The following is a short story I wrote while on a particulary long trip in the center of China. It's long, but I hope you enjoy it.
T.I.C.
It’s a land shrouded in mystic, always luring the adventurous, but mostly out of reach. It’s a land deep in history--ancient history--as rich, as romantic, as bloody as that of Europe and the Middle East. It’s culture is deeply rooted in it’s past, but now change is running rampant over the land. This Is China or TIC.
It’s the largest English speaking country in the world and it’s not the United States. It’s the largest beer drinking country in the world, and it’s not Germany. It’s the fourth largest county in the world, area-wise, and the largest, population wise. It has 55 distinct ethnic minorities and over 200 unofficial dialects. T.I.C. or This Is China.
For six months, armed with a few polite, badly pronounced Chinese phrases, I had the pleasure of roaming through China with a small team to look at breweries for potential joint ventures. On this particular day, I find myself deep in the Shanxi Province, the fringe of China’s Wild West--a coal mining belt with few redeeming qualities. This day, was to be a travel day and what started out as a seven hour trip from LinFen to ZhenZhou City; ended up being a twenty-five hour quest to see Hukou Falls; the 2nd largest waterfall in China. On the map, it’s merely inches off the highway.
It’s a land shrouded in mystic, always luring the adventurous, but mostly out of reach. It’s a land deep in history--ancient history--as rich, as romantic, as bloody as that of Europe and the Middle East. It’s culture is deeply rooted in it’s past, but now change is running rampant over the land. This Is China or TIC.
It’s the largest English speaking country in the world and it’s not the United States. It’s the largest beer drinking country in the world, and it’s not Germany. It’s the fourth largest county in the world, area-wise, and the largest, population wise. It has 55 distinct ethnic minorities and over 200 unofficial dialects. T.I.C. or This Is China.
For six months, armed with a few polite, badly pronounced Chinese phrases, I had the pleasure of roaming through China with a small team to look at breweries for potential joint ventures. On this particular day, I find myself deep in the Shanxi Province, the fringe of China’s Wild West--a coal mining belt with few redeeming qualities. This day, was to be a travel day and what started out as a seven hour trip from LinFen to ZhenZhou City; ended up being a twenty-five hour quest to see Hukou Falls; the 2nd largest waterfall in China. On the map, it’s merely inches off the highway.
My three lao wai comrades (laowai is Mandarin for foreigner), two interpreters, two beer company representatives and a grumpy driver were stuffed into a Jinbei Minibus. Think 1960’s vintage VW Microbus and you’ve got a pretty accurate picture in your mind. I’m pretty sure this particular vehicle might have been comfortable in it’s day, but it’s day was about twenty years ago. The age of the bus is frozen in time since the speedometer reads thirty kilometers per hour whether we’re standing still or vibrating down the highway. Faded numbers on the odometer read two hundred thousand something, but they haven’t moved in years. The shock absorbers were, well, they weren’t absorbing anything. Two years later I still have the bruises on my ass to prove it.
Yet, there we were, three Americans in the bowels of China, trying to catch up to the keys on our laptop computers as they bounced on our laps; writing reports that would somehow have to be transmitted back to the states by the next morning. Al Gore didn’t exactly have China’s countryside in mind when he invented the internet. I hear a loud bang and a word I recognize as the Chinese version of “CRAP” and realize my interpreter dozed off just long enough to have his head thrown against the window as the bus rocked over another enormous rut. I decide to close the lid of my computer before vertigo completely overwhelms me and gaze out at the countryside.
Everything here is veiled in black dust from the mines. The air is thick with it and many of the locals wear black-stained cotton masks or wrap dirty cloths over their nose and mouths to filter out the carbon particles. The driver balances the Jinbei on a ridge between two mountains weaving in and out of the pedestrians, laying on his horn and shouting, while I close my eyes pretending not to see the thousand foot drop-offs on either side. The Chinese don’t have the equivalent of DOT or OSHA, so guardrails don’t exist. Finally, the road turns to hug the face of the next mountain and we veer close to one of the chiseled terraces riddled with human-size mouse holes. These near-perfect arches act as the structural support to keep the mountain rock from crashing inward. Odd black wisps of smoke curl from each burrow and drift upward.
Before today, I’ve said many times, that nothing I see in China surprises me, thus our invented term, This Is China or TIC for short. Today is a first...well a first since the last time something really threw me for a loop in China. As the bus bounces by the mouse holes, I begin to make out the shapes of families huddled around small piles of burning coals for warmth in the back of each. I looked around to see my fellow lao wais are as saucer-eyed as I am. It finally hits me that there are thousands of people walking about and not a single brick and mortar structure in sight.
The mouse holes that began as coal mine shafts had been converted to living quarters for the workers. The fortunate had scrounged pieces of corrugated metal or scrapes of wood to tilt up at the openings shielding them from the wind and rain. The wealthy families near the road had all the luxuries in life, a custom fit wooden doorway at the front, a stove pipe to carry out the noxious black soot, and electricity. The electricity is stolen directly from the main power line secured high on utility poles.
Suddenly my cell phone buzzes; startling me from my gaze. This is China. Hundreds of miles from civilization and the cell phone service is flawless. I flip open the receiver and hear my wife’s static-ridden voice. Before I can describe what I’m seeing, she goes into a diatribe on her hard day and how the garage door opener broke and how she had to use her key to go inside the house and how she broke a fingernail opening the garage door manually. At this point, all I hear is yada, yada, yada and I feel like shouting into the phone, “Sorry, I’m going into a tunnel.” Instead, being the insensitive jerk, that she later called me, I tell her that there are thousands of people living in caves here and they would die to have a door, let alone one that opens at the push of a button. I actually hear myself say, “Get over it and call a repairman.” Thank God I lost the signal shortly after that remark and we continued to bounce along the mountain trail.
Next came the “Sign”. No, not a sign from God, but a road sign with a unique English interpretation. Okay, again, I’ll remind you that we are hundreds of miles from civilization and I’m pretty sure that even the most adventurous Westerner wouldn’t be driving this path, but there it was, in Chinese characters and English: “Easy hair of front trouble, large carry the heavy vehicle.” We all laughed until we understood what it meant. “Easy Here, Trouble Ahead, Large Vehicles Carrying Heavy Loads.” As the tiny Jinbei rounded the curve, there it was. A massive truck, taking all but a few feet of the available trail.
The cunning truck driver immediately swerved to the face of the cliff, leaving the outside and a thousand foot drop, sans guardrail, for us to negotiate. There were a few words and gestures exchanged between the drivers as the Jinbei inched along the cliff face. A miracle moment later it was all over and we were descending into the Huang He valley. That’s the Yellow River.
It’s now been eight hours. Those few inches on the map took six hours to negotiate. As the Jin Bei grinds to a stop, we crawl out to solid footing and take in the scenery. Odd, that we’ve come all this way to see the second largest waterfall in all of China and, stretched out alongside of us, is a mile-wide dried-up river bed with nothing that resembles a waterfall in sight, and we can see up and down the valley for miles. We all thought it, “Where’s the waterfall?” Finally someone dared to ask. “Waterfall is still a few more kilometers. We will have a break here at the Jin Pu Hotel.” There is a unified sigh of relief, both for the opportunity relieve ourselves and that we hadn’t spent eight hours of hell for nothing.
After a short potty break; thank God for western style toilets; it was back in the bus. Chinese toilets are a whole other topic. We bounce down the road for about a mile and pull to a stop next to a cute, petite young woman with an orange coat, wielding a megaphone. But the scenery hadn’t changed and the same thought comes rushing back. “Where the hell is the waterfall?”
How about a nice dish of fried scorpians for the ride back. You can get it in a "To Go" box.