Back to the countryside

Having grown up in the suburbs and spent most of my adult life in a big city, I now jump at the chance to see the countryside. Maybe I hold too romantic a notion of what it is. I expect layers and layers of tree-covered mountains to disappear in fog, the river to flow lazy with its clear, cold water, the air to be so clean it is sweet.

One of my students, Huang Qiong, invited me her old home. She does not live there now, but her grandparents and many of her relatives still do. The town -- the name of it escapes me now -- was about three hours by bus. During the ride, Huang Qiong and three classmates played Chinese pop songs on their cell phones and sang along. They joked with each other, switching from the local dialect to Mandarin to English. (The English was limited to short phrases. "OK!" "Let's go!") School was on break for National Week and Mid-Autumn Festival, and our mood was light.

We stopped finally on an unpaved street lined with small stores selling clothing, shoes, snacks, meat and vegetables. Huang Qiong bought a slab of beef from a woman selling vegetables on the street. A cow leg dangled on a metal hook. The woman grabbed the bone with her bare hand and hacked with a cleaver. The five us walked down the road and was approached by an old woman with a bow-legged gait.

"My nai nai," Huang Qiong said. The woman was her father's mother.

The woman was a full head shorter than I. She grasped both my hands in hers. Her hands were small and round and rough. She smiled a yellow-toothed smile and said something to her granddaughter.

"She said you can't understand her, can you?" Huang Qiong translated. I turned to the grandmother and shook my head.

Nai Nai left us and we veered off the road onto a dirt path that wove through the tall grass. An unpicked squash lay unpicked on its side. About twenty meters down the path were a row of one-story cement homes. We walked through an open door into a small unlit room with a table in one corner and a wok over coals in the center.

In the room was another old woman with a weathered face but still mostly-black hair.This was Huang Qiong's wai po, her mother's mother. Wai Po led us into the back room, smaller with a table and benches along the wall, just big enough to seat the five of us. My students and I cracked peanuts and ate spicy seaweed and tofu as Wai Po prepared our lunch. From the other room came sounds of chopping and sizzling.

Everything cooked for us came from their own land. Rabbit with hot peppers, beef and celery, tofu. Even the rice was from the family's land. My friends and I always say you can tell when food is made with love, and this meal definitely was. Wai Po did not eat. She was waiting for Huang Qiong's grandfather to return from working on the land. She stood next to us and urged us to eat more, eat more.

After lunch, we took a ten-minute bus ride to one of the mountains where Huang Qiong said we could ride a boat on the river and get a better view of the scenery. The river was dammed where we entered, so we climbed what felt like a couple hundred stone steps to the river bank. My students told me not to talk. If the people who owned the boat knew I was not local they would charge more money.

The two women who sat on stools next to their boat wanted 50 RMB, about $7. Huang Qiong told them she rode the boat for 30 RMB last year, but the women would not budge on the price. So instead we left the boat ladies and started down a mountain path that took us to a cave Huang Qiong wanted to show me.

We walked for half an hour came upon a couple houses along the road. I was reminded again not to talk and to hide my bottle of water, apparently a sign of a non-local. Huang Qiong spoke with the couple in the local dialect and paid them. We continued along the path. Huang Qiong later told me that she paid 30 RMB for the five of us; usually the couple charges a couple hundred for entrance to the cave.

According to a granite slab outside the cave entrance, Fair Cave was formed centuries ago. Made of limestone, the cave was 200 meters long, 60 meters high and 30 meters wide. The sign continues, "Some earth and stones on the top of the cave have been eroded, just like opening many windows into the outside road. The exit of the cave is such a marvelous window which [sic] a waterful [sic] called 'longeviity waterful' runs down from the top of the cave. It is a magic heritage created by nature, which ranks to [sic] a world-class geologic relic."

The cave was cool inside and we clumsily walked over the rocks of a dried-up stream. The cave exit was in fact "a marvelous window." Soft, white light poured through an opening above and the stream reappeared. In that moment, I forgot where I was. I forgot I was an American in China. I forgot I was a teacher and they my students. We were all children, running over rocks, dipping our fingers into the ice-cold water, in awe of everything around us.

WARNING: I have been traveling for the past week and a half, so there is a backlog of posts.