Hour of the Rat (25 page)

Everyone’s parents are fucked up
. I suddenly hear his voice in my head, saying that. I remember, when he said it, we were hanging out in the dining hall, having gotten our tacos and a Coke in his case, a mochaccino in mine. The air-con was working that day, I remember, because I’d gotten a chill off all the sweat that had soaked my clothes. I’d just read some email from my mom, about some guy she’d been seeing and how it hadn’t worked out, and I was bitching about it, like, how could she keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again?

“Most of them shouldn’t have kids, but they do, and here we are.” Dog leaned back in his chair, laughed a little. “People do the best they can. Sometimes it’s not good enough.”

S
O
, W
OLF
C
HILD
, AKA Langhai. I do a search on Youku for users with that name. And what do you know, there he is. With five videos posted. Including the Yangshuo cat rescue.

“You fucking idiot,” I mutter.

Okay, maybe not totally. All you have to do to get a Youku account is provide a name and an email address, and that stuff’s easy enough to disguise. Hotmail, Yahoo!, a host of others, you don’t have to give your real name.

But still. The guy’s a fugitive. He fled to China, which was stupid enough. And he’s left a video trail.

Here’s one from Guiyu.

I click on it.

Shots of the countryside. Music underneath, some kind of weird techno stuff that makes me nervous. But he’s good at this. The video is powerful. The smoking fields. The mountains of electronic scrap. The blackened streams.

And people. Workers surrounded by clouds of toxic steam. Their arms covered with rashes. Children, little kids, standing in front of piles of wire and keyboards.

Text crawls across the screen, in English and Chinese, saying things like, “Guiyu is the largest e-waste site on earth.” “Guiyu’s children have a seventy percent higher rate of lead poisoning than average.” “Guiyu’s water is undrinkable.”

And then shots of a protest, a mob of farmers from the look of it, surrounding a government building, holding signs and clenching rakes and hoes in their fists. “The pollution has spread beyond Guiyu, killing crops and contaminating farmland.”

Huh, I think. In China stuff like this gets “harmonized” pretty fast, scrubbed right off the Internet, but on the other hand there are so many “mass incidents” in China that it’s hard to catch them all, and Langhai hasn’t had a ton of hits on his videos yet.

The truth is out there, but if no one sees it, does it matter?

I look at the titles of the other videos: “Beautiful Yangshuo” and “Dangerous Seeds.” I watch the second one. Most of it’s a compilation of still images, shots of fields and corn and the occasional PowerPoint slide. The narration is in Mandarin, with English and Chinese subtitles. It’s a sort of brief history of GMO plants and why they should scare us, a summary of the stuff I read and the things that Sparrow and Kang Li and Han Rong told me at the sanctuary.

The Mandarin speaker is a woman—Daisy, maybe? I can’t tell. We talked mostly in English. Maybe some other cute Chinese girl he’s met along the way.

Okay, call me bitter. But a guy like Jason, good-looking, American, he’s going to find Chinese girlfriends pretty easily.

The last shot: a graphic of a Chinese proletariat hero brandishing a hoe, a field of golden rice. “New Century Hero Rice.”

I get that prickly feeling, the one that’s part fear and part connection, like I’ve stumbled into an electric current.

“
Is this a hero or a traitor?
” the woman asks.

The most recent video, posted just two weeks ago, is called “Dali Scene.”

Dali, in Yunnan, the province on China’s southwestern border. The second location on Daisy’s list of seed companies.

T
HERE ARE TWO TRAINS
daily from Guilin to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, one at 3:30
P
.
M
. leaving from Guilin North, the other at about 4:45
P
.
M
. from the main train station close to the hostel. From Kunming it’s easy to get a train or a bus to Dali.

Yeah, I’m going to Dali. Yeah, I know it’s a stupid idea. But I’ve come this far, I might as well keep going, right?

Right.

I could probably make the 3:30
P
.
M
. train if I hustled, but when I go to check train tickets at the handy hostel travel desk, they make a call and tell me that the only sleeping berths available are two upper soft sleepers and one upper hard sleeper, and I really don’t know if I can manage the climb up to either of them right now.

There’s a lower soft sleeper available on the 4:45
P
.
M
. train, and for a small surcharge they’ll buy the ticket for me and bring it back to the hostel.

So that’s what I decide to do. I hand over the money for a ticket. I hang out in the bar/restaurant. Have another beer, then some coffee. Watch “Beautiful Yangshuo” and “Dali Scene.” The Yangshuo video includes footage of the Yangshuo Ancient Village Artist Retreat Inn, and I wonder if they paid for it, paid Jason/David/Langhai to shoot the piece, because it sure is a good advertisement for them—the video’s really well done. Maybe he’s putting some of these pieces up on Youku so he can get work from them.

And that’s when it occurs to me: These video sites have messaging.

Maybe I can send Jason an email.

I sit back, staring at the last frame of “Beautiful Yangshuo,” and consider.

If I write him, tell him I’m Dog’s friend, tell him how worried his family is, how much it would mean to Dog to hear from him, that would be doing my duty, right? Completing the mission. No need to go all the way to Dali.

Then I think, But I wouldn’t know for sure that he’s okay. That he believes I am who I say I am.

I mean, I guess I could try to get Sparrow to vouch for me. That is, if I can trust Sparrow. If Sparrow can trust me.

I should just bag it. Except I already bought the train ticket.

I figure I might as well go. My leg’s feeling better, so I’m not so worried I’m going to drop dead from a blood clot. And what am I going to do back in Beijing, other than deal with my mom and Andy, a toilet that won’t flush, and the DSD?

Besides, Dali’s supposed to be beautiful, and I never got to float down a river on a bamboo raft.

W
E GET INTO
K
UNMING
at 10:35
A
.
M
., and I have less than an hour to catch the train to Dali.

No big deal, you’d think, but this is China, where most times you get on a train it’s like an escape from the fucking Nazis or something: mobs of people carrying crazy amounts of crap, pushing, shoving, determined to get on that train first, which can be kind of scary, going through gates and up and down stairs. For a lot of Chinese, if you’re going any distance, the train is how you go. If you’re a migrant worker, one of the tens of millions traveling for work, especially if you’re trying to get home one of the few times a year you have a holiday, you pray you can get a train ticket.

I’ve learned never to travel during those times.

But even though this isn’t one of those times, the train I’m trying to catch is hard seats only, and that scene can be pretty Darwin.

I’m wiped out. I didn’t sleep too much on the overnight train, a combination of some snoring business dude, pain, and nerves. I made myself a double Starbucks VIA before we pulled in, and that’s hardly put a dent in my exhaustion.

Kunming is supposed to be a cool city. I’ve heard a lot of
great things about it. They have really nice weather, a hipster-foreigner ghetto, lots of pretty scenery. But the Kunming train station is freaky. I have to go downstairs to buy my ticket to Dali—you can’t buy tickets for a train that doesn’t go through your departure city, don’t ask me why—and I’ve never seen so many
nongmin
, peasants, camped out in a train station before, sleeping on the ground, propped up against their faded plastic bundles, sitting there, waiting for … I don’t know what. Wearing their patched clothes, their cast-off T-shirts, faces tanned and thickened by years of sun. Staring at me like I’m a total alien.

I’m looking for the ticket window. My leg hurts, my duffel’s slipping off my shoulder, and I really need to pee.

“
Xiaojie. Xiaojie. Qing ni, bangzhu wo. Bangzhu wo xiaohai.
” Help me, miss. Help my little child.

I turn to look, and there’s this beggar lady crawling toward me on her knees, clutching a filthy kid in one arm, her other hand outstretched. “
Qing ni, bangzhu women.
”

I so do not have time for this right now. I give her my best blank look and keep walking.

And she grabs my leg.

“Please, please,” she sobs. “Please help me and my child!”

The pain is so intense that I don’t even scream. I just do a face plant, my cheek hitting the slick marble pavers, the shock only barely absorbed by my outstretched hand, my duffel bag landing with a whump to one side.

“
Cao ni!
” I yell. “Get your hands off me!”

The kid starts to wail. I shake my head, wait till the white spots in my vision clear, push myself up to a sitting position.

A crowd has gathered around us—
nongmin
, mostly. They stand there, arms clasped behind their backs, staring like they’re watching a play, maybe one called
Foreigners Do the Strangest Things
.

“You’ve never seen a foreigner before?” I yell at them. “What are you all,
zhutou
?”

“Sorry,” the woman whispers. “Sorry.”

I look at her, and she’s sitting there with her blackened clothes and her howling baby and a frightened look, and suddenly I don’t care if it’s a scam, if she’s run by some boss of an organized beggar ring; it’s just sad and horrible, and I want to get away, go someplace where I can pretend this stuff doesn’t exist.

Ha-ha. Good luck with that one.

I try to stand up, and I can’t. The people in the crowd shuffle their feet. Mutter at one another. Point. A couple of them get out cell phones and snap pictures.

Fucking great.

I drop my duffel. I can’t stand up with the weight of it on my shoulder. I push myself to my feet, slowly, with my Yangshuo walking stick. Try to blink the pain away. Adjust my daypack and grab the duffel strap.

The beggar woman scrambles to her feet. Then she does this totally weird thing—she puts her hands under the duffel and boosts it up, so that I can easily adjust the strap pad on my shoulder.

The baby has stopped crying. Its face is smeared with dirt, I notice. I wonder, did Mom put the dirt there before they came out of whatever hole they’re living in, so the kid would look more pathetic?

The baby stares at me, dark eyes the color of coffee beans.

I reach into my jeans pocket and pull out a couple of wadded-up twenty-yuan notes and give them to the woman, because I’m such a fucking idiot.

And of course I miss the fucking 11:20
A
.
M
. train to Dali.

S
O
. I
BUY A
ticket for the next available train, which doesn’t leave until 11:30
P
.
M
. I score a bottom bunk on a hard sleeper—it’s
a seven hour trip, and even if I can’t sleep, I figure it’s better I should be able to stretch out my leg. I check my duffel bag at a locker, and I hobble back outside, to the chaos of the station and of Kunming in general, and somewhere past the giant black plastic policeman robot—I’m not sure what it does, but it looks like some pervy child of Robocop and a Legos man—I catch a taxi.

“Where do foreigners like to go in Kunming?” I ask the driver.

He starts going on about the Stone Forest and then some other theme park an hour or two outside of town that, if I understand him correctly, involves dwarves, which is kind of tempting, but I shake my head and lift up my hand. “Just want to go someplace close by. I have a train to catch later.”

“Maybe Wenlin Jie.”