All tomorrow’s parties

But what did you do in those Chinese villages? my city friends ask me. Didn’t you get bored with hiking about in the wilderness, and crave some society, some culture, some fun?

A lot of the time I was writing my book, and craved solitude and long hikes. But a lot of the time, I was going to parties.

The Bai, the Miao and the Dong, the Tibetans and Lissu – they do love a good party. Like followers of traditional calendars everywhere, they find endless occasion: sowing and harvest; full moon and flood; birth, marriage, death of people and of gods; house-warming and tomb-sweeping; arrivals and departures, beginnings and ends. And they are always happy to share the occasion with random visitors. If it involves said visitor making a total fool of herself, so much the better…

In the Bai region of Yunnan it’s the grandmothers who keep the world going, the calendar pages turning, the parties full of food, dancing, pageantry, laughter. They do love to laugh. To dress up the tombs and temples and houses (not themselves; it’s the old men who dress up in cardboard crowns) with bright flags and flowers and paper people and paper money. To dance around, tinkling cymbals and tapping drums. To feed, and ply with baijiu (rice wine) the five thousand.

Every month there’s a festival in one of the many temples scattering Shaxi valley, and it’s a fabulous and hilarious privilege to be invited to join in, to eat and eat, to sit on a tiny bench watching the performance, to be dragged up to dance with a huge bunch of paper flowers or a china bowl containing a lit candle – balanced on my head.

The locals are all so delighted, dashing about the temple, bowing to the gods, reciting prayers, gossiping and openly laughing when it all goes a bit pear-shaped… I’ve no idea of the religious significance of any of it, or why they made me dance with a bowl on my head. I suspect there was no significance, they were just making it up as they went along, propitiating the gods just in case, and having a lot of fun.

Rambling between villages in Guizhou province, we stumbled over a Miao house-warming party and were invited in for food and drink – drink – drink. Old men already so drunk they couldn’t stand up; aunties and grandmothers, those ones who keep the word turning, busy making everyone else drunk with their endless bowls of wine dipped from clay jars, which have to be drained to the bottom not once but twice; younger sisters looking after the babies. The family’s four sons were all there, even the one who was working in Fujian province, in the city, and who wandered off with his girlfriend to walk moodily hand in hand through the paddy fields; two modern children, not charmed by rural excess; a bit bored now they knew what else life had to offer.

Later there will be dancing; there will be bull-fighting, they promise, filling up our wine bowls yet again. I am kidnapped; carried off to the upper village and presented like a hunting trophy to various households, to a succession of shyly, sweetly smiling small girls trying out their few words of English and showing me their battered school books; more food; more wine; up to the village hall where the bronze drum is hauled out of storage and hefted down to the square and the former communist party leader begins to bong and blong, the giggling small girls and a few chuckling grannies begin to dance and laugh when I get the steps wrong, round and round we go or maybe it’s the world that’s going round and round, the strings of drying yellow maize and red chillies, the dark wooden houses jumbled along steep cobbled pathways and the pink pigs peeking out from their sties, the gigantic stairs of the rice terraces stepping up the mountain, peopled with hay stacks like shaggy giants wearing topknots of pine branches -

and now I’m in another little dark house, sitting on a miniature stool by the embers with another lot of people I’ve never seen before all chomping and slurping, staring at me with shiny eyes, solemn staring babies peeking over their parent’s shoulders, and I feel like a pink pig, like a giant puppet pig in a tiny puppet show, in a Miao Punch-and-Judy, and I really don’t want any more baijiu thankyouverymuch – and I tiptoe away when no one is looking and stagger back to the lower village, where I find my Chinese companion has been tucked up in bed by our hosts to sleep off the alcohol and I’m on my own where no one speaks English and everything’s broken…

Palaces for piglets

Kaiping, in Guangdong (Canton) province, was the heart of the piglet trade.

Around the turn of the 20^th century, thousands of impoverished Chinese were tricked into going abroad in search of streets paved with gold, money showering down from trees. What they found instead: more poverty, exploitation,  heartless countries that did not love them, would not understand them, only wanted them to make money out of them…

Translation of a typical advertisement recruiting Chinese workers (from the Overseas Chinese museum, Zili Cun)

The same old story. Nowadays, it’s called people-trafficking.

But still, there were opportunities to be had. For every ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred who lost everything, who never came back, there were the few who returned to China with their pockets lined with money and their heads full of grand ideas. These are the ones who built the Kaiping diaolou (watchtowers).

Every village and small town in this area is a grey jumble of tall concrete towers and balustraded concrete mansions, all in a strange and forbidding sort of Disney architecture, a half-remembered or half-understood approximation of Scottish castle mixed with Italian villa.

They were villagers, these men and boys who went overseas and worked in laundries and building railroads; hard-working, single-minded, self-taught and self-made. You can see it in the style of their buildings. The diaolou have none of the elegance of traditional Chinese architecture, nor the frivolous charm or grace of the European classical or gothic or baroque, the romance of those castles they imitate. What they have got is a defensive boldness, a sort of single-minded self-confidence and determination. Fortified to keep out thieves and bandits, fancified to impress the neighbours.

They are very ugly, most of them, but incredibly atmospheric; each village with its fancy, falling-down front of grand buildings facing a duckpond where geese sit under umbrellas in bamboo enclosures, and narrow dark alleys behind threading between the high forbidding walls. Kaiping district must have been rich for such a short time, when the piglets, the overseas Chinese, came back. But then everyone who could afford to left again.

Now these towns and villages are frozen in the 1930s. They look like wild west towns after the gold rush has gone. Sleepy and crumbling, trees and cacti growing out of the grand facades, broken stained-glass window panes and cracked tile floors, rooms full of abandoned bedsteads and bureaus. Photographs of the owners still hang on the walls, a glimpse of that fascinating turning point, when the nearly 300-year-long Qing dynasty was coming to an end and China was giving in to the modern world, when men still had long plaited queues but wore western suits, when women bobbed their hair and dressed in fitted qipaos.

In a room at the top of every diaolou is the ancestral shrine, of carved and gilded wood and painted glass. A reminder that family is everything.

Childless (son-less) wives of the men who emigrated and never came home to them would adopt boys, to ensure that the family name carried on. And then there were the paper sons and daughters. Paper children born out of fire, because it was after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed all the immigration records that the city’s Chinese population could claim US citizenship and therefore the right to bring their foreign-born children into the country – or, after visits home, claim new births.

These made birthright ‘slots’ – children who existed only on paper – which could be sold to young people to enable them to come to America.

And that’s where they still are, leaving their (true or adopted or bought) ancestors’  pretensions to grandeur, a family life in the Old Country, to moulder and crumble into the palm trees and the flowered creepers and duckponds. Lots of the diaolou now are home only to ducks and geese – and piglets.

Mr Jiang, an overseas Chinese from Canada, wanders among the diaolou, lifting the trails of creepers, turning over the clutter of crockery and broken balustrades, looking for history, for beauty, for clues about ownership. “No one cares about the architecture,” he says sadly. “No one cares about the past of these places.” An old couple living alone in great echoing mansion (all they can find to fill it are a few tiny stools, a heap of firewood, some cooking pots) show us around its high empty rooms and grand staircases, delighted if bemused to have visitors.

Mr Jiang wants to buy one or several diaolou, to preserve them as museums or as holiday homes, if he can track down who to buy them from. It seems an impossible task to an outsider, especially since entire villages have the same surname. But the village is everything. Family is still, even overseas, even after all this time, everything. In Chinatowns all over Canada and the US, everyone knows each other, Mr Jiang says. He will ask about such and such diaolou in such and such village, and someone will know who it belongs to, will remember family.

In which I inadvertently climb a snow mountain

Well, it wasn’t quite inadvertent, and I was probably more prepared for it than many of the people in Haba base camp, who had apparently never camped (“It’s so strange sleeping in a sleeping bag – you can’t move your arms!”) or seen stars before (“How will we know if the weather is clear when we start at 4a.m? It’ll be dark!”). But I didn’t plan to do it.

Mountains are fascinating and grand. I love how small they make me feel, I love hiking among them, watching them change with every shift of the light and lift of cloud. But I’ve always vaguely suspected people who risk life and limb to get to the top of them of being… slightly arrogant?  Unimaginative? A bit incomprehensible.

Reading about climbing Everest made me feel a bit disgusted with the whole endeavour, particularly its modern commercialisation, but mostly just puzzled by why people would endure so much of what seems like total misery (boredom, exhaustion, altitude sickness, frostbite) just to say they have been on the highest peak in the world – along with, these days, thousands of other people. There’s no purpose in it, no trip from here to there. I suppose other less famous mountains are much more of an adventure still, and an achievement, but really what are they a test of? Endurance? Skill?

And now I’ve done the same thing, on a much smaller scale, myself. It’s just that I was in Haba base camp, half way though a hike, and our friends were in the camp planning the ascent the next day, and the mountain was just there, snow-white and waiting… and really, by that point, why not?

The mountain from the lake

Well, because it was unbelievably utterly freezing, for a start. And 5400 metres high. And we had to get up at 3 a.m to hike most of it in the dark. And at 7 a.m the sunrise was flame and gold and violent and below us, in drifting brilliant clouds along deeply distant valleys, over pink-tipped granite peaks so far left behind they were like crinkles in paper… And at 8 the wind was worse than knives and we were in cloud or fog and there wasn’t enough air anymore. And the steep snow field went on and featurelessly on. And I lost everyone else. It was just me and the rope snaking upwards through whiteness, across whiteness, into whiteness; my own personal icy Sisyphean hell of pointless misery. One tethered rope leading to the next one, the next, a climb going nowhere, and what the hell was I doing this for anyway? Struggling to move, to breath, and for what purpose? I had no idea if I was anywhere near the top, and even if I did reach the top I wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway, no fabulous view, no earth falling away forever, just freezing fog, drifts of snow fine and heartless as dust…

(We’d sat yesterday in the base camp, me and my hiking companion, basking in the sun of a cloudless morning watching the climbers, black dots toiling up this same snow field, then along the ridge at the top that looped back taking them out of sight – watched them the way I’d watch sport on TV, because I’m too lazy to do anything else, except this was an exceptionally slow and boring sport, of creeping black dots – we’d watched some of them get only half way up the snow field, and then turn back and begin the long defeated creep down again)

I didn’t much want to be a defeated dot, but really I was just worried that if I turned back I’d get lost after the ropes ran out. So I kept on. And was rescued by a St Bernard dog with frost in her whiskers and lumps of ice big as golf balls stuck in her paws. I could have been hallucinating at this point…

(but – see this Haba summit photo… my proud and affectionate mum asks, which is you and which is the dog?)

And then cloudless skies and views that go on for ever, all the way down.

The lake from the mountain

So what was it a test of? Endurance? Skill? Stupidity? That familiar human desire to do utterly pointless things…

Harvest

The valleys are filled from end to end with gold, and with people cutting and binding and lifting and loading this gold, laying it in elegant braids, stacking it in shaggy-headed stooks, lifting it into baskets or onto horses to carry their treasure home.

They are all working so hard but they are all so happy, everyone I meet taking a minute to give me a huge smile of satisfaction and pleasure in the golden sunshine and the golden harvest and the blues skies and the long blue shadows, in sweat and dust and the sweet smell of cut stalks. Smiles of possession of riches that have been earned with their two hands, and which they can hold in their two hands; a good crop and work well done and the family fed for the next year.

In Guizhou province they told me no one knows who originally made the terraced fields that turn whole mountains into fantastic mazes; into intricate stairways for giants. They’ve been there for generations, for ever. And the local people now are harvesting the rice the same way they have been (give or take a bit of pesticide) for generations, cutting it with sickles, binding it with straw rope just like those first nameless farmers who so ingeniously fitted the fields to the landscape.

Yet the technology is changing right now, as I watch, as I write. Look down on a valley filled with curves and strips of gold, and you see laden horses plodding along the paths, and you see laden carts pulled by bicycle and by hand, and you see laden small tractors and trucks and sanluche – three-wheeled cabs. You see old women winnowing by pouring grains from a basket into a gigantic tray in a strong wind. You see people winnowing with treadle-worked machines. You see a few mini combine-harvesters trundling round the mini fields, spitting out dust and chaff.

China is all about change. Incredibly, incomprehensibly fast change. Next year I guess there will twice as many combine harvesters; there will be more powerful, bigger ones. Two years after, maybe no one will use horses anymore. In five years time, the terraces will not be big enough for the combine harvesters and tractors, and will the terraces begin to go?

Ruth

Some people I carry with me when I travel. I try to see sights through their eyes, knowing they would love them, they’d share an appreciation no one else quite has, and they’d bring something new; a side I haven’t seen, idea I would never think of, delight I couldn’t feel without them.

My Aunt Ruth is one of those people. I think she would so love some of the places I’ve seen, and imagining her there enjoying them makes me enjoy them more. She lent a shine and depth and fascination to everything she turned her attention to. One of the biggest joys of my life has been when she turned that attention on me. Sometimes being in her company felt a bit like being a rubber dinghy bobbing along in the wake of some amazing, anarchic, entertaining, benevolent ship in full sail, off on an adventure. But one of her great gifts was to make me (and so many other people, I know) feel so special and promising, like I were reflecting back some of that brightness and generosity and fun. It was such a privilege to feel like that.

Today in Somerset people are gathering to mourn Ruth’s loss and celebrate her life, and I am a thousand thousand miles in China. I wish I could be there with people who loved her. But she helped give me the confidence to be where I am.

She was such a lavish giver of gifts, and I can’t begin to sum up everything she gave me. I think how she would enjoy some of the people and places I’ve encountered on my travels. I hope she knew that she herself and the garden she made in Somerset are among the most absolutely wonderful and inspiring of them.

The moon is made of red beans

In the West, I see a big sad face in the disc of the full moon.

In the East, I see a rabbit. Riding a bicycle.

Nevertheless, wherever we are, East or West, it’s the same moon we all see. And that’s why the Chinese have the Mid-Autumn Festival, when everyone eats moon cakes stuffed with sugar and spice and red beans and egg yolk, and gazes at the full moon, and remembers family and dear ones far away.

The Chinese thought of everything of importance centuries before everyone else.  Never mind aeroplanes and Internet. Moonshine and cake  bridge the distances and bring us together.

Why we are the way we are

I have five children. When people are having a party, for a birthday or another celebration, always they invite all their family. Many people around them. I have no one to invite to my party. I lost my whole family to the Khmer Rouge. That’s why I have many children now, so they will never have to be alone like me.

guide, Kampot 

The Hells, on the lower registers, are pictured in greater detail than the Heavens above.

East section of the south gallery bas-reliefs, Angkor Wat

Photo by Annie Eagleton

Mostly the bas-reliefs carved on Angkor Wat and Bayon are of battles. Pandavas killing Kauravas, monkeys killing demons, Khmers killing Chams, Khmers killing Khmers.

The huge scenes are composed with such bewildering energy, realised with such individuality and skill – and love, in even the smallest details; maybe most of all in the small details tucked around the edges of all the kings and gods and demons and armies fighting to keep the world going or bring it to a halt: the vignettes of ordinary people going about their ordinary business of living. Building and playing, buying and selling, hunting and cooking, making love and music and jokes and babies.

Among all the ancient temples, today’s ordinary people are going about their ordinary business: planting rice and leading their cows home and playing volleyball and begging one-armed, one-legged; trying aged six to sell postcards to tourists.

Over it all the sun is setting plush and sultry, reflected in puddles and paddy fields with perfect fidelity. Rice grows upside-down in a glowing sky, Heaven on Earth or Earth in Heaven.

This cannot be reduced to pictures or words

I got up, I faffed a bit about what to wear, wasn’t too enthused by the picture of my face staring back at me from the mirror, considered how to fill my day. I had breakfast, went for a walk, visited Tuol Sleng, or S-21, where 17,000 or more people were tortured for months by the Khmer Rouge before being bashed over the head and dumped in the Killing Fields.

I watched all the other people like me, walking stickily in the heat around this school turned prison, trying to look solemn, fingering their guidebooks and already thinking about their next move.

I walked on into the busy bright city that thirty-five years ago was cleared of its population overnight and turned into a ghost town. I visited a market, a bookshop… I met friends for cocktails at the FCC and we watched the sun set and the Khmers and foreigners promenade along the riverfront; forgetful, enjoying life.

I don’t know how to process my day. I don’t know why I do what I do.

While I was at S-21 my friend Annie visited a wildlife rescue centre near Phnom Penh. She showed us her photos of macaques and gibbons rescued from miserable lives as toys and tourist attractions; described how they hung disconsolately from the bars, putting a paw out of the cage with a mute plea to be stroked.

“They all have such sad stories.” she said. “Look at the poor things,” their photographed faces so full of expression: soulful loneliness and irritation and desolation and disdain.

The faces of the Tuol Sleng prisoners – row after row of mug shots, the men in high-buttoned shirts, the women with short bobbed hair; nameless, numbered – are mostly expressionless. Or I don’t know how to read their expressions. I can’t see terror or defiance or anger or desperation or despair. They just stare out, one after another after another after another, and I want to look at every single one of them, pay attention, pay them their due because it’s the least I can do, recognise each and every one as an individual with all their hopes and secrets and faults and promise, with fathers mothers siblings spouses friends who loved them –

(Most of these people have never been identified; the records have been lost and maybe anyone who knew or loved them is also dead. There were only seven known survivors from Tuol Sleng)

– But it’s impossible. However much I try, they blur into one face. It’s easier to relate to the monkeys, mute creatures whose feelings we think we can read so clearly. But who knows if they really feel what we think they feel? They can’t tell us.

The prisoners of Tuol Sleng tell us, they told it in page upon page upon page of confession for a regime gone mad; all of it saying one thing – Make It Stop.

Lanterns

The houses in Laos are so flimsy, perched up on their long stilts as if waiting for the wolf to huff and puff and blow them down.

At night, skim-milk blue light shines out from open windows and doors and right through the thin reed-woven walls, so that the houses glow from inside like Chinese paper lanterns, just tethered to the ground by their skinny stilt legs. About to lift off and drift away.

A French woman I met who has been coming here for years told me she loves Laos because the people seem to treat life so lightly; as a gift. Flimsy and fragile and easily blown away.

I walk through the village and when I turn back I half expect it to have vanished, to see just a trail of vanishing lights in the dark sky.

The magic mountain

There’s a specially-built platform, behind a high wall that blocks the view from un-paying people on the road behind. For 80 Yuan, you can have the Mountain presented to you, a picture in a coffee-table album.

The photographers line up at six a.m, waiting to take the same picture that everyone else takes. Today the Mountain doesn’t oblige; you wouldn’t even know there was a snow range there on the horizon behind the thick cloud. Nature thumbing its nose at commercialisation. I wonder if the photographers got their money back.

Two days walk to get closer to the range, and waiting for the Mountain to reveal its summit is a lesson in patience and abstraction. It’s a collection of black and white and grey shapes, constantly changing outline, and yet impossible to catch the moment when they change. The Mountain puts itself together, point by plain by angle by curve, out of sky or cloud which suddenly become rock, become snow, and the Mountain is a whole snowfield bigger than I thought.

Rumble roar, and that’s an avalanche falling like a slow-motion waterfall; the Mountain endlessly remaking and reshaping itself like a live thing.

I have to look away to nearer, greener things, because all that black and white vast distance is doing peculiar things to my eyes, to my sense of scale. The nearer slopes are grey-green toothy crags, huge and steep enough, but manageable. When I look back there’s a whole new, higher peak to the Mountain, and I still don’t think it’s the top.

In the end I turn my back on it and walk away. But the Mountain follows me down the valley, getting bigger and more solid and complete every time I turn round. Over the ridge and down the other side; I’m almost back at the village when I turn one last time and it takes my breath away because it’s all there, right up to the summit, far higher into the sky than a piece of the earth has any right to be.

This landscape is too huge, my appetite for walking it bigger than my ability to do so, as I hike out from under the Mountain’s shadow, leaving behind the mossy ancient forests and the roar and rush of a hundred waterfalls for the stony, barren, steep-sided wind-tunnel of the Mekong Gorge.

The river brown and terrifying sucking along far below, the prayer flags on the chain-bridge blown out too taut to even flap once in the relentless wind. Clouds of dust and grit boiling up from the depths of the gorge, a glaring low sun, and me tramping along pretending I’m a Tibetan pilgrim chanting ommanipadmehum, tramp tramp, whenohwhenisaliftgoingtocome, tramp tramp, and in the sides of this bone-dry, dusty, hellishly inhospitable gorge there are tiny magical oases of villages and bright green vineyards floating, suspended half-way between towering crags and deep roaring river, and look, there’s the road on the other side winding up laboriously loop-de-loop ohshitthat’ssofar all the way back…

At long last I do get a lift in the back of an open truck, and then it’s just forget the aching shoulder, twisted ankle, sore feet, gritty eyes – because the sun’s setting and far on the horizon the magic Mountain is no abstraction; beautiful Kawa Gebo is shooting a rainbow plume straight upwards into dazzle-edged clouds. We’re climbing up up up this ridiculously winding road, the vast valleys and gorges and tiny villages and pocket-sized fields of green and gold are laid out below me and hover above me because it is all so big and grand and I’m just a speck, a mite, an inconsequential scrap of flotsam blowing through it.