Has China changed? Yes. And no. I asked my Dad before I left, "With all the radical changes that have happened in the world, does Wallburg ever change?"
Wallburg is the tiny town in North Carolina that my Dad grew up in. There’s a store, a church, a post office and a few houses on the road, one of them the house he grew up in. My cousin lives there now, and still there’s the bare spot in the hedgerow where the cars come too fast around the corner and hit that poor little replacement box hedge bush on average about every year.
He answered no, he didn’t expect it did. We talked about it a while. Sure, people have Internet, and they drive cars with GPS units in them. But they still do what my dad did and his parents before him — they go to school, work, and church. They live next door to their parents, marry their high school sweethearts, get jobs in agriculture or law enforcement or nursing or research or high tech; have children, and grandchildren, and everybody knows each other and it’s off the beaten path so you’ve got to wave when you pass another car because if not somebody will say, "Why didn’t you wave at me the other day when we passed cars?"
So I imagine that if five Chinese people came roaring into a little American town on Harley Davidsons fully geared up for traveling, to stop to ask directions or mail a letter or to ask for tools, or limping in with engine problems that sure, they’d likely be met with the same slack-jawed stares that we’re getting everywhere we go here in China.
I’ll bet that in Wallburg, if one of those Chinese riders had a mechanical difficulty with her Harley, and she stopped and started fooling with the engine, that a crowd would gather round and somebody would figure out who had the tools and parts and creative know-how to fix it, that the’d haul it to that place and all else would be interrupted to start working on it. I’ll bet, too, that they’d be invited in the house for a piece of pie and some sweet tea or a dinner of fried chicken and potato salad.
Maybe one of them would take photos of of the tomatoes ripening on a shelf in the screened-in back porch because of the golden sunlight shining on them in the late afternoon light. And the bed of roses carefully tended next to the grape arbor.
The kids would gather round looking at these strange black haired, black eyed people with funny accents, who talked to each other in a language completely indiscernible, and giggle and run to the doorways when the strangers gazed into their eyes and asked a question or took a picture.
Today I noticed a mechanical problem near in a small town of about fifty or maybe one hundred people. We’d been riding all day through spectacular countryside in spectacular autumn weather and spectacular autumn colors under a bluebird sky dotted with a few cotton puff clouds.
We rode north out of Beijing yesterday, and then west, into Heibi province along high, jagged mountains that had been heaved up a very long time ago and then softened by the elements so that they lay in gently cascading peaks burnished orange this time of year with the trees changing colors.
The switchbacks were wasted on the sidecar motorcycles. I wished for a two-wheeler except in the patches of gravel and rockfall. We were so out of range of civilization that we worried about gas, so coasted down the other sides of the mountains for miles and miles, silently wheeling down past absolutely wilderness and then, suddenly, our first Mongolian pony standing on a hill alert, sniffing the air and bucking at our unfamiliar presence.
A few miles beyond the base of that hill lies a small town, a row of houses looking out onto the road and then fields beyond, and mountains beyond that. It was so clean and fresh we stopped to take it in, and then we met one of those people who just vibrate with positive energy, a woman of about 48, a beauty, with her long glossy hair arranged into a braid and walking down the street calling her pigs. We laughed and mimicked her and she came over, laughing with us, and said she was looking for the mama pig because she’d just had a dozen babies and would we like to see them?
Yes, is always the answer, so we laughed chanting "sweee, sweee, sweee," with her down the road, and finally they came running and we ran back to the pen where she poured the slop into the trough for them, the reward, and then they sniffed our legs and ran off with mama again.
"Ask her if life is good here in this mountain town," said Diny to Teresa, and the women nodded yes, with a radiant smile, "I’m happy, life is good, and in the winter we wear furs."
Her compound was full of chickens, a few were jumping at a cabbage she’d hung in a tree and the others were scratching at the just-harvested corn drying on the concrete porch in front of the house. One was drinking from a puddle under the water pump, an old-fashioned hand pump that pulled it from a well.
Her daughter in law emerged, with two grandsons. One boy was shyly captivated with the light-haired foreigners, coming forward, and then, just before real contact, withdrawing. "What a tease!" Teresa said in Chinese, and the mother and grandmother nodded emphatically yes!
Then there were more ponies, and carts pulled by burros so filled with cornstalks that they filled three quarters of the road, and when they met going opposite directions, the noise of the stalks hitting was like jumping in a haystack.
Most of the burros were followed by their babies, untethered and long-legged and energetic prancing creatures who shied at the disturbance of our engines but who remained obediently on their side of the street next to their mamas.
Finally, we found gas, and continued on a straight black road through a fertile valley. I heard a rattling noise that sounded like something on the frame had come loose, but couldn’t find anything. Finally I stopped in frustration — I couldn’t stand the noise any more, and it was the rubber donut attached to the drive shaft. It had worn through.
The guys couldn’t repair it on the side of the road so we traveled slowly to the next small town where there was a tractor mechanic that had the tools and the manpower to remove the tire and the drive shaft, and then one of the other motorcycles parked in the compound started smoking. One of the many villagers who had gathered around had fooled with the key, left it on, and it had burned the wires and hopefully not the points. We were all freezing cold, it was going to get dark soon, and where would we stay?
Solution – the neighbor asked us in for tea and then dinner. We accepted the green tea, declined the dinner but it was forced upon us anyway — fresh steamed vegetables straight from the garden — and waited another hour for the men to finish the repairs. She showed us a bed where we could stay. Some of the family was away selling flowers. We said yes, and then the men came and said the repairs were done, and they were going to tow the other bike to a hotel in town, and we should come too, so we reluctantly left and here I am in a hotel in who knows where, on our way to Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, on our way to Datong on our way to Wu Tai mountain on our way back to Beijing, maybe, if our plans don’t change once again.
