The Indomitable Okinawan
We arrived in Yueyang to darkness and driving rain. Raindrops shot across the sky horizontally, with enough velocity almost to bruise skin, with the temperature hardly warm enough to keep them rain. Within minutes, Manabu, my diminutive friend and fellow teacher from Okinawa, and I were drenched to our adrenal cortexes. It felt like that one special high school football game every fall when the skies open up, the players roll around in the slop and the fans shiver. And now it visited me in Yueyang (yu-AY-yang), a town of five million people where China’s longest river, the Yangtze, meets China’s second largest lake, Dongting Hu.
I had my water-proof, knee-length, blueberry-colored parka on, hood up. I stood on the road and attempted to hail a taxi, as headlights raced past, lighting up the rainy night. Manabu stood beside me, nothing covering his head of buzzed black hair, a flimsy navy blue windbreaker covering his torso, and gray jeans on his legs. He already had a cold before we left, and I could hear, over the constant car honks and cell phone rings, Manabu’s furious coughs and chattering teeth. He tugged on my arm at one point, as cabs shot by without a pause, and said, “Daniel, we are in paradise!” He gave me a high five. Indeed, paradise found. It took over ten minutes to hail a cab, which then dropped us at our hotel.
The hotel has no heat. Located nearly in the center of China, Yueyang stands as the dividing line between heated and non-heated buildings. By government decree, buildings north of Yueyang may have indoor heating; buildings south of it, no heat, apparently to save coal. The hotel did thankfully have a hot shower, three warm blankets per bed, a bottomless supply of hot tea and a restaurant that serves heaping bowls of steamed noodles. Children, their parents and their grandparents were there, all warm-hearted, all wrapped in sweaters, all attempting to converse with us, giggling the whole time. It was that moment in travel when a singular force - rainy misery - conspires to unite all people as brothers and sisters. Or, in China, as gege (GUH-guh) and jiejie (JEAH-juuh).
People have no idea how to categorize Manabu and me. It’s enough drama to have in their midst a white man, seemingly the height of Yao Ming. Then, throw a dark man, seemingly the height of their grandmother, beside the ginormous white man, and, huh?
Immediately, they start firing questions at Manabu. And, time after time, Manabu politely explains: “So sorry, I don’t speak Chinese. I am Japanese.” And then, I step in. “Women shi gege (WUH-muhn shuh GUH-guh),” I say, pointing to Manabu. In Chinese, it means, roughly, “We’re brothers.”
And then Manabu tells them, in his own dialect of JapChinglish, that we are actually twins. We were separated at birth in Okinawa -- Manabu stayed in Okinawa, I was shipped to Minnesota. And I ate nothing but hamburgers my whole life, hence my height. Manabu ate nothing but sushi, he tells them, hence his height. Finally, we have stumbled back into each other in China. “And,” Manabu adds, “I will feed my children nothing but hamburgers!”
Manabu awoke on Saturday morning hacking up his lungs. Only his head of black, spiked hair, resembling an Alaskan Kodiak, showed, his face and body mummified in three layers of white down blankets. Immediately, he sat up in his bed and proclaimed, smiling broadly, “Daniel, today is Saturday, tomorrow is Sunday, the next day is Monday. I will see Sky on Monday - just three days. I am happy man!”
To Manabu, Sky is Dulcinea. She’s his private English and Chinese teacher, 24 years old, radiantly beautiful and sweet like a persimmon. The lungs he was hacking up mattered nothing to him. Nor did the freezing temperatures. Nor the rain beating against our window. Nor the lack of heat. Nor the still-drenched clothes he was about to step into. He was three days from Sky, three days from another chance to “catch her heart.”
After we each took a long, hot shower and packed up to head outside, Manabu stopped me, tugging on my arm. “Daniel, I want to tell you just one thing,” he said, the usual look of total sincerity in his eyes, his voice dead serious, as always. “Today is travel day. I don’t need the sleep. I don’t need the rest. We must do the travel all day.” Perfect.
Frigid rain fell in torrents. We were virtually the only people on the streets, except for the vendors cooking up steamed breakfast on their oil drum stoves, sheltered by rainbow-colored umbrellas. We feasted on some noodles, pancakes and edible bags of fried rice, bought a disposable camera, and scampered around like chickens to stay warm. Manabu continued to hack furiously, and my nose dripped. We walked down to the docks, beside Dongting Lake.
Barges floated by, a few fishing boats idled in the distance, but the docks were completely empty. Rain continued to fall, the sky was deadly gray, whitecaps crashed onto shore. We played Charades with the one guy we saw, asking about the ferry. No ferry service today, he gestured. He crossed his arms, holding them against his chest, shivering. “Too cold.”
We walked up the steps to the second floor of the dockhouse. And a quick left turn brought us into a tiny room packed with about twelve people, three oil-drum heaters and a card table. The men were smoking, playing mah-jong -- a kind of Chinese gin rummy -- and screaming at each other, customary when playing cards. The women were wrapped in sweaters, sitting close together, warming their hands over the flaming oil drums.
It’s hard to say if they were more shocked at the sight of us, drenched to our adrenal medullas, or if we were more shocked at the sight of them. In any case, everyone immediately burst out laughing, a moment so spontaneous and unexpected that it can only bring joy. They spoke Chinese at Manabu, he told them, so sorry, I’m Japanese, and the Charades began.
We want to take a boat to a famous island called Junshan Dao (june-SHUN dow), we gestured. And they recognized Junshan Dao, and recognized that we wanted to take a boat there, and nodded as if to say, yep, let’s roll. Manabu attempted to ask how much in Chinese, and they responded. Manabu tugged my arm. “Daniel, ohmygod, just two yuan!” So, 24 cents for the two of us. No need to bargain. We nodded yes, gestured toward the docks.
Two of the younger men put their mah-jong on hold, leaped out of their chairs and led us downstairs. Manabu handed them our two yuan. They laughed hysterically. After more gestures, it turned out there was a misunderstanding: actually, they wanted two hundred yuan. If they had asked for my little toe, I would gladly have hacked it off and forked it over. We were so intoxicated by the prospect of riding the waves that any price was alright. We forked over the 200 yuan -- about 25 dollars -- and were on the water within minutes.
The boat was an old fishing vessel, about 30 feet long. We sat in the captain’s cabin, along with the two men, who are about our age. They smoked enough to ruin our lungs as well as their own, wore nice dress coats and pants and loafers, and told us fishermen jokes in Chinese. Of course we didn’t understand, but we laughed anyway. They were jolly fishermen. Over and over, they offered us a cigarette. We declined, recognizing the redundancy of inhaling more smoke in a room already full of it.
We cruised along at a steady speed, the boat gently tossing us up and down, side to side as it hit wave after wave after wave. A huge amount of mud and sludge make the water a sea of cappucino. Everywhere, bamboo rods stick fifteen feet out of the water, twenty feet apart, with nets suspended below, into the water, to snag some wu, or fish. We passed dozens of long, slender, wooden houseboats, moored together in harbor, the women cooking noodles and the men playing mah-jong on the back deck. As we passed, the idle fishermen and their wives waved and screamed greetings in Chinese.
About halfway through the ride, as water began to leak into the captain’s cabin, Manabu tugged on my arm. “Daniel, do you know the Bangles?” he asked. I told him I had heard them a few times, but wasn’t a big fan. He told me he worshipped the Bangles when he was a teen-ager. “But, Daniel, do you know the song Manic Monday?” Yes, I know it. “Daniel, the Bangles are liars! Monday is a beautiful day. I get to see Sky!”
This made me remember a scene in the movie “Dumb and Dumber,” in which the two main characters take a wrong turn. They’re supposed to be in the Rocky Mountains; instead, they’re in a Nebraska cornfield, and one of them says, “That John Denver is full of shit!” And so I taught Manabu to say, “The Bangles are full of shit.”
We landed the boat in a mud bog on Junshan Dao. After maneuvering the vessel between idle houseboats and fish farms, one of our captains killed the engine, while the other jumped out of the cabin, scurried on the deck toward the front of the boat, jumped onto land and staked a Chinese flag into the mud. Manabu tossed him a rope, he tied up and we jumped to shore.
Shore was mud and rocks for as far as I could see. No docks. No buildings. No people. No hills. Our captains gestured something about how it costs money to land the boat where all the other boats land, so we landed on the other side of the island and were going to hoof it. And so the journey began, as rain dumped out of a gray sky and we sank to our ankles in a chocolate bog.
I found myself in the unusual position of being the best prepared of the four of us. As our captains slipped around in their loafers, and Manabu shivered in his flimsy blue windbreaker, I relatively glided over the bog in my hiking shoes and stayed relatively dry under my hooded water-proof parka.
After about ten minutes’ walk, our world instantly turned emerald green. I’m not sure if it was just grass or some crop such as tea, but, suddenly, flat fields of verdant green surrounded us, stretching endlessly. Brilliant. I made good time, opening a large lead on the other three, connected with them only by the distant echo of Manabu’s hacking coughs.
At one point, we came onto a forty-foot wide branch of the lake. Over it stretched a homemade, jerry-rigged footbridge. Six bamboo poles were its stanchions, supporting about five steel ladders, welded together at their ends and stretching horizontally from land to land, over the water. At the peak of its arc, it was probably thirty feet high. I paused at the entrance. Our captains didn’t hesitate, crossing it in their loafers, and we followed. It was wobbly, and the ladder steps were slippery, but we made it across no sweat and what a rush it was.
We trudged onward, our shoes sloshing in the mud, our bodies long ago numbed to the frigid raindrops. Again, I opened a large lead, and Manabu’s coughs echoed in the air, and little plumes of smoke rose from each of our captain’s heads, ubiquitous cigarette hanging from their mouths, step after step. It had all the gruesome beauty of Irish cross-country -- isolation, gray sky and rain from above, green landscape all around and mud bog below -- without the leg-wrecking hills or the cardiovascular agony. We were together but we were alone, each man keeping a distance from the others, pacing the vast nothingness and reveling in the empty space, so rare in this country. So rare, too, not to hear car horns blaring or cell phones tooting or children shouting “hello” at the top of their voices. All was still, the raindrops pitter-pattered against my hood, my shoes sloshed step after step. Life had a lovely rhythm.
It occurred to me: we could be their captives. And the thought thrilled me. I had a burning desire to get on my toes and do some running. This stroll, while peaceful, was getting tedious. What better way to cap off the journey than to become most dangerous game, hunted on a deserted island on a gray day, with sheets of rain falling and rivers of mud to slog through. And, with them in their loafers, I felt quite certain I could leave them behind no sweat.
Alas, the two fishermen were as excited about the trip as we were, each telling us more jokes in Chinese, offering us more cigarettes, being jovial. Nothing sinister or devious about them, almost unfortunately. And, finally, a Buddhist temple appeared in the distance.
The temple looked beautiful. An enormous copper Buddha statue stood in front of it, with huge sticks of incense burning beside it. From the Buddha, a flight of steps led to the temple itself, with sloped red tile roof and two pillars supporting it. We entered.
Soothing music played and incense burned. However, any threat of spirituality quickly died when the sales clerk approached us. She was dressed in traditional Buddhist prayer clothes and, unfortunately, spoke English. Manabu and I would look at one of the thousands of knick-knacks on display -- jade Buddhas, incense sticks, scented candles, tea leaves -- and she'd start packaging it for purchase and say, "How many of those can I get for you?"
Even though the temple had a roof, giving us shelter from the rain, I longed to be back on the trail with our captains. The long walk represented all that's great about China -- spontaneous meeting, shared adventure, camaraderie with no common language. The temple brought us right into all that's annoying about China -- let's exploit the rich foreigners, with a smile, under the guise of the "sacred." Manabu bought some tea for Sky, and we headed out.
After walking a ways with the captains, same way as we came, they gestured to us: one of them would walk to the boat and drive it home; we were to go with the other captain, to the bus, and take it home. Apparently, they thought we preferred to be in a bus, instead of in the driving rain. Manabu's coughs were growing more furious, though, so we agreed it may be a sound plan.
The bus sat idle for fifteen minutes. On it sat four rough-looking men, the bus driver, Manabu, our captain and I. At one point, Manabu tugged my arm and said, "Daniel, ohmygod, look there." He pointed at a sign, in the front of the bus. It said, in Chinese characters, in Pinyin, and in English, "No Smoking." And yet, sitting in front of us were six men, including the driver, smoking a cigarette. The sign was hardly visible through the thick cloud of smoke. They had a good laugh when we pointed at the sign.
The bus meandered throughout the island, picking up a lot more rough-looking characters along the way until it was packed, people standing up and hardly room, or air, to breathe. Periodically, there would come the sound of a puppy yelping or a chicken squawking. A lot of the men were carrying bags, apparently home to live creatures.
It was supper time when we finally got back to the hotel. For Manabu, this presented a problem: his one pair of shoes, white Adidas, was drenched and covered in mud; his one pair of pants, the gray jeans, weighed about 30 pounds, soaked with two days' rain; his blue windbreaker, and long-sleeve shirt and turtleneck below it, also were sodden with rain. I asked him what he was going to wear, that he might be kind of cold. "It's okay," he replied. "No problem."
And he went into the bathroom and emerged from it wearing all he had left: athletic shorts, a light blue short-sleeve "U.S. Navy Sea Bees" T-shirt, and the flip-flop slippers provided by the hotel. "Daniel, I think the restaurant will be heated. No problem." Indeed, no problem.
And it wasn't a huge problem, all things considered. Manabu sat in the restaurant, close to the heater, arms crossed against his chest and a few goosebumps, no more than usual, covering his bare arms. Then, we heard a sudden crash, and looked at the entrance -- one-half of the sliding glass door was now obliterated, a pile of glass crumbs.
Manabu, now completely exposed to the subfreezing air, sitting with his knees against his chest and his arms tightly around his knees, dressed in his t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops, his arms a goosebump plantation, his teeth chattering to three-quarter time, his skin whiter than mine, insisted everything was okay.
I suggested we move to a different room, that had a door and was further away from the now-missing restaurant door. "Daniel, I want to tell you just one thing," Manabu said, staring straight at me with his enormous brown eyes. "I am okay. No problem." And so we remained at the same table and ate the food as it came -- fried eggplant, Japanese tofu, steaming noodle soup -- and I watched as the food would shake on the end of Manabu's chopsticks, as his shivering fingers moved it toward his chattering teeth. As he said, it's okay. No problem.
I was awakened at 7:30 the next morning by a bright flash of light. I looked up and there was Manabu, standing about three feet from me, snapping a photo of me with his disposable camera. "Daniel, CHURCH!" he screamed, "church" ryhming with "starch." I had mentioned the possibility of going to 8 a.m. Mass on Sunday but was well prepared to sleep through it. I didn't for a second think Manabu would want anything to do with a church on a Sunday. What I didn't realize then, and found out later, was that our trip to Mass would be Manabu's first ever trip inside a church, in his 27 years. It was the field trip he'd always wanted to take.
Mass was Dostoyevsky takes Yueyang. The youngest of the 100 or so congregants was in her early 50s. It was an assembly of gray hair and wrinkled skin and weary eyes, and it was cold enough to see each breath emerging out of each congregent and confirm they were still with us. All wore old, tattered knit coats, knit hats, mittens and scarves.
The service was entirely sung, with no instrumental accompaniment and no priest, and people from the congregation took turns leading songs. The songs were more chanted than sung, primarily in minor tones, and each note lingered long and hard in the church's vaulted rafters. Of course, I was completely illiterate, but I heard struggle and oppression and desperation in the minor tones looming in the church's rafters. In China, religion is not a way to show vanity or a matter of prestige; all who come do so out of profound faith, a faith that's been battered and bruised and tested to its core, and it's apparent in every breath I saw, every minor tone I heard, every Rosary clutched by old, wrinkled hands.
Soon enough, we were walking to the train station, through the still driving rain, to head back to Zhuzhou. And the train ride included all the usual characters -- the young and eager, the middle-aged and desperate -- approaching us, saying, "can we be best friends," asking for our phone numbers, snapping photos with us.
We got back to campus and, suddenly, it was winter. We had left on Friday afternoon after six weeks of almost uninterrupted gorgeous weather -- nearly constant sunshine, hardly a drop of rain, suitable for shorts and a t-shirt. We returned on Sunday night to a campus still wet from the weekend's rain, our students wrapped in scarves and knitted hats, the outdoor basketball courts virtually empty for the first time since I've been here. We needed help getting our film developed from our disposable cameras, so we caught the first two students who passed, Risky and Water.
At 5:25 on Monday morning, I heard Manabu walking up the flight of stairs to my apartment, hacking up his lungs. He rang the doorbell, said it was Manabu Kawahira. I opened the door. Manabu, smiling broadly, proclaimed, "Daniel, the Bangles are full of shit!"
