by Thom Jones
At the site of the world’s largest Buddha I met some nice Danish girls who asked me what was I doing in China when I didn’t have to be there without some compelling reason. We traveled to Outer Mongolia together and slept in the same yurt. The Danes told me they’d hit China by accident and were bugging out for the nearest border, which I recollect was Siberia. This was just after SARS raised its ugly head. At the height of SARS hysteria Chengdu appeared to be a ghost town, the crowded streets empty except for lone individuals in face masks making panicked runs to the nearest pharmacy or grocery store. People in our program would get drunk on Tsingtao beer, and with beer bravado they vowed long and loud to stick it out until the end. A day later you would hear they’d lost their nerve and in the dead of night had caught the first flight home.
The weather in Chengdu is so variable that you can almost die of heatstroke one day and on the next you’re wrapped up in a mummy sleeping bag by the electric heater with your teeth clacking like a pair of joke-store dentures. On cold nights you can see your breath. It forms into ice crystals that look like diamond dust. They hang in the air a moment and then tumble to the floor with tiny silver-bell tinkles. Antarctica.
As for the cockroaches, you get so used to them you learn to stab them to death with your index finger. Early on, the Chengdu roaches were so terrifying to me that at the first look I would bust down walls to effect an escape. What really got to me were those razor-sharp jaggedy things on their legs, and those wispy thin whip antennas. See one coming and I would go on a rampage like a twenty-ton elephant that had just seen a mouse and was convinced the harmless little rodent would climb up its trunk and accomplish a suffocation. Quinny says that for the elephant a field mouse is akin to a small but highly visible SARS molecular virus. He said it’s all a matter of proportion, a matter of scale. And it’s all completely irrational. “Like how many people worldwide have died of SARS, three hundred? That’s just a stupid superstition!” But the next afternoon his crap was all gone and Elizabeth informed me that Quinny had caught the eleven A.M. flight to Vancouver. What a piker!
During my first months in Chengdu the streets were so thick with the confusion and disorder of human traffic, the city’s every corridor so crowded, that I scarcely knew where I was going. You just got caught up in riptides of the frantic hoard. I would get so lost I had to take cabs home at extravagant prices.
Once I had my bearings, I bought a Flying Pigeon model bicycle off the black market. Daddy loves Flying Pigeon stories. The Pigeon had bald tires and bad brakes. Still, it was a deal—the only commercial transaction in which I came out ahead in a lifetime of shopping. Well, there I am riding the Pigeon when a truck shot past me and knocked over an old man who was riding a bike without a seat. The accident left the poor man sprawled out on the road, an unconscious bloody wreck. No ambulance came. The man began to have convulsive seizures and turned blue. No police came. People stopped to stare at the injured man but no Good Samaritan lifted a finger to help him out. Sometimes I think the residents of Chengdu are positively evil, all ten million of them. I’m not from Samaria but I helped the man to a teahouse and from there I hired a pedicab to take him home. I offered to take him to a hospital but he said he was okay and wanted to go home.
When the brakes on my Flying Pigeon went out, I bought a new set that cost twenty cents installed. The bicycle repairman later fixed a flat for an American dime. Elizabeth called me a fool and told me the bike guy totally ripped me off. How do you get ripped off over a dime?
I give as much every week to the rotating watchmen at our apartment building, although the prevailing fee is less, a single tenth of a yuan. These men guard bicycles for a living. That’s all they do. A week after the old man was struck by the truck, my Flying Pigeon was stolen from a bike rack near the post office. Bike thieves carry commercial lock cutters. There is simply no percentage in owning a nice bicycle; it’s just going to get stolen and with a new bike you have to get it licensed at the police station and take a bike-riding test. Since the Pigeon got taken, I’ve lost three crappier bikes. The Pigeon 2 was a rust bucket but it did have a basket and a bell, each of which was stolen on separate occasions within a week. Next the square foot pedals were stolen and I was left pedaling on thin pegs. Then someone stole the seat cushion, leaving an exposed seat spring that was determined to munch a hole in my ass. I told my dad about it. My father hears “rusty spring” and he fears tetanus. He hears “monkey bite” and fears rabies. Mosquito bites: malaria, Japanese encephalitis, and dengue fever. You don’t even want to know what he feared when he first heard of the SARS epidemic. Obviously no way in hell did I consider telling him that Marcello was a black soccer player from São Paulo, Brazil, eleven years my senior.
The Danish girls had it right. Life in China is so arduous, there’s never a single day when I don’t wish I were somewhere else. Bad things happen on a daily basis. But I don’t necessarily want to go home. I’d happily join a wandering Gypsy horde in Romania or travel the Australian desert with a tribe of Aborigines. My big fear is that I will return to an America unknown to me, an America where I will face plasma TVs with impossible remote controls, an America with a new jacked-up level of road rage, with an indecipherable new wave of computer software. I will return as Jennifer Crusoe. Or Rip Van Jennackal. This is what often happens to Peace Corps volunteers, or so I’ve heard.
Chengdu is such nonstop noise. Bulldozers and stuff. We had a water pipe in the bathroom burst and the whole bathroom had to be remodeled. You had to step over the construction workers when you came and went since the workers sleep at the job site. They sleep, wake up, drink a cup of tea, eat a bowl of rice, and then work for hours on end. Smoke two packs of cigarettes, go back to sleep in the stairwell, on and on they go twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every day the carbon copy of the day before. Chinese Groundhog Day. Building and construction work gets done quickly but it’s highly dangerous employment. People doing manual labor, people who work in factories or in coal mines, are constantly getting maimed or killed on the job. You don’t want to be a doctor or lawyer in China; a janitor has more clout. The highest-status job goes to the engineer or computer geek or an entrepreneur versed in American business know-how.
My junkman is always standing by the garbage cans like a prostitute on a street corner. He’s short even by Chinese standards and he likes to clasp his hands, swinging his arms back and forth while whistling to himself or smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. My father is greatly amused by this man of mystery but there is so little to say I have to make things up. One of my goals for China was to get to know the common man but this is impossible because of class differences and the fact that the Sichuan dialect is pretty much impenetrable.
My dad doesn’t get that. In every email or every calling-card phone conversation home he interrogates me about the junkman. “What kind of clothes does the junkman wear?”
“A charcoal sports jacket with gray slacks, suspenders, and a pair of Nikes with white spats.”
“Oh, ho ho. There you go again but really, a sports jacket? Like a businessman, a stockbroker? A lawyer? Does the junkman have a family? How old is he? What career path did he follow before he was reduced in circumstances to the five garbage cans?”
My father sent me a Mariners ballcap and I gave it to the junkman, who wears it with tremendous pride. Or so it seems. Once I gave him what was left of a phoned-in pizza. The deliveries of pizzas, incidentally, are made by bicycle with little hot boxes on the rear fender. Rather than thank me for the pizza, the junkman sneered and tossed it into a garbage can. He didn’t smile at me for a week after this incident. I wondered what unfathomable line I had crossed to offend him, but beyond that I didn’t really care.
My father says that if I’m making a hundred a pop teaching English to junior high school kids, just think what kind of windfall it would be if I gave the junkman five bucks now and then? Wouldn’t it be similar to giving the character Pip in Great Expectations an ersatz trust fund? Wouldn�
��t it confer unto me a sense of power, grace, and entitlement? This was something that never really crossed my mind and when the junkman disappeared overnight, I had to confabulate more junkman anecdotes for my father, who often seemed more interested in the junkman than in me.
I was curious about his fate as well. He just vanished into thin air. People get sick and die overnight in China. Sometimes you see them lying dead in the streets. I wondered if maybe the junkman had crawled off somewhere and died in a gutter. It seemed likely.
At the university my research project is water pollution. And as I said, Chinese tap water is most definitely not Ice Dew. The rivers are polluted by sewage, factory runoff, human and animal wastes. People like to commit suicide in the rivers and think it highly romantic. So the rivers contain poison in many guises and the surface is covered with a white sudsy foam that looks like washing detergent. The chemical oxygen demand in most rivers is high. What’s weird is the fact you can always see people fishing along the riverside. They catch fish with tumors, extra fins, or faces like Jay Leno. The lantern-jaw thing.
The cheapest, most rudimentary form of pollution control is both simple and practical. You round up a little manpower in a city where labor is almost free. You get them to dig cisterns in the channels that lead to the rivers. The cisterns temporarily contain the water, where the force of gravity allows the fecal sediment to settle on the bottom. Then you permit the relatively clean top water to enter the river systems. It’s affordable and very much a step in the right direction. Another pollution fix-up in coal-powered China, with its bad air, is the Three Gorges River Dam Project. The dam will soon replace countless coal-burning generators, supplying pollution-free electricity. In this regard China is on the verge of a legendary historical event. The world’s largest hydroelectric dam!
To see the last days of the Yangtze River Valley, Marcello, Elizabeth, and I took the three-day ferry trip downriver. The cliffs are so high you get a sore neck looking up toward the top. Our tour guide pointed to the 170-meter white painted stripes on the Yangtze Valley’s granite cliffs. That’s how high the floodwaters would reach. Looking up, I felt like I was having a Jack and the Beanstalk adventure. One hundred and seventy meters is a trip into the clouds.
Flooding the plain will not only fill the river gorges, it will displace millions of peasant farmers. It will bury the Panda Cave, the Suspending Coffins, the Bright Temple, and Fendu, a ghost town where malevolent spirits are thought to dwell, and more—much more. The Chinese government seems not to worry about this, pointing out with pride that the world’s fastest-emerging economic power will soon boast the world’s largest dam. Early on, engineers and project managers realized that three separate dams would provide more power than one, and would disperse the available electricity over a greater and more expansive area. But why drive a Beetle when you can drive a Cadillac?
With most of the passengers seasick, we disembarked at Double Dragon Town to recover our land legs. In Double Dragon Town the citizens were literally removing every stick of furniture, every brick and stone, chipping away with pickaxes, hoes, and tiny hammers, and lugging all this stuff to the high ground, where they were reconstructing the whole city. And here comes the kicker: in Double Dragon Town, whom do I find but my junkman. It was the Mariners ballcap that first caught my view and sure enough it was him. Geez! Talk about finding a needle in a haystack! The junkman was wearing his charcoal sports coat and his gray trousers, which were now torn at the knees because of his new occupation. His knobby knees were thick with grime, scuffed and bloody. I chased a pair of Dramamine tablets with a bottle of Ice Dew and, having done so, I handed the empty bottle to my old friend. He gave me a toothless smile of recognition. Because the whole story would delight my father, I gave the junkman a pair of one-hundred-yuan notes, a sum of approximately twenty-five dollars. Money enough to buy a good deal more than a new pair of pants.
The junkman took my money but he didn’t exactly seem thrilled to have money. You would think he would be; my father would think that. I mean here he is working like a dog, and it can’t be for his health, you know what I mean? In that sense the junkman was like the David Carradine character Caine, in the TV series Kung Fu, above such trifling worldly concerns as m-o-n-e-y!
He didn’t say, “No thanks, Grasshopper, you keep the money,” but he did something that showed where his heart was. When the junkman saw that I was shivering from the cold he reached into a big sack he had with him and gave me an extra-large, olive-green, ankle-length quilted Mao jacket, an item that is next to impossible to find these days. After the Cultural Revolution ended, Mao jackets were soon as scarce as passenger pigeons. I’m sure the junkman knew the value of such a jacket. They are dandy as all get-out, a hundred percent cotton, nice and roomy, excellent in rain and raw weather, not all that stylish but a veritable fortress. I was cold and the junkman gave me a coat. I was completely blown.
My year in China didn’t exactly teach me to go with the flow, to experience the eternal Tao, which, like the water behind the Three Gorges dam, will conquer all things. You can freeze the water, poison it, boil it into steam…all of that is true. But relax your life and follow the Tao where it leads you? Choose nonaction over action? They compiled that philosophy thousands of years ago. In this day and age you pull a number like that and every graduate program in America will turn your lazy ass down. Law school? Forget about it. You pull that shit and you’ll be serving coffee at Starbucks. Try that one and what you’ve got is a lifetime “career” in coffee.
Bomb Shelter Noel
MICKEY BOUGHT ME a goldfish he named Seven Cent. He’s got an orange streak along his lateral line running from forehead to tail. His dorsal fin is as black as night and appears to have been chewed. Otherwise he is albino in coloration except for his tail, which is translucent. You can see clear through to the bone. Me personally, I would have named him X-Ray, but you can’t judge a book by its color. Seven Cent is a showman, a gifted performer, and he’s got some pretty smooth moves.
He swims the perimeter of his little fish tank hugging the side of the glass with one eye, in full presentation for effect. He swims around in concentric circles with his mouth going open-close, open-close like a normal fish until he begins to pump his gills and then shoots himself skyward, partially breaking the surface, where he executes a well-timed flip, wagging his tail for propulsion, right down to the bottom, where he shakes things loose.
When you are on the Highway to Death, like me, everything is interesting. Everything is important. You see different, taste and smell different; everything has wonder written in it. Things you have done six million times seem new, and likewise you run into a seven-cent celebration of life in its otherwise impenetrable glory.
As Doomgirl I host a show called Bomb Shelter Radio broadcast at 147.859 MHz. The program is directed to survivalists. Mickey roped me into doing it because I have a pleasantly low voice. It’s his radio, and he rigged up an antenna, which bounces radio waves at a communications satellite so the show can be heard worldwide. I play classical music and do some astrology, but the show is mostly about survival.
Mickey taught me a lot of survival stuff and this is what the listeners tune in to hear. I can build an igloo in frozen Antarctic wastes or a cozy tropical shelter poised to withstand apocalyptic tornadoes and hurricanes. I can read a compass, hunt, fish, forage edible roots high in vitamin C, and I have helped Mickey construct our bomb shelter, which is A-1 deluxe.
Watching Seven Cent, I sometimes feel like I’m drifting through the icy rings of Saturn, sight unseen, far far away, safe and secure amid grains, flakes, and pieces of smashed comets. Chunks of rock the size of trucks are there, to be sure, but mostly it’s snow and ice. Who knows? I feel like those odd people reading your fortune at the carnival when I begin to speculate on things unknown. When I told this to Madame Rosa she threw back her Roma head and laughed like a hyena. Madame Rosa is a tarot reader with advanced paranormal skills. She asked me, “What’s your blood su
gar? Ten?”
I am a type I diabetic with hypoglycemic unawareness. Because of this I’m on a first-name basis with every paramedic in town. “Laura! Laura! Can you hear me?”
You wake up with an IV in your arm, totally spaced. Every coma I have is different. When I have a rock-bottom seizure I come out of it feeling pretty good. It’s the light stuff that contains the most terror. They are the realm of the Bone Crusher and his dancing Salvador Dalí demons. You come out of those ice-cold and soaking wet. I follow my diet religiously, eat in a timely fashion, and test my blood sugar on the hour. People think you just go around like a reckless fool. “Here comes that dopey girl with her big bag of Halloween candy.”
Last night in the warm glow of my Aladdin kerosene lantern down in the bomb shelter, I was reading about a family in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Ulaanbaatar is the coldest capital city on the planet but only 3 percent of the population over the age of twenty is diabetic. Three percent in a world where 8 percent is average! Many among the rural population of Mongolia, the prosperous ones anyhow, live in snazzy yurts. The people of Ulaanbaatar eat mutton dumplings, tinned herring, and cabbages. They smoke L&M cigarettes. Ulaanbaatar is like any other city except for the extreme cold.
At the dialysis center some of the day patients brought in a Christmas tree. Someone wrote “Christmas is just around the corner” on the green chalkboard at the well-lit entryway. Dixie Platte picked up a piece of chalk before a treatment and added, “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas!”
Dixie is one year and seven months older than me, like that makes her the final word on subjective topics. Dixie is a lap dancer at the Zebra Club. She says the dialysis fistula planted under her wrist looks like a 1965 portable phone from Botswana. Dixie gets by on a cadre of older customers who don’t look at her wrists.