White Gold

by Caitlin O'Connell

  “Intuition.” He opened a drawer and pulled out my passport. “And I figured you wouldn’t want to go back to the mansions, so I went out and got this for you this morning.”

  “Thanks, Craig, I really appreciate that.” I put my passport in my pocket. “How did the place look?”

  “Charred. Hard to believe the infamous Chungking Mansions is gone.”

  “And all those innocent people. You know that Nigel’s guys threatened to kill me if I didn’t leave town. How seriously should we take that?”

  “I’ll work on that problem while you’re away.” He pulled a package out of his drawer. “In the meantime, here is a new phone, a credit card, and some pocket money.”

  “Thanks, Craig.” I picked up the iPhone 6. “This will be much better than the one I just picked up from Li’s shop.”

  “I assumed so. And I got you some safari kit—khakis and the like. Everything’s packed in that carry-on. Should be room inside to fold up the garment bag.”

  “You’ve outdone yourself.”

  “It’s an absolute pleasure to be at your service.”

  I laughed. “You’re a funny man.” I wheeled the carry-on toward the restroom. “Mind if I make a quick change?”

  “I’d be delighted for a viewing.”

  I opened the carry-on on the floor of the restroom to two neat piles of earth-colored clothing inside. The first stack was two thin cotton pairs of khaki pants, and another pair that was an olive cotton-nylon blend, and one pair of brown shorts. In the other stack were two tan short-sleeved nylon tops, two olive cotton tops, and a cream-colored silk blouse, similar to the best shirt I currently owned, only nicer. He also got me several pairs of underwear and bras. I quickly changed my clothes and immediately felt better. How he knew my exact size was a mystery.

  I looked at my watch. It had been twenty minutes and my ivory sample was now ready to be decalcified. I presented myself to Craig with a slight bow.

  “Splendid outfit.” Craig admired my new clothes.

  “And now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’ve got to finish up these samples.”

  “Can I be of assistance?”

  “Actually, I’m going to need you to do a few of the steps while I’m gone.”

  Craig got up. “Excellent.”

  We walked back into the lab and I put my gloves back on. I removed the pulverized ivory sample from the cryogen and tapped the powder into a fresh sterile tube.

  “Now that the sample is pulverized, we need to remove the calcium.” I poured a solution into the vial. “This is EDTA, a combination of ethanol and acetic acid that removes calcium from the solution,” I explained while vortexing the vial briefly to get it thoroughly mixed. Then I placed the vial in a rack in the refrigerator.

  “This step takes twenty-four hours and needs to be repeated twice before we can extract the DNA.”

  Craig was taking careful notes in his head. “Okay.”

  I made up two more vials of EDTA solution, labeled them, and placed them in the same rack with the crushed ivory sample. “Tomorrow at this time, I need you to pour the solution off the ivory sample and pour one of these fresh vials of EDTA solution into the vial with the ivory.”

  I looked at Craig. “Easy, right?”

  “Got it.”

  I picked up the second vial. “And the next day at the same time, I’ll need you to repeat the process again.” I closed the refrigerator and picked up a piece of paper. “Here’s the cheat sheet as a reminder.”

  Craig took the paper. “Perfect.”

  “You think you can handle that?”

  Craig nodded. “Looks easy enough.”

  I looked over the lab to make sure everything was in order before leaving. As I walked out of the office, Craig popped his head out after me.

  “And Catherine?”

  I turned around.

  “Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

  It took me a moment to realize what he meant. “Right, of course, my bouquet.” I smiled sarcastically. “I’ll be meeting her at the airport an hour before the flight.” I looked down at my prepacked carry-on. “I’ll log this down as a second one.” I hesitated. “No, wait, a third one.”

  He smiled. “Yes, an Armani is like a bouquet.”

  “An Armani, really? That’s Craig, always subtle.”

  “Yes, always in good taste.”

  I rolled my eyes and hit the elevator button. I was looking forward to seeing my first wild Asian elephants.

  Xishuangbanna

  Ling-Ru and I flew to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. During the flight, Ling-Ru pulled out a copy of the South China Morning Post from her bag and put it on the tray table. “Did you see this?”

  I shook my head as I looked down at the faces of the ten people who died in the Chungking Mansions fire. “Do you know any of these people?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “How are you feeling?”

  “Lucky, I guess.”

  “Luck.” Ling-Ru frowned. “There’s a lot of unlucky people out there. But luck,” she scoffed, “I don’t believe in it.”

  “I can appreciate that. What I should have said was ‘grateful.’ I’m only alive because of you.”

  Ling-Ru smiled. “Consider us even.”

  “Counting Bird Street, I think I still owe you one.”

  “That’s right. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  When we arrived in Kunming and made it over to the bus depot, we had a little over an hour to kill before the bus was scheduled to leave for Xishuangbanna. We decided to take a walk in a nearby park to clear our heads.

  We crossed the busy street and made our way over to a lovely local park with a lot of old trees creating large umbrellas of shade over all the walkways. I wasn’t expecting to find something like this right in the middle of the city.

  The first thing I noticed about the park aside from the trees was that almost every visitor I saw was a senior citizen. There was a group of old women in loose full sleeves and slacks and large pointed broad-brimmed reed hats, standing in five rows of seven, all engaged in a synchronous Tai Chi routine.

  There were lots of card tables set up with seniors playing mahjong. Others were playing cards. Another group was engaged in another kind of martial art that looked a little more rigorous than Tai Chi.

  As we made our way through the park, we walked past a circle of old men wearing business suits and sitting on plastic chairs, each with a birdcage sitting on the ground next to them. There wasn’t much talking. They all had their hands folded, listening to their birds singing.

  I walked closer to the circle to listen to the birdsongs—they were all nightingales. They were easier to focus on here in this quiet park than they were on Bird Street in Hong Kong. Each bird had a slightly different patterning to its repertoire, but all equally as beautiful. I noticed a little carved wooden ornament attached to the bars of each of the cages. There were three Chinese characters and then three letters, NNS.

  I pointed out the letters to Ling-Ru. “Do you know what NNS stands for?”

  Ling-Ru shook her head.

  “What about the characters?”

  Ling-Ru squinted. “I’d have to get a closer look.”

  It struck me as we passed the group that one of the old men looked very familiar. I could swear that I knew this man, but that would have been highly unlikely, given that I’d never been to this place before.

  “It looks like that same language we saw on the fish meal crates on the tugboat. It looks like Tai Lu characters.” Ling-Ru stepped closer.

  I pulled Ling-Ru away. “That’s okay. I can blow up the photo later.”

  I had Ling-Ru walk with me around the other side of the circle so I could get a better look at this man. It was indeed someone I knew. It was Mr. Weiping, the man who chartered the floatplane in Guangxi and told me to take pictures of the HIN of the broken-down tugboat moored at Jin Jin’s dock.

  What would Mr. Weiping be doing here in Kunming on a Sunday
morning with all of these other men as if he had lived here all his life? He said he had never left Guangxi Province. In retrospect, that was an odd thing for a pilot to say.

  I took several pictures of this group of men in case it became relevant at a later date. I tried to get a photo from three sides so I could get at least a profile of everyone within the circle.

  Ling-Ru watched me take the pictures. “You gotta love the reverence an old man has for his nightingale.”

  “It is impressive, isn’t it?” I took one last photo and then looked at my watch. “We should probably head back to the bus depot.”

  “Yes, let’s pick up some water as well. It’s about a four-hour bus ride.”

  “Four hours?”

  “Four very windy hours through a mountain pass.”

  “Oh no.” I wished we could have made arrangements with Mr. Weiping to charter a plane. Surely, Craig would have mentioned such a long bus ride given my tendency to suffer from motion sickness. Then again, maybe he didn’t know about that.

  We bought some bottled water and stood in line to get on the small bus. It looked like there were a lot more people than there were seats on the bus, but we all managed to sit, and fortunately, I got a window seat.

  The ride was long and treacherous and involved passing other crazy minibus drivers. Four hours later, we were finally in the park and meeting with the manager, Zhang Yong.

  —

  “You must be Catherine Sohon.” Zhang got up from his desk and shook my hand. “Zhang Yong. Come have a seat.”

  “And I’m Ling-Ru Chu.” Ling-Ru shook Zhang’s hand and we both sat down.

  “It’s late. I’ll drop you at the ranger’s cabin so you can settle in for the night. There’s a little kitchen next to the cabin stocked with dry noodles and tea. I’m sorry I can’t provide any more than that.”

  “That sounds perfect.” Ling-Ru and I were both tired and I, for one, was not very hungry.

  “I’ll pick you up at six a.m. We can tour the park and then it’s about a two-hour drive to Elephant Valley, where Jet’s camp is located. He manages the elephant tourist operation and is familiar with the elephant traffic that comes through the mountain pass between Xishuangbanna and Burma—or Myanmar, I should say.”

  “What does this trainer know about the wildlife traffic?”

  “I believe that some of his elephants were stolen from Myanmar and trained to be part of their tourist show. Before that, he was a runner for the illegal wildlife coming into China from Myanmar.”

  “He hasn’t been arrested for trading an endangered species?” Ling-Ru asked.

  “I am not sure how he is allowed to operate,” Zhang replied delicately. “Since the elephants are considered domesticated, they fall outside wildlife jurisdiction. The authorities know about what goes on there but haven’t done anything about it. The trainer is a nice man. He is originally from Thailand. Very good English. I think you will find the meeting worthwhile.”

  The mention of Thailand made me want to show Zhang the script that was written on the fish meal crates. I opened the image on my phone and zoomed in to the text and showed him the picture. “Do you know what this means?”

  Zhang inspected the script within the photo. “It looks like Dai. There are many Dai people in the region, and I’m sure you could find someone who could read this. But I’m not from this region and never learned the language.”

  Ling-Ru looked at the Polaroid pictures pinned up on the wall behind Zhang’s desk. She pointed to a picture of a small tree house that was surrounded by elephants drinking at a stream below the structure. “Where’s that? Can we go there?”

  Zhang looked up at the picture. “That’s inside the park. You can spend tomorrow night there if you like.”

  We both nodded enthusiastically as Zhang got up to show us to our quarters. Ling-Ru heated up a bowl of instant noodles in the microwave, and I had some decaffeinated tea before we both turned in.

  In the morning, we took a short trail from Zhang’s office to a gondola. We passed a parking lot next to the gondola entrance. There were hardly any cars in the parking lot, and yet it was completely full of garbage—each parking stall had a large white plastic bag full of Styrofoam containers and the remains of a group lunch. Empty tin cans and plastic water bottles rolled around in the breeze.

  I shook my head incredulously. “That’s a lot of garbage.”

  Zhang nodded. “With the huge influx of Chinese tourists, we can’t keep up with the garbage. They come here with their lunch, stay for an hour, eat, and then leave everything behind. This is all from yesterday.”

  “What a shame.”

  “There are no guidelines for how to be a tourist in a nation that hasn’t had any experience with this activity.”

  “That’s an interesting problem.”

  “It’s really nice to see that our citizens want to come to these parks to see nature. But it’s also a problem. The middle class has grown so fast. It’s overwhelming.”

  Zhang guided us onto the gondola. “And there are other problems. Problems with elephants raiding crops, and also the rubber plantations are like a giant cancer taking over more and more land. The regulations aren’t clear, and rubber companies are taking advantage. People are switching their crops to fruit trees, and crops get shaded by the rubber trees.”

  “Does the government get involved in helping farmers keep elephants out of their crops?”

  “Not really. The rangers don’t have the resources to handle it. If you have any suggestions on keeping elephants out of crops, that would be very helpful. We have used electric fencing in some places and that’s worked, but it’s too expensive.”

  “Do you get much poaching in the park?”

  “Some, yes. But not really elephants.”

  “Do you think more Asian elephants were being poached because of the trade reopening in 2008?”

  “I couldn’t say about other Asian countries, but not here. I think most of it is coming from Africa.” He hesitated and then continued. “We can’t keep our citizens from eating our neighbor’s wildlife. How can we be expected to monitor the trade of something that gets flown in from another continent?”

  “I agree with you.” Ling-Ru nodded.

  “I recently went to India as part of an IUCN Asian National Parks mission meeting. I was amazed at how much wildlife I saw in their parks. And there were squirrels everywhere. Here, there are no squirrels. Squirrel trapping is a big problem.”

  I was about to comment when Zhang resumed. “But those are the small things. There are much bigger problems coming across the mountains from Burma.”

  “I’d like to learn more about that.”

  We heard high-pitched calls emanating down from the trees. Ling-Ru looked up at the canopy. “What’s making that sound?”

  “Gibbons—they were put here for the tourist industry.”

  I looked up to catch a glimpse of a small black primate with long arms, brachiating through the trees with ease. “Interesting.”

  The gondola passed over dense secondary-growth forest with lots of banana plants. Zhang pointed down. “Sometimes you’ll see elephants here. They come for the bananas.”

  In the distance, you could see a sharp line in the vegetation where the forest abutted vast plantations. I pointed toward the plantations. “What’s being grown there?”

  “Rubber.” Zhang shook his head. “Too much forest is being cut down for rubber.”

  I looked out at the rubber trees that extended to the horizon. “Can anything be done to protect the forest?”

  “It is our tragedy.” Zhang shook his head again. “Wildlife doesn’t pay like rubber does.”

  We got off the gondola, and Zhang drove us to Elephant Valley to meet with Jet.

  Lu Lu the Elephant

  When we arrived in the elephant camp, Zhang introduced us to Jet, the elephant trainer from Thailand. After an exchange of greetings, Jet introduced us to each of seven elephants, including a two-year-old calf.
He started with the most dominant elephant, Lily.

  “Ol’ Lily here is in charge.” Jet slapped her flank and had her back up a little bit while the calf approached us. “And this here is little Dim Sum.”

  “Hey there, Dim Sum.” I giggled as Dim Sum tried to reach into my pants pocket with his trunk. “What’s he looking for?”

  Jet handed me some apple slices to give to Dim Sum. “Treats.”

  I bent down and held one out. “Aren’t you a cutie.”

  Dim Sum waved his trunk around, snatched the apple slice from my open hand, placed it in his mouth, and held his trunk out for more. I laughed and placed another slice in his trunk. He bent the tip of his trunk around the treat and tossed it in his mouth and held it out again.

  I laughed again. “Hey, I can’t spoil you on our first date.”

  Jet laughed and scratched Dim Sum’s head. “Dim Sum means ‘touch the heart,’ and he sure has touched all of our hearts.” Jet smiled. “But he also likes to try everything,” he explained. “That’s really how he got his name.”

  “Dim Sum.” I scratched Dim Sum behind the ear. “What a perfect name you have.”

  Ling-Ru went to scratch Dim Sum’s other ear and Lily stepped forward imposingly, aggressively flapping her ears, and emitted a low threatening rumble.

  “Easy, Lily.” Jet put himself between Lily and us and picked up a stick and pointed it toward the ground. “Back up, girl,” he said assertively. Then he turned to us. “Step back a little. Lily isn’t used to Dim Sum getting so much attention. We don’t normally let the tourists interact with him because she’s so protective. She can be unpredictable.”

  Ling-Ru and I stepped back. “Sorry, Lily,” I called out to Lily. “We were just admiring your adorable calf. I assume he’s her calf?”

  “Yes.” Jet nodded as he walked some distance away. “Dim Sum,” Jet called to the calf, offering him a large banana leaf that he pulled off the back of a truck. Dim Sum ran over and accepted the gift with relish.

  Jet laughed, patted Dim Sum on the head again, and walked back over to us. “Normally, an elephant learns what to eat from what all the others are eating. But not Dim Sum. He was determined to learn the hard way. He’d want to try everything and that got him into trouble a few times. After several bouts of diarrhea, we had to stop him from sampling new plants. We’ve had to keep a close eye on him, and that hasn’t always been easy.”