I Grew My Boobs in China (33 page)

Just because I’m not in a school doesn’t mean I’m finished. It means I’m skipping, which means I’m going to have a mile-high stack of studying to do when I get home. Which means when I’m finally there, I won’t have a moment of fun because I’ll be locked in my room for the next five years.How will I ever face my friends?
The fear that each day I was away added yet another assignment to the pile never slipped my mind, but I was losing my battle to reduce that waiting pile. Being so preoccupied with future worries was definitely interfering with my ability to enjoy the present.

Mom’s approach from the beginning was, “You can’t do anything about it now, so don’t bother fretting about it. Enjoy this while you can, and think about the rest later. There’s no sense in stressing yourself out. Learn what you can about where you are. It’s not as if you’re not getting an education. It’s just a different kind of learning.” As my complaints about my heavy backpack grew louder, so did Mom’s insistence that I should lose the weight. “Oh, just chuck it! You’re obviously not going to do it, so stop carrying all that deadweight around.”

Over the course of using and sorting the things in my backpack, the schoolwork had eventually slid to the very bottom.
Mom’s right; I’m never going to finish this stuff within the year. Who am I trying to kid?
Internet availability and China’s censorship made it way too difficult to do research, plus we never stayed in one place longer than a few days so I never had time to really get into it.

I was well aware of how much difference five pounds could make in my life. By the time we reached Beijing, the hard reality of my situation sank in, and despite my worries, I’d finally thrown both courses in the garbage. I could still visualize the pile of paper sitting in the trash in Beijing, and of course, I began to wonder if I’d done the right thing as soon as I’d let them fall.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Later, my choice was confirmed as I sat crammed on the bus floor. Apparently being separated wasn’t the worst possible dilemma we had to deal with on the thirteen-hour bus ride to Mongolia. Women, children, and boxes of two-day-old chicks already occupied the beds we’d hoped to use. As it turned out, the bus trip originated a few towns back, and its aisles were crammed with boxes and burlap sacks tied firmly to the bedposts. Mom and I only managed to secure a bit of floor space in the front where people had to climb over us to get on and off. The sudden arrangement change was bad enough BEFORE an extra man and woman were assigned to “bunk” with us, too. The pretty Asian lady with thick black hair tied neatly in a French braid began shouting at the driver as soon as she couldn’t get a bunk. Clearly, she was also under the mistaken impression that she’d paid for a bed. After she vehemently let the driver know how she felt about him and his organization, she plopped herself down next to me against a bedpost, arms crossed in an almost audible “hrmph!”

Surviving the night took priority over anything else. With no light except for the sudden bursts of lightning streaking across the sky, I couldn’t have done much homework anyway. I imagined myself struggling with my nose literally pinched between pages and enduring all kinds of paper cuts. My elbows would’ve whacked the girl next to me, making her even angrier. My writing likely would not have been legible even if I’d managed to do enough work to send to my teacher.

“Sorry teacher, my dog
did
my homework,” would be more believable than trying to explain what was actually going on. 

Mom was curled up on her side on the floor with her back to me. “This is torture! I need to sleep on my back,” she complained more than once. “I never should have done both ears at the same time!” A couple of days earlier we girls had abandoned Ammon to go in search of a beauty parlour. We’d taken turns sitting in blue, plastic chairs while three young ladies sputtered in Chinese as they prepared to take a piercing gun to our ears. We probably shouldn’t have been surprised when they slid open a dirty drawer full of loose earrings and placed one randomly into the gun.

“Aren’t you going to sterilize it!?” Mom asked incredulously. The ladies shared a perplexed look before moving closer to Bree, who was sitting restlessly in the chair as her tan faded before my eyes.

“Wait, wait!” Mom shouted, holding her palms out to stop them, “Clean? Sterilize? Alcohol?” They finally understood the obligatory game of charades and soaked the earrings in a bottle cap of vodka.

“I guess that’s what you get for two bucks, eh?” I shrugged. We’d paraded into the hostel to show our brand new piercings, unashamed by our pink and swollen ears, to Ammon, who just shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“See what happens when I let you guys loose in the streets!? I’m not surprised that you two would do something stupid, but I didn’t think Mom would too!” Bree now sported four new holes in her ears, Mom had the cartilages in both ears pierced, and I had the cartilage in my second ear pierced; Bree’d done the first one for me at home with ice and a needle years ago. So Mom wasn’t particularly enjoying the bumpy ride as she was forced to lie on at least one sore ear. (For the edification of any who might not know the finer points of such beauty routines, the healing process of a cartilage piercing is a good deal more painful than those done in the fleshy part of the ear lobe.)

A man who had been sitting in the bus stairwell made his way over to the space we three girls were sharing and slowly, with each bump, slid closer and closer until he was leaning all of his weight on my knees.
Go away. I hate you!
I thought as I subtly tried to kick him off. My whole body was squished, and my legs were completely numb. I had to turn slightly when I adjusted my position to relieve their tingling, thus creating a small space that he used to try to insert himself between me and the other young woman. In an effort to prevent the unknown, stocky man from getting any closer, the girl and I instinctively squeezed together. We shared not a word in common. I didn’t know if she was Chinese or Mongolian, her age, or even her name, but I freely welcomed her closeness.

As I dozed in and out of consciousness, my chest burned and my limbs ached with the need to get a moment’s rest. I felt like my innards were turning grey, like a slab of meat exposed to the sun, and wished a hundred times over that this infernal ride would end. My head was swimming and my throat strained to keep the hot lava deep in my belly from forcing its way up. Naturally, the man was just as tired as I, and he continued to lean and push, despite my new female companion occasionally snapping strident complaints at him.

She and I clung to each other in that crowded prison the whole night long, my head on her shoulder and my breath on her neck. For that single night, I had a companion, and our shared ordeal made us a team. I felt as if I’d completely lost touch with the world, and I really missed having a friend. It made me think of Terri, and I didn’t have the energy to wipe away the tears that trickled down the side of my cheek and into my ear.

I learned the next morning that the pesky man was the second driver, not just some anonymous pervert, and I couldn’t help but worry when he took over at the wheel. I kept imagining his heavy eyelids nodding off and his head drooping over the steering wheel as he drove the overloaded bus at typically high speeds.

When we finally arrived, my unnamed companion slipped away without a word and I got busy finding an appropriate place to relieve my nausea. Hanging on to a chain-link fence, I could produce nothing more constructive than a few violent dry heaves. I could feel Mom’s presence near me. Her face first displayed real concern, but she pantomimed the silly morning sickness joke once I’d assured her that I was alright. Ribbing me about being pregnant was by now a running family gag, though I did not find it all that funny. Given my growing boobs, the increasing frequency of the nausea that no one else experienced, and the fact that I’d missed my period, even I sometimes wondered. But unless I was the next Virgin Mary or had missed a major lesson in sex education, I knew I could not be with child. The symptoms I shared with many pregnant women were relatively easy to explain: missing my period was a clear sign of built-up stress and the drastic change in my environment; my boobs were just growing (finally!) from the natural development phase I was going through; hunger was often associated with growth spurts; and intermittent nausea can be explained by any first-time traveler.

I waved Mom’s inquisitive look off.
But I do feel awful!
I thought, as a little water dripped from my mouth. My backpack balanced me as I leaned forward to heave again, but it was no use. There was nothing in my stomach.

The place we were dumped was nothing but a dull, square cement building. There appeared to be no food or lodging, only dust and more dust and some stern-looking officials with machine guns. I remembered my fervor to partner up with Mom for the journey and began questioning whether I actually felt safer with her when we arrived at our destination before Ammon and Bree. I realized how completely lost we were, and knew that Ammon would at least have known where we were. It felt strange to feel that way. Up to that point, I’d pretty much always believed my mother could right all wrongs. 

I’d seen my siblings at a couple of the stops during the night, but when we arrived at five-thirty in the morning, they were nowhere to be found. The last time we’d crossed paths they were ahead of us, so it didn’t make sense for them not to be here.
What if we aren’t in the right place? What if they crashed? What if we never find them again? Where will we go? Where will we sleep?

After a nerve-wracking, two-hour wait, they finally came trudging in. I can’t express the relief I felt, but there was no time to celebrate. After briefly explaining the time it had taken the driver of the other bus to fix a flat tire, Ammon raced off with us in tow to figure out the next leg of the trip, as we had still not actually reached the border.

It didn’t matter that we hadn’t slept all night; it didn’t matter that I was sick; it wouldn’t have mattered if I were suffering epileptic seizures – we had to keep going. I thought back to the countless times I’d stayed home “sick” from elementary school. Then, I was mostly faking to give myself time to catch up on a project to avoid losing marks for being late, which Mom knew all too well, but here there was no way to cheat or fake it. We couldn’t just stop at the halfway point, as I’d learned when climbing the hellish stairs at Emei Shan.

Bree and Ammon had lucked out and gotten beds the night before, so they weren’t nearly as exhausted as Mom and me. It was particularly painful to hear that there were even spare, unused beds on their bus. They had also met a really friendly Mongolian woman, Khongorzul, who was traveling with her daughter, so their experience of the trip was drastically different than ours. Bree promptly introduced us. “This is Khongorzul, the lady we met on the bus. She’s great! She gave us cookies and she speaks English!” Khongorzul appeared to be an affluent, educated woman with an oval-shaped face and a tall, slender body, though I suppose five-feet-six wouldn’t normally be considered tall. The twelve-year-old daughter had the same charismatic, intelligent air as her mother.

Strict personnel denied our request to walk the few kilometres to the next border post, to my great relief, and luckily, Khongorzul agreed to share the cost of hiring transportation to cross the border. She raced off with us to find a driver, insisting that he had to be Mongolian. Period. No discussion. There was no way to deter her from this fixation. “Chinese, they are crazy drivers. Not safe!” she kept saying as we ran alongside her, weaving in and out between the waiting jeeps in order to determine their heritage. All the while, she continued to tell us what heathens the Chinese are. The only reason she was in China at all, she vehemently added, was because she, coincidentally, was applying for a Canadian visa at the closest consulate, which happened to be in Beijing. Had there been any other way, I’m sure she’d have traveled twice that distance to avoid stepping foot in China. To her dismay, she had been refused a visa and, worst of all, this denial would prevent her from applying again.

After talking to a few Chinese drivers, she proclaimed, “I don’t like those guys. I don’t trust them. Don’t go with them or they’ll rip you off. They are dishonest.” Ammon agreed, though his dislike was directed at taxis in general. In his mind, cab drivers belong to a race of their own.

Ammon had warned us of the hatred the Mongols felt for the Chinese, but I was surprised that it was so blatant. He had shown us on the map how Mongolia was sandwiched between China in the south and Russia in the north when he explained some of their historic enmity.

“Mongolia was originally a province of China. During the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, just before World War 1, they declared their independence, but it took until 1945 to gain international recognition. Because they were helped by Russia, their greatest ally, they converted to the Cyrillic alphabet, were the second country to adopt communism, and Russia became a principal trade partner.”

After a few minutes of checking jeep after jeep, Khongorzul finally found a driver she approved of. “He is from my country. He’s a very good man.” Our well-chosen driver then bustled around to make space for the eleven passengers and the luggage he intended to transport across the border. He plucked his cardboard box of fresh fruit out from inside the jeep and opened the hood to somehow fit the fruit into the engine compartment.

“Now, we can go,” Khongorzul translated as he signalled us in through the side door. The tiny five-seater, war-torn Russian jeep was already occupied by five sweaty strangers. Three members of our group took up the space where the fruit had been. Once the rest of us had squeezed in, we headed down the bumpy road towards immigration, with arms and heads protruding from every window.

Ammon and Bree were bursting with excitement, a feeling I did not share. I can’t say that I was particularly thrilled about going to Mongolia. They had germinated a plan to spend some time there even before the big family-trip concept came up. When Ammon returned from his latest trip to Southeast Asia, he’d planted the seed in Bree’s head, showing her where Mongolia was on the world map that covered an entire wall in our house. It wasn’t long before they started “putting it in the air” that they’d like to spend an entire month volunteering on a Mongolian horse ranch together. As I looked back on those conversations, I figured it was probably their plans that got Mom subconsciously dreaming of travel and moving it to the forefront of her brain. I remember Bree insisting to Ammon, in her inimitable, know-it-all way, “I’m coming on your next trip. Just you watch!” I also remember feeling very grateful at the time that I would be at home and wouldn’t have to live without a shower in the middle of nowhere for weeks on end, and that I wouldn’t have to leave the comfort of home – ever.
Little did I know.
I laughed cynically at the memory. Inevitably, Mongolia had somehow become a major destination for our trip.
Who dreams of visiting the wilds of Outer Mongolia, for goodness sake?
It’s probably Bree’s fault that we’re here!