He tells me about his year in Beijing. He was at Beĭdà too, like Michiko. “We had this amazing city of international students right on campus,” he says. “Europeans, South Americans, Africans. And yet everybody spoke Mandarin.”
“That must’ve helped you learn.”
“Yeah, but with two non-native speakers, neither of you knows how the language is actually supposed to sound. We probably just made each other’s errors worse!”
“Was everyone in dorms together?” Does he know her?
“Yes, all the foreigners. We were probably isolated from the regular students intentionally, since Beĭdà has been the center of so much activism over the years. The government wants Beĭdà to be prestigious and to be a place where foreigners come to learn Mandarin, but they’d love to do without any more democracy movements.”
I can’t tell him about her. I know that. I should just forget her, or I should just never have been with her, or, well, either way, it’s something to deal with on my own.
“It was really different for us,” I say, “down in Guangzhou. The gates were locked at night, but otherwise we were free to go where we pleased around town.” I tell him about watching movies, dancing in discos, meeting dissidents for dinner, disseminating propaganda in parks, visiting cultural landmarks with attractive fellow teachers. “One of the teachers who taught at our school last year dated one of the local teachers, and everyone quietly knew, and my roommate dated that same teacher this year,” I say. “I was good, though.”
“Better to steer clear of the Asian Cravin,’” he agrees, with a casual grin.
We exit into darkness. The street is unlit, and a starry sky is overhead. The fading murals await us in our room, and as I climb into the cold bed, my mind wanders over the day, past the callous stare of death, past the swirling sands in the stream, back to the morning’s sizzling omelets at Momma Jun’s. In a minute my body warms the sheetless cot.
An alarm buzzes in the darkness. It’s already five-thirty. Anton snaps on the light. I stumble to my feet, reaching for a shirt and pants. We trip down the stairs onto empty streets. The wind whips around us as the first bending arrows of the sun illuminate the sleeping heavens.
Atop a concrete cube, Chinese characters declare “Rouergai Bus Station.” The Chinese evidently renamed this town Rouergai in order to liberate it from the Tibetan language, which is not only difficult for them to pronounce but impossible to transliterate with characters. And as with the time zone, everyone in Zöigê seems simply to work around the imposition. Inside the cube, the bright fluorescent light and swirling cigarette fumes greet us. Yesterday, our waiter told us that there are two buses to Songpan: one leaving bright and early at six; the other, for those who cherish daylight and beauty sleep, departing half an hour later.
We slip out back, where a crowd is stepping past a ticket taker and squeezing their sluggish bodies onto a bus. The mountain dawn around us is frosty and beautiful. The stink of sweat and chicken excrement wakes us up as we push onboard and sidle between two cages of complaining birds, six tarpaulin-covered crates, a dozen sacks of potatoes, and countless human beings. We find seats at the back and push open a window.
The bus begins to roll. Several dzo perched on hillsides watch us rumble out of town under the periwinkle sky. Beyond the hills, the slopes turn deep green and then, for the first time, snow white at their peaks. The only sign of human habitation is a single chain of telephone poles running fifty yards from the road.
I ask Anton if we should ask the driver to let us off so we can camp over the first rolling crest.
He smiles, following my eyes. “You’re really into this idea of living here.”
“It’s so beautiful. This whole land feels blessed. Why not? We could go months without anyone knowing. As if we’d dropped off the face of the earth.”
“It’s a special place,” he nods. “Maybe someday. We’d need some serious gear.”
I spot plumes of smoke curling skyward and follow them down to a village of tiny white dots that turn out to be tents. People do live out here. We pass close enough that we can make out an enclosed herd of dzo beside a mound of black dirt that might be a human home.
Miles of mountains push us downhill, and around noon we roll down into a valley and into Songpan, where the sun is high, hard, and scorching. On a crowded, shady stretch of sidewalk we wait four hours until the bus to Jiuzhaigou finally arrives. The bus is late, and we have to run alongside it, banging the dirt off the hinges of its rusty door. It never stops. Arrogant and packed to the gills, it just keeps going, right out of town, never stopping, never even slowing to confer with us. The hot dust stares back up at me as I pant, letting it go, feeling tired and frustrated. I suddenly laugh, and what spreads through my body is strange, sweet, and new: a recognition that every moment is like this—impossibly unpredictable.
The monsoons up north are bad, we learn, and mudslides have closed the road. There is no next bus.
A man loads boxes of melons into a large titanium-white jeep. He’s the fifth person we’ve asked, but he is going to Jiuzhaigou, and if we pay for the gas, he’ll take us. Flat-faced, middle-aged, he wears a frayed red T-shirt emblazoned with the Coca-Cola logo, but where the letters should spell “Coca-Cola,” they spell “Cocaine.” He doesn’t speak English, so he’s probably not aware of the wordplay. He assures us we can do the trip in five hours, which makes no sense with the monsoons and mud—and the fact that the woman in the bus station said it would take eight. But it’s too tempting, and we close the deal and load our bags into the back. Ten minutes later, we climb in and roar out of town on a cliff-hanging highway.
“We’ll beat the rain,” he vows quietly. For the first time in China I find a seatbelt and fasten it. We turn onto a pitted dirt road which takes us northeast, through terraced rice paddies. We have to slow down, almost to the pace of a man in a broad-brimmed straw hat who steps along the terrace walls between puddles that reflect afternoon sunlight. The Swiss cheese road turns to soup, and the driver kicks down the four-wheel-drive and slaloms around knee-deep sinkholes. At twilight we hit a line of stopped vehicles, and the driver climbs out to investigate. “A stuck car,” he reports. “The mud is like snow. We might… not… make it.” He gives us a blank stare. There are no more places to stay before Jiuzhaigou, so it’s a gamble, and Anton and I glance at each other. “Go for it?” he asks, raising a fist. “Double or nothing?”
I nod and smile, and we tell him. We forge on, steering around trapped vehicles, climbing hills of thick ochre mud. Darkness drops like a curtain. We roll down a slope and around a bend, and there below us, lit up by our headlights, is a long queue of parked vehicles. The narrow road is soft, velvety mud. Buses, trucks, and jeeps idle, pointed down, while others, below them, are stranded and point up. At the face-off, in the center of the road, a broad rut bisects the road, and a truck is mired down in it. On our right, a steep, wooded mountainside rises abruptly; on our left, the viscous soil shelf drops off sharply. People mill about in the halo of headlights, waiting to try their luck.
Obviously it will be a while before we can move on, so I hop out into the cold. After just two steps my shoes are caked in an inch of the orange-brown glue, but I trudge on, past the people, up into the woods. From a steep outcropping I gaze down at the writhing truck, its frantic roar now distant enough that I can also hear the crickets sing to the milky moon. I have a disease and a wife and a child, all three. I did everything wrong. I allowed her in. I surrendered my freedom. Death awaits around the next bend.
A sigh emerges slowly from my chest, a whisper, and I breathe deeply for many minutes. I contemplate the moon and lose track of time.
Our “Cocaine” driver sits motionless in the jeep as I climb back in. The four cars ahead of us are gone. The driver who’s parked behind us raps on the window and demands we go or move aside. Cocaine listens, does nothing. A full minute later, apparently having saved sufficient face, having said to the world, “no one tells me what to do,�
� he starts our engine. I can hear his stuttering anxiety, smell his metallic fear. We begin to roll to the right, all the way right, alongside the mountainside, and watching his face tense, I wonder if mine looked that way yesterday when I saw death. Down we go, bouncing along the slippery edge of the rut. A bus is down in there. THUD! Our right front wheel slips down into it. Cocaine gasps. Our wheels spin, and we slide, creep forward, then rock back, spitting mud and gravel, going nowhere. Then, our momentum carries us out, over, and down. We pass five buses queued for the ascent.
I drop in and out of dreams. Dazed and dim, at two in the morning, I realize we’re parked in a dirt lot. The only building around has a sign: The Jiuzhaigou Guesthouse. We made it. The driver nurses a beer on a bench, looking pleased. Anton and I groggily climb out, thank him, and split a room in the guesthouse.
The morning sky unfolds above us, royal blue and vast, spanning the space between the upward stab of glorious green peaks. The air darts into our lungs sweetly as we hike on a long dirt road, searching for a way into the national park. From nowhere, growling like thunder, shattering the beauty, kicking dust into our eyes, a steamroller and dump truck roll by. The din sends us to the roadside where we have to pick our way through stacks of cinder blocks and concrete-mixers amid what appear to be half-built hotels. Another roar approaches from behind. “Hello?” calls a voice. We shield our eyes from the sun and spot a thin driver on top of a tall red bulldozer. He waves his baseball cap jovially. “America!” he shouts, in what could be self-parody but isn’t. He points to space in his cab. Perplexed, we climb aboard and slap hands with the young man. He has a sharp Adam’s apple and filthy work clothes, and he pilots us along at a crawl. Anchoring one foot in the cab and the other on the rumbling right fender, I command an emperor’s view of the forest, the construction sites, and the swift river racing alongside the road. The river seems to run directly below me. “Wom!” He shouts above the roar of the engine.
“What?”
“Wom-en!” He grins over his shoulder in Mandarin. “Do you like women?”
“How much?” Anton asks.
“150元 for a room and a beautiful, young girl.”
Not bad. I consider something I’ve never considered before. Such a connection must feel meaningless.
“How do you know her?” Anton asks innocently. “What’s her name?”
“You like girls!” The guy bursts into laughter, delighted at this simple discovery. “Her name doesn’t matter!” he cries. “I’ll take you. Now.”
“Is she waiting in Jiuzhaigou Park?” Anton asks.
“No. It’s right here.”
“We want to stay in the park tonight,” Anton apologizes. “Maybe tomorrow night.”
The bulldozer-driving pimp looks crestfallen, but he takes us all the way into the little town. Jiuzhaigou Town is a ramshackle, hastily-built street of souvenir shops catering to tourists and building supply stores catering to itinerant construction workers. The name Jiŭzhàigōu (the Valley of Nine Villages) refers to nine ancient Tibetan settlements, but this surely isn’t one of them.
We climb off the bulldozer, thank the man, and walk up to the gate of China’s largest national park. Compared to the Bīngmăyŏng, the gate is unimpressive and deserted, but we buy the requisite tickets, which promise a “Tour of Beautifulest Jiuzhaigou Valley Park in the Scenic Way.” Sure enough, we’re soon herded into a minivan alongside four Chinese tourists, and we zip up into raw pine forests and across plateaus of gorgeous blue lakes and broad sonorous rivers. The road wends high into the mountains before we pull over next to a few peasants’ homes and a small inn.
Anton and I rent beds and immediately set out on foot to explore. The sun bakes our backs, and breezes whistle through spectacular pine trees overhead. We strike off the main road, onto a path that meanders down into a meadow nestled in the mountains. A river cuts through the meadow, and its rushing is soon the only sound we hear.
It should be legal in America, Anton explains, as we reach the middle of the meadow, where a small two-log footbridge spans the river. “Prostitution will always exist, and it’s by nature non-violent, so why force its association with drugs, violence, and criminality?” He confesses that he almost accidentally partook in Tianjin: After a long bike ride, he and a friend saw massages advertised for 80元 and made arrangements for massages in their hotel room. Two girls showed up wearing tight clothes and makeup, and Anton and his friend enjoyed the massages but refused the girls’ suggestive advances. The girls asked for 300元 anyway. “An older lady with a leathery face showed up to… clarify things,” he chuckles. “There we were, haggling with the madam. We finally agreed on 150元 each.” He sighs. “We were a little worried, I guess. But you know, they’re probably just trying to support their families. It’s illegal because of perceptions, because of media coverage.”
We sit on the bridge, remove our shoes, and wash our feet in the razor-cold current. Anton did an internship with CNN while studying in Beijing, and his task was scanning newswire for bits about China. He says it was all about perceptions there too—to CNN, he discovered, delivering news is not about being fair, covering both sides, or giving voice to the unheard, but rather about entertaining viewers and affirming American stereotypes of China. “We shot scenes portraying China as poor and lacking human rights laws, as a place in profound need of—most of all—American influence.” The experience may have put an end to his dream of being a journalist, he says. He hopes now to become a college professor. I watch the river flow around my feet and cut between my toes, imagining my own various futures, with and without freedom, with and without a Japanese child, with and without Michiko.
Back on the road, on the way back to the inn, the scent of frying soy sauce lures us towards a sign, down a path, through tall brown grass, and all the way to a cottage with three tables on a veranda. A couple is quietly eating at one table; laughter spills out from the cottage. We sit at an empty table, next to the couple, close enough to hear the man hulling sunflower seeds with his teeth. The woman, pregnant, stares at him thoughtfully, watching him hull, spit, eat, hull, spit, eat—the three actions all occur between his teeth, so it looks like just chewing and spitting. “Love,” Anton says, watching them, smiling. He tells me that he had a girlfriend for most of the year. “A passionate and impossible relationship,” he says.
“Nĭmen hăo!” A matronly woman emerges from the dark doorway and greets us. Anton orders for us, and I sit in silence, wondering why I can’t tell him about Michiko, wondering why I’m so dutifully silent. The woman returns with platters of what lured us here—spicy noodles swimming in a broth of scrumptious garlic, scallions, red pepper, and huíxiāng, a Chinese fennel that delectably numbs the tongue. Overhead, the sun kisses the mountaintops, and fresh, chilly breezes remind us of the speed with which this warmth will end.
“Actually,” I close my eyes and watch the parting of the clouds on the windswept plateau, the singing sun emerging. “I just met someone up in Xiahe. She was from Beĭdà.” I look at him. “We hit it off. It had been months, without even a kiss, for me, and we hit it off right away, and,” I tell the whole story. He listens.
“You didn’t have condoms.”
“We didn’t have condoms.”
“You had sex four times.”
“We had sex four times.”
“Stupid,” he nods. “But hey, you got weak. It happens to all of us.”
My fists unclench under the table. My smile wraps around the planet.
“No need to kill yourself over it,” he says.
“But I don’t know anything. I don’t know what’s going on with her. All I have is her name and her home address.”
“A lot of guys I know wouldn’t even care and would have forgotten her by now. One guy I know in Beijing gave a girl money and said, ‘get an abortion or do whatever you want, I just don’t want to hear about it.’” He shakes his head. “Do you really think she’d want to get married if she were pregnant?”
&nbs
p; “I was weak.” I address my plate.
He jokes about his own moments—weaknesses and subsequent anxieties—and he’s no monk. He laughs about it, “getting weak,” and his laughter is contagious, infectious, delicious, and it finally ripples through me like the garlic and fennel, hot and sweet on my mouth and nose. Yes, my God, the truck didn’t go over the edge.
“You should write her a letter,” he says. “She’ll tell you if she’s pregnant.”
“A letter? To her home address? What if her mother reads it? Here’s a letter from some strange American guy asking if her daughter’s pregnant!” I laugh, and it’s bliss.
“No e-mail address?” he asks, and I shake my head. “Well, you have an e-mail address, right? Include it. Maybe she has the same fears. You’ve got to do it, write her, man.”
A wind rushes through the leaves overhead, and our empty plates are stained orange from the spicy noodles.
Chapter 31
The Waters of Jiuzhaigou
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
The selfsame well from which your laughter rises
was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being,
the more joy you can contain.
—Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Sunlight streams in the window, awakening me. I arch my back, stretch, and smile. There’s nowhere to go this morning—no need to pack, no need to leave. I rise, use a wooden outhouse, and wash at a spigot on the patio. Our breath is still visible in the air as Anton and I set out on foot to find Jiuzhaigou’s famous blue lakes. Trekking up the road, we share a breakfast of crackers, peanuts, and white salted taro root. The salt spreads its ancient satisfaction on my tongue, waking a deep presence in my body. I chew, moisten, crush the food, and propel my body uphill. Anton stops a green jeep carrying four PLA soldiers. “Venerable masters,” he entreats them, and they wave us on happily, joking with us, reminding me of my soldier friend at Tiananmen. The jeep conveys us upward, then angles off the main road onto a brand new, steamrollered dirt clearing cutting through virgin woods. The soldiers let us off there, beside a steep incline. We spot small lakes below us that are the most brilliant hue—the blue of a blue jay’s tail after a spring rain. Above us, peaks stand against the sky like torn green paper, and the splendor of the scenery takes my breath away. Summiting a small crest, we come upon a pond nestled in the woods, one we could swim across if need be, and we crouch beside it and dip our hands into the water. I make a fist, moving my fingers through the shallows, seeing if the cyan will transfer, but my hand comes out only wet.
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