November 28, 1995 

In the Guangxi Autonomous Region (so named because it has a lot of minorities) of southern China, there is a small, surprisingly trendy village called Yangshuo along the Li River. The village is about an hour's drive south from a large city called Guilin. The main attractions are the spectacular, oddly shaped limestone hills and the pretty, crystal clear Li waters that wind through them.

I won't attempt to describe the sharply vertical hills. Only a picture could do that. This is the beautiful, strange landscape often depicted on Chinese scroll paintings, and it has inspired countless generations of Chinese poets and artists. I am neither a Chinese poet nor artist, but I, too, am inspired to sing the region's praises.

Yangshuo is Trekker Central, with loads of gritty, young backpackers from Europe, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, America, Israel, and elsewhere. It reminded me a little of Sedona, Arizona (dramatic rock formations surrounding a town that attracts a variety of artists and free spirits) and a little of Antigua, Guatemala (lots of foreign backpackers, good food). Yangshuo itself bears a strong Western influence courtesy of the backpackers. Backpackers, though, generally are unintrusive people who resist the urge to "contaminate" a place with demands for a 7-11, McDonald's, central heating and other comforts of home. We heard about Japanese and Taiwan money coming in to build the place up a bit, though. Currently, the best hotel in town is about a one-star (not a very visible star to the naked eye, either), so we've got a ways to go before we hit crass Niagara Falls-style gaudiness.

Outside of Yangshuo, in the various villages along the river reachable by bike or boat, is where the real magic is. It truly felt as if time had stopped. This was old China, the China of Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth". And it wasn't a tourist show.

I'm writing this partly to give some impressions of the area, partly for personal journal purposes, and partly to give some tips to those who are thinking of travelling there soon. I went there with a good friend, Lynn Whitlock, who also works in the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong. We flew first to Guilin in about an hour and met Our Man in Yangshuo, Mo Jiang Ming (he doesn't mind it if you call him Chairman Mo). Mo, who speaks very good English with a Liverpool accent, had been recommended to us by a previous traveller as a very honest, dependable "go-to" contact who could arrange anything we needed in Yangshuo. He turned out to be exactly that and a wonderful person besides. He was proud of Yangshuo and the people there, and he innocently bragged of his "naturalness" and good command of English. Lynn had contacted him from Hong Kong in advance, and he agreed to meet us at the Guilin airport Thursday night (Thanksgiving) with a car to take us to the hotel he had arranged for us.

We spent the first couple nights at the Xilang Hotel, which had broken windows, no heat, and hot water only in the evenings. A lot of rickety Chinese-made trucks struggling to start in the morning (not to mention the very Chinese habit of loudly and laboriously snorting, spitting, and hocking up everything in your lungs in the morning) woke us up pretty early each day. For about $6 a night for a room with three beds, what do you expect? It was clean, and the blankets on each bed were super-heavy, practically mattresses in themselves. We spent Saturday night at the Zhuyang, which was truly a Great Leap Forward from the Xilang in terms of hot water and quiet.

We presented the Chairman with a bottle of Scotch as a gift when we arrived, and he acted extremely embarrassed and reluctant before taking it. I enjoyed the show. We had also brought long about a dozen packs of Marlboros to hand out to people who helped us along the way, but these turned out to be less-than-useful. Guangxi is very open commercially, and I saw lots of Marlboros, M&M's, Coke, and other Western products everywhere in Yangshuo and nearby villages.

We had dinner the first night at the Green Lotus Cafe, where the Chairman had based his self-styled traveller assistance service. The Green Lotus was typical of the many cafes in Yangshuo. It had indoor and outdoor seating, very good food, menus in Chinese and English, Western music (pirated or otherwise) and a friendly, English-speaking host who would happily switch to Chinese if you preferred. I forget the Chinese name of our host at the Green Lotus, but her English name was Jenny. Privately, Lynn and I called her "Jenny, don't lose my number", as some sort of inaccurate allusion to the old Steely Dan song.

In contrast to conservative and harried Hong Kong, the people of Yangshuo were extremely friendly and colorful, and we felt the urge to give everyone we met a nickname (whether they knew it or not). It was especially funny if another traveller had found the same nickname independently. For example, Lynn named one woman Ubiquitous Zhou because she rode around town on her bike all day appearing everywhere, constantly smiling, rounding up travellers to visit her home and Moon Hill. A Canadian who got roped in by her remarked to us, completely unprompted, "She is a bit ubiquitous, isn't she?" U. Zhou carried little notebooks around with her with handwritten endorsements from previous travellers. We would get accosted by her so many times in one day that we felt there must be more than one of her. Neither of us being inclined to join large groups when you could otherwise "do it yourself", Lynn and I managed to avoid hiring her, if not avoid running into her absolutely everywhere. The woman covered ground like Deion Sanders on the football field, like a candidate on the campaign trail.

23-year-old Max Angst was another character. We found him in Planet Yangshuo regretting his decision to reject a low-paying job in a coastal province. As eldest son, obligations to his peasant family kept him in Yangshuo. But strong opportunities still are scarce in the area, and he hasn't been able to get permission from his work unit (local government subunit that still controls most major decisions of your personal life in China) to work in Guilin permanently. We tried to cheer him up and reassure him about his youth and certainty of more and better opportunities in the future. American optimism didn't seem to be catching that night in Planet Yangshuo.

Back to Jenny. She was very sweet, and helped us arrange boats and bikes on several occasions. There was always a commission in these transactions, and even with a regular meal or purchase in the market, there was a foreigner mark-up to the price. Even so, it was all dirt-cheap, and I would haggle in the markets only for fun or if I thought the vendor was going too far. The price would instantly drop when I replied in Chinese, the Chinese-speaker's discount. Often, it would drop by 50% whether you spoke Chinese or not anyway. I bought several scrolls depicting the local landscape, a few ivory chops (stamps with your name carved in Chinese characters), and a Chinese army compass from the 1950s.

It was great to have an opportunity to speak Mandarin again. Hong Kong is pretty scarce for Mandarin opportunities. As each day passed, more and more came back from my first year of study in Washington. In each of the cafes and hotels, at least one person spoke good English, and the market vendors all spoke fluent "buy and sell" English. But everyone else was surprised to hear me speak Chinese and very curious to hear that people study it in the U.S. One nice experience was walking around town with one guy and his little baby on his shoulders talking about this and that until we parted paths at a food market. The surrounding villages had few English speakers. And the Guangxi accent was a helluva long way from that of my Beijing-born teachers, but they spoke slowly for me and were patient. It was like a foreigner learning English from Bostonians and then visiting rural Louisiana for a few days.

The town itself was very trendy and obviously reflected the influence of the several thousand trekkers that have passed through. Unlike Guangzhou, where all the opulent hotels and bars fueled by Taiwan, Hong Kong or Japanese money seemed terribly gaudy and overwrought, the little cafes in Yangshuo were just plain cool. They had very clever names and menus not only spelled right in English, but very funny as well. CAFE NAMES: Minnie Mao's, Mickey Mao's, Planet Yangshuo, Global Village, Meiyou Cafe ("Meiyou means "don't have". A sign outside explains that they don't have "bad beer, bad service, or `hello banana' people"; the last part will be explained in a bit), Hard Seat Cafe ("hard seat" is the cheapest ticket you can buy on a Chinese train), MC Blues Cafe (I suggested that the MC stood for Motor City; I am also going to send them a tape of good blues to play). At night, the cafes filled up with trekkers, played copied versions of American movies ("Pulp Fiction", "Death Becomes Her") and music that made you feel like you were in a time/place warp (Pink Floyd's "Meddle" album followed by the latest Stone Roses).

The T-shirts were clever too. One had "Yangshuo: Been There!" in Chinese characters. Obviously, some young travelling Westerners have spent time with new Yangshuo friends helping them on their marketing techniques. So many of the people we met seemed so innocent and eager to help or just talk, you wanted to do something for them in return and, as foreign "ambassadors" of the outside world, show some reciprocal friendliness and appreciation. I took a lot of people's photos, and now I have to develop them and send them back as small gifts. Most probably can't afford a camera, so these photos are one of the few ways they have of seeing themselves and their families grow over time.

Speaking of families, we saw an unbelievable number of kids. What's this about a one-family, one-child policy? They were everywhere! In the markets, in primitive schools, in the rice paddies. And they all knew one English word: "Hello!"

On the subject of "hello", I have to mention that the Chinese have morphed it from a simple greeting into a catch-all, to mean "Hey you! Want to buy this fake Tang-dynasty teapot?", or "Come this way, big nose!" or "Look out! Here I come on my bicycle, and I don't want to hit you!" We've been trained for years to politely respond to "Hello" with a "Hello" reply, and soon I found myself saying hello to every two-bit vendor in town.

Bicycling outside the village among the fields, everybody young and old would say "hello", shout it at you from passing trucks, pause from tilling with a water buffalo to yell it, nearly fall off their bicycles saying it. At first, I always tried to respond, especially to children in order to encourage them and to show them that what they learned in school could actually be used with a foreigner.

After about a day and a half though, I ran out of hellos. It was just too much. I began to shout out "Bonjour!" "Hola!" "Guten tag!" and "Zdravstvutye!" To my delight, a small girl out in the fields, totally unfazed, replied "Bonjour!" to me without even looking up from whatever she was doing.

When we first walked thru the markets, Lynn and I noticed a T-shirt with a bunch of bananas on it that said "Hello, banana!" At first, we thought it was a tasteless jibe at overseas-born Chinese, who can be mockingly referred to as "bananas" (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) much like some blacks are called "Oreos". Later, when we were at the pier waiting for our boat to leave on one of river trips, an old woman got on cheerfully yelling, "Hello! Banana!" and holding up bunches of bananas in both hands. All the Westerners nearby broke up laughing as we realized we had finally met the infamous woman behind the phrase. She made some sales, too.

Over the stretch of the four days in Yangshuo, we managed to make visits to three nearby villages. On Friday we went to Fuli by boat and cycled back with the beaten-up mountain bikes we rented for about 60 cents for the day and had stored on top of the little junk. In Fuli, we met two brothers, Stephen and Allan, who had just opened up a pleasant, simple teahouse above the tiny harbor about a month before. They were playing Michael Jackson from the pre-Thriller days. Allan explained to us how he had started the business, how much his taxes were, and how he had had to bribe various regional officials in order to obtain the land and get a business permit.

On the way back to Yangshuo, we pulled off the road and visited two fishermen about 30 years old down by a large pond. One of them invited us out on his small raft of bamboo poles strung together for a short trip round the pond. The raft was propelled by one person using a long bamboo pole to push off the pond bottom. Knowing what was on my mind, Xiao-ling allowed me to push us around for a while. We chatted for a little bit, took pictures of him with his daughters and his sullen brother to send back, and left.

That night we gave in and joined a large group who were going to watch a cormorant fishing display. The boat was arranged by a young guy with glasses who bases himself near the pier. We initially dubbed him Specs, but when we found out his real name was Marco (as in Polo), we had to defer.

This style of fishing has to be unique to China. Although our trip was largely staged for tourists, we saw plenty of real fishermen plying their trade throughout the trip. Each fisherman takes out 6-10 cormorants (large fish-hunting seabirds) on his narrow bamboo raft with a lantern tied at the front to light the way. The birds, with strings around their necks to prevent them from swallowing the fish they catch, float alongside the raft and dive whenever they spot something. The have a string tied around one leg, but the other end was not attached to the boat. Our guess was that they were trained young to come back to the boat, and the string only reminds them of their earlier lessons.

When the birds have caught enough, the fisherman takes them ashore and makes them cough up the fish for his basket. When he has enough, he takes the strings off their necks and lets them go out again to eat their dinner for real. The whole scene was eerie and otherworldly somehow, not made less so by the eager faces of us tourists gawking out of the boats at the birds diving and the ancient fisherman gliding along lit by his lamp. Lynn and I forgot our cameras. At first, I regretted it, but now it seems more fitting to leave the memory as an unreal, shadowy night adventure rather than an all-too-real, badly shot photograph of a staged cormorant fishing show.

The next day we took a longer trip upriver about 2 1/2 hours to the village of Xingping. We got off there, had some tea in Deborah's small teahouse and cycled back through the town's market, which resembled a frontier town of the Old American West (or even medieval days), with cobblers, mattress makers, millers, general stores, and bike repairmen patching tubes instead of blacksmiths fixing horseshoes.

The countryside from Xingping to Yangshuo was stunning and offered us the best view of rural farming life of the whole trip. Except for the road on which we travelled and a few power and phone lines impossibly strung along the jutting hills, the scene must have looked much as it had 1,000 years ago or more. The fields are intensively cultivated, divided into very small plots by irrigation ditches and access paths that would make large tractor machinery useless. I don't know much about farming, but the system employed in Guangxi certainly is designed to make maximum use of its main asset: human labor. And it's no accident that many public toilets were located on the main road next to irrigation ditches that course through the fields.

On Sunday we cycled to climb the aptly named Moon Hill. It has a crescent-shaped hole in it near the top. After getting by an unusually aggressive crowd of vendors (there was even one, lone, cheerful woman at the very top ready to sell us water, Mao buttons, postcards, and candy), we climbed up and enjoyed a stunning view of the hills and rice paddies stretching out toward distant mountain ranges. From up high, the hills resembled clumps of unused clay tossed aside after God completed a major piece of work during Creation, as if Guangxi was a derelict workshop left behind when the Himalayas were finished.

After descending the hill, we hired a guide to take us through part of the nearby Black Buddha Caves. Never having visited a cave system before, I found them fascinating, including an underground stream. We jumped onto a raft on the stream's underground shore for a couple "Journey to the Center of the Earth" photos, but with a flight to catch in Guilin that evening, we declined the 3-hour tour of the cave maze under the mountains. Next time!

The only major irritation during the trip was the clamor of car/truck horns and bicycle bells in the immediate vicinity of Yangshuo. Until you escaped the immediate confines of the village, you were subjected to a ceaseless barrage of vehicle horns. Drivers or cyclists proceeded down the road in broad daylight hitting their horns 10-20 times in a row, quite needlessly, apparently as if to say "I'm here! I'm here! Where are you?!" Other drivers would answer with a barrage of "I see you! I see you! I'm over here!"

In all sincerity, I am convinced that new drivers in China are trained to hit their horns almost constantly to prevent accidents. The result, of course, is that you become immune to these horns very quickly, and it is difficult to distinguish between real danger and the typical asshole hitting his horn for no reason. One day I was lucky enough to rent a bike with a working bell; I rang it with a vengeance at every idiot around in retaliation for their thoughtless assault on the peacefulness all around.

As I ponder the rest of my tour in Hong Kong, Taipei and then Beijing, one conversation with two other travellers during the trip is worth further comment. On top of Moon Hill, we met two Americans who had trekked for about six weeks to many of the major cities and sites in China and who were about to exit through Hong Kong. After enduring some hardships in the north and on the trains, they were really enjoying the relative comfort of Yangshuo. However, they warned us knowingly, trendy and open Yangshuo isn't the "real" China. Rather, the real China is that of the crowded, polluted cities they had disliked earlier in their trip. Not yet having travelled in the north, I didn't choose to argue, and Lynn and I told them about some good places to hike in Hong Kong when they got there.

While I agree that no one could say Yangshuo is typical of China, I think the areas around the friendly little village certainly are. We saw intensive rice cultivation with entire families working in the paddies, worn women weighed down by twin baskets full of straw or water balanced on their shoulders, water buffalo instead of tractors, cormorant fishermen and women washing clothes on stones in the clear, clean river, people tramping to and from various villages on different market days. We also saw a fair amount of construction (lots of tedious manual labor without benefit of heavy machinery) to widen roads and build new housing as the region struggles to move forward and improve living standards. These people were not putting on a show as the pair of us quietly biked by their fields in the countryside. This is how they and their ancestors have lived for centuries upon centuries.

Eighty percent of China's population is still rural and based on agriculture. How can you just visit Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, and Chengdu and say that Yangshuo and its environs are not the real China? If any of you ever plan a trip to China, and I know some of you are, I recommend that you don't limit yourself to the big cities. Like these two earnest trekkers from Colorado -- who were so interested in China that they had even taken night classes in Mandarin for a full year before the trip -- you could be disappointed and miss the rest of the "real" China.