17. Waiting for my wife

I only managed three hours sleep as the boat docked in Yiching at 530AM and Postman Pat ushered everyone off the boat quickly. I was exhausted, having failed any great amount of rest in days, and grumpy as hell.

We boarded the prearranged bus for Wuhan and found a comfortable seat with a footrest, and I was looking forward to more sleep. Before we settled in, Pat swapped Five-foot and I to another bus due to it being closer to departure. Five-foot had a flight to catch, hence the need for speed and Pat was trying to help. Five minutes later, he swapped us back to the bus we had been on previously, only the comfortable seats were taken and I had to sit at the back with my feet on a step instead of stretched out or on a footrest. Having my feet in such an uncomfortable position, after the swapping around, I was not going to get any sleep at all and I was fuming.

I didn’t know if I could contain my absolute fury at Pat who I now wanted to hit. He was trying to help, but as far as I could tell, was incompetent and hurting more than helping. I sat in silence, stewing over my feelings and bitter about my situation. I was beyond laughing at Pat’s incompetence now, having been jerked around one last time. Maybe I had found my breaking point. Before I could hit him, and I really, really wanted to, Postman Pat walked off the bus and in the direction of the car park, where a little red van probably waited for him. I knew my opportunity to hit him was gone as I would never see him again. Not surprisingly it was a relief. I was glad to see him go. The bus left as morning sunlight burst through the clouds.

After watching crops go by for a few hours, as the roads passed through farmland, I had a sense of calmness back, and it wasn’t too difficult to bare a traffic jam on the expressway. It had been caused by an overturned truck, which was being unloaded by hand. The delay continued for some time, so people poured out of vehicles including us from the bus. I took the time to chat to Bethany and she took a quick toilet break just behind the metal barrier. I thought it would be too public for a woman to be comfortable with but she wasn’t concerned. She suggested my ginger goatee suited me but I didn’t believe her.

All of a sudden, the truck up the road was unloaded, traffic began to move again so the bus filled up and the driver took off quickly. It was then that I noticed that the seat beside me was empty. Until then, with my dark mood engulfing me, there was a shoulder I had been squashed beside, but now it was missing, as was the person it belonged to. Two Korean women were alarmed, wondering where their friend was. He was standing back on the side of the road, that’s where.

We were almost six kilometres further down the road before they got the message through to the driver that the bus was a passenger light and that he needed to stop. Because it was an expressway, he couldn’t just do a u-turn and he probably wasn’t going to anyway due to conserving fuel. The driver, one of the Korean girls and a random passenger who was pissed off with the situation, ran and walked back to find our absent friend while most of the passengers sat outside and chatted.

It was over half an hour before some cops came past wanting to know what was going on. Bethany tried to offer some semblance of order to the search, which was slightly amusing. The cops just smiled, nodded and jumped in their car without listening. Bethany walked back to us and took a seat on the roadside metal barrier, not hiding her hopeful yet despondent demeanour.

It was a very serene place to stop, with large green paddocks just beside the road, and cows grazing maybe fifty metres away. If you could ignore the large vehicles passing occasionally, it was great as green pastures lined with trees stretched in all directions, the motorway splitting them in two. I was feeling sorry for Five-foot however. If he was awake, he was probably worrying about making his flight.

An hour and forty minutes after we had first hit the traffic jam, the cops arrived back with their car overloaded with people and dropped off everyone that had departed the bus, along with the formerly missing Korean man responsible. There were a few irritated and bemused eyes looking in his direction while he ducked his head in shame.

Five-foot had to get moving if he would make his flight when the bus first got to Wuhan. It was 1230PM and he had less than an hour to get to the flight. He got off at the first stop and caught a taxi leaving me by myself, which I didn’t think would be a big drama.

At the main bus station, I was supposed to meet a man holding a placard with Five-foots name on it. He was to be holding a pre-booked train ticket for that evening that I had paid Postman Pat Y100 deposit for when we were on the boat. Wuhan is on the main trunk line between Guangzhou and Beijing, hence it's travelled a lot and to travel quickly, tickets need to be bought in advance. Unfortunately the man, or more importantly, my ticket wasn’t at the bus station when the bus arrived nearly two hours late. Without this ticket I could be stuffed for any travel that night plus out of pocket.

I enquired at the information desk in the bus station, entering into a discussion in broken English and Chinese that grew more and more frustrating by the moment. I tried to explain to the kind lady who was trying to help that I was looking for a man who had my train ticket for this evening. I thought this statement was within my Mandarin vocabulary, but I was wrong. She looked very confused, so I thanked her for her time and walked away.

Outside, standing beside a line of taxi drivers who all called out to me continuously, I tried calling the company Five-foot and I had booked the ticket through but got no answer. The lady from the desk joined me outside and while I continued telling her the same thing repeatedly, that I was looking for a man with my train ticket, she seemed more confused than before.

She suggested I should sit and wait for my wife, which confused me as I never mentioned I had a wife. It was at this stage I knew I should call Five-foot, because maybe I had mentioned my wife when I was trying to refer to a ticket, a man, a train, or me. As the phone rang I cursed my relaxed approach to learning Mandarin. I knew B+ averages wouldn’t be good enough but I had to come to China to prove it.

Five-foot answered and I told him the situation, telling him I was going to the train station as soon as possible in the hope I could get a ticket if things turned to custard. It felt like everything was already congealing until he said he had time before his flight to organise the company representative to contact me.

In my haste to get to the train station I accepted an overpriced taxi fare from one of the bastards who had been watching and laughing at me during my unfortunate conversation with the helpdesk lady. All the drivers refused to put their meters on and would only take the fare for, at first, Y30, but after a little bargaining, Y20. They could all probably tell I was in a hurry so knew I would be susceptible to being ripped off.

In my haste, I inadvertently jumped in a taxi driven by an absolute madman, endangering my life. As we left the congested streets and reached the less busy road north to the train station, he began weaving in and out of traffic at high speeds and asked me questions in Chinese. I could only answer with “Budong”, meaning that I didn’t understand.

As we sped along, I fielded a couple of calls from Five-foot, the last to explain the tour company representative would call me soon to organise a place to meet, if I was still alive. I thanked him profusely as the taxi driver accelerated to get through an already red light.

A slow moving truck turned onto the road directly in front of us as we approached it at great speed. My driver, without slowing, swerved to the left to pass then swerved again to the right to mount the footpath so we could avoid having to stop for traffic lights. Pointing back at the truck, the taxi driver turned to me and said, “Dangerous”. One of the few English words he knew and it nearly made me piss myself laughing.

I think he knew I was in a hurry, so obliged by nearly ending the race early for both of us. While we were still on the footpath, weaving between the sporadically planted trees, I received the call from the guy from the tour company. We agreed to meet at the square outside the train station.

The car screeched to a halt and I staggered out of the taxi trying to find my feet, thanking the driver for the ride of my life and walked to the meeting spot. The man with the ticket turned up promptly and soon overcharged me, which I realised after doing the maths an hour later. I'd paid more of the deposit than he said I did. But I had my ticket, and allowed myself a massive sigh of relief, and it was only NZ$10 he stung me for, which seemed inconsequential at the time.

I called Five-foot to thank him for the help and noted that if it weren’t for him, I would be stuck in a completely foreign city for maybe longer than 24 hours with little more than NZ$35 in my pocket.

After checking some emails at the Wangba at the station, failing to find a live-scoring page for a New Zealand rugby match, I went for a walk. An hour or so later, after visiting a lavish toilet in a lavish furniture mall, I stumbled across the McDonalds the baggage storage attendants at the station suggested was ten minutes away. The other couple of places to eat right next door looked okay but the air conditioning sold me. Macca's it was.

Wuhan had more empty buildings waiting to be filled with residents. The city is also on the banks of the Chang Jiang so will have a population increase due to the flooding in the west. It’s a very modern city, much like most other Chinese cities and wasn’t particularly clean while I was there.

I pottered around reading and writing for an hour or so in Macca's with all the patrons watching me intently. If I looked up, someone would be staring at me without a sense of him or herself, so I smiled and offered them a greeting in return. Mostly, I got rose coloured cheeks, a giggle and a “Hello” from the women, and the men were just as embarrassed. I meandered back to the train station, getting there too quickly with still two and a half hours to waste before the train left. I walked in the opposite direction from which I’d gone before to a street with quite a few empty looking shops and restaurants.

“Xiaojie,” was the only word I recognised when a woman asked me a question.

“Budong,” I replied, offering an ear for her to repeat herself.

“Xiaojie,” she repeated, pointing at a couple of younger ladies, wearing very little. It wasn’t as if the days’ heat suggested they needed any more clothing but it was pretty obvious to me that I was in the red light district.

“Xiaojie,” she repeated herself again after I realised where I was.

“Bu yao, xiexie,” I said to the woman, who laughed either at my attempt at Chinese or at how polite I was. I turned around and headed back towards the train station.

On the square outside, a man flashed a badge in my face, spoke and pointed at my pockets. I said I didn’t understand what he was saying and he showed me his badge again. I said I didn’t understand and he became angry, pointing at a couple of Chinese characters on the badge and speaking harshly at me. I said I didn’t understand again, and when I indicated that we could get the English-speaking ticket counter clerk to interpret, he gave up and moved on.

Sales people approached, saying stuff to me in Chinese and when I said I didn’t understand, they spoke slower and louder.

“Ah, well,” I replied, “now you put it like that, I still don’t understand.”

They continued even more slowly and even louder and I just repeated myself. They didn’t go away so I ventured into the waiting halls.

With the departure hall packed with hundreds of people heaps vying for seating, there was a lot of screaming and shouting. I hadn't had much sleep or food and my senses were overrun with the noise and activity around the room from the kids running around to the parents chasing them. A combination of all these led to my anxieties and emotions getting away on me.

I began dwelling on the fact that I was in trouble as soon as Five-foot had left me alone, yet I had thought I was quite competent beforehand. I saw another foreign backpacker turn up for a train and he looked confident and happy by himself. I wondered what I was capable of and began wondering if I looked confident to everyone around me. Maybe the other backpacker felt just as frail as me but was faking it. I considered I wasn’t that frail because I got sorted, but I needed Five-foot’s help. All of a sudden I was in a downward thinking spiral I couldn’t snap out of.

There was no record of my train up on the screen at all, and I was getting anxious about it. With no check-in time and no departure time listed, it looked like Z86 to Beijing West Train Station did not exist, as trains departing after mine were already represented on the boards. The announcements were all in Chinese, and I could decipher that they kept mentioning Beijing west station, yet nothing was written up on the board. It was much easier for me to work out what was written rather than what was announced so I wasn’t feeling confident at all. What I was going to do if it was cancelled or postponed, I didn’t know. Then I worried that my ticket could be faked. As I studied my ticket, checking the printed date, time and destination, I thought about how much money I had but couldn’t think of any alternative plan should I not be on a train that night. I couldn’t think straight.

I began thinking about all the places I would rather be. I wished I could be back in my old bed at my mother’s house in Christchurch. I wished I could have someone with me. And I started to take notice of how lonely I was. Not just lonely now but simply and completely alone in the world. And my fears came to me while I was sitting there, like, what happens to me beyond when I’ve died? What happens to me when I’ve been to heaven? Where do I go when the next thing ends? And the last thing ends? What happens to my soul when God has finished with me? How do I prepare for the ultimate loneliness?

And I choked back tears in the Wuhan train station departure hall. And I realised why I had come to China, finally.

Waiting for the train, I was losing the plot because I felt exposed and frail and wasn’t sure of where I would be sleeping or if I would be safe soon. I wanted, more than anything, to be safe. I wanted somewhere to hide and was hoping like anything that the train would be that place. It was the only sanctuary I could see possible that night. Sanctuary from I’m not sure what.

Why I had come to China was for the same reasons. Here I was in a country where I had an excuse to fail with women thanks to the language difficulties and to not bother looking for work because my time here wouldn’t be permanent. The plan was that I could avoid my past and my future here. I was trying to hide from everything in my life.

I had wondered if this trip was a test of how much stress I could take, or looking for a wife because the women in New Zealand I liked took no notice of me. Now I knew I was travelling because I was a coward and couldn’t deal with the ex-girlfriends and the prospective ex-girlfriends from the past. And I couldn’t handle the idea of failure looking for work. The only problem was my life followed me wherever I went.

Now these senses of failure were being displaced on my inabilities as a traveller. I was a terrible backpacker, naïve and unprepared, and a failure. Hiding from the people at home was being replaced by needing to hide from all the people in this waiting room. I didn’t want to be around people and I didn’t want to deal with my failure.

The feelings I was avoiding at home had caught up with me in China.

I sat there for an hour trying to read, feeling sorry for myself, when a new train to Guangzhou appeared midway up the departures screen, above other trains that hadn’t yet departed. Ignoring the noise of the hordes of people, my eyes were trained on the board hoping train Z86 would pop up too.

Then, like a beacon in the night, illuminated in blessed red electronic-board writing was Beijing Xi Z86, and I instantly relaxed. I was assured that a bunk would be welcoming me soon, and I would be back in the capital city in the morning, and the noise of screaming kids and parents couldn't bother me anymore.

During a day which I thought service in China had proven itself to be completely shit, the lady from the train station service desk proved that it was a variety. Whether she saw me looking anxious or distraught, or she just felt it her duty to help a foreigner, when the time came to check in she came and told me in English to go to my train before she called all passengers to board. I didn't really need the help by this stage, but I did appreciate it. As I strode towards the boarding platform, I felt a massive weight flying off my shoulders.

Aboard the train carriage, a mother and two kids shared the same cubby hole with six bunks as me. The boy was around seven years old and was excited to be on a train. The little girl was only three or four and either scared of the train or of me. I got the boy into trouble as his mum wanted him to sleep, while the two of us looked out the window and I pointed at stuff whispering “Kankan”, meaning “look” and he did the same for me. After a while, his mother spotted this and got up to smack him lightly then closed his side of the curtains, offering me a dirty look.

I managed to sleep quite well, although I woke up thinking it was morning only to find the boy next door had his personal light on, maybe as a nightlight. I lay there awake for a while, unaware of this until I looked out the window seeing complete darkness. I looked at my watch and it was 2AM.

The kids woke me up again at 6AM as they grew a little impatient and bored, which quickly became loud and whiney. They weren’t anywhere near as loud as the cabin-mate from the boat though. These kids were bliss compared to him.

The train arrived in Beijing at 7AM and as I exited the absolute pig that is the Beijing west train station, I gave up on the difficult acquisition of a taxi. I approached the private car drivers in the square outside who all seem to be waiting for dumb, rich foreigners to come their way.

“Wudaokou,” I said to the first guy I saw, rubbing my thumb and index finger together to make the international signal for money.

He scanned me from head to toe and offered “Y100.”

I laughed and walked on, instantly receiving better offers from the other drivers without even speaking.

“Y80.”

“Y70.”

“Y60,” one man said, and I bargained him down to Y50. I was paying him a lot but I was feeling exhausted and generous and couldn’t be bothered looking too hard for anyone cheaper.

The driver spoke English well and we chatted about Beijing and football for a few minutes, but I was too tired to talk for long.

During our travels, a major downpour had flooded parts of Beijing and almost a week after the rain, any ground not concreted over was still sodden. Wudaokou smelt terrible when I got out of the car, like the sewers had overflowed and ran into the streets. The mid-summer heat made the smell nearly intolerable.