Willie's journey began on the banks of a river whose name he hadn't learned. But because he was an American, blithe ignorance of geography carried its own excuse, like a cowboy his pistols or a packhorse its saddlebags. He decided, fancifully and willfully, that it was the River to Nowhere; so he was eager to board the boat.
Willie knew a slender bit of Mandarin Chinese, necessary utterances, halting and prosaic. How much is it? Do you have noodles? I am an American. But as the little river boat puttered upward through the mountains, further from the big towns and the rail lines, his vocabulary would become as meaningless as Spanish or Bengali. He was entering the mountain realm of the Miao, a race and place so content in isolation that next to it even Han China seemed an adventure in Modernity. But Willie was positively hoping for encounters with alien consciousness. Exactly that motive had sent him here seeking the world's furthest inverse.
By the time the boat's motor had reached its full power, Willie had made a new friend. He was a young Han man, decent in appearance, amused at almost everything. Wherever Willie went, this man was sure to follow: chatting at him near the stern, befriending him at the bow, unanxious, manfully persistent. Words being nearly useless, communication depended on gestures, smiles, and drawings. Still the two managed to establish that their shoes were widely divergent in price, that Willie had visited several important PRC cities and his companion none, and that China is the world's most populous country. It was Willie's belief that at one point they had formally introduced themselves, and if he was correct, the man's name was something like Xie Feng. Or Sher Fang. But Willie thought of him as Happy. Willie relied on mnemonic devices to attach names and faces even in his own land and language. XieFengorSherFang would never do.
Now, Willie knew that if he ever went home, he would forever be asked the following question: How did you get around? And since the answer could not be, I knew the language, it would have to be, You manage. Willie was already an experienced traveler. He knew that all objects of commerce, food and shelter among them, have the curious quality of presenting themselves for sale when needed, no matter how unable one is to ask for them. He knew that with stiff persistence, one can learn from a seat mate of any nation the names of his maternal aunts. In this light, it is remarkable that people ever bothered to invent language. Truly we could live without it and barely feel the lack. So mused Willie.
Willie handed his guide book to Happy and pointed him to the pictures -- all the places Willie wouldn't go. To him, the Great Wall and the terra-cotta soldiers were stampeded, distasteful, profane. Willie was on a calculated trip to nowhere and the next stop was Fu Lu. He was making no allowances for fun. Fun resided in Kunming and Shanghai, where it was pickled and sold. There, if you liked, you could buy a Fun sandwich with bacon and extra mayonnaise, and potato chips on the side. But fun is deadly quiet in Nowhere, or it makes a small and distant sound; and he who has ears to hear, let him hear. Fun at the moment was barely humming, much less insistent than for instance the little boat's motor, a marvel of muscular industrial combustion. (This bobbly little washbasin of a transport was plenty picturesque for one billion Chinese people, but not for dreaming Willie. Willie wanted steam.) Fun was not in the mists above the green and creeping mountains -- that was existence, or otherness, or something.
While Willie was actually thinking the preceding, Happy had been poking him in the ribs and pointing at the pictures in the book: camels in the West, beaches in the South, jungle and desert and city and mountain. Ah, goddamnit, thought Willie. To be a penniless tourist in your own godgiven land.
Some hours later Willie was disembarked in Fu Lu: a hardsloping river village, nearly innocent of commerce. From the dock one could see both ends of town, one of which was the dock itself. Even capitalism, observed wistful Willie -- in truth, he was nine parts hungry for every one part wistful -- even when capitalism finally gets its grip on the city of Fu Lu, its fingers around the souls of the men and women there, it will not find much to squeeze. But let's hope for Fu Lu that river runs rapidly, and returns downstream in bits and shards all that the world sends up to it. Or one day a traveler, arriving by helicopter, will see this brightly painted sign:
Welcome to the New Fu Lu
Where Today Meets Tomorrow
And Everything Is Possible
But haven't you heard the rumors about foreign languages visiting China? Many, they say, have been stolen away -- to a sinister laboratory of malicious translation, where shadowy scholars build evil new grammars from the blood and the flesh of mutilated tongues. Thus:
Welcome You to new Fu Lu
Where Tomorrow is Yesterday
but everything was Probable.
Secured at the cuff by his host, Willie was led to Fu Lu's one restaurant. The place was like a halfbuilt barn, neither indoors nor out. It was composed of three parts. The front part was a kitchen with nothing in it. The middle was a large patch of dusty cement. And toward the rear were chairs without tables -- unsturdy tripods, suitable for dwarves -- occupied by a number of curious calm men, sitting, smoking, not eating or drinking, sitting, smoking. Near their feet was a vessel of embers, providing cheer at best. Willie was led among the men, and after a little splash of conversation that Willie assumed to be about himself, there was silence. Willie hunched himself upon a seat and put his feet almost in the fire. Useless. But after a few silent minutes had gone by and no one had offered him food or drink, Willie began to ponder: How do I get a meal in this place?
There was no explaining anything: why the men were congregated there, why Happy had attached himself and wouldn't let go and wouldn't stop smiling, what the pot of coals was even supposed to be for, most of all why the place had the appearance of a restaurant if no one was actually interested in food. Willie stood up and approached the proprietor, who was leaning his elbows on the counter, and said, in Mandarin, Lao ban, I'm hungry. The lao ban leaned his elbows on the counter. Then Willie patted his stomach, because this bit of international language is never misunderstood (but pity him who must indicate that he has an ulcer). The lao ban leaned his elbows on the counter. Happy kept his distance, when for once he might have been useful. Willie knew not what to do except to say the names of all the dishes whose Mandarin names he knew: seven: hoping that one might have penetrated into the land of the Miao. None had. The lao ban seemed to be made of wood.
How did you get around? Willie would have to devise a new answer. Because now there were no more choices. Sacrificing his dignity to his desperation, and arbitrarily choosing the chicken as the animal in whose language he'd speak his shame -- Willie clucked. He was dreadfully humiliated, but he'd finally made his point. The lao ban lit the gas under two kettles of water, and went purposefully into the street. Absolutely reasonable, hugely encouraging, considering what use the kitchen had been.
As Willie reclaimed his seat he noticed that he wasn't feeling very well. He was barely over a strain of the flu and was already attacked by something else. Any of these chills or sweats or sneezes might mean malaria; because as a traveler he was ardent, a dogmatist, and hadn't been bothered with malaria medicine. And he'd been down in the lowlands among the swamps. Then as if to demonstrate the power of incongruousness, this thought murmured itself to him: God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
It seemed so little help. For this restaurateur had reduced him to clucking then had promptly disappeared and Willie's faith was failing that he'd ever see the man again because probably he was just some guy off the street who liked to play a little joke now and then and now loaves and fishes would do nicely for dinner if only someone would provide him a plate of something hot or cold spicy or bland solid or soup and demand that he eat with his hands or suck it through a straw it would not matter simply anything edible insect or worm would do. But just at the moment that Willie was becoming resigned to his delirium, a little fond of it in fact, the lao ban returned, inexplicably proud, bearing in his motherly clasp a live, quite clucking chicken. Willie became ashamed of his imitation, reminded of the original's perfection.
But that was to be his last rational thought for a space of some few minutes; for when the chicken's neck was laid across the block and a knife was raised above it, Willie hallucinated a blade racing down toward the thin and flimsy join between his own temporal flesh and his own everlasting soul. His mental balance did not improve at all when a pot of boiling water was poured freely upon the carcass of the still-bleeding bird, and its feathers were taken off by the handful. Willie's appetite was nearly killed dead when the lao ban threw the chicken at a distance of a yard into the second pot of boiling water.
The lao ban was no believer in fancy food. He used two ingredients: water, and a chicken. In Guangxho Willie had feasted on every maritime delicacy, all of it delicious and extravagant; in Chengdu he had had a Sichuan hotpot, and had learned to like the slices of cow stomach as much as the spicy pork; in the Guanxi countryside he had been given rice cakes with red star imprints on them, and that was very charming; but he almost balked at a poor beheaded bird in the town of old Fu Lu. Dizzy from sickness and hunger, Willie saw the chicken scramble out of the pot with a weapon in its vengeful wing, intent on striking down a man or woman or child for every hideous chicken death in history, till there were no more people left to kill -- then take to the kitchen and put on an apron to prepare a delicious sauce.
Happy and the other men were staring at Willie with a wonder near as wide as Willie's own wonder. He was just as fantastic as a homicidal chicken. The lao ban was standing over him as would a mother over a little boy fiddling with a bowl of spinach. Willie made every effort to suppress his fanciful thoughts: only sober and determined eating was likely to improve his state of mind. He forced himself to take a chopstick stab at the floating fowl, and another, all the while afraid that he would have to defend himself against a flurry of pecks and flaps and eye-pickings. He began to realize at the third or fourth bite how strange everything, from an objective point of view, had become. I have thought myself a reasonable person, he observed, and yet I fear my food.
Headline in the Fu Lu Times: Human Population Increases by One, Chicken Population Shows Proportionate Decrease.
But presently Willie was fed. A little warmth came back to his body and hallucinations ceased. He wondered what might arise from an all-poultry diet: lasting gratitude of the people of Arkansas, eternal damnation if God is a chicken. Through the restaurant's open front, he watched Fu Lu come and go. Peasant woman, peasant man. Dog. Grandmother with baby. Woman in floor-length white robe. Two policemen. Cart of vegetables. Inquisitive policemen. Stockstill staring policemen.
One was tall and the other short, one thin and the other stocky. The expression of the taller thinner one was absolutely absent -- he seemed to have just woken up from a nap. The shorter plumper one looked from Willie to his colleague, then from Willie to his colleague. The taller one's face suddenly took on a lip-pursing look of decision. The shorter one noted the change in the taller, and mimicked his expression. The tall one advanced and the short one advanced. The smoking men sat up stiffer on their stools and talking stopped among them. Willie intuited that the magic bond he'd shared with Happy had utterly dissolved. Love is fickle.
Willie guessed at once what occasioned the lawmen's interest: Fu Lu was evidently closed to foreigners. Willie had been negligent, purposeful even, in wandering wherever the wind took him. But what in this little nothing of a town-- certainly indigent, but not possibly more so than the rest of the province, and to its credit, a little picturesque -- what the officials could want to keep from outside view, Willie couldn't guess. But while Willie was engaging in irrelevant little musings, the tall officer was engaging in good detective work: he ascertained with final certainty that Willie was not Chinese.
It turned out that the tall one knew a little English -- half again as much as Willie knew Mandarin. So while Willie was escorted to the station house over Fu Lu's newly paved street, the town's only evidence of civic improvement, a rudimentary interrogation took place in two tongues. Do you have noodles? I am an American. On either side of the street, the tiny village was enlivened by the little bit of life that enlivens tiny villages on any of the world's continents. All of the nothing that for thousands of years perhaps had made Fu Lu a very citadel of nothing, prospered and endured. Willie was about to be expelled from Nowhere.
He was taken to a room full of desks. At none of the desks was work being done. He surrendered his passport, and while the tall policeman thumbed its little pages, he felt as if a vagabond were rifling his pockets and a pervert were groping his privates. The short policeman stood attentively by and did nothing. What Happy had been to Willie, the short policeman was to the tall one: useless, and never absent. If arrogance, thought Willie, is in inverse proportion to a person's true importance, this little uniform of a man must be the proof. Willie remembered the story of the Australian traveler who was caught with a prostitute and sent to Sinjiang province for six months of moral reeducation. And then he began to hear the screams -- or merely a miserable soul's lament? -- coming from a place quite nearby. Almost, you'd swear, in the building itself. The policemen were perfectly unperturbed.
If only he'd come a few centuries earlier, Willie could have wriggled out of this by introducing China to the magic of linear perspective.
Later in the evening, enduring his house arrest, Willie remembered the friendly official a few towns back who'd warned him against Fu Lu. Willie had a policy against taking advice, distrusting the disinterest of disinterested parties and not much believing anyway that things could be controlled. But now the friendly man had to be respected, and wistfully thanked in absentia. For justice was swift, justice was fair, and justice went like this:
BY ORDER OF THE PEOPLE'S COMMUNIST DEPUTIES IN FU LU: THE OFFENDER SHALL BE MADE TO PAY A FINE OF THIRTY QUAI, payable in RMB as FEC are useless in the hinterlands and thus unsuitable for the deputies' private purposes AND SHALL FURTHER PRODUCE A SELF-CRITICISM IN WRITING which no one will be able to read IN WHICH HE SHALL EXPRESS HIS SINCERE REMORSE FOR HIS OFFENSE though of course we'll know he doesn't give a rat's ass AND FURTHER SHALL BE PLACED UNDER HOUSE ARREST UNTIL SIX A.M. TOMORROW AT WHICH TIME HE SHALL BE COMPELLED TO LEAVE BY THE FIRST AVAILABLE TRANSPORT though damn if we're waking up early enough to see that he does.
Now that's tough justice, muttered Willie to himself. The tall policeman looked as if he suspected some sort of sarcasm. But he could not prove the charge. And he could not ask Willie to repeat himself, because he was supposed to know English. And Willie understood all this, so he said quite aloud, smiling widely, You fucking two-inch prick.
Two hours later, buried under a bivouac of blankets but feeling anyway as if someone were jabbing icicles into his flesh, Willie achieved a new sort of unity: his soul was forcibly brought into tune with the shiverings and lurchings of his body. Another thing suffered through, fed into the gnawing jaw of his compulsion toward elucidating experience. Joy and gain be damned. The Protestant approach to tourism. One day he'll be able to say, I am blameless, I have done every miserable thing that God gave me days enough to do. He wished he could sleep, but he was kept awake by his creeping fever and some cluster of anxieties lodged in his esophagus.
Was his anxiety moral?
It was attended by a moral sentiment, complicated and uncomfortable.
From what did the discomfort spring?
From being a social i.e. moral outcast without having violated any scruple of his own.[PB]
Did he call his scruples into question?
He doubted them as arbitrary.
Did he analyze them deeply?
No. He was hindered by his illness; and even in good health he made but a poor philosopher.
Of his two discomforts, physical and moral, which was the more unpleasant?
The physical, because it threatened to shred the soul from the flesh; and the moral, because it might never be healed.
Was his moral discomfort really so great as that?
It seemed so.
Since he could not fall asleep, how did he pass the time?
He coughed repeatedly.
Was coughing amusement enough?
No. He began to re-read the only book he had.
What book was it?
The Ambassadors by Henry James.
How long did it hold his interest?
Not long. It seemed to have nothing to do with anything.
Did he find any other diversions?
He counted his money and discovered himself poorer than he thought. He looked through his bag as if he might find something new in it. He drank many cups of tea. He wrote a postcard to his parents.
Content?
Dear Mom and Dad,
On the boat ride a I met a nice guy. Ate a freshly slaughtered chicken and was put under house arrest. Love,
Did he subsequently mail the postcard?
Yes, three days later, in the town of Kaili.
Upon receiving the postcard were his parents worried?
Greatly.
What, that we may know, did his self-criticism say?
I'm sorry I came to Fu Lu. In the future I'll find out whether or not Chinese towns are closed before I waste the boatfare.
Are you certain that that's what it said? Couldn't the official, even with his poor English, have managed to decipher it?
I insist that it said exactly that. And anyway, who are you to question my account? Potentially millions of people will read this, and I dare say their enjoyment won't be enhanced by these little retentions of disbelief that constrict your hyper-rational brain. It's much easier to criticize than to do; easier to doubt than to inspire faith; much more pleasant, I'm sure, to amble into the middle of a narrative and leave again when it suits you, than to do the hard work of building and rebuilding and rebuilding again. So please suppress your destructive tendencies, or I will have to ask you to leave.
Very well. I am here as your invited guest, and I must watch my manners. Returning to the matter at hand, was there ever a rendering-sincere of the meager lefthanded apology expressed in Willie's compelled self-criticism?
You have a funny way of saying things; but yes: gradually, and grudgingly.
Did Willie in future times remember his day in Fu Lu with fondness?
It provided the stock story of his travels in China, but other days and places which left deeper prints in his conscience, produced no tales to tell.
WHILE WILLIE SWEATED AND WORRIED
1. The short policeman drank shots of bai jiu, spitting every second one into his lover's mouth.
2. His wife breastfed a sickly newborn baby.
3. The tall policeman took a lonely walk by the lonely river and wondered what lonely life lay before him in this lonely town and world, then went home to his extended family.
4. Happy smoked with the smoking men.
5. The smoking men smoked men smoking talking men.
6. The lao ban rested comfortably in the fortress of his logic, whereby restaurants exist in the absence of food and no one asks any questions.
7. The soul of the chicken ascended half to heaven before remembering it could not fly.
8. The short policeman spit the night's last shot of whisky into the mouth of his failing mistress. She hadn't any legs left. But the policeman found her perfectly serviceable.
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD
1. Two men, one fat and one thin, ordered pastrami sandwiches at different Manhattan delicatessens, unconcerned with events in Argentina and Mali and China. The thin one burned the sandwich off by dinner, while the fat one gained a pound.
2. A stroke befell the oldest resident of Jasper, Alabama.
3. The President of the United States locked the bathroom door and masturbated.
4. The levitating soul of a chicken hawk smelled the soul of a chicken, but couldn't place its source.
5. A scared little boy and a scared little snake were cast in mortal conflict, resulting in mutual mortality. For which of the two do you suppose more tears were wept? Does either care now for tears?
6. Florida swarmed with lovebugs. Carwashes did a thumping business.
7. Junior Wells and several lesser bluesmen snored drunkenly in a California motel. The late morning light stuck its fingers through the blinds and was cursed.
8. A paranoid psychotic outside Kansas City discovered he'd run out of medicine. All his thoughts turned to dismemberment.
9. Juliet Wilson of Memphis, Tennessee attended a baptism by morning and a funeral by afternoon. One ceremony made her feel peaceful and the other made her sad; but the feelings belonged to the wrong ceremonies; the world was reversed; and she wondered why.
THE WORLD WAS REVERSED
Willie's day was nearly done but he still had strength for one wish. He wished that he were not in a sickly body in a dingy room at a great remove from comfort and love and cheer. But Willie had strength too for this remorse: that opium was no longer king in China, and thus couldn't help him to shake body free from mind. Once he had smoked opium in Bloomington, Illinois.
Willie finally fell into dreams: a fat grey cat supported on its head a fat red penguinesque bird. The Penguinesque and the Picaresque are commonly seen as complimentary forms, though one is pre-Romantic and the other is flightless. Every second the Great Watch of China ticks a ticktock second toward a seventh millennium. Jericho Troy Xian St. Augustine. Postcard home. The cat has lost its bird. Do you suspect him? But look, he is not more fat. Tiny green snakes wrap themselves around vines that cling to an aquarium, and then snakes cling as vines and the vines crawl snake. The vines seek prey and kill as boas kill, but the snakes go hungry and wilt. Photosynthesis. Detritus.
Willie heard a sudden snap, felt a pain, and awoke: it was Fu Lu morning cracking its lash on five hundred backs. Tea was brewed and food was stewed. Willie made his coughing cursing way to the bus depot: to ride the only bus: on the only road: that led out of town: in only one direction. Every seat on every transport in all of China is filled up every time. Willie succeeded in getting on the bus only because a teenage soldier dragged him on while expelling someone else. Farewell, my friend. May you soon quit this place, with no more ill befalling you.
Willie hoped that the worst was behind him, but you cannot anticipate a day's events. Events such as: a grim sneering bus driver honking a hellborn bellhorn which sounded louder within the bus than without and whose horror was loosed not once not twice but three times when the bus passed even the loneliest most harmless bicyclist on the loneliest country road -- but Chinese cyclists are rarely lonely, for it is hard to be lonely in China. And the clankclankclank of the bus's rattly drafty windows clankclank. And Willie's seatmate, the broadest-shouldered man in China, whose unyielding breadth left half of Willie's behind on the seat and half of it sitting on air. And the four dismal days in dismal Kaili, where Willie tried to recuperate in a cold nearly misty plastercracked cage of a room while visitors to the bathroom across the hall provided for his entertainment emphatic expectorations and odors of a very personal nature. And his weehour walk through the rabid-dog outskirts of souldead Kaili to find at the rail station he'd missed the Beijing train and would suffer for another twenty-four hours the worst town in the world. No, none of that could have been anticipated; but neither will it pry the lid off a well-closed story. Nothing of Willie's deliverance to Beijing, Mongolia and beyond. Of all this let's say simply, That he saw a lot of nice places and met a lot of friendly folks.
