by Amy Tan
“These little foreigner girls”—Du Lili points—“who are they?”
“Her schoolmates.”
“Why are they being punished?”
“Punished? They’re not being punished.”
“Then why are they wearing the tall dunce hats?”
“Ah-ha-ha-ha! Yes, yes, tall hats for punishing counterrevolutionaries, that’s what they look like! In America, foreigners wear tall hats to celebrate birthdays, also New Year’s. This is a party for Libby-ah’s birthday. It’s a common American custom. The schoolmates offer gifts, nothing useful, just pretty things. And the mother makes a sweet cake and puts flaming candles on top. The child plants a wish in her head, and if she can blow out the candles all at once, the wish will grow true. Then the children feast on sweet cake, guzzle sweet drinks, eat sweet candy, so much sweetness their tongues roll back and they can’t swallow any more.”
Du Lili rounds her mouth in disbelief. “Tst! Tst! A party for every birthday. A simple charm for a birthday wish. Why do Americans still wish so much, when they already have too much? For me, I don’t even need a party. A wish once every twenty years would be enough. . . .”
Simon pulls me aside. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“Where to?”
He leads me out of the courtyard, then points to the archway between the mountains, the entrance to the next valley.
I wag my finger at him like a nursery school teacher. “Simon, you aren’t still thinking about that cave, are you?”
He returns a phony look of offense. “Moi? Of course not. I just thought it would be nice to go for a walk. We have things to talk about.”
“Oh? Like what?” I say coyly.
“You know.” He takes my hand, and I call out over the wall: “Kwan! Simon and I are going for a walk.”
“Where?” she shouts back.
“Around.”
“When you return?”
“You know, whenever.”
“How I know what time worry?”
“Don’t worry.” And then I have second thoughts about where we might be headed. So I add, “If we’re not back in two hours, call the police.”
I hear her happily grumbling to Du Lili in Chinese: “She says if they’re lost, telephone the police. What telephone? We have no telephone. . . .”
We walk quietly, holding hands. I’m thinking of what I should say. I’m sure Simon is doing the same. I’m not going to settle for patching things up automatically. I want a commitment to become closer, to be intimate with our minds and not just our bodies. And so with our own yet-to-be-spoken thoughts, we head in the general direction of the stone wall that separates Changmian from the next valley.
Our meandering takes us through private alleyways that interlace related compounds, and we apologize to those families who stare at us with curiosity, then apologize again when they run to their doorways, showing us coins for sale, green tarnished disks they claim are at least five hundred years old. I shoot a couple of frames and imagine a caption that would suit them: “Changmian residents staring at intruders.” We peek into the open gates of courtyards and see old men coughing, smoking the stubs of cigarettes, young women holding babies, their fat cheeks bright pink from the pinching cold. We pass an old woman with a huge bundle of kindling balanced on her shoulders. We smile at children, several of whom have cleft palates or clubfeet, and I wonder if this is the result of inbreeding. We see this together, two aliens in the same world. Yet what we see is also different, because I wince at such hardship, the life that Kwan once had, that I could have had. And Simon remarks, “You know, they’re sort of lucky.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, the small community, family histories linked for generations, focused on the basics. You need a house, you get your friends to help you slap a few bricks together, no bullshit about qualifying for a loan. Birth and death, love and kids, food and sleep, a home with a view—I mean, what more do you need?”
“Central heating.”
“I’m serious, Olivia. This is . . . well, this is life.”
“You’re being sentimental. This is the pits, this is basic survival.”
“I still think they’re lucky.”
“Even if they don’t think so?”
He pauses, then raises his lower lip like a bulldog. “Yeah.” His smart-ass tone is begging for an argument. And then I think, What’s the matter with me? Why do I have to escalate everything into a moral battle of right and wrong? The people here don’t care what we think. Let it go, I tell myself.
“I guess I can see your point,” I say. And when Simon smiles, the embers of my irritation are fanned once again.
The path leads up the hill. As we round the top, we spot two little girls and a boy, all around five or six years old, playing in the dirt. About ten yards beyond them is the high stone wall and its archway, blocking our view of what lies beyond. The children look up, cautious and alert, their faces and clothes covered with mud.
“Ni hau?” Simon says in a flat American accent—“How are you?” being one of the few Chinese phrases he knows. Before the children notice, I bring out the Leica and fire off five shots. The children giggle, then return to their play. The boy is patting out the finishing touches on a mud fortress, his thumbprints still visible on the walls and gate. One girl is using her fingers to tweeze small blades of grass. The other girl delicately transfers the green slivers to the thatched roof of a miniature hut. And crawling near the hut are several brown grasshoppers, the captive residents of this elaborate compound. “Aren’t those kids smart?” I say. “They made toys out of nothing.”
“Smart and messy,” Simon answers. “I’m kidding. They’re cute.” He points to the smaller girl. “That one sort of looks like you at age six, you know, the birthday party snapshot.”
As we walk toward the archway, the children jump up. “Where are you going?” the boy says gruffly in his childish Mandarin.
“To see what’s over there.” I point to the tunnel. “Do you want to come?” They run ahead of us. But when they arrive at the entrance, they turn around and look at us. “Go ahead,” I tell them. “You go first.” They don’t budge, only shake their heads solemnly. “We’ll go together.” I extend my hand to the smaller girl. She backs away and stands behind the boy, who says, “We can’t.” The bigger girl adds, “We’re scared.” The three of them huddle together even more closely, their huge eyes fixed on the archway.
After I translate this for Simon, he says, “Well, I’m going through now. If they don’t want to come, fine.” The moment he steps into the archway, the children scream, turn on their heels, and flee at top speed. “What was that about?” Simon’s voice echoes in the rounded entrance.
“I don’t know.” My eyes follow the children until they drop behind the hill. “Maybe they’ve been warned not to talk to strangers.”
“Come on,” he calls. “What are you waiting for?”
I’m looking at the walls along the ridge. Unlike the mud-brick ones in the village, these are made out of huge blocks of cut stone. I imagine the laborers from long ago hauling them into place. How many died of exhaustion? Were their bodies used as mortar, the way workers’ bodies were when the Great Wall was built? In fact, this looks like a miniature version of the Great Wall. But why is it here? Was it also built as a barrier during the days of warlords and Mongolian invaders? As I step through the archway, the pulse in my neck pounds. My head begins to float. I stop in the middle of the tunnel and put my hand on the wall. The tunnel is about five feet long and five feet high, tomblike. I imagine ghostly warring troops waiting for us on the other side.
What I see instead is a small, flat valley, a rain-soaked pasture on one side, a sectioned field on the other, with the pathway we are on continuing straight down the middle like a flat brown ribbon. Flanking both sides of the valley are dozens of loaf-shaped mountains much smaller than the two peaks ahead of us. It would be the perfect setting for a pastoral romance, if not for the fact tha
t I can’t get the faces of those scared children out of my mind. Simon is already walking down the hill.
“Do you think we’re trespassing?” I say. “I mean, maybe this is private property.”
He looks back at me. “In China? Are you kidding? They don’t call it communist for nothing, you know. It’s all public land.”
“I don’t think that’s true anymore. People can own houses and even their own businesses now.”
“Hey, don’t worry. If we’re trespassing, they’re not going to shoot us. They’ll just tell us to get out and we’ll get out. Come on. I want to see what’s in the valley after this one.”
I keep expecting an angry farmer to come charging at us with an upraised hoe. But the lush pasture is empty, the fields are quiet. Isn’t this a workday? Why isn’t anyone out here? And those high stone walls, why are they there, if not to keep someone out? Why is it so deathly quiet? No sign of life, not even a peeping bird. “Simon,” I start to say, “doesn’t it seem, well—”
“I know, isn’t it amazing, more like the fields of an English country manor, a scene out of Howards End.”
In an hour, we’ve traveled the length of the valley. We begin walking up another hill, this one steeper and rockier than the last. The path narrows to a rough trail of switchbacks. I can see the wall and the second archway above, the limestone peaks looking like sharp coral thrust up from an ancient ocean floor. Dark clouds whirl in front of the sun, and the air turns chilly. “Maybe we should head back,” I suggest. “It looks like rain.”
“Let’s see what’s at the top first.” Without waiting for me to agree, Simon climbs the path. As we wind our way up, I think about Kwan’s story of the missionaries, how the villagers said they were killed by bandits. Maybe there’s truth in the lie. Just before we left the hotel in Guilin—when was that? only yesterday?—I picked up The China Daily, the English-language newspaper. On the front page was a report that violent crime, once unheard of in China, is now on the increase, especially in tourist locales such as Guilin. In one village of only two hundred seventy-three people, five men were executed by firing squad a couple of days ago, one for rape, two for robbery, two for murder, crimes committed all in the last year. Five violent crimes, five executions—and from one tiny village! That’s swift justice for you: accused, found guilty, kaboom. The newspaper further reported that the crime wave stemmed from “Western pollution and degenerative thinking.” Before being executed, one of the hooligans confessed that his mind had rotted after he watched a bootlegged American movie called Naked Gun 331⁄3. He swore, however, that he was innocent of murder, that hillside bandits had killed the Japanese tourist and his crime lay only in buying the dead woman’s stolen Seiko watch. Remembering this account, I do an appraisal of our robbery potential. My watch is a cheap plastic Casio. Although who knows, maybe hillside bandits crave digital watches with built-in calculators the size of thumbnails. I left my passport at Big Ma’s house, thank God. I heard passports are worth about five thousand U.S. dollars each on the black market. Thieves would kill for those.
“Where’s your passport?” I ask Simon.
“Right here.” He pats his fanny pack. “What, you think we’ll run into the border patrol or something?”
“Shit, Simon! You shouldn’t carry your passport with you!”
“Why not?”
Before I can answer, we hear rustling in the bushes, followed by a clop-clop sound. I picture bandits on horseback. Simon keeps walking ahead. “Simon! Come back here.”
“In a sec.” He rounds the bend, out of sight.
And then I hear him yelp: “Hey, there. Whoa! Wait . . . hey, wait!” He comes scrambling down the path, yelling, “Olivia, get out—” then flies into me so hard he knocks the wind out of me. As I lie in the dirt, my mind detaches itself from my body. Strange, I’m so lucid and calm. My senses seem sharper. I examine the knot on my lower shin, the popped-out vein on my kneecap. No pain. No pain! I know without any doubt or fear that this is a sign that death is around the bend. I’ve read this in how-to books on dying, that somehow you know, although you can’t explain why. The moments slow. This is the one-second flashback that dying people have, and I’m surprised how long the second is lasting. I seem to have an infinite amount of time to sum up what’s been important in my life—laughter, unanticipated joy, Simon . . . even Simon. And yes, love, forgiveness, a healing inner peace, knowing I’m not leaving behind any big rifts or major regrets. I laugh: Thank God I have on clean underwear, although who in China would care? Thank God Simon is with me, that I’m not alone in this terrible yet wonderful moment. Thank God he’ll be by my side later—that is, if there is a heaven or World of Yin, whatever. And if there is indeed a whatever, what if . . . what if Elza is there? Into whose angelic arms will Simon fly? My thoughts aren’t quite as lucid or healing anymore, the seconds tick at their usual workaday pace, and I jump to my feet, saying to myself, Fuck this shit.
That’s when they appear, our would-be assassins, a cow and her calf, so startled by my scream they skid to a mud-flying stop. “What’s the matter?” Simon asks. The cow gives me a big-gummed moo. If self-humiliation were fatal, that’s what I would have died of. My big spiritual epiphany is a joke on me. And I can’t even laugh about it. How stupid I feel. I can no longer trust my perceptions, my judgments. I know how schizophrenics must feel, trying to find order in chaos, inventing bootstrap logic that would hold together what might otherwise further unravel.
The cow and her calf lope off. But just as we step back onto the path, a young man strides down, stick in hand. He wears a gray sweater over a white shirt, new blue jeans, and clean-white sneakers. “He must be the cow herder,” says Simon.
I’m wary of making any assumptions now. “He could be a bandit, for all we know.”
We stand off to the side to let him pass. But when the young man is in front of us, he stops. I keep expecting him to ask us a question, yet he says nothing. His expression is bland, his eyes intense, observant, almost critical.
“Ni hau!” Simon waves, even though the guy is standing right in front of us.
The young man remains silent. His eyes flick up and down. I begin to babble in Chinese. “Are those your cows? They scared me to death. Maybe you heard me scream. . . . My husband and I, we’re Americans, from San Francisco. Do you know the place? Yes? No? . . . Well, now we’re visiting my sister’s aunt in Changmian. Li Bin-bin.”
Still no answer.
“Do you know her? Actually, she’s dead. Yesterday, that’s when she died, before we could meet her, a real pity. So now we want to make a, a . . .” I’m so flustered I can’t think of the Chinese word for “funeral,” so I say, “Make a party for her, a sad party.” I laugh nervously, ashamed of my Chinese, my American accent.
He stares me straight in the eye. And I say to him in my mind, Okay, buster, if you want to play this game, I’ll stare too. But after ten seconds I look down.
“What’s with this guy?” Simon asks. I shrug. The cow herder does not look like other men we have seen in Changmian, the ones with cold-coarsened hands and home-chopped hair. He’s groomed, his fingernails are clean. And he looks arrogantly smart. In San Francisco, he could pass for a doctoral student, a university lecturer, a depressed poet-activist. Here he’s a cow herder, a cow herder who disapproves of us for reasons I can’t fathom. And because of that, I want to win him over, make him smile, assure myself I’m not as ridiculous as I feel.
“We’re taking a walk,” I continue in Mandarin. “Having a look around. It’s very pretty here. We want to see what lies between those mountains.” I point toward the archway, just in case he doesn’t understand.
He looks up, then turns back to us with a scowl. Simon smiles at him, then leans toward me. “He obviously doesn’t know what you’re talking about. Come on, let’s go.”
I persist. “Is that all right?” I say to the cow herder. “Do we need to receive permission from someone? Is it safe? Can you advise us?” I wonder how it would
feel to be smart but to have your prospects go no further than a pasture in Changmian. Maybe he envies us.
As if he heard my thoughts, he smirks. “Assholes,” he says in perfectly enunciated English, then turns and walks down the path. For a few seconds, we’re too stunned to say anything.
Simon starts walking. “That was weird. What did you say to him?”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“I’m not accusing you of saying anything wrong. But what did you say?”
“I said we were going for a walk. Okay? I asked if we needed permission to be here.”
We trudge up the hill again, no longer holding hands. The two strange encounters, first with the kids and now with the cow herder, have put a pall on any sort of romantic talk. I try to dismiss them, but unable to make any sense of them, I worry. This is a warning. It’s as clear as smelling a bad odor, knowing it leads to something rotten, dead, decayed.
Simon puts his hand on the small of my back. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” Yet I long to confide in him, to have our fears if not our hopes be in synch. I stop walking. “This is going to sound silly, but actually I was wondering—maybe these things are like omens.”
“What things?”
“The kids telling us not to go in here—”
“They said they couldn’t go in. There’s a difference.”
“And that guy. His evil chuckle, like he knows we shouldn’t go into the next valley, but he’s not going to say.”
“His laugh wasn’t evil. It was a laugh. You’re acting like Kwan, linking two coincidences and coming up with a superstition.”
I explode: “You asked me what I was thinking, and I told you! You don’t have to contradict everything I say and make fun of me.”
“Hey, hey, easy. I’m sorry. . . . I was only trying to put your mind at ease. Do you want to go back now? Are you really that nervous?”
“God, I hate it when you say that!”
“What! Now what’d I do?”