“Denting navel,” my mom stops to whisper.
WE PULL IN TO Guilin just before three in the afternoon some twenty-two and a half hours later, most of which I spend trying to sleep and listening to Chinese lessons on my iPod. Andy wants me to come down and sit with them on the lower berth and… I don’t know, dent navels or something, but I leave my upper bunk only when I have to use the toilet.
I’m not in a great mood. I slept like shit, my leg and hip ache, and I could use a decent meal-shrimp chips and noodles in a cardboard cup didn’t cut it. Andy and Mom, though, they’re all chirpy, like they’d spent the night in a Hilton and had a full course of room service.
Guilin is in Guangxi, a province in China’s far south, between Guangdong and Yunnan. First time I’ve been here.
It’s warmer than Beijing at least. Grey and damp, almost drizzling, but I’m okay in a jacket and a hat.
The Guilin train station looks like just about every Chinese train station I’ve been in: a big, swoopy roof topped by the giant gold characters for “Guilin,” too much slippery marble pavement, too many touts swarming on us like mosquitoes: “Lady, need taxi? Hotel? Go to Yangshuo? Tour Reed Flute Cave?”
“Buyao. Yijing youle.” Sorry, dude. We don’t want, we’ve already got.
Mom tugs on my shoulder. “Honey, why don’t we take a cab?”
“Because they cost too much and they’ll want to take us to their ‘special’ hotel. Besides, most cab drivers are crazy.”
“Andy says-”
“Forget it!” I snap. “We’re taking a bus.” A lot of the bus drivers are crazy, too, but my logic is at least buses are bigger, in case we crash.
I’m still in my bad mood as the bus to Yangshuo pulls out of the train station’s parking lot. It’s a big bus, with decent bucket seats and a dirty video screen up in front, which probably means bad Hong Kong movies played at an earsplitting volume for the next hour. Mom and Andy sit next to each other in the seats in front of me. In the seat next to me, I get my backpack. Fucking typical, I think.
Not that I’d be good company or anything.
A few minutes into the ride, it starts getting harder for me to stay pissed off. Because even though Guilin so far looks like your typical Chinese city-green glass high-rises with cylindrical towers topped by what look like giant versions of cocktail umbrellas, stained concrete apartment blocks, white-tiled storefronts, karaoke parlors, half-constructed complexes wrapped in green plastic netting and bamboo scaffolding-there are these weird hills in the middle of it, hills that rise like giant monoliths or misshapen half-formed pottery, and a couple of them remind me of animal silhouettes, almost, and I flash on those sculptures at the Ming Tombs, only furred by green.
Also, the video screen stays blessedly dark and silent.
The farther we get out of town, the more of these hills there are, and even the predictably crazy bus driver’s attempts to maneuver around three-wheeled “mosquito” tractors and big blue farm trucks isn’t enough to totally distract me from the landscape. It’s sort of like the moon, if the moon really were made out of green cheese.
Finally we pull around a broad curve flanked by a massive granite-faced hill, into a town. The first streets are lined with low, white buildings. Lots of cruiser-style bikes ridden by Chinese and Western tourists-you can tell they’re tourists by their ambling pace, their relaxed smiles. Farther along I catch glimpses of traditional architecture, probably reproductions, more hills, a small lake fed by canals. There’s a hotel in front of the lake, a low green building with a giant TV screen a couple stories high that’s playing videos of more of these crazy mountains lit up by lasers and fireworks. Why, I want to know? Aren’t the real mountains cool enough?
This is Yangshuo.
Our bus pulls in to a narrow, steep driveway, down to the parking lot of the Yangshuo bus station, a couple stories of dirty white concrete slabs and a crowd of idling minibuses. Across the top of the building, above a stall selling snacks, there’s a red banner in Chinese with an English translation underneath. The English says YANGSHUO TO SHENZHEN MANHOLE TICKETS, YOU CAN ENJOY FREE OF CHARGE IN THE MANHOLE GO TO HONGKONG.
I almost ask Andy what the Chinese actually says, since I still suck at reading characters, but I turn and he’s all busy helping my mom with her oversize wheeled suitcase.
Fuck it.
THE HOTEL WE’RE STAYING at is close to the lake, not far from the McDonald’s and a place advertising “corn juice.” It’s cheap enough and it’s clean enough, and that’s all I really care about. My mom and I are supposed to be sharing a room while Andy has his own, but I wonder how long that’s going to last.
“What do you feel like doing first, hon?” my mom asks as she unpacks her suitcase. “It’s probably too late to rent bikes today, but Andy says the ride over to Moon Mountain is supposed to be really pretty.”
“Just taking a walk,” I mumble. “Why don’t you unpack and do whatever, and I’ll meet you guys back here and we’ll go to dinner?”
“I wouldn’t mind a walk if you want some company.”
“Look, I just need a little…” I take a deep breath and start over. “Thanks, but I’m feeling a little stressed. It helps me to… you know, just think about stuff on my own.”
She frowns. “Well, okay, hon. Whatever you need to do.”
When in doubt, play the PTSD card, which is what “stressed” is code for. Works with my mom every time.
I am such a shit.
I walk along the lake and the canal and then down to the Li River, its broad expanse swaddled by fog. It’s getting dark, but I can still see the silhouettes of the lunar hills-one that looks like a wizard’s hat, another that resembles the big toe of some buried giant poking up through the earth.
It’s not totally a lie. I’m better, I know I am, but every time I start to feel okay, something happens, sometimes just some stupid little thing, like some asshole in a bar staring at my rack or a sour smell in a latrine, and it smacks me in the gut, and I’m right back where I was.
Below me an old man wearing a padded peasant jacket and a round straw hat rests a long pole across his shoulders with two fishing birds-cormorants, I think they’re called-perched at either end. He’s not fishing, he’s posing for photos. I see the flash of cameras as a European couple shoots off a few. Probably his last customers of the day. It’s almost dark.
I find a coffee place that advertises free Wi-Fi.
I NEED TO GET a hold of Lao Zhang, let him know what’s going on. I should have done it before, back in Beijing, but I didn’t feel comfortable even using my VPN once I knew the DSD was watching. Stupid, probably. Like Harrison said, they can find me wherever I go. But I feel safer somehow, getting out of town. Being someplace different.
And a random Internet connection with a virtual private network has got to be safer than trying it from my apartment.
I get out my battered laptop. Power it up. Connect to the VPN.
It takes me a few times to get a connection. The government’s really ramped up the Great Firewall since all this Jasmine shit started.
Finally I’m in. Over the Wall.
I log on to the Great Community.
It’s the same welcome screen as always: the beach, the ocean, rendered in a texture that looks like brush strokes. A three-legged dog splashing in the surf. A giant Mao statue, bleached and faded, half buried in the sand like some sort of Sphinx, seagulls nesting in his outstretched hand. Farther up the beach, the Twin Towers, leaning against each other for support.
He started it as an art project, he told me. And a safe place, for him to work, for me to visit. Like we used to have for real.
It’s changed a lot since the first time I saw it. There are others here now, other avatars. Maybe a hundred people. Artists, mostly. Writers. Musicians. Where before there was only a dumpling restaurant and a house, now there is a little village, with a nightclub, a gallery, more houses, crazy constructions that don’t fit neatly into any kind of category: windmills cobbled to nuclear plants, castles that morph into trees and mushrooms, crazy-ass shit that doesn’t make any sense to me. But then a lot of the art stuff never did.