JAMES WHITLOW DELANO/CORBIS SABA Passengers in Ulan Ude Station complex, Siberia

Train 3, car 14, berth 5. I boarded the Trans-Siberian expecting sinister, unshaven traders with Peter Lorre leers lugging lumpy sacks. Instead, my compartment was filled with carefully stacked woks, Gap sweaters and three women. The goods belonged to two of them, and they swatted me away when I tried clearing a space. The third woman moved a small duffel bag, her only piece of luggage, and motioned for me to sit beside her.

			C H I N A Photographs by LISE SARFATI

Miss Zhou introduced herself, and then interrupted my reply with an exclamation. "We're leaving!" It was an illusion—the train beside us was departing. Miss Zhou swiveled her head from the moving side of the carriage to the still one, realized her mistake and climbed, embarrassed, into her bunk above mine. Our train remained for now in Beijing Station.

To Miss Zhou it always would. Across 7,865 kilometers and six days, the train would carry the 23-year-old seamstress to Moscow and a new life, transforming her from citizen to immigrant, with no plans to return. I was a tourist, fulfilling a dream after seven years of riding Chinese trains, saying a temporary goodbye to China as we pulled out of Beijing and headed for the border. Miss Zhou had never seen a border before. She didn't know what it meant to leave. She didn't have to, not yet. For Chinese, train No. 3 was really two trains: one speeding away from China and one that would never leave. We rode them together, at once.

The diesel chugged past the Great Wall. Dried corn stalks piled high beside drying bricks in dried-out fields scrolled past the window. In the hallway, a mother held an infant to the glass, naming the sights: "Cow. Crow. Coal."

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Miss Zhou swung down from her bunk onto mine, landing with a thud, a bouncing ponytail and a giggle. She framed large crooked gray teeth in bright pink lipstick. Makeup covered acne, and her eyebrows had been plucked and replaced with two penciled bolts. Embroidered flowers grew on each flared cuff of her jeans, while a tight white tank top clung flat to her chest. She thrust her palm into my face. "Sir, how do I say these in Chinese?" Through her shaky script, I made out the months April through September.

"Why do you want to know?"

"I'm going to Russia!" She laughed, as if it were as obvious as the painted propaganda passing by outside. The mother read aloud: "Study the Three Represents. Love my China. Serve the People." The infant giggled and smacked the glass.

At dusk, a fine mist of sand coated the compartment. Outside, an unrestored fragment of the Great Wall stood atop scrubby grass, an Ozymandias leaned upon by a hopeful shepherd in the dusty yellow light. Miss Zhou huddled over my customs form. "What did you write? What should I write?" I filled out the paperwork for her. Under "Currency," I recorded "$330," the amount of folded bills she'd bought from a friend of a friend who'd returned from America. She leaned on me with knees apart, a pose completely innocent perhaps only on a Chinese train, where a young girl becomes everybody's little sister. "We're friends, right?" she asked, offering an apple. She studied my Russian visa, comparing it to hers. Something troubled her. She stood up, opened the door, closed the door, sat down and stood up again. She fussed, she fretted. Finally, she motioned me into the hall. "I've never been out of China before," she whispered. "I'm really nervous about customs, and the police."

Her story tumbled out in a gruff voice. She worked 12-hour days, six days a week, making dresses with Italian and Chinese labels. The job was exhausting. She held up her chaffed hands as evidence, and pointed to her raspy throat. "Dirty air." A friend of a friend told her about Moscow, where a factory of a friend of another friend needed dressmakers. Miss Zhou's awe-filled description had me believing that Moscow was indeed the magnificent, pulsing heart of the modern world.

I unfolded the world map on which I'd been tracing our route and pointed to Beijing and the line we'd thus drawn. "It's too far!" she exclaimed. "That's impossible." She fingered a city in central Mongolia. "Is this Shanghai?" I asked her to find Moscow. She motioned to South America. I asked to see her hometown, Wenzhou. She pinned down Beijing, keeping the slippery concept in place, and moved south, stopping in Hong Kong. "Here? Say, where's your hometown?" I answered San Francisco. She asked, "The capital of South Korea?"

I believe in maps, in scale. At every waking moment, I know where I am in relation to the rest of the planet. Miss Zhou had no use for them. Until now, her entire life revolved around home, from where she knew the way to work, and the way to Moscow. Just get on the No. 3, where the p.a. played Chinese pop songs, the conductors spoke Chinese and the canteen sold Chinese food. I asked Miss Zhou where she was. "I'm on the train," she laughed. "In China. Where are you?" I pointed to the border on the map, then out the window. "Mongolia."

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