I find a seat in a nearby grove of trees, beside a babbling creek. I open my journal, and thoughts pour out onto the page—thoughts about solitude in this fascinating sea of people, thoughts about trust and strangers, thoughts about loneliness and irritation and attraction. A striking difference between this culture and my American one seems to be the focus in the U.S. on the individual. The Enlightenment, the consciousness revolution that guided the founding of the U.S., discovered and championed the individual at every level. That revolution never happened here—they gave up or didn’t try. The focus here remains on society as a whole, on stability, on continuity, and this seems only more true with Deng dead. If this government stays in power, the one “modernization” they’ll likely achieve is the military, which conveniently is the one usually used to show off. I’d have to bet on war within 50 years. I hope I’m wrong. But if this empire stays together—if the wealthy eastern third doesn’t pull itself away from these hinterlands in another massive revolution—it will become unbelievably powerful. And world history doesn’t have a lot of examples of major empires rising to preeminence peacefully.
As for right now, there’s no conflict between China and the U.S., between myself, the traveler, and the folks here who see me as a “big nose.” In fact, there seems to be a harmony between me, whatever I am, and here, whatever this place is. I think I love it. I feel a delightful, new attraction to the beautiful women all around me, and I don’t know if this is from the long separation from “my people,” or if the “Asian cravin’” that I feared with Lu Lan is real. Am I actually more attracted to Chinese women? Or is it simply that I’ve gone longer without a kiss, without even a caress, than at any time since I was 15? It doesn’t matter. This is freedom—I can do or be anything here.
Removing my tan cap in the heat, I find a flat spot on the bank and do something I haven’t done in many months: sit and simply watch my breaths. I gaze at the water and let my thoughts come and go, and let the air come and go. Now.
I rise some time later and step through the trees to the Prayer Hall. Large red pillars etched with Chinese and Arabic script in black and gold frame the Hall’s door. Men in white robes and skullcaps slip out of their shoes and pad inside. The sounds of afternoon prayer spill out into my ears, and I remember the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees, and Lu Lan, and the pleasure I felt finding China’s spiritual and religious life. Something is needed to balance the politics and the business and the rush for modernization.
South of the Muslim District lies an old-fashioned neighborhood of winding cobblestone streets and signs written in flamboyant characters. Passing a teashop, I inhale a bouquet of fragrances: raw grasses, flowers, dried fruit. A row of art galleries exhibit paintings of bamboo, mountaintops, tigers, people—even portraits, which are unusual in Chinese painting. I wander into a woodcarver’s shop where the walls are covered with scowling, rainbow-hued masks, then into a calligrapher’s shop proffering black ink stones and elegant scrolls of poetry.
Back on the sidewalk, I stop to watch two men crouched over a game of Go. They sip tea and take turns placing white and black stones, slowly filling a wooden board until the stones seem to form white and black dragons that eat each other.
I found no neighborhoods like this in Guangzhou.
My steps carry me all the way to the city’s towering walls, where a steep stone staircase leads up. I ascend the stairs to find an utterly deserted plateau atop the broad barrier, a vantage that would make Qin Shihuang proud. The sun is setting directly before me as I stroll over the flat stones. Westward, into that pink and crimson swirl, I continue tomorrow.
I walk further, and first a speck, then a recognizable figure, and finally a man on a bicycle pedals up to me and asks a few friendly questions. He offers me his bike. I refuse, but he insists, so then I’m riding atop the wall, the cool evening breeze in my mouth, smiling, wondering.
Why did this man appear and loan me his bike? Why did the man at the Bīngmăyŏng insist I take a photograph? And the woman at the Summer Palace? And the PLA soldiers at Tiananmen Square? Somehow, whenever I let go, whenever I let myself be lost, I find myself anew, and some anxiety drops away; some new force takes over and the world opens up, spreads out naturally, and embraces me.
Chapter 24
Friends in Poetry
學而不厭誨人不倦
Never cease to study further and to teach others.
—Confucius
It’s their final class, and I witness things I’ve never seen in my students before. As they file in, they are silent and seem sad. Some of them hand me greeting cards that utilize familiar, broken English: “Don’t forget me, I hope our friendship will be lasted as long as PRC’s and USA’s. It won’t be broken, will it?”
I write my home address on the board, and they copy it down with unusual diligence. They pay close attention as I speak about the joys of communicating in a foreign language, about the possibilities if they forge onward with English.
Sandoh raises his hand. He asks about my plans. “Where are you going in China? What will you do when you get home to America?”
“Study Chinese,” I joke, not sharing the truth—that I have no idea, that I’m here looking for ideas, that I’m here seeking my fortune.
Alice, née Sally, who didn’t want to sit next to boys and who reported on human rights, raises her hand. “We’ll miss you,” she says, brushing her hair from her face. “Already… we really miss you.”
Raymond, the competent boy who plagiarized about wombats and kangaroos, stands and smiles. “Teacher Tony, we have a gift for you.” He produces an oblong green box containing a Chinese scroll. “It’s from everyone.” He gestures solemnly to the whole room. He steps forward and hands it to me.
Opening and unfurling the scroll, I find Chinese calligraphy alongside a painting of a bull and a stork. The calligraphy is a poem about friendship. The bull and the stork “like true friends, feel each other’s pleasure and feel each other’s pain.” On the scroll’s reverse side are the signatures of all of the class’s twenty-nine students, hand-written in a rainbow of hues. I read the poem aloud in Mandarin, and my students applaud for several moments, and there, again and perhaps for the last time, I’m a celebrity teacher, the gwailo lăoshī.
I dismiss my students, and they leave quite slowly.
“Don’t get into trouble,” says Sandoh, with a grin, on his final way out the door.
Chapter 25
The Silk Road
人往高處走水往低處流
Water inherently seeks low places,
Man inherently seeks the heights.
—Chinese proverb
A cough wracks my body, throwing my head upward, into a nasty collision with the bunk above me. Smoke and chatter rise from the bunks below. A dull beige landscape slides by my dirty window. I feel trapped on a moving prison, on the edge of illness, on the edge of the Gobi Desert. I’ve never been one to rest well in crowded quarters. Rubbing my head, I make a sandwich of weird weightless peanut butter, white bread, and canned strawberry goo that I bought in the Xi’an train station.
The afternoon passes, taking us across a sea of dusty, undulating hills that on maps is called the Muus, an arm of the Gobi. Thankfully, by nightfall, the men have inhaled all their cigarettes, and I drift off. Several times in the darkness my bowels cry out, and I shuffle to the toilet, wondering what will become of me if illness snaps its jaws around me.
At dawn, I gaze out the window, and the beige expanse is unchanged, but there’s something new about the light, a harshness, a splendor that dazzles my eyes and floods the parched monotony. Gashes, crevasses, and then small canyons riddle the landscape. The Yellow River appears, meandering through this no man’s land, and then finally, jammed into the valley alongside the river, rises a metropolis: Lanzhou.
We roll to a halt, and I depart the train and station quickly. Longing to avoid nightfall in another urban grid, I look at a map of this province, Gansu. I decide on a Hui Muslim
village called Linxia. “Muslim”—the word conjures visions of exotic lands, places I’ve never been, places my father taught me about in his geography classes. I think of my parents and realize that no one back home has heard from me in weeks. A woman at a phone kiosk eyes me warily as I draw near. “No long distance calls,” she snaps, shooing me away, yelling other things I don’t understand. I take a stab at sarcastic Mandarin and say “thank you,” and watch for her response. Something punches me in the arm, a computer monitor strapped onto a moving motorcycle. Cursing, cradling my arm, I sigh and move on. The place resembles Xi’an and Guangzhou: broken sidewalks, no trees, grimy restaurants, air like tea water, and a sun that is a mere suggestion, a memory invisible through viscous overhead haze. Everything seems to stink of sweat or fish sauce.
The legendary Silk Road once left from this very outpost, crossed the upper reaches of the Yellow River, and forged off into the desert towards Europe. But today not even the hot smog leaves the valley. We’re all trapped. I cross the street and enter a gigantic square named The East Is Red Plaza, an expanse of pavement bordered by manicured bushes and festooned with red huíguī banners. Obviously it’s another locus fashioned by the authorities to awe any and all dimwitted citizens.
“The Telephone and Telegram Office is a good place to make international collect calls,” advises the LP. I walk several blocks and find the building. The metal door scrapes the floor loudly as I enter. “Sorry, no collect calls,” apologizes a woman behind a counter. She speaks softly. “You may buy one of the bank cards.” Back out in the heat, I find the bank, but it’s still closed at 11:40 on this Wednesday morning. Or maybe it’s already closed for xiūxī, the Chinese lunchtime siesta. I walk on and buy a bottle labeled “Liángxuĕ Mineral Water” that is probably just bottled tap water. I take a deep pull. Dehydration is a greater risk than water poisoning.
A yellow pickup-truck taxicab approaches, and I decide it’s my best option. I hail it and climb aboard. The cabby greets me with a glare, and we wade onto a broad road, a slow mess of dust and honking vehicles. Exhaust laces the air like microscopic bubbles of some exotic plague. In a neighborhood of squat adobe homes, we roll so slowly that two women, clothed head to toe in white, walk past us.
The cabby tells me he’s Buddhist, which surprises me. “Buddhism is finally legal again,” he adds.
“Deng was permitting that, right?” I ask. “A slow rebirth of the three big faiths, Taoism, Buddhism, and Islam? But adherents can’t join the Party?”
“It’s much better today than it was ten years ago,” he says. What he’s not saying is that ten years ago was far better than during the Cultural Revolution, when teenagers pulverized shrines, mosques, and temples to show patriotism. “Lanzhou is 70% Buddhist,” he declares proudly. I ask if he means Muslim, since it’s towards central Asia that we’re so very slowly crawling. “70% Buddhist,” he insists. “Most Chinese are Buddhist at heart.” Perhaps the cabby’s faith impresses more than just me, because a higher power of some creed intervenes, traffic parts, and we’re suddenly at the station. “Find a bus out here on the street,” he advises. “Don’t go into the station. The prices are higher for lăowài.”
I decide to trust him, and I soon spot a bus with a hand-painted sign with the characters “Linxia.” I step aboard. The driver is busy with another passenger, and I quietly ask an elderly man in the first row how much he paid for his ticket.
“11元,” he frowns, stroking the long hairs on his chin. He wears the white skullcap of the Hui.
“You,” the driver cuts in. “Where are you going?”
“Linxia,” I reply.
“50元.”
“What? Locals only pay 11元.”
“Insurance,” he replies. “Mandatory for foreigners. Go inside, you have to buy insurance.”
“Insurance for what?”
“An accident.”
“Are you going to have an accident?”
“No.”
“So why do I need insurance?”
“It costs 50元.”
“I’ll give you 35元,” I hold out the cash. “That’s triple.”
He nods and takes it. I push down the aisle and manage to squeeze into a spot on one of the six benches. My backpack slips down in front of my knees like a stuffed fish. There are three women on board. The two dozen other passengers puff on cigarettes as we roll away from the station.
Up we climb, out of the city, higher and higher, winding into China’s highlands. The Silk Road, this ageless link to the exotic goods and ideas of the West, hoists us up onto its first harrowing cliffs, and as our wheels near the edge, I gaze out, back over a valley of farmers’ fields that look like brown and olive shoeboxes. The air thins and cools, and as if from an eternal slumber, my senses awaken and drink with relish the textures and hues around me. My backpack is blue jay blue, the large cloth covering a man’s basket is carrot orange, the seats are all dry grass green, the lacy hats on the men’s heads are eggshell white, and the landscape expanding to the horizon is mottled peanut beige.
“Hello,” a young man smiles at me from across the aisle. “You are traveling?” He too wears the white skullcap of the Hui, and he asks the standard questions, but in English, so I answer in English. He was born in Linxia to a farming family, he tells me, but he managed to get abroad on a rare scholarship and graduate from a university in Pakistan. He dreams of studying at a European or American university. Amazingly, he already speaks Tibetan, Urdu, Arabic, English, Mandarin, and the Lanzhou dialect of Chinese. Yet a hint of desperation strains his voice. The local government has an iron grip on the farmers out here, he says. “They tell us what to do—what to plant and when to harvest. We’re left with the shell of communism—the bad parts—and the only way out is through the Party, or by joining the army.”
“Can’t you go to Lanzhou or another city?”
“Some can, but we’re still in the dānwèi system—we lose everything if we move. The government is so fŭbài. How do you say fŭbài in English?”
“Corrupt,” I reply.
He smiles. “It’s better that we talk about these things in English.”
“How about the huíguī?” I ask.
“Hong Kong?” He chuckles. “It’s nothing. They take our food and money and build beautiful ‘friendship monuments’ in Beijing and Hong Kong.” He sighs. “Government officials often demand bribes—for everything—they too have to eat—but there’s nothing left here for us. All the food and money goes back to the coast. And then Beijing just forgets about us.”
We bounce through a poor village of white plaster and red brick. Scarlet, hand-painted characters on a white wall declare, “Having a daughter is as good as having a son.” The traditional preference for boys persists, apparently, as does the government’s inclination to shape attitudes through signs. “If you have a second child, maybe to try to have a boy, and don’t pay off the official,” this farmer’s son explains, “you lose your job. In some other places I think farmers are allowed more children for farming. Not here. We still have what they call one-child-policy.”
He falls silent, and I gaze at the passing farmland. Eventually I open Narcissus and fly mentally to the German countryside, where Goldmund hoofs it, village to village, living on impulse and generosity. He stays in farmers’ barns and playfully tempts young wives out into the night. One night in a forest, a fellow traveler takes Goldmund by the throat in order to steal his one gold coin, but Goldmund’s will to live takes over, and he betters the other man, killing the robber with his pocket knife, feeling the man’s blood run through his own fingers.
My eyes jerk up as the bus veers sharply. My seat catapults me into the aisle as we swing around a hairpin turn. A jeep is there, coming at us, and we brake, swerve, brake, and pass the jeep, driving on the edge. My seat catches me again when we cut back into our lane. Exhaling, I notice that no one else looks perturbed, that the driver is handling the wheel as calmly as before.
We pass through another
village and then reach Linxia, which looks more like a small city after the villages we’ve passed. The broad central boulevard is paved. Crescent moons grace numerous tall spires against a clear, cobalt afternoon sky. The bus pulls into a gravel parking lot, and passengers grab together their sacks, baskets, cans, boxes, and crates. I step down just ahead of my new friend and offer him my water.
He declines. “Are you looking for a hotel?”
I nod, taking a swig of water. “Nothing too expensive.”
He leads me down a dusty dirt lane between shops and squat cinder block hovels. We stop at a building that is encased in bamboo scaffolding, reminding me of Guangzhou. He points inside, where I see men with hammers pounding on the walls. He bids me farewell. I pay 38元 ($4) for a full room, and it turns out to be far nicer than the ghetto I called home in Xi’an. The room has two beds, a desk, a television, and even a private bathroom, and it resembles an American hotel room—until I discover that a dozen bathroom tiles are missing, the open plumbing is rusted through, the wooden chairs wobble over, the blinds don’t work, the threadbare carpet is riddled with stains, and the sheets are too small to cover the beds.
But I feel like a king, because it’s all mine. Delighted, I leave my pack and head back onto the street to explore. Flanking the hotel are rows of open-front shops that are jammed with merchandise: chopsticks and dinner bowls, spark plugs and hubcaps, leather slippers and flowery prayer mats. Strolling slowly, I exchange nods and smiles with vendors and pedestrians. Several old bearded men glare at me, but this time when I smile they don’t scowl. They nod with a trace of pleasure. They’re sitting around a pot of tea in an open-front café, and they wave me over, so I sit with them, exchanging greetings, answering their basic questions. One man, the owner of the café, his clay-orange cheeks splotched with brown, launches into local history with a mix of pride and disgust. He and many of his friends were imprisoned during World War II, the Japanese occupation, and the ensuing communist civil war, their Muslim faith making them secondary citizens and often a priori suspects of crimes and sedition. Many were jailed, others hid or escaped and banded together, and those who did started their own Hui political party in order to pursue an independent state. They failed, and after many years and many martyrs, finally, reluctantly, they settled for this, what Beijing calls an “Independent Autonomous Prefecture.” This very town, Linxia, was made the prefecture’s capital. He needs to tell me the story—I sense it—he needs to get off his chest what happened, and I do my best to follow his heavily accented Mandarin.
Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China Page 18