The first two areas up for exchange were vacated on June 7, and prior to the arrival of the new immigrants, the areas held handover ceremonies.
The Shaanxi handover ceremony was not held in the provincial capital but outside a small village. All around us were loess hills and gullies edged with the terraced fields left by our ancestors’ tilling. The hills extended off into the distance as far as the horizon. This deep and benevolent soil had nurtured untold Chinese generations across the ages, but now the last group of children to be brought up here were bidding it farewell.
Ten children from the handover commission, five Chinese and five Americans, took part in the ceremony. It was a simple affair. We took down our flag, and then the American children raised theirs, and then both sides signed the agreement. The American kids were all dressed as cowboys, evidently taking this as their new Wild West.
The ceremony lasted ten minutes. As my hands shook, I lowered our flag and clasped it to my chest. The five of us were foreigners now. We said nothing, numbed from the exhausting work during the migration. It would take time to fully understand it all. The vast yellow land was like my grandfather’s weathered face, and now that giant face that stretched to the horizon was staring silently up at the heavens. There was not a whisper of sound. All of the many things the earth may have wanted to tell us were buried beneath it forever, and in silence it watched us depart.
Not far off a Chinese helicopter was waiting to carry us to Gansu, the second province scheduled for exchange, and away from this land that was no longer ours. I had a sudden impulse and asked the American children if we could be allowed to walk there. The little cowboys were shocked: “It’s over two hundred kilometers away!” But in the end they agreed, issued us special travel permits, and wished us good luck.
Then a puppy came running over from the now-uninhabited village, nipping incessantly at our legs. I bent down and took him in my arms. The helicopter flew off with an empty cabin, its thunder receding into the distance. The five of us, plus a puppy born on this very land, began our arduous journey. We couldn’t say why. Was it longing? Or penance? We just felt that so long as our feet still were on this soil, no matter how hungry or thirsty or tired we got, our spirits still had sustenance….
The handover ceremony in South Dakota took place beneath Mount Rushmore. Giant faces of four of the greatest presidents in US history watched in silence as a red five-star flag was raised; later, people would remember a different set of expressions on those faces, but that wasn’t the focus of our attention at the time.
Unlike the chilly loneliness on the other side of the world, here several hundred American kids watched the ceremony, and a military band played the two national anthems. Once the Chinese children had raised their flag, representatives of the two sides came to sign the agreement. The Chinese representative signed, and then it was time for George Steven, governor of South Dakota. As several hundred kids watched intently, he ambled over to the signing table, slung a backpack off his shoulder, and took from it a stack of pens, fountain pens and ballpoints both, over a hundred in all. Then he began signing, using each pen for only a dot or two before setting it aside and picking up another. He signed for fifteen minutes, and it was only when the crowd’s protests grew too loud that he straightened up from the table. He had signed with nearly one hundred pens, and apparently was somewhat annoyed that his parents hadn’t seen fit to give him a longer name. Then he launched into a loud auction of the pens, with an opening bid of $500 each. As I watched the price skyrocket, I was seized with anxiety, and in a flash I thought of the signing table! But I was too slow; a few other kids had already rushed over to dismember it, and in the blink of an eye the poor table had been reduced to splinters of wood in the hands of dozens of kids. I glanced down at the flag in my own hands, but it did not belong to me. Looking about me for something else, I had an idea. I turned and raced into Carvers Café, and as luck would have it in a side room I found the tool I wanted: a saw. By the time I came back out, the bidding had climbed above $5,000 on George Steven’s last few pens! Two flagpoles towered before me; on one fluttered the brilliant red Chinese flag, which clearly was untouchable. But the other, which once held the Stars and Stripes, was empty. I hurried over and started sawing, and in a matter of seconds I had cut it through. As it fell, a crowd of kids ran over hoping to take it for themselves, and then fought to break it into pieces, no matter that the wood was too thick to snap. My saw managed to get me two segments, each about a meter long, but I was too tired to fight for any more. But two was enough! I sold the saw for a couple thousand to another boy, who immediately joined the pack tussling over the flagpole like they were in some ferocious football game. I auctioned off one of my pieces for $45,000 but kept the other to sell later for a higher price. Then the army band members starting selling off their instruments, and it was havoc for a while as things got out of control. Some kids who hadn’t claimed anything, and who had no money for the auctions, began crowding around the Chinese flagpole, and it was only when soldiers with machine guns from the Chinese Navy vowed to defend the flag and the territory it stood on with their lives that the kids finally left in dejection. Later, everyone regretted auctioning things off on-site, since memorabilia from the first territorial handover quickly rose in value tenfold. Luckily I held on to one piece of flagpole; I used it later for seed capital to open a transport company in Xinjiang.
Now the three leaders had reached the end of the exhibit, the prehistoric gallery of the origins of Chinese civilization. In the previous galleries they had felt in awe of the finely crafted objects from earlier ages, but also perplexed, since it seemed as if an invisible wall kept them separated. The estrangement had been most acute when they had entered the premodern gallery, and it had almost sapped their courage to go on. If even the not-so-distant Qing Dynasty was an entirely unknown world to them, had they any hope of understanding any earlier age?
But contrary to their expectations, the farther back in civilization they went, the less of a separation they felt, and now that they had reached its remote origins, they had the sudden feeling of being in a familiar, inviting world. As if, after a long voyage through strange, incomprehensible lands, all of them peopled solely by incomprehensible adults speaking incomprehensible languages and living a different kind of life, almost as if they came from a different planet, now they had reached the end of the earth, and had found a children’s world just like their own.
Those splendid, exquisite premodern artifacts did not belong to children; the humanity that created them had already grown up. Humanity’s childhood may have been more remote, but it spoke to children all the same. The three children stared intently at the Yangshao culture[8] artifact: a clay pot. The crude object reminded them of a rainstorm from their young childhood, and of forming a similar object out of mud under a rainbow after the storm had passed. The age before them was the age of Pangu separating heaven and earth, of Nüwa mending heaven, of Jingwei filling up the sea, of Kuafu chasing the sun. Humanity grew up, but its courage slackened, and no more did it create such earth-shattering myths.
8
A Neolithic culture that flourished along the Yellow River 5000–3000 BCE, predominantly in what is now Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi.