The following day I come equipped with toothbrushes and a cardboard box which has pictures of smiling faces cut from a magazine stuck on the sides and the words MIRACLE TEETH WHITENER painted on the front. As I sit behind it and shout my wares, I understand why the Mizhi tooth puller had such an unnerving gaze, because I too just stare at people’s teeth now when I speak to them. A middle-aged man with a scraggly neck sidles up and demands a demonstration. His teeth are black with nicotine. I brush the two front ones for free. By the end of the day my entire stock is sold. I count my earnings and decide to move to the People’s Hotel.
My room has four beds, a desk, a coat stand and a broken mirror with a sticker that says NO GAMBLING OR WHORING.
After a hot shower I lie in bed with a cigarette. A guest walks in and sits down on the next bed. It is the man whose two front teeth I brushed this morning.
‘That powder you sold me was lethal. My teeth may be clean, but my mouth is all swollen.’
‘It is a French product. Perhaps the formula is little strong for Chinese gums.’
I ask him what he does for a living and he says anything that keeps him away from his village. He says he has been to Beijing and seen Mao’s Mausoleum, and I tell him he is the first person I have met this month who has travelled to the capital.
We chat for a while, then in the evening we go out for a meal. His name is Liu Jingui.
I notice him staring at the waitress and ask if he is looking for a girlfriend.
He gives a loud cackle that sounds like a branch breaking from a tree. Then he whispers, ‘I run a little business, brother. It’s top secret. If the police find out I’m finished.’
Hoping to find out more, I chat about women and ask if he has had any luck recently.
He sniggers. ‘Can’t play around, brother, I have a wife at home.’
‘You sell women, don’t you? Never mind, you don’t have to tell me. I just thought we were friends, that’s all. I was obviously mistaken.’
He presses my hand. ‘You are an educated man, brother. It is an honour for me to call you my friend.’ He moves closer. ‘I don’t have many skills, I’m just trying to get by. If I can go home with a thousand yuan in my pocket at least I won’t have disgraced my ancestors. All right, might as well tell you, I am a — how shall I phrase it — coil remover. I give discounts to the poor.’
‘What type of coils do you remove?’
‘The ones placed inside women after their first child. I help take them out again.’
‘Have you had medical training?’
‘No, but no one has died yet. Some women bleed a little but they are fine after a couple of days. First I removed my wife’s coil, then she told her friends and soon everyone in the village wanted theirs out. I made a lot of money, but then someone reported me to the family planning officer and I had to run away.’
The scrambled eggs I ordered are riddled with flies. They crawl from my mouth as I chew. I ask the waitress when the eggs were cooked. She says yesterday, so I tell her to bloody well heat them up again.
From Yanan I travel a hundred kilometres east to the Hukou Falls and see the vast Yellow River charge through a narrow channel and gush down a precipitous cliff in wild yellow waves.
It is almost dark when I reach Yichuan. I spot a mud hut with a light on and knock on the door. The old man who opens it tosses some straw into his storeroom and says I can sleep there. We talk for a while by candlelight. I ask him what is the furthest place he has travelled to in his life.
‘The top of the hill by the Yellow River,’ he says.
‘How far is that?’
‘About eight kilometres.’
‘Have you never wanted to go a little further?’
‘They say there is nothing but fields beyond that.’ His face is like the furrowed earth.
‘Not all the land is tilled.’ For a moment I forget what towns are for.
‘What do the town folk eat then? People die after three days without food.’ He picks a burning twig from the stove and lights his cigarette.
Later the old man remembers he did go further than eight kilometres once. He injured his eye on the fields one day and was taken to the county hospital, but his eyes were shut all the way there and all the way back so he never saw a thing. He says he lost his wife in 1961. She was sowing melon seeds by the banks of the Yellow River and was washed away by a sudden flood.
As I approach the town of Hancheng, the road becomes black with soot. When trucks from the nearby mines rattle past, people as black as the road slide from their shacks to collect the coal that has toppled to the ground. The ditches they have dug into the road are so deep that even the best drivers cannot help losing some of their load.
From the hills above Fenglingdu, I see the Yellow River run through its wide valley like a thin trickle of urine. I am exhausted. China is too old, its roots lie too deep, I feel dirty from the delving. I have seen enough. A month walking these winding roads has twisted my mind. I need to find a patch of flat land and rest for a while.
6. Wandering Down the Coast
House of Memories
A week later, I take a train to Qingdao to spend Spring Festival with my family. As I walk out of the train station, I hear the wide ocean and smell its damp, salty breath. The noise of the crashing waves holds memories of my childhood, my first love, my early passions for art and life. I glance over the tiled roofs to the highest hill, and see the Catholic church whose steeple was removed in the Cultural Revolution. The Germans took control of Qingdao at the end of the nineteenth century, and during the seventeen years of their rule, transformed it into a replica of a Middle European town. The elegant architecture had no effect on the chaos of my childhood.
It is nine years since I last visited my parents’ house. The yard seems to have shrunk. The red characters LONG LIVE MAO ZEDONG THOUGHT I painted on the wall at thirteen have almost flaked away. The sky looks a familiar blue above the red-tiled roof. I open the wooden door. The brass handle is still missing its inner ring and decades of turning have scraped a large hole into the wood. I removed that ring myself at the age of eight when my parents were out and donated it to the school furnace so that my teacher would praise me for my selfless contribution to the communist revolution.
The inside is as shabby as ever. The leaky lead kettle still hangs from the same nail on the kitchen wall. My school math book lies in the dust on top of the bookshelves, my Young Pioneer’s badge pressed between its pages. It takes me back to the Cultural Revolution, when my high-school friends and I would jump into the classroom through the window. The teachers had lost control. I remember when my English teacher tried to teach us to say: ‘Long live Chairman Mao. Long, long live Chairman Mao!’ my classmates threw paper darts at her desk and shouted, ‘Stop spouting the language of our capitalist enemies! Shut up and go and clean out the toilets!’
My brother has a child called Ma Yong and my sister is pregnant. My old classmate Wang Jun got his feet stuck on a railway line last year on his way back from work and a train drove right over him. My other classmates are all married now, but they still seem to be stuck in the 1970s. Their only new topic of conversation is which factories give the highest bonuses. I do not tell them that I am a rootless vagabond now, who has travelled down from the Yellow Plateau for some rest and some good food.