China by Train
My job runs on airplanes, but China is teaching me the train. This month: Beijing to Shanghai, 1,300 kilometers in under five hours, on a line that opened last year — smoother than most flights I take, and it leaves from the middle of the city instead of an hour outside it. Beijing South station is the size of an airport and runs like a Swiss watch with more people in it.
The travel is the job, out here. Our clients are the manufacturers in Shenzhen, the banks in Shanghai, the carriers and ministries in Beijing, and you learn the country at platform level: instant noodles in every carriage, business done across the fold-down tables, and every city on my route rebuilding its skyline at the same speed as its railways.
The food on the road deserves its own accounting. Hand-pulled noodles near the station in whatever city I land in, eaten standing. Jiaozi in the north, where dumplings are a religion. Soup dumplings in Shanghai, which require technique and humility in equal measure. I have had memorable meals in private dining rooms on client budgets — and better ones for two dollars, at counters I could not find again.
People at home ask what China is like, and I have stopped trying to answer in one sentence. It is the largest construction site and the largest market I will ever work in, and it moves at train speed: 300 kilometers an hour, on schedule, with noodles. I am lucky my work makes me a regular passenger.