China

4 March 2008

You are in China, and it is obvious from the very border, exploding with the industrious mega-growth gripping a nation which is unfathomably big. 15-story buildings at every moment of construction. The border officials ask you if you speak Chinese with an air of expectancy. The rifle through passports as if they were in some way suspect, you suppress a cough and surreptitiously wipe snot away from your nose - you have already lied on the questionnaire about your proximity to birds in Northern Laos and whether you are suffering from these symptoms. Eventually you are stamped with the first of the extraordinary red ink and waved back on the city bus, minus the two Russians who had been the only other Western travelers on your bus from Oudomxay, Laos.

The immediate and overwhelming changes in the landscape are dominated by sweeping vistas and scale of agriculture, both enormous and impressive. The road is much better and superhighway is in the works across the way. A man will slide into the seat next to you for a very brief while, but still long enough to smoke 5 cigarettes.

Out the window young women are wearing fake Gucci hot pants and boots, rhinestones sparkling. They walk arm in arm past tractor-engine wooden carts piled high with yellow watermelons. Everything is in Chinese, except irrelevant and strange translations on advertising banners.

The landscape grows more spectacular, lush above the Mekong River. It is dark on arrival to Jinghong, which is first announced by a neon-lit bridge - lights running up and down the towers, a rainbow spectrum on the sides. Unlike the previous week spent in the isolated village of Muang Noi, the lights will not shut off at 9:00 pm with a sputtering of the generator. You are already certain the China will offer itself as the most psychedelic of countries on your trip to Asia.

Off the bus and bags dumped unceremoniously into a white hotel room you are half-starved and looking for the first real meal of the day after 7:30 am sandwiches at the bus station. Turn left on a cutty alleyway and look inside to see a a young girl being instructed in a traditional flute with a gourd as its base. To the right is a stadium with lights fully blasting and heading back to the main road when 2 loud explosions ring out. You drop and grab your lover as if in reaction to gun shots. It is a moment before realizing it is the beginning of an intense display of fireworks directly overhead. Professional pyrotechnics detonate very close to the surface of the ground and are the most awesome you've ever seen, brilliantly colored in the warm black of the night. "Because China invented that shit," you'll say at the dramatic conclusion.

Leaving Rooster Territory

We've left rooster territory. This is not counting the chicken the boys ('the boys will be boys' boys) snuck in past the gate to the courtyard of the girls' dorms. Not counting this chicken, which was smuggled with the accompaniment of loud popping fireworks, we have stopped dwelling with poultry nearby. I imagined the stunt led to at least 3 out of 6 pressed close couples saying goodbyes that got hot and heavy late that muggy night outside the main gate.

A note on this:
We’ve traded bamboo-bungalow hopping for a room with a balcony 5 stories up surrounded by the girls' dorms of the university where Chris, Katie and Michael teach. We have big water heater and a shower like a space ship. We watch the lights switch out automatically in the girls' dorms at 10:30 pm and know that they have no hot water. Clothes and blankets hang outside windows and the students wash their hair over the balconies. We have to call, "Ayiii," just the same as the students to get in past the locked gate at night - but receive no scolding for bad behavior.

Far from rooster territory, at 5:30 am the nation-mandated exercises for students wake us instead of the crowing machismo of birds. Bewildering pop music and undecipherable distorted Chinese blares from speakers hidden except for their diameter of noise. The morning calisthenics are not optional.

Most mornings I sleep through the music. It is impossible, the students say, to complain. There are student monitors in each class. 'Spy' has a different connotation here.

When we were still in bungalow-dwelling rooster territory, I often slept through their 5 am wake up calls. Even roosters get confused, too excited for the sun to rise. I understand in a way. I get out of bed quickly in a blurry morning at the thought of a new day's cup of coffee. Wade through the cacophony of Friday's market that's only a few blocks from here to get a few varieties of delicious mushrooms, a spinach-like green, spring onions, garlic, peppers, eggs and new potatoes to make big omelettes to share. It costs less than two dollars to buy all these ingredients for breakfast for 5 people.

In the beginning of the week Stevo and I took a bus to Shaoguan. We found ourselves in a peninsular city with rainbow neon light trees next to the river and some sobering Chinglish describing the Japanese invasion of the city underneath a very intense visceral sculpture. We found awesome veggie dumplings fried up by an extremely charismatic man in an alley and the best bakery in China. The next day we made our way to Nanhua Si - a Buddhist monastery 1500+ years old. A truly enormous complex, we wandered paths through huge graceful trees and gaped at 1000 year old monks preserved and lacquered up black in full lotus behind glass.
The signs told us that when one of the monks was hacked into during the Cultural Revolution he bled liquid blood. It was the "Tomb-sweeping holiday" and gold paper floated down through the hazy air near a huge incinerator for burning "hell bank notes" and other paper items (in the market today Chris got a paper Nokia cell phone) for ancestors and ghosts.

Back in Ganzhou we were invited to drink tea all afternoon in a friend’s tea shop downtown. I watch the "professor of tea" wash the leaves and splash water around the table in a perfected ceremony and we drink dozens of tiny cups of perfectly brewed te guan yin. The whole crew of us hang out and make friends with John's younger sisters (10 and 14) as well as an extended family that arrives in a police van. Vehicles in this country, after all, are first and foremost for transport.