Back of Beyond (49 page)

As soon as I entered the imposing stone gates, I found a tranquil haven of peace where I remained for what seemed like a modest eternity, among the temples, statues, and shrines. I intended to climb Fung Wong Shan Mountain with the monks to watch the sunrise; I planned to have long and convoluted philosophical discussions with the two bearded travelers who had drifted in, but somehow the tranquility of the place seemed to remove all desire for diversion.

Well—until the following day at least when I met a lanky man with a vast frazzle of sun-bleached hair—while piling my plate with all kinds of unusual vegetarian delights in the communal dining room. He had come unexpectedly to this quiet place a few days previously and had decided to stay awhile.

“I don’t know what it was. Just a feeling that I was in the right place—like somewhere I’d been coming to for a hell of a long time.”

Mike was not one of your religious dabblers—collectors of spiritual shards of knowledge, scrapbooking through the options of Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism, and a dozen or so other more esoteric “isms.” I met them all the time on my travels and was often charmed at first by their newfound enthusiasms, their guru-gushings and patinas of centered calmness. Then I’d discover after long conversations that they were invariably as confused and anxious to nail down their spirits as most of us are, to define the edges of experience too precisely, to snigger at the unenlightened with the selfish smugness of eager disciples willing away their souls to the newest—or nearest—guru.

Mike was forty-three. A tall, tough Aussie adventurer, sinewed with life-on-the-road experiences, etched with a thousand traveler’s travails and brimming with tales that made my toes curl with envy.

And Mike had the spirit of a child.

Behind the hooded eyelids and bushy beard and leathery face was a baby sparkle, a hardly repressed joy in everything and everybody around him.

Our night-long dialogue in the tiny bedroom cell we shared (the monks believe in spatial economy even though we were the only overnighters at the temple) was as exciting as any in my journeys and adventures. We talked like kids—ideas rushing out of wild minds; new concepts whirling around us like confetti; truths tumbling over more truths in great piles of half-digested wisdoms….

Looking back I see he helped me realize there are special moments when you acknowledge one of the givens of real travel—a desire to leave worldly distractions and allow the child inside to emerge again, open-eyed, open-mouthed, goo-gooing at the mysteries and magic of places unknown. A sudden shining of utter innocence; a rebirthing in the midst of strangeness; a rediscovery of recesses in the brain untouched, unexplored. The salve of spiritual serendipity.

The brain is so full of fun and wonder. Back in the “swinging sixties,” rare (and invariably double-edged) dabblings with hallucinogens such as LSD, and other “consciousness-expanders” left me in awe of the mind’s amazing resources. We all possess an Aladdin’s cave of terrors and truths, memories and repositories of knowledge we never, never even suspected we possessed. Whole filing cabinets of the stuff, libraries; a Pandora’s box of power and perception that most of us leave well enough alone.

Blasting through the barrage of “no entry” mind signs, you enter realms of untold riches, touching the infinities of the human spirit, discovering the links that tie us all together like tiny molecules in some enormous entity too vast to comprehend and yet—there! A dim recollection of prebirth embryo states? A reaching back to the knowingness of the newborn babe (Wordsworth’s “streams of immortality”?). A desire to build again a new, surer foundation, to bring back the deepest perceptions to the blinkered grind of daily life?

But after all the excitement of such explorations, then come the dangers—the tolls of trespass. The fear of too much truth, too much new “reality,” junking the petty patterns of half-lived lives. The alarming consequences of totally changed perceptions. A wish for safe pragmatism versus the bright lights of new being. The fear of losing what you have known and trusted for so long; the fear of never ever finding your way back to the comfortable confines of consistency and discipline and order and the “measured tread” of your previous life. The fear of a whole new spectrum of options, choices, and possibilities—of unleashing too much of the child again to romp and play and build anew with new blocks of knowingness. Ah—there’s the rub! What if it was all wrong: what if the accumulated guilts, sorrows, pains and pangs, beliefs and faiths of the years have only been barriers—even comforting prisons—against the vast possibilities of humanity and the harmonies of a far larger whole?

Would you want to dabble further? Would you wish to continue the journey or rest in a safe haven? Would you prefer not to know at all? I’m still trying to answer such questions.

Mike left the cell early in the morning, when it was still dark, to climb nearby Fung Wong Shan Mountain and watch the sunrise. I’d planned to go with him but sleep finally came after hours of conversation and he must have decided to let me rest.

Later I waited for his return, but he stayed up on the mountain or maybe moved deeper into Lantau. I was disappointed. There was much more I wanted to talk about, to learn from this particular traveler. But travelers tend to keep traveling on, allowing things to happen as if ordained by a higher power. And that was fine. I was happy for him and his freedom. I was happy for the life-child inside him, the child he’d shown me; I was delighted by the child he’d rereleased in me.

I listened to the tape of one of our disjointed, rambling conversations and realized what a strange literary man I’d met, too. He had a great admiration for William Blake and quoted him extensively:

He blamed so much of today’s worldly problems—particularly in the West—on “the wrenching apart of the eternal mind—a shrinking of humanity from the boundless being of imagination into a mortal worm of sixty winters and seventy inches long” (Blake again).

Mike seemed to regard his fellow Aussies as “spiritual savages” (then a little T. S. Eliot) “distracted from distraction by distraction.” He added his own: “sham lives disguised by wealth and fashion.” And Yeats: “Men are born to die with their great thirst unslaked.”

“We’re now far too scientifically ‘clever’ to be able to survive without wisdom,” he’d said sometime in the early hours and then paraphrased Salvador Dali: “‘in a world dominated by “techne” we need the forces of psyche to restore the balance,’” and dropped in a fragment of Louis Sullivan: “‘the world is filled with knowledge; it is almost empty of understanding.’”

I found some of his conclusions depressingly negative. While it’s easy to be critically glib at some of the more garish outrages of man, particularly Western man, I can’t resist a bubbly optimism. I told him of a recent visit to Disney World’s Epcot Center where, in spite of all the hype and rosy-colored collages of our collective future, I came away feeling, Hey! maybe we’ve all got a chance after all….

Mike was cautionary: “Look—the greatest gift you can give the world is your own growth into consciousness.

“But that doesn’t have to be at the exclusion of all the potentials we’re creating. It took evolution a billion years to change things that we can change in one generation now—or less. Hopefully for the better.”

He quoted someone else, I’ve forgotten who: “The worthiest of men retire from the world to an inner world.”

“That’s fine,” I said, “but remember this bit of something I read last week: ‘The key has always been/in your hand,/to open the door,/that you’ve been raging round the world/always looking for.’ You don’t have to stay ‘raging round.’ The world needs you, everyone, to bring back a deeper—a wiser—context for all the possibilities.” Then I got in one of my favorite Henry Ford quotes: “‘Each man must live up to his potential for each man has God inside him.’”

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s another bit of Yeats for you: ‘Sometimes I hate reasonable people; the activity of their brains sucks all the blood out of their hearts.’”

“But this
is
heart stuff. I’m not intellectualizing. I really believe that we’re on the verge of making the world an amazing place to live in. You’ve got to be careful about getting stuck too far ‘within,’ y’know; that thing that Graham Greene said about ‘the universal desire to see a little bit further before the surrender to old age and the blank certitude of death.’ Fear of the finite can make hermits—or hedonists—of us all!”

“No one expects any more than that we be discreet in our abominations.”

“Who said that?”

“God knows.” He looked at my serious face and laughed, “I’m joking, y’know. What you’re trying to say is, keep a balance; do something with what you bring back. Right?”

“Right.”

“Yeah. I suppose that makes sense.”

“You really think so?”

“Surely. It’s just that there’s so much—inside.”

“That’s great. But it doesn’t have to stop you operating—outside.”

“Well, let’s take you,” he said. “You’re wandering the world, free as a fly—what do you bring back?”

“Well, I write and illustrate books on my travels. I try to share something of what I’ve seen and learned—and felt. And, whenever I can, I give Anne help in her work in the field of international blindness. I was an urban planner for god knows how long and…”

“Well, okay, yes, all that’s great but don’t forget your Yeats,” he said, still smiling. “‘The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’”

“Here’s a bit of your Yeats back at you. Surely the balance is the individual who explores both dimensions—inside and out—‘a person in whom the center has held.’”

He was honest. “I’m still looking for the center. I’m still on the inside.”

So I was honest. “I am too—I often feel like a small boy playing on the edge of an ocean of truth’—that’s Peter Matthiessen, by the way. But I can’t put everything on hold until I find it.”

“Show me a satisfied man, and I’ll show you a failure.”

“Yes, but what about a happy man?”

“Happy?”

“Yes, happy. You remember happy?”

He roared with laughter like a child. “You mean happy like in dumb blissfulness?”

“In a way—assuming that most of us are all pretty dumb in the great scheme of things. And bliss is a pretty nice thing to have while we keep bumbling along.”

“Who said that?” he asked.

“I did.”

“I may quote you on that.”

“No more damned quotes….”

But he was off again: “Ah, would that we might drift forever into the dreams we dreamed tonight….”

(And so on…)

I’m not really sure how many days I spent at the monastery, watching the monks, in their gentle rituals, joining with them for their vegetarian meals, and listening to the temple bullfrogs, chortling and burping in the evening like little mud-happy Buddhas. But even now, deep in dreams, come sounds of cymbals and chanting and the long echoing booms of the gongs….

Absolute chaos!

You wonder if the riders on the seventeen-hour overnight
China Flyer
special from Beijing to Baotou are embarking on some month-long migration to the back of beyond where starvation is rampant and drought assured. For over an hour now the hundreds of passengers crammed on benches and occupying most of the floor and the waiting hall of Beijing’s central station (just down the hill from the Forbidden City) have been checking, packing, and repacking their bags and boxes of food, their bottles of beer and flagons of rice liquor
maotai
(“liquid razor blades” is a popular simile). As soon as they discover a tad more space in their bulging sacks they’re off to the stores again to buy more dim sum, paste-filled buns, pink cakes with jade green icing, candy bars in fluorescent wrappers, jars of fruits and pickles.

The four of us watch bemusedly, me, Ed Duffy from Los Angeles (a self-made Chinese trader), and our two Chinese guides who are accompanying us to explore the more remote parts of Inner Mongolia.

Duffy is dumbfounded. But there again he’s always got that dumbfounded look even after ten years in the import-export business, as if the ways of China are totally beyond his comprehension but worthy of diversionary amusement nonetheless. Our guides, Yves and Barney (their Chinese names are unpronounceable), possess permanently out-to-lunch smiles. I asked Yves if he had bought food and he replies slowly and complacently: “I haave nooooles.” (I later discover the man is a noodle freak. He eats nothing but noodles. If there are no noodles around, he’d rather starve.) Barney, on the other hand, never seems to eat at all and just sips tea out of his own personal glass jar in a kind of nipple-sucking stupor.

Then an odd thing happens. It appears to me that, since this is my first time on a Chinese train, the other passengers obviously know far more than I do about the necessities of travel. So my amusement turns to concern and I join the throng, standing up at the stalls, cramming the little bags of food into my pockets, even buying a liter bottle of maotai (twenty-five cents!) in case the night ride is cold. Duffy still looks dumbfounded; Barney and Yves smile at me vacantly. But I feel more secure now. I’m ready for the journey too.

Beijing begins to pall after four days. I feel guilty even thinking this; it had been a childhood dream to visit this mystery-shrouded city, and I never found out why the actuality didn’t quite live up to the fantasy. Maybe it was the sprawling vastness of the place. Maybe I’d been spoiled by hustle-bustle Shanghai with its crowded vitality and Chicago-style grittiness.

My journey actually began boisterously in Shanghai, a vibrant port city, as I dodged constant armadas of bicyclists and frolicked through two days of dining at noodle shops and
dai pai dong
(stalls selling delicious stuffed dumplings for five cents a plateful), watching street barbers and elderly residents of the old walled city basking in bamboo armchairs and kids practicing calligraphy on little sidewalk desks, amazed by the frantic antics of live turtles, crabs, eels, mantis shrimp and water snakes in the outdoor fish markets, peering into mysteriously dark herbalists’ stores where mixes of stags’ antlers, caterpillars, dried frog, lizard tails, and ginseng were mortared-and-pestled into powdered “Herculean potency” remedies for “listlessness, debilitation of the lower limbs, and concerns of the sexual impotency.”

Beijing in comparison seemed a little too inscrutable. Unlike Shanghai it didn’t really feel a walking kind of place, except in the magnificent Forbidden City itself, which tells you so much about the old China—Rococo riches amid abject peasant poverty; celestially inspired harmony and order in an apparently ungovernable nation of vast deserts, impassable mountain ranges, and far too many people on far too little usable land.

The city was a totalitarian dream of grand monumentality with hidden human undertones. Broad boulevards, enormous ceremonial squares, and shady parks fringed by ancient temples contrast with the intensely intimate
hutungs
(alleys) where families live in almost identical three-room houses set in high-walled courtyards. Here the constant sounds and aromas of cooking (how the Chinese love their food!) and the liquid trills of caged canaries conjured feelings of domestic underpinnings and stability in this imperious capital city. I wandered, unchecked, among the gamblers, the old herbal stores, the endless ranks of parked bicycles, and found the human side much more enjoyable than the great boulevards and vistas of palaces and temples. After four days I was happy to leave and curious about the upcoming seventeen-hour train ride.

The great gates to the station platform are pulled back and chaos reigns again as we are rushed by the crowd, trying to locate our soft-sleeper compartment. After much deliberation about the relative merits of the three classes of rail travel—hard seat, hard-sleeper, and soft-sleeper—we had erred on the side of luxury and purchased the appropriate array of tickets at three different windows.

Then we almost lost them. We forgot you have to make a laborious journey back to the station to reconfirm your tickets even though we had only acquired them two days previously. Poor Yves offered to make the trek; it took him five and a half hours.

A stern-faced female guard in a loose-fitting green uniform (everyone in China seems to wear oversized clothes) led us to our tiny comparment and announced: “This is where you will stay. Please do not move from here.”

To emphasize the point she closed the door firmly behind her. It was stiflingly hot. Duffy tugged open a reluctant window. Immediately the door opened again and our guard strode between scattered bags and suitcases and pulled it shut.

“Window not open till we leave station,” she said loudly.

Duffy looked even more dumbfounded. Our two guides just sat nursing their smiles. I was the troublemaker. “We need one open window or door. Preferably both,” I said.

The woman spoke slow English but understood everything. She garotted me with a glance. But she left the door open.

A minute later two of the prettiest girls I had seen in Beijing knocked gently on the door and offered us a three-foot-high Thermos flask decorated with pink painted primroses. Barney and Yves smiled; the girls placed it in the center of a small window table along with a jar of fresh daisies.

Barney immediately became animated in a kind of blank-eyed way. It was like watching a robot at work. From his bag he pulled out an empty jelly jar with a screw lid. From the top pocket of his shirt he withdrew a plastic bag of something very illicit looking. (Marijuana in China?) But it turned out to be a far more precious leaf. The aroma of black China tea with jasmine and ginger overtones filled the compartment. From another pocket he drew a spoon and carefully measured the tea into the jelly jar. Then he moved to the Thermos flask, opened up a small tap near its base, and out poured the hot water. When the jar was three-quarters full he turned off the water, sealed the jar, turned it twice to mix the tea, and set it beside him on the seat to infuse. He must have been the happiest man on the train.

Yves, who had been watching the whole process impatiently then turned to his bag, pulled out a porcelain bowl and a plastic container bulging with what looked like huge white worms. (Duffy was doing his dumbfounded bit again.) He scooped a handful of the worms into the bowl, opened a little brown envelope he carried in a separate bag, poured a little white powder on the worms, and then held the lot under the Thermos tap. A pair of chopsticks appeared from nowhere; he stirred the mixture twice, sniffed it, and began putting the worms into his mouth with the chopsticks in a grotesquely hedonistic manner.

“Noodles?” I asked.

“Nooooles,” mumbled Yves. “I laav noooooles.”

Duffy and I decided to start on the maotai. It was going to be a long journey.

At 3:32
P.M.
precisely the train pulled out of Beijing. Steam billowed by the window. Women, selling more of those spongy buns and lunch packs of cold rice and sliced pork in plastic boxes, made a last desperate pitch before being rounded up and removed by the guards. We flung open our windows and the cool air rushed in along with the steam. Almost immediately a waiter was at our door to discuss dinner. I say “discuss” because this was no mere “first sitting” or “second sitting” query; he invited our full participation in deciding the precise contents of our evening meal, including the nuances of the sauces to be served with the chicken and the pork entrées, the size and range of side dishes, the required liberality of seasonings, the type of tea, and (at Yves’s insistence), the thickness and consistency of the noodles. By the time he left we were all salivating with expectation. All except dumbfounded Duffy, who decided it was time to liven up the party with more maotai and ribald tales of his ten years as a China trader.

The train got off to a rip-roaring start, rocking through the suburbs of Beijing (endless brick kilns and half-built gray brick houses with gray pantile roofs, set in identical walled courtyards). Then we raced on into green rice paddy plains, wispy trackside poplar trees flishing by (that’s the sound they made, flish, flish…), miles of paddies, like green quilts edged by a blue border of hazy hills; people in the fields—hundreds of them—bent double in strange lampshade hats, wading through the mud, tending each bean shoot like a vine. Every inch of land was used. Yves watched intently.

“My father did,” he said.

“Your father was a paddy man?” I asked.

“Bad back. Finished now. Collects eggs.”

I can imagine. Hours every day, bent like that.

Barney slurped his tea from the jelly jar, with closed eyes. Then the pace slowed. For no reason apparent to us, the train suddenly slackened its furious pace and for the next two hours we began a stop-start sequence that left us all sweating and swearing at the ineptitude of the Chinese railroad authorities.

A girl came to refill our Thermos from an enormous tin kettle shrouded in a pea-green cozy. We were all so annoyed by the slow pace that we didn’t even smile at her. Barney had seen it all before. He opened one eye: “We arrive on time. Every time. No problem.”

He closed his eye and went back to sleep.

There’s a commotion. People are hurrying up and down the corridor. A whistle blows. The train speeds up. Ahead I can see a range of mountains rearing like a black tidal wave out of the plain.

“The wall,” mumbles Duffy. “It’s the wall.”

And it was the wall. The Great Wall of China. All ten and one-half seconds of it as we peered through the steam at the ancient sinuous monument snaking up and down a series of rocky hills. Then it was gone.

“That was a bit quick,” I grumbled, hoping I’d managed at least one blurry photograph.

“You’ll learn.” Duffy smiled complacently. “Only slows down when it gets boring. Goes like the clappers when there’s something worth seeing.”

Dinner was a feast and, for ninty-five cents a head, one of the best bargains in the world. After an enormous porcelain bowl of aromatic broth flecked with tree ears, the dishes just kept coming: chicken with celery and black mushrooms; tiny pungent shrimp with mustard greens, large medieval-banquet-size slabs of broiled lamb, yellow and green beans in soy sauce, wonderful fried potatoes glazed with a sugar-candy coating, stewed duck with bok choy, glazed pork casserole with white slivers of melon. Admittedly the flavors lacked the spicy richness of U.S. cosmopolitan restaurants, but there was an honest earthiness to the gravylike sauces. After five stop-go drowsy hours on the train, eating came as a joyous diversion. Fellow passengers grinned at our enthusiastic devouring of platter after platter. They passed us bits of their own special foods: little bottled sauces brought lovingly from home, pungent pickles, a lemony spice that gave the rice piquancy, a soy-and-sesame-oil concoction with the sear of Szechuan pepper, thick squashy dumplings with delicious pork and black bean centers…. We responded with cigarettes, ballpoint pens, maotai, and a slab of Hershey’s chocolate, which was passed from hand to hand like the finest Russian caviar.

Evening shimmers of sunset across endless miles of rice paddies. Figures silhouetted purple against translucent patches of light. A filigree of poplars through the warm air. In the soft-seat compartment the telling of long tales, high-pitched laughter from a crowd of white-shirted Chinese businessmen, slow careful card dealing, smoky shadows next to a flooded bathroom, women in blue uniforms sweeping, always sweeping, and bringing more hot water for the giant Thermos flask.

I sneak down the train to the hard-seat carriage, avoiding the female guards, who love to pounce on wanderers with official glee. The noise increases in the hard-sleeper section (more offers of maotai, cigarettes, and dumplings steaming in hot water) and reaches true cacophony in the hard-seat. Smoke, the smell of cooking food, singing, shouting, spitting of melon seeds, belching, and smiles. Miles of smiles. Bright teethy (and toothless) grins and deep guffaws as I burn the inside of my mouth with a modest-looking dim sum laced with liquid fire. For a few moments I feel aloof from it all, but very soon I become part of the throng: a man shows me his winning hand of cards hidden behind his yellow nicotine-stained fingers; dice players seem hypnotized by the constant click of their grubby cubes; another pulls back a bright red shawl from a baby and shows me the most placid of cherubic faces, plump and pink cheeked; someone gives me half an orange neatly trimmed, each segment open like a flower; an ancient man with thin wisps of gray beard flings back the top of a straw basket to reveal four snow-white ducks, trussed and teary eyed (he smacks his lips and sniffs deeply as if he can already taste them!).

Duffy had described the hard-seat area as halfway between a cattle truck and a college bean feast. John Belushi would have loved it. One cry of “Food-fight!” and the place would have blown wide open. Another sticky bun appears in my palm. I’m beginning to love it all….