Originally written: Spring 2010
Clementines have become an object of nostalgia for me. They evoke strong memories of rocking back and forth in a darkened, moving bunk; bent over and cramped so that my chin is nearly resting on my knees; strangers down below and camaraderie with the girl across from me; and the taste of peanuts. Perhaps I should backtrack a ways.
I didn’t just stay in Kaifeng for the entirety of my four months in China. I traveled around with some friends, seeing the sites, visiting the cities people outside of China have actually heard of... in effect, being a tourist, which is a role I’m quite happy to take. When we traveled to cities outside of the province, cities such as Beijing (北京), Shanghai (上海) and Xian (西安), we generally took overnight sleeper trains. You may be familiar with overnight sleeper trains –I’m certain they exist in most corners of the world- but China was the first place I encountered this form of transportation, and it may be some of the details are different than in other countries, so I will describe them here.
Overnight sleeper trains, as the name suggests, generally depart in the evening to nighttime hours, traveling all through the night, to arrive at their destinations early the next morning. In the place of normal seats, passengers spend the trip on individual bunks, where they will hopefully sleep most of the journey to arrive refreshed at their destination in the morning (this has rarely been the case to my experience). The bunks are stacked three on top of each other, six to a ‘cabin’, which has varying degrees of privacy. At the foot of the bunks runs a narrow passing lane, which may have small tables and fold-out chairs mounted to the wall of the train car. It’s not spacious.
My friends and I seemed to have a habit of getting the top bunks on all of our trips, which never made any difference to us but they seemed to be the last ones to fill up. To get to the top bunk, you would either climb up a tiny ladder at the foot of the bunks (which in fact serviced two bunks, yours and your neighbor’s on the other side of a thin wall separating your ‘cabins’); or, in more enclosed cabins, there would be hand- and foot-holds on the inside of the cabin to help you climb up and down (you inevitably used the edges of your lower bunkmates’ beds as well). The space between the top bunk and the ceiling was minimal though, so upon attaining the foot of your bunk you would have to sort of launch yourself in horizontally because you hardly had enough room to crawl (for the lower bunks, it was the bunk above that imposed this limitation). Once upon your bunk, there was absolutely no question of sitting upright, though you could swing your legs out over the side and hunch your body over into a position that resembled sitting. So that’s what we did when our bodies didn’t want to lie down.
On my first overnight sleeper, coming back from Beijing to Kaifeng, a trip I suspect of somewhere between nine and eleven hours but I can never remember, I became miserably feverish and spent some of the most claustrophobic, weakened, temperature fluctuating, motion sick and overall awful nine to eleven hours of my life wondering why this trip wouldn’t end. I ended up being sick with fever for almost a week after that, and though I’m fairly confident it had nothing to do with the train ride itself, I bore a grudge against overnight sleepers for a long time afterwards.
But they were the cheapest, most convenient way to travel, so we kept using them when we had somewhere far away to go. On what was to be my last full weekend in China (I had to leave a week earlier than I had originally planned, due to Visa issues with France), we went to Xian, one of the four (now counted as eight) ancient capitals of China and home to the famous terra-cotta army. My roommate and frequent fellow traveler, Tim Schutt, had fallen ill the day before (the day after he had bought his ticket) and so opted out of the long train ride and the trip. That left me and my other American classmate, Lauren Jones, to make this final trip.
On our previous overnight journeys, we had learned the necessity of bringing snacks—I had a bag of shelled peanuts I had bought the day before on Breakfast Street, and Lauren bought a sack of clementines from a vendor standing outside the train station as a last-minute thought. They were rather small and had already passed into that kind of old and mushy stage on the outside that I would have disdained from eating back home (I was kind of a picky eater before coming to China). But she bought them, getting at least six for something under one American dollar, and we took them on board the train. Once we were situated in our tiny space on the top bunks, same cabin, as per usual, I realized (not for the first time I’m sure) that I really liked being in China, even in its most bizarre, claustrophobic little sleeping cars, and I was going to regret having to leave. As the train started moving with its telltale rock back and forth, Lauren and I were sitting on our bunks across from each other, legs swaying over the side, backs hunched against the ceiling, sharing my bag of peanuts and her clementines across the bunks. Pretty soon –it was already late when we started- the lights in our cabins went off, and we were left in the semi-dark sleeper train heading toward the ancient city of Xian, feasting on our peanuts and clementines. And I believe those mushy old clementines were the best I ever tasted.
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