by Kurt Caswell
And what about the cinnamon, the source of Guilin’s name? If some of these dishes were seasoned with cinnamon, who would know, as meat dish after meat dish arrived at our table, smothered in a dark, gooey sauce. Were we eating chicken or beef or horse or dog? Likely one of each. Truly, Guilin is famous for its cinnamon trees Cinnamomum cassia, which Fan Chengda calls “a wondrous tree.” Its use as a spice and a medicine dates back at least four thousand years. In the Southern Song, however, most of the cinnamon trees of Guilin had been cut down (lord knows why), and the spice came from afar. They have all grown back since then, though, and in late summer and fall, the cassia blooms and the city is overwhelmed by the sweet scent of cinnamon.
(8) Outside again, gliding through Ox Gorge and its towers of stone, I waited at the rails hoping to see something new, something changing, something fantastic. The upper reaches of the river out of Guilin are densely populated, with towns and cultivated fields crowding the banks. Ox Gorge, however, is far too mountainous to support many people, the great humps of limestone cutting off easy overland access to form a wild green wilderness. The river itself is the pathway in and out, as it was in Fan Chengda’s day. River travel was more dependable and often faster and cheaper than overland travel. In the Southern Song, the Li River was part of a great network of navigable riverways, where boats moved goods (silks, pottery, salt, teas, rice) and people, especially government officials. The road system was also well developed but could pose a formidable challenge if the weather went bad. Though river travel had its dangers too (winds, dangerous rapids, low or high water), it was the way the country moved. The government rules regarding the travel of an official of Fan Chengda’s power and influence allowed for an entourage of up to four passenger boats and one luggage boat. Fan Chengda often traveled with his wife and two sons, and sometimes other family members, all supported by staff and attendants: six from traveler’s service, two from the letter and memorial service, and fifteen from food service. A large group of well-wishers would travel with him for the first several days of the journey, along with a soldier escort of 330 men, for pirates worked the waterways.
Another bend in the river, and we came by Immortal Stone and its companion Wangfu Rock, also known as Yearning for Husband’s Return Rock. These two formations come with a story. Somewhere in the Chinese past, a young couple and their baby were transporting goods on a small punt to Guilin. They had very little food, but when a destitute man appeared, they gladly gave it away to help him, expecting someone farther upriver would do the same for them. They traveled on and grew hungrier and weaker, and at last the husband climbed to the top of a hill to look for help. He scanned the river for other boats, and in his extreme worry, he turned to stone. His wife waited and waited for him to return. Finally she climbed up the hill. At the place she discovered his lithified body, she too turned to stone.
(9) The river drew us down, and with Kraig and Kazuko at my side, I took in the smoky, humid air on this early spring day. We could see other tourist boats like ours on the river, in front of us and behind, more evidence that China’s markets and monuments were open for business. Meanwhile, along the banks of the Li, peasant farmers worked their fields and paddies with nary a stitch on, barefoot and oblivious to the passengers at the rails who gazed at them as if at zoo animals. What did these farmers care about the rising smoke of China’s industry? They had always worked these fields, and while the government and the corporations grew rich, they would still be working these fields. They worked these fields as a symbol of its past, bucolic icons of a quaint agrarian Confucianism, or a tourist attraction.
I wondered if these farmers were Chinese, or descendants of one of the several tribal cultures indigenous to this region. Fan Chengda devotes a great deal of attention in his Treatises to these cultures, which collectively he calls the Man Peoples. They include the Yao, Lao, Li, and Dan peoples, as well as the Man. He writes about them to work out how best to govern, how best to bring them into the fold so that they may be of service to the Southern Song. Perhaps we must not judge Fan Chengda too harshly, as he grew very fond of Guilin and its peoples and found them fascinating, yet of the Man he has this to say: “Their manner is fierce and ferocious; their customs and habits are preposterous and strange. It is not possible to completely rein in and rule them by means of the teachings and laws of the Middle Kingdom, so for now all we can do is to bridle and halter them.” I hear in Fan Chengda’s tone a bold reverence for the Man, just as I hear his frustration as a governor. Indeed, these cultures do sound fierce and wondrously strange. Consider the following string of customs and behaviors:
•Fan Chengda reports that after a Lao woman has given birth, her husband will lie down next to the newborn and pretend to give birth himself. If he does not do this, his wife will be met with sudden illness.
•The country of the Black Warrior Lao is “filled with miasmic poisons. Those who come down with such illness cannot drink any medicine. So they knock out their own teeth.”
•The Man hate foul smells, so they defecate into a hole and then cover it up, like a cat. They also use feces to “deal with people whom they despise. They fling chamber pots at these people, who invariably leap onto their horses and flee in alarm.”
•When a relative dies among the Li peoples, “no one cries or eats rice porridge. They eat only raw beef, which they regard as the ultimate way of expressing profound grief.” They then put the dead into a coffin, pick it up, and begin walking. They cast raw eggs before it. “The place where the chicken egg does not break is selected to serve as the grave site.”
•Apparently, both the Li and the Yao are fond of killing. When Li men drink together, they keep their knives by their sides. “If either says anything inappropriate, they then get up and try to kill each other.”
•Yao men are “suspicious and ruthless and treat death lightly. They can also endure hunger [for a long time] when they are away in battle. They ascend and descend the precipitous mountain trails as if they were flying.”
(10) I wondered whether the cranes were still hanging around the Li River. Had they gone north? Probably. The red-crowned crane, the largest and heaviest of the world’s fifteen crane species, spends winters here (among other places), and Fan Chengda mentions it in his Treatises. He calls it the gray crane and says its entire body “is a gloomy gray color.” Gray cranes “are also able to sing and dance.” He is referring to their courtship dance, which may also be performed spontaneously at any time for no apparent reason. Fan Chengda reports that the laws of the day prohibited the capture or trapping of rare birds, and thus many fascinating birds, rare and otherwise, lived during the Southern Song. Fan Chengda writes of parrots, peacocks, and cockatoos, as well as the hill mynah (“capable of human speech” and “compared with a parrot, much cleverer”), the halcyon kingfisher (people “dry their flesh and sell it”), and the magic falcon, which nests in holes in trees. People like to block off these holes with wood, which forces the bird to dematerialize and pass through the tree’s trunk to enter its nest. It does so only after performing a ritual dance. Upon finding its hole blocked, the magic falcon drops to the ground at the foot of the tree and performs the yu step, dragging one leg as if in a limp. After this dance, it can enter its nest. People then sprinkle ash on the ground to retrace the bird’s steps, hoping to learn its magic. Would you not want to learn to dematerialize too? But the clever little bird, which is probably a kind of woodpecker, or possibly the Eurasian kestrel, erases its tracks with its talon, so no one may stumble on its secret.
(11) On the top deck, the Li River spreading before us, Kraig and I watched the honeymooners in our tour group as we came by Crown Cave and Half-side Ferry. It was a bright, clear day, and the day went on being bright and clear as the couples held each other’s hands and peered over the railings at the water passing under the boat. One couple in particular—a most handsome couple, she in her lacy white dress, which bent around her knees and made visible the form of her body in the river wind,
her white, impossible shoes, and her slightly broad and flattened nose on her angelic face; and he with his smart black slacks and white business shirt, his glowing gold watch, his Tom Cruise haircut—seemed truly in love. He made goo-goo eyes. She giggled and kissed his forehead. She put her hand on the small of his back. He dropped his hand onto the convex mound at the back of her dress. It was a little show for us, the other passengers, to suggest that their lives would be better than ours. They would be true to each other, and their money and good fortune proved they had been chosen by a benevolent providence. I watched a few birds pass overhead, three flying together in the bright air.
Choosing a bride was a very different affair in Guilin in the Southern Song. “People in villages are violent and brutal,” writes Fan Chengda. “Men kidnap the wives and daughters of others and run off with them.” This he calls Abducting a Partner. The couple flees to some remote backwater, where they may live happily ever after, at least until another man appears who then abducts the woman again. Poor creature. She might be abducted several times in her lifetime and never see her family or relatives again.
(12) Not much was happening on the deck of that tourist boat as we navigated the river. It felt a bit ominous, like the soft pool before a rapid. I wondered what would happen next.
Among the peoples of Guilin, there is a way to discover what would happen next, or at least whether that next thing was good or not so good: divination with chickens. According to Fan Chengda, “They take a young rooster, hold it up by its two legs, burn incense and divine through prayers, and beat the chicken to death.” The two thigh bones are removed, cleaned, and bound with a cord. Then, by inserting a piece of bamboo into the bundle, somehow the diviner can determine if a person is auspicious or inauspicious. Some people also divine with chicken eggs.
(13) At the Painted Hill of Nine Horses, it seemed nothing at all was going to happen. This wonderful wall came up before us and towered over the boat. Its story is that Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, left his heavenly horses unattended. They escaped into the wild green hills and grazed on succulent grasses and bright flowers. One morning while they were standing in the Li River, a god discovered them, and took them home to heaven. They fled and smashed into this great wall of rock, and both turned to stone.
A beautiful story, sure, but honestly, folks, it all becomes rather like looking at clouds and seeing a dragon or a hat or the face of the ugliest woman you ever loved. A child’s game, and little more. Farther on, we passed Yellow Cloth Shoal, a wide chunk of stone beneath the river’s surface that looks like cloth drawn downstream. And then rising from the river’s surface are formations that look like a monkey with a watermelon, a bear lying on its back, and a woman holding a baby, reportedly the Crown Prince. Instead of these visions, one might also see, respectively, Magic Johnson with a basketball, a dead horse, and Saturn devouring his children. The mind can go completely wild. Or the mind can be dulled by too many romantic stories of lovers turned to stone, fairy princesses, and fathers making noble sacrifices to save babies. It’s easy to feel youthful and in love with the world when the day is new, but to sustain that love into the afternoon and on toward evening, to wake every morning and find your true love beside you and be in love with her, to go to your job and joyously follow the routines of your boring day, to sit down to a meal and say thank you and really mean it, to love your life enough to want to keep living it: that is the impossible work of the world.
(14) The day was wearing on, and Kraig and I needed a coffee. So over the final miles of the Li River tour, we sat at a table below decks with Kazuko and drank one cup, and then a second. After passing Carp Hill (yep, rocks that look like carp), then Camel Crossing the River (rocks that look like a camel crossing the river), and Snail Hill (a snail, of course), we neared Yangshuo, the end of our journey. Here, the famed Green Lotus Hill holds another such story, something about a carp and a fairy who fall in love, and because love is impermanent, the fairy panics and tries to find a way to guarantee that she can stay with her carp lover forever. As you have likely guessed, for some mysterious reason, the fairy turns to stone. In that way, if you look on the bright side, she got her wish.
The hill is famous for its many pavilions and for the statues and Chinese characters carved in the limestone walls. The most famous is the carving of the character “dai,” which stands at nearly twenty feet high and ten feet wide. “Dai” means both “area” and “young generation.” As part of a longer phrase, “dai” translates to mean that the youth of the area should work hard to maintain its beauty and to contribute to the country. What a pleasant thought, as our cruise on the Li River came to an end.
(15) Back in Guilin, Kraig and I walked the city at night. The tour group had kept us busy all day, and now we wanted to explore a little on our own. From the Park Hotel, we came down across a bridge over the foulest body of water I had ever seen, perhaps part of the old moat around Guilin, or one of the canals dug for water transport a thousand years ago. In the dark, at the water’s edge, we heard singing frogs and watched a man set frog traps in the thick night stench. Did he catch the same frogs we ate for supper in the hotel? We had eaten other treasures too—in particular, blackened swallow, a plate rimmed with little charred birds, which must be eaten head first, beak, eyes, and all. The taste was bitter, sour, like vinegar. Kraig couldn’t quite stomach it, so he ran his chopstick through its eyeholes, like performing some voodoo rite.
Out on the streets, we passed dentists drilling teeth at night, people hovering over card games under dim electric lights, and bicycles coursing in and out of the traffic, the taxis, buses, cars, trucks, and the uncountable people, many walking barefoot. A young man stopped us to ask if we could light his cigarette. He wore little round glasses, like James Joyce, the left lens with a crack down the center.
“A light?” Kraig said. “But you have a lighter in your hand.”
“Sir, yes I do. But this lighter is for trade. Would you like to trade?”
“Why not,” Kraig said. “This is not an English lighter, though. I bought it in Japan.”
“This is not a Chinese lighter,” the man said. “I traded with a German.”
His name was Li Yuan, and with this introduction he launched in on a series of questions. He asked about freedoms in America and Europe, and about the movie Forrest Gump. He believed that in America, what happened to Forrest Gump happened to everybody. He asked if in the West people could go to a library and read any book they wanted for free.
“Yes,” I said. “That is true.”
“And you can truly read any book?”
“Right, you can read any book in the library.”
“In England too?” he asked.
“In England too,” Kraig said.
“I have lost my most prized book,” he said sadly.
“What’s that?” Kraig asked.
“Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.”
“Oh, yes. Wonderful book,” I said.
“Sir, would you please send me another?” He handed Kraig a small slip of paper prepared with his name and address.
“You want a copy of Siddhartha?” Kraig asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Why? Can’t you find one here?” I asked.
“Sir, this is not possible. This is not a free country.”
A small crowd gathered to watch us. A couple of Chinese soldiers walked by. Then they walked by again. Li Yuan appeared nervous. China was opening up, sure, but it wasn’t open yet, and maybe it never would be. Li Yuan’s chance was slipping away, so he came to the point.
“A man I know said he can take me to America if I pay him one thousand dollars. I do not have this money,” he said. “But I am working to save it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure I’d trust this man with your money.”
“I know,” Li Yuan said. “Maybe I would waste my money. But I have to try something. I feel like a prisoner. Maybe you can help me.”
“I don’t think we can h
elp you,” Kraig said.
“Please sir. You must help.”
The soldiers walked by again.
“No,” I said. “We cannot help you.”
“At least, please, send me this book,” he pleaded.
“I’ll send you the book,” Kraig said.
“Yes sir, thank you,” Li Yuan said. “Thank you. And if I write to you with some questions, is this OK?”
“I’ll send you the book,” Kraig said. “That’s it.”
“OK, sir. Thank you.”
“All right,” Kraig said, and he put out his hand to say goodbye.
Li Yuan shook both our hands excitedly, and we parted.
It was late, and as we were to catch an early flight to Beijing, Kraig and I turned back toward the hotel.
“Are you really going to send him the book?” I asked.
“No,” Kraig said. “Probably not.”
We went on, crossing over the stinking waters again, and up the hill toward the many lights of the hotel.
AH, VENICE, AGAIN
Italy, 2009
There’s nothing new to say, nothing more pleasing said Henry James, than to hear it said.
— Robert McNamara, “Of Venice”
Everything has a beginning, a time when it wasn’t what it is. The universe was born out of the Big Bang, and before that there was no space, and there was no time. Our galaxy and solar system have a beginning. The earth has a beginning. And you have a beginning, an origin point before which you were not anything at all. But one can hardly say this about Venice. Perhaps it is the one true exception, or rather, it is exceptional, the exception’s exception, the city that was a nation, the swampy mudflat that became a marble island, the dwarf that grew into a giant. And it has always been so. You can never come to the end of Venice, the way you can never come to the end of Shakespeare or Mozart. So why bother with this great theme, why tap out yet another story of this place out of time? The point isn’t that someone will say something new about Venice (certainly not me), but that its vastness allows everyone to say something.