T A B L E_T A L K Do you haggle? Share your tales of bargaining abroad in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Road Warrior By Brent Gregston Insider's guide to Brussels (05/11/98) Sex and the salaryman By Dave McCombs Changing fortunes are altering one of Japan Inc.'s most cherished relationships (05/08/98) Road Warrior Dawn MacKeen Airfare roulette (05/07/98) Mondo Weirdo Come back soon An ambiguous encounter in Switzerland (05/06/98) West Africa's capital of ghosts By John M. Edwards What has Parisian-style boulevards, eight-lane highways and Christendom's tallest church -- all dead-ending in jungle? (05/05/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		INTO THE HEART OF CHINA .-. PAGE 2 OF 2 We ate dinner in the living quarters, a single-roomed, 20-by-30-foot building lit by two bare bulbs dangling from the rafters by wires. We ate atop a kang, an 8-foot-square, waist-high adobe cube that served as bed, couch and table. Michael, his father, uncle, Paul and I ate cross-legged around a special low table set directly atop the kang. Though Michael's family wasn't Muslim, the region was heavily influenced by the culture and religion imported by the silk traders a thousand years before, and the women ate in the kitchen. After dinner, Michael's father, a gentle, taciturn man, smoked a cigarette wedged vertically into a tiny pipe while we played cards. At his suggestion, Michael offered to show us his family's fields. The sun was setting behind the hills as we walked out of town. Often we encountered farmers driving their flocks of sheep home through the streets. In the narrow, walled streets we were forced to move aside and clung to the walls like victims of a woolly flash flood. Low hills broke the countryside into small plains. The villagers grew wheat communally on the plains, but each family had its own private plot at the bottom of an arroyo cut into the earth by a small tributary of the Yellow River. The region received little rain, so the plots were intensively irrigated. In the roseate glow of the sunset, Michael led us down a path to show us his father's corn, soybeans, sunflowers and watermelons. Every watermelon patch was overlooked by a tiny adobe structure. "What are these for?" I asked Michael. "Guardhouses," he said. I pictured hordes of raiding Mongols sweeping down from the north, hellbent on pillage, bloodshed and watermelon. "No," he said. "In the summertime, at night, children creep in to steal watermelons to eat. I used to do that," he admitted with a shy smile. "It was exciting." Night had fallen by the time we got back. A routine power failure had left the streets pitch black except for the occasional oil lamp or bobbing cigarette tip of a passing farmer. Michael seemed able to see in the dark, but Paul and I had to feel our way along the walls like cave crickets. Unfortunately, the dogs shared Michael's skill; crouching in the dark like ninjas, no doubt holding their chains in their mouths to prevent telltale clinks, they waited silently until we were in range, then exploded in our faces like ravenous demons. In the end, though, their voracity saved us; in their haste for blood they always leaped a moment too soon, before we reached chain length, and we managed to make it home unpunctured. The next morning, stiff from having slept on what was, essentially, a giant brick, we breakfasted on porridge and then went to watch the wheat harvest. Wheat, rather than rice, is north China's primary grain. The concrete village square was a warehouse of 10-foot piles of harvested stalks. The villagers would rake each pile into a flat circle and a farmer would drive furious circles on a toylike tractor, towing a small millstone over the stalks. Next, villagers flailed the stalks with wooden flails to further shear off the grains, and then others with homemade pitchforks cast the material high into the air to separate out the stalks. Women using sheaves of wheat continuously swept the remaining material into tighter and tighter circles. After the stalks had been removed, the wheat was scooped onto flat baskets and thrown high into the air to winnow out the hulls. The remaining knee-high pile of grain was bagged and loaded aboard a cart destined for the mill. Everyone took part in the work, and the children, playing hide-and-seek in the piles, enjoyed it thoroughly. That night another power failure again plunged us into darkness. Michael suggested we visit his uncle to play cards by the light of an oil lamp. As we crossed the now empty village square, the sound of pouring water drew us on until Michael suddenly stopped and greeted someone. The pouring stopped momentarily as a man replied, then resumed as Michael explained: "This is my middle school teacher. He wants to know how I'm doing in school." He introduced us; the pouring stopped again and a hand fumbled toward mine in the dark, and the pouring resumed. A burst of light from a camera revealed a young man pouring water from a well into a basin at his feet. The flash froze the man in mid-pour, the individual droplets twinkling like gems. In the darkness we struggled awkwardly to assume some semblance of a proper pose, standing shoulder to shoulder, but again Michael's photo caught us by surprise -- Paul's gaze wandering down at his feet as I squinted blindly at my invisible neighbor. After another attempt we managed to take a proper Chinese photo, the three of us touching each others' shoulders, offering stiff, self-conscious smiles to the camera. Michael spoke a few more words to the teacher, and we said goodbye. The man had chores to do, and the harvest wasn't over yet. "He is proud of me," Michael said after we left. "He says I must be doing very well at school for my teachers to visit." The next morning, before we left on our long drive home, Michael took us up into the neighboring hills for a view of the countryside. Though they appeared green and grassy from a distance, closer inspection revealed them to be covered with only a thin, clinging layer of roots and lichens. Below us rows of young trees acting as windbreaks outlined the fields. But outside the irrigated areas the land was dry and dusty, given over to tough clumps of native weeds and grasses. Less than 200 miles from the Gobi to the west, bordered by the Mongolian grasslands on the north, the region receives only a few inches of rain a year, and because of its elevation -- over 3,000 feet -- it's cool even in summer; winters are bitterly cold. Michael himself looked curiously old. His weathered face and dry hair sprinkled with white belied his 19 years, as if growing up in the parched environment had aged him prematurely. The hills ended abruptly at the edge of town in a low wall of yellow stone cliffs. The base of the cliffs was pierced by a long row of narrow caves, 8 feet wide, 15 feet deep, cut into the solid rock. The caves were empty and open to the elements, their floors covered with a thick deposit of yellow sand. I asked Michael where these caves had come from. The villagers had cut them, he said. Thirty years before, when his parents had first arrived, there had been nothing -- no trees, no animals, no food. The villagers had cut the caves by hand into the mountains and lived there for three years as they scratched their farms out of the soil. Entering one of the caves I discovered that I could, in fact, stand upright in the center. But life was much better now, Michael told me. Ever since Deng Xiao Ping had embarked on a course of "Socialism with Chinese characteristics," opportunities had emerged. Once, you had to have powerful connections in the Communist Party if you hoped to live well. Now, he said, if you work hard and take a chance, perhaps anyone can lead a better life. Even people without connections. Even him. I got a Christmas card from Michael last December. He sends me one every year from China. He is in Xi'an now, a busy provincial capital, working as a manager in a national insurance company. He tells me he is doing very well. He says he hopes to come visit me in America some day, for business or study. I have no doubt he will. SALON | May 12, 1998 Joshua Cohen is a writer who lives in Pennsylvania. Join the discussion of travel in China in Table Talk's Wanderlust area.