It was time to leave.
The employees at the airport slept on their hands, knuckles reddening
their cheeks and foreheads. Behind them, rows of ramen, chocolates, toothpaste
and airport necessities were stacked in Spartan efficiency.
"Sleepy gene,"
Sheshie reminded me, jerking her thumb towards her Chinese mother, dead
asleep on her suitcase. "See?"
A one-year-old wandered unsteadily towards me, a pack of cigarettes in his hand. I made faces to get him interested. It worked. He wobbled my way, miniature fingers losing their grip on the packaging. He tried to throw them to me.
"Isn't he a little
young to be smoking?" I joked to the mom, who hovered nearby. She didn't
understand a word, just nodded in response, smiling. Always smiling. The
boy opened the pack and dumped the contents across the floor. His mother
barked something in Mandarin, and he backed away from me in clumsy steps.
"Kids like you,"
Sheshie continued. "But you're always getting them into trouble. The trade-off
isn't equitable, in the end."
Guilin smothers the skin, an oxygenated straitjacket. The humidity lines your lungs with shag carpet.
"It's like a fluffy
blanket," Sheshie said, scanning the cloud layers lining the horizon,
long before we landed. Long before the Li river, with its metastasized
limestone tumors jutting from the earth like sentinels of the sky. Its
suckered cormorants with ropes tied around their necks, unable to swallow
the fish their captors sent them to imprison. A rural dirty trick. I turned
my camera on the canny fishermen, who shadowed their ornithological puppets
like parents.
"Cheap bastards,"
I cracked.
"Ugly American," Sheshie shot back.
When we landed in
Yang Suo, Sheshie pointed to the open-air market and cooed like Monroe.
Scores of fragile stands stuffed with knock-off Gucci, Versace and other
local craftsmanship. Without warning, she bolted into the crowd, heading
with purpose to the purses. I looked away from the camera and blinked
after her, starting with anxiety into the throng. I found her five minutes
later poring over beads.
"Ugly American is
back," she said, without looking up.
Her mom stood grinning next to her, half the wharf's goods packed into
anonymous bags stacked beside her. I stood and watched the capitalist
ballet as Sheshie haggled over prices, deciding against employing the
digicam. I settled for redundancy.
"Cheap bastards," I said, ducking back out into the wandering crowd, my
paranoid hands groping my pockets for our passports.
My inner antennae
became aroused. I turned to find a misshapen mother barely four feet tall
standing beside me, her leather face wrinkled with labor. She carried
what I thought was a sleeping infant strapped tightly to her back, before
I realized he looked about twenty-five. But it was hard to tell in Guilin.
"Thank you," I answered repeatedly in Mandarin, confused by her alien
tongue. I could remember nothing else to say, and did not understand anything
she asked.
"You made a
friend," Sheshie joked from behind me, bags stuffed with purses dangling
from her hands. "I'm proud of you."
By the time we got downtown, I had two tapes worth of traffic footage. Cars, buses, bikers, pedestrians and stray animals nearly colliding in harmony, missing the full force of the city by inches. Clockwork. The dazzling challenge to randomness never failed to catch me seizing the chair for fear of cardiac arrest. It made for riveting cinema.
The bus driver frowned
as I sat on the floor near the front window, where no chairs or snoring
septuagenarians could interfere. But he eventually relented, cracking
an in-the-know grin. We had become fast, mute friends after I repeatedly
slammed my head into the television hanging from the bus ceiling on a
metal box.
"Tall." The only thing he ever said to me.
After an hour, I stopped ducking in anticipation of a freeway bloodbath brought on by one straggling senior. Guilin elderly walk unafraid across their thoroughfares, bored resignation etched into their faces. Because China's streets redefine theories of flow. Its conundrums always solve themselves. When no one died, I turned the digicam off and watched Sheshie sleep. What will our hybrid children look like when they emerge, red and raw from the womb?
"China is a sleeping elephant," the official argued to the sensei in the martial-arts film I can't remember. But the elephant is waking to the modernizing mayhem hanging from its country's countless cranes. I did not find a corner of the country not under construction. Every plot of land a graveyard of bricks, reminders of a Third World left behind, architectures and infrastructures demolished like yesterday's scrolls. Skeletons of jagged malls crept upward now, ready to claim earth's ceiling for the future. Soon the smell of damp earth that hangs over Guilin like a penumbra will surrender to them, join the cosmopolis already cropping up along the Li, lighting the nocturnal paths of lovers and laborers alike. The dying offer protest, along with the romantics who dream of rural hardships they will never know.
But Guilin's sunken toilets will rise one day, unburdening its motherland's quadriceps in the process. It will take only better alarm clocks. Foreign investments. Paradigm shifts. The kids want their MTV. And kids always get what they want. Watch them nestled in slumber. Listen close and you will hear them.
Wake up, sleepy gene.
