20. Am I strong?

After a days rest, I organised my travel north, waiting a few days in Beijing with Five-foot.

In Wangfujing, central Beijing, a busy shopping precinct stretches for maybe a kilometre. Shops and bars, malls and restaurants are seen and heard by the thousands of people congregating there at any time of the day. I was sitting on the edge of a small garden drinking a bottle of iced tea while Five-foot did some suit shopping. With the many people walking by, and with the amount of noise and sell, sell, sell, it wasn’t really a place to relax.

Most people in the central city tried to pretend to not be interested in me but gave away signs to the contrary by staring at me out of the corners of their eyes. Two girls aged between ten and fourteen approached me.

“Where are you from?” the older one asked in well-spoken English.

“I’m from New Zealand.”

“Do you like China?”

“Yes, very much,” I lied.

“Why?”

“Um,” I said, thinking hard, “people here are very polite and helpful.”

“Have you been to Hangzhou?”

“Yes, I was there last week,” I said, smiling.

“We are from Hangzhou. Did you like Hangzhou?”

“Yes, it is a beautiful place.”

“Do you speak any Chinese?”

“Yidiar,” I said, which was meant to mean “a little,” but they looked at me with absolute confusion.

“You can speak English,” one of the girls said, meaning that I can’t speak Chinese.

“We will teach you some Chinese,” they said. Soon, they were increasing my Mandarin vocabulary with words such as flower, turtle, butterfly and shop.

“Now I’m going to test you,” one of the girls said. After a test result of 60%, I was pretty content, but neither of the girls seemed impressed. They said goodbye, and ran back to their parents, leaving me to try to take in the conversation that I had just been a part of.

Sometimes it felt like I wasn’t really a willing participant but a bystander, with things happening at me, not with me. My mind didn’t seem filled with any thought at all, and I felt blank. Here I was, having a cultural experience with strangers that, when I set out travelling, I had hoped would happen, yet I was so distant, it could’ve been an out of body experience.

Five-foot interrupted my introspection and we returned to his place in Wudaokou.

The view out Five-foot’s window took in the communal square of the housing estate he lived on. At 5PM each afternoon, kids and mothers would gather around the circular fountain that switched on for thirty minutes, like clockwork every day. The children would hover above the water-shoots awaiting the water flow and mothers would sit and chat in the shade. Once the water-shoots switched on, the kids were soon running around screaming and playing and the parents, too, laughed and enjoyed the fountain antics. Thirty minutes later, the water switched off abruptly, the kids disappeared and the mothers stuck around to continue their gossip.

After a few days of eating and watching DVDs, I grunted a farewell to Five-foot. He was headed home to New Zealand, his Mandarin studies complete, while I was going north. I was unsure how I would get on without him considering he’d done most of the talking for the weeks we’d travelled together, but it felt right to be doing my own thing. I was unsure if it was a test I was choosing, but it felt like one. I felt as though I was trying to prove to myself how much I didn’t need to hide. I wasn’t running anymore, I was merely looking around. That’s what I kept telling myself, at any rate.

I was on an overnight train to Dandong, a city on the border of China and North Korea, and hadn’t spoken to anyone at all. The train left Beijing in the late afternoon so I was soon on my bunk reading and looking out the window from time to time. Midnight arrived before sleep did, and a young woman of maybe twenty years of age lying on the bunk opposite noticed I was still awake.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. The train lines serviced the east coast towns north of Beijing, but I wasn’t sure which towns we were nearest to.

“Where are you from,” she asked.

“New Zealand.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Are you strong?”

“Sorry?” I said, not sure if I had heard her correctly.

“Are you strong?” she repeated.

“No, I’m not very strong at all,” I said, not sure if that was what she had actually meant to ask.

“Why do you not sleep?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why do you not sleep?”

And she couldn’t answer. It seemed her vocabulary was spent. She stammered a little, smiled and seemed to want to continue the conversation but didn’t know how.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No,” I said, smiling.

She climbed down, stepped into the dark corridor taking a bag full of dried fruit. She was soon passing me dried apricots and asking me if I liked them.

“Yes, they’re very nice,” I said, eating out of duty. She smiled and continued eating while sitting by the window.

She told me her name is Xiao Pang, which I thought translated into Little Fatty, but I couldn’t see why she’d be called fat. I suppose she had a more shapely figure than the average Chinese girl, but to call her fat was just wrong. In fact, she was notably attractive to me.

She stood up from the small table and rubbed my face full of stubble with her hand. “I like,” she said, looking into my eyes. I smiled. And then she started rubbing her hands on my arms.

“I like,” she said more intensely than before, looking deeply into my eyes. So Xiao Pang liked my hairy arms and face. My reaction was a mixture of appreciation, although my skin kind of crawled. I knew she meant well, maybe extremely well, but it was a little creepy.

Imagine lying on a bunk bed on a packed train and in the dead of the night an attractive young stranger who doesn’t speak much English starts coming on to you? Okay, it doesn’t sound that creepy at all but I think the lack of ability to express our thoughts to one another through language made her advances extremely simple. I didn’t really know how to react.

I had no intentions outside of sex and didn’t want to give her the wrong idea about wanting a girlfriend so instantly shied away from her. Many women in China see marriage to foreign men as a means of escape to another life, so getting a date is relatively easy for a European looking male. It also made the women look pretty desperate and put up with some shocking treatment from the men. That was something I preferred to leave to others.

She climbed back on to her bunk and soon, the night was filled with the sounds of the train rattling along the tracks while I wondered what might’ve been.

My mind went back to a few women I’d treated poorly in New Zealand. I could’ve been ignoring women because I didn’t want the specific hassles that each one seemed to offer. My inability to communicate very well with Xiao Pang gave me an excuse to avoid her interest, and I’d often found excuses to avoid the issues in relationships I’d been in.

I resisted the urge to get involved with Xiao Pang due mostly, to be honest, to her desperation being a little too off-putting. I’d like to think this proves me to be gentlemanly, but I wasn’t thinking gentlemanly thoughts at the time. The next morning, I was kicking myself for passing up what I thought was a fantastic offer. The only other similar invitations I received while in China tended to be in the form of trade and commerce.

Xiao Pang disembarked at the last stop before Dandong, a city called Fengcheng, surrounded by hills and mountains of deep green trees and field after field of crops. The city looked like it either needed a revamp or to be levelled. The buildings were decaying and falling apart, broken windows needed replacing and roads went uncared for. Central Shanghai and Beijing would never suffer such ignominy again.

As the train began to pick up speed, we passed the mother of all four-wheel-drive vehicle-parking areas. For maybe ten to fifteen seconds, all to be seen through the window was white, blue, red, silver and black four-wheel-drives parked outside what I guessed was an assembly plant: a large metallic, shiny, new building. The thousands upon thousands of brand new vehicles awaiting shipment from this formerly remote part of the world filled an entirely concreted plateau on the hillside maybe fifty metres from where the train passed. And that made me laugh.

Just outside a town only a few years from absolute ruin, a factory produces vehicles for the roads of rich New Zealand suburbs like Fendalton, Khandallah, and Ponsnobby. I didn’t bother guessing where the people that built them live.

The weather was refreshingly cool in early morning Dandong when the train arrived at 8AM. The temperature was in the low-twenties, hardly cold but not stifling at all. Puddles filled the uneven platform of the city’s station, leaving narrow strips of dry concrete for the hundreds of disembarking passengers to safely tow their trolley-suitcases towards the exit. Jostling for the exit with the usual rugby scrum was thereby exacerbated and with my pack being pushed constantly, I quickly tired of nearly being thrown, inadvertently or not, into the puddles. Screw it, I figured, and stepped out into the middle of the two-inch deep warm, stagnant water, splashing my way to the exit while onlookers didn’t try to hide their amusement.

Mao greeted travellers to the square outside as his likeness hail-waved towards the exit gates. Holy Night played on the large sound-system and a giant screen displayed advertisements on the wall of the station. I checked my internal calendar, and it was only August. Christmas was starting earlier every year. I headed east towards the hotels and river, passing through the built up city and soon reached the waterside looking at North Korea only one hundred metres away.

All I could see was plant life, a few small buildings and, in the distance, smoke billowing from an industrial sized chimney. Looking north and south, there was little else to note, apart from the building shells of a small village, box-like grey concrete building skeletons the only sign of human existence, with no inhabitants discernable. I hadn’t looked for a room and the time was nearing 9AM so I walked along the riverside looking for a cheap hotel.

Struggling to find anything, even after asking numerous people, shop owners, and even braving confronting the police, I stopped a taxi.

“Do you know a cheap hotel?” I asked in my best Chinese, surprising myself.

“Yeah, get in,” he replied in Chinese, and before I could ask him where it was, he stopped near the train station and walked me into a hotel I had walked past twice.

I paid and thanked him and was shown to a flea infested closet with a shared bathroom and toilet, no air conditioning, and continuous street noise as cars zoomed by honking their horns.

“I’ll take it,” I said, the world’s biggest grin plastered on my face.

An hour later, I was on the bus to Hushan headed towards Tiger Mountain and the Great Wall. Before the bus left the city the driver stopped at the side of the road to pick up freight packages, which were duly dumped in the aisle. People on bikes and scooters delivered the packages to bus stops and street corners. At one stop, a lady was selling fried corncobs so windows were opened and bargaining began between the fryer and passengers. Corn was passed throughout the bus while money flowed out.

My own bargaining with the corn lady was great entertainment for everyone nearby. She wanted Y5 from me but everyone else had paid Y1. I told her I wouldn’t pay more than Y1. She refused, citing a reason I didn’t understand, and turned her head away from the bus window I hung out of, which delighted the crowd. As soon as I offered Y2, she agreed and the rest of the bus laughed, as did the crowd that had now gathered around us outside. I was slightly embarrassed, both for the argument and for paying twice as much as everyone else, but at least breakfast tasted good.

The bus left the city heading north and travelled through the countryside. With the river border to the east, hills to the west were covered in crops and untamed natural forest. Forty-five minutes after leaving Dandong, the Wall was in view and when the bus stopped, a finger was pointed at me and I was told to get off. I thanked the lady that pointed at me and she said something about Americans to the other passengers. As the bus departed I heard laughter throughout.

I strolled down a small path to a gate surrounded by free roaming chickens. I had to take a photograph while visiting the Great Wall with free-range chickens running around.

From the top of the Great Wall on Tiger Mountain, which is more of a hillock than a mountain, there are views far and wide into North Korea. I couldn’t see much other than farmland, mountains to the south-east, and a few people tending to their crops. A town with grey concrete buildings could be seen in the distance, no movement visible. No great insights into life in the Axis of Evil could be made from the Wall’s vantage point.

Looking from north to south, I could see small buildings hidden in the vegetation, each the size of a small garden shed. Apparently this is where the gun-toting North Korean border guards live and roam from day and night. Try crossing the river border and they’ll pop up from behind a shrub with rifle in hand to say “Hi”.

I ticked that box on the perilous climb down and was happy with my day out, and it was still early afternoon.

I had a semi-conversation with a couple tending to their garden by the bus stop, telling them I was from New Zealand and asking if they were too busy for a photograph. As they posed, smiling and laughing while I counted down to the photo, a taxi pulled up to offer me a ride.

“How much to Dandong?” I asked in Chinese.

“Y10,” he said, which was more expensive than the bus but I figured I could afford it. With encouragement from the people tending their garden I got in and we were off. He drove like a madman, as I expected.

After a minute, he leant down and turned his meter on, which instantly read Y6, which I thought was odd. As the meter wound up to Y10, and we were nowhere near Dandong, he turned off the main road away from the river.

“Ni qu nar?” I asked him. “Where are you going?”

“Hen kuai,” was all I understood of his reply, which means “very fast.” I took this to mean he was saying this was a short cut.

“Dandong, Y10 ma?” I asked trying to figure out if I was still going to be charged Y10 as the meter now read Y15.

“Shi, shi, shi,” he said, in a reassuring tone, either meaning, “It is, it is, it is,” or “Ten, ten, ten.” It could’ve meant anything, but the word “shi” spoken with a certain tone means “is”, and with another tone means the number ten. I took from his tone, that I was fine so I relaxed a little, although I was still wondering where we were going.

We came to a small town where he stopped for no apparent reason other than to talk to a local. Within a minute he noticed I was staring daggers at him so his foot hit the accelerator again and we continued towards the city. The meter now read Y25 and I was getting worried about this guy.

The taxi climbed a small hill and once on the crest, Dandong’s tall buildings and river to the east were in view. He turned onto the esplanade road at the northern end of the city that runs beside the river and I breathed a sigh of relief as I could see, in the distance, the border crossing bridge near the train station. I was back in the city but now the meter read more than Y30. I ordered him to stop the taxi.

“I’ll walk from here, thanks,” I told him, and handed him Y10 to his dismay.

“Y35,” he said, grabbing my arm tightly, angrily yelling something else at me.

“At the Great Wall,” I said in Chinese, “you said Y10 to Dandong.”

He replied with laughter, but the grip on my arm didn’t ease, and he reiterated the Y35 charge. He knew he’d tricked me. I seethed for a moment, but figured I could bargain with him.

“Wo gei ni Y20,” I said to him, meaning I’d give him Y20, which he was shocked and disgusted by.

While he thought about it, I removed his hand from my arm and placed it on his chest forcefully. A white mark was left on my forearm that transitioned to red as blood began to flow back to the area. Looking him in the eye, I pulled out the other Y10 and opened my door. Seeing this, he grabbed my forearm again, yelling something in my ear.

I quickly dropped the Y10 on the floor and grabbed his hand again, this time having to rip at the fingers to break his grip. He was a strong man, but as I placed his hand on his chest again, his eyes opened in shock. Maybe he wasn’t expecting me to break his grip so easily, or surprised that I wasn’t letting him bully me.

He gave up, and I backed out the door checking for my wallet, camera, and passport pouch. I didn’t want to leave without myself intact. He was looking pretty angry but scared too. I felt my heart beginning to pound and blood started pumping through my temples like a hydroelectric dam on overdrive.

“Zaijian,” I said, not bothering to smile.

“Zaijian,” he replied, picking the money up, also not smiling.

I crossed the street in front of his parked taxi and we continued our locked eye contact until I got to the footpath on the other side. I had to look away to check my footing, and as I looked back he spun the car around and sped back in the direction we had come from.

From the esplanade I watched people fishing from boats in the river while others swam the early afternoon away. Men chose Speedos as swimming garb as per usual, although a positive for the future, some young boys were wearing board-shorts.

A few cruise boat operations took people as close to North Korean soil as they could without touching the other side of the river for fear of being shot at. Photographers offered me the opportunity of a photo taken at the Sino-North Korean border wearing traditional Korean garb, which I declined.

After dinner I returned to the riverside. The mist obscured most of the night’s sights but the old bridge was illuminated in lights, reaching out and ending abruptly halfway across the river. Having been accidentally bombed by the USA in the 1950’s, it now is a bridge to nowhere. The new bridge now in operation was not viewable. With the mist and the darkness, there were no lights on it maybe as protection from any accidental bombardment plans in fruition.

I hadn’t seen any security forces at all. Having expected a strong military presence I was slightly surprised there was nothing to be seen during the day that suggested this was little more than a city nestled by a river with farmland on the far side, rather than having a fascist dictatorship governing within a stones throw.

As I kept walking, I could see war-boats halfway across the river, positioned every thirty to fifty metres north and south, guarding the border. Thinking about it, there was a presence during the day too, although not to the same extent as only a few boats were around. I just hadn’t taken any notice of it. Maybe I was distracted, waiting for the taxi driver’s union to turn up and “prosecute” me.