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.

Nearly every afternoon a monsoon-like rain lets loose on the town drenching everything.  It doesn’t cool things off, though.  Just makes it all more steamy.  I seem to always get caught out in these and have to find shelter under the umbrella of some vendor. 

 I’ve been thinking a lot about this past Mother’s Day, May 8, which also happened to be my mother’s birthday.  If she were alive she would have been 80 years old.  During the past year I’ve had a number of dreams about my mother.  On an island where the dead are served first at dinner time, I guess this isn’t surprising.  In the most recent one, we were at Lake Cable in Ohio where I grew up.  She looked like she was in her mid-forties and was radiantly beautiful, black hair streaked with silver.  She was very calm and very peaceful.  She told me to keep writing, that she had read all of my work on my computer and I was able to capture people’s lives.  Then she told me she knew she was dying of congestive heart failure and that it was okay.  “An eye for an eye,” she said.  In another she appeared as a very old woman, so bent over that she had to crawl.  She said, “I feel so sad when I look at these children to know that they, too, will have to grow old.  How good it would be to die to day.  Then I could be with him.”   In all of them, she had made peace with dying.  Who knows where dreams come from?  Maybe it’s just my subconscious working my way through grief.  Maybe there is something of her spirit still left that is trying to comfort me.  Who knows what happens after we die?  I know I don’t believe in anything that religion teaches and, yet, I believe in something.  I believe that even nothing is something.  I came half way around the world to try and mend myself, to put my life back together again.  A big part of it is my mother & father’s dying but it’s also more than that.  It’s realizing that in whatever time I have left on this planet I want to live.  China has turned out to be an apt metaphor for fully living life.  Sometimes I can literally see the old world come crashing down and a new one rising up in its place.  It’s sad, but also what life is about.  Change.  Evolution.  Knowing that nothing is permanent so don’t hold on too tight and, yet, at the same time embrace it with all you have.  The other day I was walking down Guoxing Avenue just outside the college and a motorcycle passed me.  A young man was driving it and on the handlebars sat an ancient lady with gray hair, wearing a pink dress and no helmet.  She was laughing.  That’s how I want to be when I’m 80. 

Why do people come to China?  What compels, draws, lures us, to leave our home, family, and friends and come to the other side of the world and teach English?  I don’t think there’s any single reason.  I don’t think there’s a right or wrong reason.  One man came to get away from his wife.  A college student came to get away from her parents.  I met a former soldier who didn’t want to go to Iraq.  Maybe there was a divorce or losing a job.  Maybe someone felt called by God. 

In my case it was a combination of grief over losing both of my parents within two years and a questioning of my own identity as a wife and mother.  With the death of my parents, my role as a daughter ended.  As a mother, my two sons were nearly grown and that role was also changing.  I needed to rediscover who I was on my own terms.

As soon as I stepped off the plane in Haikou I was assaulted by a heat more intense than any I had ever imagined:  a humid, steamy heat that coated everything with a sticky layer of sweat and moisture.  Driving from the airport to Haikou College of Economics and Technology where I would be teaching we passed water buffalo, a common enough sight in Hainan, but to my foreign eyes these lumbering creatures looked exotic and in an odd way, beautiful.  The land appeared to hold every shade of green imaginable.  I felt very far from my homeland, very alone.  And yet, without a doubt, I also felt instantly drawn to Haikou. 

And have I rediscovered myself?  Hard to say.  In some ways I’m sure I’ve changed.  China is a great place to learn patience.  But I’m still myself.  You can change your location but it’s much harder to change who you are.

It started off innocently enough.  A text message from a friend who had been taking grass samples for the Red Cross in rural Hainan said he had some extra tickets to a Red Cross tsunami benefit.  It was a Monday night and I didn’t have any classes the next day so I figured, why not?   

I took the bus across town to Haikou’s equivalent of the Civic Center—a large auditorium with two balconies.  Pretty good acoustics.  I was told to be there by six o’clock which seemed a little early for a show but I figured they knew what they were talking about.  Besides it was Monday night.  Maybe they wanted to finish early.

At the door I was met by a woman in a navy blue suit who greeted me warmly and ushered me backstage.  I wondered, why am I going backstage?  That was my first clue that this was going to be another one of those China events. Information here is doled out by the teaspoonful.  You’re given a little bit, then a little bit more, and eventually, the whole picture might emerge, although most likely you’ll never get it all.  Warning bells were beginning to ring.

Backstage there were six other foreigners—2 Americans, 2 Canadians, 1 Australian, 1 English—all looking as bewildered as I.  A few of them I knew, the others were introduced.  I was handed a white Red Cross T-Shirt and told to follow the woman with the black high heels.  Before I knew it, people with microphones surrounded me and began firing questions.  Can I say “My name is Jordan and I’m an American” in Chinese?   I said it a couple times and they were pleased.  Could I say ‘We wish happiness and peace for the world”?  I needed help with that one.  But apparently I did it well enough for the local radio station to record it for their broadcast.  Then I was asked to join the others for a spot on TV where we repeated the peace and happiness line in unison. 

During all this little girls with painted faces were prancing around carrying lit candles, dancers—amazing dancers—were practicing at the side and outside I could hear the auditorium filling up.  “Are you ready for dress rehearsal?” someone asked. 

“The WHAT?”  I asked.

“The song.”  After one look at my face, she said, “Oh, no one told you.”

“Told me what?”

Nola, the Australian, said “Don’t worry.  You just have to do backup.  It’s just tralalalala.”

They marched us out on stage behind the curtain and showed us where to stand.  Marched us back off stage to a little room where for five minutes we practiced singing.  Nola sang a Chinese children’s song that she sang with her Kindergarten class and the rest of us sang “tralalalala.”

In the middle of the program of highly paid, professional singers and dancers, they paraded us onstage:  a motley crew of  English speaking foreigners in our T-shirts and off-key voices singing “Tralalala” in front of a few thousand Chinese and being filmed by China television.   Never doubt that China is a polite country.  We were welcomed with resounding applause and the following day found our pictures on the front page of the Hainan Daily News.

There’s a saying on the blackboard of one of my classrooms that the bitterest times make the best memories and there’s some truth to that.  The last part of the trip turned out to be by far the best although at the time all I could think about was how cold I was.  Another student of mine, Tu Liang Jun invited me to his home in Huang Mei, Hubei Province to spend the week of Chinese New Year.  Hubei is in central China.  I had to travel several hours from Wuhan, the capitol in a crowded bus full of people, goats and chickens.  When I finally got off in Huang Mei, Tu, met me with his father and a city councilman in an old Toyota sedan.  He told me I was the first foreigner ever to come to their village and the mayor had stopped by their house to tell them to treat me well.  That night the family presented me with a live fish--the same honor that Nixon received from Mao when he visited China in 1972.  The father then took the fish out and killed it for the next day’s dinner. 

The New Year was ushered in with endless fireworks, firecrackers and sparklers.  All over the countryside, the sky shone brilliant with flaming colors and shooting sparks.  At midnight we ate.  And we seemed to eat steadily for the next five days.

In the morning all the men went to the graves which were just outside the front of the house.  From the window I watched.  They bowed to the ground, burned incense and set off more firecrackers.  The day after that the women went.  Tu said there are at least 3 generations of his ancestors buried there.  

On the third day we went to the temple.  Huang Mei is flat, surrounded by rice paddies but in the center of the village is a huge hill, not quite a mountain but pretty big.  Tu told me the Buddha, himself put it there to remind the people not to forget the gods.  It was pouring rain the day we went.  We all rode bicycles and carried umbrellas--a true challenge on muddy streets.  I finally had to give up because I just couldn't navigate but then the rest of the family felt bad that I was getting soaked so they all put theirs down too.  So I flipped it back open and did my best--weaving back and forth and still getting soaked.  When we got to the mountain we made our way from one temple to another.  First the main one to the Buddha.  Then another for Guan Yin, a local goddess of childbirth.  Another for the 3 fairies.  One to some of the village ancestors.  And the final one to Di Zang Wan, the earth king.

Xiao Chen, Tu’s mother and I turned out to be nearly the same age.  I am a few weeks older so we called each other mei mei (her--little sister) and jie jie (me—elder sister).  I’ve always wanted to be a big sister.  After the first day, we figured out a communication system that consisted of my broken Chinese, a dictionary and pointing.  We spent a lot of time laughing and chopping up garlic, ginger and vegetables. 

Of course, there was a downside.  It was cold.  Really cold.  After thousands of years of civilization I would have thought the Chinese would have discovered the fireplace but there was no heat.  For a week I kept on the same four layers of clothing and still froze.  On New Year’s day we woke up to snow, then rain, then snow again.  I kept my down jacket on constantly, even sleeping in it.  We did have a bowl where we burned coal now and then so if you huddled close enough you could occasionally thaw out your hands.  The bie jiu helped.  That’s the traditional Chinese white wine that’s around 80 proof and tastes like turpentine with sugar mixed in.  I felt rude to refuse it.  It’s a strange little ritual drinking bie jiu.  You begin with a small glass and someone makes a toast and you take a drink.  Then you eat a little.  Then someone else raises the glass and you take another sip.  You only drink when someone makes a toast so there is a lot of toasting going on.  As soon as the glass is low, it’s filled again and the toasting starts all over.  By the 4th round, the toasts are getting longer and more maudlin all the time.  You also feel warmer.  Or maybe you’re still freezing but it doesn’t matter as much. 

I spent a week in Huang Mei then headed down south to Fujian Province for some warmer weather and to meet a friend of mine from Haikou who was heading back to Australia.  Half the village showed up to see me off.  I was loaded down with candy and fruit, homemade slippers and peanuts.  It had been a long month and I felt ready to head back to Haikou which was beginning to feel like home, at least for a while.

Most people would start at the beginning.  But I think I’ll start in the middle.  After I’d been teaching in Haikou for six months we had a holiday—six weeks off for Chinese New Year.  I decided to see other parts of China.

It started off well enough.  A few days in Shanghai at an old hotel with a large room, wood floors, lots of atmosphere and just across the bridge from The Bund.  

Then came Beijing.  Although The Great Wall really is spectacular, the rest of the city exhausted me.  I left earlier than I had planned.  Because of the holiday train tickets were getting hard to find. 

The next stop was Shuzho in Shaanxi Province.  One of my students, a girl named Li Juan, had invited me to visit her home.  There is a well-known tourist city with a similar name--Suzhou down near Shanghai and the woman at the ticket office was convinced that’s where I wanted to go.  “No.  It’s Shuozho in Shaanxi,” I told her.

“Oh, no.  Suzhou is in Jiangsu,” the woman assured me and began to issue my ticket.  I showed her the address Li Juan had written out for me.  The woman smiled and shook her head.  “This must be wrong.  You want to go to Suzhou.”

“I don’t want to go to Suzhou.  I want to go to Shuozho,” I said.  

“But you can’t go to Shuzho.  Foreigners don’t go to Shuozho.  You have to mean Suzhou.”

I finally called Li Juan on my cell phone and she convinced the woman to send me to Shuozho not Suzhou.  Maybe I should have listened to the ticket lady.  I can't imagine hell would be a whole lot worse than Shuozho.  Smokestacks belched smoke into the air covering everything with a layer of grime that floated above us like clouds of black cotton candy.  I stayed with the Li Juan, and her granny--an austere old lady with iron gray hair who still wears the dark blue Mao uniform of the Cultural Revolution of which she was a proud soldier.  She probably helped execute the teachers.  

Li Juan and her parents took me on a tour of the hometown--an amazing Buddhist temple that rose up out of the smog, an icon from some forgotten time.  And, of course, the coal mine.  We stood on a hill and watched the carts roll down the track and disappear into the black mouth of the earth.  We got a close-up view of the smoke stacks.  My eyes burned from the fumes. To top it off, I got the grim news that I might not be able to get a bus ticket out town.

Fortunately, that didn't prove to be the case.  Daddy is a policeman with
connections.  He got me one out the next day--a soft sleeper which at that point I was glad of.  

Then came the train ride to Xian which proved to be typical of how things had been going on this trip.  As I boarded the train, Li Juan snatched my ticket out of my hand (quite frankly, she's a bossy little bitch sometimes) and handed it to one of the attendants, instructing him to show me to my seat.  By this point I had already made my way across several thousand miles of China but Li Juan was convinced I couldn't find my seat on my own.  So in a brusque, authoritarian way, the attendant signaled me to follow him and proceeded to lead me through an endless string of cars, finally seating  me on a small seat in the 3rd class car.  People were crammed together, spilling into the aisles.  Men spit and blew their noses into the aisle.  A baby cried.  I tried to tell him I had paid for a soft sleeper and there must be some mistake, but he waved his hand and disappeared.  So I sat.  A few minutes later a woman came and demanded my ticket.  I pointed and told her that the gentleman in the uniform took it and hadn't given it back.  She barked something at me and signaled me to follow.  So I duly took up my bags and made my way through 3, 4, 5, 6 or more cars--all packed full with hundreds of eyes staring at me.  She motioned me to another tiny seat that pulled down in the aisle and disappeared.  At this point I decided this was absurd.  I already knew my berth and car number--I had it memorized before I got on the train so I made my way to the sleeper car, found my berth and went in.  There was only one other man there, a pleasant fellow who smiled and greeted me.  I settled in, read my book for a while, and finally turned off the light.  A few minutes later, the attendant burst into the room, started shouting angrily, pointed to my bags and signaled me to follow.  Confused and too much of a wimp to protest I got my bags, followed him through 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 cars back to 3rd class where he sat me down on the same little fold-out seat.  All this time I'm asking him in my poor Chinese to please give me my ticket, give me my ticket.  He ignored me and walked away.  This time I followed him.  I was tired and pissed off.  Finally, he turned and threw a ticket down on the counter--a 3rd class ticket for 56 yuan.  I paid over 200 for mine.  I blew.  I started shouting at him in a combination of bad Chinese and vulgar English.  I snatched the pen out his pocket, circled the 56 and wrote 200 in big numbers.  We were both shouting and waving our hands in perfect synchronicity.  But deep down I knew I was defeated.  I knew I didn't have a chance in hell of winning this thing so I did the next logical thing.  I bribed him.  I paid another 200 yuan for another ticket.  He smiled, patted me on the shoulder, graciously led me back to the sleeper car, punched my ticket, and the next day I made it to Xian.

Xian and Chengdu

I liked Xian.  An old city surrounded by a wall.  I planned to go to Chengdu next but train tickets were once again proving hard to come by.  However, Xian wasn’t a bad place to be stranded.  After my first night in a budget room at the YMCA, which judging from the sounds next door at all hours of the morning, afternoon and evening also rented rooms by the hour, I moved to a 3 star hotel in the center of town with a room overlooking the town square.  I wandered through the old city, visited the mosque and temples.  One day I took a bus to the Terra Cotta underground warriors. 

By chance, I ran into another student on the street one day and he also took me to visit his family where I was treated to dumplings and chicken and some great Muslim dishes. 

That evening when I went back to the hotel I decided to get a massage.  The sign in the elevator advertised ‘healing, therapeutic massage’ and since I’d already had several great ones in other parts of China, it seemed like a good idea.  My first clue that things weren’t right came from the surprised looks at the desk.  But they took me back to a room and told me to wait.  Now, mind you, I’m a middle-aged female.  Pretty average.  I have short hair and wear glasses.  The door opened and gorgeous young girl walked in with a bottle of scented oil wearing a sheer negligee that barely covered her ass.  I immediately burst out laughing.  The girl demurely sat down and motioned for me to lie on the couch.  What could I do?  I lie down.  Since massage in China is, at least in the therapeutic cases, done with the clothes on, I was still dressed.  She gave me a massage but didn’t use the oil.  At one point she sat on my back and kicked my butt with her feet.  Not the greatest massage I’ve ever had.  It was clearly not her specialty. 

            I began to think it was time to head back to Haikou, but then the next day I got a ticket to Chengdu.  I loved Chengdu.  A great city with great massage places that were really massage.  I stayed at Sam’s Hostel, a bit run down but with a lush courtyard, friendly people and prices that can’t be beat.  This also seemed to be a gathering place for foreign teachers on Spring holiday.  In a short time I took up with two Australian women, an Englishman, a Swede, and a couple from Ireland.  I visited Leshan, the Panda Reserve, lots of markets and took a cooking class.  All in three days.  There was only one downside to the trip.  For almost 20 years, from the time a former boyfriend first took me to a Sichuan restaurant, I have fantasized about going to Chengdu, the heart of Sichuan cooking, and sampling the food.  I love fiery, spicy food and planned to try everything from small tea houses and sidewalk cafes to at least one first-class restaurant.  Now, there’s no one but myself to blame for this.  I was also lonely and liked the company of my new acquaintances.  None of whom shared my fondness for spicy Chinese cooking.  Day one:  We ordered pizza.  That night I tried to convince them to try some local cuisine but was voted down in favor of an Irish pub that served hamburgers and French fries.  The next day included the trip to Leshan and we ate packaged noodles from a sidewalk vendor.  That evening was the cooking class so I did have at least some of my desire satisfied.  The following day would be my last in Chengdu.  I spent the day with the Australian women where we again had lunch in a pizza parlor.  I agreed but said that night I really wanted to try a local restaurant.  Back at the hostel, we opened a bottle of wine and were soon joined by the Irish, the English and the Swede.  I figured the more, the better, so we headed out to a restaurant.  Somehow plans had changed and I didn’t realize it.  The next thing I knew we were sitting at a large table in a TexMex Restaurant noshing on chips and eating enchiladas.  This is what you get for expectations.