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

by Tony Brasunas

  Further down, in the coffee-colored Yunnan lowlands, we pull over at a bus stop for dinner. Spicy chicken and green peppers steam over to our table like manna from heaven, and the food is cheap enough for us to feast like the ravenous beings we are. She seems self-conscious and distant, thinking about something far away, maybe that boyfriend; then something shifts, and she laughs and jokes with me and asks about Peizheng and playing guitar for my students and the songs I played. She climbs back onto the bus ahead of me, and the driver grabs us with his eyes. “140元, you two!” he barks. We can’t risk anything, so we give him only half the amount, promising to pay the other half if we actually get beds. An hour later, two men get off, and the driver calls to us. We fork over the balance, leaving ourselves with but a pinch of colorful paper equivalent to $2.49.

  The whole journey I’ve been wondering if this could happen—if she and I could share a bed—since every other bunk holds either two men or two women, and since even married couples rarely touch in public. Yet sure enough, this captivating creature I admired and released and drew into my adventure and still don’t quite understand—she and I climb into bed together. Lăowài are different. Perhaps to everyone she and I are the same gender—a third gender, off-limits to all. Or maybe we’re just perceived as incurable freaks, barbarians to be indulged and humored, because, God help us, we didn’t grow up in Central Nation (the literal translation of the word China), and we don’t know any better. This is why Byron and I were locked up on campus for a year.

  To me, it doesn’t feel like we’re the same gender. Our hips touch as we gaze out into the indigo quilted sky and witness its bashful stars. We shift beside each other, trying to stay cool in the lazy sticky air, remarking how good it feels to relax. We discuss the highs and lows of this seeking, losing, and finding called travel—its treats and traps, its sometimes forgotten role in spawning the demon named “tourism,” which is defacing this land with plastic ski lifts and concrete promenades. Her foot brushes mine, and I apologize for embarrassing her. She glances at me, laughs, and elbows me in the ribs. “You could stop staring at me.” She doesn’t seem upset, and my body aches to embrace her, to hold her, to comfort us, to share this pleasure and physical exhaustion. My mind intervenes with more serious considerations. I can’t, here, on the bus. It’s too aggressive when there’s nowhere for her to go.

  I lie back, alone, and look out into the billion minuscule pinholes twinkling silver. I focus on just one star, feeling its distance and then feeling her closeness: the tingle, the gentleness, the curiosity. I hear her breathing soften and deepen. Memories of people I’ve pushed away float by my heart like clouds, and then memories of the gorge dart through my mind like mountain sparrows. The bus rolls to a stop in the darkness, and we sit motionless in a caravan of buses and trucks stretching across the barren plateau like a Great Wall. Stranded in the heat and silence, in this tight space and taut magnetism, my mind longs to wander. A voice whispers. I can choose my experience in this moment, and in all moments. Liberation unwinds. She rolls over towards me, naturally, into my arms, and we’re finally united, together. So much needless anxiety melts. Gently I kiss her warm neck and we relax, but a jarring bounce in a pothole wakes me up. A bead of sweat rolls into my eye and the mattress beneath me feels hot, unbearable. Chantal is on the other side of the bed. It was a dream.

  A horn blares into my ear, sunlight pours through the window, and out there in the brightness stands a sign with the characters Qìchē Xiūlĭgōng (Automotive Mechanic). We’re in industrial suburbs, and the riotous cacophony is the city of Kunming. My back screams its soreness. I tap her awake, and we unload our packs onto the white concrete and squint at the pollution and construction. With our final mao pennies we hail a cab. I want to ask if we ever kissed, because I’m really not sure, but she’s sitting over by the window, too far from me, so I let it go. At a bank, we get out. We negotiate with a teller, and insistent in the face of hostility, I find my bargaining paying off like never before: For the first time I’m able to withdraw Chinese money from an American account. Chantal scores too.

  We part ways—she to a travel agency, I to the train station. She needs a plane ticket to Beijing, since she goes home from there in two days; I still need to discover whether I’m going home at all, and if so when. We pick a café listed in the LP and agree to meet there at 3, in four hours. “Let’s not say goodbye now,” she says, standing at my shoulder, watching me write my address in her little book.

  “Just in case,” I say, and I take her into my arms. The quick, perfunctory closeness melts into a moment of warmth, and the world around us stops, and then she boards a bus for the airport.

  At the Telephone & Telegraph Office, I decide Kunming agrees with me. The god of telecommunications grants a connection, and my mother’s voice is like a light at the end of a long tunnel, a faraway sound arriving like a vision from the wrong end of a telescope. She says I’m coming home. I have a flight out of Hong Kong. In five days. I thank her twice and tell her I love her.

  Home. The word trips off my lips, clumsy, unfamiliar, exotic, like “gorgonzola.” It seems illogical, impossible. I pay, but as I head for the door, a bizarre vision from a corner of the room seizes my eyes: a row of five brand new computers. They’re part of a new government experiment with the yīntèwăng (Internet), I learn, and I’m actually able to log on and access my college email program. Dated yesterday, something atop my inbox hails from a Japanese address. It’s Michiko. She’s seeking me, writing in English. She’s cheerful, using exclamation points and a smiley face. She’s back in Kurashiki, finishing college, spending the rest of the summer there. She wants to know about my travels; she hopes to see me again, someday, soon. She thanks me for my letter. She waits two paragraphs before telling me. She isn’t pregnant. She isn’t pregnant. She isn’t pregnant. It wasn’t that time of the month for her. My exhalation pushes me back from the plastic, up from the chair, across bumpy linoleum, to the window, where a breath of sunlight falls on me, touches me to the core, whispers gentle words.

  Treading the sidewalks, stepping on the suitcase-sized stones of the city’s central plaza, I witness the world dumbly, believing nothing. All of this was meant to be. She’s doing fine. I’m going home. The answer has always been to trust. I was meant to open my heart.

  A martial arts exhibition blocks my path. Young teenage boys in white robes wave black wooden swords over their heads and then stab right, left, and finally down, in choreographed uniformity. Dozens of them prance about the plaza, mirroring each other, approximating military precision.

  I continue on, reaching the enormous central train station. Men fling fragments of English at me like frogs licking for gnats. “Tickets! Cheap! Fast!” They look leaner and more aggressive than their counterparts in Chengdu, so I expect the worst. I need to get to Guangzhou, to get to Hong Kong, to cross this kingdom quickly. Standing in line for an hour, I reach the front just as the ticket windows slide shut for lunch and the two hours of xiūxī, Chinese siesta.

  Frustrated, I comb the nearby blocks for a cheap hostel where I can drop my pack. Up and down the streets I go, but there’s nothing, nowhere that accepts dà bízi. Two hours drift by, and with nothing to show for my time, I return to the train station and again wait in line.

  This time I do reach the front of the line, and I speak with a surly lady who snaps at me as if I’m her least favorite, most impetuous child. I ask for a hard sleeper to Guangzhou. “Yìngwò dōu meíyŏu!” Nothing.

  I allow a man to nod at me on the way out. “Where you go?” he asks.

  “Guangzhou. Hard sleeper. Tomorrow.”

  “Of course. Come with me.”

  “How much?”

  “400元.” A smug smile darts across his face. “At the most. Come with me.” He wears a black jacket and a Puma cap, and he points to an alley beside the station. “Our office.” I consider a moment, then warily follow him down a crowded alley redolent with pungent herbs that summon memories of my hospita
l nightmare. He motions for me to wait and darts inside a tiny café. I back up against one wall as a shirtless peasant pushes a wheelbarrow of coal past my toes. Huffing and puffing, the peasant narrowly misses a suave man with sunglasses and a cellular phone. His wheelbarrow then grazes a table of toy plastic airplanes and Bugs Bunny figures, and he knocks some toys to the pavement. A salesman unleashes a furious invective at the peasant, who freezes in place and stares penitently at the ground.

  The man emerges from the café and asks whether I can leave on the 4th. I say it has to be sooner—I could leave tonight. He regards me a moment, nods. “Come with me.”

  “Are the tickets real?” I ask, following him around another corner and into a fish market.

  “Of course,” he picks his way between busy stalls, around puddles, and I have to hurry to stay close. He glances over his shoulder at me. “My name is Wei.”

  Down a still narrower alley, he leaves me in a minuscule office where a different man, one with a thin mustache, who smokes and leans back precariously on two legs of a chair, advises me to be patient. “Wei will return soon. He’s good.” A fleck of ash from his cigarette falls onto his red tie, and he leans forward as I sit down. His chair crashes to the floor. He mashes the cigarette out in the ashtray and lights another. “It’s difficult to work on such short notice.”

  The sweaty little room looks, I suppose, somewhat like a travel agency—train schedules and tourist posters cover the walls—but it seems unlikely many travelers solve the maze to get here. A rare obese Chinese man tries to sit at the other desk, but he’s too big for it and gets comfortable instead by turning the chair sideways, loosening his tie, and undoing a top button. Two other men come and go, as if taking turns standing guard outside. They chain-smoke and talk fast in dialect. I tell them many times where I’m going, that I’m a teacher, that I’m American, not mentioning why I need to leave so soon—international air travel would imply riches and they might gouge me harder. The man with the red tie stares at me. “You speak Mandarin well.” He turns and speaks with the fat guy in dialect, nodding at me and laughing. I look at them all. Yes, it’s a den of thieves.

  He turns back to me with a smile. “You’ll get your ticket. It’s Wei, he’s good.” I glance again from face to face and see something, or rather the absence of something—the coldness that turns mischief into malice. It’s not here.

  A new man enters and shuts the door. The man with the red tie turns to me, holding a slip of paper. “Here’s your ticket. 12:30 pm. August 2.” He puts it down on the desk between us and lights up another cigarette.

  “Hard sleeper?” I ask.

  “Mm.”

  “Express train?”

  “Special fast.”

  I nod and reach into my money pouch.

  “500元,” he says, tapping his cigarette.

  I look around, but still no sign of Wei. “Wei said 400元.”

  “It’s difficult to get a ticket like this,” the man explains.

  “He said four hundred,” I repeat. “You probably paid two hundred, so it’s a fair price. Don’t try to trick the foreigner.”

  “500元,” he insists, throwing me a smile, gesturing to the others. “There are five of us. One hundred each.” They want a banquet tonight. But now I know what this is—bargaining.

  “I’ll give you 450元,” I say. “That’s fair. I still need to eat dinner myself. The ticket was probably 200元, so this is 50元 for each of you.” I put the money on the table and read the ticket carefully. He puts his hand on the cash, and I’m out the door faster than Sandoh ever darted out of my classroom.

  A bus ferries me across town to the café, forty minutes late, and it’s not a sweet “oasis of French pastries,” but a dark, narrow Chinese bakery where they probably put the red bean paste in everything. Wrong again, LP. Chantal is nowhere to be seen. I buy a coconut bun, take an outdoor table, and survey passersby: bankers, mechanics, saleswomen, shoe-shiners, schoolboys. My watch gestures towards 4, and I realize that she’s not coming, she never came, and she never was going to come. She was through with me. I bite into the middle of the little cake, and red bean paste squirts out. At 4:30, I stand, leave, forge down the pavement, and make the hour-long hike to the Camellia Hotel, Kunming’s main backpacker joint. The last bed in the dormitory was just rented, I discover, dashing my hopes of saving money. “To a Canadian girl,” the attendant apologizes. I ask for the name, and sure enough my heart somersaults into my stomach. After a moment, when no one’s looking, I steal into the dormitory on my own. It’s empty—those smart brown eyes, that smile that made everything richer, more complicated, more fascinating—she’s nowhere to be found. The room is vacant save for standard-issue, bulky lăowài backpacks, some typical porcelain souvenirs, and ten hard empty beds.

  The hotel flees behind me. In a hole-in-the-wall diner, a family bickers at the table beside mine. A bowl of spicy noodle soup—Kunming’s famous guòqiáo mĭxìan—shows up before me, and I disappear into sip after sip of the broth, slurping up the long white lāmìan (hand-pulled noodles), letting the fiery flavors cleanse my sinuses and caress my brain. Cleansed and massaged, my brain knows what it knows: Companionship is temporary, solitude is temporary, and anything that can disappear will. A spicy lump of chili, tripe, and egg slides into the belly. My heart marches to a different drummer, however; it laughs in the temporary, cries in the temporary, draws me into the temporary, savors the temporary, and then languishes in the narrow, barren lands of fear and confusion brought by the temporary. I was never meant to open my heart.

  The sun fires brilliant morning spears into a dank, double-occupancy room. I arise, feeling a sweet serenity in my limbs. I leave the room and wander through the streets, feeling happy with every shop and face I see. I climb onto a bus headed to Lake Dian, which lies far outside the city. The scenery fades from city blocks to paved industrial sprawl, then from moist, fertile farmland to broad, rolling, forested hills. An enormous expanse of lapping blue water appears in a bowl in the contoured woods, and the sun’s magnificence ripples on its surface. I step down and walk along its banks, letting my lungs open and relax. My torso ascends in the broad beams of light, and I feel the inhaling and exhaling pass through my heart. The light pierces deeply into me, releasing knots between my lungs. The exhalation is vast. The next breath carries into my being hopes, lessons, beauties, discoveries, disappointments, and strands of tingling things that remain incomprehensible.

  I hold out a thumb, to hitchhike, and eventually a towering truck picks me up. The driver is a chubby-faced man with a little cap that makes him look like Mao Tse-tung. He curses in torrents as his vehicle stutters its way up a slope. Between choice phrases, he tells me that these hills are often called “the Dragon Hills,” since they look like a dragon, but that some other people call them “the Sleeping Lady,” since the flowing contours of the hills also appear to be hair falling into the sea. It’s Kunming’s organic Rorschach test.

  He lets me off when I spot a path threading higher into the wooded hills—into the sleeping lady’s breasts or over the scales of the dragon’s back. I hike up along the path, my feet scratching a rich scent from soft beds of yellowed pine needles. A grove of huge, smooth, black stone boulders carved with writing and dates make me stop, and I run a hand along their inky coolness. Gravestones for Kunming’s rich and famous, I decide, resting, sighing, turning to absorb their breathtaking view of the lake. The sails of several junks dot a distant bay. Continuing higher on the path, I pass through a grove of erect, smoke-colored birch trees, and I reach a meadow at the small mountain’s summit. Wind rushes violently through the meadow, bending beige grasses. Far below on one side lies the lake, shining like a vast blue mirror; far below on the other side lies endless countryside with villages of white specks. I take in the view on both sides, pausing, contemplating. Yunnan, the name of this province, literally means “South of the Clouds,” and from this point China’s southbound rivers, which form in the Himalaya, flow down into
Burma and Vietnam. My journey too now takes a new direction.

  Yes, this is how it ends. Traveling, life. It begins unusual, surprising, and exciting, even though we know that it will end, and that when it ends, we will return to where we came from. Still the suddenness is shocking. The now comes unexpected every time.

  Unquenchable gusts rush through my hair and drive down a yellow flower at my feet, making it bow to me. Instead, I drop to my knees and bow to it, living alone with it atop the world, closing my eyes. Overcome with the arrival of gratitude, I revel in the sensations of the wind, the spontaneous kiss of the wind, the fickle intimacy of the wind. Gusts blow through my ears, through my head, through my chest, and I release further, and everything disintegrates, and I am blown apart, scattered like dandelion seeds. Nothing is solid, nothing is permanent. There is only a singular presence, the earth beneath me, firm and fertile, calm, everlasting, singing one note, one hymn, one rhythm, one command, one order, one word that goes out to everything: Grow. The grasses, grow. The rivers, grow. The canyons, grow. The plants and animals, grow.

  My eyes slowly open. A blue-orange butterfly alights on my knee. Gazing at it, I sense Chantal and feel exquisite delight with her visit to my life—her companionship, her smile, her bittersweet choice. Her departure was a small death for me, an invitation to suicide for some corner of my heart, and last night I let it die. I let it go. Now something new there may grow.

  The lake and the hills and the sky spread out wide around me. I pray to them for acceptance of all that has passed. I pray for beauty and honesty in all that will pass. Now, now, another small death. I exhale, and I die. I leave this trip, this life, this time. I leap into the breezes and fly.