The Train to Lo Wu Read Online Free PDF

It’s in a valley, you know, but
you can never see the mountains, they’re always hidden in the
clouds. You won’t like it there.
    Why not?
    The boys are rough. They’ve hardly been to school at all—they only
work in the fields. They like to fight. And they say dirty things all
the time.
    I’ve been in fights.
    Don’t be ridiculous, she says. You shouldn’t resist them. Just make
friends with the toughest one, the leader. Teach him how to write bad
words. Otherwise they’ll tie a stone around your neck and throw you
in the river.
    The boy curls his arms around his stomach and turns to face
the wall.
    I’m only joking, she says. You take everything so seriously.
    The family in the room above his listens to the television at full volume; the sound echoes in the pipes and rattles the window-panes. In the winter he lies in bed with his headphones on, listening to the radio, but now he opens the window and moves his chair against the wall so that he can lean his head back on the sill and doze to the faint sound of traffic, ten stories below. Coming out of the dream, he hears buses hissing along Nathan Road, delivery trucks creaking on old brakes. Drumbeats from a car stereo. He flattens a hand against his chest and feels his heart reverberate like footsteps in an empty hall.
    You will go mad this way, he thinks.
    Thirty-one years. And you have not yet leaped from the train.
    He lifts his head slightly. A feeling of danger lingers in the distance, a sound barely within range. Old Chen, he thinks, what’s wrong with you? What do you have to be afraid of?
    Last year at this time, he remembers, we went to the flower market, Lao Jiang and his wife and I, each of them holding an elbow. Peonies, orchids, amaryllis. Buffeted by clouds of scent, like a perfume factory. Last year I wasn’t afraid of dreams.
    And what has changed recently in your life, old head?
    The American girl.
    He sits up straight, and then stands, pacing the room, taking deep, angry breaths. It isn’t possible, he thinks, she’s done nothing wrong, she only has a soft heart. But then there are the funny questions she asks sometimes, the talk of interviews. He laces his fingers together and pulls them apart. Isn’t she only a polite girl?
    How could she possibly know?

    Tell me again what is you study, he says to her. He is washing his hands between customers, craning his neck to hear her over the hiss of the faucet.
    Anthropology.
    No, no. Your project.
    Patterns of adjustment over time, she says. The way people who have survived traumatic upheavals adapt to changes in their environment later on.
    Ah.
    Taking the situation now in China as an example. The last ten years: 1988 to 1998. And then the decade before that— beginning with Deng Xiaoping’s election. And then the twelve years before that.
    He feels as if someone has knocked against his chest like a door.
    Cultural Revolution time, he says, reaching for a towel. So long ago.
    For some people it’s as if it were yesterday.
    He dries his hands carefully, rubs his palms together and massages his face; there is a sharp pain between his eyes that will not go away. Here there many protests, he says, remembering what Lao Jiang has told him. Riots. Always police in the streets. I stay inside for many days.
    Hong Kong was lucky, she says. One woman I met in Wuhan was locked in the same room for a year with her three little sisters. One of them died. One jumped out the window. One went crazy. The man that was responsible is now the head of her work unit. Still lives down the street from her.
    Anybody can make a story, he says. How you know who to believe?
    I trust them. And I ask lots of questions.
    He turns and spreads a new towel out on the table, smoothing its wrinkles. Lao Jiang, he thinks, don’t be so shy, come interrupt us. Tell a joke, for once. Talk about the weather. But the shop is quiet and sleepy. A fly drones past his ear.
    Let me give you an example, she says. If you were someone I wanted