Tom: Xijiang (August 09)

Xijiang (August 09) · Aug 11, 08:21 PM

Low fog settled in last night, shrouding the valley in a mist that brightened with an invisible sunrise, illuminated the river and the silhouetted town on its far side. At a guesthouse beside the bus stop I found breakfast — hot soy milk with fluffy fried bread-sticks, chopped up for easy dipping. This is one of my favorite Chinese breakfasts, though it’s not filling. Up the street, past the large public square and basketball court marking the center of town, I found a large number of village men putting up the timber frame for a new building. Two dozen or so men are hoisting the frames with ropes, poles, and their bare hands. Old men nearby are carving joint pegs. A woman is working in a portable kitchen setup across the street in a recently demolished lot covered with rubble. Further up the street — towards the entrance to town — carpenters are preparing new beams and posts for more frames for a second building. Beyond that, raw lumber is being processed into posts, beams, and planks. Children and animals — mostly kittens and small dogs — roam freely though the construction, as do locals unemployed by this new development; they are going about the healthy, if plain, task of living an ordinary life. At the entrance to town a little just past the make-shift lumber processing area a long message carved in stone tells the story — in Chinese and in English — of the town’s history, including a couple of scenic spot titles; Beijing has plans for this place.

Back towards the bus stop I sat down for a bowl of rice noodles with sliced pork and chopped green onions — another typical Chinese breakfast item.

I ran into Mathieu and Aurelie — the first French couple I met yesterday. We are both planning walks out of town into the surrounding countryside, albeit in different directions. They will follow the river upstream, I will cut perpendicularly through town up into the terraced hillside. In the steep backstreets and alleys chickens, roosters, and ducks are more common. A maze of stone steps and concrete paths criss-cross the valley-side village, winding up between old wooden and mixed concrete and wooden Miao family houses. On a roof an old man is chopping dried corn into thin discs — he looks to be halfway through a pile that will require several more hours of work.

I stuck to the main path, though at one juncture a couple kids had to point me in the right direction. Coming down from farmlands above, I pass locals carrying harvested corn and grains in baskets hung at both ends of bamboo poles they carry over one shoulder. The town thins out as I climb up, and soon I’m on a worn dirt road walking through low forest and then terraces. The rice fields are bright green, and the view back down into town and up the river valley floor farmland are stunning. It’s well worth the sweaty climb, and I take a couple of small side-trails out along the rice-field terrace rims to enjoy the feeling of this place. Tomorrow morning a Chinese tourist with decent English and a video camera will tell me that the conditions of the local people are not so good and access roads should be improved to increase sight-seeing, but part of me wants to disagree. Every day I work in a sealed, windowless lab space with carefully conditioned air. I am barraged with electromagnetic radiation and I have to be careful to avoid obesity and repetitive stress injuries. Maybe I’m romanticizing, but there is something fundamentally good in the agrarian life working close to the earth in the open elements. I know that life has it’s own unpleasantness and danger, but for me — right now — the grass is greener. Too bad it doesn’t pay as well, no?

I enjoyed my walk; the sunshine, the heat, the valley spread below and the details of the wildflowers and fields through which I wandered. On my way back down into town I made sure to take a different path, and ran across fields growing the long red chilis that make la jiao, the spice Sichuan and China’s southwest is infamous for. Crossing the river at the bottom of the valley I passed women washing clothes, kids playing in the river with inner tubes, and men washing up or swimming, all within a couple hundred yards of each other. I was hungry again so I returned to the noodle shop from earlier for another beef noodle bowl. There are four shops in a row, but I like finding a local place and returning a few times. It adds an element of comfortable rut-ness to my life on the road, and I enjoy the short friendships that spring up on occasion.

Today is a market day. They happen every five days or so; it’s why I chose Xijiang to visit. This morning I saw women setting up bamboo stalls in the public square and butchers selling meat in the adjoining basketball court, but the market wasn’t open when I left for my walk. When I returned, the village center was buzzing with activity. The market was divided into three sections: durable goods (sandals, skirts, fabric, watches, etc) in the public square, meat in the basketball court, and produce in a stone paved courtyard below the basketball court.

This is good atmosphere for shopping. I wandered up and down the main stret, poking into all of the several tourist shops, checking out silver bracelets and looking for anything “what suits my fancy”. In the end I picked up a frog ring and a pair of wide bracelets for 65 yuan. Later I will buy two of the local wide-brimmed hats; they are quintessentially Chinese and my French friends say that you can’t find this particular kind in Yangshuo, which is the only stop between me and my exit out of China. The hats are bulky — the larger of the two has a diameter of at least two and a half feet — so I have no idea how I’m going to get them back to America, but I’m determined to do it or fail trying.

The market has brought everyone down into town. Children are playing the street. Old men — I sat down with them for half an hour later — congregated together on a corner opposite the market. Farmers walk through carrying harvested grain, corn, and sometimes pigs in bamboo basket cages. I’ve seen less than a dozen foreign tourists today and well under a hundred Chinese travellers. From an “unspoilt minority village” perspective, Xijiang is the most perfect place I’ve been.

I returned to my room at one point to offload purchases. I hadn’t yet bought the hats, so it was just the silver. On the first floor of the guesthouse, I stumbled into a Chinese group sitting down for a lunch banquet. The invited me to sit, and forcibly insisted on it once they heard I was traveling alone. We get all kinds of local food, including fish I don’t eat, and also notably including a nasty local alcohol. I manage — accidentally if you’ll believe the luck of it — to drop food into my bowl of firewater, so I have an excuse to switch to beer. Then the staff comes out. They are dressed traditionally, with big jangly necklaces and bigger headdresses with even more jangle than I’ve ever seen before. The start singing for someone, something in perfect pitch unison. It’s all beautiful, but like every rose’s thorn, if they sing for you then they feed you shots from shallow bowls: one from the left, another from the right, and then again from the left. They work their way around the table (which includes me!), and there’s even more drinking — this style of getting drunk is a local Miao custom — where they tell the story of the song and then make you drink fan yi jiu (translator alcohol). I refuse as much as I can, which is a useless strategy. After dinner they guard the door and sing for anyone leaving, then make them drink one last time. I hang around till all the Chinese have left and the girls have taken off their costuming. This is how Han Chinese experience minority culture. This and flag led tour groups — interesting and unsettling.

Back in town I check on the construction progress. Remarkably, the frame is up and another is on it’s way. Men are climbing all over it, positioning and securing cross beams. I wander side streets down by the river, and cross an elaborate new bridge to the Chinese block-and-concrete style school on the far side. The market is still on. After a while — that while includes the action of buying those hats I mentioned early — I run into my friendly French friends. They are headed upriver for a swim. I’m going back to my room to drop off the hats, but say I might follow them. Either way, we agree to meet for dinner. The backup meeting plan was a good idea, because on my way up through town I found all the construction workers retired to dinner in the street, seated down long, low benches with the women and children. The invite me to sit. Adventurously, I sit. They give me a bowl of a really nasty alcohol and say he jiu (lit. drink alcohol), and I drink. They say gan bei (empty the cup) and I empty my cup. I’m eating what I can to buffer my stomach while I try to figure a way out; their alcohol is being poured from a large plastic gasoline-style container. I bet gas tastes better.

I was doing well until the women came round. They aren’t singing, and they aren’t jangling, but they are feeding people shots of something very awful and even stronger. In the time between when I realized “Oh, sh_t” and when I was finally able to escape, I went from sober to heavily buzzed. I started drinking sloppily, letting the clear poison spill down my chin — less for my stomach. I escaped through a blockade of women with shots I barely choked down, aided by solid drunken handshakes and back-pats.

I’m drunk now. Unfortunately, there’s more alcohol in my stomach that has yet to be pulled into my blood-stream. It only now occurs to me — during my final week in China — that I should be explaining how I can drink, maybe on religious grounds. It’s too late for that now, so I do the only sensible thing; I find public toilets and induce vomiting. If you’ve ever seen the public toilets in a small Chinese village, you’ll know exactly how easy this task is.

With my stomach empty, I’m glad knowing that I’ll be getting soberer soon, so I walk back into town to meet up with Mathieu and Aurelie for dinner. Note that I steer clear of the construction area. Mathieu finds me in the public square; he’s been talking with the town’s two English teachers — the newer of which has only studied for five years, himself. Everyone is amused to hear the story of how I’m a little drunk, or maybe it’s my pissed imagination. In any events, we peel off for dinner after talking together. Waiting for the food, my friends introduce me to Escoba, a French card game. The other French couple from yesterday arrives to join us for the game and for dinner. So does a lone Frenchman from Brittany (half the people at this table are from Brittany now). He was pulled into our group because — in the retelling of my afternoon adventure — I used the Chinese he jiu and gan bei. The propiator, hearing me, insisted on bringing out wine glasses and a bottle. Everyone got a small glass of the rose-colored wine. What I’m thinking: oh dear, not again.

I sip with the initial toats, but that’s it. For the rest of dinner I gulp water from my 1.5L bottle. The man from Brittany got a glass, too, and I drew him to our table by remarking on the wine after his reaction to a sip.

We are having a good time — so good that they turn out some of the lights to hint that maybe it’s getting late. I want to catch the first bus back to Kaili tomorrow, so this is a good excuse to pull away. I left with a sincere offer to visit Brittany, and returned to my room to pack, shower, and go to sleep at eleven.

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http://tom.spacing-guild.net/2006/08/12/enroute-to-guilin-august-10

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