Most of the tourists that come here are Chinese. In fact, they are mostly Chinese men. And nearly all of them wear the same thing. But that's not new. In a way. Chinese men have been wearing the same clothing for a long time. Before the end of the Cultural Revolution they all wore that Mao outfit. They all wanted to or had to look like him. Now they all look like businessmen on Casual Friday. A dark blue suit, white shirt underneath, some dark color pants, cheap dress shoes. The tie is conspicuously missing, to show that they are, in fact, on vacation.
She sees a group of them go in the best restaurant in town. At least she is told that it's the best in town. She has never been to a restaurant here. She moved here when she got married to this man who saw her in the fields one day and thought she would be a great help. She was from a village half an hour walk away. Like that day, ten years ago, when he saw her, she is still wearing a big straw hat. Her face is dark and a little red fro the late summer sun. She scratches her nose a little, and a mixture of dirt, oil, sweat, and sunburned skin comes rolling off her long, gray, fingernails. She is still as thin as ten year's ago working on her dead father's field. But she's wearing a different shirt, a prettier one. Nowadays you can't really buy the old fashion, single-color, dark blue shirts anymore. There are so many more options, and if she wanted to, she could look like those women on TV, lots of make up, most en vogue hairdo, and of course, beautiful dresses. Her husband struck it rich by selling their land by the river to a tour company that wanted to set up a restaurant and a station for all the tourists who come here to see the famous karsts and the rivers that flow through them. He also turned another piece of land by one of the rivers into a tourist attraction by digging out a lagoon and putting exotic fish in there. The Chinese tourists are suckers for these kinds of things and would love to make use of their newly bought, expensive Japanese cameras on such an artificial lagoon.
She watches some examples of these tourists walk out of the restaurant that she had seen them go in earlier. She doesn't have to work in the fields anymore. The big field they had that wasn't used for tourism was sold so her husband could establish a hotel in the big city where tourists flew in. What she does have is a plot of land outside her new house, where she still enjoys planting vegetables and taking care of pigs and chickens. There's also a goat. It's what she enjoys doing. She doesn't care much about the tourism that has swept through this region that used to be quiet, where people worked hard, on the land or on the rivers. Now, the land is full of migrant workers who are fed by the tourist industry, and the river is buzzing with the sound of motorized boats that try to look like the old bamboo boats but really are made of fiberglass tubes. She doesn't know that they are fiberglass tubes, only that they are obviously not bamboo. She had worked fifteen years in the mountains to know what bamboo looked like in the water.
She gets up and walks towards the landing. She takes the main street at first. There are plenty of shops, most are selling trinkets and souvenirs for tourists. Most of the sellers are still people she had known since moving to this village, but some are new from the big city, trying to make a new buck. She gets a little tired from seeing all the fake stuff for sale, and, with a bamboo leaf in her mouth, she takes a detour through the narrow streets that wind among people's houses. She is a little at ease now.
Her blue and red head cover is getting a little bothersome, and as the sun is no longer beating down from above, she takes it off. She is a mother of three children now. It's because of the children her husband hasn't totally left her and married or at least run off with his mistress in the city. She understands that, but she doesn't really care. She would not want his life, so much ambition, so much desire for money. She just wants to be left in peace with her children. From the sun and from her children her face is gaunt and freckly and has been developing wrinkles. She sees some of the older women coming out of their houses to pour out some dirty water into the newly covered sewers (through the little openings), and she sees that they don't look older than her.
And somehow she started thinking about those tourists again. She knew they had just come back from a river boat tour and went in to the restaurant to have tea and snacks. Some of the men had women with them. She isn't sure if they were the men's wives. She wonders if her husband has ever gone traveling like that with his mistress. But she doesn't envy him or them; she has no desire to travel. It is enough that she crossed the river to visit a high school friend who had also moved here a few years ago. It is her vacation to be away from the kids.
She takes the bamboo leaf out of her mouth when she sees the two strangers walking in front of her. They aren't the Chinese tourists she had seen earlier. One seems Chinese, young, short hair, but he is wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans, things she had seen on TV but never seen around here, not on locals or on the tourists. One time when she went by bus to the big city to visit her husband's new hotel she saw some people looking like that. But what makes this man more different from the others in that city is that he isn't in a big group of people. People who wear modern clothing seem always to be in a group laughing and having fun. More interesting is the person he is talking to and walking with. They are talking in a strange language, probably English. She isn't sure if he's Chinese, a tour guide, or a foreigner, Japanese? Hong Kong? Overseas? She is not Chinese at all. She has dark, brown hair, but glitters a little in the setting sun. The way she walks is different, in some ways, than what she has been used to. But because she could only see this foreign woman's back, she can't see her face. She can see her lower arms, very white.
She is entirely bewitched. She has seen white women on TV, but she never took much notice of them, just another strange object on TV. But here she was in the presence of a live version. So she follows them, not noticing how the distance between them is decreasing. But before she can get too close they had reached the boat landing. The three just find themselves standing at the same spot. She hears him speaking very broken Mandarin to a boatman while they both try to ignore this fisherman with two cormorants sitting by his boat. She knew him; he used to be a real fisherman until the tourists came and he managed to get them to pay a lot of money to have pictures taken with him and his cormorants. All the Chinese knew that the fisherman here use cormorants to fish, so taking a picture with one is like being part of a legend. The two here, however, are not at all interested in being in such a photo, frustrating the ex-fisherman. The man is trying to negotiate a price to cross the river. They apparently don't want to get on a boat ride. They want to get to the other side where there is a path to walk along the river.
She finds their objectives amusing. But she now can see the woman's face. It is very fair, but golden too in the face of the waning sun. Why would they be walking into the darkness? She didn't understand. They keep talking in that foreign language to each other. Her eyes are light blue with dark pupils, making her look even more exotic. She grew up calling white people white demons, and now she understands why. Her nose is pointy but subtle. And her lips seem fiery red like her tomatoes on a white plate.
Suddenly, suddenly at least to her, the woman turns to her. And the woman smiles, revealing perfect and ivory teeth. The former peasant woman suddenly turns all red and looks downward, giggling. She is in her late twenties and she suddenly finds herself acting like a little girl being paid attention from a boy for the first time in puberty. And when she looks back up slowly, she finds the white woman still smiling at her, but not with wonder or curiosity, just a friendliness she had never seen in any tourists. If the tourists paid any attention to her, these compatriots of hers would look down on her, seeing that she must be one of the peasants or worse, migrants, lingering in this part of China underdeveloped except in touristy areas. She might even be mistaken as a member of the many minorities that have had roots here for centuries, judging from the traditional clothes she's wearing.
But here the white woman is smiling at her. And she feels lost. Suddenly she has all these questions about the world, as if the world had suddenly expanded in front of her eyes, beyond the karsts, the fields, the green horizon she has grown up seeing. Even beyond the TV that has given her a two-dimensional peek into the world outside.
The white woman turns back towards her companion when he started talking to her in that foreign language. Suddenly the former peasant woman wants to know what language it is, how they can possibly understand each other with all that gibberish, and if many other people communicate like that. She turns her attention to the man, and almost supplicating with her eyes to feed her newly developed hunger for answers.
He is smiling, telling her something that makes her smile too. And he proceeds to dip his right hand into this little pouch well hidden under his T-shirt and removed a few bills out. She looks at how much they are paying the man, and thought that although it is ten times how much she would be paying, it is still a lot less than what the tourists are paying the tour companies, who, in turn, pay very little to the local people. She is impressed by them, not only by how this exotic woman looks, but also how they aren't like other tourists.
The woman turns around one more time and waves at her before she and her companion boards a boat operated by one of the helpers of the owner of the boats. The former peasant woman walks up to the owner and asked why they wanted to go so late to the other side. He looks at her, puzzled, then answers that they are visiting a little monastery an hour's walk from the landing on the other side. She is puzzled. She knew there's a monastery there, rebuilt after being almost totally obliterated during the Cultural Revolution. Why are they going there? They are Buddhists? It's so quiet down there, there is not much to do, and while there are karsts all around it, one or two photos would suffice. They negotiated so that tomorrow morning they would come back by boat. "So they are staying there overnight?" "Seems like it to me!" The man turns around to tend to some repair job by two of his workers.
More questions that will never be answered. The last time she had her curiosity piqued was when this old lady of a neighbor told her that there were a lot of foreigners up at the Moon Hill because they liked going to there for rock climbing. The old lady, who could not live on just the measly state pension that has long left behind by inflation, would go there to intercept the climbers and sell them water. She would climb all the way up to the base of the Moon Hill just to intercept them; she told her that her secret was to be persistent, and in a month she would earn double her state pension from selling water to these people. "But I guess you never have to do that, hey!" the old lady said to her before walking off. She didn't really care for her last remark, just wondered why people came all the way here to climb these rocks!
"Why did they come all the way here to be in the middle of these rocks in a monastery?" she wondered. Then she remembers the white woman's smile and she felt warm. She felt that though the world suddenly became infinitely larger, she isn't a complete stranger to the people that occupied this infinity.
