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May 21. Beautiful weather. I hired a guide in Xuelin to smuggle me across the Burmese border. We looped round the official border post and sneaked into Burma at Zuodu. The exhilaration of leaving China was overwhelming. I felt like an escaped prisoner. I tore off some leaves for mementoes. We crossed ancient woodland and fields of high grass and saw a mountain village with the same conical huts as Xuelin and Zuodu. We climbed over its wooden fence. There were lots of pigs but very few people. It looked like a model primitive village. My guide was afraid of crossing Decapitation Gully alone, so he found a local to take us through. The gully was indeed quite frightening. Looking up, all I could see was a thin line of sky. In the past, neighbouring villages met here to fight their battles. The victors would march home with severed heads and stick them on the village gates. I remember Chairman Mao politely suggested to a Wa delegate in Beijing, ‘Now that we have entered the modern age, surely you could rethink the custom of placating grain gods with human heads. Perhaps you could use monkey heads instead.’ Following that remark, the skulls were removed from the Wa gates and the decapitation custom slowly died out.
Suddenly my two guides stopped and started whispering to one another. I was afraid they were discussing my head. The knives dangling from their waists were longer than mine. I sneaked a knife from my bag and stuck it in my belt, then asked them what the matter was. They muttered in Wa and pointed to the sky. At last I guessed from their gestures that a bird had flown across our path and it was dangerous to proceed. I said we could rest for a while and wait for a bird to cry out ahead. According to Wa custom, if a bird sings on the path behind, you should turn back immediately.
I put my notebook down, lean back against the tree and close my eyes. All I took from that foreign land were memories of old women with caved stomachs, girls with bloodshot eyes selling loose tobacco, a desperate mother crouched by a pothole, dropping potatoes to her son who had fallen down four days before while out picking berries, and a man dragging a banana tree to market hoping to earn some drinking money. People who live isolated from the modern world maintain their traditions, but also their poverty. In just thirty years the population of Xuelin has grown from three hundred to two thousand. The mountains’ resources are stretched to the limit, and the people have no choice now but to build a road. I rushed across that land, knowing I would never return. Those villages belonged to the past. My destination still lies ahead, somewhere on a different path.
The next day the roadworkers have still not arrived and the line of trucks is nearly four kilometres long. Business is roaring. To pass the time, I take out the chiffon scarves I bought in Kunming and planned to use as presents, and start selling them for two yuan a piece. Our bald driver is still standing inside the bus trying to sell off his consignment of ducks before they die of starvation. He charges one yuan for a live duck and five mao for a dead one. Peasants who bought the birds yesterday have roasted them at home and are now selling them for twenty yuan. The makeshift stalls are selling their chillied beans, spicy peanuts, tobacco, tinned beef and beer at double yesterday’s prices. A couple of newlyweds take turns to guard the presents stacked in the back of their truck. The bride’s dress is filthy. She is asleep in the driver’s cabin now, mouth wide open. The pink silk roses in her hair are crushed flat. The groom is in the back, whisking the flies away as he rubs his dead pig with salt. Someone tried to steal some cement from another truck last night and the driver beat him so badly he had to be rushed to the county hospital. The policeman who has come to investigate told me the driver is the son-in-law of a local Party secretary, and will probably be let off scot-free.
I sell ten scarves in an hour. As I sit beneath the tree on my folded jacket, my mind returns to Li Chengyuan’s comfortable sofa that I slept on a few days ago. His study was neat and tidy. There was a potted jasmine in the corner and all his books were bound in leather. His wife belongs to the Dai nationality and is a nurse in Baoshan Hospital.
Li Chengyuan is a very cautious man. He does not smoke or drink alcohol. He insisted I visit the local clinic for an inoculation against Japanese encephalitis. He is one of the few city youths who decided to remain in the countryside after the Cultural Revolution. He said there were subsidies for living in the frontier regions, and that the salaries were higher. The stalls outside his house sold large-grain Zhefang rice, the smell was delicious. The streets were full of foreign goods that had been smuggled across the border at Wanding. But drugs were rife too, and the town already had two detoxification centres.
He told me many of his friends escaped to Burma in the 1970s to join the communist guerrillas. I asked him how the city youths managed to clear so much of the rainforest. He took a swig of tea and said, ‘We burnt the trees then detonated the roots. Our political instructor made us dig one metre into the soil. He checked it with a ruler. Said it was our political duty to "expose the roots". Chairman Mao wanted us to "Change Heaven and Earth". We worked like slaves.’ He told me a girl from his group went for a piss in the jungle and was attacked by a swarm of hornets. The boys stood and watched her writhing in the sea of yellow insects, but not one of them dared go to her rescue.
His group spent a week in the Jinuo mountains, felling a sacred banyan tree to make way for terraced paddy fields. The tree had one hundred trunks. The locals called it Niunaixiu. All that remains of it now is a patch of dry land.
‘How did you get through those eight years? I wouldn’t be able to last more than a month in those mountains,’ I said, rubbing cream onto my insect bites.
‘There was a road seven kilometres away, with a petrol station and a farm shop that sold ice lollies and mangoes. We went there every Sunday to buy tins of canned meat. We sat under trees with a lolly and cigarette, and watched long-distance buses pull up at the petrol station and passengers get off to stretch their legs. Those people were our only contact with the outside world. They told us about the arrest of the Gang of Four, bell-bottom jeans, ballrooms opening in Shanghai. We knew about tight trousers two whole weeks before the central authorities banned them.’
‘But you could write to family and friends, surely they kept you in touch.’ When my brother was sent to Inner Mongolia, he visited us every two years and always left with large supplies of lard and soya sauce.
Li Chengyuan stared at the tea cup lid twirling between his fingers and said, ‘I have not told anyone this before, you must promise to keep it a secret. My real name is not Li Chengyuan, it’s Li Aidang. My parents were murdered in the Cultural Revolution because of the names they gave to my brothers and me. Being the youngest child I could have stayed in the city, but I knew it would be safer to leave.’
‘Aidang — love the Party. What’s wrong with that?’
‘My brothers were called Aiguo and Aimin. Get it? Love the Guomindang!’ He smiled bitterly. ‘My parents had no idea, you see, never occurred to them. Guo-min-dang. Who would have guessed? In 1979, there were still seventy thousand city youths stuck in Yunnan. Forty thousand went on strike, demanding to be let home. I didn’t join them though, I had just got married and wanted to stay out of trouble. Then the government announced that everyone could go home except for married couples. The next day a few shame-faced couples filed for divorce. By the second day, there were five hundred of them queuing outside the registrar’s office. The government then stipulated that divorces would have to be registered within the next seven days to have any effect. You can imagine the chaos. Suddenly there were seven thousand couples queuing for divorce. It was a sobering sight. Half an hour before the deadline, hundreds of frustrated couples stormed the office. The walls collapsed and several people died in the crush. In the following weeks the streets were filled with abandoned children. Some parents tied their babies to bicycles and stuck notes on the handlebars that said: "Whoever takes my child can have this bicycle." ‘