RUNAWAY TRAIN

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

(published in Hong Kong Economic Journal, December 4, 2011)

Wow, just in time! No sooner did the whistle blow than we made a break for it, leaping aboard the train as it creaked into motion. Still panting from the last minute dash across the platform, we were escorted to our assigned seats in the hard berth carriage. We watched platform slowly recede, far too slowly, for we had been detected and the person in pursuit of us was now just outside the window of our compartment, shouting and gesticulating wildly. 



This unusual send-off did not go unnoticed by our fellow travelers.



Had it not been for the angry scowl of our pursuer and his incantatory use of the word “nakwaning” which was the local term for white foreigners, he might have been mistaken for an excitable driver or tour conductor seeing us off, bursting with misplaced emotion, waving an awkward goodbye.



“Pengyou?” queried the stranger in the adjacent seat. The wiry middle-aged man’s wry smile suggested he had already surmised otherwise.



Feeling exposed, I explained in the best, blustery Chinese I could muster that the red-faced man cutting the air with his hands, still heaping verbal abuse upon us foreigners in Shanghai dialect for all to hear, was no friend of ours, in fact we hardly knew him. 



But we knew he didn’t want us on the train; the last we saw, he was conferring with a uniformed officer as the platform slipped out of view.



Sitting in a close huddle with my travel companions, fellow American students at East China Normal University, I felt safe at last. We compared impressions of our close escape in excited terms, exchanging quiet high-fives. After being pent up on campus and denied permission to travel, just being on a train in motion was exhilarating enough, to think we were racing out of Shanghai en route to the distant ancient capital of Xian was liberation itself. 



The adrenaline rush sustained us as the brown-grey hues of the exhaust-choked cityscape gradually gave way to misty vistas of ricefields, bamboo groves and fog-wrapped hills. 



We had boarded the long overnight train at the last minute, not because we slept late, or got the time wrong, or got stuck in traffic or failed to book a taxi in advance, --in fact I had left campus a day early and over-nighted elsewhere in Shanghai, instructing my travel companions to reassemble at the crack of dawn at a busy downtown location-- but because we had been expressly denied permission to travel to Xian.



The stop order was issued by a low-level barbarian handler--in our eyes a snoop and a meddler-- although he had a slightly more dignified title as an official in the foreign office at the university. 



That it was his job to mind our business we didn’t mind as much as the fact that he was continually trying to profit from our vulnerability to a bureaucratic thicket erected to keep people in place. One had to ask for permission to do things that didn’t require permission back home and if we didn’t resent it, we were in any case slow to adjust. Whether it was to book a taxi, buy train tickets, and reserve a hotel room, or even change money, we had to leave a long paper trail. The snoop was the go-to-guy for stamps, permits and official forms and much akin to petty officials since time immemorial, the small stakes of the gates he kept watch on encouraged him to extract the maximum in concessions from those who needed help most.



I hadn’t yet mastered the art of greasing palms or gift-giving, nor was I inclined to, but if you got on the wrong side of the unspoken quid pro quo, which was not difficult, you could find yourself a virtual prisoner on campus. Permission denied. 

If the temptation to extract monetary benefit for trumped up paperwork is universal, there was still something peculiar about the controls placed on my group, as China’s vast social control network itself was modernizing, if not crumbling away. 



We were caught in the vestige of an increasingly anachronistic system of control that had, since the latter years of the Cultural Revolution at least, permeated an entire nation, leaving a billion people in its thrall. 



The leafy tranquil campus, formerly known as Saint John’s, was full of simmering memories that were not openly talked about but not forgotten either. Rightists and leftists, (our own personalized tormentor was said to be the latter) had gone at each other’s throats during the shifting fortunes and violent reversals of political struggle in the past few decades, only to find themselves still cooped up in the same work units, side by side with their former political foes. We heard from some teachers and students that our particular handler was a confirmed xenophobe who was still feared for the fearsome punishments he had meted out on others when the Gang of Four ruled Shanghai with a vengeance.



Neophyte that I was to the turbulent currents of a broken political system in transition, my ignorance bolstered a fearlessness that local friends could envy but not easily emulate. Day after day I courted trouble and pushed boundaries, diving into muddy shoals, navigating murky terrain with aplomb. I ignored rules I didn’t like and quickly learned not to ask permission to do things where permission was unlikely to be granted. Give ‘em face so they stay out of your face, was more or less the wisdom of the day, and if it sometimes took extraordinary measures to minimize contact with those who were assigned to control us, it was worth it just to feel free.



My bicycle was called Flying Pigeon but it should have been The Liberator. The beauty of getting around on wheels under one’s own power was the ability to slip through the net of control on campus, and elsewhere, just by being in motion. The streets were jammed with cyclists in those days, so it wasn’t so much the velocity of travel as the anonymity of it. Thousands of fellow cyclists might look and stare as curiosity demanded, and look they did, but on wheels one was left unperturbed in personal terms. 



In contrast, to book a taxi not only required planning in advance, usually a half a day or more, but involved paperwork explaining where to and where from, along with name, address, ID, and, in the case of foreign passport holders, FEC funny money scrip for payment.



To travel in the provinces was even more complicated. 1983 was still in the days when the only really easy way to travel was to book a tour with China Travel Service, but being students on a Chinese campus meant we were effectively part of a danwei, or work unit, and any travel was supposed to be approved by the unit. Our assigned handler stated bluntly that our only choice was to book a tour, through him, a privilege for which we would have to pay a hefty fee, along with all of his expenses, in order that he might accompany us each step along the way. He would decide where we could and couldn’t go --for some reason Xian didn’t interest him—and more off-putting, who we could and couldn’t see. 



If the man had been reasonably friendly, like the teachers and foreign dorm staff and foreign dining hall staff, and some of the drivers, we might have gone along; after all a knowledgeable tour guide can open doors and present new vistas, but this particular handler seemed bent on doing the opposite: running interference, hemming us in and slamming doors shut.



Being watched and thwarted was one thing. To have to pay the expenses, in foreigner-only scrip no less, of the person thwarting us was just too rich. So four of us got together and conspired to go to Xian on our own. 



Iron wheels pounding iron rails, the train carriage rocking with hypnotic rhythm, we raced westwards. Hair blowing in the damp breeze, sweat long-since dried in the open-aired train, we reviewed our good fortune. We had stuck to plan and our timing had been crisp, and yet we almost didn’t make it. It was disconcerting to hear from the others that my dorm room had been searched the night before, but it didn’t surprise me, there was no guarantee of privacy anywhere. 



We had taken care not to use phones or taxis. As for scoring train tickets, which required paperwork and passports, I turned to the black market through a trusted connection. So how did the university foreign office know we would be at the station trying to catch that particular train? 



The weak link, we surmised, piecing together the known facts as our ride sped into the setting sun, was that one member of our group had bragged that we were leaving town, and somehow word had gotten out.



Living under surveillance, living with surveillance was not an entirely negative thing; presumably it reduced crime, but more to the point for us, all first-time foreigners, it was more or less an expected part of the China experience. For those who got a kick out of being in China precisely because it was different, and in many ways certifiably weird, to completely elude, or remain unaware of, the demi-monde of spies and informers would, in some paradoxical way be a disappointment. We alternately worried about it and laughed about it, and, for the moment, we were laughing.



If being watched was a way of life, it was the little interventions that rankled, things like having to show ID, field intrusive questions, or being denied access on account of skin color. We got all tangled up trying to untangle provisional currency rules –foreigners needed to show an ID card for the privilege of spending the oily, sweat-stained RMB. On the other hand, dispensing Foreign Exchange Certificates, the funny money that was colored on one side, crisp and relatively uncirculated, was like wearing a sign that screamed, “Charge me more, I’m a tourist!” 



Not having “liang piao” meant being denied a serving of noodles, even with the right money in hand, while not having a travel permit meant no traveling.



But it was the way these petty rules served as barriers to people to people contact that annoyed me most of all. I wanted to meet and mix with ordinary people in a system custom-designed to keep me apart, albeit in relative comfort. The problem of traveling with a handler was the not-so-petty way that an official could intimidate, silence or otherwise pose a threat to any friends or friendly individuals one happened to meet up with along the way. 



The ticket-checkers came back to re-check our tickets for no apparent reason, but soon we are served tea, hot water actually, by a pert young water bearer. She unplugged the cork and cloth plugged thermos and started filling the cups of thirsty passengers. When one thirsts, even water is a welcome treat. 



Enamel-coated metal cup extracted from my traveling bag, I accept a cupful of “poor man’s tea.” Uncertain nods and curious glances from our neighbors in the crowded “economy” class carriage gave way to bits of conversation and friendly gestures. I am offered a pinch of crumbled tealeaf to enrich the hot water, and a parcel of plain greasy cookies made the rounds. Our immediate neighbors, who carried the most paltry of overnight bags, hardly big enough for a book and a toothbrush, were not traveling light. Their seating area was blocked with by several large cardboard boxes.

The woman sitting nearest the boxes demonstrated that a used jam jar could be a perfectly good container for tea, as it had the added advantage of a spill-proof cap, while her male companion offered me a smoke, going so far as to pre-light “my” cigarette, which I had the ingratitude to refuse. 



The air could have been fresher, but there was much to savor. Sipping fragrant tea –it might as well have been champagne given the bubbly sensation of growing solidarity with our neighbors— we were at last on our own, having outfoxed the fox in his own lair. 



Our narrow escape from Shanghai had not gone unobserved by other people in the carriage. What a comic scene it was, what with our pursuer, sputtering and flailing frantically, ordering us to disembark!



Soon we were chatting with what seemed to be one big happy family. They too were going to Xian, but not to see the terracotta warriors. They were transporting television sets, purchased in Shanghai, for resale in the provincial capital. The ringleader, and the woman I took to be his wife, regaled me in conversation for much of the journey; as a much-monitored foreign student living in a foreign dorm, dining in the foreign students cafeteria and otherwise coddled in a guarded university environment, it was fun to be talking with “ordinary” people who made up in street smarts what they might have lacked in bookish wisdom.



My three fellow American traveling companions, all New Yorkers, congratulated me for the street smarts I had shown in getting us to the train on time despite the hot pursuit. Part of the feint required me spending the night before off campus, as I was the one being watched, at the home of a local friend –technically illegal but I prudently neglected to ask for permission. The other three got to the station in a Peace Hotel taxi and met me near the swarming entrance at the pre-arranged time.



Between the pulsating rumble of the train and the genial tone of conversation, almost entirely conducted in Chinese, it occurred to me that I had finally arrived in China. As we sped into the sunset, en route to a glorious ancient capital, we were poised to escape drab communist conformity and social confines of Shanghai and to enter the real China, the eternal China.



My actual first day had come two months earlier, and my first impression upon deplaning at Hong Qiao airport was the questionable quality of the air; hot, humid and redolent of a latrine. The streets into town were fitfully lit at best, and under the few lights there were crowds seemed to mull, some people reading, others talking, others doing nothing in particular. 



Upon reaching the university gate we were greeted by a tall Mao statue, but most of the campus was so dark that flashlights were needed to navigate. 



The dorm was a three-story brick building, a designated residence for foreigners. Before the current wave of Japanese and American students had filled the rosters, the building had been home to students from places like Vietnam and Albania. 



Perhaps it was the blanket of darkness that was thrown over campus that makes me even now remember that first night primarily in aural terms. After dropping my bags off, I took a short walk on an unlit tree-lined path made all the darker by the overhanging canopy of leaves. I got the feeling I was being followed and slowed down, until I could make out what the whispery voices behind me were saying. It wasn’t a variation of “nakwaning” which I had already heard a hundred times since arrival, but rather something else, in clearly enunciated standard speech.


“I wonder if he understands what we are saying…”“Ting dong ting bu dong?”

I turned around and saw the silhouetted outline of two women, both dressed in light cotton shirts and slacks, hair braided in long pigtails as was the fashion of the day.



“Ting dong.” I answered, the first words of a fine friendship with Jing, a student from Fuzhou. Jing, who carried a flashlight, lit the way and we ambled around campus, her girlfriend effectively playing chaperone. We did one circuit of campus, long enough to know we wanted to meet again, but how to get in touch? Phones were few and far between, and even if not bugged, you had to speak in the presence of the person who manned the public phone, which ruled out any privacy. It would raise too many eyebrows to call for someone at their dorm, especially if there was the appearance, or potential of, a cross-cultural romance. So we settled to meet again at a noodle shop near campus, with plans to take a walk in Changfeng Park afterwards, chaperone included.



Back in the dorm I was unexpectedly greeted with a hauntingly familiar guitar lick by Keith Richards. In a weird Proustian twist, “Gimme Shelter” reminds me of arriving in China, even to this day. As it turned out, my immediate neighbor in the third floor of the foreign student dorm was the proud owner of a boom box cassette player. Later that night I met some of my Japanese neighbors and we struggled to communicate in a musical mix of Chinese, Japanese and English. Up early with jetlag the next morning, I was hit with another kind of aural inspiration --the Chinese national anthem-- followed by bouncy martial tunes that accompanied early morning calisthenics on the sports field next to the dorm. Foreign students were exempt from having to attend but not excused from having to hear the open-air broadcast of music and pronouncements used to whip the Chinese student body into shape.

In the days that followed I spent more time off campus than on, touring the Huangpu River with Jing and her coterie of friends, and exploring the not so clean, not so pretty back alleys of the sprawling industrial city on bicycle. But where I really got a feel for the place, and became imbued with a sense of both its former glory and the stifled, muffled cosmopolitanism of the present day, was as a visitor to the homes of relatives of Chinese Americans. I was especially moved by the vicissitudes of fate and fortune in the life of the Pei family that had once lived in a magnificent mansion on South Huangpi Road. The multistoried wood mansion, a veritable Hongloumeng residence with a garden built in imitation of Shizilin, the Pei family garden in Suzhou, was large enough to be converted into a high school after the revolution, while the attached garden was converted to a basketball court. The matriarch of the Pei family, pride subdued but proud nonetheless, still lived there, sharing a few ramshackle rooms of what was once the servant’s quarters with two of her daughters and their families. 



In a way, it was their example, their perseverance, their philosophical broad-mindedness and their basic decency that taught me what Shanghai once was and could again be. Their example allowed me to see the hardliners and Cultural Revolution stalwarts, like my nemesis in the foreign student office, as isolated xenophobes unrepresentative of the whole. 

It doubled my determination not to let a petty official get between me and China, not if I could help it. The very fact that permission was denied to go to Xian made me want to go all the more.

I didn’t know anyone in Xian, but having traveled wide and far in my college years, including most of Southeast Asia, West Africa and the length and breadth of India, I was confident we could manage on our own. There would be predictable problems with finding shelter, and the dual currency system, which effectively restricted us to the over-priced hotels-and-restaurants-for-foreigners circuit, but this problem was surmountable as there was a brisk black market trade in FEC currency and presumably some inn-keepers and merchants who would take money of any color. In fact, Chinese entrepreneurs loved the Monopoly money as much as we hated it, so there was potential for some deal-making.



I already had a thick pocketful of RMB, acquired from Shanghai friends, and even a collection of small plastic coupons that were used to disburse personal quotas in grain and other controlled essentials of daily life. Even lowly noodle shops demanded the chits, and given our glaring lack of a “jiedai danwei” or official host in Xian, I expected we would be eating a lot of noodles.

The night was long, but none of us had slept more than a few hours. Even in our dawn-induced drowsiness, though, there was a rising elation as we reached the outskirts of Xian. We were on the verge of reaching our destination, courtesy of the train that had spirited us out of Shanghai.



I exchanged contact information with our newfound friends, and bid them well. We gathered our luggage and stepped into the pale light of the platform of Xian Station, anxious to explore the city. We felt free, almost giddy upon arrival.



Thus it came as something of a shock to be arrested in front of our newfound friends and everyone else.



After spending a day and night on wheels, fully caught up in the romance of rail travel, rolling through empty station in towns one had never heard of, hearing intimate tales from strangers one might never see again, stirred by the wail of trains passing in the night, freed not only from the constraints and habitual restraints of life on campus, but seemingly freed from political constraints of China itself, it was a real downer to be taken into custody.



Thinking I knew how things worked, I had instead been lulled into a trap. Given the hubris of incomplete understanding, I simply didn’t see it coming. 



All the while we raced towards Xian at high speed, sleeping fitfully on our hard but cozy berths, air whipping around from all the opened windows, a team of railway police were preparing to arrest and interrogate us, having been telegraphed by their counterparts in Shanghai. The train system, far from being free, was a bottleneck for social control. We might have been away from our unit and way in between cities, but we were never not under observation. Anywhere the train rolled, the social controls rolled with it. We were effectively prisoners of a “danwei” on wheels, never far from watch of the railway police.



We were asked to hand over our passports and then led to the train station’s security office. The first bit of bad news that I could decipher was that we had been refused permission to enter the city of Xian. As we sat and sweat and worried, uncomfortable at being held against our will, we were told we would be sent back to Shanghai to face the law there. 



I handled the negotiations, feeling far less fluent than I had just hours before, while my companions seemed far less impressed with my supposed street smarts and penchant for outsmarting the authorities. 

The joy of escape and the wonder of travel was replaced with sinking dread and fear of confinement. Someone had ratted on us and it was not hard to figure out who. The man with the scowl on his face had taken away our smiles and put the scowl on us. In places I had been before this, like Thailand, smiling was so common as to be contagious. Here the opposite was true. We were learning what it was like to go native in a land of unhappy campers.



After about two hours of petty interrogation and fruitless negotiations, my sleep-deprived companions were pale-faced and haggard, incapable of smiling. No matter how we tried to spin it, there was no hiding the well-established fact that we had boarded an intercity train without proper reservations, travel permits or a minder. Worse yet, we were wanted for some unspecified violations according to a responsible person back in Shanghai.



In desperation, thinking in terms Americans are accustomed to thinking in, I asked if I could make a phone call. The idea was to get someone, anyone on the phone and ask for advice on what to do.



The answer was no, but I extracted a few business cards from my wallet anyway under the eagled-eyed scrutiny of the man guarding me. He scrunched his eyes, and methodically read out loud the name on one of the cards, and then asked what I was doing with the card of such a well-known person. I explained that I had met a certain Mr. Wang Bingnan (王炳南) through the Chinese Peoples Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries because I knew his son in New York.



Wang Bingnan was not just a well known Beijing-based official, but was something of a hometown hero in Xian, a celebrated veteran of the war against Japan and a supporter of the revolution. He had studied in Japan and later served abroad as a diplomat, an internationalist at heart. 



Soon my would-be jailer and his fellow officers were examining the bilingual card, turning it over and over, as if it had more than two sides. At first I regretted letting them see it, as it apparently upped the stakes. I had foolishly upgraded our case from that of petty train station politics, to some sort of scheme at the national level as well. 



The security men decided to check the veracity of my story --and my right to possess the business card in question-- by making a long distance call to the office of Wang Bingnan in Beijing. And that’s when our sinking fortune flipped and things turned out for the better.

Not only did Mr. Wang vouch for me, but as Chairman of the Association for Friendship he was sorry to hear there had been an unfriendly “misunderstanding.” He instructed one of his subordinates based in Xian to drive to the train station posthaste to vouch for us and escort us from the station to a hotel. Within an hour we bid farewell to men who had detained us, no hard feelings, and hopped into a chauffeur-driven car which took us to the Bell Tower Hotel where we were enjoined to stay free of charge, courtesy of the Friendship Association. Having access to an official car over the next few days greatly expedited our excursions to the Terracotta Warriors, the Forest of Steles and the big and small Wild Goose Pagodas. Onward travel to Beijing was booked by the book and we left Xian feeling very free indeed, though of course we had just stumbled into a more tolerant and supportive network of control and were never really on our own.



I later learned that the pals we made on the train were smugglers, or viewed as such, and that nearly every move I had made in Shanghai on the eve departure for Xian had been recorded and observed. My local friends had been questioned, not so much a matter about the kerfuffle with the foreign office at the university, but as to ascertain how I got the black market tickets and more ominously, about what relations I had, or might have had, with the convicted smugglers.



“Your file is already an inch thick,” a confidant with police connections in Shanghai told me a year later. “Be mindful of what you are doing.”



For the better part of the 1980’s I traveled the length and breadth of China as a tour-guide, cruise director and informal interpreter. I continued to take umbrage at social controls, and my confrontations with those whose job it was to police me, while never serious, continued apace.



The main problem was my stubborn insistence on doing little things incompatible with my racial status and nationality. I got arrested for walking in a park at night with a woman during the crackdown on “Spiritual Pollution.” I missed curfew at my dorm and neglected to sign in and declare any visitors. I got in trouble during the campaign against Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization. Working with foreign news teams, I got in trouble for skirting rules designed to thwart good reporting.

And there was the incident, amusing only in retrospect, when I got detained and held for a day of interrogation, along with Chen Kaige (陳凱歌), Gu Changwei (顧長衛) and three English friends for visiting a film set in Yunnan at a location deemed closed to foreigners. There were similar mishaps and misunderstandings for traveling without travel permits in places like Hainan and Fujian and Tibet. By the time I got involved in the student demonstrations of 1989, and Tiananmen Square was declared off-limits to foreigners and just about everyone else, I was breaking rules by the hour and had acquired a long paper trail. 



Then that trail went cold as I left China for an extended stay in Japan. Even there, I had run-ins with the long arm of Chinese officialdom, mainly regarding my links to the documentaries about Tiananmen and links with dissident community, particularly after I had published some letters in the Asahi Shimbun and Los Angeles Times that Wei Jingsheng (魏京生) had written in prison. 



My paper file, if it still exists, must be thick and doggy-eared indeed, though there’s no saying it’s all in one place and what’s left of it is probably scattered on forgotten shelves here and there. 



Meanwhile, China has modernized greatly, and now computers are the name of the game, allowing officialdom to snoop and meddle on an unprecedented scale, thanks to invasive Internet technologies, search engines and social networks developed by and promoted by my freedom-loving homeland.