Most Unforgettable Character–Bronze Winner: Politics on the Rails
By Jeff Vize
Trains were built for China. China was built for trains.
Either way you frame the statement, the Middle Kingdom is undeniably a country for trains. It’s not just because the rail network in this country includes some 50,000 kilometers of track, or because its trains are comfortable and cheap. And it’s not just because trains provide a superb view as the landscape morphs from choked cityscape to rice-paddies to pockmarked desert moonscape. It’s all of that, yes. But it’s something else: It’s because the trains are China. You find the country inside them.
On my trip from Beijing to Xi’an, I found the entire country packed into one boxcar. Of course, I had no idea what I was getting into when I bought my ticket. It wasn’t until I boarded that I began to sense something awry. It felt as if everyone on my car was waiting for me. Conversations stopped in mid-sentence, meals were interrupted, card games were stopped and heads swiveled. Then there was the staring: People stared as I approached, swung their heads to stare as I passed, leaned over to stare as I put away my bag, and stared as I sat down to read.
I had been stared at before in China, but this seemed different. These stares communicated a palpable tension – a feeling of anticipation and excitement. The stares were the looks of people about to share a great secret with you, looks of invitation. Something was about to happen, and silly me, I thought it was just a train trip.
It was just a train trip, but train trips, I learned, are special here. While one boxcar might represent all of China, it simultaneously represents none of it. On the rails in China, things are different. Trains are a world of their own – a kind cocooned social purgatory that sprouts halfway between the real world and nowhere. There is no privacy. There are no social, cultural, or linguistic barriers. People transform, and they are required to interact.
The atmosphere in a Chinese train is that of a traveling living room. For Chinese, a long train ride is an event, and they make themselves at home in order to enjoy it: People roam the aisles in their pajamas, drink themselves into oblivion, play cards, eat lavish banquets and generally take over the place as if it were theirs. It’s perhaps the best way to enter a Chinese home without actually being invited to one.
No one understood the significance train trips more than a man named Li, who introduced himself to me about one hour and three beers into the trip. Actually, the word “introduce” is a bit misleading. He stumbled toward my table, took a seat across from me, slammed down his beer and proceeded to stare at me for about three minutes.
Li was a thick man of about 30, with pockmarked cheeks. His lips quivered as he stared, as though he was about to tell me something. He wasn’t. He just wanted to stare. For a moment, I thought he might kick me out of his “living room.” Finally he took a deep breath and spoke.
“Are you?”
He bellowed the words with as much dignity as he could muster, but he was clearly nervous. I was too, especially considering I had no idea what he was trying to say. But by now, two of Li’s friends were standing behind him, and a good ten passengers in our vicinity were staring. I had to say something.
“I’m fine.”
He nodded solemnly, as if I’d revealed some secret information. He cocked his head slightly so that he could see his friends. Then he turned back to me and resumed his staring. Conversation-wise, the ball was in his court, but he wasn’t playing. I tried another simple phrase.
“So, how are you?”
“I … I … am …”
He was drowned out by the laughter of the other passengers before he could finish. When the commotion died down, one of Li’s friends lobbed a few words of Chinese in my general direction. I looked over my shoulder. Yep, he was talking to me.
More Chinese followed. I grinned.
“He wants to know if you speak Chinese,” said a woman across the aisle. She was nearly out of view thanks to the crowd that had gathered. I craned my neck to see her, and the onlookers cleared a path.
“No, I don’t.”
No matter. The discovery that someone spoke English excited Li. He turned in her direction and began barking something in Chinese.
“He wants to know which country you are from,” she said.
“Meiguo,” I said.
I had learned the Chinese word for “America,” but not much else. The crowd cooed, but it was one of those reactions which left me uncertain about my standing: Were they honored by my presence, or were they going to throw me out the window?
“Where are they going?” I asked the woman.
“They are going to Xi’an. They are soldiers.”
A lump rose in my throat – not out of fear, but of vague disgust. I’d seen Li’s comrades lording over Tiananmen Square, where they wore green trench coats, fur hats and cold looks to match the frozen breath that puffed from their noses. Considering the fifty-year stream of negative news about these guys and their employers, Chinese soldiers are an intimidating bunch to the average visitor. Now one was trying to buddy up to me.
I looked again at Li. His friends were giggling at him, and he responded with drunken slurs. So these were the men that slaughtered pro-democracy protesters in 1989; the men that enforced martial law in Tibet and harassed political dissidents? They were hilariously unimpressive – a collection of hicks, really. I studied them, trying to reconcile Tiananmen Square and his friendly greeting of “Are you?”
Li returned the stare, then reached into his bag for something: a beer. He handed it to me.
He lifted his drink and toasted me roughly, spilling the frothy contents onto the table. Everyone cheered.
The beer was a good idea; alcohol always helps establish a stream of translation, even when you don’t speak the language. It also brought me “inside.” Now that I had accepted his gift, Li had the right to pepper me with questions. He wanted to know everything: How did I like China? What did I think of President Bush? Within minutes, I was holding a class on American culture to some twenty pupils.
None of the students were more astute than a man named Wang. He had strolled up behind the crowd as I was talking about Monica Lewinsky or some such nonsense. I spotted him immediately because his six-foot height set him apart from the squat crowd. His crisp khakis and pressed blue shirt made him like a dab of color in an old black-and-white film. He stood at a distance, his eyes fixed on me through black-rimmed spectacles.
Finally, he twisted his body into the crowd and slipped through. He came forward and took the seat next to me. With one phrase, he managed to shift the entire direction of conversation.
“So you are American?”
He spoke with an accent, but his command of English seemed good. He had abundant poise – almost to the point of arrogance.
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you going to Xi’an?”
“Yes, to see the Terracotta Warriors. And you?”
“Yes, I live in Xi’an.”
Our conversation was wooden. Wang’s eyes were preoccupied, drifting to the others around us. They were pestering him for a translation. He hissed back in Chinese. The tone was clear: “This is my foreigner. Go away.”
Once Wang wrested control of me, he didn’t waste any time getting to the point. There was business to take care of.
“What do you think of Falun Gong?” he said.
The question seemed exceedingly blunt.
“You mean the religion?”
“No,” he said. “The cult.”
“Right,” I said. “I don’t know much about them. I just know the government doesn’t like them. They seem peaceful.”
I was noncommittal on purpose, trying to feel out where this conversation was going. It didn’t take long to figure it out.
“I knew it!” he said, suddenly becoming excited. “Americans think Falun Gong is being persecuted. They’re not! They’re brainwashed!”
He banged his fist in one hand for emphasis.
“They follow their leader. This man is an American agent – very dangerous. Falun Gong is not a religion. It is a cult. They should be stopped.”
I had judged Wang to be an educated person, which he certainly was. But I was thinking of education in the Western sense: A healthy skepticism, broadmindedness, openness to other opinions. Instead, he seemed to be an organic propaganda vehicle. It caught me off guard.
“Don’t you agree?” Wang said.
“I don’t know. Why should the government arrest them? Shouldn’t people be free to practice their religion?”
“It’s not a religion. They are organizing to overthrow the government.”
“I find it hard to believe that a small group of cultists who practice Tai-Chi can threaten the Chinese government.”
“No. It’s the same in your country. What about David Koresh? Or the Mormons? The American government killed them.”
I tried to keep my head.
“That’s different,” I started, not quite sure how I would actually make him understand the distinction.
“They’re the same.”
“They’re not. Koresh was stockpiling weapons! Raping little girls!” I said, growing flustered.
Wang straightened in his seat and smiled faintly, clearly pleased at provoking me.
“Speaking of your government,” he said. “What about the Chinese embassy in Belgrade? Don’t you think it was bombed was on purpose?”
I knew the incident he was talking about. It took place during the 1998 war in Serbia, when NATO planes bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. It was officially an accident, but considering that China was vehemently opposed to the war, some considered it suspicious.
“Well,” I said. “It’s strange that our high-tech missiles could fail so conveniently as to destroy the Chinese Embassy.”
Wang’s eyes gleamed. In my desire to be honest and open to every possibility, I had just validated his beliefs. I tried to take it back.
“But I’m not saying that it was …”
Wang didn’t let me finish.
“You see,” he said, validation shimmering behind his glasses. “I am right. You agree with me.”
It was becoming clear that Wang didn’t see me as a window into American culture, but rather as a punching bag representing a country that someone had told him to hate. My resentment had reached the boiling point. I had to strike back with a question of my own.
“So what do you think about Tibet and Taiwan – or Xinjiang?” I said.
“They are part of China.”
“But Taiwan has been independent for 50 years.”
“They are a renegade province,” he said. “They have always been part of China, and they will be again. There is no doubting that. Even your government agrees.”
“Well, what about Tibet then?”
“Tibet has a long history of connection with China – almost a thousand years. That’s older than your country itself!”
He finished with a dismissive laugh, as if to indicate that China’s mere antiquity elbowed the opinions of people from any other country.
“But the people aren’t Chinese. The culture has nothing to do with China.”
“But we are helping them. That is why we liberated them. We did not invade. Tibet is very poor. They want us to help them.”
“But you stole that land!”
“What about America? Your whole country is stolen!”
His reply stung. I had worked up such a head of steam that the hypocrisy of my argument had never occurred to me. Or maybe it had. After all, shouldn’t we strive to keep others from making the same mistakes that we have made?
Wang didn’t see it like that. The only thing that mattered was that America had done the same thing. Our hypocrisy was just another indication that the West was trying to keep China down.
Still, Wang’s unflinching adherence to the government line baffled me.
“Isn’t there anything you don’t like about China?” I asked, exasperated.
After some wavering, he admitted that he disliked the fact that the government had destroyed so many old buildings during the Cultural Revolution. This wasn’t exactly daring – in fact, this kind of criticism is apparently tolerated by the government – but at least I got something out of him.
Strangely, this turn in the conversation seemed to make Wang uncomfortable. Innocuous as his criticisms were, he began to look nervous. Within a few moments he had excused himself.
But my social duties were not complete. The vultures had been circling, and Li was the first to land. He leaned across the small table that separated us and pushed his sleeves up. He smiled broadly and began barking commands toward the English-speaking woman in the corner.
“He wants to know what you think of Clinton,” she said.
Before I could answer, Li interrupted.
“He says he likes him very much,” the woman translated. “Very friendly to China.”
“I agree. He was.”
Li seemed satisfied with my answer. He leaned over the table to pat my shoulder. He fed more Chinese to the woman, and she kept translating. The crowd swelled again. There were about a dozen people in our vicinity, standing around, squatting in the aisles, hanging from the beds. The rowdy train hushed when the translator spoke.
“He said Bush is not nice,” the woman said.
“Maybe not.”
The simplicity of the conversation amused me. The Red Guard whose comrades had intimidated me in Tiananmen Square felt easy compared to the aggressive litigation-style techniques of Wang. I didn’t even have to answer. He just wanted to tell me how much he liked Bill Clinton.
Then came the next question:
“Do you think China and America are friends?”
“Well … maybe not best friends, but we are friends.”
The answer was translated. Our spectators exchanged a series of grimaces and grunts. Li asked a follow-up question. The woman’s facial expression changed. She appeared hesitant to translate.
“What?” I asked. Whatever the question was, it couldn’t have been worse than what Wang had just subjected me to.
“It’s … difficult to say, but …”
“What?”
“No. It’s too funny. He’s just a country boy. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“No, really. Tell me.”
“OK,” she began hesitantly. “He asks if the American Army and the Chinese Army fight, who do you think would win?”
I could feel a grin spreading across my face. It was a Chinese smile – one of those ambiguous expressions that you see so often here when someone is embarrassed or unsure of what to say.
Fighting off a hostile interrogator like Wang is one thing; but Li had a genuineness that the lawyer had lacked. I’m sure Li wasn’t immune from the propaganda that Wang spouted. But it seemed that his lack of formal education had freed him to think about these things on his own terms – and determine how they would affect his own soul, not just the nation in the abstract sense. He actually wanted to know what I thought. He felt it mattered.
I came up with the best answer I could.
“Let’s just say I don’t want to know.”
A whisper made its way through the crowd. The translation followed a few seconds later. The whisper rose to a roar. Li, the fearsome soldier, raised his beer and toasted my empty beer can with a bang. Realizing I had finished it, reached into his back and produced another.
He shouted something at our interpreter.
“He said you should be the next president,” she said.
If only international politics were as easy as the train ride to Xi’an.
