Trained by Trains: Focus on China

(August 1986) The two-day honeymoon drew to a close. It was time to get down to work—on the other side of the country, that is! A scenic two-and-a-half-day train ride would see us to what we would refer to, at least for the next four years of our life, as “home.” On the eve of our departure, I was asked to accompany Xiao Lu downtown to check in our group’s luggage.

The train station was crawling with passengers—migrant workers, tourists, students, and pickpockets! There was not an inch to spare. We paid the puller of a rickshaw-looking flat wagon to cart our belongings to the weigh-in counter. Traffic in both directions at the front entrance was at a standstill.

We managed to squeeze our way through the human wall of consolidated travelers. Inside was another story—utter chaos! Some men were standing on top of the counter, others—on the scale. The next thing I knew, fistfights were breaking out around us! I was stupefied at the swiftness of police intervention, which handled the confusion with electric cattle prods! When I think back—dude!—we were being tased!

Had I been alone, I would have nearly drowned in the anarchical sea of people. To my advantage, Xiao Lu knew the ropes. Shrewdly capitalizing on the presence of a western snazola with two deep-set round eyes, he invited special treatment from the personnel. Although I was discomforted by the maneuver, it did clinch the job.

From baggage check-in, we hurried over to a special office marked soft sleepers to purchase our train tickets, which, to my surprise, could be obtained solely upon the presentation of a currently extinct foreign currency called wàihùi[1] Xiao Lu explained to me that the trip would be more comfortable if we rode in firstclass compartments. In afterthought, preferred treatment for the two-and-a-half day initiation on a Chinese choo-choo was not such a bad idea after all.

On a positive note, the firstclass sleeping quarters, which bunked four passengers per cabin, were not as crammed as we had anticipated. As for the engine, it was fueled by coal, which blanketed the entire train—inside and out—with a solid layer of pitch-black soot. The washing facilities rendered scant assistance to the ash-smirched journeyers.

Less user-friendly were the toilets, whose doors swung open just enough to grant entrance and—well, you got it—squat! The feat did require some innate acrobatic agility. Feet planted on the two raised blocks over the hole and trousers angled slightly above the knees, the initiate balanced the bumps and simultaneously pinched the nose tightly closed as an anti-suffocation measure. (God forbid if the train came to a sudden halt before completion of duties!)

Not all trains boasted dining cars. In their absence, bartering out of the window for products from vendors at local stops was always the recourse. Then again, one trip to the toilet and the most appetizing choice of the day may be to fast.

While exploring the other cars of the train to pass the time away, I stumbled on the hardsleeper section—train cars with aisles and aisles of unpartitioned bunkbeds stacked three levels high. On one such leg-stretch, I came across Xiao Liu and her husband who were the underprivileged employees of our university’s wàibàn office.

When I stopped off for a chat, the animosity that they were harboring was seething through their half-cracked smiles. Sparing no effort to break the ice, I hurriedly retraced my steps to retrieve an envelope of family pictures from my cabin to show Xiao Liu and her husband. Slowly they warmed up to me, at least on the surface.

So, what about the menswear? We will get there...2 1/2 more days on the train...

[1] Pronounced Why! Hweigh!

Photo top right, Beijing Train Station 2008 by Vmenkov, Copyleft at Wikipedia.

Photo middle left Copyright Men's Fashion by Francesco.
Photo bottom right by Yaohua2000 GNU Free Documentation License at Wiki Commons.

A Culture Vulture at Heart: Focus on China

(August 1986) The flight to China was pleasurable but long—thirteen hours airtime, not to mention layovers. The wheels of our plane screeched down in the dead of the night. The airport in Beijing was deserted; customs was a breeze.

“So, this is it...Zhõnggúo[1],“ I muttered, “home to one-fifth the world’s population. But where are all the people?”

Having retrieved our luggage (the few pieces we had), I exited the baggage claim area and wearily tottered my jet-lagged body into the reception area of welcoming wàbàn[2] representatives—university delegates from every province of China.
Deciphering my misspelled name that was indelibly markered on a 7-by-11-inch card, I introduced myself to a scrawny young man who was vigorously waving the sign head and shoulders over the crowd.

“Mm, I am… aah… Lu, your… uh… personal living… aah… trans-lataah!” he melodically intoned. “Shall… aah… we go to… aah… your hotel... waah?”

With the back of my hand, I wiped a hole clear on the steamed up window of the minibus and, pressing my forehead against the cool damp glass, I gawked fruitlessly into the mist of the night.

After a short ride into the city, we checked in at our destination—the Beijing Camaraderie Hotel—a leftover from the Fifties era and reminiscent of the Chinese hospitality that was extended to Soviet experts. The gargantuan structure, whose grounds sprawled over a half-million square feet, comprised fifteen hundred rooms of traditional Chinese ornateness.

Hardly awake on my feet, I turned down the purple silk bedspread and drifted off to deep slumber. At the peep of the day, I was pleasantly awakened by a mesmerizing hum, not of the espresso pot of days past but rather of the cicadas buzzing outside in the trees of the garden.

Groggy from jet lag, I tried on for size a pair of slippers that were tucked under the bed and, shuffling to the window, I threw open the shutters to get an earful of nature’s musical. The rising sun cast a spectrum of silvery-white rays through the heavy summer vapors that were lifting through a silhouette of poplar trees.

“Absolutely beautiful!” I breathed as I uncorked the shiny imperial-red thermos and poured out some steeping-hot water into a cup of loose-leaf tea.

Sitting patiently, I eyeballed the green leaves as they floated, one by one, to the bottom of the cups.

After breakfast, Xiao Lu[3] presented me to the other wàibàn officers from his institute, who kindly proposed to guide us around the city, a plan for which I was more than game.

Barely putting our feet on the curb, we were stopped dead in our tracks by a thick, oncoming, bumper-to-bumper torrent of bicycles and tricycles, horse carts and pull carts, three- and four-wheeled tractors, buses, cars, vans—even grandpop’s old truck from the Thirties—and, yes, farmers who carefully balanced produce that hung from opposite ends of bamboo poles straddled across their shoulders.

“Ah, here they are!” I gasped. “It’ true! China is teaming with people!”

It was the mid-Eighties. Construction was raging everywhere. Instead of TV antennas striping the skyline, cranes sat perched on the roofs of countless unfinished high-rises and skyscrapers. Overshadowed by the massive heaps of glass and concrete, the traditional bijou of China’s yester years was hidden: unrefurbished homes graced with delicate wooden birdcages hanging outside walled-in courtyards.

It was to this environ-ment that my curiosity was drawn—namely, to the people. Lagging behind, I ogled in all directions at once. Unfortunately, we could spare no time if we intended to see the highlights. Besides, that evening the Central Education Bureau was hosting an orientation session, which was to be trailed by a twenty-course banquet! We had better step on it and work up an appetite!

We raced through the Summer Palace—a park trimmed with hills, rivers, pagodas, lakes, gates, bridges, and streams. At noon, we bent our steps to the Tian An Men Square district and zipped through a dozen of the nine thousand rooms of the Forbidden City.[4] We exited through the gateway below the famous veranda where, in 1949, Mao Ze Dong proclaimed “the ten-thousand-year reign of the People’s Communist Republic of China.”

We wrapped up the whirlwind of mini-lectures on China’s art, history, music, and culture by waiting our turn in a human chain that snaked for miles, just to catch a glimpse of the Republic’s founder, whose supposed body lay in a glass case inside the heavily armed mausoleum.

The sites of Beijing were fascinating. More intriguing were the swarms of people. All over! Every which way, right or left, wherever we turned, we bumped into people...people...people! I had the weird sensation that they were all staring at me, too! The others on our tour shared the same curious feeling. Had paranoia set in? No, well, not yet!

By the early Eighties, the average person in China had yet to set eyes on a western mug, which was readily described as a “dàbízi”; otherwise known as the ole’ “snazola.” I could not help but laugh through some of the mini-lectures throughout Beijing, when Chinese tourists nonchalantly posed as close to us as possible, trying not to be noticed, so as to snap a stealthy shot near a foreigner with a dàbízi.

[1] “Zhōnggúo”—pronounced June-gwall—literally meaning ‘the middle country’, which stems from the ancient Chinese belief that China was the center of the world where heaven and earth converged, qualifying it to be the only valid civilization.
[2] The Chinese term for ‘foreign affairs’.
[3] ‘Xiăo’—pronounced she-owl—is the Chinese title used when an older person addresses someone younger. ‘Lu’ is a surname.
[4] Otherwise known as the Palace Museum or Imperial Palace. The former residence of the emperor and present home of government offices, temples, and gardens.

Photos 1986 Beijing, Copyright Men's Fashion by Francesco.