I'm back
After two weeks away, I rode the overnight train from Beijing to Zhuzhou City, arriving at 8:44 a.m. -- exactly as promised on my ticket.
I caught a cab at the train station. It felt lovely to be back in the snarled madness of downtown Zhuzhou traffic. Immediately, a minibiker was in our sights, headed for a head-on collision. To avert him, we swerved into the opposite lane, where we found ourselves staring at the headlights of an oncoming blue dumptruck. Morning pleasantries, voiced through about a dozen horn honks apiece, were exchanged, and lives were spared, again, against all odds, with deft swerving, neither vehicle slowing a bit.
Before long we were on the State Highway for the Insane, heading out of the city and into the countryside, eventual destination this university. The road was quite deserted, so no collisions or near-death experiences.
The morning sun, radiant in the eastern sky, reflected off the standing pools in the rice fields. Mist rose from the frosted cabbage patches. Beige teepees, made of wheat stalks left over after the fall harvest, stood firm, spaced about fifteen feet apart. Narrow ribbons of red clay, raised about three feet above the soil, snaked between the fields, separating wheat from rice from cabbage from grain, providing workers transportation between the fields and an easy perch from which to water their crops.
Farmland here is more a collection of hundreds of little gardens than one enormous plot, and so fields have the look of an immense patchwork quilt, with the clay passageways the seams. They curve and twist constantly, and intersect at odd angles with curvy, twisty other ribbons of clay and thus form a Gaudi-ian geometry, and end only when they collide with a fifteen-foot-high dirt wall, rounded and shapely and announcing a rise to the next terrace. There, the same patchwork exists, and ribbons of clay snake between the fields, colliding at odd angles and eventually meeting their end at the next fifteen-foot wall of dirt, rounded and shapely, announcing the next terrace.
And the pattern continues, and all I can do is recognize that farmland is art and I better put on my running shoes for my next ten-mile trip through the museum that surrounds the State Highway for the Insane.
As we got closer to campus, an elderly man walked along the road, a live carp dangling from a rope in his right hand, flapping gently. And then a boy walked by with his father, his left hand clutching his father's hand, his right hand holding about five dozen bottle rockets, a smile of expectation on his chubby face. It's Spring Festival, and the villagers are stockpiling food and fireworks to celebrate, and everone is giddy. Firework explosions shake the earth and threaten my hearing, piles of leaves are burning everywhere, children are romping through campus.
Ever since I arrived in Shanghai two weeks ago, I've longed to return to Zhuzhou. At first, I thought the feeling would subside and I'd settle into life in what's known as civilization and forget my longing for life in the village. Instead, it grew only more intense, and now that I'm here, amid the sights and smells and noises that are by now perfectly familiar, I understand why I longed to be back, and I understand that, in four short months, Zhuzhou is home, and I'll miss it wherever I go in the world.
