This is the story of three men.
The first is a rice farmer who lives a few miles outside Yangshuo, a gorgeous town set in the imposing Karst countryside of Guangxi province in China. He’s 37 years old, and has been married ten years to a beautiful woman who grew up in the same village as him. They have an eight year-old daughter, an only child like countless tens of millions others in China. The country’s one-child policy has relaxed a little in the last couple of decades – as the terrible consequences of macrosocial engineering dawns on the bureaucrats in Beijing – so the farmer and his wife have some small hope of being able to have a second child. The rural Chinese, if they have a son as their first child, cannot conceive again. The farmer, when asked what the consequences of another pregnancy would be, whispers “hospital”, and looks furtively around as if a uniformed official might spring sternly forth from the shrubs by the side of the road. They are weirdly lucky in their misfortune of having first a daughter instead of a son (daughters are not merely financially burdensome to marry off, but cannot adequately help in the family’s rice paddies). Having a daughter in China is ignominious at best, downright shameful at worst. Perhaps a hundred million baby girls have been murdered in the past twenty or thirty years. Drowned, strangled, or just dumped by the side of the road.
But the couple’s misfortune in having a daughter has a silver lining. It means that, with the relaxation of some of the rules from Beijing, they might be spared the trip to “hospital” should she fall pregnant again. Perhaps, but it’s not assured. The urban Chinese, however, cannot avail themselves of such discretion. A second pregnancy still leads to state-mandated abortion in the heaving Chinese cities, perhaps more than anything the defining stamp of a authoritarian system within which the individual is forever subsumed to the collective. On an issue as thorny as abortion, one should be prepared to accept and even respect a multitude of different viewpoints. But when the State violates a woman to terminate her foetus without consent, a grave evil has been committed and no amount of impressive stadia and cute-as-buttons mascots at the Olympics should permit the world to forget this.
But although our farmer would naturally have preferred a son, he's besotted with his little girl. She’s in her third year of education, but the school is poor and doesn’t have adequate books. After he finishes tending the rice paddies with his wife all day, he reads to his daughter in the evening. He speaks excellent English for someone of his roots. Three years ago, he borrowed a small sum of money to travel to Guilin – an hour’s drive away – for English lessons. It’s the farthest he’s ever been from his farm.
The English lessons allow him to work as a tour guide on the sole day a week he’s not farming. He takes visitors to Yangshuo biking through the mountains, on bamboo boats on the Li River, to the famous water caves twenty kilometres away. His accent is the stuff great comedy is made of, a perfect caricature of himself. His English itself is superb, but with a stifling formality suggesting his teachers were older Chinese who’d learnt at university rather than any of the hundreds of thousands of young Westerners who come to teach English in China. The accent lilts and undulates, with inflection independent of the context or his meaning. He’s learnt from books with a phonetic template, not by watching television. They don’t own one, anyway, and if they did, they wouldn’t be able to afford the satellite channels with English language.
His parents live in the same house, commonplace in Asia. They’re only in their sixties, but people age fast here. Already they’re elderly, and cannot help much with the farming. He provides for them as he does for his wife and daughter. It’s a painted picture of rural Asian life. Sometimes when you’re ready to be confounded, the most surprising thing of all is that things are just as you expect.
His name's Wen. He wears the cheap, drab olive attire of the Chinese peasantry, and which the whole country wore only a generation ago. The young Chinese from the cities dress unwittingly like clowns; draped garishly in Western labels with ludicrous coloured and wankily styled hair. The young men often wear make up. The girls dress like underage Hentai sex princesses. The boys and girls sport as much jewellery as the body can carry and bear the crushing yoke of aspirational selfconsciousness. This is what we’ve given them. They look ridiculous.
They’re part of the rapidly emerging, Chinese urban middle class. They’re the first generation in Chinese history to have the means to explore their own country. It’s still not easy to go overseas, the language would be a real barrier and besides: this is the magnificent and rich country they’ve learnt about all their lives. So in their droves, they’re showing up in Dali and in Kunming; in Yangshuo and Xi’an; in Yuncheng and in Yinchuan. In Yangshuo they outnumber Western tourists a hundred to one. They want to see the famous Karst scenery and to peer at how the peasants still live. So, as well as taking Western backpackers around, Wen makes his living showing rural life to the Chinese from Beijing and Shanghai.
Watching quietly from the sidelines, their disdain for Wen and his type is embarrassing. He’s too polite when you approach him alone, too curiously English to use his English to express what he really thinks. But it’s clear: there’s a chasm in China, a great wall which divides the peasants from the programmers and the farmers from the civil engineers. They come to Yangshuo not just for the scenery and a break, but for vindication of their decision to leave in the first place. Condescension transcends all tongues. If I were him, I’d be apoplectic. But he smiles quietly as they laugh and point their bejewelled fingers, and takes their money home at the end of the day for his daughter’s further schooling. His life is small and simple, and he loves it. He is, without doubt, one of the finest people I’ve ever met.
The second man is an Italian. Fifty-four years old with wispy white hair and elegant spectacles, he is to be found, at any time, staying in one of the world’s millions of hostels, guesthouses or budget hotels. He dresses like any other affluent European traveller, all polafleece and gore-tex; travel pouch and windbreaker. He speaks English impressively, with – like Wen – an amusingly bouncy inflection, but typical for a Milanese.
His name is Sergio but he’s no normal traveller. The first twenty or so years of his life were typical enough: a good family, a good school, girlfriends and various jobs. He even moved in his early twenties to England, where he lived in Sheffield with a girl called Diane. He said her name was
De-aaa-na. But I’m pretty sure it was just plain Diane.
They lived together for five years, a relatively average couple in a more-than-usually average place. But this was the last time his life would be average, for he went travelling in 1974 and has never stopped. He’s been travelling, practically non-stop,
for thirty-four years.
His story is incredible – in the true sense – until you hear him speak more. He owns no property, he hasn’t had a car since the seventies. He owns no clothes besides those which fold into his well-worn backpack. He’s filled up over twenty-five passports. He doesn’t use email. He’s never owned a mobile phone or a computer. He supposedly funds this unending voyage with oddjobs on his travels. Fruitpicking for four months here; factory work ten weeks here; sorting mail for a month there. His transport is always the cheapest he can find, and he has no desire to blow money on wine and women. He stays in $5/night dorms and in thirty-four years of sharing rooms with strangers, he’s met a lot of people. Tens of thousands, he estimates. But he keeps in touch with no one.
His parents are dead, his brother is somewhere in Italy. He’s never been married, and has no real friends. We crossed paths in Kunming. I was there just for a night, to break up the tedium of the journey to Dali. He’d been there a month already. He’s been in China for the past two years. It’s his seventh time here. He spent a year in Vietnam, three in Africa, two in Australia, one in India, one in Russia, and too many others to list, but in all that time, in all that time, not once has he rented or bought a home. From six years before I was born until now, he’s wandered the world in dorms and fleabag hotels.
I’ve met people of this ilk before. There was the dreadlocked and pirate-bearded Dutchman in Sarajevo who’d been cycling for sixteen months with no end in sight – and apparently no bath either. Yet he was what anyone would call a hippy. Not just his appearance either, but a peacenik wanderer who in his heart wanted to be left mostly alone. Sergio is by no means a hippy. Highly organised and well-maintained, he’s just decided to do what he loves more than anything. “Friends will change and they’ll leave you”, he remarks, with a surprising absence of bitterness. “Why would I want a house or a car or a wife?” he asks rhetorically, revealingly conflating the accumulation of chattel with love. “Why would I stay in one place when I can keep moving whenever I want?” This last question wasn’t rhetorical. I replied that, as salubrious as travel may be, there’s a lot to be said for ‘home’ – for putting one’s roots in the ground. He guffawed and slapped me on the back. Sometimes there’s just too much which separates people to even try understanding.
He doesn’t know what his next destination will be. He’s thinking about going back to South America someplace, maybe to work in a bar. But despite how alien his life is to anything I’d ever choose for myself, his generosity and friendliness to someone he’d never see again and to whom he owed nothing was breathtaking. He showered me in advice for my upcoming travels, offered maps, shared various mysterious foods from his bag. By design, he keeps nobody at all in his life. But he opens his heart to those just passing through. No wife, no children, no home – just endless, timeless movement, forever. I thought of Wen, and how in his whole life he’s travelled 65km. Strange, how people are.
The third man is English. He lives in Dali City, which is about as far west as you can go in China before crossing into Burma or Tibet. It’s a small town of 40,000 with a long and glorious history. What remains of the old town is still ringed by the medieval wall, and is pleasingly free of traffic and pollution. It’s famous for its marble (so much so that marble in Mandarin is “Dalishi”) and the people are strikingly different from other parts of the Middle Kingdom. Most of the inhabitants share the surname ‘Duan’. They look more like Tibetans or Nepalis than coastal Chinese, and the Bai minority still wander the town, selling trinkets in colourful, traditional garb. The women offer to sell – in their full traditional dress - hashish to the tourists, and stand around in groups at night outside the bars. I’ve never been anywhere else in the world where, confronted by a group of drug dealers, I’ve felt that
they’re the ones intimidated by
me.
The Englishman is in his late thirties. His name is Michael and he’s beanstalk thin with a curly goatee and greasy red hair. He wears a cardigan which would make him incongruous in Dali anyway, but for the fact that he wears shorts as well – and the visiting Chinese gape at his hairy pale legs as if he’s an invader from a celestial otherworld. In bohemian and beautiful towns such as Dali around the world, one commonly stumbles across the backpacker who accidentally fell in love with the surroundings and contrived never to leave. I can’t count the people I’ve met like this. And watching Michael stroll along the cobbled street, you’d be forgiven for assuming he’s one of these. But he’s not.
He grew up in the east end of London, from a middle-class family. He excelled at A Levels and took himself off to Edinburgh to read history and got a first. He moved back to London, spent a few years among miserable commuters, measuring out his life in coffee spoons then moved to Dali to open a bar. This was five years ago, and he never, ever, wants to leave. He spends his evenings pouring drinks for travellers and sharing stories, blasting out his favourite music and making fleeting friends. If the pursuit of happiness is one’s primary goal in life, he says, he’s reached his zenith. He’s there. There’s absolutely, definitively, nothing else in the world he wants.
Three men, three chance meetings, three stories. Each so different but every one exactly the same. Wen’s life of staid simplicity isn’t elective, but can one really hope for much more than a loved family and an outdoor life in the mountains? Sergio’s existence is a diametric pole apart, but like Wen, he has nothing and he has everything. And Michael’s life, like Sergio’s, is one of his own choosing, but like Wen’s, it’s one of constancy and simplicity. I’ve met these three unusual men within the space of a week or so, and have been reminded, peculiarly perhaps, of the story of Goldilocks. Stumbling into the bears’ house to rudely steal their porridge (or was it sleep in their beds? I can’t remember), she finds two extremes, and one ‘just right’. I think of Wen, and despite his very real poverty and his knowledge that he’ll never be able to venture outside his province, I crave the simplicity and warmth of his life. I think of Sergio, and despite his lack of friends or family, or a place to call home, I admire the absolute freedom and autonomy his choices afford. But most of all, I think of Michael, who realised what he wanted and what he didn’t, and he changed his life accordingly. I wouldn’t want to run a bar in China any more than I’d want to grow rice or spend my life in dorms with grimy itinerants. But there’s a great deal to be said for courage, for determination, in breaking free of the shackles of expectation. In knowing what you desire, looking at your life as it is and changing it accordingly until it’s just what you want. Just right.
There are moments in life so thankfully rare, so exquisite you can hardly breathe. Time slowly slows and then just as slowly stops and everything, absolutely everything else disappears. The birth of one’s first child, I would imagine. The first night of your honeymoon. The Red Sox winning the World Series for the first time in four generations. I’m having one of those timeless moments right now – right this second. I don’t usually write in real time – it reads too much like a journal. But right now, this infinite nanosecond deserves nothing less. There’s no other way.
king its way down into the gorge, bouncing it off the flat walls and the mirror-flat water and off the white painted signs thirty metres up the cliff walls which designate to where the river will fill, once the three gorges project is complete.
eryone I care about could feel it too. Traveling the earth, ticking off your own list of the wonders of the world means you can collect these moments in a locket kept pressed tight to your chest. They’re yours for always – nobody can ever take them away. And whenever times are hard, whenever you’re against the wall and when life’s quotidian drabness stomps on your soul, you can take a slow deep breath, close your eyes and stop the clock in your mind, taking yourself back to one of those handful of exquisite moments life can afford, when there is nothing else there, nothing at all, but you.
