I Grew My Boobs in China (32 page)

“How could you ever forgive, let alone worship, a person who killed that many, even if it was an accident? I mean, he was responsible for the number one death toll in history?!” I was appalled.

“I can’t believe this many people are bringing flowers. They must have incredible censorship going on here,” Mom whispered, observing the long line-up and the dozens of vendors selling flowers as we looked for a spot to play cards. “There’s no way they could possibly know. They have to be in the dark.”

“That would seem plausible, wouldn’t it? If we can’t even open our blog site, it would make sense for them to block any negative information on their leaders or government,” Ammon said practically. “But that’s how they keep people suppressed. Like you said before, how come millions couldn’t stop the insanity of one man who wanted to build a wall halfway across the country? Mainly, it’s ’cause they weren’t connected, but from now on, people will be united through the Internet. It all starts with one person’s actions setting an example, like the ‘unknown rebel’ of Tiananmen Square. He’s the kind of leader you need to start a movement. The whole world saw the picture, but I bet if you asked the locals here, most wouldn’t know about it. Which makes me think, maybe he doesn’t even realize his worldwide fame and that’s why he never came out. Maybe he never even knew the effect he’d had. Either that, or they killed him.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Venturing out the following day, it was hard to resist popping in for quick looky-looks as we passed shop after shop. Every few feet, the three of us would skitter off into one of them, leaving Ammon on the curb tapping his foot impatiently. We’d obediently return and then set off with him again, but five minutes later, we’d run off like disobedient ducklings yet again. We had five kilometres to go, but Ammon finally snapped when we entered yet another bra shop.

“I’m done with this! I’m not going to miss the Temple of Heaven for bloody lingerie shopping.” Throwing us a simple map of Beijing that was reproduced on the back of a business card and marked only with our hostel and the temple, he hissed, “And stop sharing clothes! I can’t tell who’s who from behind anymore. You three are driving me nuts!!” And with that, he stomped off in a huff. The three of us looked at each other rather perplexed, but then we couldn’t help laughing.

“But we have to shop so we don’t have to trade clothes anymore!!” Bree shouted after him, but he was already gone. I’d like to say he merged into the crowd and disappeared, but it was more like watching the dark ringlet of his short ponytail bobbing above the ocean of people until finally the distance between us became too great to see it anymore. The constant stress resulting from being outnumbered undoubtedly made this a long trip for him. Understandably, I don’t think his personal checklist included sampling every shop in Beijing.

“I guess we have been acting a bit like Donald Duck’s nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie,” Mom said, feeling for him.

We could understand Ammon not wanting to spend all his time shopping, but the issue of sharing clothing was something else entirely. We each had our colours, Mom generally in red, Bree in black, and me in pink, and even I got confused when Mom wore Bree’s black shirt or Bree sported Mom’s red one. The three of us were around the same height and we all had long brown hair. On the other hand, we found sharing quite liberating, as it tripled our meagre, five-item wardrobes. Unfortunately for Ammon, this was a habit we wouldn’t soon be quitting. We shrugged off his concerns, possibly underestimating the needs and frustrations of a man who is attached, sometimes uncomfortably, to three related females.

As we made our way uncertainly towards the Taoist Temple of Heaven, we wove through narrow side streets boasting shops of all kinds. It felt like there was a garage sale on every corner where you could find absolutely anything, all of it unbelievably cheap. By the time we arrived at the temple, we had run short of money, and we were grateful Ammon wasn’t there to witness it. Without our leader to keep us in line and enforce the rules, we’d clearly lost all self-control. We tried the few ATMs we found along the way, but none wanted to give Mom any money. We were really not looking forward to asking Ammon for dinner money with our tails between our legs, but the more immediate problem was that, without him there to bail us out, we couldn’t even afford the price of full admission tickets. We had to rely on Mom’s amazing ability to “always get what she wants,” and she came through again, somehow wangling discounted student tickets for each of us.

Stepping into the gardens surrounding the Temple of Heaven, Mom filled in for our tour guide, “So, this temple was built in the fifteenth century.”

“And Taoism is the one with the yin and yang symbol, right?” I said, remembering what Ammon had taught us at previous Taoist temples.

“It represents balance: black and white, heaven and earth,” she agreed.

“That’s so romantic!” I said.

“So how long did it take to build this?” Bree asked.

“I’m not sure,” Mom admitted.

“I know who would know,” I chipped in helpfully.

“Where is Ammon anyway? We’re never going to find him in here!” Bree said, suddenly inspecting the area. We twirled and spun as we walked down pebbled pathways in the beautiful garden complex, taking in the beauty of all the gorgeous flowers while keeping an eye out for the trusty leader who’d abandoned us. The Temple of Heaven gardens were too much like a maze for us to have any hope of finding Ammon, though, so we left before too long.

Though we’d paid the cheaper student rates, we had only enough left to buy a small bottle of water for our long walk back to the hostel. We set off in its general direction, this time with Mom leading. After inspecting the small map carefully, she decided to take what looked like a shortcut, a plan that gave me a distinctly uneasy feeling. Nonetheless, someone had to take charge, so off we went. As we might have predicted, before too long, we didn’t recognize any signs from the tiny map that only named major roads.

“Hmmm ... This must be the right way, but I’m just going to ask someone to make sure.” Mom walked over to a man on the curb who was idly watching traffic go by. She began speaking in English and pointing in the direction we were walking. He nodded in agreement. “Okay, so he says it’s down this way. We’re on the right track.” When we’d gone a bit further and still not seen any familiar street names, she tried again and stopped a young couple, this time showing them the hostel’s business card map. They looked at each other uncertainly before they, too, nodded. “Well? Is it that way?” Mom pressed them for more and pointed again down the same route we’d been taking, and they again responded with one more simple bob. “Okay then, we must still be heading in the right direction,” she assured us, and we kept walking. The streets were getting busier and louder with a lot of honking and shopkeepers shouting. My head was buzzing and I wasn’t at all confident about the directions we’d been given.

“Oh, I don’t remember any of this,” I said, having hoped that we’d start to recognize things again after walking thirty minutes. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Ask another person.”

“I can always backtrack. I know how to backtrack. I just want to try this shortcut for a while longer before we give up on it.” This time when she asked someone, she pointed in the direction we’d just come from and got more nods. “OOH, okay, so we went the wrong way. Maybe we walked a bit too far.”

“Mom, I think they just don’t understand anything!” Bree insisted.

A couple of the people we’d asked without pointing had simply shrugged and walked off. As a test, we purposely pointed in what we knew was completely the wrong direction the next time, and that person also nodded.

“It’s probably your terrible pronunciation,” I complained, feeling too hot and tired to be gentler about it.

“But I’m showing them the map! They should be able to understand that,” she said, as she reached out to another couple and started pointing at the map all over again and asking for a specific street.

“Oh my goodness! We are actually getting lost,” I grumbled.

We stopped to ask a couple of young military men. “Is it this way?” Mom asked pointing to the right. They nodded. “Or is it this way?” she ignored their nods and pointed to the left. Another nod. “So it’s in this direction, this way?!” Mom repeated, her arm motioning to the right. They nodded, then gave a confused shrug. “Okay, thanks anyway. Xie, xie.”

They must be thinking, “Just agree with them, and they’ll leave us alone,
” I thought as I watched Mom struggling and sweating. After walking a few more discouraging steps, she gave up. “Yah, they don’t understand. We’ll just have to backtrack then, if we still can.” Our shortcut had turned into a very long exercise in frustration. Two hours later, we finally arrived at the hostel with blazing red cheeks, our hair all frizzed and fly-away, and our clothes dark with sweat from going way over our daily average of 10km (6.2mi).

I wondered if Ammon even knew about Travel Rule # 4 – Never point any particular way when you’re asking for directions, and if he did, why he never told us about it. Maybe he didn’t want to give away all of his leadership secrets and didn’t expect we’d ever need to use them.

When we finally walked into the lobby, Ammon was sitting there and looked up from his book with a cheeky grin. He was just sitting there, seemingly unworried and wearing a smile that said, “SEE? You need me.”

I knew it was true. As annoying, anal and downright mean as Ammon could sometimes be, we wanted a smooth, successful journey, and he was our ticket to that, in addition to being a dearly loved family member. I realized that, beneath his smirk, he couldn’t hide a subtle sigh when we arrived safely. Nothing but worry would cause him to sit and wait in the lobby like a watchdog. I’d seen how expertly he could control his emotions when he’d dealt with his cancer, but for the first time, I saw past his beard and furrowed brows and into his heart. Of course he was going to razz us that it took a few extra hours roasting in the sun to get back without his guidance, but it was all a cover-up. He had abandoned us in a big, strange city, and he felt responsible. At that moment, I understood how much he cared for all of us, and I directed an equally cheeky grin right back at him, pleased that I’d discovered his secret.
I think I can live with that.

Chapter 29

New Territory

“What?! What do you mean, ‘we have to separate’?” I gasped when Ammon brought back “the good, the bad, and the ugly” news from the insanely chaotic ticket stand.

“I thought you checked it all out yesterday?” Mom said.

“I did! I got our four tickets. But now they’re saying there isn’t enough room on one bus. It’s kind of hard when they’re all jabbering at me in broken English, you know? We’re just gonna have to meet up at the end. The buses are supposed to go in tandem, though, so we shouldn’t be too far apart.”

“I’m going with Mom,” I said eagerly. As a hopeless Momma’s girl, I naturally felt safest with her. The many honking, roaring noises of the bus station made me nervous, especially with this new plan added to my standard sense of unease. Ignoring the few scattered, metal benches, we sat on our big backpacks in a circle, as if around a comforting campfire, and pulled out the cards. I still felt the weight on my shoulders from carrying the heavy pack all the way there. Smiling at them beneath us, I wondered why we didn’t use them as portable seating more often. The daypack that secured my journal and Rhett was strapped around my foot as a safety precaution.

Before long, we’d drawn the usual crowd of onlookers who wanted to join in on our card game. We’d surrendered our first deck of cards a couple of weeks earlier to the cowboy guides from our horse trek in the mountains around Songpan, but the new deck was already looking worn. As Mom dealt the next round onto Bree’s upturned daypack, Ammon started talking to whoever was listening.

“You know how people say the ideal amount of exercise is ten thousand steps a day? They did a study showing that between the daily lifestyle of work, walking around the house, buying groceries, and the usual stuff people do, the average American takes somewhere between a thousand and five thousand steps. Well, we’ve been averaging 10km (6.3mi) a day,” he continued proudly as he picked up his newly dealt hand. “That’s fourteen thousand one hundred steps for me,” he stopped a moment to let that sink in as he sorted through another winning hand, “and I take about two steps to every three you guys take,” he ended, acknowledging for once that our standard mode of travel was more demanding for us short people.

“Yah, we walk everywhere,” Mom nodded in agreement as she tossed her next card.

“We never STOP walking!” Bree complained.

And I, for one, felt the effects of all that walking as I nudged my backpack forward a bit to get close enough to throw down my best cards.
It might be nice to be trapped on a bus for a while. Then there’s no way Ammon can drag us around and make us walk all day. Still, we’ll be sweating either way.

Ammon smirked as he laid down a pair of twos to score yet another win.

Between finding embassies to secure the various visas we needed, getting our hepatitis A booster shots, sightseeing, and “shopping” in the markets of Beijing, we’d walked 91.25 km (56.7mi) that week, according to the pedometer that hung on Ammon’s belt. That far exceeded our daily average, and inspired me to think about how proud my gym teacher would be if I could report having walked that far!
But that thought immediately resurrected the constant question lingering in the back of my mind;
what am I going to do about school?
I still couldn’t let those worries go, and continuously beat myself up about it.
How can Bree be so unbothered by it?
She had barely finished Grade 11 before we’d left and had conveniently convinced herself that she’d graduated. She appeared not to have a worry in the world.