Chapter 12
Playing Chicken and Losing
吃一塹長一智
Knowledge comes from falling in a pit.
—Chinese proverb
“Hello!” the saleswoman shouts to me cheerfully. She crouches over a neat mound of jumbo carrots, obviously eager to rip me off. The other vendors are already observing me, so her English words signify little. “Hello!” I echo, but my sarcasm disappears into the culture gap. For a moment I miss supermarkets and their simplicity, their price tags, their neon-light clarity.
I lower myself beside her, over a large mud puddle, and use my best, quiet Mandarin. “How much are the carrots?”
“Liù kuài yì jīn,” she says, smiling at her neighbor.
I understand! 6元 per jīn. Yes, last week I was betrayed, ridiculed, taken to the proverbial cleaners. That old guy smiled at me so warmly because I was paying him five times his normal price for potatoes! And that giggling cucumber girl. They all had a grand time.
“Too expensive,” I say. I think for a moment what to say next. “How much is the Chinese price?”
“Eh?” She eyes me. There’s a pause. “4.50元. I need to eat too.”
I turn and walk off, comprehending their game. They’re just laughing at the big nose, plotting to fleece me. Let them keep their damned vegetables. I step into the shop with the young shopkeeper, my kindred soul, who also heartily overcharged me. The vat of the best cooking oil draws my eyes, and I smile at the shopkeeper, realizing there’s a choice here. I can be angry, or I can view the prices I’m quoted as an opportunity to give charity to my neighborhood vendors. Rather than handouts to the rare beggar, I can give gifts to poor women selling carrots. It’s patronizing perhaps, but if they feel a need to hoodwink me, I’m certainly entitled to treat them as devious children. The government may even encourage them to overcharge gwailo—everyone certainly thinks we’re filthy rich. I move on through the stands and stalls, listening more, nodding less, laughing more wisely with the young woman with the cucumber gourds. I offer her eighty percent of her prices and fill my pack with round mottled asian pears, emerald-leafed bok choy, husky heads of garlic, and the finest gargantuan carrots.
The smell of burning sugar wafts out from a small bakery on my way home, and I step inside. The chairs and tables are small and a bright, childish orange. In the glass display case are sweet buns and honey-hued breads. The place actually has price tags. But there’s a different problem: I need to avoid the odd pork pieces and red bean paste that seem to hide inside every doughy roll and bun. A girl in an orange-striped uniform catches my eye, and I point to a roll. “What is the… inside-this-thing?”
She laughs, but not like the market vendors. Her chuckles betray a different, softer amusement.
“Is it the hóng doù (red beans)?” I ask.
She’s helpful, and we stumble together through each of six different kinds of sweet buns. I say xièxiè (thank you) many times and walk away with a sack of eight assorted buns.
Back on the street, I try another wild experiment and open a freezer. A Magnum Bar—a real vanilla ice cream bar coated with chocolate—draws my eyes. Ice cream freezers purr all over these sun-baked sidewalks, but I know dairy isn’t a traditional part of Chinese culture or cuisine, so I’ve hesitated ever since that nasty carton of milk on the first day. Ah, what the hell. I buy one, tear open the wrapper of the imported Hong Kong treat, and lick the silky chocolate. Delight charges like electricity along my lips, up my tongue, awakening my taste buds like rain on parched land. In a flash the pleasure overwhelms me, telling me its secret: I am changing, I am transforming, I am adapting—to this dirt, to this heat, to this food, to this language, to this confusion. Part of me is starving, but I am surviving. For now, as my eyes slide closed, I savor the cold, sharp, exotic sweetness.
Sapping life even from the leaves of the trees, the afternoon heat counsels sloth, but I forge ahead with my plan. Paige is continuing with a “multicultural awareness” lesson that we devised together, but for me it’s been a failure. It feels like holding water in a fist just trying to maintain my students’ attention, let alone connect in any meaningful way over something as cerebral as multiculturalism. It’s Thursday and I’m with my favorite class, Tenth Grade, Class IV, the one with Iceboy and Jrace and Winnie. I’m going it alone.
“Hello!” the students roar. As always, they’re laughing, whispering, yelling, or gazing silently, and the ones who remember their notebooks are copying down the new words I’ve written on the board. They listen to my instructions on the future tense. Adam stands and shouts: “I will watch the NBA tomorrow!” Then he fills in the other blank: “After I go to McDonald’s, I will watch the NBA tomorrow.” Two more stand and deliver, performing well, tossing out cultural references with spurts of fluency. This is a smart class, I decide. Iceboy could be the smartest student in any of my classes. He says: “Before China becomes a modern country, it will ruin the environment like America did.” A boy without a nametag says he can’t read the words on the board, and I skip him, but the next two students copycat, feigning innocence, smirking, and they don’t listen to my explanations; everything hurtles downhill, as if my students suddenly conspired to do absolutely nothing useful.
“Donkey, what will you do?” I hear my voice rising in frustration. “Yes, but what will—” The bell rings. They know I hear it, and they don’t even wait for me to dismiss them. I scold them: “Before you come to my next class, you will improve your English.”
They’re leaving, filing out, and I sigh, trying to let it go.
Downstairs, to the dormitory, through the gate, and I’m home; it’s 2:45, two hours before I’m meeting a woman whose business card my father gave me ages ago. He never met her, but her telecommunications company and his formed a joint-venture. Her name is Xie Ran, and a few days ago I fumbled with a telephone long enough to ask her to shop with me at the market. Hopefully she’ll instruct me a little on navigating Cantonese life. I take out my dictionary, check on a few words, and then lie down for a rest.
My eyes fly open. Sweat clings to the back of my neck and my head is swimming. The hands of our pale green clock point to 4:10. I climb out of bed and stagger to the toilet. Nausea and cramps, and my gut gives out. Light-headed, I slowly return to bed, dizzy. The ceiling drops in close, as if to strike me. Like a fist to my stomach comes a realization: I am unfathomable journeys away from anyone who cares.
Some time later I hear the front door.
Byron walks in. “Hey, what’s up?”
“I’m sick,” I mumble.
“Really? With what?”
“Sick. Headache, dizzy, just bad. Could you go meet Xie Ran at the front gate? I’m supposed to meet her, but tell her I’m sick. She speaks good English. You can go shopping with her if you want.”
“Well I—OK, I’ll bring my backpack. I’ll go. I hope you feel better. I’d say I’d call a doctor, but…I don’t know any.” He laughs alone. “We can find one if it gets bad.” He leaves. My cheek drops back down onto the hot pillow, and the dirty white walls and fluorescent lights spin freely. I roll over and clothespin the netting, sealing myself off. My eyelids sink shut. The blood pounds inside my skull rhythmically, making the bed sway. It’s those tenth graders, I’m thinking, their infuriating noise.
I hear talking and the clink of plates, but I can’t see. It’s suddenly night. My stomach is churning and I need to get to the bathroom. The netting grabs me like a web but I manage to struggle to my feet. I stumble across the dark room, palming the wall to steady myself. I step through the door, into the light, and past the table. Byron and Xie Ran look at me, then I’m in the bathroom. I collapse on the toilet. My head and stomach fly against each other. My bowels slam into my stomach, and I almost keel over, feeling my body ripping apart. It’s too much. In a vision, my body is drawn and quartered by horses; my torso surrenders, explodes.
I manage to clean myself up, and somehow I’m back in bed with a cramping belly, a throbbi
ng head, and the knowledge that I’m dying. This is not just sickness, illness, bad luck; this is an exotic, lethal, belly-ripping, incurable, invincible monster.
A hazy vision of Byron’s face appears and asks something, and then Xie Ran materializes and also speaks. I close my eyes. I’m leaning on Byron down the stairs and out of the building. Saccharine air and a red taxi sit there, where no road goes. We drive around on campus, on the sidewalks, on the basketball court, and my head lolls back. The window is open and the gusting air reminds me of life. It’s suffocating, and it’s going to make me vomit. We park and Xie Ran and Byron help me into a gray box of a building, and I collapse on a small yellow chair. The floor is red and black tile, chipped, dirty. People around me wear masks of pain and fear and desperation. The old woman on my right writhes, sighs, and moans as a young boy crawls on her. Her cheeks are swollen like a feasting squirrel’s.
Hours slip by. Byron takes me into a room with several beds, each obscured with a circular curtain pulled tight. To hide dead people. We’ll all soon be dead. I lie down and close my eyes, and a doctor unbuttons my shirt. I whisper, “No needles.” I have to repeat myself until Byron finally hears. Maybe Xie Ran will translate. I try to pray—to Jesus, to Buddha, to Sun Tzu, to new gods floating above me wearing wild crimson robes. The doctor leaves and comes back with tongue depressors. He feels my bare chest and shoulders. If I survive, I’ll leave this land, I’ll go home. If I survive.
My feet land below me, and I’m handed a metal bowl, tissues, paper cups.
“Stool samples,” says Byron from some faraway place. “The bathroom is downstairs. I’ll show you.” He leads my feet down a corridor where people are seated on the floor, along the walls. A boy with a garish, raspberry-hued face watches me. We pass through a dark doorway, onto large stone steps, down, down, down. One hand on the stone wall, I descend into a damp dark dungeon. “In there,” Byron points into an archway. “Knock ‘em dead.”
I step in. The air stinks thickly of mildew and feces and I barely discern a trench cut into one stone stall. Energized somehow, I set down the metal bowl and the paper cups and squat over the trench. Not to disappoint, the rest of my stomach streams out. The room spins and my breaths come short as I pour from the bowl into the cups. I hear and then find the drip-drip-drip of a broken spigot and rinse my fingertips in the stinking water. I struggle back upstairs, carrying my disease in the flimsy cups.
Byron greets me at the top of the stairs. “Over here, follow me. It’s good… Xie Ran is here… I don’t know...” A doctor takes the warm cups. Xie Ran says they’ll do tests to see about dysentery, and the word dysentery means that she really does speak English. I long to lie down, but I drop into a chair and my eyelids descend. Xie Ran is talking, “Not dysentery… the tests... days… Western or Chinese medicine?” My stomach ties new knots. A taxi cradles me, and I hope my body will hold together a moment longer, a minute longer, so I can enjoy this miracle that God grants us—that our bodies ever hold together in the face of this immense need to explode.
“Paige can take your classes tomorrow,” Byron says. I nod and my bed swallows me whole.
I wake up late, sweating in the afternoon heat. Byron says that they got me Western and Chinese pills. Both are covered in Chinese writing, but the Western pills are a stark white and are packaged in detachable plastic bubbles. I study them. What a fool I am, an idiot. I knew if I dropped my guard for a moment the demonic local germs would infiltrate my flesh and snap their jaws around me. It’s a Chinese illness, I finally realize, it needs a Chinese cure. With a gulp of boiled water I swallow two yellow pills.
Evening brings gentle breezes and mercy from the heat, and Xie Ran visits with two bottles of 7-Up. I finally manage to introduce myself, hoping my grateful words make up in sincerity what they lack in vigor. You were my savior. She shares some good news that saddens me: Her company is sending her to Shanghai for an eight-month business course on Internet marketing that will set her up for a promotion. Feeling abandoned, I wish her luck.
But by Saturday I’m well enough to recant my hospital oath, and I choose to stay in China. The snake, the ice cream, the bad pastries, the smelly chicken—whatever it was—matters little. My worst fear came true. I was an idiot, I tore up my belly, I died in a Chinese hospital. And I’m still here.
A Chinese illness needs a Chinese cure.
Chapter 13
A Child’s Drawing of the
End of the Earth
道生之 德畜之 物形之
All beings are expressions of the Tao,
Born in virtue, and shaped into matter.
—Tao Te Ching, 51
A stone staircase leads up into a tower of roughly hewn orange stone. From within the stone tower, a second staircase takes us up and out and onto the Great Wall of China. We stand on it, at an incline. In one direction the tremendous wall plummets down all the way to the glistening lake, crosses it like a dam, climbs up the far side, and then arches like a great serpent over angled crests as far as the eye can see. We turn the other way and hike up, into the warm windy sky.
Built two thousand years ago, the stones of the Wall remain well cobbled, and between the crenellations the Wall here is quite broad—wide enough for passing horsemen. The drop on both sides is precipitous however, and we tread carefully. A slip would become a long somersault all the way down to the grassy meadows of the south side or down to the no-man’s land on the north side. As we continue our upward hike, my eyes are drawn like magnets to the beauty of the north, the barbarians’ side. Small hills stretch like wrinkled brown blankets all the way to a hazy horizon. I wonder if it is the Wall’s monstrous size or the spellbinding grandeur of the view that is lodged so fiercely in Wujia’s mind; despite his reveries and recommendations, there are no green horses to be seen.
A tranquility settles into my mind as I inhale the fresh wind. That outburst on the bus must have been triggered by my anxiety—about traveling, about weakness, about loneliness. It’s all here. I take a deeper breath.
“Look,” Colt stops me. “You’ll be able to take a ride up instead of walking.”
I follow his eyes to a row of pink poles that appear to be a half-built ski lift.
He chuckles. “No beautiful historic site that couldn’t use some pink plastic.”
Simatai will soon be like the touristy sections of the Wall found closer to Beijing, I decide. Brad, adjusting his scarlet Ohio State cap, gazes at the poles. “But it won’t make it quite all the way up,” he observes. “The slope’s too steep.”
“Don’t underestimate these people,” counters Colt. “If steepness were enough to stop them there never would have been a wall here at all.”
We reach the next tower and scramble up into it, shimmying through a crumbling window. We discover other humans inside—four Japanese tourists, sitting quietly in the cool darkness. I remove my tan cap to let my forehead cool, and I peer back through the window, admiring how the Wall rides the peaks’ undulations like a cowboy on a bronco.
“Drinks?” A short, bronze-skinned woman appears, her lined, weathered face upturned. Three big leather satchels of beverages and snacks are slung over her shoulders. Colt declines for us, and he and I discuss the stones beneath our feet—the precision with which they’re laid, the way the Wall perches on the very apex of the mountain. “How were the stones carried up here?” Colt asks the stooped lady in Mandarin.
She grimaces as if she remembers. “There were ten thousand strong men. It took one hundred years.”
Nice round numbers.
“Cool water? Cola?” she asks. We shake our heads. She doesn’t seem interested in the Japanese tourists and she insists. “Soon you’ll be hot and tired and want something to drink.”
“We’re strong,” Cathy replies, and turns towards the doorway.
“Americans?” she asks.
Cathy nods, and perhaps that’s the reason the woman follows us.
We reach another tower, and then another. Breezes kiss
my neck and a biting heat rushes into my thighs as we climb higher. The incline grows steeper, probably impossible for horsemen, and the chunky orange bricks fit together less snugly. I fall behind and chat with the drink lady. She smiles a toothless smile when I ask her why she’s still with us. “Soon you will be very thirsty,” she says. She wears a tattered brown jacket and her black hair hangs long and ragged about her bags.
“But aren’t your bags heavy?” I ask.
“It’ll be lighter coming down,” she says. She isn’t answering my real question—how she does it at her age.
Water from my own bottle wets my throat. “I’m not going to buy any of your drinks,” I say. “But why don’t you let me carry some?”
She looks at me, and without argument hands me two of her sacks. Honored, I sling the honey sodas, bean milk, bottled water, and herbal health concoctions over my shoulder. She tells me she’s here every day. “I live down there.” She points down to the barbarians’ side, to a small village with a dozen tiny houses. The houses and the Wall are of a similar shade, and between breaths, I ask her if they are the same stone.
She nods. “People often take stone to build their homes.”
“Are you married?” I’ve gotten the hang of asking this question the Chinese way, without hesitation.
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