On and Off the Road to Neijiang

Masculine idiocy has a way of disguising itself as pragmatism. Practicality. Common sense: the voice of the testes. It works sometimes. Other times, it self-destructs. The same rationality that invented the calculus drives a man to reduce a malfunctioning can opener to a battered heap of scrap metal.

But as long as idiocy remains incubated there in the masculine mind, it is both safe and harmless. No one will bother it in its cave. In its cave, it will bother no one. It is mere bullshit introspection at this point: it has not yet been beshatted. There is no way to detect an idiotic manthought until it is fully digested by the manbrain and excreted out the manmouth, at which point the outside world exacts its swift and unforgiving judgment, usually in the form of a kick to the crotch, the very origin of the bullshit manthought in the first place.

My sitemates and I decided to go to Neijiang for Thanksgiving. The two of them went about the planning process in their own effeminately reasonable ways - consulted students, looked up ticket prices online, weighed the pros and cons of various modes of transportation - while I nourished my inner Jew reading Portnoy's Complaint and otherwise whiled away the week flatulating and scratching my junk around the apartment up until the day before departure, when I was suddenly assailed by my usual wave of pre-departure panic.

I happened to run into Meghan that afternoon. For her and Christy, the jury was still out. They weren't sure which bus to take. Their students had presented them with a travel dilemma that I, in my infinite masculine wisdom, decided to resolve.

"Our students told us that the direct bus to Neijiang takes six to eight hours," said Meghan, "but they said that if we go to Chengdu first, then catch a bus to Neijiang, it only takes four."
"Students schmudents," I said.
I observed that Neijiang was only 240 kilometers away, and that it was impossible that the direct bus would take eight hours. Heck, I said, with all the running around you'd have to do in Chengdu – catching taxis, buying more bus tickets, waiting in line - with that whole rigmarole, I bet it would take eight hours from Chengdu.
"Yeah," said Meghan, a bit warily, "You've been here longer than I have. I guess you're probably right."

The next morning, Meghan and Christy sallied forth at daybreak. I loafed around the apartment eating cereal, waiting for my jeans to dry.

I made it to the bus station at 11:45 and had the good fortune of winning Seat #2 on the 11:50 direct bus to Neijiang. Seat #2 gave me a panoramic view of the road, as well as a direct line to the bus driver in brokering pit stops for my hyperactive bladder. I was the bus driver's right-hand man. His co-pilot. The Andy Richter to his Conan. Sitting in Seat #2 meant that I was hidden from the gawping crowds in the middle and rear of the bus – if I played my cards right, no one would ever know there had been a laowai on board. Aside from the bus driver. And my neighbor, a college coed. A smitingly gorgeous college coed, I might add. This meant that I wouldn't muster the courage to talk to her. Which meant I could get some reading done.

My neighbor stuffed her shopping bags under the seat and sat down rigid and slouchless next to me with her hands on her knees. Then she leaned forward and asked the driver how long the drive would be.

"Depends," he said.
"Depends on what?"
"Luck."

We sailed away. The bus merged onto the highway. NEIJIANG - 240 km. Already, I was beginning to question the merits of Seat #2. For one thing, the floor was movie theatre sticky and the air was swimming with fruit flies. For another, the only loudspeaker on the entire bus was bolted to the wall directly above my head – and it should come as a surprise to no one that the Chinese like their in-flight entertainments loud.

My neighbor was uninterested in talking to me. So uninterested, in fact, that she quickly zonked out into one of those mouth-open, slobbering-everywhere slumbers. Which looked nice. I tried to zonk myself out as well. But I could neither sleep nor read nor write nor think, what with the fruit flies and the squawking loudspeaker. Then, as we left the highway for a shitty gritty two-lane road, there was death via vehicular manslaughter to consider.

The panorama view from Seat #2 was suddenly a curse. Blasting towards oncoming traffic at a combined velocity of 120 miles per hour terrifies me, as I figure it ought to terrify anyone, but I'm the type of guy who can't take his eyes off the onrushing headlights. On road trips in the developing world, I cannot help but stare my own mortality in the grille. Reading was out of the question; Portnoy's Complaint turned colder than a frozen latke in my lap. I sat there in a cloud of fruit flies, sweating, feet stuck to the floor, calculating the space between the tip of my nose and the mirrors of each and every semi-truck that typhooned past. Twelve inches. Six inches. Three inches. Just the widowpane. The road narrowed from two lanes to one, and after a while, even the one lane was debatable. A notional lane. A platonic ideal that no one had gotten around to building. Smelling fear, the fruit flies mounted an offensive on my scalp. They were sluggish and out of season, but they had strength in numbers.

But even death grew boring after a while. Gradually, my mind drifted around to the in-flight entertainment, a piece of VHS junk called The Little Princes. The protagonists – who else but The Little Princes? – were a trio of ten year old kung fu fighting brothers. Caught between the adorability of childhood and the depravity of puberty, The Little Princes seized upon a little bit of both for their own distinctly Chinese charm. They were cheeky and misguided. They were lecherous creeps. They were not altogether likeable. But they beat the shit out of everybody.

My favorite scene took place in an optometrist's office. American optometrists are generally soft-spoken Jewish men. But the Chinese archetype of the optometrist is different. It is a feminine archetype, an unusually busty archetype, and one that is dripping with sexuality. Or so I gathered from my bus screening of The Little Princes.

Optometrist: Read the first line, please.
Little Prince #3: L … R … Q … O.
Optometrist: Very good. Second line.
Little Prince #3: W … A … L … V.
Optometrist: Excellent. Bottom line.
Little Prince #3: Optometry Exam Number 54, Copyright 1982, Xiao Wang Printing Company.
[some sort of "baffled" sound effect]
Optometrist: What! You can read that? I can barely read it, and I'm standing right next to the board!
Little Prince #3: Of course I can read it, missy. It's easy with eyesight like mine. They don't call me "Eagle-Eyed Little Prince #3" for nothing! I could read it with my eyes closed.
Optometrist: Well, we'll just see about that! Close your eyes, young man.
[Little Prince #3 shuts eyes]
Optometrist: Now tell me what you see.
[camera zooms in on Optometrist's blouse]
Little Prince #3: The label seems to say … 38-D. Xiao Wang Brassiere Company. What does that mean?
Optometrist: [fainting] Well, I never!

Amidst all the leching and asskicking, there was a song and dance number. Granted, the Little Princes fared much better at leching and asskicking than they did at singing and dancing. But as a critic, I have to say that the soundtrack really held the film together.

We are The Little Princes
We will pursue our enemies to the very ends of the earth
We will banish all opponents to oblivion
We are young and we are mighty
We are The Little Princes
We will handily dispose of the problem

Thirty minutes into The Little Princes and two hours into the bus ride, the sleepless weeks of writing were compressing my eyes into hyphens. Neither death nor 140 decibel fart noises could keep me conscious. I gazed out the window and saw that we were approaching a village that billed itself "The Lemon Paradise of Sichuan." But the fruits on the billboards didn't look like lemons. They were green. They didn't even look like fruits. They appeared to be gourds. I drifted off into a half-sleep and dreamt of Donkey Kong throwing lemonlike gourds at me. I had just reached Level 3 when the bus skidded and swerved and I was jolted awake. Out the window, I could see that we were being chased by peasants, and that the road ahead was blocked by two very large trucks. Pirates? A bus robbery? Terror on the high seas? A hijacking in the Lemon Paradise of Sichuan?

The driver stopped the bus and leaned on his horn. The trucks didn't budge. Briefly, he considered off-roading it into a ravine, which would have killed him and everyone else on board. Then he shut off the engine and got out to parley with the peasants. A few minutes later, he came back and told us that we were going to stop for a while. A few minutes after that, the peasants boarded the bus with crates full of lemon gourds. Almost everyone on the bus bought a lemon gourd, except for me and the smitingly attractive coed next to me, who was still drooling everywhere.

We remained parked there in that weird place for half an hour. It was 3 PM. The sun seemed neither to rise nor to set. It just hung there like a lemon gourd on a string. The sides of the road were strewn with gutted lemon gourd carcasses. I could hear the people in the seats behind me snarfing away, sucking the juicy gourd meat through their teeth. When they were done, they cast the rinds onto the floor of the bus. Ah, yes. Hence the movie theatre stickiness. Hence the fruit flies. I watched the driver smoke a cigarette with the lemon gourd people. I saw him shake hands with everyone, and I could've sworn I saw him pocket a little something for himself.

The lemon gourd trucks parted and we were moving again, but not for very long. Just long enough for the smitingly gorgeous coed to wake up in horror at the sight of a bearded white man next to her. Then she remembered where she was, remembered me, wiped the drool off her chin, and stared at the television, which was playing trashy Russian music videos by then. We were entering a village of even less consequence than the Lemon Paradise of Sichuan and the road had thinned out to a salt and pepper strip of gravel upon which three lanes of traffic were bargaining with each other for death or safe passage. I had a good view of the speedometer and I could see that we were moving along at a steady 80 km/h clip, much too fast for my liking, up until we were stopped outside the Village of Little Consequence, at which point we were moving at about 0 km/h, which is much too slow for anyone's liking.

We were stuck behind a convoy of kerosene tankers. Together, we rumbled into the village like a procession of elephants. The villagers were lauding our arrival, or lampooning it. They walked alongside the bus, chattering and cat-calling and peering into the windows like we were zoo exhibits, something the other passengers were uncomfortable with but I thought was rather ordinary. Our driver grew impatient and tried to pass one of the kerosene tankers, whose captain responded by threatening us with fiery death, swinging so close to the bus that I could've reached out and touched the kerosene tank if I'd opened the window. The bus driver stopped and shut off the engine. We were officially screwed. None of the tankers were moving. There was no way to pass them without killing the entire population of the Village of Little Consequence and ourselves in the process. So we just waited there. And then, amidst the already bountiful absurdity, the capitalized Absurd struck. A four-to-the-floor beat pumped from the bus stereo, and after a brief synth interlude, I heard the six words that no self-respecting gentleman of poor endowment ever wants to hear: don't want no short dick man.

I had heard the song before, three years ago in a club in Hangzhou, but passed it off at the time as just another formaldehyde-induced hallucination. I've since googled the song. Surprise: it's called "Short Dick Man," and it's by a band called 20 Fingers. It is perhaps more fun reading the song than listening to it, unless you happen to be on board a Chinese bus stuck in a village of little consequence. The abridged lyrics are as follows:

don't want no short dick man
eensy weensy teeny weeny
shriveled little short dick man
what in the world is that thing?
do you need some tweezers to put that thing away?
that has got to be the smallest dick
I've ever seen in my whole life
I have ever seen in my whole life
get the fuck out of here
eensy weensy teeny weeny
shriveled little short dick man
isn't that cute? an extra belly button
you need to put your pants back on, honey
don't want no short dick man
pobre, pobrecito
que diablo eso?

I no longer even laugh when these sorts of things happen in China. If I did, I would likely be wack-evacked for giggling in perpetuum. So I just looked around the bus to see whether anyone was wearing the same facial expression that I was, which one of you tech-savvy kids might render like so: >:-O. But no. The people were bobbing their heads to the beat, secure in their magnitude. Here were no short dick men. Here were men of girth and substance. Here were satisfied women. Here were the Chinese. Me, I kind of grimaced and checked my watch and wondered what would end first: our internment in the Village of Little Consequence, or the extended Short Dick Man megamix.

I fired a text message to Meghan.

"How's Neijiang?" I asked.
"We're not there yet," she said.
">:-O, " I typed. "You guys left four hours before me."
"Yeah," she said, "we did."
"Three hours in and I'm stranded in a village," I wrote. "Does it get any better?"
"No," she wrote, "it only gets worse."

I was not encouraged. Neither was the bus driver. So he left the convoy of kerosene tankers and set off down a side street. He rolled down the window to ask a villager whether we could make it through to the highway. The villager nodded emphatically. The peasants gathered around the bus and seemed to be carrying us uphill. They would perhaps one day tell their grandchildren about us. The Bus That Came to the Village of Little Consequence. There was daylight ahead. A through street. A dusty little capillary that would lead us back to the clotted artery to Neijang. We were almost there. And then we came to a series of widely spaced pillars in the middle of the road. The bus driver stopped the bus at the top of the hill. He shut off the engine, got out, and visually measured the breadth of the bus against the space between the pillars.

"We're too big! We won't fit!" he screamed.
Ah. Poetic justice for the Small Bused Man.
The bus driver's peasant Virgil trembled.
"Sorry," said the peasant.
"Sorry? Sorry! We've wasted a half hour. You told me we could get to the highway on your shitty peasant road." Here, the driver spit in the dust. "Fuck you, you fucking cunt."

The driver got back on the bus. He fired up the engine. Fuck you, you fucking cunt. I knew the words. They were some of the first I'd committed to memory, but I had never before heard them used in China. I was shocked and amused, which looks like this: >:-D. The driver put the bus in reverse and we coasted forlornly back down the hill. The villagers gathered around to laugh us off. When we'd returned to the main road, the kerosene tankers were long gone and the road was clear. The driver cursed at his sudden good fortune.

But we weren't free yet. The road ahead wasn't quite busworthy. It wasn't even monster truckworthy. Looking back, I still have no idea how the kerosene tankers made it out of town. The driver stopped the bus and got out to consider the potholes. One of them was deep enough that the driver practically had to spelunk his way down into it. The Chinese words zenme ban popped into my head: what to do? And almost instinctively came the Sichuanese reply: mou fa – nothing can be done.

I have used the following tagline before in writing, but it is not really mine to use. It belongs to Richard Lee of Daegu, South Korea, and it was originally applied to South Korea. But I will borrow it once again – assuming that the namedrop is a sufficient citation – and I will here apply it to China: the land where everything is possible, but nothing is possible.

There is a certain zenlike contradiction to possibilities in China. Or perhaps it is more of a Daoist thing. But the laughably sure things in Chinese life – e.g., that you can get noodles at a noodle restaurant – sometimes turn out to be absolutely, unthinkably impossible. Twice last week I went to restaurants that not only specialized in noodles, but did not in fact sell anything other than noodles. And on both occasions, I was told, "No noodles." Mou fa. Nothing can be done.

And yet, what do the Chinese do when a road is in such disrepair that a busload of 49 people and one laowai appear to be stranded forever in a village of little consequence? Why, they build the road.

Noodles at a noodle restaurant? Impossible. "Short Dick Man" playing on a Chinese bus to nowhere? Possible, even probable if you're stranded on the bus long enough. But building a road, almost from scratch, in order to get a single vehicle back onto the highway was a stretch of the imagination for me, even as I sat there and watched the peasants do it. They scrambled about with wheelbarrows full of ground-up stone. They lugged over massive slabs of concrete. Whatever scraps they could drum up from the construction site across the street, they dumped into the potholes. And one way or another, the potholes were filled and leveled off, and in fifteen minutes flat, the only road out of the Village of Little Consequence had been rebuilt.

The bus driver fired up the engine and we crept slowly forward. Finally, the laughter I'd managed to stifle through twenty minutes of "Short Dick Man" came tumbling out. The peasants were steering the bus forward like it was a taxiing 747. We dropped gently into Divet #1, then rolled up and out of it. Divet #2 gave the TV set a good rattle, but aye, the mizzenmast, she held. Divet #3, the real doozy, the one the peasants filled up with what looked to be birdseed, set the bus a-shimmying, but our fearless pilot clung to the wheel with two iron fists until the front tires at last kissed the somewhat paved road that stretched out ahead of us. The driver gunned it. We were off. My fellow passengers let out a whoop, and the peasants let out a whoop – either because they were happy to have helped us, or because they were happy to be rid of us.

All and all, the bus ride to Neijiang would take seven hours. My sitemates were none too pleased with me when I arrived, but I'd like to think that they derived some satisfaction from the knowledge that karma had indeed given me my well-deserved seven-hour kick to the crotch. And then, suddenly, it was Thanksgiving. And there were forty other laowais to entertain. The masculine idiocy, as it turned out, had only just begun.

The Somewhat Bearable Lightness of Being a Hobo

This year I wanted winter to come and it came. Now I want it to leave. But it won't go away. I know winter will linger well into March. The fog has descended and the fog will remain. And I will write away the next four months of my life in my meat locker of an apartment, with a space heater tilted upward towards the most vital organs I have to offer. I hate winter. Always have. But this year I wanted it to come just the same. I wanted winter to come because it was familiar. Last summer, like all summers, is a blur to me. But I can remember last winter. That memory is comforting to me. I can remember very clearly where I was last year at this time. I remember the fog, how the windows were windows onto nothingness. I remember the cold. I remember breathing fog. I remember me, a spry young 26 year old, writing away those winter months in his meat locker of an apartment, with his space heater tilted upward towards the most vital organs he had to offer. And it comforts me to think that he is me and that I am him, and that we are both waiting for the next big thing, whether it comes or not. Most of all, it comforts me to think about the next big thing.

I spent this past Thanksgiving weekend in Neijiang, a Nanchongesque city some 200 kilometers southwest of Nanchong. After the party, I stowed myself away on a boxcar in the middle of the night and left everything else behind. Like a vagabond calling card, I left behind my hobo satchel, my winter coat, and what little dignity I had left. Most of my earthly possessions remain back there in Neijiang. So I have been parading around Nanchong in autumnal gear – my usual sweater-and-collared-shirt combo – in the foggy depths of Sichuanese winter.

If you go around underdressed in China, people will tell you one of two things. They will compliment you on how healthy you are – voluntarily freezing one's ass off is clearly the mark of a physically robust human being - and they will tell you to put on more clothes. I get this several times a day. You are so healthy! You should put on more clothes! I get it in Chinese, and in English. Ni-de jiankang hen hao! Ni yao duo chuan dianr yifu! You are so healthy. You should put on more clothes. After a while, I get to feeling like a total stud. Or a hooker. A rugged beast of a man. Or a two-bit laowai gigolo. You tell me.

There is nothing I fear more than shopping. I will go shopping with women, because I enjoy the company of women. Who doesn't? But I never go shopping on my own volition, least of all in China. Least of all will I go shoe shopping in China. I've tried it before. I do not have abnormally large feet, not in the West. But my feet are anomalies here in China. Nobody has seen anything like them. Nobody sells shoes my size. Not the Chinese Big & Tall, not the Nanchong Clown College. Nobody. I go out shopping for shoes and wind up feeling like the Elephant Man. Sorry, sir. We don't have your size, sir. It seems you are freakishly disproportioned, sir. Perhaps if you had bound your feet years ago, sir, you wouldn't have this problem, sir.

So I've worn the same shoes for two years now. I own two pairs of shoes. I have worn both pairs for two years. I have my Pumas, which where good as new when I found them at a Goodwill in Omaha two years ago. They fit me perfectly when I bought them for one US dollar. Then I have my pointy-toed dress shoes, which I purchased for a similar fee at a similar thrift store. Both pairs of shoes have fallen to shit over the past few months. The Pumas are unwearable by now. The pointy-toed dress shoes, too, are unwearable, but I wear them anyway, because they are in slightly better shape than the Pumas. And they are dress shoes, after all.

So you can imagine me trolling the frigid, unforgiving streets of Nanchong in my sweater and misaligned collar, unshaven, unshowered, my shoes falling to pieces with each and every step. And perhaps charity is your natural reaction. Somebody get this man a coat. Somebody get this man some shoes, fer chrissakes. But it is really nothing to me. I prefer to troll about in such disarray. I have been doing it for years, and on several continents. Sichuanese winter is not Nebraskan winter, nor is it Polish winter, so I do not fear it. And there is little I enjoy more than a pair of shoes with a history. I was perfectly happy in my dishevelment. The way I saw it, I'd endure the winter until I retrieved my coat from Neijiang. And I'd wear those pointy-toed dress shoes until there was nothing left of them but socks.

My students were not of the same mind. As I was leaving class today – shivering ever so slightly, trailing gnarled strips of leather in my wake – a student approached me, wished me a merry Christmas, and thrust two very large bags into my hands.

"Thank you!" I said.
"It's nothing," she said, and disappeared.

I didn't open my Christmas presents, not right away. I wanted to be surprised. Perhaps my students had given me a book. Or a snow globe. But after a couple of blocks, I couldn't resist. I stopped on the side of the road, opened one of the bags, cleared away the tissue paper and found a shoebox buried underneath. I cracked open the shoebox and saw that there were indeed shoes inside. And in the other bag, beneath the tissue paper, there was a winter coat. And taped to the coat was a card.

"Mr. Panda – You always look so cold! You must be very healthy! You should wear more clothes! And your shoes are death. Let us provide for you. Do not thank us. It is nothing. We just wish you happy every day! Happy Christmas!"

Hmm, I said.

My old shoes carried me to my new favorite restaurant, this dumpy little dive where they serve rice noodles with beef chunks in a delectable MSG broth. I sat and read the card over and over again. I looked at the jacket. I looked at the shoes. I felt an immense amount of Catholic guilt. How to explain to the kids that this is how I live? That crummy shoes and freezing my ass off in winter are simply how I go about life? That the straits I sail in China are really no more dire than the ones I explored in Mexico, or Poland, or Korea, or Omaha? That I am never really comfortable unless I am uncomfortable? How to explain that I am a hobo, that thousand-proof moonshine courses through my vagabond veins, that I care not for luxury unless it's cheap and dripping with irony? How to thank them? I put on the coat. Was it ever warm. I shivered with warmth. I did not put on the shoes, but took them out of their shoebox and compared them to the warped strips of leather bound to my feet. They were exactly the right size. How did my students know I wore size ten and a half shoes? How did they even find size ten and a half shoes? Christ, I said aloud, and I tried to light a cigarette, but the owner of the restaurant swept in and planted one of his own cigarettes in my mouth. He lit it for me. I smoked it. Christ, I said again. This place beats you and it breaks you, then it overwhelms you with kindness. And in the end, you no longer know what to think of the place.

So I sit here in my meat locker of an apartment on a Friday night that has soured into a Saturday morning. I sit here writing, wearing a poofy black down-feather jacket and a pair of perfectly fitted Chinese shoes – half-sneaker, half-dress shoe. I look like J-Lo from the waist up, and like a Chinese vegetable monger from the waist down. I no longer need the space heater. From here on out, I will save energy. I will just wear the jacket. My old shoes sit there in the corner of the room, frowning, decomposing with jealousy. My winter coat sits curled up at the bottom of my hobo satchel in an apartment some 200 kilometers away in Neijiang. Me, I feel as good as new. Younger, in a way, than I have ever felt before. Wiser, perhaps. Dumber, certainly. But still restless, still hungry, still homeless, just another hobo waiting ever so patiently, ever so foolishly for the next big thing to come my way.

Enter the 36 Chambers of Nanchong

So, check it. I have this running repartee with the owner of the inconvenience store on Fly-Infested Restaurant Street. It goes something like this: I walk in and she calls me laowai, so I call her laowai. Then, for whichever customers happen to be present, she explains that I am a laowai to her, and that she is a laowai to me. Though she is Chinese and I am an American, we are both laowais to one another, and we are both okay with that. I introduced this concept to her about a year ago and she has since taken quite a liking to it. So have I, for that matter.

The owner works the counter. She also stocks the shelves. She takes inventory, receives shipments, and all the rest. Her husband just kind of hangs out, watching TV and getting drunk. I don't think he holds much stock in the company. He gets jealous whenever I come in because I tend to hang around for hours at a time, cracking jokes with the missus - or at least he goes through an awful lot of beer when I'm there. I don't mean to provoke him. I'm not attracted to his wife in the least. She is older. Out of my age group. Beyond the reach of my libido. But fellow absurdists are hard to come by in this country. So you make jokes with them when you can, and sometimes they give you free cigarettes in return.

Monday night, while I was wisecracking with the missus, some college kid came up to the counter with a bagful of beer. I asked him what brand the beer belonged to. I'd never seen it before, I said. Just curious, is all.

"Zhe shi wo-de pijiu," he said. This is my beer.
"Well, I figured as much," I said, "but I mean, what brand is it?"
"It's mine. That's the brand. Mine."
"Mine? Hmm. Never heard of it," I said.
"Mine. Look it up."

I nodded and shot a glance at the missus. She mentioned to Lao Douchebag that I was a regular customer, that I spoke half-decent Chinese, that despite my being a laowai, I was a rather charming fellow, all things considered, and so on.

"Whatever. How much is my beer?"

I couldn't resist.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Just making sure. Is that - is that your beer? The beer that you're buying? It's your beer, right? I mean, you didn't really make that clear beforehand. The beer. Is it yours?"
"Yes. It's my beer."
"So it's your beer, is it?"
"Yes. It's mine."
"So it's not mine."
"No. It's not yours. It's mine."
"Good. Good," I said. "Enjoy your beer!"
And I bid him a good night.

Lao D left the shop in a huff, but stood outside watching while I shot the shit with the missus, up until the shop closed and her husband threatened to guillotine me with the garage door.

I bought the cheapest pack of cigarettes available on the Chinese market and slipped out into the night. Lao D was waiting for me.

"Do you want to drink these with me?" he asked.

Well, I thought, here was an unexpected twist. I was just about to punch this kid between the eyes a moment before, and I'm sure he was just about to do the same to me. But now beers were at stake. And we were men. And there was beer. And the kind of guy I am, I wouldn't turn down a beer from Dick Cheney himself. So I accepted the offer. Now it was our beer. Along the walk, his girlfriend joined us, and the three of us went up to Lao D's one-room apartment above the inconvenience store on Fly-Infested Restaurant Street.

"So," I said, assuming a seat on his living room couch, sipping on one of our beers, "what do you do?"
"I'm a kung fu master," he said. "I teach at the university sometimes."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I studied at Shaolin Temple," he said. "You heard of it?"
"Shaolin," I murmured. "Rings a bell."
"Yeah. Shaolin."
"So you're probably pretty good at this kung fu thing," I offered.
"Yeah. Pretty good, I guess."
"Show me," I said.

He told me to stand against the bed. Then he told me to punch him in the face.

"I'm not sure if I can just - "
"Punch me in the face. Hard as you can."

I couldn't bring myself to do it. Until I remembered the beer transaction. It's my beer. Look it up. Douchebag. I swung as hard as I could.

What happened next, I cannot explain. I found myself on my back with my legs flailing around in the air. I could do nothing but gasp for breath at first. Then I started laughing uncontrollably. He released me and I got back up to my feet.

"Again," I said.
"Okay. Hit me."

I juked around this time, feinted left, feinted right, then lobbed a drunken Irish uppercut at Lao D's lower jaw. Again, I found myself laid out flat on my back, an elbow grinding into my neck and my face smothered into a pillow. I let out a muffled shriek. Master Lao D released me and stood there at the end of the bed, watching disinterestedly while I wriggled like a bug crushed into the carpet. I got back up, thoroughly winded.

"You know," I said, "I mean no offense, but you don't really look that strong. But I guess that's part of your - "
"My windpipe," he said. "Stick your fingers in it."
"No, thanks," I said. "I don't want to kill you."
"Trust me. You won't."
"But - ... I will?"
"You won't."
"You wan't me to put my fingers - in there?"
I drew a circle just under his adam's apple.
"Yes, right in there."

Cringing, I poked at his esophagus. Then I went for broke and shoved two fingers into his neckhole. A network of hidden muscles emerged. They tensed. They flexed. And they clenched. I squealed and withdrew my fingers as from a hot stove.

"Shit!" I said. "How did you do that?"
"I'm a Shaolin master," he said. "That's how I did that."

I stood there massaging my fingers back to life. They had turned purple. Lao D handed me another cigarette. I struggled to hold onto it. He handed me another beer, and I used it to ice my fingers.

"So," I said, "stupid question, but can you levitate at all?"
"A little," he said. "I'm gonna need you to stand up against that wall, though. And hold your arm out. Yeah. Like that."

He backed up into the hallway and I waited while he stretched.

"Don't move your arm," he said. "Hold it up, nice and steady."

He did some calisthenics of the sort that generate fireballs in Street Fighter II. A barely audible thrumming sound seemed to emanate from his gut. He squatted slightly, like in Super Mario 2 when you want to jump really high. He focused on an object in the far-off distance. By then, I was fully expecting the impossible.

Instead, he just kind of hopped. And landed. Well short of my arm.

"Sorry," he said. "I can't levitate right now. These khakis are too tight. And I can't take them off because my girlfriend is here."
"That's alright," I said. "That was about three feet higher than I can levitate. On a good day."
"Maybe I can levitate for you next time."
"Yeah," I said. "I'd like that."

Alas, alack: the Shaolin master scoffs at gravity, spits upon the very laws of physics, but is humbled by bootleg Dockers and prudish ladyfriends.

"How long have you been doing the kung fu thing?" I asked.
"Started training at Shaolin when I was two."
"Two. Years. Old?"
"Two years old."
"So did you beat the shit out of five year olds when you were two?"
"No," he said, "but I could probably beat up five year olds now."
"Yeah," I said.

I massaged my wrist. Those two tumbles he'd given me had really aggravated my Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. I wondered if I would ever type again.

Lao D's girlfriend had been sitting in the corner the whole time, silently watching her boyfriend kick the ever-loving sand out of the hobo he'd brought home.
"Are you a kung fu master, too?" I asked her.
"Oh, no," she said. "I just work at Zhang Fei Beef. Have you heard of it?"
"Of course," I said. "Very famous."
"Do you want some?"
She produced a large plastic bag and opened it at my feet. She reached in and took something out. Beef, I figured. She gave it to me and I started indiscriminately noshing on it.
"Thanks," I said. Then I turned the greasy object over in my hands. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Bony. Oblong. Like a deep fat fried stone. "This is good. What is it?"
"Rabbit skull," she said.
I became suddenly aware of the jawline, the sloped forehead, the notches where the ears had been, and the eyeballs: all white, stewed in their sockets.
"Yes," I chuckled. "Rabbit skull."
Lao D got up to take a leak and when his lady friend wasn't looking, I slipped the hideous thing into the nearest trash can.
"So, are you a student as well?" I asked Xiao D.
"No. Just a worker," she said. "But I do study kung fu. He is my teacher."
"Show me," I said.

So I stood in one place while this nice Chinese girl kicked me in the kidneys ten times in a row. (Like most nice Chinese girls, she was wearing steeltoed jackboots.) When Lao D came out of the bathroom, he told her that she was doing it wrong, so he kicked me five more times in the kidneys, very effectively, until I told him that, yo, I'm probably gonna need those internal organs.

He handed me a cigarette and lit one for himself. We clunked beercans and we drank.

"I've been meaning to ask," he said. "Can you teach me English?"
"Probably," I said. "But you can't pay me. I'd get in trouble."
"So how can I pay you?"
"Teach me the ways of the Wu-Tang Clan," I said.
"Never heard of them."
"Yeah, probably not," I shrugged. "They're really more of a Westside thing, aren't they?"
"Right. Well. Anyway, my dream is to open a dojo in America."
"Might need English for that," I said.
"So I was thinking you could maybe help me. And I'll teach you kung fu for free."
"Sounds good to me," I said, "because my dream is to kick the shit out of a frat boy at Billy Frogg's on a Tuesday night in Omaha."

We shook hands. Then he squeezed a pressure point I hadn't known about and I dropped like a 160 pound bag of rice. His girl sat down on the bed, coughed, and gave Lao D a look. He hoisted me back up to my feet.

"Time for you to go," he said, and started hustling me towards the door. He gave me one last cigarette, and one more His Brand beer for the road.
"Can you smoke and still do Shaolin kung fu?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
"And can you drink, too?"
He clunked his beer against my beer.
"Of course."
"Well, then," I said. "Let's do it."

Practice starts tomorrow.

Throwing Out the Script

On your first day in China, the director will hand you a script. And you would do well to follow that script, at least until you have all your lines memorized, or until you've learned enough of the language to improvise.

But improvise at your own peril. In my experience, deviating from the script only ruffles the feathers of the other actors, and actors are a delicate bunch. For them, the script is fixed and immutable. People change but the script does not. Not much, anyway. The script may mutate ever so slightly over the course of thousands of years, but I have run into some Chinese dudes at the park who were at least a thousand years old, and they followed pretty much the same script that my students do.

The script looks like this:

Chinese Person: Hello.
You (The Foreigner): Hello.
CP: Hey, your Chinese is really not too bad!
You: Oh, pshaw. My Chinese is lousy.
CP: What country are you from?
You: America.
CP: Are you a teacher or a student?
You: A teacher.
CP: Do you teach English?
You: Yes.
CP: How much money do you make?
You: 1,500 bucks a month.
CP: US dollars?
You: No. Chinese RMB.
CP: Impossible! That's not enough money!
You: I know. But I'm a volunteer.
CP: A what?
You: A vol-un-TEER.
CP: Huh?
You: A vol-UN-teer.
CP: ... I don't understand.
You: A VOL-un- ... teer?
CP: Oh! You mean a VOL-un-TEER!
You: Yes.
CP: [shaking head] Not enough money.
You: ...
CP: How long have you been in China?
You: About a year.
CP: Have you gotten used to Our China?
You: Yes.
CP: Do you like Chinese food?
You: Yes.
CP: Are you married?
You: No.
CP: Do you have a Chinese girlfriend?
You: No.
CP: You should get one.
You: Maybe I should.
CP: Do you think Chinese girls are beautiful?
You: Yes. Very beautiful.
CP: You should get a Chinese girlfriend. Then you can stay in China forever.
You: ...


The above questions may come at you in a variety of accents, or in a slightly different order - but the script almost always begins with Your Chinese and Your Country of Origin, moves on to Your Job and Your Puny Salary, Whether or Not You Like China, and then, finally, Whether or Not You're Planning on Anchoring Yourself Via Ye Olde Ball and Chain to China Forever.

Other acceptable topics include the prosperity of America relative to China, the amount of time it takes to fly from China to America, the different places you have visited in China, and the length of Chinese history relative to our own negligible ancestry in the West. But these are not usually included in the script.

I am well acquainted with the script by now. I can recite it in my sleep, and sometimes I catch myself doing so. It's not that my Chinese is all that good - in fact, it has been languishing as of late. But I have mastered the script. At the very least, I know my lines. And that is because I have the exact same conversation countless times every day. That, incidentally, is the biggest reason why my Chinese is languishing: I am rarely allowed to deviate from the script.

About six months in, I threw away the script and started to dabble in deviation. If someone asked me where I was from, I would say "Nanchong," and laugh in a disarming enough way. And the conversation would drop like a dead duck. If someone asked me whether I liked Chinese girls, I would chuckle and say "Not really. They only seem to want me for my money." A dead pelican. "Have you gotten used to life in China?" "No, actually. It's kind of crowded, rather noisy, and people bother me all the time because I'm a foreigner." A dead ostrich.

The Chinese conversation is all about achieving the most harmonious pitch possible. Deviating from the script is like playing in the wrong key. In the West, our conversations are more like fugues. There are melodies and countermelodies, inversions and key changes, dissonance and consonance, agreements and disagreements. When you're talking to someone in China, you need not be interesting, but you must strive to be agreeable.

Questions like "Have you gotten used to life in Our China?" do not ask for an honest answer. If you say anything other than "Yes," you are sure to make your interlocutor very uncomfortable. Likewise with questions about Chinese members of the opposite sex, Chinese food, and China in general. You must express unflinching admiration for all things Chinese. It isn't necessarily that the Chinese are blind to their own flaws. Often, a Chinese person will observe that His or Her China is much poorer than Your America, but because it is the Chinese person making the observation, it is safe for you to agree. The most important thing is not political orthodoxy, but avoiding conflict, upholding the opinions of the person you are talking to. Above all else, you must be agreeable.

What happens when you're not? The conversation dies a sudden and awkward death. The other day, a cabbie asked me whether I made more money in China or in America. I laughed and said, "America, of course." Wrong answer. He fell silent. I tried to qualify the remark by adding, "You see, I'm a volunteer here. I don't make any money at all!" But it was too late. I had slighted His China with that inadvertently smug-sounding "of course" - I had lost him, and he didn't say a word to me the rest of the long cab ride home until he blurted out the fare. He didn't even say goodbye.

The same thing happened when I was asked for my thoughts on Chinese girls, and made the mistake of alluding to their avariciousness. I had been asked a question, so I decided to give an honest answer. The dude I was talking to nodded, looked down at his shoes, bid me farewell, and made his escape.

We follow a script in the West, as well. I'm not denying that. Very few people in your life really want to know how you're doing: the only real answer to "How are you?" is "Good." When talking to a stranger in the West, if you start all of a sudden unloading baggage about your ex-girlfriend, you're liable to be abandoned for a more appealing corner of the room. There are social penalties for throwing the script out the window. But the Western script is just a framework. It is the rhythm section, over which we improvise according to our whims. In China, the rhythm section is the music - and in that respect, it is conversational muzak. To my ears, at least.

It puzzles me, the script. I don't enjoy following it, least of all because I have to act out the same scene ten, twenty, thirty times a day. But the script is not something that changes, and it is not something any of us laowais can hope to change, not even by playing our own Ornette Coleman free jazz tenor solo over the muzak. The Chinese script is something that must be gotten used to. And at least in that sense, to answer your question, Mr. Cabbie, I suppose I have gotten used to Your China. I'm not quite cozy enough to live here forever, reciting the same script till I'm dead - but I suppose I'll just keep that to myself now, won't I?

[exeunt Mr. Panda, passenger side door]

Promises To Keep

I teach Oral English.

I would much rather be teaching Oral Spanish. Or Oral German.

... or American Literature. Or British Literature. Or Writing. Or Creative Writing - ooh, that would be nice. Hell, at this point I'd be willing to teach Business English. Or Linguistics. Or Quantum Mechanics. Or, I don't know, Home Economics.

... or better yet, English 407: Beatniks and Politics - A Psychedelic Flashback to The 1960's and a Totally Trippy Analysis of its Posthumous Reverberations in Contemporary American Culture. Or better yet, English 502: Stan The Man - An Assessment of Stanley Kubrick, His Films, and His Legacy. Or even better yet, OK Computer 543. Or Kid A 571.

... or even better yet ... well, I could dream up a long list of uber-hip elective classes that I could (and perhaps should) be teaching at China West Normal University. But Oral English is not an elective for my students, and it isn't an elective for me. Twice I have begged the director of the University for some variety in my teaching diet, but she keeps throwing Oral English classes my way. Oral English is the only class I have taught thus far, and Oral English is probably the only class I will ever teach in China.

And I'm okay with that. My students need a lot of help in the speaking department. They probably don't need any more literature in their lives. They certainly don't need to do any more writing. So I try to keep reading and writing far away from the syllabus. But once in a while, I throw some poetry at the kids to see how it hits them, just to see how it bounces back to me. Or I give them a writing assignment, as a kind of survey to figure out what, exactly, my students are thinking when they are too terrified to speak.

We watched The Joy Luck Club a couple weeks ago. My students were stoked about the film, and a couple of them rushed up to the computer after class to copy it to their memory sticks. But the kids tend to clam up under pressure; I didn't think an in-class discussion would unearth anything worth unearthing. So after the movie, I let them out a full ten minutes early and gave them writing homework instead. They weren't sure whether to cheer or groan.

The following week, I was pretty damn excited to have those hot little papers in my hands. I rushed home to read them. I was curious to see what my students would have to say about Chinese-Americans, a demographic they didn't even know existed prior to seeing the film. Would they consider Amy Tan Chinese, or would they think of her as an American? How did my students imagine the average Chinese-American lived in America? And how did they imagine the average laowai fared in their country? I asked them to write about all of those things, both because I was curious, and because it was a subject innocuous enough and ambiguous enough to hopefully inspire some real thought in my students without getting my ass in trouble. What bounced back at me, however, wasn't innocuous or ambiguous in the least. It actually kind of scared me.

1. Do you consider the second-generation Chinese-Americans in the film more Chinese or more American?

More Chinese - 96% (361 students)
More American - 4% (15 students)

All precincts reporting.


2. What difficulties might a Chinese person encounter in America?

racism - 26%
language - 19%
dutch pay - 8%
love - 4%

All precincts reporting.


3. What difficulties might a foreigner encounter living in China?

chopsticks - 28%
food - 24%
language - 20%
traffic - 4%

All precincts reporting.


I read through every last one of the 376 papers. I did not juke the stats. What you see is what my students believe. In a way, they responded just the way I had expected them to. I've been here three semesters, after all. But I hadn't counted on such an overwhelming landslide. When I'd finally hashed out the numbers, I couldn't believe them. 96 to 4? Chopsticks - honestly? My gut American instinct told me that the Republicans had fucked with the voting machines again.

I am not a Chinese-American, but I will hazard a guess that fewer than 96% of second-generation Chinese-Americans would identify themselves with the country of their ancestors rather than the country in which they were born and bred. It would be a significant slight, I would think, to refer to a second-generation Chinese-American as anything other than an American - or at least, I have never met a Chinese-American who wouldn't take it as anything less than an insult.

I am not a sociologist, either, so I won't analyze questions 2 or 3 any more than I should, other than to remark that racism and a pair of wooden sticks make for a mighty odd couple at the top of the respective lists. Chopsticks and food have been, for me, the #1 and #2 easiest things to adjust to in China. Like I'm complaining about the twice cooked pork. None of my 376 students mentioned racism as a potential problem for foreigners living in the People's Republic of China.

This week, I hit my students with some classic American poetry. Teaching is always an experiment, especially when you are not a teacher by trade. My poetry classes are the most successful experiment I have ever conducted. I didn't expect the poetry experiment to succeed in my first semester, one year ago. And I have kept waiting for it to fail in the semesters since. But my poetry class is always the best class of the semester. My students get fired up about poetry, and I have no idea why. I get fired up, too, because I am a literary hack who enjoys masquerading as a professor from time to time. Perhaps I feed off the energy of my students, or perhaps they feed off of mine. In China, TEFL may crumble, but poetry always wins.

My very best poetry classes have the same feel as my undergraduate literature courses at the Midwestern Jesuit College to Remain Nameless, back when we used to read and discuss texts instead of vivisecting them - during that fragile, Edenesque bliss before junior year English Major Bullshit rolled around and the twin spinsters of Deconstructionism and New Criticism burst into the room with their rusty meat cleavers and hacked to bits whatever pleasure there was left to be taken from reading.

My students take time to read the poems, they brood on them, and they bust their asses trying to understand them. I doubt I could expect the same from a class of American undergraduates. Hell, I doubt I could've expected the same from myself as an undergraduate. I was too busy ... let's just say I was busy. But without exception, all of my students, even my very worst students respond to the poems in a thoughtful way, often in an insightful way. I don't teach them. They teach me. They might not be able to speak worth a damn, but they can analyze poetry. Poetry inspires them to speak.

I have learned a lot from my students, and I see all of those old poems in a new light because of them. But they remain rote learners - so my kids will sometimes ask me point blank to tell them what the poem means. I admit to them that frankly, I don't really know. I may perhaps underline something with my index finger, or mention that the author is a woman, or that he is black - but otherwise, I want them to follow their own noses, to chase their own lines of thought. I want to throw these poems at my students and see how they bounce back to me. Their analyses are never anything less than fascinating. But more often than not, their ideas bounce right past my outstretched glove, and go skipping out into left field.

I had my students split into six groups, and each group analyzed one of six poems: "Dream Variations" and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes; "Loving You Less Than Life, A Little Less" and "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why" by Edna St. Vincent Millay; "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost.

I chose those six poems because they are relatively easy to read, and because all of them are fairly literal but invite interpretation. I chose those three authors because they are a neat and tidy (and not terribly subversive) cross-section of all the rage, lust, and mystique that make American poetry what it is, whatever it is.

Before they dug in, I told my students that there were no right or wrong interpretations, that their opinions were as good as mine. That wasn't just a hollow feel-good statement to bolster my students' confidence, though it was partially that. By now, I know what my kids are capable of. They aren't much for conversation, but they can read. They've been force-fed Jane Austen since they were freshmen in high school, so I knew that Robert Frost was well within their literary grasp. The diction was not going to be a problem. I knew that they would understand the poems, and that they would have opinions about them. And I knew that our opinions would differ, as they always do, and I wanted our opinions to differ. I wanted the stony mass interrogation chamber that is Room 307 to feel more like a room with padded walls, where they could fling themselves against the barriers like crash test dummies and afterwards, as in the wake of a particle collision, we'd slowly try to piece everything together. The poem goes in, the thoughts come out - you and I scurry around the lab trying to make sense of them.

In all of my classes, the St. Vincent Millay groups maintained that the author was a male writing about a female. This, despite Millay's "unremembered lads" in the one poem, and the brown hair growing about the brow and cheek of her lover in the second poem. I explained that a "lad" was a young man, and that facial hair, under ideal conditions, does not manifest itself upon the cheeks of women. But my students insisted that Millay was a man, either because they were unacquainted with female poets, or because they were uncomfortable with the idea of females poetizing about such racy promiscuous shenanigans. Even after I made it clear that the romantic objects in both poems were men, and many different men at that, my students maintained that the poet was a man. Homosexuality was, perhaps, less shocking to them than the prospect of a female with a somewhat diversified love life. So I left it open. Perhaps Ms. Millay was writing in character as a man who had fallen in love with a bearded lady when the circus came to town. But I couldn't help myself. I couldn't help nudging them in the right direction. The poet is a woman. Her boo has a beard. Odds are, she's writing about a man. My students giggled into their hands. And I can't even describe the giggling that followed after I insinuated that "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" might just have been referring to more than one pair of lips ...

My students fared a bit better with the Langston Hughes poems. Most of the kids picked up on the fact that the poet was black. Others I had to prod a bit.

"What kind of person do you think he is? Do you think he's white, like me? Do you think he's Chinese? Or Indian ... "
"He must be very tall."
"And very handsome."
"Maybe," I said.
"He must be very rich."
"And he must have a colorful life."
"In a sense," I said. "But what about this line: 'dark like me.' And this one: 'black like me.'"
"His heart is black."
"Kind of," I said.

The groups reading "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" relished using the word "negro," whatever it meant, and I had to discourage them from making a habit of it.

"Teacher, is it bad?"
"Er, uh," I said. "Yes. People will hurt you for using that word."

Their electronic dictionaries led them down a treacherous path of synonyms that I likewise had to stamp out.

"Teacher, I think the the writer is a n_____."
"Um. Yes," I said, "he is an African-American."
"So he is in fact a n_____?"
"Don't say that. People will kill you for using that word. But yes, he is an African-American."
"Sorry, teacher. So he is a black?"
"Yes. He is ... black."

Most puzzling and wonderful of all were the Robert Frost poems. I have never been afforded such an instantaneous glimpse into the Chinese psyche. Somewhere, Robert Frost is rolling in his frosty grave. This is not the way he would've wanted to have been interpreted. And yet, poetry being what it is, I had no means (and no desire) to cockblock the interpretations that my students offered me. I let them stand. I lavished my students with praise. I disagreed with them completely, but I am not Robert Frost, and I am not Chinese, so I listened to them for a good long while, gave them all a solid pat on the back, and moved onto the next group.

"The Road Not Taken" is so quintessentially American that by now it is almost beyond interpretation. Two highways diverged in bumfuck Nebraska. One of them freshly paved, adopted by the Sarpy County Jaycees, dotted with McDonaldses and Burger Kings and Cracker Barrels, a mainline to the clogged artery of Interstate 80: boring. The other, all gravel and glass shards, like something out of Deliverance: exciting. I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.

Whatever an American may or may not be, no American would interpret "The Road Not Taken" as anything less than an ode to individualism. Robert Frost might be the last criteria we have left for Americanism. Wherever our politics may lie, however blasé our lives may in fact be, we all believe that we are following our own paths, that our road is the lonely road, that we have broken ranks with the rest of society in order to pursue our own preferred brand of happiness. Deluded or not, that sentiment, perhaps, is what makes us American. And it might just be the only unifying belief we share in common. Maybe we should include Robert Frost's poem on our naturalization test. If you find this poem somewhat uplifting, you're in. If you are of the mind that Robert Frost royally fucked up in wandering down that nasty road littered with doggie doo and backwoods sodomites, you're out.

But my students are not American. No, they universally agreed: "The Road Not Taken" was a poem about regret. They did not appeal to the text, but to their nature. The man in the poem deviated from the common road and went down the unpopular path. A grave mistake. Frost was writing the poem as a bitter old man, ruing the day he made that decision. Why, oh why, did I take that shady-ass Deliverance road? Why didn't I follow everyone else down I-80? The road not taken, according to my students, was the road that Frost damn well ought to have taken.

Above all else, I am charitable to my students. So I didn't disagree with them outright, however much I disagreed inwardly. But I tried to Ouija Board them in the right direction. Well, don't you think it's possible that the poet is happy with his decision? Doesn't this poem feel optimistic to you? Before long, though, I realized that Robert Frost had rigged his poem in just such a way that I had no evidence, no case, and no authority to even suggest that my students were wrong.

"I shall be telling this with a sigh," writes Frost, "somewhere ages and ages hence/two roads diverged in a wood, and I --/I took the one less traveled by/and that has made all the difference."

In life, there are happy sighs and sad sighs. There are good differences and bad differences. Was Robert Frost sighing in a contented way? Or was he sighing like a Notre Dame football fan? Did the road less traveled by lead him to a Conoco station, or into one of the deleted scenes from Deliverance? I could point to nothing in the text that indicated that, yes, Robert Frost was pleased with his decision. He was sighing, after all. Perhaps, after all, he had fucked up. Maybe, after all, I have fucked up, too, by joining the Peace Corps when I should've taken that five-figure recruiting gig with the University of Phoenix. But every high fructose fiber of my American being tells me that Robert Frost didn't fuck up, and that I haven't fucked up, either. My students would beg to differ. Two roads diverged in a wood and the less harmonious road is to be avoided. And this, I suppose, makes all the difference between us.

My students, all of them but one, reacted the same way to "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." It wasn't a poem about escaping from society, about reveling in solitude, about sinking into the majesty of nature if only for a short while. No, the poet just wants to go home, they said. It's cold and it's dark and he's very lonely, they said. He just wants to go home to be with his wife.

"But what about this?"
I underlined with my index finger.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

"We don't understand," my student said. "How can the woods be dark and deep - and lovely?"
"Sometimes the loveliest things in life are dark and deep," I said.
"But he has promises to keep," she said. "And miles to go before he sleeps."
"And miles to go before he sleeps," agreed another.
"He wants to go home to be in bed with his wife."
"Yes. He wants to go home."
"The woods are terrible and scary."
"His home is cozy and warm."
"He must get out of the woods."

I nodded. I didn't quite disagree. Then, a girl in the front row lowered her head so that her hair obscured her face. She cleared her throat and she spoke.

"Maybe it's about writing," she said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"He is a writer. Maybe he means, writing is lonely, and dark, and deep, and scary."
"Go on."
"And home is comfortable, and easy, and very relaxing."
"Yes?"
"But he wants to stay with writing. Although it is lonely. Even though it is scary. Even though it is hard for him," she said. "He will go home someday. Everybody goes home. He will go home. But only when he is ready."

The bell rang. Time for a smoke break.

"That's a really good idea," I told the girl. "I honestly hadn't thought of it before. That probably means that you're smarter than me."

I couldn't see her face, but I could see that she was smiling. I left the room and walked up four floors to the roof of the teaching building, where I could be alone. It was evening. The sun was setting with a snarl of smog smeared across its face. I lit a cigarette and flicked the ash seven floors down. Then I planted my arms on the ledge and planted my head in my hands and I cried like a bitch. Fuck, I said. Fuck. You fool. Yes, there are students who slip through the cracks, students who survive. That is why you are here. You fool. You colossal fool. How did you not see it? Even after fourteen years of education and reeducation, there are kids who survive, whose brilliance somehow escapes unstrangled. You are here for them, you fool. So stop whining and teach them. You fool.

They exist. They slip through the cracks. They survive. Let them succeed, I thought. Let them be happy. Let the world give them all that they need. Sometimes they slip through the cracks. If only all of them could slip through the cracks. If only there were more cracks ...

3:10 to Kamchatka

My Chinese DVD collection consists primarily of whatever movies the girl before me left behind in the apartment: You've Got Mail, Feast of Love, Married Life, The Other Boleyn Girl, A Love Song for Bobby Long. I have no shortage of beer coasters. Then there are the handful of movies I brought from home, a couple that I bought in Chengdu, and There Will Be Blood, which I stole from Jacob and am holding hostage until a day in the distant future when he can appreciate it for the masterpiece that it is.

I don't buy many DVDs in Nanchong, because I don't really know where to buy them. There are no sprawling bootleg DVD markets here. I have seen them in Chengdu and Chongqing, and on the east coast of China. But in Nanchong, we have proper DVD shops that are strictly legitimate and almost exclusively domestic. It's slim pickins for Western films. They can be found in the darkest, rankest corner of the shop, hidden behind the softcore pornography and the instructional ping-pong videos. They're pricey, these laowai DVDs, about the same as they would cost in the States, and the selection is some pretty lowbrow shit - and overdubbed lowbrow shit to boot. So unless watching Mariah Carey's Glitter in Mandarin is your thing, your best bet is probably the internet.

But when it comes to streaming movies, my laptop is no better than my toaster oven. If I want to watch a movie, I have to splurge on an overpriced DVD of less than exacting taste. Or at least I had to, up until a couple weeks ago, when I finally found a DVD shop that caters to my impoverished American sensibilities. It is called the "Open-Hearted Video Store."

The owner smokes excessively, even for a Chinese man. At the same time, his accent and his mannerisms aren't Chinese at all. Perhaps he's Japanese - but around these parts, that is not exactly the kind of question you want to ask if you're interested in keeping a full set of teeth.

As I enter, Mr. Openheart will grunt and gesture with his cigarette at a couple of cardboard boxes stashed under the legitimate DVD rack. This means that he has gotten a fresh shipment of bootlegged foreign DVDs. Or he will smoke and say nothing, which means that no new shipment has arrived. Either way, Mr. Openheart has already amassed an epic collection of bootlegs, and I can easily while away several hours of the evening sifting through DVD slips until my hands are coated in an invisible but palpably grody dust. Call it the dust of piracy.

Yesterday, Mr. Openheart grunted and gestured, and indicated not one but four new boxes of DVDs. Jackpot. I rubbed my hands together and squatted down on a little wooden stool. I cracked open the first box. And I sifted through the schizophrenic rubbish.

Mr. Openheart has eclectic taste, which is not to say that he has good taste. No, it does not seem as though Mr. Openheart has any taste at all. His is the DVD collection of someone who simply buys movies at random, regardless of quality, popularity, genre, rating, or country of origin. A typical sequence of titles goes something like this:

The Talented Mr. Ripley (in Portuguese), Toy Story 2, bondage film from Hong Kong, Predator 2, Singin' in the Rain, Ceausescu-era propaganda film from Romania, Saw 6, Season Three of Bob the Builder, bundle of anime porn, The Godfather Part III (in Korean), Bushwhacked (starring Daniel Stern), Little Women, bundle of anime porn, art flick from Latvia, City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly's Gold (in German) ... und so weiter.

The DVDs are organized in no way that I can tell. Maximum entropy seems to have been Mr. Openheart's filing criteria. This makes DVD searching a tedious process, but at the same time an engrossing one. I am never quite sure what I'll find. It's the thrill of the hunt, I suppose. There have been evenings where I've browsed for two hours and left without buying a thing. Other times, it's as though Mr. Openheart imported an entire box with my Amazon Wish List firmly in mind. The Stanley Kubrick Criterion Collection? Meeting People Is Easy? Blue Velvet? Weekend at Bernie's ... 1 and 2? When that happens, I shoot Mr. Openheart a suspicious glance across the room.

Mr. Openheart might be openhearted, but he ain't cheap. Sketchy and disorganized as his DVDs may be, they go for three bucks a pop: a pretty Peace Corps penny. So whichever movie I finally decide on, I'm liable to watch it at least seventeen times before my service is up. Better make it a good one. On an openhearted shopping day, I will reject about 98% of the available DVDs and place the remaining 2% in a "maybe pile" on the floor.

Yesterday, after sifting through the four new boxes and several of the older ones whose contents I pretty much have memorized by now, I set out the following maybe pile: Good Night and Good Luck, How the West was Won, 3:10 to Yuma, and Gangs of New York.

I wrote off Good Night and Good Luck because it was too short. I knew it was going to be a long, cold night in the apartment. I needed some filler. Back in the box with ye, George Clooney. How the West was Won I ruled out because I was feeling fidgety and I needed a movie that would hold my attention, nothing with panorama shots or substance. Gangs of New York, at a whopping 163 minutes, was about to get my final nod when I read on the back of the case that the soundtrack included a new song from U2. Shuddering, I put Bono back in the box. And I decided that I'd take the 3:10 to Yuma.

Mr. Openheart, having smoked and watched over my shoulder for the duration of my two-hour hunt, sensed that I was either autistic or a man of discriminating taste, so he offered me a cigarette. He asked me a question that I didn't understand, then smirked and told me that he was giving me a discount. Then he lit my cigarette for me and bid me adieu.

On the walk home, I passed a woman hawking bootleg DVDs on the corner. A rare thing in this town. Most of her movies were overdubbed, but as I approached, she produced a stack of 10-in-1 DVDs.

The 10-in-1 DVD is a modern marvel of intellectual property theft. Ten movies for the price of one. Ten movies on a single disc. How do they do it?, the reader wonders. Easy enough. The bootleggers use state-of-the-art software to drop the video integrity down so low that it's like watching multicolored bits of sand dancing around on the screen. (Mel Gibson actually looks less insane this way.) And they chop out all the mid-levels of the soundtrack, such that the dialogue is only barely audible but the gunshots ring out so loudly that your neighbors will come knocking on your door, just to make sure you haven't offed yourself. But it's still ten movies for the price of one, even if you'll never watch eight of them, even if you need to hold a magnifying glass up to the screen to make sense out of the other two.

My favorite thing about the Chinese 10-in-1 DVD is the cover artwork. There is a picture of some half-naked (or naked) woman, or some greased-up action hero like Jean-Claude Van Damme, looking his most constipated. And there is fire everywhere. And some embossed, shiny letters screaming ... screaming ... something at you.

SUPER THE SCOURGE THE BALLOON BOY OF THE WESTERN ENTERTAINMENT!

KISSING THE FACE MELODRAMA WALLOWS IN THE LOVE!

CRAZY BEAST DO THE BITE OF NICHOLAS CAGE!

If you squint long enough and hard enough, you can deduce the unifying theme of the ten movies. It's like a Magic Eye, or Where's Waldo? Ah, yes: these are romantic comedies. Okay, these are horror movies, I guess. These are movies about ... Neanderthals? Oh, wait. No. These are movies starring Nicholas Cage.

They will sometimes try to fit an actor's entire body of work on a single DVD, but they get mixed up every so often, especially when it comes to black actors - and Tom Cruise for some reason.

THE DENZEL WASHINGTON IS ASTOUNDING SEXY HAT MAN!
(Included on the DVD are about three Denzel movies, Driving Miss Daisy starring Morgan Freeman, Ghost Dad starring Bill Cosby, and everything in the Orlando Jones oeuvre.)

TOM CRUISE FAR AWAY THE ACTOR TURNS HEAD IN THE SKY!
Ben Stiller, Robert Downey, Jr., Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Adam Sandler, and of all people, Mr. Bean. I guess we all really do look the same.

I settled on the special edition THE KICK THE BLOCK FLYING DOWN MASTER OF THE ANKLE! DVD, which consisted of five b-movies with the word "fighting" in the title, Karate Kids 1 through 3, and Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2. The nice lady sold it to me for a buck.

I went out for dinner. All the restaurants were packed with college kids who were already standing up to heckle me as I passed. So I walked until I found a truly filthy little dive that was completely empty except for the owners and their son.

While his parents were back in the kitchen, the kid approached me and snatched my DVD cases off the table. He opened 3:10 to Yuma, tried to fit the DVD in his mouth, then threw it on the floor. He moved onto the 10-in-1, which he started rolling along the floor, going vrooooooooom.

When my food arrived, I was bent over, trying to pluck the DVDs off the floor with my fingernails, sweeping all the sauce-soaked packaging into a pile. The parents were watching all this. The kid was watching me and giggling with his fingers in his mouth. I grinned at him, as if to say: boy, are you in trouble. But nothing happened. Papa set my food on the table and sat down next to his wife in front of the television. I sat down to eat. The kid came over and took my chopsticks right out of my hands. I fetched another pair, but he took them, too. Then he pulled something out of his pocket. It didn't appear edible, but he put it in his mouth anyway and started chomping on it with his mouth wide open, right in front of my face. My twice cooked pork was getting to be mighty unappetizing.

The kid went for my backpack. He unzipped the flap and started taking my papers out.
"No, no," I said. "Don't do - ... I need those!"

Then he discovered my Kindle. I glanced up at the parents. I wasn't about to discipline their kid for them, but from the looks of things, their baby was about to discipline my baby.

"Hey, boss!" I called. I gestured at the kid.
The mom came rushing over.
"Come on," she cooed. "Don't do that."
He kept rummaging.
She tapped him on the shoulder.
"Come on," she said. "Don't play with Foreign Uncle's bag."
He wasn't listening. He had successfully freed the Kindle, and whether he'd smash it on the floor or start reading Nabokov was anyone's guess.

Just then a cat came tumbling out of a styrofoam box in the kitchen. The cat lay there stunned for a moment. Then he made eye contact with the kid. His tail poofed and the poor critter booked it out into the street. The kid gave chase. Ah, yes. Another animal to torment. I was off the hook. Me 'n Kindle could breathe easy again. I could eat. There is a lot happening in China, so when worse comes to worst, and it often does, rest assured a deus ex machina is always waiting in the wings.

When I got home, I tidied up the living room just enough that I could bring myself to sit down in it for two full hours. I dusted off the TV screen with a dirty sock. Then I popped in 3:10 to Yuma. A Western backdrop came up on the screen. There were gunshots, the clip-clop of horses. But when Russell Crowe's mouth moved, a funky cocktail of consonants came tumbling out. The title faded into view. "3:10," I read, "... to where, exactly?"

It was a Russian DVD. Easy enough, I figured. I know at least six letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. I'll just find the language menu and squint for a while and then switch the DVD back to English somehow. No problem. But only Russian Dolby Surround Sound was available. And Russian subtitles. Also, Ukrainian subtitles, from the looks of things. And my Ukrainian is no better than my Russian. My shoulders slumped. It was a Russian DVD. There was no English.

I flew at the television.

"Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!" I raged. "Confound you, you scoundrel! Foo!"

And the television merely blinked back at me with screwed-up eyes. I nearly succumbed to the brain fever right there on the spot. Instead, I heated up some coffee in the samovar and had myself a nice, long Dostoevskian sulk.

I rewound back to the scene at the DVD shop. Mr. Openheart. The cigarette. The discount. The smirk on his face. I replayed the transaction frame by frame and found that I could decipher what he had asked me. Yes. He had asked me: can you speak ... Russian? It was all clear to me then. I had been taken for the proverbial ride - on the 3:10 to Kamchatka.

The Lost Tourist Prefecture of Shangri-La

Gentlemen, I give you a toast. Here's my hope that we all find our Shangri-La.
- Lord Gainsford, Lost Horizon

You need not worry
You need not care
You can't go anywhere
- The Kinks, "Shangri-La"

The mythical city of Shangri-La, like most mythical cities, remains a mythical city. Shangri-La didn't even exist as a mythical city until the 20th Century, when it appeared in print as the fictional setting of James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon. So you might as well go looking for the Springfield where The Simpsons live, or Tolkien's Middle Earth, or the Lost Starbucks of Nanchong. These places cannot be found because they do not exist. But that hasn't stopped intrepid crackpots from searching for the mythical city of Shangri-La, and it hasn't stopped cash-strapped governments from claiming it as their own.

India insists that Shangri-La belongs to India. Pakistan insists that Shangri-La does not belong to India. Bhutan stakes its own feeble claim to Shangri-La, but nobody knows where Bhutan is, either.

Most occultists worth their salt place Shangri-La somewhere in modern-day Xizang Province - or Tibet, take your pick. Others point toward my home province of Sichuan, but even if Shangri-La had been here, I am sure that it has long since been bulldozed and replaced with a 47-story apartment megaplex, also named Shangri-La.

The Nazis believed that Shangri-La was the Himalayan Ursprung of a blonde, blue-eyed race with untainted National Socialist ideals, but alas! - a 1938 expedition only turned up more brown people. Ach, scheisse!

An American philanthropist named Lutcher Stark gave up the hunt and built his own Shangri-La in Orange, Texas. Lutcher Stark's Shangri-La played host to a shit ton of azaleas - his favorite flower - as well as a couple flocks of free-range swans and ducks. The Shangri-La of Orange, Texas was destroyed by a snowstorm in 1958.

In the late 1960's, The Kinks were purported to have found Shangri-La in lower-upper-middle-class Britain, at least metaphorically. They wrote an album about it. Then they started singing pop songs about transvestites.

More fruitless searching, more Discovery Channel specials, more Kinks reunion tours ... until finally, in the year 2001, the People's Republic of China unearthed the real, actual Shangri-La on the northern frontier of its very own Yunnan Province. Shangri-La's name, incidentally, was Xiang-Ge-Li-La. How had we missed it? It had been right there on the map, staring us in the face all along.

Of course, there are some nasty rumors floating around the internet, to the effect that Xiang-Ge-Li-La skulked around for countless centuries under the guise of Zhongdian, until 2001, when it was hastily rechristened Shangri-La, in order to boost tourism revenue in the otherwise desolate and unproductive nether regions of southwest China. But I wouldn't pay those rumors any mind. Xiang-Ge-Li-La is Shangri-La. It is legit. It's the real deal. I should know. I've been there.

I set off on my quest for Shangri-La in late January of this year. I caught an overnight train to Kunming, where I was reunited with my estranged drinking buddy, Mark: the infamous Bostonian of South Korean fame. We took in the sights of Yunnan's largest city, which is to say we visited the Kunming Dwarf Kingdom and paid homage to the World's Largest Optimus Prime. Yes, above all else, Kunming was a study in contrasts. Then Mark sallied east and I drifted westward, having picked up Erin, a fellow volunteer, along the way.

We caught a bus to Dali, where we crashed the Golden Triangle backpacker scene and lost a small chunk of change gambling on where exactly in the bar an overfed chicken would shit. After we'd worn out our welcome with the local Lostafarian expats, we found that we had just enough money and just enough vacation time left over to go west to Lijiang, or north to Shangri-La.

As a rule, if everyone in China recommends a tourist destination, you'd be wise not to go there. Because everyone in China will be there. You'll spend the better part of a week waiting in line, and when you finally get to the front, a man in drab military garb will say, "Welcome to the end of the World's Longest Queue. Five hundred kuai, please."

Everyone in China had recommended Lijiang to us, so we vowed never to go there. Lijiang was dead to us. We had heard nothing of Shangri-La, but the novelty was irresistible. Where thousands of Discovery Channel camera crews had failed, we would succeed, at least on a technicality. We would make it to Shangri-La. And if there were t-shirts to be gotten, we would get them.

We asked the nice lady at the hostel how to get to Shangri-La.
"Huh? Oh, you mean Zhongdian?"

The next morning, a little yellow bus came hurtling down the road.

"Is that the one?" I asked.
"I don't know! It's got Tibetan writing on the side - run!"

We sprinted, waving our luggage around in the air until the bus whinnied to a stop twenty yards down the road. I got the impression that it wasn't the kind of bus that stopped on a regular basis. Stopping didn't seem to be its strong suit.

Nor was structural integrity its strong suit. Upon further review, this bus didn't have many strong suits at all. The floor of the bus was a hobo suitcoat of welded scrap metal, and even the relatively smooth highways of Dali were threatening at any moment to split the cabin right down the middle. Not even five miles out of town, the trip was doing bad things to my prostate.

In China, you learn to live with vehicles that can't stop or stick together. But then, most of the time you're not weaving ramen noodles up into the foothills of the Himalayas.

I have realized over the years that I was not made for the sea or for the air. I am a land mammal. And for that reason, I tend to gravitate towards the plains. Looking back, all of the places that I've lived have been about as inland as I could get; all of them far removed from any mountains that weren't traversable by stairs. But the little yellow bus to Shangri-La was lugging us up a steady incline and before long the road turned to dust and a yawning abyss began to spread out beneath us.

"My God," I said, recoiling in terror, "it's beautiful."
Erin gripped my wrist.
"It is, isn't it?"
"Yes," I said. "It is."

I couldn't bring myself to look down into the abyss. That giddy top-rung-of-the-jungle-gym sensation blossomed in my gut. The bus driver was driving one-handed, sometimes no-handed, yapping into his cellphone with the one hand and smoking with the other. At the same time, he seemed to be vying for some kind of Road to Shangri-La speed record as he repeatedly scraped the bus up onto the skimpy spaghetti-strap gravel shoulder that lay between us and a ten-second drop into the pit of the stomach of nothingness. No, I thought, forcing myself to peer out the window for a full second: this wouldn't be the kind of fall you get back up from.

Still, the beauty was not lost on me. En route to Shangri-La, we had already reached Shangri-La: not a Shangri-La you can live in or even visit for very long, but the sort of Shangri-La you see out the window of a ramshackle bus with no brakes. The sun was setting over the whitecaps in the distance, planting a golden halo upon the abyss and cloaking in darkness the mountain roads below. No words would suffice, other than some half-assed sentiment to the effect that I had never known such natural beauty was possible - and unfortunately, no photographs will suffice either, as the only pictures of mine that turned out show a golden-green blur, a darkness, a windowframe, and a pair of horrified, bloodshot eyes reflected in the glass.

Just as the sun seemed to have vanished forever, the bus pulled us up out of the darkness and gunned out onto a plain, and it was evening again. I could look out the window again. Here, I felt a bit more at home. It was the Nebraskan panhandle outside. The earth looked dry and punished, the grasses huddled together in knots, as if for warmth. The sky, meanwhile, had swollen to tremendous proportions and belonged to a depth of blue that I had forgotten about after eight months of Sichuan. The architecture, too, was unfamiliar. Not an apartment complex to be seen. Just long, squat houses made of real stone and actual wood. I no longer felt like I was in China. Only the omnipresent red flags mounted from the passing rooftops reassured me. But then, I am nearsighted.

"That's weird," said Erin. "The flags."
"What's so weird about them?"
"They're Soviet flags."

I squinted long and hard and saw that yes, there was a sickle and hammer where the five stars ought to have been. I blinked.

"That is weird," I said.



We were kicked off the bus on a bleary random street corner as the sun went down. We weren't even sure that we had arrived in Shangri-La.

"Are we here?" asked Erin.
"I dunno," I said. "This looks like Billings, Montana to me."
"Maybe Shangri-La was really in Billings, Montana all along."
"Yeah, but this is like the car lot strip of Billings, Montana."

We were back in China again. The buildings were as gray and as soot-stained as they are anywhere else, and the red flags wore the customary five-star constellation in the upper left hand corner. The signs were in Chinese, but there was no English to be found. English had been replaced as a second language by the puzzling curlicues of Tibetan. And in the meantime, it was really fucking cold. Erin and I stomped in place and cursed. We had left Dali and its perpetual spring for the howling Himalayan winds of Shangri-La.



We hailed a cab and told the cabbie to take us to a "cheap hotel," which we hoped would get us to a youth hostel and not to a flophouse. The cabbie was puzzled by our accents and asked where we were from.

"We're Sichuanese," said Erin.

After much negotiation, we wound up at a hostel in the so-called Old Town of Shangri-La. In the lobby, we were descended upon by a couple of ferociously friendly dogs, both of them wearing the underbite that is the mark of good breeding in a Chinese pooch. A door opened and out came a pudgy young Chinese man in a bucket hat. He watched us frolic with the dogs for a moment, then he said something to us in fluently mumbled English.

"Sorry?" I asked.
He mumbled again.
"Er, um," I said.
He mumbled once more, faster this time.
I looked at Erin. She looked at me. We reached for our passports.

It is easy enough to accustom oneself to the diverse accents of the world, but there is really very little one can do with a bona fide mumbler. This mumbler was quite friendly and had plenty of things to mumble about. So we listened. And we established, eventually, that Bucket Hat was the owner of the hostel, that he had owned it for five years, and prior to that, he had served fifteen years in the United States Navy. I glanced at Erin. Erin glanced at me. The thought that struck us then was the same one that would nag us for the rest of our stay: how, just how does one mumble one's way through fifteen years in the military?

Smiling, Bucket Hat invited us to have a seat in front of the television and to crack open a couple Tsingtaos. We stood there smiling back at him like a couple of rubes until he gestured at the couch, the television, and the beers. We sat and we cracked open our beers. Bucket Hat snatched up our passports and, as he turned to the computer, his smile fell off like an untied shoe. He was smiling in one instant, then staring vacantly at the screen in the next as he typed up our vital information.

"Did you see that?" I whispered.
"Yeah," said Erin. "Creepy."
"Your passport's legit, right? I mean, you are who you say you are?"
"I think so. You?"
"I can't remember anymore."

On TV, people were eating noodles with their bare hands.

Bucket Hat returned our passports and yammered at us some more. He sat down across from us but didn't crack open a beer. He asked us some awkward questions. Then, Erin and I did our stretch, yawwwn, boy-what-a-long-trip! routine and managed to sneak upstairs to the room. Erin locked the door, unlocked it, and locked it again.

"I get a weird vibe from that guy," she said.
"Bucket Hat? Yeah, me too."
"I mean, The Shining weird."
"That's funny," I said. "I was about to say that. That's what this place reminds me of, so far."
"The town or the hostel?"
"Both. Hey, you still got that flask in your purse?"
"You mean Mark's Vietnamese snake whiskey?"
"That's the stuff," I gruffed, swigging. "Hair of the dog that bit me."

The next afternoon, we set off on foot to explore the Lost Tourist Prefecture of Shangri-La. The Old Town was little more than a faux-Tibetan nest of knickknack shops. The architecture was of dubious authenticity, and the Tibetans were of equally dubious ethnicity: they were Han Chinese women dressed in Tibetan drag. The shops sold fake animal pelts, replica tusks and replica fangs belonging to various replicated beasts, giant slabs of artificial yak butter, semi-silver machine-minted handcrafts, four-foot tubules of incense that smoked like hydrothermal vents ... Everything smacked of tourist trap claptrap, but Shangri-La would probably be the closest Erin and I would ever get to Tibet, so it was nice, at least, to imagine what Tibet might, perhaps, in no way resemble.



We had breakfast at 2 PM. The Tibetan knickknack vendors of Yunnan Province are generally not Tibetan, but the restaurant owners usually are. And I will say this for the Tibetan restauranteers of Yunnan Province: they do not skimp on breakfast. The English Breakfast at a Tibetan restaurant will set you back twenty kuai, or about three bucks U.S., but it comes with two eggs, a wallop of sausage, a rasher of bacon, a couple slices of toast, and coffee. Real coffee. Or yak butter tea, if you're into that sort of thing. This particular breakfast nook had lots of cats, and it took me two hours to finish my plate because I was too busy rekindling my lifelong feline love affair. The music on the stereo was 21st Century Leonard Cohen, by far the most tasteful music I'd heard in China since my arrival. Though I've always appreciated Leonard Cohen, I'd never quite gotten into his synthy stuff. But the breakfast was so good and the cats were so lovely that I vowed right there and then to steal some albums from the internet and give the old man a chance.

Thoroughly bloated and unusually gassy, we set out again, and this time we walked towards the east, away from the Old Town. We came to a truly devastated building, a building that hadn't just been neglected, but looked to have been actively looted and pillaged. The windows, oddly enough, were still intact, but the walls were not. I pressed my face to the glass and saw heaps of battered cement and crushed bricks strewn about what was once the floor of the establishment. In the middle of it all, there was a western toilet, smashed in half and laid to rest against a stack of cinder blocks.

"A western toilet. That's odd. What the hell was this place, you think?" I asked Erin.
She blew some dust off the glass.
"A youth hostel," she said.
Sure enough, there was the official Lonely Planet logo, stuck to the inside of the window. We walked a bit further and saw the name of the hostel pasted against the next window: SHANGRI-LA TRAVELER CLUB.

The next building over was similarly destroyed, and it, too, was once a youth hostel. Rather eerily, there were still postings taped to the outside wall. "LOOKING FOR A TOUR GUIDE TO TIBET. CALL ME ... " "FOR SALE: USED BICYCLE, GOOD CONDITION ... "

"I hope this didn't start happening today," I said.
"Yeah. I shouldn't have made that crack about The Shining."
"Bucket Hat knows," I said. "He always knows."



A couple blocks later, we arrived at the main square, or something like it. It was a sunny day in Shangri-La, so the square wasn't terribly unpleasant to behold from a distance. But like a good Monet, it was rather hideous up close. The square was completely abandoned, and mostly destroyed. There were knock-off Disney-themed boats in the lake, most of them toppled, overturned, drowning. The pillars along the waterfront had long since come undone and had apparently been cast into the lake with some enthusiasm. The Tourist Information Center had been gutted, the windows smashed. One of the windows had shattered in such a way that what remained of the glass was the outline of the bunny rabbit from Donnie Darko. All of the buildings were clogged with garbage and smashed bricks. They reeked strongly of human feces. And yet they were all new, mint condition. The square couldn't have been five years old.







"Why do I get the feeling," said Erin, "that tourism never quite took off in Shangri-La?"
"Well, we're here, aren't we?"
"Yeah. But we're the only ones here."

This was true. In two lazy afternoon hours, we had navigated the whole of Shangri-La, and the only people we'd encountered on the streets were the faux-Tibetan knickknack vendors and a Canadian couple. And we kept running into the Canadian couple. It didn't seem like the kind of town where anybody actually lived, or the kind of town that people actually came to visit. Shangri-La was a ghost town.

We wandered amongst the rubble until the sun had set, until the cold had turned my beard to leather. We returned to the hostel. Bucket Hat watched us enter and invited us to sit down in the lobby. We stretched and yawned and oh, boy, what an exhausting day on the town we'd had ... We went back up to the room and watched the Winter Olympics.

The next afternoon, after breakfast, we left Shangri-La altogether and drifted up into the mountains. After that first day, I felt like we were a couple of chumps to be hanging around Tibetan Silver Dollar City when all that ... space was out there. The mountains were gorgeous. But as a Nebraskan, I am not well-acquainted with topography. Erin is from Ohio, so she wasn't much better. But let it be known: mountains can be deceptively far away, especially the big ones. We walked our way out of town and across several miles of nothingness. Still, the mountains eluded us. And still, we walked. We walked and walked until we came to a sandy path leading up into the cleavage between a couple of whitecaps.

"You're sure you want to do this?" Erin asked.
"Sure," I said. "I mean, not sure. But sure."
"There's a fence," said Erin, "and a sign. And a dog. Maybe this is private property."
"Naw," I said. "Who would pay for this shit? And anyway, we've come this far - "
"That dog doesn't look friendly."
"He's sleeping. But how about this," I said, "I grab a brick and you grab a brick, and if the dog attacks, we brick the dog."
I knew Erin would go for it. She's Irish, and so am I, at least halfway so. The Irish are not above bricking dogs to death. So we picked up two bricks each.

We walked up the path and as we passed through the gate, the dog raised its head and stared at us. We kept walking. The dog remained poised there, half-awake.

"I don't know about this," said Erin.
"Neither do I," I said, "but we've come this far - "

We took a step. The dog pounced to its feet and visibly bristled. It barked. It charged. We ran. I remember nothing. I remember being scared shitless. I remember flinging a brick over my shoulder and instinctively shielding my balls with my hand. Then we were back out on the street again, hearts racing, adrenaline pumping, legs turned to rubber like we'd just dropped sixty floors in an elevator. In the distance, I saw that the dog had laid back down and was trying to get some sleep.

"Do we try again?" I asked.
"No," said Erin.
"Alright. Have it your way. But would you have killed him?"
"Hell yeah," said Erin. "I like dogs, but ... you?"
"No doubt."



We walked the streets for a bit. There were cows grazing the median of the highway. We passed several mountains but did not approach them. Instead, we named them after our nearest and dearest: Mt. Vijay, Gary Glass, Jr. Memorial Bluff, Rosstin Murphy Shan. We came across a pack of domesticated dogs, all of them collared and well-groomed. They were on something of a rampage, barking up and down the alleys, chasing down windblown scraps of garbage. The leader of the pack was fairly imposing, but the rest of them were anklebiters, dachshunds, mere pups. I gave chase.

"What the hell are you doing?" Erin laughed, grabbing my arm and chasing after me. "Didn't we just get attacked by a dog?"
"We can join the pack! This is the only scene in town," I said, breathlessly. "They probably won't even notice. Look at their raggedy-ass crew. We're better than them."

So follow we did. A couple curious dogheads turned in our direction. But after a while, after the pack had accepted us, they didn't really mind. They did their thing. They went on sniffing expeditions, then shot off on barking expeditions. We sniffed and barked right along with them for several blocks. Thankfully, Shangri-La was desolate enough that no humans were around to judge us. The dogs certainly didn't. They just thought we were a couple of unusually tall and lanky-looking dogs. We hung with them until they got into a tussle with the guard dog out in front of the Communist Party headquarters. At that point, the dogs went one way, and the humans went another. Troublemakers all, none of us wanted that kind of trouble.

Erin and I followed the highway out of Shangri-La until we came to a pleasantly apocalyptic wastescape. We'd just finished reading The Road, so the view was practically nostalgic. We struck poses.

"Give me Lawrence of Arabia," I said.
Snap.
"Give me George Clooney of Syriana," she said.
Snap.
"Give me hitchhiker."
Snap.
"Give me constipated man crushing a chunk of cement with his bare hands."
Snap.










It was frustrating, in a way. All that farmland gridwork stretched out in front of us, the livestock scattered like dots, the jagged whitecaps in the distance, the stormclouds gathering a furious brow upon the horizon. And yet all of it was out of reach. It was within walking distance, but we knew there would be fences, and walls, and guard dogs in our way. And we were already exhausted from an entire day of wandering, and running with the domesticated dogs of Shangri-La, and running from the guard dogs of Shangri-La. If we turned back now, we had Tibetan Silver Dollar City and The Shining youth hostel to look forward to. We didn't want to turn back. So all there was to do was stand there at the side of the highway and admire. Here is beauty. Here is Shangri-La. Shangri-La is not a city. Shangri-La is not Xiang-Ge-Li-La. No, Shangri-La is a place off in the distance that you can never get to. You approach it and it recedes. It is the horizon. But once you know where it is, you can at least stand back and say, what a pretty place it would be to visit.

We returned that night and sat down in the hostel lobby at Bucket Hat's behest. He grilled us some eggs, then he grilled us about what we did during the afternoon and evening. Nothing much, said Erin, and I emphatically agreed. He pressed us further and I told him that we'd tried to walk up into the mountains, and that after we'd been attacked by a dog, we decided to walk along the highway and stare at the mountains for a while. And I swore I could've seen him pressing a button under the desk. Erin yawned. I stretched. We went back upstairs. We watched re-runs of the Winter Olympics and, for the first time in either of our lives, we found ourselves rooting for the United States like they were the Good Guys.

We decided to leave the next morning, but Bucket Hat informed us that there weren't any trains or buses out of Shangri-La for another four days, at least. Panic flared. Erin and I retreated to our room. I locked the door, unlocked it, and relocked it.

"This won't work," I said. "After four days here - "
"After four days here, I will eat you."
"Or I will eat you first," I said. "We'll go crazy."
"We'll go batshit. But maybe we can catch a taxi?"
"Or maybe we can walk?"
"Or maybe we're fucked," said Erin.
"Probably we're fucked," I said, "but in the meantime, the Winter Olympics are on CCTV."

So we watched the Winter Olympics for four days straight in Shangri-La. It's not something I'm proud of, and I'm sure Erin isn't, either. But the both of us learned a great deal about the sheer skill involved in piloting a bobsled, about the geopolitics of figure skating, and more about Tonya Harding than we could ever hope to know. By the end of it, we could actually understand curling. In the afternoons, we would sneak out of the hostel and run off to check out those lonesome mountains in the distance. Once, we saw such a squall brewing in the mountaintop heavens that we had to run along the highway back into town, and that night it actually snowed, though nothing stuck.

The next day, we found a square with some legitimate-looking Tibetan temples, but China had long since conditioned us both to disbelieve in the antiquity of anything. However much we wanted to believe, the Tibetan prayer flags were like used car flags to us. So we wandered around the square for a bit, took some pictures, and returned to our warm hostel room and watched the US-Canada hockey game. For lack of other things to do, I bellowed up a storm.



It had become clear to us, in the meanwhile, that we had been the only guests at Bucket Hat's hostel over the course of that long, sensory deprived week. How did Bucket Hat make money? How did Bucket Hat keep the rooms so clean? How did he keep the Tibetan frills so finely polished, and how could he afford to donate half his proceeds to a Tibetan orphanage across town, as he so proudly mumbled? These questions and others would never be explained to us by our bucket hatted host, and in any case, whatever the answers were, mumble mumble mumble, we would not have been able to understand them.

A yellow bus rolled into town on a Tuesday, one full week after we had arrived, four full days after we had planned on leaving. So we bought the tickets from Bucket Hat and hustled down to the station two hours before the bus arrived. I ran across the street to a noodle shop at 7 AM to buy breakfast for Erin and me. For me and Erin. Whichever is grammatically correct.

A hobo Briton had struck up conversation with Erin in the meanwhile. He had been in Shangri-La the whole time, but we hadn't seen him, no doubt because he was off doing far more adventurous things than gazing at mountains, fending off feral dogs and watching the Winter Olympics. He regaled us with tales of his backpacking misadventures through Tibet. Shangri-La was his last stop before returning home to the Commonwealth. Gap year, y'know. He regaled us with tales of shirpas and gurus, tales of freezing to death in sleeping bags, tales of burning to death on remorseless Tibetan plains. And I tried to maintain interest. I really did. But more and more, backpacker stories bore me, as his stories were visibly boring Erin. His stories didn't bore me out of jealousy. Believe me, I wouldn't have the balls to venture up into the Himalayas, and I do not envy the chapped testicles of those who do. But in the words of my undergraduate creative writing adviser, the lovely Mary Helen Stefaniak (in reference to something I'd written that reminded her of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy), "It's all been done." (Here, she tilted her head back and cackled a bit. Then she regained composure and churched her hands in her lap.) "Yes, Keith Petit. It's all been done."

I'm not one to disagree with Mary Helen Stefaniak. It has all been done. Tibet, El Dorado, Atlantis, Shangri-La - by now, you'd be hard-pressed to find a square inch of earth that has gone untraipsed by Keds brand footwear. It's all been done. Still, however many times it's been done, as an aspiring traveler, you might yet hold onto some feeble Eat, Pray, Love-esque faith that a backpacking trip through the Himalayas might afford you some sort of spiritual enlightenment. But I've met enough backpackers by now to know that that no, that's not how it works. You can only backpack for so long. Backpackers must one day unpack their backpacks and return to ground level. After that, they get jobs, they get married, they start families, and eventually, they have to grapple with the same problems we're all busy grappling with. Escape is not an escape, because one day, the escape will end, and then you are left with yourself. Or you can escape forever, if you so desire. That option, after all, remains open to all of us. But the universe is plenty lonely as it is, and very few people have the constitution necessary to live apart from society any longer than a couple of years. Very, very few people have what it takes to be a hermit.

Living abroad is a temporary escape. It takes courage, and I admire that courage. It is what I am doing right now, and what I have been doing for several years. But I don't take pride in it, because it is purely voluntary on my part. I could be living very comfortably in the United States right now. I live slightly less comfortably in China at the moment. So what? Were I stranded up in the Himalayas, I'd be living even less comfortably. So what? The difference is: as a Westerner, I have chosen to come here and I do not have to stay here. I can always go back. But the people who live in China are stuck in China. The people who live in Tibet are stuck in Tibet. Their lives are not glamorous, however much we'd like them to think so. What we consider an escape, they consider life. The frontiers we explore remain the frontiers, even after we're done with them, and the people who live on those frontiers have to remain living on those frontiers. There's very little adventure left in travel, the more I think about it. It's all been done.

No, to my mind, the only real adventure left is the mind. The mind is where it's at. That doesn't mean you can't supplement your adventure with a trip through the Himalayas, or a lowly sojourn to Shangri-La. But what matters to me is who you are, not where you've been. When you come down from the mountains, what life can you bring to that story? Why should I listen? Why should I care about it? You've been where I have never been. So make that story dance, child.

Every year, more and more long-haired scrubs go venturing up into the Himalayas, but I shall not. I am currently a scrub and I may yet grow my hair out. But those mountains are much too high for me. No, my story will take place at ground level. I was not made for the sea or for the air. I am a land mammal.

It is not out of envy or bitterness that I rail against the backpackers, if I am railing against them at all. I just don't see a story there anymore. Not unless I know the mind behind it. Not unless I find that mind worthwhile. When it comes to stories, the mind is the only thing that counts. There are men who have never left their hometowns, who have lived their whole lives in cubicles, and yet they have more to say than I ever will. And you should pay attention to them rather than me, because they have traveled and I have not.

The British hobo bid us farewell and departed. Erin lost her stainless steel chopsticks somewhere in the bus station and we spent fifteen minutes looking for them, to no avail. Then it was time to get on the little yellow bus. The whole ride back, all the old ladies were puking out the windows.