Not the city

If you’re feeling frustrated with Chengdu you can leave it for an afternoon and come back feeling much better. Mainly because venturing outside of the city will remind you that things can be much worse. But also much better.

In the much worse category we can go ahead and list all of the ways that driving on mountain roads can take days off your life. What with the toddlers toddling into traffic or being fed their meals at the side of the road; the elder generations walking three abreast in the road – balancing oversized baskets, muddy hoes, or small children somewhere on their bodies; the barely-moving tractors dragging saggy lengths of rebar up the mountain; and a lone cyclist hogging the road back down – it’s not easy to get where you’re going.

There’s a lot of “Oh crap, did you see that?,” followed by “Oh hell, get your eyes back on the road.” In fact, leave the city for half a minute and you’ll realize that the outlying roads are marvelously un-conducive to driving. They take the surreal inconveniences of city driving and run them over. Twice. With a tractor driven by a five year old.

And while these roads may lead to where you’re going – in our case a mountain town called Shangli 上里 – you start to notice what they’re missing along the way. We couldn’t find a bank. Didn’t see a grocery store. Witnessed neither gas stations nor libraries.

We did see children scuttling in the dust with chickens, enormous tree trunks resting on their sides, and a family that happily fished a vegetable out of the gutter.

The farther you get from the cities, the harder life gets. It’s the unfortunate combination of more challenges met with fewer opportunities. And if you asked people what holds them back most in these places, I doubt they’d say the lack of a Starbucks. The most basic of services still haven’t reached these areas. A sidewalk would be a shock.

But you will also find things that the city lacks. There are streams and waterfalls and bamboo trees. There are mountain passes and rice fields and flowers drying in the sun. And parking lot attendants who step over to the field to explain to you that this is the countryside and that people who live here are farmers, all before guessing you are way younger than you are. “You’re just a little off,” I responded, “just a little off.”

I wonder if he would have guessed the correct age of the cat laying next to the flowers in the main square. The lady tending the drying blooms lay her rake down to pet him, pulling his ears back and explaining he was twenty years old.

I say “he” but I have no clue whether it was a him or a her. In Chinese there may be different written words for him 他 and her 她 and it 它 but they are said exactly the same. So he is twenty and she is twenty and it is twenty.

And twenty may be the number of times Xiao GuaiGuai was held, photographed, or complimented by strangers... often with a single individual doing all three. Such a popular exhibit was this “big eyed” “precious” “doll” (all their own words) that it was hard to eat our noodle lunch without someone stopping by for a viewing. It happens in Chengdu too, but the smaller the place and the farther afield you are, the more akin to a rockstar a non-Chinese baby becomes.

I didn’t take any photos of foreign babies but I did get a shot of a babied dog. Whose owner in turn got a shot of Xiao GuaiGuai.

We were very happy with the noodles we happened to get for lunch. We ordered them because the people sitting at the table next to us had ordered them too. These noodles were the house specialty and they’d been thrown and swung before being deposited into a steaming cauldron of boiling liquid. They were then raised en masse and coiled into a bowl with leafy greens and fatty hunks of meat and la jiao 辣椒, the spicy pepper found in so many of Sichuan's dishes. Did we want la jiao? they’d asked while taking our order. As if we would say no.

There were some other questions posed to our table but they remained unintelligible on account of being asked in the local dialect. A few sentences the chef rattled at us in quick succession made no sense until he turned to the people at the other table and said, in perfect Mandarin Chinese, “they don’t understand.”  听不懂. We understood that.

And when the chef concentrated on speaking to us in Mandarin it seemed he was most eager to learn one thing: Why do we speak Chinese?

It was the first time I’d ever been asked that question. Usually people ask how we learned Chinese, or where we learned, or when. But never why.

I suppose the why is that we live in China. The why is that without Chinese we wouldn’t be traveling to small towns to see this country outside of its cities. The why is that when you can talk to people you can start to understand.

But it’s only a start.

(Next time I’ll remember to ask the gender of the cat.)