A Very Laowai Christmas

I'm finally on the bus, en route to A Very Laowai Christmas in Wanzhou. It took me the better part of two days to get to the bus station because Nanchong has six of them, and I can never remember the name of the one I want to go to. I asked my barber last night, but he thought I was just making chit-chat: yeah, Wanzhou, snip-snip, mm-hmm, bus station, snap-snap. I asked three different convenience store clerks, each of whom insisted that the bus was no way to travel and refused to tell me the name of the bus station. But I wasn't going to take the train this time around, nosiree. Chinese trains are dead to me. Owing to my last trip to Wanzhou, the train is a sensory cocktail of squawking junk vendors, screaming children, and feces.

I went home, went to bed, and redoubled my efforts this morning: I put my fate in the hands of a Nanchong Toyotavan driver. She took me to two different bus stations before consulting the cabby oracle, a tubby dude in a Russian hat who gave me a cigarette and bellowed directions that got me, at last, to the bus station I wanted to get to in the first place, whatever it's called.

If I am a C-List celebrity on campus, I am a jailhouse debutante down by the bus station. The college kids shout HELLO! - the bus station riffraff chants FRESH FISH! Cabbies, trishaw pilots, ticket scalpers, shoeshiners, whores, gigolos, warty old men in fake leather jackets flogging air filters for mid-sized Suzuki mopeds ... you wave your hands and run in the opposite direction, but your disinterest only succeeds in convincing the riffraff that you're secretly interested in their wares.

Claustrophobic and famished, I ducked into an alleyway that reeked promisingly of MSG. I wound up in the Nanchong toilet district and walked for blocks looking for a place to eat, finding naught but places to shit. Then I passed through Nanchong's J-shaped pipe district, responsible for the manufacture and distribution of every single J-shaped pipe in the world. Then I came upon the door district: street after street of doorless shops filled with doors, like something out of Borges ... I keep hoping that someday I will stumble across the Oriental Trading Company's Sichuan headquarters, where I would show the boss my old business card - Keith Petit, Freelance Copywriter - and maybe he'd hook me up with some complimentary "Over the Hill" koozies, hot off the press. But these wanderings seldom lead anywhere, just into the bowels of some kafkaesque/borgesian industrial labyrinth and, eventually, the realization that China is a very large place that I will never understand.

Now, on the bus, we are passing Nanchong's industrial labyrinths at warp speed. There goes the Fargo-sized-woodchipper district, the neon light district, the ginseng district, and then we're out in the industrial hintergrund: vast swathes of fenced-off mudpits marked with imposing Chinglish signs, mustard gas hanging thick in the air. The hintergrund stretches for miles. This is part of Nanchong, too, the part where no one lives and no one goes voluntarily - and it is probably the biggest part of the city. The area I am familiar with - my college campus and a couple of half-pleasant streets lined with what pass for bars in this country - is the cherry sitting atop a monstrous slag heap of hard work, noxious gases, and heavy industry.

My bus companion does not seem to care that I am a foreigner, so it's just me and the scenery and Robert M. Pirsig for four hours. Gradually, Zen and the Art puts me in a zenlike trance, then a fullblown coma. When I regain consciousness, we're pulling into a rest stop just outside of Liangping. I pop out for some noodles and a smoke. All the passengers who were hitherto unaware of the laowai on board are henceforth aware. They speculate (loudly) as to whether I can understand Chinese or not. The Mandarin words for "to understand" and "to not understand" are ting de dong and ting bu dong, respectively, so an odd chorus of Chinese bell chimes fills the air as I'm waiting in line for noodles. Ting de dong, ting bu dong, ting de dong ...

"What do you want? You want a hardboiled pigeon egg? Corn on the cob? Wiener on a stick?"
"I'd like some noodles," I say.
... ting de dong, ting de dong! A thrill sweeps through the crowd: he understands!
"Noodles!" shouts the vendor. "That guy over there sells noodles."
I head in the direction of the noodle man.
"Wait! You need to buy a ticket from me first."
I pause and scratch my head.
... ting bu dong, ting bu dong! Heads shaking all around: he doesn't understand!
"So, let me get this straight," I say. "I need to buy a ticket from you so I can get noodles from him?"
"You don't understand?"
"I understand," I say, "but I don't understand."
I hand the middleman seven kuai. He hands me a ticket.
One of my fellow passengers tells the noodle man to go easy on the spice.
"Laowais can't handle spice," he explains.
"What do I look like? A baby?" I ask. Approving laughter from my entourage. "Extra spice, please."
... ta chi la, ta chi la! A miracle: the laowai eats spicy!
I hand the noodle man my ticket. The noodle man hands me a bowl of noodles heaped high with chili pepper. I sit and no fewer than ten grown men huddle around the table to watch me eat.

Our Very Laowai Christmas turns out to be very laowai, indeed. Not since August have I found myself in the company of more than five Americans at once. I'm not sure how to act. I have no idea who Lady Gaga is. I keep reverting to Special English - "The weather in Nanchong is very, very cloudy!" - and using the sign language I rely on to communicate with my students. We eat burritos and drink spiced wine until, at seven sharp, China knocks at the door. In comes a man named Kingway, wielding a toddler in split pants. Some old timers arrive with a portable mahjongg table. A ten-year-old boy shows up with an erhu and performs for us. Dear Santa, earplugs make a perfect stocking-stuffer for the sensory-overloaded laowai on your list.

Fair warning: if you throw a Halloween party, your Chinese guests will turn it into a Mid-Autumn Festival party, and if you throw a Christmas party, they will turn it into a Spring Festival party. We sit around listening to the locals talk about Spring Festival. By now, of course, we are well-versed in the nuances of the Chinese New Year: four generations of Zhangs gather in the living room to watch CCTV for days on end, glutinous rice balls for breakfast, there is footwashing involved, etc., etc. But our guests don't seem all that curious about our own annual pagan ritual, about the droll-mouthed fat man cutouts on the wall, the plastic fir tree in the corner or the row of giant red socks arrayed in the hall. And why should they be? The Lunar New Year is upon us! Spring Festival is only a month away! This is China. Welcome to our China. Red lanterns are hanged to banish the evil beasts. You had better eat the black algae to engender prosperity and industrious well-being. Wash the feets at midnight for produce colorful life ...

Our guests leave at exactly nine PM, and it is once again a very laowai Christmas. We sit and drink and talk until dawn turns the Yangtze a healthy shade of cyan. I fall asleep in mid-sentence, refuting Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like To Be A Bat? The next afternoon, I'm back at the Wanzhou bus station, but there aren't any buses to Nanchong, so I catch a cab to the train station.

I'm smoking on the steps, waiting for the 8:00 train, when the Chinese Howard Beale comes swaggering towards me. "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymo'!" he screams to no one in particular, then his eyes focus on mine and he rests his hand on my shoulder. "Laowai, have you eaten?" Not in a couple hours, I say. "Let's go!" he shouts.

We wind up in a seedy dive across the street. Beale is visibly and olfactorily drunk. He orders three dishes: sauteed green peppers, the MSG cabbage platter, sweet-and-sour bitter melon. Then he fetches a couple of beers from the fridge, shoots a cigarette my way, and sits there watching me eat, drink, and smoke.

"Laowais are humans," he observes. "Chinese people are humans."
"That's right!" I nod. "We are all humans on this planet."
"You are a human. I am a human."
"Ha ha! You are correct, sir."
"Different minds," he says, pounding his chest, "same heart!"
He is shouting. By now the people around us are staring at him and not at me, a bad sign.

At home and especially abroad, I am a magnet for schizophrenics and raging drunks. When I'm at the pearly gates, I'll be escorted to St. Peter's podium by a ragged army of derelicts and winos who will inform St. Peter in broken English punctuated with OK!s and the occasional thumbs-up that I am a human, that I have a colorful heart, that I once gave them the equivalent of 17 U.S. cents for a hipflask of rice vodka, and for this good deed and many others I should be admitted to the massage parlor at the end of the neon pink tunnel.

"So, er, what kind of work do you do?" I ask.
What Beale describes involves too many hand gestures, seems too intricate and shady for my liking. I ask no further questions. He demands two more beers and tells the waitress to hurry up when the beers don't materialize instantaneously. The woman at the next table comes over to sit with us. She orders a dish of stir-fried mushrooms and watches me eat them. She mentions that she lives in Nanchong and that she has a son. She wants me to teach him English. Howard Beale pulls me into his trenchcoat.
"Do you understand what she's asking you?"
I nod.
"But do you really understand?" he asks.
"She wants me to teach her son English."
"Yes," he nods. "She wants you to teach her 'son' English."
Oh, Christ. Not this again.
"Sorry, ma'am," I say. "I'm a volunteer, so I'm not allowed to teach for money."
"Oh, you don't have to do it for money," she says.
Beale nudges me in the ribs. He toasts the young woman and me and we empty our glasses. Beale stuffs a hundred-kuai note into the waitress's fanny pack on the way out the garage door.

The three of us walk to the train station. I try to lose them in the crowd, but Howard Beale clings to my backpack and keeps pushing me into the woman from Nanchong. He hands me a cigarette.
"Can I smoke here?" I ask. There is a sign above my head depicting a cigarette with an X through it. It says, confusingly, "SMOKING PERMITTED."
"We can't," Beale says, "but you can."
I light my cigarette and start throwing elbows in an effort to dissolve myself. Beale gets held up at the turnstile. The woman from Nanchong has a ticket for a different compartment, but tells me to wait for her when we get to Nanchong. I noncommittally agree and climb aboard.

I'd sworn off Chinese trains after my last trip to Wanzhou, but this time I manage to score a middle bunk in a sleeper cabin. My cabinmates are from Chengdu, so they don't even blink when a foreigner barges into their quarters with a beer in his hand and an Intro to Philosophy volume tucked under his arm. Someone has an especially cute three-year-old granddaughter who is too bashful to say hello to me. She is clamoring for her imaginary friend, a black scarf with skulls on it, whom she addresses as "Skully." As I'm climbing up to my bunk, one of the pins on my field jacket falls off. The little girl's grandma hands it back to me: it is my Poodleface pin.
"What does it mean?" she asks, staring into the poodle face on the pin.
"My friend gave it to me," I explain. "He was on American television once."
She squints at the poodle face, then back at me, as though Poodleface, American television, and my very laowai existence are as imaginary as Skully, whom she is stuffing into a burlap sack full of radishes while her granddaughter weeps and pees her pants simultaneously.

Cloud City

I woke up on National Day with a brain full of smog and a great wall of mucous obstructing my sinuses. I could hear the National Day Parade echoing in the halls, so like the rest of China, I turned on the TV and sat down in my underwear to watch it. Walt Disney meets Kim Jong-Il: a trillion dollars worth of long-range warheads scrolling past, followed by pastel papier-mâché floats overflowing with oompa-loompas, emperors and astronauts. The premier, arms crossed over his chest, appeared pleased with his people's display of military might and camp.

I napped off the rest of the day, played Mario Kart with the Mennonites for a bit, and slept off the rest of the night. The next morning, I threw a pair of underwear, some mismatched socks, and three indie rock t-shirts in a backpack and caught a taxi to the bus station. I was bound for Yunyang, a small town in Chongqing Province, whose name, I am told, means "Cloud City."

Public transportation in China has a way of making you kneel down to kiss the ground of wherever you wind up. You find solace in the bus driver's age: he couldn't have lived to see fifty if he were an incompetent driver, or a homicidal maniac. These are your thoughts as you and the person sitting next to you grow suddenly silent because your bus is passing a police car at 140 kilometers an hour on a two-lane highway - the driver is on the phone - and you're careening towards another onrushing police car, who flashes his brights but keeps on coming. The bus driver leans on the horn. Just as you start to murmur the Lord's Prayer and fondle rosary beads that aren't there, the driver veers you back into the right lane, averting death by a ramen noodle, puts down the phone and lights up a cigarette.

The bus driver was something of a comedian. He insisted that I sit next to him, which gave me a front-row seat for all his interstate acrobatics, and made me the butt of his jokes. About eighty kilometers out of Nanchong, he stopped on the side of the road to pick up his sidekick, his co-pilot, the Kevin Eubanks to his Jay Leno. Leno wisecracked, delivered aimless monologues, cursed at slow-moving vegetable trucks; Eubanks cackled and slapped the dashboard. Eventually, I had to pee in the worst way.

"Excuse me," I said to Leno. "I need to use the bathroom."
Leno cackled. Eubanks slapped the dashboard.
"It's three hours to Yunyang, laowai!" Leno shouted over the squawk of the horn. "But if you really must pee, perhaps we can stop on the side of the road."

Determined to save face, I held my water for three hours. Meanwhile, Leno kept the laughs a-coming. I couldn't understand whatever dialect it was that he was speaking, but he and Eubanks kept looking at me and cackling. The whole front half of the bus was vastly amused. At one point, he gestured towards me and said, "This laowai doesn't understand what I'm saying!" That much, of course, I could understand.

China is like Gulliver's Travels in that you can ride 200 kilometers in a bus and find yourself among lilliputians or houyhnhnms who speak an incomprehensible local dialect and live in their own incomprehensible local way. So it was with Yunyang, the Cloud City. It should perhaps be renamed Cloud City II, or Yunyang, Jr., as the original was wiped out by the floods that drowned the towns along the Yangtze after the completion of the Three Gorges Dam. Fifteen years ago, the inhabitants of Old Yunyang packed up and rerooted themselves on the side of a mountain. New Yunyang was hastily stacked in terraces, four of them, such that if you live on the top level, you can peer over the artificial canyon's edge and see Matchbox cars and ant-sized humans scurrying around on the bottom level. The sidewalks on the top terrace are pocked with drainage holes - which the Yunyang Peace Corps volunteers call "death" - that look down onto heaps of sewage-drenched garbage four stories below. Some of the deaths are grated with reebar, others are covered in Plexiglas. Children like to dance around on the deaths while their parents sip tea and play mahjongg.

Because the top level of Cloud City is way up in the stratosphere, the preferred mode of transportation in Yunyang is not the taxi, the bus, or the bicycle rickshaw: Yunyangers take the stairs. From above, the city looks like an Escher painting. There are stairwells that rise so high that if you take the steps two at a time your ears pop and if you race back down to the bottom you get the bends. There are secret stairwells that take you through a wormhole to the opposite end of town. There are stairwells that lead nowhere. There are stairwells which loop around so that you wind up precisely where you started. Yunyang holds an annual motorcycle race up the biggest stairwell in town, although I am told that it is not as thrilling as it sounds, because they only race one motorcycle at a time.

As far as I know, there are three foreigners in Yunyang. Two of them are my friends. The third was rumored to be a fat Cuban girl, but I am now informed that he is a musclebound Cameroonian man. My arrival in Cloud City was greeted with much fanfare. The university staff took me out for a night of mahjongg, Moutai, and moongazing.

I know enough mahjongg vocabulary to show my opponents that I am not ignorant of the rules or the language, but that I am a colossal idiot nonetheless. We played twenty games before dinner and I lost all of them but one. It was like Gary Kasperov, Bobby Fischer and Big Blue vs. a malfunctioning Apple IIe computer. My only triumph was a cheap one, largely owed to the dean of the university, who took control of my mahjongg tiles and slid them around the table in such a way that I came out the victor.

We sat down for dinner. I sensed that these were my kind of people. They were absurdists. The dean of the music department - a lanky fellow with an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice - drank and crooned and toasted the laowais once a minute. We talked about language: the universal language of people who cannot understand each other. Someone busted out the Moutai - a vile but expensive rice liquor that comes in little gasoline cans - and I was coerced into drinking two glasses of the stuff before I broke down and pleaded for a beer. We ate until we could eat no more, then the Dean of Music stood up and barked, in English, "Let's look at moon!" We went outside. It was raining. The Dean of Music raised a finger. "I am go get beer," he proclaimed, "so we drink beer and look at moon!" Again, these were my kind of people.

We took the stairs as high as we could and got so close to the moon that you could smell the moondust. But the moon was invisible, covered in natural and artificial Cloud City clouds. We took the stairs back down to ground level and closed out the night huddled under a nylon canopy on the side of the road. We played a drinking game that I could not understand, and even after I understood it, could not play because it involved numbers.

"Five! Fifteen! Twenty-five! Drink," the Dean of Music shouted. "Ten! Twenty! Thirty-five! Drink."

It turned out one of the guys was a tai-chi instructor, so we took to the street, foreigners and Chinese alike, and lined up in a row. A crowd of bao-bao men gathered to watch. Our sensei slinked along the sidewalk, chopping the air in slow-mo with a bottle of booze in his free hand, and we recited the mantra familiar to all English-speaking novices in the Way of the Supreme Ultimate Fist: "One big watermelon. I cut it in half. One for you. One for me. I don't want either of them."