“He’s letting you know he speaks English.”
Our driver reminds me of the slick Hong Kong youths who hang out in the trendy pool halls of San Francisco, the same pomaded hair, his inch-long pinkie nail, perfectly manicured, symbolizing that his lucky life is one without back-breaking work. He flashes us a smile, revealing a set of nicotine-stained teeth. “You call me Rocky,” he says in heavily accented English. “Like famous movie star.” He holds up a tattered magazine picture of Sylvester Stallone that he has pulled out of his Chinese–English dictionary.
We stash a suitcase of gifts and my extra camera gear into the trunk of his car. The rest of the luggage is at our hotel. Rocky will have to take us back there tonight, unless Kwan’s aunt insists that we stay at her place—always a possibility with Chinese families. With this in mind, I’ve tucked an overnight kit into my camera bag. Rocky opens the door with a flourish, and we climb into a black Nissan, a late-model sedan that curiously lacks seat belts and safety headrests. Do the Japanese think Chinese lives aren’t worth saving? “China has either better drivers or no liability lawyers,” Simon concludes.
Having learned that we’re Americans, Rocky happily assumes we like loud music. He slips in a Eurythmics tape, which was a gift from one of his “excellent American customers.” And so with Kwan in the front seat, and Simon, the owl, and me in back, we start our journey to Changmian, blasted by the beat of “Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves.”
Rocky’s excellent American customers have also taught him select phrases for putting tourists at ease. As we traverse the crowded streets of Guilin, he recites them to us like a mantra: “Where you go? I know it. Jump in, let’s go.” “Go faster? Too fast? No way, José.” “How far? Not far. Too far.” “Park car? Wait a sec. Back in flash.” “Not lost. No problem. Chill out.” Rocky explains that he is teaching himself English so he can one day fulfill his dream and go to America.
“My idea,” he says in Chinese, “is to become a famous movie actor, specializing in martial arts. For two years I’ve practiced tai chi chuan. Of course, I don’t expect a big success from the start. Maybe when I first arrive I’ll have to take a job as a taxi driver. But I’m hardworking. In America, people don’t know how to be as hardworking as we Chinese. We also know how to suffer. What’s unbearable to Americans would be ordinary conditions for me. Don’t you think that’s true, older sister?”
Kwan gives an ambiguous “Hm.” I wonder whether she is thinking of her brother-in-law, a former chemist, who immigrated to the States and now works as a dishwasher because he’s too scared to speak English lest people think he is stupid. Just then Simon’s eyes grow round, and I shout, “Holy shit,” as the car nearly sideswipes two schoolgirls holding hands. Rocky blithely goes on about his dream:
“I hear you can make five dollars an hour in America. For that kind of money, I’d work ten hours a day, every day of the year. That’s fifty dollars a day! I don’t make that much in a month, even with tips.” He looks at us in the rearview mirror to see if we caught this hint. Our guidebook says tipping in China is considered insulting; I figure the book must be out-of-date.
“When I live in America,” Rocky continues, “I’ll save most of my money, spend only a little on food, cigarettes, maybe the movies every now and then, and of course a car for my taxi business. My needs are simple. After five years, I’ll have almost one hundred thousand American dollars. Here that’s a half-million yuan, more if I exchange it on the streets. Even if I don’t become a movie star in five years, I can still come back to China and live like a rich man.” He’s grinning with happiness at the prospect. I translate for Simon what Rocky has said.
“What about expenses?” says Simon. “There’s rent, gas, utilities, car insurance.”
“Don’t forget income taxes,” I say.
And Simon adds: “Not to mention parking tickets and getting mugged. Tell him most people would probably starve in America on fifty dollars a day.”
I’m about to translate for Rocky, when I remember Kwan’s story about Young Girl’s Wish. You can’t stop people from hoping for a better life.
“He’ll probably never make it to America,” I reason to Simon. “Why spoil his dreams with warnings he’ll never need?”
Rocky looks at us through the rearview mirror and gives us a thumbs-up. A second later, Simon grips the front seat, and I shout, “Holy Jesus shit!” We are about to hit a young woman on a bicycle with her baby perched on the handlebar. At the last possible moment, the bicyclist wobbles to the right and out of our way.
Rocky laughs. “Chill out,” he says in English. And then he explains in Chinese why we shouldn’t worry. Kwan turns around and translates for Simon: “He said in China if driver run over somebody, driver always at fault, no matter how careless other person.”
Simon looks at me. “This is supposed to reassure us? Did something get lost in the translation?”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I tell Kwan, as Rocky veers in and out of traffic. “A dead pedestrian is a dead pedestrian, no matter whose fault it is.”
“Tst! This American thinking,” Kwan replies. The owl swings his head and stares at me, as if to say, Wise up, gringa, this is China, your American ideas don’t work here. “In China,” Kwan goes on, “you always responsible for someone else, no matter what. You get run over, this my fault, you my little sister. Now you understand?”
“Yeah,” Simon says under his breath. “Don’t ask questions.” The owl pecks at the cage.
We drive by a strip of shops selling rattan furniture and straw hats. And then we’re in the outskirts of town, both sides of the road lined with mile after mile of identical one-room restaurants. Some are in the stages of being built, their walls layers of brick, mud plaster, and whitewash. Judging from the garish billboard paintings on the front, I guess that all the shops employ the same artist. They advertise the same specialties: orange soda pop and steamy-hot noodle soup. This is competitive capitalism taken to a depressing extreme. Idle waitresses squat outside, watching our car whiz by. What an existence. Their brains must be atrophied from boredom. Do they ever rail against the sheer randomness of their lot in life? It’s like getting the free space on the bingo card and nothing else. Simon is furiously jotting down notes. Has he observed the same despair?
“What are you writing?”
“Billions and billions unserved,” he answers.
A few miles farther on, the restaurants give way to simple wooden stalls with thatched roofs, and even farther, peddlers without any shelter from the damp chill. They stand by the side of the road, yelling at the top of their lungs, waving their string bags of pomelos, their bottles of homemade hot sauce. We are moving backward in the evolution of marketing and advertising.
As we drive through one village, we see a dozen or so men and women dressed in identical white cotton jackets. Next to them are stools, buckets of water, wooden tool chests, and hand-painted signboards. Being illiterate in Chinese, I have to ask Kwan what the signs say. “ ‘Expert haircut,’ ” she reads. “Also each one can drain boil, clip off corns, remove earwax. Two ears same price as one.”
Simon is taking more notes. “Whew! How’d you like to be the tenth person offering to remove earwax, when no one is stopping for the first? That’s my definition of futility.”
I remember an argument we once had, in which I said you couldn’t compare your happiness with someone else’s unhappiness and Simon said why not. Perhaps we were both wrong. Now, as I watch these people waving at us to stop, I feel lucky I’m not in earwax removal. Yet I’m also afraid that the core of my being, stripped of its mail-order trappings, is no different from that of the tenth person who stands on the road wishing for someone to stop and single her out. I nudge Simon. “I wonder what they hope for, if anything.”
He answers mock-cheery: “Hey, the sky’s the limit—as long as it doesn’t rain.”
I imagine a hundred Chinese Icaruses, molding wings out of earwax. You can’t stop people from wis
hing. They can’t help trying. As long as they can see sky, they’ll always want to go as high as they can.
The stretches between villages and roadside bargains grow longer. Kwan is falling asleep, her head bobbing lower and lower. She half awakens with a snort every time we hit a pothole. After a while, she emits long rhythmical snores, blissfully unaware that Rocky is driving faster and faster down the two-lane road. He routinely passes slower vehicles, clicking his fingers to the music. Each time he accelerates, the owl opens his wings slightly, then settles down again in the cramped cage. I’m gripping my knees, then sucking air between clenched teeth whenever Rocky swings into the left lane to pass. Simon’s face is tense, but when he catches me looking at him, he smiles.
“Don’t you think we should tell him to slow down?” I say.
“We’re fine, don’t worry.” I take Simon’s “don’t worry” to be patronizing. But I resist the urge to argue with him. We are now tailgating a truck filled with soldiers in green uniforms. They wave to us. Rocky honks his horn, then swerves sharply to pass. As we go by the truck, I can see an oncoming bus bearing down on us, the urgent blare of its horn growing louder and louder. “Oh my God, oh my God,” I whimper. I close my eyes and feel Simon grab my hand. The car jerks back into the right lane. I hear a whoosh, then the blare of the bus horn receding.
“That’s it,” I say in a tense whisper. “I’m going to tell him to slow down.”
“I don’t know, Olivia. He might be offended.”
I glare at Simon. “What? You’d rather die than be rude?”
He affects an attitude of nonchalance. “They all drive like that.”
“So mass suicide makes it okay? What kind of logic is that?”
“Well, we haven’t seen any accidents.”
The knot of irritation in my throat bursts. “Why do you always think it’s best not to say anything? Tell me, who gets to pick up the pieces after the damage is done?”
Simon stares at me, and I can’t tell whether he is angry or apologetic. At that moment, Rocky brakes abruptly. Kwan and the owl awake with a flutter of arms and wings. Perhaps Rocky has picked up the gist of our argument—but no, we are now almost at a standstill in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Rocky rolls down the window and sticks out his head. He curses under his breath, then starts punching the car horn with the heel of his hand.
After a few minutes, we can see the source of our delay: an accident, a bad one, to judge from the spray of glass, metal, and personal belongings that litter the road. The smells of spilled gasoline and scorched rubber hang in the air. I am about to say to Simon, “See?” But now our car is inching by a black minivan, belly up, its doors splayed like the broken wings of a squashed insect. The front passenger section is obliterated. There is no hope for anyone inside. A tire lies in a nearby vegetable field. Seconds later, we go by the other half of the impact: a red-and-white public bus. The large front window is smashed, the hound-nosed hood is twisted and smeared with a hideous swath of blood, and the driver’s seat is empty, a bad sign. About fifty gawkers, farm tools still in hand, mill around, staring and pointing at various parts of the crumpled bus as if it were a science exhibit. And then we are passing the other side of the bus and I can see a dozen or so injured people, some clutching themselves and bellowing in pain, others lying quietly in shock. Or perhaps they are already dead.
“Shit, I can’t believe this,” says Simon. “There’s no ambulance, no doctors.”
“Stop the car,” I order Rocky in Chinese. “We should help them.” Why did I say that? What can I possibly do? I can barely look at the victims, let alone touch them.
“Ai-ya.” Kwan stares at the field. “So many yin people.” Yin people? Kwan is saying there are dead people out there? The owl coos mournfully and my hands turn slippery-cold.
Rocky keeps his eyes on the road ahead, driving forward, leaving the tragedy behind us. “We’d be of no use,” he says in Chinese. “We have no medicine, no bandages. Besides, it’s not good to interfere, especially since you’re foreigners. Don’t worry, the police will be along soon.”
I’m secretly relieved he isn’t heeding my instructions.
“You’re Americans,” he continues, his voice deep with Chinese authority. “You’re not used to seeing tragedies. You pity us, yes, because you can later go home to a comfortable life and forget what you’ve seen. For us, this type of disaster is commonplace. We have so many people. This is our life, always a crowded bus, everyone trying to squeeze in for himself, no air to breathe, no room left for pity.”
“Would someone please tell me what’s going on!” Simon exclaims. “Why aren’t we stopping?”
“Don’t ask questions,” I snap. “Remember?” Now I’m glad Rocky’s dreams of American success will never come true. I want to tell him about illegal Chinese immigrants who are duped by gangs, who languish in prison and then are deported back to China. I’ll fill his ear with stories about homeless people, about the crime rate, about people with college degrees who are standing in unemployment lines. Who is he to think his chances of succeeding are any better than theirs? Who is he to assume we know nothing about misery? I’ll rip up his Chinese–English dictionary and stuff it in his mouth.
And then I feel literally sick with disgust at myself. Rocky is right. I can’t help anyone, not even myself. I weakly ask him to pull over so I can throw up. As I lean out of the car, Simon pats my back. “You’re okay, you’re going to be fine. I feel queasy too.”
When we get back on the open road, Kwan gives Rocky some advice. He solemnly nods, then slows down.
“What’d she say?” Simon asks.
“Chinese logic. If we’re killed, no payment. And in the next lifetime, he’ll owe us big time.”
ANOTHER THREE HOURS PASS. I know we have to be getting close to Changmian. Kwan is pointing out landmarks. “There! There!” she cries huskily, bouncing up and down like a little child. “Those two peaks. The village they surround is called Wife Waiting for Husband’s Return. But where is the tree? What happened to the tree? Right there, next to that house, there was a very big tree, maybe a thousand years old.”
She scans ahead. “That place there! We used to hold a big market there. But now look, it’s just an empty field. And there—that mountain up ahead! That’s the one we called Young Girl’s Wish. I once climbed all the way to the top.”
Kwan laughs, but the next second she seems puzzled. “Funny, now that mountain looks so small. Why is that? Did it shrink, washed down by the rain? Or maybe the peak was worn down by too many girls running up there to make a wish. Or maybe it’s because I’ve become too American and now I see things with different eyes, everything looking smaller, poorer, not as good.”
All at once, Kwan shouts to Rocky to turn down a small dirt road we just passed. He makes an abrupt U-turn, knocking Simon and me into each other, and causing the owl to shriek with indignity. Now we are rumbling along a rutted lane, past fields with pillows of moist red dirt. “Turn left, turn left!” Kwan orders. She has her hands clasped in her lap. “Too many years, too many years,” she says, as if chanting.
We approach a stand of trees, and then, as soon as Kwan announces, “Changmian,” I see it: a village nestled between two jagged peaks, their hillsides a velvety moss-green with folds deepening into emerald. More comes into view: crooked rows of buildings whitewashed with lime, their pitched tile roofs laid in the traditional pattern of dragon coils. Surrounding the village are well-tended fields and mirrorlike ponds neatly divided by stone walls and irrigation trenches. We jump out of the car. Miraculously, Changmian has avoided the detritus of modernization. I see no tin roofs or electrical power lines. In contrast to other villages we passed, the outlying lands here haven’t become dumping grounds for garbage, the alleys aren’t lined with crumpled cigarette packs or pink plastic bags. Clean stone pathways crisscross the village, then thread up a cleft between the two peaks and disappear through a stone archway. In the distance is another pair of tall peaks, dark jade in col
or, and beyond those, the purple shadows of two more. Simon and I stare at each other, wide-eyed.
“Can you fucking believe this?” he whispers, and squeezes my hand. I remember other times he has said those same words: the day we went to City Hall to be married, the day we moved into our co-op. And then I think to myself: Happy moments that became something else.
I reach into my bag for my camera. As I look through the viewfinder, I feel as though we’ve stumbled on a fabled misty land, half memory, half illusion. Are we in Chinese Nirvana? Changmian looks like the carefully cropped photos found in travel brochures advertising “a charmed world of the distant past, where visitors can step back in time.” It conveys all the sentimental quaintness that tourists crave but never actually see. There must be something wrong, I keep warning myself. Around the corner we’ll stumble on reality: the fast-food market, the tire junkyard, the signs indicating this village is really a Chinese fantasyland for tourists: Buy your tickets here! See the China of your dreams! Unspoiled by progress, mired in the past!
“I feel like I’ve seen this place before,” I whisper to Simon, afraid to break the spell.
“Me too. It’s so perfect. Maybe it was in a documentary.” He laughs. “Or a car commercial.”
I gaze at the mountains and realize why Changmian seems so familiar. It’s the setting for Kwan’s stories, the ones that filter into my dreams. There they are: the archways, the cassia trees, the high walls of the Ghost Merchant’s House, the hills leading to Thistle Mountain. And being here, I feel as if the membrane separating the two halves of my life has finally been shed.
From out of nowhere we hear the din of squeals and cheers. Fifty tiny schoolchildren race toward the perimeter of a fenced-in yard, hailing our arrival. As we draw closer, the children shriek, turn on their heels, and run back to the school building laughing. After a few seconds, they come screaming toward us like a flock of birds, followed by their smiling teacher. They stand at attention, and then, through some invisible signal, shout all together in English, “A-B-C! One-two-three! How are you! Hello good-bye!” Did someone tell them American guests were coming? Did the children practice this for us?