AWOL

by Jennifer Barclay

  The arrival of twenty-first-century Asia à la Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai is still spotty in the Chinese provinces, where a city of two million is small potatoes and barely noticed on the org charts. The old government-run three-stars still clock in with one-star service, though the smiling desk clerks with one hundred words of English are trying to try. The marble and tinsel lobbies are spic and span. Little else is. The rooms are bleak and musty, the beds rocky. Coffee may or may not be had; the cable package has fourteen local channels and Star Sports Spanish League football. The cheerful lady who sets up the extra cot for our six-year-old proceeds to neatly dress it with a damp sheet. Doesn’t she notice? Doesn’t she care? Over our bed, someone has hung a photo of a couple embracing in Hawaii-sunset silhouette, one female nipple outlined against the sky as clearly as a holy mountain. A stab at sophistication gone askew: apparently scissored from a magazine, it has been glued on at least ten degrees off square. Didn’t they notice?

  But morning dawned clear and washed, breakfast was decent, and our car zipped toward Tai’an, the town in the shadow of the mountain, down a freshly built toll expressway through a lush autumn harvest. The road looked as though it had been dumped rudely on the landscape yesterday, a bit crooked. It didn’t seem to touch the Shandong plain, but we were cheered by the sky and the smooth ride. Cornstalks were tied in grey-green stooks; rooftops and farmyards and the tarmac at gas stations glowed ripely with the old-gold burnish of nubbly seas of spread corn drying on the cob. We passed a man under a peasant hat and shoulder yoke, trundling the expressway shoulder, walking in two different eras. The Ming emperors may have seen the same image. Is China full of history or empty of time? The roadside stands were laden with two mellow fruits: plastic Confucius tourist baubles (the sage’s birthplace at Qufu is nearby) and bins of stupendous red apples. Above Tai’an, the mountain reclined like a lazy green panther as we pulled in.

  THE ARRIVAL OF TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ASIA À LA HONG KONG, SINGAPORE AND SHANGHAI IS STILL SPOTTY IN THE CHINESE PROVINCES, WHERE A CITY OF TWO MILLION IS SMALL POTATOES AND BARELY NOTICED ON THE ORG CHARTS.

  Poorer than Beijing, the city has more the air of South Asia due to a plenitude of belching buses and whining scooters bearing entire families. Dusty, it is also well-treed and, in many districts, freshly painted. In the middle of town, a broad street exits straight uphill to meet the god. In the opposite direction, the boulevard’s lower reaches are a perpetual bazaar, vending a herbology of plants from sprouts to trees via the scout-knot contortions of bonsai, and an accompanying cordillera of pots, from thimbles to planters the size of pickup trucks. Lower still, a bird market. In China, birds, for mysterious reasons, are the companions of old men—never children, never workers, never retired women.

  At the very bottom of the inverted T, whose tip is the holy peak, broods the massive Dai Miao temple, one of the greatest and saddest of Chinese relics, constructed for the rites of visiting emperors as far back as the Han, rebuilt in splendour during the Chinese cultural zeniths of the Tang and Song, supplemented during the Ming and Qing, and crudely patched over in recent decades, with a few dusty exhibits of painfully poor quality. The central hall of the Imperial and Taoist cult is again in full operation, with photo-snapping tourists burning incense and buying prayer sheets. This cult has the official thumbs up. Yet somewhere far off, there is a fine filigree crack in the globe. A small whine of dental drill, or a water droplet falling, or a tock like a woodpecker’s assault on the spine: a devotee of the wrong cult, a Falun Gong follower is being tortured.

  Hiking the trail up Tai Shan, like all wondrous journeys, has pace and rhythm, and a great narrative hook. The hook comes at the halfway mark of Zhongtianmen, the gate of Middle Heaven. We have been climbing the steps for three hours. The shoulder of the mountain and the thick cypress groves have permitted no vistas forward. We are refreshed by a simple lunch of thin pancake, egg and shallot fried on a barrel-top charcoal burner and folded—a sort of Chinese fajita. This is a nice hike, we say. As we see the first signs of the midway station, we know we will make the top. Another couple of hours of strolling. The three kids will be fine. Adrian, the youngest, has only needed to be carried a few times.

  Twenty minutes later, our thighs are numbing on an unusually steep flight of steps without landings; but, gasping, we emerge as if from a basement staircase onto a busy piazza, amid milling crowds. Flexing our knees, catching air, we wander forward. We are stopped short by a dynamic and deflating panorama. We have cleared a ridge, and now, across a broad depression, a span of mountain lap, we can see the top. The kids weren’t prepared. “Wow. No way.” Not a jagged crag, but, impossibly far off (given we are walking with the expectation of actually going there), a blunt stone forehead against a stray cloud and, at the edge of sight, a thin line scratched vertically to a notch at the top: a human ladder carved in stone. The steps.

  We won’t walk it all at once, I announce, trying to quell rebellion. We will climb it a bit at a time. There’s no hurry. Now I am under the power of the place. A wisp of worshipfulness slips through my work-a-day cortex. The worshipfulness, like love, joins me to something, connects me to histories and cultures whether I wish it or not. We refuel, visit appalling toilets, head down into the pines and then, slowly, the mountain rearing and steepening and then standing up straight, we put one foot in front of the other, step after step after step, all afternoon.

  Hours devolve into minutes, minutes into seconds, the mass into the moment, the here and now of the next step up. We thirst for the flat, the brief landing, the pause in the vertical. Adrian now clings to my back. As we haul forward, upward, I can balance him using a walking stick as the third leg of a tripod. Those passing us on the way down nod approvingly and give me a thumbs-up. I am being absorbed into their communal project, and that’s okay by me. The trees thin out, uncounted. The treads grow narrower, half a foot deep, and the risers grow higher. The staircase narrows. Entrepreneurs appear, wiry veterans, offering rides on their shoulders for a fee. I have a momentary madcap hallucination of me astride a bony neck, Adrian still on mine, a jerky giraffe scaling the holy heights. The notch in the sky creeps toward us.

  During the final ascent, there are no more landings, no spots broad enough on the steep flights to trust my trembling arms to lift Adrian off my slack shoulders, so he stays put in spite of my fatigue. On these last few hundred steps of the 6,600, we are above shade, silhouetted on the mountain’s face. It is so steep that Caitlin, fourteen, can face only forward due to vertigo. Twisting around to look at where we’ve been on this journey is dizzying and menacing, Eurydice’s path turned inside out and exposed. We realize that going down the way we came up would be lunatic. The cable car we had sniffed at (how can you do a pilgrimage, see the “real China,” cruising up Tai Shan in a cable car?) will have to ferry us down.

  We’re there. We stagger to a benison of the horizontal and sit down. The crown reached, Shandong province far below reposes dustily in all directions. Crowds beat a hasty path to a summit street jammed with karaoke and postcards, and loudspeakers playing the light pop that China adores; Britney doing it again, Backstreet being back. The view is gorgeous; it’s as holy as Wal-Mart.

  But we are almost immune. We are high with our own perseverance and the glorious millennia-rich pathway we’ve trodden. Maybe our Chinese co-walkers are immune too, inoculated with their labour. Of course they haven’t walked encumbered with Canadian brains. But I’ve gradually come to conclude that the only thing more dangerous than indulging in ethnocultural generalizations is ignoring them, intricate and evolving and elusive as they are. The Chinese think without thinking that they’ve always been here and always will be. China has various anxieties, but the reality of their link to this vast lobe of Asia isn’t one of them. They’re well-connected. The Communist Party, currently playing P. T. Barnum and John D. Rockefeller by turns, may be as identity-conscious as a teen with bad skin, but the populace they deign to protect and torture exhibit less cultural
anxiety than any on the planet. I envy them this from time to time, I think as we go dutifully to the gleaming new Swiss-built cable car and swing out into green air.

  But if I didn’t have this particular brain, outgrowth on the edge of an assortment of empires, I would have no envy to meditate on, to eventually dismiss. I belong to enough networks. It may be arrogance to believe we have a more Heisenbergian angle on things than the Ptolemaic imperiums, more sapling flex than countries older than coal, but we permit ourselves few other boasts, so what the hell.

  On the plane back to Beijing and toward Monday morning and the office and budgets and personnel plans and embassy committees and the diplomatic formulae of tough business with this compelling, inferiority-complex-ridden, polite bully of a newly emerging ancient nation, I realize what’s nagging the back of my head, what’s different about this flight. The TV screens are illuminated, the music channel is on, then the news. But there are no headphones. An alternative voice is not an option. Silence is not to be thought of. We sit in our schoolroom rows with traces of the holy mountain of cypress and dove-grey temple roofs and stone gates and the endless unfolding fan of the steps as an autumn liqueur in our veins: all of us listening to the same damned thing, tin strips being hammered in. In China you need a thousand images just to begin the poem. One down.

  David Manicom has published three collections of poetry, an award-winning volume of short fiction, and Progeny of Ghosts: Travels in Russia and the Old Empire, which won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the Writers’ Development Trust Award for Non-Fiction. A Canadian Foreign Service officer, he currently lives with his family in Beijing. His next book of poetry, The Burning Eaves, will be published in 2003.

  Culturally distinctive but practical souvenirs.

  016Destination: Mexico

  OFF-SEASON IN PUERTO VALLARTA

  Warren Dunford

  Directly beneath the balcony of my hotel room is the main beach of Puerto Vallarta. In February, the scene will be wall-to-wall towels, but now, in September, the golden sand is almost bare. Palm trees gently sway. The sound of the surf is loud enough to create a constant hypnotic spell. It’s the epitome of tropical splendour.

  I am determined to ignore it.

  My goal for the week is to hide in my room and not speak to a single soul. I am here to write, and off-season—the hottest, most humid time of year—provides the perfect conditions for self-discipline.

  How could I sunbathe when merely removing my hat for ten seconds feels as if someone has splashed hot oil on my bald spot? And the undercurrent on Playa Los Muertos—Beach of the Dead—is so strong that tourists frequently drown or break ankles or at least dislocate shoulders.

  So I’m better off staying inside, sequestered in my minimalist white room, cooled by the ceiling fan and focused on writing ten pages a day.

  My only torment is the maid. I know she’s not intentionally trying to provoke me, but it annoys me that she doesn’t clean my room at the same time each day. Her inconsistency profoundly affects my concentration. Will I have fifteen more minutes to be prolific? Or two hours? I like to know this, so I can pace myself.

  From the origami-laden bathroom.

  Each morning at nine, I silently, surreptitiously, open the door to the hallway and look for the maid’s cart. It’s not there. So I go back to work. I lie stomach-down on the bed and scribble longhand in a school notebook, while the rough cotton sheets give me elbow burn.

  Was that a sound in the hall? I sneak open the door and spy on a family of German tourists as they head off to the beach. I wonder if they’d let me go with them. But no, back to work. I check again five minutes later. And five minutes after that. After two hours, the maid’s cart suddenly appears beside a room at the far end of the hall. Now I must guess her exact time of arrival, based on the cart’s proximity, so I can put on my sandals and be ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice.

  The problem is I don’t speak Spanish. Despite my frequent visits to Mexico, I know little beyond por favor and gracias. The one phrase I really should learn is “When will you be cleaning my room?” Or better still: “Would you please clean my room NOW?” It would be so simple. I could look it up in any Spanish phrase book.

  But my whole reason for going to Puerto Vallarta is to stop communicating, and as a writer, frankly, I’m sick of knowing so many words. I find it refreshing to go to a place where I don’t understand any of them.

  So I wait—writing, or more likely, reading a trashy paperback—and finally the maid knocks on my door. She wears a fitted white uniform. She’s in her forties and she has tired eyes but a lovely, warm smile. I smile back, mumble, wave my hands, gesturing obliquely to the tip beside the bed, and scurry off down the hall.

  Outside the hotel, the cobblestone streets are lined with white-washed condos and tiny red-tile-roofed houses. Families lounge on lawn chairs on the sidewalk, and home cooking thickens the air with a spicy, smoky aroma that’s almost intoxicating.

  This neighbourhood is known as the Zoña Romantica—though romance is not on my personal agenda.

  I go to the convenience store.

  On my first visit to Mexico, I was thrown into a gringo panic attack: I was ravenously hungry, yet terrified that whatever I ate would induce immediate vomiting and diarrhea. Feeling weak, I found a small grocery shop and purchased the only items that seemed safe and familiar: tequila and baby cookies. The cookies—just a few pesos a roll—are called Marias, and they’re like arrowroot biscuits, only slightly more lemony. Their sweetness is perfectly cut by a tequila chaser.

  THE PROBLEM IS I DON’T SPEAK SPANISH. THE ONE PHRASE I REALLY SHOULD LEARN IS “WHEN WILL YOU BE CLEANING MY ROOM?” OR BETTER STILL: “WOULD YOU PLEASE CLEAN MY ROOM NOW?”

  Over the years, these items have become staples in my Mexican diet. I stock up with a fresh bottle of Cuervo Gold and a few packages of Marias.

  When I get back from the convenience store, the maid’s cart has been abandoned. She hasn’t even started my room.

  I think about all the brilliant writing I would definitely be doing right now, and I head back to the street. In the midday swelter, I walk several blocks and discover the hyper-air-conditioned Farmaçia Guadalajara—the perfect place to cool down.

  I scour the aisles, searching for culturally distinctive yet practical souvenirs for friends back home. I find a brand of toothpaste called Lucky Star—the ideal gift for Madonna fans. I know several people who’ll appreciate an underarm deodorant called Mum for Men. And I become infatuated with a box of women’s hairpins that must have time-travelled to the shelf from the 1930s. The olive-green woman on the package resembles Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

  As I walk back to the hotel, I stop by the beach and stare out at the water. The bay extends in a massive sapphire-blue circle, defined by matching mountain slopes that remind me of two curving arms, with the old town right in the heart of the embrace. When I get up to my room, the maid is nearly done. She’s mopping the red-tile floor, and she doesn’t notice me, so I tiptoe down the hall and sit on the staircase. Hiding there, I open a package of cookies and wonder if I’ll ever be able to recover my concentration enough to write.

  Then, suddenly, there’s the maid standing in front of me, watching me knock back a mouthful of tequila. She motions to my room, smiles shyly, and we both say, “Gracias.”

  In the bathroom, I find that she’s left me with intricate towel and toilet paper origami—delicate sculptures resembling sailboats, swans and tuxedo shirts—so lovely they’re like those gifts you can’t bear to open. But by now I’m so hot and drenched in sweat that I desperately need a shower … In the evening, after I’ve finished work and taken myself out for dinner, I sit on the balcony and watch the rain. That’s what I love most about September in Puerto Vallarta. Every night there’s a thunderstorm of a magnitude that I might have to wait for all summer at home. In the darkness, lightning forks down viciously into the bay. But
sheltered here, behind a veil of pelting raindrops, the night feels blissfully calm.

  After seven days of this identical routine, I can’t write or read another word. The solitude, the repetitiveness and the tequila slow me down to a numb, zombie-like lethargy.

  But I’ve come to see boredom as healing. My mind achieves a stillness and quiet that other people might find through yoga or meditation—renewing my patience, lengthening my attention span and increasing my appreciation for just about anything. I actually start to miss my hectic lifestyle back home. And that’s the sure sign that I’m ready to end my off-season and turn myself back on.

  Warren Dunford is the author of two novels, Soon To Be a Major Motion Picture and Making a Killing, both of which were partially written in Puerto Vallarta. He lives in Toronto.

  017Destination: France

  CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE EURO-TRASH KIND

  Deirdre Kelly

  Gabriel lived in a noisy section of Saint Germain, upstairs from a Greek restaurant and around the corner from an outdoor market hawking fruit and fish, oxtails and onions. A well-travelled acquaintance had given me his number when she found out I would be spending a few weeks in Paris that summer. “He’s fun,” she had said in a smoky Toronto bar. “He’ll show you around.”