I am on the train to Beijing. I am sharing the coupe with two Chinese men… one old… small, his features tightly defined, a land of boundaries between eye and chin. The younger one is tall and thin, his face more muted, a little oily, maybe not so much to be trusted. Is this true? I have no idea. He wears a gray topcoat and a black fedora. He hoists himself up to the top bunk and proceeds to eat from a bottomless plastic bag of food. He has tofu wrappers, oranges, train noodles, over-ripe bananas and dragon flower fruit. He reaches into his bag chomping away obsessively with his legs folded under him like a Buddha. Before he leaves he will buy a watermelon from the “fuwuyuan” and deposit it in his plastic bag.

The old man looks at me nervously, walks in and out of the coupe. I hunt up the toilet before it overwhelms me with disgust. He has taken off his chinos when I come back, folded them up and placed them in the wire mesh shelf. I should have remembered that train etiquette requires that old men feign embarrassment as they take their pants off in front of strange woman from unknown countries. I am treated to his gray woolen long underwear and his gnarly, worn socks. He has bunions on both feet.

Later still, a younger man with a plaid scarf comes in with as much baggage as I. He throws it up onto the bed. I can tell he’s checked us all out quickly and really doesn’t want to be bothered. Black Fedora is irritated that he has been awakened from sleep following the many snacks of his travel life. Plaid scarf climbs up gracefully with his feet on the two footrests. Black Fedora has a discussion with Plaid Scarf as he straddles, his posterior regions inches from Black Fedora’s face. Black Fedora discusses Plaid Scarf’s climbing down to turn off the music. Plaid Scarf straddles. Black Fedora talks. Everything must be discussed in an ancient pattern of language that proscribes a dialogue softened by politeness. Plaid Scarf is younger, so he does it. Chino Pants listens to his MP3 player. It’s so loud I am treated to the seesaw of Chinese music. Occasionally he hums and sings along. His phone rings constantly… Da Ta Dum… Dum… Da Ta Dum… Dum… Dum… and then the spine-tingling screeching of wild birds. Sometimes he answers, sometimes he doesn’t. We all want to be left alone indulging ourselves in an on and off half sleep. There is a God afterall.

Northern China glides by as I sip my bitter, three-kuai green tea from a cute paper cup. I cover myself with what looks to be the clean “beizi.” The pollution and morning mist are thick… the fields are brown and long woolen underwear gray. It has been warm, but out here there is frost on the ground. We pass orchards and other trains, fossil fuel cones and high-tension wires. We slow. We speed up. The sky is the color of gunmetal. I begin to feel on the move again. I am alone with my thoughts.

Yesterday, a manicurist had hysterically shouted to all of the other customers, except me, that I had a short lifeline on my right hand. I guess she thought I didn’t understand any Chinese. Later, she asked me if I wanted nail polish. I said, “Well, I am going to die anyway, so what’s the need? Do you understand?” She said, “No,” so I pointed to my lifeline and said, “I am dying tomorrow so I don’t need it.” Embarrassed, she mumbled that I should put cuticle oil on my fingers every day as she took my money. She gave me no other advice on the finer aspects of palmistry, and I didn’t provide her with further evidence of my arrogance.

But, here I am on this train today half sleeping, half absorbing the gray world of a Northern Chinese winter… I am surely not dead I don’t think…  unless all of life is a dream. None of us really knows that, do we? Alive today, dead tomorrow… and here we are with today.

In Beijing it’s snowing. I drag my bags off the train behind me down the bump-a-bump ramp, around the corner and up the incline. I am reminded of colossal China… so many people all pushing and as eager as I to get out of the Cecil B. DeMille set of a train station. My phone rings and rings but I don’t have a spare hand to answer it. I know it’s a driver, Ji, who is waiting to pick me up. In the end, it’s not him, but his friend. Ji’s car has collided with a motorbike. He has sent a friend. Too bad… I like Lao Ji.

I eat a simple plate of celery and lily bulbs with a bowl of rice when I’ve settled into the empty dining room that has closed after lunch… my thoughts beyond the window in the winter garden of the tattering Zhu Yuan. My rice is of such a quality, each grain…a comfort… the green tea, shades of chartreuse and emerald, silk on my tongue, a luxury. I can’t stop drinking it. The man who pours the tea steaming from a teapot made of brass with a three-foot spout comes many times. The fragrance drifts in the air and into the back of my throat. I study the leaves in the bottom of the imperial yellow, faux cloisonné cup. They tell me nothing. I like that they keep their secrets deep within their leaves. The catbirds make a racket among the bare branches. The snow drifts down onto the slippery stone walks. It covers the crooked urn on the top of the small hill. I take another sip.

I watch an old foreigner with greasy hair and three “xiaojie” half his age in the garden… perhaps he’s called them up for a massage and they have taken a walk with him in the garden. They are smiley… coy… they make cute poses for his camera lens. They play games in the snow. They run after each other. They give accidental, quick touches and then laugh… a simple sexual dance of a paradise he has already had. Will he be driven by a repeating, unrelieved craving for this want over and over again? He seems on top of the world with the illusion that he is young and a valuable catch beyond the money in his pocket… as if life were merely a simple, sexual dance when the Eastern steps may really be far more complicated than he may imagine. Is this true? Maybe… probably. I will see him in the morning eating his breakfast. He will be alone with his deep cigarette cough and bowed, hung over head staring emptily into the garden, drinking cup after cup of the burned black brew of coffee. He sits in a cloud of cigarette smoke hanging heavy like his morning after mood. What will he be looking at? There are no “xiaojie” there this morning. What does he see as he looks out into the wan winter sunshine teasing the bare branches with its unwelcome gaze? What is he thinking? I will never know.

It will be morning for me, too. I will be sitting there, my hair combed with an unmade face. I will be drinking jasmine tea, my cold hands warming from the clear glass. I’ll look out of the restaurant window, too, and I’ll know what I will be thinking. I’ll think, so slowly with the passing days, I am becoming much like a Chinese character…a harmony of practiced strokes of different lengths, left to right, top to bottom… a character written among many that tells the common, every day story in what is written as well as what is not… a beginning, a middle… but, not yet, an end.