The Train

In this unfamiliar country, I boarded a train. The appointment was scheduled for two and a half hours later, and the train was expected to arrive in one and a half hours. This meant I had one hour to take public transportation in the city I had never been to before, to reach the appointment location. According to Google Maps, this should be enough time, but I was afraid of getting lost in that unfamiliar city.

The train’s speed was notably slow, at least compared to the trains in the country that I was familiar with. When I was at the train station earlier, I even smelled a strong diesel scent. I never imagined that trains still ran on diesel in this day and age. It was early morning, and the train wasn’t crowded, so I could sit anywhere. The seat next to me was empty, so I put my backpack there, but I was afraid someone might take it as it contained important documents. I decided to move and sat in the aisle seat, placing my backpack by the window. Glancing around, I noticed a young black man sitting across the aisle from me, wearing headphones and dozing off. I also felt a bit drowsy, but I didn’t dare sleep. I was afraid of missing my stop, and I was still worried about my backpack being stolen. Moreover, I couldn’t relax and fall asleep due to an underlying anxiety. The train’s announcement system called out the next station. I wondered why all those English textbooks and exams I had taken throughout my life never taught me what “calling at” meant. Nevertheless, in this context, what the phrase meant was quite clear. Then came the familiar phrase they repeated at each station, “If you see something that doesn’t look right… See it, say it, sorted.” I wondered if anyone really made that call. If I happened to lose my backpack, maybe I could try calling the number 61016, but given the efficiency here, I would probably still miss my appointment, and that would be troublesome. At least, if I did contact the police, they wouldn’t arrest me, I thought, somewhat humorously.

The young black man next to me seemed to wake up. I saw him take a book out of his bag, and when I glanced over, I noticed it was Nineteen Eight-Four, a book I had read too many times. Memories flooded my mind all of a sudden. I recalled the last time she and I sat at the corner table of a distant Starbucks, I ordered a latte with oat milk, and she got an oat milk latte. After receiving our drinks, I took off my face covering and began explaining the plot of Nineteen Eight-Four to her. She said she had heard about it and had read part of it, but she never finished it because she found the world described in the book too dark, which made her feel oppressed and uncomfortable. As she spoke, I gently ran my fingers through her shoulder-length hair and looked into her eyes. Her eyes weren’t large, and she had single eyelids, not the traditionally defined type of attractive eyes, but I gazed into them, the lively yet serious ones, as if they held the answers to the mysteries of life. That day, after finishing our coffee, she took me to her apartment again. She said she was designing flyers for them and wanted me to take a look. I asked if visitors to her place still needed to register, and she answered, “That’s fine; you’ve been there so many times, why worry about that?” I thought she had a point. After we reached her tiny but neat room, she turned on her computer, only for me to discover that the so-called flyers were actually blank. She said it was her design, and asked me if that was clever. I recalled an old joke [1] and couldn’t help but chuckle. She suddenly hugged me, but it didn’t really catch me off guard. She had a fragrance, a scent that I could recognize but couldn’t describe; her physical presence pressed against mine, tangible and real. While hugging her, I whispered in her ear, “I didn’t bring a condom today.” She chuckled upon hearing it, not saying anything, just holding me tighter. After she stopped laughing, she fell silent for a moment and then burst into tears. I patted her back gently, whispering, “It’s okay, it’s okay, we’ll be fine…” But deep down, both of us knew that we might not be fine. We stayed like that, hugging each other, until her computer went into sleep mode, showing a large calendar with numbers that cruelly reminded me that we only had two days left. I closed my eyes, trying to push away those thoughts, but I couldn’t. Then, she muttered something, which I didn’t hear clearly. When I asked her what she said, she hesitated for a moment and replied, “Never mind, it doesn’t matter if there’s no condom…”

The train suddenly came to a stop. The announcement explained that it was a temporary stop, and the train was expected to be delayed by twenty minutes. I checked my watch and calculated that I would have forty minutes left to navigate the unfamiliar city. I remembered my struggle earlier at the train station, trying to figure out how to go through the ticket gate and watching others do it to follow suit. If the city’s tram system was a bit complex, I would likely be lost again, and I couldn’t afford to waste time. It seemed easier to take a taxi in this situation, but I didn’t know how to call one in this country. I decided to message my friend P and ask for help. I subconsciously opened WeChat, only to remember that I couldn’t use that account anymore. I quickly switched to Telegram, where I had only a few contacts, including my friend P. He replied promptly, suggesting I install Uber. I followed his advice and tried to link my credit card, but kept getting verification failure messages. I started feeling uneasy, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility of it being an issue with Uber. I sent P a screenshot of the problem. P replied that my bank account was probably frozen. Ah, just as I suspected! I cursed silently. P asked if I had a local bank card, and I said yes, but a recent transaction was still being processed in Hong Kong, so there wasn’t much money in the account. Generously, he sent me his bank card information, telling me to use it temporarily. I thanked him, feeling frustrated that I had underestimated their tactics and should have transferred all my assets earlier. But after calming down, I realized that the Hong Kong transaction, if arriving on time, would still be enough to sustain me for some time until I found a job here - of course, under the condition that I didn’t miss this appointment.

The train slowly started moving again. I checked my watch; considering the twenty-minute delay, I still had forty minutes to reach my destination. I saw the young black man next to me still reading Nineteen Eight-Four. “He loved Big Brother.” That’s how the book ended. However, in our story, I would never love Big Brother. I wanted to believe she wouldn’t either, but if she didn’t, how would she survive the next few years? They would force her to love Big Brother; that’s something they would definitely do. But she chose this path herself, and maybe she had already prepared herself for the worst? About two months before our last meeting at Starbucks, in her small apartment, she was half-sitting on her bed while I was sitting on the edge. It was the first time she mentioned her friends’ plan. She spoke hesitantly, as if afraid I would disagree with, scold, or even report her. She said, “I trust you completely, that’s why I’m telling you.” I was excited to hear this and immediately expressed my desire to join them. But she remained calm and didn’t immediately agree to let me join. After a moment of silence, I asked, “What’s your plan for after everything?” She closed her eyes and said, “I don’t know… But maybe nothing will happen in the end? After all…” She turned her head to look at me and then glanced at a corner of the bookshelf where a thin, red-covered constitution was placed. I knew what she meant. “I know,” I said, “but you don’t really believe those words mean anything, do you?” She gently moved her head, the movement so subtle that I couldn’t tell if it was a nod or a shake. I turned to her, reaching out to hug her, and whispered softly, “It’s still early, let’s go get our passports shortly after. I have a friend who can…” But I didn’t expect her to seem offended by my suggestion. Before I could finish, she pushed my hand away firmly, saying, “No, you go by yourself. I will be fine.” I hence stopped saying anything…

The ticket inspector approached, and I didn’t know what to do, so I just handed him the orange ticket from my pocket. Fortunately, it was the right thing. He smiled, circling something on the ticket with a pen, and thanked me before leaving. The mix of anxiety and relief, but a version intensified by hundreds of times, had just overwhelmed me not too long ago. That was about a month ago at the almost empty airport, I was holding my brand new passport with a fresh visa attached. Facing the immigration officer dressed in white uniform, I told him the words that I had rehearsed for over a dozen times, saying I was on a business trip to negotiate deals. He carefully examined the start and end dates on the visa and asked me to provide my invitation letter and related documents for the business trip. Those documents were prepared by my friend P, and I took the bound files out of my bag and handed them to him. He quickly went through them and then extended his hand—this moment was so intense that my breath almost suffocated, my heart ceased to beat and my body collapsed onto the ground, as I almost believed that he would press a secret button on the table, triggering an alarm that would summon armed guards from all directions, ordering me to raise my hands above my head. But none of that happened. He reached out his hand just to adjust the camera. He asked me to take a photo, and that three-word phrase felt like a miracle, declaring my incredible stroke of luck. I stared intently at the center of the camera’s lens. For a moment, I thought of her eyes, those lively yet serious eyes that were so fresh in my memory but that I would be unable to see for a long time, and the answers to the mysteries of life that they held might be lost forever. I was so lost in thought that I didn’t even notice that the transparent plastic gate was already open, a moment that I longed for. “You’re free to go,” the immigration officer urged. I hurriedly put away my passport and all the documents, striding out of the border of the country I had left behind, the country where I had left too much, too much that I couldn’t take with me. I knew I wasn’t safe yet. I knew they hadn’t discovered my identity, but that was only a matter of time. As the plane took off, I kept my eyes fixed on the flight path displayed on the seatback screen, only feeling relieved when the soaring plane crossed the border over the vast desert. At that moment, a place on the map reminded me of the vice-chairman who had risked everything to cross the border by plane. [2] His remains were forever left in a place he never could have imagined, and a bizarre sense of sympathy surged within me.

My phone’s screen suddenly lit up. “Breaking news,” a message from BBC popped up. I glanced at it lightly and almost choked. Her beautiful name, transliterated and labeled as a “dissident” of that country, constituted the subject of the news. The verb was “sentenced,” but I couldn’t see the rest of the content because my phone’s screen was too narrow, with only an ellipsis obscuring it. Trembling, I tapped on the news, but at that moment, the train suddenly entered a dark tunnel, which deprived me of my network connection, and the content couldn’t be loaded. I felt an overwhelming sense of anxiety, almost wanting to curse aloud. Just then, the train’s announcement said that the next station was about to arrive. I thought I should check the documents in my bag again: my passport, birth certificate, the residence certificate prepared by my friend P, oh, and of course, the wanted notice and its English translation. I rearranged my backpack and closed the zipper. Closing my eyes, I thought of the countless possibilities of us. Perhaps one of the not-so-bad ones would be that, after several years, I would still accompany her on the same train, call the same Uber, and go to the same visa center. By then, maybe she could apply for a spouse visa. Of course, all of this depended on my not missing this appointment, and more importantly, it depended on her survival, her true survival. I didn’t know if she could survive, or rather, if they would allow her to survive. I didn’t even know if I could successfully call an Uber in a moment or if the city would be congested. I sighed; at this moment, my closed eyes felt a glimmer of light. Opening my eyes, I found the train had left the tunnel and was slowing down. I held my phone in my hand, picked up my backpack, and quickly walked toward the train doors.

(Originally written in Chinese; English translation based on ChatGPT results.)

Footnotes

[1] “A Soviet political joke describes a disgruntled man holding up a white piece of paper in the street in protest and, when asked why, the protester replies that everyone knows what the paper is supposed to say.” See blank piece of paper on Wikipedia.

[2] See the death of Lin Biao on Wikipedia.