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You return to the bus station and go into the waiting room. The
busiest place in this small town is now deserted. The ticket window and the
parcel window are boarded up from the inside so knocking is useless.
There’s no-one to ask so you can only go through the lists of stops above
the ticket window: Zhang Village, Sandy Flat, Cement Factory, Old Hut, Golden
Horse, Good Harvest, Flood Waters, Dragon Bay, Peach Blossom Hollow ... the
names keep getting better, but the place you want isn’t there. This is just
a small town but there are several routes and quite a few buses go through. The
busiest route, with five or six buses a day, is to Cement Factory but
that’s definitely not a tourist route. The route with the fewest buses, one
a day, is sure to go to the furthest destination and it turns out that Wuyizhen
is the last stop. There’s nothing special about the name, it’s just
like any other place name and there’s nothing magical about it. Still, you
seem to have found one end of a hopeless tangle and while you’re not
ecstatic, you’re certainly relieved. You’ll need to buy a ticket in the
morning an hour before departure and you know from experience that with
mountain buses like this, which run once a day, just to get on will be a fight.
Unless you’re prepared to do battle, you’ll just have to queue up
early.
But, right now, you’ve lots of time, although your backpack’s a
nuisance. As you amble along the road timber trucks go by noisily sounding
their horns. In the town the noise worsens as trucks, some with trailers, blast
their horns and conductors hang out of windows loudly banging the sides of the
buses to hasten the pedestrians off the road.
The old buildings on both sides stand flush with the road and all have wooden
shopfronts. The downstairs is for business and upstairs there is washing hung
out to dry - nappies, bras, underpants with patched crotches, floral-print
bedspreads - like flags of all the nations, flapping in the noise and dust of
the traffic. The concrete telegraph poles along the street are pasted at eye
level with all sorts of posters. One for curing body odour catches your
attention. This is not because you’ve got body odour but because of the
fancy language and the words in brackets after "body odour".
Body odour (known also as scent of the immortals) is a disgusting
condition with an awful, nauseating smell. It often affects social
relationships and can delay life’s major event: marriage. It disadvantages
young men and women at job interviews or when they try to enlist, therefore
inflicting much suffering and anguish. By using a new total treatment, we can
instantly eradicate the odour with a rate of up to 97.53% success. For joy in
life and future happiness, we welcome you to come and rid yourself of it...
After that you come to a stone bridge: no body odour here, just a cool,
refreshing breeze. The bridge spanning the broad river has a bitumen surface
but the carved monkeys on the worn stone posts testify to its long history. You
lean on the concrete railing and survey the township alongside the bridge. On
both banks, black rooftops overlapping like fish- scales stretch endlessly into
the distance. The valley opens out between two mountains where the upper areas
of gold paddy fields are inlaid with dusters of green bamboos. The river is
blue and clear as it trickles over the sandy shores, but close to the granite
pylons dividing the current it becomes inky green and deep. Just past the hump
of the bridge the rushing water churns loudly and white foam. surfaces from
whirlpools. The ten-metre-high stone embankment is stained with water levels -
the new greyish-yellow lines were probably left by the recent summer floods.
Can this be the You River? And does it flow down from Lingshan?
The sun is about to set. The bright orange disc is infused with light but
there’s no glare. You gaze into the distance at the hazy layers of jagged
peaks where the two sides of the valley join. This ominous black image nibbles
at the lower edges of the glowing sun which seems to be revolving. The sun
turns a dark red, gentler, and projects brilliant gold reflections onto the
entire bend of the river: the dark blue of the water fusing with the dazzling
sunlight throbs and pulsates. As the red sphere seats itself in the valley it
becomes serene, awesomely beautiful, and there are sounds. You hear them,
elusive, distinctly reverberating from deep in your heart and radiating
outwards until the sun seems to prop itself up on its toes, stumble, then sink
into the black shadows of the mountains, scattering glowing colours throughout
the sky. An evening wind blows noisily by your ears and cars drive past, as
usual sounding their deafening horns. You cross the bridge and see there a new
dedication stone with engraved characters painted in red: "Yongning
Bridge. Built in the third year of the Kaiyuan reign period of the Song Dynasty
and repaired in 1962. This stone was laid in 1983." It no doubt marks the
beginning of the tourist industry here.
Two food stalls stand at the end of the bridge. In the one on the left you eat
a bowl of bean curd, the smooth and tasty kind with all the right ingredients.
Hawkers used to sell it in the streets and lanes but it completely disappeared
for quite some years and has recently been revived as family enterprises. In
the stall on the right you eat two delicious sesame-coated shallot pancakes,
straight off the stove and piping-hot. Then at one of the stalls, you can’t
remember which, you eat a bowl of sweet yuanxiao dumplings broiled in
rice wine. They are the size of large pearls. Of course, you’re not as
academic about food as Mr Ma the Second who toured West Lake, but you do have a
hefty appetite nevertheless. You savour this food of your ancestors and listen
to customers chatting with the proprietors. They’re mostly locals and all
know one another. You try using the mellifluous local accent to be friendly,
you want to be one of them. You’ve lived in the city for a long time and
need to feel that you have a hometown. You want a hometown so that you’ll
be able to return to your childhood to recollect long lost memories.
On this side of the bridge you eventually find an inn on an old cobblestone
street. The wooden floors have been mopped and it’s clean enough. You are
given a small single room which has a plank bed covered with a bamboo mat. The
cotton blanket is a suspicious grey - either it hasn’t been washed properly
or that’s the original colour. You throw aside the greasy pillow from under
the bamboo mat and luckily it’s hot so you can do without the bedding. What
you need right now is to off-load your luggage which has become quite heavy,
wash off the dust and sweat, strip, and stretch yourself out on the bed.
There’s shouting and yelling next door. They’re gambling and you can
hear them picking up and throwing down the cards. A timber partition separates
you and, through the holes poked into the paper covering the cracks, you make
out the blurred figures of some bare-chested men. You’re not so tired that
you can drop off to sleep just like that. You tap on the wall and instantly
there’s loud shouting next door. They’re not shouting at you but
amongst themselves - there are always winners and losers and it sounds as
though the loser is trying to get out of paying. They’re openly gambling in
the inn despite the public security office notice on the wall prohibiting
gambling and prostitution. You decide to see if the law works. You put on some
clothes, go down the corridor and knock on the half-closed door. Your knocking
makes no difference, they keep shouting and yelling inside and nobody takes any
notice. So you push open the door and go in. The four men sitting around the
bed in the middle of the room all turn to look at you. But its you and not they
who gets a rude shock. The men all have bits of paper stuck on their faces, on
their foreheads, lips, noses and cheeks, and they look ugly and ridiculous.
They aren’t laughing and are glaring at you. You’ve butted in and
they’re clearly annoyed.
"Oh, you’re playing cards," you say, putting on an apologetic
look.
They go on playing. The long paper cards have red and black markings like
mahjong and there’s a Gate of Heaven and a Prison of Hell. The winner
penalizes the loser by tearing off a strip of newspaper and sticking it on a
designated spot. Whether this is a prank, a way of letting off steam, or a
tally, is something agreed upon by the gamblers and there is no way for
outsiders to know what it’s all about.
You beat a retreat, go back to your room, lie down again, and see a thick mass
of black specks around the light globe. Millions of mosquitoes are waiting for
the light to go out so that they can come down and feast on your blood. You
quickly let down the net and are enclosed in a narrow conical space, at the top
of which is a bamboo hoop. Its been a long time since you’ve slept under a
hoop like this, and you’ve long since passed the age of being able to stare
at the hoop to lose yourself in reverie. Today, you can’t know what traumas
tomorrow will bring. You’ve learnt through experience everything you need
to know. What else are you looking for? When a man gets to middle age
shouldn’t he look for a peaceful and stable existence, find a
not-too-demanding sort of a job, stay in a mediocre position, become a husband
and a father, set up a comfortable home, put money in the bank and add to it
every month so there’ll be something for old age and a little left over for
the next generation?
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