Sunlit City Scribblings (Part 1)

[Chenyin Pan]

“Which train you were on?” The young guy in baseball cap, sit aside of me, asked.

“The one from Shanghai,” I mumbled, “that damned 48 hours ride.”

“How come they arrived early today?” He grinned with sincerity, since I really can’t detect any mischief in his sunburned face.

“Guess Buddha sensed my piety to this pilgrimage to Lhasa, so he pushed the train a bit.” Tried my best to be funny under the circumstance, I was satisfied as he giggled along.

After sitting, slouching, squatting and continuous cursing for 48 hours, I finally arrived in Lhasa, Tibet. It was the tiredness rather than the impact of the high altitude that got me first. As the train slid in the domed station at 7:50 PM, the Sunlit City was still accompanied by the tipsy clouds in the west, sober ones in all other directions. Potala Palace was merely visible in the distance.

One of the new friends I met after sharing 48 hours ordeal took me to where all inbound buses gathered, waiting for their last business of the day. Bag-pack travelers, but mainly Han Chinese immigrant workers, private entrepreneurs with luggage, bags full of tins and pans and other living trivial bulged up the bus pretty soon. It’s absolutely bizarre to see things in daylight at 8:00 PM, though China is equitable in size to the United States, but different time zones are unanimously applying Beijing Time nationwide (means it’s only 6:00 PM by local standard). While I managed to peep on the scene outside the bus, through sullen faces, shabby haired heads and bags dandling in front of me, all the shop signs, the traffic, the roads flashed by were all appeared as the other sesame twines to their brothers and sisters in any cities in China.

As the bus lurched and stopped on the side walk, the conductor yelled at me and the other bunch travelers at the back of the bus that we shall leap off in there, in Chinese. We thanked the conductor. I tried to be smart, searching in my mind on how to say ‘thanks’ in Tibetan, ‘no result found’, it responded bluntly.

“You guys heading to the youth hostel in Duosenge Road?” I asked tentatively.

“Sure! Are you going there as well? How did you find the place? But anyway, it’s a great place, we stayed there 3 years ago in our first visit to Lhasa. “The man on his earlier 60s rambled as we walked along, ahead of the rest, “you know, the boss of the hostel was a smart and sharp young fellow from Beijing, he saw the business opportunity and opened up this hostel 3 years ago, we stay here for a few days when the hostel had just opened less than a month. Those Tibetan hooligans done the place great damage in that Riot, of course, but heard the business has came back ever since then.”

The word “hooligan” startled me a little bit, but I didn’t bothered to correct his term of usage, or it is really because I’ve heard the far more derogatory curses and biased comments on Tibetans to the point that my nerves are getting numb in front of the petty ones like “hooligan”.

“Yeah, so how was the last visit?” I directed the conversation to another topic.

“Oh, that was fascinating!” There are lights sparkled as his eyes wide up a bit. “We enjoyed our trip very much and that’s why we have always wanted to come back and revisit the place, and of course, we are heading outbound to Nepal, India this time.”

“That’s cool! You gonna go to…” I was about to have Dharamsala poping out from my mind, but am struggled to find the Chinese pronunciation of that city. Ghee, how many Chinese have ever heard about the place? Definitely not the one dragging along besides me, I had this thought to myself.

“Well, we’ll stop at the main cities there and swing back to Shanghai.”

His Shanghainese accent has already betrayed his identity.

“So, how long you will stay in Lhasa? Are you a student or you work now?”

The spotlight was on me eventually, as the rest of the bunch also shifted their focus to me, at the moment, I felt the heat immensely.

“I don’t know, I’m planning to stay in Tibet for a month or so, the best case though.” There was a moment of silence. Waited for a while, figured that they have snapped out of their startling, I went on with my story. “I have worked in Shanghai for over a year and half after graduated from college and am trying to find a job there for the summer, but so far no luck.”

There was another moment of silence, but the old man broke the ice shortly. “Well, you are young and you will find a job sooner than later, but traveling, drifting in the wild of the West is the thing that might happen to you only once in the life, better do that when you still have time and energy.”

I grinned a bit in my heart as I have the image of Grandpa drooling “Full of piss ‘n’ vinegar!” in Grapes of Wrath as this old Shanghainese old man trying to give me a pep talk. What he said was not nonsense though.

We waited the red-light when a tricycle approached us. Their lead feet just couldn’t resist the enticing offer, the hostel is still a quarter mile away.

“I’ll walk along first.”

“All right, we’ll see you in the hostel.” The old man said that without lift his head up, busied himself to help others get on the seat and bargained the price with the driver.