The Low Season
I didn’t expect to see her lying dead there, so still, red scarf over her forehead and eyes like a cold compress against a fever. We aren’t trained to see a person truly inert and I could swear to so many things in that cold room – a flinch of her arm, a rise and fall of her chest from a woman startled, no, angered, that interlopers were brought to gaze at her wrinkled flesh. I could see my breath in the winter air and surprised myself by thinking she must be cold.
So we just stood there. The man who had brought us to the body, the woman’s son, held the blanket that served as the door and looked at us looking at her. He said not to worry, he wasn’t worried, and everyone knew this was coming. This wasn’t an official visit, just a peek, a quick view in the way that someone shows you the guest bedroom they just redecorated. So I followed the rivulets of folded skin down her arm with my eyes. She looked so old. Sunken into the table. Melted with total relaxation. If her spirit was gone, it couldn’t have gone far.
Moments before my friend and I had been sitting outside, a few feet away with plastic cups of green tea and forty people boisterous and confused and fussing all over us. It happens, you wander around looking happy and harmless and white and soon you’re holding tea and forced to sit down and you’re talking about all the NBA teams you know but you talk about two people only, really, just Yao Ming and Kobe (though connoisseurs ask you about Tracy McGrady). The man across from me was grinning wildly. His family and friends were all here and two foreigners wandering the back alleys of this lethargic town had been plucked off the streets. A feast was being prepared.
“This is fantastic, do you do this all the time?”
“All the time, no. Today is special.”
“Spring festival?”
“No. My mother is dead.” A lull. I muttered I’m sorry and he waved it off and laughed. I wondered if people would smile when I died, and I guessed it would depend on if I was really old when it happened. Another lull.
It was hard to know what to ask next. It would seem a little crass to change the subject now that I had realized I had wandered into a wake. “When did she die?” He screwed his head down. A genuinely good question, but he didn’t know the answer. He turned to his friends who were all watching us talk and asked them. There was some discussion and then general nods of agreement.
“About one or two hours ago. Let’s go see her!”
*
In winter, Jiuzhaigou is deserted. The airport is empty, the cab drivers lackadaisical. In the car, my driver tells me the only ones left are the locals who don’t have to travel far to reach home during the New Year. The cab company has even given up. Drivers are on their own, lone wolves desperate enough to stand for hours to catch the five tourists arriving by plane – god speed and they don’t even have to kick back a cut of the fare to the management. The highway from the airport is barren and ice-slick, an abandoned ribbon of asphalt winding through valleys flanked by snow-covered mountains. Then: castle turrets jut like knives from the side of the road. It’s startling – mountain vistas accompanied only by the jangle of tire chains giving way to the gray of something almost medieval. The turrets aren’t alone. Polished signs hang from rafters carved in what would be old west saloon style if cowboys made liberal use of fanciful red and pink paint. Still it’s grand, this muscular defense of the surrounding nothingness. And ancient, too. Notices by the road pegged the history of the place to 800 years. Never mind the ancients didn’t have neon.
My friend and I got out of the car to look partially out of curiosity and partially to clear our heads after nearly spinning off the highway because the driver got too cocky. The fortress city lies along the path to the promise of postcard nirvana: Jiuzhaigou – spire-like mountains ringing lakes of unearthly, impossible blue. Water of such sapphire intensity that you feel God got bored with his natural hue paint palate and started designing earth with Photoshop instead. A must-see.
At the front gate of the fortress town, three woman swept ice chips from the roadway with handmade brooms. They asked me why the hell we were there, why we would bother coming when the town was closed. I told them we were looking for the bathroom. They laughed. Sign after sign for restaurants, karaoke places and hotels beckoned with their garish intensity.
“There are no bathrooms here.”
“No bathrooms?”
“None. Come back in summer. This place should be finished by then.” On the surrounding buildings, some windows were still covered with factory seals. The staff bathroom facilities, when we finally found them, overflowed with water from unfinished plumbing. It was a giant tourist trap, a mega park for those going to or coming from nirvana, for whom the lakes weren’t enough. In the summer, oh in the summer I was told there’d barely be room to walk from all the people soaking in the freshly built past. The women chuckled as we climbed back into the car, where the driver was sitting with the heat turned up against the cold.
As we drove on towards Jiuzhaigou, we began to see outskirts of the bonanza the turret town hopes to siphon off. The two miles outside the front gate are lined, stocked, exploding with the carcasses of shuttered hotels. There’s a Sheraton there, captaining the hotel offerings. Rooms can run in the hundreds of dollars, absurd sums in a country where nice places can be had for twenty. The cab driver laughed as we glided by. The arrogance and face-saving of foreigners. It wouldn’t look right, pr wise, he said, for the beauty of a top end hotel to turn dark and hulking in the winter doldrums. So the place stayed open, at night the only lights on in the surrounding rustic darkness, catering to the handful of wealthy people who occasionally showed up.
Our hotel, one of about four still operating out of the scores and scores stretching to remarkable distances, sat in the center of an empty complex – walkways and gardens and reception areas just deleted of people. In
It’s not like the place we ended up was unknown. Lonely Planet, that setter of travel to-do lists, even said to go there – hotels were cheaper and the morning bus to the Jiuzhaigou gate a locally-flavored steal at a couple of kuai. But even the buses weren’t running now, too cold and no point because all the non locals and tourists had long since evacuated the area now that the hillsides were brown, morose, and unworthy of telephoto lenses. The people still there, even if they didn’t have a car certainly had a horse and, at any rate, there was no reason to leave. So we wandered comforted by the fact that at least here, there were people. Our driver waited as we rambled.
It was clear from the road that wealth had recently arrived here, but it had yet to spread. Newly constructed streets and the squat, bathroom-tiled homes of the newly moneyed started almost immediately to the right of where we were dropped off. Tourists had been gone for a while, but the market was still active late into the afternoon, though hopes of making any sales seemed to have dwindled. The bored young men crowded around the toy vendor and persuaded him to take out the pellet guns he had for sale so they could take turns attacking a cardboard box. We stopped and stared as they raised the rifles to their shoulders and smacked the box through with orange pellet after orange pellet. We turned and walked through the old quarter.
*
I asked, not long after we had seen the body and avoided the bleary glances of the women mourning and knitting scarves outside of the temporary morgue, how anyone, even the friends of a woman so old as to make everyone feel that she was cheated out of nothing in life, could be so festive when the body had not yet gone cold. The answer was simply a number. “82, 82, 82 82 82!” How could you question a life so long? This was not her first funeral, they reminded me. At countless others, who bothers to care how many, she was outside with everyone eating noodles while some other body lay cooling behind the curtain. The woman’s son commanded me to eat, and slapped me on the back when I had slurped down my second bowl.
Tradition is a bizarre thing in
As I set down the noodles, a young, serious guy came over to me. He hadn’t yet admitted to himself the need to shave, and the long tendrils of soft, rarely cut whiskers sprouted above his lip. He asked me if I wanted to go to a performance, something traditional, and I hesitated, visions of recorded music and high ticket prices and minorities dancing in costumes floating before me. It had already happened in more Chinese tourist sites than you’d want to believe. Traditional dances and songs delivered several times a day to coincide with the arrival of tour groups. He was, of course, insulted. He placed his hand on my back and smiled. “Just get in the car.”
And, so, the mourning party emptied out into the street and raced for a small gray van parked nearby. We piled in and careered down the mountain, stopping outside the town temple, where a crowd was gathering.
Inside, I was given drumsticks and my friend a cymbal, and, on the orders of a tall man dressed in blue, the jamming commenced. Soon everyone was there, the son, the grandson, the knitting mourners and the noodle chefs, clapping to the beat. After my turns drumming and then dancing under the giant dragon head (like those street performances with one guy shaking the head and the other guys bent over behind him, pretending to be the tail) another one of the mourners took my arm and brought me into the temple.
It was beginning to get dark, and candles were lit. Massive, grotesque heads, deep colored and angry, flickered in the shadows. These were defenders. Protectors armed with huge swords and permanent scowls. We stood in front of them as others took turns going all out on the drums outside. Soon I was on my knees, waving sticks of incense before the gods and plunging them into the gravel of the altar before the gods and it hurt because the knee cushion was worn down near to the wood from use.
An old woman, the temple groundskeeper, made a valiant effort to explain the history of the place, but our guide, the grandson, kept getting distracted and wandering off and I didn’t speak the local dialect. We smiled as she swept her hand past the dark, rough wood of the place, several hundred years old, growing steadily darker as the sun disappeared.
Outside, in the last bits of twilight, the final stragglers of the performance troupe had arrived, including two boys head to toe in fur and a pair of twenty-somethings in yellow resplendence to match the dragon head that had been dancing in the narrow passageway. Old men maneuvered behind drums and gongs while the meaty, established men of the group took hold of the drums that would hover in the air as they were being beaten to wake the town and let them know that something was coming.
It was about a week after the New Year, and now that elders had been visited and lucky money distributed, it was time for the world to know that other groups were still in need of respecting. Trains and parades like this traversed the streets and hills for miles around, gongs and lilting beat starting as the sun set. A young man donned a baby’s mask and danced before the dragon with a feathery brush - a fanciful pearl the dragon is after and a
Soon, though, the throng passed onto concrete, the new area where few old-time locals now lived and where few people were now that the out-of-towners had returned to their parents for the holidays. Low wooden buildings gave way to the bathroom tile and plaster of new construction and the streets widened. Noise, well, noise wasn’t an issue for the gongs and drums, but as we turned a corner onto the main street the parade became solitary, a detachment of lanterns and dragons bobbing along an empty road.
We processed for about an hour and a half, the grandson stopping by occasionally to relight my fish and help me pass it off to an older woman with a firmer grasp of wind dynamics. My cab driver inched along beside the procession, saying he was tired and wanted to go home.
Things ended, for me, in front of the government headquarters in the center of town. The government building sits at the far end of a large square, raised above the surrounding buildings by ten feet. The procession filed in, by this time a loose collection of about forty people, ecstatic and dancing. There were no homes around on either side, no spectators or people happening by. It was just us, and a few policemen guiding the fireworks into neat lines before the giant government red star.
A man stepped out of the procession and the dragon stopped to look. He called out, asking the people to bless the government. They roared in response. He asked again. Again they roared. And at the third time, after the roar, fireworks drowned the sound.
It was then that we learned why the cab driver was so antsy. The parade wasn’t finished, wouldn’t be for another four hours and who knows because sometimes it goes till dawn. Spring festival, the New Year, isn’t where it is by chance. It’s the dead of winter, the time when no fields are productive and everyone would be stuck at home anyway, so you might as well celebrate, even if your new neighbors aren’t around to share it with you. As we crawled into the cab I got a text message from the grandson wishing me a happy new year.
We drove back, my friend, the cabbie and I, through the darkness of the countryside. We took a side road, one built only for the locals with insider knowledge, to help them avoid the highway toll station perched just outside of town. We drove for half an hour through the looming black until lights emerged ahead. We passed the empty hotels sulking like a ghost town, still except for the few people there who had nowhere else to go.
The next day my friend and I would be in the park, Jiuzhaigou, staring at lakes, some radiant blue, some frozen over, and one named Panda Lake in honor of a panda seen long long ago there, before their habitat was co-opted and they fled, and long before the government announced plans to replant some of the animals’ favorite food in hopes of one day luring them back. A couple of days after that, I’d get another message from the grandson, an apology for taking so long to respond to my response. “I’m sorry it’s taken so long,” he wrote. “My grandmother is dead and we have things to do.” By that time I would be in another part of the province miles and miles from the dead old woman with the red scarf about to be buried in the ground not far from where she entered the world.
