Where is Jon?

With yesterday’s rain on the window sill
I leave my home behind,
All for the sake of anticipating a stranger.
—A Poet From Chengde

Autumn came south dragging the cold hem of her dress, and I rushed north to meet her. Old Hangzhou lay across the Yellow Mountains, in the fertile plain of the lower Yangtze, at the southern end of the Grand Canal that dug over a thousand miles to Beijing, and on the eastern shore of West Lake. All this geography brought to Hangzhou a worldly prosperity.

When the Song Emperors ruled China, Hangzhou was a city of philosophers, poets, politicians, artists, and other men of worth, in palaces and towers, as well as two million soldiers, artisans, peasants, and slaves, scurrying across a thousand bridges and between a hundred thousand wooden buildings. Marco Polo of Venice traveled there in the thirteenth century, when Hangzhou was the largest city in the world, and its grandeur so impressed him that he called it a hundred miles wide and “beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world.” Ibn Battuta also visited in the fourteenth and found it wonderful.

A long series of misfortunes reduced Hangzhou to what it is today. Kublai Khan’s Mongols took the city in 1276. The harbor silted up during the Ming Dynasty. A man named Hong Xiuquan, calling himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ, twice captured the city in the middle of the eighteenth century and each time damaged it more and more, as a center of the human vices he sought to abolish. All the buildings of the old town were destroyed. Deng Xiaoping included Hangzhou with old Canton in his economic reforms, and the city boomed with new business and luxury shopping. But it is not the same.

At least West Lake remains. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of lakes in China called West Lake, and this one is the premier: a wide and serene expanse of blue, formed when Kangxi Emperor drained a swamp, and since elaborated with silted islands and three great causeways, ringed by misty hills of purple, temple pagodas, willow gardens, and floating beds of lotus flowers, all furnished by ages of donations by wealthy aristocrats, who also wrote the long list of jingdian, that is scenes or viewpoints, worth seeing about the lake.

The Qianlong Emperor issued the first list of top ten perspectives of West Lake, including “Spring Dawn At Su Causeway” and “Autumn Moon Over the Calm Lake,” which are to be seen from specific points around the lake, marked by stelae in the Emperor’s own hand, and even more handily on all tourist maps. Later reappraisals of the list, prolific and always listing ten, included more abstruse scenes, such as “Lingyin Zen Buddhism,” “Beishan Street Meditation,” and “Precious Stone Hill Floating in the Rosy Cloud.” I can only assume that such lists had their providence in that same noble impulse that drove the Victorian Brits to write long accounts of perfect walks through London and Oxford, though unlike that British arcana, the imperial jingdian are still followed religiously by photocentric Chinese, after some vision of a famous age.

I arranged through Couchsurfing to stay in the apartment of a Chinese girl working in Hangzhou. Scarlette was her English name, and she was studying English that she might pass the language test to receive a work visa for New Zealand: “But I don’t know if I can.”

“Your English is very good.”

“Not many Chinese people travel alone. It is not like America or Europe, where everybody wants to travel to other countries. We travel in big groups. All Chinese are very worried about the things that can happen when you are in foreign country.”

We talked in the room she had set aside for me, in the apartment provided by her work, twenty minutes walk from the northeast corner of West Lake. There was an old creaky bed under stained walls, and a tattered curtain concealed a pile of boxes. It was much nicer than the garret I had in Xiao Likeng, and her hospitality put me in a good mood. It was the Mid-Autumn Festival that day, and though the sky was too gray for the classic viewing of the moon most everyone had taken off from the city for home during the few days of vacation. Scarlette remained in Hangzhou rather than return to her family’s provincial town, because the much longer National Holiday began on the first of October. She spent that time studying English and showing me around.

I tried to reassure Scarlette that New Zealand was a fine place to go; but working abroad for the sake of experience was apparently an odd notion for a Chinese to entertain, and Scarlette was very skeptical. Her English was intelligible, but it was clear by the stilted way she spoke, with many sighing interrupts of ah between syllables and words, that she was unused to speaking aloud the studied grammar and vocabulary of her classrooms.

“I learn English many years, in school, but oral English not so good. All Chinese people learn in school only to do exam, but many, they do not want to speak English because they are afraid of their face—to make mistake, it’s very embarrassing.”

“Face is important in China. Mienzi. And English is difficult. Too many words.”

“Sometimes I cannot think of the right word. I know what to say in Chinese, but in English, I do not know. It is embarrassing.”

“It shouldn’t be embarrassing. It’s just difficult. It’s hard to learn a language. I’m trying to learn enough Chinese to get by, but I can’t say much. A lot of times I have to just make gestures, like this one if I want to find a hotel.”

I put my palms together and turn them sideways to lay my head on them, then point around like, which way?

“But I want to communicate. People can understand me if I just do that, but I don’t want them to just understand me. I want to have conversation.”

“Then it’s good your practicing.”

Scarlette grinned. “I’m very glad we can communicate.”

“That’s the hardest part about coming to China. I can see things, but I cannot talk to people or ask them questions. There’s a big barrier or wall to stop me from understanding China. It’s really not possible to know a country unless you speak the language.”

Perhaps it is impossible even if you do. In the gloomy, rainy morning, Scarlette asked me what I would see, and I said, “I’d really like to see where Yue Fei is buried.”

“U F A?” wondered the girl.

Yes, Yue Fei! Hero of China! For when the Mongols descended, and the Emperor retreated south to Nanjing and Hangzhou, in the days of the Southern Song, Yue Fei had his mother tattoo on his back the four character phrase: 尽忠报国, meaning, “Give life for the nation.” He was the son of a farmer, raised by his own sword arm and sharp mind to the rank of general. Battle after battle he won against the Mongol horde, but when he was encamped within sight of the old northern capital, the Emperor had Yue Fei recalled. He was put in prison and strangled for the eternal crime of subversive popularity.

“You want to see that? I think only foreigners want to see this. No Chinese want to go there.”

Sure enough, Yue Fei’s tomb appeared prominently in the English version of the tourist propaganda, while the same site was relegated to a small corner of the Chinese book.

“This is very funny!” said Scarlette.

We took a bus out along West Lake’s northern bank to the northwest corner and got out into the rainy street in front of the Kentucky Fried Chicken that neighbors the tomb of the hero. As Western restaurants went, it was Scarlette’s favorite.

“I like KFC. You can sit and talk, and I like chicken sandwich. Chinese people call everything hamburger, but my English teacher says not hamburger, sandwich. He likes Subway very much. He is very big, you know? Very—hmm, big.”

“Fat?”

“Yes, he is very fat.”

“Too much hamburger.”

“No, not hamburger. Sandwich.”

Yue Fei was buried in a wide complex, where there stood two shrines to his noble memory and several ancillary shrines for his subordinates. There were statues twice as tall as a man, and the Chinese bowed to the altars. Some rooms contained artifacts and paintings, and some murals of the hero’s deeds. His tumulus was in the garden, at the end of a stone path lined with statues of soldiers, scholars, and beasts. Beside him was a smaller mound for his son. Near the entrance of the garden were four statues behind a fence.

“There are the bad men,” said Scarlette,—“you can throw things at them.”

An iron Qin Hui, who took the blame for Yue Fei’s death, or rather martyrdom, that the Emperor responsible might save face and absolve himself of blame for a crime he did not regret—he knelt there in chains near the entrance, along with his wife and his two cohorts in malice, ready to receive the blame that should rightly fall on higher shoulders. There were Chinese people taking photos in every direction, and I looked back towards the grassy mound of the tomb.

“He’s not even buried here.”

“Wait, what?”

Alas! it was true, for after Yue Fei was executed, when the Mongols took the city, they desecrated the grave and stole the corpse of their great enemy.

Scarlette and I walked out to the lake and across the bridges and small causeways that encircled a garden of reeds and lotus lilies. A gentle rain tapped on everything and stirred the water of the pond. Across one of the great causeways that cross the lake, a strip of trees and bridges and strollers, there was gray West Lake and its blue hills. The poet Su Dongpo famously compared West Lake (Xī Hú) to Xi Shi of the Four Great Beauties of Ancient China:

Rippling waters shimmering on a sunny day,
Misty mountains shrouded in rain.
Plain or gaily decked out like Xi Shi,
West Lake is always alluring.

The banks abound with such stories. Scarlette tried to tell me the romantic legend of some lady or other, but ended up in a frustrated admission: “It is hard for foreigners to come to China. There is much you do not know.” I know now that Xi Shi was so beautiful that fish would forget to swim and sink away when they saw her face, and I saw that Xī Hú was full of koi, flickering gold between the lilies. The water was eutrophic, overflowing with nutrients from frequent dredging, but there was a beauty in its cobalt opaqueness.

Scarlette took me on another bus back downtown to lunch at Zhiweiguan, a famous restaurant where all the Chinese tourists like to eat: Hangzhou noodle soup and some of their famous pork dumplings. Scarlette abstained from the latter, saying, “I have had them too many times. When you have something too much, it is not good anymore.”

We went through a park where a stage had been set up for the Mid-Autumn Festival, and there were Korean and Japanese dancers performing a mixed number. The Koreans wore bright, wide, simple hanbok dresses, the Japanese simple linen, and they announced their numbers in three languages. A seventy-year-old Chinese woman danced with a rope that had a saucepan of water on each end, swinging it all around her body in a savage way and finally dumping the water out to show her grace. There was a Chinese dragon dance, and the Koreans performed the fan dance and the t’alch’um masked dance.

Scarlette and I walked on through the royal willow garden to the Hefang old street and looked at the crowds in the early twilight. There were hawkers hawking chopsticks and clothes, and a man made candy creatures at the end of sticks. We bought roasted chestnuts and ate them in a pavilion with free medicinal tea from a crowded apothecary. An old vagrant reclined on the bench across from us with small change spilling out from his pockets. He looked at Scarlette and I, exchanging words and comparing our nations, and said, “He learns from you and you learn from him—it is beautiful,” before moving on.

A mother in an autumn dress and her curious-eyed daughter sat down. The girl was maybe eight, with her grin half empty of teeth, drinking some ice drink with the straw set in the gaps of her smile.

“Is he an American?”

Children are usually the easiest people to talk to when learning a language, and I could reply in Chinese, “Correct. I am an American. Hello.”

“Is America nice?”

“It is good—beautiful. You should come.”

The girl said something that made her mother and Scarlette both burst into laughter. Scarlette told me, “She said, ‘I want to go to America to drink fresh milk,’ but why? We have fresh milk here.”

“A delicious drink”—Hǎo hē.

“Which do you like more, America or China?”

“China.”

“You are American and like China more, I am Chinese and like America more.”

“We should trade,” I said in English.

It is generally impossible to get a good rest in a Chinese dormitory, what with one party staying up until two, repairing a bicycle or throwing bags and chattering with all the lights on, and with another waking up at six and doing the same. Elderly lodgers add to the morning racket by bringing up all the night’s phlegm out of their throat, with a noise I will not describe, and spitting it into the sink. I do not agree with those who call the Chinese rude, but they can be inconsiderate, understandably: there are too many people around to worry about stepping on a few toes now and then. The Japanese respond to a crowded situation with a universal virtue of quiet, polite dignity; the Chinese by simply ignoring everyone else in frenzied pursuit of their affairs.

The way in which the Chinese men brush their teeth astounded and horrified me a number of times in various hostel bathrooms and is worth description. He hangs his lips open over the basin and moves the brush in his mouth like a jackhammer. His eyes bulge out, foam gushes from his mouth, and he grips the countertop with his other hand as if it were a gunwale in a storm. He begins to gag with bile from ramming the brush in the back of his throat, but he goes on with it for more than a minute in the same motion, ending by spitting and hacking up phlegm. Where the Chinese learned this technique is among their many mysteries, but it is practiced only by the men: women being far too delicate before the mirror for such dental brutality.

I spent my first day in Suzhou, a mild and clear-skied day, finding the old walled town and the sleepless youth hostel, and then looking for dumplings. I have found that I possess an ability, when the stomach is in a certain vacancy, to walk directly to a hall of bāozi. That night I strolled aimlessly the old road, which would have been peaceful if not for the horn-wailing E-bikes that crashed across the cobbles, until some intuition of the gut bid me turn aside on a perpendicular alley. I followed this to a main road and crossed that to a small and crowded local eatery, with noodle soup and heaped plates of pan-fried dumplings that squirted grease everywhere if the bite was too hasty. The Chinese gnawed and slurped vampirically at these greasy viands, so that the whole place sounded like a spit orchestra.

In the morning this feat of gastro-perception directed me to walk directly out from the hostel and down an alley, with no idea of where I was going, until I espied the familiar tower of bāozi trays in one of the stores. “Ah stomach,” I thought, “what do I need a compass for when I have you?” It was as if all that bāozi I daily consumed had somehow polarized my gut into a tracker. When I return home I suppose my stomach’s trick will point me eternally westward toward a kitchen in China, as the Mohammedans always face Mecca, until my gut instinct magnetism is recalibrated to some more convenient lodestone.

Suzhou was the other paradise of Marco Polo: he called it the Venice of the East, a city of canals and gardens with romantic names that drew me there: the gardens of the Master of the Nets and the Humble Administrator, the Garden of Cultivation and the Garden For Lingering In, and the Couple’s Retreat. The last was the only one I visited, full of tourists and in no way serene or spiritual, losing in shouts and posing all its aesthetic. Folly, folly—the Liberation is folly! This is why I cannot stand socialism: because some people do not deserve affluence and access to high culture, because they sully it by their ignorance.

Shen Bingchen, governor of Susongtai, retired to the mansion of the Couple’s Retreat in 1874, cultivated and expanded the eccentric garden and gave it its name, as much for the garden’s two parts as the wife who shared them. It is not so much a garden as a series of courtyards with subtle plantings, stark and carefully made, with many pavilions to consider certain scenes of grottoes and ponds. The east garden featured at its center an extravagant rockery named Yellowstone Mountain, made to look like the ridged peaks of Anhui, and surrounded by such structures as the “Amongst the Mountains and Water” Pavilion, named for a Song dynasty poem, the Moon Viewing Pavilion, the Thatched Cottage at the City Center, and the Studio of the Returned Ink slab, where a young scholar found an ancestor’s ink slab five generations after it went missing; though my favorite building was titled “The Balcony of No Frippery.”

On my approach, I heard some racket from within. “Is it a wedding party?” I thought. But no! there were tourists by the bus load, mobbing every passage as their guide shout over loudspeakers to compete with other guides doing the same; and there were trash bins everywhere and incontinent tourists peeing in the corners, spoiling all the gardener had once achieved. The elegant construction and careful aesthetic of the old cultivation was entirely lost by way of the noisy throngs, as a saintly cloth is tarnished by an unhallowed touch—and this place was pawed by the greasiest plebeian mishandling! Some things should remain the province of nobility alone!

I went outside the white walls of the compound and strolled down the canal, mourning the beauty that had been lost in liberation, and reflecting that perhaps Saturday was not the best day to visit the gardens in the world’s second most beautiful city according to Marco Polo, when I heard the wild melody of an old folk song carry down the canal from around the corner. An old peasant woman in blue was paddling a raft across the stream by the contrivance of an oar roped to the stern, which she managed back and forth like a fish tail, and she sang to the water as she furrowed it. The Chinese voice is an earthy sound, born of toil and soil, best when accompanied not by electric guitar or Madonna pop, but by crickets and waves and wind-russled leaves.

I resolved to leave the gardens of Suzhou for somewhere more natural, somewhere like the towns of Anhui and Jiangxi that I had so enjoyed; but to do this I had to pass through Shanghai.

My friend had always despised this vast, urban development for its filth and the manners of its people. I had seen worse filth, and by not speaking Chinese I think I avoided the worst of the Shanghainese rudeness; but I could not appreciate its vast, urban scale, as much as the Chinese, who seem to revere it in brochures and travel pamphlets. The towers were impressive monuments to the ingenuity of capitalism and the insignificance of individuals within an economy. They once called it “the Whore of the Orient” for all the debauchery celebrated there by Western entrepreneurs and imperialists and their Chinese cohong collaborators. A missionary in the 1930s said, “If God allows Shanghai to endure, he will owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.”

God did not allow it, and the instrument of Armageddon was named Mao Zedong. Shanghai became a hotbed of leftist radicals, who snatched at the chance to rise up against their exploiters. All foreign industry left for Hong Kong, and the Gang of Four was based here for the ten years before Deng Xiaoping revolutionized the country. Then Shanghai became the capital of trade it had been before and is today the wealthiest and most populous city in China proper.

It was raining when I arrived. My sandals had no traction on the wet streets, and if I did not have a good skill for recovering from a fall, I would have fallen many times over. I dropped by things at a hostel and wandered through the urban jungle to the Bund, where I found the rain suited the old hulks of European buildings now flying Chinese red from every tower. The modern skyline of Pudong was a jagged futuristic mass across the Huangpo River. I visited the Shanghai Museum, where the habits and activities of the other visitors drew my attention away from the Han coins and inlaid Ming furniture—inspecting this cupboard with an energetic movement of the spine, circling that statuary with a camera recording, photographing themselves amidst those winter furs from Tibet.

I drank that night with an Australian in the hostel bar and discovered something of some interest from the bar-girl. She was a healthy Mongolian girl, a student of Japanese, even though she once hated the nation as much as most Chinese. All autocrats need an enemy for the masses, whether its gays or blacks or Islam or France, and in China that enemy is Japan: in school they learn the whole horrid history of Japan’s invasion during the Sino-Japanese Wars, the bombing of Shanghai and the rape of Nanjing, and in the news there is always some reoccurring matter, some insult by the Japanese Prime Minister, some issue of who owns this island or that, and recently a fisherman who was arrested by the Japanese for crossing into their waters. So this girl was brought up hating Japan, at least until she met some Japanese and found out they were just as friendly and generous as most people are everywhere. Since her sister began working there, and her parents have forced her to start studying the language as well, she has made many Japanese friends who help her with studying and tell her about Japanese culture.

The 2010 World Expo in Shanghai was as organized and maniac an effort as the 2008 Olympics had been to show off China’s exceeding global worth. There were great eruptions of fireworks, and Jackie Chan and Quincy Jones wrote the theme songs. The theme was the environment, and was elaborated on by way of a huge park on the southern bank of the Huangpu, filled with the entirely unnecessary constructions of 192 countries—Vegas facsimiles and Borg cubes and various designs which, had they been airborne, would make perfect UFOs—that all lit up brilliantly at night: a park of propaganda, fast food chains, souvenir stores, and corporate sponsors—but those were electric buses crossing the vibrantly rainbowed bridge! In the future, there is no need to turn out the light.

Initially I hesitated to go, but decided that I might regret missing a world expo, which are at best random events, held whenever a nation decides to improve its image through mummery. And I went straightaway to the American Pavilion, because I was filled with an unpatriotic and almost perverse fascination with the way my country advertised itself. A compatriot from Connecticut let me in past the line and I entered, along with a seething tourist crowd, the first of four great chambers. There were three screens along the back wall, and a Chinese-American girl from Florida announced in English and Chinese that we would see several videos, the first of which would begin shortly.

It began in this way: “Nihau, I’m Kobe Bryant and welcome to the American Pavilion.” A camera crew tried to teach a few New Yorkers to say as much in Chinese, with the forced humor of most government videos. It was apparently beyond Kobe’s linguistic skills, and the skills of most American statesmen, who spoke in English to the crowd. In the next room we were all seated for a second video, wherein Hillary Clinton, children of carefully chosen ethnicities, and corporate spokespersons commented on helping with the environment; and in the third chamber a little girl wanted to turn an empty urban lot into a garden, amid much singing and montage—but by then the Chinese were ravenous to get their fake passport stamped and have their photo snapped, and then to hustle on to the next queue on the map. They rioted against the door to get at the set for the New York Stock Exchange and the Disneyland castle background. They were not here for enlightenment, but for collectibles!

I tended towards the pavilions that these truant tourists avoided. I saw the Peruvian hut and went through the Caribbean Pavilion to kill some time—all the poor nations of that sea sharing one roof! Disco-lit stalls in a long warehouse, all dealing rum and reggaeton, and morose islanders sat behind the entry desks to stamp passport after passport with the fake seal of their national booth, with an endless stream of Chinese circling round the place for nothing but that. “Yes it ends next month,” said Barbados,—“thank God.” Most pavilions functioned in the same way. The Chinese waited for as long as an hour to receive their stamp, take pictures with every sign or poster, and then stroll back out to the next long wait.

Mostly the Expo was organized by region, but Iran, North Korea, and Lebanon were all jammed together on one side, like the unpopular crowd at a high school dance. I went that way, wandering into any pavilion without a line, and in this way seeing Belarus, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, and Qatar. (The latter had an especially interesting exhibit about the life of a Qatari pearl diver, that compared so favorably to the American pavilion I had to wonder what was the matter with my countrymen.) There was a lame parade and several performances planned. Jaime Torres played the charango with an Argentinian band in the American Square, and there was a beautiful dancer as well. The event in the European Pavilion was billed as Russian Songs and Dances, and featured three half-naked dancers, gyrating as if in the worst Slavic nightclub, and one Russian DJ in a red top hat, spinning beats and shouting into the microphone, “Yo Moscow!” The Chinese had never seen anything like it before.

The Iranian Pavilion proudly featured maps of old empires, pictures of fallen capitals, and statues and busts of the nation’s proudest sons: the poets Ferdowsi, Roudaki, Rumi, and Hafez, the polymaths Omar Khayyam and Avicenna, and several noble kings. But it was closing up for the night, as was most of the park, so I took a bus back across the Huangpu and a subway home, to plan my journey further north toward Beijing.

Time and Seasons, what things are you,
Bringing to my life ceaseless change?
I will lodge forever in this hollow
Where springs and autumns unheeded pass.
―Tau-Yun, wife of General Wang Ning-chih (400 AD)

Xiao Likeng was once a farming town, and retained its old form in its present role as a reliquary. The crowd of old houses remained, those great white buildings of Jiangxia, smeared gray by age, with dark tile roofs and dark wooden railings and window panes, and everywhere the red of hanging lanterns. Beyond the edge of town, past the white stone walls of the last houses, there were no suburbs nor car parks nor houses—there was nothing. A few rice fields marked two sides, verdant jade and nearly ripe, and steep hills hemmed in the rest with bamboo thickets and solitary pines.

The four principle streets were arranged like the lines connecting the Great Bear constellation, and along each of these cobbled pathways ran a sloping canal, a combination of rain gutter, sewer, garbage dump, washroom, and urban coolant. Flat bridges of stone or wood, colorful strands of drying laundry, and power lines crossed the shallow streams and the overgrown slated banks, where young willows hung down their fingers. That scraping, splashing sound was that of villagers at the bottom of the steps, washing clothes and hands, pots and vegetables, in water not quite clean enough for the purpose but cleaner by far than most water in China. A close glance into the green weeds and cobalt streams revealed small goldfish flickering among the rocks. Boatmen offered to float the unwary Chinese tourists down these stretches of canal for twenty kwai—a distance, because of the small cataracts, of about fifty feet.

Nearly half the stores fronting the streets were trinket stalls that also made a mint off the Chinese tourists, and the rest were restaurants and hotels doing the same. That tinny, droning sound was that of a tour guide with an amplifier at her belt, explicating the mysteries of village life to a battalion of urban Chinese. They roamed down the streets in their packs, in fishermen hats and safari shorts, with too-big cameras around their necks, photographing the town as if for evidence. The men set their girlfriends or daughters against the most scenic views to take their posed picture, while strange men in the background snapped surreptitious shots for their own collections.

Many of these tourists could be seen leaving Likeng loaded down with treasures, like the Achaeans leaving Troy. They had jewelry of beaded pine around their necks and wrists, wore strings of river pearls, wielded toy slingshots and crossbows, carried glossy wooden Buddhas and phoenixes and astrological creatures, or packaged bits of pottery in the imperial style of Jingdezhen, and some ambitious conquerors even bore off entire wooden chests, with delicate floral carvings, set across their shoulders.

The villagers were no worse off for the rampant pillaging: in most stores, when the artisan was not carving at a table or sawing at a comb, to make it appear as if all the crafts were handmade and not ordered from a factory in Hangzhou, the vendor could be seen watching a downloaded Chinese drama on a new computer or cooking food: leading an altogether fine life of rural mummery. “Conquered, we conquer,” as a Greek once said.

Lonely Planet calls Xiao Likeng, in its short blurb on the subject, “a delightfully picturesque village,” which ensures that every French tourist in Jiangxi heads to Likeng directly. These were a different breed of visitor: strolling the canals with a quick, arm-swinging pace and horse-blinders on to all the other tourists in town, acting as if they were alone in a private adventure, in the bitter way of a self-deceived married woman who pretends she is the only remaining member of her sex no matter where her husband may look.

The French yearn for discovery, and they follow this yearning by picking out the smallest and least likely name from Lonely Planet. That they all find the same Arcadia should not be surprising, but then the French are a ridiculous race and could not be called French if they did not act woefully astonished.

I never minded the crowds—it’s another attraction, something worth watching. I entered the town of Xiao Likeng with a Canadian couple who had been on the bus, and by their presence there was able to bargain cheap rooms in a cheap hotel next to the Shenming; and though the Canadians checked out for a nicer place the next day, I remained in my three dollar garret, looking down on the square and the canals. I sit at the little desk, and I try to remember the hustle of Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

I was only two nights in Guangzhou, but the night before I arrived blends in my memory with the adventure of getting there. After a sleepless havoc of twisting roads and velocities, the bus from Sinjiang arrived in Wuzhou so late that no cheap, respectable inn was open, and I sallied out past a mob of taxi drivers and motorcyclists, though eventually settled in at an all-night diner set up in a parking lot, to read my book and sip a beer. I will not bore the reader with more descriptions of confused travel, but several adventures found me sipping another bottle of beer in a comfortable on the steps of the Wuzhou bus station at six in the morning, and chasing a cockroach around the place with the owner of the store and the chair. I found a bus with the last of my energy, and collapsed and vanished into the seat.

I had a strange dream, that I was working for a photographer who had taken pictures of an Irish mafia’s fencing operation, which was going online to a new Web site for the sale of stolen goods, and my friends could not believe it. Then I’m dreaming about the slim and dark-haired girl next to me, our legs almost touching . . .

“Guangzhou, Guangzhou, Guangzhou!”

I collect my wits before I collect my baggage. Guangzhou was no provincial town: Romans traded here, and Persians and Khmer, Hindus and Mughals, and opium runners, when it was known as Canton. It was always a wealthy city, a gateway to the empire, and the suburb of Shenzhen was made a “special economic zone” by Deng Xiaoping’s modernizations in 1980. There is a saying in China: “You think you’re brave until you find Manchuria, you think you’re smart until you visit Beijing, and you think you’re rich until you see Shenzhen.” Guangdong is also known for its cuisine, the finest in China, with which the Reader may already be familiar: most Chinese expatriates are from this province.

I just had to find a place to stay, but I only knew that one hostel was near the ferry to an island called Shamian Dao, where the European traders were quartered. Asking for directions was impossible. I wandered out and found Internet in a small store—the shirtless proprietor leering over me, the girl bubbling with laughter—and took another hour to reach the Riverside Youth Hostel. By then it was four o’clock—and I had guessed as a joke that it would take that long to find a bed: how often such humor is prophecy!

There was no one but an old Croat in my dormitory, but downstairs I met a Kiwi who had just lost six hundred dollars and a credit card to a hotel thief in the neighboring inn. Peter (his name) looked like Bill Murray in Lost In Translation, but a little skinnier. I asked him to come have dinner with me, at some place recommended by the pretty girl behind the counter. We had noodles and some fish in soya, a Cantonese delicacy, in a restaurant of big round tables, crowded with diners and laughter. Peter said that he knows his mind and generally controls his emotions, but with so many things going wrong, he felt things slipping out from under him in China, like the proverbial rug: felt himself getting annoyed with the world. In my opinion, these difficulties are part of the adventure. This opinion made Peter feel old.

We crossed the Pearl River on a ferry and came to Shamian Dao, the colonial isle, now full of malls and business parks—still colonized, but by corporations rather than nations. Looking for coffee, I caught the two Flemings I’d met in Tiger Leaping Gorge: Meike and Neik, who said they also recognized me walking the riverbanks of the Li River north of Yangshuo. “You have a very distinctive walk.” “Do I?” “Yes.” We had coffee, and I a Guiness for the same price, at a riverside café among China’s bourgeoisie, looking out across the river at the neon-lit ferries and the new apartment buildings, where you must apply for a room twenty-five years in advance.

It was not yet midnight when Peter and I said farewell to the Flemings, who crossed to Hong Kong the next day, but it felt so late. The ferry was closed and so we wandered through the filthy frenzy of the nighttime fish market, where I gained an appreciation for Guangzhou: a big, filthy city. Eventually, after many miscarried plans, we took a cab back.

A typhoon lashed into Hong Kong the next day, and the deferred clouds rained on Guangzhou for the next few days. I wandered the Qingping Market and its dark alleyways: a rotten street, the smell of a pet store from all the rabbits and ducks and dogs on sale for eating, and other stalls selling mysterious things. Overhead were colored tarps and lanterns, webbed electrical wires and caged songbirds, and beyond the leaning buildings: the sight of modern apartments in sterile tyranny.

A patient rhythm guided life in Likeng, as in all the villages of China, which even the trends of tourism could not overwhelm. At night, when the day-trippers had packed their cameras and left for a nice hotel, and the shop-owners had replaced the wooden slats over the fronts of their store, and when all those villagers who worked in Wuyuan had returned from their jobs—then Likeng returned to its senses.

The streets then filled with locals, who all knew each other, and with talk and laughter. They sat under the wooden eaves of the Shenming Pavilion at the center of town or played cards in some back alley. A puppy chased two schoolgirls screaming across a bridge, past a mother who waddles her infant around the courtyard. Fireworks go off, offerings to the ancestors, and farmers skid back into town on the backs of motor-carts, diesel engines with trailers mounted on the back, with much wailing of horns and leaping aside of pedestrians.

The canal was a black mirror, reflecting the bright flowers that sprouted from the stone bank. The white houses and their black rooftops, the cyan sky, fading to lavender in the evening, when the clouds turned pink and the schoolchildren scaled all over the Shenming Pavilion and the swallows riot in the young oak by the restaurant down the canal, where I sat on a stone stool under a trellis of loofah squashes, hanging halfway to the ground, and asked for noodle soup.

“Okay. I will tell my mom to make it. You want noodle soup, and fried egg?”

“Yeah, good. Tell your mom to make that, too.”

It was my favorite place to eat in town. I found that it helped the appetite to look the other way when they washed their greens in the canal.

I sauntered home in the twilight. By seven the whole town was dark, except for a few baijiu bars, with tapped jars of rice wine. An occasional echo of argument comes from these, and a couple walking whispers a word, the crickets sing, a child laughs, a washbasin clatters, and otherwise all is as quiet as it always was.

Hong Kong had its own rhythm.

In Kowloon, the roots of the Chinese banyans spilled out from stone planters that lined the street. We got milk teas from a stall mobbed with Muslim girls in colorful headscarves. There was a huddle of Indians out on the pavement, the men in mustaches and the women in saris, smelling of garlic and turmeric. As we walked, sucking tapioca pearls out of the bottom of the cup, Indians would cry out, “You want copy watch? No fake, copy!” The diligent cartographer could measure distances in parts of Hong Kong by these trinket touts, roughly one every half a block—go that way past four Indian watch-sellers, turn right, and after three more Indians you’ll be there.

We crossed Nathan and threaded the market lanes in the warren that exists in some form or another behind every Hong Kong thoroughfare: the neon signs, the lambent camera stores, the eateries with roast ducks hanging under the heat lamps in the window and steam geysering from the soup pot, and the Arabic stalls with flatbread and lentils and foreign aromas, always named after Ali Baba and manned by his thieves; dark stairs lead down to dungeon bars, and the American chains have all found a toe hold, 7-11 and McDonalds and even Ben & Jerry’s, as well as the European fashion brands, which do more business here than at home; but there are far more Chinese clothiers in those beaten alleys.

Old men hide themselves behind harsh words, seated and sweating around tables under the canopies, with bottles of rice beer, plates of muscles, and decks of cards. A bicycle speeds past, loaded with styrofoam crates. A Westerner shambles by, looking lost in his khaki shorts, and another is entirely fashionable, late to meet his Hong Kongese girlfriend. There is an African couple speaking in guttural hymns, and a steadfast Sikh lessoning his selectively deaf son. The packs of the turmoiled young, the exhausted adults, and the fading old are as faceless as any urban swarm, omnipresent, the sight and sound of them; their great desire is to be like the Hollywood pictures, just as the rest of China wants to be like them.

In 1997 Britain relinquished control of Hong Kong to China; yet the border stations remain, and the Hong Kongese still drive on a different side of the road, use a different currency, speak a different language, vote democratically in different elections, and for a different system of laws, and do not consider themselves Chinese. Go ahead and ask one if they are from China, and they’ll say, “No, Hong Kong!” They often ask each other, “I don’t look Chinese, do I?” Sergi once asked the proprietor of our hostel if there was a locker or somewhere he could put his valuables—“Don’t worry,” said the man, “there are no Chinese here.” The staff was in fact mostly Filipinas, as are most of the domestic servants in Hong Kong.

Yes, Sergi of Tarragona and I had crossed to Hong Kong on the same day, on different buses. We saw each other at the border station and agreed to meet at a certain hostel in Kowloon, the crowded mainland district just across Victoria Harbor from Hong Kong Island. (The British holdings here included a chunk of the mainland, along with a number of islands, granted by a forced convention in 1898. The expiry of this ninety-nine year lease marked the occasion of the island’s return to Chinese rule.)

Arriving in the city, I had no idea where I was, where I should go, or how I should get there. The bus had dropped me off in a park, one of those optimistic oases in the heart of urban canyons, populated by old and withered men; and after spinning with a sense of vertigo, I entered a 7-11. When I emerged, I had a clear idea of the currency (one beer was ten Hong Kong dollars), and had learned of the “MTS,” a sort of subway, and that the Hong Kongese spoke fluent English. So I took the MTS south a few stations and found the Mirador Mansion—which must wait for its portrait—right where it should be. On the thirteenth floor was the USA Hostel, previously called the Traveler’s Friendship, and Sergi was just checking in at the reception desk, which was a classroom desk in the hallway. The dormitory was spartan, but Hong Kong was expensive: it was either the Mirador or the Ritz.

Sergi and I had some cheap noodles at a narrow shop, and we asked mutually, “Well now what? Walk around?”

So we wandered the big city, fascinated by the lights and people, and the number of Burberry and Gucci and Zara stores, as there seemed to be a mall in every station of the MTS, in every pedestrian walkway, and in the entrance of every great building. Shopping for adornments seems to be the principle activity of the Hong Kongese, and the well-wrought style of this rich caste often made me feel shabby in comparison. Hong Kong is a black and white town: some are very rich, but there are a great many poor Chinese, Arab, Indian, and Filipino workers there. They live in shoebox rooms, ten of them crammed together, and send all their money home; yet they are too proud to accept tips or sympathy. There is little crime or violence in Hong Kong—the Triads keep things in order—though recently a poor laborer threw battery acid at the crowds of noble shoppers in the Ladies Market.

We stopped in the Fine Arts Museum, which overlooks the harbor, and saw two girls on the stringed errhu and zheng, or zither. They played airy summer melodies: the wine of a fly in a tent, the tinkle of a wind chime; and songs of the harvest, complex rhythms full of depth and work with a forward melancholy and a crescendo. There were no repetitions. The theme was a suggestion with as many variations as a river, or a human life.

Sergi and I wandered north to a narrowing district called Austin and stopped for dinner in a streetside dive, which invited us by its grimy charm, in character like the old men, in polished clothes and stained jerseys, who patroned it, sitting along a counter outside the lighted window with beers and shrimps and noodles. We shared their fit feast and age worn table, and their bright wisdom!

“Tsingtao, famous Chinese beer. Famous all over the world. O try these shrimp. Very famous.”

There was a German girl in our dormitory named Katharina, or Katha, and I was glad that she came to breakfast with Sergi and I the next morning, because she was very pretty. We crossed Victoria Harbor to the island where Hong Kong began, and Katha went to the hotel she had picked out—a little luxury for her final days in Asia—and I to the Chinese visa office to request another admittance into that country. In line I met a couple: a jovial Spaniard of Madrid named Joser and a pretty Russian of Ulan Bator, Mongolia, named Elena, and we chatted for a while. They had to stay to stay in Hong Kong an extra night to get new visas, not having realized that the city was separate from China—“Same country, different system,” as the border guard explained it—so I took them across to see the Mirabar Mansion, which the Russian did not like much.

The first floor of the Mirabar Mansion was a maze of bright white hallways, lined with shops selling all sorts of things, from repaired cameras to reeking Indian dishes, and manned by canny Parsees, sharp-eyed Mohammedans, coal-skinned Africans, and goliath Sikhs, all whispering and shouting at one another. It was their leering faces on the way to the elevator that inspired Katha to move out that morning, a story she later related to the trembling Elena.

“Do we really have to stay here?” she said skeptically.

“Come on, it’s okay!” said the Spaniard—who proclaimed in her absence, “Never date Russian girls.”

Well Katharina and I went to the Computer Centre, a tower of electronics just between the Ladies Market and the Sports Street in a district north of Kowloon where the pedestrian cannot see the sky for all the neon signs above; and there we haggled netbooks. Back on the island, we met Sergi and a friend of his, a French girl, at the tram station. There was an ancient tram line that ran up to the peak of that rocky and generally inhospitable isle; from the top one can see just how poor a location it is for a metropolis.

All the skyscrapers of Hong Kong are packed into a thumbnail of land on the western side, just across the straits of the harbor, so packed with ships that you might cross it from bow to bow as Darius did the Hellespont, from Kowloon, and more urban sprawl. What makes Hong Kong an ideal spot for a harbor was the very mountain from which we observed it: the rock shields the boats from the typhoons that bash into the southern coast of China every monsoon season.

And I was looking east, onto the South China Sea, which here flowed right out into the Pacific. I’d reached the Ocean, which even Alexander never could, and from that peak there were only a few scattered isles and atolls between me and the Pacific Coast of America.

But the journey is not over yet, and the strangest things always happen at this latter end. On returning to the hostel in Mirabar Mansion, a strange scene:

I had just sent some emails and returned to the dormitory room when Joser and Elena entered. The Russian clearly was not used to these spartan dorms, but he wanted to save money. They were arguing in a quiet way, suggestive of buried embers, and Joser was standing up with his coat on.

“I’m going to get something.”

“Don’t go.”

“Are you scared?”

“Just stay. Come on.”

Joser left, and Elena began to pace the room.

“Just a few more days. Then goodbye. If it doesn’t work when you travel, there’s no future, right?”

She confessed to me and the Brazilian windsurfer on the bunk below me all of her boyfriend’s faults. He was an alcoholic, out getting drunk that very moment, always losing money and begging his rich father for more, though she had been paying his way for the last month. Once he came back drunk with a Chinese whore, and then passed out on the bed. The whore refused to leave and was thrown out screaming by a footman. And Elena wanted confirmation.

“I should leave him, right?”

Joser came back with two tall cans of Heineken, sort of slinking in, and Elena asked, “Did you lose anything?”

“No. Well, maybe I lost something.”

Elena left for the shower, as Joser sat down and cracked his second beer. He had apparently drained the first in the elevator.

“Never date a Russian girl. It’s too hard. It’s like she’s with a whip. Driving me all day.”

He complained and told his version of how they met at a party in Miami, through a mutual friend. When Elena was back and up in her bunk, he had finished his second.

“. . . and I came out, into the middle of fucking nowhere.”

“Hey watch it man, that’s my country.”

“Sorry, ha ha.”

I found all this set-piece drama bizarre. The next morning the Brazilian remarked to Sergi, “Man, it was fucking crazy. She talked and talked, and when she went out he came in and did the same thing. It was like a play.”

I spent the next day on Lanmu Island: a long squiggle off Hong Kong, full to sinking on weekends, and on a hot day of early autumn like the present occasion, as pleasantly deserted as a county fair when finished. The shut stalls, the biking locals, the lanky trees and lackadaisical construction, all gave the impression of solitude and Caribbean peace. Old men drank beer and played cards, and I looked at the real estate postings on the way to the beach of soft and golden sand. A swim in the cool green water and a nap in the shade of the palm trees, next to gold-skinned and “romantically savage” Katha. There were four lifeguards on duty, although Katha, Sergi and I were the only sunbathers, and three of these guards were employed in sweeping the tideline with nets to pick up garbage that had been blown in by the recent typhoon.

Also marring the tropical idyll was the Hong Kong power plant, a vast industrial place on the end of a promontory, all smokestacks and pipelines—though why it was built here, and not on some rocky waste in the archipelago, is as much a mystery as its first owner. Mr. Kodori, an Iranian Jew, once boasted of owning ten per cent of Hong Kong because he owned that Lanmu plant. These days his dynasty runs the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon.

We hiked down to the southern tip and haggled at the fish market for a good meal: boiled shrimp with soya and chili, fried spring rolls, battered calamari, huge clam medallions served in the shell with rice noodles and spring onions, with rice beer and jasmine tea to complete the picture.

Katha had to leave, but Sergi and I went to another beach before the last ferry back to the mainland. Sergi received a text message from a Hong Kong girl he had met on a ferry, when he was in the disarming company of his French friend; it said: “I’m taking tomorrow off. Let’s go to the museum, then I’ll take you to Cheung Chau Island.” Sergi laughed and shook his head, then looked back at his phone. Quoth the Catalonian, “I’ll have to sleep with her.” He wrote in reply: “Museum, island, with you, sounds perfect.”

We ran to catch a late boat back.

The following day was a Tuesday, and because all the museums were free I went to see a great number of them with Katha, while Sergi was off with his Hong Kong mistress. The German and I had Hong Kong dim sum, fulfilling a dream of mine; and I said goodbye, as this was her last night in Asia. Sergi returned to the Mansion so late that I wondered if he ever would. The girl who had taken a day off work for him had also bought him lunch and dinner.

“She started to speak Chinese really quickly and I just couldn’t do anything. Man. She paid for everything, and we had a big dinner, with beer. She said, ‘If I ever come to Spain . . .” like she ever will.”

That night there were two pretty Norwegian girls in the room, and we stayed up until two, playing some loud combination of Egyptian Ratscrew and a game the Brazilian windsurfer knew, as a wild-haired Italian tried to sleep.

All my days in Hong Kong and Guangzhou were crowded from dawn to dusk with activity, because those lands are expensive and I wanted to see it all in great haste; and the next day, after this card party, I could do nothing but slink around Hong Kong island with Sergi. I said to Sergi, “I’m going to sleep tonight. Really sleep. Unless there are more Scandinavian girls in there who want to party all night.”

“Yes,” said the Catalonian, who flew to Tokyo the next day, and his excitement for Japan peered out from his exhaustion like a child through the bedsheets of a fort,—“I am tired, but if there are Scandinavian girls we will stay up. Play some music, light some candles, put, you know, a color on the light.”

“Mood lighting?”

“Yes. Mood lighting. We will stay up all night.”

“We can teach them some card games.”

“If there are Scandinavian girls I will stay up. If there are any girls.”

But there was only the wild-haired Italian, who slept all that day.

And then I returned to China: to Guangzhou, where I stayed a night in the vacant apartment of a CouchSurfer, who was out of town but left her key in a secret place. It was a normal Chinese apartment: there was one room, with steep red stairs leading up to a private loft, and a bathroom tucked away to one side of the kitchen, which consisted, like most Asian kitchens, of a rice cooker and a sink. There was also a bookshelf, an old TV, and cute knickknacks that issued a homey feel. Goldfish shared a glass bowl with a plant on the windowsill. Strange art had been printed and posted on the walls, and on the stairway and ceiling, too. In one corner a yellow armchair held my prepared bedding. On top of the pile: a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, bookmarked by a Starbucks receipt, with a Keats verse handwritten in the back:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”―that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I spent the night on the floor, and in the morning folded the sheets, hid the key, and departed without ever seeing my beneficent hostess, back into the wild streets of Guangzhou: to shuffle among the hoi polloi of the sidewalk, race in and out of the open subway doors, weave through traffic, fight for restaurant seats, and to show no mercy in such matters.

Boarding the train out of Guangzhou, on my way north to Jiangxi and this garret in Xiao Likeng, I became conscious of the reason for all this human frenzy. There were four sections of the warehouse where the throngs waited for long distance trains, and each had four rows of seats with four doors at the end. These were opened one at a time, and the people rushed forward, crowding in on each other, filling every available gap with themselves, their children, and their toe-crushing roller-bags; and then the gate would be closed and the next row allowed to charge into the breach.

I was watching this at my ease when the guard came over, hurrying me forward with waving hands. “Train, train,” he said, and I replied, “Don’t worry.” I hate waiting in lines, so I went forward late and found my gate had already been sealed. A sweeper lady considered me dispassionately over the padlock as I hopped over the row of seats and entered the parallel row, where the masses were then filing through the door.

Part of that mob, one molecule in its compactness, I saw how imperative it was to move that way. There were too many people around China for organized queues and leisurely boarding. There would be no movement without this rude and wild way, this herd migration. The organized chaos of the East Guangzhou Railway Station resembled those close-ups of molecular activity and blood veins that we see in biology, and it was not even the most crowded railway station in the city, nor comparable to the greatest one in Asia―the Victoria Terminus of Bombay, which could be, in retrospect, considered an English expression of the end of the world.

Sharp wind, towering sky, apes howling mournfully;
Untouched island, white sand, birds flying in circles.
Infinite forest, bleakly shedding leaf after leaf;
Inexhaustible river, rolling on wave after wave.
Through a thousand miles of melancholy autumn, I travel;
Carrying a hundred years of sickness, I climb to this terrace.
Hardship and bitter regret have frosted my temples—
And what torments me most? Giving up wine!
—Dou Fu (712-700), “View From A Height”

It was far too early for such effort, but Mama Naxi was screaming about the seven o’clock departure time, which did not leave much time to spare. Our bags packed and in the foyer, Sergi bought the bus tickets while I went out to get bāozi and yak’s milk from down the lane. Ana of Bogotá was also attached to our unit, but she could manage herself and did not think much of Chinese breakfast.

Of Mama’s three servants, Number Three was a young man from Japan, always in an apron, who spoke with a Sibylline twist of accent, a voice of an old kung-fu master, halfway between wisdom and insanity, with a nonchalance that made him the Stubb of Mama’s three mates. He was the house cook, and Mama Naxi was always berating him over some matter or another. Presently, in the midst of hugging her departing guests, she shouted at him to get going, and Number Three shepherded the dozen travelers gathered in the entrance out toward the southern bus station. Normally Mama arranged a minibus to take her lodgers along, but there was a strike going on and the strikers had attacked a few drivers who continued to run tourists around.

As the bus took about an hour to arrive, I have some time to introduce the destination: Tiger Leaping Gorge lay in the mountains just north of Lijiang, along the first stirrings of the Yangtze River, the longest river in Asia, which runs parallel with the Irrawaddy and Mekong until a miraculous 180 degree bend around a lucky mound of rock just south of here, from whence it curves off towards the East China Sea. The river, at the entrance to the gorge, was a snaking, muddy current between high slopes, narrowing upstream until it cut like a knife through the granite substrata of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and Haba Snow Mountain, their misty citadels high above. The locals called the Yangtze the Jīnshā Jiāng, the Golden Sands River, and they call the gorge after a legend of a tiger who leaped across the gorge at its narrowest point to escape from a pursuant hunter.

The high path traversing the gorge began in sleepy Qiao Tou, and most people take a minibus back from the end along a low road at the base to Qiao Tou, and from there back to Lijiang or on north to Shangri-la; but Sergi had arrayed around him several other hikers—Anna, myself, a Polish couple, Michal and Paulina, and two Flemish girls named Meike and Neik—who wanted to hire a van to take the back roads, the old winding highways, directly from the end of the trail and all the way to Shangri-la, after spending a night at a hostelry up on the mountain. The more people involved the longer it takes to negotiate a fair deal, even if the price ends up being lower in the end, and our diplomacy dragged on and on: Ana arguing in Chinese with the girl at Jane’s Guesthouse over the price of the van and the transport of our seven bags. At one point I suggested, “We could hitchhike to Shangri-la,” and laughed aloud at what circumstances had allowed me to say it.

Eventually we agreed on a price and paid it, packed day bags and bought water for the trip, and set off eagerly down the road and up the high path along Haba Snow Mountain on the west side of the gorge. At most intersections and turns there was an old Chinese gentleman sitting under a tree who would point one way or another to tell us where to go, though we never paid anyone for this service. (Actually the park was supposed to be closed at that time of year, but some locals kept the trail up and the old woman they set at the entrance to ask for ten kwai was too adorable to refuse. Some American had taught her to say, “Dangerous,” which she cried at us when we got too close to the edge.) There was also a horseman who followed us and would point the way when we looked back to him, and offer occasionally the use of his horse.

This became more and more appealing with each switchback, as the high path went winding and rising above and along the Yangtze, a brown ribbon in a deep valley of green slopes, roads on either side. Soon the far road left off, and the far hill became an imposing cliff face, crenelated ridges buttressed by blade-edged formations and rife with green and cloaked in mist.

The Jade Dragon Snow Mountain grew more and more scenic as we went along, though we were often looking down at the ground up which we trudged, for from the Nuoyu Village we began the Twenty Eight Bends, and its endurance test of steep climbs and rocky stairs, winding back and forth above the treeline, in numbers sure to exceed eight-and-twenty. Legs tired, our lively conversation dimmed, and we took far fewer pictures. We stopped part of the way up at a hut selling cold drinks, snacks, satchets of ganja and baskets of mushrooms, which the woman would scream about. “I think she’s a cousin of Mama Naxi,” I said. Near the top there was a panoramic promontory, standing there before revetments of stone a mile high, curtained in cloud, with the Yangzi invisible below us—what a sight!

There were some more steps to climb, and after we had passed the peak of our exhaustion, we climbed back down from it. We sat down, Sergi and Ana and I, and waited for the others to catch up. Sergi had a GPS that declared that we were at 2662 meters, the highest the trail went, to our great rejoicing. (The device also told our walking speed and rest time, announced to significantly less excitement.) Ana was trekking with a purse full of things, and Michal the Pole took a beer out of his and cracked it for the top of the world. We all passed around what we had, including the beer.

It was two hours from there through a forested strand of mountain to the Tea-Horse Inn, where we had a lunch of noodles and beer. The hour trek from there to the Halfway Guesthouse (which, in conversation, I could not help but call the Halfway House) was the most awe-inspiring in the scenic trip. The trail was an even shelf, a yard across, winding along the cliff face, with steep slopes below and that great wall across the gorge, far to wide here for any to leap.

The Halfway House was set above a tile-roofed village and was a square hall, a few stories high, with a rooftop terrace and a good kitchen. It was a little more than halfway along our route, with only a few hours left to hike the next day, and most of that downhill; but we wanted to stay in the gorge because it was beautiful. Our dormitories were on a lower floor, set in the cliff, and the most interesting feature was the toilets—“scenic” stalls with a door and two walls and one open space, looking out on the vastness of the gorge to the greatness of nature. What better time is there to contemplate empty spaces?

There was a crowd of people on the terrace, when I went up there after taking a shower and getting a bottle of rice beer. Twenty-four people were staying that night in the Halfway House (there had been 64 the night before and 78 the night before that), and most of them came up to the roof. There was a Dutch family, sitting around a stump table, with two German girls and two Polish ones, whom I had met on the road. The half-Venezuelan father of the clan was a businessman with Shell, who had been working in Beijing for over a year on an environmental project. He laughed when I asked about working with the Chinese, as did his son and daughter, who I expect have heard the complaints before.

“It’s two steps forward, three steps back with the Chinese. It’s always very difficult. The system here is very hierarchic, very bureaucratic. Sometimes a Chinese comes to me, ‘My boss says we cannot do it,’ and I say, ‘Well tell him why we have to do it.’ He gets this look and says, ‘But the boss said—it’s already decided.’ ”

“The emperor speaks, the minister obeys,” I said, quoting an old dynastic saying.

The Dutchman said that everything in China is someone else’s problem, especially with the environment. The Chinese want and appreciate a clean environment, but they expect someone else to clean, care, and pay for it—the people and the companies look to the government, the government to the international agencies.

I told him a story I had heard, “This Western girl was walking in a nature park with a Chinese guy, and he was saying, ‘Don’t go to such-and-such a place, it is so dirty, garbage everywhere,’ and as he said this he was unwrapping a candy bar and throwing the wrapper into the bushes. They don’t consider an individual impact.”

He agreed and added that there is no independence among the Chinese, and quite a lot of face-saving sweet talk that confuses formal business. “They’re very shrewd businessmen,” he concluded.

Now Ana studied business in Hong Kong University, where her experience was much different—residing with a local family or in the campus dormitories, she played witness to Chinese relationships and personalities. “People say the Chinese are cold,” she said, “but they are not cold. They just don’t show their affection so publicly. But they are very close, and friendships and relationships are very important to them.” In the dorms, she said, best friends would sleep five to a room in a row of mattresses and slumber party giggles, rather than alone in their own bed. Boyfriends and girlfriends did everything together.

A lot of us moved downstairs when it began to drizzle, to a big-windowed hall; and as Constance of Germany told of her childhood, raised in Argentina, and the orphanage she missed in Bolivia, and Kasia of Poland described the friends from Shanghai she had made during an exchange program to a Finnish school, and Michal told of cheap drinks and long nights in Granada, and Ana of her small French town where it all closed at seven, before turning to speak Japanese with the man from Chiba—as these topics went round, I had to lean back and think, “I’ll miss this.” Home suddenly seemed so provincial, next to these wilds of Yunnan that managed to gather such diverse folk.

And oh, how great the wider world! In the morning I could look out the window on ribbons and curtains of clouds crossing the jagged cliff face of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain on the far side of the gorge. More clouds billowed up out of the canyon, and the river was louder than the soft rainfall, which had ceased by the time we finished our breakfast and packed our things. The trail was incredible—atemberaubend, to borrow a German phrase—here a cut shelf again, weaving back and forth around the headlands that ran out towards the far wall, and beneath rock faces and across streaming waterfalls. Clouds from below washed over us like waves, then cleared the way for pristine views down and across the gorge.

After some time the way sloped up, then down on more switchbacks, wet with streaming rainfall. And it was after two hours, covering ten kilometers, that we came down a last stretch of gravel road to Tina’s Guesthouse, where waited our bags, our van, and the impatient driver. The latter had sent Ana a text message at eight that morning, “I am here,” but we left the Halfway House at nine. At Tina’s, some wanted to hike down into the gorge to see the pools and waterfalls, a two hour venture; and as the Germans and Poles did this, the Belgians, Catalan, Colombian, and I stayed, preferring, if we had to make a choice, to eat lunch. There was a big group of Spaniards there, eating buckets of rice with their shirts off, who squawked and chicken-winged their elbows. “I like chicken. You better watch out.” They went on joking and laughing about one thing or another as we talked of Chinese bigotry and other serious matters.

It is an insult to tell a Hong Kongese, “You are very beautiful, like a Filipina,” because “they are the servants.” One would also do well to avoid saying they look Chinese, for they despise the mainlanders. They also think very highly of light skin.

“Once I came back from the beach,” said Ana, in her measured and accented English, “and I was very tan. I had turned black. In Colombia everyone is like this, but in China it is not done. When I came home, my host mother was so upset. She was like, ‘Oh Ana, what have you done! You are so dark! Why would you do this?’ They try to keep their skin as white as possible.”

We talked and talked, and Sergi was saying that he had to call home for some festival, which caused me think of something.

“Oh . . . I forgot my mom’s birthday.”

“When was it?”

“You did?”

“July.”

“Oh that’s bad! Your mother!”

“Yes, this is bad.”

“I forgot my mother’s birthday,” said Ana, “in July as well. She did not speak to me for a week. She is very sensitive.”

“You’re in trouble!”

“Have you talked to her since her birthday?” someone asked me.

“Yeah, she didn’t say anything. She’s too nice to. Man, I feel bad.”

For the next several days those girls in the group would remind me, “Have you called your mother yet?”

Anyway, when the seven of us—that is, Sergi, Ana, Neik and Meike of Belgium, Michal and Paulina of Poland, and myself—finally got into the van, the driver was in such a mood to blast off down the brain-jostling dirt road, sometimes paved and sometimes not. He ignored us entirely for the Chinese pop songs on the radio, incongruous with his gruff appearance, which reminded me of a recovering alcoholic. He stopped to buy water and Chinese Red Bull, a variant that would be illegal in America and Europe for all its extra caffeine, and then continued through the wide valley at the end of Tiger Leaping Gorge and up into the hills beyond.

The Chinese drive recklessly, inattentively, even incompetently—going too slow or far too fast, always weaving about and driving in the wrong lane, passing on blind corners, and they are unable to make a U-turn, to park, or even to pull into a driveway without first stalling at an awkward angle in the middle of the road. They seem to follow the lack of personal responsibility even on the highway, for they do as they please and anticipate that everyone else, be they pedestrians or semi-trucks, will make way; and as pedestrians and semi-truck drivers follow this credo of nonchalance just as much as the average driver, I am amazed that there are not more fatalities on Chinese highways. Our driver was merely speeding, though as our road followed cliff faces this made for a harrowing ride. We had only one close call, coming down from the mountains on a narrow road, when a big truck confronted us after we rounded a bend in the wrong lane, nearly running us off the road, through the line of trees, and down into a precipice. I could only stare at the driver after the wheels grazed the dirt (I was in the passenger seat, on account of my height), but he looked entirely unfazed and unimpressed by our narrow survival.

At long last the van came into a wide, green valley, with black pigs and cattle and stout brown horses. The sparse houses were constructed in a style I had never seen before: each two-story building had three stone walls, slightly-slanted like a fortress, and one wooden facade, opening onto a courtyard framed by mud-brick walls with grass growing on the top. Out there amid the highland plains life seemed the same as it had always been. The town of Zhongdian, at the center of the valley, had changed appreciably ever since its name was changed to Shangri-La to attract tourists and adventurers: from a small Tibetan border town to a broad expanse of new malls and hotels, vaguely Tibetan in certain aspects, in the way that Caesar’s Palace in Vegas is vaguely Roman.

All this sprawl encroaches, like leprosy, on a methodically manicured Old Town of cobbled streets, queerly named stores, and warm wooden inns. The proprietor of one of them, the Harmony Inn, met us at the entrance to the Old Town, beyond which no cars were permitted. She was a slim, serious, dark-skinned young Tibetan woman, in jeans and a plaid shirt, trailed closely by her golden-furred dog Fei-Fei (Fei means “fat” or perhaps “husky” in Chinese), a huge and gentle beast, descendant of the man-eaters bred by Tibetan mountaineers in darker days.

Her inn, just up the hill from the market square, on a wonderful street of lanterns and wooden eaves, began in a wide common room of dark wood. There were red couches and tables and a bookshelf and a wooden bar, arranged around a long wood-burning stove set on a hearth of bricks. There was always a pot of water set there, and the woman often fried mushrooms on it and later dried them and put them in alcohol. Fei-Fei sprawled next to the door, and a majestic white cat occupied his own chair near the fire. The lights hung low, cased in yellow shades, and the whole room was warm and adventurous—and if this has failed to evoke anything in you Reader, simply imagine that Nepali bar from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and you won’t be far off. Up the narrow wooden stair was a dormitory of beds lined up against a window over the street. Loud Irish drinking music poured incessantly from a pub across that street, where three or, at the most, four men sat drinking.

After claiming a bed, I met some travelers downstairs and asked them about the local restaurants, especially about where I could find Tibetan momos, or dumplings, and noodle soup. Two Hollanders, Belle and Ruben, who had been acquaintances through a friend before taking this trip together and were now entirely sick of one another, and an English fellow named Evan accepted an invitation to join we seven for dinner, but ten is such an ungainly number.

With no clear leader, there was much prevarication in front of each and every restaurant, as we toiled for a lengthy time to decide on one. I wondered if we would check every place in town. Eventually, out of mutual frustration, we settled on a restaurant and Ana helped everyone to order a number of dishes to share, including momos. It was an hour before we saw any trace of them, as the one young woman working there bustled around the place. In the meantime, Ana led the conversation with a well-mannered hand, effortlessly drawing stories and dialogs out of her guests, forgetting none of them and exercising her wonderful memory on each, and speaking in such a way, with her Colombian accent and cosmopolitan cool, that it was impossible not to listen. I was very impressed, because Americans, though familiar with the barbecue, have no idea of how to run a dinner party.

The next day, the old band of seven rented bicycles and pedaled north to Shangri-La’s principle attraction, the Ganden Sumtseling Gompa, or Monastery. The three mile ride there, due to Chinese driving skills, which remind me constantly of that screaming truck driver in Raising Arizona, and also of my father’s hurried manner of driving when he has to go to the bathroom, though when the Chinese are in a hurry they drive far more frantically—those driving skills made our ride a thrilling one. From the main gate we rode up over a hill, then down into a grassy valley and around the manicured swamp called Lamuyancuo Lake, on a roughly cobbled road that led to the high hill where the monastery had stood for 300 years. It was shelled by the People’s Liberation Army during the reign of Mao (I think Americans should be familiar with that manner of delivering freedom to a people), and under Deng Xiaoping was reopened as a tourist attraction, though perhaps “Tibetan zoo” would be a more fitting term. Most of the monks moved out to smaller cloisters, and now there are as many soldiers in Songzanlin as Buddhists.

The Chinese were, when I visited, rebuilding the main hall, which peaks the steep hill between two lesser temples. Residences and other shrines ran down the hill to the wall that ringed the base. We parked our bikes outside this and entered the gate, viewing temples on our way up the central stair, wondering at the indecipherable Tibetan pantheon, with all its demons and symbols, and marveling at the fortress-like architecture. By the time we neared the top, we were entirely exhausted by the thin mountain air, and we bought drinks from a Tibetan cantina before moving on to the platforms, stone passageways, and great temples atop the hill.

The few monks I saw either helped with construction or, if they were older, napped in the temples next to cardboard boxes filled with money thrown in by Chinese tourists, who treat the monks as part of the exhibit and photograph them extensively. All the statues of deities and lamas were covered in yuan banknotes, and there were more stuffed into the mouths of dragons or behind the picture frame of the Wheel of Life. Some Chinese tourists prayed before them, and then stuffed their pockets with alms.

When we had explored all the upper temples, we collapsed back down the stairs and unlocked our bikes. We took them around the lake and back up the hill, then coasted down into town. A funny thing happened when we went to eat. Starving, we stopped in the first place we saw, which was a small café, and Ana ordered seven bowls of whatever the guy in the corner was having. The old Chinese woman who owned the place stood petrified for half a minute, staring at these seven lăowài as if at as many monsters, then fled to the kitchen to get her daughter, who took our order with much confusion.

There was more confusion at dinner time, where the waiters argued endlessly with poor Ana about how quickly it would take them to make our dumplings, and the drunk Chinese at the table nearby had something to say, as well. I turned to Sergi and said, “How is it that we, knowing no Chinese, can order easier than Ana, who is fluent?” It was true—I might go into any restaurant, point at a few things, say the word for pork and rice, and then say, “Correct, correct, correct,” and eat whatever came out from the kitchen; while Ana would have to endure an endless series of protests and explanations and offers of drinks and all sorts of things before finally receiving her food. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Back at the inn, I was looking in my journal and realized that I had only been in China ten days. I told this to Sergi, who said, “No way man, it’s impossible,” for with all that had happened, all the people we had met, and all we had learned, it seemed as if a month had gone by. There were fireworks that same night. We watched them from the porch and the street, and the innkeeper told us that they were for Chinese Valentine’s Day. The booming show went on and on, until the colored phosphorescence was blooming ghostly through the smoke of all of ten minutes’ barrage. “Imagine what it is like in Beijing or Shanghai,” said Michal. Sergi joked, “They have fireworks because we are leaving tomorrow.”

I mentioned before in this chronicle that I have been in the habit of concealing the length of my trip from other travelers—when asked, “How long are you traveling?” I say how much more I have to go. Sometimes I say one year, which does not cover it all, for when I was in Shangri-La it had been one year, seven months, and two weeks since I waved goodbye and boarded a plane to London. But that is an absurd length of time to be traveling, to live out of a backpack off the cheap greasy fare of quick diners, with fleeting friendships and too many farewells.

Realizing this, not with the revelation of the mystic but in the slow humbling of some belligerent who sees that all his arguing is only making an ass of himself, I had cut Cambodia and Vietnam out from the itinerary, and when called to make further excursions here in China, I refused them. All my friends would go north into the mountains, a four-day journey by bus along precipitous tracks overlooking the great peaks of eastern Tibet, stopping for the night in towns with Tibetan names and ways, all the way to Sichuan, a land of four rivers, famed for spicy food and beautiful girls. I waited outside the bus station with the bikes as they purchased their tickets. I would go back south through Yunnan to Kunming, and from there to the dragon-back hills of Guanxi. I waited without sadness: to see it all is impossible, and you must tear up all the roots even to try.

My choice required many farewells, taken in the hall of the guesthouse at an early hour. While we waited for the others, Neik explained the strange dream she had had: “I dreamed you all came to my village in Belgium, to visit, and my mother made spaghetti, but it was not spicy. It was very plain. So I added tons of Tabasco, because that’s what we are used to.”

“I dreamed a funny thing,” said Ana,—“I went to a big party in a house between Colombia and Venezuela. The house was underground. There were many people there, but it was secret, because Chavez does not allow this kind of thing. Everyone was having a good time, and then, all of a sudden, Chavez came. People were like, ‘Oh no! Chavez!’ But Chavez started to sing and he joined the party. Then the Chinese police came to break it up. People were running everywhere and hiding in cabinets. Chavez had disappeared. The police started saying, ‘Who speaks Chinese?’ and I was like, ‘Oh no!’ It was a very funny dream.”

I laughed and said goodbye to them all, kissed the girls on the cheek, shared with Sergi a heterosexual embrace, and went back to bed. I was alone once more.

Looking south from the Harmony Inn there rose a steep hill, topped with a chörten or Tibetan stupa. In the mornings a monk sat under the great Buddha statue within, wrapped up in a maroon blanket and chanting mantras from deep in his throat. The old faithful of Zhongdian prayed before the statue and circled round the building. The men walked with dignity, and the woman wore traditional Tibetan garb: a maroon vest and blue apron worn over black smock with white cuffs, with a magenta turban, open over the skull in the Chinese style.

At night, in the square beneath the stupa, women in the same attire, as well as girls in Western dress and men and children, would gather to dance in a great circle, which shimmered with their waving arms and spun as they walked or twisted this way and that in unison. The movements repeated, though the song made them faster and faster up till the end, and each person danced alone—an American square dance made round. A handful of maniacs around the edges danced wildly, but in the center they were all skilled, for they did this every evening. There must have been five hundred people in the circle on the nights when I saw it.

I went with Ruben the Dutchman, Evan the Englishman, and Dave, once an Islander but now an Australian, and an enthusiast of cameras and cycling, and we danced at least one dance in that great circle of Tibetans. We found the rhythm and learned the steps by watching the locals, and at the end at least looked no more foolish than when we had begun. Dave had a peculiar story: he was on a cycling trip measured in years, crossing the entire Himalayas from Yunnan through Tibet, Burma, Assam, Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal, Kashmir, and Pakistan, asking locals and scholars what they knew of Shambhalah, the Himalayan paradise of Tibetan legend—as opposed to the fictive Shangri-La of 1933’s bestselling novel, Lost Horizon. Having reviewed cameras for an Australian magazine, both Canon and Ricoh sent Dave new models to try in his trip, and he was looking for good newsstand stories along the way, such as the new solar farm outside Kunming, though the money never interested him.

“For a while I wanted to buy land in Australia,” he told me as we had Western breakfast at Noah’s one morning, “but how stupid is that? How can you just say, ‘I own this,’ when anyone can walk on it or look at it. Now I think I’ll get a caravan, just to live where I want.”

And I thought I had known adventure!

I left Shangri-La by bus, and though on that day I got no further than Lijiang, on the next I arrived in the rural town of Shaxi, which I had wanted to visit. Like Lijiang, Shaxi’s old architecture was preserved, though by a European agency rather than some Chinese tourism bureau, so that in Shaxi one could see an old village without the souvenir stalls and hassling crowds that normally accompany Chinese antiquities. The Chinese tourists did not care for Shaxi, where there were no stores to shop or nightclubs to be seen drinking beer in, and the villagers were quite happy to go on living as they always had.

Shaxi was a small town in a wide, green valley. The new buildings were constructed in the old style, the old buildings maintained by new techniques. By the river the walls were low and tiled along the top, and in a quadrangle of a courtyard two wood-carved demons sat in scowling sentinel outside the wide front of the temple. Narrow and romantic lanes led off in all directions, and round openings led to rock gardens with a sparse aesthetic largely lost to the rest of crowded China.

The day I arrived happened to be the day of the market. Nearby farms brought in their goods—fresh-picked oranges, apples, pears, grapes, pomegranates, and watermelon; green onions, winter peas, fat tomatoes, and long, skinny eggplants and radishes; spicy chili peppers and mouth-numbing Sichuan ones; pork heads and haunches and pan-fried sausages; and buckets and jugs of peanut and sunflower oil—and the traders had their stalls with knock-off clothes, plastic jewelry, cowboy hats and fedoras, plastic containers, soap and cosmetics, and cheap Chinese factory shoes. The street between was crowded as it could be. Women wore baskets on their heads, and mothers treated their children to toys and snacks. The children who were not walking back from school with a few books embraced were chasing dogs down the street. Old musicians roamed the street with their instruments in cloth sacks, making for a funeral, and peasant women in bright costume led donkeys back out into the country with market goods and gas cannisters lashed onto the beasts’ backs. The women pursed their lips and wore sneakers under their gypsy skirts. Motorbikes, too, rolled through the crowd, and tuk-tuks roared off from the perimeter, and there was a sound of hammering and music and haggling. Sunglasses were cheap, umbrellas expensive, in those days preceding autumn.

The cookhouses steamed with custom, and there were buckets of dirty dishes in dirty water out front. Teens smoked sullenly under a brick wall. One child squatted with her pants down in front of her mother’s stall, obedient to nature if disobedient to her screaming parent. A boy showed an old grandmother the plastic watch he had received. A mother and son took off laughing from the cantankerous old popcorn vendor, who scowled after them. Another old woman, wet-voiced with one tooth and a blue shawl, sold fake banknotes with the faces of Qing emperors on them, and cardboard shoes and paper suits, to be burned for the ancestors; and she had joss sticks of all sizes, from pencil-thin to big as your arm. A clothes merchant in mismatched Western formal wear announced prices over a headset and speaker that he wore, before dropping his umbrella and packing up the store.

By five, everything was gone.

I wandered the town and entered a gathering in a courtyard off a back alley, where all sorts of people were gathered around makeshift tables with bowls of food and bottles of báijiǔ rice wine, as the old musicians I had seen in the street were up playing the wining peasant tunes of rural China. I soon found myself, by virtue of Chinese hospitality, with a bench, a cigarette, a cup of tea and a glass of báijiǔ, and I refused offers for dinner. Some women were wearing white turbans and string belts, some men chef hats and the same. I asked the drunk who had served me wine about these, through hand signs, and he indicated that they were children of the man who had died, drawing my attention to the coffin in a recess in the wall, which I had not noticed before. There was a picture of an old man, and several old women knelt on the floor, rocking with grief. Everyone else was in excellent spirits.

I spoke with one of the dead man’s daughters, who was an art teacher in a nearby village and spoke some English. I asked about the old men playing the old instruments, and she said, “Only old men can play. No young people learn this. It is not good anymore.”

The next morning, two dozen white-turbaned women went wailing down the street, dangling all over each other in the midst of their histrionics. Then came the troupe of musicians, fiddlers with their instruments on their waist and some finger-pickers and a flutist. The sons in their hats bore out a sort of effigy and more carried the coffin, caparisoned in streamers. Why does a coffin look so much smaller than a man? Children threw crackling ribbons of fireworks, and there was great noise and tumult until the thing had passed.

It was a suitably gray day, though I thought the rain would hold off for whatever ceremony the mourners had planned. I ate noodle soup for breakfast and then strolled around the river and the old courtyards and considered my options. To get to Guilin I had to go through Kunming, a long way away, and thought the best way was to go through Dali. To get there, I packed my bag and walked out of town to the road, checked my compass, then walked along in the direction I thought proper. O great highway, open thy arms to receive me!

China is here, Jack Burton.
What does that mean, China is here? I don’t even know what the hell that means.
―Big Trouble In Little China

Ah China―land of legend! In the halls of cultural memory its collection appears: the Great Wall scribed in elegant lines on a silk panorama, a panda in a bamboo cage, an elegant porcelain tea set, a helter-skelter movie poster of Bruce Lee, and perhaps a portrait of Mao Zedong as well. Emperors, armies, silk roads, and jade wonders!

The traveler expects romance from China, seeks misted mountains and crowded alleyways, a sophisticated culture entirely different and on the other side of the world from home―and the quixotic strength of my romance will turn China into what I seek of it. This is the setting for the penultimate chapters of my adventure.

Mohan did not appear very whimsical, though the trip to that border town had been—such is often the case in life and travel. The bus there was full, so Sergi and I hitched a ride with a bus full of Laotian silver merchants, the back packed with their merchandise, on their way to a market in Mohan. We officially entered China at that pleasant station, where you rate the official passport stamper, and a friendly officer knows English and some Español.

Boten on the Laotian border was a city of thatched bamboo houses and dirt alleys, with children and dogs rolling about in the gutter. But crossing a line on the map, suddenly the buildings were gleaming new, tall and white and factory-made, with blue tile roofs that curved in the Chinese fashion, on freshly-paved streets, where well-lit stores stocked with the mass-produced crud of an industrial nation.

I practiced my Chinese, “Duo shao tian?” How much is it? I intended to learn as much Chinese as I could, and my lessons began that morning with the phrases a girl had written down for me in Luang Prabang. I asked how much is it to Meng-la, as we organized transportation with two Japanese, from Kobe and Kufu.

This southernmost province was Yunnan, a land of mountains and hills, much more temperate than bordering Tibet. The highway north was new, and the hills had been carved away or tunneled through to accommodate it, some of the tunnels miles in length. We passed through country towns: ocher houses with dark roofs, slanting out at the corners, and a ridge running along the top with two up-curved ends like horns.

Reaching Meng-la, the bus rounded several palatial hotels newly sprung south of town, in strange and outmoded designs, one vast in red and gold. The city center was sparkling and western on its main drag, clean and new, though I expect most of the structures were seedy within, and the alleyways certainly were—wet stone and refuse and ruffians in narrow canyons of decrepit buildings—but we found the northern bus station alright. The Japanese left for Jinghong; Sergi and I would go to Luchun the following morning, and to the Yuanyang rice paddies from there: a short detour on the way to Kunming.

Language made China a difficult country to travel. Mandarin, the national language, has four tones to it—high, rising, falling-rising, and falling—so that a phrase like ma can be pronounced four different ways to mean four different things. It is a clipped and guttural tongue of trade, much more concise than the Western languages, and much easier to shout in a market. As for my first day attempts at it, most Chinese could not understand my pronunciation of phrases or place.

The poor locals, for whom helping a foreigner was a matter of honor, could only look perplexed and speak right back in Chinese. Sometimes they would speak slowly, or try to write out characters on a piece of paper or even on the palm of my hand. I often resorted to undignified charades or to drawing pictures in a notepad, and the Chinese endured this in good humor. The Chinese word for one such as myself, or the most commonly used word, is lăowài, meaning “venerable foreigner.” The prefix lăo is also used in lăozī, meaning “teacher” or “old master,” and in lăoshu or rat (literally “old mouse”).

Written Chinese is a different language entirely. Each character represents not a spoken sound, but an artistic depiction of an idea. Witness the Chinese characters for their own nation: 中国 , Zhōngguó, Middle Country, the first a bisected box to show “middle,” the second the character for land with a border around it to mean “nation.” Put a sign for person over the top and that same character means “king.”

Reading Chinese is not like reading this English text, sounding out all the transcribed noises of the mouth; rather, it is like following a story set in art: an art of elegant pictographs, of stroke order, precision, and calligraphic flourishes. One who can write Chinese can paint, and one who can read Chinese does not necessarily speak zhōngguó-huá.

The Japanese travelers I met were getting around by writing out the kanji characters for bus station or chicken fried rice and following the pointed signs, and they said they could read about seventy per cent of something written in Chinese. 中国 means the same thing whether the Reader says aloud China or Zhōngguó or Chūgoku or Sredínnoye Tsárstvo or Empire du Milieu. Within China, a man from Beijing and a man from Guangzhou, though they could not have a conversation, could share the same newspaper—and I could pick it up as well, if I only knew four-thousand characters.

Among the most difficult elements are the four character sentences―the characters literally mean something about animals or nature, but have implied aphorisms, such as “different roads all reach the same end” (殊途同归 ) or “when the tide goes out the rocks are revealed” ( 水落石出), which you simply must have memorized.

In their great tread backwards, the communists tried to replace over two-thousand characters with much simpler variants, to improve literacy among those who had no time for the noble old arts—“like trimming the foot to fit the shoe” (削足适履 ).Taiwan and Hong Kong waved off the regressive effort, and these days, thanks to Chinese cultural narcissism, the complex characters are returning to the mainland.

Anyway, everyone in Meng-la would spite all these barriers in their great wanting to help this lăowài. One man with a wispy beard and a good grasp of English helped Sergi and I procure tickets to Luchun, and we let him show us a friend’s hotel, where we found a dirty room with two beds near the bus station for 30 kwai ($4). Looking in the bathroom with its squat toilet I said, “Hey there’s porn in here.” The same nude woman beamed out from all four walls. No mere poster, these shapely quadruplets, but a design glazed into the very tiles.

Leaving our porcelain brides, Sergi and I went out to wander the town. We ordered lunch by pointing at vegetables and praying, and later inspected the market—stalls of clothes, soap, incense, meat, and dusty vegetables laid out on blankets in what looked like an airplane hangar—as the locals joked and laughed and tried bare English phrases; they animated pig legs and ran them around the butcher’s table, and the old men slapped the wooden pieces together as they played at Chinese chess—and I was overcome with such a feeling of wonderment, because this was real and not some act for tourists like in Thailand, because this culture ran so deep I would never be able to know it all, and we were the only lăowài for miles.

This was real travel!

China is a nation apart from the world. The Chinese have always called their land Zhongguo, “Middle Kingdom,” because of its central preeminence on earth. Other countries radiate out like the petals of a lotus flower, and the Middle Kingdom exerts an authority proportional to proximity. “From the edge of the sky to the ends of the earth,” quoth Voyager Zheng He, “there are none who have not become subjects and slaves.”

This is the way that China fancies the world, and there is one other thing the Reader should know about it: this fancy of the Middle Kingdom is, and always has been, make-believe. When the Ming Emperor dispatched Voyager Zheng He across the southern seas with the fleet of China supreme, the mission was not to conquer or even discover the world.

(Zheng He may have even reached British Columbia, planted a flag, and sailed away from that irrelevant outland, a century before Columbus the idiot thought the Caribbean was Indonesia. It took Amerigo Vespucci of Florence to realize the discovery of the New World, a German map-maker to name it, and the religious plagues of Europe to populate it. The Chinese realized what it was immediately, but they did not care one way or another for that empty barbarian land.)

Voyager Zheng He sailed into the ports of Zanzibar and Ceylon and staged impressive parades with his great army―not unfamiliar to any spectator of the 2008 Olympic Games or attendant to the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai―then he requested a certificate of auspicious submission to the Emperor, without obligations, other than a role in the celestial mummery of China. The Emperor of China received the traders of Japan, Korea, and Persia as emissaries of subservient nations. Their trade goods were called tribute, and the merchants were given “rewards” in equal measure to bring back home to loyal benefactors. Their commerce became another pageant of vassalage.

So the student of history sees that China does not care an ounce for anything other than China. Allay your fears―there is no such thing as the Red Threat!

Also observe the most important thing in China: Mianzi, Face. The greatest injury is not moral sin but public shame. A malicious action is not wrong as long as nobody knows about it. Revenge must come subtly, the forceful hand hidden by a silk glove, and that makes it acceptable. Defeat must be concealed and victory proclaimed. This ethic of appearances applies as much to the lowest guttersnipe in Chongqing as the grandest maneuvers of the People’s Republic.

It sounds unscrupulous, to use the least condemning word, but I urge the Reader not to be so quick to judge this foreign perspective as barbarism. In essence it is the American Dream: if you act like things are such a way, then they are; and the great pretender can be anything, even morally right. We Westerners pretend to the same virtue, while extracting the same rewards: only we are never aware of the charade our conscience plays, never pull back the curtain to find the miser standing there, making a profit off goodwill and Samaritan impulses.

Returning to Meng-la, a flustered teenager had ran up to help us without any reason at all, except that she spoke some English. The words trundled out of her mouth: “Excuse. Me. What. Are. You. Looking for?” Well we had just finished bowls of rice and meat and a bottle of beer at some local eating house, and we were out looking for tea. “Oh, cha. If. You. Want. Umm. Water! There’s a supermarket. Over there.” We thanked the girl and waved goodbye to her.

There were few teahouses in Yunnan, which was a coffee-drinking country, so we settled on beer at an outdoor cafe on the main drag, watching the posh Chinese circumambulate the road. It was Friday night after all, but we had to be up at seven.

At the hotel I watched an amazing old wire-fighting kung-fu serial. A warlord had kidnapped an imperial princess. Her protector was an old monk with a magic green staff, who flew around destroying rocks, at night so you could not see the wires. When the warlord captured the old man’s ward, the man died somehow, and there was a tournament among his disciples to find who would inherit the green staff. A long-haired drunk took on three brothers, who flew through the air hitting the ground with long sticks, and were eventually overcome by the drunk’s unpredictable technique.

When the drunk disciple confronted the warlord, he was put hard to the test and nearly killed—but in the last instant a book landed next to the drunk’s head, and the wind of their furious combat blew the pages one at a time, so the drunk could see all the motions of some ancient martial technique. He performed these motions against an energized backdrop and pointed his hands at the warlord, who howled and then exploded. The princess was saved! The fighter nearly missed his own wedding because he was dead drunk again.

“Yes,” I though,—“Yes, this is China.”

We missed the bus the next morning, though did not realize it until halfway through our noodle bowls. “Wait,” said Sergi, “what time is it? Shit! Did you set your clock forward? Shit, shit!” Neither of us had remembered to change our clocks an hour ahead for China, and so the morning bus to Luchun had left almost an hour before. Sergi swore around the noodle shop, but it all worked out: at the bus station they returned our money, and we spent it on tickets to Jinhong. From there we got a ten hour bus to Kunming.

I must add that the highways in China are a marvel of sheared mountains and bridged valleys and two mile tunnels, the great works of a great empire. Replanted trees rose up the sides in neat little rows, the land not just tamed but domesticated by human industry. I was perversely delighted to see Chinamen in paddy hats running wheelbarrows of stone to a railway bridge in the warm pleasant air that had put me in such a good mood. It had been sunny since I got to China and not at all too hot or humid.

Kunming itself is known as the City of Eternal Spring: far enough south and high enough in the hills to be always a perfect temperature under a beaming blue sky, with only a little of the gray smog that characterizes China’s vast metropoleis. It is a city of merely three million, in a province of only sixty, yet Sergi and I both felt something of culture shock when we arrived. Moving from the villages of rural Laos to a city comparable in its modernity and fashion and its lineup of Western chains to Madrid or Toronto (and far more advanced than Bangkok or anywhere else I’d been since Tel Aviv, six months before) had both of us wanting to leave immediately.

Sergi and I went to a hostel right on Jinmabiji Square called the Hump, and named after the Burma Hump, presumably, which dropped of supplies to Chiang Kai-shek’s Republican army during the Japanese invasion. The dormitories were full, but they let us stay on the floor in the common room for a bargain that we were happy to accept, though we had to wait for everyone out there to call it a night. I glanced across the pool table to the groups of guffawing rich Chinese, who had ordered about four beers per person and then just laid them out across the table unopened, and I thought dispassionately that it would be a while. So Sergi and I wandered out to see the town on Saturday night.

Happy, handsome, well-dressed Chinese bourgeoisie strolled around the neon-lit gateways of Jinmabiji Square, with LED signs flashing consumer propaganda from the rows of glass towers. They walked up Zhengyi Lu, lined with palms and shopping malls, to McDonalds and Papa John’s and even, horrifically, a Wal-mart, and bought huge Canon cameras and Zara handbags and bottles of European wine. Taking these same streets and observing all this, I placed the sick, disillusioned discomfort that had hollowed out my gut. It would take some getting used to, these Western ways!

Ponder this: China is in not a communist country. Workers in America have better protections and social services, and most Chinese intelligentsia look with undisguised envy at the welfare systems of Northern Europe. Deng Xiaoping worked all that goodwill out of the People’s Republic thirty years ago. That being said, Kunming is a long way from Beijing, which works well in its favor. Yunnan has the largest minority population outside Xinjiang and Tibet, and a large Muslim population: 200,000 in Kunming.

We ate noodles from a halal place, waited out a quick monsoon shower, and wandered through the back alleys behind the square, where we observed a strange spectacle: Every night before a bar or restaurant opens in China, all the employees convene out front in martial ranks, with their hands clasped behind their back, as their manager walks up and down the line, reading from a clipboard and exhorting them to great deeds of fry-cooking and waitressing.

The next day, after finding baozí and bus tickets for an overnight to Dali, Sergi and I met some friend of the Catalonian’s, a Chinese-American from Florida named Linda who had been teaching English in China for two years, with designs on learning China and working for the American foreign service. She and Sergi had met in Vang Vieng—not tubing but biking and hiking and those sorts of things, and I could not picture Linda tubing, anyway. She was a quiet, distant, perhaps cerebral young woman, and she took us to a Brothers Jiang restaurant for guōqiáo mĭxiàn, across-the-bridge noodles: a Kunming treat. We each received plates of raw meat and vegetables, a bowl of noodles, and one of chili and spices, and we poured them all into a Jethro-bowl of broth.

“It’s very Western here,” Linda was saying, “but still very Chinese under the surface. The men spitting in the street—I’ll never get used to that—the food, the smells, the way people think. Have you seen the pants that the babies wear, with the hole in the back? That one has them on over there. They just pee everywhere.”

“Saves diapers,” I said.

“Can you imagine how many diapers China would go through? Oh, there he goes.”

Outside a young mother was holding her infant spread-legged over the flagstones, while the kid let loose through the aforementioned hole in his pants.

Linda’s sister was also a teacher in China and had married a Chinese man, but Linda said she could not date a local—“I just don’t get them,” she said—not with the spitting and the lack of conscience beyond shame and the way they thought in general—“You say that now,” said Sergi—but it is easy for lăowài boys to date Chinese girls—“They’re more malleable, I think. You see a lot of foreign teachers with Chinese girls. The Chinese don’t mind it, although they get mad when it’s an ugly foreign guy with a beautiful Chinese girl.”

“That makes me mad too,” I said. “Some jerk with no prospects at home, swooping into China to carry off some poor peasant girl.”

“Yes, this also makes me mad,” said Sergi.

“I guess that does make me kind of mad. That guy from Mississippi I worked with in Hangzhou, he married a really nice Chinese girl, who was also a teacher. We were really good friends at the school. I never knew what she saw in him. The only thing he could say correctly in Chinese was beer. Pizhou, iping pizhou! You know, now that I think about it, he always had a beer. You can drink anywhere in China, and anytime we went somewhere he took a beer and drank it in the street. It’s kind of weird. So they got married and he took her back to meet his conservative family.”

“In Mississippi. Oh no.”

“Yes, they live there now. She says it’s alright, but she misses Chinese food. There aren’t any markets or anything, so she can’t cook.”

“Why would you marry a Chinese girl and not let her cook?”

There is a saying in Asia— if you want to have fun, marry an American; if you want a girl you can trust, marry Japanese; for a passionate girl, go to Korea; and if you want to eat well, marry a girl from China.

Linda said that Kunming felt like home now—was home, even though her accent was not perfect, and she could never let her guard down.

“You have to look up, down, everywhere. There’s falling construction, unmarked potholes, those E-bikes that come swerving up behind you without making a noise.”

“And the little old ladies that cut in line.”

It was true what she said, which made life difficult for a peripatetic thinker like myself: the industry of my intellect suffered by the need to always be looking in every direction and watching the periphery vision, because in China some motorbike loaded down with chickens could always come crashing through a red light in the wrong lane.

“You know,” said Linda, “I got scammed when I came back to Laos.”

When Linda returned to Kunming from the Laotian jungle, she relaxed her guard. This was her hometown, and she spoke the language and knew the people and had lived there for some time. She might have waited an hour for the local buses to start running, but instead she got in a black cab and told the driver, an unreadable woman, to take her to her street near the University. There were already two locals in the car, one going to the airport and one downtown, and Linda joined the latter in the back seat.

At some point in the long ride into town, the urban desolation of suburbia all looking the same, the wallet slipped out of the pocket of the man on his way to the airport, and Linda watched the man next to her snatch it up guiltlessly. The first passenger began saying, “Where’s my wallet? It’s gone! Who has it?” and shouting at everyone, as the driver took them around in circles. Linda pointed out the perpetrator, who had committed so blatant a crime. At first the thief kept a stone face of denial, though eventually, as the victim pressed him from the front seat, the thief yielded the wallet like, Oh how did that get here?

The passenger went through his billfold and said, “My debit card is not here―where is it? Give it to me!” But the thief was adamant that he had not removed the card, nor any of the yuan. “Well then,” said the victim, after some time of arguing, “you’ll all have to give me your bank card numbers so I can make sure you don’t transfer money from my account.”

This was a ridiculous demand, to which the driver and the thief readily complied, but Linda refused to give up such private details. Now all three of them turned on her, still driving randomly around, and demanded that she write down her card number, her PIN, and her account balance―or maybe she was the thief! She protested, “But you already know he took your wallet―why would I have the card?” They were not interested.

The black cab pulled over at a pay phone and had her call her bank to prove her balance, but she could not remember the PIN number. “What is it?” they said, “You have to remember. Think hard. Write it down.” Then the driver picked up a policeman with an off-colored army uniform and a plastic police badge, and Linda was crammed in the back with the thief and the victim while the driver took them in circles and the cop lectured her, told her to give up her bank details so they could make sure of her innocence, or they would have to go to headquarters where it would take… twenty hours to process her. Linda would not give in.

Eventually the driver dropped her off on some street of Kunming entirely unfamiliar to Linda, who asked, “Where are we?” The driver told her, “The University is just over there,” waving broadly, and Linda said, “I don’t know where this is,” and would not pay the fare until she got to her home. “Fine, fine,” said the taxi driver, “don’t pay.” And the driver, the thief, the victim, and the cop all got into the cab and drove away.

Linda, Sergi and I finished our across-the-bridge noodles and took a walk to help with digestion, down to the two T’ang pagodas behind the square: high, clay-colored structures with dozens of rooftops stacked on top of each other, set in wide shady courtyards. An old man with a long white beard sat on a stone bench under the trees in a position of dignified repose, his hands folded before him on a walking stick. He wore a cap and glasses, and offered the slightest nod when Sergi asked if he could take a picture. More venerable old Chinese played boisterously at cards and Chinese chess and mahjong around the corner from the pagoda, in Good Fortune Alley.

Sergi and I said farewell to Linda, and I went off to find a bookstore. Failing this, I had dinner instead, sipping beer and chatting in pidgin and hand-signs with the waiter, and when I went to pay the young waiter refused.

“I, please, you,” he said, spreading his hands in a gesture of sacral offering.

“Well. . . shit.”

I moved slowly towards the door, waiting and hoping for him to call me back and tell me what the price was, that I had somehow mistaken his intentions for generosity, but no—I had somehow found (though I hardly deserved) a free meal.

I was horrified to find how ardently China yearns to be Western. They adhere to that American idea—that you can become what you seem to be. But that is not true. We are as we are born, and that way we remain; otherwise becoming a worthless absurdity, garbed in mummery and stupid passion and a naïve and empty hope—in short, an American.

The Chinese all want huge DSLR cameras they do not know hot to use, German cars they cannot drive, American cinema instead of their own fine auteurs, Spanish guitars while the zither fades to dust; they want Italian suits in Hollywood gangster cuts, and French wine that they can’t really taste. It’s a sign of status to be Western, just like pale skin and a fat stomach, and the young and wealthy of China scorn with haughty contempt that which appears “too Chinese.” In Kunming they have torn down the old wooden houses of contemplative courtyards and tile roofs and replaced them with the grand structures of metal and glass that to them symbolize a golden notion of development. O Tacitus, they bring a wrecking ball and call it progress!

I mourn all that’s being lost under this Western steamroller, and do not abide by the American conceit that our way is best—and torch all the rest! “The curse of the human race,” said Salman Rushdie, “is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.” One thing alone comforts me in my reflections: that this infatuation may be only temporary. I have glimpsed the remnant culture beneath the absurd Western appropriations—it’s far too sophisticated to be squelched entirely—and know from history that such a buried ember may be renewed, that this situation of conquered contentment will not necessarily last for ever.

The analogy I would like to invoke comes from Japan, which, in tide of yore and time long gone before, was to China that cultural sycophant that China is to the West in modernity. Japan loved everything about China, adopting the language, the art, the religion, the clothes, the philosophy, and the government, even though most of it fit their little island like a fat man’s robe would fit a child, and in fact the Japanese had some admirable native lore that seemed in danger of being forgotten.

A hundred years passed wherein the Japanese grandees would dress up as Chinese bureaucrats and play at being Chinese generals and write awful poetry in a language they had never heard spoken aloud, and the Emperor in Nara would write “from the Emperor of the Sunrise Land to the Emperor of the Sunset Land”—and then a strange thing happened: the Japanese ceased all communication with China, closed its ports, stopped bringing in scholars and silks and writing out verses about Chinese landscapes in Chinese calligraphy, and stopped pretending that Japan was something else.

The Japanese had taken in quite a bit of foreign culture, and for the next hundred years they sat there alone, quietly gnawing on that great big bite, selecting the good bits and spitting out the fat and the bones, and patiently blending together the best and most palatable parts of China with those modes and inveterate ways of their own heritage, thus producing (if we simplify things a bit) such elegant and entirely Japanese inventions as the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries, the Japanese sword, the Haiku, the Koan, Zen Buddhism, and Bushido: more recasting native ways in a foreign light, than adopting foreign ways entirely.

If there are rules of history, and as far as I know the only rule is that there aren’t any others—but if we can learn something from analogies, at least, then I see China and much of the world caught in that landslide phase that the Japanese had to overcome, overwhelmed by the shiny newness of a foreign way, and wrapped up in the forms as they disregard the substance—and the substance remains essentially native. Even cloaked in the new clothes of Michael Jackson and Louis Vuitton, caught betwixt and between an old world and some unknown composition of assimilated cultures that I cannot fathom, this is still China—I hope.