China 1996

Two weeks in rural China--October 1996

I'm not a writer, but I'll write this anyway, which may be
what I should have done four years ago, when the events were
fresher in my mind. Then again, maybe only the memorable is
left, and that's the part worth telling.

The first chapter of a travel book is the least interesting,
being more about the author than the place, and after all, I am
not so interesting that China would come to me. I went to China
at 8 am, when I stepped off the gangway onto the decks of a Chinese
boat tied up at the chaotic Hong Kong port. I wasn't yet sure I
was in China, but the fact that it was a Chinese boat gradually
confirmed itself, and it wasn't so other-worldly after all.
Not yet. The crew was Chinese. But they were dressed casually,
and wore Nikes they had bought in Hong Kong, and had a relaxed
air about them as they took orders for lunch and then spent quite
a bit of time smoking and acting like there was no link between
themselves and the tyranny that was supposed to keep them in
cowering terror.

The boat was a fast "jet-boat" or something, and sped up a river
with periodic glimpses of human presence
along the shore line, but I was unable to
detect any visual clues that appeared to signal a territorial
transition from Hong Kong to China. So, whether I liked it or
not, stepping aboard the boat was the entry to China.

This would be my China for the rest of the day, since we had
opted for the boat ride all the way to Wuzhou, some 300 kilometers
into China, beyond the frontier of the coastal province of Guangdong.
I suffer from what I call "terminal anxiety", that uncomfortable
feeling of being thrown out of the warm womb of a bus or plane,
into the chaos of a terminal full of people who know
the local language as well as where they are going. Two things
of which I am remarkably ignorant in such situations. Wuzhou,
in my estimation, offered a much more digestible terminal for
my anxiety than the other option, the
great, bustling, industrial city known for centuries as Canton.

Sherry confirmed my accidental wisdom. It was dark when the
boat pulled into Wuzhou, a complication that was not considered
bucause it was not reflected in the fictitious timetable.
The Chinese entry formalities were among the easiest and most
amiable in the world, as a young heavily-armed
woman in military regalia gave
our visa a cursory glance, our visage a bright smile, and our
passport page as lady-like a thump of a rubber stamp as allowed
under the ancient technology invented by her revered ancestors.

This is the point at which my terminal anxiety crescendoed
and just as suddenly crashed. A moment later, heading out into
a frightening and mysterious new
dark, a slim hand was extended: "Welcome to China.
My name is Sherry. Do you plan to stay in the hotel recommended
in the Lonely Planet Guide?" We were escorted in the dark down
a slippery slope to a "taxi" landing, where a few small, rickety
boats with kerosene lanterns were waiting to transfer passengers
across the river to the city of Wuzhou, on the opposite bank.

Sherry paid the fare, and led us several blocks down rather
deserted streets, and presented us to the desk clerk at the hotel
we had chosen with our baffled nods back at the customs house.
She announced the hotel rate---a figure that included the taxi
fare and no doubt, her commission, and if we wished, an add-on
for our tickets on the bus the next morning to Yahgshuo. She'd
be back, she promised in better English than Schwartzenegger's,
in a few minutes with the tickets---the
bus station is less then a block away. Meanwhile, let her know
if thre is anything else we might need. Sherry is the perfect
antidote to terminal anxiety.

The lunch on the boat was excellent, but still the only thing
under our belt, so we were delighted to see that there was a
little open-air cafe almost next to the hotel, where two
schoolgirls were still hanging out at this late hour of maybe
7:30, seemingly relishing their adolescent struggles. The
struggle between their natural bashfulness and their wish to
practice their school English. Their struggle between childhood
and adulthood. Their struggle between the China of their
ancestors and the China of the global marketeers. Their struggle
between being home at a decent hour, and attending the side-show
that we were unwittingly staging for the amusement of two
billion Chinese. It was clear to us that, Sherry motwithstanding,
most foreigners still went straight to Canton.

---0---

Wuzhou at 7:30 am is the antithesis of Wuzhou at 7:30 pm. the
streets were a-clang with bicycles and an impressive variety of
vehicles capable of cartage, rising in modernity to those belching
clouds of diesel smoke. Everything true-to-form: Chinese riding
bicycles. The same cafe was there for breakfast, but each of
the girls was now just one-one-billionth of China, a memory stamp
for whom we wish good Karma for the pleasure their
company gave us.

The bus trip to Yangshuo was pretty uneventful, relatively
speaking. It did not crash. The bus spent an hour or more
getting out of the city by a route apparently devised by an
infinite number of monkeys, picking up a few people along the way.
Once on the highway, we saw how uneventful our trip was. Not
far along, the fairly fresh wreckage of a horribly mangled bus
still partially
blocking the highway. Another hour later, an even more grisly
sight---another bus in similar posture, a few covered bodies
not yet removed for burial, a few more gawkers for whom the
spectacle had not yet worn off. This one happened maybe two
hours ago.

Still in Guangxi Province, we planned a stop in Yahgshuo,
thinking that
China would be such a jolting new travel experience, that it
would be a good idea to lay about in a town full of backpackers
and acclimate ourselves. Also get some accounts of other people's
experiences, and learn how to cut some corners and avoid
pitfalls. Ordinarily a place we would avoid, but we
had terminal anxiety about China as a whole. Partly due
to the Lonely Planet guidebook, which seemed cover-to-cover to
be a dire warning about how hard it is to get around in China.
By the time we got there, though, China had given us enough warm hugs
that she was not such a threatening, inscrutible place after all.

Yangshuo is one of two Meccas in China for the budget
traveler. Full of cheap guesthoues that are at once China and
any other place on the "gringo trail". It is China, provided one
wanders outside the triangle describing the bus station, the post
office, and the guest-house strip. Just across from our
guest house, there were two restaurants. Where we ate, the
food was served in Mongolian style, the staff bent over backward
to serve us and see that we enjoyed our experience and gained
a knowledge of China from it, the atmosphere was whatever the
Chinese clientele brought in with them. The backpackers ate next
door, where the staff was surly, the table-cloths were white,
banana pancakes were the specialty, and "Hey Jude" came out of the
loud-speakers.

We were anxious to move on, yet Yangshuo was still an
enriching exprience. Being birdwatchers, we wandered out of the
triangle, and headed for the countryside, famous for its
imposing geological wonders, the Karsts. Vertical-sided rock
pinnacles sticking up at random, hundreds of feet into the air,
with fairly flat land between them.

Birders are always wary in new terrain, because local customs
about trespassing, land use, and the presence of strangers can
vary widely and complexly
from one place to another. So we set out with some
trepidation, to see what our first rural wander would be like in
the most inscrutible of the world's corners. We felt that none
of the other backpackers had ever been this far from "home".
Soon enough, we encountered a family picking what were probably
Kumquats, although this is a vegetable I have little imtimate
acquaintance with. With a wide grin and a friendly gesture, the
man offered us each a fruit, which we regarded with a certain
visible uncertainty, meant to show that we would appreciate a
primer on how to consume them in accordance with local custom.
Or any other custom. Far less inscrutibly than a tea
ceremony, the whole orange plum-sized object popped into his
mouth, and he spit out the seed after a moment's chewing. Hey, we
could do that! And a brotherhood was formed. So much so,
that the Kumquatteer would not hear of us departing with any
part of our pockets and paraphernalia unstuffed with fruit. In
the most populous country on earth, overcrowded and poor,
we saw no other
people in a three-hour walk through rich, fertile land. Only
the man who gave us a part of his family's meagre wealth,
out of a relaxed, amiable hospitality. Not as a gesture of
anything---but as The Way, in a place where the Tao still is.
This is China.

---0---


Rural stops like this are a hard luxury to find, in China.
A special government permit is still required of hotels
if they wish to receive foreign guests, and few hoteliers
will trade off the red-tape for a few yuan from the token stranger.
Even fewer are the regular bus routes that might link one small
town with another over any appreciable distance. Guilin is the
bustling, modern capital of Guangxi Province, and from there,
a bus can be taken onward to Longshen, where the woman who
teaches English at the local school also has a hotel. And
a permit. Longshen is a picturesque stone-bridge town, and our
hotel balcony overlooked the river, where fishermen still use a
Cormorant with a ring around its neck to catch fish.

Approaching Longshen, we noted that the bus descended about
10 kilometers down a mostly forested mountainside, with virtually
no traffic, so in the morning we decided to catch the Guilin bus
and get off near the top. There, we could get in our first
real serious birdwatching, and walk back down if no passing
bus materialized en route. A few footpaths led off the road,
and following one for a few hundred meters brought us over a
little rise, face to face with a picture-postcard view of a
Chinese village, of maybe twenty houses. Just in time to meet
a resident, walking toward the road. What will he think of us,
I wondered as I flattered myself with the thought that I was
perhaps the first foreigners to ever see his village? "Ni hao ma",
I said, showing off about half my entire Mandarin vocabulary.
"Ni hao ma", he said, as if he met me at that same spot every
morning, and he disappeared down the path behind us. So much
for the idea that the Chinese are suspicious of foreigners!

"Chinese", now, has become somewhat of a misnomer. By
Longshen, we have left behind the Han Chinese, the typical
Chinese who occupy the entire eastern half of the country,
and we're now in what in America would be Window Rock,
Arizona. Here the people are Dong, ethnically, culturally, and
linguistically, and the man who exchanged "ni hau ma" with me
on the trail was also speaking a foreign language. Dong is
the fifth most widely spoken Sino-Tibetan dialect in China,
with a little over a million speakers. If we had needed to
converse, the villager
would have recognized that we spoke no common language, and
he would have written his words on his hand, since the written
word is the same in all of China, regardless of how the word is
pronounced by a dialect speaker. This was a source of daily
amusement and frustration to us, as shopkeepers would write
things down that we did not understand, with an air of "that
settles any misunderstandings". The Chinese are quite
accustomed to people who look funny, but they are presumed to be
from far-flung corners of China.

The walk down the hill confirmed what we had already learned
in our Yahgshuo perambulations. China is a nature-friendly
country, as old Buddhist/Taoist mentalities can hang on
through adversity as tenaciously as Judaeo-Christian ethics
did in Europe through the middle of the century. The
Chinese have not taught their birds any particular fear of
human presence, and coolies working in rice paddies seem no
more threatening to the clusters of birds than do the oxen.
No doubt there are parts of China in which a more
crushing population and
deeper poverty has taken it's toll, as in Laos, where the
collection of birds for the pot or cage is a national cottage
industry. But the parts of China we saw showed little
visible evidence that harvesting the local birdlife would be a
crucial part of a precarious living. As we walked past a house
in a tiny roadside settlement, children playing noisily
under a door-yard tree did not dismay in the least the dozen
or more species of songbirds we identified feeding among its
branches.

Half way back to Longshen, the land leveled off, and the
agricultural area became dotted with towns, so we tried to hail
the first little local bus that passed. We were peremptorily
ignored. It occurred to me about ten minutes later that it
was not to be taken personally, for along came the more
appropriate bus from Guilin---a fact probably known to the first
driver. We were cheerfully picked up, and we began to get off
at the first stop in Longshen, several blocks from our hotel.
"No, no, wait" gestured our conducter, who then dropped us off
exactly at the front door of the hotel at which we were already
registered. Jungle drums? Did everybody know we were there,
including the man who said hello to us on the mountain village
path?

China -- Part 2

Of the few Chinese people we met who could speak English,
less than a half-dozen of them, none of them told us a thing.
Nothing. Information that is in the standard tourist brochures
is quickly forthcoming, fluently and with enthisiasm. But
no questions about anything else were ever answered. Nothing
about life in China. Nothing about who owns this hotel.
Nothing about where any of those mysterious busses go.
Nothing about the nature of the nearby countryside. Nothing.

The departure of the bus from Longshen to Sanjiang
is officially sanctioned tourist intelligence, but how
we got there is anybody's guess. It had been days since we
had seen a road sign in any language other than Chinese,
so our itinerary from one known town to another can only be
taken as an article of faith, inferred by very imperfect
maps and an assumption that the bus goes the shortest way.
On a map, as the crow flies, it looks like about an eight-hour
walk. The bus left at nightfall. Somehow, it managed to
keep on going, without reaching Sanjiang, until we had dozed
off in our seats, and then kept going, making occasional
stops, until finally a stop was accompanied by a bit of
commotion. Wonder began to replace our stupor, and our
investigation revealed that a truck-driver's misadventure
had blocked the road, which would remain blocked until
the truck could be moved, and the Chinese Auto Club does not
respond with any particular alacrity. Neither does the
Guangxi Department of Highways, so there was nothing to be
done except build a new road around it, with whatever tools
were ready at hand, like screwdrivers and hubcaps. This
was done.

I often hear men in suits extolling the virtues of hard
work. I can assure you that such men have never done an
hour of hard work. Hard work is what was done by the bus
driver and his assistant and a few particulary skilled
passengers, with their bare hands, who built a bus-length
of road in the middle of the night in the
mountains where there had been none a few
hours before. Hard work was what was done when it was then
discovered that the roadway was still too narrow, and a
utility pole had to be removed, too. This was done, in the
dark, without disrupting the flow of whatever flowed through
the wires above. Hard work is also done every
day by a billion peasants bending over rice paddies, but not
by men in suits.

It was still dark when the bus squeezed past the truck and
continued on its way to Sanjiang, one of the better known places
in Dong country.

Sanjiang boasts a number of Drum Towers and Wind Bridges, the
architectural artifacts that, like the Great Wall of China,
represent the open air museums that one encounters while traveling
through a land that hasn't really changed very much since Marco
Polo was here. Among the accommodation choices in Sanjiang, is the
place whose name, as I reacall, translated into something like
The District Guest House of the Independent People of the
Autonomous County of Dong. It consisted of more than a few long,
rambling darkened wooden two-story dormitories with sweeping
creaking verandahs which made one think that for some reason, the
enire population of the Autonomous County of Dong periodically
assemble here and need to be lodged. Toward the further end of
one of the buildings, up on the second floor, a room identical
to all the others was found for us, and a charming lady in the
universal bright maroon, long-skirted, straight-lined dress of Dong
was designated to be our escort to our room in the otherwise
deserted building. I was never able to determine whether the
women of Sanjiang had for centuries identified themselves with
this indigenous typical costume, or if maroon was the only
color in the last bale of fabric that arrived at the Dry Goods
Store of the Autonomous County of Dong. The English-speaking
boy at the Dong Tourism office was characteristically
taciturn.

Long-e is not on any map I know of, maybe not on any at all.
The road from Sanjiang to Liping crosses the Guangxi-Guizhou
border somewhere on one side of the other of Long-e, which
might even be in Hunan Province, for all I can tell. Whoopie
Goldberg owns the bus and the town. Kate and I stared at each
other in disbelief. We have never before seen such a convincing
celebrity look-alike as this Dong woman. Face, expressions,
geatures, body language, hair, voice, everything. Pure Woopie.
She ushered us and the other passengers onto the bus--she was
the stewardess. She sat in a jump seat facing the rear, just
behind the driver, and picked up the children and hugged
them and tickled them, and regaled them with stories that for
all I know might have been Chinese translations of Jumpin'
Jack Flash.

Just at night fall, the bus arrived at Long-e, which is
the designated overnight stop. The road house of all roadhouses.
The town consist of little more than this hotel, which is
an extension of the bus. Everyone gets off, and heads for
the dining room. Whoopie and the driver get off, and make
for the kitchen. Beer is unloaded from the bus, Whoopie's
sleeves are up, and in an hour, a magnificent and sumptuous
banquet is laid out of incredible if not diverse Chinese
cuisine. Guests are then shown to their candle-lit
rooms, for those
who think hotels are for sleeping. But now, the only
electricity for miles around is put to good use. It is the
generator of the idling bus. Charles Bronson films are
loaded into the VCR, the volume turned up high, and
nightlife in Long-e rattles the windows with the sounds
of gunfire and karate grunts until what seems like about 15
oclock in the morning. Somehow, the second leg of the trip
on Whoopie's bus to Liping seems tame.

The banquet at Whoopie's Roadhouse was by no means an
unusual feature of travel in this part of China. The
people in rural south China are very, very well fed. Food
is everywhere, and it is rich, varied, delicious, well-
prepared, and abundant. Noodles are more common than rice,
and the most frequenty encountered dish is soup, which
almost always contains plenty of chunks of meat. Soup
is eaten at any hour of the day, and it is also the most
common breakfast. Solid matter is eaten from the bowl with
chopsticks, then the broth drunk directly from the bowl,
but the soups are thick and leave only a moderate amount
of spicy broth. Most people probably go for days with
nothing else, but the soup is a substantial, filling meal
with plenty of fidelity to any nutritionist's food pyramid.

We could learn little, though, of the eating habits of
families in their private homes, and know only about
restaurant cuisine. But outside eating is very widespread.
Plenty of restaurants everywhere, and very busy. Proper
meals also abound, and portions are huge. One can get a
bowl of soup at any time, almost anywhere. It is hard to
find a well-traveled street without a sidewalk cafe within
a few blocks, ready to serve soup at any hour.

As for quality, the sky is the limit. So is the
imagination of the people who provide the food. One of my
best meals came at a lunch-stop in a bus-line roadhouse.
Wonderful-looking dishes were being served, so I pointed to
a masterpiece, indicating my choice. It turned out to
contain not just Canadian Bacon, but maybe a half-pound of
it, in thick slabs, beautiful to savor as well as behold.
After enjoying, I reflected on some other aspects of the
rest stop. The toilets seemed more elaborate than one
usually encounters, and the cinder-block building quite
large and well constructed. As often the case, there were
no fixtures---just a wall that came down to floor level,
with an opening to allow for a trough under the wall. Being
in a rural area, the sound of livestock did not seem out
of place, but only later did I realize that hogs on the
other side of the wall were in fact the flushing mechanism.
And my dinner.

Nothing goes to waste in China. Small villages typically
did not feature in-house conveniences, but rather community
bathrooms that were built up a few steps above the ground.
The nightsoil of the village is gathered from this central
depository, as the most natural of all fertilizers for the
practical use of increasing food
production. At a half-pound per person, China produces a
half-million tons of **** every day. Nothing goes to waste.

Liping was not a friendly town. We arrived at mid-morning
on the bus from Long-e, and our first inquiries about lodgings
were met with surly rudeness. Nobody knew where the hotel was
on this Sunday morning, although a couple of times we were
directed to a doorway that was unceremoniously closed with
curt but unknown explanations that sounded an awful lot like
"Go away". We decided the best way to spend this Sunday would
be on a bus to the next place. But, as often happens at bus
stations, the local boy who likes to practice his English is
hanging around, and he seems willing to tolerate our presence.
He enthusiastically agrees to accompany us to a place of his
recommendation for lunch, and although his English is
rudimentary, the event is cordial. More importantly, now that
we have been "adopted", the townspeople seem to have warmed
to us somewhat, and we no longer feel antipathy. But by now
we already have our bus tickets in hand, for an evening
departure, and the ticket-master has even revealed to us
that there are day-rooms above the bus depot---rooms that
look suspiciously like hotel rooms, but they are designed to
enable families with a long daytime wait for a bus to make
themselves feel at home. Ultimately, the Liping ticket
master proved to be the characteristicly helpful Chinese,
who had infinite patience for the idiocyncracies of
strange foreigners who not only could not understand the
language, but couldn't even read it! Time and agian, we
found that any question
addressed, however indecipherably, to anyone in China
would generally result in the questionee setting aside whatever
he may be doing, to apply himself the task of seeing that these
aliens succeed in their quest. The first time it happened was
in Taiwan, where a bus-station attendand patiently drew us a
map of where to go to find our appropriate bus, which
did not use the bus station, but just passed through town and
stopped at a designated spot on a main street. We found the
spot, or at least thought we did, and after ten minutes, along
came the man from the bus station, on his bicycle, to make
sure we were at the correct place. Throughout China, similar
small sacrifices were made on our behalf so frequently, it
quickly ceased to astonished us.

China -- Part 3

The next 24 hours were spent on busses, with changes at Kaili and
the Guizhou provincial capital of Guiyang---neither of which appeared
to generate any regrets about not stopping. Anshun was our destination
and we were also glad of that choice. A little bigger and more
developed than our previous stops, it was still a pleasant city with
moderate traffic and easy walks to the hills and paddies from our
hotel near the edge of town. We were also near the light industry
district, and experience on several continents has taught us that
the best sidewalk cafes are where people eat with hardened and
dirty hands. As everywhere in south China, plenty of meat in the
cheap soups.

At Anshun, a river flows into a small marshy lake, and the city
straddles the inlet, with a wide causeway connecting the two parts.
A walk around the lakeshore appeared to offer the kind of birding
habitat we had seen little of, and there was also a ramshackle
but pretentions hotel just across the causeway, where the birds of
the ornamental plantings on the lawn beckoned. But the causeway
presented a view we did not expect.

"That's a body!", gasped Kate as we neared the far end of the
causeway. I didn't see where she was looking, so I checed out the
water for a suspicious floating object. No, on the road! There, on
the pavewment, about 50 yards ahead of us, was what looked like a
duffel bag that had been run over by several vehicles after falling
off a bus. It was a child--a boy of maybe 7 or 8, dressed in
clothing a bit more ragged than the local standard, his skull
partly crushed. Forensic medicine is not my strong suit, but
I would guess the body had been there since being struck by a
passing vehicle, probably the night before. Hundreds of pedestrians
had walked around the body since then--most of them probably trying,
as we did, to give it the kind of glance that would not signal an
excessive morbid curiosity. Life is cheap where there are two
billion of them. After birding, we'd have to pass this way again
to return to our hotel, several hours later. It was still there.

Anshun is where we first saw the culinary art of preparing dog.
Shops that sell or serve gastronomic dog prepare the animals with
a maximum of conspicuous flourish, on the sidewalks in front of the
shop, where the animal is on display until ordered in the dining
room. I'm not a dog lover, dead or alive, but I felt the
posture of the canine cadavers presented a too-sad-to-be-comical
aspect. The meat is also too expensvive to fit our budget, so we
went on to our usual beef or pork soup.

Our western turn-around point was Xingyi, just inside the Guizhou
border from Yunnan province. As is often the case in smaller Chinese
cities, there is only one hotel that is licensed to accept foreign
guests, and when the rickshaw driver pulled into the courtyard, it
had an ominously expensive look. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac,
and several Mercedes were parked under the ornamental greenery along
the circular drive. Oh well, nothing could be done but go in and
inspect the rate chart behind the desk. But we had forgotten that
there is no "class" in China. This was not a first-class hotel, it
was a hotel that was designed to serve the needs of the citizens
who chose to pop for a bit of luxury and style. And for their hired
drivers. There was a wing of very pleasant rooms, all with TV,
all occupied by those who served other more opulent guests. Not the
best rooms, not the best view. We had a view of a man who spent his
entire day carrying buckets of coal by hand from somewhere to the
coal pile adjacent to the hotel's power house.

It started to rain when we got to Xingyi---never hard, but never
stopping, either. We could make it to the little store a block away
where excellent local beer was exactly the same price as bottled
water. And, where on an errand, I discovered that there was an
inscrutible and imperceptible difference between the words for
toilet paper and sanitary napkins. The Chinese are delighted
when we amuse them that way. But, because of the rain, we ate all
our meals in the hotel dining room, surrounded by people who could
afford to exude endless clouds of tobacco smoke and the consequent
hacking coughs, without a thought about any apparent effect this
might have on people at the next table. Or at the same table, in
the case of a couple of Chinese who welcomed themselves to our table
to try out their limited English.

We gloried in this dining room. The food was incredible. No
matter how hard we tried, we never succeeded in getting our order
down to the quantity that would have fed only four or five hungry
people quite nicely. We didn't care because it was so cheap, and
we knew someone would eat the leftovers. The waitresses seemed
delighted with us. Coveys of them would gather
around our menu to giggle through bizarre transmigrations of ideas
to the Mandarin page from the almost equally incomprehensible
English page.

This was our home for four days, while it rained. We didn't
understand the significance of the rain until we went to the bus
station on the second day, to secure tickets to Nanning. Dutifully,
we then returned to the station in time for our late afternoon
bus, only to be told something. Bus company empolyees and waiting
passengers alike took us under their wing, and we were finally
ushered back into a waiting rickshaw and taken back to our hotel.
Of course, when we did not understand what we were told, it was
written down for our clear understanding. We presented the note
to a hotel desk clerk who had some knowledge of English, and
we were told there is no bus. Try tomorrow.

The events of the next day did not differ to any significant
degree from those of the first day, except that now, information
about muddy roads got through to us. On the third attempt, we
were assured by the small bus station crowd concerned with our
welfare, that there would be a bus to Nanning. We sat and waited,
while all sorts of modern busses arrived and left, some with
passengers and some without. Finally someone came and beckoned
us to a lot behind the bus station where a rickety old bus was
loading baggage. Our bus. "Nanning?" I insisted, inquisitively.
Yes, yes, we were constantly assured. I got out the guide book to
show them the word in Chinese. No problem. Get in.

The bus filled up fast, and we sat on huge cloth bags of something
just behind the driver, where there were also five Vietnamese
boys. Since Nanning is closer to Vietnam than Xingyi is, this
gave me some assurance, even though Vietnamese must ride a bus
in the opposite direction to have gotten to Xingyi in the first
place.

The quality of the road deteriorated rapidly as we got into
higher country, and we saw no busses at all coming toward us,
nor any other traffic. I notice things like that, with
trepidation. It soon became
clear that our driver was a bush pilot, and was blazing his way
where no other dared to go. It got dark soon after we left
Xingyi, so my only impression of the outside world was in the
headlights. It was not reassuring. At one point, we came to
a town. The road did not become a bit better going through town,
in spite of the fact that the "town" was in fact a vibrant city,
where I could look up into high-rise, ten-story apartment
buildings at people sitting in lighted rooms at desks doing their
homework as nonchalantly as if there were a road to the outside
world.

Every half hour or so, we would pass a tent, with a light
inside, from which a man would come out and wave to the driver
or perhaps talk for a moment. The road maintenance crew,
keeping the road open for us, or warning of diffuculties
ahead. We kept going. About halfway through the night, the
driver stopped at a village roadhouse for a rest stop. He
was exhausted from the ordeal, and got off the bus looking like
a fire-fighter on CNN who had been up for 48 hours in an
Oregon forest. It was three hours before he again had the
nerve to head back out onto that road, which for all I knew,
was hairpin curves and sheer dropoffs all the way.

By daybreak we were through the worst of it, and even
got back onto a paved road, passing through prosperous-
looking cities. In one of them, the driver blew the horn and
gestured to another bus-driver, and pulled up beside him and
some questions and answers were exchanged. Get off, we were
told, there is a bus to Nanning! What? Where was THIS bus
going? Another of China's unanswered questions. The
new Nanning bus was a delight--comfortable seats, all to
ourselves, smooth roads, and in two hours the bus pulled into
a city which I later confirmed was actually Nanning.

Nanning is totally different from the China we had just
come from, and it wasn't just the sunshine. Wide throughfares
full of cars, people walking around who do not spit. Shopping
malls with clothes and jewelry and electronics and appliances.
People dressed like they have heard of London. Telephones, from
which Kate tried unsuccessfully to phone home, but did pump from
the AT&T operator the intelligence that Clinton had beaten
Dole. She shushed me when I said "ask about the World Series."

But Nanning was, for all its differences, still China.
Everyone bending over backwards to make everything nice and
well-oiled for us. Even the train tickets to the Vietnam
border was done in only two trips to the railroad station.
Always someone to show us the way, and try patiently
and valiantly and sometimes futilely and apologetically
to help,
wherever confusion might or did or would leave us feeling
helpless. A stranger always feels helpless in China. But
it seems that the Chinese have an unerring sense of that,
and with an empathy we cannot even imagine, feel an
altruistic compassion to dispel that sinking darkness
from their honored guests.