We climb higher, and I admire the immense beings called mountains that stand like eternal hosts to everything. The mountains are what they are; they do not long to be perfect, nor even to be good; their truth is their truth, and they need nothing else. Our steps bring us to an enormous lake in the mountains, an inland sea, where tall slopes plunge straight into tranquil water. The sun’s fierce reflection bisects endless ripples on a meadow of aquamarine. We could not swim this one. Moments ago, Anton was arguing that marijuana is no worse than alcohol and that, like prostitution, it ought to be legalized, regulated, and taxed, but because of lingering perceptions in the U.S., it can’t be; now, he falls silent. The water quietly laps against brown pebbles near our feet. We rest and let the cool air drench our lungs.
“Everything is a matter of perception.” I repeat his words.
He nods.
Two shoeless children appear, approaching on a dirt path and then wading in to their knees.
What Anton eventually says is, “It’s time. I have to go.” He’s glad he made it here, he sighs, but he needs to leave, to be on the road first thing in the morning.
I nod and panic.
“This place really is amazing,” he cranes up at the peaks, as if looking for the last time. He knows something about fēngshuĭ, the ancient Chinese geomancy, and he calls the mountains the permanent, energetic yáng force: the male, creative force. He names the water the flowing, nurturing yīn: the female, enduring force. He seems to be addressing the water. “This place has perfect harmony and flow. The duality—both parts are equally represented.”
Yin and yang, male and female, life and death. Perhaps things are what they are but can only be defined by an opposite. Solitude and union, fear and trust: I could never truly know one without also knowing the other.
“Now? And miss the waterfalls?” I ask. “The legendary waters of Jiuzhaigou?”
“We don’t even know where they are.”
He stands. I nod, pull my battered tan cap lower to combat the midday sunbeams, and we hike down together. We pass a different set of cerulean lakes on the way down. We stop where a broad river connects two lakes and a gutter brings a stream of the river into a tiny wooden hut too small to stand in. Inside, we discover that the water spins a carved upright cylinder—a prayer wheel, alone here in the wilderness, turning constantly. I watch it rotate for several minutes, my mind spinning with it, and I’m at the prayer wheels of Xiahe again, caressed by revelations. I am loved, we are all loved, always, from the ground to the clouds, from the start of life to the end.
At our hotel, he grabs his pack. Further down, a long, rickety, plank bridge takes us across the river, and we hike silently on a path that snakes up and down the other bank, weaving over logs and under branches, through overgrown bushes, and over fallen trees that rest partly in the water. The air tastes rich and loamy. The forest breaks into a clearing where elephant-sized boulders are strewn about as if God had crushed chalk in his fingers, and I hop onto them, jumping from one to another, landing only on the pointy tips, joy and lightness gathering like sparks in my limbs.
Across the river, where the road is paved, we come upon people: a parked bus and a tour group. A man in a peach-colored polo shirt greets us while the rest of the group, all teenagers, explores a rocky riverbank. The group is from Guangzhou, we learn, and the friendly man, who is their chaperon, chats with me about the Five Ram City. He tells me a story about corruption and a patently false newspaper article, and his story is remarkably similar to that of Yang Youwen, the dissident camera repairman who bought me Budweisers. “I want to go to your country,” he says in English, with a little laugh. His eyes are full of eagerness and frustration, and it reminds me of all that is Guangzhou, that huge pulsing hive of people wanting to be someone else. The fashionably dressed teenagers step back onto the bus, and he offers us a ride. Anton and I nod and climb aboard happily, and some of the teenagers want to talk with us and practice their English, while others withdraw into their headphones. At least no one has to ride on top. Anton learns that they’re leaving in the morning for Chengdu, and he negotiates to ride with them. Thus he suddenly doesn’t need to buy a ticket for a bus, and since I’m staying in Jiuzhaigou a few more days, it’s already time for me to go. We embrace at the front gate, and I thank him for everything I can think of. The bus rolls away, he’s gone, and I’m stranded on the dusty dirt road with the dump trucks.
My eyes wander from the ground to the sky. Solitude and union. Trust and fear. I could never truly know one without knowing the other. There’s an alternative path on the other side of the narrow river, and a tree has fallen across the current, so I test its strength with a foot. It’s solid. I step onto it, one foot after the other, looking straight ahead, and I’m balanced ten feet over the turbulent brown water, finding the same equilibrium—light, patient, never looking down—I found hopping on those boulders. Freedom and fear come in swift waves. Reaching the other side, I feel bolts of energy charge up from the ground through my feet to my legs, my thighs, my stomach, my chest. My mind clears as if it were a mountain pool after a rain. I’m alone. My fear stands naked before me like a vertiginous peak, and I observe it as I never have before. My fear isn’t there to protect me from things that could actually kill me; it’s there to protect me from confusion and dark places inside me. But, in fact, it doesn’t protect me, it’s not a mountain at all—it’s a wall, it’s the dark places themselves, and it makes me run away from people and from solitude, from illness and from singing at a wedding, from Lu Lan and from gwailo colleagues. Always, I just run from every unknown part of me, every aspect of life that I don’t want to face. Nothing is erased by this escape! Life grows and changes shape and through the lure of curiosity or the slap of misfortune, finds me again, bringing its lessons again, again, again.
Branches overhead crucify the fading sunlight. The capricious path pulls me into thick underbrush, and I stop, wondering where my curious feet are carrying me. I’m about to turn around, but I spot a stick at my feet, and I take it in my hand and hack my way on through leaves and branches. I apologize to the branches. I’m sorry if I cause you pain. I think of Goldmund and smile, realizing these curious feet brought me this far—to Jiuzhaigou, to Songpan, into the truck, into the monastery, into bed with Michiko, to Xiahe, to Xi’an, to Beijing, to Peizheng. I smile. I love this. At the end of it all, this is what I love. Doing what confuses me, scares me, makes me suffer—as long as I don’t die—and I never seem to die—I grow. My stick falls from my hand as I hold aside a young tree limb and spy a cottage in a clearing. I step up close to its dark windows, walk around it, and follow its driveway downhill onto a dirt road. Soon I’m through the woods and onto the pavement of Jiuzhaigou Town. Twilight envelops the village scene as I walk down its street. The sun breathes orange sighs on the tea green mountaintops above.
I eat at a sidewalk diner and watch darkness slowly touch everything: horses and trucks on the road, an ice cream vendor, the leg of the table holding a pottery bowl of white rice. I pinch up the last grains, and a pony-tailed waitress asks me about my Chinese skills while refilling my tea. It’s been days since I’ve had a real conversation in Mandarin—I let Anton do all the talking—and I’m fascinated as her mother, the cook, sits down with us and recounts how the two of them came to this ragtag village in search of a better life but now abhor its lawless, get-rich-quick culture. Once they’ve saved a little money, she says, they plan to move someplace where the girl, who’s sixteen, can go to high school.
“China is so beautiful,” I tell them. “Don’t stay here. Your food is delicious—you’ll have no trouble saving money.”
The mother smiles bashfully, and I watch her thoughts stray to greener pastures. She looks at me again and warns me that the park guards often close the gate at dark.
I heed her words, bid them farewell, and hurry away. Rounding the bend towards the gate, I see a floodlight on the gatehouse. Under the huge light, four PLA soldiers sit at a table in the mid
dle of the asphalt road, playing cards. Behind them, the big gate remains ajar. “No more tickets,” one calls out, as I approach. “Tomorrow morning. Seven.”
I reply that I already have a ticket, but when they find out where I’m staying they tell me that it’s too far and that I should come back in the morning. I pull my ticket from my pouch. “No, this was expensive.” I want to make it home tonight. “I’ll walk.”
“Walk?” One soldier laughs loudly. He suggests instead that I sit down for a rest. A man in glasses pulls out the one unoccupied chair, and I hesitantly sit and answer their questions. Five jumbo beer bottles stand empty on the table, and when one soldier thrusts his handshake at me clumsily I can tell that he’s drunk. Another leans back in his chair with his hands behind his head and shouts at me. “You better see the waterfalls of Jiuzhaigou! They’re gorgeous! Magical! If you’re going to walk seven miles tonight, you can walk a few more tomorrow!”
“I better get started,” I say, and stand.
“Walk, foreigner!” the drunkard cries, and everyone laughs.
I leave the spotlight. A stimulating pine scent rides the night air, and the full moon and twinkling stars cast enough light to paint the trees across the river. I hike along the road, rounding bend after bend, accompanied by rushing wind in the trees and chirping crickets and frogs in the shifting shadows. The gusts blow stiff and chilly, and as my feet grow tired I look at my watch and calculate: Rigorous hiking could get me there by 2:00 a.m. if my legs hold out.
The road turns a lighter black, then gray, and a full minute before it passes, I know a car is coming from behind. Headlights flash, and I flag it down. “Wise sage, may I have a ride?” The man in the minivan blinks at me as if he’s the one caught in the headlights, but he lets me in. And soon the wilderness is streaking by outside. Gratitude fills me, and fifteen minutes later, I’m at the inn.
Morning sings sweet and fresh, and a boy with a cart outside the inn sells me fruit, bread, and water. I hike off the road in a new direction, up through a sloped glade into a sun-soaked field of tall brown grass. A solitary tree stands guard in the center of the field, and I sit against its trunk. In Narcissus, Goldmund finds a sketchpad and pours onto paper the images of love and death that are burned into his brain—the magical countryside, the corpses slain by plague, a slender black-eyed girl named Rebekka. He draws himself too—as a curious wanderer, as an open-hearted lover, as a fugitive from death. His visions, one by one, incarnate on paper.
I lie back and gaze at the drifting clouds, imagining shapes and faces in the billowing heaps of vapor. What are the concerns of clouds? What are their fears? I imagine that they would say that matter forms and reforms, again and again, into life after life after life. The cycle is effortless, beautiful, and inevitable.
My gaze shifts from the clouds to the sun itself, and when my eyelids close to protect my sight, colored grains of sand appear there, falling in slow motion onto a mandala, and the four spheres of the mandala speak the same natural cycle as the clouds—life and death, creation and destruction. I see the mandala slowly turning. It is a cycle of four: four places, four phases, four spheres that cycle on and on. For a human journey, the first part is these thoughts, the mental permutations that playfully overtake my mind; the second is the feelings, these peaks and valleys of joy, frustration, and fury; the third is the flesh, the taste and touch, the sometimes delicious, sometimes diseased skin and bones and their sensations; and then there’s a fourth piece, the patient wisdom in the clouds, a fertile and mysterious permanence of awareness. The mind, the heart, the body, the soul. Could it be so simple? Certainly conflicts arise along the fault lines that divide me in four—four different wills pull me apart. With Michiko, I went with my heart for a few days, and it was a sweetness, a love without the mind’s fear, if only for a minute, an hour, a day. Then my mind retook the upper hand, telling me with its intimidating authority that I made stupid decisions and risked everything imaginable.
I open my journal to a clean page and write a letter. “Dear Michiko, I hope you’re safe and well,” I write. “I enjoyed deeply our time together.” I describe the beauty of Langmusi and Jiuzhaigou, and finally, simply, clearly, I ask if she’s pregnant. Unsure about the clarity of my Chinese, I add a paragraph of English to pour everything out completely.
Finished, I turn the page and drink memories of her freely, riding a horse alongside her, feeling her fingers hop on my chest, joining her body and mine. I write a poem on that next page. Skin, contact, touch, weakness, union; humans think so much, so carefully, but the luscious, thirsty skin rubs against itself—may I experience that again!—and thoughts vanish. The sweet skin, the weakness, the sweet skin, the strength.
I stand and hike farther, seeking the sight Li Song called the most beautiful in all of China, searching for the famous waterfalls of Jiuzhaigou, letting the drunk guard last night be my guide this time. After several uphill miles, a path diverges down into the woods, and I’m tired enough and hopeful enough to try it. Twenty yards down the trail I reach a broad river, and it splits into two ferocious channels, the nearer one switching back sharply. I spot a nook at the elbow of the deafening switchback, where I know that at least I can retreat from the sun. There, on a carpet of pine needles, I flip open Narcissus again, and Goldmund now woos a beautiful princess and rediscovers passion and the thirsty curiosity of his senses. But the fierce prince discovers him and sentences him to the gallows. He awaits execution in a dungeon. An image appears to him that replaces all his many other visions: a divine Mother, a presence who sees all life and all death with equal compassion. In tears, he tries to accept his imminent death, to bid farewell to the sun and rivers, to the sweet taste of wine, to the smell of yellow leaves in the wind, to a young woman’s song from a window. But he can’t. His instinct to live impels him, and rather than be hanged, he plans to murder the priest who comes to confess him. At dawn, when the priest enters his cell, Goldmund steels himself to kill. The priest enters… and it’s his old friend, Narcissus! Goldmund is saved. He rides off with Narcissus, now the abbot, to the monastery.
A gust of wind sweeps through the branches, and I rise and trek onward, between the channels of the river. Rounding a sharp bend, I hear a faint whisper. Around another bend, it grows to a roar. I step between two trees, and before me a magnificent waterfall gushes straight off of two-hundred-foot-high walls of stone. Outcroppings split, slice, and throw the downpour a thousand ways, and each droplet is a prism of sunlight dancing down to diminutive islands in a broad pool. Pine saplings quiver in the incessant rush of air. The noise and vapor envelop me and pull me into their timeless song, into their eternal white peaceful violence. I kneel on the moist earth at the water’s edge, and my hands fall onto knobs of rock. The water plummets and pounds, and in the clamor I hear again the entreaty that the sun sang to me on the windswept plateau. And this time the entreaty rips me open. Awed by the sparkling transience of creation, in its effortless beauty, I relinquish control and release. Tears roll to my cheeks. I am alive. Like everything around me, I too am this miracle that forms and reforms, again and again, into joy after joy, into suffering after suffering, into wish after wish. Each droplet dies, each moment dies, everything dies, as it must, as it longs to, to make way for the next form, the next moment, the next twirling leap in the dance.
Chapter 32
White Rabbit, Black Rabbit
Now he was part of the wide world.
It contained his fate, its sky was his sky.
Herman Hesse,
Narcissus & Goldmund
I climb over a woman to get to the last seat. She gathers a pile of purple pomegranate rinds in her lap, and she gives me a friendly purple smile. The jam-packed bus rumbles and begins to roll, and slowly Jiuzhaigou Town slides by the windows. I think back to the mother and daughter in the diner. Wealthy Chinese people today make enough money to vacation, so the government now grooms these national tourist sites to satisfy them, and to cash in; they build ski lifts at
the Great Wall, for example, and gigantic pink promenades beside the Bīngmăyŏng soldiers. The PLA soldiers in the jeep said they were building a helicopter airport and paving all the local roads because Jiuzhaigou is slated to handle 300,000 tourists a year. For now the place is a motley mishmash of thieves, speculators, and opportunistic construction workers. The bus bounces along, back the way the red bulldozer ferried me and Anton. Our tires splash through mud puddles and jump over huge rocks, throwing everybody into the air. The Greyhound-style bus is out of its element here in the mountains, and it’s carrying way too many people.
A bone-crunching hour goes by, and I study vocabulary in my faithful scarlet dictionary. Pùbù, “waterfall;” dúlì, “independent;” guānguāngkè, “tourist.” Late in the afternoon we charge through Songpan, and there’s no room for new passengers. But it’s different up here amid the bodies, smoke, peanut shells, and leaky bags of pork; now, the waving people running alongside the bus look desperate and silly. Leaving them behind, we climb higher, bouncing onto a tiny dirt road that ascends taller mountains. We shoot around blind bends. SMACK! The pomegranate woman’s elbow punches my skull as she pulls a metal suitcase down from the rack. She looks at me without apologizing and gets off on a vacant hillside. I greedily try to occupy both seats, and it must be my selfishness that brings death upon me.
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