Another man cuts in, asking if I’ve eaten yet. I lie, mostly so they don’t feel compelled to treat me to a lavish feast. They go on, telling me that just last year the PLA came into Linxia and brutally dispersed a Hui demonstration, killing two people and wounding dozens. The newspapers didn’t report any of it. I listen as long as I can, but so many strange words fly by me I soon feel lost. I thank them for the tea and go.
At the center of town stands a mosque with a gorgeous emerald green dome. A wooden bench beside it welcomes me, and I sit, alone, studying my dictionary and taking in the passing scene. Women in black turbans with long attached capes pass by as if in mourning, but I think it’s their customary dress; young men in white T-shirts grunt, lugging a baby-blue gas tank past me; two lovers stroll by, hand-in-hand, smiling, dressed in fashionable colors; an old man in a navy blue communist-era “Mao Suit” shuffles by. Beyond them all, at the distant horizon, the sun dips toward the purple peaks of Tibet. Lanzhou felt like the dreariest place on the planet—like some personal hell, like illness in exile. Here, I’m still alone, and I can’t put my finger on why, but this place feels peaceful, open, and welcoming to me.
The rich aromas of lamb kebabs flood my nose and brain, and I’m lured off of my seat. The vendor’s cart is across the street, and I’m nearly to it when a young man is at my arm, launching into breathless, broken English: “My name is Qiu, how are you? Nice to meet you and I’m very well, thank you. Like to talk? At my home.” I look at him, absorbing his smile, and he turns and walks away, motioning insistently for me to follow.
I go along, and he leads me past a loud auto mechanic’s, down an alley, through an ill-fitting wooden door, and into a small home. The concrete floors are scrupulously swept; the furniture is sparse and plain. Qiu barrages me with questions as his mother carries in noodles, chilled peppers, and tea on an elegant wooden tray. She smiles shyly at me and withdraws. I eat while he carries on in enthusiastic broken English, smiling at me oddly, as if we’re plotting some conspiracy together. He takes down my name and address and then confides in me that he prefers speaking Arabic to speaking Chinese and often uses his Arabic name. He wants to go to Lanzhou Foreign Languages University to improve his English and then to travel to Australia. “Right now I need a pen pal,” he smiles. I ask him whether he is Hui, though by his white cap I know he is.
Awkwardly, nodding, he whisks me back outside, leading me down street after street, crisscrossing the city, and we see six mosques in less than two hours. When the white moon reveals itself overhead, Qiu makes a promise. “Tomorrow,” he points to a distant building. “We will see the tomb of Hamuzeli, the father of the Hui People. And we will burn incense at the famous Taoist temple.” He smiles, and I feel wary and confused by his enthusiasm. Nevertheless I give my assent.
The clamor of construction yanks me awake at six, but I feel exquisite. An unfamiliar bliss courses through my veins. I depart my hotel and hike to the edge of town. People on their way into town zip by me on bicycles, roar by on unmuffled motorcycles, or walk by pushing wheelbarrows of leafy produce. I continue on, toward rolling green hills that rise to mountains at the horizon, feeling exhilarated, as if touched by lightning, realizing I’ve finally left civilization behind. I am free to journey into the unknown.
The road leads over a swift stream, and at the bridge, I step off of the road and onto a grassy bank. Kneeling, leaving the rays of the rising sun to strike the bank behind me, I gaze into the stream, ingesting the morning air slowly. I release into meditation, letting my breaths slowly flow up and down, in and out. The rays soon strike my chest and then dance on the shimmering water itself. In the silence, gazing into the eddying mirrors, I panic. The cold currents jump up and grab me. No one knows where I am! No one cares! I see Lu Lan’s face, and I can’t fathom why I left her behind, why I pushed her away. The couch in the women’s apartment in Guangzhou appears, and it’s our Thanksgiving celebration, when everyone was there, ten lăowài huddled together to celebrate, and to me they were all superficial and boring, cowardly animals, scared of really experiencing the world, this world. That world is this world. I was pushing everything and everyone away.
After some time, I return to town. Passing a woman with a wheelbarrow of fruit, I realize I’m famished. I buy a handful of fresh lónggăn (dragon eyes). The tan rinds of the grape-sized fruits yield to the puncturing push of my fingernail, and I seize the juicy, white flesh with my teeth. The sweetness spreads down my tongue. A young Hui man sells me hot, freshly fried wheat bread. I find a comfortable perch on a flight of concrete stairs and bite off a semicircle of the golden dough. Eating the simple food, Goldmund’s words jump to mind: “To a wanderer, a simple scrap tastes more delicious than a whole meal with the prosperous.”
Below my vantage point, two children wash green onions with a hose. Beyond them, the street fills with wagons, pedicabs, bicycles, and cars. Shops open their doors one by one, revealing families eating breakfast. For a fleeting minute, my brain wraps around this entire experience—this land, this empire, this China—coalescing all of the beauties and ills into a single idea. A breeze sifts by me with more thoughts, and the singularity dissolves.
Rainbows lure me into a tailor’s shop. Swatches of silk in scintillating yellows, emerald greens, citrus oranges, and blood reds feature wild gold and black embroidery. The threads dance into dragons, flowers, and abstract geometries. Carefully folded, the sheets of extravagant fabric stretch from floor to ceiling. The tailor, a round-faced Hui man in a plain white shirt, sits sipping tea and stroking his beard. “Zăo ān,” he says, and I return the morning greeting. He shows me a shirt he’s working on, motioning me so close that I can smell his mug of strong green tea. I praise the silk. He smiles, showing me the tiny stitches he makes. When I ask, he echoes the Lanzhou cabby’s words about religion and freedom: It’s getting better, and here in the Hui capital, every Muslim may even leave the country once for the sacred hajj pilgrimage to Mecca—provided that he leaves behind a 3000元 bond. He beams as he describes his own hajj, three years ago. “Thousands of us prayed together in Mecca. I was so happy. I cried.”
A woman enters the store, and he greets her with “selia amu,” which sounds oddly like Salaam aleikum, the Arabic Muslim greeting. Surely as the centuries cycled by Arabic influenced the Chinese spoken here and created a Hui dialect. The tailor rolls up his sleeves. He knows which silk she wants—purple with circling red and gold dragons—and he wields shears and a yellow yardstick. Several minutes later she leaves with the handsome material folded under her arm.
“She makes robes for government officials,” he explains. Sitting down on a bolt of sky blue silk, he resumes describing his hajj, and he tells me he’s been studying Arabic since his return. He teaches me a few words in Arabic, and I teach him a few in English, and we laugh together. I photograph him, capturing his smile, his spirit, his calmness. I thank him and turn to leave, but before I do, I turn back in order to thank him again for the photograph, as if I’ve used him for something. I should leave this device behind and ditch this need to capture. Just be in the present moment. He nods again, and I stumble out, unable to part with the camera.
I do however decide to leave Linxia. I’m quite close now to Xiahe—the place Colt extolled—and I feel it beckoning to me. Xiahe is a smaller town higher in the hills that’s shared by Huis and Tibetans. I retrieve my pack from the hotel, but before leaving town I honor my promise to rendezvous with Qiu.
He’s delighted to see me. His brother and father sit beside us in their concrete home and watch us speak English. Qiu can’t go to the tomb of Hamuzeli today, he apologizes. He’s wearing a mysterious smile again, and my mind races to detect his motives. He only grins, so I glance at my watch. There may only be a few buses to Xiahe, and it’s always better to start a trip early in the day. I mention this, and Qiu promptly offers to accompany me to get a ticket. “You can leave your bag here,” he suggests.
Leave my bag here? No way.
There
isn’t much of value in it. Let’s do an experiment. I mentally mark its position, how it leans, and the way it’s tied. I leave my pack.
Outside, the sun blazes its unapologetic inferno. Qiu offers to hire one of the motorized wagons that converge around me, but I wave them off and we walk. At the bus station, he goes right up to the counter and asks for a ticket “for the lăowài,” which even I know is not the best strategy for obtaining a decent ticket. “There are buses every hour until five,” he reports back, grinning. “But they’re 34元 for you—it’s more expensive.” I reply that I’ll buy my ticket later, and this seems to please him. He insists on hiring a motorized wagon for the trip home, so we roar over the uneven concrete, whipping recklessly between farmers’ tractors and pedestrians, and I feel once again that I’m a spectacle for the prestige of my companion, that I’m conferring honor on someone I barely know.
Back in his home, my eyes dart to my bag. It’s untouched. I feel my chest constrict sharply. Shame overtakes me and tears rise to my eyes. Silently, I apologize to these simple people for my suspicions. I look at Qiu and feel an inch of my heart open. The face in which I saw deceit holds only curiosity. I tell him to write to me, and I promise to write him back. The whole family bids me farewell. I thank them for more than I can say.
Walking to the bus station, I gaze into the sky, feeling strange, uprooted, and afloat on some vast cloud. How much of this paranoia, this fog, this dark fear is inside me? It feels endless, bottomless, and deeper than anything else, as if it’s all that I am underneath my happy facade. My eyes amble across the azure ceiling of the world, finding nothing.
The bus pulls out, and the dirt streets of the town roll by me. Proud and placid, the Hui people relax in the heat, more at ease than China’s mainstream Han, who always seem so anxious to zhēngxiān (push to be first), to strive for riches, to nab those rare chairs. It seems that these people up here in these desolate Tibetan highlands and Muslim lowlands—areas that together account for half of China’s surface area—aren’t really Chinese at all. They might all crave their independence. If it ever comes, it won’t be peacefully.
About a mile out of town, we pull over. The scent of burning motor oil rises through the bus as passengers step out into the afternoon to frown or to offer mechanical advice. I remain in the bus with Narcissus & Goldmund. The sculpture of a woman on the wall of a church touches Goldmund’s soul, and he temporarily halts his travels to apprentice with its sculptor. He settles in the village, learning slowly to immerse himself in art, to open himself to inspiration, to express his heart through his hands. He creates a superb statue of St. John with a grave face inspired by Goldmund’s memories of Narcissus—and he wins both his master’s praise and induction into the local sculptors’ guild.
I put down the book as people reboard. The bus is fixed, and our trip turns into a brutal uphill climb on dà bízi-shaped slopes. But we do it—we summit these first foothills of the Himalaya—and we wind around switchback turns and swoop down into pine-forested valleys. We cross plateaus and traverse narrow riverine bridges. The paved road ends in a verdant mountain bowl that cradles a beautiful town, and instantly I know it’s Xiahe. We roll right down a main street lined with ancient brick and wood buildings. Three monks in hot pink robes pass by amid crowds of pedestrians. The sun sinks behind the surrounding peaks, and we pull over. A man wearing a backward green baseball cap leans into the bus. “Labrang Hotel? Labrang Hotel?” he calls out.
A hotel? Why not? I take my pack, hop out, and climb onto the plywood bed of the man’s motorized wagon. He guns the engine, and we roar down the alleys of Xiahe in the twilight, passing Huis, Tibetans, and Han Chinese. We zip to the other end of town and off into rolling pastures. Darkness gathers around us, and I spy just a few lights ahead of us in the distance. A cold wind whips at my ears and through my flimsy shirt. I cross my arms to keep warm, regretting packing so lightly, closing my eyes, just choosing blindly to trust this time, and suddenly seeing, instead of darkness, an entire fertile world on the edge of a precipice, and exhilaration wells in my heart, and beneath it is a sweet gratitude.
The breaks squeal and the driver calls to me. He points between two large fields. When I climb down, he spins the wagon around and returns to town, taking the roar of his engine with him. The road leads me alongside a river, and the few lights ahead turn into a gate enclosing an inn.
The lobby is a wooden place in a sweet state of decay. I rent a bed. Unlocking the door to my tiny room, I find a big white surprise. Lăowài! A tall Caucasian man, another stone in this barrel of rice, the first I’ve seen since the Dutch couple by the mosque in Xi’an. He looks up from a book. I watch myself ask him, one by one, all the questions I find tiresome.
“I’m twenty-nine,” Shaun says. “I was living in Indiana, near Purdue, teaching social studies. I was engaged and ready to settle down. Then I came to China to teach English for a year. What was I thinking?” He laughs, watching me collapse on the other bed. “I broke up with my fiancée that fall,” he continues. “I’ve lived in Fuzhou, on the coast, ever since. I went back to the U.S. last Christmas, and I just couldn’t relate. The only women who would talk to me were fat and smoked. I mean, how many women here are fat or smoke? This place is just what they say, ‘Ugly White Man’s Heaven.’”
I tell him I’m famished, and he recommends a Tibetan restaurant in the nearby woods. So I stroll back out through the hotel gate and cut left into a forest, the moon providing the only illumination. A path leads me through birch trees to a hut with chipped white walls. I knock on its heavy wooden door. A bronze-skinned man with black hair gathered in a ponytail appears.
“Hello,” I say in polite Mandarin. “I’m so sorry to bother you. Is this a restaurant?”
“It is indeed a restaurant.” He smiles, letting me into the single room. A woman gets up from a table and reaches into cabinets above a small white stove.
Hesitating, I ask for Tibetan food.
“Great!” the man laughs, pulling out a chair for me. “That’s all we have.” He hands me a blue bowl of thin white yogurt swirled with honey. I taste a spoonful, and it’s fresh and sour and delightful. The woman sets a larger bowl of raw brown barley flour in front of me, and I stare at it a moment. Tibetan cooking is light on preparation. The man sits next to me and shows me how to mix water, yak butter, and milk powder into the barley. He does it with one hand. “This is tsampa,” he says. “The most common Tibetan meal.” He watches patiently as I try the cupping and grinding motion. “Tibetans eat many other foods too. Yak, lamb, dumplings.”
I pop a bite-sized ball of the mixture into my mouth. It’s hearty chewing—an honest, nutty flavor. “I thought Tibetans were Buddhists,” I say between balls. “Vegetarians.”
“Tibetans are Buddhists,” he agrees. “Yes. But we live in the Himalaya. If we didn’t eat meat, we’d all be dead!”
“Are there many Tibetans here in Xiahe?” I ask, scraping the bowl with my fingers to make a final orb of tsampa.
“Many,” he nods. “Labrang Monastery is here, which is the sixth biggest Tibetan temple. We get many tourists too.”
“Tourists—are they your main customers?”
“Tourists, construction workers, pilgrims to the monastery.”
“Mostly Chinese?” I eye a golden brown classical guitar leaning against one of the plaster walls. I haven’t touched a guitar in weeks, and just looking at it, my fingers curl for the frets. A fat-mouthed Buddha painting—all brilliant blues and greens—hangs above it on the wall.
“No, mostly Tibetans.”
“Is that your guitar?” I finally ask.
“Yes.”
“Do you play it often?”
“Not really.” He looks at it sheepishly.
There’s a hasty knock on the door, and he rises to finger open the latch. A crowd of white American teenagers—three girls and three boys—rush in and seize every vacant seat and all the air in the tiny place. I gape for a moment, but then I’m translati
ng for them, placing their orders, and hoping the couple has enough food. The teenagers chat about their ten-day tour and how amazing it is and where this whirlwind summer between high school and college is taking them. They ask me questions, but I don’t say much, partly since I’m shocked—and disappointed—by their presence. A guy with glasses in a plum-colored Land’s End fleece plays the guitar. He runs through some expert jazz riffs. I stare at the traces of barley flour left in my bowl, watching myself psychically push these young people away. With a sigh, I answer one of the girls’ questions. She sits closer to me, telling me that they have a twenty-hour bus ride to Chengdu in the morning. She smiles, calling herself crazy.
Chengdu is a huge city that I’ll reach in weeks, if ever.
I wish them luck and thank the cooks. Outside, the moonlight glows white on the bark of the trees as I return to the inn alone.
Chapter 26
Walking to Heaven
The time came when the risk it took to remain in a tight bud was greater than the risk it took to blossom.
—Anaïs Nin
Outside my door, mountain peaks rise on all sides to kiss a newborn sky. Crisp morning air rushes into my lungs, and I feel weightless as I step down the mosaic path that bisects the courtyard. Tiny orange, yellow, and white flowers dot ankle-high grass on either side of the path. The inn’s walls are covered with murals of the Buddha and natural scenes. My senses feast on the art and vibrant colors as if to finally satiate themselves after all of the months and miles of concrete.
Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China Page 19