Chapter Sixty-Seven: Trains and Chinese Consulates (~jinghan)

It’s 17th November at 5am in the morning. uh huh. 5:30am.

I think I had forgotten how beautiful the world could be at 5:30am. The air is cold but perfectly still. Pregnant with possibility, it smells like adventure. The street lights are still on, but not with the weariness that they seem to cast in the evening but a fresh steady light as if wanting to make the most of the last hours of their shift. The bus rounds the corner and stops at the curb with a welcoming hiss and pours light and warmth into the cold still air as the doors sigh open.

The train station is also hush. No phones ring, no people chat. And the train arrives out of the darkness.

As the world rushes past, the sun begins to rise, and the book on my lap is forgotten.

In the east there is a golden fringe chasing a pale blue chasing a purple dawn in the west. The land is shrouded in mist like a fallen cloud and some lights in a passing town twinkle in the distance. Sleepy cows graze on breakfast. Black soil, green crops and grassy planes. Little yellow school buses come out. Mountains rise out of flat pastures then fall away again.

At last, the purple fringe of evening flees over the horizon in the west- to work another shift in another land. And wow! And wetlands! Like little patches of fallen sky! And the fist birds of the day are fluttering flakes of black in the sky. All but a lone white stalk beating the air slowly below its large wings.

The scene changes to industrial looking ships intricately silhouetted against the sky. And the oil refinery still puffing its white smoke into the air. And then bridges and city appear. Train rides are the most beautiful thing in the world!

“The next station is Emeryville.” I change to a connecting bus and find myself on the streets of San Francisco. My mission today is to get myself a chinese visa. I scroll and unscroll my map in my pocket as I walk, pulling it out every few blocks to check my direction. Unlike Davis, there’s tightly packed houses, small leafless trees, noisy construction and so much grey concrete everywhere you look. Finally I see two stone lions sitting by a door – that must be the chinese embassy. There’s a sign on the door that says “please use entrance around the corner for visa applications. I round the corner and their is a line of people there already, even though the embassy doesn’t open for another 15 minutes.

I stand in line and read my book until the line starts to move. A security guard is checking each bag before people enter. When it’s my turn he looks in my bag. “You can’t take this in,” he says holding up on my digital camera.

“Oh uh… is there somewhere I can leave it?”

“Anywhere outside.”

(Oh no!) “But I don’t know anyone else in the city! I don’t have anywhere to put it.”

“Sorry, I can’t let you in with it. That is the rule.”

“What if I don’t use it inside?”

“Sorry, I can’t let you in with it. You’re holding up the queue.”

(Ah!!! What do I do?) “Do I have to line up again when I come back?”

“I’ll let you in from the front.”

This is not as consoling as I hoped. My mind is rushing. My first thought is: I have come all this way to be stopped because I have a camera! I call up a friend of my parents who lives in California because I am lost for ideas. I think I something all in one breath like “Hi Ayi this is jinghan I am in sanfransisco getting a chinese visa but they won’t let me in because i have a digital camera and I don’t know what I can do with it!” because then I have to repeat everything I said again at half the pace. But as I am doing so I notice that there is a Japanese hotel on the opposite corner of the intersection.

“Do you think I could go to the hotel and ask them to hold it for me?”

“Uh yes, you should try that.” (I don’t think she really knew how to help me, but I needed moral support anyway.)

So I impatiently wait for the crossing lights to change. And as I hurry across the intersection I am deciding that if this fails I will put the camera in a zipped side pocket in the hope that the security guard won’t notice (they weren’t checking that thoroughly, to be honest, I just had the camera on the top because I was busy taking photos on the train). I didn’t like being dishonest, but I’d be leaving it a bit too late if I came back another day.

There is a kind looking Japanese old man with a white beard at the hotel desk. He doesn’t even concern himself with the fact that I am not a guest at the hotel agreeing immediately to help me out. I thank him repeatedly.

After my application is lodged I have some time before I can pick it up later in the day. So I visit the Cathedral opposite the chinese consulate, and then I find my way to the City Hall where I first got off the bus and look around the public library and the asian art museum (well okay, the shop, because I didn’t have time to make it worth buying a ticket to go into the actual museum).

It was nice to walk around and to buy a few things in the city, but by the time I came back after collecting my visa, it was harder to ignore the grungyness of the concrete and the claustrophobic way the tall buildings rise up to block out most of the sky on either side. I was very glad to get back on the train and head back to Davis – land of the cows and farmland and only 5 blocks of down town.