Many years before the Da Guan Yuan and the night in the gardens of the Forbidden City, I will have returned to China for the summer. I won’t leave until just the first snowflake flies. I can’t find shoes that fit to replace summer sandals. One day I just decide.  I leave.   I’ve bought socks in the meantime to cover my bare feet… and there I am, strange looking, functional feet walking up the street looking for my dinner dressed in wrinkled clothes I washed in the bathtub and hung to dry.

The air is blue. It is the time of the corn fields burning in the fall. The harvest has come in with the fall smell of burning corn stalks is in the air. The streets are foggy from the blue smoke. It is getting cold at night. I like this smell in the air. I like this time of year. It is a time of deliverance from the merciless sun… a time of plenty. Vegetables and fruits cover the sidewalks. People stroll along in the smoky air eating from the lushness created by the earth from spring through summer. The streets are a student’s practice piano concerto of flowing fingers guided by the metronome… the space just between the tick and the tock. The boots and hats, the gloves and coats will come out. The energy will change to that of winter… soon, but not yet.

Sometimes I meet friends in a restaurant on Chao Shan Street. It is a Szechuan place where they clean the tables with a dirty rag using the customers left over glasses of beer We order “hongshao qiezi”… eggplant in a spicy Szechuan, red sauce and “xiao longxia qiu”…..the curled up red hot tails of crayfish the place is famous for. Our fingers are bright red and oily by the time we’ve finished with a pyramid of red shells on the table. We order bowls of sticky rice to eat with the sauce left over from the eggplant… wash everything down with oolong tea… laugh and laugh and prognosticate about why anyone would run off to live in China.

Other times I forage on the street for a steamed yam, a still warm scallion pancake as wide and round as a tree trunk chopped by the baker with a cleaver darkened by age into pieces that he tries to weigh a little to his advantage until I chide him. I find steamed field corn and “liang pian,” cold and spicy sesame noodles with thin straws of cucumber that I advise the seller to make with a little more of this and less of that. I take what I’ve foraged to the cheap hotel I have been living in for months and eat it on the little round tea table in the alcove. Sometimes I finish it off with half a Hami melon and save the rest for later.

I like this life. I thrive in this “nothing” that is my life in China.

In the mornings I go to the dining room and eat my breakfast. I meet another breakfaster there. We eat together and talk every morning before he goes off to work. We often have dinner together. He has lived all over the world and regales me with stories about places like Jerusalem and Brazil. Toward the end of my time there, he will ask me a question with penetrating eyes. “What is a woman like you doing still living where you are?” We will stay in touch. He writes to me often, and the question appears in his correspondence long after I have left China.

What is a woman like me doing living in the place I am? Indeed. There is little to hold me back. One day he will vanish into thin air… but his question will haunt me.

Yet, I can’t decide. It really seems like I would like to live in China, but what about my Western life… the house… the friends… the family of cousins who remain… the job? For these months that I have returned to China, I torture myself with “what ifs” and other doubts and worries and ask myself what is holding me back.

In late summer, a friend visits me with her daughter, Cinderella. She wants Cinderella to travel, but her mother is old and ill, and she can’t leave her. She wants me to take Cinderella to Yunnan. I’ve travelled in Yunnan in a previous pair of China years and imagine bus stations and train stations, taxi drivers with interesting stories… but, my plan is not her plan.  It will be the the Chinese tour bus for us. I will remember a Chinese friend who often asked me, “When you travel, will you go alone or suffer with the Chinese?” We will not go alone… she will not permit it. It is her daughter. I can’t refuse. China is a web of chess game relationships and, suddenly, I’ve realized without knowing it, my king has clattered to the board. Many years later now, I smile at this thought.

We go off on a tour bus. I am the only foreigner. There are two old people from the same province who live north of us. They adopt us. Grandma and Grandpa will manage our trip. After all, how could any practical Chinese parent allow a Chinese girl to travel with a foreign woman? Soon… very soon, we are weary of advice. Where were we for breakfast? Why didn’t we go to bed early last night? Where were you? And the advice. You must eat a good breakfast. You must shower and go straight to bed. Don’t wander away from our group. Don’t go out at night alone. What would happen if you were to get lost? Grandpa is an inveterate cheapskate and picks restaurants for us. We sit on the tiny woven “dengzi”… me, with my knees in my face, eating sensible dishes promptly at 6 o’clock when we long to sit by the canals at tables with chairs and enjoy the paper lotus flower lights floating on the water in the late evenings. One night he orders broccoli, a Western vegetable, to meet the requirements of my palate. It is his way of showing hospitality. Underneath, he is a sweet, caring old man… and the wife a wonderfully practical woman. Cinderella carries their suitcase everywhere… opens doors and helps them onto the bus… actually they are not that much older than I. We must be polite. We must be sweet, but we escape whenever we can. Cinderella wants to explore the wilds of Yunnan and I surely don’t want to discourage her so weary am I of tour bus hats, songs sung on the bus, games played when I would rather be sleeping, the guide screeching through a battery-operated megaphone while we all follow a ridiculous pennant held high by the guide so that we will not be separated from the herd.

We drive up through the mountains of Yunnan. Fall is coming on.  Pumpkins grow down over the hillside. We pass cottage gardens. I am relieved that I won’t be repeating the breath-robbing climb up the slippery steps over 5,000 meters of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain to see the glacier, lovely though it may be up there with wild flowers growing through the snow. The bus nonsense has tarnished my ardor. I am worn out from a crazy early morning to midnight schedule… the pushing herd of people at breakfast. The weather is poor on the mountain. We wander in the rain in meadows and woods below the misty summit instead. They are mountain magic. Cinderella is not used to being away from the herd, but we are far from the others.  She begins to wander up high into the trees. I can see the beginnings of a wanderer in her akin to myself. I see the beginnings of a life of solitude in her. She will marry some years later. She will travel far and wide. It will be that understanding of solitude in her that will become our bond.

Later, we join the others and drive to Yufeng monastery to see a famous camellia tree there over 500 years old that a monk kept alive during the Cultural Revolution by sneaking in and watering it. Legend has it that lovers come there to cherish their love to inspire them to live a happy, peaceful life with each other. Sadly, although I will return to Yunnan, I will never see it bloom. I will never stand under it’s reaching branches to cherish love and, perhaps, neither will Cinderella. Over time, things will change in both our stories… our separate lives in many faraway places, but it will be that solitude and acceptance that sustains us both.

Cinderella seeks out a blind fortune-telling monk who discusses our futures at length. He tells her that her grandmother will not live long. Tongue in cheek, I ask him where I will live. He says, “Of course, you will live in the East.” The funeral is over when we return some days later.

I leave China again. I harness myself to my old life regardless of what the monk portends. I go back to work and find an additional job. I travel and travel dragging my two jobs with me along with their endless writing requirments… and travel again and again only to come home and write more long, boring reports. I send off gatherings of data from my itinerant forays into the West over mountains and across deserts that is a conundrum of organizational headaches. I return home from time to time to the natural history museum of my old life. I really try to make it work. I still garden and cook, read books and call my friends. But, I have accepted that I am alone. Any life I have will have to be generated by me.

Change arrives just like that in one moment passing into the next. I can see the old woman across the street driving in and out. She has a fairytale house of fancifully conceived brickwork. She is a widow like I. She stays to herself. One day, the ambulance arrives. She has died. What I have been thinking all along becomes apparent with the ambulance parked in the driveway.  Maybe she was content with her life, but I do not want to be this woman in my own fairytale house… a perfunctory ambulance at my door… alone ’til death and the house did them part. I don’t want to live in a natural history museum anymore with curiously beautiful things that are empty. The house is bereft of laughter and half-alive with only shadows of memory and I am drowning in the leftover, lifeless glut.

I let it all go… the pots of geraniums… the tablecloths and crystal… the pictures… the antiques… the Cuisine Art… the Kitchen Aid mixer… the espresso machine… the dried flowers of my mother… the sound of my husband emptying the dishwasher of clean dishes in the middle of the night. I die to the feeling contained in the memories. I cry at letting them go… their pictures… the feel of their clothes as I washed and ironed them, folded and put them away… the soft curls at the nape of his neck… the fragrance of her lace handkerchiefs packed away in the flowers we gathered in fields together… the memory of parties with the house lit up like a jewel box late into the night. How can I go on otherwise? I’ve loved them as best as I can, but they are gone and my heart can bear no more.

I get rid of the things that mean the most since their absence… the books. My heart thuds between my chest and my stomach at each one I pack into boxes and either sell or give away. Then it’s the closets full of my own vanity… the theater posters… the rugs…. the sheets and the towels… the fountain… the lanterns that illuminated the garden on August nights. I say good-bye to the housekeeper… the neighbors… the neighborhood dogs and cats… the towering Ash tree with the co-determinant trunk… the red, Tibetan amulet in the branches of the new tree I planted to bless it… the way the sun sets through the kitchen window… the flowers… the grass… the dust on the sidewalk.

The house is finally empty. I walk out of the door. I feel nothing… to feel something might allow certainty to fail. But I do allow one admission. I am alone.

Years will pass in China. Life will glide until there are edgy moments… then, calmness… sadness… joy… the range of feelings and circumstances as they unfold anywhere for anyone, but each day I will walk into the streets of China and silently bless myself. I am in China. My eyes will never be less than wide at the sights I see each day… each night. I will change in China. I will accept that one can live in the middle and find peace without a continuing need for excitement that ultimately corrects itself and plummets into boredom and, perhaps, despair. I will not always live that way, but I will see what is possible and will experience that nurturing space. It will be the “nothing” of my life in China… just life… an uncomplicated peace… just another person unseen among the crowds… just a part of the landscape of mountains and rivers and colors and flowers and sky. There will be great relief… there will be great joy… freedom… in having moments that have no expectation of me. A time will come when it is the right time for my life in China to come to an end. The end will not come easily… but, the end will hold lessons that in my old life would have been too difficult for me to learn.

I’ll pack up everything again until the apartment is empty and it is time to go. I daydream about one more task before I leave China. I dismantle all of the characters I learned throughout the years and separate them into the eight piles of similar strokes. No more do the strokes look like a sheep… no more do they show me feet that stop or men that walk, fish that swim… tigers that roar or grass that grows. I neatly tie them into bundles. I take them to Teacher Zhang, the trash man, and stand there. I can’t decide whether I can bear to discard them or if I can bear to take them with me. It is a daydream I will leave right there. I will make that decision on another day after I have left China.

I wonder, instead, if I will ever speak the Chinese language again… ever hear the sound of brush across the blank space of rice paper as the strokes reveal a picture of a word… a history, the movement much like the Wu Shu sword as it arcs through the air or the circulation of the acupuncture needle beneath the skin. Will I paint a picture of pipa growing from a vine, the leaves curled and dying away…. walk by a lake while I move in time with the willows as they catch the breeze… ever buy Chinese herbs to concoct a dark, mysterious, healthful brew patiently waiting the day until I can put it in a cup of boiling water and taste the bitter, strange essence… hear a student practice the mournful erhu as I walk beneath an open window. Will I smell the cornstalks burning outside the city as fall comes on or bite into a “tang hulu” of candied crabapples in the cold air… or call someone’s  phone that plays a famous Yunnan folk song on the “hulusi”… walk beneath the sycamores or pick roses from the profusion growing over the fences in the spring…

…and this last, perhaps, the longing that will continue to long for itself… will I ever see a pair of “Xique” glide so gracefully toward the mountain landing in the cedar trees… then diving and circling with black and white wings flapping to find each other again? Will I hear their whistles full of desire… calling for each other… two up, two down… in the middle of the night… alchemy in the middle of the night… all night…

If there is any regret to my life in China it is that the nothing of my life in China is all be behind me now. I was a small-town girl who went off to work each day and took care of her family… wealthy with friends… a person happy in her life… who loved and was much beloved. The circumstances of my life gave way to a completely different kind of life. How can I not smile through tears of gratitude… feel the power of still forces that transformed my life… fulfilled what had longed to grow up from the silent, most unformed part of me?

 

I know I will remember. I know I will forget.