I need to check out the places in Langhai’s video. See if anyone knows him. But first I need to figure out where those places are.
I have to decide how I’m going to handle this.
Lunch, I decide.
MY HOTEL IS UP a little hill. I head down it. With my knit hat on and a sweater, I’m pretty comfortable. It’s funny, because Kaili looks like a lot of other small Chinese cities. A little run-down. Lots of concrete and red brick, round grey roof tiles. Maybe a few more trees. But there’s something kind of pleasant about it. I’m not sure what. It feels relaxed, I guess. Not so many cars. The air is clean.
I wander down a narrow street with no sidewalks. There’s a market here, tables selling fruits and vegetables, meat, tofu, spices. Noodle stalls. I’m tempted to stop at one of those, but I keep going. I hear people talking, and I don’t have a clue what they’re saying. It doesn’t sound like Chinese at all. Kaili is the capital of the Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture-at least that’s what the book in my hotel room said-and I guess most of the people here aren’t Han.
And then I hear this crazy music. It’s like… I don’t know how to describe it. Pipes. A drone. High-pitched women’s voices. I mean, I’ve heard plenty of Peking Opera, and it’s nothing like that. This slips into my head. That musician who used to live across from Lao Zhang back in Mati Village, he’d love this stuff, trance music, with a beat.
As I approach the intersection, I see the parade.
It’s not a big parade. Just a line of musicians and singers. The men are wearing, like, bell-bottomed pants with embroidered trim. The women, red-embroidered skirts and silver headdresses, big silver necklaces that drape over their chests like floppy collars. The men carry these pipes fringed with red yarn and ribbons, and the pipes are so tall that they brush the leaves of the trees.
Is this the every-third-day big festival, I wonder, or just the normal daily one?
I follow them.
They go through a gate, weaving into a parking lot. I think it’s a restaurant. Or maybe restaurants-there’s more than one building. Lots of restaurants are like this in China, where you have different levels of service and price. Private dining rooms for special groups. Public rooms for everyone else.
With the musicians and all, I’m guessing they cater to tourists.
Straight ahead is a one-story building painted a kind of greenish turquoise, with a mural on the front that’s this psychedelic design of dragons and flowers, so intricate that it makes me dizzy.
Or maybe that’s because I haven’t eaten.
I go inside.
YOU KNOW, THEY’RE PRETTY used to foreigners in most of the places I’ve been in China, but not here. Everyone stares. It’s like I’m some kind of celebrity or something, maybe the kind that gets loaded and ends up on the cover of the National Enquirer.
Then the hostess, who’s wearing an outfit that looks like the female musicians’, except without so much silver, breaks into a smile. “Welcome, welcome!” she says, and indicates a table. “Qing zuo!”
I sit. The other customers check me out. They seem friendly anyway. A lot of smiles. They’re small, most of them, short and trim. I never think of myself as tall or big, but here I am.
“Rice wine.” The hostess has returned with a younger waitress in tow, who’s bearing a small clay jug and a cup, like a sake cup, on a tray. “Local specialty. Please, try a little.” At least I’m pretty sure that’s what she says. Her Chinese is hard for me to understand.
I’m not crazy about Chinese wine, but I don’t want to be rude. “Xie xie,” I say. “I am interested in trying local specialties.”
She pours me a cup. And it’s good. Kind of sweet, but not syrupy, and without the chemical burn of baijiu. “Very good to drink,” I say, and she pours me another one.
Great. Is this one of those situations where if I don’t drink, I’m being incredibly impolite and they’ll hate me? Maybe I should go ahead and risk being hated, considering that I am on a mission here.
I drink it. The mission’s not going to happen till after lunch, right?
I have a fish with sour cabbage and pickles and sesame-flavor tofu, some more rice wine, and it’s all really good. A couple of guys at the next table ask me where I’m from. “Beijing,” I tell them. They laugh. “Your Chinese sounds like a Beijing person,” one of them says.
What brings me to Guizhou? they want to know. Vacation, I tell them. “I’ve heard Guizhou is very beautiful.”
Oh, yes, they tell me, and proceed to rattle off a list of places I need to visit: Xijiang Village, Langde Shang, Shiqiao, Zhaoxing Dong Village, some cave whose name I miss, and Huangguoshu Waterfall-“biggest waterfall in Asia.”
“Many things to see in Guizhou,” one of them tells me. “You should stay here awhile.”
I nod. But there’s not much chance of that.
“I saw this video about Kaili,” I say. “Very beautiful places. If I showed you, could you tell me where they are?”
I RISK SWITCHING ON my iPhone. The GPS is off, I tell myself. So is the Bluetooth, and I have a VPN installed on the browser. What are the odds that someone can find me, just because I turned my phone back on?
I really have no idea. I never did figure out how the Suits kept tabs on me last year.
Buzz Cut, though, he can’t know what the Suits know about me, right?
Assuming Carter didn’t fuck me over.
I’m suddenly feeling like drinking more rice wine.
“Is that a new iPhone?” someone asks. “How much does that cost? Very expensive in China!”
Another time, I’d maybe try to explain American cell phone company contracts, but not now. “I don’t know. It was a gift.”
I find the video and play it for the crowd.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I SET AN ALARM, get up early, drink some coffee. Go downstairs at 7:30 A.M. and meet the driver I hired yesterday.
The places in the video, they’re all near Kaili, I’m told. Most of them famous, at least around here. Xijiang, the Thousand-Family Village. Shiqiao, known for its handmade paper. Other places whose names I don’t remember but that I have written down on a piece of paper.
“Can we visit them all in one day?” I ask the driver.
He looks at my list, compiled by the folks in yesterday’s restaurant. Frowns. “Maybe a day and a half.”
“I don’t have a lot of time.”
“We can try to hurry.”
WE GO FIRST TO Xijiang. It’s a tourist trap, with a hundred-kuai entrance fee, but a beautiful one. Wooden buildings with carved doors and windows, rising up a hillside in layers, like a beehive. Wooden signboards shaped like butterflies. A quiet river winds through the center of town. Stone streets. Noodle stalls and souvenir stands. And ATMs and a place to buy phone cards. We enter at a long wooden bridge, grey roof tiles supported by wooden poles, carved beams, a balcony up on top, and are greeted by lines of old men and women, singing and playing pipes, offering shallow bowls of rice wine, which I’m wishing were coffee given how early it is. I have a cup anyway-you know, to be polite.
I see a sign for a coffee place, but it’s closed.
I wander around the town for a while, up the hill to the next level, until my leg starts aching, and then I sit and try to think it through. I watch a small group of Chinese tourists pass by, led by a guide wielding a pennant flag. Thankfully, no bullhorn.
Would Jason be in a place like this? A Disneyfied Miao Minority village? With entrance gates and ticket takers?
I know I wouldn’t be, if I were him.
I limp down to the teahouse where the driver waits.
“Let’s go,” I say.
WE DRIVE A WAYS. To Shiqiao, a village where they make paper by hand. The mountains look just like the video, I think. Jagged and draped with mist. Those white banners, whatever they are-grave markers? prayer flags?-they’re everywhere. Stuck into the earth. Tied onto tree branches. Some of them have red dots in the middle, the edges blurred by the bleed of the paint into the white.