The Refugees

LONGXI, China - The 16-hour journey wore on the faces of the 150 or so passengers left in Car 16 of the T75 express to Lanzhou.

When the train left Beijing West Station two-thirds of a day earlier, the bright blue car was full of activity, groups furiously peeling and eating sunflower seeds, exchange stories about relatives back home, and generally revelling in the upcoming nine-day vacation. Most of the people in the car are headed home to visit relatives, temporarily leaving their 12 hour a day, marginally paying positions for a little relaxation.

Sitting to my right, occupying seat number 51 was one of those people. Xian Yuan is 26 years-old with a live in girlfriend he met at Xi'an Jiaotong University. He works for an American cell phone company, writing code for the software inside the phone. The work's not bad, but his Chinese bosses constantly set projects that keep him there late in the night.

Xian Yuan likes to move around. He's worked for a year in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu and now Beijing for the same company. "When you're young, it's the time to visit different places," he told me. He wants eventually to head to India or especially Japan next. He asked me several detailed questions about the process -- whether Americans need visas, and how much a beer cost on the streets of Tokyo. I answered the best I could, mostly through second hand information I have gleamed from friends there now. We talked for several hours, probably the longest single conversation I've ever had in Mandarin, and it became clear that we were kindred spirits, bouncing around from place to place in the years just after college.

Meeting people like Xian Yuan is why I love to travel by rail. As I've documented on this blog, I've already spent over a week on the rails so far this year, and it's perfectly possible that I'll double that time before the year is over. I just don't know if I'll be doing any more travel in particular class.

Most Chinese trains have three classes -- soft sleeper, hard sleeper and hard seat. Sleeper cars have beds -- six per cabin in hard, four per cabin in soft. All of my previous overnight trips in Chinese trains have been in hard sleeper. It's a busy place, with people chatting from early in the morning to late at night, bouncing from cabin to cabin to visit friends. Nothing in hard sleeper, though, prepared me for a night in a hard seat. A hard seat cabin in arranged in alternating rows of five seats that face each other -- two on one side of the aisle, three on the other. There are more dividers between the seats, it's more like a slightly padded bench.

All of this might be O.K., but there is actually a fourth class on these trains: standing tickets. These dirt cheap seats get a person into a hard sleeper car, and that's it. If there's open seats, they can take them, but otherwise they are stuffed in between aisles, next to the bathroom, even under the seats, literally anywhere a human might fit. With the holidays approaching, more than a 100 extra people crowded Car 15, meaning about 200 people were crammed in a space the size of four or five minivans.

It was incredibly crowded. I shared my three person bench with Xian Yuan and two other people. Getting to the bathroom at the end of the car took 10 minutes. Reaching the restaurant car -- only possible by crossing four soft sleeper cars -- was next to impossible. I managed to reach it, only to find the kitchen closed and masses of people passed out in and around each table.

The train resembled a moving refugee camp, a horde of humanity crammed into an impossibly small space. As the night turned into early morning, the glazed over eyes and sagging faces of my fellow passengers made it appear that the final destination of this train was the gulag, not a vacation.

At 7 a.m., I bid goodbye to Xian Yuan. We exchanged contact information and made a promise to hit up a bar sometime when his boss let him out before midnight. Stops at Zhengzhou, Xi'an, and Tianshui slowly cleared out the packed cars. By Longxi, I had the entire bench to myself. Getting a few minutes of sleep is now a distinct possibility. And sometime in the not too distant future, I too will be able to get off this train.