really.

Movie
.

My agent in Los Angeles had been pitching my
Atlantic
article to producers who were in turn pitching it to studios. They had been close more than once, and now there was a possible offer: a major producer was on board and a private financier was considering funding a script, which would be presented to studios once completed. I didn't have the details yet but was told to expect them in a matter of days.

Throughout the process, I hadn't been able to work on much else. I had images floating in my head of relocating to Hollywood; of sipping martinis on a private jet flying to the New York premiere; of a steamy affair with the female lead. It was all so close, yet so far, far away. It was delusional, of course, but this is what happens when you're plucked from obscurity to land a Hollywood agent. You get ahead of yourself.

D
espite Beijing traffic's best effort to stop me, I made the train to Guilin minutes before its 8:58 a.m. departure. I claimed my spot on the middle berth of a second-class compartment, called a “hard sleeper.” The beds were almost as comfortable as first class—“soft sleeper”—but had six berths to a cabin instead of four. The train was sold out, and my car was a hive of activity.

For reading material I'd brought Paul Theroux's 1988 book about train travel in China,
Riding the Iron Rooster
. Much had changed in China in the last twenty-two years. Much hadn't. “A train isn't a vehicle,” Theroux writes. “A train is part of the country. It's a place.”

I couldn't have agreed more. Chinese, in particular, don't just ride a train—they live in it. The minute a train pulls from the station, sunflower seeds are chewed, card games played, and tea endlessly gulped. Cigarettes are smoked; bodily gases passed. Passengers sleep away the hours as if on vacation, chat with strangers, or gaze out at the passing world. Riding the rails wasn't just a way to travel China, neither during Theroux's journey nor mine; it was a way to experience it.

There are two types of people on Chinese trains: sleeping people and restless people. The old lady beside me had already fallen asleep and begun her monumental snoring, which would continue unabated, except for a few meal breaks she took in bed, for the next day. I never saw her go to the bathroom, and I wondered if her bladder was the size of a wineskin. Meanwhile, a middle-aged man on the bunk below me was up and down, up and down, all morning, rustling through his belongings, chatting with his buddy, or smoking cigarettes in between cars. Technically, smoking was not allowed on the train, a rule ignored in totality.

As we traveled through Beijing's outlying regions, I lay in my bunk and read Theroux. I was the only foreigner in the car, and periodically a Chinese passenger stopped by to say hello.

“Ni hao,” they'd say.

“Ni hao,” I'd reply.

“Ah! Your Chinese is very good!”

Chinese have very low expectations of foreigners.

A gritty city in Hebei province rolled by. I picked over a supply of ham, cheese, crackers, and fruit that I had brought with me in order to put off consuming the gruel served in the dining cars of Chinese trains.

Rule number two: bring snacks.

U
ntil the late 1980s, China relied on steam-powered relics to transport citizens and goods around its vast territory. Iron Roosters. By 2010, it was home to the largest high-speed rail network in the world, with 4,300 miles of track. The year before, China spent more than $80 billion on rail construction, and it had plans of adding 10,000 miles of capacity by 2020. The country already had more than 1,200 miles of routes that could run at top speeds of 220 miles per hour, with much more to come. China had grand ambitions of connecting coastal cities to the remote west, and it envisioned lines beginning in China and stretching across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

There were a few things about train travel the Chinese hadn't yet perfected, however. Food, namely. For dinner, having exhausted my ham, cheese, and crackers, I went to the dining car. I ordered a meal of stewed cabbage and rice with a bowl of chicken soup, and washed it down with a watery can of Snow Beer. It didn't work. Not even alcohol could make the food palatable.

I was back in my berth for lights out at 10 p.m. Some passengers had been asleep for hours. The old lady across from me was still snoring. She hadn't moved in more than twelve hours. I would have thought she was dead were it not for the snoring. The men below me smoked in their beds, thick clouds of smoke wafting up to my bunk and into my nostrils.

I read to the light of my cell phone. It was fascinating to read of Theroux's train journey and then look around to my own. In 1988, the Cultural Revolution was still fresh in the collective memory and people were still dealing with its repercussions. In 2010, the Cultural Revolution existed in theme restaurants in Beijing. The China I knew had nothing to do with communism. Back then, Deng Xiaoping's reforms were just taking hold. Now China was a fast, materialistic, frantic juggernaut. Construction, money, epic change. The world Theroux described in
Iron Rooster
seemed so familiar (travelers in pajamas drinking tea, spitting sunflower seeds on the floor), yet so different. When he traveled China by train, the changes were just beginning. As I sat in my berth en route to Guilin, they had come to fruition. The future was here, and the Chinese seemed as comfortable in it as they were riding the train.

After midnight I prepared for sleep by removing from my bag earplugs, an eye mask, and sleeping pills (rules three, four, and five). The snoring and smoking continued throughout the night. The pills were useless.

O
n long train rides there's a lot of time for thinking, and that's what I did that mostly sleepless night. It was the first real thinking I'd done since the summer, when the “Rent a White Guy” article was taking off and dominating my every waking minute.

In early August, I'd gone back to North America for a few weeks. I went with fifteen friends from high school and university to San Diego for a long weekend to celebrate our collective thirtieth birthdays. We rented a house near the beach and spent four days catching up and partying like maniacs.

One afternoon we were walking from our house to the beach and I was telling my friends about my life in China. “It's weird,” I said. “It's like it's not reality over there. I mean, I have no responsibilities, no mortgage or anything, no job to go to. It's like living this, sort of, fantasy life.”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it. It's awesome in China,” one of my friends said.

I could tell he was annoyed, but I wasn't trying to brag. The opposite, in fact. I tried to explain that living in China felt like fiction. It was a choice to opt out of being an adult, to escape the realities and responsibilities of adulthood, and I was starting to wonder if that was really such a good thing. In some ways, I was beginning to envy my friends at home—who had girlfriends, well-paying jobs, comfort, and security. They had a place to call home.

Seeing my parents in Canada also hit me hard, as it did every time. My dad had just turned sixty-eight and my mom sixty. I saw them about every six months, and every time they looked just a little bit older. I could see it in their faces, and living away from them amplified that awareness.

When I flew back to China, I lacked the same energy I normally had whenever I returned from North America. I was exhausted and unmotivated. It took me weeks to get around to unpacking my things in the new apartment, and a month before I scheduled a Chinese lesson with Guo Li. Work seemed excruciating. I had no fresh ideas and no will to dig any up.

Part of it was the anticlimax after the “Rent a White Guy” craze. Although there was still a chance of selling the article rights for a movie, I had to confront the hard truth that the movie might not happen. In July, when the hysteria was at its climax, it seemed all but certain. But I should have been heeding my friend Paul's advice—“I wouldn't get my hopes up.” My hopes were
way
up. So many people seemed interested and momentum was building. But over the summer, the number of producers willing to create a package—a fleshed-out story idea with possible stars, etc.—had dwindled. Calls and e-mails from my agent were growing less frequent, and even with this new potential offer, of which I knew very little, my gut was telling me it wasn't going to happen, and that even if it did, I didn't really deserve it.

T
he train pulled into Guilin station in the early afternoon. I immediately rushed to the ticket office to buy a ticket for my next destination, Guangzhou, two days later. This was a massive flaw in China's ticket purchasing system: train tickets could only be bought from the departure city, an annoyance that often resulted in a mad scramble to buy return tickets as soon as a train pulled into the station.

After buying a soft sleeper ticket for Guangzhou, I took a bus to Yangshuo, just over an hour out of town, with a twenty-five-year-old Swede named Olaf, whom I'd met on the train.

“There is a Chinese conundrum,” Theroux writes in
Iron Rooster
. “If a place has a reputation for being beautiful, the Chinese flock to it, and its beauty is disfigured by the crowd.”

Prime example: Yangshuo Valley. The area is known for its rocky, mist-blanketed peaks, depicted for centuries in Chinese landscape paintings. But it's not the chill backpacker hangout it once was. Mid-Autumn Festival was just kicking off, and the once-quaint town was wall-to-wall with tourists, dressed in baggy plastic ponchos to keep out the rain.

On the advice of friends, I'd booked a room at a small guesthouse in a village a few miles outside of town. It was raining, but I went for a stroll around the village anyway, taking photographs of the rocky hills and the Yulong River. At night, I met Olaf in Yangshuo town and had a dinner of spicy boiled fish and fried vegetables at an outdoor restaurant. We drank beers at an expat hangout called Reggae Bar, chatting with a chain-smoking Irish musician and a group of girls from Guilin who wanted to practice their English.

The next morning, despite the rain, Olaf and I rented bicycles and rode up and down the valley, perusing the villages and stopping to take photos. The hills were shrouded in mist, and the sky was a dark gray. Rice paddies surrounded us. As we continued up the river, locals offered us rides across on bamboo rafts, which, apart from harvesting rice, seemed to be the only business going.

We stopped for a swim at a part of the river where a couple of old ladies were defeathering chickens, preparing for a Mid-Autumn Festival feast. They tossed the feathers into the water. Up close, the river was polluted. Plastic bags. A Coke bottle. A dead fish. The water felt like a tepid bath. We got out soon after getting in, and I felt itchy for the rest of the day.

Despite the itch, it felt good cycling around that afternoon, in the outdoors, in the rain. It was a beautiful place and my head was clear. This was my job, and for a few hours I appreciated how lucky I was.

N
ot that lucky, evidently. I woke up sick the next morning and couldn't even get out of bed. My train for Guangzhou would be leaving in the early evening, and I spent the day sleeping, sweating, and running in and out of the bathroom.

In late afternoon, I hauled myself out of bed and took the bus into Guilin. I was miserable. My stomach was in ruins, and I was sweaty with fever. On the bus, it took all the will I had to keep from throwing up on the floor beneath my feet. I put headphones on, but my seat partner kept tapping me on the shoulder to ask me questions in Chinese: “Where are you from? What do you do? Do you like China?” My head felt like it was going to explode.

My ticket was soft sleeper, on the bottom berth of a cabin I shared with a thirty-something businessman from Guangzhou. He was a car salesman and offered me glossy pamphlets of the models he sold. He was single and had a sad quality to him. “I travel all the time,” he told me. “Very tired. Too tired.”

A fat young man in a pink golf shirt with a dimpled bald head that resembled a honeydew melon opened the door and asked if I would move to another cabin and sleep on the top berth. I told him I wouldn't. He grunted and scurried away. Later, another man peeked his head through our door, looked at me, and said, “Be careful of your things. There are thieves on board.”