Hour of the Rat

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I SET AN ALARM, get up early, drink some coffee. Go downstairs at 7:30 A.M. and meet the driver I hired yesterday.

The places in the video, they’re all near Kaili, I’m told. Most of them famous, at least around here. Xijiang, the Thousand-Family Village. Shiqiao, known for its handmade paper. Other places whose names I don’t remember but that I have written down on a piece of paper.

“Can we visit them all in one day?” I ask the driver.

He looks at my list, compiled by the folks in yesterday’s restaurant. Frowns. “Maybe a day and a half.”

“I don’t have a lot of time.”

“We can try to hurry.”

WE GO FIRST TO Xijiang. It’s a tourist trap, with a hundred-kuai entrance fee, but a beautiful one. Wooden buildings with carved doors and windows, rising up a hillside in layers, like a beehive. Wooden signboards shaped like butterflies. A quiet river winds through the center of town. Stone streets. Noodle stalls and souvenir stands. And ATMs and a place to buy phone cards. We enter at a long wooden bridge, grey roof tiles supported by wooden poles, carved beams, a balcony up on top, and are greeted by lines of old men and women, singing and playing pipes, offering shallow bowls of rice wine, which I’m wishing were coffee given how early it is. I have a cup anyway-you know, to be polite.

I see a sign for a coffee place, but it’s closed.

I wander around the town for a while, up the hill to the next level, until my leg starts aching, and then I sit and try to think it through. I watch a small group of Chinese tourists pass by, led by a guide wielding a pennant flag. Thankfully, no bullhorn.

Would Jason be in a place like this? A Disneyfied Miao Minority village? With entrance gates and ticket takers?

I know I wouldn’t be, if I were him.

I limp down to the teahouse where the driver waits.

“Let’s go,” I say.

WE DRIVE A WAYS. To Shiqiao, a village where they make paper by hand. The mountains look just like the video, I think. Jagged and draped with mist. Those white banners, whatever they are-grave markers? prayer flags?-they’re everywhere. Stuck into the earth. Tied onto tree branches. Some of them have red dots in the middle, the edges blurred by the bleed of the paint into the white.

I walk through the main street of the village, green mountain rising behind it. It’s quiet. There are walls made up of unmortared, uneven grey brick. A satellite dish on an old tiled roof. New wooden houses here and there, with fresh window carvings. I can smell the wood sap. Bunches of yellow corn hang in the eaves. A rooster and chickens.

I glance inside one wooden building with an open front. There’s a young guy in there, bending over scarred wooden troughs, and it smells like wet paste, like kindergarten. He’s making paper, I guess.

No sign of foreigners, other than me.

WE DRIVE UP MOUNTAIN roads. The air smells like pine and mist. Rice paddies spill in terraces below us. A lone peasant in a round hat ambles along the side of the road, carry pole with wire baskets full of cabbage on either end draped across his shoulders.

I can’t really take it all in. All this… I don’t know, nature or whatever. Yangshuo was stunning, but not like this. Not wild.

I keep expecting the director to yell “Cut!” and stagehands to drag it all away.

We keep driving.

We stop at a village. Have some late lunch. Women weave at this village, at handmade looms. They want to sell me cloth and silver bracelets. I buy a simple bracelet, to be polite. Out on the main street, there are men crouched by birdcages. “The birds fight,” the driver explains.

I don’t really get this. They look like songbirds.

“They take them out of the cages?” I ask.

“No.”

So… what, it’s a sing-off?

I never do find out.

Finally we come to a village that starts in a valley, winds up a hill. Wooden buildings, like Xijiang’s, but not as fixed up. Bunches of corn and peppers hanging in the eaves. There’s a fancy wooden bridge with three shingled roofs crossing a stream, and something that looks like a waterwheel made from bamboo and old logs. A few of those prayer flags, or grave markers, or whatever they are, stuck in mounds on the hillside.

I recognize this place from the end of the video.

“I want to take a walk here,” I tell the driver.

I HOBBLE ALONG THE stone path. Shallow steps lead up into the village. Chickens and a dog and an occasional cat scamper by. But it’s very quiet. Hardly any people. An old woman who sits out on her stoop working on some embroidery. An old man smoking a pipe. Something snorts and snuffles in a shuttered, dark bottom floor of one of the old wooden houses. A pig? A crazy person? Who knows?

Farther up the path, the village widens out into kind of a plaza. There’s a bunch of buildings, some in the familiar white tile and cement stained by green mold. A school, I think, and maybe a police station or a village government building. There’s a basketball hoop off to one side. Black-and-white paintings of Karl Marx, Mao, and Deng Xiaoping hanging on the two-story school building. Still no kids. It’s practically a ghost town.

I keep walking up the path. I hear a couple drifting notes of a wood flute, shaky, like the person doesn’t really know how to play it.

Here’s a brick-and-wood building with a cross on top. A Christian church, I’m pretty sure. Farther on, another plaza, surrounded by more wooden buildings, and wooden benches shaded by a peaked roof. There’s a pole in the center, with a carving of what looks like a cow skull stuck on top.

“This is where they do the old dances,” someone says.

In English.

I turn, and there he is.

Jason/David/Langhai.