East of Croydon

by Sue Perkins

  LI-JIN: Swae, swae, swae, swae, swae …

  ALL: SWAE!

  It’s at this point that Li-jin suddenly gets incredibly animated.

  She tells me that there is no written tradition in Aini culture – that their history is woven, literally, into the detailed embroidery of their clothing.

  I can no longer speak, but listen with interest. Just before I lose consciousness, I think, No wonder they have to embroider everything. With refreshments this strong they’d never be able to remember a bloody thing otherwise.

  And black.

  I believe the next day involved a drive to Tacheng, where we caught sight of the mighty Yangtze river. I say I believe, because I personally don’t remember any of it. I’m so sorry. Simon Reeve or Ben Fogle would never have behaved like that. They are professional broadcasters. They don’t drink a litre of bootlegged home brew and collapse unconscious on a load of highly embroidered wristbands.

  What I do remember is that Vicky decided I should do a reflective chat to camera at six o’clock the next morning, in a nightmare piece of documentary-making that we now all jokingly refer to as the ‘Culture in the Car Park Piece to Camera’. The Culture in the Car Park PTC is a classic example of how not to make television.

  VICKY: (behind camera) OK, Sue. What are your thoughts on your time with the Aini?

  I tried to open my mouth, but realized my lips were glued shut by some sort of resinous gum. I ran my tongue over them, delivering some much-needed moisture, and began.

  I noticed, after a couple of minutes’ opining, that everyone was just staring at me. What on earth was their problem?

  This is what I thought I was saying:

  ME: We cherry-picked the cultural artefacts that define ‘Britishness’ years ago. How strange to be in a country that is in the process of doing exactly that in the twenty-first century – of negotiating what is saved in the public cultural consciousness, and what is lost.

  But this is what I was actually saying:

  ME: Because because you know I don’t need to say because you know and you know you know it’s culture isn’t it and that can change will it I don’t know she made me a really nice embroidered gauntlet because not all is written down will it be lost yes or then again no I think yes I think that sorry I’ve got a burp coming.

  Forty-eight hours later, and whatever hellfire my body had ingested had now been fully expunged. We said goodbye to Echo and Wendy, and I had a pain in my heart as I hugged them. It’s a strange truth but, sometimes, the less verbal your communication is with someone, the more you bond on a deeper, more intuitive level. Wendy and I never exchanged more than the odd grunt or giggle, yet every time I pop some new-found nugget into my mouth, I remember her face, and see her, hands on belly, laughing, laughing, like her face is going to split.

  22. Ho Goes There?

  We pointed the car towards the heavens, and drove for six hundred miles until we were enveloped by cloud. As we wound round the mountains, I noticed the river below. She had changed. Gone was the calm and steady companion that had flowed alongside me at Luang Prabang. Now I had a more agitated and restless escort. Her name was even different here. She was no longer the Mekong, or Mother Water. Here she is known as the Lancang Jiang, or Turbulent River.

  We climbed into the chilly reaches of the Himalayas, where the air let slip its oxygen. I began to feel the squeeze in my chest. Everything felt fierce and raw here – the landscape as clean and white as bones.

  We arrived in Baisha, at the foot of the rather splendidly named Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. I wanted to stretch my legs, so took off for a stroll around town. I was drawn to a gap in a row of low-slung buildings, through which I could hear the faintest pull of music. I ventured down the alleyway towards the sound and, as I reached its source, came out into an open-air venue to find what could only be described as a pensioners’ line dance in progress. The women of the Naxi tribe were in full swing at their weekly exercise class.

  It was a beautiful, spontaneous moment: dozens of elderly women in traditional dress – blue caps, dark jerkins, with white scarves criss-crossing their torsos, whirling in perfect synchronicity. I joined them for a while, but soon became too wheezy to continue. I stood back and watched them in awe, septuagenarians, octogenarians together – all still at one with their bodies. What a thing, not to be at war with your physical self.

  This area of Yunnan has been famous for herbalists and botanists ever since the Victorian plant hunters first beat a path to it in search of the exotic. I imagined how they would have found this exposed landscape, the thinness of the air – the utter otherness of its people. Everything is available to us now, of course, the world’s topography shrunken by the internet – but how magnificently, beautifully curious this place must have seemed back then. Nowadays, these plants, the clematis, rhododendrons and peonies, are familiar residents of our back gardens. Back in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they were alien species to the European travellers, prized and fantastical. So prized, in fact, that the appropriately named George Forrest escaped with a couple of arrows through his hat while trying to get his hands on a local speciality. The rest of his party were killed. I’m no botanist, but that seems a somewhat high price to pay for a flowering Camellia saluenensis, lovely though it is.

  Perhaps that’s what’s missing from Gardeners’ Question Time – that element of jeopardy. Maybe that’s the way to wrest the show from its ageing audience and give it a more contemporary edge. Younger viewers might tune in if Bob Flowerdew risked a spear to the ribs every time he ventured towards a contributor’s Jasminum polyanthum. Or if Bunny Guinness had to dodge crossbow bolts fired from the Cambridgeshire branch of the WI as she went in search of a rare fenland fern.

  I was due to meet Dr Ho, a famed herbalist in the region – over ninety years old and still busy practising Chinese herbal medicine from his roadside dispensary. If the Cambodian Hermit resembled Grasshopper, then Dr Ho was a dead ringer for Fu Manchu as played by Peter Sellers in The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu. He was barely four foot tall, mere skin and bone, with a wispy white beard that travelled from his lower lip down as far as his midriff.

  But make no mistake: this was no frail old man.

  I am always conscious that having a camera shoved in your face can be a disconcerting and intimidating experience, so I always try to be as gentle in my approaches with interviewees as possible. In this particular case, I needn’t have bothered. From the moment we arrived, Dr Ho was camera-ready. In fact, I suspect Dr Ho had been camera-ready for several decades before this little show-off was even born.

  ‘Ni hao!’ I placed my palms together in greeting and bowed towards him.

  Dr Ho looked towards us blankly. Perhaps he hadn’t heard me.

  ‘Ni hao!’

  Silence. Dr Ho didn’t seem remotely interested in me, but he was interested in the camera lens, which he beetled towards at breakneck speed. What on earth is fuelling the pensioners here? They’re all super-charged. There must be something in the water.

  I tried again. ‘Ni hao! Dr Ho!’ Still nothing. ‘Ni hao!’ In truth, my hellos were now starting to sound more like a cry for help than a greeting.

  Dr Ho carried on towards the camera until his nose was mere millimetres from the lens. As his face filled the frame, his mouth widened to a grin that only just stopped short of the full Tony Blair. He then launched, unprompted, into a lengthy monologue about the variety of TV programmes he had featured in. The list was seemingly endless. Jesus, I thought, his IMDb profile must go on for pages. It appeared there was no presenter in either hemisphere who hadn’t beaten a path to his front door in search of an interview. In fact, I appeared to be the very last documentarian to learn of his existence.

  He gestured upwards, to the wall – which turned out to be covered in newspaper articles, all of them about Dr Ho. There was Dr Ho posing in a white coat, Dr Ho stroking his beard in quiet contemplation, Dr Ho smelling a plant looking intrigued. He had been a National Geo
graphic centrefold, and there was not one, but two signed photos addressed to him personally from Michael Palin no less.

  I laughed out loud. There really is no such thing as a new idea in television – no place on earth spared its glittering reach.

  After a solid five minutes of showbiz chit-chat he paused for breath – and, just at the point where I thought I could get a word in …

  He got out his cuttings.

  The first book contained page after yellowing page of newspaper articles, photos and profile pieces. Dr Ho was about to open the second book when he was overtaken by a hearty cough. I took this break in his monologue as an opportunity to ask him a question about the collapse of herbal plant stocks. Michael Palin beamed down on me. God, the pressure. Had he, the Godfather of the Modern Travel Documentary, asked this question before me? Was it even worthy of his unrelenting gaze?

  Dr Ho responded to the question by simply laying a hand on my shoulder. What had started out as me trying to be solicitous of his feelings ended up with him being solicitous of mine. His touch was basically saying, ‘I’m sorry, you’re the four hundredth person to have interviewed me, Sue – but I shall go easy on you, as you’re patently a novice at all of this.’

  Dr Ho ushered me outside, pausing only to introduce me to his silent wife, who was also in her mid-nineties. I am not sure whether she was silent by choice, or whether experience had taught her she was unlikely to get a word in edgeways regardless. He then proceeded, unprompted, to give me a full medical. He grabbed my tongue with his thumb and forefinger, dragged it out of my mouth and inspected it. He put his hand on my pulse. There was some earnest nodding. Then, out of nowhere, he rammed his thumb deep into a pressure point on my philtrum – that hollowed strip between your nose and top lip – and I jumped out of my chair, howling.

  ‘Headache,’ he said, satisfied with his diagnosis.

  And he was right. I did now have a headache.

  Dr Ho seemed to be some sort of reverse-doctor. You came in completely fine, but left with a dazzling array of symptoms.

  It was then the turn of the equally wonderful Dr Ho the Younger (who was probably sixty, but had the boundless energy of a pre-teen). This was a man for whom the phrase ‘Personal Boundaries’ had little or no meaning. He crushed me in an intense embrace, then whirled me to and fro – desperate to introduce me to his rare plant and shrub collections. There was an urgency about him that was both compelling and intimidating: he delivered everything in a breathless monologue, as if, any minute now, someone was going to shut him up for ever. His English was excellent, although he put the emphasis on strange words, which tended to give each sentence a somewhat shocking jolt.

  HO JNR: This – very good FOR the colon. COLON! You see and this flower is for THE breast, disease of the BREAST, disease OF the breast.

  He brought me to his garden, a compact and serene space containing some ten thousand species of medicinal plants and herbs. Round the edges were wicker baskets, full to the brim with multi-coloured seeds, flowers and roots, all drying in the sunshine. Just being there made you feel well.

  HO JNR: What DO you need from PLANTS?

  ME: Do you have anything for a wrenched tongue and a banging migraine?

  Dr Ho reached into one of the baskets and lunged at me with something that resembled orange peel. I think he was aiming for my mouth, but instead I took a glancing blow to my eye socket.

  ME: Oh, and something for corneal damage too, if you have it.

  He pirouetted off in the direction of a lobelia. I sat in the garden and drank in its peace. And then I left, before Simon Reeve arrived for his shoot at 6 p.m.

  23. The Miracle at Cizhong

  As we became more remote, as we drifted further from the major towns and cities, I’d expected the roads to peter out, the wide boulevards to give way to dust and loose chippings. Not here. Here the roads were brand new, the slick stink of freshly laid tarmac still hanging in the air. We drove from Tacheng to Cizhong on one of these brutal highways that cut deep into the range. It started to rain, and the vast mounds of aggregate leached their endless grey into the surrounding earth. To the right, we noticed scree and, above it, exposed flanks of mountain flayed by landslides. I recognized these scars. They were familiar.

  We were entering dam country.

  Here you can see, first-hand, the violent ingress made by man on the landscape – the terraced farms, fashioned over centuries, scored with fallen rubble. Over one hundred thousand ethnic people displaced. For this.

  For progress.

  We were not alone. The Chinese government had demanded that a guide be assigned to our crew. From now on, as we moved into politically sensitive territory, we were to be monitored. Of course, it wasn’t only the dam that was politically sensitive: we were approaching the border between China and the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Enter our official watchman, Mr Li.

  Mr Li was a nervous, waxy-faced man, who could well have come straight from the pens of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Mr Li redefined fastidiousness, and his desire to cross every t and dot every i sadly didn’t end with his job. Pathological pernicketiness, it transpires, doesn’t begin at 9 a.m. and finish at 5 p.m. sharp. At dinner every night he would regurgitate statistics and facts in an unrelenting monologue, desperately designed to assure us how open and tolerant Chinese society was. He never seemed to realize the irony of the situation – that his very presence told the magnitude of that lie. In the end, I felt rather sorry for him – after all, his life was spent watching others rather than participating himself, always the spectator, never the player.

  As we spiralled upwards, you’d find the odd, comforting counterpoint to the filth and the noise. There would be the occasional white pagoda on the hills above, decked with brightly coloured prayer flags flapping in the gusting wind. This would indicate we were entering a Tibetan village, that a certain serenity could be found there, amid the modern maelstrom that circled the mountains.

  We were starting to ascend to proper altitude now, over three and a half thousand metres above sea level and counting. When I walked, I could hear a little wheeze in my throat – like a wasp trapped in my larynx, struggling to get out. I arrived in Cizhong, exhausted – having taken some surreptitious shots of the construction site and the scope of the building works in the rare moment our car managed to break away from Mr Li’s convoy.

  Cizhong is home to a population of ethnic Lisu, Yi and Tibetan people – 80 per cent of whom are Catholic. The remaining 20 per cent of Tibetan Buddhists join the Catholics during their celebration of Christmas and vice versa during the Tibetan New Year. It’s a happy, peaceful mix.

  That evening, I attended mass in a beautiful, ornate little church that had been built by the French missionaries in the nineteenth century. It was a rather improvised affair, from what I could gather. There were no bells, no smells and no priest either, just a layman orchestrating responses from the pulpit. Women sat on the left, men on the right, all singing Catholic songs in Tibetan, like the missionaries had taught their ancestors over a hundred years ago. I say all, I just moved my mouth up and down like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  The guy I was scheduled to interview the next day, Mr Yi, was among the congregation, but I avoided saying hello. I like to meet people for the first time on camera, so you get all the rough edges and genuine connection.

  Next to me on the pew was the cutest baby I’d ever seen, a riot of chubby ruddy cheeks topped with a bobble hat. Her mum was on the phone for the entire service, the screen casting an eerie blue light towards the altar, like a Tibetan remake of Poltergeist. It’s that odd contrast of new and old and painful and funny that makes this place so extraordinary. I love it. I had grown addicted to it.

  The next day we trudged along muddy pathways down to a small clearing by the river. Mr Yi was there, beret plonked with the requisite degree of jaunt on his head, chatting to his chickens, who pecked around him in the dust. He has been a practising Catholic all his life. He had also been a schoolteac
her. When the Cultural Revolution swept across China, he was arrested, and duly sentenced to hard labour in a ‘re-education camp’. For thirty years.

  I tried to imagine what it would be like to believe in anything strongly enough that I’d be prepared to relinquish my freedom for it. I failed.

  In the middle of our chat, Mr Yi shuffled off into his house and emerged, minutes later, with a pile of documents. One was an official letter, folded and bound in faded red velvet. The script inside was printed on brightly coloured floral paper. In all honesty, I thought it was an invite to the local fete.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, somewhat confused.

  ‘It’s my certificate,’ he said, proudly.

  A certificate? Excellent, I thought, with relish. This is where we’re now about to career spectacularly off piste. This is going to be fun.

  ME: Mr Yi, what’s it a certificate for?

  YI: It’s from the government …

  ME: Really? What for?

  YI: It’s a thank-you. It’s thanking me for my service to my country.

  There was suddenly a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. It dawned on me that this certificate was, in fact, the official rebranding of his prison sentence. His penal servitude had simply been reclassified as state service. And instead of the righteous indignation and fury that you or I might feel after being robbed of decades of our life, Mr Yi sat there, grinning, as pleased and proud as Punch.

  I tend to go into interviews with just one simple question that I want answered, maybe a theme that needs unpicking. Once again, nothing prepared me for the casual horror of Mr Yi’s story and the lack of self-pity with which he disclosed it. You wait, thinking there’ll be a coda of ‘Poor me’ or ‘I’m so angry’ – but what sets these people apart from any I’d met before is the total absence of hatred or the desire for retribution. Horrors had come and gone, and could well come again – but there existed no trace of bitterness. Pain is part of life: you deal with it, even embrace it. You can’t insulate yourself from it. The Tibetans neither fetishize it nor expend energy trying to hide from it, like we do.