新疆 Prologue

My dad and I were in Hong Kong this year to visit family and stuff and today we took the "Through Train" from Hung Hom Station to the city of Guangzhou in Mainland China. My dad was born there, and his brother's family lives there now. It's only about a two hour train ride away from HK, but my dad hasn't been back there in six years or something. The trains are pretty clean and comfortable, so it was a pleasant ride.

As we sped along the rails through the changing landscapes, rainclouds came and went. I loved the strange, isolated feeling that came from opening my eyes after dozing off and being greeted by a window almost completely obscured by the raindrops running across it and the steady pitter-patter of the storm outside. Once, we passed through a city in China where they had put up a concrete wall beside the tracks to keep people form trespassing. On the top of the wall they had poured concrete and stuck in glass shards that act like barbed wire to discourage climbers. The sun was out right then, so as the train rolled past I kept staring at the glass, glinting all different colours in a strange dance between ugliness and beauty. I tried to imagine the person who had to make it, wearing thick gloves and carrying a bucket of broken glass collected from who-knows-where, slowly working his way across the wall, sticking the shards in pointiest side up with a pattern he thought most advantageous. Interesting job?

We arrived in Guangzhou in the afternoon. My aunt and uncle and cousins came to pick us up, and on the ride to their apartment I got a taste of China's epic traffic conditions. When turning from the small street onto a main road, this little blue car passes by like an inch away from the back corner of our car. I was sitting right in the back of our minivan so I watched it just slice by horrifically. Of course, there was also another spot where we had to U-turn to get to the other side of a street the size of the 401 with lane dividers down the middle. There were about 6 other cars also trying to do the same thing, in both directions, and right beside there we saw a NO U TURN sign.

My dad pointed out places he still recognized all along the way, but I couldn't recognize anything even though I've been there more often than he has in the last 10 years. It gave me a slightly harrowing feeling of being in a completely foreign and unfriendly place (as my preconceptions of China dictated to my mind), and this was the first day of a rather lonely trip for me.