the long grift.

The train ride from Shanghai to Chengdu, the centrally-situated capital of Sichuan Province, takes thirty-six hours. I'd harbored some real, rose-colored projections regarding this transport - sunrises searing a changing landscape; lamp lit nights tucked into a soft sleep bunk with a book while the host locomotive jetted west-ward through the night; refreshment trolleys loaded with Hogwartsian sweets. In my fantasy, foreign love and paternal porters lay just beyond the next cabin.

The dream, alas, was speckled with fallacy. Hard sleepers were economical, not to mention the only available way to travel. Hard sleepers, from what I understood, resembled concentration camp bunk beds. There were no walls; just head-to-toe layers of thinly-mattressed cots. 'Locomotive', also, was a romantic mental euphemism for a rusted train with paint-splattered walls, dirty linoleum, and two squatter toilets per car. I decided almost immediately to volunteer myself for thirty-six hours of unconsciousness, which I achieved, more or less, successfully. I polished off a light and appetizing novel and one apple, and commenced with coma. I was roused periodically by porters vending instant noodles or gruelly rice porridge ladled from a wooden cauldron on a cart, but rather successfully staved off nutritional, excremental and conversational activities until we neared Chengdu, one-and-one-half days after boarding the train.

The woman occupying the adjacent bunk immediately offered me bread and fruit upon my awakening, perhaps thinking that I was gravely ill for not having eaten or stirred much since Shanghai. We conversed in the way I parlay with everybody I meet in China: I let them do most of the talking, and lie in the convenient direction when asked about myself or nod in agreement. I surmised immediately that she was a working class lass - most likely somebody's hired help. She was returning home to Chengdu for the first time in three years. The thought of a three-year absence from anywhere - the States or New England or New York or home-home in California still makes me nervous, although time began to pass more anonymously and smoothly somewhere around the eight-month mark. In July, loneliness crested; desperation reared. Today, however, newly arrived in Chengdu, I felt good.