the egg

Yesterday my friend gave me a hard-boiled egg. It was a brown egg with deep cracks at one end and he gave it to me in the early a.m. when it was cold and black outside. If I didn't know better I'd say it was foggy except that what felt like fog was bad air smelling of smoke and burning. It was just your regular Chengdu a.m. and my friend was at his post eating breakfast. He works the night shift and when I take our dog for a morning walk he's still at his post. So each morning he says hi, and I say hi. Then the dog says hi. But we're in China so what I actually say are things like, “Still working?,” and he asks questions like, “Are you walking the dog?,” and then we both pause while the dog licks his hand. We all seem happy with our routine. For me it makes the neighborhood feel like a real home, but I doubt my friend feels this way. He already feels at home. And when he gave me the egg from his own breakfast, it made me feel at home too. Like there’s someone who knows me and maybe considers me a part of their daily rhythm. If at this point I'm thinking of the chicken or the egg conundrum I'd say the egg definitely comes first. It's the start of things and sets the roots for everything that follows. And besides, at that hour, it's way too early for the roosters to start crowing in Chengdu anyway -- something, I suppose, you only know if you call Chengdu home.

November 22

It’s another Thanksgiving in China.

We’ve got two pumpkin pies with streusel on top, one just out of the oven. There’s a box of Stovetop sitting on the counter just waiting for its butter and water. And I can hear Shi-wen peeling the four potatoes which will be boiled and mashed and subjected to copious amounts of gravy.

This year our turkey came roasted in slices from a shop that sells sandwiches and salads and other things western. Admittedly this is not quite as dramatic as roasting our own bird but it'll do. Especially with gravy on top.  

The only necessity we couldn’t find was the can of Durkee onions that would have allowed the guilty pleasure of a French onion casserole. Despite being very hopeful, and going to several stores where western stuff is sold, Shi-wen was told that the places that once had the onions were now sold out. And the places that never had them, still didn’t have them. So no French onion casserole for us.

A missing casserole is admittedly a small thing in a big picture with lots of be thankful for. This is the middle of southwestern China after all. There’s no Cool Whip either and we’ll survive that too.

And while China won’t allow us our Durkee onions or our Cool Whip, it has nudged us towards being grateful for things that folks back home aren’t likely thinking of today.

 I’m thankful my pants have bottoms.

I’m thankful my favorite sofa is here for napping.

I’m thankful for the supermarkets and butchers who prepare meat the way I recognize it.

And I’m thankful I haven’t fallen in a manhole.

All this is to say, I’m thankful for the way my worldview changes each time my home does. Admittedly, gratitude is not the first emotion that wells up when I’m avoiding the open manholes and the no-bottomed pants, but you get there eventually.

Happy Thanksgiving Chengdu. 

With love from…

Where have I been? Looking at the time between essays, it’s obvious I’ve been somewhere, perhaps even somewheres, and that I’ve neglected to properly track our adventures. And there have, indeed, been adventures.

To not write abut adventures because of the essential act of having them is a terrible waste. They should be captured in the middle of their unrolling and their unfolding, their actual happening. If you wait too long then everything is at risk of becoming a jumble of 'where did this happen' and 'which city was that dinner in?'

I now face an imperfect assignment of reconnecting with, and recapturing, a set of adventures at a delayed moment – when the passions of travel have long cooled and the flavors of the meals have sifted away – doing none of them any justice but at least rescuing the group from the pile of the fully forgotten.

Shall we start?

There was Bangkok.

And Singapore.

And Paris.

And Milan.

Four different places that when compared to our well-worn departure point have something very in common: they are all not “here.” And not being “here” means we did not go a single day in any city without commending our ability to see, to view distant buildings crisply and actually catch a glimpse of the giant ball of flames known commonly as the sun.

And the blue, oh the blue. Over our heads everyday there was blue.

Per our usual, food was the destination as much as any city and we ate feverishly and fantastically everywhere we went. Thai food was fresh green herbs wrapped in rice paper with savory spicy meat dragged through sweet vinegary baths. Singaporean dishes were hawker stalls selling rich and heady aromas best enjoyed on simple chairs in simple halls. Paris was wispy croissants and intense macaroons and snails smocked in a soup of garlic, parsley, and butter that boiled while you dragged the snails free. The Italians gave us their tomatoes and their cheeses and their baked Sardinian olives with skins that fell off as the meat slid free of the pits.

Aside from the edible, there was the visual. Temples begging to be climbed, each with a worthy view at the top but none with a way down that matched the enchantment of the way up. Rides on riverboats through grey waters that churned with vegetation and trash, with city running along both shores. Cathedrals glimpsed on foot during dawn runs. Contemporary statues with saucy airs and renaissance portraits with splayed out frogs playing the role of the devil.

But what stood out in a way I couldn’t have predicted was the fruit. One doesn’t know the wonder of fruit until fruit’s pleasures are forbidden. I feel for Eve in that garden because my life is in a place where I would eat the apple too.

And I did. I ate them. With big gusty bites and small moans in between. And berries… if apples are good then berries are unimaginably better. They are small moist kisses sent by nature to the markets of Europe and laid out for the taking. So red and sweet and unfathomably perfect.

I finally understand the paintings by the great masters where fruit tells the story of yearning and decay and all the things man wrestles with in his heart. My photos are love letters to the morning markets of Paris where I bought raspberries and grapes in brown paper bags. 

I loved what came from those bushel baskets and the cardboard boxes and to make myself feel better I tell myself I’ll eat that fruit again. And sure, I’ll see the cities too, but for some reason it’s the fruit that haunts me.

I may be alone in leaving my heart in a Paris fruit market, or devoting my dreams to Milanese berries, but I didn’t get to choose which memories should dig most deeply into my heart. And in trying to recapture the sensation of running through four cities in a month I’ve discovered it’s those memories that sing the loudest.

safe to eat

The United States has states. China has provinces. And both of these geographical building blocks, with their hard-defined borders and softer-to-sell regional specialities, help their residents carve a personal identity out of the country as a whole.

We live in Sichuan province where food is spicy and complex. Life is lived slowly and fully. And the girls are so pretty that a young man who comes here may never leave. Or so I’m told.

I say these things because they are what I’ve heard and because they make sense based on my brief life here. But if you asked me to start walking and say when I’d stepped out of Sichuan and into neighboring Yunnan, I couldn't do it.

I couldn't identify an unmarked state border in the United States either. That’s why we have all of those cordial highway signs welcoming you to Illinois after bidding you a fond farewell from Wisconsin. Even in our own backyards we need the little white fence to remind us when we’ve wandered onto the neighbor’s side of the yard.

This lack of footing is more drastic when you're abroad. And it's why I’m focused on building a beginner’s grasp of all of the little parts that make up the whole.

It’s about collecting the clues and cultural threads you run past in daily life until that collection of odds and ends becomes a definition, a familiarity, a sense. It's slow-coming and only blooms with travel, and conversation, and mistakes made into opportunities.

In mid-August I went to Yunnan province and staked my first understanding of that part of the whole. So what I have now, when I think of Yunnan, is a very personal definition that comes from four days of cross-country travel and many hours in a car. It comes from walking on Kunming’s dusty and constructing city streets and then later weaving through tall grasses in the shadow of Lijiang’s mountains.

I have seen Yunnan’s famous mix of peoples who live together in a vibrant mix. The mood is warm and colorful and pulsating, and the people are open and friendly. They also sell and eat a lot of mushrooms.

Lots and lots of mushrooms.

 

They're sold at the markets in long stretches along the street, laid on tarps and sheets with the dirt still clinging to these freshest of funguses. Mushrooms are on most restaurant menus and the best are displayed out front the way a bakery lures its audience with rows of pastries.

So naturally, when you’re in Yunnan, you’re supposed to indulge in this local speciality. We obliged and at most meals ate at least one mushroom dish. And from my newbie perspective, they were good.

However, at one point I was clearly too much of a newbie to appreciate the local delicacy that was before me.

We were having dinner in a small town outside of Lijiang and there was an incredible spread of food. Everything looked fantastic and I sampled almost every dish with one important exception: the plate of fresh mushrooms.

This was one of the most appetizing dishes of the group but when I looked closely it was obvious that the mushrooms hadn’t been cooked. They were raw, and this broke one of my only rules for eating on the road: do not eat raw foods that cannot be peeled.
 

And the real kicker was that when I looked terribly closely at the mushrooms -- because I was tempted by the dish and really hoped to find an excuse to eat it -- I saw there were tiny delicate worms on the mushrooms. Yes, slender little worms were walking and waving on our food. Thinking I had to be mistaken, I asked my colleague if I was seeing things.

But she saw them too. And being from Sichuan, and not from Yunnan, she also wondered whether the worms were supposed to be there. She pointed them out to the waitress who wasted no time in making it painfully obvious that she thought my colleague and I, and our collective concern about the worms, were a little misplaced.

With both nonchalance and impatience in her voice she huffed, "Of course there are worms on the mushrooms… Everybody knows that the worms are how you know the mushrooms are safe to eat."

The worms are how you know the mushrooms are safe to eat.

How does this not become a substantial chunk of my Yunnan understanding? Especially when the remaining five people at our table, all from Yunnan, agreed enthusiastically with the waitress and were more than happy to eat the Sichuan folks' share of the mushrooms.

(To her credit, my colleague was very polite and ate a few pieces of mushroom that she swears had no worms.)

I had several colleagues with me at the meal and they all ate the mushrooms. And I suppose I shouldn’t wait any longer to mention that when we got back from the trip they all got varying levels of terribly sick. In trying to figure out what happened we discovered that the only real difference between my diet on the trip and theirs’ was that they had all eaten those raw mushrooms, along with a smattering of raw lettuce in the mountains.

This is not meant to besmirch the mushrooms of Yunnan. The mushrooms are obviously among the freshest that are to be gotten in China. I for one will never forget this. And I would hate to leave everyone thinking that my Yunnan knowledge will start and end with mushrooms. Far from it.

 

Thanks to Yunnan I now know a little something about minority traditions in China and about the unique challenges of eco-tourism in the area. I know that in Yunnan you can drive above the clouds for miles. I also know that there are places here with skies as blue and crystal clear as any other part of the world, with green valleys and wildflowers and lakes filled with melted mountain snow.

I know there’s a lady outside of Lijiang who makes fantastic cheesecake and that deep-fried Yunnan cheese tastes more like phyllo dough than a dairy product. I know that if you eat vegetables that are washed in the creek you will be ok.

I know these things because I went to Yunnan. And I will keep them close and add them to the build-up of knowledge that one day, hopefully and maybe, will make up a greater understanding of this very diverse country.

A country where even worms on the food mean something different depending on where you are.

until it goes away 拆

I love Chinese markets. I love the melee and the melody. The selling and the screaming. It all flows together, a little river of life running through the city. Not stopping for the heat or the rain or the weekend.

The only thing that might stop a market, that might change it all, is if you take it away. If you crush it and tip it and make it no more. And that’s what the spray-painted character on the walls of this market mean. 拆 means designated to tear down. Designated to disappear and forget.

In China the tear-down happens to the nooks and crannies. It happens to the places that are old and rickety and real. And the first step is the spray-painted marker, the “拆.”

So it has happened to this place. It has happened to the alley down the street. This place that is imperfect and fascinating. Where people live and work and buy and sell. All in the same stretch. The chickens and the fish and your bike and your bed. All in one big bunch.

And so we walk through it and see it and smell it. Trying to take it all in before it goes away in a rush and a roar… before another marker of what Chengdu used to be gives way to the Chengdu that is tomorrow. But we still have today and today it looks like this. Today it’s still standing.

the proof

Chinese often ask if we're acclimated to living here, if we've settled into Chengdu. It's a regular question in conversations with locals. They ask, 习惯了吗? and I always say yes.

I say yes, that we appreciate the pace of life and that we love the spicy food. I feel like this is a valid response – if a bit safe and over-simplified – and I mean it when I say it. But then today we went and had ourselves a moment that proved I am absolutely telling the truth.

It went like this... We walked out of the house. We saw the blue sky. We both gasped and pointed, and then we took an extra-long walk because the sky was blue and the air was clear and we know this is a gift you cannot buy.

We know this because we have lived in Chengdu long enough to know things like this.

In other words, we've acclimated.

new noodles

This city loves noodles almost as much as it loves tea. And Chengdu looooooves tea. So walk through any neighborhood and you’ll readily find – wedged in with the vegetable shops and the hair dressers and the guys selling who-knows-what – lots and lots of noodle shops. If you live here and you like noodles, it’s easy to be happy at lunchtime.

It’s equally easy to lose track of all of the places you see once by chance and want to eat at later. Our version of this “looks good, need to go back” list grows daily and today we happily sought out and crossed off a noodle shop that was recently added to the list.

This was the first noodle shop we’ve seen where they press the noodles to order. For each bowl, the noodle guy jabs a wad of dough into the press and then lays on the handle until noodles come out of the other end and drop into the water. A lady behind the machine then fishes them out with a wicker strainer and their journey to spicy goodness begins. They’re also a different kind of noodle than we usually see; with their nutty taste and color we’re guessing they're some version of buckwheat.

The noodles that came to our table were swimming in a spicy red pool and flecked with bits of celery and assorted green stems. We liked the noodles but the surprise of the meal was what the guy across from us was eating.

 

We had noticed them waiting in the steamers out front, but only after seeing them at our table were we temped to get our own. We got two of the soft white orbs and discovered they are filled with pork and delicious. The outer skin is difficult to explain – soft, chewy, and unexplicably reminiscent of cheese. Actually the whole thing is like a mountain delight you would find waiting for you back in town after a hike through the Alps. This means they’re awesome. Really, really awesome.

So we ate the two we ordered and then we ordered two more. This was after we had finished our noodles and a miniature loaf of some kind of rice bread that tasted like brown sugar or beer or something soft and fermented. These had also been lined up in the steamers out front.

A woman who later sat down at our table told us we should buy more of the meat-filled orbs for dinner; just heat them up in the microwave, she said, and they'd still taste great. She also told me to take the oscillating fan next to our table and point it at myself so I wouldn’t be so hot and sweaty. This lady has a lot of good ideas.

So, overall – with the great food and the wise table-mates – today’s visit was a solid success. One down, so many more to go.

c is for chengdu, and cookies

I remember the first time they came into our house. Shi-wen had removed a tiny tissue-wrapped bundle from his pocket, unwrapped it, and set two cookies on the table. He said simply: “These cookies are the best.” I don’t generally tolerate crispy cookies but for these I make an exception because he was right. They taste like crazy, sweet, salt and numb and are from a bakery near the Wen Shu temple where there is always a line. So if you’re near there and you notice a crowded bakery, join the throngs and buy a giant bag of whatever these are called. Better yet, point at them and then make big sweeping gestures with your arms. Yes bakery worker, I want this (sweeping arms) many of your amazing cookies. These are the kind of cookies that make mouths numb and whole weeks better so eat them from the bag until you can finally make yourself stop. And if that time doesn’t come, you will be in good company. 

of rice and rivers

The striking landscape printed on the back of China’s ¥20 bill is equal parts geographic fortune and artistic vision. Cash registers, pockets, and purses across China are stuffed with these limestone formations climbing from their shallow river. How many times a day does this scenery change hands? Billions upon billions?

Everybody here knows the scene, just as Americans know the face of a penny. They also know where to find it: wedged in the Li River, 90 km south of Guilin.

Last weekend we jetted off in pursuit of these exotic scrapes of rock and I suppose that in the most generous and general way you could say that we found them… problem being that as we traveled the length of the river we realized our goal was a moving target that was literally shifting at the pace of the river.

While everyone will tell you that the ¥20 view is along the Li River (漓江), no one can tell you exactly where. Determining the exact location is a lot like trying to hammer down where your Grandma first laid eyes on your Grandpa – there’s a great story that everyone tells but no way to pin down the precise geographic coordinates. So, as is often the case when traveling in China, it’s best to drop any scientific expectations you might have and instead go with the flow of the story.

This means that if, while you’re floating along the river enjoying an endless parade of karst rocks and smooth waters, someone tells you with complete and stone-faced confidence that at that very moment, that at that very second, you are staring at the one and only famous ¥20  scene, just go ahead and believe them.

We believed them three different times.

The first time was on the raft we hired to travel down the river from Yang Di (杨堤). The raft was made of big plastic tubes rather than bamboo and was operated by a man who was far more interested in his cell phone than he was the scenery. It was clear he’d been doing this for a while.

Before we left the dock in Yang Di he had masterfully fashioned a funnel out of an empty water bottle and then used it to fill the engine with gas. He then used said engine to scoot us along the river at a goodly pace. Any whispers of charm that might have come with personally rowing along at a leisurely pace had evaporated at about the same time as the engine had arrived.

He knew his way along the river and from his seat at the back of the raft he not only pointed out when the famous scene was in front of us, but had also chimed in to offer advice as Shi-wen engineered a photo of the two of us with the scenery in the background.

Shi-wen couldn’t see the shot he was framing up, and could only extend his arm while pointing the camera back in our direction, but the driver had a clear view of the camera’s display screen. So while Shi-wen stretched and angled, the driver glanced at the screen, looked at us and then at the rocks, pointed a little to the left, then a touch to the right. Then gave us the thumbs-up, perfect.

The scenery itself was imperfect but if you looked at it with artistic license, and some squinting of the eyes, you could make out something like the famous view. Also, our driver had been quick to inform us that the view on the bill was actually an edited version of this scene, the craggy outcrops squeezed closer together to make for a more dramatic scene. This was a nice touch to his story and smoothed any conflicts that arose when comparing the ¥20 bill to the reality of what was in front of our faces.

This was the first time we saw the scene. The second was along the shore.

After our journey down the river we disembarked from our raft and started down a main road that ran along the river. Along the way we noticed a neglected-looking sign hidden in an unassuming alcove off the road. It had a picture of the ¥20 note and seemed to be saying that if we went down the flight of stairs behind the sign we would see the famous scene.

So we did.

For those paying attention to simple concepts like space and time it was really clear that this scene was unrelated to the one we’d seen from the river. In fact, it was facing the opposite direction. But the oddest part was not the location of the scene but rather the lack of other people checking out what is supposed to be one of China’s most famous natural landscapes.

There was just one other family standing there on the landing. Not that either of us wanted to be sharing the small wooden structure with a larger crowd of people, but skeptics might wonder why, if this was really “the” view, there weren’t as many people here as we’d seen floating down the river?

Not unexpectedly, the second view was about as convincing as the first – which is to say that neither was particularly convincing. (Although this view got points for having an actual sign.)

The third viewing came after lunch which was a very, and unfortunately, enlightening meal.

After our view from the landing we made our way to Xing Ping (兴坪), a place where if you happen to trundle down the right streets is a great chance to see a certain slice of small town life. We wandered their alleys for a bit, glancing in doorways and windows, watching as people sat at tables playing cards as their TVs played nonsense in the background. We lost count of the number of Mao portraits we saw displayed in homes and the number of times we saw pomelo rinds drying in the sun.

As we wandered down quiet passageways we also found a public restroom. It was beneath the branches of an old reaching tree and sat beside a small, quiet stretch of water. As one might imagine, this dirt-floored open-air shed added to the “you are no longer in the big city” atmosphere, as did the water buffalo lounging around outside in the stream.

We eventually came around a corner and found a restaurant doing a brisk business with several tables of Chinese tourists. We asked for a menu and were handed a version in English. Shi-wen wisely recommended I also grab the Chinese menu for comparison.

I grabbed a Chinese version from behind the counter and we compared the offerings and prices. Both areas had fairly drastic deviations. If we were being nice we’d say that this establishment had included the price of English translation services in its English menu prices. If we were being less generous we might say they were taking advantage of people who don’t speak Chinese.

Seeing as we speak Chinese, and on good days can read a Chinese menu, we ordered off the Chinese version. This was as much for the prices as the selection. We ordered soy-sauced tofu with tomatoes and peppers, along with a dish of bitter melon and egg. The bitter melon dish was actually one of the items mysteriously absent from the English menu.

The meal was good but as we were leaving the restaurant Shi-wen saw something that made us very happy we hadn’t ordered any meat.

As we passed a waitress in the process of cleaning up another table, Shi-wen saw that she was carefully removing uneaten meat from the plates and placing the pieces in a separate clean dish. It was kind of shocking but kind of not, and based on the reactions people had to my telling of this anecdote, it seems that Chinese really like to think this woman was saving the pork for her dog.

After lunch we endeavored to find a way to a well-known fishing village (鱼村) that can only be reached via a long hike or a river cruise. We opted for the cruise but first had to navigate a mess of vaguely bureaucratic confusion in which the ticket office next to the dock refused to sell us tickets for the outing. They also refused to say why.

It was infuriating: there were passengers boarding a boat within eyesight of the office but the workers inside just kept dancing around our request to buy tickets.

In the middle of this frustrating scene were two local women we couldn’t shake. They kept insisting they would “help” buy our tickets. These were the same women who had come running at us as we first approached the dock, peppering us with questions about where we were going and how many tickets we needed.

The whole thing was suspicious, but we eventually discovered that in an alternate universe kind of way this was the best way to get tickets.

We learned this because as we were asking passengers boarding the boat how they managed to buy tickets we ran into a Chinese tour guide who offered to take us over to the ticket office. Once we got there she tried to convince the workers to sell us tickets. Again, they refused.

She then offered to buy the tickets on our behalf. The office at first refused even this but then eventually agreed to sell her our tickets for ¥168 each.

As we got ready to buy the tickets, the two women who had been following us around the dock insisted on “helpfully” purchasing our tickets for us at the discount price of ¥100 each. The reason for the discount was unclear, but what was absolutely, crystal clear was that this little exchange was exactly what the ticket office had wanted all along.

We were worried the boat was going to leave without us so we gave up understanding and gave them our money.

There’s no way to know if this little operation is related to corruption (Chinese are the first to suggest this angle) or to generating income for locals (naturally the touts are the ones suggesting this) but as a Chinese language student I’m just glad that our exasperation was related to the confusions of culture rather than language.

When we finally boarded the boat we realized we had spent so much time fighting to buy a ticket that we had forgotten to ask where we were going. But it was too late, we were already sandwiched in with the crowd of other tourists.

Shi-wen and I had window seats facing each other across a small table. A pair of Chinese tourists sat next to us, sharing the table, and by the end of the tour each had handed his camera across the table to his friend and asked to have his photo taken with the foreigner sitting next to him.

My new joke, when asked to take a photo with a stranger, is to say with genuine concern, “You know I am not famous, right?” Everyone laughs, but then they still want to take the photo.

The main topic of Shi-wen and my conversations while riding the boat – aside from the beautiful scenery which, in the spirit of there’s a first time for everything, even included a pair of amorous water buffalo – was the odds on whether or not the boat would actually be stopping at the fishing village.

Even though our tickets said we were headed to the village we knew better than to assume this somehow ensured we were stopping there. Live in China for two days and you’ll realize that everything is fluid, so it’s best to keep your expectations equally so.

The good news was that we did stop at the village.

The bad news was that our visit was to be managed Chinese tour group style.

One of the boat’s employees, a megaphone-wielding woman who had previously used her electronically-amplified voice to extol the benefits of having your photo taken with cormorant fishing birds for the low, low price of  ¥12, now announced that we had 15 minutes to look around the village. She concluded the screeching announcement with an ominous warning: If you don’t return in time we will definitely leave without you.

We looked at our watches and then scurried around the lonely village, taking photos that reminded us of some of the more desolate towns we had visited in Italy. In the small mess of corridors we quickly ran into our seatmates who said they were heading back, there wasn’t enough time. We eventually followed, but not before taking several more photos of village chickens and one of pomelos taped to a tree.

Once we were all back on the boat, it started making its way back to town and we were allowed to hang out on the roof. It was at this point that we saw the third version of the famous scenery.

Shi-wen and I were standing at the back when a tour guide who had been talking with us earlier pointed to the right and said, “This is it, this is the famous view!” People around us starting pulling our their ¥20’s and taking photos, so we did the same.

Of the three this seemed the least convincing but since everyone else was so enthusiastic it felt odd not joining in. And what if the third time was the charm?

After our day on the river we took the public bus back to Yang Shuo (阳朔) for about a dollar and the hour’s drive through the countryside was worth far more than that.

Living in a big Chinese city you are exposed to a certain kind of China. And while people living in these cities face their own urban challenges, these are nothing like the challenges faced by the people who live outside of China’s urban sprawl. Coming to places like this you can finally understand why.

We saw homes with dirt floors and no running water. Women carried live chickens by their feet at bus stops, farmers in rice paddies used their hands to work through the mud, and workers headed home along the roadside with hoes and shovels propped on a shoulder.

Kids rode in wheelbarrows attached to bicycles, tractors chugged along with their motors exposed, and farmers in slippers led oxen down the side of the road. Dogs stood in the middle of main drags eating road kill while cars and trucks and buses flew past in both directions.

On Sunday we drove some 150 km to Long Sheng（龙胜）and spent three hours on these roads, really feeling the pattern and rhythm of rural space. We were speeding through the countryside, zooming past ultra-green rice paddies in the near and limestone towers as sharp as shark teeth in the far.

The car was going fast, passing buses and trucks, and honking to let the scooters and the bikes know we were close. We’re blurring along and then we come to a town, a small blip of a center on this path, and so we slow. We drive down the main drag and see what a main drag in this life looks like.

It’s a slow drag, a different drag… the kind of drag where women sit outside holding babies on their laps watching traffic. There are people working and sometimes there is a hill of oranges that a dump truck has released, and there are men and women filling gusset bags with oranges and filling the air with a sweet citrus smell that the car grabs and traps and takes along for a few fragrant seconds.

There are things burning, always things burning… Out of mill chimneys and in the fields and on the road’s edge next to the children playing in the dust. Black smoke and white smoke and grey smoke. It all rises and dissipates.

But somehow still the air is clear and clean. And even though driving behind a slow-moving bus or a sputtering truck will clog and taint the clarity, it is still not like the air in Chengdu.

This neglected countryside lacks infrastructure but at least it has the sky. Out here there is more of it, more air, more breath. So you take it in with deeper drags.

It’s a long jarring ride from Yang Shuo to Long Sheng, a township about 90km north of Guilin (桂林). I say jarring because as you draw closer to Long Sheng you start to climb the sorts of mountain roads with rock slides, the kinds of mountain roads with drivers laying on horns that make a sound as much about hope as warning.

We saw only one accident. Buses that had been traveling in opposite directions had passed too closely and scraped into each other. It had happened before we got there, and there was just enough space for us to squeeze by and continue on our way.

We went to Long Sheng to visit the famous LongJi TiTian (龙脊梯田), the Dragon Spine Rice Terraces, and we chose to explore the Da Zhai (大寨) terrace area which we’d heard was quieter and less overrun than the other choices. Once we were there we concluded that the relative quiet might be due to the fact that you actually have to hike your way up to the postcard views.

There is one exception. People who are unwilling or unable to hike can pay to be carried up the winding paths on a sedan chair. We only learned this when Shi-wen glanced over the side of the hill and noted, “Someone’s being carried up on a chair!”

Shortly thereafter a not un-large woman was presented to us in a reclined position. Aside from the woman, her bags, as well as those of her friends, were also being transported by locals. They carried the backpacks and purses in over-sized woven baskets on their backs.

As we stood there sweating through our clothes, the basket carriers made climbing up steep, slender paths look perfectly normal. And they were not young; the lady tasked with hauling the gear of the reclining tourist was a good decade older at least.

Reclining tourists aside, the hike was stunningly beautiful. The terraces are configured out of mountains and mud, with a quiet trickle of water escaping from each paddy.

To weave between the levels and the pools – to see farmers slapping mud on the walls to make them taller and to see the footprints they’ve left in the silt-y floors of the unplanted paddies – makes you realize these are nothing less than agricultural art.

These terraces are something that only hands can make out of mountains. And to see it before the green rice plants are forced into the mud, to see it with only the water in its basins, is like seeing a thousand undulating mirrors pointed to the sky.

It is beautiful and quiet and strange. They hug the mountains and turn with the terrain. And because the sky was cloudy silver they reflected the glow rather than letting you see the rich mud at their floors.

As we came back down we passed through a bamboo-forested patch and could finally understand why so many poems have been written of bamboo and bamboo glades. The quiet and the lift of bamboo is wholly different from the strength and weight of America’s oaks and pines.

As we walked down this stream-ridden path pairs of locals occasionally came up. They wore traditional clothes and rubber boots and carried farming tools on their shoulders. We would say, “你们好” and they would respond in kind. Who knew what they thought of us, all sweaty with legs shaking, as they sailed through their upward climb.

The town had what you might expect of a small cove nestled in the big mountains: a shop that sold ice cream to tourists, a Party office with China’s one-child policy outlined on a large poster out front, and a basketball court where a donkey tied to the basket had recently relieved himself.

Of course the town was made up of more than ice cream and donkeys, and the truth is that it really reminded us of Switzerland. The entire hike did. Not only because of the stunning natural scenery but also because of the style of architecture.

The easiest way to describe the wooden structures that dotted the terraced hills would be to call them Chinese chalets. Made of wood, they're at the same time resilient and welcoming. Seeing how the aesthetics of China and Switzerland can have so much in common really highlights the heavy hand that nature plays in guiding culture.

As we left Da Zhai we stopped at one of the smaller villages along the road to look around, and noticed a pair of local women washing their long hair in the stream.

It was a disarmingly private moment and we quietly watched as one of the women dipped her head deep into the flowing water and then raised it out, combing the long swath of hair as it left the water. It was quiet and beautiful, a small personal moment in the midst of a giant space.

Where we had stayed in Yang Shuo was also sweepingly silent. It was outside of town and at night there were only the voices of crickets and frogs. It was a pitch-black swath of land and had it not been so cloudy I’m convinced we might have seen the Milky Way.

Galaxies aside, we were surprised by how many must-see Chinese wonders we were able to cross off our lists in one go. The only question is whether or not we get extra credit for seeing the ¥20 scenery three times.

But I suppose that wouldn’t be fair… seeing as I’m not quite sure we can confirm we ever saw it at all.