Station 2: China

In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka, the owner of a renowned chocolate factory, hid five Golden tickets within his famous Wonka bars. These tickets served as passes for an exclusive tour of his heavily guarded chocolate factory, as well as a lifetime supply of chocolate. However, the narrative unfolds as one by one, the lure of hazelnuts and milky delicacies weakens and eliminates each of the winners away, leaving Charlie as the only survivor left. As a reward, Wonka offers Charlie the chance to live with him in the factory, explaining that the contest's purpose was to find a successor to take over as factory owner once he retires, on the condition that Charlie leaves his family behind forever. 

I vividly remember that time I was holding that ticket in the palm of my hand, which number one, was not golden(it was white), and two, was not going to take me to a chocolate factory or anything equally as interesting, or anything at all. It was a one-way ticket to the middle of nowhere. Having done my homework with a pitifully outdated phone, I knew I didn’t want to go on a ride to the edge of the world. But having a choice requires another choice that precedes it, and I had nothing.

Being shorter than the other kids, I could never become a goalkeeper or a defender. Most of the time, I was thrown towards either the left wing or right wing darting up and down the pitch. It just so happened that I was right-footed, that the admissions teacher sent me to the right wing in a trial match against other like-minded boys.

Football at its essence is a marathon, not a sprint. One by one, others got rejected for tripping over themselves. They try to do tricks but lose the ball, or they try to play dirty but not fair. For me, I just made sure I kept my nose facing forward throughout the day, hoping they would see something. Along with being vertically challenged, neither was my physical strength superior, But I could read the game that little bit better: where to position myself on the counter-attack or leave behind expensive mistakes in the wake of my opponents. I always found dribbling easy from the start. Knowing where to kick the ball without looking at it was less a learned skill and more an inherent gift. My feet and the ball had learned how to communicate with one another, building trust with each time they touched. This allowed me to survey the game without worrying the ball would run away. 

That was what they claimed to have seen in me and in return, offered me an educational detour to an international football school. To outsiders, they will say that where I am headed to is a factory for churning out athletes, local parents tell me it is an expressway with the pandas. And to most people, the place that turns adolescent dreams into a non-negotiable sacrifice. And it’s all true. There is never a lie, only the best truth. 

They promise that we will get more practice and the potential to go pro domestically (or internationally but they’ve yet to do so).  But the push from behind is greater than the pull forward. This is the real world and in the case of China, it is a giant monopoly board -  hoard as many properties, prestigious jobs, fancy clothing, and statuses as you can at the start of the game before others get a hold of them in a game that either lets you escape inequality or prolong an intergenerational poverty. I never watched football at home, I just liked playing it. So people were shocked when I told them I didn’t take allegiance to a favorite team or familiarised myself with the names of renowned soccer “celebrities”. They’re playing a game with a leather ball, the only ball I see is made of money. 

Mom and Dad are the hardest working people I know. The farm runs regardless of whether it is raining cows or the sky is burning. It is a crucible that runs on the fuel of their spirit throughout the year and the one after. The air is cold and will cool it if they don’t touch it for long enough. It is the pride of the family which at the same time is the last place they would want their son to work in. My future is beyond the fields, “I do not belong here,” my father warned me. This is a purgatory until the family’s eventual salvation. There’s a whisper in the air, where bigger men, as they have told me, had their ways of taking a larger slice of the cake. The opportunities that the town offered(or lack thereof) promised no promises here. After rolling the dice and emailing every school and sports school nationwide that I was a sporting prodigy and a must-have, this was my final time to land on chance, the one that could land me on GO. 

Turns out, one of them was foolish enough to believe them, and thus, I was transferred to Leipzig Chengdu International School. It was in one of the newly branded “soccer cities”. I was so sure I wouldn’t have gotten it. On the day itself,  I hadn’t yet learned how to speak English even though it was in the title that it was an international school. It was so pathetic at that point that when they first talked to me, I struggled to even tell them I couldn’t speak English(in English). So I spoke to them in Mandarin. “Dui bu qǐ, wo bu ke yi jiang ying wen.” Like turning on a code switch in a compartment behind their back, the white men began speaking in fluent Chinese. Once they finished talking to me, the switch reversed and they spoke among each other in English again. I thought it was an automatic rejection.

That day, Mom and Dad made sure that I went back to the drawing board to learn how to write coherent sentences. Eventually I learnt the conversational basics but didn’t practice what I learnt, choosing the path of least resistance which was Chinese. It was also around this time my parents gave me a phone and I was learning the cool phrases being exchanged. A playful trend has emerged where people use the phrase “Wo gen ni bu yi yang” - You and I are not the same. In fact, I’ve never seen this many fair-skinned people before coming here. They are taller too. Just like how different provinces had different types of food like dim sum in the canton region and seafood dishes along the Pearl and Yangtze River Delta, there were different types and shades of white. Different foods gave off different reactions depending on spiciness and saltiness. I began to recognize different accents just as well as they could recognize mine, instantly knowing that I wasn’t from here and poorer as well. Lots of people from across Europe and China came and went from this small town next to the mountainside. Most of the sports teachers were white while the Chinese taught maths and sciences. All the while, I was the piece of rope in a tug of war between using the accent I have, and the accent I want others to hear. 

It is not about who I am, but whose I am. Three months and counting, my tragedy began after I had been isolated from my old friends and family. It shouldn’t hurt me since everyone was going to different junior high schools, but they would still get to see each other in town or the city area, they were good as gone. My day to day routine is as such: Wake up at six in the morning from my dormitory, wear the white and blue uniform I had prepared the night before, walk across to the center of the three blocks for morning exercise, before moving to the last block for school lessons, don’t forget to bow down to the giant stone statue standing erect on top of the black marble cube. His name is engraved on the cube which says “Kong zi”, someone whom Mom and Dad told me is important to follow for his Eastern philosophy. I did not know what philosophy was and still do not. Midday before lunch was soccer practice that was too well maintained to ever grace the day of light of my old town. Lessons continued in the afternoon before a secondary sport and dinner. Each day is a rinse and repeat of the previous day with more or less soapiness than the last.

The food is nice. The richer(that’s a poor people’s word, they prefer to use ‘affluent’), pretentious kids think that it’s a chore to eat canteen food. But I appreciate the generous serving of meat, vegetables, and rice, guilt-free from needing to consume my parent’s cash crops. I also noticed there are a lot of energy drinks chained up in fridges at the corner of the canteen as well. Supposedly the sponsor of this school is an energy drinks company and so the staff are treated with as much as they want of it. They tell us that if we do well on a test or a game, they will give one to us. Everywhere in the school, there are stickers and reminders of two red colored bulls colliding towards a central sun. Alternatively, there’s the signature catchphrase “Song Gei ni chi bang”, which in English, translates to ‘gives you wings’. 

The days turn into weeks as I slowly metamorphosized into one of the many bulls. A sun is lit on my tail as I begin to run in circles chasing after my very survival and death. Suffer now in the name of progress. That is the motto of every Chinese citizen given from the ruling party. Is it worth it though? As I trot along from classroom to pitch to classroom, I carry a monster in my bag. It is made up of homework and assignments. My lessons are it’s meal time. Each day it grows inside my bag, only making it harder to run from place to place each time. I had to carry it wherever I went, sometimes I even split it into two: one half in my hands, the other hanging from my bag. There’s a sign attached to my head, a giant SOS sign, but it is invisible. No one sees it breaking my bag and back. 

Of course, a monster needs to be fit and healthy as well. Every run and technique is looked under a microscope by the football teachers Mr Werner and Mr Jonak. They’re straight to the point and love to smoke by the corner after each training session. After a quick search, I discovered the former used to be a pro in Europe, while the other learned sport science back in Germany. They both maintained a similar clean cut from when their online photoes were taken however many years ago. It’s two whites in a sea of mostly yellow teenagers with a few whites like salt sprinkled over an egg yolk. Hundreds of years of Chinese development later, we are still listening to Western colonizers and what they have to preach. It was China that gave birth to football. But it was the British who domesticated it. It’s like a son teaching a parent how to play their favorite game for the first time. That is how football became a product of colonialism in China. 

Just like any other sport, you’re only as good as your last game. And how good I am depends on how bad the other is. Systematically, a meritocracy was established where good players were sorted into the good teams, and the latter in the worse teams. They didn’t even try to hide it. The teams were named in alphabetical order from A to Z in descending quality. Naturally, my admission into the school via my talent put my in the stronger team, though it didn’t correlate to a better bond with my teammates. On the pitch, I played together with them. When it was time to go, I became the shadow of the group - there but never there. 

When I look back, it’s easy to say that this GO card sent me onto a destiny steered away from the conventional schooling experience of tens of millions of other Chinese students. If the national high school exam, the GaoKao, was a platform to go into university, I was standing on a knife edge. Only those who are the best would be sent to Europe, that’s what our form teacher said in her first lesson. (Although in secret, she told everyone in the class that this class was the fast track as well and our chances were strong.) 

“A safety net diploma is always there, but that’s not why you’re here.” 

Plant me onto a pitch of other technically gifted players beyond my level, and watch them pull me along or wither into obscurity. 

At the end of the day when I return to my dorm, I am bodiless but have to unload the monster and delicately cut him layer by layer with my pencil. Unknown to the teachers for some reason, it is an impossible task to motivate athletes in a sports school to do school work. Physics is fun, especially when there are questions about sports like the angle of shooting or speed of a tennis ball before and after a bounce. Someone realized this and decided to make his own set of questions for the rest of the school to follow. But more often it’s a waste of time. If only don’t like could mean the same as don’t do. A minimum GPA remains and has to be obtained if I want to level up. 

My best friend throughout all of this is No-Face. He’s always there, sitting on the table waiting for me to talk to him. I first met him at the movies, and then at a toy store so I decided to bring him home and then to my dorm. After a while, he even began to tell me the time. Looking at his shadow, I knew exactly when it was six or seven pm. But once it was dark enough he would stop. If I’m bored, me, No-Face, and silence would sit together by the table next to the window and complain about yet another teacher or classmate for disliking me or my face. Even when I am bored I have to study so I play some music in the background. It’s the same one from the movie that No-Face one was in so that I could feel like I was somewhere else. Perhaps if I listen long enough, I will hop through the mirror and into that universe too. I can be the angry bull with a sun attached to my tail running around in circles. Tomorrow I will see pigs piloting red barons in the sky, offering me a ride back home. 

That has been the mystery I’ve been trying to solve since I got here. The trains have never arrived since I came. The first time it happened, I was at the station and the speaker said there was a track signaling fault. It felt like the worst night of my life. I slammed the door and shot the soccer ball as hard as I could against the wall, sending a loud echo against the wall, rebounding and punching me in the stomach. Defeated, I limped into bed and woke up the following day where I always did.

My phone usage has skyrocketed the second it landed on the lap of my newly twelve year old self. It was around that time I stopped using a calender as I saw little relevance in using one. Nonetheless, my parents packed one into my luggage. It was a simple grid of dates where each month could be torn off once the month had passed. It was meant to be utilitarian but now is mocking me for how long I’ve been counting the days since I’ve sentenced myself here. Or how many moons I have seen since I last saw Mom and Dad. Instead, we call each other every week, passing over the cliches that parents tell their children when they’re far from home. It felt more processional than necessary and I was beginning to wonder whether they really wanted me back home. 

With more time to contemplate what is the point of me being here, I started to become more imaginative. This is the age when I begin to see the world in all its colors. People could actually die for reasons other than their health and old age. Why would they want to do it though? Somewhere in Shanghai, a star actor known as Butter Wang from the film The boy and the life was nominated for the Golden Rooster Awards last year jumped into a lake and never came out until people found him the next day. Football isn’t any different either, people were prematurely ending their once in a lifetime career in half to retire early. The Football Federation is also facing criticism for recruiting foreigners from abroad and rebadging them as Chinese citizens to play for the national team, despite having no ancestral connection to this place at all. They didn’t even have a Chinese name, not at least until they were given sloppy translations like Feng Nan Duo(Fernando). At least Mr Werner has the dignity to represent his birthplace in Germany than as a Chinese, he probably would not want to associate himself with us either. 

As I scrolled into the depths of the news, apparently there was a boy from a sport school, just like him, who died of a heat stroke by pushing himself too much during a soccer practice. In a diary entry a few days before the incident, he said that his dream was becoming increasingly impossible and the only way was to over-exert himself. When I tried to look it up a few days later, the article had vanished, likely removed. 

It never pictured to me that dying was an option. The option is always there, and it’s quite easy to do it if you think about it. But what happened to the constellation of neurons in the mind that stopped humans from doing what they did when logic so often argued they shouldn’t. More importantly, is this an option for me? 

The more I stayed here, the more I realised that the train is not coming any time soon. The speaker at the train station was like a magician. Performing new shows every week, he had many tricks up his sleeve. Some days it was a technical breakdown, or perhaps it was maintenance-work-Saturdays. Any flavor of train faults that could happen, the universe was interested in trying it out. At first, they handed out refunds but then they stopped. When I told my parents, they agreed that I should only come back when the semester ends. 

And that is why today I am back to try my luck at buying the tickets. On the opposite side of the platform stood a medium-speed rail which should arrive before mine. There are no gates between the platform and the track. All it took was one step. My legs begin to tremble at even the thought of it as I have to straighten it by force. As it arrived from the other end, I stared at the tracks and then the train and then the tracks again. The sensation of my head arching slightly forward as though my momentum was about to tip any further forward. It is the only thing I could think about. This is my chance. If I wanted to, really, I can do it. For a moment, I shared a few precious seconds with my funeral. 

In the end, I didn’t move. The train passed free of any obstructive teenage bodies. Overhead, an announcement came that the service would be postponed to an unknown date. I’m not even surprised. Hearing the news, I drag my deflated body back for another weekend’s rest here. I decide not to message my parents about it yet. When I return to my room and dropped my bag, I change my mind and decide to treat myself to dinner and look around for a bit. 

Wallet, keys, phone, and without an umbrella, I shut the door and make my way down the concrete stairs, feeling the friction between my shoes and the overused floor until I reach the main gate. The security guard doesn’t bat an eye and continues reading his morning newspaper. I could bring back a bomb if I wanted to. From where I stand, I can see most of the town. Except for a single mall, there’s nothing on offer for the average high schooler. There are no tourist here obviously. I imagine a tour guide approaching any unlucky traveler who stumbled here to tell them: “Sorry you must have gone the wrong way. This way please!”  As she points towards the urban parts of Chengdu and the panda-populated mountains. 

The sun begins to rest as some of the streetlights illuminate circles on the ground. From memory, I find the obvious life sized boba balloon absorbing the sunset outside its shop. There are a few students inside. Even without their uniform, they could have only come from one place. Two elderly and a teacher sit on their wooden stools in the corner. Liberated to use my Chinese again, I ordered a brown sugar boba and takeaway fried rice. In a plastic bag, I go up the gentle hill a few miles west of the school. Time moves and so does the hill. The sensation of sitting here feels more pokey than last month I feel. A handful of students sprinkle above and below where I'm seated as I pull out the yellow and white takeout box and dig into it. Occasionally I cleanse the saltiness of my sweat with the sweetness of the drink. 

Sitting here on my own, I want to go home. I expect the energy drink inside the school to give me a pair of wings. Possessed by an iridescence, the world will turn weightless below me as the wind catches me. And at long last, at seventeen hundred hours, Mom and Dad will come to the rescue from my loneliness epidemic. Then again, it could be best if I remain cooped up here than to return home and waste precious human resources on another stomach. I’ve seen the outdated school website which was created five years ago but looks fifteen older, my education is taking a greater burden on the bank of Mom and Dad than if I went to a normal school. Burning fuel and cash is not an option. What kind of student is so desperate that their living allowance is their only savings? The agony. 

I look at a town where the poor have cars and hence it never saw the need to invest more than one way in, one way out. The wealthy live in a different world. Rich moms have a garage, their rich dads have a limousine. When a dad puts his limousine inside her garage, the child of a rich family is born. Being an international school, there is a wealth of private drivers. Parents show off to other parents whose limousine is shinier and longer than the others. Not far from here, a megastar is performing a live concert and some classmates were talking about it between breaks. I don’t need their tickets. I have a phone and can listen to their music for free. 

Fourth of January, that was when I got my golden ticket. A naked platform was jacketed by glass squares overhead. I stood shoulders stiffened in the same plain grey jacket and black cargo pants I’m still wearing now. A woman hugs me from behind and passes me a Cookie Bubble Tea. She kisses her son goodbye while the father stands three paces behind trying his best to ignore the deaf child who cannot hear himself talking in mushy Chinese. A stranger looking at stranger things. The countdown reaches to five, and I salute them farewell, throwing open promises of returning from a faraway land. The train ride offered little in the way of scenery. Aside from the enormous backpack on my lap blocking me from a full-screen view, I passed by the rows of farmlands and villages before crossing a valley, all the time paying attention to the complimentary drink from Mom. 

This is the only drink I will ever need -  I could live the rest of my days with nothing but a vault dispensing it. Every morning, I'll position my mouth right under the tap and let the little biscuit bits crunch as they blend seamlessly with sticky chewy golden pearls showered in a milky indulgence. The creamy and caramelized fragrance will remind me to forget where I am headed, riding a one way ticket to Flavortown. I take my last sip and let out a sigh of despair. At what point did the right train take me down the wrong path? 

As the moon continues to climb higher in the night sky, I gaslight myself that my parents don’t need to see me this year when suddenly my phone rings. Without any further notice, the train line from the Chengdu-Kunming regional line will be decommissioned. Perfect. I continue to sit and pretend to be a panda. I saw a video recently of a mother panda using its mouth to pick up its baby panda cub from running away. Heck, I’ll let my mother bite my clothes and drag me home for even just a weekend. I need a break from this place. A good day will always follow up after a bad day. But I can never be happy during the happy moments because I know the bad day is inevitable. 

My body repels from the idea of sleeping back in the dorm again. When I try to sleep, I don’t see it but my mind senses that there are spirits around me. Sometimes they look from afar before coming closer and standing on top of me while I sleep. I tense up as I imagine them smiling at me. They’re not there but I feel them. Others pass by without noticing me and I pretend not to notice them. One time a giant worm flew into my room and ate me whole. Each otherworldly thought paralyzes me in my sleep. I don’t know who is coming today. 

The time passes by faster than usual and I guess I should return before the curfew. There’s no ocean here. I just noticed. Unlike my hometown where the waters extend beyond infinity, I am in a sea of greenery. If there is a swimming pool here, then I cannot remember it. I went back down the hill and past the cafe where I saw my teacher opposite the street, recalling the burst of adrenaline as I grabbed my food and made my escape. I made it back in five minutes before it automatically locked. Once again, I'm greeted by the same expressionless stuff toy and the monster. It’s expressions the same as always. I don’t have time to face my monsters. Adjusting No Face to face my bed, I drop onto the mattress, aware of the dailies and weeklies of the following day. I really cannot handle these monsters anymore. What happens if I just run so fast towards the sun that I pass out? What if I actually had wings? 

The very next day, a student dies from heat stroke while running on the school track. In the not so far distance, a train rides along its set of rail tracks for the first time in seven months. At the front of the train is a bear who is the locomotive conductor. 

“Choo Choo!”