河北省
May 3: A Country Market
The sun burns away the satiny morning haze and a landscape of jagged mountain peaks bite into the skyline like a line of pointy crooked teeth. Down another set of switchbacks they fall from view and then the crazy mountain peaks appear again, then there's another valley, and another roller-coaster rise with a view of the peaks, and so on, for forty kilometers. The air-cooled motorcycle purrs in the morning chill and I'm so intrigued by the landscape that all my worries of yesterday simply melt away.
On a downhill switchback I overtake a man holding a wooden cart ahead of him, but just barely. The cart is filled with straw to cushion two long tree trunks which are bouncing and sliding. He man's hands so tightly grip the handles that his knuckles are white. He looks up when he hears me decelerate and I hope that I haven't surprised him so much that he dumps the cart, or falls over the cliff.
The man returns to my thoughts every time I reach the bottom or the top of another hill. I wonder how he's going to manage pushing and pulling his heavy load up and down this one, and the next. There is no obvious destination until finally, after a few more sets of switchbacks I emerge into a wide valley and a beehive of human activity. On the banks at the curve of a wide, dry riverbed a farmer's market is in full swing. Riding across a massive concrete bridge I get a bird's-eye view of the rows and rows of tables full of fruits and vegetables, cooking fires, and a colorful jumble of plastic goods. The scent of sweet dough mingles with the smell of animal manure and dust.
I park between a dilapidated three-wheeled diesel truck and a donkey cart under the shade of a cluster of trees. The donkey high-steps and rolls its eyes at me, then brays and bucks, stepping backwards which knocks the cart into a tree and suddenly I am surrounded by a crowd of people and then more people surging in waves, hemming me in so tightly that there's no room to dismount.
After taking my helmet off and removing the key I just step down, despite the crowd, and space magically appears. Nobody returns my greeting, it's the bike they're looking at. Even though it's Chinese, it attracts attention because it's a big antique motorcycle with a powerful 750cc motor and a sidecar, and it's absolutely enormous in comparison to the little 125cc bikes they putt around on.
I leave them with a sigh, knowing that they'll squeeze the brake and clutch levers, maybe even fiddle with the idle screw, tap the odometer glass, and they'll certainly peek under the sidecar cover, maybe try on my helmet. I'm attempting to learn to live with it.
The marketplace is a big mess of tables and piles of goods overlooking the dry riverbed, stacked wherever there's a flat piece of ground. There are food stalls, fruit and vegetable vendors, stacks of twigs, plastic goods in primary colors, and baby animals in cardboard boxes. People stare at me but they're also busy buying and selling. Its likely that most have traveled very far on foot, bicycle, or donkey cart in the pitch black morning to get here.
To orient myself I walk down the bank to the river, stumbling over sharp white rocks to find a spot where I can scan the landscape. This must be an awesome river in rainy season, I think, with the bridge I crossed curving over it so high. In contrast to the trees I parked under on higher ground, all of the vegetation on the banks is young. It must flood regularly, and spectacularly.
I pull my binoculars out of my inner pocket but fail to find any villages or signs of human activity anywhere, not even a trail of smoke from a cooking fire. But there aren't enough vehicles parked here to have carried so many people and I haven't seen any buses on the road so I wonder how often this happens. Clearly this market is an important event. Maybe there are marriages being arranged. Certainly there are flirtations. A teenage boy and girl stroll out to get some alone time and stare a moment, surprised when they realize I'm not Chinese. Then the boy pushes the girl toward me. She stumbles and screams, then turns and hits him and runs away, laughing. Clearly, a match in the making.
After a while alone I walk back to buy oranges, pears, and bananas from vendors who make change for my small bills, and it occurs to me that oranges and bananas don't grow in this area so they must be traveling or have a supply chain from the south. Then I buy a stick of dough fried in a wok bubbling with oil. It tastes of honey and cinnamon and, when I smile in appreciation, the cook grins and yells something that makes everyone around us laugh.
A few steps away, an old woman sits on a tiny stool under a tattered green tarp tied all akimbo to the branches of a big tree above her. The tarp casts a cool green shadow over her skin, and in front of her is a massive wok on a coal fire set into a shallow hole at her feet. She lifts the cover to spoon a dark liquid over dozens and dozens of eggs, their shells cracked all around, and uses a slotted spoon to select one for me and plops it on a crumpled sheet of brown paper. I peel it to find that the whites have a marvelous, marbled pattern from being cooked with their shells cracked in the dark liquid. The egg is delicious, both salty and spicy, with an astringent aftertaste, and as much as I can tell the ingredients are black tea, soy sauce, and cinnamon, or something like anise or fennel. I devour two more, tossing the shells in the pile of trash next to the tree trunk while people go by doing their business.
I buy six more eggs and hold out a selection of coins that might total 25 cents at the most, hoping it's enough, but the woman picks out a just few of the smaller coins. I thank her and she grins, showing discolored teeth like the eggs she sells. I grin back. Apparently where there there are no tourists, there is no tourist price. And considering that the average farmer probably doesn't make ten dollars a month, unless they take a factory job, which gets them about a hundred, well, I try to pay more, but she waves me off.
A scent of almonds leads me past piles of pea shoots, stacks of spinach, a pile of tightly woven brooms with short handles, and cartons of twiggy branches. A flimsy card table is covered in hand-woven basketfuls of warm yellow cookies glistening with a coating of egg whites. I buy a dozen from the middle-aged woman selling them. She can barely take my money for giggling at me, and the vendors on either side rib her about it.
People are still leaving me in relative peace to wander the market and they all seem lively and happy to be here with the notable exception of a teenager with a long black braid that trails over her shoulder and dark circles under her eyes. She sits on a stool next to some cardboard boxes, hands in her lap, staring vacantly into space.
I don't see what she's selling until a little girl of about 5 or 6 skips over in a yellow dress to hand the teenager some coins. Without even looking she reaches into a box under the table and drops a handful of tiny yellow chicks on the tabletop. The bewildered chicks, so unceremoniously plopped from the darkness into the bright sunlight, peep and stumble like wind-up toys. The little girl in yellow selects three of them and skips back off into the crowd as the teenager scoops up the coins and tosses the remaining chicks back into the box.
I recognize her despair, the general malaise of an adolescent with the additional burden of not fitting in. I was a similarly sullen teenager stuck in rural North Carolina, surrounded by other teens whose career plans were to drop out at age 16 to help with the family tobacco farms. I was not so limited in opportunities, even though I was not brought up to have a career but to get married and have babies, like my mother.
My dad, an engineer at IBM, had been brought up on a farm in the area and fit in with the locals, but my mother was raised in Seattle and had gone to college in North Carolina after my grandfather's company transferred him there. Because mom was not "from here" and we did not attend any of the many local Baptist churches, we were could both be proclaimed "Damn Yankees" at any convenient moment, as well as heathens who were "going straight to hell."
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.
Our neighborhood was absolutely homogeneous, except for us, a fact brought home by Diane Ackerman who broke her promise not to speak with heathens in order to let us know that her parents had forbidden her to speak with us any more. Conveniently, Celia and I found a gopher snake under the willow tree at the end of our property and as she strolled snootily by we chased her, swinging the snake and yelling Eat the Apple! She ran screaming back to her pink chiffon bedroom and didn't pass on any more directives for a while. Still, we continued to play kickball in her yard, as it was the only place in the neighborhood where we could practice kissing in private and hear our parents calling us for dinner.
In China, this girl has next to zero chance to break free, seeing that the government will never let her move, even if her parents get so sick of her sulking that they say okay, go. It seems improbable that Chairman Mao still has a lock on much of the population but he does, since the communist party's classification of locals in the 1940s as either landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, or poor peasants, still determines by heredity from that era who goes to school, who is admitted into the armed forces, who you can marry, and even whether you can fill a local administrative posts. But because China has opened so many factory towns, and the newly affluent urbanites need services, young villagers who sneak off illegally find it a better option than their future farmer training offers. Though the new factory cities require long hours and provide overcrowded conditions, an escape from village life, an arranged marriage, or controlling parents, is more than worth the risk.
The guy next to her, tending to a stack of crates holding dozens of baby rabbits, is obviously her father, and the old woman next to him might be her grandmother, tending crates full of tiny pink piglets that squirm and push against the metal grates. When I stop to look at the pigs the old woman leaps from her stool to grab a piglet and shakes it by a back leg just inches from my face. I jump back and she cackles as the desperate writhing creature screams and wriggles. I glance at the girl, but she's still in her emotional coma, an understandable self-defense from the crass behavior around her.
The hunched old lady is in stitches, holding her back with one hand to support her laughing fit while in the other, still waving the unlucky piglet high in the air like a flag for the entertainment of the crowd around us, all of whom also think it's extremely hilarious.
I move on down the stalls, grateful for my lot in life well knowing that it might change any second of any day, like the day my dad said we're moving to San Jose. We pronounced San Jose with the "J," telling everyone we were moving to "San Josie," only realizing when we arrived and heard it said correctly that the "J" was pronounced as an "H" and it did not rhyme with "posy" but with "ole."
My dad bought another motorcycle once we were there, a Honda 250 Scrambler that I loved to race up and down the hills across the highway. I also loved to cook, and since my mother didn't, I was sometimes allowed to create exotic dinners of my choosing, subjecting my sister and my twin brothers, then toddlers, to cornish game hens, avocados, and other exotic produce we never saw in North Carolina.
My mother thought that because I liked to cook that I tended toward domesticity, and she thought my sister, who spent as much time as possible at the nearest horse stables, was the adventurous one. But it was my sister who settled down with a husband, had four children, and continues to nurture a rotating menagerie. And I only briefly married, found suburbia hell, and took off as soon as I possibly could to taste exotic fruits in exotic places.
The most exotic life this girl, and millions like her, is likely to find would be in the city nearest whatever factory she landed in. It was that, or stay in the village eking out a sustenance existence with a husband of her parents' choosing. If I had to take bets on when she would leave, I'd bet that the next time this market happens, she won't be here.
Though obviously poor, the vast majority of the crowd are neatly dressed, like everyone I'd seen so far. The women wear dark slacks and suit jackets in Easter-egg colors, their version of spring fashion. The men wear darker jackets, neatly pressed but frayed at the edges. All of the old folks wear the blue Mao pants and jackets, and many young people wear camouflage. I don't see much actual commerce going on, just pennies here and there, and wonder where all this stuff will go - and where will the people go - at the end of the day.
When I've bought as much food as I think I can use in the next couple of days I go back to the bike, which sits abandoned next to the donkey. I'll need to check the cables and screws before I start it up, but now I just want to sit here for a few minutes and people-watch while snacking on some of the fresh fruit I bought.
I was obviously mistaken about people caring more about the motorcycle than me, because as soon as take out my Swiss army knife and plop down on the step of the sidecar, people press in so tightly that it is impossible to move. Frustrated, I stand up quickly, which causes a ripple of panic among the glossy black heads below me. I'm taller than everyone by a few inches.
Suddenly the crowd parts and a very tiny and ancient couple, both in blue Mao uniforms, emerge, scolding everyone, and the crowd magically melts away. The couple pats me with their tiny, gentle hands, urging me through the crowd to their fruit stand just across the way, where they pat me down onto a tiny stool and start chattering. Their friendly faces are intensely wrinkled. They keep talking. I just smile and nod.
The old man rinses a cup with hot water from a thermos and offers me tea, and, in turn, I offer them some of the almond cookies I just bought. The woman kneels down beside me companionably, or perhaps, protectively, and the old man snaps at the few people who dare pause to gawk. Everyone walking by is so high above me now that I'm sitting on this tiny stool I feel a little self-conscious and vulnerable. I decide to just look down at the dirt and to enjoy my snack and tea.
After I take a few sips, the old woman hits my knee and starts babbling toothlessly. I doubt that even if I could speak Mandarin that I could understand what she's saying. It feels like she's asking questions, though, every sentence ends with a question mark, so I use my Mandarin for Travelers to tell her that I am American.
She hits my knee again, throws her face into the air and bellows as if I've just said something hilarious. She asks more questions and I give her random answers, place names like Beijing, where I say I started my trip, and then I tell her I'm traveling to Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan with the motorcycle. She answers that she's never been there, so far away. Or so I think, because she shakes her head in understanding, and the questions don't end in question marks any more.
I'd like to ask her some questions, but our language barrier is impossible and I really wish Teresa was her to joke with her and then get to the interesting part, if she'd talk about the Cultural Revolution, and the Long March, and how she survived, unlike 300,000 of her generation.
We continue to talk, and I tell her that I am forty years old, I'm not married, and I have no children. She wags her head in disbelief. I really like her toothless smile, her tendency to slap my knee and laugh for no apparent reason. After a while she runs out of questions. An almond cookie dangles in her callused fingers as she stares vacantly into the street.
We sit in silence until the donkey starts braying, and I stand up to see the driver trying to maneuver the cart past the motorcycle. It's time to go. The couple, so very old and so incredibly tiny now that I'm standing up again, just smile and nod as I take their hands and bow to meet their watery black eyes and say thank you and goodbye. Just another day in their long lives. Everything behind them.
When I put on my jacket, helmet and gloves and the crowd converges on me again. I start the bike, the brake and throttle cable screws and the idle screws all seem to have remained unmolested, so I kick it into reverse, but the people nearest cannot move because of the crowd behind. The donkey honks and bucks and the driver curses the crowd, yelling in panic as I inch slowly back. The faces around me are staring and benign, so benign that it's disconcerting.
Finally and with relief I am ride of the marketplace and on the open road again, the warm air in my face, free to ride in the empty countryside.