through the looking glass

at the congjiang bus station we met a young chinese backpacker. we talked a bit and found out he was heading to huangxiao, also in search of the polyphonic singing of the dong minority that had drawn me to zhaoxing. zhaoxing is the largest dong town, huangxiao one of the smaller. hu had to use the little boys room so we stopped in a hotel, the backpacker asked where I came from, looked at me strangely when I said tianshui and dissapeared. hu found him bargaining a 3 wheeled mototaxi, but we hadn’t eaten since 9 and it was already after 6pm so he went his way. talking to another 3wheeler we found we’d have to take a 1 hour night walk to get to huangxiao, and I still wanted to see zhaoxing anyway. but another driver who’d been listening told us about another miao villiage, different sect than langde (there are piles of different sects, white, black, short skirt, long skirt, and on and on. I never did find out which the two we visited were), 5km away at the top of a 500m mountain, so we told him we’d go after dinner and walked off in search of food products.

10 minutes later, food along the main road passed over, the driver passes us with another passenger. turn right after the bridge, I’ll find you there. okay then. he did, we climbed in, and he took us down the road to a nice little hole in the wall, where we insisted he join us. turns out there are three foreign teachers in the city, and his daughter is an english major in kaili. we said we’d call tomorow to meet her if we had time, hopped in the ride and took off for piasha. (piasha is the miao name, but as mandarin doesn’t have that sound they call it basha.) there were times when I seriously doubted the 150cc bike’s ability to pull metal frame, rider, 2 passengers and 2 big packs up, and the man needed oil something fierce, but we made it. we pulled up in front of a building, dogs barked, he immediately went forward 40′ and stopped again in front of the Basha Inn. We were greeted by a party around the fire, good smells from the neighboring kitchen, and a 30 kuai room with two big beds, a bathroom (though it turned out there was no actual running water in the building), and a little balcony for 30 kuai. done. the door down the hall was open, and while someone fetched us hot water to wash off the road dirt we chatted with two of a group of dong musicians on the road to a concert in another villiage. there were some 20 of them staying in the hotel that night, meeting up there before heading off together. the two boys we talked to couldn’t have been more than 20 (one reminded me so much of young brian, down to the way he smoked his cigarettes, I had to blink repeatedly), but they’d recently travelled the area and did a marvelous job of convincing hu that I was not crazy to want to go to zhaoxing (he’d never heard of it and was a little wary).

a sign spotted on the night walk taught us that this villiage was a ‘museum villiage’, their way of life preserved for visitors and themselves. hmm. we also found that the surrounding area was a nature preserve of old growth forest, something unfortunately rare in china. somehow not tired I spent a few hours listening to the sounds of practicing musicians on traditional instruments while catching up on my journal.

hu and I began our walk the next day together, but a pack of dogs blocked a path he’d really wanted to take. they were guarding their home and I wasn’t gonna mess with that, so I opted to head down another path while he went back to try again. (he never made it, spending the morning with three little girls he’d met, visiting their home. amusingly, my other way eventually took me to the spot he’d wanted to get to.) wandering the top of the mountain I was struck by the hardness. a boy passed carrying a very long gun and a bucket, he wasn’t more than ten. every man in the villiage carries a knife, and unlike langde most of the people we saw here were men, the women seemed primarily to be wherever the female children were.

I wandered past homes, peeking in cracks and doorways until meeting a pair of little girls, one shy but curious, casting sly glances my way, the other outgoing, all smiles. I struck up a conversation about the pig in the shed nearby and we chatted a bit with a little mandarin (only one seemed to speak it, the other spoke her local language, or so I thought) and a lot of sign language. I asked if they could take their picture, they were hesitant until they saw the first one, then they couldn’t get enough. we played around for a while, climbing things and looking around corners, they showed me around the area, then the shy girl came out in tinted mandarin with ‘please give me a picture’. I had no idea how I’d manage that, as neither could tell me their address, but fortunately hu promised to send the pictures he took to the family he met, so I’ll put mine in with his and hopefully they’ll find their way home.

we met back up for a mediocre lunch that turned out to cost as much as the room, because apparently there is no water at all in town, it must be brought in from congjiang. we ate around the fire with the musicians, talking travel and music and life, and then hopped a ride with them down the hill into town where we hustled over to the bus station just in time to get the last two seats on the bus to zhaoxing. which doesn’t actually go to zhaoxing, it goes to Luoxiang where a 20 minute walk awaits.