Land of Big Numbers

by Te-Ping Chen

Together they slid, uneasily, into this new life. In the mornings, one woman began leading calisthenics sessions to the sound of a tinny transistor radio from one of the guards. The children spent hours chasing one another around the benches on one end of the platform, and did not appear to weary of their game. In the afternoons, adults chatted, watched television, or slept.

  At night Pan heard whispered endearments exchanged between a teenage couple who slept a few feet away. Unlike the others, the two seemed utterly content, staying up for hours to eat ramen and watch the television as it flickered in the dark, schoolbags discarded to one side. At times Pan touched the roof of the small cardboard cove she’d erected above her head, offering a semblance of privacy. On its inside, she had stenciled in a number of stars.

  She made one for Jun, too, bending and taping the cardboard with care. “You don’t have to draw on it,” he’d said, and she’d nodded, embarrassed.

  One morning, a shout went up in the station: someone had seen a flash of color peeking out from the pile of blankets where one construction worker slept and found that he had been hoarding piles of ramen. When they pulled back his bedding, they found dozens of packets had been stuffed inside.

  “Selfish!” shouted the middle-aged woman with a perm. “Don’t you think of the rest of us?”

  “Get up! Apologize!”

  Eventually the group took a vote, and a retired professor among them was chosen to manage the ramen. A sign was drawn up and pasted to the supply station: NO SEEKING PERSONAL BENEFITS: TAKE ONLY WHAT YOU NEED. Later that afternoon (some had begun to eye the professor with suspicion), a second vote was taken and it was decided that they would instead draw up ramen ration tickets, to be handed out every day, and that system lasted for a few days before the guards brought in additional boxes and there was an excess of ramen anyway and everyone abandoned it.

  Pan thought of the first time she’d taken a train, thirteen years ago with her mother, before she’d passed away from stomach cancer. Her father had been there, too; it was before his accident, before his confusion had set in, before his illness had turned him into an invalid. She had been ten, and they had been going to see the famous karst landscapes of the south. The train was a hulking green locomotive that carried them for hours, and when they arrived, the air was hot and humid and the hills lush with foliage. Later she would understand her mother was already sick at the time, and this was a final trip for them all to help say goodbye.

  Time passed. At night, the baby cried. Jun ventured into the tunnels less frequently, and, like the others, started sleeping for long intervals during the day. “When will the train come?” they asked the guards every morning. “Together we’ll get there,” they replied, like manic pharmacists given only one pill to administer. The calisthenics woman stopped leading group exercises in the morning after she came down with a cold; dampness from the tunnel had caused it, she was sure.

  And then in the middle of the afternoon, two weeks on, it happened. The air changed abruptly, a wind blew through the station, and a rushing noise grew louder.

  “It’s a train!” yelled one of the children, getting to her feet and dashing near the edge.

  “Careful!” her mother warned. “Don’t run!”

  Others shouted, too. “A train! A train!” Around the floor, several passengers who’d been taking a post-lunch nap fumbled for their glasses and quickly rose to their feet.

  Jun was already at the end of the platform, waiting, peering into the tunnel. Pan hurried to join him. “Do you see it?”

  “I see it.”

  The light was getting stronger, streaming through the thick air of the tunnel. The crowd lined up around them, watching. The light grew nearer; there was a honking sound. The train entered the station, moving fast. Inside they could see the train car was empty. There was a moment, too late, when everyone realized that it was not going to slow. It did not stop.

  After it departed the station, they sat around dazedly, trying to console one another. “Next time,” they said. “It’s a good sign, anyway.”

  A short while later, the sound of the Train Goddesses’ song came on the audio system.

  Thank you for your cooperation, please line up, do not push

  Be a civilized passenger, for your safety and that of those around you

  We’ll get there—​

  Then it was abruptly cut off, as though an order had been quickly countermanded.

  Later, lying in bed, it occurred to Pan that the careful trails of debris that Jun had been leaving had probably been obliterated by the train. It didn’t matter, she told herself. So far his periodic searches hadn’t yielded anything, anyway. She suspected he was keeping them up just as a way to be alone: twice she’d seen him shrug off the teenage boys who tried to join him.

  Days drew themselves out, days in which Pan, like the others, spent hours prone in bed. After long days on her feet at work, and long nights caring for her father, for the first time in years, she found she could sleep for twelve, thirteen hours straight: such richness, such intoxication. At times it was an effort to pull herself out of bed, to push herself to think of what was required of her now.

  “Something’s wrong,” Pan told the group one morning nearly a month after they were stranded, slowly stirring her ramen. “We’re never going to get out. Not unless we do something.”

  “It’s a mechanical issue,” said one man who worked in a metallurgical plant and snored loudly through the night. “Have a little patience.”

  “Patience?” Jun said. “It’s been weeks.”

  “What do you have to do outside that’s so important, anyway?” the woman with the perm said. Her voice sounded coquettish, and Jun’s face flushed. It was true that he didn’t have a wife or children waiting for him, like some of the passengers did. It was true that he would not be missed at the factory, either; they would just move another man up the line.

  “Anyway, it’s not so bad in here,” a woman who worked as a schoolteacher said, sensing his discomfort. “They’re taking good care of us.”

  Since the first days, the guards had brought in mattresses, folding tables, chairs, and pillows. They’d wheeled in extra television sets and for meals had begun serving simple boxed lunches: steamed buns, sandwiches, fried noodles. There were towels, even a badminton set, lots of paper and markers and pens for the children, a few boxes of books and videos. What else did they need?

  “That’s not the point,” Pan said.

  “What is the point?” the retired professor said, with what sounded like genuine curiosity, as though she were a student who’d posed an interesting academic question.

  Pan stared at him crossly, not knowing what to say.

  “I’m getting more rest than I have in years,” said a man to her right, and a few of those assembled laughed, as if he’d been joking.

  “So you aren’t upset?” Pan said, appealing to the group.

  “Of course we’re upset,” the professor said. “But it doesn’t do any good to be anxious. Just calm down.”

  “I am calm!” Pan said. Then she turned away and walked back to her blankets, slowly and deliberately, to show how calm she was, and to camouflage the heat around her eyes.

  It took two days to hatch her plan, and then one night after everyone had gone to sleep, she arranged her three other co-conspirators by the staff door. Jun was the one who’d had the good idea to lay additional blankets on the floor and recline on them, as though they’d simply chosen to move their sleeping spots. “There are cameras,” he said. “They could be watching.”

  The next morning, the four of them woke early and listened intently for sounds of movement, each holding an extra blanket. When the door’s lock turned and the first guard entered, Jun sprang up and flung a blanket over him. It was harder than they’d expected: one of the teenage boys had to rush to Jun’s aid before the two of them managed to pinion the guard’s arms to his side.

  By then the second guard had entered, baton aloft, but also disappeared s
puttering into a blanket. Farther down the platform, heads were beginning to turn.

  “Hurry!” Pan yelled to the other passengers, as she and the second teenage boy fought to keep the blanket pulled tight and the guard’s arms pinned to his side and to wrestle him to the ground. “Someone get the door!”

  “Help!” the boys cried. “Help!”

  No one moved. In another moment, roused by the commotion, half a dozen other guards had rushed in, pulling the blankets from their colleagues’ heads and administering shocks to Jun and the two teenage boys. Pan they left alone: she registered the surprise on their faces, seeing she was female. “Wait!” she screamed. “Please!” They ignored her and gave Jun and the other boys a few halfhearted kicks as they left, bloodying Jun’s nose, taking their still-laden cart with them.

  After that another vote was taken: Pan and Jun and the teenage boys weren’t allowed anywhere near the staff door in the mornings.

  “You’ll get us into trouble,” the woman with the perm scolded them. “Don’t you realize, we depend on them for everything?”

  “We could have escaped, if more of you had just helped,” Jun said angrily, rubbing his head, still sore from being struck by the baton.

  “Yes, and what would we have done once we got there?” said a man with a small, pointed face and a shadow of a mustache, who monopolized the bathroom in the morning. “Do you think we wouldn’t have been punished?”

  “We just wanted to get out,” Pan pleaded. “We have important things to do outside.”

  “Are you saying the rest of us don’t have important things to do outside?” the woman with the perm said indignantly.

  “It’s not the guards’ fault,” the construction worker said abruptly, and everyone turned to him in surprise. It was rare for him to comment at all.

  That night, without saying anything to anyone, Pan defiantly pulled her mattress across the platform, close to Jun’s. In the middle of the night, after she’d gotten up to use the bathroom, she came back and lay down, tensing, wondering if he was awake. After a few minutes, she stretched out her arm and let her hand rest on top of his blankets, where it stayed for perhaps thirty seconds, until he grabbed it and pulled it inside. She let out a low laugh and rolled toward him.

  Two months after they were stranded, the country’s state broadcaster sent a team to do a report on the group, dispatching reporters to film their badminton games and to interview the passengers. The guards let them respectfully through as the stationmaster, a woman they’d never seen before, wearing a shiny badge and a black tricornered hat, supervised.

  The reporters moved through the crowd, picking their subjects. “Sometimes I despair, but I trust in the authorities,” the middle-aged woman with a perm said, lip trembling, in the clip that all the news stations aired that evening. “Together we’ll get this train moving!”

  Back in the studio, the broadcaster nodded and intoned to the camera, “The spirit of Gubeikou Station is strong.”

  The next day, theirs was a front-page item, under the headline GUBEIKOU SPIRIT. The newspapers carried each of their names, in a double-page spread, along with their photos, opposite an editorial that praised them for their bravery, for “inspiring a nation with their fortitude and optimism.”

  The atmosphere in the tunnel changed as they pored over the papers the guards had brought that morning, examining their photos. The woman with the perm asked for, and was promised, extra copies.

  After breakfast, the retired professor called a meeting. “It’s time we organized ourselves,” he said. “We have been here two months, and we may be here much longer. The nation is watching us,” he said sententiously. “We need to be role models.”

  Pan made a face and turned to Jun, waiting to see his expression, but to her surprise his eyes were trained on the professor’s face, and he was nodding.

  “Look at this trash,” the professor said, gesturing at the detritus around the tables where they’d eaten. “The bathrooms are a mess, too. We need to organize cleanup crews. We need discipline. We need a schedule.”

  There was a sound of general assent. “We represent the Gubeikou Spirit!” he said. “We need to come together.”

  Soon the group had drawn up a list of tasks. Jun volunteered to lead the cleanup crews. The woman with the perm said she’d help run morning calisthenics. The schoolteacher said she’d tutor the children, and asked for volunteers to help. Another woman offered to lead a team to do regular laundry: two items per person per week. They would use the bathroom sinks. The construction worker said he would hang some clotheslines.

  A sudden camaraderie seemed to have seized the group. Looking around, Pan felt her skepticism weaken. “I’ll help work with the children on their sums,” she offered, and felt herself embraced by a smile from the teacher.

  The woman with the perm began singing a chorus from the Train Goddesses’ song, giggling, shuffling her hips. A little self-consciously, as though they were on camera, the rest of the crowd caught the tune, too:

  Thank you for your cooperation, please line up, do not push

  Be a civilized passenger, for your safety and that of those around you

  We’ll get there together.

  After that news broadcast, donations started to flood into the station. First it was pallets of dehydrated beef sticks and tins of cookies. Then a store donated piles of new down jackets. One culinary school down the street offered to have its trainees cook for them, and fresh, hot meals began arriving twice a day. To the group’s delight, someone sent an old karaoke machine as well, and soon the afternoons were punctuated by the sound of people warbling lustily, taking turns at the microphone.

  The guards, too, turned unexpectedly solicitous. After seeing TV commercials for a new kind of fried chicken, the guards brought them samples. When the retired professor complained he was chilly, they sent in an electric heater. When the group wearied of their existing stock of videos, more arrived.

  “It’s better here than on the outside,” a few of the stranded passengers were heard to joke, and others agreed.

  Every now and then, the announcements still sounded—​“The next train will be delayed. We thank you for your understanding”—​but at longer intervals now, and someone had turned the volume down. It was possible, at times, to forget that they were even in a train station. After the news broadcast, more reporters kept arriving, and with them new comforts, as well. The stationmaster ordered couches and more television sets. There was a new program featuring the palace intrigue and romances of a family with two daughters unlucky in love that the group assembled daily to watch, shouting and jeering at one sister, cheering the other on, Pan’s head curled on Jun’s shoulder.

  And meanwhile, the train system kept growing. In the distance, if they craned their necks just right, they could sometimes hear the sound of hammering and drilling. There were twenty-eight lines now open throughout the city, the newscasters said. By the end of the year, there’d be twenty-nine. “With the Gubeikou Spirit,” an anchor said one night, “we will continue to persevere, to build the world’s most advanced train system!”

  At that, the crowd on the platform cheered. They were more considerate of one another, stood a little more upright. The mayor had come to see them, had shaken their hands and posed for a photo before a red banner that bore the words GUBEIKOU SPIRIT. In the mornings, after calisthenics, they ran twenty laps around the platform together, laughing as they tried to round the corners without knocking into one another. In the afternoons, they traded off taking care of the baby, who had grown a soft cloud of hair and begun issuing her sunshiny smile to anyone who looked at her.

  To her surprise, Pan found she liked working with the children, helping them with their math, joining them as they colored. On large sheets of paper, she encouraged them to create jungle scenes and geometric patterns, big whorls of colors and diamonds that they taped to the subway walls.

  It was only late at night that her thoughts turned, reluctantly, to her father
. By now, surely the neighborhood committee had taken charge of his care, she told herself. Perhaps he didn’t miss her, she thought—​some days he was so confused. She was a poor caretaker, she thought guiltily, working long hours, always away: he might do better in a real institution.

  Still, lying near Jun, she found herself restlessly trying to conjure up new methods of escape anyway. They could revolt en masse and climb over the turnstiles—​surely some of them would get away. They could refuse food, refuse water.

  The next morning, Jun would gently dissuade her. “At this point, we just need to be patient,” he said. “We’ve done all we can. If you haven’t noticed,” he added, “most people here are actually pretty happy.”

  He got up and went to play badminton; in recent weeks he’d begun a heated competition with the construction worker. Disgustedly, Pan ate two extra bowls of ramen for lack of anything else to do, and then stopped. Across the way, the calisthenics woman had started up the karaoke machine and was beginning a bouncy rendition of a folk tune with two other women. Pan lay down, shut her eyes, and again fell into a deep slumber.

  One morning, the guards came in and affixed a new circular to the walls. Attention, it ran. Gubeikou Station is currently conducting track work. Passengers are advised to stay off the tracks until further notice.

  A ripple of interest ran briefly through the group, then dissipated. The woman with the perm was diligently leading an aerobics session, which was running behind because a few people had slept late, and the group was anxious to finish and have their breakfast (fried mushrooms and steamed rice porridge with pickled vegetables, which smelled very good indeed). It was an unnecessary notice, anyway: Jun and the teenage boys had long ago given up their quest to find a way out through the tunnels.

  Shortly after the notice went up, another train arrived. Everyone paused what they were doing and looked up as a rushing sound grew nearer, and a horn sounded full blast. Some of the children moved toward the platform, but the adults simply froze and watched. The locomotive, when it entered, was full of people, they saw: a pack of dusty-faced commuters looking tired and sallow under the fluorescent lights. It zoomed forward without slackening its speed, and, in another moment, it was gone.