After the meal, the young villagers take me to the house of an old widow who sings me some Miao love songs. I cannot understand the lyrics so I just look at the woman’s expressions. As the wine drifts to my head I fall into a doze and dream of my first love. She is standing on a Qingdao beach, wearing a long black skirt. The sea breeze streams through her hair. She says, ‘My parents don’t want me to see you any more. Go away now. Go!’
At Motianling Pass I light a cigarette, glance back at the path I have taken through Guangxi then at the wilderness of Guizhou that lies ahead. On the map this region is called the Land of Ninety Thousand Mountains. Only the wind can cross this sea of green heights, I will never make it. At first, the mountains seem to laugh at me. Then, as I climb one after another, I discover each one has an individual weight and form, each is as unique as a human face. The mountains I painted in Beijing were just lifeless protrusions of earth.
I take off my ‘journalist shoes’ and change into my plimsolls. The further I walk the less I know why. I have become a marching machine. As long as I have a bag on my back I will walk, until I drop. The path takes control, I follow it blindly. I have lost all sense of direction. Why did I choose to live this way? I am not a dog, after all.
The money I made in Guangzhou is almost spent. The capital of Guizhou is not far ahead now. Perhaps I can pick up some work there. I follow the wind north, and two weeks later tramp into the dirty streets of Guiyang, ‘City of Petty Tyrants’.
Entering a Strange Circle
I find the house of the dissident poet Li Zhi at the end of a long narrow lane. There is a two-metre-high brick kiln outside his door. It looks as if he has made it himself. I hear rhythmless chords crash on a piano inside. It is the kind of piece parents force their children to play. When I step inside, Li Zhi clasps my hand. His wife goes to pour me some tea and his two little boys clamber up to the gallery and jump around like monkeys.
‘I got your letter last month, but I never thought you would make it! Sit down and I’ll show you my new work.’ He hands me two clay masks. The features are hideously deformed and painted in garish colours.
‘When masks are this ugly they’re not frightening any more,’ I half-joke and take a sip of tea. ‘What happened to you last year at Hu Sha’s house? I heard the police broke up your poetry reading.’
‘Yes. The cops arrested me and dragged me back here. Said I could never visit Beijing again. I haven’t written any poetry since then.’
I cut to the chase, and tell him my money is running out and I need to find some work.
‘Well, you have come to the right person. I know everyone in Guiyang! A friend of mine has just opened a sofa business. I’ll see if he needs any help.’ When I spoke with Li Zhi in Beijing he used standard Chinese, but now he has slipped back into Guizhou dialect. Fortunately it sounds similar to Sichuanese so I am able to get his drift.
His brick house is tiny. There is a double bed downstairs and a mattress in the gallery for the children. A piano and two lamps occupy the remaining space. A dim light bulb shines on the cucumber, exercise book and half-eaten meat pie on the piano lid. The meat pie looks delicious.
‘Is there anything you would like to see while you are here?’ Li Zhi waves his hands as he speaks. His fingernails are filled with clay. He looks as fragile as the broken pieces of terracotta I saw by the kiln outside.
‘Something different. I have become very interested in minority cultures since I worked on that exhibition in Guangzhou.’
His wife starts to wash the dishes. She has thick glasses and soft, pale skin. She looks like an accountant. One of the boys swings from the edge of the gallery, kicks into his mother, crashes onto the piano, screams, falls to the ground and scuttles under the stool.
‘Do you know Old Xu?’ I continue. ‘He’s a friend of Yang Ming’s. Works for Guizhou Press. No? Never mind. So, tell me about Guiyang.’
Li Zhi shoots a furious glance at his children. I can tell they are in for a beating when I am gone.
‘Of the artists, Tang De is quite good, and Dong Kejun is listed in the World’s Who’s Who. Everyone else is crap. Tian Bing is the only poet now that Huang Zhang is in prison. The writers are shit. I am the only famous person in Guiyang, really.’
The boys start throwing paper darts at my head.
‘Have you somewhere to stay tonight? No? I’ll take you to Tang De then. He’ll put you up. As for you rascals, just wait until I get home!’ The little monkeys slip through his hands, leap up to the gallery and giggle, their faces as scrunched as their father’s masks.
On Saturday afternoon, Tian Bing takes me to a quiet, forested park in the outskirts of the city. As the rain clouds clear, we head for the park’s highest hill. The smell of dust fades slowly as we climb. I have been staying with Tian Bing and her husband Tang De for a few days now, and have found a job making sofas. Tang De is a woodcarver. The whorled patterns he creates echo the lines of his face. Tian Bing is a poet and a reporter for Guiyang Television. She boiled all my clothes this morning, and gave me a new pair of jeans. She tells me Yang Ming is coming to visit her next month. They were at university together in Chengdu.
Halfway up she stops and shouts, ‘Slow down, will you!’ Her skin looks transparent in the sun, the downy hairs on her face sparkle with sweat. Sometimes she reminds me of a sick chicken. We sit under a tree. She is as damp as the bark. ‘Gorgeous view, isn’t it?’ Her Sichuan dialect reminds me of Ai Xin. I keep seeing visions of that beautiful poetess waving at me from the wharf.
‘Everything looks nice from a distance. See that yard over there? That’s where I make the sofas.’ Then, turning to her, I say, ‘Why did you move here, Tian Bing?’
‘One grave is as good as another,’ she sneers. Last night she showed me her poetry. I pencilled some corrections and her face went red with fury. ‘Who do you think you are?’ she said. ‘You Beijing writers are all the same. The arrogance!’ She has been sharp with me ever since.
‘You don’t seem at home here. You are too sophisticated. This place is so cut off, everyone is slightly strange. I haven’t been able to think straight since I arrived.’
‘Stop thinking then! You’re so self-important, wanting to meet every little intellectual in town. So much for detaching yourself from the mundane world!’ This fragile-looking woman has a spirit of steel. ‘I didn’t like this place at first,’ she concedes, ‘but I am a woman after all, and where my man goes, I go.’ She tears a handful of grass and scatters it over my trousers. I think of the line from her poem: ‘The lover’s zip has rusted.’
‘I like that line: "A woman as strong as rock." ‘ Then I pause and say, ‘Tang De is a good man.’
‘I like the way he sits around all day smoking and drinking. I can’t bear those polite men who help with the cooking and washing up. If it weren’t for Tang De I would have left years ago.’
‘But what brought you here in the first place?’ The saying goes that in Guiyang, you never see three days of clear sky, three li of flat land, or three coins in your pocket.
‘My first boyfriend moved back here after university. I joined him later, six months pregnant, only to discover he was living with another woman. Son of a bitch.’ Her eyes begin to redden.
‘Bastard.’ I imagine he is one those cringing young men who become transformed into petty tyrants on home ground.
‘You mysterious wanderer, dropping into our lives like a gift from the sky. Tell me, is there any cure for jealousy?’ When she fixes her eyes on me, she looks like a little girl whose neck still smells of milk.