Night Train

by Thom Jones

  Many of the girls in my exchange program are anorexic binge-purgers. Trying to match the prepubescent, rail-thin physique of the Chinese ideal damsel. Catch one puking and they cop the bad-water or food-poisoning defense when in fact bulimia is the more likely villain, especially among repeat offenders. My roommate, Elizabeth, is a puker and she barely tries to hide it. She will starve herself for days. She will live on air for eleven days and then comes the binge. By then her stomach has shrunk to the size of an English walnut, but on Day Eleven she starts pounding the food down. Day Eleven you come home and find everything in the cupboard scarfed, ingested, devoured, and done away with like Mother Hubbard’s bare cupboard and her faithful but starving Great Dane.

  In the hotel room of Elizabeth’s alimentary track, checkout time is eleven A.M. “Huh-rooga!” she goes. “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! Huh-rarf!” You can hear her in the “ce suo” with a greenbottle fly providing a backbeat to her puke music. When Elizabeth plays the whale in the squat toilet I somehow feel compelled to wait and listen, like I’ve been paid to bear witness. I stand there and listen to see what comes next. Elizabeth actually believes that if she tapes up her thin-lipped cakehole and makes the magical 90-lb. mark, she’ll bag her Prince Charming. A handsome dog along the lines of Matt Damon, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal, or some combination thereof. If not one of them, and she’s feeling grandiose, she dreams of landing her very fave, Brad Pitt. Like that is so not going to happen, but when it comes to Brad Pitt, Elizabeth is in love.

  Elizabeth is Chinese-American but she hates the look of Chinese men, utterly despises them. She bitches about them constantly. E’s got big bones and huge shoulders and she actually looks better heavy. She looks best as a middle linebacker. Sumo E. No matter how thin she gets the other girls call her “The tanker, Ms. Exxon Valdez.” When E drops fifteen, her inflated Miracle-Gro pumpkin head looks even bigger. It’s monstrous in the first place and with the weight of this hydrocephalic water-on-the-brain head of hers combined with weak neck muscles, the head flops around like some kind of rag doll, or it will loll to the side depending on which way the wind blows. It’s a damn watermelon. She looks like Oprah Winfrey whenever that international billionaire TV mogul takes her own diet to the starvation level, when she has twice-daily workouts with a personal trainer, or so they say in the tabloids. It’s all a crying shame since Oprah is not a bad-looking woman. Oprah looks far better with a little meat on her bones, at least in my opinion.

  However, it is well known that you can’t reason with anorexics; they can never get thin enough. When it comes to body weight a puker is supremely deluded. Puker stories abound and no healthy American woman can fail to read the horror tales of anorexia/bulimia with anything less than astonishment, fascination, and smug self-righteousness. “There goes that walking skeleton now. Look at her, two months ago she was fatter than a hog! Thank God it isn’t me!” My favorite anorexic story is the tragic account of Karen Anne Carpenter who, if I’m not mistaken, may have been on a macrobiotic diet. They wrote a whole book about it. What utter depravity! If Elizabeth doesn’t watch her ass, she sure as shit is going to end up burning a hole through her esophagus. Her teeth will rot to nubs. Note: I don’t swear in front of my dad; it’s disconcerting to him, though he sure enough likes to cut loose with the foul language. With him it’s always “Motherfucker this,” “cocksucker that.” “Shit, fuck, piss, goddamn it, Jesus Harrison Christ,” and so on. He listens to Samuel L. Jackson swear and imitates him, Pulp Fiction–style. I’ve heard this sort of trash talking from Day One.

  The hard-core anorexic lives on air and bottled water, the aforementioned Chinese tea, and now and then an occasional baby carrot or a ketchup packet. I have made an objective and impartial study of the yo-yo dieter. For a layperson I pretty much have my finger on the pulse of this problem. I got eyes. I can see.

  When Elizabeth goes long enough without food she becomes positively evil. Once after a Valium-and-beer suicide attempt, she confessed to me that an eating binge gives her a pleasurable sugar rush comparable to getting trashed on Tsingtao beer.

  So I stand near the toilet and listen. “Tomato skins and corn? Good God! I don’t remember eating tomatoes and corn.” After a big chunder in the squat toilet she eats a low-cal spinach salad and feels virtuous.

  Elizabeth grew up speaking Chinese in her Nevada home, where her family spoke Chinese and Chinese alone. Like after twenty years in America, her parents still can’t speak three words of English. Which means Elizabeth knows the Chinese language well enough to get straight A’s in introductory Chinese-language classes. She doesn’t have to open the book. Meanwhile she basks in the glory of her professor’s high praise. So there you have it, two felonious crimes! Not only is Elizabeth a puker, she also pretends to learn Mandarin Chinese when in reality she already knows it forwards and back. She has even tricked herself into feeling proud over this pathetic non-accomplishment. I’m a Caucasian taking advanced Chinese courses, doing the work of fifty Sabine slaves and forty horses, and still, B’s are not unknown to me. I believe that a report card with inflated A’s is as dishonest as a puker’s thin frame. I’m not some evil bitch. I feel empathy and compassion for Elizabeth, I truly do, and I don’t report her secret life to anyone. Mainland China has thrown many a young American around the bend, but enough of my tiresome clichés.

  Chengdu, where I live and go to school, is in Sichuan Province. It’s a city of ten million. I’m one of the hundred or so Caucasians in this sunless, three-packs-a-day, air-pollution nightmare of a megalopolis where the sky is perpetually white with ozone-dense smog and where, as I have briefly mentioned, the tap water is undrinkable.

  When you are out and about roaming the drab streets of Chengdu you drink Ice Dew bottled water only after carefully checking the aluminum-sealed bottle caps for tampering. A bottle of Ice Dew drinking water goes for less than two yuan, about twenty cents. In the little street stalls these beverages are mostly warm, though the shop proprietors sometimes keep a bottle or two of Ice Dew water in the ice-cream freezers.

  I give the empty Ice Dew bottles, which are refundable, to a junkman who sits in front of five trash bins outside my apartment complex. This is what the man does for a living. My father loves junkman reports and inquires after him at every opportunity.

  If you are a puker like Elizabeth you can drink Ice Dew or tea for appetite-suppressing liquid bulk and you are one step closer toward recovery. Elizabeth is such a frequent barfer the enamel of her teeth is coming off. Her grandfather left her a trust and she plans on spending every dime to beautify herself. She wants to take a little trip down to Tijuana, where she can go eyetooth to eyetooth for one of those Gary Busey 750-watt smiles. In Tijuana she can also get her crooked pugilist stump of a nose streamlined. Then, with a blinding smile and an irresistibly beautiful nose, her big head notwithstanding, Elizabeth will be swept right off her size 12, triple-X wide feet by Prince Charming. Once she bags her man, she will never have to lift another finger.

  “You foolish girl,” I told her after suicide attempt number four, “consider how seldom things turn out the way we expect them to.”

  Meanwhile Elizabeth makes do with Quinny, who stands in at five foot two, carrying one hundred and eleven pounds of nervous energy. As you may have guessed, Quinny is no Brad Pitt. His flat snake eyes are as black as obsidian and color-coordinated to go with his black upper-incisor cavities. He’s got extra-special bad breath because he’s always dipping his food into some rancid fish-sauce concoction. This is breath that can buckle your knees at a distance of fifteen yards. It could fell a herd of oxen.

  Quinny is the antithesis of Prince Charming. He’s a hyped-up ADD, Adderall-doesn’t-work, walking nervous breakdown. What a pair they make, the alpha and omega of social dysfunction. Late into the night I hear them screwing on Elizabeth’s futon, stopping in the middle of it so Quinny can tie her up and spank her fat ass with a stolen rec-center Ping-Pong paddle. But I shouldn’t complain. For so many highly strung ty
pes, sexual release is the last of the bleed-off valves. Without sexual relief, both of them would sink into the black psychic abyss of manic psychoses and probably take me with them, as insanity can be infectious. Both of these nutcases are on maximum-strength Paxil. Sometimes their shrill craziness permeates the humid rice-paper walls of the cramped apartment, infiltrating even the synthetic fibers of the shag rug that smells like a wet dog. E’s got dirty clothes lying all over the place, dirty dishes, laundry hanging to dry on strung-up ropes, and on top of that there are a hundred fifty Quinny messes as well. I sometimes want to take a knife to both of them. Or maybe just get my hands around their necks, bonk their pumpkin heads together, and then just shake the living hell out of them both. And to think I actually “liked” Elizabeth back in the States, before we came to Chengdu as roommates.

  In her weight obsession, E says all Chinese women are bulimics, that’s why they all take chopsticks to the bathroom after every meal. E’s mother and sister—both born in China—are pukers too. It’s all in the fam. A waif frame is part and parcel of being a Chinese female. Not only that, but due to the heavy air pollution obscuring the sunshine, the Chinese girls have flawless white complexions. On a green air-quality-index day, however, when the sun peeks through the smog, you won’t catch a Chinese woman without a parasol. There is mastery in the art of bicycling one-handed with an umbrella in the other. But what really drives a Chengdu female crazy and makes her most insecure is a short stature. You read the lonely-hearts classifieds and it often goes something like this: “Tall Chinese male, 5'3", seeks Chinese girl, 5'4"–5'9". GIRLS WITH SHOELIFTS OR COWBOY BOOTS NEED NOT APPLY!”

  When her parents can afford it, a short Chinese teenager will have an orthopedic surgeon break her shin bones and then install ratchet devices on either end of the broken bones. The patient will then pretty much lie in bed for two years eking out a millimeter or two of bone length each week with an Allen wrench. Remember that China is the country that put foot binding on the map. So you can acquire six centimeters of shinbone growth by this method and, with luck, meet your Chinese Prince Charming. You might even bag a European guy and effect a permanent escape from this grimy hellhole. Always industrious, the Chinese girl will spend her long convalescence mastering English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Euclidean geometry, physics, chemistry, Kantian philosophy, or something roughly approximate. She will acquire violin and trombone expertise, and when the whole show is over she will have a typing speed of seven hundred words a minute.

  At the university level they all want to learn English. The girls will take you out to dinner or to some awful karaoke bar. They flatter you and blow smoke up your ass just so they can practice their English. We call them English sluts. On the other hand I can earn a hundred yuan of under-the-table income to teach a one-hour class in English. Really simple stuff. “Put your right foot in, you put your right foot out; you do the Hokey Pokey and you shake it all about. Shake ’em up, baby!” My Chinese friends, intellectuals for the most part, beg me to order them copies of Reader’s Digest, that very paragon of literary excellence and sophistication. Like watching American films and Bonanza reruns, Reader’s Digest helps students cement the basics of English.

  Their next move is to go out and buy some new clothes. Small fortunes are put out for a wardrobe full of qipaos. Chinese girls will take out loans and surety bonds just to follow the latest trend, complete slaves of fashion. For all the book learning, not an iota of common sense.

  I’m five foot six and when I walk the back alleys to Sichuan University or tool over there on my Flying Pigeon bicycle, people will point and stare. “There goes the round-eyed barbarian. No doubt she’s a Western spy.”

  I’m not fat by American standards, but they call me fat here, follow me and gawk at my foreignness. They chant “fatso” in the local dialect, Sichuanhua. They don’t know I speak Chinese until I turn around and lower the boom with “Cao ni ma!,” which translates into “Fuck your mother!” That little bon mot never fails to get a rise out of them. Often they retort something to the effect that I’m a cheap American whore, when in fact I’m the very model of propriety. To keep the men off me, I wear a plain gold wedding band. I tell them, “My husband got out of prison yesterday and as we speak, he’s on a flight to Chengdu. And brother, let me tell you, he’s a bad motor scooter, jealous as hell. So you better look out; he’ll nail your ass to the nearest tree.” Of course, since the Chinese have cut down every tree in the country you would have to go to Finland for a tree. My father knows nothing of this.

  When pressed on matters of nationality, I claim to be Canadian. The Chinese love things American but hate America. As for Canada, they think it’s a city in southern Ecuador. Americans in China take a lot of heat over Iraq and our honorable president, George W. Bush. I learned not to admit to being American after the third or so cab driver yelled vehemently at me for voting GWB. Shit, I wasn’t even old enough to vote yet when he was elected. And good luck explaining the Electoral College to a stranger in Mandarin. Not worth the effort, so Canadian I became.

  China is one of the few remaining places on earth where material goods are still cheap, though there are two prices, prices for locals and prices for foreigners. You have to bargain them down or they have contempt for you. In America you bargain down the price of a house or car, but you don’t go into a supermarket and haggle over the price of canned peas. I let Elizabeth handle this. At least she’s good for something.

  They don’t have dental floss in Chengdu, so my father sends me seventy-five-foot dispensers of waxed floss in every care package. No tampons here either, but I don’t ask him to send me those. Also, the children don’t wear diapers. Instead there is an open gap at the back of their trousers from which they piss and shit in the streets. Even little toddlers are adept at this revolting habit. In this regard they are totally lacking in shame. You get used to seeing it by the third day and realize that it’s normal. Once I saw a woman put cabbage leaves out to dry on a piss-and-shit road.

  In Sichuan the food is so hot with spices and fiery oils that it can raise blisters on the roof of your mouth, your inner cheeks, tonsils, and uvula. This hydrochloric-acid diet causes pieces of flesh to hang off the oral cavities like string, like you just ate a McDonald’s hot apple pie straight from the sizzling French-fry cooker. My father also sends me bottles of selenium, which he claims is deficient in the Sichuan soil, and the lack of which is rumored to cause stomach cancer. At his behest I take selenium and zinc.

  Until my nineteenth year I lived on junk food. China has made a vegetarian of me not only for my health but also for ethical reasons. What right do we have to so demean animals as to reduce them to food? What kind of sadistic Adolf Hitler insanity is that? Come to think of it, Hitler was a vegetarian.

  Twenty years ago people still thought smoking was glamorous. I can’t give the exact date, but I foresee that one day eating animals will become untenable. Meanwhile not only do the Chinese eat cocker spaniels and Chihuahuas, they’ve got restaurants that serve broiled rats. A damn rat ran across my foot with comic-book ferocity at the hair salon. This on my third day in-country. Its sharp paws scraping across the tile floor sounded like fingernails on a blackboard. I just about peed my pants. And the rat knew what he was doing; it was a calculated act of malevolence because after he ran past, he turned his head over his shoulder, bared his razor-sharp teeth, and caught my glance with his red squinty eyes. He didn’t squeal with pleasure. No, he had a low baritone voice like James Earl Jones and kinda went, “Huh, huh, huh.” Like some cartoon rat. Daddy loved that incident, though he was concerned that I might come down with rat fever.

  Our first weeks here, Elizabeth and I wanted to see everything in China, every square inch. We went to the panda research center and it was a stone bore. Ten red pandas that are not impressive at all; they look like raccoons. There are about ten giant pandas and a bunch of guys with thick glasses in white coats with clipboards. And you can’t just go anywhere, as ha
lf the place is restricted from tourists. For years you hear pandas are sacred and lovable but then you stand there and watch them and they won’t do a single interesting thing. A brain no bigger than a BB. I got rapid-fire mosquito bites one after another. The whole ordeal was a total bust.

  Next we took a trip to the mountains and were warned by guides not to get fooled by the cute act of the monkeys along the trail, that they most definitely would harass us and bite. I came back from that journey with mosquito welts the size of quarters and a festering monkey bite in the web between my forefinger and thumb. I think Chinese mosquitoes have antifreeze inside them. The only effective bug repellent is pure DEET and five tablespoons of DDT taken orally four times a day.

  In Tibet I saw an Alley Oop–looking dude eating a raw shank of yak meat and washing it down with tea and a splash of yak milk. The fat content of yak milk is 16 percent. I am a lacto vegetarian but I draw the line at yak milk. Instead I put soymilk on my cornflakes. It tastes awful but like anything, you get used to it.

  Once on a forty-hour train trip to Beijing I saw a bucket of dead eels by the train toilet. That night cooked eel was served in the first-class dining car. Newly vegetarian, I couldn’t face cooked eel and ate a chocolate bar for dinner. Chinese chocolate is bitter like a combination of cooking chocolate and Dial soap. It was good for another Daddy report. He wrote back asking for “every detail.”

  You get a sleeper coach with a first-class train ticket. It had always been a dream of mine to sleep in a plush Pullman sleeper. Click clack, click clack as the steel wheels rock along iron rails, the most comforting sound in the world. In China the train beds are narrower than a balance beam and about as hard. Cigarette smoke like gas warfare. Every Chinese male over the age of eight smokes at least two packs a day. Boy, my hopes were dashed on that one. Top it off, I got the gastro and spent the whole ride balancing over the squat toilet, conveniently located at the hinge between train cars. Nothing like a little polluted air blast to the ass when you’re good and sick.