“You see him now?” Kang Li asks.
I look. Fuck if the Buick isn’t following us.
“Yeah.”
“Cao dan,” he mutters. He steers hard right, and the Jeep goes up on two wheels as we take the corner onto another narrow street. Through the gaps in the low buildings, I can see fields, and before too long the buildings fall away and we’re bouncing down a rutted dirt road bordering rice paddies. We turn again, onto an even bumpier lane that turns to mud as it suddenly runs downhill into an even smaller village. The Buick is still right on our ass. We nearly take out an old guy on a bike and we kick pebbles onto a couple of old aunties shucking corn out on a stoop, and then we’re through that village and into more fields. The road’s even muddier now as we barrel along, the Buick behind us, and I think, okay, maybe this was why Sparrow didn’t tell Kang Li about the whole David–Han Rong thing, because this is insane, and that’s when Kang Li pulls the Jeep off the road and heads into a flooded field. The Buick follows. The Jeep chugs and churns and keeps moving, oversize wheels throwing up wads of mud.
The Buick? Sits there. Stuck. Wheels spinning in the muck. We pull away, leaving them behind.
Kang Li pumps his fist. “Diu na ma!” he shouts, grinning.
“Hoo-ah!” I yell back. “That was awesome!”
“Zhen niubi!” he agrees.
We’re at the end of the field now, and with a grinding of gears the Jeep crawls up onto another tiny road. I look back at the deep gashes our tires made through the field. “I hope we didn’t trash his crops too much.”
“Not planted yet. Besides”—Kang Li shrugs—“let the guys in the Buick pay.”
Works for me.
“To Guilin?” he asks.
I nod. “Sounds good.”
I ASK KANG LI to drop me someplace with wireless, close to the train station.
Here’s the thing: Sure, planes are faster. But when you buy a plane ticket, you have to show your passport. Trains? Just hand over your cash.
I don’t know who those guys are, who they’re working for, but if they’re at all connected, I’d rather not leave them an easy way to figure out where I’m going.
Which brings up the question: Where do I go now?
I figure I have three choices. Back to Beijing. Or to Guiyang, capital of Guizhou, or Dali, in Yunnan, where the other two seed companies from Daisy’s list are.
Beijing is probably the sensible choice.
I haven’t decided, I tell myself. I’ll think about it for a while, and then I’ll make a decision. Based on … you know, rational shit, like the train schedule and what makes the most sense for me to do.
Yeah, right.
THERE’S A HOSTEL WITH a bar and a café about ten minutes’ walk from the station, advertising free Wi-Fi. Kang Li drops me off at the curb. On it, more accurately. “Get you close,” he says.
So it’s only a couple of yards, but I appreciate it. My leg hurts like hell, from sitting in the car, from the kidney-rattling chase through the rice paddies.
It’s no big, I tell myself. It’s just pain.
“Thanks,” I say. “Thanks a lot. I mean, that was … that was …”
Kang Li waves a hand, brushing my appreciation aside. “Mei wenti,” he says. Not a problem. “It was good fun.”
We get out of the Jeep. Kang Li grabs my duffel from the back. “I’ll take it inside for you.”
“No need. It’s not heavy.”
He hands the duffel to me, and I sling it over my shoulder.
“You sure you don’t know who they are?” he asks.
“I really don’t.” I hesitate. “I don’t think they know about me visiting the sanctuary, whoever they are.”
Unless they’re connected to someone at the Gecko. Someone who saw me talking to Sparrow.
I push the thought aside.
“You should still be careful.” I fake a smile. “Sparrow needs you to take care of the cats.”
He grins. “I will. Bie jiaoji.” Don’t worry.
I GET A TABLE at the bar/café. One wall has money from all over the world plastered to it. Another is fake brick. It’s just after 1:00 P.M., so I order a beer and a pizza and get out my laptop.
Of course I’ve got a ton of emails, and I tell myself not to get sucked into those, though I do take a minute to read the one from my mom (“Back in Beijing, the apartment’s fine, except the toilet in the guest bathroom isn’t flushing and there are some pretty bad smells, so I just have the door shut for now“). I note that I have a couple from Vicky Huang, and I think, Shit, I was supposed to meet with her, or with Sidney Cao, or with somebody, while I was in Yangshuo, but that’s going to have to wait.
I look for the email from Sparrow with the link to the video she showed me, the one that Jason helped put together.
I watch it again.
There’s that one glimpse of Jason, loading the crated cats into a car.
How is this going to help me?
I check out the links on the video. Here’s one for Yangshuo Friends of Animals. I click on it and find their website. In Chinese, of course. It would help if I read Chinese better, but I don’t. So I just scroll down until I come to a post with photos, photos of cats, in bamboo cages. The truck. The rescue. This is it.
And here’s the embedded video.
I go to Babelfish, an Internet translator. It’s not perfect, but in a pinch it will give you a quick and dirty translation of a web page.
And at the bottom of the post it says, “Thanking for the production of video element to Wolf Child.”
I look up “wolf” on my handy iPhone Chinese dictionary. “Wolf child,” langhai, has its own entry. It doesn’t just mean “baby wolf.” Langhai is a term for a human child raised by wolves.
What did Dog say about his and Jason’s parents? I try to remember. It wasn’t like we talked about things that much, back in the Sandbox. Our whole “relationship,” if you want to call it that, wasn’t exactly about sharing serious emotional stuff. He mostly gave me shit, and we occasionally messed around.
Everyone’s parents are fucked up. I suddenly hear his voice in my head, saying that. I remember, when he said it, we were hanging out in the dining hall, having gotten our tacos and a Coke in his case, a mochaccino in mine. The air-con was working that day, I remember, because I’d gotten a chill off all the sweat that had soaked my clothes. I’d just read some email from my mom, about some guy she’d been seeing and how it hadn’t worked out, and I was bitching about it, like, how could she keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again?
“Most of them shouldn’t have kids, but they do, and here we are.” Dog leaned back in his chair, laughed a little. “People do the best they can. Sometimes it’s not good enough.”
SO, WOLF CHILD, AKA Langhai. I do a search on Youku for users with that name. And what do you know, there he is. With five videos posted. Including the Yangshuo cat rescue.
“You fucking idiot,” I mutter.
Okay, maybe not totally. All you have to do to get a Youku account is provide a name and an email address, and that stuff’s easy enough to disguise. Hotmail, Yahoo!, a host of others, you don’t have to give your real name.
But still. The guy’s a fugitive. He fled to China, which was stupid enough. And he’s left a video trail.
Here’s one from Guiyu.
I click on it.
Shots of the countryside. Music underneath, some kind of weird techno stuff that makes me nervous. But he’s good at this. The video is powerful. The smoking fields. The mountains of electronic scrap. The blackened streams.
And people. Workers surrounded by clouds of toxic steam. Their arms covered with rashes. Children, little kids, standing in front of piles of wire and keyboards.
Text crawls across the screen, in English and Chinese, saying things like, “Guiyu is the largest e-waste site on earth.” “Guiyu’s children have a seventy percent higher rate of lead poisoning than average.” “Guiyu’s water is undrinkable.”
And then shots of a protest, a mob of farmers from the look of it, surrounding a government building, holding signs and clenching rakes and hoes in their fists. “The pollution has spread beyond Guiyu, killing crops and contaminating farmland.”
Huh, I think. In China stuff like this gets “harmonized” pretty fast, scrubbed right off the Internet, but on the other hand there are so many “mass incidents” in China that it’s hard to catch them all, and Langhai hasn’t had a ton of hits on his videos yet.
The truth is out there, but if no one sees it, does it matter?
I look at the titles of the other videos: “Beautiful Yangshuo” and “Dangerous Seeds.” I watch the second one. Most of it’s a compilation of still images, shots of fields and corn and the occasional PowerPoint slide. The narration is in Mandarin, with English and Chinese subtitles. It’s a sort of brief history of GMO plants and why they should scare us, a summary of the stuff I read and the things that Sparrow and Kang Li and Han Rong told me at the sanctuary.
The Mandarin speaker is a woman—Daisy, maybe? I can’t tell. We talked mostly in English. Maybe some other cute Chinese girl he’s met along the way.
Okay, call me bitter. But a guy like Jason, good-looking, American, he’s going to find Chinese girlfriends pretty easily.
The last shot: a graphic of a Chinese proletariat hero brandishing a hoe, a field of golden rice. “New Century Hero Rice.”
I get that prickly feeling, the one that’s part fear and part connection, like I’ve stumbled into an electric current.
“Is this a hero or a traitor?” the woman asks.
The most recent video, posted just two weeks ago, is called “Dali Scene.”
Dali, in Yunnan, the province on China’s southwestern border. The second location on Daisy’s list of seed companies.
THERE ARE TWO TRAINS daily from Guilin to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, one at 3:30 P.M. leaving from Guilin North, the other at about 4:45 P.M. from the main train station close to the hostel. From Kunming it’s easy to get a train or a bus to Dali.
Yeah, I’m going to Dali. Yeah, I know it’s a stupid idea. But I’ve come this far, I might as well keep going, right?
Right.
I could probably make the 3:30 P.M. train if I hustled, but when I go to check train tickets at the handy hostel travel desk, they make a call and tell me that the only sleeping berths available are two upper soft sleepers and one upper hard sleeper, and I really don’t know if I can manage the climb up to either of them right now.
There’s a lower soft sleeper available on the 4:45 P.M. train, and for a small surcharge they’ll buy the ticket for me and bring it back to the hostel.
So that’s what I decide to do. I hand over the money for a ticket. I hang out in the bar/restaurant. Have another beer, then some coffee. Watch “Beautiful Yangshuo” and “Dali Scene.” The Yangshuo video includes footage of the Yangshuo Ancient Village Artist Retreat Inn, and I wonder if they paid for it, paid Jason/David/Langhai to shoot the piece, because it sure is a good advertisement for them—the video’s really well done. Maybe he’s putting some of these pieces up on Youku so he can get work from them.
And that’s when it occurs to me: These video sites have messaging.
Maybe I can send Jason an email.
I sit back, staring at the last frame of “Beautiful Yangshuo,” and consider.
If I write him, tell him I’m Dog’s friend, tell him how worried his family is, how much it would mean to Dog to hear from him, that would be doing my duty, right? Completing the mission. No need to go all the way to Dali.
Then I think, But I wouldn’t know for sure that he’s okay. That he believes I am who I say I am.
I mean, I guess I could try to get Sparrow to vouch for me. That is, if I can trust Sparrow. If Sparrow can trust me.
I should just bag it. Except I already bought the train ticket.
I figure I might as well go. My leg’s feeling better, so I’m not so worried I’m going to drop dead from a blood clot. And what am I going to do back in Beijing, other than deal with my mom and Andy, a toilet that won’t flush, and the DSD?
Besides, Dali’s supposed to be beautiful, and I never got to float down a river on a bamboo raft.
CHAPTER TWENTY
WE GET INTO KUNMING at 10:35 A.M., and I have less than an hour to catch the train to Dali.
No big deal, you’d think, but this is China, where most times you get on a train it’s like an escape from the fucking Nazis or something: mobs of people carrying crazy amounts of crap, pushing, shoving, determined to get on that train first, which can be kind of scary, going through gates and up and down stairs. For a lot of Chinese, if you’re going any distance, the train is how you go. If you’re a migrant worker, one of the tens of millions traveling for work, especially if you’re trying to get home one of the few times a year you have a holiday, you pray you can get a train ticket.
I’ve learned never to travel during those times.
But even though this isn’t one of those times, the train I’m trying to catch is hard seats only, and that scene can be pretty Darwin.
I’m wiped out. I didn’t sleep too much on the overnight train, a combination of some snoring business dude, pain, and nerves. I made myself a double Starbucks VIA before we pulled in, and that’s hardly put a dent in my exhaustion.
Kunming is supposed to be a cool city. I’ve heard a lot of great things about it. They have really nice weather, a hipster-foreigner ghetto, lots of pretty scenery. But the Kunming train station is freaky. I have to go downstairs to buy my ticket to Dali—you can’t buy tickets for a train that doesn’t go through your departure city, don’t ask me why—and I’ve never seen so many nongmin, peasants, camped out in a train station before, sleeping on the ground, propped up against their faded plastic bundles, sitting there, waiting for … I don’t know what. Wearing their patched clothes, their cast-off Tshirts, faces tanned and thickened by years of sun. Staring at me like I’m a total alien.
I’m looking for the ticket window. My leg hurts, my duffel’s slipping off my shoulder, and I really need to pee.
“Xiaojie. Xiaojie. Qing ni, bangzhu wo. Bangzhu wo xiaohai.” Help me, miss. Help my little child.
I turn to look, and there’s this beggar lady crawling toward me on her knees, clutching a filthy kid in one arm, her other hand outstretched. “Qing ni, bangzhu women.”
I so do not have time for this right now. I give her my best blank look and keep walking.
And she grabs my leg.
“Please, please,” she sobs. “Please help me and my child!”
The pain is so intense that I don’t even scream. I just do a face plant, my cheek hitting the slick marble pavers, the shock only barely absorbed by my outstretched hand, my duffel bag landing with a whump to one side.
“Cao ni!” I yell. “Get your hands off me!”
The kid starts to wail. I shake my head, wait till the white spots in my vision clear, push myself up to a sitting position.
A crowd has gathered around us—nongmin, mostly. They stand there, arms clasped behind their backs, staring like they’re watching a play, maybe one called Foreigners Do the Strangest Things.
“You’ve never seen a foreigner before?” I yell at them. “What are you all, zhutou?”
“Sorry,” the woman whispers. “Sorry.”
I look at her, and she’s sitting there with her blackened clothes and her howling baby and a frightened look, and suddenly I don’t care if it’s a scam, if she’s run by some boss of an organized beggar ring; it’s just sad and horrible, and I want to get away, go someplace where I can pretend this stuff doesn’t exist.
Ha-ha. Good luck with that one.
I try to stand up, and I can’t. The people in the crowd shuffle their feet. Mutter at one another. Point. A couple of them get out cell phones and snap pictures.
Fucking great.
I drop my duffel. I can’t stand up with the weight of it on my shoulder. I push myse
lf to my feet, slowly, with my Yangshuo walking stick. Try to blink the pain away. Adjust my daypack and grab the duffel strap.
The beggar woman scrambles to her feet. Then she does this totally weird thing—she puts her hands under the duffel and boosts it up, so that I can easily adjust the strap pad on my shoulder.
The baby has stopped crying. Its face is smeared with dirt, I notice. I wonder, did Mom put the dirt there before they came out of whatever hole they’re living in, so the kid would look more pathetic?
The baby stares at me, dark eyes the color of coffee beans.
I reach into my jeans pocket and pull out a couple of wadded-up twenty-yuan notes and give them to the woman, because I’m such a fucking idiot.
And of course I miss the fucking 11:20 A.M. train to Dali.
SO. I BUY A ticket for the next available train, which doesn’t leave until 11:30 P.M. I score a bottom bunk on a hard sleeper—it’s a seven hour trip, and even if I can’t sleep, I figure it’s better I should be able to stretch out my leg. I check my duffel bag at a locker, and I hobble back outside, to the chaos of the station and of Kunming in general, and somewhere past the giant black plastic policeman robot—I’m not sure what it does, but it looks like some pervy child of Robocop and a Legos man—I catch a taxi.
“Where do foreigners like to go in Kunming?” I ask the driver.
He starts going on about the Stone Forest and then some other theme park an hour or two outside of town that, if I understand him correctly, involves dwarves, which is kind of tempting, but I shake my head and lift up my hand. “Just want to go someplace close by. I have a train to catch later.”
“Maybe Wenlin Jie.”
It’s a street near the university. There’s a lake not too far from here, he tells me, “Very beautiful. Very peaceful. You can go there and drink tea if you like.”
On the ride from the train station, Kunming looks like the other second-tier cities I’ve seen: too much traffic, the same banks and shopping malls, and big glass and plastic fronted buildings. More trees, maybe. The weather’s not bad for this time of year—shirtsleeve appropriate—and the air smells pretty much like air, as opposed to soot and chemicals.
Hour of the Rat Page 18
