Trying to meet up with Charity in the big station is the first exercise of many during the trip in challenging cell phone culture. My "little smart phone" only works in Sichuan province . . . and we ain't in Sichuan anymore. I use a public phone to call Charity and tell her I'll wait at the Northeast exit. But when I climb up and out the exit is complicated, with three floors. I choose the middle one, and wait. The weather is much colder than I brought clothes for. Wind. I watch the other waiters play with their many-featured cell phones, wonder if I could charm them into letting me send her a message.

When she doesn't come I wonder nervously downstairs to see her (I think it's her) squinting at a map of the station. She begins to walk away, and I follow after, disturbed by how unsure I am that it is her. When I touch her shoulder to turn her around, our reunion is underwhelming, like meetings of loved ones here are. I don't hug her, though I want to.

She has come more than an hour to the train station to meet me, but she dismisses her own hospitality, saying, "I've never seen the Shanghai South Train Station" - a backwards excuse we delight in making to our friends. No one ever means exactly what they say and you're not SUPPOSED to take anything at face value.

We bus back out to the outlying district of Shanghai where she is stuck in (forgive me) nothing of a life. Just work (and nothing to hold her there) and trying to make it another year or two when the college loans will be paid off and she can return to Sichuan. An older cousin and his family but she doesn't see them often. No money to go out on the weekends. No ping-pong in the common room because someone would call her boyfriend and tell him she's hanging out with other guys. You could mistake the place for any small city, China. We spend two days between the hotel room they have rented for me and the restaurants where we eat lunch and dinner with her boyfriend, who is nice, and gentlemanly in every patronizing way. She stays with me at the hotel and finally we have someone to whom we can tell everything.

On the second night we gang up on her boyfriend about the dinner choice. We want dumplings. He wants to go back to the same Sichuan restaurant where we had (granted, a very tasty) lunch. We win. The dumplings are terrible. I buy microwave popcorn and we go back to the hotel to watch TV. 

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.

scarlet robes on a shanghai-bound train

What can I say except Justin (and Cheryl, Hee-Jin, and Naomi this weekend) have kept me busy? I'm gonna try playing catch-up a bit. Hold off on writing about yesterday's fun and try to drag up early-March memories.

I liked Shanghai more than I thought I would. On Sunday afternoon, upon arrival, I wondered completely lost around the huge many-squared train station, enjoyed a donut!!! and coffee with The History of Love, wondered what the helpful traffic police meant when they used the word "daba" for bus, and eventually (sort of accidently) ended up riding the Maglev (magnetic levitation)train to the airport just in time to meet him. The train, which except for a small group of Japanese tourists was mostly deserted, took eight minutes to get to the airport. Yep, it was pretty fast. And I promise, Dad, that next time you come to China, we will ride on this thing.

pic from: www.monorails.org/tmspages/MagShang.html

I have these phrases scribbled in my yellow notebook, with stars and exclamation points:

Justin is coming!
I'm in Shanghai!
I'm eating a donut!
I'm going 431 km/hr!
The Yao Ming on that giant Visa card ad is wearing lipstick!

Earlier in the Nanjing train station I had written:

The class isn't as exclusively high for this fast train as I imagined it might be. The ubitiquous plaid-striped bags, and one of those huge shapeless fake-jean backpacks that Jesse Bauman bought in Nanchong.

I don't know why people get up and pile up in the lines. We'll all get there eventually, won't we?

Across from me two Tibetan monks in full scarlet robes. One wears zip-up boots that look really warm. Too warm maybe. He has a deep cough. A long-haired companion too, not in robes. I wonder who they will meet in Shanghai. Or are they headed international?

And now I'm drug back to this morning, when I was so sobered by more news about protests in Tibet and in other parts of Western China. Protesters being arrested and killed. Looting, burning, and rock-throwing, while not helpful I agree, are not nearly as scary to me as the stories offered as explanations, and the way that even cynical friends here believe that yes, China is one, and anyone who dares to say otherwise is just asking for (read:deserves) trouble.

(And yes, I appreciate the irony of, in one post, loving on the Maglev and hating on the policies that build face like that.)

Borrowed these pictures are from a good blog by a guy who lives in Xinjiang.