Back on the Train

Chances are if you're reading this, and it's not Friday yet, I'm somewhere on that red line going up or coming back. Again.

The Train

The aisle went down the right side of the train. Fold-down seats with a strong recoil back into an upright position line the wall against windows. Small tables, perhaps 10 inches deep, are offered for every two seats. The left 2/3's of the train are bunks 3 high, 6 to a cabin. They are perhaps 18 inches deep and spaced maybe three feet apart from each other in height. It is impossible to sit upright in the top two bunks. The bottom bunks provide headroom but are used as couches by random strangers. Spidery passengers use other bunks as ladders up and down instead of the micro-ladders.

I got to the train late-ish. Sometimes you get a spirited cabbie, sometimes you don't. When I got onboard the luggage racks about the fold-up seats. I had to pile my backpackers bag and my laptop bag on the bed while tucking my book satchel underneath the bottom seat. Needless to say this took an already cramped situation and cut my sleeping space in half.

* * *
I managed to make the sleeping space bearable. I threw a comforter over my bags and propped my feet on them. For the first time in awhile it was relatively easy to pass out when night came. I didn't sleep the night before and got only a few hours as we passed through Hebei province at the begining of the trek. I think it's easier for me to sleep in slightly situations than in comfortable beds.

I woke up at 2am though. A soft-spoken English-speaking employee of the constuction arm of SinoPec (Chinese state-run oil company) was sitting at one of the chairs watching the nightscape of Sichuan Province unfold. We had an eerie conversation in the darkness. The mining outposts in the mountains lit the train as we passed by. I had a vaque idea that somehow, in some way, the afterlife vaquely resembled being on a 27-hour Chinese train ride.

* * *
I tried falling back asleep. I turned to put my headphones on - Mogwai had knocked me out earlier in the night. I moved and felt something fall.

THUMP!

I had twice dropped my Chinese workbook to the floor during the voyage. A gruff looking man escorting his son to his first day of college lifted it back up to me both times.

I looked down. My pillow was slumped against his body and it had knocked his tea cantine against his head. CRAP! I rolled over facing the wall and fell into uncontrolable quiet laughter.

Play it cool. Pretend like it was the girl sleeping above me.

After a few minutes I rolled back over to plan my rescovery operation. The pillow was gone. I looked closely. The man's head was propped twice as high as it was last time, my pillow a kindly gift from the gods above.

* * *

The Other China

I remember the second night I was in Tianjin we were having a small BBQ on a large outdoor patio on the 4th floor of the office building ACES is in. We have the 4th floor largely to ourselves. While we were eating sheep kababs I kept noticing the top floor of a building about 80 meters away. Later I would deduce it was on top of the Carrefour supermarket and KTV karaoke building that also hosts the new restaurant called "Hans" that features Chinese girls dressed as 19th century Dutch maidens.

What caught my eye was that there were men walking passed a window wearing what looked like chef's clothing. White hats, white clothes, the whole outfit. I laughed it off. It was a curiosity. Why would there be cooks on the 10th floor of a building? Other than Dru asking if I'd seen it too, I didn't think about it after that..

From different angles, inside my classroom, I noticed the building wasn't in the greatest condition. Windows were broken out on the top floors but it wasn't abandoned. I could see people walk by occasionally. The mystery deepened... what was going on up there? The photographer in me wanted to sneak around up there.

A week ago, in the middle of a class, I realized what it was. It was a dormitory. A dormitory filled with men of all ages. The structures I couldn't make out inside were bunk beds. It was obvious when I saw men laying down on them now at 8:30 at night.

I don't know who they are. I don't know where they work. My best guess is that they're unskilled laborers from the country. You hear of them in the Western press, but you never really see them. Brian told me they typically live at construction sites. This was confirmed a few weeks ago when I was looking for the antique market and found a construction site with a huge wall around it. Looking from a distance I could see cargo trailers piled three high with the walls cut off filled with bunks.

On my walks home I sometimes catch men near the same building standing outside at night with a hose and a bowl of soapy water. They stand in their underwear and bathe in the streets once the resteraunts close up and people start going home. I know who these men are. They are the cooks at one of the better, if slower, resteraunts in our neighborhood. They live in a dorm behind the resteraunt. Five-hundred yuan ($60) a month, free food, and lodging is their pay. The wage is about half of the GDP per capita ($1,700/year USD at current exchange rate, $6,800 USD if adjusted for purchasing power parity [a relative and sketchy measure of buying power that quadruples their GDP from 2.2 trillion USD to almost 9 trillion USD]).

I'm glad I'm seeing it. I've been getting a false exposure so far. Everyone I meet is educated. They're the only ones who speak English. Most everything I see is in one of the posher neighborhoods in town. I hang out at expat bars and college clubs. Even the mountain village I spent two weeks in was financed by tourist seeing the restored Wall. On Sunday I'll begin a 27 hour train ride to the bottom of China. It's a 1200 mile voyage nearly straight south. I think I'll see the real China there.


The red line running the length of the country is my voyage. Click to Enlarge.

Tags: Treyopia current events poverty Tianjin China trains train network poor