In the cold and dark, and I need to pee: a kind of love story

        I have no idea what time it is, because the only light in the room comes from the tiny furnace unit in the corner.   The digital readout is glowing orange and reading 30 degrees Celsius.  Usually I hate these kinds of displays—visiting friends, I’ve been known to cover computer modems and VCR clocks with t-shirts and dirty underpants.  I have no pride when it comes to sleeping, and for me, sleeping means no fluorescent green or blue shadows on the walls, never mind that my eyes are shut.

Tonight, though, I love that orange glow, because it means I won’t wake up frozen and dead.  Even in bed, with something like 16 blankets on me, I know it’s freezing in our room.  Freezing.  So cold, that you want to wear your gloves and hat and stomp your feet to keep your toes from dropping off.  Alas, if only one could sleep in a snowmobile suit, we’d be just fine. 

 

We’re in Ping’an, two hours from Guilin, in the Guangxi province, a place known mainly for the pleasure you receive saying its name.  We’re in the mountains, on the Longji rice terraces, to be exact, and this evening when we sat down to dinner in our “hotel”—I use the term loosely because when we complained that our TV didn’t work the “staff” simply said, “It broken,” and went back to watching the Olympics—that night when we sat down to dinner in the dining room of our residence, it was so cold that steam poured—poured--off the dishes as they brought them to our table. 

 

Right now, though, what I’m thinking about is the fact that I have to go to the bathroom.  Bad.  Too much jasmine tea and beer, if you can imagine such a combination.  Lying in bed, Jamie’s snoring (he’s sleeping with Ellen and me) and the hum of the furnace filling the silence, I contemplate my options.  Eventually, of course, I come to the conclusion that the only thing I can do is sprint in my bare feet across the cold floor to the un-insulated bathroom at the far end of our “family room”—a gorgeous basement apartment lined in rosewood and decorated with the circular wood carvings indigenous to the region.  All of which is very pretty, but not very useful at X o’clock in the morning with a bladder full to bursting. 

So I count to 10.  And then I count to 10 again.  Then I decide that 100 is a nice round number, and that if I can’t reach it without falling asleep, then I really do need to go, never mind frostbit toes and other, um, extremities. 

 

The thing about Ping’an is that it’s unimaginably amazing, never mind its oddly situated apostrophe.  In the 24 hours that we’re there, the following events will attempt to destroy our pleasure: 

1)   The sun will remain hidden but for one, twelve-minute segment during which we’re all busy inside brushing our teeth.

2)   The temperature will never break 5 degrees Celsius.

3)   Jamie will throw up.

4)   My morning “shower” will consist of a trickle of water that embarrasses the word “trickle.”  Seriously, I’ve been spit on with more velocity.

5)   A bunch of old women will attempt to show me their hair.

6)   Lucy will have a chicken jump on her head. 

None of these will matter. 

 

Chances are, you’ve seen pictures of Ping’an, or at least of the rice terraces surrounding it and similar villages in Guangxi.  And chances are if you’ve seen those pictures, you’ve thought to yourself, “Holy crap!  I want to go there!” 

And you are right—you do. 

Rising as high as a thousand feet, these terraces are vaguely reminiscent of Aztec temples, a series of steps cut into the sides of the mountains that date  back to 1271.  Unlike the temples, though, these hills curve, causing the terraces to bend and flow, swelling at the belly and narrowing at the hips.  Hillocks rise here and there and valleys crease into the larger mountains, and the effect overall—the patterns, the lines, the way a view shifts and changes when you walk just a few dozen yards—is nothing short of amazing.  It’s the kind of place where you take a picture, walk ten feet, take another picture of the same thing, walk twenty more feet, turn and go, “Ah, damn,” and take another.  And none of these photos do the view any justice.

And Ping’an is one of the few places where the presence of the occasional building or a distant view of the village actually adds to the natural scene.  This part of China is occupied by the Zhuang minority, a group that I’m sure I’d find really interesting if I’d just take ten minutes to research on the web, but about which, at this point, I can only babble, “Their houses are really really really neat!”

Because they are:  generally deep and rectangular, they (the houses, not the Zhuang—though I’m sure the Zhuang themselves are also deep, albeit not rectangular).  Anyhow, generally deep and rectangular, these houses are wood framed, with overhanging second and third floors and wide eaves.  Often, the framing posts are left longer than needed and carved into large, pleated balls which dangle from the overhangs and are painted red.  Coal-colored shingles cover the low, wide roofs, and the effect when viewed from a distance is of a cluster of long crows hunched over dinner. 

You’d almost think you were in Switzerland.  Except for those insanely beautiful rice terraces.  And all the Chinese people. 

 

Of course, one would hope that the Swiss would at least bother to insulate their houses, something the used to dirt-hard living Zhuang have chosen not to do, damn their tough-as-nails souls.

So finally, I’m forced to throw back the covers and plunge myself into air so cold the skin of my fingers tightens just standing up.  Dashing across the room, I skid into the pitch-black bathroom, feeling my way to the toilet.  Once I take care of business, I feel my way back to the bedroom and check on the kids.  One of them is fine, but when I straighten the covers of the other, the bed is wet. 

Crap. 

Fumbling in the dark, I find the clothes this particular kid wore that day.   I won’t name names of course, because, as I’m sure you understand, I’m clinging to the hope that someday Oprah will pick my book for her club, and if this happens, I don’t want to have to spend all of my ill-gotten gains on kiddy therapy.  Anyhow, clothes in hand, I wake the little bugger, strip off the wet PJs, and make another dash to the bathroom, shivering child in arms.  Three seconds on the toilet clears out what little pee is left in this particular bladder.  Then it’s back to the bed, where I lay down a towel or two while the now severely shivering, severely wet, severely cold, and severely tired kid attempts to pull on day-old rags, in the dark, with numb fingers. 

Eventually, though, the my child is back in bed, warm and snug, already snoring. 

I, on the other hand, can’t feel my face. 

 

We spend the first part of the afternoon we arrived wandering through the village, trying ever so hard to avoid buying every darn knick-knack and doo-dad on sale at the numerous souvenir shops.  Eventually, toes numb, nostrils frozen shut, we stumble into a restaurant for a snack and a little warmth. 

I use the term “into” loosely here, because, actually, most of the restaurants in Ping’an are so poorly jointed that the owners burn small, unventilated charcoal fires inside with no fear of carbon-monoxide poisoning.  The particular place we choose is actually an outdoor café of sorts, with circular holes cut into the tables, into which are placed red hot trays of burning wood. 

Normally, of course, I’d worry about having three kids under the age of ten huddled around an open flame ensconced in metal so hot it leaves scorch marks on the table, but at this point in the day I’m pretty sure a permanent brand on the forehead of a three-year old is probably preferable to that same three year old shivering so hard he loses all his teeth. 

We order popcorn and fresh-roasted peanuts for the kids and bamboo rice and dried cabbage soup for us.  The soup comes in a huge bowl and is warm and salty, with just a hint of sourness to keep things interesting.  The rice is a local specialty, prepared in narrow tubes of bamboo cooked over an open fire until the wood is scorched and the rice has a sweet, almost corn-like taste to it.   

Warm and taut-bellied, we cross through the village again and into the rice paddies.  We’re not out there five minutes when Will says, “You know what, Dad?”

I consider carefully before answering.  He’s getting better with age, but Will is not so much a glass-half-empty kind of guy as a glass-is-half-empty-and-probably-full-of-arsenic kind of guy.  Don’t get me wrong:  I’d cut off both my arms for the boy (though I’m not sure how I’d do the second one), but there are days I have to fight the urge to tug down the back of his Levis and search for a gray tail, he’s just that much like Eeyore. 

So when it’s cold and wet and you’re walking outside someplace where there aren’t any books or libraries or rocks to throw at his sister, and Will says, “You know what, Dad?” my impulse is to duck, emotionally, because you just know something snipey might be coming your way. 

Today, though, I’ve got Jamie on my shoulders and I’m hiking through the famed Longji terraced rice paddies and my belly is full of bamboo and dried cabbage, so I just say, “What?”

“This is my favorite part of our vacation so far.”

I look at him.  His hands are in the pockets of his green down vest, and his face his down as he walks, his skin a pale, almost blue-white in the cold. 

“Will?” I say.

He nods, but doesn’t look up. 

“We’ve only been on vacation for six hours.”

Now he shakes his head.  “No,” he says.  “I mean our vacation this year.  You know, the whole vacation:  in Hong Kong.”

Nevermind that Hong Kong isn’t really a vacation per se—okay, okay, strike that:  it is—this statement nevertheless pleases me in ways you just can’t imagine.  I mean, seriously, the weather is crap, we’re a long way from home (our pretend home, that is, nevermind the one half-way around the world), and I’m making him participate in physical activity. 

And he’s happy.

So so am I.

 

Which, of course, is when Jamie throws up.

Well, not right then, actually, but very soon after.  After we’d walked a bit further, after we’d taken roughly 7 million and six pictures of the paddies, and after, luckily, I’d taken him down from my shoulders where he’d been fussing, and put him on the path, looking into his eyes as I inquired, “Jamie, are you feeling alright?”

At which point, he opened his mouth, leaned forward, and vomited.  Twice. 

“So,” I said, “the answer’s no, right?”

Luckily for us—if the word “luckily” can ever be used in the same context as “vomit”—it appeared to be the sort of upset stomach that, once emptied, went away.   Within five minutes he was skipping along the trail, yelling at his sister for racing ahead.  Almost like his brilliant parents were so busy stuffing their bellies with good food they failed to notice that he was stuffing his own golf-ball sized belly with a basketball’s worth of popcorn and peanuts. 

 

Which leaves only the women and the hair to explain.

If you do a Google search for “Zhuang women hair,” then hit “Image,” at least one of the pictures you’ll get is of a number of women in brightly colored dresses standing calf-deep in water, washing very very very long hair.

Very long. 

Say, 10 feet.

I’ve searched and searched and haven’t yet been able to find an explanation for it, but apparently Zhuang women don’t actually cut their hair.  This seems peculiar to me, since a lot of the younger women we saw in Ping’an lacked the Crystal Gayle on Rogaine look.  Most of the older ones, though, wore their hair in a peculiar bun at the top of their foreheads.  Some of them wore double-peaked turbans as well, but even with these hats, that single, knotted lock was always visible. 

All of which is well and good.  Except that, in Ping’an at least, apparently it’s something of a cottage industry for these otherwise dignified, self-respecting grandmothers, great aunts, and great-great grandmother’s of great-aunts, to undo their knots for tourists willing to part with a small sum of money.  I know this because, as we trekked our way through the beautiful, misty, terraced mountains of Guangxi, old lady after old lady approached us and offered to let us take a picture of her hair.

Which, if you ask me, is just so wrong in so many ways. 

Never mind that these women clearly haven’t seen The Ring.  Leave aside, for a moment, the whole question of dignity.  And ignore, if you can, the whole matter of hair prostitution—or at least hair pole dancing. 

No, these things aside, what’s truly disturbing about a woman in, say, her eighties, coming up to you and offering to let down her hair is simply this:

It’s gross.

Maybe it’s just me, but when I see hair that long, it’s all I can do not to picture what the rubber hair-catcher thingy in the shower must look like every morning after grandma gives her eight feet of hair a good scrubbing. 

And when I can’t avoid these images, I get this itchky feeling at the back of my throat, like I’m a cat about to urk up a hairball.

I’m not sure why this is.  I’m not sure why simply seeing someone’s obnoxiously long hair makes me, very literally, gag.  But it does. 

So when these kindly old women with their brightly colored woolen jackets and peculiar, newspaper boat hats come up to me on the winding trails over the rice terraces and ask me, in that husky voice used by hair strippers everywhere, if I’d like to see them let their hair down, I do what any full-blooded American boy in his forties would do:

Scream like a little kid and run in the opposite direction.

 

All of which has very little to do with my freezing face, the scent of urine-soaked cotton on my fingers, and that orange-black, night-darkened room in the basement of our guest-house.  But nonetheless, it’s the image that comes into my head as I crawl back into bed next to Ellen and Jamie and pull my 16 blankets back over my head:  11 separate old ladies approaching me on the trail, waiting until Ellen’s a safe distance away, and then offering to unknot their locks.  This leads me to think again about that Japanese film, Ringu, and the creepy-assed, long-haired girl who crawls out of the television dripping pond water everywhere before killing folks with her chapped lips, mossy teeth, and chronic halitosis.   Which, of course, leads me to think about every scary movie I’ve ever seen in my entire life, and the next thing you know, I’m pretty sure I’ll never sleep again. 

But then I roll over and curl up against Ellen, avoiding the ice-cube toes of Satan (more on this in another post).  Sliding my arm under her pillow, I reach all the way over to where Jamie is sleeping, quarantined from the other kids on the off-chance his retching wasn’t a one-off.  His hand is under the pillow too, and it’s warm and soft and I hold it in mine.

 

That night, after we’ve finished shoveling our dinner of curried vegetables down before they froze into multi-colored ice-cubes, the five of us race down the stairs to our room, crank up the “furnace” and crawl under the covers of the big bed.  Ellen thumbs through the day’s pictures, deleting repeats and images that show my jaw oddly elongated, as though imitating Jay Leno in a fun-house mirror, Jamie sitting on her lap, watching.  Will curls up in his down vest, buttoning it over his head to keep his ears warm.  Lucy lays next to me, asking bizarre “What-if” questions:  “Dad?  What if we were walking through the woods, and we saw a house, and grandma lived there, and she had peanut butter, and didn’t have any soap or Cornflakes, and there was a goldfish playing the clarinet?  Wouldn’t that be weird?”

Yes, Lucy. Yes.   That would be weird. 

We have every reason in the world to be miserable:  we’re 8,000 miles from our home in Virginia, and twice that distance from our friends there; we’re in a foreign country where we don’t speak the language or understand most of the customs, and where the food and water can make us sick at any moment; the weather has sucked for the last 10 weeks; it’s cold as the proverbial witch’s whatever, not just outside, but inside; and two-fifths of our family have bladders the size of shriveled raisins.

We have every reason in the world to be miserable.  

Every reason.

My slutty American sister

I’ve never been much of a patriot.

Okay, now that I’ve said that and my chances of ever becoming president of the United Sates have been blown to smithereens, let me go a bit further and be really honest:

I’ve often felt that patriotism is the playground of mindless idiots.

I don’t mean the kind of patriotism that leads someone to join the armed forces and go overseas—I actually find that quite admirable, truly brave, actually, and I’m not the sort of person to use words like “bravery,” “courage,” or “vitamin supplements” lightly.

No, I’m talking about the sort of patriotic idiocy that causes a person to stand up at a 4^th of July celebration and march in place, waving a little flag on a wooden stick, feeling your chest swell with pride as somewhere a band plays “Stars and Stripes” (I hate that song) or “America the Beautiful” (love that one). I’m talking about the sort of patriotic fervor that causes a person to assume that US healthcare is the best in the world, when in fact it’s not. Or the sort of patriotism that causes a person to get enraged anytime someone questions their country, or suggests that maybe, just maybe, the US might have made a mistake in the past—or is perhaps making one now.

That kind of patriotism really bugs me. More accurately, it insults me, the same way I’m insulted by Big Broadway musicals full of major chords and predictably melancholy ballads; the same way I’m insulted by the very existence of boy bands singing shallow songs that rhyme, or by novels by the guy that wrote “The Notebook” and that other guy who wrote “The Bridges of Madison County.” These things, like shallow, hollow, superficial patriotism, ask you to sacrifice nothing and think not even a single thought while filling you with emotions that can often sway you away from the sorts of complex thinking that are necessary in a—duh—complex world.

Now before you go calling me Godless and anti-American, let me make two points and make them very clear: first, I got my politics at bible camp. You want to talk about Jesus? Fine. My vision of Jesus is less that of a guy who makes me all warm and fuzzy and superior, than that of a guy who walks into a room and goes straight to the outsiders, making them—and not the rich or beautiful or connected or mindlessly spiritual—feel loved and valued.

You want to talk about God? Dandy. My vision of God is of a guy (or girl, or hermaphrodite—wow, did I really just call God a hermaphrodite?) who cares less about ideology and more about a woman weeping over a baby whose aorta has been sliced with shrapnel because some idiot somewhere decided they were sick of Saddam Hussein’s ugly mug and (unquestionably) annoying habit of thumbing his nose at us.

Hmmm. What matters more to God? Ideology? Or a parent’s love for a child?

Second, I want to make the point that the sort of patriotism I’m deriding here is the same sort of crapola I saw in the 1980s when I visited the (then) Soviet Union to receive my training to be a spy and a traitor to my country –wait, did I just say that out loud?

Seriously, though, if you’ve never been to a totalitarian state where every billboard features a picture of the glorious leader or the glorious founder or the glorious leader’s/founder’s glorious shiatsu, then honey, you’ve never seen patriotism at it’s glorious best. Or worst. Most mindless. Or—whatever. Because seriously? That kind of patriotism? That kind of manipulation of the emotions to make you feel good and full and like you’re part of something grand? That’s what manipulative people (say, ad men and women) do to make you forget how hollow and meaningless your life actualy is—and how unwilling they are to make it better.

So I hate patriotism. Get it? Good, because here’s a story.

Back in the 1850s when I was just a teenager, I had a friend named Mike Bushnell (not his real name) who, somewhat bowed legs aside, was nothing exceptional. His older sister, though? Mandy? Mandy was—how shall we say this?—very very “popular.” Very.

Everyone knew it. The high school principal knew it, the teachers knew it, my mother’s bridge group knew it, the news anchors up in Green Bay knew it. Mike Bushnell knew it. I mean, geez, it was all but plastered on the sides of buses.

Anyhow, it wasn’t uncommon for Mike to talk trash about his sister, calling her a slut, a sleazebag, a walking, talking, breathing—well, I can’t really go any further than that, because this is a family site and as it is the Fulbright people are meeting tomorrow to discuss relocating me (Trzkystan is supposed to be nice, right?). Let’s just say that Mike was an imaginative guy with a vivid vocabulary.

And he used it often. “What a sleazebag!” he said one day when we were eating saltine crackers on his back porch and his sister just happened to wander by carrying a book (something by Nabokov, I think).

“Yeah,” I said, trying not to wheeze crumbs all over my favorite Sean Cassidy t-shirt “What a slut.”

In an instant I was on my back, my skull throbbing and a pair of fists poised inches from my already bleeding nose. “Take it back!” Mike hollered, spit flying from the gap where they’d pulled two teeth to make his braces fit.

“What?” I wailed. “Take what back?”

Pop! Pop! My skull slammed into the wooden deck again, twice in rapid succession.

“Take it back,” he said again, quieter this time.

“Okay,” I muttered, trying to breath through the flow of blood and snot. “Okay, I take it back.” Even though I wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about.

When we were both up again, he handed me an old rag from the garage and took a look at his handy work. “Wow. You thought your nose was big before.”

I nodded, tried to laugh. More than anything, though, I was confused. “What the hell?” I said after a minute or two of trying to clean my face.

“Huh?” He was already thinking about something else, I could tell.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Everyone knows your sister is a—“ he gave me a quick look, and I stuttered. “A—you know. That guys like her.”

“Yeah?” he said. His eyes had narrowed.

I took a step back, dropped the rag in case I had to make a quick exit. Then finally I spit out: “You call her a slut all the time!”

“I know,” he said, then turned back to his copy of Spiderman. “But she’s my sister.”

All of which has what to do with patriotism? Consider this:

In the run-up to the 60^th Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Hong Kong papers were full of the pride Hong Kong people felt over their Chinese heritage. Many of these stories eventually revealed a typical HK ambivalence about the massive dictatorship that would eventually strip Hong Kong citizens of their right to voice dissent or surf for porn on the internet, but many of them did not, trumpeting the accomplishments of the PRC, particularly relative to other superpowers, past and present.

Say, for example, the US.

Some of these stories were just plain stupid. One idiot from some think tank trumpeted the fact that, yes, socialism might have been a really bad idea, but a centralized government that stripped individuals and industries of the right to make their own decisions about what to produce, and where, and when, and for how much? Sheer genius, according to this guy. “While the west wallows in the worst recession in 60 years, and Obama and congress can’t even pass health care reform, China is producing more goods, and better goods, every day.”

Then, too, there were the stories about all the missiles and weaponry the People’s Liberation Army had accumulated. “Much of which,” said more than one story in the press, “can reach the United States.” And this is news? Like, can’t most eight-year-olds these days make a missile that can do that?

But some of the stories were less idiotic and just plain, flat out sobering in a depressing, gosh, maybe I really am going bald, kind of way. Like the one about how the International Monetary Fund had said that China would be the nation to lead the world out of this latest recession. Or the other one about how China’s GDP had grown by a healthy 8% the last thirty years, was currently growing at 10% a year, and, if it maintained a mere 7% per year, would surpass the US by the year 2030.

Stuff like that just depressed me. And frankly, ticked me off just a little bit. I mean, man, the US government is tripping over its own feet on healthcare, despite the fact that it’s common knowledge that exorbitant costs are holding back corporations and causing industries to move overseas. And meanwhile the guys in the insurance business are using Benjamins to line the bird cage.

This isn't the first time I’ve experienced emotions like this while living overseas. Back in the eighties, when I was living in England and Reagan was running up the national debt and walking tough like a cowboy, there were times I would sitting around the college bar having a pint and someone would say, “Crikey,”—because you know, all English people say ‘crikey’—“that Reagan bloke is a right royal wanker, in’nt he?” And almost immediately I’d find myself defending a man I’d voted against once and called an idiot a million times.

Now, living in China for all practical purposes, I find myself occasionally feeling equally defensive about the US, much to my horror. After all, I pride myself on being able to criticize my country, on my ability to look objectively at her flaws and to seek ways to solve her problems. I’ve often said that the greatest sign of respect I can offer my students is to hold them to high standards. Isn’t the same true of my country?

Maybe so, but that didn’t keep me from getting really snotty on the 60^th Anniversary, especially when they showed this tank or that soldier or these troops marching past the review stands in Beijing.

“Oh sure,” I’d mutter at the television on the MTR (we don’t have a TV in our flat,, so I spent the day riding the train and swearing under my breath). “Oh sure, show off your tanks all you want, but who d’ya think’s better at croquet, huh? Just answer that question, why don’t you?”

Or: “Yeah, so you’ve got 1,000 really hot looking supermodels you can dress up to look like soldiers, but we’ve still got Barbara Bush, and there’s no taking that away!”

All of that said, though? The truth of the matter was this: as much as I knew what I was thinking and feeling and saying was kind of stupid, there was a part of me that really did feel like the US is better than the PRC. Yeah, I know it sounds hokey and schmaltzy and other words ending in “y” that have been made up, but there it is. And what it came down to was this:

When the PRC got together to celebrate their birthday, it was all about the weapons and the guns and the marching and soldiers. All about the force and the power and the showing of strength. All about money and the government. Non-military weren’t even allowed into Tiananmen Square for the parade--they had to stay home and watch it on TV.

And in the US, when we celebrate our birthday? It’s all about junior high marching bands playing “Copacabana” out of tune, and eight-year-old girls in hoop skirts tap dancing, and old men in VA hats waving from the backs of station wagons. And when the parade is over, we all go home and gather with our families.

Geez, I can’t even believe how dorky this sounds, but there you have it: given the choice between monetary stability and military might, and going home for a half-raw, semi-burnt hotdog and lime Jell-O with pineapples in it, I’ll take the Jell-O every time.

What a doof, huh? I mean seriously, how lame can you get, especially for a guy who just spent 700 words railing about mindless, boob-brained, sentimental patriotism.

But you know what?

She’s my sister.

Note: This post, even more than most of my posts, is my own personal, stupid, uniformed opinion, and in no way reflects the views of the Fulbright organization, the American government, or those sexy Chinese soldiers in their white go-go boots.