Yunnan

Kunming, the capitol of Yunnan Province, China

 

Yunnan is the province in China that boasts the most varied population of ethnic minorities.  Considering that 91.5% of the billion+ population of China is Han Chinese (stats from the CIA World Fact Book), getting the opportunity to see the everyday life of some non-Han Chinese was an interesting way to conclude my first, long experience in China.  My perceptions about this country and its population were in constant flux, as culture is not a static, isolated thing.  Certainly, I will never possess a clear idea of what China—or any country—really “is” in every nuanced and dynamic socio-cultural capacity, but my minor investigation would have been quite lacking without this trip to Yunnan.  Furthermore, Yunnan is a place where ecologists and botanists run amok because of its copious ecosystems and plant life.  Appropriately, varied ecological and social systems go hand in hand in Yunnan, hanging together in a delicate balance.

 

My trip began in Kunming—a city of gardens and other things of typical Chinese city criteria:  pollution, KFCs, and bustling shopping centers selling ubiquitous globally recognized brands.  Kunming has been transformed over the last few decades from industrialization and globalization, but it is different from cities like Shanghai and Beijing in the way it caters to those searching for cultural diversity.  The city exploited local color to the point where I could recognize the distinction of this place from the other places I had been in China, but I did not get the feeling that I had my finger on the pulsating and elusive artery of “authentic” and oh-so ethnic culture.  Of course, what I observed was by no means “fake” or “unreal;” things just felt more performed, and the aim of the performance was to fulfill an expectation, among both the Han Chinese and foreign tourists, of what Chinese ethnic minority cultures are supposed to be like:  colorful!  Exotic!  Tantalizing!  As cute and collectible as the Beijing Olympic mascots!

 

 Needless to say, as much as I enjoy taking pictures of urban spots of construction and dilapidation, I was eager to get out of Kunming and visit rural areas. 

 

The first time I went to a McDonald’s in China, but not the first time I did an ice-cream handout

 

However, I didn’t leave Kunming without buckling to the pervasive McDonaldization by going directly to McDonald’s.  I’m sorry, but I wanted some cheap coffee.  Plus, in a McD’s in China you can get taro pie—high calorie and delicious.  On my way into the first MacDonald’s I had been in for I don’t know how long, some dirt-smeared beggar children shot me a familiar glossy-eyed look.  I later exited the McDonald’s with my guilty-pleasure coffee in one fist and three cones of ice cream in the other.  I should have known better, but really, what solution is better when dealing with poverty so immediate and unsettling?  However, my minor action started a wrestling match between two little boys who lunged for a cone, crushed it in their collision, and lapped the oozing ice cream off each other’s hands. 

 

Bird and plant markets

 

Puppies, bunnies, kittens, grubs, beetles, squirrels, pigs, hamsters, birds, puppies, birds, puppies . . . Adorable things packed into cages, looking sad, hungry, and too weak to go into hysterics for affection and freedom.

 

Another experience at a cultural “theme park”

 

On a boat cruising the Dian Chi Lake (a highly polluted lake with a famous Chinese tobacco company along its perimeter—linked to the stifling pollution?  I think so . . . ), I met a Chinese couple:  Zhiguo and Liyan.  Liyan is a heart doctor and chain-smoker, and Zhiguo is the boyfriend who taught his sweetheart how to smoke.  Early in our encounter we had a misunderstanding:  when this couple told me they were going to a “cun” (which means “village” in Chinese), I didn’t realize they meant a cultural “theme park,” much like the Cambodian “Cultural Village” I went to in Siem Reap.  Wrongfully assuming that these fellow travelers had set an interesting itinerary for themselves, I leached onto their day trip.

 

At the village-attraction, I tried to mask my disappointment.  Five minutes into a live elephant show had me seething with guilt and regret, and I left the park immediately.  Who could be entertained by sad-eyed elephants performing tricks on lacerated knees that had been hit with hooked rods? 

 

Please note:

 

Throughout this post I am writing how “I” did this or “I” did that, but I really mean “we.”  As usual, I was traveling with Linda.  However, if I bring her out as a more dominant character in this narrative, remembered frustrations and dealings with passive-aggression will sidetrack me.  Linda is a good travel buddy, and she convinced me to do some great things on this trip that I would not have planned for myself, but she is also hyper-critical and tends to over-generalize people and culture in a way that makes me uneasy.  At this point, the narrative is turning collective—“we” means “Linda and I.” 

 

Food we ate in Kunming:

 

Cold noodles from street vendors—limejuice, crushed peanuts, chili flakes, vinegar, and some other dark liquids that I couldn’t identify were spooned hastily into my bowl

 

Papa Roti Malaysian bread—an aromatic (from the hazelnut) buttery bun that actually reminded me of a Sally Lunn bun from Bath (a famous bun in England)

 

Pumpkin crepe-cake things

 

Glutinous rice glob soup-stuff

 

Dali

 

On the shuttle that took us from our boarding gate to the airplane flying to Dali, a girl passed out in the crowd.  A tourist, maybe American, who drank too much the night before was propped up against a friend’s legs and fed milk tea. 

 

The flight was quick.  In Dali, we shared a cab into the city with two other English teachers.  Then, as soon as we got settled into a hostel, we sought out a place to rent bikes.  Our plan was to cycle around the Erhai Lake, but we ended up limiting our exploration to the west side of the massive place.  We cycled past the Three Pagodas; past rice paddy fields; past crops and markets of all kinds.  This story is best told in pictures.  So little language took place as we rode around looking at things.  (I indeed took plenty of photos). 

 

Noisy streets.  Tour buses.  Horse-drawn carriages.  Bells on the horses jingling.  Tractors.  Smells of shit.  A tower of manure.  Cow.  Horse.  Pig.

 

Eventually we rode to a ship port and put our bikes on a giant boat filled with Chinese tourists 

 

Pastel-colored umbrellas popped open in every direction as the sun emerged from behind a sheet of clouds.  One woman was wearing long gold-colored gloves that ran up the entire length of her arm.  My face was reddening under the sun, and as I darkened, Chinese women continued to pay me compliments on my “fairness.”    

 

I watched a woman in traditional Bai costume lather the head of another woman in the ship’s hair salon while listening to a horrible duet being sung in the KTV room next door.

 

The first dock the boat made was at a big white temple or palace.  I couldn’t pay much attention; I was too tired.  Linda and I found a gazebo and took a nap.  Soon, the whistle on the boat raged through our ear canals, and we ran back to make the final boarding call.

 

That night we ate in the “Old City” at a restaurant called The Happy Panda.  We listened to a family seated behind us debate about which meat dishes to order.  The food they had this time was superior to the food they had sampled the previous night.  The know-it-all young son in the family recounted what he had learned about Chinese iconography and tea from the day’s adventures:  the dragon is a symbol for man, the phoenix is a symbol for woman.  A dragon on top of a phoenix signifies a marriage.  Lychee tea (red tea) is good for the stomach.  Flower tea is good for the eyes. 

 

In one of the Old City markets, the people in the streets offered me marijuana.  I bought an impractical hat.  I bought some Yunnan coffee beans.  I tried to buy another hat, but the “hat” turned out to be a towel a woman had skillfully tied around her head. 

 

In a coffee shop run by the hearing-impaired, we watched a British couple talk loudly to the servers in English.  This couple didn’t notice the conspicuous signs about the deafness of the employees and made fools of their selves as they tried to ask for “the breakfast menu.”

 

Food tried in Dali:

 

Something similar to the cold noodle dish only, instead of noodles, I ate sliced homemade cheese on a bed of radish.

 

At the Happy Panda, we feasted on a white fish and egg pancake, Bai-style eggplant, and sesame tofu with green vegetables.

 

Baba (a kind of fried bread) with spicy, spreadable cheese.

 

Lijiang

 

It is a three-hour bus ride from Dali to Lijiang.  Views.  Bumps.  Hitting myself in the face with my camera as I try to take pictures.  Cows.  Goats.  Yellow wildflowers.  Purple.  Mountains.  Blue sky.  Farms.  Winding road.  No KTV on this bus (thank God).  Local music making me relax.  

 

I’ve never felt sick from a bumpy ride before, but this ride was not the worse to come.

 

Settled into a new hostel in a new city.  Took a car to a Naxi village outside of the city.  Watched women wander around in black clothing and blue aprons.  “Dongba” (the last pictorial writing system in use) decorated the walls of the houses.  Cowboy hats.  Hay.  The “East” feeling so “Wild West.”  Ate lunch at a table decorated with a vase of wildflowers.  The female “laoban” (boss) gave us some complimentary peaches after the meal. 

 

The Naxi are matrilineal, but not matriarchal like the Naxi branch of the Mosu people—the last surviving matriarch in the world. The Mosu inhabit an area by the Lupu Lake—which, from Lijiang, is a seven-hour bus ride.  Due to the time we had to travel and the nature of these bumpy, mountainous rides in Yunnan, I missed the opportunity to check out the Mosu village.  However, Yupu has been overrun by tourism, and as eager as I was to sit at a campfire with the Mosu, I had a feeling that I would have been disappointed.  The Mosu are the most wealthy minority in Yunnan and not without reason:  many male tourists (especially Chinese men) flock to Lupu in order to partake in a Mosu “zou hun” (“walking marriage”).  Mosu women do not practice marriage or co-habitation; a Mosu woman’s lover visits her at night but returns to his mother’s house in the morning.

 

“Old Town” Lijiang was dizzying.  Labyrinthine. 

 

Linda lost her camera.  She blamed the hostel staff.  More feelings of shame and embarrassment on another’s behalf (much like watching those British people scream at the deaf Dali people) as a hostile tone was taken in a place where signs stating “not responsible for lost or stolen items” abound.  As Linda searched for her camera, two quiet German men smiled at us shyly.

Food in Lijiang:

 

Naxi Baba

 

Liang Fei—blue, jelly-like stuff that is usually fried and which does not possess a strong flavor

 

Raspberry smoothie made with yak yogurt

 

Tiger Leaping Gorge

 

The Tiger Leaping Gorge trail starts in the town of Qiaotou.  We shared our mini bus from Lijiang to Qiaotou with a family of Californians, one of whom was an environmentalist working in India. 

 

The bus stopped at a temple on the side of the highway.  In the temple, some monks grabbed me and handed me a piece of yellow paper with some red characters stamped on it.  The monks had me hold the paper between my pressed palms and blow on it three times.  Then they ushered me into a small room where a monk with big bifocals and missing teeth tried to talk with me in Chinese.  He put a necklace of large, heavy prayer beads around my neck, put his hand on my head, and prayed for me while ringing a little bell.  Afterwards, it was apparent that the monk was asking me for a donation, but I had no money so I pretended that I didn’t understand Mandarin very well.  After he put a wooden bead bracelet on my wrist, I told him that I didn’t want it and that I had no money. However, the bracelet was a gift and so I couldn’t refuse.  Back in the bus I realized I was the only one given a small token from the monks. 

 

In Qiaotou we dropped off our stuff at Jane’s Guest House.  Most travelers hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge leave stuff at Jane’s before departing on a two-day trek on foot.  Jane is thus quite famous among travelers and everyone wants to know:  what do you think Jane is?  Is she a manly woman or a womanly man?  Jane, with her feminine name and regal and feminine voice has bulging biceps and a moustache.  My pronoun for her is “she,” and she was a most obliging and helpful hostess. 

 

We started on the trail.  It was sunny and cool.  An hour into the hike we stopped to eat at the Naxi Family Guesthouse.  After the meal, we soon found ourselves lost. We walked past a house with a ferocious-seeming black dog that growled at us, and I had to talk Linda out of her impulse to fight it.  She took up a stick but before she got too aggressive, I told her it was best to walk by slowly and not make eye-contact (I learned how to handle angry stray dogs while living in Nevada, Missouri where I was chased more than once by some pugnacious creature).  This dog was our first obstacle on the trail.  I joked with Linda that it was symbolic—that our success against the black animal was an auspice for great things to come.

 

We met up with a group of eclectic boys who were temporarily traveling together as they had all met in Lijiang and discovered that they were headed on the same route.  Neil, a young British man who just graduated with a degree in business, took to Linda immediately—she with her MBA and their shared love for surfing.  I chatted with a longhaired guy from Spain who had moved to Ireland to teach himself English.  He occasionally works at a restaurant in Ireland only for as long as it takes him to procure a satisfactory allotment for traveling.  As we chatted, we got lost again and had to do some backtracking, but we arrived at the Half-Way Guest House before dusk.   

 

That night at the guesthouse, we played poker with the boys and drank a bottle of Yunnan baijiu.  Two of the men in this group were from Israel (we met a lot of people from Israel during our travels), one of who was a coin collector.  When we were looking for spare change to place bogus poker bets with, the other guests in the guesthouse gladly opened their pockets and gave us an assortment of foreign currency.  The coin nerd was beside himself—we had to brush him off with the promise that he could go through the treasure after we had finished our game.

 

The next morning it was foggy and rainy.  We set off on a trail slick from mud and wet animal shit.  We saw mountain goats.  The sound of bells on horses and cows.  Waterfalls. 

 

The end of the trail, as far as we planned to hike it, took us to Tina’s Guest House where we met a group of Chinese men who shared a bus back to Qiaotou with us.  Biking gloves.  Belting songs.  Boisterous personalities.  They had hiked the Gorge before setting off on a bike tour to Lhasa—which would take them one month to complete.  Later, as we winded up and up mountain roads that would reach 4200 meters, we thought about these boys and how crazy they must be. 

 

The road from Tina’s to Jane’s was precipitous and absorbing.

 

At Jane’s we meet the two Israeli men again and shared a mini bus with them, as well as the two shy Germans we had seen in Lijiang, to Shangri-La.

 

Food eaten along the trail:

 

At the Naxi Family Guesthouse:  pumpkin, mushrooms, and fried rice with egg

 

Banana and walnut pancakes with honey

 

Ginger tea with honey

 

Black tea with milk

 

Coffee with coconut milk

 

Shangri-La (Zhongdian)

 

Women, women, women.  Women restaurant owners.  Women running the guesthouses.  Women cab drivers.  And women bus drivers—like the one who took us to Shangri-La.    

 

We impressed the boys in the van by practicing our minimal Chinese with the driver.  We passed more amazing views.  White stupas.  Tibetan prayer flags.  Yaks.  Pigs.  Pigs.  Dogs.  Pigs.  Women with bright pink scarves coiled around their heads.  Rising incense smoke.  Stupas.  A muskrat hanging from a wooden post.  Stupas.  Tourists. Telephone lines.

 

In Shangri-La there were police everywhere.  A group of policemen stood around looking bored as women in brightly colored clothes sold fruit on the street.  “Dissidents” require military vigilance—and the Tibetans are capricious barbarians as far as the Chinese government is concerned. 

 

We walked most of the way to the Ganden Sumptseling Monastery (Songzanlinsi), the largest and most famous Tibetan Buddhist monastery in South West China.  Inside I forgot that one is not permitted to take pictures, and some monks frowned at me.

 

 Yellow kneeling pillows.  Dim-lit rooms.  Red robes.  Silver Tibetan butter tea teapots.  An altar with the picture of the Dalai Lama.  Little boys with shaved heads.  Monks with black teeth.  Stern looks.  Smiles.  “No naked light.”

 

Weaving our way through the monks’ houses on the hill next to the monastery, taking outdoor and permitted pictures.  Door.  Door.  Door.  I take many pictures of doors and windows. 

 

A little boy with glasses and snot running down his face followed us as we weaved through the community.  “Shi yi.” He is eleven.  He asked us our ages and told us that we are so old.  When Linda told him that I am her “meimei” (little sister), he nodded his head as if the fact was most ascertained.  Another little boy sped passed us, precariously balanced on the back of a calf.  Our friend laughed wildly and ran.             

 

We ate dinner at a restaurant specializing in local cuisine.  The waitress handed us pamphlets before our meal was served and told us about local national parks and other places of interest.  I stared in horror at a picture of a snub-nosed monkey. 

 

Food

 

More liang fei

 

Baozi filled with brown sugar

 

Tibetan fried cheese butter

 

Tibetan barley bread—dense with hard clumps of what I guess was yak yogurt

 

Local mushrooms

 

We love the local mushrooms 

 

Deqin

 

Awoke to muffled, static prayers blaring through loudspeakers across the city.

 

Another long bus ride.    Between Shangri-La and Deqin we peaked at 4200 meters.  Everyone on the bus was smoking, making Linda and I feel even more nauseous.  When we stopped at a restaurant for lunch, neither of us could get down more than a few cups of pu’er tea.

 

Deqin is strange and claustrophobic.  We hire a driver to take us to the Tashi Inn, outside of the city closer to the town of Feilaisi.  Tashi’s place is even more unsettling—it is like a hippie commune tucked away in the mountains in China. 

 

As the “hiking expert” at the Inn rolled a joint, I inquired about local trails.

 

“I don’t want anything too strenuous.” 

 

He looked me up and down.  “You can do it.  Suck it up.  You’re in the Himilayas!”

 

We walked from Tashi’s to Feilaisi—an hour-long walk—and ate at a restaurant.  At the restaurant, we again ran into the men from Israel who bickered over what yak meat dish to order.  They were headed to the Miyong Glacier the next day, and we were headed on a two-day trek up the Meili  Snow Mountain and then down the other side to walk along the Mekong River.  The Israelis had no desire to get close to a river:  not so long ago, an Israeli fell into that river while hiking around Deqin.          

 

That night I didn’t sleep as our two Canadian roommates giggled and popped painkillers. 

 

Woke up before 7 AM the next morning.  Stretched on the roof of Tashi’s, surrounded by a white mist.  The mist was too thick to watch the sunrise, or anything else around me, but I listened to life rousing in the dawn.  Cocks crowing, cows lowing--screaming.  People shouting to one another in Chinese or Tibetan.  Bells.  Clang, clang, clang.  My favorite sound.

 

None of the hippies running Tashi’s were awake.  Linda and I made coffee in the kitchen.  We left our bags by the reception desk with a note stating that we’d return in two days to retrieve our stuff and pay our debts.

 

Got in a car to Xideng, where we would start our hike.  It was raining.  At Xideng, I tried some Tibetan butter tea in a man’s hut at the foot of the mountain while we waited for the downpour to subside. The man built a fire in a cast-iron stove before pressing play on a cassette player that blared warped jungle beats with strange Chinese or Tibetan warbling.  He had to unplug the tape player in order to plug in the blender that creamed the yak butter with the tea.  The raking sound of the blending caused little transitional interruption to the music.  With the tea made and poured, my host handed me a tin bowl full of golden-brown powder.  He motioned for me to eat a spoonful before I sipped at the tea.  As I raised the spoon to my mouth, I suddenly felt awkward, laughed nervously, and sent powder flying in a golden-brown cloud.  The tea and powder were delicious—like a malty, fatty breakfast drink.   

 

The man seated across the table from me, pouring more tea in my cup when it got half-full, showed me his Communist Party ID.  Pigs squealed.  Rain pattered on the roof.

 

I bought a purple poncho and we began our muddy ascent.  Up up up up up up up for 2000 meters.  A girl in black and white striped knee-highs barreled past me, pulling at the reins of a horse with a Chinese tourist on its back. 

 

Rain.  Mud.  Horse piss and shit. Clang, clang, clang. A cow in a bush, visible only by the sound of its bells.  Passing people on their way down as we climbed up.  We were given thumbs up.  “Jia you!”—a cheer, for encouragement.

 

As we got closer and closer to the top of the mountain we saw more and more prayer flags.  At the top, bushes and trees were covered in flags and jewelry.  I left my wooden bracelet, the gift from the monks outside Qiaotou, dangling on a branch sprouting from the head of the Meili Snow Mountain.  

 

Again we got lost as we tried to find a place to spend the night.  We walked from one side of a small village to the other and then back three or four times.  Two partially blind old ladies holding prayer beads stared at us with two good eyes.  Shoes caked in mud. Heavy feet.  More horses.  More pigs. 

 

Finally settling in at a guesthouse, we occupied the vacant common room and waited for dinner.  Linda asked someone to turn on the lights, and a man communicated to us, through gesture, that we would not have electricity until they revved up the generator.  Eventually, when they got the generator kicking, we couldn’t turn OFF any lights.  A little red lantern in our room casted a pink light as we slept, all night long. 

 

We were so hungry as we waited for our host to cook dinner that we snuck a jar of peanut butter we found above the bar in the common room and made a snack by rolling globs of peanut butter into hot cocoa mix.  Drinking tea, eating whatever we could get our hands on, I read the absurd English on the side of the hot water thermos: 

 

GREEN HOMESTEAD

 

a street played a day.  be about to go by car to go home now.

 

Before dinner, our host told Linda how much he loves the Dalai Lama and hates Mao.  Then we ate with the host and his little brother.  The horse poked its head in and out of the kitchen window.  Our host filled our bowls with more and more rice even as we protested. 

 

Another sleepless night.  A creature rustling under my bed kept me awake all night.  Mistakenly, I left some energy bars on the window ledge next to my bed; I woke up in time to see one of the bars being drug under the bed, but I was too late to see exactly what kind of creature had been so daring.  Restless dreams of snub-nosed monkeys running across the roof . . . 

 

The next day we spent about 3 hours trying to find the right trail.  When we were headed in the right direction, we were already tired.  We passed empty rural village after empty rural village.  Well-tended crops, unoccupied houses.  An old woman with a heavy stack of firewood on her back and an axe in one hand passed us and made exasperations in a local dialect we couldn’t understand.  Posters with the face of the Israeli who went missing on the trail.  Notes hidden under rocks that are stacked on the side of the trail.  One note read:  “Elephant ear.”  Another:  “Rain Jacket.”

 

Eventually we found a group of men seated around a fire.  One white man in a circle of Chinese locals.  This man is the cousin of the man on the missing posters.  They are both Israeli.  He recently got out of the military.  Two weeks ago his cousin fell into the Mekong.  They still had not found the body.  He made little indication of whether he was hoping to find his cousin dead or alive, but one glance at the raging river pronounced the word death under its raucous crashing.  Roar, roar, roar--all I can hear. 

 

The men in the circle smiled at me and gave me bread and pickled vegetables.  They would not accept the meager two-Yuan I tried to bestow on them.

 

A white river swells with a red one.  The red bean milk tea colored river is the Mekong.  We had been walking through a path lush and green all morning, and now, on the other side of the mountain, following the bend of the river, we encountered desert and rocks of geological intrigue.  Neon-colored lizards.  Snakes.  The Mingyong glacier, astoundingly frozen in the distance.  A small spotted cat with a bushy tail—it was no bigger than a house cat, but could it have been something more?

 

At a village we asked people where we could buy food and water.  An old man with milky pupils tried to sell us marijuana.  We mistakenly walked into a school.  Two rooms.  A blackboard with some Chinese characters on it.  Four children watching TV with a young lady.  The young lady sent a little girl with us to lead us to the local convenience store and restaurant.  We greedily drank water and ordered some noodles.  Flies swarmed.  A second skin of flies. Our hostess squinted at us through the bright sun and did laundry by hand.  I felt like I was in a remote desert.  I felt like I had left China far behind . . .

 

In the next village we encountered, a man escorted us and his horses back to Xideng.  We came full circle.  Our trek ended at a place called “The Karma House.”  We sat on the porch of The Karma House and waited for a ride back to Tashi’s.  An old woman smacked a stubborn calf on the rump.  Crazed-looking horses dashed by. A curious little girl tried to get me to let her steal a sip from Linda’s camel back.  Linda was annoyed.  I distracted the little girl with my camera and let her take pictures with it.  I drew a doodle in my notebook and let her try to copy it.  She took my swirling design and made little animals out of it:  snakes, fish, and birds.  When she finished, I ripped the page out of my journal and gave it to her—after all, it had her dirt-smudged fingerprints all over it.  She was filthy.  She scratched her head and white flakes drifted into the pages of my journal. 

 

A young man drove us back to Tashi’s.  He was high-speed obsessed and tone deaf.  No range, high or low, fit his voice as he sung along to the radio.  He asked us if we knew the song every time someone started to sing in English.  Christian rock.  “This song is about Jesus.” He didn’t know who “Jesus.”  He knew every word to this song about Jesus, though.

 

At Tashi’s, we partook in the communally served dinner.  It was the first “Western” food we had eaten in a long time.

  

Food:

 

At Feilaisi:  green peppers and mushrooms, fried rice with egg and tomato, broccoli in garlic sauce, white Shangri-la tea (which looks like coils of white fungus speckled with clots of dirt), and braised yak meat with onions (which I, of course, didn’t try, but which Linda assures me was delicious)

 

Tibetan butter tea

 

At the guesthouse before hiking along the river:  green gourd, cabbage and chili, cabbage soup, eggs and tomato, cauliflower, lots and lots of rice

 

At Tashi’s:  pumpkin soup, salad, and pasta

 

Back to Shangri-La

 

Another van, shared fare with more world travelers.  An Australian couple—botanists and conservationists.  The man was quite talkative.  Linda and he talked for the entire seven-hour ride and, later, through a 3-hour dinner we shared with him and his girlfriend. 

 

Kangaroo farming. Paul McCartney misinformed.  Josh Pike’s friend and drummer.  Chinese medicine is ineffective.  A Clockwork Orange is a great film.  

 

In the van I was seated in the very back and had to strain to keep up with the conversation.  I decided to sleep—some of the topics they brought up were interesting, but I found most of the interaction pretty exhausting.  When I woke up from a nap, I caught a chat about US politics and wished I was still asleep.  Linda claimed that McCain is a hippie because of his environmental policies. In fact, she went as far as to proclaim that McCain is the most “progressive” candidate.  I wondered if “progressive” has different connotations in Canada, and then I tried to force myself back into a rickety, agitated slumber.

 

The next few days . . .

 

 . . . were pretty uneventful.  I wandered around Shangri-la and arranged for some bus and plane tickets that would eventually get me back to Suzhou (where I returned for no longer than a day before I left for Canada).  In Shangri-la, I took more pictures, talked with the hostel owner, and treated myself to a Thai Yoga massage. 

 

The hostel owner told me I am too young to be a teacher.

 

“How old do you think I am?”

 

“Thirty.”

 

Night bus to Kunming

 

A few days before I returned, Kunming was flooded and the airport was shut down.  I had no problem upon my arrival to the airport, but the night bus was one of the worse public transit experiences I have ever had in my life.  It doesn’t take much effort to figure out why an all-night bus with beds, traveling on a winding mountain road with chain-smoking passengers, creates an environment akin to hell.

 

In Suzhou

 

I finalized my packing and prepared for a trip to Vancouver.  My boss from the school came to my apartment to give me my deposit.  He sat on my sofa and sweated.  It was muggy and miserable in Suzhou.

 

“What will you do next?”

 

“Work in a hospital in New York City.”

 

“A hospital!  That is perfect for you!  A hospital is a good place for a woman to work.”

 

I laughed and laughed and he looked at me strangely.

 

“Keep in touch.”