Around the World in 80 Trains

by Monisha Rajesh

  ‘Have some cheese.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jem, ‘would you like a Kinder Bueno?’

  ‘It’s not prison, mate, you don’t have to swap anything. Having said that, I’d give you five fags if you’ve got a cold beer on you? All I’ve got is a bottle of vodka and a satsuma … to make the vodka taste, well, less so.’

  Alex came in caressing a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. ‘This, is my baby,’ he said. ‘This cost me a fortune on the black market, and I’m going to put it in the fridge in the dining car and crack it open at the border.’

  So far, customs and border crossings hadn’t been a problem. During passport checks I’d increasingly been scrutinised as my miserable face became less and less recognisable beneath the accumulation of dirt and sweat. The sniffer spaniels had shown more interest in my instant noodles, panting at my lunch instead of looking for contraband and stowaways hiding beneath my berth. Otherwise we’d smiled, obliged demands, and listened for the thrilling scuffle of genuine criminals being hauled off the train. The five-hour crossing from Mongolia into China was almost as legendary as the train itself, and Jem had downloaded five episodes of Game of Thrones to see us through it. China and Mongolia use different rail gauges: Mongolia’s broad gauge is 85 millimetres wider than China’s standard gauge, a hangover from the Soviet era, and one that Mongolia refuses to cure. In a real-life version of Game of Thrones, Mongolian authorities considered the obstacle a necessity in hobbling the economic rise of its powerful neighbour – and one-time overlord. China was already the main recipient of Mongolia’s exports, and threatened by its rise – and fearing dependency – Mongolia had resorted to an age-old tactic of statistical railway-building to scupper China’s dominance. This meant that both passenger and freight trains had to wait on the border until the undercarriages – bogies – could be changed, a laborious process whereby the carriages were jacked up by hydraulic lifts, and the entire chassis slid out and a new one pulled into place. But China also played the game to its advantage: in 2002 the Dalai Lama had visited Mongolia and China had thrown a tantrum by blocking trains at the border for two days.

  Curious about what the Chinese dining car had to offer, Ed, Alex, Jem and I sat down at a booth. Now that we were in first class, local people were conspicuously absent, the seats taken up by English people drinking from cans. The Chinese staff made no effort to hide their revulsion as passengers knelt up on seats, spilt food, and mimicked Chinese accents, sharing their most hostile experiences at the hands of foreigners. It was at times like these that I was embarrassed by my countrymen, who waited until they were abroad to show their worst. Lasting no more than five minutes, we extricated ourselves from the car and went back to enjoy the luxury of our compartment, but not before Alex had lovingly laid his wine to rest in the fridge.

  ‘People keep looking at me,’ said Jem, ‘do you think they think I’m Mongolian?’

  ‘I think it’s because they’ve never seen anyone wearing pink swimming shorts and loafers in public.’

  ‘I haven’t been this high in ages … not since Dublin.’ Ed was craning his neck out of the window and trying to film the engineers changing our chassis, blocking my camera with his elbow. It was around midnight and we were now in a shed just outside Erlian, around ten feet off the ground. So seamless was the movement that none of us had realised we were levitating until we looked down upon hard hats bobbing below. We had been suspended here for more than two hours, unable to get down to use the loo, and Alex was pacing around in a frenzy.

  ‘No wonder that sink stinks. If we’re not on the move soon, I’m going in.’

  A horn rang out as a second train rolled into the station. ‘Keep your horn for your wife, you dirty bastard,’ yelled Ed. ‘Wait, hang on, that’s our dining car!’

  ‘Fuck, it is as well,’ said Alex, moving to the window.

  A few hours earlier, the train had, for no clear reason, uncoupled from the dining car, and the four of us had watched as it rolled away up the tracks and into the distance. Convinced it would come back again, Alex had pawed at the circular window, whimpering with disbelief as his bottle of wine rolled away with it. Now, it had reappeared as if to taunt him, attached to another train. He cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered to where a couple were waving at us from their compartment.

  ‘Can you check the fridge for a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc?’

  The woman waved and laughed.

  ‘No … no, seriously. It’s in your fridge.’

  Wrapped in our blankets, Jem and I went back to watching Game of Thrones as the train was slammed and jolted for the next hour. Suffering from cabin fever, Alex and Ed had made friends with a drunk Dutch schoolteacher named Max, and were now killing time by making phone calls to Max’s wife in Leiden and pretending he’d been arrested on the border for possession of drugs.

  Shunted out of the shed, the train eventually rolled across the border into Erlian where we were allowed to get down and wander around on the platform or stock up on Chinese vodka, noodles, juice and lychees at the station shop. Moonlit and quiet, it was a warm night, with a waltz playing over hidden speakers. Crouching on a wall, I watched passengers milling around in the dark, smoking and stretching, as I absorbed the enormity of what we had achieved. Over the previous eleven days the Trans-Mongolian had shown me that there were no real beginnings or endings, borders or boundaries. I’d watched lakes grow into seas, mountains rise then recede, deserts expand then shrink. Passengers had come and gone with a gradation of features that sharpened and darkened from one end of the line to the other. For days, the train’s trajectory across space and wilderness had plagued me with a feeling of displacement, the state of being in between. But now, I had a greater sense of place than ever before, bearing witness to the truth that the world was small, close and connected.

  Waking to the sound of Ed asking Alex why he had missed calls from a Dutch number, I sat up and shuffled to the window just in time to catch a glimpse of the Great Wall, a fine grey thread worming around the mountainside. Running a gauntlet of cliffs, the train had renewed vigour, thundering across bridges and gearing up as it rode the home stretch to Beijing. Snaking around rock faces, we bored into tunnels, round and black like surprised mouths swallowing us whole. Orchards huddled on the slopes, slipping down into the valleys, and muddy green rivers meandered around fishermen in bamboo hats. Women waved from the doorways of rhomboid houses, the roofs turned up like hems on dainty skirts. But the softness of the scene soon began to fade, and the harshness of steel and concrete loomed against a sickly-looking sky: billboards lined up, wires swung low, and buildings rushed towards the track as if to catch a glimpse of our arrival. Rolling into the station, the train came to a standstill, and we stepped onto the platform to where China was waiting.

  3

  From Hutongs to Hanoi

  Unsure whether to scream, cry, laugh or put a stop to the ordeal, I held my breath and tensed as a pair of meaty palms slapped my buttocks. Pinching the base of my back, dry, rough fingers worked their way up to my neck as though playing piano scales on my spine. On the advice of my friend Jamie, who lived in Beijing, we were now lying in a row at Tang Massage in the city’s Dongcheng district, trying to unwind after the journey. Having browsed through the list of treatments on offer – which included massages to soothe ovaries, boost fertility and cure insomnia – I had opted for a simple neck and back massage and was handed a pair of pink pyjamas, while Jamie and Jem were given blue ones. Each masseur or masseuse had a number so that clients could request the same one each time, and Jamie had fist-bumped his masseur like an old pal.

  ‘Do they not use oil for their massages?’ I asked, gathering my pyjamas as they trailed along the ground.

  ‘No. It’s all fluidless,’ Jamie replied, shuffling into place. ‘Well, depending on what kind of massage you want.’

  Jamie was a friend from journalism school who had left a job at NME and moved to Beijing where he had embraced the expat lifestyle and forged a career
writing about the Chinese experience, in between sitting in Australian-themed bars watching football. Over the previous two years his research had led to his being imprisoned in an internet-addiction clinic; strapping on a pair of lactating fake breasts at a class for men to understand childbirth; and visiting an acupuncture clinic for crippled cats and dogs – including a French bulldog named King Kong that had successfully regained control of his bladder after suffering a herniated disc. Cock-a-hoop from the previous week’s interview with the dissident artist Ai Weiwei, Jamie had met us at the station, hands stuffed in his pockets, bag strapped across his chest, looking thoroughly out of place. Tall and lanky with wispy blond hair like a young Sting, Jamie was easy to spot in a city where tall, lanky Sting lookalikes were rare. As such, his journalism was not the only business in operation: the novelty of Jamie’s aesthetics had opened up the world of Chinese dating apps, and judging by the buoyancy in his step, he’d completed Tinder in Beijing, and was now working his way through the suburbs.

  Our three masseurs came back into the room and I watched their feet moving around under the table, listening with mild embarrassment as Jem and Jamie were thumped and pummelled in a blur of pleasure and pain. The two were meeting for the first time, forced into bonding over the shared experience of hearing each other’s involuntary grunts and groans.

  ‘I wish there was a beer under here with a straw poking through,’ said Jamie, who was lying to my right. ‘Or a person holding it for me, but not making eye contact or anything so it’s not awkward.’

  ‘Do you come here often?’ I asked.

  ‘Christ, what a line: is that how she got you, Jeremy? Once a week probably.’

  ‘Sorry, it’s not very relaxing if I’m talking,’ I replied.

  ‘No, I like being talked to. Otherwise I only have this guy to chat to in my amazing Chinese, and I don’t think he’s really into football.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘No idea. I just know him as ‘14’: 14’s awesome.’

  While the three of us chatted, 14 and his friends were carrying on their own conversation above our heads, turning the whole affair into a mutually beneficial one. Soon, the feeling of having my pyjamas rubbed into my skin turned from chafing to burning, and I yelped in pain.

  ‘If it hurts, just say “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-ow”,’ said Jamie, ‘that means “ow”. That’s one of the first things I learnt when I got here.’

  Beijing was the first city in which I had felt lost. Smoking, sprawling, crawling, built up, and bound by ring roads and tangles of motorway, Beijing was like a city of cities. Thick with fumes, the air tasted of oil and exhausts, reaching into my throat and coating my tongue. A Dickensian smog obscured buildings, crept over walls and swirled around lamp posts. Despite snippets of English on road signs, it was futile to guess the correct intonation and impossible to explain anything to taxi drivers, who made a habit of avoiding foreigners; assuming – often correctly – that they didn’t speak Chinese, drivers of empty taxis would wave away desperate passengers, knowing that their journey would be spent in frustration, driving round in circles, reversing down dead ends, and arguing with ever-increasing volume. The key was to keep the address written on paper in Chinese or to show them a photograph of the destination and nearby landmarks. Ordering food was a hit-and-miss affair. I wanted to eat where local people ate, but that meant staring longingly at their plates, pointing and doodling pencil sketches of chickens and pigs for the staff to understand what we wanted. Being rendered impotent by language was humbling. Almost everywhere I’d travelled in the world, everyone from street kids to elderly rickshaw drivers could speak enough English to hold a decent and entertaining conversation that usually covered Premier League football teams, Bollywood movies, and various English friends they had in Manchester. Shamed by the imperialist arrogance with which the English still expected the rest of the world to speak their tongue, I could see that most Chinese had no need or desire to speak English, and were perfectly fine without it. That morning, we’d set out on foot to find the Forbidden City, and returned two hours later having managed to get no further than buying bubble tea and a cardigan from Zara.

  After our massage, Jamie wanted to take us for a Sichuan hot-pot dinner – where the staff spun fresh noodles into skipping ropes – and began the task of hailing a cab. Lingering at the side of the road, we watched in disbelief as more than eleven empty taxis drove past, swerving to avoid him as he walked into moving traffic, silhouetted by the glare of angry headlamps. Drivers pounded their horns and slammed their brakes; bikes wobbled around him. With determination etched across his face, Jamie leant through open windows like a gigolo, his jaw muscle flinching as each taxi drove on. Intent on proving to his visitors that two years in China hadn’t been a total waste of time, he finally yanked open a door and got in, belting up and signalling for us to do the same, ignoring the driver’s protests. Once you were in, there was little they could do but take you to your destination. Jumping in to avoid being run over, we sat quietly in the back as the driver ranted, and Jamie sighed with relief.

  Ashamed by our poor attempt to negotiate Beijing, I conceded that a guided tour would be the fastest way to learn about the city – which went against my every instinct. On a good day, guided tours were hell on earth: I hated being part of a conspicuous crowd, unable to move at my own pace, and would invariably drop off along the way to rummage through a market or sniff around a cul-de-sac. Tour groups to my mind comprise people who lack the initiative to discover a new place, relying on parroted information that may or may not be true. These are the same people who take cruises, happy to be herded on and off a boat, then bussed around like schoolchildren, reassured by the knowledge that wherever they go is pre-paid and safe for consumption. However, casting an eye around the streets of Beijing did nothing to reveal the layers of stories and cultural oddities. Everything from the colours of gates, heights of buildings and markings on doors, was loaded with historical significance that only a scholar could explain. On an unusually clear morning, we met Jamie by the ancient Drum and Bell Towers to take a walking tour of the hutongs – the network of alleyways that made up some of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods.

  Our guide for the day was a Dane named Lars Ulrik Thom of ‘Beijing Postcards’, a two-man company that had started by selling old photographs and postcards to galleries that they’d dug up in flea markets, then expanded into giving lectures and walking tours, constructing as clear an image of history as possible through archival research and interviews with the hutongs’ elderly residents. Lars had spread out a map of the old city on the ground and was standing in the middle of it when we arrived, a number of local Chinese lining the edges making notes, a fat, smiley baby in a pushchair looking on. A series of narrow, mainly residential streets, the hutongs were understood to have taken their name from the Mongol word for a street that led to a water well, but Lars was convinced that the name described the width required to ensure that fires couldn’t spread along the alley. At no point more than ten-people wide, some tapered so dramatically that only one bike could fit through at a time.

  After the Mongols were displaced from power, the capital was moved from Nanjing to Beijing and the city was built from scratch, with strict rules in place for how the hutongs were to be constructed: everything in the inner city was laid in straight lines and no one could build or decorate anything bigger or more colourful than the Forbidden City – which explained the hutongs’ grey palette, a deliberate choice to indicate their subordination. Unless associated with the emperor, nobody could lay golden tiles on their roofs, and gates were typically painted black, green or red. After 1949, and the communist takeover, everything was re-painted red.

  Pausing outside an old military home, Lars pointed to the stones that varied in size depending on the rank and status of the officer. Square stones were meant to resemble bookcases to show that the officer had passed the imperial examinations. The particular home outside which we were now standing had no g
ate, owing to its conversion into a public toilet. In preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the Chinese government had initiated a complete overhaul of the city, constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing in an attempt to beautify Beijing, and had decided that there should be a public toilet every 800 metres – which explained the ubiquity of the reeking buildings. The hutongs were no longer purely residential, crammed with craft shops, vegetable sellers, roast ducks hanging by their necks, and artisanal coffee shops that refused to serve milk or sugar. Every few hundred yards we found old bikes or single chairs apparently tossed into the middle of the lane, but on closer inspection they had been chained to the ground like Turner Prize submissions. It was a way for residents to stake a claim to parking spaces and ensure that no one took their spot. Cars that were successfully parked had large cardboard panels laid against each wheel, an attempt by owners to prevent local dogs from cocking their legs against them.

  Like the rest of the city, the hutongs were under threat from a new wave of demolition as the government repositioned Beijing as a hyper-modern centre for finance and technology – with little regard for those it displaced. In an attempt to return the hutongs to their original shape, restaurants, bars and the fronts of small businesses were bricked up or knocked down overnight, with owners arriving to work in the morning only to discover the demise of their livelihood. Most victims of the cleansing were Chinese migrant workers who lived hand to mouth, setting up unlicensed holes in the wall to serve food and sell their wares. Their targeting was more sinister than simply collateral damage: to manage Beijing’s overcrowding, the authorities were carefully sweeping out migrants whose tiny businesses did little to enhance the economy. Much of the change was welcomed by the city’s residents, but as the malls went up and the walls came down, Beijing’s history, grit and charm lay in ruins.