More than two hundred people came to the picnic. They traveled from as far away as Houston and Los Angeles, and a couple of Navajo families drove up from New Mexico. Two former Uravan doctors showed up, and the high-school class of 1969 held its fortieth reunion. Many people wore T-shirts that read “DANGER: Radioactive Material: I Lived in Uravan, Colorado!” An organization called Professional Case Management distributed information about government assistance for former uranium workers.
At the base of one cottonwood, people arranged old metal street signs from Uravan: Flint Avenue, Mill Drive, Calcite Avenue. They were supposed to have been shredded along with everything else, but workers had sneaked them out. A man named Stan Cadman, who had grown up in town, brought an enormous “Uravan” sign that once marked the highway turnoff. Cadman now drives a trucking route through southwestern Colorado, and often, in the middle of the night, he pulls over where his hometown once stood.
“It’s haunted up there,” he told me. “You can hear voices.” I thought about everything that might haunt such a place—mill sounds, coughing old miners, maybe even Japanese targets of the bomb—and I asked Cadman what he heard. He was a big man with a Harley-Davidson cap, tattooed forearms, and a biker beard. He smiled and said, “You can hear kids playing.”
Strange Stones
All along Highway 110 we saw signs for Strange Stones. They first appeared in Hebei Province, where the landscape was desolate and the only color came from the advertising banners posted beside the road. They were red and had big characters promising qi shi—literally, “strange stones,” although the adjective could also be translated as “marvelous” or “rare.” The banners had been tattered and torn by the wind. We were driving northwest, right into a spring storm. There was only rain at the moment, but we could see what lay ahead—the forecast was frozen on top of the oncoming traffic. Most vehicles were big Liberation-brand trucks carrying freight south from Inner Mongolia, and their stacks of boxes and crates were covered with ice. The trucks had fought a crosswind on the steppes and now their frozen loads listed to their right, like ships on a rough sea.
I was driving a rented Jeep Cherokee, and Mike Goettig was along for the ride. If things went well, I might eventually make it to the Tibetan Plateau. We had met in the Peace Corps, and after finishing our time as volunteers we had each found a different way of staying in China: I worked as a freelance writer; Goettig opened a bar in the southwest. But every once in a while we met up on the road, for old times’ sake. We passed a half-dozen signs for Strange Stones before either of us spoke.
“What’s up with this?” Goettig said at last.
“I have no idea. I haven’t driven this road before.”
The banners stood in front of small shops made of cement and white tile, and they seemed to grow more insistent with every mile. “Strange stones” is the Chinese term for any rock whose shape looks like something else. It’s an obsession at scenic destinations across the country; in the Yellow Mountains you can seek out natural formations with names like Immortal Playing Chess and Rhinoceros Watching Moon. Collectors buy smaller rocks; sometimes they’ve been carved into a certain shape, or they may contain a mineral pattern with an uncannily familiar form. I didn’t have the slightest interest in Strange Stones, but their proliferation in this forgotten corner of Hebei mystified me. Who was buying this stuff? Finally, after about twenty banners, I pulled over.
Inside the shop, the arrangement seemed odd. Display tables completely encircled the room, leaving only a narrow gap for entry. A shopkeeper stood beside the gap, smiling. With Goettig behind me, I squeezed past the tables, and then I heard a tremendous crash.
I spun around. Goettig stood frozen; shards of green lay strewn across the concrete floor. “What happened?” I asked.
“He knocked it off!” the shopkeeper said. He grabbed the hem of Goettig’s coat. “Your jacket brushed it.”
Goettig and I stared at the scattered shards. Finally I asked, “What is it?”
“It’s jade,” the man said. “It’s a jade ship.”
Now I recognized pieces: a corner of a smashed sail, a strand of broken rigging. It was the kind of model ship that Chinese businessmen display in their offices for good luck. The material looked like the cheap artificial jade that comes out of factories, and the ship had exploded—there were more than fifty pieces.
“Don’t worry about it,” the shopkeeper said brightly. “Go ahead and look around. Maybe there’s something else you’ll want to buy.”
We stood in the center of the room, surrounded by the ring of tables, like animals in a pen. Goettig’s hands were shaking; I could feel the blood pulsing in my temples. “Did you really knock it over?” I said, in English.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t feel anything, but I’m not sure. It fell down behind me.”
I had never seen a Chinese entrepreneur react so calmly when goods were broken. A second man emerged from a side room, carrying a broom. He swept the shipwreck into a neat pile, but he left it there on the floor. Silently, other men appeared, until three more of them stood near the door. I was almost certain it was a setup; I had heard about antique shops where owners broke a vase and blamed a customer. But we were hours from Beijing and I didn’t even know the name of this county. Goettig had become extremely quiet—he was always like that when something went wrong. Neither of us could think of a better plan, so we started shopping for Strange Stones.
Goettig and I had both joined the Peace Corps in 1996, when it seemed slightly anachronistic to become a volunteer. The organization’s character has always shifted with the American political climate, ever since President John F. Kennedy founded it in 1961, during the heart of the Cold War. Back then, the Peace Corps became immensely popular, attracting idealistic young people who were concerned about America’s role in the developing world. Later, after the Vietnam War, the organization suffered as the nation experienced a wave of cynicism about foreign policy. Since the attacks of September 11, the significance of the Peace Corps has changed again—nowadays anybody who joins is likely to have thought hard about personal responsibility in a time of war.
During the mid-1990s, though, there were no major national events that weighed on volunteers. It was hard to say what motivated a person to spend two years abroad, and we came for countless reasons. Most of the volunteers I knew possessed some strain of idealism, but usually it was understated, and often people felt slightly uncomfortable speaking in such terms. Goettig told me that during his interview with the Peace Corps the recruiter had asked him to rate his “commitment to community” on a scale of one to five. Goettig gave himself a three. After a long pause, the recruiter started asking questions. You’ve worked in a drug-treatment center, right? You’re teaching now, aren’t you? Finally he said, “OK, I’ll put you down as a four.” Goettig told me later that one reason he signed up was that he had a girlfriend in Minnesota who wanted to get serious. I heard the same thing from a few other volunteers—the toughest job you’ll ever love was also the easiest way to end a relationship.
Back then, I wouldn’t have told a recruiter my own true motivations. I wanted time to write, but I didn’t want to go to school anymore and I couldn’t imagine working a regular job. I liked the idea of learning a foreign language; I was interested in teaching for a couple of years. I sensed that life in the Peace Corps would be unstructured, which appealed to me; but they called it volunteerism, which would make my parents happy. My mother and father, in Missouri, were Catholics who remembered Kennedy fondly—later I learned that the Peace Corps has always drawn a high number of Catholics. For some reason, it’s particularly popular in the Midwest. Of the thirteen volunteers in my Peace Corps group, six came from Midwestern states, and three were Minnesotans. It had to do with solid middle-country liberalism, but there was also an element of escape. Some of my peers had never left the country before, and one volunteer from Mississippi had never traveled in an airplane.
None of us were remotely
prepared for China. Nobody had lived there or studied the language beyond a few basics; we knew virtually nothing about Chinese history. One of the first things we learned was that the Communist Party was suspicious of our presence. We were told that during the Cultural Revolution, the government had accused the Peace Corps of links with the CIA. These things were no longer said publicly, but some factions in the Chinese government were still wary of accepting American volunteers. It wasn’t until 1993 that the first Peace Corps teachers finally showed up, and I was part of the third group.
We must have been monitored closely. I’ve often wondered what the Chinese security officials thought—if our cluelessness confused them or simply made them more suspicious. They must have struggled to figure out what these individuals had in common, and why the United States government had chosen to send them to China. There were a few wild cards guaranteed to throw off any assessment. A year ahead of me, an older man had joined up after retiring from the U.S. Coast Guard. Everybody called him the Captain, and he was a devoted fan of Rush Limbaugh; at training sessions he wore a Ronald Reagan T-shirt, which stood out on the Chinese college campus where he lived. At one point, a Peace Corps official said, “Maybe you should change your shirt.” The Captain replied, “Maybe you should reread your Constitution.” (This was in the city of Chengdu.) One day, while teaching a class of young Chinese, the Captain drew a line down the heart of the blackboard and wrote “Adam Smith” on one side and “Karl Marx” on the other. “OK, class, short lesson today,” he announced. “This works; this doesn’t.” In the end, the Peace Corps expelled him for breaking a cabby’s side-view mirror during an argument on a Chengdu street. (This altercation happened to occur on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a nice detail that probably escaped the Chinese security file.)
After a while, it was almost possible to forget who had sent you and why you had come. Most of us taught at small colleges in remote cities, and there wasn’t much direct contact with the Peace Corps. Only occasionally did a curriculum request filter down from the top, like the campaign for Green English. This was a worldwide project: the Peace Corps wanted educational volunteers to incorporate environmental themes into their teaching. One of my peers in China started modestly, with a debate about whether littering was bad or good. This split the class right down the middle. A number of students argued passionately that lots of Chinese people were employed in picking up garbage, and if there wasn’t any litter they would lose their jobs. How would people eat when all the trash was gone? The debate had no clear resolution, other than effectively ending Green English.
The experience changed you, but not necessarily in the way you’d expect. It was a bad job for hard-core idealists, most of whom ended up frustrated and unhappy. Pragmatists survived, and the smart ones set small daily goals: learning a new Chinese phrase or teaching a poem to a class of eager students. Long-term plans tended to be abandoned. Flexibility was important, and so was a sense of humor. There had been nothing funny about the Peace Corps brochures, and the typical American view of the developing world was deadly serious—there were countries to be saved and countries to be feared. That was true of the Communists, too; their propaganda didn’t have an ounce of humor. But the Chinese people themselves could be surprisingly lighthearted. They laughed at many things, including me: my nose, the way I dressed, the way I spoke their language. It was a terrible place for somebody stiffly proud to be American. Sometimes I thought of the Peace Corps as a reverse refugee organization, displacing all of us lost Midwesterners, and it was probably the only government entity that taught Americans to abandon key national characteristics. Pride, ambition, impatience, the instinct to control, the desire to accumulate, the missionary impulse—all of it slipped away.
At the shop, a few Strange Stones looked like food. This has always been a popular Chinese artistic motif, and I recognized old favorites: a rock-hard head of cabbage, a stony strip of bacon. Other stones had been polished to reveal some miraculous mineral pattern, but in my nervousness they all looked the same to me. I selected one at random and asked the price.
“Two thousand yuan,” the shopkeeper said. He saw me recoil—that was nearly $250. “But we can go cheaper,” he added quickly.
“You know,” Goettig said to me, “nothing else in here would break if it fell.”
He was right—it was all Strange in a strictly solid sense. Why had a jade ship been there in the first place? As a last resort, I hoped that Goettig’s size might discourage violence. He was six feet one and well-built, with close-cropped hair and a sharp Germanic nose that the Chinese found striking. But I had never known anybody gentler, and we shuffled meekly toward the door. The men were still standing there. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t think we want to buy anything.”
The shopkeeper pointed at the pile of green shards. “Zenmeban?” he said softly. “What are you going to do about this?”
Goettig and I conferred, and we decided to start at fifty yuan. He took the bill out of his wallet—the equivalent of six dollars. The shopkeeper accepted it without a word. All the way across the parking lot I expected to feel a hand on my shoulder. I started the Cherokee, spun the tires, and veered back onto Highway 110. I was still shaking when we reached the city of Zhangjiakou. We pulled over at a truck stop for lunch; I guzzled tea to calm my nerves. The waitress became excited when she learned we were Americans.
“Our boss has been to America!” she said. “I’ll go get her!”
The boss was middle-aged, with dyed hair the color of shoe black. She came to our table and presented a business card with a flourish. One side of the card was in Chinese, the other in English:
UNITED SOURCES OF AMERICA, INC.
JIN FANG LIU
DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
CHINA
Embossed in gold was a knockoff of the Presidential Seal of the United States. It looked a lot like the original, except for the eagle: the Zhangjiakou breed was significantly fatter than the American original. He had pudgy wings, a thick neck, and legs like drumsticks. Even if it dropped the shield and arrows, I doubted this bird would be capable of flight. The corner of the card said, in small print:
PRESIDENT GERALD R. FORD
HONORARY CHAIRMAN
“What kind of company is this?” I asked.
“We’re in the restaurant business here in Zhangjiakou,” the woman said. She told me her daughter lived in Roanoke, Virginia, where she ran another restaurant.
I pointed at the corner of the card. “Do you know who that is?”
“Fu Te,” Ms. Jin said proudly, using the Chinese version of Ford’s name. “He used to be President of the United States!”
“What does he have to do with this restaurant?”
“It’s just an honorary position,” Ms. Jin said. She waved her hand in a way that suggested, No need to tell Mr. Fu Te about our little truck stop in Zhangjiakou! She gave us a discount and told us to come back any time.
We stopped in the city of Jining for the night. The temperature had plummeted into the teens; the rain had turned to snow; I pulled into the first hotel I could find. It had a Mongol name—the Ulanqab—and the lobby was so big that it contained a bowling alley. We registered at the front desk, surrounded by the crash of balls and pins, and by now I had a pretty good idea where this trip was headed.
Traveling with Goettig was a calculated risk. Interesting things happened when he was around, and he was unflappable, but his standards of comfort and safety were so low that he essentially had no judgment. Of all the Midwestern refugees I had known in the Peace Corps, he had come the farthest, and he seemed the least likely ever to return home. When our group first met for departure from San Francisco, Goettig had shown up with the smallest pile of luggage. He carried less than a hundred dollars, his entire life savings.
He was from southwestern Minnesota, where he had been raised by a single mother. She had two children by the age of nineteen, and after that she found jobs wherever she could—bartending, offi
ce work, waitressing at the Holiday Inn. Eventually, she took a position on the production line of a factory that manufactured bread-bag ties in Worthington, Minnesota, a town of ten thousand people. The family stayed in a succession of trailer courts and rental apartments; one year they lived on a farm because the previous tenant, a friend of Goettig’s mother, had died in a motorcycle accident. Much of their home life revolved around motorcycles. Goettig’s mother was a devoted biker, and in the summer they attended Harley-Davidson rallies and rodeos around the Midwest. He watched his mother’s friends compete in events like Monkey in the Tree, in which a woman leaps from the back of a motorcycle to a low-hanging rope, where she dangles while the man continues around an obstacle course, returning so that the woman can drop down perfectly onto the street. Another contest involves seeing which woman on the back of a moving motorcycle can take the biggest bite out of a hot dog hanging from a string. When Goettig first told me about these events, I realized that I hadn’t seen anything stranger in China. He said he had always hated motorcycles.
He was the only one in his family who enjoyed reading. He finished high school in the eleventh grade, because Minnesota had a program in which the state paid for a year of college if a student left the secondary system early. At the University of Minnesota at Morris, Goettig majored in English, and then he went to graduate school at the Mankato campus of the state university. While studying for his master’s, he applied to the Peace Corps. He’d seen commercials as a child, and he figured it was the best way to go overseas for free.
In China, he was assigned to a job teaching English in Leshan, a small city in southern Sichuan Province. With two other volunteers, he organized a play on the side: a student version of Snow White. Soon, college administrators recognized an opportunity for publicity, and they developed a traveling variety show. The other Peace Corps volunteers quickly washed their hands of the project, but Goettig was game for anything. He went on the road with Snow White, traveling by bus to small towns around the province, performing at middle schools three times a day. They had to change the play for political reasons. Originally, the Woodsman was a villain, but college officials insisted that the play end with a more favorable view of the proletariat, so the Woodsman reformed and gave a self-criticism. As part of the variety show, a brass band played “The Internationale,” a student sang Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting,” and Goettig went onstage with a blue guitar and sang “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” He was mobbed for autographs everywhere. During the bumpy rides between towns, the Snow White players sang songs at the top of their lungs and gorged on raw sugar cane, spitting the pulp onto the floor of the bus. Goettig told me that those were the longest ten days of his Peace Corps service.
Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.) Page 17