The Land of Pearls and Pinapple

Haikou is filled with odd sights.  One day on the bus we drove down a street and every shop had a Buddha outside with burning sticks of incense.  People were bowing in front of them.  We turned the corner and the Buddhas were gone, the bowing people were gone.  The shops looked like they always do. 

Two days ago in the market place a nude man strolled down the aisle.  His hair hung in matted dredlocks and he was caked with mud.  No one paid him any mind.

The market itself help baskets of coiling snakes of all colors.  Chickens.  Geese.  Rabbits.  Dried fungus and other plants.  No idea what they are.

I have a friend who likes to imitate Michael Jackson.

And the Hainanese opera deserves comment.  Even though I can't understand it, I can pretty much follow the story line.  The themes are universal:  lust, betrayal, treachery, a little incest and infanticide thrown in.  The usual fare.  I love music but I have to admit, the Hainanese opera sounds a little like setting cats on fire and turning them loose in a room full of tin cans.  But visually, it's stunning and the choreography is great.

At my age you would think I would be wise enough to avoid the motorcycle taxis, but they’ve become one of my favorite parts about living in Haikou.  They’re dangerous, foolish rides and I love them.  Whenever I need a cheap thrill I just hop on a motorcycle taxi and go somewhere.  Maybe it’s nostalgia for my lost youth, maybe just the feeling of flying, but when I’m not riding my bike, the motorcycle taxis are my favorite way of getting around.  People keep telling me to stop riding them and I do try. 

            Today I was headed for the bus stop near Mingju Plaza when under the bridge I saw a group of motorcycles.  And I couldn’t resist.  “Lantian Lu?” I asked.  We negotiated a price.  Since I was wearing a skirt, I climbed on side-saddle the way I see the local women ride, and we were off.  We zoomed under the bridge, hopped the curb up on to the sidewalk.  Today was Chinese Labor Day, a big holiday, and the sidewalks were packed.  That didn’t stop the motorcycle taxi driver.  He honked his horn and the pedestrians parted.  What a feeling of power!  Then we bounced back over another curb and out onto the street.  He made a U-turn in the middle of the street, ran a red light, dodged a bus and we were on our way.  The heavy traffic crept along but my driver fishtailed in and out of cars until the road looked clear ahead. 

            Then at another busy intersection we saw the cops.  I still haven’t figured out where the taxis are legal and where they are not in Haikou, but judging from our detour, I guess we were in the illegal zone.  Suddenly, my taxi driver took a quick right down one of Haikou’s winding streets.  He then turned into an alley, shot through a hole in a chain-link fence, down another alley and finally back to the main road.  By the time he dropped me off at the end of the street market where we nearly ran over a chicken, I felt exhilarated.  I should have give him an extra five yuan.    

Finding the way back to myself has been slow.  For the first few weeks I taught and I slept.  But this time I didn’t sleep from depression.  I slept from an exhaustion of blood, bone and muscle.  I slept during the scorching, humid afternoons and late at night I walked along the canal strewn with litter where water buffalo slept in the tall weeds and bats swooped around my ears.  Then I returned to my apartment and slept until I had to go to class.

            Eventually, I ventured into town.  I bought a bicycle and explored Haikou’s winding streets.  I discovered markets with stalls full of dried mushrooms and plants, insects and snakes.  Small cages held rabbits, ducks, cats and rats.  I began studying Mandarin and held elementary conversations with the shopkeepers.  

Now that I’ve been in Haikou for over eight months I’ve discovered that snap decisions to come to China are not all that uncommon among the foreigners who live here.  I’ve met a number of men and women who simply woke up one day and knew that they needed to come to China, that China called them.  My Chinese teacher calls it yuán fèn, a mysterious connection.   When you feel it, you have no choice but to follow.  Generally, like myself, once we decided to come, we found jobs in a matter of weeks and before we had time to question the decision found ourselves on a plane headed to Hong Kong, Beijing or Shanghai. 

Death had taken up residence in my life.  First my father’s slow death from cancer.  Then, less than two years later, my mother’s sudden death from a heart attack.  These were the two most tangible and painful losses but other parts of my life were dying as well.  I lost a short-lived job at a private university, a job I thought I would keep for years.  For the first time in my life I had been making a high salary on a regular basis.  I had paid vacations, health care, a retirement fund, all those benefits that my lifestyle and temperament had never allowed me to experience before.  My role of a mother, at least my active role, was also reaching its final years.  My older son, already in his early 20s, had left home to pursue his own life.  My younger, although still a teenager was growing quickly, and as every parent knows, the years fly.  And my writing.  Once I had dreamed that I would write a novel, that it would be published and would reach readers.  But now, with thousands of pages boxed away or stored on the computer, pages that I could never seem to revise to satisfaction, numerous rejection letters, and the reality that try as I might I just wasn’t as disciplined as I wanted to be, I began to feel that even that, the dream I’d clung to year after year, had begun to die.

For the first time in my life I experienced true depression.  Mornings I woke up crying and would burrow under the blankets, forcing myself back to sleep.  I drank too much wine.  I figured out a way to keep an endless supply of Xanex by calling various clinics and telling them I had flight anxiety.  I missed my mother and I needed a new job.  My husband and son tried to offer their support but it was my morass and I needed to shake myself out of it. 

            So I came to China.  I found a job on the internet and within a few months had settled into my own apartment and began teaching English at a small technical college in Haikou on Hainan Province, an island in the South China Sea.  Completely alone for the first time in more than twenty years.