Dewey's China Trip: Stories: Return to Beijing

Leaving Yunnan

I'm now returning to Beijing; I've had enough of Yunnan and I miss Xiujuan too much. But I don't want to take a 60-hour train ride directly from Kunming to Beijing, so I'll stop in Hangzhou for a day first and visit my Internet friend there. Hangzhou is a well-known city in Zhejiang province. People tell me it's a very nice city, but I always take what people say with a grain of salt.

The train trip from Kunming to Hangzhou takes 40 hours. I'm getting sick of these long train trips, but this time I meet a group of twenty female geography majors from Shanghai's Huadong Normal University on the train. They are returning from a 16-day field trip in Yunnan. They are pretty fun to hang out with and make my train ride seem much less long and boring.

Hangzhou

I get to Hangzhou at 10:11 in the morning and meet my friend. She takes me to see Hangzhou's famous West Lake, and we eat the nuts from the lotus plants in the lake—an odd food, slightly bitter but tasty. Each nut has a little green baby plant in the center, which is the source of the bitter flavor.

In the evening we go to an amusement park with various dangerous attractions, such as cables and chains of floats on which to cross over a channel of water, the goal being to not fall in and get wet; it's fun and good exercise. I also climb a climbing wall.

Back in my room I wash all my clothes, but for some reason they don't dry very quickly, probably because the weather is so incredibly humid here and because there's no air-conditioning in my room. Thus we take the clothes to the park the next day and hang them up to dry.

Hangzhou has many shops with beautiful items for sale, such as intricate stone and wood carvings. However, prices in Hangzhou are much more expensive than Kunming; the bus costs three times as much, for example. For dinner we eat some interesting new foods, including stinky tofu. This is the first time I've had that. It's basically rotten tofu that's been deep friend. It stinks pretty bad, but actually tastes ok. It really attracts the flies though.

Especially Fast Train

I leave at 9:40 in the evening. I have illegally purchased a student ticket from a professor who bought it for a student and then didn't need it, so the price is discounted. Also, the ticket is for a T train, which stands for tekuai (“especially fast”). The train only reaches speeds of 140 kilometers per hour (87 miles per hour), which is not all that fast, but quite a bit faster than the regular K trains. Thus the trip to Beijing only takes 16 hours. I like the T train, it's nice and clean unlike the K trains. However, the seats are still too uncomfortable to sleep in, so I sleep on the floor on my pad. The girl sitting next to me is quite nice and talks to me in Chinese a bit.

I arrive in Beijing the next day at 1:00 p.m. and say goodbye to the girl and some other friends I've met on the train. Then I go to Xiujuan's university and find a place to stay very close by. Staying in Beijing is extremely expensive relative to all the other places I've traveled in China; the room costs 100 RMB ($12.00 US) per night, and its condition is poor. However, there are many places to eat and an Internet bar nearby. Also, it's only a five-minute walk from Beijing Normal University and Xiujuan.

Applying to Study Chinese

I still havn't gotten in contact with Xiujuan yet, but I decide I will apply to Beijing Normal University in order to study Chinese here next year after I graduate from University of Washington. I start to ask around to find out where I should go to apply, which is a troublesome process. Finally a cute little girl helps me out (I say little because physically she is, but she's actually a graduate student and a few days older than I am). Her name is Zhang Erling. She helps me obtain an application and all the necessary information and also takes me out for lunch. She's very friendly, and I make plans to meet with her again to help her practice English, which she has only been studying for one year.

Zhang Erling helps me learn some new Chinese words and characters. She teaches me rigui, the word for “sundial”, for example.

I take care of some business regarding my application to Beijing Normal University. It is now evening and dark. I send Xiujuan a text message telling her that I am in Beijing and wanting to see her. She sends me a message saying she is in her dorm. I reply saying I'll come to meet her.

The Sundial

I don't remember where Xiujuan's dorm is. They all look alike to me. I go to a romantic spot on campus where there's a sundial and grass and trees, and send her a message telling her I can't find her dorm and that I am at the sundial waiting for her. But completely unexpectedly, Xiujuan replies with a message saying that she doesn't understand that character, the gui in rigui. Sure, it's a weird, uncommon character, but I am really surprised that a senior student majoring in Chinese Literature wouldn't know it. So I send her a message explaining it to her; anyway, I figure she probably knows the character but just assumes there is no way I could know it, and thus thinks I'm making an error. A few minutes later she sneaks up behind me. I am so happy to see her that it's like I am dreaming. She is even cuter than I'd remembered.

I grab her hand and we sit down on a bench and talk for a long time, telling each other our adventures. I am really curious to know what she'd thought of her trip to Shanghai. I am sure she will say she didn't like it; such a big, crowded, noisy city like New York—not her kind of place. Sure enough, she has lots of bad things to say about it.

I hold her hand and we walk for a long time talking. She brings up all these various reasons that we shouldn't be together. I have great answers for all of them, but it seems she still isn't satisfied. Eventually we come to her dorm and she is going to say goodbye. I tell her I won't let her go unless she promises to see me again tomorrow. She won't promise, so I lead her away from the dorm. We sit down in a grassy spot and talk some more.

A Romantic Thunder Storm

Lightning is flashing all over the sky and thunder is booming. “It's going to rain,” she says. “No it won't,” I say. It pours down rain and we're both drenched within a few minutes. But we don't move or try to protect ourselves from the onslaught. Instead we cuddle up, her on my lap, and we sit there in the downpour getting soaked like idiots.

Xiujuan wants to return to her dorm, so we get up to go. The ground is all wet and muddy so I pick her up and carry her on my back so she doesn't have to step in the mud. But I end up carrying her away from her dorm, towards the place I'm staying—and she doesn't seem to mind. I carry her for half an hour, all the way to my hotel, practically dying of exhaustion in the process. Then I give her some dry clothes—shorts and a T-shirt—for her to change into. I give her the little Tibetan vase, and a pretty rock I found in Middle Tiger Leap Gorge.

We try to go to sleep, but instead we end up kissing most of the night. Then we finally sleep for a few hours, but not very well because the bed is too small for two. In the morning we are still both tired, but we have to wake up. She won't let me kiss her, won't let me touch her, won't talk to me. I hold her hand and lead her back to her dorm, then sadly say goodbye.

Dinner at Minqi's

In the afternoon I call Minqi's family and tell them I am back in Beijing. Minqi's Mom doesn't understand my Chinese, so I try English—but she doesn't understand my English well either. In the end though, she invites me over to dinner. My motive for wanting to visit is that Xiujuan, their Chinese tutor, is there.

A few hours later I arrive at the familiar Xiaoyunlu apartment. It is great to eat Korean food again. They tell me that they have taken a trip to Yunnan as well. They have brought back a beautiful stone vase made of Dali marble, supposedly the highest quality marble in the world. I should have gotten one while I was there in Dali!

Heartbroken

I ride the bus home with Xiujuan, but she is pretty cold to me after I try to hold her hand. She explains that her mother won't allow her to have a boyfriend. She says that when the time comes for her to get married, her mother will choose a man for her, and she will have to accept whatever man her mom chooses, and force herself to love him. I say I could talk to her mom and ask to let me date her, but this is impossible. Her Mom doesn't understand Mandarin Chinese, only the local language used in Zhejiang. So I say I could write a letter to her mother, but she says this is also impossible; her mother can't read.

Thus I am totally heartbroken and there seems to be nothing I can do to persuade Xiujuan to be with me. She doesn't want to see me again. It's even worse than before, now that I've seen her again and spent such a nice night with her. I thought for sure I had finally succeeded in getting her to return my love, and now this.

Dewey's China Trip: Stories: Return to Beijing

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