‘Fish,’ she said in a shrill voice.
‘Anything else?’
‘Only fish today. Lots and lots of fish.’
Taking produce to market across Garze’s swing bridge
A proud restaurant owner in Garze
ELEVEN
THE BUS TO KANGDING WAS SUPPOSED TO ARRIVE EARLY IN THE morning, but never turned up. The middle-aged Chinese woman in the ticket office, resplendent in a smart blue uniform with gold buttons and a peaked cap, soon tired of the Tibetan passengers’ constant demands for information and simply put her window down and left. No one knew what to do. Burdened with large bundles of goods to transport to a distant market, the Tibetans had no other option but to sit and wait — hours, perhaps, maybe days.
With no such luggage in tow, I walked to the edge of Garze and caught a ride with a logging truck headed east. The driver was a short, round man in his forties, with a close-shaved head and a dark mole on his cheek from which sprouted several long, grey hairs. His name was Peng and he was one half of a husband-and-wife transporter tag team. She was asleep behind the curtain that sealed off the back of the cab and her not-so-gentle snoring and occasional flatulent outbursts kept us entertained for hours. Every time she snorted, or let rip with another prodigious fart, we laughed so hard we cried. I learnt that it was his job to drive in one direction and her job to drive in the other; that way they didn’t have to talk at all. The perfect marriage, he explained, was based on this simple and enduring principle. Oddly enough, when she did appear much later, she was not the crusty old hag I’d imagined but a quite cherubic woman, who smiled out at me.
We found the missing bus to Kangding later that morning, on its side next to a lorry with the front smashed in. A man in a white shirt was sitting in the shade of the upturned bus, his back against the underside of the vehicle. He waved uncomfortably with his left arm as our truck approached, while his right arm hung limply by his side, but the driver of the logging truck didn’t stop. In China, incidents like this one were treated as sideshows put on for the entertainment of others: a car crash attracted interest, particularly if there was blood; a brawl in the street was a welcome break from the tedium of the day. It seemed that the sheer enormity of the country’s population — then over 1.3 billion — had robbed everyone of their compassion. Ironically, that indifference could also help some people turn a profit. In Yushu, I had seen a blind man offering punters a glimpse into his empty eye sockets for two yuan a go.
Along the way, villages were few and far between and soon even the black tents of the nomads were nowhere to be seen. The cool air of the Tibetan plateau was gradually being replaced by uncomfortable warmth. Trees became lush and sprang from the banks of fast-flowing rivers that cascaded ever downwards to the waiting Yangtze, the 6,300-kilometre-long river that travelled all the way to the East China Sea. It felt like I was falling from the heavens, tumbling down through endless valleys, where the atmosphere became thick and wet. On and on we journeyed, pausing for food and drink at little roadside kitchens where the smoke from the cooking fires drifted across our path. It was quick and easy fare: noodles in a watery soup, with hot green tea to follow. We sat at small wooden tables on little wooden stools, eating wordlessly.
At one of these humble restaurants I took a walk up the road only a short distance and came to a woman cooking corn over a barrel. A little further on was a large heap of coal in an open-sided bunker of concrete blocks. I was within a few metres of it when, from out of the pile, there suddenly erupted an ugly snarling beast of such canine ferocity I almost fell over backwards. It lunged at me, snapping its chain tight — its jaws would have torn at my throat had those metal links been just a few more in number. The dog stood a metre high at the shoulders and was as black as the coal dust it was covered in. It looked totally evil, like something straight from the pages of a C.S. Lewis or Brothers Grimm tale, with eyes that glowered hideously, hellbent on savagery. Even when I had retreated back down the road, it watched me with a hatred I could not fathom. Only when I was back in the truck and on the road again did I feel my pulse return to normal. I realised, too, that no one had moved a muscle, or said anything to keep the beast in check. Had it broken free, I might have ended up like the man in the shade of the bus to Kangding, a mere lunchtime novelty, torn to pieces for the enjoyment of all.
Peng and his wife were going to Danba, a village near the logging epicentre of Sichuan province. There they would pick up a load of pine and spruce and haul it off to a mill about another day’s ride away. Then they would return with the newly milled lumber, all the way back to Yushu, before starting the whole process over again. I asked him what was the hardest thing about his job and he replied that there were three things he battled with the most: blown tyres, broken suspension and earthquakes.
‘The first two I can deal with,’ Peng said. ‘But when mountains fall down and bury the roads, I can do nothing but sit and wait.’
He then went on to describe an incident a few years earlier when he and his wife had narrowly missed being taken out by a landslide that engulfed the road in front of and behind them. Marooned until help came, they had built a shelter using the timber in the truck and set up house on the road. They had remained there for two weeks, living off rainwater and berries, and an occasional bit of roast meat provided by the birds the man shot with his rifle.
‘You carry a gun?’ I asked, looking about the empty cab.
With his free hand Peng reached through the curtain and squeezed the leg of his wife, who let out a shriek. She rolled to one side to allow him to search under the bedding, from where he produced a fine but quite ancient looking bolt-action rifle. I recognised it as Russian, from its markings and because I’d seen one like it before in Afghanistan. The Soviet Mosin–Nagant is famous all round the world. Today it is mostly found in the hands of gun collectors, but in the 1930s it was the trusted friend of every single Russian soldier. Over 37 million were eventually produced and no doubt quite a proportion found their way across the border into China, destined for Mao’s Communist troops. Although there was little concrete evidence that showed the Soviets had supplied Mao with anything other than hard cash, this was clearly some kind of proof that they had, on occasion, offered something more.
‘You shoot?’ he asked, passing it to me casually as he kept one eye on the road. I nodded and then wondered what I’d let myself in for when moments later he pulled over on a deserted stretch of road and started ferreting around in the back for some ammunition. He located a small cardboard box and loaded the magazine with five rounds. Then we took turns at putting holes in a plastic drink bottle he had tied to a tree, the boom of the gunfire fortunately scaring off anything living nearby. When we finished, the air was heavy with the smell of cordite and a primeval sense of satisfaction. The man told me he’d won the rifle in a fight, but something told me this was more bravado than truth. Still, it was fascinating to think this old piece of Communist military history might have once belonged to a soldier on the Long March.
A few kilometres further on, the couple turned off to Danba. They dropped me at the junction, where I sat on a tree stump and waited for another ride to take me the rest of the way to Kangding. I didn’t have long to wait. When a Volkswagen Passat police car came roaring up with its lights flashing, I thought this was turning out to be quite a day.
The car stopped abruptly in a cloud of dust, as if I was the person its passengers were looking for. I felt complicit in some crime, and began wondering if shooting live rounds in the forest had been such a great idea. Happily, though, it was just a lift they were offering and I didn’t think twice about accepting a seat in the back — after all, what harm could come from riding with the local constabulary?
They were two senior policemen, in their middle age, and, despite their obvious haste, still had time to exchange pleasantries in broken English.
‘Where you from?’
‘How long you stay in China?’
‘Where you go?’
>
We barrelled along a dirt road at breakneck speed. I checked for a seatbelt but couldn’t find one on my side by the window. There was a lap belt in the middle, however, so I sat there and strapped myself in. Rows of poplar trees flashed by like picket fences until we came across a team of labourers who had been pouring concrete to make a new road in the middle of nowhere. Big, burly men, they were covered in fine white dust, which made them look like ghosts. As we approached, they were standing in front of a tin shed, smoking.
The driver stopped the car and motioned for me to stay put. Then he and his partner climbed out, straightened themselves as if after a long drive, and hitched up their trousers. As they walked over to the group they nonchalantly unclipped their pistol holsters. There ensued a brief discussion, during which the workers seemed to be explaining what was inside the tin shed. It was now rocking from side to side and from within it I could hear a loud voice shouting fiercely.
Then the men stamped out their cigarettes and rolled up their sleeves, forming a semi-circle round the shed door. Someone must have opened it at this point because out tumbled a large figure, who was almost immediately wrestled to the ground by the workers. In jumped one of the policemen with a pair of handcuffs and, when the group parted again, he was helping a tall, very red faced man with his hands bound behind his back to his feet and pushing him towards the car.
Minutes later, I was sharing the back seat with a man who had, according to the police, gone nuts that morning and almost killed someone with a shovel. His name was Gu, or Crazy Gu as the policemen laughingly referred to him, clearly not without some justification.
‘I’ll stomp on your stinking face, damn you! I’ve done nothing to deserve being treated like this,’ he roared. Then he started bellowing like a bull for no apparent reason.
Fortunately, Crazy Gu was a thirsty man from having been shut in a tin shed all day, so when I offered to share the contents of my water bottle with him he started to calm down. At least for the time being, the bellowing stopped.
Based on what the policemen told me, and what I could get out of Gu himself, I was then able to piece together the story of his unhappiness. The stretch of road that he had been working on for the past six months was 125 kilometres long and crossed very difficult terrain. The road-making company paid him a pittance, barely enough to send home to his wife and family. He had not seen them at all in this time, although his wife wrote to him every week. Then during the past month he had received no letters and no money. The company had withheld both because they said Gu was not working fast enough; they’d said he was lazy — 125 kilometres of roadway in six months was not enough, apparently — and the punishment was laid down in order to make Gu pick up the pace of construction. But, unfortunately for his foreman, the only thing Gu decided to pick up was the wooden handle of the nearest spade. He’d knocked the man completely senseless and was now going to pay the price.
Gu may have been mad, but he’d been driven that way by the strain of his labours and by the deprivation of news from home. There was no such thing as a union in this part of the world, and what the company felt like doing, the company did. Resistance was futile, for although Gu was a strong man, he was no match for a group of faceless managers in some far-flung head office. I watched him gaze out the window, occasionally struggling with the handcuffs that bound him. What he was thinking about I had no way of knowing. His own fate perhaps, or that of his family, now deprived of an income? Or was it that he was glad to be finally free of that boring stretch of concrete road, with over a hundred kilometres behind him but still hundreds more to go. Even a month in jail might be better than that. I thought then about the road sweepers I’d seen on the long, empty roads of the Qinghai plateau. In the middle of those vast expanses, there they would be, slowly working their way along an eternity of bitumen with a straw broom. It would take a special mind to deal with that kind of job, a mind that could switch off and live with the fact that each day, each kilometre, each minute would be the same as the last. You’d need the mental fortitude of a marathon runner and the patience of a monk. I certainly couldn’t do it, and clearly these were qualities Gu did not possess either — he certainly didn’t look anything like a marathon runner or a monk.
The sunlight through the trees played upon his face as we hurtled along, and his eyelids grew heavy. After a while, he was asleep, breathing peacefully, eyes moving silently behind their lids, softly dreaming.
In Kangding, an ancient trading town nestled deep within the confluence of three valleys and surrounded on all sides by bare mountainsides, the policemen dropped me off at a public square that was packed with people playing badminton. It was said that some of the Long Marchers who made it this far had stayed behind here, in order to defend the rear. If so, and they survived, then here, possibly, were their descendants, athletically involved in the pursuit of a shuttlecock.
The air was filled with the swish of racquets and a rumbling sound like a constant landslide, which turned out to be a river coursing its way, via deep concrete channels, around the buildings. These were mostly multistoreyed, ugly concrete blocks that looked like they’d been put up in a hurry. Bits of them still needed finishing. Gutters hung at strange angles so that water dripped from them onto the streets below. Here and there the white plaster that clung to the architecture had cracked and fallen away, lying in heaps on the ground. People took no notice and walked around them as if they weren’t there. It wasn’t until later that I found out that Kangding was well known for its earthquakes and that everyone had long since given up patching over the cracks. I asked one man if the newer buildings were earthquake-proof and he simply shook his head. The town planners, however, clearly loved their badminton and had poured money into keeping everyone busy in this way, perhaps to stop them thinking about earthquakes.
As always, given that this was a long, long way from the more popular tourist sites of China, my arrival was greeted with great interest. I was offered a place on a wooden bench from which to watch the badminton and given tea from a large red thermos by a group of elderly women. They fussed over my jacket that was torn at the shoulder and soon found a needle and thread to effect a repair. Then a badminton racquet was offered to me. Although tennis is my natural game, I’d inherited my father’s ability to pick up any bat or ball and play with it like it was second nature. I was able to hold my own against my first opponent, and then win. Stiffer opposition was found in a youngster in a light blue Adidas tracksuit, but he too was despatched with relative ease. Suddenly I found myself promoted to the next grade up, on centre court. Someone carried my bag to the sideline. My next opponent was a fit young man in his twenties, named Chan. He looked nervous at the prospect of potentially losing to a foreigner. National pride was at stake, bets were being made within earshot. The roar of the river and that of the growing crowd created an impromptu grand-final atmosphere at 2,500 metres. I stripped off my recently repaired jacket and played with all the athleticism I could muster, but I lost in a grippingly close encounter in which both players had multiple match points.
Chan sank to his knees when my final shot went wide, no doubt relieved he had avoided embarrassment in front of his home crowd, and then jumped up to shake my outstretched hand. Despite the result, I’d won a new friend. He was shorter than me by several centimetres, but, as I’d already found out, his lithe frame possessed the speed and agility of an antelope. I felt like Goliath having been bettered by David’s slingshot.
When Chan took me to his family home I noticed a well-stocked trophy cabinet in the corner of the main room. In most Chinese homes this position would have been reserved for a television or an air conditioner, but not in Chan’s. Clearly, he was quite an athlete. I asked if all the trophies were for badminton and he said no then dropped into a half-crouch table-tennis position and expertly sent an imaginary ping-pong ball rocketing across the room. Chan told me he had won at county level but that China was overflowing with top-quality table-tennis players and so he’d place
d his hopes of a sporting career in badminton.
‘Are you champion in your country?’ he asked.
Not wanting to make too great a point about how he’d only narrowly beaten someone who hadn’t hit a shuttlecock since high school, I nodded in reply, and so found myself admitted somewhat uncomfortably into the world of Australasia’s badminton elite.
Chan, along with his mother, father and grandfather, lived in a two-room apartment in the older section of Kangding. His grandfather remembered the great earthquake of 1955, when the hillsides fell down upon them in great waves of earth, and boulders the size of houses rolled through the town, smashing to matchsticks anything that stood in their way. The Communists built new homes out of concrete and these he trusted would fare better in such circumstances.
‘Stone against wood is no contest. But stone against stone is another matter,’ translated Chan.
Located close to the Tibetan plateau, Kangding had been a major trading place for centuries. In the old days, Chinese porters or ‘coolies’ would arrive with blocks of compressed tea leaves on their backs to trade for Tibetan wool. These ‘tea bricks’ were not only a source of food and drink, but also a currency. Tibetans trusted in tea bricks more than a piece of metal and for good reason: in times of hardship you couldn’t eat iron, but you could consume the tea by mixing it with water and barley flour.
A Boy of China Page 11
