Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (40 page)

I had become decidedly hirsute in the previous weeks. That’s the thing about beards—they keep growing. Some beards turn out to be Santa Claus beards. Or Tolstoy beards. Friendly beards. Some turn out to be Satan beards. Mine was such a beard. No wonder I frightened the woman at the travel desk, I reflected as I sat down in the barber’s chair. With my beard, I looked like a crazed biker.

“Just a little off the top,” I said. The barberess didn’t speak a word of English, of course. She proceeded to put multiple layers of cloaks on me. What, I thought, is this going to involve X-rays? Wrapping one towel around my neck, she proceeded to keep it all together with streams of toilet paper. Nevertheless, she did a fine job.

Next to me, a man was being shaved with a switchblade. The barberess inquired whether I’d like a shave.

“Just a trim,” I indicated.

I thought I’d keep the beard. True, it was approaching Grizzly Adams proportions and we didn’t want that. I had a Jeremy Irons kind of beard in mind, the sort of beard that suggested, There goes a bad, bad man—yet he is also curiously intriguing. Like Satan.

With the first pass of the razor, however, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I stoically absorbed the assault upon my facial hair. When she finished, I regarded myself in the mirror. This was not the face of a bad, bad man. It was more like the face of George Michael. Indeed, with my fey George Michael beard, I looked like the sort of man who wears lots of cologne, and who lingers in nightclubs wondering where he’s going to get the evening dose of cocaine. Perhaps, I considered, I looked like a terrorist. But no. I just looked preposterous.

When I left the barbershop, darkness had descended. Not that it mattered, of course. Lanzhou hadn’t seen the sun in years. And then I noticed that the hotel restaurant was offering a Western buffet. I had been in China long enough to know that the words “Western buffet” should be regarded as a threat and one should flee to the nearest market. But I was in an upscale hotel in Lanzhou, and I thought, What the hell, embrace the escapism for an evening. Besides, in my brief glance of the city, Lanzhou struck me as an excellent place to get mugged. And so I entered, and loaded my plate with meat and potatoes, and a serving of frog legs done in the French manner. It was competently done, and incredibly bland. Even the frog legs, which do, in fact, taste like chicken. The flavors of China had fried my taste buds. I picked at my food, feeling clumsy and barbaric using a fork and knife again.

I looked about and was suddenly startled by the other customers. There was not a foreigner among them. Indeed, most of them were upscale Chinese parents teaching their kids how to use forks and knives and how to eat Western food.

“Ah, ah,” tutted a father to his young son. “Only use English words.”

“Do I have to eat this?” the boy pleaded.

Afterward, I marched up to the business center and sent an e-mail to my wife.
Start the boys on Mandarin lessons now. And have them use chopsticks.

It’s going to be a competitive world they inherit.

19

T
here are few words more evocative than
Silk Road.
Imagine a world inhabited by Sogdians, Gokturks, Ferghanians, Parthians, Bactrians, Nabataeans, Samanids, and other civilizations now lost to us, a world of traders and conquerors, missionaries and zealots, poets and muses, traversing the vast distances of Eurasia, trading the gold of Rome for the silk of Xi’an. There were hundreds of trails from the Mediterranean to China that would collectively become known as the Silk Road, lonesome paths over treacherous passes and barren deserts upon which civilizations rose and fell. One such path had skirted the vast desolation of the Taklamakan Desert in northern China and made its way to the town of Dunhuang, near the splendid Mogao Caves, where for centuries Buddhist monks had carved and painted scenes of wonder and devotion, a vast tomb of extraordinary artwork that for centuries lay lost and forgotten.

Flying in, I could see how this could happen, this losing of one of the great repositories of ancient art. The Mogao Caves lie at the very edge of the Taklamakan Desert, an enormous, expanding emptiness fringed by the soaring Kunlun Mountains. This desert is one of the world’s largest sand deserts. And, of course, it can get a little dusty here as wind stirs the fine grains. Indeed, as I walked across the tarmac at the airport, I listened to the jet engines wheezing and sputtering from all the sand. I watched the mechanics on their bicycles, pedaling toward the plane to investigate this strange grinding and whirring of the engines, and I thought of Buddhism, its Zen variation, and once again noted that I should look into it, because I was not at all calm flying in China and I really needed to do something about it.

Fortunately, Dunhuang is a calm place. I checked into a hotel and walked outside in the late-afternoon light to have a gander. The architecture was utterly unremarkable, but there was a pleasant small-town vibe, a congenial unhurriedness. It was the first place I’d seen in China where drivers didn’t sit on their horns. No one troubled me here. It was, dare I say it, laid-back. And nothing is laid-back in China. Dunhuang is also very mixed in its population. This is where China abuts into Central Asia. Though predominantly Han Chinese, there were also Uyghurs in Dunhuang, Muslims wearing their distinctive white hats. I made my way through a street that was setting up for the night market, past stalls selling books, ornaments, a little bit of everything, and settled at a table in front of a restaurant. Across the way there was a hairdresser’s shop with heavily made-up hairdressers idling at the door, waving and beckoning me toward them as they stood and flitted in their tight-fitting, clingy clothes.
Messagee!
Even here? I wondered. In Dunhuang? This town, this little eensie-weenie teeny town on the edge of the desert? Jesus, I thought. It’s startling the degree to which prostitution exists in China.

Before me, a friendly Muslim waiter set down a bowl of noodles with meat. I had pointed to it moments earlier and he’d cooked it up in a hotpot. It was good, a little gamey perhaps, and I opened up my guidebook since I didn’t have anything else to read, and soon learned that the local specialty in Dunhuang is
luruo huang mian,
or donkey meat with noodles. Super, I thought. I’m eating an ass. That’s all right, I reflected. For years, I’d been eating horse meat, a fact discerned only much, much later when Sylvia had accompanied me on a trip to Holland and, at my uncle and aunt’s home in Brummen in rural Gelderland, she’d inquired what precisely was that curious-looking cold cut I’d just used to make a sandwich.
Horse,
she’d been told, whereupon I coughed and hacked and choked on my sandwich as my uncle explained that for dinner that evening we’d be having the hare he’d run over the previous day. They’re good salt-of-the-earth people, my family in Holland, and I will not hear another word about how boring Dutch cuisine is. Indeed, it prepared me for China. If I could eat roadkill in Holland, I could certainly eat an ass here.

The Mogao Caves lie somewhere in the Hexi Corridor, once the only path between China and the West. Not far away is the Gilian Shan range, a solid wall of mountains that shoot out of the desert. Beginning in the fourth century and spanning more than a thousand years, worshipers of Buddhism filled the 492 grottoes of Mogao with art and thousands of ancient manuscripts. Once trade along the Silk Road collapsed along with the Yuan Dynasty, however, the grottos and caves lay forgotten until the early twentieth century, when Europeans began to hear rumors of their existence and they hopped over to explore and plunder, because that is what they did.

The Mogao Caves are not far from Dunhuang, and I hailed a taxi with a driver babbling on his cell phone as he drove me to a corner on the outskirts of town, where another taxi idled along the curb. The driver indicated that I should depart his taxi and hop in that one. Perplexed, I did as he asked, whereupon the pockmarked driver began to yell into his cell phone. They are not silent people, the Chinese, and I paid no mind as we passed the last cotton fields and followed the paved road through a barren desert of sand and stones.

Suddenly, the driver veered off the paved road to follow a deeply rutted gully. And why are we doing this? I wondered. Not for the first time, I wished I spoke Chinese. What’s he saying on that cell phone?

I have the foreigner. Now give me my money.

I was beginning to grow concerned, because earlier I had seen the turn-off to the Mogao Caves. And this wasn’t it. We went farther into the desert. We passed a dead dog rotting in the sun. The driver continued to yell into his phone.

I’m nearly there. Bring the gun.

A surprising number of Westerners do get themselves killed in China, victims of banditry. I was beginning to worry here. This path could do some severe damage to a car. What would the motive be for subjecting one’s car to such risks? It could only be something nefarious.

Suddenly, the driver veered back toward the paved road, and as we returned to it I felt true relief. What was that about? I wondered. I looked behind us. Of course. It was perfectly clear. We had taken a detour around the tollbooth.

I was let off before the entrance to the Mogao Caves, and the driver indicated that he was amenable to waiting for me until I’d finished. I explained, in that curious way one does when you can’t speak the local language, that I might be a while. He shrugged and indicated that he didn’t have anything better to do. It’s a desert. Not a lot of passengers here. And he had a
laowai
here who thought he was very cunning with his bargaining, but really, it’s like taking candy from a child. So he’d stay.

I paid the entrance fee and was pleased to find an English-speaking guide, who led me on a path through a small canyon. In its walls, hundreds of caves had been carved. They are known as the Thousand Buddha Caves, and inside the grottoes monks had painted vast murals and carved hundreds of stucco sculptures to encourage meditation and enlightenment. Many of the frescoes had been financed by Silk Road merchants. The Mogao Caves lie at the very edge of the Silk Road’s most daunting challenge—the desert crossing—and travelers either expressed their gratitude for completing the journey or their hopes for making it across by paying for lavish testimonies to their devotion. For the sake of preservation, all the caves are now sealed and only a few are opened each day for visitors.

“This secret library cave,” informed my guide, a young woman not entirely in command of the English language.

“There were thousands very holy manuscripts. English people steal them.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. In 1900, they trick monk and steal manuscripts. And you see those Buddhas without faces? Muslim people deface the Buddhas in 1920.”

There were more scratched-out faces in other caves. “It’s a shame, isn’t it?” I said. “Why can’t we all just get along? Muslims and Buddhists, Christians and Jews. Live and let live, don’t you think?”

“I know not what you say,” she said perfunctorily. I got the feeling that she’d memorized a script and any deviation from it would prove troubling to her. Frankly, I understood little of what she said and just nodded thoughtfully as she explained the story behind the immense hundred-foot-tall Buddha in the largest cave in a language known only to herself. We passed an open grotto with a sign that declared that under no circumstances should one think of entering, so I entered to find men with brushes working on a faded mural of a divine bodhisattva. Was this restoration or re-creation? It can be so hard to tell in China, and I wanted to explore this point with my guide, who had yanked me back, but her answers were insensible to my ears. But here and there, as I followed her from cave to cave, I’d pick something up though the incomprehensible din.