The China Road Motorcycle Diaries

A Country Market

I not only didn't fit in, but was a teenaged ugly duckling, despite the assistance of Cosmopolitan Magazine articles like "10 Tips to Make Yourself Irresistible To Any Man You Meet." That would start with being pretty, I sulked, scratching at a pimple, and checking to see if my teeth were straightening at all. But I still could not resist the racy content, though I couldn't fathom being in a situation that would require decision-making choices such as the questionnaire that asked, if you meet a former lover on the street while you were on business in New York City and he proposes getting together at a hotel would you, A) Accept immediately, B) Suggest a delay of an hour or two so you can shower and shave your legs and armpits, or C) Decline as you have an important meeting.

I also had a copy of Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior where I learned how to set places for my guests for a 14-course French menu served à la russe. My grandmother, on my mother's side, who was from Boston and had traveled, had given it to me since I was interested in cooking, not realizing that it would further open my awareness to a sophistication I was sure I would never experience.

The bible must have been somewhere in the stacks and stacks of books that lined the walls of our house, but I wasn't reading it, preferring literary and science fiction, especially if set in a European country or outer space. Both genres highlighted my obvious misplacement in rural North Carolina when it was obvious that belonged somewhere much more exciting, like San Francisco or Paris. I had decided upon one or the other after leafing through one of the Encyclopedia Britannia supplements we'd get in the mail from time to time, and was taking French in high school to learn how to say "bonjour" with a southern accent.

But I did escape, and here I am in China, unlike this girl, who is probably kept occupied from dawn to dusk with chores and sleeps six-up in a hut. My escape vehicle was my dad's neglected Honda Enduro. I found it in the barn and he helped me fix it, though it was sufficiently dilapidated that I needed to pump up its flat tires and fiddle with the carburetor before each ride and sometimes on the trail. Some of the neighbor boys with Honda 50s had created a series of jumps in the woods by digging holes and piling hills, and when they were there I liked to out-jump them on my larger bike, which didn't further endear me to anybody. Mark Johnson bugged me especially, and swore he wouldn't crash it if we traded just for fifteen minutes, which I did and who crashed so badly I had to hammer the frame back straight. This is the boy who had led us all across the state highway that was just built a few miles away, and when the sheriff came after us led us back into the woods shouting, "scatter!" We disappeared into the trees and didn't ride for a few days after that. Though the sheriff certainly knew who some of us were, he probably figured he'd scared us from trying that again. 

But most often I raced off to a creek where there was a rope jump to fly clear to the other side, and a big tree to climb that had a flat limb perfect for writing, drawing, or just daydreaming.

Once I "developed" there was a train of boys who came over to ask my dad to help them fix their cars.

"He likes you," my mom would laugh, as I hovered at the doorway trying to time a dash to the the motorcycle with a moment the guy's head was in the engine or, preferably, underneath the car. Then I'd quickly roll the Honda out and escape again to the woods with my sketchpad and a book.

I sympathized with the girl, wondering how one dealt with all this in farming village that resembled farming villages in medieval times, and remembering all too well how the combination of wildly fluctuating hormones and cultural isolation affected me then when, despite all my as yet unperceived opportunities and distractions, all I did was stare sullenly into the distance, utterly despairing that I would ever see San Francisco or Paris and unable to talk about it because nobody around me even cared enough to try to find these places on a map.