Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China

by Tony Brasunas

  September 18

  Three weeks that feel like a lifetime. For the first time, maybe ever, the world seems to be slowing down around me—somehow here in this strange land I can live moment to moment and examine my thoughts and feelings patiently. I teach a class or two a day, and then whole afternoons spread out before me, open and without agenda. Sometimes, in the middle of an evening, I simply observe the present—the now. Now is here. And now is also…here. Now is also my last day in Guangzhou. I know that 46 weeks of different nows will come, go, stop, fly by, ramble beside me, and then now will be time to leave. Now will be time to return to that other world.

  This now, I’m at home, in this concrete dorm, it’s nighttime, and I’m lying under my canopy of netting. A few mosquitoes perch on the outside of the netting and look in. I wonder what now feels like to them. I wonder if they realize I’m not taking any of the anti-malarial drugs. Byron, as reticent as ever this evening, reads in the chair beside the desk. To his right is my guitar, above which hangs a Monet poster I brought—Impression: Sunrise—and to its right are our flimsy wooden wardrobes, and then the large window with its prison-like metal bars securing us from unimaginable villains.

  On National Teachers’ Day, a holiday in honor of the Republic’s weary instructors, Mrs. Yuan escorts the four of us American lăoshī to another banquet, this one hosted by our English Department. A gorgeous hostess in a skintight red qípáo—a side-slit dress that Mao Tse-tung criticized as licentious—floats up on high heels and leads us down a strip of red carpet. The only furnishings in the chamber are enormous glass jars that line the walls, jars that contain a watery liquid and… coiled snakes. Pythons of spotted black, striped green, and murky patchy white. Dead, or at least sleeping. A man hurries by us toting a wire mesh cage of live, writhing ophidians.

  The hostess takes us further, into a private room fit for royalty that features a black leather sofa and a towering Karaoke machine. On the walls are elegant paintings of orioles on blossoming dogwood branches. I sit beside Mrs. Yuan on the sofa. “Snake makes the man feel very strong,” she says, without turning to face me. “Especially the snake’s blood.” She issues a strange, high-pitched laugh. “Many men come to a restaurant like this one, because the snake is flexible and so fast, and they will feel very strong.”

  “Yes, sometimes I feel weak,” I joke, falling into stiff English, realizing again that even these English teachers don’t fully comprehend the language. “What do women like?”

  “I like Beijing Duck,” cuts in Mrs. Liu, a slender, bespectacled teacher who sits down on my other side. Her demeanor is warmer. “I am from the North. Do you know Shanxi province?”

  “No,” I reply, looking from her to Mrs. Yuan.

  “It is famous,” Mrs. Liu says. “Very famous. You can see the Great Wall.”

  “Will you see the Great Wall?” Mrs. Yuan asks.

  “I don’t know. I do want to travel.”

  “Do you know ‘Bú dào cháng chéng, huài hăo hàn’?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “It is a famous saying,” She giggles abruptly again. “It means, ‘If you do not see the Great Wall, you are not a real man.’”

  Lots of manhood at stake tonight. “Yes, it is famous,” I acknowledge. “I should see it.”

  “Maybe for Chinese New Year?” she asks.

  “Maybe,” I nod, turning to listen to Byron, who is asking about traditional snake remedies. Principal Wu, up close, turns out to be an affable man with a thick mop of hair and a bulbous nose; he laughs and answers Byron with growling English reminiscent of Bobcat Goldthwaite. Paige has secretly christened him Wu-cat. “The liver bile,” he says. “It slides down easily, uh, slippery. Good for cold.”

  Mrs. Yuan cuts in. “We Cantonese people are famous. There is a saying: ‘A Cantonese will eat anything with four legs except the table.’”

  Lauren looks at me with an incredulous smile, as if to ask whether I can believe all of this is happening.

  “And snakes too!” blurts Wu-cat.

  Bowls containing inky liquid arrive on the table, and we all rise from the sitting area to claim red-cushioned chairs around the table. I sit, and immediately, from behind my shoulder, a waiter with a long spouted copper kettle arches a long, smooth stream of hot tea into my white teacup, not a drop landing on the tablecloth. Mr. Guo, a wiry English teacher sitting on my right, watches the perfect tea land in his cup too, and then he takes a turn with me. “Tony, do you know your way in Guangzhou?” He dips his chopsticks into what turns out to be turtle soup, and as he secures a shell-covered chunk of meat, I say yes, since it’s been almost three weeks now. He gnaws on the morsel he finds. “Can you do shopping?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I declare. “I just bought vegetables on Wednesday.” And without deciding to, I slurp up a big spoonful of hot broth. It’s earthy and bitter, with a dose of ginger and an aroma of earthworm.

  “Did you pay too much?” Mr. Guo asks. I consider this as other dishes arrive: beef tripe with shredded mushrooms, bony chicken cutlets with fish sauce and snow peas, a whole open-eyed blue jay glaring at me, leaves of vegetables sprinkled with oily chunks of garlic, spicy tofu with chipped pork and acerbic bamboo shoots, and innumerable other permutations on pork. In Mandarin, the word meat implies that it’s pork. I sample a tough bit of pork cooked with an oily, bitter melon. Inedible. I gnaw through my first cow stomach, finding it harder work than the beef muscle, but still palatable. Mr. Guo is still looking at me, so I ask him to clarify. “How would I know if I paid too much? How much are carrots?”

  Our conversation is interrupted by the main attraction. Two beaming waitresses carry in a silver tray on which a long snake reclines in a sinuous curve on a white platter. Everyone oohs and aahs as the splendid serpent makes its way around the table. The diverse members of the Peizheng English Department partake with delight.

  “Carrots?” Mr. Guo chews loudly on a length of snake. He glances around the table, noticing that everyone is chewing and listening to us. He looks back at me. “Well, how much did you pay?”

  “7元 per jin,” I reply.

  He bursts into laughter. “No, really?”

  I repeat what I’ve said, and he gapes at me. He repeats in Cantonese my words, in case anyone missed them, and now the whole table is laughing.

  Mrs. Liu explains to me that carrots should cost about 1.20元. I nod, feeling stupid, and then more than that—like a fraud that’s been shamed, mocked, and finally exposed. I can’t teach English, I can’t speak Chinese, I can’t even handle buying carrots. I finally just bite down into the snake. The texture is tough and sinewy, making me imagine a spinal cord, maybe my own. The flavor is rocky and salty, slightly smoky.

  “Do you like the snake, Hero of the Market?” asks Lauren. She meets my eye. “It’s good for your health.”

  “So I should be feeling more manly now?” I look down at the jagged, half-eaten bit of snake sitting in my bowl. “Somehow that’s not happening.” Countless other organs and parts of the snake are brought before us, and we learn that it is Chinese custom to eat any prized entrée in its entirety, from hind to hair, from tongue to tail. I refrain from snake eyes and most everything else, but I take a tiny gulp of the blood. My belly quickly churns. I inhale deeply as the sauces, flavors, and textures collide inside me in a bizarre mélange that is nothing like “Chinese food” back home. What I saw at the market hanging from rusty, bloody hooks—well, that’s what we’re swallowing here. First ripped off, now poisoned. Where did that snake live? And the turtle? Did it have filariasis, malaria, Dengue fever? What is Japanese encephalitis?

  A waitress brings yet another tray. This one holds eleven slender shot glasses of a yellow-green liquid. Mr. Guo clears his throat: “It’s a drink made from the snake’s—how to say—?” Everyone takes a glass, and Mrs. Yuan throws out speculative English translations for the source of the liquid. Gall? Kidney? Spleen? “It is the bile from the liver,” she decides, “mixed with baíjiŭ,” China’s
most famous liquor, a vodka made from sorghum.

  “In college they called Byron a fish!” says Lauren.

  “Shark,” Byron corrects her, eyeing the fluid in his glass. “And baíjiŭ wasn’t exactly my drink.”

  “Gānbēi!” Wu-cat calls out the Mandarin version of “bottoms up,” raising his glass.

  Lauren raises her glass to me, winking.

  I shake my head. “No one knows what this actually is!”

  “Gānbēi!” echoes off the walls and they all hoist the baíjiŭ-bile combo. I leave mine untouched. Maybe I’ll gānbēi next time if no one gets sick. Maybe if I’d had more snake’s blood, I’d feel more manly. Maybe someday I’ll eat anything with four legs but the table.

  Chapter 11

  Barbarians at the Gate

  為者敗之執者失之

  是以聖人無為故無敗

  He who fusses over anything spoils it,

  He who clutches onto anything loses it.

  —Tao Te Ching, 64

  Colt and I check windshields for the famous words. We’re in a chaotic stretch of street where buses dash to and fro like frenzied ants. He calls above the din to a driver, and the young man nods: He does go to Cháng Chéng. Colt asks how much. The man shoves a finger at a minibus and looks past us. “30元. Get in!”

  “Simatai?” Colt asks. Does our pilgrimage to the ancient miracle begin here?

  The man nods. “We leave, ten minutes, get in.” Colt tells me a joke in Chinese that crosses the language barrier: Foreigners buying tickets here are like apples at Mid-Autumn Festival. “Ripe for ripping off.” Yet 30元 is what the Lonely Planet guidebook says, describing this spot as a bus station for daily transport to Simatai, the remote section of Cháng Chéng that we want to explore.

  The minibus is a ramshackle affair, with rusty metal seats covered hastily by threadbare cloths. A dozen men with cigarettes occupy the seats, but we find space on the front bench, next to the only man not smoking.

  “Wasn’t it strange that Wujia didn’t even seem excited this morning—after insisting so many times? Now we’re actually undertaking his quest,” I say. Two teenage boys duck in and take seats behind us. “Actually, I feel bad talking about him.”

  “Yeah, it’s a scene over there.” Colt winces strangely, twists in pain, and suddenly darts to the door. “Gotta hit the bathroom. Don’t leave!”

  The young man to my left steals glances at me as I calmly examine the items in my bag. I have my dictionary, my camera, a bottle of water, Narcissus & Goldmund, the LP guidebook, and a question. Am I a traveler or a tourist? I carry only the money I saved as a teacher, I like to haggle, and I speak the local language; yet here I am going to the Great Wall of China. I feel compelled to understand this land as deeply as I can, to imbibe its every sight, sound, and smell, to sleep in its homes, to march with its soldiers, and yet I use a guidebook and I broke bread at McDonald’s. The driver starts the engine while people continue to cram in. With an elbow I protect Colt’s seat. Suddenly he’s there, collapsing beside me. “Man!” he groans. “Lā dùzi (diarrhea). Must’ve been the yaōguŏ jīdīng.”

  “I had a bad run-in with chicken myself,” I say.

  He manages a smile. “I remember the story.”

  The city streets funnel bicyclists, motorists, and pedestrians around us, and we can only inch along before merging, at long last, onto a pleasant oak-lined highway and picking up speed. Interspersed with the ubiquitous huíguī flags I spot communist hammer-and-sickle banners fluttering red against the sky. The hammer and sickle is something I simply never saw in Guangzhou. The billboards we pass are more familiar—ads for new housing developments. “Visit the Happiness Acres, an Elite Community for Sophisticates.”

  Colt writhes beside me. “Stop the bus!” he yells in Mandarin. “Big convenience. Lā dùzi!”

  The driver nods and pulls off onto the shoulder. Colt shoots out across the road, down a hill, and out of sight. I step down too, worried, and for a “little convenience.” I urinate between two willow trees, gazing across a vast meadow of leafy green crops blossoming with white flowers. Colt staggers back across the road. He’s still pale, and as we board together, people tease him, jabbering, chuckling, and complaining about the “weak dà bízi” and “never getting to Nanhua.”

  Fifteen minutes later he gasps, and the scene repeats.

  “That’s it,” he sighs, reboarding and nodding at the derisive laughter. “I hope. It’s cool that the driver didn’t leave us. Three weeks ago, in the middle of nowhere, on the way to Lanzhou, I had to get off and run for the bushes. The driver decided he’d had enough and just tossed my bag off the roof and drove off.”

  And this is my plan—to travel out into the middle of this land—with these kindly folks—alone? We roll into a dusty parking lot, and I crane my head out the window at a sign: Welcome To The Town Of Miyun. As everyone gets off, I eye the driver, inquiring whether we’re at the Great Wall. He turns. “You catch another bus here.” I try to confirm with him that we’ve already paid, but he smirks. “You get off here.” And perhaps to show us weak dà bízi what he means, he hops to the ground and walks away.

  “What?” I turn to Colt.

  Colt, looking much improved, glances at me as we step down. “Honesty with foreigners isn’t exactly in the Chinese bus driver’s code of ethics. Remember, apples at Mid-Autumn Festival.”

  The lot is crawling with local travelers. Peddlers hawk hot tea, fresh fruit, soft drinks, potato chips, frying bread, ice cream, pots of hot sweet beans. We purchase a bunch of bananas from an old woman who tells us that there’s another bus, one that does go to Simatai; she eventually nods at a bus bouncing into the lot. We approach its driver, and he waves us on with familiar words. “Get in!” We take seats in back and peel bananas. Two men load huge crates of watermelons into the aisle, packing the bus wall to wall. A woman sits down beside me, cradling an infant in her arms, and the little boy reaches out as if to touch my big foreign nose, giggling when I hand him a bit of banana. As I lean down close to his face, he yanks on my dà bízi like a doorknob, left, right. I pull back, and the boy cries out and grabs handfuls of my shirt. His mother praises my Mandarin and plies me with questions. “Aren’t your parents worried about you? How did you teach in English?”

  The driver revs the engine as two more people rush aboard: dà bízi! Colt and I stare at them along with everyone else. It’s a white couple—our age—Americans, judging by their gear and the sweet ignorant confidence stamped across their faces. They can’t find seats, and although people make room for them, the girl refuses to squeeze in; instead, she berates the driver in decent Mandarin for selling but not saving them seats. They finally flop down on the floor and lean against the crates of melons.

  The bus lazily meanders into the hills, picking up passengers and dropping off others. Grassy slopes and rocky crags close in on either side as we ascend. The fare collector asks passengers for 6元 or 8元, and then demands 25元 from us, but we pay up without whining or questioning. Half an hour later he turns to us as we pull over where no one is waiting. “Great Wall,” he announces.

  “Where?” I ask.

  He points at the window without looking. “Here. You get off here.”

  I survey the rolling meadow. “Where?”

  He gestures backward, behind us, to a diverging dirt road. “You go over there.”

  Colt and the other two dà bízi climb down to the ground. I stop. “No! We each gave you 25元, right?” I ask.

  “Mm.”

  “I said, ‘Does this go to the Great Wall?’ You said ‘yes, the Great Wall.’ Now where are we? Are we at the Great Wall? No! You’re trying to trick foreigners. Shameful!” Anger charges through my veins, and for what feels like the first time in forever, I don’t suppress it. I’m not stupid, and I’m not handing out gifts anymore. “Where? How do we get to the Wall?”

  “Down that road,” explains the mother with the infant. “You catch a bus.”

  “Let�
��s go,” Colt urges from outside.

  “Another bus?” I ask the driver. “Another bus! Why would you say, ‘We go to the Great Wall’ when all you go to is this nothing? You’re a… trickster,” which is about the worst name I can conjure. My clumsy Mandarin amuses many, but I also sense sympathy. Finally, looking from face to face, I grab my bag, squeeze down the aisle, and switch to sarcasm: “‘We go to the Great Wall.’ What does this mean? You swindle foreigners. I’m a poor teacher, not some capitalist-roader or rich nose or big nose.” I climb down and stomp over to the others. The bus rolls away.

  “Last damn time I pay anyone anything before actually arriving,” I say.

  “Ridiculous,” agrees the girl. We introduce ourselves and start down the dirt road. They’re from Columbus, Ohio. Cathy is studying Mandarin in Beijing and her companion is her younger brother, Brad, who is here visiting her. Colt tells his joke about the apples again. A motorized tricycle wagon appears, and we come to terms with the elderly driver and hop on back—but don’t pay. The road zooms by and as the wind whips through our hair, I peer up at the green peaks, still seething. With my eyes, I follow the high undulating horizon, and I welcome a deep breath. Haggling has brought assertiveness, and I trust my instincts more. So why am I so angry? We sought out an unspoiled section of the Great Wall of China—of course it’s difficult to get here.

  We roll through a crease between huge mountains, and on the tops of the peaks—along their spine—tiny stone towers are linked together by a golden thread. We roll to a halt in a parking lot, pay the motor tricyclist, and then pay an admission fee at a small booth. From there, we set out walking on a dirt path that winds past farm huts and around a large lake. Fresh air floods our lungs, and lapping water whispers in our ears. The path climbs the mountainside, and the grassy, moist red earth turns gray, rocky, and dry. I catch sight of the ancient stone, and it makes me wonder: Why do people visit this thing? Thousands died to construct it, and it didn’t even serve its purpose: Barbarians—an epithet for anyone not Han Chinese—invaded repeatedly, even after its completion. But now we barbarians pay homage to the brutal barrier; it was built to keep us out, but today it is what draws us here. The steep path stops right in front of it. The Great Wall of China. I draw my hands across the roughly hewn orange stone, massaging it through a light film of dust. It feels cool under my fingertips. According to Mrs. Yuan, I’m now finally a man.