“Beautiful, isn’t it?” A bespectacled man appears at my side. I observe his immodesty, and I decide he’s probably not the painter. I ask whether the set is Naxi or Chinese. He replies quietly. “Your Mandarin is good. The set is Chinese. I can give you a special price.”
I decline. “I’m a poor teacher from Guangzhou.”
“Wow, that’s great,” he replies. “You are helping China. The set is normally 600元.” He leans closer. “But for you, 400元.”
I squint at the paintings. Not bad. I would like to get a gift for my family. I step away to examine two carved zhāngs on a long jewelry table. A woman approaches me, and in English she praises the paintings that captivate me. She leaves, and then as if on cue the salesman returns, asking for 300元, then 250元. He offers to ship them at no cost, all for 180元, and in my amazement I nearly hand over the cash. In a moment’s pause, I notice an impatience rising in me, and I return to the street without making the purchase.
I walk further and cross a walled canal, examining more artwork, thinking again of the cycle, of the seasons, of the mandala. The four spheres ultimately unite, in this life or the next; that’s the magic and mystery mapped by the mandala. They will unite in me too someday. What will it bring, the union of mind and body and heart and soul? Perhaps I tasted it for a moment with Michiko, or at the waterfall, but now, here, the four spheres bicker and disagree inside me: My mind wants this, my heart that.
“Hi!” The salesman welcomes me back with a smile. “Did you decide?”
I stare again at the four seasons, and they seem somehow even prettier than before. Coincidentally, the English-speaking woman stops by again and chats more with me. She’s a huáqiáo, from England, visiting the homeland with her mother, who waits outside. The young woman lavishes encomia upon my Mandarin, and when I reuse her words playfully to praise her English, she laughs. “How much are the waterfall paintings?” she asks.
“He’s come down to 180元,” I reply.
“180元?” she shouts. “That’s great!”
“Yes, 180元,” I reply quietly, nodding, hushing her. “But I haven’t decided yet.”
The salesman approaches, and she tells him how great the price is. Irritated, I gesture to her to pipe down. This is not how bargaining works. She apologizes, but she insists that the salesman take down the paintings to allow a closer look.
“Great price!” she crows.
It’s $23, or £14, not much for art. The salesman turns to me. I shake my head again. “I’m still thinking.”
The woman’s mother appears, and the two admire the quartet together. “It’s gorgeous,” they agree. “And the price!” The daughter turns back to me. “Are you going to buy it? If you don’t want to, I will.”
Like an earthquake, her words overturn and demolish everything I thought I knew about Chinese customs and manners. My mind runs in circles. She’s trying to manipulate me—it’s Western manipulation! No, she likes the paintings—it’s Western honesty! The salesman wants me to buy the quartet now or let him sell it to her. Let her have it, comes a voice. I ask the woman again whether she likes it, and I ask in Mandarin, so she’s supposed to refuse stubbornly, but in fact she declares that she adores it. “If you like it,” she adds, “buy it. If you don’t, I will.” If she likes it, if she expresses any interest whatsoever, my polite obligation is to force it on her, and then she’s supposed to fight back and make me buy it, and we’re supposed to cajole and coerce each other to buy it, and then, finally, the loser of the argument buys the item and takes the winner out to dinner. That’s how it works.
“I like it very much,” she says. “But I feel bad. I’d like to pay you for letting me buy it.”
Dumbfounded, I decline her money and turn for the door. “It’s yours,” I tell her kindly.
Back outside, I return to the modern city. I buy an ear of corn off a vendor’s grill, sniff its green leafy husks for the scent of the nearby farmland, and bite into the browned kernels. The city floats by as I rack my brain for theories. Back in the hotel, I open my journal and reconsider everything I found strange. It was as if in that painter’s shop, I were more Chinese than someone from this country. She had Chinese features and ancestry, but perhaps nothing more. And how did it end? I walked away empty-handed, but with more Chinese “good” feelings—face, honor—and fewer Western “good” feelings—none of the delight of acquisition. Yes, my mind wants to judge. “Good,” “bad,” “Chinese,” “Western.” It puts everything into boxes rather than consider anything new; it will make more boxes if necessary, but it never releases its grasp. That’s the mind. But here, along with the shreds of corn in my teeth, is a new idea from somewhere else, from my heart, or from my soul: There is no judgment. There is no right answer. It would have been partly “good” and partly “bad” buying the paintings, or choosing the white rabbit, or chasing Shihui in the Taoist temple, or saying no to Michiko. There is no wrong. When the parts of me conflict—no choice is wrong. I learn from either decision. Both paths take me home.
In the pale, dusty light of the next morning, Tiger Leaping Gorge beckons me. I rent a bike and ride towards it, out of town, into Naxi country. Endless beige prairie wilderness unfolds between me and the peak of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain at the horizon—the peak that attracts everything to this realm, this place where the eternal Yangtze River forms. Weeds grab at my legs as I pedal towards the peak. The sky hangs thick and low, brushing the dark mountaintop.
A half dozen figures appear on my right, running over the low brown vegetation, and I stop as they come closer. Eight children rush up and stop in a tight huddle. They are filthy from playing in the dirt, and more carefree than my Peizheng students ever seemed to be. I greet them in Mandarin, and they smile and laugh and whisper. A boy in a blue jacket asks me the usual questions. They’re Naxi children, children whose schooling is in Mandarin—and only in Mandarin—but who still speak Naxi at home. We compliment each other’s use of the Mandarin language, and we laugh and teach each other words in Naxi and English: bicycle, friend, prairie, mountain. Before they dash back across the field, they tell me that I’m on a path: I’m on the road to the village of Baisha.
Sure enough, I pedal through a river and then the suggestion of a path merges with a dirt road and carries me into a village of adobe and garlic-gray stone. Birds sing in the trees, people stroll about on pale, khaki streets, and I let the word Baisha (white sand) trip a few times through my lips; the town does seem to be made of strange, cloud-colored sand. In a painter’s shop, a place as cluttered with paintings as the gallery last night, a saleswoman asks me where I’m from. She also asks whether I like the painting that has stopped my eyes: a towering pagoda that seems to climb a mountain behind it. I relate my indigent teacher’s pay, and she offers discounts.
Her price keeps dropping. Finally I ask, “How can you go below half the listed price?”
“They’re on sale,” she says cheerfully.
Peering more closely at the pagoda, I notice something odd about the brushstrokes. I ask about the painter, but she says he’s not available. “Will he be around later in the day?” I ask. She shakes her head. He’s out of town. “What’s his name?” I press her.
She sighs. “He’s…these are fake.”
“Fake?”
“In Lijiang too,” she nods. “They’re all copied in Guangxi province or in Singapore, and then we order them cheaply from a catalogue. I can look up the painter’s name if you want.”
“But everyone thinks this is an artistic area. They think they’re buying genuine artwork.”
“Mm.”
I look at the paintings again. They’re pretty, but they’re no closer to works of art than a Mona Lisa mousepad. I thank her for telling me that they’re just posters, and she thanks me for helping China. “If you want to support local painters,” she adds, “walk down the alley to the home of Li Pengjun. He’s a Naxi artist. His place has a painting of a tiger on the door.”
I leave the shop s
lowly, feeling odd, insubstantial, uprooted. A lightness builds in my limbs, a gratitude for the blessing of her honesty. Minutes down the street, set in a wall of ash gray stone, I find a door decorated with a painting of a tiger in a tree. The door is ajar, and I step into a large courtyard where a young man sits at a table of wooden masks and figurines. He shows me to a small gallery with walls of rough-hewn wooden planks, upon which hang watercolor paintings—paintings far simpler than the posters in the shop, paintings that depict recognizably local scenery. In one sublime work, men drive oxen over a misty bridge against a backdrop of delicate, almost invisible mountains. I gaze at it, and a tall man in a white shirt and black vest descends a staircase and smiles thinly at me. He stops to look at the painting with me for a moment.
The price turns out to be high: 350元. A painting of fat, old men in a dark tavern playing flutes and stringed instruments called èrhus fetches 400元. “If I buy both,” I ask him, “is there a discount?”
He thinks for a moment. “700元.” He’s silent as I wait for him to go lower.
“Can you go any lower?” I finally ask.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m a poor teacher from Guangzhou...”
He listens with interest to my story but doesn’t drop his prices; he even endures my attempt at the hungry-white-man paradox. I ask who painted them, and he replies that he did. He is Li Pengjun.
Admiring again the serenity of the oxherders on the bridge, I praise him solemnly. “You are a master painter.”
We discuss the scenery—mountains and prairies—and then I tell him that I’m going for a walk, to think it over. “Please come back” is all he says.
I do. He invites me to tea, and we exchange stories. He studied painting in Kunming, the provincial capital, and now lives in a house down the street with his wife and children. When I ask about the poster swindlers, he nods sadly, calling them dishonest. “They steal many customers. And the art isn’t always of a high quality.” He asks about America, and I tell him that it’s the same, that we too have painters, merchants, travelers, and thieves.
I look at the two paintings again—the oxherders and the musicians. They’d be superb gifts for my family, but I can’t pay any more than 400元 if I want to get to the gorge. I offer 350元. He comes down to 650元. I can’t believe he would let 350元 walk out the door, but he doesn’t even say 600元. We regard each other, and he smiles kindly. He hasn’t haggled, he hasn’t mentioned food, and he hasn’t even considered slashing the prices of works he clearly knows are valuable. He tells me that he has a smaller version of the painting of the musicians, one that he painted the same day, and he takes me to it—points to the brushstrokes and the black calligraphy to prove it isn’t a facsimile. I fall in love with it, and we quickly settle on 450元 for it and the oxherders. Just like that, business is over. He wraps up my paintings.
I gaze around me as I pedal out of the village. Thank you, dear, honest, little Baisha. Thank you. Honesty is the name of the quality that a thing possesses which is what it is, nothing more, nothing less.
To save money, I switch into the hotel’s dormitory. I claim an empty bed and set my oblong box of paintings on a windowsill. The only other person in the room is a dark-haired lăowài woman reading on another bed. “Excuse me,” I venture, “do you speak English?” She looks over at me. She’s in her early twenties and apparently just out of the shower, her face flushed and her dark hair wet.
“A little,” she says. I ask her if she knows where the town’s post office is, and she gives me directions, fluently, with a French accent. “Don’t hurry,” she says. “They are slow with everything.” I thank her and inform her she speaks more than a little English. She turns back to her book, looking pleased.
The post office is where she described, and she’s correct about their efficiency as well. Two hours after I arrive, a lady in an olive green uniform charges me an exorbitant fee to send home the paintings and some excess clothing. I wander out, essentially broke, following my footsteps along the river back into Old Lijiang, wondering whether I should still try to go to Tiger Leaping Gorge. The people in line warned me about avalanches after I told them my plans, and now I’m nearly penniless. I sit at the last open table in a restaurant on the river’s edge. Sipping tea and gazing into the stream, I hear familiar sounds inside me—dreams and fears—and there’s also the voice that has been whispering to me now for days, for weeks, that perhaps has been there my whole life and only now I can hear. In any event, the choice is obvious. I am to follow my intuition. I am to go to the gorge.
Three young Americans sit in the other three chairs at my table. “Are these taken?” they greet me. I welcome them. One, a tall, blond guy with a loud voice, eyes me. “God, the crazy things these Chinese people do! You know?” Another, a guy with dark curly locks and a necklace of fat orange beads, agrees. “I can’t believe that one fucking guy charged us eighty bucks for the train ticket to Kunming!” The third, a pasty-skinned woman, sighs. “I still can’t believe I bought that fake silver box from smiling-man!” They complain for a while, ordering food, eating, chatting, and I sit there, adjusting to their presence, wondering why people voluntarily ruin their experiences by focusing on grievances. The tall guy tells a bitter anecdote. “God, that whole district sucked, but at least the Belgian dude sold us that good weed.” They laugh but seem unhappy. They’re skipping Tiger Leaping Gorge because of the avalanches. I’m about to leave when they order miniature apple pies. The woman smiles at me. “I’ve heard these pies are awesome. Don’t miss out!” I release my thoughts for a moment and chuckle cynically with them about where the apples could possibly have come from. Warm little pies chock-full of softened cubes of pínggŭo arrive, and their sweetness is pitch perfect. My body rejoices.
The warm twilight disintegrates into an alpine chill as I walk homeward. Crowds throng the central plaza for a fire festival. Huge, roaring torches illuminate hundreds of faces and throw macabre shadows onto the statue of Mao. People hold hands and dance in giant circles, around and around, swinging out near me. Thumping drums and tinny flutes keep time. I step nearer, and then a young woman waves at me. She shouts in Mandarin: “Come on!” I go for it, rushing after her. “What is this?” I interlock arms with her and her friend. She shouts over the din, “The Naxi Torch Festival!” Their cheeks are flushed and they giggle with delight. The beat and the screeching melody accelerate, and I quickly learn the left-left-right-left step. The girls grin and exclaim their approval. We go around and around, four times, five times, and I’m completely exhausted in short order. Before they actually hand me a torch, which would happen on the next lap, I release their hands and say good night.
In the dormitory, I extinguish the lights and collapse on my bed. The door swings back open, and two silhouettes appear, flipping the light on and back off. One is the French brunette. “I’m still awake,” I startle them. The light comes back on, and they apologize. Propping myself on an elbow under my blankets, I ask if they’ve been to Tiger Leaping Gorge. The other girl, a blonde, confirms that she has, so I should be interested in her advice, especially as she sits down like a travel agent and dispenses it freely; but my attention moves like a magnet to the brunette. There’s something about the tan on her cheeks and nose that I didn’t notice before but now find unbelievably pretty. I can’t look away.
“…one of the deepest gorges in the world,” the blonde, a New Zealander, is saying, “but like idiots, they’re blowing dynamite to build roads…”
The brunette’s name is Chantal. She hasn’t been to Tiger Leaping Gorge yet—the two just met yesterday—so I voice my new wish and ask if she wants to go. She has long brown hair, sparkling brown eyes, and when she explains that she doesn’t have time she sounds contemplative and intelligent. Her journey is nearly over, she says, she has to be in Kunming in three days. Oddly, this more or less matches my plan. I don’t know when or if I have a ticket home, but I need to start turning towards the coast to renew my visa, at th
e least. The Kiwi speaks up. “Chantal, it’s glorious. It’d be a real shame to be this close and miss it.”
Chantal climbs under her covers. I tell her she can let me know in the morning.
“Any time before 7:30?” she asks, with a hint of sarcasm.
“Right. Don’t be late. That’s when the bus leaves.”
Closing my eyes, both adventures, like freshly finished paintings, stand before me: trekking the gorge while exploring this magnetism, or going it alone on intuition.
Chapter 34
Tiger Leaping Gorge
明知山有虎偏向虎山
Go deeper into the mountains
Even knowing there are tigers.
—Chinese proverb
The alarm shrieks. Chantal, bleary-eyed, sits up and leans on an elbow. “Tony, I’m coming.” Minutes later the two of us are out the door, down the elevator, and on the street. We climb aboard the bus and share a Naxi sandwich and a bag of pork biscuits. She laughs about the odd smell of the biscuits, which she bought yesterday, and I tell her that they must be good for some aspect of our health. “I ate snake in Guangzhou,” I say. “It was supposedly good for my… manhood.”
She laughs and tells me she’s been traveling for six weeks. Waiting for her in Montreal, her hometown, is a drummer in a rock band, her boyfriend. This news is like cold water on my face. Her accent hails from Quebec, not France, and now her English suddenly seems poor, and francophone Canada is a new, frustrating concept—so close to home, yet so far. She was an English major, she tells me, and were she Chinese I know I would find her English amazing, the way everyone here praises my Mandarin to heaven while criticizing fluent huáqiáo.
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