Chapter 94

I woke up a bit before 8 and slowly got in gear. There were fireworks outside, but somehow it didn’t bother me that much. I feel like it’s part of the soundscape of the Chinese countryside, especially during the Tomb Sweeping Festival, whereas when that happens in my urban apartment complex and disturbs 3000 people, it’s a cuntish and antisocial thing to do.

There was fried rice for breakfast. I asked the boss if they have hot sauce, remembering the trip we took in Zhejiang province during the October national holiday, where every town and every place we stayed had their own homemade hot pepper paste, and fried rice is one of the best possible canvases to taste it. He brought me... a jar of Laoganma. I mean sure, Laoganma chili paste is delicious and goes well on rice, but it’s not what I would call hot by any means. We’re not in a part of China that scores high on the Scoville scale.

We all got in baba-in-law’s Subaru and drove for half an hour or so until we reached the trailhead for this remote region’s main attraction, a hiking trail leading to a lake, in the rugged area at the border of Anhui and Zhejiang provinces. There were quite a lot of buses parked there, and groups of hikers in raincoats or plastic bags heading there in the misty rain. For sure it wasn’t going to be a quiet trail like the one from yesterday.

I don’t know what else to say other than “we walked”. The trail slowly made its way up a hill, alongside a stream we had to cross a few times, the dog was covered in mud but spritely climbed along, and made friends with the other quadruped in the area, a friendly and energetic yellow Labrador named He-Man.

After a while, there was a large group of hikers ahead, and one fucknugget had a Bluetooth speaker. Most of the time the waterfall would bury the shitty Chinatrash techno coming out of it, but it was loud as shit, and took a big dump on the atmosphere of the hiking trail. Though I wasn’t tired, I took a break and waited for them to disappear ahead while I waited for the rest of my group. About half an hour later, as I approached a little pavilion, my ears got raped again. “Don’t say anything, don’t say anything, don’t say anything, just walk past” I told myself, trying to override my instincts and engage in that Asian spirit of non-cuntfrontation. But just as I passed the mouthbreather, the terrible terrible mandopop shite went to the chorus, which sounded like a dissonant children’s song.

“Who the fuck wants to listen to that stupid fucking song?”

Ah shit. It came out like a sneeze, against my control.

“What’s the matter?!” he replied, all confused after being confronted by a stranger not in his immediate Confucian concentric circles, for probably the first time in his life.

“We’re in the forest! It’s quiet here! Nobody wants to hear that!”

He blabbered something but I just kept chasing the dog and didn’t look back. I’m more than aware that given how shitty my Chinese is it probably sounded more clownish than assertive, like those YouTube videos of road-raging Asian-Americans arguing with the police (“Why you gib ticket lah? I no go fastuh! I go sapeed rimit!”) but still the message went across. Whether or not it will be heeded is to be seen.

Walking a bit faster than the rest of my party as I was, I made it to the end and waited, sitting on a big rock. SpeakerGuy walked past, his Bluetooth contraption hanging limply from his backpack, silent, like God intended. Soon after his group gathered and started eating snacks, he said “Everyone pack your garbage, don’t throw anything” Maybe I judged him harshly and he is in fact a civilized person, like Xi Jinping encourages the plebs to be through all those propaganda campaigns.

The end of the trail wasn’t really a summit, more a plateau near a lake, but the fog was so thick we literally couldn’t see past 10 or 15 meters. So it was more about the journey than the destination, as the path itself was very picturesque. “Looks like Beijing air” I joked. A group of men in their thirties heard and burst into laughter.

We walked down, which took about two hours, and had a victory beer in the parking lot. There was a sink, we gave the dog a shower to rinse off all the dirt and mud, and then bundled him up in his towel. The in-laws came down, mama-in-law was clutching her forearm after she slipped on a wet rock and fell hard. There was some serious swelling already, she ran cold water on it and there was talk of them going back to civilization rather than waiting until the next morning as initially planned. It was around 3 PM at that point, the sun had just come out after two full days of cloud cover, fog and intermittent rain, they would be able to make it to the highway by the time it gets dark.

By the time we got back to the farmhouse, she said she felt better and they’d stick around. By that point the sun was irradiating us with its soothing rays and it felt awesome, so we got some chairs and sat outside, with beers and snacks. A car pulled over, the owner’s Mercedes, and out he came along two young boys and a rather attractive woman with a peasant chic look, all decked in gaudy jewelry and with something rarely seen in China, a shapely derriere in tight white pants. I had to force myself to avert my eyes. They said hi and walked in. The girlfriend and mama-in-law gossipped in low voices and I asked what’s up, they said they learned yesterday that the farmhouse owner got divorced a few years ago because he was too poor and living in a remote mountain area, and that’s probably his new wife. I don’t know how his fortune changed that quick, maybe the hotel is really doing good business.

The other son, a stern-looking 12-year-old, came back from the hills with a basket of tea leaves. He left with his stepmom, his two stepbrothers and a family of tourists to go get some more, I put down my beer cup and tagged along. Our little crew walked on a narrow path between two farms and went up a steep path, the small boys practicing the basic English they know, and I was very happy to help. I realized maybe I’d bitten more than I can chew, my shoes were left in the sun to dry and now I was just wearing flip-flops, that were too tiny for my barbarian feet so an inch of my heel was protruding in the back and the more mud was getting in there, the more I had to curl my toes to keep them on. Eventually I just kicked them off and went along barefoot.

We got to an impossibly steep hillside, where a tank-shaped grandma was plucking the leaves and tossing them in a large basket. The gradient must have been 60 degrees at least, but I dug my feet in the dirt and plucked along.

“Can we just soak the leaves like that?”

“No, we need to roast them first. We’ll do it tonight, we’ll show you if you want”

Which they nicely did, right after dinner (tofu in the leftover fish broth, chicken in a thick sauce with star anise and ginger, and some greens I didn’t touch because they were fried with mushrooms). Grandma put the leaves in a dry wok and sizzled them a bit, then some uncle rubbed them on a wicker mat, and they dried them in a thick wicker basket on a charcoal fire. I asked if they can dry them in the sun instead and they said it would get too bitter.

Mama-in-law’s wrist was making her suffer, so in the end they decided to leave after dinner. We bade our farewells and urged them to drive prudently, now that the unlit mountain roads were engulfed in quasi-darkness. When they got to Hefei, they went to a hospital, and turns out that indeed one of her bones is fractured. Her arm is in a cast now.

The owner, the woman with the nice ass, and another woman were about to play majiang and needed a fourth. I joined, initially just to be polite but wow, majiang is pretty fun, and I stayed for an hour. I just need to familiarize myself a bit more with the little rules and the strategy, and soon I’ll be able to go to all those smoky majiang parlors around town and play against the grizzled old men who hang out there every night.