The purple-tinged leaves unfold reaching upward like the wrinkly hands of alien green fetuses.  I’ve bought them from a secret store that has appeared from under the counter, somewhat clean and carefully tied with a brown piece of raffia as if they were a gift of strange flowers from the rough peasant woman with a face shaped like an apple and just as red.  She and I have a go at each other every day… the unsmiling walk into her shop… the dour look at everything for sale as if it is beneath the contempt of the crumpled lump of soiled bills in my frayed pocket.  She had weighed everything and packed it up last week.  I had told her to keep it all when the price had half-smiled its winding way out of her mouth from that wily brain of hers that clackety-clacks like an invisible abacus.

It is a few days later.  She has buried the abacus in a poker face as I’ve walked through the door.  I imagine it there carefully silent… its rows of black, glimmering beads moving left to right… a barely sensed calculation downward.  So, I unfold less of the wad in my pocket… iron the bills right palm against left palm and hand them to her front ways between my two thumbs… an Asian sign of respect.  I apologize for my last visit’s departure with an invented foreigner’s flourish… the broad smile… the direct look into the eye… an ingenuous nod of the head.  I’ve added that my last departure had merely come about because I had not had enough money for the items already weighed and neatly packed into cheap, red plastic bags.

She’s happy with this turn of events… this saving of our faces… this return to the dark place of green, leafy vegetables and stacks of potatoes that smell of dirt… this cluttered place with an underlying odor of vegetable rot and the saccharine waft of softening fruit that has not yet gone off. She knows now that I will shop again.  She can continue to observe each green bean I pinch… the rejection of papayas that are too soft… the rooting through to the bottom of the pile.  She will be able to continue to ask me a thousand questions about myself to fulfill the role of the neighborhood newspaper about everyone who comes to shop.  She can tell the neighbors what I say… how much I pay… what I ate for lunch.  That will give her interest against boring moments standing alone in the shop.  She can mentally calculate my future purchases as profit against the loss as I trudge up the hill and take out the wok.  I can calculate mine in a pencil-against-scratch-paper brain adding one’s, ten’s and hundred’s in a fashion that has come of a mind abounding with unequal currencies. I can continue to observe the observer… we are both mutually satisfied… a perfect balance.

She instructs me how to cook the “xiang chun ye.” Smell Spring Leaves.  She has been giving me cooking instructions and the names for Chinese things for days now.  I can tell that she thinks I am an impossibly stupid, frivolous foreign woman who buys expensive fruit out of season like its money instead of Smell Spring Leaves that grow on trees… a lazy girl who has never learned to cook anything without ruining it. She makes no bones about her opinion of me.  She’s half right.  I am an impossibly stupid, frivolous foreign woman who can barely take care of herself.  I give her that begrudgingly.  But, of cooking?  I need not tell her anything.

I’ve arrived home and gone straight to the kitchen with its dirty windows out over the road.  I cut away the woody stalks and soak the leaves in changes of cold water… the rinsing and picking through that leaves the counter and kitchen floor covered with frizzy green confetti curlicues.  I wrap them in a clean kitchen towel and leave them until supper.  I don’t want to sweep the floor of its vivid cover of spring green… these Sumac leaves from trees that are weeds to some are delicacies to others… this famine food that, beyond the reaches of starvation now, parade as merely expensive.

Supper time. I chop the leaves finely… I heat the wok with no mercy until I can feel the waves of blistering heat on my cheeks… throw in the oil… toss in the leaves. The wok sizzles. I want to believe the sound of the leaves hitting this wok would rival any cook in the street.  I chao them until almost all the green is out of them and swirl them out hissing onto a plate. I crack two eggs into the wok… add salt and pepper. Then, I turn the leaves back in.  What I eat is so China that I marvel at the strange qualities of its indescribability.

It’s later.  I cut papaya and mango… add some Spanish “miel de mil flores” and sprinkle the fruit with a little “Los Aposteles”… the treasured bottle of palo cortado sherry I’ve dragged home from some airport in Spain.  I top the fruit with yogurt… homemade in the Xinjiang restaurant down the street.  It is thick and has no sugar. It is so homemade that the whey separates before I get home.

Xinjiang.  I’ve gone to the restaurant to buy yogurt.  This is the day before I buy the Spring Smell Leaves.  The young girls in the restaurant want to know if I have been to Xinjiang.  l tell them I haven’t been there, but to Turkey and Uzbekistan. The pleasure shows on their faces and in their eyes… a dream of the dark history of Tamerlane and the domes of weed covered madrasas, blue and shining in the sun of clear, cold days. There is this dream of an old, old place that cascades from their dark, flashing eyes… a place of camels and deserts… melons and tea.  There is that sense of things between them and I… that I’ve not simply wandered off the street searching for “laghman” noodles… something between us that says I long to see the place they’ve come from that matches an antique map long lost, but not forgotten inside of them.

I sit in the restaurant waiting for my “dai zou” order… my four portions of Uyghur yogurt that will last me exactly four days. Soon I’ll trudge up the mountain to my apartment with the yogurt sloshing against my leg as I walk, but, before that, I try to imagine myself sitting there… an older woman, drinking glasses of tea poured by the young Uyghur girls who could be granddaughters.  They are cactus flowers of the desert… dark beauties not valued in the Sea of Han where feigned paleness of skin is the ideal.  The customers come in and out.  They eat the Muslim noodles with mutton and peppers and salads of tomatoes and cucumber flavored with coriander.  The cooks behind the window steam and blanch… fry and broil… they are always in motion in their toques and aprons… their blue pants visible beneath white rubber boots. I sit here in this nothing between the last something and the next something… this suspension requiring no act of anything… this nothing of my life in China…

 …somewhere there is a train that starts in Lanzhou and ends in Kashgar at the Sunday market of one hundred thousand people.  There is a desert called “Taklamakan.” Its Arabic name written right to left is layered with meaning.  Unreturnable.  The Sea of Death.  There is a bus that meanders along a dusty road from oasis town to oasis town.  There are camels.  There are hand-crafted scimitars… and horses.  There are mosques and tinny calls to prayer from scratchy PA systems.  There are caves and ruins of cities and kingdoms long forgotten.  There are these places and things both like and unlike the woman who sits in the restaurant… in the restaurant drinking the tea from a glass… this Uyghur place floating like a beacon in the Sea of Han.

These thoughts come in the next something after  sitting in the Uyghur restaurant drinking tea… waiting for the yogurt order… joking with the young girls from the desert… watching the cooks throw the noodles that separate into the air.  They are the thoughts from the time after I’ve taken my plastic bags and paid the bill.  It is night and I’ve picked my way along the broken sidewalk to Rat Street. I’ve turned left and walked along onto the asphalt of the market street with the horns of cars blowing over my shoulder warning me not to veer from my street path lest I be run down.  There is a bright star in the sky.  There is a crescent moon.

Now, it is several days later.  I walk along a stone wall.  The street is a quiet shopping street.  There are eggplants and huge radishes… potatoes and string beans two feet long laid on tarps… tiny shell fish soaking in metal pans of water sold before the coming of the Red Tide… motorcycle carts from the countryside parked higgledy-piggledy on the street.   I would walk along the wall with a stick if I had one, scraping the rough stones as if to scratch away the surface that will tell me the something of the nothing I really know of China. The trees are coming into leaf… it is a lovely day. I feel nothing in particular… just a walk along this market street, a pretend stick in hand… scraping open this wall to a secret China that only rarely reveals itself to me. This China I see… that China I imagine.  This China… that China.

I walk into the red apple-faced peasant woman’s shop.  It’s already a few days after scraping the wall with the imaginary stick that came before the visit to the Xinjiang restaurant.  She has cut a watermelon with a huge pig sticker that lies across the dirty counter.  She offers me a slice.  I slurp it up along with her as we talk. It is red to the rind and sweet… it is watermelon perfection of the next something.  A customer comes in and buys a box of sweet cherries.  She pays 90 kuai… an extravagance.  The peasant woman gives me a surreptitious look… the clever smile in her eye that is also hidden at the corner of her mouth… and I return it, look down and continue slurping minding my own watermelon business. The juice drips from my chin to the floor in a deep, quiet pool around my feet mingling grime and stickiness that I stare at until the customer leaves.  She has tried to sell me these cherries every day for 70 kuai… and, now, this knowledge is between us, this difference of the 90 kuai and the 70 kuai… this unexpected truth.  This truth that is an imaginary stick… the one that scrapes a pathway to her into the surface of a wall.  In the dim light of this shop of vegetables and fruit, something revealed by the scrape of the stick glows red between us like a Chinese lantern… barely an illumination that could easily be missed…something between this woman of a different life and this other foreign woman that she cannot guess has peasant roots herself. She cannot know that this foreign woman still thinks of herself as having dirt under the fingernails… her money hidden in her teeth… concealing her shoes in the oven.  These two women have long histories of walls not easily pierced by means as foolish as an imaginary stick.  This difference of the 20 kuai… a common event that seems insignificant is not really insignificant at all. What has been recognized even if it is not known is an understanding between us now that has the faint, red lantern glow.

And, now, it is late at night sometime later. I am thinking.  What do people with a life like mine search for? Someone has asked me this question again. I try to answer it politely long past the time I need to answer any question according to the social requirements that age allows… this question that is asked of me that defies the qualities of a definitive answer…  this question asked by those who seek to define their lives by questions requiring answers and purpose… this question that stops one dead in the tracks asked by those who perceive that journeys have an end… this question of  no answer that whispers, “if there were only an answer”… the one that travels unwanted into this life of observation… of experience that is so different from anything ever really considered early on… a solitary life with its dissatisfactions… the errant person who wanders in and out of it… the weight of its contemplation on the dark side of the soul… the question implying the all that has been taken away… this headlong giving up of the rest for the timbre in the space that is nothing at all.  Does it have a mere answer found in something?  Or, is the complete answer in the moment of slight memory just below what opens into the glow revealed in a strange place… the appearance different, yet, the same… or is it in the moment that hangs shimmering in the space of no memory at all?

These spring thoughts… these walks up the mountain on nights no longer clouded with coal dust beneath a star and the crescent moon will find me months later in a vast, dry place and later still, in a valley near a stream.  The Uygher restaurant where I drank tea will be a keyhole to  the desert and on into the grasslands.  I will move through the nothing of my life in China.  Other clues will continue to bring me closer, but if there is ever even a need to see events in retrospect, that night in the restaurant… that red-apple-faced woman…those glasses of tea… those flashing eyes imprinted a map in me. The imaginary stick will turn inward and scrape my stone walls until I reveal much of what I had forgotten and much that will be created. There will be no need for questions… no need for answers. Many years later I realize what I had written about that spring was a preface.

Before my birth there was infinite time,
And, after my death there was inexhaustible time.
I never thought about it before.
I’d been living luminously between
Two eternities of darkness

                                                          ~~Orhan Pamuk