Into China

We woke up in Vang Vieng at 6 a.m., ready to return to Ventiane for our Chinese visas (in processing) and head north. Such optimism, such chipper, knowing so little about the interminable journey that would end in first delirium, then panic, and finally vomiting.

It was five hours to Ventiane, where we found a bus leaving in one hour for Udom Xay, a northern city that was close enough to the Chinese border. That was to be a thirty-hour bus ride through the Lao mountains, often on unpaved roads, during which time was measured by the pendulous motion of the bus and the corresponding swishing between our ears. Straight ahead, all we ever saw was either dark forest or the land's martyrous plunge. The road itself dodged to the right, left, or backward as soon as it escaped our headlights.

In Udom Xay, a bus was leaving in thirty minutes for Mueng Laa, the first major city in China. The ride was ten hours. At the border, Chinese officials pored over our passports, plucking at the binding and peeling back the paper. We finally arrived in Mueng Laa and checked into a hotel for 40 yuan (~$5 U.S.). That was all we had, though, so we set off to find an ATM, dipping and swaying as we walked. After checking a dozen banks that wouldn't take our cards or our Lao kip, we found a woman who spoke a little English. She told us that there was only one place nearby that would take foreign cards, and she wrote the name down for us.

The first person we showed the characters to pointed us back in the direction of the bus station. We walked past it and asked another Chinaman for confirmation, and he pointed us back in the direction we'd come. We bounced back and forth this way, making shorter and shorter runs, for a half hour until we asked someone in the center of our pattern, the bus station. She pointed to the schedule on the wall.

So Mueng Laa was the problem, there were no foreigner ATMs there. We had to go to Jinghong, five hours away, and the tickets were 33 yuan each. We got our money back from the hotel and begged pitifully with the bus ticket people. A stranger finally came to our rescue with 10 yuan, one minute before the last bus to Jinghong was leaving. We made it on board, and once there we discussed the other options we'd had, all of which could have become very real if we were short one benefactor. First, we could try to hitchhike with people we couldn't speak with. If that didn't work, we could sell Mike's watch and my mobile phone. Still no, then we would have torn our clothes, left our shoes, and posed as beggars. As a last resort, we could have sold our exotic milky bodies to Chinese businessmen.

Milking our ignorance

Needless to say, Mike puked in his sleep that night.* So as not to anger the hotel matron, whom we had already had a charades argument with, he stuffed the sheets away in the corner of the room. We kept the "do not disturb" light on so no one would find them until we left.

A few days later, we came back from a day trip, and the girls in the lobby were giggling at us, speaking Chinese and tugging on their shirts. Ah yes, they must have found the drying apparatus. We had washed our clothes in the tub and strung them up in zigzags throughout the room. We found our clothes dried and folded on Mike's bed. What's the point of a "do not disturb" light anyway? we wondered. Just then two hotel girls, who didn't speak a word of English, knocked on the door.

They came in waving some sort of a fee chart that was all in Chinese, jabbering unintelligibly. I covered my mouth and then my ears to express my confusion. They shook the paper, on which one set of characters was underlined, more emphatically. I tried to join in the argument.

"You and your friend are both really pretty," I said, jabbing an angry finger at them.

Mike kept telling them he didn't understand, for some reason using the Thai phrase. One of them rubbed the bedsheet and then pointed to the number 70 on the paper. I thought I'd figured it out. I pantomimed vomiting and pointed to the bedsheet. They threw their hands up and nodded with relief.

"You keep quiet," Mike said to me, "and don't try to show them that you understand. I'll take care of pretending I don't know what's going on."

He tried to tell them we had paid for the room already, four nights, they should check the books. I wondered why he was trying to fake this particular manner of confusion, when there were worlds of insults and anecdotes that would have had the same non-effect. The girls stomped their feet and yelled harder.

"Why don't we just make out and forget about all this?" I bellowed at them.

Eventually they left, but they came back with reinforcements. We ended up giving them some money, but we had exhausted them into accepting a third of their asking price.

These people had treated us coldly for the past few days, and we felt like we had finally won them over. This is because arguing is a traditional Chinese pastime. When judging the length of a taxi ride in Jinghong, you have to account for the driver stopping to have several arguments along the way.

Travel brochure

Jinghong is the capital city of Xishuangbanna, the southernmost district of Yunnan province. To quote from our district map: "Virgin forest, rubber forest, fruit forest, banana forest, tea mountains, and etc, form the pictures of green sea, and it seems that the green wave will just come into your heart. There are many pretty Dai girls who have slender figures and beautiful hair."

Jinghong itself is an illuminated city. Everywhere are varicolored lights pulsing, gliding, fading to black and then awakening with a start. Azure-lit ferns and purple-gilded roofs. Worst is the Supercenter Skycity Shopping Vortex, madness of spins and counterspins, flashing spacegate, towering logos, like a hundred prostitutes pulling back garments to incite your consumer's member.

Zoom out now, quickly, and see the outlines of wooden huts and shivering rice fields at the edge of the radiance. Further still and see Jinghong as a pulsar in vast black space.

City of lawless children

Here in Jinghong, babies live the lives of thrill-seeking libertines. Dangling from the arms of their pliant parents, they defecate on the sidewalk at whatever spot pleases them. We've seen them release their spoor from the edge of a high balcony, the torn bottoms of their little pants flapping in the wind. Outside the mini-mall, they gather around a wading pool full of fake dinosaurs and real fish, jabbing their nets in the water and shouting curses. They fill their buckets with fish and stegosaurs, then dump the helpless creatures onto the sidewalk. At the river's edge, they climb into giant plastic spheres and are tossed into the water, whence they tumble about the ball drooling in their abandon.

As far as older children, ages four to six, we often see them in the alleys, setting fires to cook found turtles, or chasing each other with BB guns. Today we watched a toddler pursue a chicken while flailing a cable whip. Another boy was standing in the middle of traffic (often going both ways in one lane) and playing with his yo-yo.

And the din I hear from my fourth-floor window, that says something. From the blurred rabble that rises up from the streets and markets -- think amusement park, or Colosseum, maybe both -- one sort of sound escapes intact, and it's the ringing voice of a Chinese child, demanding, singing, or laughing like a pirate.

One hundred cups of tea in three days

We were out walking in Jinghong when diarrhea struck Mike like a mud torpedo. He hurried toward home, and I spent the rest of the day in a Western-style cafe with books I could read. I returned to the hotel to find that Mike had made friends with a man named Shuo San, an artist, writer, singer, and former policeman who belonged to the Akha minority. This province, Yunnan, has supposedly been difficult to govern throught China's history because of not only its rugged terrain but its disparate ethnic groups, including Shuo San's. He was the first person we met in China who spoke English well, and though I enjoy shouting "Poop!" at the supermarket, it was a relief to speak with him.

Mike told Shuo San that he comes from North Carolina, but this was received blankly. He saw that Shuo San's cigarettes were "Virginia-style" and told him that he was born in Virginia. Shuo San's face lit up, and he sang "Take Me Home, Country Roads," from beginning to end.

We hung out for the next few days, and always sidling in and out of the picture was Shuo San's driver, a big Mongolian who was quiet and removed until things needed to get done. He would decide on the restaurant, inspect the kitchen, and order all the food, but he never paid. Shuo San evaded most questions about him, including those about his other job. On the third day, Shuo San had no car because his driver had to pick up an imperiled friend in Burma (currently a serious danger zone). The driver laughed heartily, drank heavily, and seemed to do whatever he wanted to. When we went out to eat the other night, he wanted to hear a basketball report, so he pulled the car up to the edge of the dining room and blasted the stereo with the doors open. No one dared say anything.

While his driver was in Burma, we rode a bus with Shuo San to his brother's village and tea factory. We walked on trails among the tea fields and the high stepped terraces. As we walked, Shuo San plucked a leaf from a branch and blew into it, making it sing a high and hopeless song. He pulled another leaf and gave it to Mike as a cure for his chronic and powerful diarrhea. Then he showed us how to drink nectar from a banana flower. We ate several other fruits and leaves from the trail before we arrived at his brother's restaurant.

The decor was polished, but all made of wooden poles, and Mike noted that it would make for a top-notch theme restaurant in America. The food was diverse and satisfying. Fried fish from the mountain stream, rice pudding-soup, some kind of non-peanuts that made peanuts taste like sand, and lots more. The elder member of the family was smoking tobacco from a bamboo bong the size of a chimney. Mike tried it, but his narrow Western face was too small to form a seal. As usual, the women served us and cleaned up. They were friends, but food-servers are otherwise addressed coarsely in southeast Asia (Girl! Where is my food?). At this outing and elsewhere with Shuo San, we were constantly moving from one place to another to drink tea.

*Mike did end up thoroughly sick, with a fever and sudden explosions from both ends. At our stopover in Ventiane two days before onset, our friend had Chid shaken Mike's hand and creased his brow: "Michael, you are very ill. You are too hot."

Mike recovered quickly, but recalling Chid's perceptive touch gave us pause.