To the Train Station Fortuneteller
At first, the railway station looked no different from so many others I’d seen in China: concrete columns, opaque windows, a traffic circle ringed with idling cars. Urumqi was an industrial city of several million, perhaps best known for being the world’s farthest city from the sea. But what caught my attention was the red script that adorned the station entryway: signs written in Perso-Arabic alongside Mandarin, one bleeding into the other, like two halves of a single, beating whole.
It was noon and sweltering by the time Alex and I arrived. We’d intended to come sooner—to heed the warnings of everyone from the hostel owner to the cab driver—but, at 23, it was about as early as we could be expected to do anything. You were sitting outside the ticket gates on a green stool, sundry talismans laid out on the folding table in front of you. Perhaps you barely registered our presence. Or maybe you glanced up, sensing our air of foreignness as we passed. I wouldn’t know: I rushed past you so fast. You see, I’d never intended to linger in Urumqi, and now I was desperate to leave.
Like every American who visited Xinjiang, we were destined for Kashgar. It was the height of summer, and Alex and I had flown to Urumqi from the dusty rural town in Shanxi province where we both taught, planning to travel the rest of the way by train. How romantic was the way Alex described the 18-hour journey through wheat fields and desert and snowcapped mountains on the flight over.
Alex and I had been dating for less than a year—two of the only laowai for miles in any direction—the kind of expat romance where one of you, drunk with cheap baijiu or homesickness or both, invites the other to your apartment, and the next weekend, drinking for the same reasons you always drink, insist that absolutely nothing has changed. For months, we became each other’s frontlines against loneliness. We lesson planned together, torrented Glee over the Great Firewall, confessed our projected futures over pulled noodles. It didn’t matter that they didn’t line up. Alex thought she might stay in China, maybe work as a curator at an art gallery; I wanted to study international development in DC.
It was 2011. I’d reached the end of my two-year teaching fellowship and, in less than a week, would be returning to America for good. Alex still had her second year to go, and we both knew I could have stayed on at the university to be with her. I didn’t want to admit it, but I had doubts about whether we’d make it. I was worried that, years later, I’d lament the fact that were it not for our chance proximity in a small Chinese town, we’d never have gotten together in the first place. Our relationship had always felt firmly rooted to the present.
I pinned my hopes on Kashgar—a literal oasis in the Tarim Basin, the epicenter of Silk Road trade and about as far in China as we could go to try and postpone the eventual decision. I knew it might well be our last grasp at salvation. Kashgar was a city that had endured more than two millennia, the rise and fall of empires. Oft-threatened, it had, each time, survived: a reminder that there could be something worth saving for us, too.
But when we blew past you into the railway station, my confidence plunged. There were at least a dozen different ticket lines, and it was impossible to tell where each one started or ended. All around me were old men in saggy khakis, teenage boys wearing knock-off Emirates jerseys, gray-haired ayis in colorful headscarves. I found myself pressed up against a man in a blue silk shirt—hands shoving, feet epoxied to the ground—my own white t-shirt yellowing at the collar.
Alex motioned that she would wait outside. Time crawled. I don’t know how long I waited under the red glow of the neon signboard, silently cursing the trains that arrived and departed, or how many times my line was cut or merged or evaporated entirely. Each passing minute was an indictment of the destiny that lay before us. By the time I got to the front, restless and starving, the woman at the service counter crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Kashgar?” she asked in Mandarin. She pointed at a man who had cut in front of me and was now swimming molasses-like toward the exits. “That was the last ticket all week.”
You have to understand that I was livid. The indignity. The injustice. I had bloody murder so hot on my tongue I could taste the iron. The image of Alex and me in Kashgar—the aroma of freshly baked bread, exploring Old Town by bike, burning bright into the auburn sunset—had suddenly been extinguished. It was outside, as I squinted my eyes into the blistering sun searching for Alex, that you chose to approach.
“For a moment, the usual ambivalence of the crowd receded and was replaced by audible silence. Alex caught up to me, her face dripping with contempt. I wanted to tell her about the train tickets—how unfair and wrong everything had been—but the words got stuck in my throat.”
Shouxiang, you said, standing with your arms out in front of you. But I didn’t register your words. The trip had been my idea, and Alex had trusted me to plan it. I loathed to imagine her disappointment that I’d been negligent not to get tickets earlier, or too cavalier, or that I just didn’t care enough about us—about her—to have given this more forethought. What do you mean you don’t have a back-up? It was the way so many of our disagreements went. I’d gotten us stuck in a place neither of us wanted to be.
Shouxiang, you repeated. I thought you were trying to sell me a scalped train ticket and momentarily moved closer. It was only then that I really saw you. White skullcap. Wispy gray beard. Green windbreaker despite the heat. Your eyes were closed shut, your hands strumming the air like wind chimes. You pointed to your own hands—open, calloused—the lines on the palms that corresponded to prospects for career and health and love.
I shook my head; I had no interest in whatever divination you had to sell me. I saw Alex out of the corner of my eye and swallowed a lump in my throat. I took off in her direction, but you caught me with your arms. Shouxiang, you said again, your hands entreating mine. I swatted your hands away, the sharp thud of them slapping against your chest. “No,” I shouted, my voice pealing out like a siren.
For a moment, the usual ambivalence of the crowd receded and was replaced by audible silence. Alex caught up to me, her face dripping with contempt. I wanted to tell her about the train tickets—how unfair and wrong everything had been—but the words got stuck in my throat.
A few weeks prior, Alex had told me that she felt blindsided when I announced I was going back to America without a single discussion about our future. Being in a relationship with you is like riding a train, she’d said. If I want to get on, fine, but you’re going whether I buy a ticket or not.
We never did take that train to Kashgar. Alex broke up with me before we even made it back to Shanxi. Could she have seen something in me that day that led to our undoing? The signs should have been obvious all along. I didn’t need you to divine that our relationship wouldn’t have ended the way I’d imagined. I was uninterested in confronting any reality that was incongruous with my own.
Today, when I read about the ever-more prescient political reality in Xinjiang, I remember looking beyond the railway station to the phalanx of skyscrapers and identical apartment blocks in the distance. Had I known better then, those signs would have been obvious, too: the demolition of Old Town to rubble, the steady influx of ethnic Han, the surveillance cameras installed with software trained to distinguish Uyghur faces. And yet, it was still a shock when, years later, it came to light that Muslims like you had to fear whether you could pray in mosques or speak your language or were safe from being kidnapped, imprisoned, and reeducated in the middle of the night.
While it’s impossible to predict the future, our inability to read the signs in front of us can have dire consequences. I was so set on trying to control my own future that I was unwilling to consider yours. The fact that you had to endure that from me at the railway station is inexcusable. I want to tell you that you didn’t deserve any of it, and that I’m sorry. It didn’t matter whether or not you could see; I was the one who was blind.
About the Author
Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial essayist and author of the short story collection What Never Leaves. His writing has appeared in Literary Hub, The Rumpus, SupChina, The Huffington Post, The Shanghai Literary Review, and elsewhere. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he has also received fellowships and awards from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Kundiman, the Jack Straw Writers Program, and the Yiddish Book Center. Daniel serves as Program Director of Events & Community Engagement at Hugo House in Seattle and is currently completing a novel set against the backdrop of contemporary U.S.-China relations.
Read Daniel’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Richard Tao.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
