Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [39]
I clutched my ticket before me and noticed with some curiosity that the woman squeezed beside me carried a ticket with the same seat number. “I guess I’ll be sitting on your lap,” I noted with as much cheeriness as I could muster, given that my rib cage was being pummeled by a dozen elbows. I hadn’t really expected to be understood, of course. I was in a provincial town in Shandong Province, and to escape the conversational dead zone caused by my linguistic limitations, I’d developed the admittedly peculiar habit of sharing my random musings with strangers, just to keep the old vocal cords humming. Typically, this was met with stony silence, and then their eyes began to flicker with the realization that they have a deranged laowai on their hands.
But, apparently, she had understood, and she leaned over to look at my ticket. “Is same,” she agreed, and then she was swept onward into the train. By the time I boarded, all hope of obtaining a seat had long ago been lost. I wedged myself in the fetid, airless space between two cars, and as the train began the six-hour journey to Qingdao, I had a brief glimpse of harried police officers on the platform slugging it out with a passenger who had been left behind. Then, as the train began to rumble through Tai’an, the dozen men around me lit up cigarettes, and soon I was enveloped in a thick blue haze.
Excellent, I thought. I was finally having an authentic Chinese experience.
It was miserable, and as I reflected on my many attempts at quitting smoking, it occurred to me that this experience right here, stuck in a cramped, airless corner of an overflowing train next to a filthy squat toilet, breathing in the lung-searing smoke of Chinese tobacco, had I had it years ago, would have cured me instantaneously of any tobacco cravings, saving me the hundreds—no, thousands of dollars—I’d spent on nicotine patches and gum.
Soon, a conductor slipped through. I handed him my ticket. Regrettably, he felt the need to ask me a question.
“Uh…” I said. “Duibuqi. Wo tingbudong.” This was my guidebook attempt at explaining that I didn’t have the remotest idea of what he had just said. Sadly, however, I could not even convey my lack of understanding and be understood in China. The conductor barked something else at me.
“I’m sorry. I don’t speak Chinese. You wouldn’t happen to speak English, would you? No? Parlez-vous française? Sprechen zie Deutsche? Español? Nederlandse? Cesky? Rusky?”
So useless, these European languages. I recalled my time in Melanesia.
“Me no save Chinese. Yu tok tok Pidgin?”
Finally, my interlocutor gave up, and as he moved on he muttered something that made my train companions laugh hard and merrily until they were seized by lung-splattering hacks and coughs.
And so it went, my journey through Shandong Province. Every hour or two, the train would pull into a station, and I’d count the number of people getting off the train and compare them with the number boarding, until finally I sensed that there was a reasonable likelihood of an empty seat and I leapt into the cabin, only to discover that not only were there no free seats, but that I had lost my place among the smokers, where at least there had been a wall to lean on, and that the remainder of the trip would be spent lurching and swaying in a narrow aisleway, periodically apologizing to the people around me as the shifting train sent my elbow into their faces. Soon, the sun descended behind the murky haze outside and we rolled on toward Qingdao in the darkness. I was lost in the fog of my mind, doing everything I could to resist the urge to look at my watch yet again, when suddenly I felt someone tapping on my arm.
“Come,” she said.
It was the woman whose ticket I’d noticed back on the platform in Tai’an. I followed her as she led me to an open seat across from her.
“Thank you,” I said. “I mean, Xie xie.”
“I’m sorry,” she said with fluttering hands. “My English is very bad.”
“No need to apologize,” I said, trying to imagine an American apologizing for his poor Mandarin to a befuddled