Bound for Vietnam

by Lydia Laube

  I went into a restaurant and with the help of the phrase-book asked what their specialty was. The waitress pointed to an item at the top of the Chinese only menu. I said, ‘Okay.’ A big heap of chunky chopped meat, cauliflower, eggs and gravy was conjured up. I had no idea what it was, but later I read that the specialty of this area was dog. And when I saw skinned dog carcases, all red and bloody, but identifiable because the heads had been left on, hanging in the market, I knew that what I had enjoyed was man’s best friend, Fido. A restaurant I frequented later sported a glass-fronted charcoal grill in which three dogs complete with heads and crisp brown barbecued skin rotated.

  I did not get much sleep that night. The building construction continued, under floodlights, beneath and all around me. Bulldozers, cranes, jack-hammers and pile drivers roared, thumped and bumped, accompanied by whistle blasts and yells until after one a.m. Then very early in the morning the clamour started again. When the building noise stopped my rowdy neighbours took over, rested briefly, then started up again at five to compete with the construction teams. This went on every night I spent in Chongqing, but I survived by using ear-plugs.

  For all that, I decided that I liked Chongqing. Its streets were narrow, bent and twisty and went up and down crazily, but there were no bicycles. This was not bicycle country; men did all the packwork. Everywhere I looked I saw coolies in ragged blue Mao jackets walking about with their poles and ropes hoping for some chance employment, or bearing the most incredible loads on their shoulders.

  In the morning the bathroom taps produced no hot water, so I set off largely unwashed to find the Public Security Bureau (the police). My visa was about to expire and the PSB were reputed to supply extensions, albeit for a substantial fee. I asked the hotel receptionist to write down the address of PSB and astounded myself by finding it easily. After walking a little way, I had gone into a shop to ask directions. A young girl took me by the hand, led me next door to the PSB office and sat me down. The visa was accomplished reasonably painlessly in about an hour at a cost of ninety-five yuan and was presented to me by a beautiful young lady dressed in police uniform, plain navy slacks, jumper and shoes. With no embellishments or a single drop of make up, she was still stunning.

  Another young woman sat on the bench beside me and helped me fill out my form. She told me that she was getting an exit visa for her boss who needed to travel on business. An attractive young man took my application then sat at his desk reading the paper and extensively and diligently picking his nose. What an excavation job he did, first with one hand, then the other, to make sure he got it all. He rolled up what he found and dropped the end product on the floor. When he had completed this routine to his satisfaction, he started on his ears. Unfortunately I had to leave before I could see what came next.

  Much elated at achieving an extension of stay without the problems I had heard could be attached to it, I started my next mission – to buy a ticket onwards. Having read that it was possible to travel further on the river by smaller boat and that the Chongqing Hotel had a travel department, I went there and tried to extract some information. But the travel agent was only programmed to sell tickets on a tourist boat that did short river trips. She knew of nothing that was available elsewhere, not even in the next town. But the young man at reception produced a map and showed me that it was possible to go to Wuhan.

  I said, ‘I have just come from there. I want to go the other way, to Leshan, or another place further along the Yangtze.’

  ‘Not possible,’ he replied.

  I argued that it was and showed him my guidebook. Beaten into submission he said, ‘Okay. Yes you can go to Leshan.’ Suddenly, he knew all about it. ‘But,’ he said, ‘it’s no good boat. You not like it. Why not fly?’

  End of story. There was no way I would fly in China. I also decided against Leshan. The boat’s timetable was unreliable and irregular. Going to Leshan also meant heading north again, and I was sick of being cold. I wanted to go south, so I decided on a train to Guangzhou.

  It was now lunchtime and, as the guidebook said that good food was to be had at the Chongqing Hotel, I tried their restaurant. The menu had an English translation and attempts at western dishes, but the specialty listed was dog. I ordered rabbit, hoping that wasn’t an euphemism for rat, which were plentiful in Chongqing. Apart from the battalion that shared my room with me, I saw several well-fed rats lying dead in the gutters. The meat I ate was hot and spicy and, whatever it was, it tasted good, despite its having been chopped up brutally with a cleaver. Deciding to be utterly, decadently European, I ordered a banana split, but it was made from frozen milk with a couple of bits of banana thrown in. That’s it, I concluded. I am done with Chinese versions of western food.

  I took a taxi to the Remnin Hotel. A replica of Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, a stupendous round edifice with a domed roof, in its former life it had been a palace. I went inside for a sticky-beak and while there I decided to look up CITS which the book said was at this address. Despite a huge sign on the outside wall of an adjoining building that declared CITS to be lurking within, this involved much difficulty. I could not locate an entrance. I walked all around the wall and back again, but still found no doorway. Finally, I went up some stairs on one side and found some doors – all with indecipherable Chinese signs. One of the doors was open, so I knocked and entered. A young man was stretched out asleep on a couch. In due time he made me very welcome and did not seem upset that I had disturbed his nap. But the young man couldn’t understand me, and he had to send for re-enforcements. Eventually five men were in the room, smoking, reading the paper, or interrogating me. They could tell me nothing about onward travel. One young man spoke fairly good English. He said he listened to Radio Australia every morning. He tried to help me, but right or wrong he wanted to put me on a plane. I said. ‘I don’t want to go on a plane.’ He was amazed. ‘You don’t like to fly with CAAC!’

  ‘Listen, mate’, I said. ‘I like to live, that is why I don’t like to fly with CAAC.’

  He thought that was hilarious, but he still wanted to put me on a plane. I said, ‘I want to go down to Guangzhou by train.’ At first he denied that there was any such creature, but when I insisted there was, he gave in and admitted it. ‘Yes, yes, yes. There is a train, but very awful and impossible to get a soft sleeper without waiting a very long time.’

  ‘I don’t mind’, I said, ‘I’ll wait.’

  He repeated that it was impossible.

  I asked if he would phone the station to ask. That seemed terribly hard.

  Finally he said, ‘You wait. You wait.’

  Fifteen minutes later another man was produced to make the phone call. After a long conversation, the first young man turned to me, ‘You give me your passport and 1000 yuan for the train ticket.’

  ‘A thousand!’

  ‘Only yuan, not dollars.’

  But a thousand was a bit hot. It cost only 600 yuan from Shanghai to Beijing and that was much further. I began to think that there was something peculiar going on here, so I tried to exit gracefully and make a fast getaway. This was not easy. And later, when I found out how much money these gents had lost because I would not cough up my cash, I understood why.

  The soft sleeper on the next day’s train to Guangzhou would have cost me 360 yuan! How curious! In the event, I changed my mind and went to Liuzhou and Yanshu instead. I walked around to view the Renmin Hotel from the front. It was spectacular. I attempted to climb a colossal flight of steps on one side of it but was stopped by a young woman who removed two yuan from me. I did not know why until I reached the top and discovered to my amazement that I had paid to watch a lecture on Chinese massage in a monstrous auditorium. The inside of the auditorium was as magnificent as the original Temple of Heaven. I gawked and came down again. A pleasant garden at the bottom of the steps led to the street from where I took a taxi to the railway station.

  At the station I encountered massive problems just finding the ticket offices, let alone the on
e that sold tickets to Guangzhou. Pointing to ‘I want to buy a ticket’ in my book, I wandered around an immense area asking one person after another until I finally came to the right place. There I was confronted by row after row of counters with little windows that had Chinese writing above, and long queues in front of them. I continued asking and was directed to one. But after standing in line for ages, I decided that the prices listed above the window could not be enough to get me to Guangzhou. I moved in front of a window with large prices and the shortest waiting line and when I reached the counter I pointed to Guangzhou in my book. It did not surprise me when the ticket seller said that I was at the wrong window. She pointed to where I should be.

  What did surprise me was to see people standing patiently in queues. They were better behaved than their northern cousins – possibly because they had to stand between two lines of strong iron bars that they could not get over. But they could go past on one side. I saw one man walk along this side of the queue, shove his money in the window in front of the first person in line and buy a ticket. No grumbles were heard. No one complained. They just let him get away with it.

  I got my message across to the ticket seller, a helpful woman who indicated that a soft sleeper to Guangzhou was not available for tomorrow. I asked if there was one to Liuzhou, which is close. She replied that there was. Only later, when I asked the hotel desk staff to translate my ticket for me, did I discover to my utter disgust that the train left at five o’clock in the morning! I had to clutch the desk to sustain the shock when this horror was revealed to me. It meant I had to get up in the freezing cold at three a.m.

  Outside the station, a line of taxi vultures lurked. One grabbed me and pushed, patted and propelled me into his taxi. Then he demanded fifty yuan. I yelped, ‘Not on your Nelly!’ It had only cost nine to come there. I got out, slammed the door and walked off. He ran after me saying, ‘Forty, thirty, twenty!’ To which I genteely replied, ‘Frogs!’ Across the road I flagged a passing taxi with a working meter, who returned me for the price I had paid to get there.

  After Hiro left, I had no company in my room, well not human anyway. As I was drawing the curtains at the far end of the room, I saw a furry thing moving on the floor. On closer inspection it proved to be a large rat in the process of twitching its death throes. Death from over-eating, by the look of it. I summoned the room maid, who very casually and calmly swept the rat up with her feather duster and put it in the bin. It looked like she did it all the time. During the night one of the deceased’s brethren came looking for it. I was almost asleep when I felt a large animal jump on top of me and start walking down my hip. I gave a shriek and the rat went flying off. Next morning there was another very dead rat on the floor. I wondered if it was my nocturnal visitor who had died of a heart attack. I have been told that I have a scream like an air-raid siren.

  At dusk that evening I went strolling along the streets looking at the shops. It was a good time to be out; many people were shopping and temporary stalls, pedlars and night markets were active. Small boy shoe-shine merchants and a street ironer worked away on the footpath close to where an old woman in charge of a pair of bathroom scales invited custom. I saw a youth trying to sell the same armful of neck ties that I had seen him with in the morning and again at noon. He stood in front of a haberdashery shop that also sold ties. The tolerance of the shop keepers amazed me. They allowed hawkers to sell the same goods as they did, probably cheaper, right outside their doors.

  The shops did not diversify in the goods they stocked; one tiny shop was full of umbrellas and another of hats. Some things were so cheap that I wished I had the baggage space to bring them home, like several pretty hats that were only two or three dollars each.

  I wandered a long way up and down these fascinating narrow streets. When I decided to return, it was dark and I could not see anything familiar. Then I realised that I did not have the address of my hotel with me. I had no idea where I lived. I was lost, and I couldn’t speak a word of the language. I had used a monument at an intersection near my hotel as a landmark, but when I returned to it in the dark it looked different and I had gone off in the wrong direction. I walked for a very long time before I came to a big hotel and, in desperation, I decided to swallow my pride and ask for aid.

  It did not help that I could neither pronounce nor write my hotel’s name and, although it turned out to be only three blocks away, the reception staff did not know the other hotels in their vicinity. Nevertheless the two male hotel staff were helpful. They pored over my map and eventually worked out that I had gone wrong at the monument. Thanking them profusely, I went back to it, found where I had made the mistake and was saved from a night on the streets.

  The next morning I set off to get the filling I had lost on the boat replaced. I pantomimed ‘sore tooth’ to the hotel receptionist and she wrote the name of the hospital where I should seek help. It was not far and I walked, asking directions. I would not have known the building was a hospital if it had not been pointed out to me. There was an armed guard at the gate.

  In the grounds I showed my paper to several people and was sent all over the place until a girl in a white uniform marched me to the dentistry department. My guide led me into the building, jumped the queue at the office where patients were waiting to register and, in exchange for the princely sum of eight cents, handed me a ticket that entitled me to treatment. The dental unit was, as usual for anything I wanted, up ten flights of stairs. I consoled myself with the thought that if there had been a lift, it would not have been working.

  While I was hiking up all those steps I had plenty of time to think about chickening out. I had always dreaded the thought of being a patient in a Third World hospital and had sworn blind that no matter what happened to me I would never allow it. Before leaving home I’d had my teeth checked. The tooth that had lost its filling in the middle of a five-day jaunt on the Yangtze River had been the only one that had needed repairs. That dentist would be in a lot of trouble.

  Before committing myself to the ministrations of a Chinese dentist, I carefully considered the pros and cons of the exercise. If I did not have the tooth treated, the worst thing that could happen was that I could lose it and suffer a lot of pain into the bargain. But if I had it filled I risked getting infected with HIV. The minute I set eyes on the building that housed the dental department I very nearly turned tail and bolted. Passing nurses and doctors in grubby white uniforms, I was led through alleys, grimy corridors and chilling waiting areas. Finally, I was put into a very large room that contained six dental chairs over which six dentists laboured.

  Despite my fears, the dentists in their white coats looked reasonably clean. (The only really white coats I saw in China had been in a bank; for some obscure reason everyone in the place wore a coat of dazzling cleanliness.) A young dentist intimated that I should wait. There was not an enormous crowd of potential customers, the only place in China there wasn’t.

  In the fullness of time I was seated in the operating chair. The dentist and I indulged in some mutual pantomime. She seemed to be telling me what grisly procedure was necessary. All the other patients had brought along a couple of their relatives for moral support, but the next of kin, fickle things, immediately left their family member to the mercies of the ministering dentist so that they could attend the much more interesting spectacle of the foreign devil’s exposed oral cavity. They flocked around the back of my chair, hustling for the best view. A few waiting patients joined the sideshow. They seemed to be telling the dentist to get on with it, ‘If you are not treating this bloody foreigner why don’t you let us in the chair? She’s just hanging about doing nothing.’ But we fought them off. One woman, whom I came to think of as the Inspector, took it upon herself to have a good look in my mouth every time the dentist did. Then she relayed what she’d seen to those behind, adding what was obviously either approval or disapprobation. I lay back in the chair under the spotlight, defeated.

  Eventually a second opinion was brou
ght in; an engaging young man, who spoke a few words of English, examined my mouth and said that he would have to repair the tooth and replace the filling. He had a wonderfully gentle touch that told me he knew what he was doing. I said, ‘Go for it, son.’ He produced a drill, something I regard as one of the more fiendish and macabre instruments of torture at the best of times, but this machine was decidedly elderly.

  I think my dentist washed his hands, but he did not wear gloves and the same instruments and drill bits were used on everyone. They were only given a bit of a wipe with Metho. Enough to kill the AIDS and hepatitis viruses, I prayed.

  Each dentist’s chair was accompanied by a stand that had the operator’s pieces laid out on it. My stand had a white top that was stained and far from clean. The torture implements lay in old chipped enamel bowls and the drill – Oooh the drill! And without an injection of local anaesthetic! Never in my worst nightmares had I ever imagined letting a dentist loose on me with a drill without an anaesthetic. I am a devout, card carrying, professed and practising coward. But there was no way I was going to have an injection in China. Among the emergency equipment I never travel without was a disposable syringe and needle, but the local anaesthetic sat on the shelf before me in multi-use quart bottles that were goodness knows how contaminated, so the syringe stayed in my bag. The fact that the drill might pierce my gum was enough to worry about. The dentist wiped the pointy bit with something on a swab which may have been disinfectant, but it could have been poison, for all I knew.

  The performance began. Every cell in my body tensed, anticipating a slip of the instrument, as I dwelt on the knowledge that you only need a tiny unseen opening in your skin or mucosa to get infected. This gratifying thought did not make my stay in the chair a jolly or restful one, but it was certainly memorable. To take my mind off proceedings, I examined the window and the wall in front of me and concluded that the building had been hastily thrown together with a knife and fork. Everything was rough. The window ledge was crudely plastered, the window had been fitted crookedly and its wooden frame had had paint slopped over it haphazardly.