Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

It had been my dream in 1973 to go north on the train and onward to China. But the upheavals! The Vietnam War was only one. In China, the Cultural Revolution had convulsed every part of the country. Travel to these places was impossible. So I had flown from Saigon to Tokyo, where I resumed my Railway Bazaar.

But countries open and close. Time passed. The Vietnam War ended. And soon after Mao died, in 1976, the Cultural Revolution was over. China opened to curious travelers around 1980, the year I sailed down the Yangtze. The U.S. trade embargo, lifted in 1994, was the beginning of Vietnam's economic progress. All the borders were open now.

I got a China visa. I bought a ticket on the overnight train to Lao Cai, the northernmost station on the line from Hanoi, on the Chinese border. This was a simple trip. I left Hanoi at around ten on another night train. Besides the Vietnamese, there were a few backpackers and tourists headed to Sapa, a resort town in the hills above Lao Cai, where tribal people lived—Black Hmong and Red Zao and Tay people.

In a noodle shop in Lao Cai the next morning, eating my usual breakfast—a pile of fried rice with an egg on top—a passing motorcyclist asked me if I wanted a ride to the border. I said yes, he put my bag on his lap, and he rode me through town to a building and an archway on the bank of the Red River. I walked through, got my passport stamped, and kept walking through another archway, into China.

The frenzy of China was immediate, even in the early morning, in the border town of Hekou. All the trade was going south, over the bridge; the streets were thick with trucks. From Hekou I could still see smoke rising from Vietnamese bungalows. Lao Cai was a country town of friendly folk; Hekou was a modernized town of go-getters.

I boarded a bus for Kunming. The trip took all day, winding amid the jungles of Yunnan Province, where I saw that an eight-lane highway was being built through the villages of the Miao people, in their pink hats and pink aprons, and other tribal people with colorful epaulettes. The superhighway under construction was raised on cement pillars that marched across valleys and rubber plantations and bamboo groves. Chinese engineers had gouged a great furrow amid the jungles of southern Yunnan, leaving another blight on the landscape, displacing people, putting up signs, bulldozing virgin forest. Troops had marched through here to go to war with the Vietnamese less than thirty years ago, but in a way this bulldozing, because it would last forever, was worse than war.

Kunming, a small habitable city I had once visited and written about, was now an ugly sprawl of Chinese-cheesy buildings and four million people. I succeeded in getting to Kunming by land—from Singapore, two thousand miles. Grown rich on its tobacco crop and manufacturing, Kunming had an enormous Louis Vuitton store and a Maserati dealership and a traffic problem and persistent prostitutes. The Chinese word for hooker is gai, chicken.

"Are you a gai because you like men?"

"No. I don't like men. I like money."

China exists in its present form because the Chinese want money. Once, America was like that. Maybe this accounted for my desire to leave. Not revulsion, but the tedium and growing irritation of listening to people express their wish for money, that they'd do anything to make it. Who wants to hear people boasting about their greed and their promiscuity? I left for Japan, reveling in the thought that I was done with China—its factory-blighted landscape, its unbreathable air, its un-budging commissars, and its honking born-again capitalists. Ugly and soulless, China represented the horror of answered prayers, a peasant's greedy dream of development. I was happy to leave.

TOKYO ANDAGURAUNDO

THE GRAY SPRAWL of Tokyo was an intimidating version of the future, not yours and mine, but our children's. Glittering concrete slabs dwarfed crowds of purposeful people beetling back and forth, arms close to their sides, as though they'd all gotten the same memo: Walk fast and look worried. People become littler as they become alike. Bright lights but no warmth, very tidy, more a machine than a city. I wanted to flee to the countryside. Was there any countryside left in Japan?

From my broom closet of a hotel room I saw the domed forehead of Ueno Station. At this massive junction of shiny bundled railway lines I could board a train for anywhere in Japan, including the northern island of Hokkaido. In front of my hotel was a pond in a park, with two shrines on causeways, and some surrounding trees; at the back of my hotel, just past the rear entrance, was a red-light district, a floating world of nightclubs and massage parlors. Bland formality on one side, frivolity on the other, each side offering ways of overcoming loneliness in a city whose true population was more than twenty million.