Demon Box

RUN INTO GREAT WALL

Verses appearing here are from the Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu. An older contemporary of Confucius (551-479 B.C.), Lao-tzu was the Chinese historian in charge of archives at the royal court of the Chou dynasty. He wrote nothing of his own but taught by example and parable. When the famous sage was at last departing his homeland for the mountains of his end, the keeper of the mountain pass detained him.

"Master, my duties as sentry of this remote outpost have made it impossible for me to visit your teachings. As you are about to leave the world behind, could you not also leave behind a few words for my sake?"

Whereupon Lao-tzu sat down and filled two small books with 81 short verses, less than some 5,000 characters, and then departed. No one ever heard where he went.

The dark was already pressing down out of the eastern sky when Yang at last swung off the main road from the village and opened up for his finishing sprint down the canal path. A hundred and thirty meters away, at the end of the row of mud-and-brick houses crouching along both sides of the dirt lane, his uncle's dwelling was tucked back beneath two huge acacias. A large estate compared to the other 10-by-10 yard-with-huts, the building housed his uncle's dentist shop and cycle-repair service, as well as his uncle's wife and their four children, his uncle's ancient father, who was Yang's grandfather and an inveterate pipe-smoker, wind-breaker, and giggler… also Yang's mother and her bird and Yang's three sisters, and usually a client or two staying over on one of the thin woven mats to await the repair of their transportation or recuperate from the repair of their molars.

Yang could not see the house as he ran toward the looming acacias, but he could easily picture the scene within. The light would already have been moved from above the evening meal to the dishwashing, and the family would be moving to the television in the shop room, trying to find places among the packing crates of dental molds. The only light there would be the flutter of the tiny screen beating at the dark like the wings of a black-and-white moth.

Yang knew just how they would look. His uncle would be cranked back in the dentist chair, a cigarette cupped in his stubby hand, his shirt open. His wife would be perched beside him on her nurse's stool. On the floor, in half lotus, Grandfather would be leaned forward, giggling, his long pipe only inches from the screen. Farther back his four cousins and his two youngest sisters would be positioned among the paraphernalia on the floor, trying to appear interested in the reports of how the flood along the Yangtze might affect rice quotas. Along the rear wall his oldest sister would be preparing the infants for the night, wrapping their bottoms and sliding them, one after the other, onto the pad beneath the raised cot. The bird would be hung near the door, covered against evening drafts.

In the other room his mother would be cleaning the dishes as quietly as possible.

His uncle would be angry that Yang was late again, but nothing would be said. A quick scowl turned from the television. No questions. They all knew where he had been. The only dalliance he could afford was the public library. For one-half fen a reader could rent two hours on a wooden bench and enjoy the kind of privacy a library creates, even when the benches were packed, reader to reader.

Yang had hoped to borrow one of the newly allowed classics of Confucius. He'd heard that their library had received the very first shipment to honor at last the birthplace of the great philosopher. But the books were all already on loan. Yang instead had to choose a more familiar work, Wang Shih-fu's Romance of the Western Chamber. It was a novel his father had continued to teach even during the harshest criticism of the "slave-ridden classics."

The last loan date on Western Chamber was almost five years ago. The last borrower was his father.

Without slackening his stride, Yang pushed the book into his trouser tops and buttoned his jacket over it. Not that his uncle would not know a book was there, of course. He almost certainly would. Therefore it was not that he was concealing it, Yang told himself. He carried it in his belt to have both hands free, for his balance.

For his sprint.

Fists clenched, he pumped hard against the descending gloom, trusting his feet to avoid the rocks and ruts in the dark path. He could have run it blindfolded, navigating by sound and smell – Gao Jian's machine, sewing there to the left; Xiong-and-son's excrement wagons parked in reeking rows, ready for the next day's collections; half-wit Wi snoring with his sows. He ran harder.

He was small for his nineteen years, with narrow shoulders and thin ankles. But his thighs were thick and his upper arms very strong from the weight work of wrestling. Beneath the book his belly was like carved oak. He was in good shape. He had been running home from school every night for almost four years.

With a final burst of speed he ducked beneath the curtain of acacia and into the yard of his uncle's shop. He nearly stumbled in wonderment. Everything was lit, the whole house! Even the bulb above the false teeth – still lit. Something had happened to his mother! Or one of his sisters!

He didn't go to the gate but hurdled the mud hedge and rattled across the brickpile. He charged through the door and the empty front room to the curtain across the kitchen and stopped. Shaking, he pulled aside the dingy batik and peered inside. Everyone was still at the dinner table, the bone chopsticks waiting beside the best plates, the vegetables and rice still steaming in the platters. Every head was already turned to him, smiling.

His uncle stood, a tiny glass of clear liquid in each hand. He handed one to Yang and lifted the other in toast.

"To our little Yang," his uncle declared, the big mouth beaming porcelain. "Ganbei!"

"To Yang!" The aunt and sisters and cousins all stood, lifting their glasses. "Ganbei!"

Everyone tossed the swallow of liquid into their mouths except Yang. He could only blink and pant. His mother came around the table, her eyes shining.

"Yang, son, forgive us. We have opened your letter."

She handed him an elaborately inscribed paper. He saw the official seal of the People's Republic embossed at the bottom.

"You have been invited to go to Beijing and race. Against runners from all over the world!"

Before Yang could look at his letter, his uncle was touching the rim of his refilled glass to Yang's.

"It is going to be televised all over the world. Ganbei, Yang. Drink."

Yang started to drink, then asked, "What kind of race?"

"The greatest kind. The longest kind -"

That must be a marathon, Yang realized. Now he swallowed the mao tai in a gulp. He felt the strong rice liquor blaze its way to his stomach. A marathon? He had never run a marathon, not even half a marathon. Why had they picked him? Yang didn't understand.

"We are all so proud," his mother said.

"All over the world," his uncle was saying. "It will be seen by millions. Millions!"

"Your father would have also been proud," his mother added.

Then Yang understood. The provincial chairman of sports had been a friend and colleague of his father: an old friend, and a man of honor and loyalty, if not too much courage. It was surely he who had recommended young Yang. A grand gesture of cleaning up. For things that had happened.

"He would have gone to the square and played his violin and sung, son. He would have been that proud."

Yang didn't say so, but he thought that it would take more than a grand gesture or a televised footrace to clean up that much.

The American journalists sipped their free drinks in the deep divans of the Pan American Clipper Club room, an exclusive lounge located above the lesser travelers of the San Francisco International Airport terminal.

Exclusive indeed. Not only did one need to know of its esteemed existence and whereabouts, one needed as well to produce evidence of acceptable prestige before gaining entry. While the journalists were not exactly first class, they were in the company of those who were. This was enough to get them to the secret door, past the doorman, and into the free booze.

"How do you visualize," a fellow club sipper insisted on knowing, "hanging this gig on a hook?So it is not just another dumb road race? I mean what are you hoping to hang it on?"

The sipper was a ranking executive in the business that owned the magazine paying for this journalistic jaunt to China, so everyone acknowledged his right to be a trifle insistent.

"The hook I have in mind," answered the first of the journalists, a big bearded boy who was the editor of said mag as well as originator of the jaunt, "is sport as détente. Remember it wasn't really Nixon or Kissinger that initially broke through the bamboo curtain; it was the Ping-Pong ball. This race is the first international sporting event in China since before World War Two. To me, that has meaning."

Meaning he really had no idea at all what to hang it on. The second journalist, bald, unbearded, bigger and older than the first, muscled his brow in a Brandoesque attitude of heavy consideration.

"Let me think on that a minute," he begged. He turned to the third journalist, absolutely enormous, with big blue eyes and a monstrous camera hanging over his belly. "What about you, Brian? What do you plan to aim at?"

"I can't take any point pictures until my writer comes up with something to make a point with, can I?" was the way the third journalist avoided the question.

The eyes turned back to the second journalist; his knotted brow indicated he nearly had his answer tied down.

"One of the main characteristics," he began, "about a bamboo curtain… is it's so damn thick. The only thing it lets show through is politics. For years no idiosyncrasies, no quirks, no personality has been allowed to show through."

"Until now?" asked the editor, proud of the way his man had wiggled off this hook business.

"Right. Until now. Now they are sponsoring this big marathon with top runners from all over the globe, even though the best Chinese marathoner is slower than the mediocre from the rest of the racing world. This may be the crack in the curtain for us to go angling through."

"Gotcha!" the ranking exec said. "Like ice fishing back in Minnesota: hafta hook something before the hole freezes back." He raised his martini to the trio. "Well, fishermen: here's to a successful trip. Bring us back a biggie -"

" 'Tenshun, Clipper Club membahs," the speaker over the bar drawled, "Pan Am's Clipper flight for Beijing is now available for boarding. Y'all have a nice trip."

In the dew-heavy dawn outside one of Tanzania's 8,000 ujamaa villages, tall handsome Magapius Dasong (best time: 2:20:46) sat beside the road on his wicker suitcase. He was waiting for the local bus that would take him to the central station in Dar-es-Salaam, where he was to meet his coach for the ride to the airport. The Dawn Express Local was already tardy by nearly forty minutes of daylight and Magapius would not be surprised if it became later by twice that time before the bus arrived. By then, his two coaches and three trainers would have proceeded on to China without their athlete.

How like the Tanzania of recent years, he thought; everybody gets in on the race but the runner. Such inefficiency. Such bureaucracy. Poor topheavy Tanzania, swaying and teetering. Even the most avid supporters of President Nyerere's socialistic progress were beginning to admit that the nation's economic strife was caused by more than increased oil prices or the recent droughts and floods. Oil prices had increased for all nations; droughts and floods had always been. And if sweeping socialist reform had increased life expectancy by 20 percent in a decade, it had probably increased the social woes by 30 percent! More thefts and less to steal. More schedules set and less of them met.

This decline of care for time was what most troubled Magapius. His countrymen once were proud of their timing. If a bird was to be netted, the netman would be tossing the net as the bird flew by. It was an appointment to be kept, a pact between netman and bird. A courtesy. What was the joy in a longer life when that tribal respect for time was becoming as rare as the old stylized dream dances?

As much as the race itself, Magapius was looking forward to visiting the People's Republic of revolutionary China. If the dream were to live, reaffirmation must be found there, in that mightiest stronghold of the experiment. Everybody knew there was no juice in Russia any more, no Kunda as the Bantu put it. No baraka, as the Arabs said. And the boatloads hysterical to escape Cuba and Haiti for the capitalistic coasts of Florida did not speak well of Castro's collective. But China… ah, China… surviving Mao's madness as well as Brezhnev's belligerence. Great China. If China could not accomplish it, perhaps it could not be accomplished.

He heard a motor and stood to wave at the approaching headlights. It was not the bus. It was a loaded sisal truck that had encountered the bus miles back, stuck crossways in the middle of the tiny road, front wheels in one ditch, back wheels in the other. The bus had been turning around to return to pick up last week's mail that the driver had again forgotten.

One of the sisal truck's three drivers boosted Magapius's luggage to the top of the load of fiber and invited him to join them for the ride on to the city. He couldn't join them in the cab, however. There was no room. In the nation's battle against rampant unemployment, there were now three drivers required in every vehicle of transport, whether they could drive or not.

Magapius thanked them and climbed the heap of fibers. How particularly Tanzanian – three men in a clean cab in filthy work aprons; one on top in the blowing white fluff in the only suit the family owned, black…

In the cramped kitchen of his uncle's house, Yang was studying mathematics. He had less than a week before the trip to Beijing, and his instructors at school had decided he could best prepare for his absence by staying home and studying on his own. From the adjoining room came the whir of the motorcycle motor as his uncle drilled away at the day's collection of cavities. It was a clever setup. Raised on its kickstand, the rear wheel turned freely against a simple wooden spool that in turn drove the gears that powered the drill cables. The drill speed could be adjusted by the bike's throttle, and the whir of the little two-cycle engine helped blanket the occasional groans his patients made in spite of the bristle of anesthetic needles in their necks and arms.

Yang was seated near the window. If the sun had been out it would have fallen across his high-boned face and bare shoulders, but it was overcast. It had been overcast for weeks. Since before the floods.

His sister came in from the backyard carrying a pan of green leaves and dumped them in a large kettle of cold water, singing as she did. Yang recalled the stanza. It was from a skit his sister's class had performed for National Day a year ago. The girls had learned the song from a play that was mailed out to all the primaries, a short musical dramatization emphasizing the value of early warning and treatment of stomach cancer, China's number-one killer. His sister had stopped attending school after that year, speaking of plans to join the People's Liberation Army. Now she washed cabbage leaves and stacked them beside her aunt's wok – delicately, as though arranging expensive silks – while she sang:

How very fine, Yang agreed without raising his head from the work text; how commendable. But please explain if possible how one uses the principles of Prevention First when dealing with the diseases of the revolution itself? Wouldn't the very cure be dangerously counterrevolutionary?

He closed the big paperback on his finger and turned to watch his sister. She was long past fifteen and rounding out rapidly. In a few months someone would accompany the girl to their communal market for her first binding undergarment. In a few years Yang would not be able to pick her from dozens her same age – the same white shirt, the same black pants, the same pigtails. Perhaps that was why she wanted to join the PLA; if the uniforms were always ill-fitting and baggy they at least were less uniform than what all the other girls her age would be wearing.

Now his sister sang and swayed in unfettered innocence, still flushing with young patriotism. Yang could recall the sensation – a thrill to be part of something vast and exciting. He could remember feeling that his blood was tolling in cadence with every heart in the village, to a great shared rhythm. When he was nine, he remembered, there had come a dreadful plague of flies throughout all the land. To deal with the problem their Great Chairman had done a mighty and yet simple thing. Mao had launched an edict proclaiming that while it was not required it would be a very good thing if all the schoolchildren in the land should bring to their schoolteachers every morning dead flies. Yang had dedicated himself to the chore with all the fervor of a warrior of old serving his emperor.

He spent hours each afternoon stalking the pestiferous foe with a rolled newspaper, slaying scores past ten. Hundreds and hundreds were poured each morning from his paper cone into the teacher's waiting tray. Throughout the land other children were turning in comparable kills. In less than a month the flies were gone, all across China. Each schoolroom was sent an official pennant to hang in the window. The red silk had filled Yang with the sort of pride that made national songs rise to the throat.

Then he learned from his biology teacher that the year preceding the Great Fly Kill had been the year of the Great Sparrow Kill. That year Mao had been advised that there were such-and-so-many wild birds in China and, during its little life, each bird could be calculated to eat at least this-and-that-much grain. Which came to a whole lot. So Mao had edicted that all the kids should go out beneath all the trees where all the birds roosted, and beat clappers all night every night until they roosted no more. After three nights the birds were all dead from exhaustion and irritation. All across China! How very impressive and commendable. Except that, in the season after the birdless year, there were all those flies…

No, the slogan songs no longer brought the old tolling to Yang's blood. He still enjoyed hearing it in his sister's voice but he feared it was gone from him forever, that ring, cold and gone.

But not the wonder, he was glad to say. Not that. For instance, what had all those schoolteachers in all those classrooms all across China done with all those dead flies?

The approach of the Beijing Marathon and its international coverage brought about a relaxation of many edicts and a return to some neglected ceremonies. In the go parlors, waitresses were allowed to dress in traditional servant's gowns and pour tea for the players engrossed over their click-clicking go boards with the elaborated obeisance of old. In the food markets, children could sell cones of nuts and keep their profits, as long as they had personally gathered the nuts.

In Qufu, the small town near Yang's village in Shangong province, a group filed out of the old cemetery. In spite of the solemnity of the occasion, there was about the group an air of victory, of lost grounds regained. Many of the mourners carried unveiled birdcages, a sight forbidden until recently, and some of the women wore heirloom brocade, still musty from so many years secreted away. Yes, victory! For the loved one they had just left behind committed to the keep of the ancestors had not been reduced to the usual wad of yellow-gray ashes and smoke in the wind; he lay in a real grave, and the fresh mound of earth above him glowed like a monument.

Especially in Qufu was this burial sweet. Qufu was the birthplace of Confucius. For centuries the townspeople pointed with pride to inscriptions on family headstones that proved they were direct descendants of the famous philosopher. Then, in 1970 a regiment of Red Guards marched through the town to the ancient cemetery and toppled all those headstones. When they retreated from the cemetery they hung a huge red-and-white banner across the high stone entrance. The words on the banner left little doubt about the Chairman's attitude toward the ancestors:

WASTE NO MORE GOOD EARTH ON THE USELESS DEAD. CREMATE!

Confucius himself was exiled to the purgatory of fallen stars, along with countless poets and essayists who had expounded on his work over the centuries. Teachers like Yang's father who continued to mention the philosopher were stripped of their positions and their clothes and pilloried in town squares as "enemies of the collective consciousness." Many were sentenced to correction farms and the cultivation of cabbages and leeks instead of young minds.

Confucius's contemporary, Lao-tzu, was never officially excommunicated, oddly enough. Perhaps because his work is so scant and so obscure; perhaps because historians have never agreed on his identity, or if he was actually a living person at all. He may have been too much a myth to comfortably condemn.

The procession stopped on the slope outside the cemetery and gathered to admire the birds and speak with old acquaintances and colleagues. One of the professors pointed down the hill. A string of runners were angling off the highway onto the dirt road.

"It's our young warriors!" he cried. "For Beijing. Those two. I have them in class. The two in front!"

He continued to shout and point, though it was obvious to all which pair of athletes he meant; their new uniforms shined like chips of clear blue sky against the dingy gray outfits of their teammates.

When the two front-runners passed the bottom of the hill the excited teacher yelled, "Chi oh, boys; chi oh!"- a slang expression the professor heard around school for "pour on the gas."

Other men applauded and repeated the call, until the sudden display of local pride made the women hold their ears and the birds fly in panic against the bamboo bars of their cages.

It would be Yang's last workout. The trainer had advised him to keep his customary fervor in check. But as always, when he reached this feeble cotton field with its nine grassy pyramids, Yang veered off the packed ruts and went hurdling through the rows. He headed for the tallest of the mounds. He didn't know the name for the huge escarpment, only that it was a feng, one of a multitude of false tombs built centuries ago by sly emperors hoping to thwart desecration by thieves.

He did not look behind him. He knew the rest of the team was far back, some probably still on the avenue, jogging in and out of the swaying buses and bicycles.

The only runner out ahead of him was his friend Zhoa Cheng-chun. Zhoa and Yang had pulled quickly away from the others passing the cemetery. But when he heard the cheering and saw the waving crowd up the hill, Yang had slackened his stride to allow Zhoa to run on ahead.

"Chi oh!" he had urged his friend, pretending to pant with exhaustion. "Pour on the gas."

To have kept up would not have been respectful. Zhoa was nearly four years his senior and already a member of the academy. Zhoa was the hometown hero and the provincial marathon champion. His time of 2:19 was second only to the 2:13 of the Chinese record-holder, Xu Liang. Yang felt he could have matched Zhoa's pace for many more kilometers, but he did not wish to show a discourtesy. He let him run on.

Besides, Yang liked to have this part of his workout to himself. As he left the road he could hear the people at the cemetery cheering for the rest of their school's team, far behind.

His sprint took him past the field girls working to salvage some of the season's rain-ravaged cotton, then along the dirt dike of the irrigation ditch. Without slowing he long-jumped across the shallow coffee-brown stream, his feet churning the air. His landing startled a small hare from the brush along the bank. Yang called after the zigzagging animal, "You too, long ears! Chi oh!" He heard the girls laugh behind him.

He slowed when he reached the steep path at the corner of the feng. It had drizzled again that morning and the worn dirt would be slick. The last thing he wanted to do before tomorrow's trip was slip on the red mud. To soil the beautiful blue warm-ups sent him from Beijing would have been close to traitorous.

The climb made his heart quicken in his ears and brought a light beadwork of sweat to his lower lip. That was good. He did not perspire easily, even in this French-made suit of artificial fibers, and he needed a sweat to flush the poisons and rinse his head. He ran harder.

When he at last achieved the flattened square at the peak of the dirt pyramid he was sweating hard and his panting was no longer feigned. His father had first brought him here, just a babe, carried piggyback. He had played with the milkweed pods at the edge of the little flat square while his father and his grandfather went through the complicated sparring dances with wooden swords or bamboo pikes festooned on each end with colored ribbons to better describe the swing and swirl of the maneuver. His grandfather still came, though rarely, and without the mock weapons. The routines the old man did were simple sequences and might be seen in any park or yard.

Yang went immediately into his tai chi quan routine. He did all the basic maneuvers plus some his father had created – Stand By to Kick Monkey Nuts, and Feed the Dog That Bites You. Then he moved on to the new National Routine that had been instituted since the fall of the Gang of Four. Much like football warm-ups – jumping jacks, toe touches, neck twists. After these exercises he commenced scurrying around the little earth square in a crouch, shadow wrestling.

He was a good wrestler. The summer before he had placed third in the Torch Festival in his age/weight, and for a time his instructors at middle school wished him to concentrate on that sport, leave distance running to those with longer legs. He demurred but kept in wrestling shape. When there was a wedding in the village he was the one called on by the bride's family for the traditional bout with the bridegroom's supporters. The families knew he could make a good showing against the surrogate suitors and, more important, when pitted against the groom himself, Yang could be counted on to lose.

Spreading his towel, he finished off his workout with forty pushups from his fingertips, then forty fast sit-ups, hammering his stomach muscles as he finished.

He forced his mind to calm as he pounded the familiar knots from his abdomen. Forget those cheering townspeople. What was there to worry about? No one expected victory. Only continuity: run from here to there and back, however long it took.

His fists drove out the embolism and at last he fell back, the clean clothes forgotten, and sent his breathing up into the sky. It was all one color. There had been no sun all day. There would be no stars that night. For months now the heavy sky had shut them out, like a pewter lid on a shallow pot.

He rolled over and gazed past the checkerboard grid of cotton and cabbage in the direction Zhoa had informed him that they would fly tomorrow to reach Beijing, thousands of miles away. Yang could not conceive of such distance, nor of the towering mountains and terrible gorges where, Zhoa had claimed, no one lived. No green fields crawling with work units like aphids on a leaf; no jam of smoky huts; no roads, no bicycles, no people. Just lifeless space, clear, the way it was on the rare winter evenings when the clouds were driven south by the cold, and the long flank of the night between his bed and the stars was laid naked.

He heard the girls laugh again and stretched to see over the milkweeds. The other runners were approaching at last along the road, meeting Zhoa on his way back from the turnaround. The girls were laughing at the way the team grabbed at Zhoa's belly to make him smile. Everyone liked to tease Zhoa so they could see his smile. It was spectacular. He had been blessed with an extra tooth, diamond shaped, right between his two regular front teeth. Bright and healthy too, his uncle had said of the phenomenon. Yang could see it flash even from his distant seat.

The giggling suddenly ceased and Zhoa's smile fled. Looking back up the road Yang saw three young men, carrying shotguns and examining the road ruts, pretending that they were on the trail of the runners. A joke, certainly, but no one except the three with guns laughed.

These were not ordinary hunters. Their unkempt hair and loud swagger revealed that they were labor toughs, a growing cadre of semidelinquents who had eschewed education for the factories and the fantan cellars. Their attitude toward the pampered students was well known. Especially sport students. There had been frequent skirmishes, and the toughs had promised more. Pampered people loping nowhere was contrary to the Spirit of the True Revolution, was their claim; just another sign of Western decadence, jogging into China instead of creeping. Let comrades seeking exercise take up the shovel! That is what the Chairman would have said.

Only in the last few years had competition become acceptable enough to come out into the open. It was like the pet birds singing uncovered in the parks again. And just this morning his sister had told Yang that she had seen a woman at the Friendship Hotel carrying a cat. It was still unacceptable to purchase a pet, but the animal had been shipped as a gift to the hotel by a recent guest from London.

"Can you imagine?" his sister had wondered. "From a foreign land, a cat?"

Only with difficulty, Yang thought, trying to reconcile in his mind such ironies as rude reactionaries and free cats and false tombs. For example, it had always been an irony to him that these fengs, the forced effort of thousands of slaves thousands of years ago, afforded him the loftiest feelings of freedom he had ever known. Except for running. If you ran far enough you could get free for a while. Truly free. Another irony. It seemed that freedom came as a result of forced effort, as though the brain needed the minions of the legs and lungs and heart to build for it the solitude of separation.

Suddenly his reverie was shattered by an explosion, then two more, then a final blast. He was on his feet, scanning the rows and ditches below. Early Nation Day firecrackers? The backfire of a tractor working late?

He saw the three hunters, running along the base of his feng, laughing and shouting and waving their guns. The leader, the oldest, with the longest hair and the biggest gun, bent to the cotton rows and lifted his prize high by the ears. The hindquarters were blown entirely away but the animal still lived, uttering long thin whistles and pawing the air to the delight of the younger hunters. The girls turned away in horror and Yang sat back to wait for the men to leave. He wrapped his arms around his stomach, shivering.

It was all extremely difficult to reconcile.

In the customs terminal of the Beijing Airport, the American journalists fidgeted nervously through the forms and waited for their bags to be examined, feeling that sudden gulp of realization that Yanks always get along with their first breaths of communist atmosphere – that "They-can-getcha-and-keep-ya!" gulp-wondering and worrying about the copy of Oriental Hustler among the shirts, the stashed gold Krugerrands and crank in the shaving bag, when out of nowhere, to their rescue and relief, came an ominous Chinese drugstore cowboy with a tight smile and a wallet full of official cards. He introduced himself as Wun Mude, from China Sports Service, and gave them each a stiff handshake and a sheaf of diplomatic documents. He rattled a few phrases in Chinese to the brown-suited Red Guards, and the bags were snapped shut and the three journalists whisked past the long line and the immigration officer, and they were outside.

"Always good to know somebody at city hall," the editor observed. Mude merely smiled and motioned toward a waiting van.

The athletes had been arriving from their parts of the world for days, according to their respective countries' budgets. The poorer were to fly in, run, and fly out. The better heeled got there a few days early to acclimatize.

The American runners had been in Beijing for nearly a week, wishing their budgets had been a little less well-heeled. The Oriental food had loosened their lower intestines and the Beijing air had plugged their lungs: "When you run into the wall in this venue," observed Chuck Hattersly of Eugene, Oregon, when he came in from a light workout, wheezing and spitting, "you get to see what it's made of!"

The Americans were quartered in the modern Great Wall Hotel, complete with elevator Muzak and hot-and-cold running houseboys assigned to each room. The visiting Orientals, the Japanese and Koreans, were in the Beijing Hilton. The Europeans were scattered between. The Chinese were in a large compound dorm with most of the other Third World entries. The day before the race, everybody had arrived except the Tanzanian, Magapius Dasong.

In his tiny double room at the compound, Yang lay exhausted and sleepless after the day's flight in the old Russian turboprop. It had not been the lofty joyride he had expected, this first trip off the earth. The old airplane had been noisy and drafty, the seats confining, and the windows too small. At first he had been thrilled by the great mountains, so steep and terrible looking, but when he examined the range through the field glasses passed him by his father's colleague, he saw that the wild slopes had been tamed. Centuries of hungry toil had chiseled them into steps, thousands of descending agricultural terraces.

Tossing now in his narrow bed, he wished he had never looked. Every time he closed his eyes to try to sleep, he saw those terraced mountainsides, each few feet of retaining wall and few inches of soil the effort of so many hands and years, for another precious ton of corn, another trailer of cabbage.

It had always been a peculiar thing to Bling, his first name. His father had called him Ling Wu, after his father the stone mason, and his mother had called him Bill, after her father the missionary. So his name had never really been William.

Yet from his first day of school in Pittsburgh he had been called William by his sixth-grade teacher. By his classmates, Willy Wu, as though it were all one word, an American Indian word perhaps, certainly not half-Irish, half-Chinese-an Indian name for an uncertain wind: Willawoo.

Then when he wearied of Yankee gook wars abroad and left-wing American breastbeating at home and transferred from the University of Pittsburgh back to his birthplace at the University of Beijing, his teachers had called him Bee. Bee Ling Wu. Because he had used the letter B as his first initial on his application. This name had in turn become, to the members of his track team, Bee Wing Lou, thanks largely to the persistence of the only other English-speaking member of the ragtag squad, a girl from Sydney. "Bee Wing Louie, as yer such a dashing little black-eyed bug," she had explained with the typical Australian love of wordplay, "yer more the sprint from-flower-to-flower sort, it looks to me, than a long-runner."

Indeed, his position on the Pittsburgh team had been in the 100 and the 200 around-the-bend. No world-beater there, either. He had moved to the distances as age and embarrassment forced him out of the dashes. He found a whole new track career in China. Modern Yankee know-how in the form of vitamins, shoes, and training techniques had made him the top 1,500-meter man in all of the eastern provinces. Times that would have been barely mediocre in the States won him in China ribbons and respect. From all but the saucy Aussie.

"Go it!" she would shout at him around the last turn of the 1,500, waving her watch in the air. "Yer pressin' Mary Decker's time me little Bee Winger, go it!"

And now the American journalists, after he had been introduced to them as Mr. B. Ling, were calling him Bling.

Bling Clawsby.

"Have your droll yucks," he admonished the trio, "before I tip them you're all KGB agents."

The photographer shook his head. "Nobody'll go for it, Bling. Mr. Mude told us we have the unmistakable landlord look of American capitalists."

Mude was the interpreter appointed to the American press for the upcoming special. He was forty and fastidious, with an impeccable Western hairstyle and outfit. For the same reasons that the famous pictures of Marx and Engels were to be taken down for the day of the race, Mude had been advised that it would be acceptable to wear something less jarring to the American public than the gray garb of the Red Menace. Something Western. So Mr. Mude had tailored a powder-blue Western outfit, replete with pearl buttons and embroidered longhorns. Taiwan-made cowboy boots glittered from beneath the blue cuffs. A six-shooter tie slide held his neckerchief tight to his throat. He would not have looked out of place on Hee Haw.

In the customs terminal at the Beijing Airport, however, there had been nothing funny about his attire. If anything it made him somehow all the more ominous, especially when he waltzed them past the customs guard with one word: "Dipromatic."

It had been clear from the first that he did not like English. But he had been assigned the odious language, so some test must have indicated aptitude; therefore, he must be qualified; thus he had conquered it.

Hence he could translate – after a stiff fashion – but could not quite communicate. He couldn't chat. He couldn't joke. He could only smile and say "No," or "One cannot," or "Very sorry, I fear that is not possible."

So the journalists had been relieved indeed to come across Bling in the lounge of the hotel, reading a Spiderman comic and listening to a tiny tape machine play "Whip It" by Devo. The journalists had skidded to a gaping stop. Here was a young Chinese wearing a pair of skinny blue shades, short pants, a crewcut uncut so long it stuck up in random twisted quills. The journalists were impressed.

"Isn't this a splendid surprise?" they applauded. "A Pekingese punk."

"Far out," Bling responded. "A pack of Yankee Dogs, escaped from the pound. Do have a seat. I can see you are about to buy a poor student a drink."

After repeated rounds of gin rickeys and ideological argument they enlisted him as a go-between, with an offer of free running shoes and a promise not to reveal his true identity in their story. "Have no worry," they assured him. "No one will ever know that Bling Clawsby has defected to the Orient."

The deal was struck and Bling was with them from then on. Mude didn't care for this New Wave addition to the retinue, but he tried to make the most use he could of it. In a way, Bling afforded Mr. Mude the opportunity to be even more inscrutable. He found he could relegate random questions to Bling. When asked "How does the sports academy select students?" Or "Is there legal recourse in China if, say, this crazy bus driver runs over a bicycle?" Or "Why is China doing this event anyway?" Mude could pass these difficult questions on with a curt nod. "Mr. B. Ling will explain this you."

"Explain me this, then, Mr. Bling," the writer pressed on. "If China wants to put her best foot forward, as you say, then why a marathon? The Chinese entries are going to get creamed."

Bling leaned across the aisle of the rocking bus to answer out of Mude's earshot.

"Contradiction, you have to understand, means something different to the Marxist mind than it means to you peabrains. Lenin claimed that 'Dialectics is the study of contradiction in the essence of objects.' Engels said, 'Motion itself is a contradiction.' And Mao maintained that revolution and development arise out of contradiction. He saw the traditional philosophy, 'Heaven changeth not, likewise the Tao changeth not,' as a prop the feudal ruling classes supported because it supported them. The so-called 'way' was therefore a form of what he termed Mechanical Materialism, or Vulgar Evolutionism, which he considered to constitute a contradiction within the very fabric of the transcendent metaphysical Taoism of the past. Dig? This was the real genius of his early years. Mao did not judge the old ways, he merely stoked the contradictions existing within them."

"Covered himself fore and aft, did he?"

"In a way. In another way, he set up the sequence that was bound to be his undoing. Contradiction may create revolution, but when the revolutionary takes control he tries to eliminate the very thing that brought him to power – dissent, dissatisfaction, distrust of big government. Revolution is a dragon that rises to the top of the pile by eating his daddy. So the revolutionary dragon has a natural mistrust of his own issue – see? – as well as any other fire breathers roaming the rice paddies."

"Sounds to me like it was this dragon's old lady what swallowed him," the photog remarked. He had been following the latest denouncements in the little English-translation newspapers.

"You mean the Widow Mao and her Quartet? Naw, she's just a foolish old broad happened to inherit the reins. Not enough class or courage or just plain smarts to pull off a conspiracy against old Mao, even on his most senile doddering day. No, what it was was Mao did some bad shit to stay on top of the dragon pile, to some heavy people. Imagine the ghosts of his private hell: all those people he had to liquidate to grease the works of the fucking Cultural Revolution, all those comrades, colleagues, professors, and poets."

"I thought this guy Mao was what you left Pittsburgh for, Bling. You talk now like he was your typical totalitarian."

"Contradiction," Bling answered, turning to look out the window at the endless parade of black bicycles, "has become the New Way for a lot of us."

"Is that why you like Devo?" the writer asked. He thought Bling with his funny crewcut and ragged T-shirt had said New Wave. Bling gave him a curious glance.

"I don't like Devo. I listen to Devo for the same reason I run – to get an endorphin rush." He patted his pockets, looking for his comb. "I run because it hurts."

The original intention of the meeting was to let the doctors and the press examine the seventy-some participants who would be running tomorrow's race. But what can a doctor know about a marathon man that the athlete doesn't already know about himself? What can a heart specialist say about a thirty-five-year-old phys ed fanatic with a 35-beats-per-minute heartbeat and heels calloused thick as hardballs?

So the physical examination was waived and worried warnings submitted in its place. Of greatest concern was the water.

"Do not suck the sponges. Drinks from race organizers will be on white tables. Private drinks on red tables. Take when you want. Private drinks must be handed in tonight for analysis."

Chuck Hattersly leaned over to whisper, "I get it! They're trying to steal our formula for Gatorade."

"Please don't injure yourself with strain. Take it easy. However, to avoid delaying the traffic and spectators, there will be cut-off points for the slow -"

The shuffling murmur of the room stilled. Cut-off points? No one had ever heard of cut-off points in a marathon. As long as you could put one foot in front of the other, you could run.

"Those who have not reached 25 kilometers by the time of 1:40 will be removed from the race."

Sitting amidst 60 other Chinese runners, Yang felt knots start in his stomach. He had no idea of his time for 25 kilometers. No notion, even, how far that was. From the village to the school? Half that? Twice?

"If you have not reached the 35-kilometer point by 2:20 you will be removed."

For a moment Yang was cramped with panic. He remembered the cheering crowd at the cemetery. If he were removed he could never return home; better not to start than not to finish! Then it occurred to him that all he had to do was expend his total force to reach that 35-km mark in 2:20; he could crawl the remaining distance.

"We also suggest if you begin to feel uncomfortable that you volunteer to drop out."

"Uncomfortable?" a gnarly veteran from New Zealand muttered. "Take it easy? The bleeding hell does he think we run for?"

"One important thing further. The water in the sponges is for wiping the face. Do not drink it. There will be plenty of drink at the tables. Our deepest suggestion is that you ingest no water from the sponges. Now. I wish you all once again good luck. And look forward to seeing you this evening for the banquet at the Great Hall. Thank you for your attention."

It had been a peculiar event, lengthy and uncomfortable. And if its thrust and purpose had been somewhat vague, to say the least, no one wanted to prolong it by asking questions. As the runners were queueing up for their buses, the writer, notebook and pen in hand, corraled Chuck Hattersly and inquired reporter-fashion what in his opinion was the upshot, the kernel of the long conference.

"Don't," was Hattersly's immediate summary, "suck the sponges."

After lunch there awaited, according to Mr. Mude, a plethora of palace and pagodas all deemed mandatory for a first-time visitor to Beijing. The journalists wanted to know if they might go instead to the compound assigned to the Chinese runners. Mude said this afternoon was prescribed rest for the Chinese entries. Then they asked to see Democracy Wall. Mude explained that Democracy Wall no longer existed. Quill-headed free-lunched Bee Wing Bling, feeling looser by the minute among his second-countrymen, explained that the wall in fact still existed but was covered now with billboards bragging about refrigerators with egg trays. No more homemade posters of dissent and protest. Mude felt obliged to further explain that those foolish posters had only caused confusion among the people.

"If one has comment, one can write the government bureaus direct."

"Right," Bling agreed. "It's better to cause confusion among the bureaucrats. They're trained."

"Ah." Mude swiveled his smile back to the journalists. "Perhaps you will like to stop at the Friendship Store before continuing to Forbidden City? They have Coca-Cola."

The journalists would have preferred to scout off on their own but since they were stroking Mude to try to get permission to follow tomorrow's race in a taxi, instead of sitting on their thumbs for two hours at the start/finish with the rest of the press, they had decided to try and keep on his good side.

And if he did not have a good one, to at least stay off his bad.

One sensed that beneath that Western suit and patient Eastern smile an irritability was beginning to bubble. Though Mr. Mude never said so, it was obvious to all that whatever affection he had ever held for Mr. Bling was now in rapid decline. Whenever he acquired tickets for a tourist attraction he no longer included the scraggly little student. Bling had to fork over his own fen to get in the Forbidden Cities and Summer Palaces. When Bling was finally fenless the journalists forked over for him. This made Mr. Mude twitch and fidget in his unfamiliar cowboy clothes.

The tour had taken a turn not to Mr. Mude's liking: too many Yankee guffaws at Bling's sardonic commentary on the Beijing scene; too much talk from which he felt excluded, especially track talk.

"You are also a runner, Mr. Wu?"

They were coming out of Beihai Park, with its white dome and holiday throngs of colorfully clothed school kids scampering about like escaped flowers. Mude had been mentioning the park's renowned reputation for centuries of quiet beauty; Bling had been filling in with notes of more recent interest that Mr. Mude had neglected to mention. Until two years ago, Bling had told them, the park had been closed completely to the general public, the lovely quiet of the lake undisturbed by rented rowboats, the massive gates barred and guarded. No one was allowed in except Mao's wife and her personal guests.

Bling had been explaining what a turn-on it had been, after years of jogging past the prohibited paradise, to one day, out of the blue, have the doors swung wide and be allowed to jog inside -- when Mr. Mude interrupted with that question about running.

"Damn straight I'm a runner," Bling answered. "One of your hometown heroes. Three years varsity, Beijing U. Come to a meet sometime, Mude; be my guest."

"A runner of distance?"

"I've done fives and tens. I hold the school record in the 1,500."

"Then you must be entered in tomorrow's heroic event?"

"Sorry. Tomorrow's heroes will have to run without Bee Wing Lou's company."

"Surely you must have applied? A running enthusiast residing in Beijing as you do?"

"It's an invitational, Mr. Mude… remember?"

"Ah, true," Mude recalled. "I had forgotten. Too bad for you, Mr. Wu."

Bling pulled down his blue shades to study Mude's face; it was impossible to tell if the mind behind that guarded smile were conniving, condescending, or what.

"Talk them into a 1,500 around the Tien An Men – like the Fifth Avenue mile in New York – then you'll see me out there busting my little yellow balls."

"That would be very enjoyable."

To get Bling off the hook, the editor asked if it might be possible to take a drive out to the Beijing campus to look over the sports scene, maybe catch a track practice. This time it was Bling who was reluctant and Mude who was suddenly permissive. True, he admitted, he did have preparations to make for the banquet, but saw no reason why they could not drop him off and continue on with Mr. Wu to his track practice. Everyone was left stunned by the sudden turnabout, and a trifle uneasy. When they dropped Mude off at the stark brick building he had directed the driver to, Bling became downright unnerved.

"That was the Bureau of Immigration Records!"

"Wonder whose name he's looking up?" the photographer wondered.

"I couldn't say for certain, but I'll bet you all a buck," Bling said unhappily, "it turns out to be Mud."

Nobody would cover the bet. The bus ride the rest of the way to the campus was somber and quiet.

In spite of the bright bustle of students, the campus was as grim as the pot-lid sky sitting heavy over it. One expects lawns on a campus, but most of the grounds were the same packed dirt that surrounded the rest of the city's dwellings, only not as well swept. The rows of gray-green gum trees made the walks and ways dim, like light undersea. The sullen looks of the workers did not help. Bling told them that there had been a lot of strife between students and laborers, who also lived on the sprawling campus. Bicycle tires slashed. Rapes. Gang fights between workers who considered the students arrogant and lazy and students who saw the workers as the same, only less educated. Without police protection the students would have been in sorry straits. "Out of a live-in population of about forty thousand, less than eight thousand are students."

"Sounds like the clods have the scholars unfairly outnumbered."

"In China," Bling moped, "t'was ever thus."

There was no track practice because of tomorrow's race, but three Chinese runners and the Australian girl were prowling the bleak cement gymnasium looking for someone with a key so they could get into the track room. Bling told them how to jimmy the lock and said he thought he'd skip the workout. The editor asked if they might take a look anyway, get some pictures. Reluctantly Bling led them down a dim concrete stairwell to a cracked wooden door in the cellar. The girl was gouging at the keyhole with a chopstick. Bling took over and finally dragged the door open and turned on a light. The room was a windowless cement box with a cot and a tiny desk. An iron rod stuck in the door frame was draped with a dozen tattered sweatsuits.

"Our locker room," Bling said. "Ritzy digs, right? And here" – he pulled a cardboard box from beneath the cot – "our equipment room."

The box was piled with shabby mismatched spike shoes, four bamboo batons, a shot, and a discus.

"The javelin is that thing stabbed yonder, airing them sweet-smellin' sweatsuits," the girl told the journalists.

Back outside, Bling put his blue glasses on and started walking back the way they had come.

"Gives you some idea why China doesn't have such great track times, doesn't it?"

When they got back to the campus gate their familiar bus was gone. In its place was one of the huge black Russian-made limos called Red Flags. It looked like a cross between a Packard and a Panzer. The driver stepped out and bowed and handed them a note and four embossed invitations.

"It's from Mude. He says the bus was required for other tasks, that this diplomatic limousine will take us back to the hotel to dress, then bring us to the banquet at the Great Hall. The fourth invitation is for Mr. Wu, and Mude suggests we advise Mr. Wu that a place has been reserved for him."

"Oh, shit," said Bling. "Oh, shit."

It might be the most beautiful dining hall in the world, certainly the biggest. A Canadian football game could be played comfortably in one of its rooms, with space left a-plenty on all sides for bleachers and bathrooms.

During the day there is always a small crowd outside, gaping at the Great Hall's grandiosity. Tonight, a very large crowd was gathered because two monumental events were occurring: the banquet for the Beijing Marathon, and the State Formal Dinner for President Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togoland. In a land without M.A.S.H. reruns or video games this was big potatoes.

The crowd waited on tiptoes behind the line, hoping to catch a glimpse of something exotic – a famous athlete; perhaps the glint of an African potentate's eye. All the limos. Certainly they had to be disappointed by the first passenger exiting from the big black sedan they had allowed through – a spiny-headed Chinese in plain brown sports jacket was all. The next passenger was better, a big occidental stranger with beard, and the next was yet better and bigger. The last apparition rising out of the upholstered depths of the Russian limo – why, he was enough to stretch even the most curious rubberneck to its limits of awe. The man was beyond size or measure, and he carried an optical arsenal of the most convincing proportions crisscrossed across his girth, like bandoliers on one of the bandit giants of old. Many of the onlookers went home immediately after, sufficed.

The foursome was late. The feast had begun. The roar of it could be heard down the marble corridors, drawing them on like the seductive roar of a waterfall. When they at last reached the two ten-foot urns at the door and were passed by the armed guard, they were as dazzled as had been the crowd on the walk outside. A room big as a blimp hangar, with thousands of people at hundreds of round tables, each table manned by dozens of bustling attendants refilling glasses, removing platters, producing new dishes seemingly from the very air.

An usher led them to the table assigned by their invitation, where they found the eight other diners all still waiting politely for their arrival – two middle-aged Africans wearing somber suits and expressions, two seedy-looking Beijing men in drab Sun Yat-sen, a beautiful oriental woman, two young Chinese runners and their coach. All stood when they approached and shook hands while the woman translated.

The black men were from Tanzania, a coach and trainer. They were somber because their athlete apparently had not managed to fly out of Tanzania for the race tomorrow; they felt obliged to attend the banquet insofar as a place had been reserved, but they were flying out in the morning, too chagrined by their athlete's absence to attend the race. The seedy pair were from China Sports, a limp but adequate little sports rag printed in English. The two young runners were from the same village in a distant province, their faces subtly different from the Beijing faces-flatter, darker, with something almost Gypsy dodging about the eyes. The larger and older of the pair responded to introductions with a dental display that ranked right up there with the rest of the day's sights: he had an extra tooth, right in the middle, and was not at all backward about showing it off. The smaller runner was as shy as his friend was forward, frequently dropping long lashes over his black eyes and buttoning and unbuttoning the sports coat he was wearing. Their coach was studiously aloof.

After the initial ganbei of introduction they all sat down for the first course of a meal that would prove to be a marathon in its own right. While they were stabbing at the lead-off oddities with their sticks, the prizes for tomorrow's winners were unveiled on a table in front of the raised dais – ten cloisonne vases, each bigger than the last, and a solid silver trophy that would return to Beijing each year for the new winner. There could be heard all across the room an audible insucking of covetous acclaim. They were very classy prizes.

The speeches then commenced to drone from the dais. They saw Mude had a seat very near the podium. He had changed his attire from Western western to Eastern western – a preppy dark-blue blazer with coat-of-arms. He was introduced and stood to speak. The photographer took Bing's little Panasonic cassette recorder from his shoulder bag. He punched the Record button and set it on the table. It soon became obvious that neither Chinamen nor Roundeyes could understand a word of Mude's address, and the multitudinous roar of small talk rose again from the tables. Mude didn't seem to notice.

The American editor began to interview his Chinese magazine colleagues and the coach. The writer took notes. The photographer busied himself with photographing the exotic dishes as they arrived and whispering descriptions of each into the recorder: if this marathon thing didn't float he might get a cookbook out of it:

GREAT HALL – NIGHT BEFORE RACE

(Much noise of dining; unintelligible speech over loudspeaker in b.g.)

WHISPER NEAR MIKE:… tiny tomatoes pickled and arranged in delicate fan, gingered eel, lotus root in oyster sauce, duck neck, radishes carved to look like roses…

EDITOR: Whose idea was this race tomorrow?

(Chinese translation back and forth)

FEMALE VOICE: He says it started as a mass movement, the idea. In New China all ideas come from the masses.

EDITOR: Why don't they have better times? Ask him that.

FEMALE VOICE: He says their fastest runner is two hours and thirteen minutes. You will meet him tonight. He is from a minority in Union Province.

EDITOR: What is a minority?

FEMALE VOICE: In China there are many! These two boys are called minorities. From some provinces they speak different languages.

YOUNG MALE VOICE (Bling): Those stars you see on the Chinese flag? They each represent one of the minorities.

WHISPER: Boiled eggs, pickled eggs, eggs soaked in tea, and one one-thousand-year-old fossilized egg for each table, like sinister black jelly with a blacker yolk…

EDITOR: Will you ask if China is ready to devote the time and specialization it takes to become world class?

FEMALE VOICE: He says, absolutely.

EDITOR: Was he an athlete himself?

FEMALE VOICE: When he was twenty he had great hopes of going to the Olympics. That was thirty years ago, a time of great turmoil in China.

WHISPER:…beans, peanuts, pickled walnuts, fish stomachs and celery flambé…

MALE CHINESE VOICE: Ganbei!

FEMALE VOICE: He says, "To the good health of your country."

ALL: Ganbei!

EDITOR: If one shows athletic talent is he given special dispensation by the government?

FEMALE VOICE: He says, yes.

BLING: Yes, indeedy!

FEMALE VOICE: He says that the person with particular talent will get better food.

BLING: That's why the basketball team has those giants. One eight-foot-eight fucker called the Mongolian Tower! That's quite lofty.

EDITOR: Is there a philosophy… I mean, what's the party line on physical fitness?

FEMALE VOICE: He says the party line is to become healthy first and then friendship and then competition.

EDITOR: I knew there had to be a party line. So why, ask him, did they never address the issue of fitness before, because -

BLING: They did address it. Mao made a big point of it. He was a goddamn health nut.

EDITOR: I mean was Mao aware of the fitness of the nation?

(Long Chinese conversation back and forth)

FEMALE VOICE: In 1953 Chairman Mao noticed China's health standard was low… because of disease and poverty. So after the liberation in '53 Chairman Mao decided to make it a special issue.

WHISPER:… pickled cherries, pressed duck, shredded ham, mashed mollusks, dugong dumplings, goose ganbeied…

MALE CHINESE VOICE: Ganbei!

FEMALE VOICE: He says, "To the sportsmen of China and the U.S."

ALL: Ganbei!

EDITOR: Ask them what they prescribe for an athlete who's injured? Do they use acupuncture?

FEMALE VOICE: He says, "Yes."

EDITOR: Can he give me any specifics of athletes who had acupuncture used on them?

FEMALE VOICE: He says he can only give personal experience. He was injured once and cured with acupuncture.

BLING: You know what the most recent study proves? I'll tell you what the most recent study proves: That acupuncture works according to just how fucking educated you are. The more educated, the less it works. Ganbei to the ignorant.

WRITER: Better watch that stuff, Bling.

BLING: Know why it's called Mao-tai? I'll tell you why it's called Mao-tai. Mao had it invented when he couldn't get a good mai tai.

WRITER: Bling's fortifying himself for the heartfelt thank-you he's going to give Mr. Mude for all this free succor. Good God, look what I found in my soup. A chicken head!

BLING: You better keep it. That's the only head you're gonna get in China.

WRITER: Let's see what else -

WHISPER: He's going in again, folks. Look out!

WRITER: Well, here's your basic pullybone.

WHISPER: He's working his way down, folks.

WRITER: Pull, Big Tooth, win a wish.

FEMALE VOICE: He won't know that. He won't, from the southwest -

BLING: She's right. I've never seen a wishbone pulled anywhere but Pittsburgh.

WRITER: Whatcha mean? Look there. His buddy knows. Okay, cuz, you pull.

PHOTOG: Let me get a shot -

ALL: He wins.

WRITER: You win. Ask him what his name is again.

FEMALE VOICE: He says his name is Yang.

EDITOR: Ask him what his time is.

FEMALE VOICE: He says – oh, he is very embarrassed; we've: made him blush – that he has no time. '

EDITOR: No time? Hasn't he ever run a marathon before?

FEMALE VOICE: No. The older fellow says he is a very good runner though.

EDITOR: Why was he invited?

FEMALE VOICE: His friend says because he; Yang, has very good wins in 5,000.

EDITOR: What was his time in 5,000?

FEMALE VOICE: He says he does not know his time. No times were taken.

WRITER: Ask him – ask him about his family.

FEMALE VOICE: He says he lives with his aunt and uncle near Qufu. And his mother. He says his father is dead.

WRITER: An orphan! Here's our story. The Cinderella orphan marathoner! A minority, unknown, shy, out of Outer Mongolia, sails past the pack and takes the gold. Just what I been wishing for…

EDITOR: Very nice. But he was the one that got the wish.

MALE CHINESE VOICE: (something in Chinese) Ganbei!

FEMALE VOICE: To the Long March!

ALL: Ganbei!

EDITOR: To the Long Run!

ALL: Ganbei!

BLING: To the MX missile system!

ALL: Ganbei!

WRITER: Now you've stepped in it, Bling. Here comes our dude Mude.

FEMALE VOICE: The gentleman of the press says that is Mr. Xu Liang coming with Mr. Mude. Our fastest runner. He has run in two hours thirteen something.

EDITOR: Two-thirteen! That isn't loafing.

MUDE: Good evening. I would like to introduce you to our Chinese champion, Mr. Xu Liang.

ALL: Ganbei!

WRITER: He tosses 'em, the champ does.

BLING: And this don't look like the champ's first stop. Hey, Xu Liang! To the Pittsburgh Pirates!

ALL: Ganbei!

MUDE: By the way, Mr. Wu; I have something for you. Be so kind.

BLING: What is it?

MUDE: Your official packet – your passes and name card and number. You have been invited to participate tomorrow, Mr. Wu. To run.

BLING: Oh, shit.

EDITOR: Bling? To run tomorrow?

MALE CHINESE VOICE: Ganbei!

ALL: Ganbei!

MUDE: Gentlemen and ladies, I must take Mr. Xu Liang to other tables.

EDITOR: Goodbye.

ALL: Ganbei!

BLING: Ohhh, shit…

WHISPER:… and now the desserts: almond noodles in mandarin orange sweet syrup, glazed caramel apples that are dropped hot in cold water to harden the glaze; no fortune cookies – never any Chinese fortune cookies in China…

Past midnight at the Beijing Airport, a rickety DC-3 fights its way down through a rising crosswind. It was coming in from North Korea with more than a ton of red ginseng and one passenger, on the last leg of a many-legged flight originating in Tanzania.

Magapius woke to find himself unloaded on a windy airstrip. The shadowy workers loading the bundles of ginseng on a truck didn't speak to him, and he felt it would be futile to try to speak to them. He stood beside his suitcase and watched, feeling more and more melancholy. When all the crates were on the truck he stepped forward to ask, "Beijing?"

The workers stared at him as if he had just appeared. "I run," he told them, demonstrating his stride. "Beijing." A worker grinned and jabbered, then they all grinned and jabbered. They loaded his bag in the back of the truck. Magapius was about to crawl in after it but the workers insisted otherwise. They made him sit in the cab with the driver. They rode in back.

In the Chinese compound Yang rolled from his cot and tiptoed around his snoring roommate and closed the window. The wind had not wakened him. He had not been asleep.

He looked down the street stretching dimly below his hotel window. The start at Tien An Men Square some ten kilometers to his right, the turnaround some twenty to his left. He did not think about the finish, only about the two cut-off points. He must stay close to Zhoa, who had accomplished this 20-K time before; then he must keep going that fast to the 35-K mark, even if he collapsed ten paces after. He could get up and walk then, if he chose, and return to the square hours behind the ten winners. If the million spectators had all gone home, all the better.

September 27, 1981. Tien An Men Square, Beijing, China. Race scheduled to begin at 11:05 a.m.

10:00. Sky clear, blue, bright. Air sweet and chilled. Crowds already packing the curbs, obedient, quiet. The P.L.A. and police everywhere nonetheless.

10:15. The motorcycle brigade is ranked and ready, resplendent in their white tunics and blue trousers, alabaster helmets and chalk-white Hondas.

10:25. Last of the traffic allowed past before closure, buses jammed with expectant spectators, honking taxis.

10:26. All stop. Quiet. Such a quietness from so many! What attention. What power! And what fidgeting uncertainty as well, in the face of its own power. Men coughing and spitting; women with towels pressed over their mouths…

10:28. The participants jog across the vast square toward the starting line, nervous and colorful in their various outfits, like so many kites rattling in the breeze before launch.

10:35. A regiment of P.L.A. double-times past (they no longer like being referred to as the Red Guard), resembling ill-fitted mannequins wound too tight.

10:54. Balloon-and-banner lifts off, falls back, waggles in the wind, tries again, flapping a long red tail of welcome.

11:00. A sound truck goes by advising everybody to remain calm, and stay behind the lines indicated, and stay quiet…

11:05. Right on the nose a gunshot they're off! No shout, no cheer. One of the blunt khaki jeeps stenciled PRCC precedes the runners along the curb, honking and actually 'dozing into the throng. The American writer jogs to a vantage point and unfolds his chair. Here they come, a Korean in the lead. In the middle of the square the balloon is at last aloft.

Behind all the other runners, the Chinese come by in a pack.

The young boy, Yang, is at the very rear. The writer lifts his crooked little finger, reminding the boy of the shared wishbone. Yang returns the salute.

The next turn around, Yang has worked his way up into the pack of Chinese, and it is little Bling who is bringing up the rear, looking as disheveled as ever in a U of Beijing track singlet, his number on upside down.

"How much farther?" he puffs.

"Only about twenty-four miles," they call back.

Twenty kilometers straight west out Fu Xing Avenue to the bamboo scaffold erected at Gu Cheng Hu, and twenty kilometers back, then once more around the square to finish. The course will take the runners past many sights of interest – the Forbidden City, the Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution, the People's Crematorium, with its sinister plume of yellow smoke… and millions and millions of people. This will be the predominant sight, multitudinous faces, yet each face transmitting its singular signal, like tape across a playback head, until the signals make a song and the faces flow into one. All the runners will forever be imprinted with a single billowing black-eyed image: the Face of China. No one else will see this sight.

This face falls when the public address truck informs them that their champion and favorite, Xu Liang, is not among the runners. He was taken ill after his evening at the Great Hall and has withdrawn from the competition. Xu's withdrawal has caused great disappointment among the Chinese runners and worked a great change on Yang's friend Zhoa. Zhoa holds the second-best Chinese time. He is expected to take over, now that the favorite has faltered. The responsibility weighs heavy on Zhoa, Yang can see, affecting his concentration and, in turn, his stride. Yang sees that his head is bobbing too much; this is not like Zhoa. Also there is lateral movement of the arms. Inefficient, inefficient.

When the runners are out of sight there is nothing left for the crowds to gawk at but the journalists, and vice versa. In spite of all their stroking of Mude, they have not been allowed to follow the race. They were informed they could watch the run quite adequately on television on the parked press bus, just like the rest of the world's journalists.

The bus is packed to the door. The American editor stays to argue; the photographer stalks off in a mountainous fit of pique. The writer wanders about the square carrying his chair and seeking inspiration. He finds instead a cluster of Chinese people watching a cardboard box sitting on a folding table. Inside the box is a color TV with a bouncing picture of the front runners. He unfolds his chair and joins the cluster. The beautiful woman from last night's dinner comes to share his seat and translate the TV announcer for him. He takes his thermos of gin and tonic from his bag and pours a cup. This is more like it! Inspiration might yet occur.

11:35. It's Mike Pinocci from the U.S., followed by Bobby Hodge, Inge Simonsen, and Magapius Dasong. Mike snags a bottle from a drink table, drains half, and passes the rest to the tall Tanzanian.

In the midst of the Chinese runners, Yang watches the back of his friend's neck. Too stiff, too tense, poor Zhoa…

20 km. It's Pinocci and Simonsen and the Tanzanian.

25 km. It's still Pinocci, looking good, strong; and tall, black Magapius Dasong still right behind him looking just as strong. An American coach tries to hand Pinocci a cup of Gatorade but he's too late. The Tanzanian takes it instead. After a sip lie comes alongside Pinocci and hands him the cup. The runners grin at each other.

28 km. Pinocci and Magapius Dasong side by side; then Simonsen, struggling a little; then, coming up from the pack, the lanky Swede, Erikstahl.

Nearing 30 km a motorcycle cop shoots past to drive a spectator back toward the curb, and Magapius swerves to avoid the bike and clips Pinocci's heel with his foot. The American trips, rolls across his hip and over his shoulder, and comes back up still running, now third behind the Tanzanian and the Korean, Go Chu Sen. He sticks with the front runners, but his wide eyes reveal the fracture in his concentration.

Magapius lets the Korean pass. He shoots Pinocci a quick look of apology and he falls back alongside.

A stretch of rough road jars something loose in the trailing TV camera. The runners become indecipherable blots of color for a few miles.

The crowd back at the square is finally showing signs of restlessness. A drumming can be heard – a banging of fists on empty metal, relentless and rhythmless. A military wagon bores through a throng to check it out…

The wind tries to stir up some relief, swirling shreds of paper across the enforced emptiness of the square. The wagon comes driving back, a half dozen scuffed teenagers in custody, one with a bloody ear. All aboard stare stoically ahead, the catchers and the caught.

35 km. The camera is repaired. The picture clears. Pinocci is falling back, favoring his hip, Magapius still steady alongside, leaving Simonsen, the Korean, and Erikstahl to fight for the front. In the Chinese pack Yang realizes he has passed the 35-km cut-off point. He will be allowed to finish. He feels fine. He begins to open up – why not? As he passes Zhoa, his laboring friend exhorts him to go on, Yang. Chi oh.

Far, far back, Bling is panting oh shit, shit, shit. He sees he'll never make the 35-km cut-off. That smug mother Mude! Will he ever be delighted to hear Mr. Wise-ass Wu was not even capable of finishing.

The Japanese TV crew is disappointed with the crowd action. They're dead as stumps, these Chinamen! A sound man walks to the middle of the street with a bullhorn and tries to get something worked up. At first the crowd is puzzled. Yell? They have nothing to yell.

1:21. Kjell Erikstahl breaks the tape: 2 hours, 15 minutes, 20 seconds. Far from outstanding but, considering the locale, the rigors, the air, it's enough. Close on his heels is Norwegian Simonsen (2:15:51) and third is Jong Hyon Li of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (2:15:52). Li is followed by his Korean compatriot Go Chu Sen, then Chuck Hattersly in fifth, the only Yank to take home one of the vases. The limping American and the tall, gliding Tanzanian tie for tenth. They embrace at the finish line.

On the final turn around the huge square Yang is suddenly passing runner after runner, to the crowd's delight. Now they have something to cheer about. The Japanese sound man gets them going – Chi oh! Chi oh! -- causing the police to gather in worried, fidgeting packs. Crowds should keep calm. When Yang passes two Italians and two Japanese right in front of them they really get into the idea; CHI! OH! CHI! OH! CHI! OH!

Yang is not the first Chinese to finish. He is second behind Peng Jiazheng at 2:26:03. But Peng appears shot at the line, green and gasping, whereas little Yang finishes in a full sprint, arms pumping, looking good, his Gypsy eyes flashing. He's the one the crowd pours across the line to raise on their shoulders.

In Beijing, heroes don't necessarily always finish first.

Later, at the 35-km cut-off, three officials ran into the street with a big red flag to stop Bling. He sped up instead. "Clear the track, you yellow pigs!" He dodged through them, quickening his stride. The officials gave pursuit, to the crowd's great pleasure. The people began to cheer for this plucky laggard. Chi oh indeed. Bling poured it on, yelling back at the receding officials, "You'll never take Bee Wing Lou alive!"

Luckily they gave up after a block and Bling coasted on home. After he finished he apologized to all concerned, swore he was sorry that he had held up traffic for nearly an extra hour and, no, he didn't really know why he had done it.

"Maybe I was motivated by that Red Flag."

The next day was a rest day for the runners, another mandatory tour for the press. This time, the journalists were told, to the rural countryside to see marvels even more ancient!

The little bus had stopped on the statue-lined road to Ming's tomb to allow the photographer out for pictures. The writer also dismounted; he was picking up inner rumblings about a Yellow Peril attack. He trotted across the road and back into a pear orchard about five rows, to consult with his colon.

Hunkered among the fallen pears and the waving weeds, he tried to think about the assignment. The team was getting plenty pics and much info, but no story. That's the trouble with the New Policy of the Open Bamboo Curtain – there's too damn much info to get a unifying hook into. What was needed to hang this all on was a good old Pearl Buck plot, he was telling himself, or a fresh inspiration; then he looked closer at the handful of leaves he'd torn from the weeds. Holy shit, there it was all around him, acres of it, waving wild and free. Ming-a-wanna!

He returned to the bus blazing with excitement. He could hardly wait to get through the echoing tombs and chilly temples and back to his private hotel room. It burned in his pockets like money wanting to be spent. There are no headshops in Beijing but plenty pipes, sold as mementos of the Opium War days.

In his room he crammed seeds stems and all in the clay bowl and fired up. He sighed a grateful cloud. By the time his colleagues called at his door to tell him the bus was waiting to take them to the farewell ceremonies at the Peking Hotel, a plot had been conceived, fertilized, and, if he said so himself, well laid. All that was needed now was the hatching.

Bling and the writer's journalistic colleagues were at first understandably opposed.

"You're crazy. Worse, you're high. What do you think? They're just gonna let us fly out of here with him in a barrel like a souvenir coolie?"

"No, I'm serious. Consider the terrific publicity, the headlines: Shoe Company Smuggles Track Defector Out of Red China. I mean think of it. A couple years at Oregon under a good trainer he'll win the Boston Marathon! Sell a zillion damn shoes! I saw the stats. He went from a 2:06 at 35 km to 2:29 at the finish. That's 4:53 a mile for the last leg of a marathon, a world-record pace. The kid's a treasure, I'm telling you, a diamond that will never be cut without the proper training. Consider it. It's in the kid's best interests.

The editor nodded, considering it, especially the zillion shoes and the dawning oriental market. The photog had reservations.

"Even if the kid goes for it, how would we get him out? You saw the paperwork at that airport. What's he gonna use for a passport?"

"Bling's."

"Just a minute!"

"With little Bling's passport and a scarf around his throat – 'the boy cannot talk, comrade; that long run: laryngitis' – he could make it."

"Just a goddamned minute, what makes you think that little Bling is gonna hand over his passport?"

"Because the mag pays little Bling to keep quiet, put on the nice blue warm-ups with the nice hood, and catch the milk plane home to Qufu or wherever."

"Pays Bling how much?" Bling wanted to know.

"I'd say a thousand Yankee bucks would cover the flight and expenses."

Now the editor wants to wait just one goddamn minute. Bling was getting behind it, though – "With another say five hundred for the flight back?" – and the photog was already laying out a mental paste-up for Sports Illustrated: shot of kid getting off plane at Eugene, meeting Bowerman at Hayward Field, shaking hands at the state capitol, golden pioneer gleaming in the background…

"Let's have a gander at your passport picture, Bling."

"No less than three thousand Chinese yuan! That's a reasonable compromise, not much more than a thousand bucks!"

"A Chinese Communist Pittsburgh Shylock!"

"How will we make the pitch? We've got to get him off from his coaches -"

"We'll get him to come on our Great Wall tour tomorrow!" cried the photographer, adding another page to his paste-up. "What do you think, Mr. Editor?"

"For starters, Bling doesn't look a thing like him," the editor observed. "The eyes are different. The noses. Let's see the passport picture, Bling, because I think that even if you disguised the kid, a customs officer would take one look and -"

He stopped, gawking into the open passport.

"In God's name, Bling; how did you get them to allow a passport photo of you wearing those goofy glasses?"

"They're prescription," Bling explained.

When they saw the kid in the banquet hall they veered to his table and congratulated him again, each giving him the wishbone pinky handclasp of their growing conspiracy. Bling translated their invitation about the trip to the Great Wall. The boy blinked and blushed and looked at his coach for advice. The coach explained that it would not be possible; all the Chinese runners were scheduled to visit the National Agricultural Exhibition Center tomorrow. But thank you for so kind.

By the time they got to their table Bling and the writer had cooked up a number of alternative meets where they might make their pitch to the boy in private – Bling would follow him to the bathroom… Bling would tell him there was a phone call in the lobby – but it was that master of surprises, Mr. Mude, who came forward to further their fantasy.

"The coaches spoke of your thoughtful invitation to our little minority friend," Mude said as he stopped at their table. Tonight he was wearing a very informal sports jacket, no tie. "I talked to Mr. Wenlao and Mr. Quisan about it, and we all think it would make very good media for both our nations. Also, we are told our little Yang has never seen the Great Wall. China owes her young hero an excursion, don't you agree?"

They nodded agreement. Mude asked how their story was progressing. Better and better, the writer told him. Mude chatted a few moments more, then excused himself.

"Forgive me, but is that not the Tanzanian that tripped the American? I must go congratulate him. As to our young minority boy, I shall see that all the arrangements are made for your convenience. Good night."

"Oh, shit," mumbled the editor when Mude had walked on. "Oh, shit."

Mude's mood was still cheerful the next day, his outfit more informal yet – a jogging jacket and Levi's. He stopped the bus whenever the photographer asked. He laughed at Bling's acrid observations on roadside China. He beamed well-being. He knew his assignment had been successful. No bad incidents, and he had learned a good deal about Yankee ways. He was getting with it, as they say. So after their stroll back down from the Great Wall, when Bling asked would it be all right if he and Mr. Yang took a little run together before they got in the bus for the long ride back to Beijing – "to loosen the knots" – Mude responded with his most with it expression, a phrase he'd been saving for just such a time:

"All right, you guys. Do your thing."

Bling was still laughing as he and Yang jogged around the bend out of sight.

The journalists played with the swarms of school kids in the bus lot while Mr. Mude smoked with the bus driver. The tourists teemed. And the Great Wall writhed across the rugged terrain like some ambitious stone dragon, bigger than the sandworms of Dune, heavier than the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Not greater, though. Not nearly. As a World Class Wonder the Great Wall is really more awe-inspiring than uplifting. One feels that it had to take some kind of all-prevailing, ill-proportioned paranoia to drive that stone snake across three thousand miles and thirty centuries. The Great Pyramid says, I rise to the skies. The Great Wall says, I keep out the louts. China says, The twentieth century must be allowed to enter! The Wall says, Louts will be everywhere – shooting beer commercials, buying Coca-Cola, strutting their ugly stuff. The twentieth century says, I'm coming in, louts and all, wall or no… I'm coming in because Time can't just walk off and leave behind one fourth of all the people in the world, can it now?

The Wall doesn't answer.

It was almost an hour before the two runners came back into sight, walking. And Bling was no longer laughing. When his eyes met the writer's he nodded and mouthed, "He'll do it." Morosely. Somehow the kick had gone out of the conspiracy. Bling put on his blue glasses and climbed in to look out the bus window. Yang took a seat on the other side of the bus, looking at the other side of the road.

The ride back, Mude finally decided, was silent because everybody would be leaving tomorrow. It must make the heart very solemn, leaving Beijing after such short weeks. He embraced them all tenderly when he left them for the final time in the hotel lot. He told them if they ever got fed up with capitalistic landlord mentality to contact their friend Wun Mude in Beijing. He would see that China took them in.

Bling kept quiet up the steps and across the hotel lobby. In the elevator the journalists finally demanded in unison, "Well?"

"I'm to pick him up in a taxi when he goes out for his run tomorrow morning. He'll have his papers on him."

"Far out. The Prince and the Pauper do Peking."

"What did he say? When you asked…?"

"He told me a story. How his father died."

"Yea…?"

"A few years ago there was a thing – a fad, practically – started by members of the intelligentsia who had taken all the shit they could take. Doctors and lawyers and teachers. Journalists, too. They would be found guilty of some crime against the Cultural Revolution and paraded around town with nothing on but a strip of paper hanging from their necks. Their crime would be written on the paper. People – their neighbors, their families - would come out and insult them, throw dirt on the poor dudes, piss on them! We Chinese are fucking barbarians, you know? We aren't really disciplined or obedient. We've just never had any damn freedom! If we could suddenly go down to our local Beijing sporting goods store and buy guns like in the States, man, there would be lead flying and blood flowing all over town."

"Bling! What about the kid?"

"A fad, like. Here in Beijing it was doctors. They were catching a lot of crap for catering to the landlord element, treating bourgeoisie heart attacks and so forth. Finally, twenty top physicians, the cream of the nation's doctors, man, poisoned themselves by way of protest."

"Some protest."

"Yeah, well, in Yang's province it was teachers. The kid's father was a professor of poetry. He was condemned to humiliation for teaching some damn out-of-favor tome or other. After enough insults he and a dozen other maligned colleagues walked into the provincial university gymnasium in the middle of a Ping-Pong tournament… walked in, lined up, took out their swords, and staged a protest."

"Like dominoes."

Bling nodded. "The man at the end of the line had to do double duty: first dispatch the man in front of him, then do himself. They tried to keep it out of the papers, but there were pictures. And things like that get talked around even in China."

"Jesus."

"That anchor man was the kid's father."

"And that's why the kid went for our plot?"

"That and, of course, the stipend of three thousand huyen… that may have had some influence."

They waited for their Prince and Pauper as long as they dared the next morning. The photographer fiddled with his aluminum camera cases. The writer checked his pockets again to be sure he'd flushed all the wild wanna. The editor paid the phone bill.

They finally ordered a cab.

"I begin to suspect that we've seen the last of Bling, Yang, and your thousand clams."

The editor nodded glumly. "I wonder if the kid gets a cut?"

"I wonder if the kid even got the pitch. Bling may have put a hummer on all of us. Who can tell with these inscrutable pricks?"

The plane was delayed for two hours – emergency work for the flood victims – and they were drinking Chinese beer on the terminal mezzanine when they saw the taxi.

"Hey, look! Here he by God comes!"

"So he does, by God, so he does," the editor admitted, not too much relieved. "And, by God, with those glasses and that cap – he does look a lot like Bling."

The photographer lowered his long-range lens. "That's because it is Bling."

They couldn't get seats together until after the takeoff. "You did what with my money?"

"You heard me. Your three Chinese grand went into young Yang's travel fund to fly him to next year's Nike marathon in Eugene."

"Wait'll bookkeeping comes across that."

"Cheer up. He can still defect when he gets to Oregon."

"But what about you, Bling? Your education, your career?"

"When I got back to my dorm room last night I found I'd been moved out, girly books and all. You know who was in my bed, all coiled up like a black snake? That damn Tanzanian. Mude must've liked his style. So I decided it might be time for me to do some myself. Tripping."

"Listen, Bling. Be straight with us. Did you even ask the kid, or is this all a shuck?"

"I will not be tempted by doubt." Bling sniffed. He pushed the recliner button and leaned back, fingers laced behind his neck. "Besides, you'll get your money's worth."

"A thousand bucks for a thirty-year-old Pekingese punk? With times most high school girls can beat?"

"Ah! Good houseboy, me. Wash missy's underdrawers. Velly handy."

Yang did not wait for the bus from the Qufu airport. He left his bag and his coat with Zhoa. He would get them later at school.

He loped off down the puddled runway, east, in the direction of his village, feeling very happy to be back in the country. The sweepers smiled at him. The workers in the fields waved to him. Perhaps that was the difference: in Beijing there had been no smile of greeting on the streets. People moved past people, eyes forward to avoid contact. Perhaps it was merely the difference between country and city life, not between governments or nations or races. Perhaps there were only two peoples, city and country.

He rattled over the plank bridge crossing the canal and leaped the hedge of brush. Through the damp air he could see the fengs rising against the descending twilight, and his grandfather there like a scribble of dark calligraphy on the top, contorting through his ancient exercises.

– - Lao-tzu

Tao Te Ching

or

– Bob Dylan

Subterranean Homesick Blues