losing trains

I once loved trains. The rocking sleep, the instant noodles, the intimacy of strangers taking turns at the window seat and stumbling on each other's shoes in the night. I've crawled all over this country on her trains (though only twice outside the comfort of the hard sleeper). 

Dr. Wang hates trains. He took too many as a student, back when you had to fight your way on and maybe even through the windows. He'll drive himself, and take the cost and stress and inconvenience over those emotional memories any day. I always understood . . . but also felt no small self-satisfaction at my preference for trains.

And this time it was supposed to be the same. I bought puffed rice cakes, oranges, bottles of tea, packed the sudoku bathroom reader and study materials for the settle-in. I didn't fear the stretching out hours, though everyone but ZX and his parents said I was crazy. A few hundred kuai more and you'd be there, they said increduously, when they'd done the math. 

But I chose thirty-eight, and a five-minute walk around the corner to the station. ZX argues with the woman guarding the gate to let him in, too stubborn to buy the platform ticket. But the whole place is remodeled, shiny; there are free-standing boards with the new rules posted, and she is staunch. I am sure he is just letting off the unsettled tension of me leaving for tend days and neither of us feel good, or even sure about it.

 

The train came from Chengdu and the boarding was sweaty and trying. All of us from Nanchong in two or three cars, no empty bunks, and everybody trying to shove their three or four big bags under the seats or in the small space overhead. I had to wait to get into my compartment. Then there were two small babies. 

I reacted badly, said something sarcastic aloud about how great it was that there were two . . . and later felt bad because they turned out to be really great babies, nothing like the five-year-old spoiled boy one compartment down. They were three and five months, and their mothers were sister-in-laws. True country folk. Great patient women.

At seven o'clock in the evening on the second day it's all a haze. The stainless steel food car coming by again. The babies feeding again. The little boy is a man at three years old. He wears grey long underwear and brown man's dress shoes in his size.  Mama follows him to the bathroom. Outside the window the yellow flowers of the youcai everywhere. The graduate student is traveling to Shanghai and Suzhou to spend a few months. She and her mother, who wears skin-tight pants painted to look like jeans. She does her make-up on the second day for no one but us.

It's the third morning that gets to me. We are all ancy as it is, and the spoiled little man argues for a hotdog until, and even after, it's promised. I haven't talked to the other passengers like I used to when my Chinese was crappy. I feel so alone, like I'm floating suspended in between yet more of these worlds, and will never belong. I know the three mothers are having a conversation about the suffering of women, but they are down on the bottom bunks talking too low for me to hear. I can't remember it ever feeling so long, and think I'll not take another long one like this alone.