"La Ruche Des Oubliettes"

Karamay, Xin Jiang, 1997 to 1998.

September 12, 1997
 
Dear Henry,
      I have been in China for about three weeks now. I met with some leaders of the school I hope to teach English in. Karamay T. V. University is in Karamay in northern Xin Jiang. It is not a media training center, but a rough equivalent of our Associates’ Degree, 2-year colleges. At present there is one family from the U.K. teaching and living there. I have met them briefly and they are kind and gracious. However, the leaders said they needed time to get my paperwork in order – they need permission from the authorities in Urumqi to hire me – so I have had to wait about ten days. I did not want to stay in Karamay for ten days so I asked if I could travel, and they agreed.
      Long distance travel in northwest China (apart from air) is often by bus. There are some train lines, but not many. The large busses either have seats, or two decks of reclining seats – the latter look like a traveling bunkhouse. There are no toilets on board. The main roads are paved, but there are sections that are being repaired. As in West Africa, they are bumpy and covered with fine dust – boggy, thick mud that slows you down when wet, or spurting out from under the tires and getting into everything in minutes when dry. At meal stops I usually order something simple like beef or lamb noodles, because I cannot read the menus, and there is so much choice. Of course everyone looks at me – in the countryside, foreigners are rare, except on the roads between tourist sites which “backpacker types” (like me) like to use.
      After a visit to the west of Urumqi, I returned to the capital and continued on to Hami. The sleeper busses are not only more comfortable, they are convenient, because I don’t have to book into a hotel. Much of Xin Jiang and Gansu Province is part of the Gobi Desert. Although there are sand dunes of incredible size in the Gobi, the typical scene is one of rough-edged gravel and sand – like you would find in a dry river bed – but stretching in all directions to the next horizon and beyond sometimes. Huge plains, a range of mountains to labor over in second gear, and more plains beyond. Sage brush – like vegetation of different sizes, or nothing at all for miles, except the silent line of concrete telephone poles and the straight road losing itself into the horizon. In the midst of all this an occasional river bed with some water or a small torrent of dishwater grey glacier runoff in it. Yet I look up at the usually dry hillsides and wonder. Where is this coming from?
      On the road to Hami we stopped at some roadside restaurant, forever forgotten by outsiders except for the fact that it was on the main road and serving the long distance travelers. The lights of the row of diners were at once an oasis and a cage. Inside the pool of lights you could rest from the journey and the desert, slurp your noodles and watch truly awful “B” movies from Hong Kong. At the edge of the light, it was very hard to see where you were going or what you were tripping over. But I think that outside, in the true darkness, the desert became visible again under the starlight, and perhaps a little more friendly. I didn’t try it though.
      At Hami, I had to wait a day for the next bus to Dunhuang. I like to walk through the open-air market, seeing what is cooking and trying some of the local food. This time it was lamb bone soup. Once the butchers have cut off the meat, the vertebrae and other large bones are boiled. The dish is literally a bowl of bones with some meat attached. It is finger food, and very good! Lamb is an important food here for many.
      After Hami I went to Dunhuang, where there are some famous cave paintings, as well as an oasis called Crescent Moon Spring. This moon-shaped pond sits among huge surrounding sand dunes. I liked watching the wind chase lines of sand grains up the smoothed slope of the dune. However, there were too many people there. It would be an experience to visit Crescent Moon Spring early in the morning or at dusk, with only the wind for company.
      After Dunhuang, another long bus ride to Golmud, in Qinghai Province. There is a lot of salty soil around Golmud, where they mine potash. In places, absolutely nothing grows. After that, rides to Xining, Lanzhou, then the train to Urumqi.
      If you think that is a lot of desert to see, then you are right! I like to look at the desert, and see the empty, clean land, with almost no people, trees somehow surviving on the slopes of sand dunes, and a sky so blue it seems artificial.
      Since beginning this letter, I have found out that I will be teaching at the school in Karamay, and plan to go there soon. Now is the time to teach well, study more Chinese, and make friends.
      I hope you are well. When I write again, I will send you some photos of the area, as well as some address labels.
 
September 16, 1997
 
Dear Dorothy,
 
      After a few days I have settled in at Karamay T.V. University. Accommodations are simple, but I think they are better than at the previous three teaching locations. Not only is the air cleaner, the campus has a cleaner look to it. It pays to be part of an oil town! I have seen more stone cobbled sidewalks/streets here than in all the rest of China.
      When I first arrived here to work, the formalities for letting me teach had not been done, so I traveled for about twelve days. That was good, for now I have got much of the travel bug out of me – for now. I came back, the formalities were done, and today I began my first day of teaching. I am teaching two oral classes and one listening class. The students are mostly 20 or 21, and almost all females. They were very quiet today, but perhaps they were shy. I hope to see them open up in class more in the near future.
      As for Karamay it is a large town of perhaps 80,000, east of a large escarpment, west of the Junggar Desert, in a landscape perhaps like Texas sagebrush country. Having seen the big picture in this province through travel, I think it is time to stay in one place and live/try to understand life within walking distance of my apartment.
      The stores I like to visit are fifteen or so minutes (at the most) walk from the campus. This is good because I need the exercise, and if I didn’t have errands to do I would probably not walk. For the past two days I have been visiting a small restaurant which specializes in ravioli-like dumplings. The dumplings are O.K. but the service is so slow! Today, I brought my language flashcards, so soon after I had finished my review the dumplings came. I am hoping to try some other places.
     
September 19, 1997
 
Dear Peter,
 
      For much of the past week I have taken my afternoon walk from the campus to the post office. At first, it seems like a pointless walk in the noonday heat, but it is my window into life in Karamay and a chance to exercise. The walk is predictable in that I take the same route, try to eat ravioli-like dumplings at the same restaurant, often buy sweet yogurt from the same street vendor, and end up at the post office with something to mail out. The service at the dumpling restaurant is slow, so I have taken to carrying my Chinese flashcards and studying them while the dumplings are boiling. In what promises to become a ritual without words I sit on the yogurt vendor’s shaded bench and drink without stopping to appreciate the runny yogurt, only to start enjoying it when I reach the bottom of the jar. The woman behind the counter at the post office is kind – she volunteers to glue on the stamps herself. Perhaps the menial experience of gluing on a foreigner’s stamps is as much of an oasis experience for her, as the walk is exercise for me. Siesta time is as much a respite from the bustle of work as it is from the people work brings through your door.
      Outside the post office, many of the sidewalks on the main street or on the university campus are paved in stone, the fruit of a municipality blessed with oil. The streets aren’t too busy, the lines and groves of trees are well laid out, and orange-clad street cleaners are in evidence, sweeping the streets or sidewalks or cleaning the guardrails. I walked back to the campus, past a long line of one-room shops, all offering photocopying and wordprocessing services, past four or five soft drink/yogurt stands, stopped at a baker’s to buy a meat-filled bun, and watched a lone street sweeper while eating the bun.
      It is now a week or so later, and I have visited the baker’s again and had a few encounters with the staff. They use beehive bread ovens; the ovens are fired using brushwood, and then the wet disks of dough are slapped and stuck against the sides of the oven. (The top of the oven has a cover.) Sometimes the ovens are not beehive-shaped, but have straight sides, like a water cistern. I have also seen that it is possible to sundry tomatoes – they are cut into wedges (6th’s) and put on a tray in the sun. Any good food drier could copy that back home. Of course, the climate is drier here. Some of the locals grow small gardens, so I am often gleaning ideas from them. I see the English family a few times a week. I have been tutoring their two oldest children (13 and 10) in conversational French. On Friday evenings we get together; perhaps we will get into the habit of going out for Sunday lunch too.
 
A Trip Through Tibet (a retrospective story)
 
      I would not have made it into Tibet if it weren’t for a very helpful travel agency in another part of China. After a long train ride from Taiyuan I finally reached Chengdu and the office that until now had been some distant place at the other end of the telephone line. The next morning’s flight to Lhasa left very early. In the pre-dawn darkness of Chengdu the streets were mostly deserted and parts of the airport were just opening up.
      The flight was uneventful, but what I do remember was how dry the mountains near Lhasa appeared – stony and dry. The bus ride from the airport into the city took an hour or so, along a very fast flowing river, over a bridge and back up the other side of the river a ways. Many trees or bushes along the road had strips of colored cloth tied to their branches, as did most of rooftops of the farmhouses. The city itself had two parts, the old city and the new city.
      During the two days I spent there, I tried different local food – salty tea, yak meat, local jiaozi, and a barley-flour dish that is made by kneading together barley-flour, tea, butter and sugar in a bowl, then eating the dough uncooked – it was filling and good.
      I stayed in a guesthouse with some of its rooms along one side of a courtyard, a hop and a skip away from one of the main streets in the old city. The room was small, with patterns painted on the wall and a solid feel to it. There were other foreigners there – a few short conversations, but for the most part we minded our own business. For some (perhaps many) Westerners, Lhasa is one of those places where one comes to the realization there is nowhere else to go and nothing one can go back to. Although it is something of a crossroads, it is also the end of a road for those who are searching or running away from life.
      At this point I must admit that it is hard to write about Lhasa, for there is so much to notice and attract the senses. Imagine walking into an open market on a busy day in Guangxi – the nights, the sounds, the thousand and one anecdotes being played out before your eyes and ears – and imagine the effect this has on you. Then take that feeling and let it mix with the strange feeling that comes from being in a unfamiliar place. The fabric of life is in one respect the same as in the rest of China, but in others unique.
      I am a foreigner, so I am strange to everybody, and many things are new to me. I could walk through the busy market streets flowing with buyers, tourists (a few), children, people in from the countryside; or I could see the quiet lanes, look at the wares and food for sale on small tables or through dusty windows, and momentarily leave the rush of life.
      If you walk around the outside of the Potala Palace, and if you follow the circular flow of humanity around a famous temple, or if you wander the quieter and busier streets in the old city, you will see much of what makes Lhasa special – but perhaps you should not expect to understand it. Although Lhasa was a place where I saw new culture, ate new food, and saw new sights, it was more the place of epiphany (as James Joyce may have meant it), of discovering who I was and where I was going.
      I left after two days. The bus left early in the morning, and perhaps should have taken thirty-six hours to Golmud. It took an hour or so to leave Lhasa, past the last vestiges of towns and dense human habitation, and then poof! we entered the wide open spaces with a few settlements here and there, where the road and telephone lines were only reminders we lived in the twentieth century.
     After the river bottom land with its barley fields came the smaller irrigated fields and pastures. Bright-barred hoopoes were fairly common, and the land had a feel slightly similar to that of Dingle, in S. W. Ireland. These became pastures, which merged into stone and mountains, and then the sky itself.
      The passengers were almost all anonymous, except two European backpackers, and a little girl who was riding north with her parents. Considering the length of the journey she was amazingly well behaved and quiet; her mother was also very good at amusing her and giving her love and attention.
      Tibet is one of those places that never seem to end, where everything is under the same vast sky. Bogs, mountains, solitary yaks or herds of yaks came and went, came and went, until you had no idea where you were or how far you had gone. Perhaps it was not only geography but also the passage of time, for one’s elation at being in the mysterious land became boredom, and then outright disgust. A few days in the same seat watching a seemingly endless movie would do the same to anyone. Now that a few months have gone by and I am at a new job in Xin Jiang, I can look back at that trip and respect the high land for what it is …immense, mostly very beautiful, and in the case of sunbursts crowning mountains and the darkened land, almost glorious.
      Somewhere into Qinghai Province we got stuck in a traffic jam, a huge traffic jam of trucks and sleeper busses, with a few cars and pickups here and there like tsetse flies among the elephant. We were miles from anywhere and the road had been washed out a few hundred metres ahead. This road is the only overland route from Golmud to Lhasa. Nobody wanted to keep the oncoming lane open and soon the road in both directions was choked. Many of those who tried to detour around the washout became stuck in the boggy land.
      We sat there for twenty-four hours. At that time I had brought along a ridiculously insufficient amount of food and drink – a few small packets of Nepalese biscuits, some chocolate bars and a few bottles of water. This was rationing with no sign of the next food stop or assurance that we would leave this place. The next day – measured in sips and crackers, on a measureless plain of insomnia and featureless bog – saw anxiety turn into morbidity. Some trucks were getting through in groups, and at one opportune moment our driver cut into an escaping convoy and moved toward the point where the road had washed out. He was at once scolded, but he sweet talked his way through. Very shortly afterwards he shouted at us to get out of the sleeper bus. We grabbed our shoes, bundles and babies, jumped out and light-footed from dry spot to dry spot over the muddy crossing point. Less heavy now, the bus made it across, we swarmed on and were off.
      In some ways, the remainder of the trip was uneventful compared to the traffic jam, yet it was beautiful. Like Tibet, the scenery of Qinghai is written in a big hand – icy, white-dusted mountain passes, high mountains, a few very large, drumlin-shaped sand dunes resting in the folds of the mountain range where mountain met valley, and the same immense sky. The land became warmer and drier, we lost some altitude, had a recharge in a roadside restaurant with a smoky kitchen that made you choke, and finally reached the salty wastelands of Golmud.
      The journey from the high plateau to the potash mines took fifty-four hours. At that time it was and still is the worst overland journey I have ever taken, tiring to such an extent that one reached Qinghai in a state of shock. However, I would not have it any other way. Tibet, in all its glory, would not be the same without it.
 
 
 
October 15, 1997
 
Dear Denise,
 
      I have been teaching for about a month now. Settling into the routine has been slow, but I think it will come. For the first time in a long time I have been watching more T.V. (mostly soaps!), but I think my listening has improved slightly. Perhaps after a few months of this I will be happy with the results.
      There may be something to the concept of life going in “cycles.” When I was in Madison, WI, life was very slow. When in China the first two years I ran about everywhere, traveling by train or bus, or calling friends. Now the former ways are back. I am content to stay in this campus neighborhood area, talk with my friends, and teach. This is just as well, for Karamay is quite isolated. Imagine a small oil town deep in Texas sagebrush country. The desire to study language goes and comes, so I figure a little here, a little there, is the way to go, as long as it is consistent.
      The last warmth of autumn is going. Someone on our block has been drying tomatoes and peppers in the sun. In the morning when I get up I can hear a neighbor’s pigeons flying about overhead. They have rings on their feet, and they make a noise as the wind passes through them. Street vendors often walk through the otherwise quiet courts between the flats. Some are regular and I can tell who they are by recognizing their intonation, rather than the pronunciation of what they cry out.
      There are some restaurants outside one of the university gates, and I often visit one to eat noodles. Somewhere else in town there is a long, narrow market – part inside, and continuing on for another 100 yards outside. Many people here like to eat lamb kebabs, and at times the smoke fills the street and makes you choke. The kebabs taste good though. Inside, you can find everything you would expect in a food bazaar.
      A few weeks ago I visited a scenic spot up in the mountains, about twelve hours by bus from here. The scenery there is very different from here. Once you get away from the other tourists and concession stands it is quiet and beautiful. Here are some pictures from Tian Shi in the Tian Shan range.
      I have an informal conversation session with one of my classes, so I will stop here.
 
October 31, 1997
 
Dear Peter,
 
Here are some photos from a day trip I took to Tian Shi lake in the Tian Shan (“Heavenly Mountains”) range at the beginning of this month. If you walk away from the “tack” and into the hills, it is really quite beautiful. The air gets colder as the clouds obscure the sunlight, but when they have passed it warms again and you have a pleasant “Indian summer” experience. There are a few other spots of scenic beauty in this region, and I hope to visit them next year if possible.
I hope that you have received the other packet of photos. They are of life and scenes in Karamay.
I will stop here and go to my “hole-in-the-wall” for a bite. They do it right there! This evening I will be with my English colleagues as usual. Last Saturday I went to a local cinema to watch a Hong Kong police movie. The Chinese was too fast, but it was a good “B” movie. Sam Peckinpah would be proud (lots of action)!
 

November 1, 1997
 
Dear Henry,
 
      Recently I reprinted some photos I had taken of Karamay City. It is autumn and I think winter will bring a distinct “grayness” to this area. Now is the time to catch those images on film, while the locals are drying winter vegetables, stockpiling coal in the courtyards, and putting on more and more layers of clothing.
     In some ways, Karamay is different from the other towns of Xin Jiang because there is oil here. Revenue has been used to develop the local infrastructure – I have seen more stone paving on the sidewalks here than in any other part of China. Were there no oil, this would be a perfect setting for a Steinbeck novel in the remote areas of Texas sagebrush country. Even with oil, you could make a good story.
      Everything is walled. Every work unit, school or blocks of apartments has a brick wall around it. I feel as if the number of bricks is uncountable, and so is the volume of concrete. Over the past two and a half years that I have been here, it seems as if construction has not ceased but gone on night and day, and there is no sign of it ending. Walls were also a common feature in West Africa, where I worked, although many were made of mud bricks. In both countries however, the walls allow some peace and quiet from the rest of humanity. I live in a very quiet block of flats. As in Taiyuan (last year’s workplace), I keep my bedroom curtains closed all the time. I learn about life outside by listening. One of the block residents delivers goods between Karamay and another city in his truck. I know when he comes and goes because he parks right outside my ground floor window, and his truck has a clattering diesel engine. Someone else keeps pigeons. When they fly round and round above the courtyard the metal rings on their feet make a peculiar sound. In weeks gone by, some of the residents played ma jiang (a bit like a cross between cards and dominoes). Now, some prepare vegetables for that night’s frying pan. The travelling vendors pass through the courtyards at semi-predictable times, and each one has their own call. In some ways it is more a song than a call, which is helpful, because local dialect makes it hard to understand what they are saying. I know who is coming by their melody or their intonation. Children play. Some block residents bake flat bread in beehive ovens once or twice a week – they burn old scraps of wood or poplar trunks/branches in the oven, then slap the flat dough disks against the brick walls, where they stick and bake. But I like the courtyards when they are quiet. The trees are surrounded by a low wall that allows the grove to be flood irrigated. The trees and irrigation ditches are carefully laid out here.
      Concrete blocks of apartments are very common here, and so are the courtyards. At this time of year, many people are drying Chinese onions, celery and other vegetables outside. One of the “perks” of belonging to a work unit here (as in other parts of China) is the supply of vegetables and other foodstuffs. A week or two ago, a large truck came to our campus with a huge amount of vegetables. Every family was given their share of vegetables. (This is not their only source.) I had no use or desire for 30kg. of Chinese onions or sweet potatoes, so I told the English family here they could have it.
      Although the landscape and city are “gray,” there are patches of color and attractiveness. On most days there is a photo opportunity, but getting it on film is another matter. If no parents are around, the local kids make good pictures since they are not as self-conscious as adults.
      Although Karamay is small, there is always something new to see. During the previous two years I would travel everywhere; but here, where transportation is relatively limited, I am content to view life locally and experience China in microcosm. The staff in local restaurants are friendly and they are willing to cook my food without salt or MSG…. (Of course, when I am with friends, I don’t make a big fuss.)
      On Saturdays I take a walk somewhere – to a park, or to the monument and surrounding desert where oil was first discovered. I like to walk among the common people – the restaurant staff, vendors, street sweepers, refuse and recyclable collectors, and my students. I am common too, but it is harder to be so here, since I have brown hair, blue eyes and a big nose. (Sometimes they call foreigners “big noses.”)
      The university has asked me to teach an English class to local grade school teachers. I like to be with these people, but I have been tired recently. The course will end in two weeks.
      Florida was on the Chinese news last night. There was a story about a manatee which was rescued out of a storm drain. Did it get big coverage on your local T.V.?
      I hope you are well.
 
November 15, 1997
 
Dear Gary,
 
Thank you for your letter! I got it a few days ago, so mail takes 10 to 14 days to get here. Your letter comes at a strategic time – I need to write a long overdue group newsletter, so you will get the “first press” (to use apple cider terms), as I put my thoughts on paper.
I am teaching English at Karamay Television University. This is not a media training center, but a 2-year college, for students from different parts of Xin Jiang. I did not go to the middle school but came here (that is a long story; will phone next year during the summer). Karamay is about seven hours (350km) northwest of Urumqi, in the middle of nowhere, on the western side of the Junggar Desert. It is the perfect site – apart from a wild mini-odyssey in September (while I was awaiting my residence formalities), I have stayed near to my new home. China has shrunk from a huge playground to a municipality, and the microcosm is just as good as the big picture.
Other news...I have a bike (somewhere in the bike shed, but I have not looked for it). I walk or take a taxi (usually ¥5.00). It is starting to get very cold! It can drop to minus 20 or 30 in the depths of winter. I will buy some more winter clothing in Karamay or in Urumqi. Perhaps I will buy one of those felted, ear-flap hats which the farmers use when they come into town on their “flying brick,” 3-wheel tractors. So far, we have had only one flurry of snow; the locals say this area can get quite a lot in places.
This place is begging for a novel. Steinbeck would have a field day here. Much of the sidewalk paving is done in hand-finished stone. When some workers were repairing the road somewhere, the innards of the sidewalk were cast up, along with the paving stones, and I saw they were painted with tar on the bottoms. Karamay is an oil town. Large numbers of street sweepers are constantly on the stones, the bicycle paths or the roadsides, trying to catch poplar leaves and litter refusing to be caught, and running around in windy circles like truant schoolkids on a beach day. With the next day, the next wind, the scene begins again. Now that winter has truly arrived, many sweet-potato vendors have sprung up on street corners, bolted as it were to their oil-drum ovens while they are afire, and leaving them frozen, chained and abandoned at night. The stone-lined irrigation channels are now dry, empty and frozen. It is at times like this that I say, only the dead live in Karamay. They walk on the stones, buffeted by the wind….
I have never heard or imagined wind like the wind here. I say “heard,” because as in Taiyuan, I learn so much by just listening from within the curtained off bedroom. Only fools go out into the outside world when the winter winds blow, which somehow move your curtains even though there is double glazing, and which certainly throw dust, leaves and small debris about in the courtyards and city streets. Laden with dust that could make you sick, it is a hostile wind. Yet, on the morning after, the streets were mostly clean, much of the city’s dust had been driven into the desert, and such as remained could be swept up.
When the sun comes out, even though it is cold, the city lightens up. The people are kind and gracious. I am thinking of the street vendor with the copper dragon kettle you introduced me to last year. People like her have become my friends. Even though I do not talk too much with them I like to be with them. They are beautiful like rough hewn stones: if only I stopped to see that they have hearts, have personalities as warm as any fireside chair, and have a life. There are several of them: there are the bakers, who never tire of mirth and humor, as they slap wet dough onto the sides of their brick beehive oven or punch the rising dough into shape for the next batch. The street vendors, hoping you will come to their stall, with their faces, hair, clothes and dreams burned and worn by wind and hardship. The line of shoe shiners outside the covered market on a cold day, freezing their fingers – for two yuan a shot. The waitresses at the hole-in-the-wall near campus, harried by customers and rush hour pressures, taking a rest near the coal stove to collect their thoughts or to throw a few more knits into the sleeve that will become their husband’s winter sweater. The milk seller who comes by around 6:30 in the morning, when dim shadows are becoming clearer shapes. I like to listen to the melodies these roving salesmen have. And, of course, the students.
Compared to Taiyuan the air is cleaner, if colder. During the day there are many people walking around the commercial areas. At night, the hand-finished stones cover the pavements alone. I like it in Karamay, but the chances of becoming two are very small here. Please understand, for all my somber tone I like it here. I belong here. In some ways I have found my home away from home. Next year may involve a change to avoid teacher’s burnout, but if I can stay, then at least part of me will be happy.
 
November 24, 1997
 
Dear Sasha,
 
      I am glad you wrote to me. However, the letter sat in the office before someone said, “Stephen, there is a letter for you. It has been here for four days.” So you can see I am too lazy and need to ask after the letters they may have!
      You know, Sasha, this is at once a place of exile and a place of rest. Exile, because it is very remote and quiet. Rest, because this year is unlike the years in Taiyuan and Tianjin. During those years life was very active, my weekends went as far as a train could travel overnight, and my relationship to this great country and her people was best described as a love affair (a good one) that tried to taste ten years of life in a mere two years. Now, the country has shrunk to the size of a small city named Karamay, a rectangle one km. by two km. I am very tired. Recently, I have been thinking of either going home next year, or becoming a student and studying Chinese for a year. Either way, I will stop teaching for a while. I need to. Do you remember our class lesson on “burnout”? This is one cause. The other has to do with the question, “Why am I here, and why should I stay here”? Even though there is cold, discouragement, grayness, it is very hard to go away, for I am still in love with this place. You may find it strange, but a great deal of what I like in life I find here. Of course, like many real love affairs, there are its ups and downs, its excitements and disappointments, and always the dreams of what might be…. Dreams that are too inflated and burst, or that quietly surprise and delight you when they are realized without any effort on your part.
      Everyone here has a story to tell. Everything here is a picture painted – some easy to understand, and some waiting to be. However, I will begin with the wind. At first, I could not decide if the winter winds are good or bad. Sometimes a strong wind strikes Taiyuan and covers everything with a fine dust from Shaanxi. Here the wind is ferocious. It comes out of the west, from Kazakhstan. Schools are closed, and everyone leaves the streets and goes indoors. I do not know if it is bad, because the air is filled with dust and filth that will make your lungs infected. The trees are shaken, as if by hundreds of angry, screaming children. Shards of broken glass are blown along the ground (it seems), as if they were light cardboard boxes and not pieces of glass. I was afraid the wind would rip open my windows and try to get into my room: this afternoon I found some light rope and tied my windows closed in my bedroom. Imagine what it must be like for those farmers who live alone with their families in the hill country; with no electricity, but oil lamps flickering in the uneasy air, surrounded by children and sheep alike, while outside the wind tries to break down the door, rip off the roof, and scatter everything over hundreds of miles. I do not know if the wind is good, because the day after the windstorm the streets are scoured clean in most places (although in a few spots there are small piles of dust and leaves thrown down by the wind). In this respect, Karamay is like a fortress at war with the wind.
      The temperature falls day by day. How far will it go? Some people say as far as -30ºC or -40ºC. I want to throw a glass full of water into the air and see if it comes down as ice. Whereas before people sold ice cream on the streets, many now eat warm sweet potatoes. I wanted to be different, so one lunchtime ate cold noodles (liang pi zi).
      Today I discovered a new small restaurant. I went out for lunch with two friends and they chose a small place that serves Wei wu er food. From the outside it did not look like a restaurant, but it was clean and tidy inside – almost like someone’s home and not a restaurant. But then, home food is the best. They serve lamb bone and vegetable soup, which tastes very good. However, I usually eat tomato and soup noodles (xi hong shi mian) at another restaurant, just like last year in Taiyuan. In one restaurant there is a small coal stove attached to a large sheet metal box and then the chimney. This box takes the heat out of the smoke. On cold afternoons those few customers who come sit around the heater box in their long coats, drink tea and wait for their food. One of the waitresses has steel plates or nails on her shoe heels, so I know when she is about to come out from the kitchen with someone’s dinner. Usually, on a given afternoon, it is quiet, and it is even more withdrawn at night. The cold has reduced the city to a state of siege.
      In the busier commercial areas, department stores and the underground market there is warmth and action. People buy and sell, in some places the music is loud, but it is warm. Outside the covered market, shoe shiners sit in a line like huddled plovers in a frenzy of herring gulls, waiting their turn for a bite. Some people with small megaphones call out their wares from the top of trucks or in front of their handcart to all who would listen. Others knit or read quietly, waiting for you to disturb them before they get up and serve you. At the other end of the covered market the customers spill out onto the open street and disappear into new crowds.
      It is a pity, Sasha, but I am afraid to look into the faces of these people, to get to know them more deeply. They are some of the best people I meet, and they live life at a depth I do not know. Whereas I might observe life and sometimes write about what I see, life is written on their hands and faces, and woven into their hair. If I could, one year I would like to teach English in the country – but, for now, this is a dream.
      I hope you and your classmates are well. My best wishes to all of you!
 
 
December 12, 1997
 

Cold Noodles
 
      You would think that eating cold noodles in winter was strange. The streets are transformed into white and icy graveyards, the wind burns your skin and people walk in short steps to avoid slipping and falling down. Open air vendors lay their wares on a small plastic sheet and sit next to a small can filled with glowing charcoal. One person held her booted foot over the homemade brazier, reminding me of the great wall painting in the Hermitage: there, a desperate Frenchman thrust his boot into the fire while the Cossacks decimated his comrades. The nights are quiet under the cold fires of distant stars, but so too are some streets by day – except when it is time for lunch. School children and workers go home for an hour or two and the streets are briefly active.
      Outside the walls of one school lies what appears to be a patch of wasteland – the no man’s land between one company’s frontier and the next. It is reminiscent of the wasteland behind many supermarkets, with truck trailers that once saw the nation now holding crates, surplus stock and teenage beer parties. A glassed-in vendor’s cart waits under sawdust snow for next summer. The end of the courtyard ends in a high brick wall. A structure like a wheelless truck trailer lies to the left, and I go in.
      After a few visits the manager greets me like a regular and tells me to sit down. She knows I don’t like too much salt or any MSG and quickly makes the cold noodle dish. Liáng Pizi, as they are called, are very easy to make – put a small plastic bag over a bowl to act as a liner, add a wheat product which looks like squares of firm, though wet toast, spoon on some pickled root vegetables and spices to taste, them pour on some hot broth. Cold noodles are easy to eat. After use, the bag is thrown out, the bowl is rinsed, lined, stacked, and ready for use again. The only other dish served here is wonton soup. Each day she makes two washing tubs full of noodles garnished with wet toast squares and each day they are whittled away by the slow stream of customers. This is definitely a word-of-mouth joint. The crudely painted sign and wasteland setting suggest you are going to give away your car for fifty dollars at some scrapyard, rather than eat the best liáng pizi in town.
      At times the sawn-off train carriage – barely fifteen or twenty feet long – is quiet, save for the restless convection in the broth pot and the manager’s six-year old son who will talk to anyone who will listen to him. Her husband huddles over the potless electric ring burner and does not move. Like the Frenchman, nobody moves when they are chained to a heat source. The relative stillness is broken by new customers coming in. Some have a rapport with the manager, who has filed away their individual taste preferences in her mental Rolodex, and they come in and sit down. Others give their order, and some can be quite imperious about it. “Two liáng pizi, add vinegar, but no red pepper. Quickly.”
      Some customers do not talk, except in short slips – perhaps they are not certain how much Chinese I know? Then again, it is not the kind of place where people go to engage in hearty conversation, but to eat cold, spicy noodles in peace and quiet. Yet even here there are surprises. One day I went in as usual and promptly lost the ability to see beyond my frosted glasses. After placing my order and going in I saw one of my students and her boyfriend at the other end. It was a lesson for me. The one I had assumed was apathetic, perhaps a little surly in class, and isloted was in good company and partaking in life. Even the former railway carriage, which had seen the nation and now sheltered noodle eaters, seemed to become a little warmer. There was love, even in the wasteland.
 
December 19, 1997
 
Dear Priscilla,
 
      I am enclosing a short piece I wrote about liáng pizi. Do you like liáng pizi? I like them, but after having them for lunch for almost two weeks I am tired and want to try something new. However, Xi hóng shi miàn are still a favorite. The common people I meet here are very interesting. Even though this place is far from the big city, I think it is better; it is quieter and cleaner.
      This evening as I write this letter it is unusually quiet. During the day many people come by to sell things such as fresh milk, to change gas bottles, or to collect old cardboard, tin cans and bottles. Children play in the courtyard, and occasionally I can hear the next door neighbor’s cat crying outside the door, wanting to be let in. Now there is no sound except the faint humming from the fluorescent light, and some distant conversation in the apartment above. Yesterday we had another snowfall – about four or five centimeters – and much has been muffled by the white powdery snow. This afternoon many people were out on the street, cleaning away the snow and ice which covered the road in front of their work unit. Some used shovels to bang away at the ice which had formed on the roads. For a while, the fresh fallen snow makes everything quiet and beautiful.
      It is now a day or two later, and as I write this another peddler looking for old cardboard is walking by outside my window, advertising his service. He sings his message as he walks along. Some peddlers half call, half sing their message, pulling their never–full handcart into thousands of courtyards and an eternity of avenues. None of them speaks in standard Chinese, so I cannot understand them; instead, I recognize them by their song. They add color to the grey, ashen white landscape. One of the neighbors has released his pigeons and they are flying overhead in circles. The wind passing through their foot-rings makes a whistling sound.
 
December, 1997
 
Summary Letter
 
      Karamay is a small city on the western edge of the Junggar Basin desert, in northern Xin Jiang. Over to the west lies Central Asia, somewhere above us is Siberia, and the capital, Beijing, with its Baskin-Robbins ice cream outlet, is three or four days journey by train to the east. In terms of closer surroundings, there is an escarpment to the west, and the fringes of the Junggar Desert to the east. The city, a 1km by 2km rectangle of land covered in concrete box-buildings, is surrounded by an emptiness so tangible that one thinks of Beau G. looking out over the sand dunes. Only, there are no sand dunes here, but land a little bit like Texas sagebrush country. Like its Texas counterparts, Karamay is an oil town. This has helped in the development of its roads, sidewalks and buildings. It is here that the comedy of life à la chinois is played out in microcosm. Whereas during the past two years the stage was anywhere within an overnight train journey’s radius, or even the whole country, now the boards are the city limits, even the local neighborhood.
      This year there are no structured teams, as before, but I get on well with the English family that lives and works here. Living near them is like revisiting childhood, since I grew up in England for part of my childhood. The university is not a media-training center but a two-year institution, with some of its curriculum piped in by television. The students average twenty years old, come from various parts of the region, and are English majors. I think many will become English teachers at their hometown middle schools after they graduate. I have been teaching them oral conversation and listening. (There are other majors offered at the university, but I have not taught those classes.) For six weeks, one morning a week, I taught an extension course to about twenty-five English teachers or professionals from the Karamay school system/local oil companies. For now that is over, but should resume next year. The Classrooms are warm, and the listening lab works well.
      Winter has arrived, and still the temperature falls like a protracted bear market. It can reach -30ºC or -40ºC in Xin Jiang. About a month ago an enormous truck delivered leek-like onions, potatoes and sweet potatoes to the staff and their families on campus. This scene was repeated all over town. For days the onions, and various green leaf winter vegetables, were spread out to dry in the open air. Empty courtyards filled up with coal. Doorways and windows were barricaded with hanging quilt-like flaps and plastic sheeting. Ice cream sellers fled the streets and took shelter in small mom-and-pop stores, or closed down altogether. In their wake came the hot sweet potato vendors by day and the lamb shish kebab sellers by day and night. People ballooned out overnight with layers of thick clothing. Every so often the winter gales come out of the west and drive everyone indoors. The cold and the wind are strong but they do not stop people from living their daily life. Children play in the courtyards, neighbors bake Uighur nan bread in wood-fired beehive ovens, and roving peddlers pulling handcarts call out their wares or services. As in Taiyuan last year, it is the people one meets in everyday life who make this town, who give it character.
 
December 28, 1997
 
Huo Guo
 
      The huo guo restaurant was a surprise. After four months of eating noodles, soups and other simple dishes in small hole-in-the-wall restaurants I had implicitly assumed all restaurants were small and unpretentious. We arrived in two taxis on a nose-freezing evening and went upstairs to the banquet hall. The first impression, once I had taken off my ice-tinted glasses – was of a long buffet table loaded with many trays of uncooked food. Perhaps the table was twenty feet long, and surrounding it were sampling diners, smiling but harried servers, and wild children. The round dining tables, each holding about ten people, were arranged around the edge of the large rectangular banquet hall.
      Many huo guo (fire pot) restaurants have a large pot on the middle of the table, heated by a gas burner and filled with soup broth. Some pots are divided with a curved steel plate, so the pot looks like the “ying and yang” symbol; one half has a salty broth and the other has an explosively spicy soup. The diners or the server put what they want into the broth, let it boil, then eat it. Here, each person had their own mini-pot. The burner – a sawn-off Sprite can filled with raw alcohol – was placed under the pot and lit. Different servers, with kettles of broth or teapots of alcohol, patrolled the banquet hall to fill up as necessary. We got up from the table to choose our food.
      Huo guo has been popular for many years, but perhaps it has taken on a new dimension in recent, increasingly affluent years. In addition to the lamb, beef, tofu, vegetables and black “wood ear” mushrooms, there was fish, crab and shrimp from the distant coast. Of course, there were the other items which make this dish famous or repulsive, depending on your stomach. There were fish parts (some with head on), beef, sheep and cow stomach, chicken gizzards, coagulated blood looking like slabs of chocolate jello, and chicken feet. Strips of a tofu or tofu-like product lay in wait for anyone’s chopsticks. It looked like cream colored caulking squeezed through a fancy cake-icing nozzle, left on some autumn window sill. A bowl of dip, a glass of hot Tang, and back to the mini cauldron. Items such as meat and suspicious looking dishes should get the most boiling, while the vegetables and tofu get a quick dip. I put everything in at once, so the tofu fell apart.
      After the second dish and third glass of Tang I started to feel tired; perhaps it was also the fumes from the garrison of firepots. Across the table my friend’s face was a little redder from the exertion. I told her and the others about an earlier visit to another huo guo restaurant….
It was January and I was in Shenzhen, that wild boomtown across the bay from Hong Kong. If the pulse and power of life could be measured on a machine, Shenzhen would score very high. I went to a huo guo restaurant. Half of it was indoors, and the other half trespassed onto the city sidewalk. Business was booming and countless edibles made their way into the dozen or so cauldrons at work that night. My table lay just inside the premises, so I could see what was going on inside the restaurant as well as across the street.
      I was eating when the local constabulary came, with loudspeakers, hard helmets, sticks and crowbars. Any tables caught out on the street were turned over, the chinaware was smashed, plastic stools were shattered, and the propane bottles were taken away. The stronger tables were destroyed with the crowbars. I was afraid but continued eating. The restaurant servers stood at the edge of their restaurant like shore birds on a stormy beach, darting out when possible to snatch a surviving plate or cup. After the constables had left, the restaurant staff came out to clean up the mess. Other small businesses which had trespassed onto the sidewalk and been caught came out to sweep away their losses. In the space of about fifteen or twenty minutes the sidewalk outside the restaurant was swept, soaped, hosed down, and set with new tables and customers. Total losses: about one or two nights’ business. The feeding frenzy continued….
      I looked out over the banquet hall, onto a world quite different from that on the streets below with its vendors, shoe shiners and ice breakers. Each table was a cluster of activity, as toasts flowed, and as conversations, laughter and merriment mingled. A man held his glass with both hands while the woman with him filled it up again. The servers brought up more ammunition and laid it on the long table- trays of meat or crab parts, glasses of hot Tang, bottles of beer. Rings and make up flashed, flushed faces glowed from the heat of Sprite cans, neckties and alcohol. Double-sized boys prowled the long table alone, holding tongs and plates. The soup pots never emptied out but were filled and stoked by the watchful servers. There seemed to be no incentive to stop the dance, a replay of an earlier dance where the only things missing were dormice and togas. Perhaps it was the prelude to another, much longer dance….
 
January 6, 1998
 
Dear Henrietta,
 
      Thank you for your card. I am very glad you wrote to me. In a week or so I will leave this university for the winter holiday. Perhaps I will return here around the 19th February for the second term. I like living in Karamay but I need to leave for a while to be alone and to travel. I almost never tire of looking out the window of a bus or a train at the passing countryside of China. There is always something interesting to see, even if it is familiar. After staying in one region for these past four months, I want to move on, and on, and on, almost like a dream that never stops – until it is time to continue the year’s teaching.
      When I saw you last time it had snowed – a thick, wet snow easily formed into ice. Here, the snow is very dry. You cannot make snowballs to play with: it falls like dust or powder on the land. Not long after a snowfall however, hundreds of feet and car tires had packed it down into a slippery white earthskin. The street sweepers bang away at it with shovels; some eat it away with salt. Children use pieces of bamboo as sled runners or ice skates – they stand on one or two slivers of bamboo and take hold of a rope which is pulled by a friend. Most people walk carefully on the icy streets, in pursuit of business.
      I joined them to walk to the small restaurant where I eat lunch. It would seem strange to leave the university and its surrounding restaurants and walk for ten or fifteen minutes to buy a bowl of noodles, but the noodles are good and an excuse to get some exercise. In this cold winter, it is all too easy to stay indoors every day, every night and become lazy. Lazy and depressed.
      Near the noodle restaurant is a covered market. The upper level sells shoes and clothing, while the lower level forms a long tunnel of food and vendors. There are more types of food and spices than one can count – sliced lamb for huo guo, dried mushrooms, bean flour noodles, fruit, red peppers, a stripped dog with its mouth frozen into an unchanging grin by the subzero temperature, and ashen gray mounds of dried persimmons. I walked between the lines of vendors, looking indirectly at the food; if I payed too much attention to the tables, perhaps the owner would ask me to buy something. At the end of the line, after the spices, lies the dried fruit section of the covered market.
     I like to eat dries figs. Do you like figs? The figs here come from the southern part of Xin Jiang. They are hard and light brown, with shriveled, wrinkly skins. The bottom of the fig is cut with a knife, by the farmer perhaps, to allow it to dry in the summer air: now, these cuts look like giant smiles. A small bag of 100 to 120 figs goes for fourteen yuan (almost $2.00). I now buy my figs from the same old man and like to do business with him, although it wasn’t that way at first. Surrounded by boxes and piles of dried fruit, keeping still to keep warm, he didn’t look very friendly. If I remember right, he didn’t shave, so his face was garnished with gray stubble. Like his competitors, he waits for people to come to examine his walls of fruit and nuts, although he is typically quieter. If the others sense you are looking for something to buy, they will try and persuade you, but this man, he often waited. By the third visit to his stall we had a relationship; now when I appear out of the faceless crowd he smiles. I pay my fourteen yuan and drift back into the river of customers.
      I have made friends with a number of the street vendors I meet while walking to and from the noodle restaurant or the post office. We do not talk about much – just a few words about my common life here or whatever. Each relationship is fragmentary and would never exist were I not walking somewhere or doing some shopping; but when I put these fragments together I find a bigger picture of life here. It is however a shallow picture, for I have not developed a deep relationship with anybody outside the university.
      In a few months this land of snow and packed ice will again become the fruit basket of grapes and melons. On the university campus I see a few birds hopping about on the snow, sorting through castaway sunflower seeds. Do these birds stay in Karamay throughout the winter, or are they the first of the new arrivals from the south, knowing that spring is coming? At this time of the year, little things like this are very meaningful to me. Sometimes my heart relates more with those birds than with a thousand people. Yet I need people too. That is why I keep in contact with friends. I am glad you wrote that card. I look forward to your next card or letter.
      What are you doing these days? What is your work? Do you have any chances to see the beautiful countryside? Perhaps I will never have the chance, but one year I would like to live and work in a quiet, small town in the countryside of Guizhou or Hunan – to teach English. I will stop here. I hope you are well.
 
 
 
January 8, 1998
 
Dear Paul,
 
     Thank you for your card and news of life in Taiyuan. If your classmate hasn’t already told you, I hope to visit Taiyuan sometime after the Spring Festival holiday. I do not know what time exactly I will be in town, but I will call you several days before I come.
      It is now exam week at this school. I hope to leave Karamay next week or soon after. The weeks of teaching are over for a while. I like the students here, but it is time for a rest. We all need a rest, and everyone wants to go home.
      Although Karamay is a small city, there is a lot to describe about living here. I will tell you about some of this if we meet in Taiyuan. However, the daily life of many people is the same here as in many Chinese cities, so there is much which is familiar. Of course there are differences – there are more Wei wu er zu (Uighur) here, it is colder, and Karamay is well known for oil, not coal. It is very isolated here: I like the isolation sometimes but not always, so I have been talking to friends. Karamay is like China in miniature, although its isolation and oil wealth give it a unique flavor. Wulumuqi is about five or seven hours away by bus. You can buy most of the things you need there, but I prefer the quietness of Karamay. However, Wulumuqi has a Wei wu er zu market where you can buy all kinds of interesting food, spices and carpets: sometimes I like to walk through the market, eat some yáng roù chuàr or zhua fàn and watch everything. It is like a “living film.” The carpets are beautiful to look at. Back in Karamay I sometimes visit the local cinema to watch films. Although my Chinese is better, I still cannot understand much when I watch a film. However, my listening comprehension has improved from watching the television. I like the film channel.
      Do you like to eat liáng pizi (cold noodles)? About one or two months ago, two or three students introduced me to cold noodles, just as you and your classmates introduced me to ban lan zi. Since then, I have eaten liáng pizi many times. One day I went into a very small cold noodle restaurant. There was only room for one small table, some space for the owner to prepare dishes, and two or three customers to stand. It was very cramped, but the noodles were good. Many people like to take their noodles in a small plastic bag back home, but I prefer to sit down.
 
 
January 9, 1998
 
Dear Olivia,
 
      Thank you for your letter. I was glad to get it. By the time you receive this letter I will have left Karamay for the winter holiday.
      You are right about the snow in this place – it is much cleaner than in other cities in Xin Jiang. I think the main reason for this is the wind. Karamay is in the middle of nowhere – mountains are to the west, and the Junggar Desert lies to the east. Any smoke pollution is quickly blown away. Of course, after a few days the snow on the roads gets dirty, but after a fresh snowfall everything is white and quiet. It is a light, dry snow. When it falls it is easy to sweep away, but if many people walk on it, or cars pack it down, the snow is hard to remove. The street sweepers are always busy throughout the year, against snow and ice in winter, and leaves and dust in summer. I have heard that in Altai, the snow is very deep and the weather cold. That sounds good!
      You asked me if I was used to living in Karamay. Normally, I would have said yes, but now I wonder. Yes, I like it here: the city is quiet, the people are friendly enough, the students are interesting to work with, and the other foreigners at Diàn Dà are fun to be with, but.... In some ways I am less used to life in China than I was before. I like to eat Chinese food (especially Xi hóng shi miàn), but I ask the server at the restaurant to make it with no salt or wei jing. I have met many new people, but almost all the relationships are not deep: instead, I spend a lot of time alone in my apartment writing letters, as well as some time planning lessons or other, small tings. I live here more as an observer of life, and not as a liver of life. I am too withdrawn, although I like it here and want to be here for this year. This year I have written many letters, telephoned many friends, and watched the television a lot. (However, watching T.V. has been good for my Chinese studies.) What this means is that I have adapted life here to make it easier for me, rather than change myself to fit in with life.
      Karamay can be a very lonely place, but I like it here. Since there is desert all around us it is very isolated, but it is also an interesting place to be. Oil has made this town rich, and made it into a “miniature China.” It is not a big place – perhaps 1km. by 2km. – but there is so much to learn about culture and life by walking down the same street day after day, as I buy food, paper, or visit the post office. I do not look at the sky much but down at the ground, yet even the ground tells a story. The roadsides piled with snow, people walking from work or to school, children playing behind their homes, my neighbors baking nán bread – all tell a story about common, daily life. A few months ago people were drying onions and green vegetables outdoors in preparation for winter. Now winter has come and stayed, and people live as if it would never go away, as if winter were a permanent visitor. The only sign of spring has been a small group of sparrow-sized birds jumping from branch to branch in the hedgerows and searching for something to eat among the discarded sunflower seed shells left by passing students. When the air warms and the water glows again, some of this will change.
      I do not know if I will be here next year. Part of me wonders if I should go back home for awhile, at least to rest. Sometimes I think this is a suitable place to be, and I should stay longer. I also think about teaching English in another part of China – perhaps in the huáng tu gao yuán area of Shaanxi, or elsewhere, perhaps Hunan. Sometimes I think too much, but dream too little. Of this I am sure – I am glad I came to Karamay for this year.
      I hope you will be able to make new friends at your school, certainly if you plan to live there for some years. Do you get on well with any of the other teachers at your school? What are your students like? Are they interested in their studies? Would you like to receive some English listening materials, so you can practice your listening skills?
 
January 11, 1998
 
Dear Tim and Mary,
 
      When you asked me to send some letter travelogues to you it reminded me of the trip through Ningxia, a little over a year ago. I am glad you asked this, for now I have a framework to write within, as I go over this great land again. I also plan to bring my small autofocus camera and take some of the pictures I missed earlier. It is a great comfort to me to know that you are both out there – wherever “out there” may be – at all times. This semester is virtually over: meals with the English family have been good, even if I keep a low profile, and the many hours alone have had a payoff in terms of writing letters and pieces. It is good the holidays are coming soon – there is only so much one can write about this concrete chessboard.
      I went out for a walk around one of the quieter sections of town as darkness was falling and streetlights were coming on. Last week’s snow has been swept away and much of the ice banged off the road with brooms and shovels, but in many places the surface is still slippery, even greasy. The road flanking the university has a number of small restaurants and mom-and-pop stores. Outside one a
hanging loudspeaker insulted an otherwise quiet neighborhood with pop music. Five minutes later I turned off one street onto an even wider cross-avenue. The faintest of crystally snow was falling. This cross-avenue has not been fully developed. The irrigation ditches have been built and covered with concrete slabs, but the tree holes along their route have not been filled and planted. As always, you must watch the ground wherever you walk.
      I was walking nowhere – just anywhere to clear my mind and get out of the room for a while. It works. The wholesale fruit and vegetable market was quiet and virtually abandoned. Uighur music from some fourth floor window flowed over the walls and down the side street. A hundred years later the hush of winter evening returned. Somewhere ahead the concrete ended and the desert began.
      Spring Festival is in the air and once again, boys are taking to the streets in pairs or small groups to throw strike-and-toss bangers on the pavement. Smoke and steam rise from a Uighur bread oven. It is a new neighborhood and I want to check it out. Drawn by a group of hanging lights, I walk through a small vegetable market on the street, watching the vendors chop up turnips with cleavers and wearing Charles Dickens fingerless gloves. I note a small dumpling restaurant, for a possible future visit. The market is a place of life and action, even if the people are anonymous. A hundred feet and two turns in the street later there is nothing but the faintest of snow falling on gray buildings and the ashen white ground, and all is peaceful again.
      The university students have left and gone home for the most part. As I began to write this I could hear children playing outside in the courtyard. A few bursts of laughter from somewhere outside, the neighbor’s cat crying outside wanting to be let in, the hum of the fluorescent light, and silence. Tomorrow I will prepare for leaving, Tuesday give an oral exam with the English teachers, and on Wednesday leave. Spring travel fever is rampant, and this time I hope to have minimal social stops.
      Outside, the faintest of snow powders the city and the hand hewn stone pavements.
 
January 16, 1998
 
Dear Tim and Mary,
 
     As I write this I am sitting in an airline ticketing office, waiting for a bus to the Urumqi airport. The past few days, which at first appeared to promise nothing noteworthy, have had some vivid images.
      At the Karamay bus station among the passengers and boarding dock workers was a man who looked very much like I imagine St. Peter did in the early days, with bushy but not full beard, and shock of black hair (the hair made me think of one of the W.B. “Toon Town” characters, after touching the wrong wires). The bus left but the image of a face in the come-and-go crowd did not. I “zoned out” most of the journey.... At the lunch stop – a Hui establishment – I watched the noodles being made. The fire was hot, the chef made ten-plate batches of sauce using his ladle to dash in oil, and the steamy smoke turned the kitchen into a Turkish bath. At times all I could see was the outline of the chef or one of his helpers in the steam.... It was pleasant to be back on the train again after four months in Karamay and occasional bus travel, and nice to be at a 20 yuan per night room (about $2.50. Wouldn’t it be wild if Day’s Inn had similar deals?!)....
      I have a week or so to do things before flying to Guilin, in the south of China. I went to Turpan to have a look for a few days. Turpan is noted for its low elevation, hordes of grapes, the Emin Minaret, Uighur culture, Buddhist caves, and other sights. Parts of the city have permanent grape trellises and arbors put up over the streets and sidewalks, and I imagine the place would look beautiful and well dressed in summer. In midwinter however, the place was worn out, uninspiring, and nowhere I wanted to be when in low spirits. After seeing the Emin Minaret (a brick structure reminiscent of an adobe and beam one in Niger I had seen pictures of), I left Turpan and returned to Urumqi.
      That bus journey was the coldest one yet. Outside, the night air may have been between -20ºand -35ºC. I only had my light shoes on, for the South (serves me right!), and began to freeze. After a time, I switched seats and put my feet near the exhaust pipe running between the seats. One wonders about carbon monoxide seepage, but it was cold.
      I had been debating for many days about whether or not to visit Ili (west of Urumqi, in the hill country). The flight out was at night, so I couldn’t see any pretty Tian Shan scenery, but the next day I went walkabout. The downtown area was the usual concrete forest. The Uighur open-air market was thronged with people, a river of black heads. As with many markets and bazaars, there is always something happening. One food which looked interesting was some kind of fruit – perhaps figs – stored in 20-gallon containers of sweet syrup and ladled out to customers. Here, as anywhere in China, salesmen of a feather definitely flock together: this is fine for the customer, but this must make competition very hard for the merchants.
     During that day I wandered away from the concrete zone and into the Uighur residential area. Fifty years of time fell away. The streets became quieter, with horse drawn mini wagons pulling light freight or serving as taxis, and boys spinning solid steel tops on the packed snow and using small whips to keep them spinning. An irrigation ditch carried dishwater grey water in front of the houses. A freshly killed, still steaming sheep was carried off a wagon and into a meat shop. The snow, blue trim and relative quiet made this neighborhood of one-storey houses instantly attractive, and any motor vehicles intrusive.
February 1st – two weeks and many miles later. I am in Qingdao, home of Tsingdao Beer (“the beer that made Shandong famous”?). I have been following a predetermined route through China, but have nonetheless been drifting; in one bus station, out another, sat next to countless fellow passengers, and seen the inside of too many train station restrooms. I drift in and out of the two pools of Chinese life – the new, up-and-coming, aspiring, and increasingly cosmopolitan, and those who continue as before or who have been left behind. Last night I wanted a dose of American culture, so I watched Batman and Robin, dubbed. Many people here are well dressed – of course, those who can pay the ¥10.00 ($1.20) fee would be better off and well dressed. My travel clothes and tent-like brown canvas coat may be alright in parts of Xin Jiang, but in the marble lined cinema waiting hall they made me laughable. In some, a few aspects, the unfolding society is beginning to catch on to some of the elixir of Western life. Qingdao, as in many other Chinese cities, is sprouting glass-skinned skyscrapers.
      And what about the other side? My imaginary sweetheart has always been a common girl – a hotel worker on the second floor service desk, a railway conductor, a daughter of peasants, a middle school teacher in some forever anonymous country town, a simple, unadorned, and kind person. It is their society that I have seen the most of. This is the China I love, and which I like to be in and sometimes write about. I have often wondered what form to use when writing about this place, but for now letters will do. There is always something to note about the common people. Even as I write this (Feb. 4th, Shaanxi), a nine-year old boy has given up pushing his friend around on a luggage dolly to watch me write…
      I don’t want to write about each leg of the journey – in some ways it has been a little crazy, trying to cover as much ground as possible before I am due back in Karamay, as if this were the very last chance to travel. However, I have seen China unravel before my eyes. One pleasant new discovery is the new tracts of countryside which can be seen from the long-distance busses, particularly in areas where the trains cannot go.
      South of Xi’an lies the Qing Ling range. It looked like an interesting place, so I took the train from Wuhan, and got off at Ankang. The cold noodles are very good in Ankang: here, they mix in some bean sprouts, then dash on various spices. (I must admit, this trip has seen me sampling nibbles from street cart vendors everywhere – much better than the fancy stuff in the big restaurants!) I bought a ticket for the first bus up to Xi’an, naively thinking it would be a simple run; as it was, it took about fifteen hours, arriving in Xi’an at four in the morning. Oh well, no hotel bill for that night!
      The Loess plateau to the north of Xi’an and the Qing Ling range to the south make road building (and travel) a challenge. The road winds its way out of one valley and into the next along contour lines. Whitewashed trees on each side of the road serve as guides and barriers. The drivers frequently overtake other, slow vehicles in the worst of places – before a blind corner or the crest of a hill. (In some ways, Chinese traffic behaves like water molecules – that wouldn’t go down well on the Rte. 1/I-93 mixing point in Charleston!) Sitting some ways back inside the bus, I felt like Calvin and Hobbes, sitting on bucket seats inside a dragonfly’s brain, and looking out through the huge French window eyes as the crazy insect skimmed among the reeds at water level. Whoever designed the bus or redid the bench seats did so with small people in mind – two of us had broad shoulders, so the person on the aisle seat effectively had half a place. We had two babies on board that night, wrapped up in blankets to the point of being bulletproof. One of them cried a lot.
      In the bench seat in front of us were two young women. I think they were workers or maybe farmers, because their hands were weathered far more than age alone would accomplish. One of them had her hair cut fairly short, straightened (by a perm?), and dyed brown. They were fairly quiet. We continued into the early evening. As light was beginning to fade, someone had the idea of starting up a card game. Seats were swapped, a soft knapsack became the card table, and the game was on. The young woman with the brown hair suddenly became a new person, leading the game, full of energy and jokes, and impossible to cork up, now that she was in her element.
      Night came, and with it the cold. The windows on this bus tended to rattle open again and again, letting in the wind. We traversed the snow line a few times, had some problem with the engine, sat for an hour or so in the cold while the driver and his helper tinkered away, and were glad to leave the Qing Ling and reach Xi’an. It was an “all nighter.” However, I would like to see the Qing Ling again by day – the scenery looks very promising. It would also be a good place to teach in for a year or two.
      The loess plateau of Shaanxi is another interesting area. The loess (as they call it, “yellow earth”) can be 300 feet or more thick in places. Many of the “cave houses” are built into the sides of the hills and have large, half-circle windows at the front. It is cold in winter, and life is difficult there, but there is something magnetic and attractive about this area. Perhaps I will write more about this part of the journey in another letter.
      I hope you are well. I look forward to seeing you, and summer, is not that far away.
 
February 19, 1998
 
Dear Hugh and Daisy,
 
      Thank you for your letter of January 14. About that time I was on the road, and a few days ago I returned to Karamay. In a few days I will begin the second semester.
      When I arrived in H.K., I decided to visit Macao, because I hadn’t been there. I took the hydrofoil over, with the sweat of Hong Kong barely formed on my back, spent the night in some rundown hotel, and went walkabout the next day.
      Have you been to Macao? It was a shot of pure cultural bliss to one jaded by concrete mausoleums and aesthetics turned upside down. I devoured everything Portuguese I could look at, walked through parks, up and around some of the forts/lighthouses, followed crescent-shaped avenues under voluptuous vegetation. Looking at the windows of some of the old, old houses I couldn’t restrain myself from dreaming….
      Señorita Doñata Favorita de los Casos Medhera stared out over the immaculate courtyard, over the short span of water to the green mountains beyond. Her uncle had taken her from Lisboa to escape turmoil and cholera, and to seek his fortune, and she had had no choice but to accompany him. He was well connected and had given Favorita the best rooms and a setting as close to Lisboa and Torres Vedras as he could, but she was inconsolable. Little did her uncle know that, far from rescuing her, he had taken her from the only one she ever loved, who still wandered the streets of Lisboa seeking audience with anyone who might know where she had gone….
      On well…. Back to the 20th Century. Even in the morning, Macao is sultry, and the sweat does not evaporate away easily. On the cobblestoned pathways ascending one of the eastern lighthouses, many people jog or do exercises. I liked the places that evoked the old country, and embraced the vegetation of the new. At the Camoens grotto I tried reciting the lines from the Luciades (even though I cannot speak the language)….
      For now, it is one more semester, then back for the summer – and maybe six months. I need to rest and also reevaluate where I am going (and set some affairs in order). However, I hope to return to China. Perhaps it will be one of the inner, not peripheral, regions of China. Still no sign of her. During the early part of this holiday I spent a day or so with someone I thought I was interested in, but that soon proved to be the result of “winter madness” and errant dreams, rather than anything real. While she was inside the mall shopping, I wandered the local streets sampling the street food. I later learned that “going shopping” is one of the feminine “tests” but I do not mind having failed! I was too engrossed in slices of raw ginger root impaled on a bamboo skewer, pickled in vinegar.
      As with last year’s Spring Festival holiday, I went traveling. After seeing my friend, I took the bus and ferry to Hainan Island. Perhaps I should have seen more of Beihai (in Guangxi), but I was in a hurry to catch the boat. I dashed on board, found a cabin, and rested while the last passengers got on and the crew prepared for departure.
      Beihai harbor in the late afternoon was full of wooden fishing boats, arranged in closely packed lines at their mooring. However, one couldn’t tell if they were being used or not. It seemed as if their woodwork had never been painted, or else the wind had immaculately polished away all varnish, all paint. The harbor had the air of permanent closure, as if fish had suddenly ceased to exist, turning the docks into garlic braids of ghost boats. We left Beihai and entered the darkness of the open sea….
      It seemed that the coastline ran in a certain line, since I could see a string of lights in the distance. However, someone said they were the lights of fishing boats. In time we passed a boat, which had bright floodlights mounted on the mast that lit up the deck and the surrounding water. In the distance, other lights floated restlessly like unmoored stars. On our boat, many people sat together on one deck or if they could afford to, retreated into their cabins. The galley was a scene of orderly chaos, the food was fairly good and the air not too smoky. It was peaceful to stand on the windy side of the boat later at night and let the wind blow away thoughts, as it blew anything light and loose off the decks. The seas were dark, and therefore appeared untouched.
      I spent the next day riding busses and a train on the ring route around Hainan Island. Perhaps that was an uncultured thing to do on “China’s Hawaii,” but I wanted to see countryside and log miles rather than sit on beaches. A new generation of coaches has arrived on the more developed, “Interstate Highway”-type routes: they are just as comfortable as the ones back home and have T.V.s bolted to the ceiling, but they often show pulp films from H.K., and it was very easy to watch kung-fu rather than the scenery. The ring route scenery was rather ho-hum, but the mountainous interior looks promising, should I ever return. By that evening I was over three-quarters of the way around the island. One stretch of road had many overarching trees, and in the darkness, with only our immediate area in front lit up by the bus headlights, it seemed as if we were riding through an endless tunnel of whitewashed trees. I like the somewhat altered state of mind one discovers at night on long-distance bus journeys.
      There were other sights, but I will stop here. I hope your next stage will work out well, wherever that may be.
 
February 19, 1998
 
Dear Polly,
 
      Thank you for you Christmas card and newsletter. I have often read the paragraph on “don’t keep looking…just look occasionally…”, and I like that idea. Thank you for that and the other ideas.
      I returned to Karamay after a wild tour of the bus and train stations of China, with rest stops watching the countryside pass by. If that sounds a little inverted it is meant to be, for that is often what happened. There is a lot of China to be seen milling around the bus stations, doing everything from jumping the queue at the ticket window like water seeping around a loosening sandbag in a dam, to ripping apart a sugar cane stalk to get at the sweet pulp inside, to sleeping on a pile of luggage in a throng of travelers that threatens to stampede the moment a conductor opens the gate. It seems that most or all traffic here – human or mechanical – moves and behaves like water.
      I left Hainan Island on the boat for Hai’an, on the “thumb” of Guangdong Province. Getting on the bus was typical – confirm the destination (“yes, we will be leaving soon”), go right to the back and sit down, watch other passengers fret and pack the bus to capacity, and ignore the lady selling tea-eggs, then ask the man in the seat in front to buy two for me. The bus floor is a war-zone littered with empty ammunition cases – fruit peel, sunflower seed shells, candy wrappers and soda cans strewn among the suitcases and feet. Somehow, the bus driver or an assistant wades through the passengers to collect fares. I prefer the public, scheduled busses – they leave when they are supposed to (typically) and go. The private operators are often anxious to wait until they are stuffed with riders before they will go: at times they will appear to leave (to the great relief of the passengers), only to circle the block and return to their waiting place in the hope of getting one more rider. I think they play this cat-and-mouse game with the traffic police because they are greedy for money.
      We passed through the red earth, wet landscape of this part of Guangdong. I think the number one reason I like the north of China over the south is because the north is dry. At a roadstop with conveniences and semi-shanty restaurant I ate a dish I shouldn’t have (thankfully, nothing attacked my guts) and moved on to Zhan Jiang. There is nothing very spectacular there – the train station, an immense hangar of a building that elephants could get lost in. However, interest revealed itself during the ever-present quest for street food. After walking down a main street and finding nothing suitably tantalizing (come on, this is Guangdong, one of the world’s “food capitals”!), I returned to a potential streetfood site. At a knee-level stall, a vendor was boiling some broth. On the table were bamboo skewers of quail’s eggs, tofu “skin,” and other dainties. For pennies you could choose one and watch it be boiled in the broth, then spiced to taste. She used a small paintbrush to smear on the red pepper and soy sauce mixtures. Since the boiling platform was low, the stool-like chairs were even lower. As usual, people were looking on and asking questions. The questions are fairly predictable (I think you know what they will be!) – nationality, job/activity, wage, family, age, why single?, are you looking for a Chinese wife?, etc. This scenario repeated itself many, many times during my travels (and, of course, at Karamay). I like the street food - indeed, I took an almost perverse pleasure in spurning restaurants whenever I could. Of course, I followed some simple rules and typically ate cooked food. Although I am sometimes naughty, I know what can and cannot be eaten. In this respect, Africa and China are similar. When it comes to drinks I am very fussy about what I take in – quite the opposite from food choices. The red label Wa Ha Ha purified water is the best, I think.
      The snacks weren’t enough, so I ate some noodles at a restaurant with some-what rude staff. Of course, at this point I noticed the real delicacies. Some of the best Chinese food comes out of bamboo steamers, so I always have my eyes open for steam rising into the air. At one bakery stood a stack of the large steamers used for cooking steamed bread (mán tou). Mán tou can be boring, but these steamers held all kinds of steamed dumplings and other pastries – sweet and savory. Needless to say, I took some away, and know where I will visit first on the next trip through Zhan Jiang – which will probably never happen. In any case, I have noticed that most of my snack haunts have been demolished or closed down. Progress, “turnover”, and bankruptcy are here, just as they are back home.
     So now I am back in Karamay. This semester will be busy but I have no idea what it will bring. I have pretty much decided not to renew here next year, and to use that time to reassess, regroup, and then return to China.
 
February 20, 1998
 
Dear Mark and Sally,
 
      It is a Friday afternoon, the end of the winter holiday; next Monday the new term will begin. Over the break I traveled in China by bus, train, air and boat to see some places and visit some friends. During the Chinese Spring Festival, train station are very busy, and Guangzhou (Canton) East station was no exception….
      Computers have made buying rail tickets easier, as have the electronic display boards showing how many seats/beds are available. However, the area before the barred ticket windows are reminiscent of a cattle stockyard, with steel rail fences to channel the thousands of ticket buyers. However, many people jump the line to buy tickets for themselves or their friends. Like water, they will seep through any opening. At times, it takes an actively present policeman to control the crowds, since forming a straight, orderly line seems not to be part of the culture. There are also private ticket sellers wandering through the crowds, but I do not trust them – their tickets may be fake, and I don’t want trouble on the trains.
      Upstairs there are several waiting rooms. Those waiting for their trains went into a huge room capable of holding one or two thousand people, and more. Different parts of the room were partitioned by the rows of bolted bucket seats according to the different trains. Keeping such a place clean was almost an impossibility, as people came and went, dropped litter on the floor, spat, and put their bags next to (or often on) the seats. Some people slept among or on their pile of luggage. A few children with suspicious countenances roved the crowd and I sometimes kept moving or turning around to keep an eye on them. On many platforms throughout the waiting hall, televisions showed the same “B” movie – a gangster movie from Hong Kong.
      Many of the travelers came from the countryside. In the south they use split bamboo carrying poles, from which are suspended heavy and sometimes ungainly loads. Hard life in the fields has scoured the superficial beauty off their faces or hands and out of their hair and clothes, but often replaced it with a better, more robust one. It seems as if some of the most lowly, uneducated and struggling people are the most attractive – the ones one could fall in love with. Nobody is innocent, but in a land burning with the pursuit of affluence, they and their counterparts among the workers sometimes represent one of the final frontiers of a kind of innocence. Of course this is a generalization, but they evoke something. They make up the majority of the population, but I know so little about them, having worked in the cities. One year, I would like to teach in the country, and just be there. For the moment, they only exist through the windows of moving trains, in chance encounters, and in my imaginations.
      I waited in that building for eight or so hours. The “B” movie was partly through its fourth showing when the announcement came to cross over to the opposite waiting hall. The crowd rose as one, flooded over, was badgered into lines by railway staff, and extruded out of the hall and towards the train through four or five ticket-punching gates. Compared to some boarding scenes it was quite orderly; there have been times when the gate was opened and the crowd burst out of confinement and onto the platform like spring torrents, in hope of a seat. In some places, boarding passengers have choked the carriage entrances and come in through the windows, clambering in first, or thrusting up their friend, child or luggage to get their seat.
      Many people in China go home over the Spring Festival holiday, so in the days and weeks before this time the transportation system is swamped. However, on the holiday itself the trains are almost empty. During one such time, I was talking with some of the carriage attendants and they invited me to the dining car for a party and a dance. A dance, on a train? (The railway workers dress in quasi-military uniforms and often try to project a ship-shape demeanor.) Well, that is what they had. The dining tables and chairs had been removed, there were peanut, watermelon seed, and sunflower seed shells all over the floor, a karaoke T.V. at one end on a table, and people dancing – on a train rushing through the night somewhere in China. I wonder if similar things happen somewhere between Los Angeles and Dallas/Fort Worth at 30,000 feet on Christmas Day. It was revealing to see the face behind the demeanor on occasion, although I do like the safe, predictable, everyday demeanor….
      Now I am back at my worksite, with one more semester to go. It seems the worst of winter is over, and I look forward to spring in all its dimensions. For lunch, I will go out with the English family also working/living here to a local restaurant. They make a good lamb and celery noodle dish.
      I hope you are all well. Thank you for writing to me.
 
 
February 18, 1998
 
Dear Michael and Rose,
 
      My father forwarded your Christmas newsletter to me. Thank you for writing to me. First, congratulations on your new arrival! One day I hope to see him, as well as you and the way you have expressed yourselves in your home (ie. - design, painting, arrangement, etc.).
      Home. What a strange concept to me! Home is my small suitcase (and wherever I am working), and this shows no sign of changing much. At present I am in Xin Jiang at a 2-year college teaching English. The longer I stay in China the more I like it.
      However, having said all that, I am planning to return to Mass. for six months, partly to deal with burnout, partly to “recalibrate” and reorient myself, and partly to set some affairs in order.
      There are a few more days left before the start of the new semester. The bathroom toilet is dripping again, some kids are playing outside and in the block stairwell, and the weather is noticeably milder. I think winter may be on the way out, although I suspect a final offensive. They say there are windstorms in spring, and that makes me cautious, for the fall winds are wild and ferocious. I have not seen any of the students, but that is fine; after a month on the road, in and out of bus and train stations, I am glad to just sit and rest. This semester will be busy, with American Culture to teach as well as Listening and Oral classes. I hope the students will be keen to learn, and that they will gain enough “linguistic critical mass” so as to use English creatively, and not mechanically. I hope that I will be inspired, to do the job well.
      And what of the great hinterland? Two things struck me during the rides between cities. One was the arrival or increase in satellite T.V. dishes, particularly in rural areas that I do not think of as “rapidly developing.” In one village I passed through, there were the usual bamboo groves, one-story farmhouses with upturned roof-ends, terraced fields…and eight dishes. Few things have changed the face of this country more than the television. (Also, “pop” culture and rock/contemporary music have come and are proliferating). The other phenomenon was the great increase in wealth and quality of dress in many people. There were quite a number of times when I was noticeably shabbier than all the other people in the room. It won’t be long before the initial appearance and style of many cities here will resemble the malls, and parts of society/places in the U.S. This trend will continue. I prefer the quieter areas, but I fear that the old look of things is blowing away, like successive layers of milkweed pod in autumn. Here in Xin Jiang the frontier is slipping away, and I think will not return.
 
 
 
 
 
 
February 22, 1998
 
Dear Joan,
 
      While traveling I did not want to write much, so for days I let anecdotes and scenery pass by. Now I am back in Xin Jiang, school opens tomorrow and I have been catching up on recording certain events. Various people have gotten a segment of the story spliced into the letter I was writing to them. Naturally, the Bengbu section is yours!
      Anyhow, back to the road…. The bus from Qingdao to Nanjing was your typical “sleeper” bus, with short, knee-bending day couches, hordes of people going somewhere, sunflower seed shells on the floor, and smoke in the air. I was on an upper level bunk which I prefer, because these are more isolated and I can sit by myself and think. The trip was long and so-so, but even longer for the other passengers: they were continuing on to Fuzhou. What a killer ride, especially if you were traveling with children! The driver kindly let me off opposite the train station. I had to cross four lanes of traffic. It was after or around midnight so I was tired, but for some reason I felt almost a little intoxicated (too much travel!), and my reactions were much slower. I realized this, so I waited until there was absolutely no traffic approaching before I crossed. Nothing happened, and I went into the station and bought a ticket. (Perhaps it was the “second-hand smoke” that made me tired.) Anyhow, I got to Nanjing and got off at the train station. The world outside some stations seems never to sleep, and it is weird to see rows of vendors ready and waiting to invite you into their restaurant to eat midnight dinner. I looked for bao zi, found some (they were so-so), and got on the train for Bengbu.
      Bengbu is a fitting place to arrive at around three in the morning, when it is lightly raining. Its rundown, half squalid demeanor is accentuated under the insufficient street lighting. The paving is broken or muddy, taxi drivers want you to come with them and are not happy when you don’t, and there seems absolutely nowhere to go for the night, unless you happen to know a place. After some hesitation, I went into what I thought was my old standby: I am still not sure if it was. I was impressed – they gave me a bed in a 3+3 bed grouping for ¥28.00 (about $3.00). Several hours later I was on my way to our old site.
      I spoke to one of the campus shopkeepers, who remembers Mark and I buying “cold dog” ice creams. Small world. So Bengbu is run down as always, but I still like it – it was and is my first home in China, my lao jia.
 
March 10, 1998
 
      I first met Persephone (for that was her English name) in Bengbu City in the summer of 1994, and from the start I knew I loved her. Both she and those five weeks sprang out of the desert in my soul like mighty ivy vines and coursed in their own way over the next four years, snatching my imagination and feet alike to wander every corner of China. Searching and understanding China from top to bottom is impossible, like a toddler trying to visit and inventory every room in a huge mansion, but it was enough to glimpse each room. How I wish I could live in the house – or at least some of its rooms – for years and years! I write this because I sense that I must leave this place, and perhaps not return. So many things blown away – innocence, childhood, home, dreams – and perhaps this too. At times, returning to home turf seems more like a sojourn in Babylon.
      1994 was a summer of miracles: where there had been a wasteland of my own making there now stood the green, flower-flagged meadow of a new chapter. The meadow was so large I had no imagination of its extent or boundaries; as it was, I spent those five weeks playing in the cowshed, as it were, - the campus of the Anhui Institute of Finance and Trade. Actually, Bengbu has nothing to do with meadows or flowers, or even cowsheds. It is a grimy, run down little city next to a stinky river in Anhui Province, about twelve hours by train northwest of Shanghai. If it were not an important rail junction, Bengbu would be yet another next-to-nothing place. I think many people call it less than that on occasion….
      The weather that summer was unbelievably hot, on a number of occasions crossing the 40ºC mark. Sometimes it rained, but that helped only briefly. On most afternoons while everyone was trying to rest the cicadas had tuned up and were giving free concerts. My teammate Mark and I downed dozens of the local raisin-studded ice creams called “cold dogs,” or else drank bottled water. Our fans never seemed to rest, unless the power went out, which it would during some peak demand periods.
      Most of my memories of Persephone during this period are fleeting. Her quiet beauty was unmistakable. Reticence, caution, fear – call it what you will – I admired her with as much indirectness and secrecy as one would expect from a novice. Still, I was a teacher and she was one of my students, and a stranger at that. I did not want to get thrown out of the teacher sending organization. She came from Xin Jiang, that fabulous, distant region, and this added to her attractiveness. At that time, Xin Jiang was a place as yet unseen, but devoured on maps and in my imagination. Strangely, it was the keepsake photo I took of her (and the others, in their turn) that froze her image in my mind for the next year and a half. While posing for the shot she clasped her hands together with the index fingers extended together and arrowheading towards the ground. It’s funny how little details like that can endure.
      I returned to the East coast at the end of the summer. A year in semi-limbo studying Chinese in cafés with foreign students or at the apartment, then the second contract, this time in Tianjin. Two hours east of Beijing by train, Tianjin and Boston share one great similarity – their street systems are terribly tangled. From here, I fanned out in all directions to visit former students, as far as one could travel in a weekend. The winter holiday was no exception, only the distances were greater. In time it was Persephone’s turn, and I went to Xin Jiang with no more than a map and an address in Chinese I could barely read.
      Xin Jiang is different – very different. At times you can’t help wondering if you are in Iran or Turkey, but it is still very much China. The lamb kebabs are awesome. The ground underneath crossroads or rotaries is sometimes excavated and made into an underground market. They are easy to enter, once you have pushed aside the heavy draft quilt, but leaving them is a challenge, for the exit doors are not well marked and you are never quite certain where you will emerge. Before entering an underground market you must look across the busy street to the place you want to emerge, visualize it, and make your way through the crowds of underground shoppers by dead reckoning. The public transport runs on Beijing Time (and not local time, which is two hours behind). Once you have missed a bus once you will not forget again.
      There was another bus to Persephone’s town so I boarded and paid the fare. It was a sleeper bus, with bunk bed-like structures fitted inside where the seats should have been. The air was foul with cigarette smoke and each short bed equipped with dirty quilts, but it was better than going to a hotel for the night. The journey was typical of night journeys by sleeper bus – cocooned from the cold, knees drawn up, the vehicle always shaking and jolting, my mind unable (it seemed) to rest and stop turning – a kind of psychotherapy on wheels. The night was dark and the condensation froze white on the windows, unless I scraped it off every so often with an old Kinko’s card to peer outside. Of course in time, daybreak and destination arrived, I found the local minibus to the outlying village and set out.
      The minibus driver let me off in the middle of nowhere and pointed down a long, long avenue of poplar trees. With the minibus gone, the starkness and stillness of this part of Xin Jiang took hold. What had been summer cotton or wheat fields lay under snow and ice, checkered off by lines and avenues of poplar trees. Skeletal cotton stalks protruded out of the snow awaiting their final reaping from roving sheep. Apart from a mounted shepherd and his flock, a few people walking home and myself, there was no sign of activity. No wind, not even a poplar leaf for the wind to blow, no music of wind on branches. Nothing, until I continued down the long avenue with the snow crunching underfoot. Alongside the avenue, the concrete irrigation channels lay empty of meltwater.
      One of the neighbors led me to Persephone’s home and I introduced myself to her parents. She was not in, so we talked until she returned. If I remember right, she was not expecting such a visit. On the surface, her “I am glad you are here,” sounded almost bland, but who knows what delight danced behind her smiling, yet sad and tired eyes?
      I stayed three days. Although the rush and activity of the Spring Festival holiday had subsided somewhat, the atmosphere was familiar, though quieter. We talked, watched the television, nibbled snacks, talked, ate meals, sat in silence, and drank tea many times, over many cycles. I felt awkward and ill at ease over how to manufacture three days of social commerce. Why do the Chinese flee their work units, fight their way into and out of train or bus stations, travel a few hours or across the nation in often trying conditions – if only for this? I came to enjoy, even long for the rest periods when they would let me go into a vacated bedroom and I would burst out of the real world and into my imaginary one.
      Although there was a small rural village around me, the world I lived in was Persephone’s home. Like most properties in China it had a courtyard. Perhaps in summer they grew eggplants and peppers and onions, or sat under the grape arbor at noon while the land burned…. Next to the main gate to the outside society was an open-sided shed filled with dried cotton plants – stalks, pods and all, except the cotton. This was the winter fodder for the few sheep her family owned. I often came out here at night. The stars above were brilliantly clear, the air cold and clean, and the land so peaceful one could hear nothing save the sheep in their pen. Her home, I think, was mud brick and plaster, one story, with cramped kitchen, living room and bedroom or two – a typical farmer’s home, with concrete floor, and well kept. These blended with more contemporary things like the television, glass top tea table, factory made wardrobes, and brightly colored synthetic bedspreads or quilts.
      After three days I left. It was a long walk down one gravel road and then down another, but Persephone and her father saw me off to the nearest minibus stop. The sky was gray and cold, and our good-byes predictable.
      I did not see her for two years. Yes, there were a few letters, perhaps a phone call or two, but no other direct contact. We lived in our respective exiles. She found a teaching position in a local primary school, while her classmates stayed near the east coast of China in business and trade positions. I moved from Tianjin to Taiyuan with its coal dust, and vinegar flavored noodles, and then to Karamay in northwest Xin Jiang to begin a new contract. Exile, I think, is not merely a geographical constraint but also a state of mind. She came in and out of my mind like a seasonal migrant, like the swallows that come to nest in my father’s barn; she would be gone for a time, but when she came she pervaded my interior world. This was not the case in the real world, although it was impossible to create a watertight seal between the two.
      One of my other students, who was also Persephone’s classmate that summer, knew something was going on between us. It was the summer after my three-day visit to Persephone’s home; I was in China’s northeast. The land of bitter cold was warm, greenleafed and thronged with people in light cotton clothing and sunhats. On the river was a park. Many people came here to fly kites, or sit on the ground to gaze out over the water. Cheryl is a good talker – she almost always has something to talk about, and it is measured and thoughtful. We sat on the sand bar, watching the kites, talking of Chinese women, love and marriage. Somehow, she knew there was an interest in Persephone, and wanted to know. Why not? It was clear and obvious she hoped something would develop. But how did she know?
      Of course, Persephone was not the only contender in my imaginary world. As a foreigner in a land of exile I was in my element – in this respect, China is one of the ultimate interior and exterior travel destinations. For the first time, I lived and traveled among people and in a land that mirrored who I was and what I thought or imagined I wanted. In some ways, this culture was the first one that I seriously observed and allowed to influence and permeate my being – something I typically resisted back home. Many women – friends and strangers alike – took my fancy, and especially anybody with braided pigtails, but nobody endured. Guilt, lack of interest, unwillingness to step out and risk moving forward or move away from my cultural norms, or just another whim blew them all away like mayflies. All except Persephone.
      When I arrived at Karamay to begin a new contract I discovered that the necessary paperwork to allow me to work there was incomplete. This meant I could not be hired – at least, not yet. The school leaders gave me ten days, so I left Karamay in a hurry and took to the open road for Persephone’s home town.
      What a difference it was to see the same route in late summer and not midwinter, by day and not at night. The ghostly moonlit semidesert became semidesert indeed, dry and flat to the north and hemmed in by the Tian Shan range to the south. Talc-fine dust filled the inside of the bus as we negotiated road construction zones. Huge geological formations that lay hidden by night seemed to suddenly appear, as if recently put there by the Ministry of Landscapes. Her hometown around the bus station looked pretty much the same, save that you could buy orange juice ice slush and not just freshly baked sweet potatoes. I found the local minibus, which looked remarkably familiar, and returned to her outlying village. On the minibus I met a woman who asked me where I was going and who I was looking for. It turned out that she knew Persephone or one of her family members so we talked for a while. After alighting she invited me to her family’s home for a drink, but I was afraid to meet them so I declined. She pointed to a brick water tower in the middle distance, out among the poplar trees and cotton fields, and we waved goodbye.
      It was late afternoon, early September, toward the end of cotton harvest. The bulk of the crop appeared to have been picked, judging from the mountains of raw cotton one could see in collection and baling depots along the main road earlier that day. However, there was still cotton in the fields, and scattered harvesters here and there. I followed a raised footpath along a line of poplar trees, no longer in the farmland of Xin Jiang but through the very fields of Boaz. The workers stood among the cotton plants, picking or talking quietly. It was one of those warm afternoons when, instead of laboring and overheating, you want to sit under the trees and watch the shadows lengthen, the airborne swallows chase insects, and ants crawl up and down grass stems…but I could not. After trial and error and several questions I stood outside the familiar blue gate and knocked, as if revisiting a chapter from a vague dream of long ago that I was not sure I had dreamed. Her father opened the gate.
      Persephone had gone. She had left her outlying village to take up a teaching job in the neighboring province, and in northwest China the provinces are enormous. The atmosphere of the place and the father’s expression were not the same as before. The home was empty and subdued, almost as if in the aftermath of bereavement. I don’t think Persephone’s father was very happy to see me on his doorstep. This was not the time to stay, even though he offered to let me spend the night. I shared some news of no real importance, got Persephone’s new address, and left down the same two gravel roads. Back in the downtown area, I tried to get a bus to one city, couldn’t, and took the first sleeper bus to Urumqi and the road beyond.
      Over the next three days I worked my way towards Dunhuang in Gansu Province, passing through Urumqi, Hami and countless miles and horizons of gravelly Gobi Desert. For some reason, the long roads across nowhere to an obscure place never cease to draw me, largely because of the ephemeral persons waiting for me at the end of the road. These people were not mirages, but around each destination lay strewn instead the discarded petals of opportunity.
      How I found her there is still something of a miracle. The address scribbled by her father would take me as far as the front gate of the school she was working at, but what then? While waiting for the next bus out of Hami I had called the school and heard vague words about Persephone’s whereabouts from someone, but what did he know? He turned out to be one of the gatekeepers who kindly led me across the street and into the labyrinth of identical housing blocks. After a little trial and error he shouted up concrete stairwell and brought down a resident. Behind her came Persephone. Whether she was expecting me or not I do not know, for she could often appear dispassionate at first glance, but who know where her heart and her mind walked, away from the eyes of spectators?
      It was a fairly short visit, given that the last one lay eighteen months in the past. Partly for her sake and partly for the sake of her sister and brother-in-law, we spoke more Chinese than English. They put on a VCD of Clint Eastwood’s “The Dead Pool” – good pulp entertainment for me – but the English was too hard for her. It faded away and we continued talking. Nothing remarkable happened save that I left after an hour or two, to return to my hotel. They saw me to a cab, we parted, and I melted into the darkness and the next leg of my journey through the desert.
      That was the last I saw of her. During this time I maintained telephone contact with some of her classmates in various parts of China, ostensibly for keeping their English level maintained, but partly for other reasons, and partly because I was lonely. The once-large pool of old students had shriveled up to a few good friends and some occasional telephone contacts: I had become tired of riding the circuit from one meeting and too much food to another. Yet I was still searching. Whereas Cheryl had asked me about relationships, now I shared with some of these student friends my dream of finding someone in China. It was inevitable, and I knew it, that such information would leak out and race all over the country. However, it is possible Persephone never heard from her classmates, but drew her own conclusion from the visits from across the desert, the long letters and phone calls, and finally the set of English self-study listening materials. In our last phone conversation there was no mistaking the love that danced behind her faraway voice and questions.
      I knew I had gone too far. I told her that I needed to return home for a year and that I was not certain if I could return to China. But why? Even though I might not come back, I would always write and sometimes call, like I did with many of her classmates. Did I have a girlfriend – at home, or in China? No, but I was not able to have one, and I explained why. I will never know if she understood. I told her I would call the next month.
      As I hung up, the last petal of opportunity fell from my hands to the ground, to be picked up and carried into the night by the desert wind. I should never have gone near her, for she was off-limits to me.
 
March 20, 1998
 
Dear Marvin,
      I got your letter, stamps and photos: thanks. The students liked the stamps.
      Anyhow, here are some photos of a carpet factory/outlet I visited in Urumqi. The demonstration looms were interesting, the stock was so-so (except for the example I photographed, and it doesn’t look very Uighur to me) and very expensive. It was a tourist site/outlet. However, I have made some new friends – from Karamay, not the outlet – who have friends…etc., etc. We will be visiting the carpet bazaars to pick up good wool on the inside track. Much of what I have seen is either horribly tacky, or machine woven (blah), but I have found one of the mother lodes.
      Carpets and lamb-based dishes have been a good introduction to the local Uighur culture. It is so nice to be an outsider in this respect – within reason, I can wander through the bazaars, or eat lamb stew in back-set hole-in-the-wall restaurants watching Steven Segal fight and bark orders in Uighur – there is no stigma. (It’s good to be “Swiss” out here.) One Uighur payed me the ultimate compliment by addressing me in Russian – I deliberately dress down. The Uighur bazaar in Urumqi has pretty much everything you would expect from a bazaar, except that the authenticity of time and aging which Indiana Jones or Victor Lazlo would have seen has often gone. There was one side courtyard in Kashgar that for a second took me back to medieval times, but so much has been transformed or defaced by the local strain of consumerism/tackiness that seems to be over much of the world.
      Friendship and relationships are key to being more than a stranger in their midst. In some ways, I have learned more in a week of unfolding friendship than in months of watching everything from a distance – although the two systems compliment each other. The Uighurs are very sociable, fun-loving, have a good sense of tradition and family, and do well with lamb dishes, dried fruit, spices and pizza crust-like bread. Friendship is a bridge, but in this culture lack of relationship also serves as a barrier: so long as one is not hurt in an accident, this barrier is a very useful regulator of social contact. Although I am easily recognized, wearing a hat and covering my brown hair does seem to reduce attention from other people on the street significantly, and this helps.
 
The Hole-In-The-Wall.
 
March 29, 1998
     
Somewhere downtown lies a row of small restaurants. Although they offer pretty much the same food and service to their neighborhood, they appear to survive and get on with each other, borrowing a chicken or some vegetables when the need arises. It is, shall we say, cooperative competition. However, they do have their own individualities – one restaurant is fronted with blue glass, another with a blue quilt to help keep winter drafts from leaking through cracks in the door. Businesses in town are responsible for clearing snow and ice off the sidewalk in front, so maybe they take an interest in the sidewalk itself on this street. In front of one restaurant the sidewalk is paved in brick, somewhere else, in broken and irregular slabs of polished red granite. The latter can be very slippery on snow days.
      I chose the Leaping Rabbit restaurant over the others because the staff was kind and didn’t cheat me like one or two of the neighboring establishments. Off and on, I have been eating there for six months. Usually I eat noodle or vegetable and rice dishes. The restaurant is modest to the point of being almost anonymous – although most people know about its specialty, “big dish” chicken, a platter heaped with chicken, potatoes, leeks and noodles, enough for six people. Inside there are five tables carefully arranged near the walls. The floor is concrete, darkened by age, use, and the patina of spilt dishes, workers’ boots and a thousand moppings. The tables and stools give a warn-out appearance, although this is sometimes brightened up by the plastic floral tablecloths the manager puts out. An old white sheet hanging from roof to hip level in a doorway separates the dining room from the kitchen, and beyond that must lie a storeroom and the family’s living quarters.
      Noises always come in from the kitchen and entertain me while waiting for lunch or dinner. The popping sound of chopped leeks falling into hot, hot oil, the flash of foot-high flames in the wok, the ramshackle exhaust fan sending temptations into the neighborhood or another fan forcing more air into the coal fire, or the nerve jolting thwack of hand-made noodles slammed on a tin topped table. These noises are altogether different from those of the dining room – the television, people opening and closing the front door (or leaving it open), orders for extra noodles, and the countless sounds of eating.
      During lunch and dinner hours the restaurant can get very busy. I do not like to be there, hearing or imagining I hear the gossip about “the foreigner,” or just being alone in the midst of many different groups of people, so I deliberately come late for meals. Sometimes there is a party or two still eating, but usually there is nobody there save a solitary diner quietly slurping noodles. The speakers on the evening television programs tend to speak too fast, but still it is good listening practice. If the restaurant is almost empty, the mealtime is a quiet oasis
on the day’s journey; if not, I withdraw.
      Many westerners have a running battle with Chinese restaurants over MSG in the food (as well as oil, salt, and red pepper). Indeed, by many American or European diner’s standards, the Chinese add almost pathological amounts of these ingredients into their dishes; they use their cooking ladles to dash in their flavorings, and not their fingertips. The Chinese, for their part, think of food as the westerners like it as tasteless. This issue can very easily turn into a “no-win” cultural conflict, and since relationship building and allowing people to keep face are so important to life here, it is better to say nothing and eat what they give you (unless MSG really does make you sick). However, this same dynamic of relationship building can be turned to one’s advantage. Now that I have become a “regular” - but more importantly, a friend – of the manager, it is much easier to explain what I like to eat. This must be done somewhat slowly: first the MSG and the salt, then the oil. Red pepper is a little harder to change. Accept initial and occasional bouts of “forgetfulness,” praise good dishes (and sometimes salty ones), and effect change by gently reminding your contact person the next time you order that dish (rather than by criticizing it the same night you eat it). If you speak too directly and make them lose face, you have lost a chance to build a relationship – and get good dishes.
 
April 11, 1998
 
Dear May,
 
      I must admit that Zoe’s letter came out of the blue. Of course, I had hoped she would reply to the Spring Festival travel letter I sent her, but I was not expecting an introduction. This place is a very gray and brown place, with paving stones underfoot, concrete everywhere, and the semi-desert running up to the very edge of town. Somehow as a result of one letter – nay, a brief note – the world has taken on many more colors (but they were always there to look at). I find it very interesting this should take place during Xin Jiang’s all-too-brief springtime.
      I do not want to write an overt introduction (“I am this…and that….”) for that can be meaningless in such a distant, abstract context. Would you not rather know more about this far-flung corner of China and its people? There is much more to Karamay than oil. It is the people here that make life happen and make it interesting. Since this small city is separated from the rest of China by the semi-desert, it has become a China in miniature, with a number of faces. It is home (although home has often been my suitcase) for now.
      And what of Shanghai? Yes, I have eaten jiao zi on Nanjing Road, walked the Bund, glimpsed Pudong and Jiaotong Da Xue, but that is very little. What is your neighborhood like – modern, upscale and fast paced, or a pleasantly quiet backwater between the development zones?
      It is now the next morning. Outside, someone’s chicken is telling the whole neighborhood that it has laid an egg. This grouping of apartment blocks has a life of its own. In winter, some resident’s pigeons were one of the few signs of animal life as they wheeled around and around in the frozen sky. In time, came caged songbirds on sunny balconies, and the first sparrows in the bushes. Even now, the bushes are beginning to bud and bloom, as Xin Jiang comes out of winter and resumes its place as China’s fruit basket. Now, some of the residents have brought in chickens, and perhaps gardens will follow. Outside my window (I am on the ground floor) there is an outdoor table with a summer roof above it and no walls. On warm autumn evenings some of the neighbors liked to play ma jiang under the bare light bulb. I liked hearing the click of their ma jiang blocks rasping over the concrete table and the background music of their conversation. I wonder if they too will come out with the warming of the evenings.
      This year I have learned much about the children, animals, traveling vendors, and service people by just listening. I cannot see out of my bedroom window because I keep the windows and curtains closed with rope and fasteners, partly to shut out the ferocious autumn and spring winds that come out of the northwest. If I want to see who or what is out there I run to the kitchen window and peer out through the lace curtains. At times that is not necessary, for most of the people passing through here can be recognized or partly identified by their voice. The traveling salespeople have their own message, tone of voice, rhythm, and time of day or week when they visit. I like listening to the cardboard and bottle collectors, who pull their handcarts in and out of the courtyards: they half sing, half call out their message. If I were a student of language and linguistics, I would like to study their “song-calls” from a linguistic perspective.
      For lunch today, I went out to a local restaurant with the English family that lives/works at T.V. University, and we ate dà pán yáng ròu. Do you like mutton? Or do you prefer chicken, vegetables, or fish? Of course, being in Xin Jiang it is very easy to get mutton. I do not like cooking, so I have found a small, local street restaurant with a friendly staff who are willing to make simple Chinese dishes, such as vegetable stir-fry, or soups with mushroom or dou fu in it.
      Evening time…. After a quiet afternoon and a “free talk” with some students, I am back in my room. Outside, the peace of the day has vanished as another windstorm hits the city. In the apartment above, someone is chopping vegetables on a wooden block, but out in the courtyard the trees are being shaken as if by hundreds of angry children. In the main entrance to this building a loose door on rusty hinges sings uneasily. During these times the streets are mostly empty, but I still want to go out to get dinner, call some friends – and have a look. Outside it is wild, as the wind sprays dust into everything and shoots large grains of sand horizontally over the ground. It is very difficult to see clearly when crossing the road because if you take your hands away from your face, the sand will get into your eyes. Although it was safe inside the restaurant, there was still an uneasy feeling as the wind shook the door and tried to get in, or pushed objects over on the roof above our heads. I returned home after dinner and decided I didn’t want to do that again for a while. These winds, however, are one of the few remaining reminders that this is the edge, the frontier, and for that I like them.
      I will stop here for now.
 
April 21, 1998
 
Dear Theresa,
 
      While sitting at my desk with your letter before me I had “writer’s block” – the inability to get ideas out of one’s head and onto the forever patient paper. At the point of giving up, something happened outside my ground floor window that reminded me of life in Tianjin. A small van drove up to the end of the courtyard, horn blowing loudly. Evidently the driver was looking for somebody and didn’t know which room his friend lived in, so he shouted out a name so the whole neighborhood could hear him. After a while he left. I remember many times like that when I was in Tianjin.
      It is a Tuesday night, the time when the movie channel shows an English language film. However, I didn’t like tonight’s offering, so I am back at the writing desk, with my mind somewhere between the real world and the numerous imaginary ones I live in.
      Today is the three-quarter mark of this school year, since the second term, midterm exams are being held around now. It is also the frontier between winter and summer: in one day I saw the first blossoms cautiously emerging from the twigs, and brief, brief snow flurries blowing down from a cold sky like crumbs falling from a biscuit tin that everyone thought was long empty. At times this is how I feel too, but somehow the days continue, one after another. Water has begun to flow again through the irrigation ditches, the ornamental flower beds have been cleared, manured and raked, and the cold earth awaits the final kiss of sunlight.
      For supper I went out to a “hole-in-the-wall” restaurant as usual. I like their soups, particularly their clear broth and mushrooms. If I need some meat I will order a dish with lamb in it. It is easy to think of the unrelated university housing and this restaurant as a boarding house with its familiarity and simplicity, its removal from the rest of the world, as well as its population of transients and residents. Come to think of it, I don’t know who the residents are – everyone seems to be transient. Only the restaurant staff know. The gathering at lunch the next day was fairly representative of who comes and eats here. In one corner of the room five students – actually, they were my students – ate soupy noodles. Their lean budgets constrain them to the simple, cheaper dishes, although on occasion I have seen a group sharing a “big dish chicken.” (dà pán ji). Two of the other tables were occupied by six or seven workers. Perhaps they came from one of the nearby construction sites. Instead of packing away thick sandwiches they ate one, even two plates of noodles with lamb sauce. I remember one man – crew cut, dusty blue cotton jacket, plastic shoes and no socks; and a face detached from the people around him but focused on his noodles and inner thoughts. It was the absence of socks which caught my eye. After the workers had left and their debris cleared away, four others came to the table. They were managers, who wanted a table from where they could watch the road and presumably their vehicle, perhaps one of the thousands of black windowed, luxury or urban assault vehicles bought for company use and found throughout the country. At the table behind them were two others who may have been lower level managers.
      How old are your students? Are any interested in conversations in English, as well as the grammar and reading practice? You say that you have been tired. The same happens here: I have talks and classes, do some of the things every teacher does, and feel tired. I work best when I have to do a job by a certain time; when I am free I am directionless. I am glad you have the inner motivation to continue – please carry on. You are right when you say success comes from diligence. It is natural to miss home. I am very much a lone wolf, but even I like to think of my family and home town from time to time. However, home is always there – it can never be taken away from you.
 
May 15, 1998
 
Dear May,
 
      I received you letter yesterday. One of the other teachers in the English Department said, “Stephen, there’s a letter for you from the bank.” At first I did not understand what he meant, even though he repeated himself twice. Then I understood. I went to the same place overlooking the Diàn Dà gardens and read your letter. Thank you for writing.
      Xin Jiang is so far removed from Shanghai you might as well be on the moon – yet this is still China. Many people have not been here, although they often see it on television. I like big countries – China, Canada, Russia – because you can travel everywhere, see many people, and yet be in the same country. On the other hand, it is only four hours by air or 3½ days by train/bus from Shanghai to Karamay – that is quicker than the weeks and months it must have taken in the days of camel caravans. In some ways, the entire country has shrunk to the size of a television screen, and through it the images and projections of modern society diffuses out of Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou – and of course, Beijing – into every home, restaurant, and hotel in China. By virtue of their geography, Karamay and Xin Jiang are the frontier, but the television, roads, and the aspiration of people toward modernity are changing the shape of things. I think that in twenty or so years, the “frontier” (as an image in one’s mind) will have vanished, except perhaps in far-removed villages and in the memories of older men and women.
      Xin Jiang brings to mind grapes, raisins, lamb shish-kebab (yáng ròu chuar), watermelons and ha mi gua, and of course singing and dancing. You can see the singing and dancing on the television frequently if you turn to the Uighur (Wei wu er zu) channel on the television. In terms of the real thing, I saw live dancing once at a buffet banquet that was held for many foreigners working in Xin Jiang. We were driven by our university to Wu Lu Mu Qi for the banquet and stayed in town for a day or two. Wu Lu Mu Qi is about five to seven hour’s drive from Karamay, so I do not go there often. Indeed, Karamay is like a concrete ship becalmed on a huge sea of sand, a sampler of Chinese culture surrounded by diminishing wilderness. Sometimes I quietly mourn the passing away of the wilderness, not just as an entity, but as a state of mind. It is why I came out here, in part.
      I have been teaching at Diàn Dà for about eight months now. This is my first job in Xin Jiang. I have wanted to be in Xin Jiang for about ten years – in large part because it was so very remote and far away from normative, typical, mainstream society. I saw a land of deserts – huge deserts – of rivers running out of majestic snow-crowned mountains and losing themselves in the never-satisfied sands of the desert. Indeed, if you travel to the southern half of Xin Jiang, around the Taklimakan Desert, you can see these things and more: sand dunes a hundred meters high and taller, miles of roadside gravel desert where not a single green thing grows - not even a thornbush – and night skies so clear and empty of clouds each star is a bright and beautiful diamond and the Milky Way a skein of diamond dust. Yes, it is all there. However, I went to Karamay, as oasis of people and concrete box houses surrounded by a landscape far less dramatic than that of the Tian Shan or the Taklimakan. I have had joy in being here, even though it is hard at times, such as I have rarely had before.
      The students I am teaching at Diàn Dà are not preparing to work in the television field. This place is a two-year university for those students whose exam grades were not good enough to get them into a four-year university. For some students, being here is the chance of a lifetime – they come from families that never have had someone go to university. For some others the burden and disgust of having failed to get into a four-year university is very heavy. I think many of them are intelligent (actually, they all are, although the English levels of several need improvement). Most of them will become English teachers in their hometown middle schools: they come from various parts of Xin Jiang. I teach them spoken English, listening, and North American culture; in addition, we often have “free talks.” Sometimes however, the free talks are boring – the walls of reservation have not yet been broken down, or else I talk too much. Occasionally though we hit a good topic and run with it. As often seems to be the case with college English classes, most of the students are female; many are shy and blushing, but a few are outspoken and bold. I like my students, although as I prepare to leave here I am sad we never left off crawling for real linguistic flight.
      You asked if I enjoy living here in Karamay. For the most part I do. Life here is very, very simple and uncomplicated – almost crude. The world here – with the exception of people’s clothing – is often gray or monochrome. My food is simple (and yes, I like Chinese food very much but do not like salt or wei jing). Even though Karamay has a reputation of being a “boring” city, there is plenty to see here: I almost never tire of watching the human comedy unfold around me. Every street, each xin cun, many shops and vendor’s stands and all places where people meet to buy, sell or talk have a story to tell or a word sketch to paint in letters. Why, only yesterday I returned to a new site, a first floor balcony turned window-shop and reached by five concrete steps, to say hello to the ayi there because she was kind…and to buy some chocolate. The local children like to climb the steps, rise up on tiptoes and thrust their nose and cheeks between the window bars – as far as they can – and ask, “Ayi, do you have any candy, any Wahaha gai nai?” The scene is straight out of Norman Rockwell. Perhaps the reason I like such scenes and the quiet walks through the backwater xin cun is because they are a kind of walled garden, for now free of the turmoil outside. So yes, I do enjoy living here for the most part, but it is lonely. There is no avoiding that. However, although there were reservations last September, I have no regrets, no remorse at having come here.
      Is life here different from life in Shanghai? Well, yes it is because of location, local conditions and culture, size and many other variables, but in some way I think it is the same – “another slice of Main Street, P.R.C.” I would say the same of many places in China: I am amazed at the homogeneity of mainstream culture in almost every corner of the country, in spite of obvious regional variations and the like. I think a lot of this trend in similarity has to do with the television. Shanghai may not be here in reality, but in a way it is here in peoples’ televisions, in their minds, and in their aspirations.
      I visited Shanghai briefly in August 1994 and one or two times again sometime in 1995 and 1996. As for this year, I hope to leave Karamay around July 26, and be in the Shanghai/Jiangsu area from (about) July 30 to August 10. I would be happy to see you in Shanghai, and also have another look at the city.
 
May 22, 1998
 
Dear Ann,
 
      I had been thinking for a month or so whether to send this on to you. A lot has gone on this year, so it is time. No doubt you will see similarities between this story and “In Search Of An Orchid”, which I wrote for you in 1986. Some things have grown; others remain the same.
      Africa was beautiful and evocative in its own way, but China has taken me – through it land and people – like nothing else. Here is a strange thing: I am still much the same introvert you have known, yet I have found more fulfillment and happiness here than in many other settings – although it is often lonely here. Somehow I feel at home in the wasteland, surrounded by and watching the common people living their lives out day by day. After ten years of relative silence I am writing again. There is much to write about here in terms of common, everyday life in the form of letters, monologues and short stories.
      Today the teachers supervising the graduating English majors listened, as one by one the student gave their “oral defense.” It was a long day. Some of the defenses were given in Chinese, so I had to assign/estimate grades for them. It was at times very easy to watch the small pieces of poplar tree “fluff” come floating in through the window and come to rest beside the podium or somewhere else. It is, after all, an infectious time of year. The leaves are out and the cuckoo’s voice soothes the entire countryside. At times during the day and evening one can hear the neighborhood girls and boys playing courtyard games. Now the courtyard is quiet.
      I hope you are well. I plan to return to Massachusetts in mid-August, this time for a six-month change (before coming back to China?). I hope we can get together! This story (enclosed) was an interesting experience that taught me some things: I am fine now.
 

A Trip To Altai
 
      Tomorrow we go to Altai – the other English teacher and his family, some of the English Department, our university president, the driver, and I. I have been waiting for some weeks now for this journey, and now it is almost here. In part, I am looking forward to this trip since it means a chance to get away form the routine of work for a while. I like teaching in China, but right now I am burned out: it is time for a change of scenery. However, this is only part of the story….
      If you look at the map of China, there is Altai at the edge of things – where China, Russia and Outer Mongolia meet. To the east are the Altai Mountains, to the west the Junggar Desert Basin. I have images of pine-clad mountains, cool breezes in summer, horses, sheep and perhaps camels on the slopes, Mongolians and Kazakhs scrutinizing the land from atop their shaggy ponies – and horse’s milk. Oh yes. I have been dreaming of trying some horse’s milk for several months now, but here in Karamay it is hard to find. Maybe if I had some Kazakh friends they would bring some in from their cousin’s homestead out there in the mountains. I would like to watch someone patiently milking a string of mares and hear the music of mare’s milk squirting into the bucket, then taste the sweetness of fresh milk. Perhaps you think I am crazy, but this is sometimes what I am like.
      I hope to find something of the frontier out there, a place virtually untouched by development and modernization. Perhaps I would have to turn into a bird and fly for a day before seeing such a place.
      These days have been hot – very hot. The Xin Jiang sun is great for making melons and grapes, but it is brutal on bare heads at noon, even for short periods of exposure. Last night I went to the university’s athletic field to walk around the 400-meter track a few times, and to think as usual. Several other people were walking around the track, and a few sat on the perimeter wall, marked by the occasional glow of a cigarette butt or by their silhouette if there were lights behind them. Across the street two or three cranes mounted with floodlights illuminated their construction sites. Night is a cool and peaceful time to work, and the wind was friendly….
      We left early on Thursday morning, and the road to Altai was long and hard. After clearing Karamay, we passed through two oilfields – acres and acres of wasteland studded with “bobbing donkeys” (ke tou ji) and the occasional oil drilling tower…a steel forest drawing oil out of the ground. We passed on and entered an even emptier land – dry, vast, and desolate. There is rock and stony ground everywhere – rocky outcrops worn into various shapes by the incessant spring and autumn wind, or else shattered by freezing. In the parts that appear more “sandy” there are countless small stones in the soil, as if a raisin addict put far too many raisins than necessary in a plum pudding recipe. The desert scrub appeared greener than usual, and had flushes of lavender-hued blossom. In places, small wildflowers held on to life and stirred in the breeze. Sometimes the ground appeared as if sprinkled with green chalk dust – like some landscapers use back home – but it was thin, almost film-like vegetation seen at a distance from the passing minibus…the barest of forage for any passing animals.
      The gale-sculpted landscape is very reminiscent of places in Arizona and perhaps the Dakota Badlands: the locals call one area “Wind City” because it looks like an abandoned, vanishing city, now visited only by the wind, various animals, and tourists. We left it behind and entered an area where the road was being ripped up and repaired. We left the pavement and struggled through the heavily rutted tracks left by the bus and truck traffic. This continued for two or more hours. Thick, fine powdery dust poured into the windows like a dark coating of bees trying to come in and get us, and at times the driver had to stop the minibus to let the dust fall off the windows and drift away. We were frequently thrown up out of our seats and into the air on account of the uneven track. Even though the windows were closed the talc-like dust came in and covered everything.
      During those two hours, much of our attention was on the road and how to endure it: I closed down much of my mind or else retreated into my own inner thought world. In time however, we returned to the pavement and opened our minds and perspectives to the landscape around us.
      It was classic Kazakh country. We drove along the middle of what seemed a huge valley – a wide, flat and grassy plain with distant mountains on each side. The mountains were rugged and majestic under the endless sky – at times grey and massive with rain clouds, at times eye-searing blue touched up with flimsy white or cotton puff clouds. At their bases, the mountains were skirted by their washed out soil, huge buttresses of material from landslides and constant, annual springtime snowmelts. The lightly grassed plain was marked here and there by cream- colored Kazakh yurts and speckled white and brown with their owner’s flocks and herds. The horses seemed never to tire, grazing here, running there, pursued by their foals in search of food.
      In time the pastoral dreamland faded and, after a while, we returned to the typical semidesert, or else areas of farming, poplar trees, and settlements. It seems that water makes all the difference. Karamay, where I work, has a limited amount, but Altai is blessed with abundant supplies. We crossed an almost uninhabited mountain pass with rocks eroded into strange shapes and a roadside village very reminiscent of Burkina Faso (although without the conical thatched homes), and entered Altai.
      Altai is in a league all by itself: being hemmed in by the mountains helps, and being a border town also gives it a character of its own. The river, now wild and foaming with snowmelt, cuts the small city lengthwise, and the mountain slopes restrict and direct urban development. Yes, there are the usual concrete box buildings, but they are not offensive and overwhelming – the mountains, a profusion of trees and, above all, the abundance of water makes everything beautiful. It is hard to find similar communities so well endowed with natural beauty in much or all of Xin Jiang Autonomous Region.
      We settled into our hotel – I think one of two catering to foreign visitors. Over the next two days before returning home to Karamay we visited friends, tourist sites, and a leather goods factory, but these, although very generous and hospitable, are not what I took home with me in my heart from Altai. I have to admit that at the time I was morose and isolationist, but I never stopped looking for beauty in my surroundings, or at the people and their common life around me. This city has Han, Kazakh, Uighur, and perhaps some Mongolians, but I tried to focus on Kazakh culture, since I had seen little before.
      Along one of the main streets was a string of Kazakh ladies selling yogurt. They each had a few stools and a table with a bucket of yogurt on it. For about twenty cents they would ladle some yogurt into a tea bowl and give you a drinking straw or spoon with which to drink it. There was sugar if you wanted it. Of course the yogurt was delicious and I drank down the first bowl immediately, but it was the feeling of being just a fraction closer to the land, another time, another way that made the yogurt visits delightful. In some ways, this was emblematic of why I like being in China (among other reasons) – the freedom from social restraints, in exchange for new, although chosen limitations, and of course vast plains of opportunity. I think such vendors could not have sold their goods so easily in all places. During the weekend in Altai I visited the yogurt sellers at least four times: they provided some of my best memories of the trip.
      Altai was unique in two other ways. Somewhere near the river was a park unlike any I had seen in China – anywhere. In contrast to the standard boat lake/pagoda on a hillock/willow trees/sundry vendors and amusements, this park was very unintrusive and followed nature’s contours, not people’s. Thus, the narrow paved footpath took you through the cool woods under the shadows of birch trees, with wildflowers and woodland vegetation lapping the very edges of the path, and woodbirds singing as they would in any peaceful forest. It was a place where one could lose oneself in peace and tranquility, and great for quiet bike rides or walks in the morning. During the cool evening the next day I wandered the main and side streets, searching and lost at heart, but staying near the yogurt sellers. I think too much. After yet another tea-bowl of Kazakh yogurt, I went down to a small park in the center of Altai, next to the wildly foaming river of meltwater. In the middle of this grassy enclave within an enclave is a statue of two Mongolian or Kazakh riders in full gallop, fighting over a sheep. They are depicted true-to-life and full of energy. Around them lay lush lawn and carefully laid out concrete and stone footpaths. The only light came from streetlamps, and it seemed much of this city district’s people had come out here to walk around, chat with friends and enjoy the cool summer evening. Soothing, relaxed jazz music came from out of the darkness somewhere, and I walked about looking for the band. There was no band in the park but two or three speakers on the ground playing music, near the flow of passers-by. No problem. For a brief moment, then two, then for several minutes I walked in a different world altogether, more like the Boston Public Gardens or the Esplanade near the Hatch Shell than the one I had been expecting. People mingled. Was it the quiet darkness, the jazz music, the freedom of summer after so long a snow- shackled winter, or something else? I saw, felt no tension, other than that which I carried within me.
      Altai is not a perfect town, but in spite of the pain of economic restructuring and layoffs, it appeared to be one of the very few urban communities in China where mere aspiration was (if briefly) transcended, and replaced with a certain peace, cooperation, harmony – and the enjoyment of goals reached.
      On Sunday we drove back to Karamay along the same road. At least familiarity made it seem a little shorter. A few miles before the dust zone, the driver stopped to pick wild mushrooms and we all got out to explore this fragment of the Kazakh pasturelands. We continued on our way, got filthy dirty from the invasive dust, sat in silence as we passed through the forest of oilfield equipment and reached home in a dazed state. However, it did not matter. I had tasted Kazakh yogurt by the bowlful and that alone made this trip worthwhile.
 
September 13, 1998
 
Denise:
Never forget that
This country, and all that
Is in it is
Yours.
There your dreams take you, and there
Can your feet bring you, perchance by
Walking today,
Skipping tomorrow, and
Running next year –
And the next.
 
Never forget the
Zeal
Of those who
Built this land and gave it to
You.
Indeed, were you a drop of
Water on sand, a blade of grass on
Concrete,
Consider them as a princely inheritance,
Given
Especially for
You.
No more the bleak
Buildings, no longer the
Road wandering nowhere,
No more the small boxes of life!
Open your eyes and
See
What has been given
You:
Every building a palace,
Every road with a purpose, and
Every box a
Pedestal to stand on, to
See what is there and what
Can be done.
 
Never forget that,
Though you be surrounded by
Mediocrities on occasion,
This land and you are
Gifts for each other.
Yet even here the road

Ends not.
 
 

 
Twilight of the Idiots.
 
      This year, 1998, was a bad one for the trees. With the coming of summer and the sudden arrival of millions of green fluttering leaves, those trees that had failed were starkly revealed, cut down with axes and taken away on trucks or on freight tricycles. There were hundreds of them — not throughout the city but throughout sectors of the city alone, a scene repeated over and again. To me, it looks like a triage, with some staying put and surviving and some staying put and dying. Or perhaps a symbol.
      It is early July and I have two weeks to go before leaving this place and spending a few weeks in another city with a new friend. We have never met face to face but were introduced by a common friend. Perhaps we will like, then love each other; perhaps I will fail and be taken away like the trees. . . . Now however, it is early July and the summer’s fire has not yet reached its zenith. I do not want to be here during August. Of course, for those plants and flower beds which are well watered there seem to be no limits — the marigolds outside one of the university buildings are no longer dainty flowers, but have explosively grown into a primeval micro-forest.
      Last week my teammates left and returned home to England. In a few days about nine Americans are expected to arrive and teach a summer English program. It is review week at the university and the students want to be left alone to prepare for the exams. I have no idea what they are up to right now, only that at some as yet undisclosed time we will meet again for the exam. I leave them, not with a sense of fulfillment or of any expectations for the next time we meet, but with different feelings. Comparatively speaking, earlier students were watered as it were from a spring of new water, but these students were offered water from my own cisterns. It is perhaps not surprising that “free-talk” topics, meetings and relationships have dried up. All for lack of water, and one to deliver it as it should have been.
      For about two weeks now I have been in my room, every night and for much of each day. Of course, there were visits to the outside, talks with my English friends and others, but these were but interruptions to the larger theme of life in a box. . . or a clamshell. Perhaps, as an observer and not a doer of life, the image of a clam “filter-feeding” is appropriate, for this is how I have come to better understand this place, even though I am reclusive. I have resumed pacing the floors in the apartment, small as they are, but the thoughts are churning and repetitive, not creative. Sometimes something illuminating comes to mind, but this certainly does not come from me.
      I leave the room because I am hungry — either for food or more deeply for company. On most days I call up a friend or two. Each talk lowers the water in the cistern a little more, and besides, the talks are usually the same. I sense people laughing at me as I talk on the phone. It is but a short step from being the lonely foreigner to becoming the village idiot.
      The road from the university to the downtown area is now uncomfortable to travel at noon. It is almost high summer. It is also a time of layoffs all over the country, and people everywhere are taking second or second-rate jobs as vendors to make money and keep themselves occupied. Many sell ice cream, yogurt, soft drinks, sunflower seeds and other small things. The vendors and their stalls lie strung out along the street, like cast off pearls looking, waiting for an oyster to receive them. They draw electricity for their cart-mounted freezers from somewhere, rig up sheets of old cloth as awnings, and tie the cords to trees or bricks placed on the sidewalk. After they go home the bricks remain on the sidewalk, ready to trip somebody up in the dark. If there is a pipe-lined hole in the ground they plant a large, brightly colored beach umbrella in it to keep off the sun.
      I visit a few of these vendors for a specific item — usually yogurt or fruit juice — but also for something more intangible. One — she sells the fruit juice — makes me feel quiet and at rest as if it were my mother giving me shelter and something to drink. She and others like her are consoling to visit. The others I avoid, or else I ought to avoid for my own good. I wonder how this all appears to the onlookers. Probably ridiculous, as I wander the streets, looking for consolation in yogurt pots and brief companionship with street vendors. Yet, for all that I barely know these people, they represent much of what makes China noble — along with all the other lowly, common people I have seen in every corner of the country. At certain times I think that one of these people — from the peasants, attendants, workers, teachers, students and the like — is just the kind of person I would like to marry. Whether this is a flash of truth or a flash of madness remains to be admitted.
      The final week has brought changes. The curtains in my bedroom need to be cleaned in preparation for the next foreign teacher. Throughout the year I had kept them closed against the dust, and to that extent I was largely successful. The curtains were filthy and on the stone window ledge I gathered a small pile of dark gray dust. The curtains also served to shut me out from the outside world, and help keep me inside. I knew much of what went on outside, but they knew nothing of the person inside — but perhaps they did. For a year, that curtain, fastened and tied shut, filtered out the outside world, but not its sounds. For me, the courtyard was a world of sounds, of children playing games known the world over — but only to children, of housewives talking in Uighur or Chinese to each other — I knew everything but understood nothing, of the pigeons circling overhead with the wind whistling through their foot rings — whom I followed in my imagination, of the neighbors playing Chinese checkers under the courtyard shelter outside — the light from the naked bulb piercing the curtain and marking the ceiling as I stared upwards from my bed, and the clicking of the wooden checker pieces on the concrete table driving into the inner room that is my mind like repeated gavel blows. . . . All that changed when I took the curtains down. All of a sudden the room became naked, exposed; if I clapped I could hear a slight echoing. Everything became bright and I would often look up at the fluorescent light to see if I had forgotten to switch it off. For a while I even retreated away from the outer rooms and their windows to the center of the apartment, to where people could not look in at me.
      The summer teachers — eight, with the ninth arriving later — are here now and have begun teaching. They are new to this scene in many ways but full of vigor. It is time for a change of crew and I am glad for it. However, their coming and watching events unfold as they should makes me think of cycles coming to an end, of returning to an earlier time. It was four years ago that I came out of going nowhere to the summer teaching program in Bengbu. That summer was indeed a kind of awakening and began a four-year love affair with this place that is China. Through travel, looking, listening, eating, teaching, and making friendships I went it would seem everywhere. Yet this was not my doing. Seeing those new teachers, whom I hope will be changed and inspired like I was, makes me think of the beginning and wonder if now is the end. Hearing a Chinese popular song which was well known that summer in 1994, the year of miracles, made me wonder. There have been many times of success, as well as of failures and emptiness, but I have found my home here and I want to stay. For now, I am going home for a season; I know this is the right thing to do and so I have peace. There are those I love back home too, as well as places I want to visit.
      It is now two days before departure. The cistern is virtually empty and the only thing which interests me is leaving, or else withdrawing. Who knows what I shall do in the big city for two days while waiting for the airplane to an uncertain future.
      How funny it is that on the eve of departure one’s eyes are opened to the world one took for granted, each measured step of the traveled year. I hear of places I never knew existed, speak to people who wish they had used the year to practice their English, or begin a new acquaintance which if started ten months ago could have been a promising friendship by now. Just as this desert city is a microcosm of the larger nation, so this year has been a miniature in its own right.
      I hope it has not been in vain. In terms of being in the right place at the right time, I am confident, but at times when I am alone in my blue-and-white painted room roving Xin Jiang in my imagination, I wonder. But the place and the life here are glorious.