Fruit Pickin'

Fruit pickin’ near the Taihu

We were confused when the guy we assumed to be the organizer of the trip addressed the people around him in English—not Chinese. He is a Malaysian. He was in a blue "LOVE YOUR BODY" t-shirt. He was conducting a group of not only Chinese people, but also Americans (Linsey and I) and two Japanese businessmen. He was patting the heads of children whose mothers' are black belts in his martial arts classes. Not even my headphones could drown out the screaming of the children as they waved their plastic battle axes and fervently shook their gourd rattles. One of these children, Linsey later discovered, is her student; upon this mutual revelation between instructor and pupil, a dozen pictures of Linsey and I were snapped by the sticky hands of a child photographer.

Linsey signed me up for an adventure she saw advertised at a local gym: orange picking.

Enduring a crowded minivan/bus with sweaty, nose-runny, loud children became completely worth the aggravation when I was blinded by the sunlight reflecting off the vastness of the Taihu; a white expanse that would be completely disorienting if it were not for the few boats of fishermen to anchor the eye with a scattering of black dots. The possibility of this sheerness some day greening my vision, as the sun reflects off miles and miles of pond scum, left me morose and pensive.



Once we were tuned into the diversity of the crowd around us, we asked one of the Japanese men (the one who didn't have a lazy eye—we couldn't talk to THAT one—where do you look?), "Do you like China?" A dangerous question indeed.

He reluctantly answered, "Yes," from across a Chinese rotary table—from across the heads of two fish with their bones picked clean, two fatty cubes of pork in a reddish brown sauce, a bowl of snails, a half a bowl of rice, a plate of collard greens, and a bowl of chicken soup in which only the head of the chicken, with its milky eyes, remained.

Later, on the bus, over the heads of chickens in grocery bags with hearts still beating furiously, this Japanese businessman elaborated on his answer: "China is . . . dirty. I don't like the dirty."



The dirt of China packed itself into my cuticles as I ran my hands over the waxy bellies of oranges.



With an orange plastic sack in my hand, I wasn't sure what to do. I would rather take pictures of people picking fruit than have to go through the activity for myself. Plucking a fine-looking specimen, at least to my amateur eye, I mimicked the people around me by peeling my initial prize and eating it; an incomparable sting of citrus in my throat. My uncertainty in this activity was only made worse when I grasped another firm orange and green body and was met with a, "Bushi! Bushi! Neige! Neige!" from the farmer whose orchard we were ravaging. I was only to ravage the literal fruits of his dark skin and rough hands, not his neighbor's—trees running seamlessly with other trees across invisible boundaries that we "laoweis" cannot easily detect. No mending walls.


Lunch took extra long to be served because a chicken had to first be slaughtered for the soup (if I weren't the sole vegetarian, we'd all have found the slaughtering of vegetables much more time efficient and a lot less bloody).


We waited for zombie chicken head soup while walking along a row of fruit vendors: pomegranates, persimmons, oranges, and a few miscellaneous items like plastic zip-locked bags of whole shrimp (most of the animals you eat in China get cooked and served with their faces still on).







We were no more than a mile away from the orange orchard when the van pulled over next to yet another string of fruit vendors. Half of the people on the bus got off and returned with live chickens calmly poking their heads out of the tops of plastic sacks. Their docility disturbed me; none of these animals made even one squawk as the bus lurched forward. One creature, stuffed in a red plastic waste basket, did manage to scream out when the waste basket tipped over and sent its face crashing into the ground.


The chickens waited patiently in the bus as we all exited for our final excursion of the day: exploring a scenic spot somewhere along the perimeter of the seemingly interminable Taihu. Bride, bride, pink lotus, blazing bird of paradise, pot-bellied children with discs of hard flamboyant sugar on their tongues, plastic pinwheels, "Excuse me, will you take a picture with us?", and bride—all emanating from a giant watermill.



By the end of the trip the plastic bags were torn to shreds by the chickens' sharp claws. Grabbed by the neck, their bodies hung like they were already left permanently numb, and they were carried away by people clucking about the good deal of one for 25 RMB.

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