Nancy McCabe

Back to China

Playing Uno: Old Friends and New Friends Connect in Guilin

The end of our time in Guilin is only a few days away, and our appetites are starting to drop off. Twice a day, Ms. H. arrives at our apartment with one or two tiny bags of food.  She goes off into our hall-sized kitchen that is outfitted with a cutting board, a wok, and a rice cooker, and somehow, within thirty minutes, she presents us with a complete meal, usually two dishes with fresh vegetables and meat.  But as always happens when we’ve eaten the same thing for days at a time, we’re finding ourselves eating less and less, and I’ve lost my taste for meat, which figures prominently in dishes here.

Ms. H. asks us if we like fat meat, and we must look puzzled, because she quickly starts drawing characters and pecking at the translation device.  “Streaky fat,” the device says next. “Pig’s feet?” Ms. H. tries.  Our smiles freeze on our faces.  She takes this for confusion and gets busy on the device again.  “Fertilized in fat,” it says next.

All day, we’re nervous about what we’re getting for dinner.  But then it turns out to be thin pork slices that look a little like bacon. We’re cleaning up when D., Ms. H’s daughter, shows up to visit.  We start a game of Uno.  D. loves Uno. We’ve taught her some other games, and she’s taught us some other games, but if we give her a choice, she wants to play Uno.

Once, D. brought a friend with her, and after every Uno game, the two of them enthusiastically shuffled and dealt again.  After ten games, Sophie gave me a queasy look. After twelve of them, she looked like she might soon jump off the roof of our seventeen-story apartment building. But I thought that it was fun to watch the way D. and her friend approached the game.  They divided the pile of cards in half, and then each of them shuffled, and then they dealt cards to us and then each other, just as the Chinese always serve rice to others before serving themselves. In fact, I’ve never seen D. deal cards to herself.  Furthermore, D. wanted to play over and over, but she never won.  In fact, she’d end up holding at least thirty cards, because, we realized, she was reluctant to play the “mean” cards that required other players to draw or be skipped.

D. still loves to play Uno, but now she knows us well enough to know we’ll just laugh if she plays the “mean” cards, and we’ve won her over to our cutthroat American ways. Tonight, she keeps winning. Soon her mom stops by.  We urge her to join us.  She does so reluctantly and soon we are all yelling at each other in English and Chinese and laughing.  We have decided to play until a new family arrives to stay in an apartment upstairs, a family who comes here every year and are good friends with the H’s.

We’re in the middle of a game when Ms. H’s phone begins yelling in Chinese. That’s her ring tone, a little girl’s voice calling out something like, “Phone call, phone call, phone call.” The new family has arrived.  We all leap up and grab our shoes and run out into the hall, still putting them on.  We dash into the elevator and head down to the first floor, apparently just as the other family dashes into the other elevator and heads up.  Our paths cross.  “Phone call, phone call, phone call,” Ms. H’s phone yells in Chinese.  We run back into the elevator to go up. D. means to push the “door close” button but she pushes the “door open” button and Ms. H. pushes the “door close” button and the door is confused and we’re all laughing.

And then we land on the fourteenth floor and there they are, another American mother and daughter, and everyone is hugging and shouting and talking in Chinese and English.  I’m afraid that Sophie will end up feeling left out, because the other girl speaks fluent Chinese and she and D. are old friends.  But the communal ways of doing things that once prevented D. from winning at Uno seem to prevail in friendships, and the group expands to include everyone. For the next few days, the three girls play ping pong downstairs, run off to the noodle shop or to get ice cream, pass around yogurt and crackers and mushroom shaped cookies and other Chinese snacks, use old water bottles to bowl upstairs, and have three-legged races that rattle the light fixtures in our apartment below while I’m working.  We eat all our meals together, all six of us, and the other women alternate between English and Chinese and I’m picking up more stuff but also getting headaches from trying to follow conversations. “Wo ting bu dong,” someone is always yelling, which means, “I don’t understand,” and then, for a few seconds, everyone tries to switch languages, leaving at least one of us confused. But we’re having fun and food tastes good again.

Just when we were about ready to leave Guilin, now we’re not ready, after all.

Destination Mall: Transportation Mission Complete!

When Sophie decided that we should take a bus to a mall somewhere on the edge of Guilin, she didn’t think her request was that big of a deal. Her past travel experience has been in American cities where we can ask for directions and understand the answers, in China with English-speaking guides, and in Spain and on Prince Edward Island with our intrepid friend Kellie, who has a great sense of direction and a fearless spirit of adventure. It is therefore not remarkable to Sophie to imagine an adult ushering her from point A to point B without incident.

I, on the other hand, possess an unparalleled genius for getting lost just about anywhere. When Sophie made her request, I was still basking in my success at mastering the bus journey to the  City Center.  On each trip I was on high alert, counting the stops, six altogether, and noting the landmarks: the big rock, the colored flags in the intersection, and the Niko Niko Do Plaza, our cue to start down the aisle of the top deck of the lurching bus, the ceiling so low I kept bumping my head, then down the steps to get off by the Guilin City Bookshop.

But now Sophie was ready to move on to challenges that struck me as Herculean: taking the bus to a mall somewhere an indeterminate number of stops away where I didn’t know what landmarks to watch for, to wade through acres and acres of shoes.  Even if by some unimaginable miracle we found the mall, how would we ever find the shoes she’d seen there a few days before, when we’d been on an excursion with a driver and guide?

I really hate shopping, but I could see the appeal of Chinese malls for a petite Chinese-American girl who has sometimes bought too-big shoes in the U.S. just so that she can wear age-appropriate ones rather than the sparkly ones with Disney princesses that actually fit. She’s too small to fit into the smallest pants sold at her favorite stores.  Dresses and tops are not so much a problem, but who wouldn’t be giddy in a city full of clothing made specifically for her figure  and coloring?

So I asked a guide for directions to the mall, and they seemed pretty simple. Just take bus number one to the end of the line, he said, and there it’ll be.

The buses in Guilin cost the equivalent of 15 cents (30 cents if you want air conditioning).  On bus number one, we rode and rode and rode. I couldn’t read a single street sign or business name.  I couldn’t understand the periodic announcements. We just kept going, and then we got to the end of the line and there it was, the noodle shop, the theater, the ubiquitous McDonalds and KFC, and the mall.

Sophie was mesmerized by the clothes, all the clothes made for hipless and buttless women, as she put it. Or she would have been mesmerized, except that we both quickly became confused by the sizing and distracted by our gathering audience. The crowd pressing in made the browsing experience so nervewracking that Sophie kept darting in front of me like a skittering bat and I kept almost tripping over her.  Later, whenever I opened the dressing room curtain so that she could look in the mirror, the crowd had grown.  Heads cocked as everyone admired Sophie in each new outfit. When we left the dressing room and stopped to calculate aloud how much the shirt she wanted would cost in American dollars, the crowd stole closer, listening. We were perspiring heavily by the time we left, when the other customers drifted over to the door and watched. I pretended that we were movie stars rather than zoo animals.

Although Sophie found the shoes that had prompted the excursion, she didn’t buy them. The store didn’t have a big enough size. Later we got on bus number one and rode it back.  We were almost home free when two policemen boarded and stood right in front of us, occasionally glancing our way. Or at least we thought they were policemen, since they were wearing official-looking uniforms, and my heart started to race again.  Foreigners are required by law to carry their passports at all times, but as far as I know, no one ever does because the risk of having a passport stolen is greater than the risk of being asked to present one. Sophie and I avoided looking at each other.  We focused on appearing casual and innocent of crime.

Then a paunchy policeman turned toward us. His uniform shirt was unbuttoned.  The belly that suddenly appeared right in front of our faces made it hard to take his authority seriously.

When we compared notes later, Sophie told me she thought, That policeman is naked. “What did you think?” she asked.

“I thought, ‘whew, he’s off duty, what a relief!” I said.

“Me too!” she said. “I thought, whew!”  And then, at the same time, we both said, “And then I thought, ‘ewwww!’”

We arrived at our stop and got off.  I was feeling pretty triumphant, but Sophie dodged my high five, turning it into a low five, well, actually, a tiny tap on the wrist. But then the next day, when I used my first Chinese ATM and did a little dance, despite how embarrassing that had to be for a thirteen-year-old, I got another wrist tap, this time unsolicited.  Not quite a high five, not even a low five, but still, a clear acknowledgement that yep, we’re figuring stuff out, and it’s really cool.

Blue Silk Ribbons: Entwining the Richness of Luck


Each time we prepare to go to China, a few well-meaning people say, “Your trip will be good for Sophie.  It will show her how lucky she is.”  I thought of this as we boarded the Li River cruise.  Our brochure compared the river to a “jade ribbon winding among thousands of grotesque peaks.” Or, as the Tang Dynasty poet Hah Yu put it,

The river winds like a blue silk ribbon

While the hills erect like green jade hairpins.

For three and a half hours, we cruised along, watching the “spectacular landscapism and elegant hills, the towering peaks, the variegated cliffs and odd-shaped crags” shaped like a cat’s face with little ears, like an apple, like a snail. We passed the Hill of Nine Horses.  I could only make out two of the horses and a piggybank.  We passed the scene depicted on the back of a 20 yuan note and bamboo growing along the water that looked like peacocks’ tails.  We passed water buffalo and cormorants and bamboo rafts that are no longer made of bamboo but of PVC pipe and farmland that is now rented out for cell phone towers.

And I wondered, as I often do, at the idea that travel’s primary purpose is to instill appreciation for our own lives, which always seems to me a bit smug, a way of holding ourselves apart from other cultures. There are many reasons to take a child back to the land of her birth: to expose her to the beauty of another place and the variety of human possibility, to open up her imagination, to help her understand the complexity of her own roots.  Maybe, somewhere along the way, she will also learn to appreciate her own privileges and opportunities.

But this focus on how lucky our children are makes me nervous. In my research for my forthcoming book, I ran across a lot of frustration from adult adoptees about constantly being told that they were “lucky.” This emphasis ignores the sadness of having been born into situations that made it impossible for their birth parents to raise them. Though most feel great gratitude about some aspects of their lives, many do not regard it as lucky to have been separated forever by language and customs from their original homes. No one loves their impoverished family less than others love their wealthy ones.

So I’ve spent a lot of time pondering this notion of “luck” and how it relates to our trip. Last weekend, Sophie rode a double decker bus to Ms. H’s apartment for a visit.  There, Sophie and Ms. H.’s daughter spent the afternoon reading books, watching a Barbie movie, and eating a fruit that tastes like a cantaloupe but looks like a gourd.  Ms. H’s apartment was smaller than our western Pennsylvania house, but their TV was bigger than ours, Sophie said, not much of a revelation since everyone’s TV is bigger than ours.  “I don’t even consider it a TV, really,” one of our friends likes to say.  Sophie came home with the distinct impression that American pre-teens are more sophisticated (“It was a Barbie movie,” she said, still reeling) but that their lives are not that much different from their Chinese counterparts.

Later we went to visit a school in Guilin right when it let out for the three-hour lunch break. Some children ate at school rather than going home for hot meals cooked by grandparents, then jumped rope and played basketball in the courtyard or disappeared to nap in a special room in one of the three five-story buildings. The walls were colorful, covered with maps, charts, pictures, posters, and framed drawings by students.  In the courtyard, Chinese children’s music played, then a saxophone solo by Ray Charles. Everywhere we went, we were mobbed by kids who said, “Hello!” and shrank away giggling when we answered.  A bunch of kids in red kerchiefs greeted us with the Young Pioneers of the Communist Party salute.

It is true that China is a developing country, and this and government oppression has had occasional direct impact on our own lives.  We have to boil all the water we drink.  The government blocks Internet sites like Facebook, keeping us from easy communication with many friends. Most significantly, of course, we most likely owe our relationship with each other to a government policy limiting the number of children that people can have. The realities are mixed ones.

We feel very lucky that we can travel in China for six weeks, but such “luck” always involves trade-offs.  We would not be here if not for the death of my mother—and for the fact that she left behind money for the education of her grandchildren.  I am my daughter’s mother because of another mother’s loss.

“One hundred miles Lijiang River, one hundred miles art gallery,” our cruise brochure said, referring to the landscapes along that now-polluted river that have inspired writers and painters since ancient times. The tour itself was like a microcosm of the beauty and variety and contrasts and contradictions of China. I realized that what I want is for my daughter to have a sense of this complexity, to imagine, without fear, what it would have been like to have grown up here, to gain the tools to someday continue to follow her passion for travel. And, as the grotesque peaks erected before us, I hoped that she would end up feeling lucky—to be the product of not one, but two, rich heritages, of two cultures and families and sets of traditions, and that neither of them would end up feeling entirely foreign to her.

Cooking Ice: Yangshuo Adventures with Cloud 9 Cooking School

At Cloud 9 cooking school in Yangshuo, the first thing we do is meet our classmates, who come from Nevada, Great Britain, Germany, and New Zealand.  They all speak English.  This is our first encounter with English speakers in days, and I’m so overjoyed I don’t care what we cook. We choose dishes, then troop off to the market to buy the ingredients.

This is a real market, very different from the Wal-Mart where Chinese people go to hang out in the entertainment section. This is where natives do their real day-to-day shopping. Right inside the door, the floor is crowded with bowls of live creatures.  Eels swimming in water, frogs hopping up and down inside their net bags. Across the warehouse-sized room are table after table of squash and cucumbers and tomatoes and carrots and eggplants.  Our instructor leads us up and down aisles, giving little lectures about selected vegetables. I’m talking to one of the women from Nevada instead of paying attention. Sophie frowns at me.

The instructor warns us that in the meat section, there will be dogs.  “They are one kind of dog,” she says.  “We do not eat pets.” Sophie and a couple of the women decline to go.  I have this weird disability that keeps me from recognizing and processing unfamiliar visual stimuli, which means that in the seventh grade when we watched “Wheels of Tragedy,” a gruesome cautionary film about reckless driving, I had no idea what was going on. My classmates were horrified and grossed out by the blood and guts splattered on the highway.  I dozed through what seemed to me abstract patterns. So I feel safe entering the butcher shop.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an olfactory disability, and the smell of blood is overwhelming.  We pass tables of animals in various stages of slaughter as well as cages of flapping chickens and quacking ducks.  There are no cages of whimpering puppies, although later everyone else says they saw a dog being butchered. Slabs of meat hang from hooks.  A trip through a Chinese butcher shop could drive many Americans to vegetarianism, but most shoppers whisk through matter-of-factly.  There are no hidden realities about what they are having for dinner.

By the time we get back to the restaurant, we are all slick with sweat; it’s at least 100 degrees, and it feels like we could wring buckets of sweat out of our hair. We proceed up to our classroom where somehow all of our ingredients have been prepared and placed on shelves beneath our cooking stations.

First, we chop eggplant into strings and put it in a bowl of salty water to get rid of the bitter flavor. We cut the seeds out of red and green peppers and cucumbers and shred them into strips. We squish some garlic and ginger under our knives and then mince it, cut carrots and chicken breasts into cubes, and hack spring onions into half-inch pieces. Whenever we have handled meat, we line up outside and wash our hands. Then we wipe down our cutting boards with the tissue under the sink—so this is where all the toilet paper in China has disappeared to.

The instructor proceeds at lightning speed, making few allowances for the thirteen-year-old in the room, much less for those of us who are cooking dunces.  She does occasionally reach over to help out Sophie, who is keeping up pretty well. I hasten to follow along, since sometimes I can barely hear the instructor over the kitchen noise.

We open our baggies of dumpling dough, trace water around the edges, fill them, and seal them.  Everyone else twists theirs into fancy shapes. Mine are awkward little pillows.  We place them in bamboo steamers and send them to the kitchen to be steamed.  Then, in the sweltering heat, we turn on our woks and put in oil, stir fry the eggplant, take it out, fry the garlic, add corn starch, spring onion, pepper and sesame oil. One plate down, one to go.

We switch to clean woks to stir fry our chicken, but Sophie is shorter than the rest of us, right in the line of fire of spitting oil, and she gets hit below the eye.  It burns so painfully that she leaves to splash water on it.  By the time I enlist the instructor to cover our stations so I can follow her, the guy from Stuttgart, who turns out to be a medical student, has things under control. He asks for a clean cloth.  The women who work in the kitchen offer some aloe from a plant on the sill, but the medical student says we’ll start with ice.

Someone brings up some ice.  Once we’ve established that Sophie’s eye is OK, I find myself eyeing that ice with envy. It’s the first time I’ve seen ice in China.  We can’t have it in restaurants because there’s no way to ensure that it was made with boiled water.

By the time Sophie’s eye feels better, our classmates are marching out, bearing plates of Gung Bao Chicken and Braised Eggplant.  Our dumplings meet us downstairs. I’m too tired and hot to be hungry, too drained to properly enjoy a table full of English speakers from all over the world. I drink my lukewarm water and dream of ice cubes, and when we get back

to our apartment, it occurs to me to check the miniature freezer compartment in our tiny refrigerator, where I find a dollhouse-sized ice cube tray.  I’m not sure if I’ll ever remember how to make Gung Bao Chicken, braised eggplant, or dumplings again, but we make some mean ice cubes.

Learning Chinese: The Importance of Interpretive Dance

After two weeks in China, what I’m most homesick for, besides our friends and our dog, is the ease of communication in my own language, the ability to make offhand remarks and casual observations.

Our housekeeper, cook, and Chinese tutor Ms. H. speaks a little English.  Combine that with my sparse and fairly useless Chinese phrases, and we know just enough of each other’s language to generate a lot of confusion. Add in some good will and a genuine desire to communicate, and we can spend two hours on one simple sentence.

For instance, I might say, “My, what a beautiful tree.” Ms. H. nods and repeats back to me, in Chinese, what she thought I just said.  If I don’t smile and nod enthusiastically, despite the fact that I don’t understand Chinese, the conversation is bound to continue.

She’ll do a pantomime of a tree, and then I’ll do a pantomime of a tree, and pretty soon this will evolve into a full-scale interpretive dance where we’ll both re-enact the beauty of the tree, and if I don’t smile and nod and put on my shoes to go out, she’ll whip out her electronic translator, and then I’ll open the translator on my computer, and I’ll type away while she traces characters on her screen. Our devices take our words, filter them through the others’ idioms, and spit back total nonsense.

She reads my words converted to characters on her device and then writes what she thought I said, and it comes out, “Upside down your pleasing roots?” She looks understandably confused.

I try again on my computer: “My, what a beautiful tree.” The words are converted to pinyin.  She reads them and types something: “Belonging to you the lovely vegetation?” her screen says.

I type, “Oh, my, that tree is beautiful” and she types something else: “Branches and leaves oh glorious possessions?”

Finally I realize that the word “My” is getting in the way, and so I type, “That tree is beautiful” and she looks puzzled, because apparently now the pinyin words say, “You like botanic study in the everywhere?”

Finally, exhausted, we both smile and nod and repeat our beautiful tree interpretive dance and end things on a friendly note, still feeling a bit puzzled.

Some afternoons, Sophie and I take Chinese lessons.  Slowly we are learning to say things like, “I want to go shopping,” “He is my big brother,” and “I like to watch TV,” which we don’t, actually, because it’s all in Chinese. And anyway, you can learn all the words and sentence constructions in the world, and if you get the tones wrong, no one will understand what you’re saying.  Deborah Fallows writes about a story by a writer named Chao Yuan Ren that demonstrates the difficulty of the Chinese language.  The story is made up of 92 characters, each, she says, “pronounced the same way, shi—the story of a poet (shi) named Shi who loves to eat lions (shi shi), goes to the market (shi) to buy ten (shi) of them, takes them home to eat (shi) and discovers they are made (shi) of stone (shi).”

So even though I can now say, “Today is Friday, yesterday was Thursday, tomorrow is Saturday, the day after tomorrow is Sunday,” this was no help whatsoever the first time we went to a Bank of China, the branch near our apartment, to exchange money.

At Chinese banks, each teller has a little machine that displays his or her customer satisfaction rating.  But customers can’t choose the teller with the highest rating.  It’s the luck of the draw, the first teller who posts your number. This is how we got stuck with the teller who had two stars out of five. She said something to me, and I said, “I don’t speak Chinese.”  So she said something to Sophie.  Sophie also shook her head and said, “I don’t speak Chinese.”  The woman looked irritated and went on, faster and louder, staring forcefully at Sophie, who kept shaking her head.

With a disgusted grunt, the woman started fingering my twenty dollar bills with evident displeasure. They were relatively crisp and clean, but she examined a slightly bent corner and flipped the money over to trace a fold in the middle of one bill.  She said something else to Sophie.

Sophie shook her head.  She still didn’t speak Chinese.

Finally, the woman called to a supervisor who spoke some English. “We cannot exchange this money,” he said.  “It is dirty.”

The problem was not, after all, slight bends or folds, but something no American would have ever noticed, a tiny bit of red dye that had bled onto the edge of the bills, probably from a thin strip of paper that some business or bank had once used to secure them together.

On our way out of the bank, I pushed the “dissatisfied” button.

Two days later at a Bank of China branch in Yangshuo, where Western tourists are much more common, a cheerful teller with three stars barely glanced at the “dirt” on my bills, and I successfully exchanged them.

At first I thought maybe if we’d spoken fluent Mandarin at the first bank, I would have had the language to marshal some great argument for why they should accept my money.  But later I understood that if we’d spoken fluent Mandarin at the first bank, the two-star teller probably never would have gotten irritated with us in the first place.

Nevertheless, we’re making progress, if somewhat slow. After Sophie practiced reading a pinyin book with Ms. H. one day, Ms. H. wrote on her translator, “You are very strong.”  She meant that Sophie had done a good job, and we knew that, even if her device’s interpretation sounded slightly sinister:  “Your blood is worth bottling,” it said.

Scaling the Dragon’s Backbone: Our Visit to Longji’s Rice Terraces

Last week, we arranged a trip to the Longji Terraced Fields, a favorite tourist destination two and a half hours from Guilin. A new guide named Bing picked us up for the long drive to the minority villages where the Zhuang and the Yao peoples have lived for more than thirteen generations and seven hundred years. We drove out of the city through villages that more closely matched my picture of rural China: dogs running into the road, bikes toting platforms piled with construction materials or watermelons, an old man in a coolie hat pushing a wheelbarrow. Along the road grew osmanthus trees and orange groves and rice, and tiny ducks floated on ponds.

Soon we turned up and up a narrow, winding mountain road, cliffs dropping abruptly alongside, a clear stream rushing by in the valley below, getting further and further away as we climbed.  Our driver honked his way through every hairpin turn on the one-lane road. When we met another car or van or bus, somehow we squeezed by each other without slowing down. Waterfalls fell from the sides of the mountains and swinging bridges swayed high above the valley.

We stopped to buy tickets and a woman with elaborately knotted hair approached us, offering postcards for sale.

“She is Yao, married with children,” Bing murmured.  He knew this, he explained later, because Yao women only cut their hair once in their lives, when they are sixteen.  Then they wear their hair in styles that signify whether they are single, married, or married with children.

“What if they’re unmarried with children?” I asked.

He laughed and said, “There is no hairstyle for that.”

Oh, well, I thought.  What single mother has time to do her hair?

Sophie was disappointed that there were only three categories. Why no hairstyle, she asked, for widows, or women who have lost children?  “And what about widows with dead children?” she asked indignantly that night, right before dropping off to sleep.

Soon we began to ascend the mountain on foot.  Zhuang women lounged at the entrance to the walkway, wearing turban-like head coverings made of colorful terry cloth that looked like soft absorbent cushions.  All along the walk were stalls with embroidered pillow coverings and dresses and handcrafted earrings and toys, bags and jars of chili peppers, spreads of colorful fruits. Sedan chairs rested by the roadside, waiting for customers to pay to be carried to the top of the mountain by two strong men. In front of us, girls lugged large bamboo baskets on their backs.

After about 200 uneven, steep, sometimes slippery steps made of rock, the passages usually narrow with ravines dropping off sharply below and no guardrails, the sun glaring, the temperature somewhere in the neighborhood of 105, I was hot and thirsty and tired and a little dizzy. Bing, a young man who regularly leads tour groups on hikes here, and Sophie, who if she were home would have been right then on her way to the National YMCA Gymnastics Competition, mounted the steps briskly. I was starting to see why the brochure that had come with our tickets said, “Hiking should according to physical condition.”

Since I couldn’t keep up, I paced myself by stopping periodically to take pictures of the rice paddies cultivated by the Yao and Zhuang, according to our brochure, in “every corner of the valley, forest and cliffs.” They were amazing, like slices of bread staggered one on top of the next, or a bowl of scalloped potatoes.

Just when I thought I couldn’t go on, Bing said, “Halfway there!”

Halfway? Seriously? That was all? If there had been a bench I might have sat on it, but instead I had no choice but to push on up the steep steps, past precarious looking wooden platforms built out over the valley, past a hotel with a barn for animals on the ground floor, past a youth hostel and vendors with fruit and bracelets and Yao women who offered to unwind their hair for tourists for 10 RMB, about $1.50.

Finally, finally we reached a platform overlooking the layers upon layers of rice paddies.  Feeling triumphant, we joined all of the tourists taking pictures and exclaiming over the view.

Then Bing said, “Just a little further.” That’s when I saw the 50 or so more steep steps continuing up the mountain.

Up we went, Sophie and Bing at what appeared to be a jog, me at a trudge.

When we reached the top platform, everything became very, very quiet. For a few minutes, we were the lone climbers up there, surveying the panorama of rice terraces against the backdrop of mountains. Sophie thought they looked like steps going up and down everywhere.  These terraces combined with the mountains above are known as the “Dragon’s Backbone,” the terraces like scales, the mountaintops zigzagging against the sky.

“When you lead tours, does everyone get to the top?” I asked Bing.

“Yes,” he said. “But usually we go much more slowly.  And some people ride up in the chairs.”

Sophie and I shared a bottle of water and looked out at the mountains while our sweat dried.  Locals often came here, Bing said, to walk off stress.  I could see why. After 550 steps and the view spreading out before you, nothing else can really matter.

Sophie declared that she was starved, so we headed down again.  We stopped at an open-air café, where we had a local specialty, sticky rice with bacon and corn that had been stuffed into hollowed-out bamboo and roasted over an open flame, then broken open and brought to our table. We sat there for a long time, surrounded by nature and tradition, looming mountains and sculpted rice paddies and the Yao and Zhuang in traditional costumes and rugged rock steps and bamboo chairs and a man surfing the Internet in a corner.

Back in the van, headed down the mountain back to Guilin, we rounded a curve and came upon a man right at the moment that he raised a stick and brought it down hard, over and over. “Oh, my,” I said, when I realized that he was beating a snake to death. I imagined that he’d spotted the black coil on the path ahead and thought fast to save his companions from danger. But Bing pointed out the bus parked by the side of the road.  “He is a bus driver who saw a chance to take home some snake wine,” Bing said.

On we went, down, down, down, and I once again skimmed the brochure.  “Here, you may hear a sound of purely love song, you may see a group of Yao girls, who are carrying things with their bamboo basket on the way home among the mountain,” it said. “They are all treasures in the world.” I thought of that line as we passed a school letting out, children flooding out of a drive and hopping onto waiting motorbikes and bicycles, riding off with fathers and mothers while others started running, running, their backpacks flying, down the side of the road.