A Train ride home, during China’s Great Migration

Words cannot begin to describe how gleeful I am to have spent an entire day traveling by train from Beijing to Hong Kong, four days before the Chinese new year, to partake in the annual homecoming ritual for migrant workers. These few days before the Chinese new year mark the annual period (春运) during which migrant workers in job-rich coastal cities like Beijing bring their bounty home and share their faraway tales. To be sure, my family in Hong Kong hardly needs me to lavish them with largesse from the north, and, most certainly, my faraway tales, already piped a few times a week back to Hong Kong by way of cellular and electronic communications, are hardly so outrageously sodden with juicy bits as to command an in-person delivery.

But the presentation of a bounty and a tale is not the point. This annual period is also when migrant workers would go out of their way to find their way home, despite the all-impossible task of scoring a ticket when millions of other souls would try to do the exact same thing; despite the fact that China’s domestic train system would be stretched way beyond its designed capacity; and despite the fact that a good portion of this migrating population would actually travel without an assigned seat, be left standing in the train car for hours upon hours before legs would buckle and knees yield, only to still manage to drag their carcasses home and then be awakened from the dead by the heroic cheers of their home crowd upon their return. The point: I want to participate and immerse myself in the migration process in order to fully understand what it means to survive the journey and find destination, where, allegedly, pompoms gyrate and firecrackers await for the hero returning from the capital city. A train ticket would buy me an immersive experience that my Dragonair ticket, bought a month ago, never would. Thus, three days before I were to fly back, I canceled my flight and opted instead to take a train -- with a standing room ticket for the most honest, proletarian form of experience -- from Beijing to Shenzhen. From there I would take the MTR home.

On the night of my departure, Beijing’s temperature dropped precipitously from mid single digits to negative teens, yielding a severe condition that was depicted, ever so creatively, as “colder'n a witch's titty” by Kaiser Kuo, a friend in Beijing. Because I came to the train station prepared for a Siberian winter, I was happily surprised to find a train compartment filled with fuzzy warmth upon entry. While this warmth was partially attributable to the train’s adequate heating system, I suspected that the fuzziness was chiefly due to a combination of air-tight insulation and the sheer overcrowding in the train car. The train car in which I stayed, apparently designed for 120 sitting folks and another dozen or so stand-uppers, ended up engulfing, by my count, more than 200 homecoming souls. This insular body heat, together with the corresponding body odor and bad breath, was much of what I had to come to terms with on the way home. The standing room was jam packed with standers and littered with bounty bags. The compressed crowd reminded me of the Hong Kong MTR during the rush hours, but such comparison would end as soon as I reminded myself that I never had to stand in the MTR for 23 hours with neither a bed nor an assigned seat.

As soon as the train started to move, the first order of business, for those with standing room tickets, was to jostle for valuable space. Reclining surfaces for leaning onto, valuable; middle aisles, not. Since I didn’t act quickly enough, the only spot left for me to claim was between a six-foot tall man and a broad-shouldered college student; both, like me, were left standing in the middle aisle, with neither reclining surfaces to lean on nor enough space to fold ourselves in a more restful, genuflecting/squatting position.

The unintended intimacy with my two fellow passengers could have been very awkward had we not attempted to strike up some conversation – after all, parts of our bodies would occasionally touch each other for the ensuing 7 to 8 hours. The tall man has been working in Beijing for the past 7 years, first as a construction worker and now as a HVAC manager at a commercial building in the CBD area. The man, with an acutely chiseled countenance and a robust body frame, was at first terse in his conversation and overly protective of his privacy. But after half an hour or so, he warmed up enough to slowly reveal his usual loquacious self, and started talking incessantly about his work and life in Beijing. He beamed a clear partisan affection for Beijing, and was obviously very proud of what he had achieved while managing about in the capital city. He was excited about going back to his hometown, near Ganzhou (赣州), for the first time since he left for a job opportunity in Beijing, a heavy handling gig in the construction of one of those spaceship-looking buildings in Zhongguancun (中关村). He was also slightly perturbed by his prolonged absence – that he wouldn’t recognize his rapidly developing hometown. A cloud of anxiety also gathered around him as he explained how everyone back home had expectations of him, and how he, the supposedly vagabond shoes-wearing king of the hill Beijinger, would now not only recount his experience in the vast land’s capital but also spread and share the material wealth. That was the focal point of his anxiety: he confessed that while he brought dozens of MP3 players, cell phones and other electronics, he may still not have enough units to go around. More significantly, he may not have bought enough good-quality trappings to satisfy the mushrooming level of expectations. After all, in this age of ferocious advertising and relentless product placements, his folks back home are all too familiar with the iPods and iPhones of the world, and the knockoffs (山寨机) that he could afford and bought, considering the not-so-insignificant quantity needed, were anything but. His honest re-weaving of the social fabric of his more down-to-earth hometown vis-a-vis that of a rapidly cosmopolitan-izing coastal city like Beijing caught my full attention, but apparently didn’t impress the computer engineering college student well enough to keep him from leaving our conversation and submerging into his PSP screen.

Kneeling on the floor next to us was an affable couple, a husband and a wife who were both janitors at a military hospital in Beijing. They told us that they moved to Beijing to work at their current jobs a few years ago after getting recommended by a militarily-connected relative in Jian (吉安), their hometown. While reminiscing their previous journeys on the same train in the years gone by, they were initially perplexed by how this year’s bounty bags were plumper, and the fellow passengers’ wardrobe sharper, despite all indications of a recessing economy and a tougher road ahead, even for these richer coastal workers migrating home for the new year. They professed that, while their jobs were relatively secure, they could observe society’s economic anxiety by how people would spend at the grocery store or at the eateries – that the days of unruly big spending, noted the wife, were gone. Her theory was that these migrant workers had to channel the “all is good” message back home, lest their family back home be disgraced by a returnee not living up to full expectations. Her intuition was grim but, in my view, dead-on.

A few hours later, the sardine-like packing eased up slightly because, as if by osmosis, some folks eventually found less crowded cars to stand in. Some other passengers would arrive and disembark. It was by this time that we had more space to move around, untangle our legs, and either find fresh faces to chat with or just slip away into solitude.

As folks began to acknowledge each other’s presence and acquaint oneself with others, they loosened up not only their guard but their bounty bags too: a few took out fruits, biscuits, breads and noodles to share with fellow passengers, cultivating a season of warmth and good fellowship in an improvised pot-luck feast. The camaraderie of this working class underscored all the goodness of humanity, and presented a welcoming contrast to the foreign media’s oft-Hobbesian portrayal of an unruly Chinese populace…at least that portion of the population practicing ruthless entrepreneurship and those now embroiled in food safety, toy safety and corruption scandals.

After standing on my feet for 18 hours, I finally found myself an empty bench of seats vacated by a group of disembarking passengers. In the subsequent hours, I rolled myself into a deep coma, thoroughly exhausted but amazed by my two legs – a couple of workhorses that never let up and buckle. When the train finally stopped in Shenzhen, I felt renewed and profoundly enriched. The erstwhile day slipped by as if in a blink of a moment. Two hours later, and after a dinner with a friend gracious enough to cross the HK-China border to meet up with me at the Shenzhen train station, I reached home, glad to see my parents and happy to unload my bounty of a thoroughly sumptuous, uniquely relishing experience.