Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (31 page)

Enough of a wreck, however, to have missed the church service himself. It turned out that we’d also missed breakfast at the guesthouse. I was, of course, in no mood for food. I was not entirely convinced I could handle food. But the cure, of course, could only begin with nourishment.

We walked into the old town in search of sustanence as the little men inside my head continued to pound away. I yearned for the sun to disappear. I wanted darkness. I wanted the grim twilight of Guangzhou. Anything to dull my headache.

Soon, we came across a pizzeria. Dali is that kind of place. There are pizzerias. I sat there in the tiny restaurant with my eyes closed, massaging my temples, trying to decide if I could manage to eat a slice without hurling. It was a very bad hangover. Somehow, I forced a few bites into my mouth and lived in hope that they would stay down.

Back on the street, we walked on to a large outdoor Bai market. There were dead pigs, dead chickens, blood, flesh everywhere, all over the place, all these carcasses being butchered. This was not a good milieu for someone desperately trying to suppress the spontaneous expulsion of a pizza breakfast. I had a vague notion that I should linger here, that there was traditional Bai culture here among the animal carcasses. Something to learn. But I was not well. And so we marched to the Three Pagodas, which are among the oldest pagodas in China.

In my surly state, the entrance fee to the pagodas seemed an offense of the highest order.

“A hundred and twenty
kuai,
” I sputtered. “It’s an outrage.”

I fumbled with my money. My head throbbed. And then the fireworks began. The Chinese love their fireworks.
Pop, pop, pop.
Every Saturday in China—wedding day—the country explodes to the sounds of head-shattering booms.
Pop, pop, crack. Rat-tat-tat-tat.

“I need to get out of here.”

So instead of lingering at the pagodas, we walked back toward the West Gate, where we were convinced by a woman to follow her on the Number 2 bus to Erhai Hu for a boat trip to a temple and fishing village. This was more my speed. The bus was very crowded with women carrying babies on their backs inside wooden baskets, but the farther away from town we got, the better I felt. As as we ambled down a country road, we passed fields of hay and innumerable carts pulled by men or donkeys and a young woman walking alone in traditional white and pink garb listening to an iPod.

Lakes, I discovered, are the cure for hangovers. There was a freshness to Erhai Hu, a pristineness that soon purged the lingering effects of last night’s revelry. It was blue. It was clean
ish.
There were fishermen plying the waters, and in the near distance rippling hills, and beyond that the Jade Green Mountains that rose to a lofty 12,000 feet. We took a tour boat across the pleasant expanse, and soon I began to feel better.

We were let off below a temple, which like those on Putuoshan was devoted to the worship of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion. There was a graceful pagoda on a promontory overlooking the lake, and we stepped in to pray for some compassion. Or rather, I prayed. Jack doesn’t pray to bodhisattvas. I, however, was willing to seek help for my hangover wherever I could find it. Then the boat took us onward from the temple to a small fishing village on an island in the center of the lake. On its banks were nets full of tiny fish drying in the sun. There wasn’t much to see save for a small outdoor market. Still, it was pleasant, quiet. We sat around a tree stump for tea. Nearby, on the shores of the lake, women were washing clothes by hand. Soon, we were joined by the villagers. We couldn’t understand a word, of course, but they were very friendly. A fresh breeze blew and an elderly woman offered us a plate of tomatoes.

“You know what?” I said to Jack. “I’m actually feeling kind of content right now. It’s not often that you feel the love in China. China, as you’ve probably noticed, isn’t the warmest place on Earth. And so to be here, in some village in the middle of a lake in Yunnan Province on a clear day, and to be offered a plate of tomatoes, gratis, just as a kindly gesture to a visitor…it makes me happy.”

“Well, good,” Jack said. “It’s about fricken time.”

15

T
here are many places in the world I wished I’d seen thirty years earlier, but none more so than the town of Lijiang, nestled in the shadow of the Himalayas, in a lush valley beneath the looming majesty of Jade Dragon Mountain. It was here, in the 1920s and ’30s, that the idiosyncratic Dr. Joseph Rock, a brilliant botanist, established his well-stocked base. He was born in Vienna but had moved to Honolulu in 1907, where he had found his calling in the study of plants. Possibly suffering from island fatigue (something I could totally understand), Dr. Rock made his way to Yunnan Province and arrived in Lijiang in 1922. He was no mere backpacker, however. He had taught himself Chinese at the age of thirteen, and brought gold plates to dine upon, opera records, and a bathtub that he insisted porters carry over mountain passes. His perambulations in the region around Lijiang, under the auspices of his nemesis, the National Geographic Society, led to his magnum opus,
The Ancient Na-khi Kingdom of South-West China,
memorably described by the travel writer Bruce Chatwin as perhaps the most eccentric publication ever produced by Harvard University Press.

It was, in fact, Bruce Chatwin who had put Lijiang on my mental map. He is sometimes described as a travel writer; at other times, more unkindly, as a fabulist. When I read his work, back in my teens, I didn’t care to make the distinction. Perhaps he wrote about a world as he wished it to be, but what a world. His essay about finding himself caught up in a coup in Africa remains for me the ultimate evocation of cool sangfroid. In the 1980s, he visited Lijiang and wrote a memorable essay about Dr. Ho, a Taoist healer, spinning a tale of love and magic and a history that never ends. So it was with uncommon enthusiasm that I boarded the bus for the journey into the high hills of Yunnan and the fabled town that some believe was the inspiration for the mythical Shangri-la.

“So, Lijiang,” said Jack, trying to muster enthusiasm for the six-hour bus journey. “And what can we expect to find in Lijiang? More hippies? Maybe some anarchists? Crackheads?”

“We’ll be visiting the Naxis.”

“Naxis?”

“Uh-huh. Naxis.”

“Well, okay. Let’s party with the Naxis. Will the Israelis be joining us too?”

Naxi is actually pronounced
Na-khi,
but we did not know this then. Descendants of nomadic Tibetans who had settled in the verdant valleys and soaring mountains of northern Yunnan, the Naxis are the predominant minority in Lijiang. It is a matriarchal society wherein men are relegated to the status of useless dolts, henpecked ninnies, or, if they’re lucky, dreamy slackers, which is good work if you can find it. In any event, such an arrangement seemed profoundly un-Chinese, and this, too, seemed in need of observation.

The bus was crowded, and we crossed the flat farmland alongside the blue waters of Erhai Hu on a two-lane road without an emergency shoulder, which would be unremarkable except for the fact that the road, this narrow slab of cement, was elevated ten feet above the farmland, presumably to deter farmers and animals from wandering across it. And naturally, this being China, there wasn’t anything like a guardrail. Passing a truck, with no room for error, while oncoming traffic was barreling toward us at seventy miles an hour, is one of the more uniquely terrifying experiences I’d yet encountered. The drive was essentially one long cardiac event, and I tried to calm myself by watching the Bai farmers in their fields, hundreds of men and women, threshing wheat by hand. On a small television screen that rested above the driver, we were treated to a long loop of martial arts films and highlights from the Bruce Willis oeuvre. I had always wondererd what the movie
Die Hard
might sound like dubbed into Chinese. Fortunately, I now had the opportunity to hear Yippeekaya Motherfucker spoken in Mandarin. This pleased me to no end. Clearly, my threshold for entertainment is low, which is a good thing because it was a long bus ride.

Lijiang is situated above 8,000 feet, and as we climbed into the hills I began to notice an increase in soldiers and military garrisons. Traditionally, this area of China was the frontier. But the soldiers, of course, are not in Yunnan to guard against an invasion from the Republic of Myanmar. China has the largest army in the world and there’s only one reason, of course, to maintain an army of that size: to keep the Naxis in line. And the Bai. And the Tibetans. And the Uyghurs. And anyone else who might have subversion on their mind. According to the Chinese government, there are three evil forces in the world: terrorism, separatism, and extremism. It’s a broad group of evil forces and it gives the government a lot of leeway.

Despite the soldiers, however, the scene was an Arcadian paradise. There were forested mountains. There were the farmers threshing grain and people selling apples by the side of the road. There were wood-beamed farmhouses with yellow corn drying in the sun. Now and then we passed donkey-led wagons and the peculiar three-wheeled tractors that looked like choppers on steroids. I couldn’t imagine leaving a farm in Yunnan for an urban cesspool like Guangzhou.

I was lost in my reverie when the man across the aisle asked me where I was from. “My name is Tam,” he said.

Tam was from Beijing, where he worked as an engineer designing medical supplies. Or at least, that’s what he used to do.

“I quit my job last week.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. Beijing is too big, too dirty. Everything is about money now. I don’t want to live that way. I want to live in the mountains under a blue sky. I can get a job anywhere.”

Tam’s wife and young son had remained behind in Beijing. The nuclear family, as we know it, wasn’t the norm in China anymore, as the booming economy had been scattering families to the wind. Not so long ago, it had been nearly impossible to obtain residency permits outside one’s place of birth. True, political realities might have taken you someplace new. Mention to the wrong person that you’re going to spew your bean-curd milk if you have to read the Little Red Book one more time and soon you might find yourself farming stones on the barren steppes of Inner Mongolia. But like Judy in Dali, longing to be a housewife in Dalian, Tam was part of the new vanguard of Han Chinese moving westward. True, most were hunting for business opportunities. But Tam, and I sensed he was hardly alone, was moving to the west for lifestyle reasons, searching for his own private California.

“That sounds like a good plan,” I offered. I understood; I’m usually first in line for the escapist bus. “That’s great that you can do that in China today.”

“Yes. There are many changes in China.”

“All for the good?”

Tam shrugged. “China is very complicated. Everything is changing, but the politics remains the same.”

“Yes, it strikes me as odd,” I said, pleased to have met someone so open with his opinions. “I wasn’t in China thirty years ago, but I suspect that the China of today looks vastly different. And yet the government remains stuck in another era.”

“We need more democracy,” Tam agreed. I hoped, for his sake, that there wasn’t a government goon on board. “Today, maybe 500 officials have a say in government. But the people have no say.”

“Yes. It’s not right.” And now I hoped for my sake there wasn’t a government goon on board.

“People are very worried.”

“As they should be.”

“They think the government will start a war.”

War? How now, what’s this about war? War with who? Should I be digging bunkers in California?

“Er…what war?” I hesitated. “With America?”

Tam looked at me oddly. “No. Not America. With Taiwan.”

“Ah…Taiwan.”

Technically, of course, the U.S. has indicated that it would go to war with China should it ever attack Taiwan. Indeed, China was seen to be preparing for it by confronting the technological advantages of the U.S. China had been testing weapons that could take out satellites. They’d hacked into the Pentagon. But there couldn’t be more than twelve people left in the U.S. who could muster any enthusiasm for an apocalyptic war with China over Taiwan. Of course, those twelve people probably all had jobs at the White House.

“So do you think it likely that there will be a war between China and Taiwan?”

Suddenly, I rocketed against the seat in front of me. The bus slid across the roadway, the tires shrieking. We were heading directly into the path of a chopper-tractor that had unwisely chosen that moment to make its turn onto the road. The bus screeched to a stop mere inches from the other vehicle. The bus driver emitted a well-deserved harangue at the tractor operator, who remained stoically perched atop his machine.