Around the World in 80 Trains

by Monisha Rajesh

  ‘Ayi?’ I asked.

  ‘Ayi’s our cleaner.’

  ‘Oh, okay. Do we need to let her in or does she have a key?’

  ‘She has a key, so you’ll probably just find her wandering about.’

  ‘What’s Ayi’s name?’ I asked, thinking it sounded a lot like ayah, the Hindi word for a nanny or maid.

  He frowned for a moment. ‘I have no idea. She’s just … Ayi. Ayi is the Chinese word for aunt or auntie. She’s cool, but she breaks stuff and then doesn’t tell us that she’s broken it. And if we ask her about it she says we have too many things.’

  ‘How did you find her?’

  ‘We didn’t. She sort of came with the flat. I don’t actually have a number for her. Hannah might. In fact, we’ve never seen her papers or anything so if we ever went away she could clear out this place and all I’d be able to tell the police is that Ayi did it.’

  Ayi turned out to be a wisp of a lady with cropped hair, who didn’t seem at all bothered by two strangers wandering around in pyjamas. She politely refused my offer of tea, washed the dishes, scrubbed the bathrooms, and sat down at half time to have her own cup of tea and a mantou bun from a blue plastic bag. The culture of instinctive trust placed in hard-working elderly people was something I was used to seeing in India, and it was heartening to see the same here in China. There was no way I’d hand over my house keys to someone in London without knowing their name or where they had come from. While Ayi pottered around, I put on a load of laundry and we spread out our map to see what remained of our route. From Beijing, we planned to board the bullet train down to Shanghai then swoop across the country to Xining where we would take the Qinghai railway to Lhasa. This was set to be one of the highlights of the trip. While tracing the line, the very thought of travelling to Tibet on the highest railway in the world sent tingles through my finger.

  I put the kettle on as Jem began to check timings for the onward journey from Lhasa, when my heart thumped to a halt. The washing machine was sloshing our clothes, and with them, the rolled-up bundle of North Korean won that I’d forgotten to retrieve from my socks. Almost in tears, I switched off the machine and peered inside; everything was soap-covered and drenched. This was Kim Il Sung’s divine retribution for taking the notes in the first place. With a consolatory cup of tea, I sat down again and examined the official outline of Tibet’s present-day borders, which China had chewed off with such ferocity over the last sixty-five years that the region was barely a fragment of its former self. It was another pin on the map that raised a red flag on my conscience. I had interviewed Tibetans who had escaped to India; I’d joined in Free Tibet protests outside the Chinese embassy in London, and was acutely aware of the plight of Tibetan monks and nuns who had taken to self-immolation as a means of protesting against Chinese rule. However, I had also heard the Dalai Lama speak, and witnessed him encouraging foreigners to visit Tibet and to describe their experiences on their return. His approval had lessened my guilt as I booked our stay in Lhasa. Much the same as North Korea, we had to secure visas from China and were unable to travel without an approved guide, but it was a small price to pay to scale the roof of the world.

  Folding away the map, I heard Ayi close the door behind her, leaving as quietly as she had arrived. On the kitchen table was a small pile of our books and pens that she had tidied up, along with one stray sock that she had picked up on the staircase – inside of which was the bundle of won. Unrolling it with a yelp, I saw the beaming face of Kim Il Sung on a treasured 5,000-won note, and gave thanks for the stroke of luck. At that very moment, my phone alerted me to the day’s second piece of good news: Marc had arrived in Beijing.

  10

  Ghost Cities and the Great Wall

  Being on the road frees you from the burden of the everyday. Witnessing others’ hardships and poverty puts first-world problems into perspective, slapping you out of misery and self-pity. Yet, before I met Jem, I had often had moments on my travels when I was overwhelmed by loneliness, and sank into troughs of depression deeper than those I had at home. Suddenly aware of the distance of my loved ones, I’d plummet into despair, watching sunsets alone, camouflaging myself in noisy cafes, convinced that everyone was laughing at my solitude. These dips would never last long, but there were periods of being alone in hotel rooms, where night and day blended into one, my thoughts turned to liquid, and nothing but a small miracle could save my soul. Five years ago, Marc was that small miracle.

  I had just boarded the Lifeline Express, a hospital train run by an NGO in Madhya Pradesh in India. It was stationed for five weeks in a town called Umaria, a spot so desolate that connections from big cities ran only twice a week, and my fellow passengers from Katni had laughed in my face as I got off, enthralled as I heaved my bag across the tracks. I had recently fled from my travelling companion – under a dark, dark cloud – and was ill, depressed, and desperate for someone familiar to talk to. Aware that the best cure for my woes was to focus on someone else in need, I had arrived on the train to report on volunteer surgeons who operated on local people suffering from cleft palates, polio-related deformities, cataracts and ENT complications. The last thing I had expected of my first morning was to meet a photographer from Hackney. With a Welsh mother and a Sikh father, Marc had grown up in Scotland before moving down to London to be a railway engineer. But after ten years, he’d packed it all in to become a photographer. Like me, Marc had turned up in Umaria to document the work on board the train, and was equally pleased to find a journalist who could put words to his pictures. We’d worked well together and continued to do so once we were back in London, staying firm friends to the point that Marc and his camera had agreed to join me and Jem for the final six weeks of our trip.

  Marc had flown in to Beijing pumped up and raring to go, only to find us deflated and dormant. While we recuperated, he had busied himself by wandering the hutongs, photographing the local residents, and getting to know his flatmate, Fish, before luring us out for a bowl of noodles, where he proposed we spend the afternoon climbing the Great Wall.

  ‘Come on guys, we can’t come to Beijing and not see the Great Wall.’

  An Imodium between my teeth, I observed him with envy. His eyes shone with the anticipation of adventure, and his leg bounced with the energy of a man with culture pulsing through his veins. We had probably looked like this five months ago. But at this stage, I hadn’t passed a solid stool in six days, selected my daily wardrobe based on what smelt the least, and was perfectly happy to accept that my time in Beijing had been spent shopping for cardigans in Zara, being ignored by taxi drivers, and having a back massage. All three experiences had been unique to the Chinese way of doing things, and as a result I’d broadened my understandings of the local take on fashion, racism and masochism.

  Marc’s eagerness reminded me of my parents during family holidays. My father would hammer on the hotel door at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, while my mother rang the bedside phone – at least three times – to inform us that they were going down for breakfast. Finally, my brother and I would surface at 9.55 a.m., just as breakfast was finishing, and then want to go for food, much to my father’s chagrin, having paid for breakfast in the room. We’d get moving around noon and everyone would be sulking, my father striding ahead at the Hagia Sophia, or the Acropolis, or Disneyland. Nonetheless, we still ended the day with the middle-class comfort of having embraced some culture – even at Space Mountain. Keen, therefore, not to emulate teenage apathy in my thirties, and excited to ride another train, I gave in to Marc’s demands, and we set off to visit the Badaling section of the Great Wall.

  The train smelt of popcorn – hot, radioactive-yellow popcorn – carried by a man wearing a satchel and jeans. He appeared not long after the train departed, clutching an open bag that wafted buttery, salty pleasures up the aisle. Holding it out to a girl with pigtails, he offered her a handful, but she handed over a note, took the bag, and he wandered back the way he came. She hugged the bag, staring out of the window,
mechanically chewing one piece at a time.

  ‘Has she just bought his popcorn off him?’ Jem asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but it does look like it.’

  ‘It smells amazing, I want some now,’ Marc said from across the aisle.

  The man appeared again, holding another single bag. Curious, I edged past him and went to see if he had a stash in the next carriage, or a portable microwave, and found nothing but passengers scrolling through phones and staring at the expressway running parallel to the train. I returned to my seat as some students bought his second bag and shared it round their group. Within a minute, he came by with a third bag, so hot that he was tapping it between his fingers. Convinced that the carriage must have some kind of Narnia-like doorway, I bought his bag and settled back as the popcorn squeaked between my teeth like buttery bits of polystyrene. Five minutes later he came through with two bubbling bowls of noodles.

  The S2 service to Badaling took just over an hour to Yangqing county, about fifty miles northwest of Beijing. The section of the wall at Badaling is the most accessible stretch, which means that it is also the most popular. More than 70,000 visitors are said to pass through every day – and it appeared that they were all here now, at four o’clock on a Tuesday, jostling to get up the hill. It was icy, and my eyes began to water as we climbed the paving slabs leading to the wall. Gusts of wind shoved me around, and a needle of air pierced my eardrums, but after a quick stop to haggle for a fake Burberry scarf, I was better equipped, and jogged to catch up with Marc and Jem. Unaware when we set out in the morning that this was to be our afternoon activity, I was wearing a pair of ballet pumps, and Jem was in flip-flops and socks, like a geisha, carrying a bag full of notebooks and tickets that were meant to be posted home. Tenzing and Hillary we were not. As the wall began to incline, my shoes began to slip off, and resignation set in as I eyed the curves rising in the distance, a dragon’s tail being pulled across the peaks.

  The Great Wall was as magnificent a sight as I’d hoped: the smog filtered the evening sun, allowing no more than a veil of peach light to drape the valley, softening the silhouettes of surrounding mountains. Conifers huddled together on the slopes, flecked with the maroons and reds of autumn, and the long shadows of walkers followed under our feet with the stealth of spectres from the past. After a couple of hours, the crowd thinned, the clouds drew together, and a stillness settled on the wall. Recognising that he was not travelling with two athletes, Marc had climbed ahead and Jem had gone to buy tickets for the last cable car down, leaving me with nothing but my thoughts for company. I wandered into a watchtower and crouched down to peer through a shooting hole, looking out to where one rogue ray of light had slipped through the cloud. From my spot, the wall looked like a stone roller coaster, looping over hills and plunging into valleys. Hundreds of years ago, a guard had stood at this very post keeping watch over the same valley. A tornado of leaves spun in the corner and for a brief moment I imagined being that guard. Had he watched the same conifers bristle in the breeze? Had he seen the stones turn pink in the light? For all the famous images of the wall – at sunset, at dawn, or powdered with snow – none could trigger the urge to transpose oneself quite as much as touching the stone, hearing the tap of woodpeckers in the trees, witnessing it first-hand. Travelling is synonymous with escape, the desire to create distance and observe differences, but for me it now meant the opposite. I took comfort in identifying with others, bridging distance and erasing the idea of otherness. I wanted to know who had stood on this spot, and if they’d felt the same chill I now felt in my fingers.

  Of late, it was increasingly rare to find a corner in China that resembled its original form. Even this part of the wall – that had previously collapsed – had been reconstructed to look, ironically, like its former ruined self. Most of the country was being demolished, only to be rebuilt, demolished and rebuilt again. Like an ageing Hollywood actress addicted to surgery, the country seemed unaware that the endless facelifts, chipping, digging and filling had effaced an original, timeless beauty that would have aged with grace. A shout and wave from Jem brought me forward to the present and I crept out from the tower, climbing up towards the cable cars as the leaves continued to spin in the wind.

  Beijing South railway station resembles a sports stadium. Like much of the city’s newest infrastructure, the station was one of a number of projects whizzed through in time for the 2008 Olympic Games. It took 40,000 workers just two and a half years to complete, replacing the Yongdingmen railway station, a piece of architectural beauty that had dated back to 1897. With more than 300,000 people passing through its halls every day, the station was designed across three floors to separate arriving and departing passengers. It certainly lacked the fever and intensity of the city’s other stations: flashing with sunshine and dotted with palm trees, the station was also fitted with a glass, solar-panelled roof to provide electricity. This was the first of China’s high-speed railway stations – the prototype for all future high-speed stations – but it looked more like an airport, with white, bottle-nosed bullet trains lined up and ready to shoot off around the country.

  It was just before noon, and we’d arrived to take the G train down to Shanghai. The gaotie high-speed train covered the 819 miles between Beijing and Shanghai in just under six hours and was the preferred choice of business travellers and the wealthier middle class, who couldn’t bear the tedium of an overnight service or the fuss of a two-hour flight. Between 7 a.m. and 9.30 p.m., more than forty of these trains travelled to Shanghai, so we’d had no problem reserving three seats, boarding and departing on time.

  The romance of railway travel took a bullet to the heart on these trains. Most passengers ate out of KFC bags, then slept face down on the tray tables or chewed on sunflower seeds that they’d poured into their sick bags. After an hour, an attendant came by with a trolley stacked with mini tubs of strawberry Häagen-Dazs and bottles of Starbucks iced coffee. Like Japan’s Shinkansen, the G trains offered no more than a means to travel from one destination to the other. Of course, this was no bad thing. Fewer people had the time or the inclination to while away a full day picking their teeth and staring at the countryside. Overhead, a digital monitor showed that we were travelling at 302 km/h. The train had a 350 km/h capacity, but after an accident near Wenzhou in 2011 that killed an estimated forty people, the authorities had lowered the speeds – even though speed was not the cause of the collision, but a lightning strike that had stalled one of the two trains involved. The Chinese government had tried to censor reporting of the crash unless it highlighted positive stories of blood donation or local heroes attending the scene, so strong was the government’s fear of painting the new railway in a poor light. The crash led to a state investigation into the ministry for railways, which uncovered widespread corruption and resulted in suspended death sentences for two officials. However, in September 2017, a number of trains were once again allowed to run at their maximum speed and were renamed ‘Fuxing’ – the Chinese for ‘rejuvenation’ – to reflect improved monitoring systems that would stop trains automatically in the event of an emergency.

  Looking out of the window for inspiration, I found nothing but concrete clusters of empty tower blocks and dormant cranes flashing past every few minutes. The skeleton structures looked like lifeless Lego cities sprouting up from the farmland. Most remained unfinished, the top few floors draped in tarpaulin. Dubbed China’s ‘ghost cities’, these hubs had first emerged in Shenzhen in 1978, then mushroomed over the last fifteen years after a government push to boost GDP and improve the infrastructure in the country’s more remote areas. The new developments contained sports stadia, shopping malls, schools and crèches, all of which were designed to attract rural communities or citizens from overflowing megacities in search of lower rents and a better quality of life. Yet most remained empty, gathering dust and notoriety: the foreign media had taken delight in the apparent failure of the scheme, pushing ‘ghost cities’ to the top of the folder labelled �
�Wacky Chinese Stories for Westerners’, but they had ignored the small print; most of the cities had been built with the aim of populating them by 2020 or 2030, so it was too soon to declare them a flop. The Chinese response was that they were simply in the middle of development. In reality, the term ‘ghost cities’ was a misnomer. ‘Ghost’ suggested that these cities had once thrived, before succumbing to desertion, but these stillborn cities had never had a pulse, and were waiting for people to come and pump life into them.

  Government officials claimed that some cities were already populated, but the numbers seemed disingenuous; they included construction workers from the site, and people who had had no other choice for accommodation after their rural homes had been wiped out to make way for the cities, buying the properties with the compensation money. However, that didn’t detract from the fact that some cities were beginning to see other residents move in. I hoped they succeeded, if only to wipe the smirk off the face of Western press.

  Although I despaired about the annihilation of ancient sites and the bulldozing of history to rubble, there was still something enviable about the Chinese attitude to construction, whether it was cities or railways; they thought, they planned and they built. The high-speed railway programme began in 2003 with a 251-mile line between Qinhuangdao and Shenyang for trains running up to 155 mph, and in just fourteen years China had completed construction of more than 12,500 miles of high-speed track, with trains running at a capacity of 217 mph. To put it into perspective, that was almost a third of the entire length of India’s railways. The proposed plan was to extend the passenger lines to 18,600 miles by 2020. While we were still dithering over plans for a third runway at Heathrow, and HS2 was set to be ready by the time most of us were dead, the Chinese had already resurrected the old Silk Road route and were running weekly freight trains from Beijing to London.