The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  A speeding passenger train en route to a Chinese coastal resort jumped the tracks and slammed into another, killing at least 70 people and injuring hundreds in the worst rail accident in the country in a decade. In January a high-speed train ran through a group of maintenance workers, killing 18. China … is expanding the system to accommodate what is the world’s most dense passenger and freight network.

  —Sunday Times, April 29, 2008

  ELEVEN

  Hope and Wait

  EVEN AT EIGHT in the morning it was as dark as a cave in Urumqi. And freezing, the streets slick with ice, frozen gobs of spit dotting the sidewalks and streets like gross polka dots. When I left Delhi I’d inadvertently tossed my guide to China. Chinese were like Americans—they thought they were the center of the universe (the Chinese name for the country, Middle Kingdom, said it all)—and few Chinese, at least in Urumqi, spoke English. “Few” being an understatement. No one spoke English. At all. And I had two things I could say in Chinese: thank you and hello. My hotel was twenty-four stories of glass; for the first time in months I was in an affluent, totally modern world, yet I felt cut off. I had to improvise the moment I tried to take a taxi to the train station. I drew a picture of a train. Said “choo, choo, tchka, tchka,” and somehow ended up at the train station, a massive square Stalinist building that was packed—a line of shaking, freezing people jumping up and down like engine pistons, running out its doors and snaking down the stairs. I pushed on through and found eighteen ticket windows, each with a line hundreds, maybe thousands deep. Melted snow and spit covered the slippery floors. Which was the right window? I couldn’t tell. Was I to wait for hours and then get to the wrong window?

  I needed help. Maybe my hotel? I tried to get a taxi. Drivers shook their heads when I tried to get in. Men and women aggressively pushed me away and jumped in. Finally I pushed back, and jumped into a front seat. Handed the driver the card with the hotel’s name and address. “Uh-uh,” he said, shaking his head, grunting, spitting out something. I got out. Tried again. Finally found a driver who took me. The desk clerk summoned a woman who spoke some English. There was another ticket office, she said. Nearby. I wanted to get to Hohhot and she wrote the name in my notebook. In the end it took me four trips to two stations to get a ticket to Hohhot, there to catch a train toward Mongolia. The language wall was total; it was like trying to communicate with fish in the sea.

  An hour after boarding, a woman in a blue conductor’s uniform came to me and unleashed a torrent of indecipherable words. Thank you, I said. How are you? It was all I could say. She stomped off, returning with another conductor. He unleashed the same torrent. Thank you, I said. How are you?

  He tried harder. She tried harder. Thank you, I said. How are you?

  They left, returning a few minutes later with two passengers who spoke some English. “Where are you going?” they said.

  “To Hohhot,” I said, showing them my ticket.

  “Yes,” the men said in harmony, “but where are you changing trains?”

  “Changing trains?”

  “This train does not go to Hohhot. You must change trains.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me where!”

  They conferred. “Wu Wei,” the men said, the conductors nodding. “You must get off in Wu Wei.”

  “When do we get to Wu Wei?” I asked.

  By then I had my trusty pad and pen. The woman grabbed it, wrote “13:10,” and presented it to me.

  I had, somehow, ended up not in the lowest class, hard seat, but in hard berth—six platforms in a spotless train with down comforters and down pillows. There was nothing I could do, no conversation. Every once in a while the people near me jabbered at me. I nodded. “Thank you, thank you,” I said. “How are you?”

  I got off the train in Wu Wei and I didn’t even know where Wu Wei was. It was freezing, maybe ten degrees. The train station stood elevated overlooking a square with a tall pole on which galloped three black horses. It was still. A few shops lined the square and one six-story, modern cube of a building. Wu Wei was deserted. I showed my ticket to a line of policemen in blue uniforms in the unheated station. I had no idea what they said. I unleashed a torrent of English.

  A policeman grabbed me by the arm, led me outside, into another room, the ticket room. He marched to the front of the line, much was spoken, a ticket spat out. I drew a clock, pointed to my watch. “17:48,” he wrote.

  I followed him back to the station. He shook his head, pointed … out. To the square. I shook my head. Showed him my bag, asked if I could store it. He shook his head, said words I couldn’t understand, pushed me toward the square. No, I didn’t feel like taking a stroll with my bags, so I went back into the station. Where I sat for four hours freezing, amid peasants with ruddy cheeks and silver teeth. I made friends with some. I showed them photos of my children stored on my cell phone. A woman gave me an orange so cold it was hard to hold and partly frozen. I paced. I read. The time drew near. I had two scarves around my neck, gloves, long underwear, a ski hat, and I shook. But there was no train. I took my ticket back to the police. One of them, a woman, suddenly spoke: “Tomorrow,” she said.

  “You speak English?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “And your train is tomorrow evening.”

  Four hours freezing for nothing! The modern building was a hotel, and not a bad one. I squawked like a chicken. I drew a picture of a steaming cup of coffee. They nodded. I felt my communication skills were improving. Soon after, I got a glass of warm milk and spareribs.

  That night I called home for help. My youngest daughter was in her second year of Chinese; Lindsey bought a guidebook and they sent me a few words and phrases, which I copied into my notes and I thought I might be able to take a bit of control again.

  I SPENT THE NEXT NIGHT on the train in a hard seat. Every seat was taken, and some people had to stand. Frost and ribbons of ice an inch thick coated the window. I sat as upright as if on a pew in church. My fellow passengers snored, stared, and ate enormous quantities of sunflower seeds. My neck ached; my knees cried; my back throbbed. I had no idea where I was; I could talk to no one, decipher nothing. This was my moment of triumph: I had come three quarters of the way around the world. I had braved the rivers and mud roads of the Amazon and the desert trains of Mali and the ferries of Indonesia and Bangladesh. I had walked through the markets of Kabul. For the first time I felt helpless. As lost as lost could be. If I pushed aside the purple curtain and wiped the ice rime off the glass I saw nothing but blackness and snow. A baby wailed and I could not sleep. I felt totally cut off; connecting to the world, the thing I wanted most of all and that I’d been getting better and better at as the months passed, was impossible. My fellow passengers showed no interest in me. I thought of the scene in Tobias Schneebaum’s Keep the River on Your Right in which, after four days of walking alone in the jungle, he came upon a band of naked Akarama Indians, a warrior tribe so fierce and feared that he’d been warned that they’d probably kill him on sight. Instead, though, the Akarama, after silently watching his approach, leapt up. “All weapons had been left lying on stones and we were jumping up and down and my arms went around body after body and I felt myself getting hysterical, wildly ecstatic with love for all humanity, and I returned slaps on backs and bites on hard flesh, and small as they were, I twirled some round like children and wept away the world of my past.” I had been feeling that more and more, in Indonesia and Bangladesh and sitting on the moist grass of Palika Park with Moolchand; that love for humanity which sometimes made me, yes, ecstatic and both liberated and connected. It was a feeling I seldom got at home, where I was known as a bit of a curmudgeon, but out in the world I so often felt new, fresh, like I could see each blade of grass and stone on the sidewalk, and feel open to whoever crossed my path. Out in the world I saw every human being as good and fascinating. As worth knowing. At home I too often ignored people and felt apart from everyone. Out on the road I had this driving desire to connect, an
d often I did, in part because people could read that openness I so rarely had at home. In China that seemed gone entirely, like a dream. Was it simply the language barrier? Or something else, something within me? Probably a bit of both. Here in western China the language and culture gap was huge, but I also realized that with every mile I was inching closer to my starting point, away from the new and back to the past. I felt scared; what if everything I had learned—evaporated upon my return? How could I find the courage to make that life real again?

  An hour out of Hohhot we stopped and a young couple slid in next to me. He wore tight black jeans and a cool black sweater with a silver zipper. I was in a daze. “What’s your favorite number?” he said, apropos of nothing, in excellent English.

  I perked up. “My number?”

  “Yes, you know, like one, two, three, four …”

  “Six,” I said.

  “Dude, it’s good!” he said, holding up his hand with the pinky and thumb sticking out. “Six and eight are lucky! We are students. I am a counter! I work with numbers.”

  “An accountant?”

  “Yes! That’s it! An accountant.”

  “What’s your favorite sport? Do you like the NBA?”

  I nodded. “Can you watch the NBA in China?” I said.

  “CCTV 5!” he said. “Dude, it’s the all-sports channel!”

  That was an hour out of Hohhot, though, and soon I was off the train, walking through the streets until I found a hotel. Then back to the train station to puzzle out my next leg, toward Mongolia. The lines were epic. Which window? I couldn’t tell. I waited in one. I drew two clocks, with one through twenty-four. I wrote the word for tomorrow next to the word for Erlian. “Erlian, ming tian,” I said boldly when I got to the window, courtesy of Charlotte—Erlian tomorrow.

  “Mayo,” said the woman, don’t have. I drew a calendar. I pointed to the day. “Mayo.” I shrugged, pointed to the date again. Out spat a ticket. For Sunday, five days later, too long to stay in Hohhot.

  Somehow I found the bus station. Somehow I bought a ticket to the Chinese-Mongolian border town of Erlian, leaving the next morning at eight. Most of the phrases my daughter Charlotte had given me I couldn’t make work—intonation was so important in Mandarin, nothing but gibberish came out of my mouth. I trooped back through the cold to my hotel. I went to the restaurant. “How are you?” I said. “Thank you.” I ordered, pointing to a photo in the menu of what looked like rectangular strips of meat and green string beans. My dinner came: strips of pure fat in hot peppers and garlic. Like bacon without the meat. The texture was hideous but it tasted really good.

  I fled to my room, through a phalanx of waitresses and desk clerks who said, as I passed, “How are you? Thank you!” And then they giggled.

  In the morning I shouldered my bags and strolled into the frigid streets of Hohhot toward the bus station. I had no idea where I was going, except toward Mongolia. I had no idea when I’d get there. There was some question about whether I needed a visa or not. The Mongolia guidebook said I did; various websites said I didn’t. But I was buoyed by thoughts of Moolchand and Fardus, their eternal optimism, and I’d just finished all 1,886 pages of the Chinese English-language edition of Alexandre Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo, whose ending words were “Wait and hope.”

  I skated onto the bus and off we went. My seatmate wore silvery shining satin slacks and had long sideburns. “How are you?” I said. He looked at me like I was from the Stone Age and said nothing.

  We climbed and swirled up into brown mountains covered in snow, and an hour later emerged on high rolling plains. Sun. Big sky with a boundless horizon. Strange motel-looking places in the middle of nowhere with yurts instead of cabins. Acres of twenty-foot-tall imitation dinosaurs striding across the steppe.

  We made a bathroom stop. The men’s room was a work of art. An outdoor trough encased in frozen piss five inches thick gleamed a faint yellow. Five holes in the floor five feet above the ground revealed amazing free-standing sculptures of frozen shit that rose two inches above the holes themselves. It was so cold it didn’t even smell.

  In the early afternoon we left the highway and headed into a town, stopped by a restaurant. Everyone piled out. A lunch stop! I stood around. I went into the restaurant, but no passengers were inside. Maybe it was just a bathroom break. I waited. I got cold. It was freezing. I got back on the bus. I sat. After twenty minutes the driver came up to me and erupted in Chinese. I heard the word Erlian. “Erlian!” I said. “Yes, I’m going to Erlian.”

  “Erlian!” he said. “Erlian!” Then I understood. We had, in fact, arrived. Mongolia was here, somewhere.

  I saw a hotel. It wasn’t a hotel, but the bus station. “Mongolia!” I said at a ticket window. A ticket spat out. An hour later I sat on a small, ramshackle bus with no heat. Women piled in with duffel bags and more duffel bags, five to a woman; they were traders. They filled the seats. Frost covered the windows. A man boarded with a truck tire. Another man thrust a car bench seat covered in faux leopard into the aisle. We took off. Hit the border, as imperial as any I’d ever seen. Sky, snow, steppe, and a massive marble building with mirrored glass shining in the sun. I went in one side, came out the other. Another hundred yards and we hit Mongolia. The affluence, the sparkle and shimmer of China, evaporated.

  The border checkpoint was dim, old, dusty. I filled out a form. Visa number: I had no visa. Hotel: I had no hotel. Flight number: I was on a bus, so I left that blank, too.

  I waited and hoped in a very long line.

  My border agent was beautiful, with eyebrows finely arched and plucked. Pink lipstick. Long black hair in a ponytail. Green camo fatigues. A huge gold badge. “What bus number?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The bus from Erlian.” How many buses could there be?

  “What bus number?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She unleashed a string of words to the people behind me in line. They shrugged; none of them were fellow passengers.

  Five times she asked me and five times I just said I don’t know. She looked at me. “What hotel?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Zamyn Uud.” That was the city we were going to.

  “Zamyn Uud Hotel?” she said.

  “Yes!” I said. “That’s it. The Zamyn Uud Hotel!”

  She wrote. But it was the visa, or my lack of it, that I was worried about. She opened my passport. Thumbed through the pages. Looked at me. “What bus number?”

  I shrugged. She wrote something down. Picked up a stamper and, clunk, stamped my passport. Fifteen minutes later we were in Zamyn Uud, Mongolia, on the edge of the Gobi Desert.

  There was nothing in Zamyn Uud, Mongolia. There was dirt and ice and snow and three restaurants and a train station, a lot of yurts, a couple of general stores. It was 42 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. A pool table lay dead in the town square, its felt covered with a layer of white. On the edge of town stood two boxcars, from which frozen horse hides, like sheets of plywood, were being unloaded onto trucks. My hotel, which was not the Zamyn Uud Hotel, had no hot water. When darkness fell the sky was nothing but stars, a dusting of snow sparkling like broken glass. I felt far away from everything. Nisa called from Delhi, sobbing. Lindsey sent me a note that hinted of a new, budding relationship; apparently I wasn’t the only one who felt we had grown apart. On my way to the restaurant for dinner I ran into wandering yak. And found a man lying on the snow. He wore a fur cap and knee-high leather boots and had gold teeth and his legs were scrambling but he was getting nowhere. He could not rise. He was hopelessly drunk. I did my best to lift him to his feet, but he was big, solid, and he clutched me tightly, weaving, slipping. He had no gloves. We slipped and slid and skidded to a bench in the square, by the pool table dusted with snow, where I left him. I wanted to hang out, to talk, to just sit and watch the world and meet people, but that was impossible when it was 42 degrees below zero. People rushed past in thick winter coats; if I paused for more than a moment the cold
cut through my clothes as if I was naked. What would have happened to Schneebaum’s adventure if those Akarams had ignored him?

  In the restaurant it hit me: I was starting all over again. I knew not a word of Mongolian, and the menu was in Cyrillic. Bring me anything, I motioned. We struggled. Being me in such situations was like being a wiggling minnow on a line cast from a dock; if there was an English speaker within a half-mile they’d find me.