5.18, Mi Shi -> Jingzhou -> Wuhan
Continuity is going out the window at this point; my journal is just a mass of notes for the past week or two, so I'm just writing what I feel like writing now.
After two nights in Fenghuang and two nights at Sun Zhi Jun's apartment in Mi Shi with both Jun and Molly, it was time for me to head back to Wuhan. Quite aside from other things, despite all protestations to the contrary, at times I felt like I was intruding on some kind of romantic interlude in their lives.
We levered ourselves out of bed around 9am, red-eyed and yawning after drinking tea and chatting until the wee hours the night before. After a breakfast of eggs fresh from Jun's parents' chickens, freshly made soy milk, and highly suspect supermarket "ham," we grabbed a bus to Jingzhou.
Arriving in Jingzhou, they led me to the central bus stop. After our goodbyes, which I admit were not without somewhat more than their fair share of emotion on my part, Jun and Molly sat me down on a bus, paid my fare over my objections, and went off on their merry way.
I wasn't left alone to mull over my own thoughts for very long, though; I was soon joined by a Chinese man, cast from a very recognizable mold. I consider men of this type to be possibly the least pleasant company available on public transport here in China, trumping even the incontinent baby demographic, or the I'm-hot-and-I-know-it girls who are constantly tapping texts on glittering mobile phones, with similarly bejewelled fingernails.
At any rate, these are men in what I like to call the "I Don't Give A Shit" phase of their lives. There's no specific age bracket. Some men may never enter this phase, and some men never leave it. Tellingly, I have never met a woman in this phase of her life; although, I suppose it is possible that I just choose to ignore them so completely that they fail to figure in my memories.
Despite having no discernible age or ethnic grouping, men of this type are easily recognizable. They're usually wearing business casual clothes, sometimes sport coats, which look increasingly old fashioned and dingy as you get closer. Their personal hygiene is questionable at best, they are great proponents of the oft-lamented practices of spitting everywhere and hurling litter with reckless abandon, and their voices are tweaked above everyone else's by several decibels.
This guy was a perfect example. I'm not even sure how it was possible, but he was somehow simultaneously greasy, moist, and scaly. His short-cropped hair clung tenaciously to his head like an oil slick, but a shower of dandruff clumps -- not flakes, clumps -- detached regularly from his scalp whenever he moved or itched his head, which was regrettably often.
While personal space is a fairly nebulous concept in China anyway, my new friend took this to an entirely new level. Crossing his legs into the aisle, he'd lean his upper body toward me, so eventually he'd be resting against my shoulder, dripping dandruff oh so gently down the front of my shirt.
Uncrossing his legs was another fun habit of his, the end result being the full length of his leg pressed warmly against mine. There are more than a few people from whom I would welcome this kind of contact, but a greasy man in his 40s with halitosis and a penchant for picking his nose in public does not rank among them.
He also liked to sing along with the music videos on the bus's television, grabbing my knee whenever a girl in a miniskirt appeared. Never before that day have I lamented the invention of the miniskirt.
After about four hours of this, I was grateful to be able to get up, brush the dandruff snowdrifts from my jeans, and bid my new friend a hasty goodbye.
Now thoroughly disgusted with my fellow man, I decided to splurge on a cab back to the hostel, and what I consider my home in central China; the bar at the Pathfinder hostel in Wuhan.
Greeted with smiles, hugs, a cup of tea and an invitation to dinner, it was like the sun coming up after a long night.
There have been many moments like that here for me; sometimes I fear for the consequences when I have to finally board my return flight.
5.10-5.11, Wuhan
Note: skipping a few journal entries to write this one, just because I feel like it.
5.10:
After a thoroughly unpromising start (temps in the high 80s and low 90s, lots of humidity and pollution and noise), Wuhan is really looking up. After trying unsuccessfully to contact Zhi Hui last night -- her phone ran out of credit -- we connected this morning, though that didn't really do us any good. There seems to be a particularly resilient language barrier there; or, more precisely, a comprehension barrier. Our conversation went something like this:
"Hello?"
"Hi Zhi Hui, this is [my fake Chinese name]."
"Oh hey! Are you having fun at Wudang Shan?"
"Uh... I did, but I'm in Wuhan now, remember I told you yesterday?"
"Oh yeah! So are you having fun?"
"Sure, it's not bad. You said you were going back to Hangzhou on the late train tonight?"
"Yep! My train leaves at 9pm."
"Cool, well I'm having dinner with some new friends tonight, if you want to join us."
"Oh really? That's great! Well, have a great time... If you need anything, just give me a call, and if you ever go back to Hangzhou we should hang out!"
"Er... All right?"
"Great! Talk to you soon!"
Anyway.
Will and Sadie are a hilarious couple, and very ballsy. They're travelling even lighter than I am, both in terms of personal effects and Chinese language ability, of which they have virtually none. I suspect their Welsh accents probably don't make communication with local Chinese any easier either, so they've had a frustrating time of it, even with the food. They related a story about some barbecued squid-on-a-stick which I'll refrain from repeating; suffice it to say I'll avoid the squid on a stick from now on. I very much doubt I'd be able to deal with many of the difficulties they've borne, or at least not with their good humour. I treated them to a nice dinner and they're on the fast train to Shanghai tonight, so hopefully they'll have a better time of it there, and will be more willing to open up to the incredible street food.
Ma Jing, aka Molly, is also a lot of fun. She's a recent graduate at the nearby fine arts university, and we became friends because the Bank of China staff love Americans for some reason.
Let me explain.
Ma Jing has been trying to exchange a fistful of dollars for about half a year, with no luck because they're a little ragged around the edges, and the bank won't change them. On the other hand, they're much more willing to give Americans the benefit of the doubt.
Since I had a bunch of dollars I had meant to use in Southeast Asia, we hatched a brilliant plan: I would trade her my crisp new bills for her tattered ones, and we'd go down to the bank. I'd pretend I couldn't speak any Chinese and flash my U.S. passport around a lot, acting the part of the dumb American. Ma Jing would change my pristine dollars, I'd blunder my way through exchanging hers, and we'd be golden.
If there's one thing I'm good at, it's playing/being dumb, so that was no problem. Although, the second I wasn't allowed to speak Chinese, the temptation to do so was almost overwhelming. It was a huge challenge not to nod at various things being said to me -- with varying levels of frustration -- by the bank staff, until Ma Jing had a chance to translate for me.
In the end, we strutted out of the bank clutching fat stacks of 100RMB notes, giddily feeling like we'd just robbed the place. The great Wuhan Bank of China heist of '09.
To celebrate, even though she'd engaged to come to dinner with me, Will and Sadie, Ma Jing insisted on treating me to some of her favorite street foods; iced sweet Jasmine tea, and some maddeningly delicious popcorn chicken.
We had some time to kill, so she took me on a tour of her university campus; noting that all the sculpture students we saw were boys, we were also quick to point out that they all seemed to be working on female busts and nudes; constructing their own fashion of sexual equality, I suppose.
5.11:
Sitting at the hostel bar, which happens to double as the front desk, has proven to be a thoroughly worthwhile pursuit. Quite aside from being the shadiest and breeziest place in the hostel, it is by far the friendliest. Ma Jing is working today, as is her brassy friend Yi Ran / Anna, an acquaintance of theirs from a hostel in Beijing (Mia), and the boss, Yang Guang, who happens to be a stunning natural beauty in what appears to be her lower thirties, sporting something of an earth-child look and a warm, flashy personality.
She's very much like a big sister to the staff here, and to the regulars (a group of which I have apparently become an honorary inductee), she's alternately flirty, motherly, and sisterly. Oedipus would have had a stroke within minutes of meeting this woman. Freud could have written volumes.
Business is slow, so we're just all hanging out here away from the heat, chatting with each other and whoever happens by. Ma Jing handed apples out to everyone, which were happily devoured, and I was invited to join them for the staff lunch, which was up there with the best meals I've had here in China. Not necessarily for the food, which was very good, but for the company. Mostly I'm just sitting here absorbing the atmosphere; it's astonishingly familial and casual, and even though I only understand every third word or so, the laughter and smiles are universal, and the good nature radiating from everyone around me precludes the need for literal translation.
I get pulled into the conversation once in a while; someone asks how to say something in English, another says I look a little like a Buddha, to a riot of laughter, and the boss repeatedly offers me a job and a place to stay. In general, I'm just happy to sit here and soak it all in.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, I've decided to stay here a couple extra nights. The staff and boss have invited me to a memorial tomorrow night for last year's earthquake, which will involve lots of readings by local poets. They're trying to persuade me to read an English poem, but I've repeatedly assured them that's a non-starter.
Ma Jing is off to parts unknown tomorrow, and thence to Fenghuang, where I'm meeting her in a couple days. So she'll miss the memorial, which is a shame, but the crowd here is a lot of fun; the boss and staff lend the hostel an air of restless fun, and the whole city seems a brighter place for it. It's a pity the boss's husband isn't here as well, I would have loved to see the interplay between the two.
5.6 – 5.7, Hangzhou to Wuhan-Wuchang
The hard sleeper was something of an anticlimax. From the depths of my fevered imagination, I had conjured up images of long rows of narrow, splintering wooden planks, not far different from a slave ship of the 1800s. In fact, the compartment was sleek, clean, and comfortable; basically the same as a soft sleeper, except with a third tier of bunks near the ceiling. I won't assume that they're all like this, but I wouldn't exactly call it hard going.
I am the first one in; once I get settled, a laconic college student with highlights in his cartoonishly spiked haircut comes in, wordlessly climbs up to a top bunk, and promptly falls asleep.
He is followed by a pair of a type I have often seen travelling in China, especially around tourist hotspots and during holidays. They are, as I explained to Michael when we spotted one such couple atop Huang Shan, "Man-Child and Mother."
The phrase is loosely defined as a man in his mid-late twenties or early thirties, doughy and with a bad complexion, accompanied only by his aging mother, who is generally sporting a somewhat annoyed expression, and more often than not is giving every woman anywhere near her son's age a thoughtful, if not actually hopeful, look. The man-child is usually socially awkward, and avoids conversation and eye contact with everyone but his mom.
Basically, Buster and Lucille from Arrested Development.
These two are followed in turn by a perky, sexy-librarian type in her early twenties, who offers us some fruit from a grocery bag, then disappears to do whatever it is hot librarians do to prepare for a train ride. Organize their Dewey Decimal catalogues in the altogether, perhaps.
Meanwhile, ManBoyMom have struck up conversation with each other, and I'm just leaning back, scribbling in my journal and eavesdropping -- which, given their heavy accents and my poor language skills, proves fruitless.
Sexy librarian returns, and starts asking me questions; I hold my own for a few minutes, then have to confess that I'm from the States when I talk myself into the inevitable linguistic dead end.
We chat for a while, then Man-Child turns to me; much to my surprise, he's spent a year at UNC studying nutrition, and is actually quite friendly and nice. He serves as an occasional translator for sexy librarian -- who has by this point introduced herself as Ke Zhi Hui -- and me for a while. Having no English name, she asks me to give her one, so Alice it shall be. I briefly considered naming her Booya, because that would have been hilarious, but figured I'd play it safe, with UNC guy there to spill the beans. Soon after that, we all break off and go to sleep.
At about 5:30am, we're woken by the car attendant so she can swap our bunk cards back for our tickets. Everyone else goes back to sleep, but I'm getting antsy, so I stand in the compartment doorway and watch out the window as the sky goes from black to a milky grey, revealing villages, sodden fields, and hulking towers of steel girders, apartments and malls in the making.
After a while, I head back to my bunk, only to see a pair of lacy socks appear from above, wave back and forth uncertainly for a bit, then settle gratefully when I pull the foot pegs down. Zhi Hui appears, bids me a good morning, and disappears for a bit.
By now the rest of the train is waking up too, and the sky is rapidly going from a light grey to a dusky orange and blue. The mute scrambles down from his top bunk and vanishes, never to be seen again. I trade good mornings with UNC ManBoy and his mom, then they sink back into bed.
Zhi Hui returns and takes a seat across from me; after chatting for a while, she invites me over to the window seats outside the compartment, where we sit and talk while the sun comes up over alternating views of farmland, achingly idyllic scenes of village life, and the inevitable bleak industrial wasteland, garbage piles, and stagnant, filthy ponds.
When the attendant comes by to tell us we're approaching the station, Zhi Hui and I exchange numbers, and she agrees to help me get a ticket to Wudang Shan. This is fairly typical of most people I've asked for help in China; once they understand I'm not handicapped in some way or trying to pull their leg with this I'm-From-The-US nonsense, they're more than happy to go out of their way to help me on mine.
Exiting the train, we're swept along with a rushing mob down some stairs and into the terminal, where Zhi Hui pulls me over to an information desk. In response to her questions, a uniformed woman sullenly points us "over there."
Walking that way, we're quickly mobbed by touts, asking us where we're headed. At the first mention of Wudang Shan, one of them becomes excited, pulling at my sleeve and practically yelling at us. Zhi Hui seems to think it's fine -- hard to tell with this little man screaming in my ear -- so I follow his pointing finger and tail his even smaller friend to a waiting electric scooter, where I awkwardly climb into the bitch seat.
Zhi Hui waves goodbye, says to call her if I run into any trouble, and then we're off.
Slowly.
At just under 200 pounds, plus my sizeable pack, I am not the easiest load this electric scooter has had to bear. So, perched like some kind of enormous parasite on the back of the scooter, ludicrously clutching the miniscule driver, we wheeze and whine our way up the exit ramps, barely passing people moving at walking speed.
Once out on the level streets, the scooter fares a little better, and I am treated to a brief but harrowing (even at reduced speed) ride through Wuhan's morning rush hour.
Pulling up in front of a bus station, the man jumps off the scooter and leads me by the hand into the terminal. As requested, I hand him ¥160, whereupon he tells me to wait and disappears at a run.
Awesome.
Looking around, I figure even if he has cheated me, I do seem to be in a bus station, so I can probably get where I'm going from here.
As luck would have it, he comes sprinting back after a minute or two, and leads me -- by the hand, again -- to a waiting bus. I take a seat, ask the man sitting across the aisle if the bus goes to Wudang Shan, and he says he has no idea.
His hair looks a little windblown, and he has the slightly stunned attitude of someone who maybe just got whirled through rush-hour traffic on the back of a tiny scooter, so I decide not to press the issue.
Luckily, I do overhear someone say "four hours to Xiangfan," so at least I know I'm going in the right direction.
Maybe.
Journal Transcript 4: 5/6
Note: Now my journal is kind of starting to get sloppy; it's becoming more a collection of notes rather than a narrative, so bear with me here.
Hangzhou Train Station:
Welp, here I am 3 hours early again. This time I'm cutting it a little fine, by having a late dinner at a fast food joint whose logo looks suspiciously like the KFC Colonel, except with a neatly combed part, a complete lack of facial hair, and an epicanthic fold.
The food, by comparison, looks stellar -- roast chicken, noodle soups, cold meat platters, what looks like spaghetti, and a tantalizing array of cold and hot starters and sides. Hoping for as close a comparison as possible, I've ordered some roast chicken. We'll see how it goes.
Last night was a blast; once Yuuko and Keiko overcome their massive, near-crippling shyness, they're a lot of fun. Also, all respect to Marjolijn and her dietary choices, but Louwailou was SO much better with meat options on the table.
We grabbed a taxi back to the hostel afterwards, but jumped out early when we spotted a laser/water show; it went on for about fifteen minutes -- easily besting the Bellagio's in variety and composition -- after which we had a nice leisurely walk along the lake back to the hostel and our waiting mystery fruit.
The mystery fruit party was, in a word, phenomenal. The wax apples were universally adored, and that warty green thing was astonishingly good. The dragon fruit was... well, it was anticlimactic. A bit like a bland kiwi was how Yuuko put it, and I can see no way to improve on her choice of words.
Then there were those tiny cherry-like things, the plum/apricots, and the camouflaged honeydew; I'd gladly tuck into any of them again, and I know I'll think wistfully of them when I'm back in the States.
Stuffed and sticky with an array of juices -- all of them fruit, mind you -- we sat around and talked about various food obsessions, each revelation made all the more mouth-watering by the effort needed to communicate it to each other.
After drooling together over ume shiso maki -- the shiso pork roll of yakitori fame -- we decided to head off to bed, where I had a call with the girls. Jabbering away in my bottom bunk while Yuuko & Keiko were showering, I didn't notice the naked Frenchman in the bunk above me until I jumped up to go wash up.
(This chicken, incidentally, is superb -- but only in comparison to KFC's)
Pierre, as it turns out, is on a whirlwind 20-day tour of China, and I was able to point him to a few resources about Huang Shan, which I hope will prove useful to him.
I was also able to point him to Keiko, who speaks French, much to her dismay.
Anyway.
This train ride is another incremental increase in difficulty; I've opted for a hard sleeper this time, and I have to make one or two connections before I get to Wudang Shan ( note: ended up being about four, a story for another time ). Not having a reservation anywhere is also a slight worry, but I should probably be okay. After all, aside from having a hard sleeper, this is nearly the exact same situation I was in heading to Huang Shan, and that ended up all right. I certainly can't expect the same caliber of experience on this leg -- though I will probably harbor some hopes nevertheless -- but my fear of undiluted misery awaiting me has sensibly diminished.
Having had the good fortune to spend more time with Marjolijn in Hangzhou, I'll happily admit that my initial imprsesion of her as a cynic was way off base. I'm not just saying that because she said she'd be checking my page, either (You Lun, ni hao...).
Despite being several years younger (I assume) and possessing an entirely different procreative toolset, Marjolijn is I think very similar in many ways to the person I hope to resemble, eventually.
Let me be clear by saying I'm not talking about hormone treatments and lots of plastic surgery; I simply mean that she's very grounded, yet doesn't seem to have lost any of her mobility. She's calm, capable, apparently fearless, and still has a sense of humor, and I do look forward to meeting up with her if she ever makes it down to California.
My last act in Hangzhou, apart from this stint in the train station and watching a few episodes of the Chinese equivalent of "Blind Date" -- they mix it with some Elimidate and Queer Eye -- was to sit on a bench by Xi Hu and watch the sun go down over the mountains. It was a nice little moment of quiet reflection, and I felt it a fitting way to bid farewell to Hangzhou.
Yet another place I never expected to visit -- in fact, I decided to visit only one or two nights before I got there -- yet one to which I find myself saying 'till next time, rather than goodbye.
The best laid plans…
The whole point of this trip was to only have the loosest of plans, but even these have been changing at an ever-increasing rate.
First, I was going to spend two weeks in China. Then, I tacked on 3 months in Southeast Asia. Then I decided to split the time evenly between China and Southeast Asia. Then, I added a week in Japan. Then I eliminated the week in Japan... there were just too many complications and expenses associated with that section.
Now, more and more, I am leaning towards eliminating the Southeast Asia portion of my trip altogether, and just ducking over to Hong Kong for a few days near my visa's 60-day limit, then returning to China proper.
Being able to interact with the local people on a meaningful level in China has really been the driving force behind my travels here, both physically and mentally.
I can't imagine there will be that level of interplay between the locals and me in Southeast Asia, so aside from eating amazing food and suffering through the tremendously bad weather (currently it is 100 degrees in Bangkok, with thunderstorms -- or perhaps one continuous thunderstorm -- every day this week), I can see most of my time being spent idling with other Western backpackers, gasping in the heat and humidity while hiding from the rain.
This would probably be pretty fun too, but I can eat Thai food and be sweaty at home.
I see the occasional fratpackers (copyright trademark patent pending, muthafuckas!) here in China, hanging out exclusively with other Americans or Europeans, ignoring all the locals except the inevitable women who are magnetized by them, downing beers at the hostel before heading out to the nearest Western bar, and drinking all night before staggering back to the hostel in the wee hours.
I'm all for people traveling the way they want to, but for better or worse, from all the accounts I've had, this is the impression I have of most backpackers in Thailand and it holds no appeal for me.
I view it as just a slightly altered version of the package-tour mode of traveling; one journeys to some exotic location, only to expend tremendous amounts of effort trying to cling to the familiar comforts and excesses of home, while collecting some tokens to validate the trip. It's probably fun, it's just not for me, and certainly not what I'm seeking right now.
Anyway.
My roommates Yuuko and Keiko -- she of the jeans-removing dance -- have proven to be very pleasant company, and foodies to boot, which automatically brings them near and dear to my heart. We've engaged to have a mystery fruit party tonight -- I went to the market and bought one of everything I couldn't recognize, so this could very well be my last post ever -- and possibly dinner at Louwailou if timing permits, which appears to be increasingly unlikely as I write this.
Conversation with them is a little strange; we communicate in a mix of Chinese, Japanese, and English, with a fair amount of gestures thrown in for good measure. There's an amusing amount of translation from Chinese to English and Japanese for Keiko's benefit, and from Japanese to English and Chinese for mine.
Yuuko is devilishly hard to understand sometimes because she mumbles a bit, is almost criminally casual about eye contact with the person she's addressing, and switches seamlessly between Japanese, Japanese-accented Chinese, and very limited English. It's made for some interesting pauses as they look at me expectantly for a few moments, before I gather they've been asking me a question in one of the two languages we have in common.
I've also become acquainted with a couple others here at the hostel, two of which have become my tutors in the intricacies of a popular soap opera out of Hong Kong, of which we watched five or six episodes last night.
I should probably be embarrassed that I'm hoping they'll want to watch more tonight, but I'm not. I really want to know if Bucktooth finds out that George Crooney killed her husband, and whether Forehead successfully undermines Crooney's power grab by teaming up with Old Taiwanese Guy and Bucktooth.
I'm all on pins and needles here.
Oh, and today I saw a girl wearing a t-shirt that said... I shit you not... "Load Work Ahead." I tried to get a picture, but wasn't quick enough.
Still in Hangzhou; I board an overnight train for Wuhan tomorrow at 11pm, where I hope to get a quick transfer to Xiangfan and Wudang Shan.