The Buick? Sits there. Stuck. Wheels spinning in the muck. We pull away, leaving them behind.
Kang Li pumps his fist. “Diu na ma!” he shouts, grinning.
“Hoo-ah!” I yell back. “That was awesome!”
“Zhen niubi!” he agrees.
We’re at the end of the field now, and with a grinding of gears the Jeep crawls up onto another tiny road. I look back at the deep gashes our tires made through the field. “I hope we didn’t trash his crops too much.”
“Not planted yet. Besides”-Kang Li shrugs-“let the guys in the Buick pay.”
Works for me.
“To Guilin?” he asks.
I nod. “Sounds good.”
I ASK KANG LI to drop me someplace with wireless, close to the train station.
Here’s the thing: Sure, planes are faster. But when you buy a plane ticket, you have to show your passport. Trains? Just hand over your cash.
I don’t know who those guys are, who they’re working for, but if they’re at all connected, I’d rather not leave them an easy way to figure out where I’m going.
Which brings up the question: Where do I go now?
I figure I have three choices. Back to Beijing. Or to Guiyang, capital of Guizhou, or Dali, in Yunnan, where the other two seed companies from Daisy’s list are.
Beijing is probably the sensible choice.
I haven’t decided, I tell myself. I’ll think about it for a while, and then I’ll make a decision. Based on… you know, rational shit, like the train schedule and what makes the most sense for me to do.
Yeah, right.
THERE’S A HOSTEL WITH a bar and a café about ten minutes’ walk from the station, advertising free Wi-Fi. Kang Li drops me off at the curb. On it, more accurately. “Get you close,” he says.
So it’s only a couple of yards, but I appreciate it. My leg hurts like hell, from sitting in the car, from the kidney-rattling chase through the rice paddies.
It’s no big, I tell myself. It’s just pain.
“Thanks,” I say. “Thanks a lot. I mean, that was… that was…”
Kang Li waves a hand, brushing my appreciation aside. “Mei wenti,” he says. Not a problem. “It was good fun.”
We get out of the Jeep. Kang Li grabs my duffel from the back. “I’ll take it inside for you.”
“No need. It’s not heavy.”
He hands the duffel to me, and I sling it over my shoulder.
“You sure you don’t know who they are?” he asks.
“I really don’t.” I hesitate. “I don’t think they know about me visiting the sanctuary, whoever they are.”
Unless they’re connected to someone at the Gecko. Someone who saw me talking to Sparrow.
I push the thought aside.
“You should still be careful.” I fake a smile. “Sparrow needs you to take care of the cats.”
He grins. “I will. Bie jiaoji.” Don’t worry.
I GET A TABLE at the bar/café. One wall has money from all over the world plastered to it. Another is fake brick. It’s just after 1:00 P.M., so I order a beer and a pizza and get out my laptop.
Of course I’ve got a ton of emails, and I tell myself not to get sucked into those, though I do take a minute to read the one from my mom (“Back in Beijing, the apartment’s fine, except the toilet in the guest bathroom isn’t flushing and there are some pretty bad smells, so I just have the door shut for now“). I note that I have a couple from Vicky Huang, and I think, Shit, I was supposed to meet with her, or with Sidney Cao, or with somebody, while I was in Yangshuo, but that’s going to have to wait.
I look for the email from Sparrow with the link to the video she showed me, the one that Jason helped put together.
I watch it again.
There’s that one glimpse of Jason, loading the crated cats into a car.
How is this going to help me?
I check out the links on the video. Here’s one for Yangshuo Friends of Animals. I click on it and find their website. In Chinese, of course. It would help if I read Chinese better, but I don’t. So I just scroll down until I come to a post with photos, photos of cats, in bamboo cages. The truck. The rescue. This is it.
And here’s the embedded video.
I go to Babelfish, an Internet translator. It’s not perfect, but in a pinch it will give you a quick and dirty translation of a web page.
And at the bottom of the post it says, “Thanking for the production of video element to Wolf Child.”
I look up “wolf” on my handy iPhone Chinese dictionary. “Wolf child,” langhai, has its own entry. It doesn’t just mean “baby wolf.” Langhai is a term for a human child raised by wolves.
What did Dog say about his and Jason’s parents? I try to remember. It wasn’t like we talked about things that much, back in the Sandbox. Our whole “relationship,” if you want to call it that, wasn’t exactly about sharing serious emotional stuff. He mostly gave me shit, and we occasionally messed around.
Everyone’s parents are fucked up. I suddenly hear his voice in my head, saying that. I remember, when he said it, we were hanging out in the dining hall, having gotten our tacos and a Coke in his case, a mochaccino in mine. The air-con was working that day, I remember, because I’d gotten a chill off all the sweat that had soaked my clothes. I’d just read some email from my mom, about some guy she’d been seeing and how it hadn’t worked out, and I was bitching about it, like, how could she keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again?
“Most of them shouldn’t have kids, but they do, and here we are.” Dog leaned back in his chair, laughed a little. “People do the best they can. Sometimes it’s not good enough.”
SO, WOLF CHILD, AKA Langhai. I do a search on Youku for users with that name. And what do you know, there he is. With five videos posted. Including the Yangshuo cat rescue.
“You fucking idiot,” I mutter.
Okay, maybe not totally. All you have to do to get a Youku account is provide a name and an email address, and that stuff’s easy enough to disguise. Hotmail, Yahoo!, a host of others, you don’t have to give your real name.
But still. The guy’s a fugitive. He fled to China, which was stupid enough. And he’s left a video trail.
Here’s one from Guiyu.
I click on it.
Shots of the countryside. Music underneath, some kind of weird techno stuff that makes me nervous. But he’s good at this. The video is powerful. The smoking fields. The mountains of electronic scrap. The blackened streams.
And people. Workers surrounded by clouds of toxic steam. Their arms covered with rashes. Children, little kids, standing in front of piles of wire and keyboards.
Text crawls across the screen, in English and Chinese, saying things like, “Guiyu is the largest e-waste site on earth.” “Guiyu’s children have a seventy percent higher rate of lead poisoning than average.” “Guiyu’s water is undrinkable.”
And then shots of a protest, a mob of farmers from the look of it, surrounding a government building, holding signs and clenching rakes and hoes in their fists. “The pollution has spread beyond Guiyu, killing crops and contaminating farmland.”