Panorama Whore Waxes Lyrical

Sorry about the delays, I am having a lot of trouble accessing the page in the rural areas.

I think I can say, with some assurance, that I’d be hard-pressed to find myself more comfortable than I am right now. It’s raining over Lijian—has been ever since we got here last night—and my sister is still sleeping, so I’ve taken my laptop outside to a wicker chair in the hotel's small courtyard. Bathing in rust-colored red from the elegantly carved wooden balconies, depicting a wild morass of fantastical cranes and peacocks, and the silk hanging lanterns, I try to decipher the inscriptions in Chinese script winding their gold way from the tops of columns to the bottom. A big, gurgling stone dragon waters a pebble-lined pond, and I’m filled with admiration for this distinct aesthetic style so unfamiliar yet so stately and serene. On my other side I’m flanked by a big window through which I can see Lijian hurrying about under umbrellas or plastic sheets. A man  under a shop awning is hammering out engravings on a bell, so backing the beat of my headphones is the sound of his hammer on the anvil.

Old women, bent double but walking assuredly and strong, carry bamboo baskets piled high with lettuce and leek from the mountains, uniting umbrellas with others for a few words before moving on. A man bicycles by with a plastic shopping bag on each handlebar bulbous with loose eggs, narrowly missing a man in a Mao uniform who’s smoking a cigarette and staring at me. There’s a wok on the cobblestones slowly filling with rainwater. Idyllic? Well, I’ve left out the Chinese tour groups, for poesy’s sake (though this province is too remote for all but a few). But the jist is unadulterated.

We’ve come to my favorite part of the trip: scenery time. Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an: all impressive, exciting, gigantic, intense. But boy is there more to this country than that. The past two days we’ve taken long transitive bus rides, seven hours the first day and three and a half the next. Caroline and my mom begin by closing the curtains to watch the Friends DVDs we bought in Shanghai on my laptop (although to be fair, after a few episodes they shut it off), but my dad and I, panorama whores that we are, jockey for positions in the front of the bus, where he skitters around filming and I sit back contentedly with my Ipod, watching the green mosaic of rice paddies and the brown cloud of the towns unfold.

Leaving Kunming the streets were modern and asphalted, but shortly after the city ended, the road did too. The next five hours we drove across a broad rocky thoroughfare, jolted like gravel in a cement mixer; vibration so continuous made the rubber band wrapped tightly around my ponytail slide slowly out of my hair three times. Lacking lane lines, the drivers made improvisation (if not ‘demolition derby’) their M.O. No one stayed on the right, because the right was full of potholes. But the left was too, and so was the center. So for several hundred kilometers we wove between boulders and puddles. Sometimes the road split, and drivers who knew the way took the softer (“softer”) route, even if it meant heading straight for oncoming traffic. Oncoming traffic understood, though. Successful travel on roads like these is a matter of collective cooperation.

We  passed several hundred workers sitting on the floor with pickaxes, hacking away at the earth.  Several hundred more, working to build anti-rockslide walls as we passed through mountainous areas, formed ten-man vertical lines to pass buckets of concrete to the top, hand to hand. Others stood on the side with hoes, flattening down the dirt and dust (although every passing car makes this effort somewhat futile). Evidently the road had been under construction for some time—but completion looked as if it’d take some time longer. (Although I bet cynically that McDonald’s opens in Da Li before the asphalt sets….) Along the way we stopped to pick up some passengers from a bus that had broken down, two young woman with Band-Aids over their eyes who hobbled up the steps blindly, arms flailing for railings. My guess is that they’d either gotten eyeliner tattooed on, or they’d just come from eye-widening surgery, a procedure many Asian women get to ‘Westernize’ the shape of their eyes. We ice cubes in this Korean deluxe martini shaker bounced along, kicking up unholy clouds of Yunnan province dust (when we later lugged our bags out of storage, they were unrecognizably powdered white). The playlist: Orishas, Sahara Lounge, Rolling Stones, Cat Stevens, and all the songs in my library that start with S, excepting the Sonatas. Divine.

The ride from Da Li to Lijian the next day was asphalted and thus lined with a great parade of people: selling fruit, hitching rides, drying rice, walking home. I had the good luck of sitting on the fold-down seat next to the bus driver, who sported, along with his right-angle wraparound sunglasses and sideways red baseball cap, the pimpest mustache I’ve seen yet on a Chinese man. My view of the road thus unobstructed by the yellow curtains (who decorates buses?) and the laughtrack of the Chinese comedy blocked out by the Grateful Dead, I sat back to enjoy the winding journey.

I wish I had taken notes, because I saw so much I wanted to write about and today all I remember of those few hours is a gold-and-green glow greatly lacking in specificity. The sun was out for just about the first time since we’ve come to China, and it suffused the fields with a unique quality of light that made me feel as though bathing in a great pot of warmth. Mostly we drove through the mountains, exhilarating glorious curves into the great wide open, the bus as if getting ready to detach from the road and fly off over the people in the fields below, barely ladybugs on a lawn. The alternating rice paddies and cornfields melded into a sinuous checkerboard, blinking green. Down in the valley we drove right through them, the road an elevated wire stretching between land and land, with nothing but swamp surrounding. Farmers dipped big ladles—wooden handles, aluminum dippers—into the water to fling into rice patches. In one a dead pig lay legs up, sinews drawn tight in rigor mortis. Near others, water buffalo lounged in mud like content hippopotami.

Donkeys carried impossible loads, as did people, looking from behind like huge, mobile bales of hay. We passed little roadside Buddhas emanating smoke from incense sticks, and communal bathrooms, the Chinese characters for “man” and “woman” spray-painted crookedly on the whitewashed cement. Babies in slings bopped along carried by women in elaborate hats—beaded crowns, embroidered flying-buttress-like headgear, and navy blue bonnets adorned with bronze coins and red ribbons. Their school-aged siblings wore tracksuits, the standard school uniform. Adults not wearing traditional or Western gear walked about in Maoist suits and olive caps, far more frequently than they still do in cities. People walked slowly, or rode—sometimes two or three to a bicycle—unperturbed by the bus’s warning honk. One jump-roped in place, another read as he walked.

All along the vast expanse, people bent over rice paddies, their backs colored buttons sprinkled across the green. That color—I keep coming back to it, it’s what I remember most clearly. It was electric! Even behind the dirty bus windows, behind my sunglasses, and once the sun was gone, that green breadth was still so patently alive, almost animate. It looked like it was breathing.

We slowed down once, to pass a group of people peering over a gulch where a crane was hoisting something up. Ah, a bus had taken a turn too quickly. Right. The tempo continued more temperately after that. Once we approached Lijian the day was over and a huge black monsoon cloud hung over the city—in fact, it’s been raining ever since. But the gold-green glow has stayed with me, the brawny mass of tangled mountains and wakened fields.

The last thing of note that day  was our dinner. I’ve been uncharacteristically tacit about the food we’re eating because, well, I don’t really like it. We’ve tasted what members of my family have alternately characterized as “fetus juice,” “burnt grease,” and “aftertaste of vomit.” Mostly I blame this on us not knowing where to go and how to order (menus are all in Chinese, and if they’re translated it’s like, “Fish Soup Sour And Pungent”).  Nevertheless, we hit a new low last night, when Caroline noticed a claw in my dad’s fried chicken. In her sleep last night, an occasion she often takes to vocally review the day’s events, she blurted out an “Ew! Ew ew ew!” which I think we can attribute to the claw. John, Judy, Alexand Mike, I hope you guys can order in Vietnamese/Korean.