A handful of Dorje's middle school friends shouted from the monastic alley up through woodwork of the second story window. The black sky gave no indication that it was six o'clock, and I failed to see the old monk as we hurriedly collected our belongings and met them downstairs. I remained quiet as we picked our way down the hill and back into the Chinese tile and Tibetan wood fusion that is Daofu. I'm often quiet when I first meet strangers in China, remaining somewhat reserved in employing my language skills (or lack thereof) until a relative level of comfort has developed. Rising before dawn, especially in such cold, pains me greatly. This Saturday morning was no exception as we walked to the store where the night before we had stashed my pack and bags of apples and walnuts, yak butter and tsampa.
I ventured to ask Dorje about our travel accommodation. He was enjoying bantering with his old friends, and his terse response about a cousin's truck insufficiently allayed my concern. I chose to remain silent for the most part, as I tend to do when I'm slightly annoyed and without effort to mount resistance. We trudged a kilometer or more to the yard that served as Daofu's equivalent of a truckstop. A shabby black dog was chained near the first of the trucks, and barked aggressively as we arrived. No other people could be seen. Dorje looked around a bit, and I headed to the toilet before anyone showed up to collect the fee of five jiao (six cents), according to the sloppy red characters painted on a wall.
Soon the pre-dawn sun began to illuminate the tired-looking truckyard. A pile of logs had been stacked beside a steel machine that looked like a cross between a steam engine and a time machine. Seven o'clock soon approached, the time that the day's only bus to Kangding would be leaving Daofu's tiny bus station. Dorje and his friends and I stood shivering on the sidewalk beside the entrance to the yard. Soon it was decided that we should locate some breafast, which was easily accomplished in the form of a tea and baozi (steamed buns filled with meat) hut not far from the truckstop.
We returned to our preassigned curb. A slim young monk stood near us, also waiting for truck drivers to show up to ask for a ride. It is traditional for Buddhist monks to wear maroon or saffron robes. He donned a yellow Marlboro racing jacket. Our group continued to stand for two more hours. I was unsure of what we were waiting for, though I chose to appear slightly standoffish as opposed to laboriously extracting details from Dorje. Soon a man began to chainsaw the logs into smaller sections appropriate for chopping into firewood. He was wearing sandals and I kept imagining him cutting off his feet. A well-dressed Chinese man wearing some kind of sports outfit and trekking boots showed up in a filthy car, and a couple of workers thoroughly washed the car and it's tires. I soon discovered that the unidentifiable machine was for pressing vegetable oil, which I assumed was also the reason the man was chopping firewood.
[If you think this narrative is plodding and uneventful, imagine how I felt.] Dorje mistook my perturbation as general coldness, and he gestured me into a small single room building that served as the caretaker's home and office. I was offered a place near the small wood-burning stove, and I began to warm myself. A tiny kitten was leashed beneath a bed. [I have seen more cats on leashes in China in the past two months than I've seen in my entire life in America.] Relatively soon, a number of people began preparing a blue truck for departure from the truckstop, and Dorje's friends climbed in the back. I began telling them goodbye until Dorje climbed in with a couple of young children and a middle-aged Tibetan man, and I was offered shotgun. It was well after half past nine.
My mood began to improve immediately as the large rig slowly pushed it's way out of Daofu and into the surrounding countryside. I wearily stared at the amber hills, rustic stone cottages and low fences covered in sod and flanked by stacks of thin firewood. The truck blew by a number of people waving palms down for it to stop, the Chinese version of thumbing for a ride. Within a half an hour, though, it picked up another student of mine, a bright round-faced Tibetan girl named Lamei Deji (Hannah).
The truck moved slowly around the curves of the highway, but the shotgun position of the blue big-rig afforded me a much more impressive view of the surrounding countryside than the bus from Kangding had. Additionally, being positioned ahead of the front axle as opposed to on top of the rear axle significantly diminished the discomfort of the pot-holed road. I wondered how Hannah and the other students were fairing in the bed of the truck, bouncing like so many yaks.
I rather enjoy the way that Tibetans tend to decorate their cars and motorcycles. A few pictures of lamas, including the Big Man On The Plateau, were taped above the driver's' side visor. Twists of colored silk hung from the rear-view mirror. I began to warm up to my fellow passengers, and I learned that the Tibetan man which whom I was sharing a seat was a Thanka painter.
Dorje layed on the small bed behind the row of seats, with a preteen boy and a grammar school-aged girl. Soon the attention of the passengers shifted to her, and I noticed that she was crying. She had become embarrassed for throwing up a bit out of the window. The man next to me was beside the window, and we lifted her from the back to sit on his lap so she could lean out the large passenger window if necessary. Dorje produced some more local walnuts, and she began to feel better as she munched on the white meat of the nuts. The insides of her nostrils were coated with scabby blood.
Once she cheered up, though, she was a delight. Her Mandarin accent was perhaps the best of the six of us in the front of the truck (Dorje knows standard Mandarin well but retains a largely Daofu accent), and my range of conversational topics generally matches those of an eight year-old. I discovered she was from Kangding, visiting Daofu "for fun." I disproved her father's assertion that all foreigners have blue eyes and blond hair, and she ran her fingers up and down my arm-hair. Her name was Drolma, and she even had an English name, Vera. She sang ABC's songs and one called "Good Morning, Teacher," the lyrics of which are basically "good morning, teacher" over and over. We drove straight to Tagong.
I hadn't had the opportunity to enjoy Tagong on the way up, and as we stopped to rest a moment Dorje's friends, Dorje, Hannah and I went to the local and super-famous Tagong Monastery. It cost ten yuan for me to enter, though the rest of them got in for free. Drolma scampered in behind us. We only had time to circumambulate one shrine room [through the small door in the white facade at the right of the photograph I did not take], and their large paintings of Guru Rinpoche and other revered Tibetan Buddhist sages was impressive and of a style I hadn't yet encountered. The incidentals of the monastery are hundreds of years old.
I offered Hannah my new toque (the Canadian term for a knitted winter hat; pronounced "tewk") and grabbed some skewered roast potatoes as we climbed back into the truck and left Tagong. The driver had purchased a number of drinks, and I was offered a terrible Chinese knockoff of Red Bull. The scenery began to change from the rolling ochre mountains to more wooded and open plains. Soon we arrived at a three-road crossroads, which marked the point at which the Tibet-Sichuan highway splits into its northern and souther routes. Turning right would have taken us west to LiThang, and soon thereafter into Tibet. Turning around would have sent us past Daofu to Derge, with northern Tibet close ahead. We turned right, and followed the traditional road back to China, back to Kangding.
[I find the term Sichuan-Tibet Highway to be somewhat misleading. Gloriously filled with potholes and composed of little more than rock and dirt in some places, the road gives new meaning to the word "highway." Most of you should envision Alexandria Senior High's parking lot before 1999, the US-59 Montrose Exit construction in Houston, or Toulouse St. near St. John's Bayou in New Orleans for comparison.]
As we approached Xinduqiao, the truck, and another rig with which we were caravaning, pulled to a stop and a handful of men disembarked. Dorje's friends had also reached their destination, a middle school in Xinduqiao. I learned that the trucks were thinning out the passengers in the cab because of a rumored traffic checkpoint on the road ahead. Apparently there is a regulation forbidding having more than four passengers in the cab of a truck at once, and the Tibetan men where unwilling to press their luck with the authorities. The men would walk and meet us for lunch at a restaurant a few kilometers down the road.
We arrived at the restaurant and waited for at least a half an hour for the men to arrive. I could see them from quite a length down the road, because they were all wearing a combination of navy blue and orange [the school colors of my elementary alma-mater, J.B. Nachman], colors that seem to be quite popular in this part of the world. A crippled cow and her calf ambled about the side of the restaurant's parking lot. The men arrived and we lunched together quickly. I insisted afterwards that Hannah join us in the cab. She appeared stiff from shivering in the back.
Two men had been switching as drivers on the journey. We started with Dorje's older cousin as a driver, and then a man from one of the other trucks took over in our truck. This man's name was Tashi, though to me he appeared to be the long lost Tibetan brother of the O'Doyle (O'Doyle Rules!) family. He was quite large and had a rather dopey expression on his shiny face. He allowed the young boy to sit on his lap and steer the rig, reminding me of just how annoying boys between the ages of ten and twelve can be.
I asked Drolma what her Zodiac birth animal was. She replied, "Wo shu niu," which means that she was an ox. I offered that I was birthed under the Zodiac sign of the boar. I offered my personal interpretation that boars are very clever. Tashi O'Doyle immediately began to tease the young girl. The word shu, a verb which means "am the birth animal," sounds quite a bit like shi (pronounced "sure"), which means "to be." Tashi asked her in astonishment if she was an ox.
She became obstinate. "I'm a person not an ox!," but Tashi insisted that she was an ox. She had been talking to the yaks out of the window, which only gave Tashi more evidence that she indeed was a cow of some kind. Soon she offered that her mother was birthed under the sign of the dog, which only made things more interesting.
"Your mother is a dog?" inquired Tashi. This, of course, is insulting in most languages. Young Drolma became quite angry, using this opportunity to test the limits of appropriate behavior with adults to shout at Tashi.
"You're a dog!" she shouted at Tashi. He seemed to enjoy the conversation, and I found it rather funny myself. He almost pushed her to the point of crying. She continued insisting that her mother was a person, and not a dog. When Tashi discovered that her father was a rooster he became incredulous.
"How does a dog and a rooster have a cow for a child?" and so on in this manner for a long time. Later, Tashi began to convince the girl that everyone had paid for the ride but her. In fact, the reason that all of the students and other passengers were enduring the slow ride through the countryside was precisely because it was free. I even played along, saying that I had payed too.
Tashi threatened to throw her out of the cab if the poor girl didn't surrender all of the money her mother had given her for snacks on the trip. She was upset, and accused him of being a dakuan, an interesting Chinese term that means roughly nouveau-riche. It was clear to me that he was nothing of the sort.
We crossed the mountain pass that marks the final descent into Kangding. The change in scenery is impressive. From the top, one can look west towards Tibet to see tan mountains and shrubby grasslands. Looking east, one views the jagged green river valleys of China. Snow-capped peaks can been seen in either direction.
The truck rolled wearily down to Kangding, and rested for a while at the other end of town as Drolma's and her brother's parents arrived to take them home. It was past seven o'clock, but we hadn't eaten lunch until almost three so no one was hungry. The thanka painter disappeared for a bit and returned with a Tibetan woman, who shared the front seat with the two of us. It made for a cramped return trip to Guza, but I insisted that it was no trouble because of the short duration of the final leg back home. The driver and the painter would be driving clear to Chengdu that night, and I'm certain they couldn't have arrived earlier than two in the morning.
We snaked through the steep greenery that reminded me of the view from my teacher's apartment at Kangding Normal Teacher's College. I was rather excited about returning home, and I still had a bit of work to do as I had class with the students the following day. I disdained the idea of class at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning. I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the large sign advertising Wasigou, the far side of the small town that contains the crossroads to the Teacher's college. Not halfway through the one-street podunk community, though, a uniformed traffic cop signaled the truck to stop. Dorje and Hannah quickly hid beneath a blanket behind the seats, and the painter sat in front of the woman to block the policeman's view of her. I was happy to see my students had such good instincts when it came to the authorities. I smiled politely.
The driver and the cop bantered for a bit in some extremely rough Sichuanese. I may have heard the driver ask the traffic officer if they were in Japan with all these strict rules, but I could have been imagining it. Either way, the cop asked him to get his paperwork together for review in an office.
The painter appeared concerned. I wondered if I should grab my things and walk the remainder of the distance to the school. The painter got out to see if the driver needed any help, or perhaps just to lend some moral support to the Tibetan and an extra set of eyes in the office. The Tibetan woman counted whispered prayers on the beads in her left hand.
I found myself imagining what would happen if the police found a reason to arrest or beat Tashi O'Doyle. I had already spent a good deal of the afternoon narrating the events of the day to myself for later recollection and documentation. I had even coined a clever pun for my blog title, KhamAbiding. I fantasized about the emotional weight of having a comedic character like Tashi become a tragic figure just as my narrative drew to a close.
Idle thought has little impact on objective reality, but it actively defines our intentions and perception of the world around us. I chided myself for secretly wishing something terrible would happen for the sake of a story to my friends. Tashi returned after a long twenty minutes. He breathed a long sigh of relief, and we drove in silence to the crossroads of Wasigou and Guza. Hannah, Dorje, and I got of the truck, thanked the men, and organized our things. I gave the painter a handful of cigarettes from the pack I received from the tourists from Chongqing.
We didn't have to wait long for a minibus to take us to the college. The reader can likely imagine the rest of the story. Dorje gave me a bit of tsampa, walnuts, apples and butter for my apartment. I hadn't showered in exactly a week, and bearded in my dirty clothes, toque, and newly broken in hiking shoes I felt more rugged than I had in two years. I admired my reflection in the window of the school canteen as I purchased some bottled water to assuage the thirst I had built from the fake red-bull and riding ten hours in the rig.
I have finally moved beyond all of my fantasies of becoming a trucker in the American West. Being a foreign guest in Western China, on the other hand, is a highly underrated activity.
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