Monday, July 29, 2013

Trains, Part One: Hanoi to Beijing


Hanoi-Beijing (42 hours)
This is the one that no one thought I should take. All my Vietnamese friends kept telling me that I should take the plane, and I met no one in Vietnam, including the grungy, cheapskate backpacker crowd who had taken or planned to take this train. It was a little difficult to buy, costs a little more than a flight, and takes 42 hours, all of which probably should have dissuaded me from the notion, but it didn’t.

I like to think that I am only afraid of a few things, but then I start listing them, and there are more than I few. I have fewer persistent anxieties than many people I know, but the ones that haunt me are fierce. Fears include unleashed dogs, fish touching me underwater, caves and other small enclosed spaces, and very sheer heights. My worst anxiety is about being late, and the second worst is about being lost, alone, and confused. Just about every single bad dream I have is about disastrous travel logistics, in which both of those anxieties are fused. There are often fish, dogs, and heights added for drama in these nightmares. I’m so obsessed with getting to airports and train stations on time that I’ve taken to calling myself a chronopath. So, it was inauspicious that this leg of the journey began with the hotel staff in Sapa forgetting to buy me a ticket for Sunday night to Lao Cai so I could get to the train departing Hanoi on Tuesday night. The Monday night train would be just fine, because only I would worry about having only about 13 hours to make my connection. Thirteen hours was only sufficient by about 8 minutes, as it turned out.

Hanoi has four train stations, and the train to Beijing leaves from one I’d never been to. I spent all day afternoon in the day lounge in my hotel in Hanoi, the last few of hours of which obsessively asking the helpful staff if they knew which station I needed to get to. Many phone calls, internet searches, and examinations of my inscrutable ticket later, and the woman said she was 100% certain that she knew which one, and when we needed to leave. I would have left earlier, of course, but I trusted them. The nice young man who was going to get me on the train and in the right compartment and I set off in a cab in the height of Hanoi rush hour at 5:15 for my 6:30 train. Thirty minutes later we arrive at a tiny station in a remote neighborhood all the way across the river, and I knew immediately we were in the wrong place. We have to wait a few agonizing minutes for another cab to materialize and then have 40 minutes to make it all the way back to where we started and to another station. Sitting in the back seat praying that we’re going to the right station this time, I watch the driver navigate the Hanoi traffic with such speed and daring that I almost forget to panic. We only barely hit one motorcycle along the way, and I actually said out loud, “whatever happens, just don’t stop.” After we screech to a halt in front of the huge and unmistakably correct station, my guy from the hotel hustles so fast that I can barely keep up with him. He throws some money on the desk of the surly lady who collects the fee for porters, guides, and, presumably family and friends, who want to see someone off on the train. We fling ourselves into the carriage, get pointed to one of the compartments, and in it, to my great relief and delight, is a smiling middle-aged western man. I have to call him Sam, for South African Man, because even though we spent about 24 hours together, we never exchanged names.

He’s on his way to Gui Lin for some sort of Tai Chi thing, after spending a few months in Na Trang. We are, as it turns out, the only western travelers on the train, and, even weirder, the only people in this carriage, which, until we reach the Chinese border, is the only car on the train. The two of us are being personally escorted to China.
Somewhere in southern China

At the border crossing at Dong Dan, we are met by another personal escort, a smiling woman in uniform who takes us to a holding area where we sit for several hours. We do not have our passports because we’ve surrendered them to another uniformed person on the train. An hour or so later, we are walked to the main station, where we meet a platoon of people inspecting, discussing, and finally, stamping our passports. They’re perplexed that Sam’s passport says he’s African, and yet he’s white. They think we’re married to each other. Who knows? It’s midnight something, and children wave at us from outside the window and run around and try to snap candid photos with one or both of us. Finally, another uniformed person escorts us to the Chinese train, where we are initially placed in a nice, clean compartment in what again appears to be a car for only us. Shortly, however, we’re moved to the next car and a compartment that also seems to be celebrating its first communion, except that it has been peed on. Oh, well, at least it doesn’t have mice like the Vietnamese carriage we were in from Hanoi to Dong Dan.

We eat the gross instant pots of noodles we’ve managed to buy and try to get settled. Every now and then, someone stops by to stare or to berate us for something. Sam has a few words of Chinese, which only seems to encourage them. For a long time, a Chinese man stood in the doorway and urgently explained something to Sam. I was grateful that my middle-aged woman cloak of invisibility left me out of the discussion.

We lock the door and settle in for the night, but in the morning the hallway is full of Chinese men – including the train staff – in various stages of undress just warming up for a full day of spitting, yelling, and shoving. The hoiking is audible throughout the carriage. At Gui Lin, Sam gets off, handing me a handful of yuan because I have no Chinese currency, and that’s the only way I can buy water, beer, or more gross noodles. I’ve begun to panic a bit about whether the guide will be there at the station to meet me in Beijing because the arrival times listed vary by about 90 minutes. This anxiety is assuaged by observing Sam’s experience: he’s told he’s arriving at 12, 1, or 4. He actually arrives at his destination at about 2:15.

After Gui Lin, I am alone as the only western traveler on the train, and I am in a now quite crowded carriage filled with Chinese people. I try to leave my door open for air and neighborliness, but it proves to be impossible because people stand in the doorway and stare. Sometimes they even step in and start gesturing. I conclude that they’re distressed that I have so much space to myself while whole families are jammed into other compartments, with children sharing bunks with each other or with adults. I do not feel guilty. But I do have to shut myself up into my little lacey, pee-smelling cell for the next 24 hours or so.

I watch southern China go past outside the window. The more I look, the less I understand about the place. Parts of it are beautiful and haunting, some with limestone karsts rising out of green fields in scenery that’s indistinguishable from Vietnam. But the buildings are all different. Chinese houses are mostly brick, low, graceful affairs with walled or fenced buildings. Villages of these, with figures working fields with buffalo, go on for miles. But suddenly you begin to see those red brick buildings in states of disrepair or demolition, and hulking, unforgivably ugly apartment blocks begin to appear. The older ones are terrible looking, and even on the uppermost floors, everyone has caged themselves in with wire or bars on their patios. Later I try to understand the purpose of these, asking a guide if the wire is for keeping people or things in or out. He says it’s to prevent burglars from getting in, which I find completely unbelievable, because I can’t imagine that a thief with the skills to scale a building would bother to rob those awful-looking places.

The crumbling old buildings are bad, but the new ones are even worse. Monstrously scaled, their refusal to acknowledge the landscape or the traditions of the people around them is like the taunts of a hulking schoolyard bully. They dare you to defend the idea of beauty, of the dignity and solace of grace and art. I wonder who will live there, who will have to accept the dehumanizing and de-civilizing effects of living in such a geometry of contempt. Around these arrogant towers, the remains of one-storey red-brick homes crumble and kowtow.

Watching the ratio of ugly towers, smokestacks, and garbage dumps to farms, brick homes, and rice fields increase as we approach Beijing makes me sad and even more anxious. The hot Pabst Blue Ribbon in a can with an actual pop-top that the snack cart lady sold me out of a pillow case helps a little, but not much. I have a premonition that I won’t like Beijing, but I have 5 nights to spend there anyway. My more immediate concern, however, is whether the guide will meet me at the station, so when we pull into Beijing and I can see a man with a sign with my name on it, I am enormously relieved. He is running in the opposite direction, and I chase him down against the tide of shoving, spitting, and yelling Chinese people.

Friday, July 19, 2013

Walking Tour of Sapa, Part Two



The walk from the cafĂ© involves two more flights of steep, chipped stairs, some scary dogs, and, surprisingly often, rain, fog, and darkness. The photos here are from a daytime trip we all took with the children, so you’ll have to imagine the rain, fog, and darkness.

Although it isn’t uphill both ways, the way to school is seriously uphill one of the ways, and, at 8:45 when class is over, dark on the downhill.


On this day, we went a slightly different way than usual because we were coming from the park where again Bruce and Ann bought all the children ice-cream. Ann had one or two leftover after some of us declined, and she sought out other children to give them to. Before long she went back and bought another big bag of cones and gave them to all the children in the park. For at least one little pants-less boy, it was his first taste of ice-cream. We also gave a cone to our 70-year old Hmong friend who had followed me to the lake earlier in the day.



After ice cream, our whole group started up the first flight of stairs to school.



Then the second ...

And finally, the last hill. Here is the classroom building with children’s laundry drying outside.


The children spend a lot of time washing their clothes in a tub by hand with cold water, and Bruce and Ann wanted to buy them a washing machine so that they could spend more time studying and playing, and less time on chores, but others vetoed the plan because they feared the girls would not be able to readjust to hand-washing once they returned to their villages.


The Wife Shoppers



(I wrote this weeks ago, but I wanted to wait until I left Vietnam to post it. For all kinds of good reasons, there are no photos.)

These two are new: An Indian (Singaporean? Malaysian?) man and a chirpy Vietnamese woman. She looks nice in her high purple heels, which I can’t imagine wearing in Sapa’s chipped filthy streets, and her short chambray dress with a shirttail hem that reveals even more thigh as she moves in the strong breeze on the terrace. She’s perfectly made-up and her bobbed hair has a slightly auburn tint. They order coffee drinks and take many pictures of each other drinking them. I hear her in her good school English explaining something about the American South. They do not know each other very well.

After the photos and the lectures on American history, she moves over to the other side of the table to share his bench and begins rubbing his furry earlobes between her thumb and forefinger and mussing his shoe-black hair.

They join creepy guy, my next door neighbor, who’s been here a couple of days, formally sharing meals with a youngish French-speaking Vietnamese woman with a small child. We sit on the terrace at the same time and pass each other frequently, but only once has he returned the “hello” I’ve proffered. I am fine with pretending each other doesn’t exist, but then I have to hear him all the time through our thin shared bathroom wall, hacking up his Gitanes, or whatever else he’s doing in there. His girlfriend/prospect isn’t allowed up here in his room, so at least I don’t have to hear that. After the first time I saw them at their candlelit dinner in the hotel, I saw him on the front porch of the hotel hunched over his netbook, and I imagined he was going in to refine his search, looking for a prettier, Francophone, educated woman who would marry his old ass, but one without a cumbersome child.

I know this is none of my business, but it really creeps me out: the aversion to western women with all their inconvenient notions of autonomy and equality, and the naked racism of the desire for the Indochine body, with its suggestions of social submissiveness and sexual expertise. I understand the Vietnamese women’s point of view, too, unfortunately. The marriage prospects for educated women here are dim, and whatever social reforms have been enacted, not to mention the communist pledges of gender equity, have failed to reach the level of the family. Women do all the work, inside and outside the home, and many just don’t want to sign up for a life like that. They want to marry a westerner with money and get the heck out of here, where they imagine they’ll have a much better life, with limitless consumer goods and financial security. Leaving behind their families doesn’t even particularly trouble them. As my friend in Hanoi, who is married to a New Zealand man with whom she has never lived, says, “it doesn’t matter, I am the girl, the extra child, I am not important.”

Monday, July 8, 2013

Walking Tour, Part One



To get to SOC cafĂ© and office, you turn right out of the hotel and start up the first hill. On your right you’ll pass the dingy little stand where a woman cells cigarettes and cold drinks and men hang out all day drinking, gambling, and arguing. After dark, the motorcycle toughs and drinkers and serenaded by a old blind Hmong man playing a wooden flute for pocket change. On the opposite corner a man offers you a motorbike ride every time you pass. There may be a gaggle of Hmong girls and women on the corner two, having been herded there by the tourist police. Then you plunge into the market, through the fruit and vegetable stalls, dodging tourists and local shoppers and alight your first set of uneven, slippery stairs. The passage through the upper level of the market is a knot of sellers and buyers of everyday goods and trinkets on the left, and handicrafts and fancier-looking “authentic” trinkets on the right. Then it’s down the few stairs clogged with sellers, onto the street swarming with motorbikes and dominated by the occasional bus. Turn left on the main street of Sapa Town, heading away from its center and up another hill.



A lot happens on this street, unfortunately most of if alcohol-related. Once I saw a drunk man heave a very large rock at the back of two people on speeding motorbike. Worse, one afternoon I watched – as if that was going to do some good – a drunk young man with a K-Pop hairdo drag his girlfriend down the hill by her arm. She was pleading and beginning to cry, and feebly hitting him with her shiny red clutch handbag, braking hard in her platform shoes on the steep slope. You used to see a buffalo in town every now and then, but the police must be keeping them away, too. Continue up the hill past the tourists eating bad food on pretty terraces, past the massage places and the Be-Bop disco, through the intersection where yet another gang of men hawk motorbike rides or bikes for rent. You will be walking in the street up this hill because Hmong and Dao women have spread their tarps and their wares across the sidewalks on both sides. Some are very old, and some are very young. Women have babies on their backs and lying on blankets under leaning plaid umbrellas. You try to tell yourself you’re doing the right thing when you say “no shopping.” Ann walks through here and gives fruit, juice boxes of milk and books to the children. You wish you were that kind of person.



This second, and much longer, set of stairs feels like something of a relief because there are fewer, if any sellers there, but it’s trash-strewn and smelly. At the top, turn right and coast a little downhill while you catch your breath. Sometimes another (the same one?) blind flute player sets up shop at the top. If there’s room to walk on the sidewalk, that’s best because this road is curved and busses, trucks, and motorbikes drive as if it isn’t. On the right you pass a guest house, a barber-shop/beauty parlor/massage parlor, an indoor roller-blading rink, of all things, and an incongruously diurnal karaoke bar. The sidewalk is patrolled by a very pregnant dog, toddlers who occasionally break free of their handlers and wobble toward the busy street, and the clusters of teenagers that skating rinks all over the world attract.
View from the top of the stairs.

View from near the bottom.
Last week they emptied out the massage/beauty parlor to make way for the rumored pool hall,  and put the trash on the street. Who doesn’t love Christmas in July?