Sadder and not as famous but looked a lot the same

Had in mind to comment once again on current events (to ask, for example, why having the US white house fighting over the interests of oil companies is sinister but having the secretary of states representing the interests of advertisment companies is lofty and moral…) then I realised I dun wanna.

There are so many China bloggers, many of them excellent and most of them a lot smarter than I am and more tuned to current events. I have nothing to contribute really. To  me, China’s appeal has always been in her people: the people I meet and the people I read about. Those who choose to share their stories with me and those whose stories I can only guess. This is (a suggested) story of the first among them, someone I came across nearly seven years ago and who have become instrumental in my China adventure even though I never saw him again. I wanted to write about that person here because the personal is, after all, political; and even when it’s not, the personal is often pretty damn pretty.

So this is how it went:

In the orient’s landscape one’s eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at”. (George Orwell, Marrakech)

He was standing in the passageway on the train, gazing out of the window. A tall, skinny boy of about sixteen, I guessed, though it’s always hard to tell here. The northern city was wrapped in grey gloomy clouds. The boy was wearing an orange T-shirt under a blue jeans jacket, stylish khaki colour army trousers and white Nike trainers. He moved from the window in response to a faint hand gesture from his mother who was sitting on the lower berth. The woman (was she his mother?) wore dark colours, a brown shirt of some synthetic fabric, with thin yellow strips, stuck inside long woolen trousers. Her dark hair was solemnly pinned to her skull, her lips meticulously painted. Her son (was he?) sat down beside her. She put her arm around his shoulder, with moist eyes fixed on his long slim face. Her hand gently stroked the long black eyelashes, the straight nose, the glossy hair, the lips – pressed tightly closed as if to prevent a cry from escaping. His arm went around her waist, holding her close, but his eyes were fixed to the floor. I was sitting on the opposite berth, about fifty centimetres from them, and couldn’t take my eyes off them, trying to decipher some oddity that struck me in their behaviour. It was something other than the air of sadness around them both, and took me a few minutes to figure out; they were ignoring me, totally oblivious to my presence. I had grown so accustomed to being the centre of attention, always stared at, laughed at, treated differently, receiving privileges, always being the strange, fascinating and amusing FOREIGNER. Now, suddenly I found myself on the staring side, trying to guess who these people were, where they had come from, where they were going, and why were they so grief-stricken.

The train was filling up. People lifting their luggage to the upper shelves or pushing it under the bunks, shoving each other in an attempt to get to their seats, shouting, joking, smoking. Vendors were carrying delicacies for sale in round bamboo trays over their heads, loudly hawking the goodies. A villager carrying her infant on her back in an embroidered cloth carrier was pushed by the female conductor towards the third class cart. Many people stopped to look at me as they passed by, some greeting me with wide grins, some whispering to their neighbours the news that there is a “lao-wai” on the train. It was the usual hustle-bustle described so colourfully in every guidebook and travel report, the same oriental chaos that I myself had portrayed in letters and diary chapters, finding it ever so exotic. Mother and son – were they mother and son? – were unaware of all around them, weeping silently now, holding hands seemingly unable to look at each other. As I was to discover, they were soon going to part, for how long? And why? My questions weren’t to be answered. I could only speculate.

The boy stood again, slowly releasing his hand from the woman’s grip. A long hug and he was walking towards the door, head lowered, long graceful body shrunken, as if burdened with a heavy load. The woman hurried to the window as the train started north. She stood there, waving, crying. I caught one last glimpse of the boy, planted on the platform in the autumn breeze, craning his neck. The train roared out of Beijing station.

The image of that young man standing on the platform on Beijing station has stayed with me ever since. That day was exactly one year since I had first come to China. I do not say it proudly, but the truth must be confessed: for the first time in this country, I was seeing an individual.

It is tempting to use this boy as a symbol representing everything that China is to me, or representing east-west relations, or the generation gap, or use him to say something post colonial maybe, but I thought, for once, I should just let him be.