Fried Eggs With Chopsticks by Evans Polly

Author:Evans, Polly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld

13

The Sun Doesn’t Rise

IT WAS A week since I’d taken an overnight train and, arriving at the station that evening, I felt little joy at the prospect of the night ahead. I sat on my blue plastic seat in the waiting hall under a dull, dingy fluorescent light. The people looked squalid. I was hardly a vision of high-class refinement myself, but still, I didn’t want to be among them.

When the boarding gate opened, I fought my way through the surging, shoving ruckus. I found my carriage and my berth. A woman sitting by the window stared up at me and then started tapping frenziedly at the window and mouthing eagerly to her friends on the platform.

‘Look, look!’ she seemed to be saying as she pointed in my direction, her face lit up and beaming with excitement. ‘Look what’s in my carriage! A foreigner!’

I scowled at her. She blushed and looked down.

I climbed into my upper bunk and lay down. Really, I reflected, I shouldn’t have shot that poor woman such a homicidal glare. She was just pleased to see me. I ought to have had sufficient self-control to keep my bad mood to myself. This trip round China didn’t seem to be doing much for my tolerance. It was as though the constant battle for survival – the fact that everything, from eating to sleeping to sending a parcel, was difficult for me here – had propelled me into a defensive mood of almost perpetual irritation. I worried how far this descent into grumpiness would take me. After a few weeks of snarls and hissing, to what levels might I then sink? Ineptly executed kung-fu kicks? Samurai swords? Kitchen cleavers?

As if an hour or so of self-reflection weren’t punishment enough, I then couldn’t sleep. Usually on these journeys the combination of the train’s movement with my aeroplane sleeping mask and ear plugs lulled me off almost immediately – but not tonight. The train stopped and started, juddering violently at every station. My fellow passengers snored and snorted creating an extraordinary symphony of rattling, roaring, moaning and groaning. The man in the bunk opposite was doing a good imitation of a slowly expiring farmyard animal.

I lay in the darkness plagued by the disconcerting, unfamiliar chorus that sang out around me. My body began to ache with a desperate weariness but my eyes stayed wide awake. I turned again and again on the hard, narrow pallet, but no position was comfortable. I finally dropped off for an hour or two but had little real rest. Then – boom! – the lights glared, the tannoy blared, and at six-twenty we arrived in Tunxi, the nearest town to the Huang Shan mountains.

I was hustled immediately by a tout into an almost full minibus which left a few minutes later for the mountains. We drove up, up into the hills – and into the clouds that engulfed them. As we rose through the winding bends of this legendary beauty spot, one of the most talked-of scenic landscapes in China, we could suddenly see nothing at all.

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