Rouqiang

I stopped more or less the first person I met in the town and asked if there was a cheap hotel nearby. The response was "Once more, in English please." I indulged him, and he said, "You should stay with me, at my house. It is just over here." I demurred, but he insisted, and I found myself standing outside o a stairwell in a state-built concrete apartment block two minutes later.

The man was Zhan Li Long, a schoolteacher from Korla (another, much larger city to the northwest) who was in Rouqiang on a year-long development program. "Development?" I asked.

"Yes, you see, this is a very poor town, a very poor county, so the government sends several teachers - about 30 - from Korla to Rouqiang each year to help teach the students."

I said I thought that was nice of them to do so. He replied that it was part of the provincial government's efforts to help develop this out-of-the-way place (read: poor and Muslim), bringing in Chinese teachers from Korla in a variety of subjects. His English was so-so, but he asked me to wait a minute, and he returned with two English teachers from the same apartment block (it turned out that the Rouqiang government provided the apartments for the teachers free of cost, though these were quite dilapidated). We went into Li Long's apartment, and the leftovers of a birthday cake from one of the English teachers' birthdays were brought in. Soon we were all chatting away in a mix of Chinese and English. A tall woman - the computer teacher - came to help prepare caihezi (deep-fried dumplings stuffed with chives and scrambled egg), and we talked about the state of education in our two countries. They said teachers were not highly paid in China, to which I replied that it was essentially the same case in the US. They said they felt good about their jobs, however, and that they felt the children were the future: again I said that most schoolteachers in the US felt the same way(I left out the fact that this idealism quickly faded in the face of bureaucratic red-tape and poor working conditions, causing many to leave the profession or to become jaded and just mark days to retirement). They asked what might be different about schools in the two places, and I said the most obvious was probably the attitude of the students and the parents: in China, teachers are still highly respected, as are adults in general. In the US, I said, children, particularly teenages, were apt to be a bit more...critical or unreceptive, more difficult to win over.

We carried on like this for some time, with deep-fried dumplings pushed on me until I had to push back, feeling the weight of the grease in my stomach. The room slowly emptied, and eventually I found myself in a room alone, with the TV on (always the TV), laying on a mat. I began to write in my journal, until the power to the building shorted out. My host, being the physics instructor, was called upon to fix the problem (a blown fuse) by candlelight, and about 5 minutes later, the power was back on, only to be blown out again 15 minutes after. He shook his head, pulled out another piece of wire, and tied it between the contacts at either end of the fuse carrier, which was blackened from heat. I asked him how old the building was: "Not very old, but it was poorly constructed, you know? So three or four times a night sometimes I am asked to fix it." I suggested he just show someone how to locate the blown fuse (well, what should have been a fuse, anyway) and wrap some copper wire between the two contacts. He sighed and said that noone wanted to learn something new, since there was already someone to do the job. Give a man a fish...

The next morning, we woke up with the sun and went out for a quick Chinese breakfast - meaning warm soymilk and fried breadsticks - and then he headed off to school, leaving me in his apartment, and saying that if I could wait until lunchtime, he would come back and see me off. I shopped for food and a set of warm thermals as another layer against the coming cold on the plateau, and around 1pm he came back, saying "Let's go", and we rushed off to lunch with the computer teacher.

I liked her manner: very aloof, with a critical tilt to the eyebrows that made her look like she wouldn't fall for anything. They asked what I wanted for lunch. "Something simple...maybe noodles." So we headed to a Uighur restaurant for laghman and at the end, of course, I was unable to pay. Li Long asked during the meal if I knew about the Lolan Beauty in Rouqiang; I had no idea what he was talking about. He said there was a museum across the street with some very old things from the area, and that if I was interested we could take it in before I left (I had wanted to leave that day). I thought for a minute, and figured Why not? So we went across the street, while the computer teacher went shopping.

The building looked abandoned: tiles had fallen off of the front facade, the courtyard cement was badly cracked, and the front doors had broken glass panes which made it easy enough to reach in and fidget with the cheap bicycle cable lock securing the building. It was closed, so he said we should come back later, if I wanted to stay another night with him. I suggested this might be putting him out, which off course he put off immediately, saying it was a great opportunity for him to practice English. We went back to his apartment, and chatted for a while, about politics, friendships between our two peoples, and so on. He was a bit of a bohemian, in a country and culture that didn't really have space for these kind of beliefs. So he was a teacher, bored with his job, and looking for a way out. His sister had married a French engineer, and lived part-time in Paris, part-time in Guangzhou. He said he had gone to Guangzhou last summer and had spend 6000Y in 3 weeks, which is an astounding amount of money for a Chinese teacher from the western hinterland. He had several amusing anectdotes about being fleeced by big-city cons, and had been pickpocketed twice, once in a red-light hair salon (he professed to having been ignorant of the red-light connotations before going there: "I never saw this in Korla". I figured this meant he didn't get out much, because every Chinese town of any size at all has the haircutters' brothels.) He asked why I travelled - a typical question - and I said part of it was to meet ordinary people, since you don't get that on TV or in the news. I said it would be nice to try to forge relationships of some kind with people of the opposite country, since the political and economic elites of the two were likely to force larger and larger conflicts in the relatively near future. He smiled in agreement: "Ordinary people around the world are good, and don't want trouble. It's always the politicians and the rich making the problems, and the ordinary folks are often led along". It was nice to meet a Chinese who had a similar viewpoint, and could express it.

He returned to school to finish his day, and I went shopping for some fruit, knowing that any money would be rejected. When school was finished, he took me to the museum building, which was now open, and we went up the dark stairs to the second floor, past the lobby which was empty save for a 6 foot high golden bust of Chairman Mao.

The museum itself, it turned out, was closed: this we found out from the administrator, a well-fed man sitting behind a large desk in a room, scribbling on several supplicants papers. My friend asked if we might see the Lolan Beauty.

"No, the museum is closed."

"But this is my friend from the US, he's only here for one day. Please, let's find a way to make it work."

The official was resistant, there was some quiet discussion, some numbers were thrown around, and I head the sum of 40Y (about $5) settled upon. I didn't want my friend to pay, but there was no graceful way out of it, so he left the room to find the appropriate person to pay the "fee" to. As soon as he was gone, the administrator called me over to his desk, opened a safe, and pulled out two pieces of pottery, obviously very old. He asked me if I liked them. I said they were quite nice. Then he asked if I was interested in buying them. There I was, standing in a room with a guardian of the cultural heritage of the region, and I was being given a chance at buying something old, perhaps ancient (I had been told the finds had been dated to 3800 years ago), for a probably small sum of money. It was the classic corrupt official, being played out in front of me. I smiled and said no thanks, and he shrugged and put the items back in the safe. Maybe sometime later, he will find a buyer...

The museum was opened for us by a Uighur employee. "Museum" meant a room, about the size of the typical living room in the suburbs, with a few cheap glass cases. I was expecting a few poor displays and perhaps some pottery shards. What was actually in the room was three glass cases at about waist level containing mummified humans, dug up out of the sand about 200km to the northwest of Rouqiang. The bodies were amazing: very well preserved, with the skin and hair more or less completely intact, their clothes - made of wool and dyed - were relatively undeteriorated. This had not been inentional, but just a result of being buried in such an extremely dry climate. The woman had died from complications at childbirth, and there was blood running down from her groin. I was stunned to find something like this in a dingy room on the second floor of a deteriorating building in a backwater town in western China. I was handed a few animal skins to look at, which were piled in a corner on the floor, with no special case for them.

"How old are these?"

"The same - 3800 years old."

Nearly four thousand years old and I'm casually handed relics which are lying on the floor. I asked if there had been other finds. Apparently, both Japanese and British scientists had dug up other remains in the area and carted them off to Tokyo and London in the early part of the 20th century.

"At that point, China was unable to protect its resources" Li Long said, "so many things were taken away. It is a sad story."

This was true: there are ancient pieces of cultural significance from all over the world in places like New York or the British Museum. Probably, these should be repatriated, since the items belong to the people of the land they were found in. I didn't mention that I had been given the chance to walk away with a piece of China's heritage a few minutes earlier by the same man he had had to bribe to get us in here.

We left after an hour, and had another dinner. More teachers came over, and I was asked by a jovial English teacher to come to her class in the morning to speak with the students. I said that would be fine, as long as I could get going sometime around noon. This would be no problem, I was told, so I agreed to go to a few English classes in the morning at the middle school they taught at.

Li Long took me to the school in the morning, just down the street. We filed in with the students. I chuckled to myself as I watched groups of students sweep the grounds, pull weeds from planters, wash windows. I mentioned to Li that he would never see this in the US; he seemed mildly surprised. One of the buildings was new, but still sporting concrete floors. His office was a large room shared by 7 or 8 teachers, all sitting at small desks grading workbooks. A coal stove sat to the side of the room. The English teacher showed up, and I was taken to a class.

I walked into the room and was immediately treated to a round of applause. "Say hello to Jeff" the teacher said, and a loud resounding "Hello, Jeff" from the students. They were all well-behaved, listening intently to me talk as I searched for something to talk about, not knowing their level of comprehension. It turned out that many students understood English quite well, having studied it for several years, as required by the Chinese educational system nowadays. The problem, I was told, lie in the fact that they have noone to speak with, not the "proper language environment" to practice and hone their spoken English. So many Chinese have a good grasp of written English, and probably a better understanding of English grammar than most Americans, but speak it rather poorly. I fielded questions from the students, mostly about myself and what I thought of China ("Do you like China?", "Do you like Chinese food?", "Can you speak Chinese?" and so on. More than one student invited me to their houses for dinner. I had the image of kids throwing spitwads at me and heckling me from the back of the room in the US, and looked out at the well-behaved kids in front of me. It was easy, but I missed the spirit of rebellion, even if I was the target.) Someone suggested I sing a Christmas carol, so I sang "Jingle Bells", humming through the parts I couldn't remember. It was a poor rendition, but I received a standing ovation. I was led to three other classes where this was repeated (including "Jingle Bells"), and then it was lunchtime.

The teachers asked what I thought, and whether I might like to stay in Rouqiang and teach for the year. I politely declined, although it might have been instructive to live in a backwater like this and teach - speak really, since the Chinese teachers instructed the students in grammar - my native language. This was not the sort of place I would choose to live in the US, so it seemed unlikely that I would choose it in China. As for what I thought, I said that the students were remarkably well-behaved (the most striking thing for me), and that the facilities seemed not all that different from some school districts in the US (the school had a computer lab, probably something a few schools in the US still don't have).

I parted ways with the teachers, thanking them for their generousity. Each gave me an email address and phone number, asking me to call them if I ran into problems. Li Long, who had already fed me and housed me, insisted on stuffing my bags with more naan, and he smiled at me as I rode away, I thinking to myself that I could not begin to repay the kindness I had encountered in this town, let alone during my trip in China.