27. Ling Xi

I bid farewell to Devrim, caught a taxi to the train station, and watching out the window as the train rolled out of Shanghai, thoughts of home raised my spirits. Within an hour, though, the train ride was driving me nuts. Three kids under the age of ten had bunks in my cubby hole and another four kids of a similar age were riddled throughout the carriage. They all came to play and sing together at my cubby hole.

I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t read and couldn’t rest. Sitting for long periods looking out the window with high-pitched squeals and screams reverberating from the walls around me, I employed some earplugs from my pockets, which had been used in the over-crowded hostel room a few days earlier. The plugs were a little dirty admittedly, and I had to pluck off the lint, but I stuck them in my ears anyway. The child-noise was toned down and I could read a little bit, but those kids were so loud, I held back from crying at them to shut up constantly.

In the late afternoon, the train came to a grinding halt. What I could see out the window was a small train station building and houses and roads nearby with rubbish overflowing from large concrete bins pouring down streets and into unkempt hedges and plantations. The sign at the station said we were in Ling Xi. No doors were opened for anyone to exit or enter the train. We were stagnant for whatever reason.

The very small town consisted of a few people, a train station, and a mess of discarded plastic bottles and food wrappings. Lying maybe seven hours train-ride due southwest of Shanghai, the town seemed to exist for piling up of waste. Like a bulldozer had swept the road clean and filled each nook and cranny, the gaps between buildings and on street corners were filled with rubbish. With this man-made garbage creep, the streets were becoming narrower and narrower.

A quaint wooden building situated at the rear edge of the ten-metre long train station platform was the colour of faded whites and greys. I felt my heart sink, as I compared this place with home, and saw how much nicer yet how alike New Zealand is to this small microcosm of Chinese consumer waste management.

The sun began setting behind the hills, and the train had been parked for over thirty minutes in this town seemingly forgotten by those rooted deeply in the throws of modernising China. It’d probably stopped to let a more expensive, more expedient train pass by, and the kids grew even louder sharing in the general frustration of standing still. I began to reminisce about Muzak.

The memories of the feeling of movement drained any other life force from me for some time and I became more and more lethargic with each passing minute. Pins and needles flowed through my body, and I felt dizzy. From behind the station building, a little girl, maybe three or four years old, skipped out onto the otherwise unpopulated platform.

She was wearing a dirty, worn and tattered pink dress and danced merrily around the platform singing to herself. Her shaven head displayed scars and pockmarks from either abuse or an already hard life, and dirt and grime covered her face. Her smile, as she skipped around, was like a rainbow on a cloudy day.

She danced over to one of the large concrete-slab rubbish bins, which were built beside the wall of the wooden station building. Happily, she rummaged away in there until she found a red plastic supermarket bag. She placed it over her head suffocation-style and continued dancing around. She was enjoying herself and I felt like crying. The reason she was alone was probably due to her parents working. As she danced and sang, I wondered what her future options would be like.

I stared out the window hoping and dreaming for her to become a lawyer or doctor, despite my best knowledge telling me it was a foolish thought. As my eyes were locked on a little girl with a future riddled with who knows what, I thought about the waste I’d made in the name of comfort. The sunlight was fading as the little girl sat down and kept playing with her plastic bag, her face darkened by the shadow of the hills. It was well and truly dusk when the train finally lurched into action, the faded pink of the girls dress seemed to have changed to a grey colour as we left her behind. I tried to forget her, because I felt my future happiness could be tarnished forever as the memory of the little girl in Ling Xi I left behind became ingrained in my head.

As I watched her disappearing into the train passengers’ collective past, my travel experiences came flooding back to me. I felt like I was desensitising every feeling I had apart from irritation and hate. Considering what had happened to me lately, and how trivial it all was, I knew I couldn’t continue validating my disdain for China.

That girl at the train station was enjoying life, and I saw that I was not. I was finding excuses to hate China and avoid caring.

I remembered the car accidents I’d seen, my first thoughts were always of people being injured, but I stopped thinking about it and chose to note the crowds looking on. And then there was the corpse floating down the Yangtze River that I chose to not think about as anything more than fish food rather than as a father, mother, husband, wife, daughter or son. I chose to not care when I walked past beggars and I chose to not care when I bought a hot chocolate for Y20, money that could’ve fed a family for a week. I chose to not care when I saw cops kicking two teenagers in Chengdu. I chose to not care when, everyday, I handed empty plastic bottles to elderly men and women who would starve if they didn’t get paid for recycling. And I remember telling myself repetitively to stop caring as I walked through the Maids Picnic in Hong Kong with Pauly.

Seeing the little girl dancing in Ling Xi made it clear that why I chose to not care was because I felt helpless. I was scared I couldn’t help, and the only thing I was left with was caring. If I cared, I couldn’t hide or run, which came to me as the best way to not deal with any situation. And it stretched back to my life in New Zealand.

The way my life was going, with no job and no girlfriend, felt helpless, so to deal with it, I chose to not care and took refuge by escaping to China. I wasn’t enjoying life all the time, despite being an incredibly lucky person, having been born in a wonderful country and surrounded by fantastic people. I had nothing to complain about, yet I complained more than this little girl in Ling Xi, who had nothing.

The dinner cart came down the corridor, so I bought some rice and, after the kids had finished eating, I was offered a seat in our cubby-hole. Their parents ensured I had some space by pushing a couple of the kids out the door. I was pretty subdued, having had a self-defining epiphany not long before. I thanked them and ate, then climbed up to my bunk and tried to read while the kids kept playing. At 9pm, everything seemed to stop, the kids collapsed onto their bunks and there was blissful silence.

At 5AM in the morning, when the kids began playing games as noisily as possible while their parents didn’t seem concerned at all, I got upset again. The screaming and singing was nearly 90dB and the earplugs were irritatingly useless. I told myself that the kids were full of life, like the girl in Ling Xi, which is a wonderful thing. I was unable to share their joy so enthusiastically though. I ended up spending the rest of the morning considering both how dangerous it could be to jump from a moving train and how to go about getting over myself.

The train finally arrived in Guangzhou at 1PM and I couldn’t hide my relief as I made my way out the door. Trying to clear my head proved futile while in a constant neurobiological merry-go-round for hour upon hour thanks to those kids. I wanted to find somewhere quiet. The modern, sparkling metro from the station was the easiest way to the hostel on Shamian Island to the west of the city centre, and the ticket machines were easier to find than operate.

The person I lined up behind didn’t purchase anything and left the screen as she was using it. Without the intro screen I was stuck without means to the English option and was lost. I stood there for a moment, aware of the people waiting impatiently, and admitted defeat. I was lost without English instruction. A woman said something over my shoulder in Chinese so I turned to her in absolute desperation and said, “Help.”

Without hesitation, she and two men explained what to do, pressing buttons and getting the English option up on screen. It was child’s play and they probably thought I was a right munter but they didn’t show any judgement. Instead, she asked my anticipated destination and pressed the buttons for me, which I thanked her for. It was pretty obvious how getting that chip off my shoulder had helped. Asking for and accepting guidance appreciatively was answered positively much more often than negatively. I knew this but that didn’t mean I accepted it all the time.

I exited the Changsha station and, while looking for Shamian Island, got lost. I stopped a young woman passing by, who led me to the island where her church group was meeting. Down the road from the church, I found the hostel and lined up behind Eric, of Canada, who got the last bunk. He consoled me with a pat on the shoulder while I booked a bunk for the following night and got a room for myself in the meantime. An hour later, I was at a bar down the street drinking beer, eating sweet ‘n’ sour pork and watching English football as Everton played someone wearing red.

And life was good for me. It was another of those meals that I savoured, alike that first meat and rice dish in Beijing.

It was no wonder people here were constantly after money from me. They are starving or dying of the heat in the summer, cold in the winter and disease and starvation year round. I was constantly seeking to be appreciated by people who are striving daily for their families to survive.

“Wow,” I said to myself, “I’m really narcissistic.”

Surrounded by squalor and disease, I was wrapped up in my fears. The same issues I didn’t deal with in New Zealand were the ones I couldn’t avoid in China.