my heart will go on
at a quarter past four in the morning, after surviving a traffic jam on a street lamp-less expressway, a ride on a bus which really Wasn't All That Dodgy but had rather cramped seats, doing a load of laundry, sipping a cup of milo and receving a phone call from jon, i sat on my bed applying moisturiser to my feet and listened to jinni and xiaoyun, who were on the sofa in the living room, chortling heartily as they recounted my antics.
like how i practically sprinted from the bus, which stopped at a small, dark and badly lit bus station at 0238, to the row of waiting taxis because it looked like there weren't enough to go around - as it was, ours was the last available licensed one. and how i looked like i was ready to brutally knock our front door down because it wouldn't open the first time we tried to unlock it (it miraculously clicked open on our fourth try).
after chuckling quietly to myself and allowing them a few more moments of enjoyment, i called out i can hear you!, and when jinni replied yah, we know! i came out to the living room and reminded xiaoyun of how, when i had gone ahead of her to check whether there was someone hiding behind the drawn curtains of the laundry balcony, i'd turned to check if she was following behind only to be greeted by the sight of her brandishing our fake magiclean wiper like sun wukong must have brandished his cudgel in journey to the west.
we, however, had just returned from a journey to the south.
***
we set out on friday morning, the beginning of the 清明节 (qing1 ming2 jie2) weekend holiday, to catch our train to 大同 (da4 tong2) in the province of 山西 (shan1 xi1), and i must say that before going to the beijing west train station, i'd never before seen so many people gathered in one place at the same time, unless you count the national day parade.
but the people at the national day parade are usually singaporeans dressed in red waving miniature singapore flags, not singing the national anthem or the pledge when they're supposed to, just like us at assembly when we were in school.
the people at the train station ranged from the very rich, clutching tickets for soft-sleeper (软卧 ruan3 wo4) carriages, to the very poor, clutching tickets indicating that they had standing rights in the aisles between the hard seats (硬座 ying4 zuo4). those who need to catch trains at the last minute and are unable to buy sitting or sleeping tickets usually also have to buy standing tickets, and then they pray like anything that people with sitting tickets will get off along the way so they can squeeze themselves onto a seat. we had 硬卧 (ying4 wo4), hard-sleeper tickets.
perhaps it's poverty and the lack of education that makes people unfriendly, or more accurately, unable to be, or less considerate and aware of others. i used to think that farmers and peasants were happy, carefree people who led simple, contented and uncluttered lives - an ideal no doubt encouraged by books like sing to the dawn. but there was something in the eyes of the rural migrant workers we saw that put paid to that. i initially thought they were going home for the holidays as well, but i had my doubts after reading about the shanxi brick factories.
an ongoing struggle to keep themselves, and maybe their families, alive. desperation, and a hollowness behind the clouds of cigarette smoke and yellowing eye-whites: they've seen and suffered too much. the knowledge that after the short reprieve of the train journey, they're going back to the coal mines and the factories, back to an everlasting pitch-black darkness, coal dust, and chemical pollution which poisons. dreary, mind-numbing work, but it pays for and provides some warmth for their cold lives, in the form of beer and cigarettes, a cheap coat, boots. getting by in the chilly spring, which seemed to be later in coming in those parts. it was Grey and Depressingly Dirty, and even the green on the trees didn't seem to herald her arrival, not like in beijing.
yet, i don't think any of them actually consciously think about these things. nor do the people who stay on farms in the middle of nowhere and struggle alone with cows as they plough the ground, with no street lamps or neighbours and only the distant rumble of passing trains for company, think about those things.
they just do what they have to.
sunburnt skin, callused hands, crooked and stained teeth, dirty dark-coloured jackets; coarse hair sticking up every which way from being stuffed under caps or from not having been washed for a long time, the ubiquitous huge cloth bag slung over a shoulder, with a strap or without, or sat upon as they waited for trains. they are why we can live the way we do. faces, but still no names, to everything that's Made in China. can we have it any other way?
i think the others thought that i wasn't enjoying myself on the trip because i said so little, and truth be told, i don't think i can say i enjoyed it as such, because it was Really Rather Painful having to see all these things. and i said so little because i was too busy looking at everything, which i found interesting and amusing. not in a smiley hee-hee kind of way, you understand, but in a
wondering-at-our-determination-to-survive-and-exist kind of way.
***
having taken more taxis in beijing than i ever have in my entire life (it's pretty cheap when there are three or four of us, the minimum fare is about 60 singapore cents a person), and having been ferried around in taxis on saturday and sunday, i think i can safely confirm that taxi drivers are three things: strange, opinionnated, and cheerful. and they're usually opinnionated about politics, particularly in china. they seem to think that one day china will take over the world and the renminbi will be the currency of choice, hate the japanese despite drama serials and clothes from japan being immensely popular among the younger generation, and sometimes sound terrifyingly like chairman mao.
take our taxi driver in datong: he suddenly pulled to a stop at the pavement just before the entrance to a petrol station, his reason being that we couldn't stay in the car whilst he pumped petrol, and he had to cut the engine, so we were all to wait until my heart will go on finished playing on the radio because we were all to enjoy the song together. he closed his eyes and swayed to the music, occassionally spreading his arms out during the musical interludes, like kate winslet as rose, 真的有像在船上飞的感觉 (zhen1 de4 you3 xiang4 zai4 chuan2 shang4 fei1 de4 gan3 jue2) it really feels like you're flying on a ship!
he seemed to like it so much that i wrote out the lyrics of the song in english for him (eh, don't tell me you didn't love it when you were 12 or 14 or however old you were when titanic was released), and made what i thought was a rather good attempt to translate it into chinese. to have translated my heart will go on as 我的心会继续 (wo3 de4 xin1 hui4 j4 xu4) would have turned it into my heart will continue so those bits ended up as something like 你存在在我的心，我的心永远有你 (ni3 cun2 zai4 zai4 wo4 de4 xin1, wo3 de4 xin1 yong2 yuan3 you2 ni3), for and i know that my heart will, my heart will go on and on. i even did my best to translate it so that he could sing it to the original tune. do let me know if you want to see the fully translated version, or what i can remember of it.
and because i couldn't think of anything else, near, far was really 近，远 (jin4, yuan3).
please keep in mind that the entire thing was done as we were travelling on a pot-holed country road in an old, dirty taxi, its interior coated with cigarette ash, after we'd braved a tour around a very pretty temple 悬空寺 (xuan2 kong1 si4) set into the side of a mountain, supported only by long and rather thin wooden beams over a thousand years old.
we travelled to and reached 太原 (tai4 yuan2) by bus on saturday night, and sunday when we travelled from there to 平遥古城 (ping2 yao2 gu3 cheng2) was the first real day of spring we had. it started off pleasantly enough, despite taiyuan being Another, Rather Depressingly Dirty town. our taxi driver there acquiesed to our demands that he teach us how to say various phrases in the taiyuan dialect, and even brought us for breakfast at a dirty, rundown market, where the food was freshly cooked and good, anyhow (the word of the trip must be dirty).
i can tell you that swear words in the taiyuan dialect sound like swear words in standard chinese.
however, that taxi driver eventually showed himself up to be a rat-fink-weasel-fox kind of man, but that's just life for you. in spite of everything i still thought he was a rather cheerful person - he even sang us some traditional shanxi songs when we told him we hated chinese techno - i was asleep but jinni said she had to sit through an excruciating five mintues of 老鼠爱大米 mice love rice in french, sung by a guy, backed by a heavy disco beat.
maybe he was just hoping we would eventually cave in to his dishonourable demand that we pay him extra for having taken what he insisted was much more than the time he had agreed to wait for us.
he did have a very nice, new, clean, shiny and cigarette ash-free taxi though. so that was alright.
***
video game machines crammed into a house built sometime in the 14th century during the ming and qing dynasties and bored teenagers with frizzy, dyed hair and gaudy clothes loitering about outside it, lazily snapping gum; children with wind-chapped cheeks, runny noses and clothes covered with a fine layer of dust, giving them a greyish tinge, playing in the dust, sitting around, disconsolate and alone, eating ice cream. that's what i'll remember of pingyao, what the unesco website describes as an exceptionally well-preserved example of a traditional Han chinese
city.
for all of china's potential for growth and supply of natural resources, much of the culture, charm and elegance it once had have been destroyed. traces of it are present everywhere, my deepest impression of this being from our previous trip to chengde, where i saw a traditional-style wooden gazebo atop a hill overlooking a canal filled with waste water from factories and sewage, surrounded by a mist which was smog.
i think the people of ancient pingyao would turn in their graves and fight to get out to change things if they could see what's happened to their once beautiful city and what their descendants have been reduced to. it was, and will go on being painful to see such pleading in peoples' eyes, hear the hunger in their voices as they entreat you to buy this, that, or take photographs which they will print on the spot, for a small fee. stalls upon stalls offering the same trinkets, drinks, ice cream, soft drinks; copies of ancient relics, gathering dust under faded umbrellas.
we would like to leave our mark, wherever we go in the world. whether it's a hasty, secret etching of our names on a famous statue, or writing such beautiful calligraphy that generations of people born a long, long time after you've passed on will whip out digital cameras when they see signboards with words in your handwriting. posing, pointing, shooting, uploading. we go to such lengths to be remembered, and to remember, although we know in our heart of hearts that some things are better left as descriptions and to our imaginations.
***
for interest's sake, we also went to the yungang grottoes 云冈石窟 (yun2 gang1 shi2 ku4) in datong which reminded me greatly of angkor wat, and the 晋祠寺 (jin4 ci2 si4) in taiyuan which i enjoyed immensely because it was pretty and too far away and not significant enough to attract as many tourists as the other places. also to 乔家大院 (qiao2 jia1 da4 yuan4) on the way back to taiyuan from pingyao, a pretty house where zhang yimou filmed raise the red lantern. which would have been much, much prettier and enjoyable if there had been less tourists.
the other word of the trip should be pretty.
which would make the WORDS of the trip pretty and dirty. and so it was.
***
i went to school yesterday on about three hours of sleep, and because we started on a new series of cases, the vice-dean called on me to answer about five questions. my brain entirely failed me on one particularly tricky translation, and he couldn't catch my chinese on another, much to the amusement of my classmates.
