Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  I admitted that I did.

  “They filmed that scene right inside that building!”

  When I visited, the Park City mayor kept his office on the first floor of the Miners Hospital. His name was Dana Williams, and he was thrilled to see the photo of Chen Meizi with her portrait. “That’s so cool!” he said. “I can’t believe somebody in China painted our building! And she did such a great job!”

  Like everybody else I talked to in Park City, Mayor Williams couldn’t tell me why the building had been commissioned for a portrait overseas. It was a kind of symmetry between the Chinese Barbizon and Park City: the people who painted the scenes, and the people who actually lived within the frames, were equally mystified as to the purpose of this art.

  Mayor Williams poured me a cup of green tea, and we chatted. He had an easy smile and a youthful air; he played guitar in a local rock band. “It’s the yang to being mayor,” he explained. He was interested in China, and he sprinkled his conversation with Chinese terms. “You mei you pijiu?” he said. “Do you have any beer?” He remembered that phrase from a trip to Beijing in 2007, when he’d accompanied a local school group on an exchange. A scroll of calligraphy hung beside his desk; the characters read “Unity, Culture, Virtue.” He told me that he had first thought about China back in the 1960s, after hearing Angela Davis lecture on communism at UCLA. There was a copy of The Little Red Book in his office library. When the Park City newspaper found out, it ran a story implying that the mayor’s decisions were influenced by Mao Zedong. Mayor Williams found that hilarious; he told me that he just picked out the useful parts of the book and ignored the bad stuff. “Serve the people,” he said, when I asked what he had learned from Mao. “You have an obligation to serve the people. One of the reasons I’m here is from reading The Little Red Book as a teenager. And being in government is about being in balance. I guess that has to do with the Dao.”

  Go West

  The first thing I learned while living abroad is that if you’re lost, you have to ask directions. The last thing I learned is that it’s possible to ship 143 boxes from Beijing across the Pacific Ocean without a final destination. I’ve never been good at planning ahead, and this quality became worse after years in China, where everybody seems to live in the moment. And in a country like that it’s easy to find a moving agent who’s willing to improvise. He went by the English name Wayne, and he wore his hair long, the way Chinese artists often do. When we arranged the contract, Wayne asked my wife, Leslie, if she had any idea where we were going. “It will be a small town, probably in Colorado,” she said. “But we haven’t decided which one.”

  “Can you decide within the next few weeks?”

  “I think so.”

  Wayne explained that the shipping container would be on the ocean for much of a month, so the address wouldn’t matter, as long as the thing was headed in the right general direction. But after it arrived in the United States, the American partner would need to know where to deliver it by truck. That was Wayne’s deadline: we had to find a home in less than five weeks.

  Wayne spent two days in our Beijing apartment, managing the moving crew. It consisted of a dozen men, all dressed in clean blue uniforms and carrying metal box cutters. For each piece of furniture, they sliced big squares of cardboard into a size that custom-fit the object. They’d cut off a piece, fold it neatly around the front legs of a chair, and then do the same for the back and the sides. After the cardboard was all taped together, it looked like a chair-shaped box. They created boxes around tables, desks, shelves, stools, and couches. They made something that looked like a giant cardboard bed. An antique three-tiered opium table was perfectly enclosed, layer by layer. It was like watching a team of sculptors work backward, until every object we owned had been converted into a larger, rougher version of itself.

  A couple of times, I tried to engage the workers in conversation, but their responses were brief and uninviting. They did not allow us to help. If I picked up an object, somebody immediately grabbed it away, smiling and thanking me profusely. “It’s better if they do it themselves,” Wayne said, and he was right. They packed the shipping container as tight as a jigsaw puzzle, and a truck carted it off into the night. Suddenly I felt wonderful: all our possessions were gone; we no longer had an address; we could live anywhere we wished. Later that month Leslie and I set off to find a new home.

  Neither of us had much experience as adults in the United States. I had left after college, to attend graduate school in England, and then I traveled to China; before I knew it I had been gone for a decade and a half. I had never held an American job, or owned an American house, or even rented an American apartment. The last time I bought a car I filled it with leaded gas. My parents still lived in the Missouri town where I grew up, but otherwise nothing tied me to any particular part of the country. Leslie had even fewer American roots: she had been born and brought up in New York, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and she had made her career as a writer in Shanghai and Beijing.

  During the years that I lived in China, I rarely returned to the United States, but I spent a lot of time thinking about the country. Most Chinese were intensely curious about foreign life, and they liked to ask certain questions. What time is it there? How many children are you allowed to have? How much is a plane ticket back? People tended to have extreme views of the United States, both positive and negative, and they became fixated on fantastic details that they had heard. Are American farmers so rich that they use airplanes to plant their crops? Is it true that when elderly parents eat with their adult children, the kids give them a bill for the meal, because they aren’t as close as Chinese families? When I taught at a college, a student named Sean wrote in an essay:

  I know that persons in America can possess guns from some books and films. I don’t know whether it is true. . . . I know that beggars must have bulletproof vest from a book. Is it true? There is a saying about America. If you want to go to heaven, go to America; if you want to go to hell, go to America.

  It was hard to respond to such combinations of truth and exaggeration. In the early years, it frustrated me, because I couldn’t convey a more nuanced perspective. But eventually I realized that the conversations weren’t strictly about me, or even about my home country. In China, I came to think of the United States as essentially imaginary: it was always being created in people’s minds, and in that sense it was more personal for them than it was for me. The questions reflected Chinese interests, dreams, and fears—even when they discussed America, the conversation was partly about their home.

  The longer I stayed overseas, the more I felt something similar happening to my own perspective. China became my frame of reference; I tended to think of the United States mostly in contrast to what I knew in Asia. And my conception of American life became increasingly open-ended. It was hard to envision myself in any particular place, but that also meant that I could live pretty much anywhere. When Leslie and I decided to leave Beijing, both of us had finished researching books, so we knew that our work was portable. We didn’t have jobs or children, and we didn’t need a long-term home; eventually, we’d probably end up overseas again. And after years of standing out as a foreigner in urban China, I liked the idea of rural solitude and anonymity. A small town in the Rocky Mountains where nobody knew us—that was our own Chinese version of the American dream.

  We bought a used Toyota, put a cooler in the back, and followed two-lane highways around Colorado. It was late March and the snow was still deep in the mountains; some of the high passes were closed. At night, we stayed in cheap hotels, and during the day we talked to real-estate agents, who rarely had much to show us. We hadn’t realized that middle-class Americans almost never rent their houses; this was before the subprime-mortgage crash and it was easy to buy. In the town of Leadville, an old silver mining community with a population of less than three thousand, I asked an agent if she had anything for rent. “Do you qualify for HUD?” she asked. I said I was pretty sure we didn’t
; she suggested a mobile home. The only house we saw for rent was a white prefab situated about twenty feet from Highway 24. It was currently occupied by a pack of molybdenum miners, but the real-estate agent assured us the men would be moving out soon; she could put us on a waiting list. Leadville was preparing to open up some mines again, largely because of demand from China. We took a glance at the house and kept driving.

  I liked the big bright landscapes, the way the mountains caught the alpenglow in late afternoon, and I liked the heavy-named towns that sat in the valleys: Granite, Bedrock, Sawpit, Crested Butte. In southwestern Colorado we followed the Uncompahgre River for miles; just seeing that name on a sign made me happy. Not far from the river, a man showed us a brand-new house that sat on an alkali flat. The white soil was as dazzling as broken glass; the thought of writing a book there gave me a headache. Whenever we did find houses for rent, they were usually misfits. They had bad carpet and cheap paneling, or they had been built somewhere in a shaded valley where the snow was slow to melt. Sometimes I sensed that we arrived in the wake of a disaster. Divorces, deaths, bankruptcies—I imagined that was why big houses skidded onto the rental market in small towns.

  In a place called Ridgway, we phoned a real-estate agency and happened to talk with a young office manager who had just broken up with her boyfriend. He had left her with the lease on a brand-new house; she hoped to move to Denver and start over. The place was beautiful: high on a mesa, a thousand feet above the Uncompahgre River. From the back, we couldn’t see any other houses; the view ran clear across a piñon forest to the fluted walls of the Cimarron Range. Ridgway isn’t far from the borders with Utah and New Mexico, and it’s home to a little more than seven hundred people. There’s one stoplight in the county. Ridgway has no McDonald’s, no Walmart, no Starbucks; we couldn’t get cell phone reception at the house. It was hard to imagine anyplace more different from Beijing, and we agreed on the spot to a one-year lease.

  We bought a futon and some lawn furniture, and camped out on the floor to wait for our shipping container. One afternoon, we drove into the town of Montrose, where we found a couple of wooden bookshelves at an antique market. The dealer agreed to split the delivery fee: we’d pay the first ten dollars and she’d cover the rest. She telephoned her son, who owned a pickup truck. “Twenty-five?” I heard her say. “That’s too much. How about twenty?” The Chinese would have appreciated that detail—less than a month back in the States and already I’d witnessed an elderly parent negotiating with her adult child about money.

  In the empty house, I signed up for telephone service. When I asked for an unlisted number, the phone-company representative said that there would be an extra fee of two dollars per month. For a moment, I weighed my cheapness against the desire for anonymity. “Put it under my wife’s name,” I said. “Her name is Leslie Chang.”

  I figured that hers was a relatively common name, but I hadn’t thought about how the phone-book listing would appear, with me attached: “Chang, Peter and Leslie.” Immediately the mail began to arrive.

  Dear Mr. Peter Chang,

  You love saving money. Better yet, you love saving money and getting better service. So why haven’t you switched phone companies?

  Leslie and I almost never got anything. Peter Chang was the one, and in the early months he received much of our mail. Credit-card and phone companies sent flyers, as did car dealerships. Peter Chang received advertisements written in Korean Hangul and in traditional Chinese characters. People called at night speaking exotic languages. The Koreans hung up as soon as they realized we didn’t understand, but we always tried to keep Chinese telemarketers on the line, to figure out where they were calling from. Who trolled through rural Colorado phone listings in search of Asian names?

  For the most part, the callers seemed to be lonely individuals selling long-distance phone cards. But every once in a while a Chinese telemarketer offered something different, and one evening Leslie answered the phone and heard a woman give a pitch for a vacation spot in Wai Er Ming. I listened in, although at first neither of us could make sense of the name. “Wai Er Ming?” Leslie said. “Where is that?”

  The caller explained that Wai Er Ming is in the American West, land of cowboys and mountains; the air is fresh and clean. It was like staring at a puzzle for a few seconds until a pattern suddenly becomes obvious, and you can’t believe you ever missed it: Wy O Ming.

  “Where are you calling from?” Leslie asked. “Are you from the mainland?”

  There was a pause. “Our company is from Hong Kong. But we do tours in Wai Er Ming.”

  “I don’t believe you’re a Hong Kong company,” Leslie said. “A Hong Kong company wouldn’t call random people like this. Also, you don’t sound like somebody from Hong Kong. Where in the mainland are you from?”

  On the phone, the woman’s voice became very small. “I’m supposed to say we’re from Hong Kong,” she said. “I can’t tell you anything else.” Afterward I sometimes repeated the word, just to hear the sound. It had a certain magic, half-strange and half-familiar: Wai Er Ming, Wai Er Ming, Wai Er Ming.

  The shipping container arrived late. The Denver movers had scheduled delivery for noon on a Tuesday, but their truck got stuck in snow on Monarch Pass, and then they suffered a mechanical failure. In our driveway, they backed into a piñon tree and knocked off a couple of limbs. When the driver realized he didn’t have the key to the container’s Chinese-customs lock, he grabbed a heavy decoupling tool. He grinned and said, “Give a redneck something to hit with and he’ll get it done.”

  American friends who had moved back from Beijing had warned us about the feeling you get when your possessions arrive. It’s similar to taking a new baby home from the hospital: all at once you’re on your own. In Ridgway, Wayne’s dozen Chinese movers became two Americans named James and Greg. They did not wear uniforms, and they did not move efficiently. They did not protest when Leslie and I offered to help. The moment they arrived they began to ask about where they could find something to eat. And after James successfully smashed the customs lock, both of them stood in awed silence before the open container.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” James said finally. “I’ll have to tell people about this.”

  During the rest of the afternoon, while we hauled boxes inside, James and Greg periodically examined the Chinese handiwork. At one point I found both of them crouched in the driveway, studying a table that was completely enclosed in cardboard. “They put us to shame,” James said, shaking his head. “This is amazing.”

  Each box had a number and a label, and James called them out as he went, so Leslie could check off everything on a list. Between boxes, he carried on a running commentary about his Louisiana upbringing, the seven children he and his wife were homeschooling, and the things he had learned in his former life as a long-distance trucker. He had recently gotten rid of his rig because gas prices rose too high. “Sold it to the next guy looking to make a million dollars,” he said. “Million problems is more like it.” James said that he spent thousands of dollars every year on books, and he told stories about all kinds of topics: trucker fueling strategies, tree nurseries, chicken farms. “They got them on so many drugs nowadays,” he said. “I had a friend who worked at a chicken plant, and from the time they’re born to the time they’re processed it takes eighteen days. Eighteen days! It used to take months. There was one woman who worked there injecting the chickens, and she’d prick herself occasionally by mistake. She got lupus and there was hair growing out of her face. That’s why I don’t eat chickens anymore. This is box No. 94—office files.”

  The last thing to be unpacked was our bed, which Leslie had found years ago in a Shanghai antique market. It had a canopy that consisted of eighteen separate pieces, all carved from elm wood, with intricate scrollwork depicting flowers, human figures, and Buddhist icons. The canopy had no screws, no bolts—only wooden notches and fittings. It had to be assembled in a specific order. We began with one post and worke
d our way clockwise, with each person supporting a side until the whole thing balanced perfectly. Night had fallen, and the darkness gave the scene a certain intimacy: Leslie and me, James and Greg, all of us together on an early-Republican-era canopy bed surrounded by carved lotus flowers and bodhisattvas and interlocking infinity symbols. After the canopy stood erect in all its glory, James spent a minute studying the fittings. “It’s so well designed!” he said. They had six hours of mountain driving back to Denver, but James was cheerful to the end. He shook my hand and wished me good luck; he seemed happy to have another story for the road.

  It wasn’t until I moved back to the States that I realized how much I had missed the way Americans talk, especially in small towns. I liked the pacing of their stories, and I liked being able to pick up the nuances of the language. Once when I visited my parents back in Missouri, I took a shuttle bus from the airport, and the driver was a South Carolinian with a huge white beard that tumbled across his chest like a snowdrift. I told him I had been in China until recently.

  “Do you speak mandolin?” he asked.

  My accent doesn’t sound that nice, but I said yes anyway.

  “I read a statistic somewhere,” he said. “I don’t know where, but it said the Chinese could march four abreast into the ocean for all eternity.”

  The driver talked nonstop for 120 miles. He told stories about his ex-wife, and he described his studies of biblical Hebrew; he had strong opinions about the Book of Daniel. Nowadays he lived in a trailer court in mid-Missouri, but during the 1960s he had traveled to France, Spain, Greece, and Turkey. “I had a rich uncle who took me there.”