Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China

by Tony Brasunas

  Something deep inside me smiles. I come to a knoll of plum trees and settle for a moment, cross-legged. My breathing slows, my mind releases a finger of its grip, and a tranquil peace gradually pervades everything. My eyelids drop, and I observe subtle appreciations in my muscles. My shoulders roll down off my neck, relaxing, opening space in my chest. The wind murmurs its playful sighs in the leaves overhead.

  When I open my eyes, a beautiful dark brown plum tree stands before me, and I can’t imagine what could be more marvelous than to study the tree and the story told by its gnarled branches. It grows upwards, reaching towards its God, but also outwards, spreading its branches and leaves into the world to explore. There is Death too, in that bark. Death and Life intertwine everywhere, harmoniously; they are partners, like the yīn and yáng of mountain lakes, like the cycle of the mandala, like trust with confusion, like solitude with yearning, like joy in the now with awareness of its end, like fear of the thing you long for. The openness and trust I knew in Xiahe before Michiko were beautiful, but they were mere blades of grass compared to the tree that’s tall enough to see death.

  The trunk forks, reconsiders, angles back, makes a tilted L into fat, healthy branches. In my dream I was scared of opening my heart; I’m drawn to this flirtation, this inclination to connect, to touch, to repel, to attract—but I am also shrinking away, terrified of this sensuous mirror trapping me, depleting me, splitting me in half.

  I rise and leave, not seeing Shihui or the quiet monk on the way out. On my journey home, I pause at a row of hair salons. I’ve been sweating constantly under my thickening mess of hair and beard, and my next destination will be Tiger Leaping Gorge—a place Byron visited and recommended—and it lies further towards the jungles of the south.

  I slide open a glass door. I’m greeted by the hot stink of hair gel. It’s a minuscule space, with three women chatting on crowded stools while four children play with nail polish on a checkerboard linoleum floor.

  “Do you cut hair?” I ask.

  The children go wide-eyed and dart under the legs of the women. One woman breaks her stare and points to a barber’s chair. After offering a greeting to the dumbstruck children, I sit and answer her questions. Very short all over, I say, showing her a little space between my thumb and finger. Seemingly amazed at both my existence and my fluency, she throws a black cloth over me and goes to work—first with scissors, and then on my face with a flat razor twice as long as my finger. I feel something grab at my leg. It’s a boy, and the hair-dresser shoos him away with a foot as she brings the gray blade up to my ear, raking my skin clean. She asks me typical questions about getting used to the food and weather, and I keep my answers short so as not to distract her. Her hand shakes as she laughs at her friends’ jokes, and she holds my head all the way back, pointing my chin straight up, scraping the skin of my throat. The blade burns against my jaw, up to my chin, and then it slices quickly along my Adam’s apple. One false move by this woman and it’s all over. Death, even at a haircut.

  A bald man stares back at me in the mirror. “Zĕnmeyàng?” she asks. “What do I think?” I reach around and feel my naked jaw. The skin is intact. “Excellent,” I grin, yanking on my earlobes. “My ears are… still here!”

  They all laugh.

  I ride home under a sky that is taking its time forgetting the sun. No one stares at me. In the waning light, I’m just another bald man on a bicycle.

  The next morning, it already feels like time to leave Chengdu. I check out of the Traffic, hike to the train station, and wade into crowds that press my backpack against my back, squeezing sweat out of me like juice from an apple. The ticket woman is finally at my service, albeit curt and distracted, telling me there aren’t any hard sleepers to Panzhihua. Soft sleeper? None. Soft seat? Nope. I swallow. Hard seat is the way of the lăobăixìng, the poor commoner; China still calls itself communist and “classless,” so there’s no “first class” or “second class,” but speaking plainly, hard seat is the milieu of the unwashed masses. I nod. She hands me the hŭochēpiào, and I notice that my claim on a hard bench begins tonight at 10:10 p.m. and ends in Panzhihua, the way station on the road to Tiger Leaping Gorge, tomorrow afternoon, sometime after 1:30.

  Ticket in hand, I hike through the sweltering midday to People’s Park. I while away the hours in a teahouse perched on the bank of a lima bean-shaped lake. An elegant bamboo chair cradles me under a pious, many-armed ginkgo tree, and I hold a cup of green tea to my lips as the balled leaves exhale their dank fruity scent. A thin wisp of a man approaches me. “Massage, 10元?” he asks. Anton’s story flashes through my mind, but to me the guy looks nothing like a prostitute. I nod. Positioning himself behind my chair, he lays his hands upon my neck. His muscular palms and fingers push my shaved head forward and down, and my eyelids fall closed as he works my shoulders in delicious circles, gripping and releasing the muscles and ligaments along my spine. Deeper, I disappear into relaxation as he lays into the base of my skull, somehow separating my head from my neck and kneading my brain. Sweet minutes or hours pass, and I leave this place, this teahouse, this empire, and float home—and I’m walking barefoot on carpet, smelling exotic things like cheddar cheese and pumpkin pie and roasting tomato soup, drinking fresh water endlessly from the tap for free. Home.

  The hands are gone. Opening an eye, I see him, waiting patiently, but I can’t even move my arm to my money pouch. I nod and finally pay him, my body buzzing.

  Several hours later I leave the teahouse and the park, following my hunger and olfactory instincts for dinner. The aroma of sautéing meat and garlicky oils wafts out from an open-front restaurant, and inside, five men in their twenties laugh uproariously at a central table. They spot me. “Wèi, lăowài, hello!” They gesture to their empty chair, insistently.

  I join them. They are five old high school buddies kicking off the weekend: two structural engineers, a computer programmer, a chicken vendor, and a car mechanic. They ask me about America, and I tell them that, yes, the U.S. is fādá (developed), as everyone says, but there is more crime and people are generally suspicious of each other. “People in America are more stressed out, more worried than people in China.”

  The car man nods. “So, just between you and me, why does the American army have to control Taiwan and tell the Taiwanese people what to do?”

  His friends frown at him, concerned that he’s brought up politics, but I offer my latest thoughts on Taiwan, as formed with Dorjee and Anton.

  The chicken vendor, who has bushy eyebrows and looks seventeen, inserts a joke about Taiwanese women. He summons more cold bottles of the local beer, and to follow custom they throw a banquet for their honored guest. A waitress approaches our table, carrying a live rabbit in each hand, one black and one white. The rabbits’ bright eyes dart nervously as the bespectacled computer programmer points to me with his chin. “You choose. Which one will we eat tonight?”

  I point a finger at my own chin, the way everyone does here. “Me?” The waitress holds the rabbits by the ears and looks at me expectantly. The black one is kicking at the air. Do I point at the one I want to eat? Or, like an emperor, at the one I wish to spare? My eyes wander up to the brown ceiling fan circling with a dozen flies. Everything is hungry; everything eats to live; everything dies to feed. I point to the black one. One day I’m at swift death’s mercy, the next day I am swift death to some other creature. At some precise, perfect moment, it will be me crossing that line and feeding trees, worms, rabbits, the earth, the universe.

  We enjoy rabbit soup, rabbit skin, stir-fried rabbit stomach, and then mouth-watering rabbit leg with vicious black Sichuan peppercorns. The spices cleanse my sinuses with such vigor that my brain settles, limpid and serene. Sichuan Province is famous for this, for fighting fire with fire—for hot weather and hotter food. My nose runs as I savor the bold flavors. The succulent red-braised beef with potatoes is overpowering, but the snow peas flavored with citrus and flecks of mushroom are subtle and deliciously complex. Th
e beer is endless. My companions’ hysterical jokes elude me, but the breeze on my face is delectable, and gradually, finally, I eat and drink enough to satisfy them. Gratitude ripples through my chest, and I voice it fully to my hosts. I offer to pay, but of course they wave me off. Long after I’m gone, they’ll fight humorously but fiercely over who gets the honor of paying—not because a lăowài ate with them but because that’s how tabs are settled here.

  Outside, I glance at my watch. The hands point to ten minutes to ten! I hoist my pack and hail the first thing that comes by, a pedicab. The young driver stands up on the right pedal and lets his weight down on it, then on the left and down, then the right again, and the acceleration draws tendrils of the night like cool death across my cheeks.

  Chapter 33

  Four Sides to Every Waterfall

  精誠所至金石為開

  Honesty that is pure

  Moves even steel and stone.

  —Chinese proverb

  I rush into cavernous Terminal #8 of the Chengdu train station at 10:04. Hundreds of people are standing in a cone-shaped queue that radiates out from the gate, while others occupy countless conjoined orange plastic waiting chairs. I gaze at the human cone. I too have to fight for my place. Plunging into the hurly-burly, pack on my back, I’m soon hemmed in on all sides by anxious and sweaty bodies, and yet I’m smiling, wondrous at the way that this is unfolding. The delicious rabbit that I condemned and consumed—he lives still, here, now, as me. All must eat to live, and all are quickly reincarnated.

  A voice echoes off the ceiling: “Train Number 356 is delayed.” A frustrated surge from behind presses my chin into a man’s head. Young and old jostle for inches. Time slows to a crawl. 10:10. 10:20. 10:30. 10:50. No further word from the voice on high.

  My legs soon ache from holding their ground. My beer buzz disappears. Faces turn to stare at me, some curious, some annoyed. My breaths of reused air grow shallow. At 11:27, the voice breaks its silence and promises salvation. 11:50, it says. But 11:50 comes and goes. Midnight strikes. At 1:28, my entire body, numb with exhaustion, awakens to sound, confusion, fear, joy, and relief. The roar of an arriving train.

  The crowd heaves forward, as if the train might never stop unless we hurl ourselves before it, and like a cattle stampede, we thousand souls ram ourselves one at a time through two small apertures. The current of humanity carries me forward, and I elbow for the left opening, and I’m there, and the man takes my ticket, and the unrelenting pressure on my back vanishes.

  Floating free, my goal now is a different opening. I need to locate a seat in this chairless nation. On board, the first partially open spot I find is between a sickly woman and a PLA soldier, and I drop quickly into the gap. The seat isn’t really hard, more like a bench, like a school bus’s, straight-backed, and arranged so that three people sit facing forward and three sit facing backward. My pack falls between my knees just in time for a jolt to throw my torso back up and out of my seat as the train starts into the darkness. The woman beside me drapes herself over a large black lacquer box. She spits phlegm onto the floor, her contribution to an obviously ancient mélange of gum, beer, juice, grease, urine, and perhaps tears.

  I avert my eyes and examine the soldier at my left shoulder. He’s nodding off, beginning to snore. My spine is taut, my feet are flat on the floor, and I’m looking straight ahead, facing backwards, towards Chengdu, waiting for my own exhausted mind to release into sleep. It doesn’t; I’m frozen. I mentally explore reincarnation, releasing myself, heart, body, and soul, but it feels impossible in this straitjacketed world. My legs have a non-negotiable need to straighten, my spine yearns to slacken, but my position is locked. My vertebrae have no option but upright. My neighbor’s nasal chainsaw begins to roar. I hum Aobao Xianghui, and Lu Lan’s demure smile materializes before me, her little “mm,” her mischievous laugh. The train rocks monotonously on the tracks and the snoring sounds faraway then close, faraway then close…

  Eons have passed, and I’ve been sleeping. I glance at my watch. The hands have barely budged. What seemed like hours was nine minutes and four seconds. I drift off again. Six minutes and eleven seconds. People go insane like this; I’ve read about it. Torturers or unethical researchers allow exhausted people to sleep a few minutes, then rouse them, then let them sleep a few more minutes, then rouse them again. In surprisingly little time the frustrated mind succumbs, goes mad.

  My watch plays tricks. Its hands suddenly point to 6:37. Claustrophobia comes. Then it’s 7:19, and the sun shrieks at me like a scorned lover. I rub my dry eyes, massage my sore neck, and look around. Corroding my mouth is the sour remains of beer and rabbit. Morning crawls along through farms, villages, rice paddies. At 4:17, we reach Panzhihua, a blindingly bright gravel parking lot. Buses are everywhere. I step into the heat like a ghost in search of final rest. The lot unfolds around me, and I find a bus for Lijiang, a town near Tiger Leaping Gorge, and though the bus is empty, I climb on and into a seat. I hold a hand over my eyes like a curtain. Sounds of other passengers float by my ears. A woman sits beside me with a bag of soiled laundry that smells like rotting carrots laced with excrement. It’s 5:32 when a woman boards and barks orders at everyone. “You can’t put that there! Don’t sit on that! Pay your fare!” She snaps at me until I cough up 27元.

  At 3:39 am, still open-eyed in the pitch of blackest night, as we bounce down a mountainside and through a forest, bits of light appear. The darkness morphs into a vacant city. “Lijiang,” someone says. I stumble off the bus and onto an empty street. The lobby of a concrete hotel smells dank and unclean. No people, no lights, no sounds. A pummeled couch in a corner seduces me easily, and I’m asleep in less than a minute.

  I’m dreaming of tall Caucasian people. They are upset, shouting at a young Chinese man. They stand four feet from my head, and there’s a German flag patch on one backpack. White rays pry their way past my eyelids. I’m in the fetal position on a filthy sofa, the whimsical extremities of my watch signaling 6:52. Everything feels completely wrong. I shoulder my pack and step into the street.

  The town buzzes with people, bicycles, cars. In front of me, a bald old man steps herky-jerky, starting and stopping. He empties a plastic bag of yellow breadcrumbs onto the pavement, and a dozen crows descend immediately for the feast. The man regards me like a curse and continues on his way at his infantile pace. I come to a row of food stalls where pancakes sizzle and gètĭhù solicit passersby. The sensuous aroma of frying onions pervades the air. I hand over a pink note for one of the soft discs of toasted dough, and as I bite into it, a delicious, greasy, herbed pork oozes over my tongue.

  Further down the street, I pass the glass doors of a nice hotel. I can’t resist. Cold air tickles every pore of my skin as I float through the lobby, murmuring a prayer to the god named Air-Conditioning. I watch three uniformed girls behind a desk look past my deplorable grooming to my skin. Little do they know this lăowài is—inconceivable!—penniless. Well, almost. I take their cheapest room, cover the sun with the blinds, and climb naked between the sheets. Oh, sheets, forgotten friends! I haven’t gone insane yet.

  Some time later, I awaken, and my mind somersaults into another week. The blinds stand open, revealing late afternoon. I splash water on my face and head out. Energy belatedly reaches my legs when I set foot in the town’s central, miniature Tiananmen Square, where a gigantic statue of Mao Tse-tung stands. Mao offers his eternal, one-armed wave-cum-salute. Wide boulevards, concrete buildings, honking horns, red socialist banners—Lijiang feels like any other small Chinese city. But I keep walking, and when I cross a river, cut through a noisy vegetable market, turn down a winding alley, and cross another bridge, I enter a ghetto of old wooden buildings, teahouses, and artisans’ shops. This is Old Lijiang, eternal capital of the Naxi people. The LP recounts the Naxi’s descent from romantic matriarchal Tibetan nomads:

  Naxi matriarchs maintained their hold over men with flexible arrangements for love affairs. The azhu (friend) system allowed a
couple to become lovers without setting up joint residence. Both partners would continue to live in their respective homes. The boyfriend would spend the nights at his girlfriend’s house but return to live and work at his mother’s house during the day. Any children born to the couple belonged to the woman, who was responsible for bringing them up. The father provided support, but once the relationship was over, so was the support. Children lived with their mothers, and no special effort was made to recognize paternity. Women inherited all property and disputes were adjudicated by female elders.

  It could work. Michiko would be in a separate home, a separate country, a separate dream. I’d spend the nights with her, then go home. She’d settle any disputes.

  A vendor walks by with hearty Naxi sandwiches—eggs, goat cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, spices—and I stop him. I eat as I wander the winding streets. In a painter’s shop, my eyes slowly inhale the spectacle: Hundreds of vertical scroll paintings hang from the walls and the rafters. There are butterflies, orchids, boats, and towering mountains. Scrolls of flowing poetry in an unfamiliar script, which must be Naxi, occupy an entire wall. A set of four traditional Chinese paintings depict a single waterfall in four seasons: snowy whiteness covers the perpendicular beauty in winter; tiny ships dock in the lake at the foot of the voluminous waterfall during yellow-green spring; rich flowers and a full, languid fertility infuse reddish summer; and pale pink and green hues depict the wane and quiet of autumn. I look from season to season and witness the passing of years; I lose myself in the turning of the wheel of seasons, a cycle of four so similar to the rotation of the mandala, and so similar to the flow of the body, heart, mind, and soul. There are other mysterious cycles of the universe I don’t yet understand. My mind whirls, and I’m gazing again into the evanescent miracles of high summer clouds.