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INTRODUCE YOUR BRAND
Intro: Do You Stay or Do You Go?:
A Mini-choose Your Own Climb-cation in the Mountains of China
Your Internet browser lights up green. CONNECTED.
You sigh with relief. One more time, you have connected to the real Internet beyond the Great Firewall. You look out the window. Motorized tricycles with produce zip across the dusty country roads. Tractors and trucks chug along with cargo bouncing around the back. You barely hear any Mandarin outside, mostly the local languages of Naxi and Lisu that dominate this mountainous part of Yunnan Province.
You open the tab for BBC News.
With the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday, tens of thousands of people left the city before officials could lock the city down. Now the provincial government of Hubei province is putting the entire city of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, under complete lockdown. No one in… or out. Stephen McDonald, BBC, China
You click on another link to the New York Times.
Major US airline carriers are already cancelling a majority of their flights to China, some as far out as April 2020 with no indication if regular service will resume in the foreseeable future. Some countries are even considering banning travelers from entering if their flights originate in China.
“Shit.” You close the lid on your laptop with a sharp flick of the wrist and look around your room. Your gear is half-packed in your North Face duffels. A trad rack peaks out from the lid of your haul bag. You look down at the table. Your train ticket to Kunming, Yunnan’s provincial capital and the nearest international airport, stares at you next to your passport, which is open to the visa page.
You quickly snatch your phone up and look at flights on Skyscanner app for the following 2 days, almost twice as expensive as normal. As you stare at Skyscanner’s results, your heart rate ticks up, and you turn off the screen. You pause, take a deep breath and pick up your passport, dropping it on the ground. You reach down, pick it up, and leaf through it to the visa page.
ENTRY: 2019-12-26, BEIJING DAXING INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT PORT OF ENTRY
VISA TYPE: Z
VALID UNTIL: 2020-11-09
“I have the time. I could wait it out.” You mumble to yourself as you scroll through WeChat, opening various group chats and reading through the Chinese characters the best you can.
“I hear that soon there will be no more flights in or out!”
“Villages are even building walls in the middle of the road to keep people out! Look at this place in Hunan Province!”
You throw your phone onto the bed and hurriedly pack the remaining gear back into your duffel bag. You heft all three bags, probably close to 120 pounds of gear and items for living, onto your shoulders. Under the massive load of gear, you strain down the narrow hallway of the guesthouse stairs, bumping into the old, uneven wood protruding from the walls. As you reach the front entry, you catch a glimpse of the owner. You clumsily wave at her.
“You’re leaving?” She asks.
“Yes! I think I am going to try to catch a train to Kunming.” You stumble a bit as the weight of the bags throws you off-balance.
“OK, then you better be quick! Word is that drivers in town don’t want to leave town now.”
“Just for foreigners?” You ask, almost amused, since you have asked that question about “just foreigners” a thousand times.
“No. For everyone.” She nods.
“Well, I think I am going to give it a try! Thank you for everything!” You wave one more time before pushing open the door and stumbling out to the street.
“Be safe! And good luck!” The owner calls after you.
You stumble into the mid-morning sunlight, dodging some e-bikes and motorized tricycles that come zipping around the corner. Everything seems frenzied. People run in and out of stores holding piles of plastic bags stuffed with produce, eggs, and piles of random household goods. A few people throw confused glances towards you. You try to shrug it off. You are a foreigner with huge bags. Everyone stares.
You spot a line of mini vans on the far side of the main street, over by a cobblestone parking lot. Men in jackets with indecipherable English brand names–mostly consonants–and business casual shoes lean against their cars with a cigarette in hand. You throw your bags down near the van in the middle of the line and approach one of the men.
“Hey, sir! Are you going to Lijiang today? I need a lift to the train station!”
“Nah, sorry. Too dangerous these days. Too much trouble.”
“But it shouldn’t be any trouble! I am trying to leave!”
“I don’t know if I can take you anywhere. You are a foreigner after all. I could get in a lot of trouble for this.” The van driver takes one last, long puff of his cigarette before throwing the butt into the gutter on the side of the road.
The winter sun warms you despite the cold, dry mountain winds. You take a look around. While most people hustle past you on their way to their next pre-pandemic errand, you notice more and more people giving you fearful glances. This group of people hustles past you, some pushing their children along, so they do not stop in your vicinity. A few of the drivers towards the end of the line gather with their buddies, talking to each other in the local Naxi language and motioning in your direction.
“Listen, sir. Please, take me to the train station. I have no other way to get there!” You muster the best Mandarin you can. After practicing with Duo Lingo for eight months, you feel a tiny hope that you can hold your own when bargaining.
The driver scoffs. “Ahhhh, I don’t know. The second we get on the highway, the traffic police are going to hassle us. If they see that you are a foreigner, they might not even let you into the city! It’s going to be a lot of trouble for me… There’s the toll fee, the gas money, plus all the extra trouble…”
“Fine. I’ll pay you an extra 100 RMB if you leave now. If we encounter any trouble, I have all my papers and a plane ticket already booked.” You lie a bit and show him a screenshot on your phone of your old plane ticket that got you into China. You know he cannot read it because it is in English.
He sighs. He nods his head towards the car, and without a word, opens the trunk for you to load in your bags. You throw everything in and scramble into the passenger seat. The minivan creeps out of the line of cars parked on the side of the road. You stick your head out the window one last time as the main road in town disappears behind a cloud of dry season dust.
The van hurtles down the winding country road along a river at 60mph. You pass police checkpoints every dozen miles, and each time, your mouth goes dry as a stern police officer looks at your documents. You half expect one of them to declare you a health risk and demand you go into quarantine.
Hours later, you reach the train station. The driver nearly falls over as he tries to lift one of your bags out of the trunk.
“So heavy! What do you keep in there?!” He rolls the bag out of the trunk and it lands with a thump on the pavement. You hoist it upright.
“Climbing gear.” You say, almost certain you messed up your Mandarin tones.
“Hah.” He chuckles. “So much stuff just for one person to go outside? That’s crazy!” He closes the door of the trunk and you hand him the cash. The two of you exchange platitudes before he gets back into the van and drives off. The train station is weirdly normal.
People have stopped giving you strange looks. There are no government loudspeakers blaring the dangers of COVID. It is… normal.
You look down at your ticket, then up at the station. Your phone starts vibrating in your pocket. A bunch of texts come through.
“You’re leaving? You don’t need to! You can stay here with us until this whole thing blows over. It can’t be more than a couple of months.”
You frantically read through your friend’s texts.
A loudspeaker turns on and an automated announcement blares out over the plaza in front of the station. “Ladies and Gentleman, train K4602 with service from Lijiang to Kunming will be departing in 15 minutes. Please have your tickets and bags ready to board through gate 2 on the second floor.”
You realize that train code is the one on your ticket. You look at the texts on your phone, then back to the train ticket, then back to your phone. This is it. This is the big split. You have to decide to stay or go.
Fleeing the Storm The Had Already Arrived
Uncertainty, Arguments, and Improving My Debate Chinese in the Time of COVID
Creaaaaaak. CLUNK.
I slammed the metal door leading into Dane’s century-old courtyard house. The thin metal shuddered and shocked me, even though I had closed that same door hundreds of times over the six years I had visited the place. I navigated in the half-light around a big bucket of recycled beer bottles in front of the ghost wall in the entryway before rounding the corner into the courtyard itself. Trash collection had all but stopped as the pandemic scared the locals in Dane’s village.
I looked up. The two mountain summits I tagged turned ink black as the sun disappeared over the west side of the Cangshan Range. The windy season gusts that defined the season–late January–were already stirring up the forest around the house.
I peeled my mountaineering boots off my feet and threw them down onto the stone floor outside the bathroom. Clods of dirt splattered across the deck. I ran my hand through my hair, oily from a few days on the 13000 foot mountains that stood just behind his house.
“Damn, I’m hungry.” I tossed my bag to the ground with a dull thud. “Thank god I decided to wait this thing out in Dali, at least I can get some dank food here.”
Dane sat on a blown out, hole-filled couch on the adjacent side of the courtyard in an alcove, watching me decommission my muddy gear. The paper light hanging above him, already deformed from being whipped in the winter winds of multiple years, swayed in the cold breeze.
I saw his expression, and had a suspicion he was about to deliver bad news.
“Uh, I don’t think anything will be open, dude.”
“You’re serious? None?” I sighed and looked down at my stomach through my sweat-stained base layer shirt, as I could feel it grumbling for some sort of saturated fat. After days of thousands of feet and many miles up in the forest and getting buffeted by gale-force wind while eating instant noodles, the craving for something massively unhealthy was overwhelming.
“The Dali government just declared a state of emergency. All of Old Town is closed.”
“ALL of it?” I said incredulously. I squatted down and started petting Lucky, Dane’s and his housemates’ half-paralyzed dog. He had mantle pressed his way out of the courtyard and onto the deck where I was standing. I scratched him underneath his chin. His jaw slackened, and his ears flopped over in delight.
“Everything was dark when I went there,” Dane said, shaking his head. “You are welcome to make something in the kitchen here.” He motioned through the old stone arch that separated the courtyard from the kitchen.
Old Town, the bustling tourist center of Dali in China’s Yunnan Province was usually busy at all hours of the day. It was full of winding streets and alleys I could regularly weave through. I could dodge the tourist traps on my way to some local restaurant or quiet noodle place tucked away behind some centuries-old stone houses. There always seemed to be something open, even if it was cheap, spicy barbecue whose grotesquely excessive chili seasoning would make for a grand but completely unwelcome exit after the following morning’s coffee.
“There has GOT to be something outside of the Old Town that is open. Where are people in town going to eat?” I reached into my pack and dug out the keys to my van.
“You can try. But I’m telling you, since you’ve been gone, shit has been really weird. No village wants anyone coming in from the outside. No foreigner. No waidiren (ethnic Chinese who move to a new area in the country). Only people who are residents in the village. I’ll go with you. I just want to see what it’s like now.” He got up and grabbed his jacket off the couch.
I turned towards the door. “Well, it isn’t that much time to get into Old Town in my van. Worth a look.”
My van lurched onto the G214 highway, the tiny lawn mower engine whirring away beneath the two front seats. The highway, 8 lanes in both directions, was deserted. The closer we got to Old Town, no new cars appeared. Most lights were off, save for the colorful, blinking LEDs that so many buildings in China are covered in. Except for me and Dane, there was not a soul out on the road. I slowed the van down to a crawl as we passed a line of restaurants that were normally packed with local diners. Every single one looked abandoned. Doors shut and locked and not a single light turned on in the buildings.
“This is f***ing creepy.” I squinted through the windshield. “I’m ready for some zombies to pop out of an alley somewhere… like 28 Days Later.” Some trash blew and skipped across the highway as I made a U-turn at the intersection for the main street of Old Town.
“I guess you should just… eat the leftovers and vegetables back at my place? It should be good. Locky made a ton of food.” Dane turned his head to look out the back window at the ghost town behind us as we sped away.
“Sure. But damn, we are going to be hungry in an hour.” I missed the shift, and the engine whined until the clutch engaged and we sped along the dark highway back to Dane’s house.
The next morning, we all sat in the courtyard of the house. The winter sun let us shed our early morning layers down to our t-shirts. Locky, Dane’s housemate, emerged from the kitchen with a pot of coffee and put it down on the table in the middle of all of us. We all sat in silence as Dane reached across the table and poured everyone a cup.
“You thinking of staying?” Locky looked over at me, squinting in the sun.
“Probably. It sounds like getting back into Liming will be a huge uphill battle, even with my papers. Sounds like they don’t want to let anyone in.” I sighed and stared down at my cup and watched the wisps of steam rise from the coffee.
Dane took a long drink out of his mug. “Well, then we should probably go do some supply shopping. Word is the police are going to close the wet market in Yinqiao. Our neighbor said she was going to stock up because the market is scheduled to close either today or tomorrow.”
“Guess we need to buy food for… weeks?” Locky said as he cracked off a piece of the loaf of the bread he made for his new bakery. His new venture was slated to open right as the world appeared to be closing down.
“Or we’ll just be living on your bread and some Snickers bars from the corner shop!” Dane chuckled as he got up from his seat to get his backpack. “Ryder, can we take the van down to town for a food run?”
“Yeah, sure.” We both grabbed the bags and headed for the door, stepping around the ghost wall and bottle bin that had not been removed since trash collection slowed from the increasingly strict lockdown.
We climbed into the van and headed down the main road out of the village. I rounded one of the narrow blind turns where the road hugged a few old houses.
“… the hell?” Dane pointed through the windshield. In front of us was a huge wedding party. It looked like almost everyone from the village was there.
Colorful flags were strung up all around the entrance of the courtyard. People brought low benches and tables out from the yard of the house and placed them on the side of the road, barely leaving any room for any vehicle to pass. I downshifted and the van slowed to a crawl. Smoke billowed from the outdoor kitchen the hosts had set up near the doorway. A wafting smell of fried pork entered the car.
“So much for coronavirus restrictions.” I peered out the window and looked at the locals surrounding the car. All of their eyes watched us as we slowly passed through the party, steam twisting up from the pork dishes the host had just delivered to the tables. There had to be at least two dozen people all staring at us. Two foreigners in a car in the middle of a pandemic leaving the village. If people were paranoid about us before, driving right through three dozen of them all simultaneously staring at us was going to make that paranoia explode.
“Well… let’s not take that road back to the house.” Dane looked out at the side view mirror. Some locals still stared in our direction as I accelerated towards the 214 highway.
By the end of an hour, Dane and I had both loaded our 50 liter packs down with produce. Green onions and broccoli stalks stuck out from beneath the brain of my pack as I handed a local vendor some change for a big chunk of tofu. I lifted the bag, water dripping out from the sides.
“That it?” I said, adjusting my pack as I walked up to Dane, who was buying a big wad of dried noodles.
“Turn around.” He motioned towards my pack. “I’m out of space in my pack. Let’s toss the noodles into yours.” He popped the clasps on the pack brain, throwing me off balance as he squashed the noodles into the top of the pack. I started up at the snow-dusted peaks above us and wondered if I would ever have the time to go back up there.
We headed back across the market square towards my car, not needing to do the traditional gentle elbow push to get through the normal market day crowds. The market was mostly empty. We passed a stand for a strawberry vendor.
I motioned towards the huge baskets of ripe strawberries. “Well, if we are going to be stuck at home for a while, we might as well stock up on the good stuff.” I grabbed two baskets brimming with big strawberries, handing the vendor the cash.
We arrived back at Dane’s house, stashing away all of the produce in the pantry while Locky kneaded dough for his next day’s bread experiment. Locky’s wife, Rio, walked in on the phone.
“… Yessir. My apologies.” She said, furrowing her brow and shooting me a worried glance. I placed the last of the onions in a bowl and gave her a confused look.
An irate male voice crackled from the speaker of her cell phone. His Mandarin was heavily inflected with the local Bai language.
“I recognize that van!” A man shouted. “He’s that foreign friend of yours who stays in his car! He shouldn’t be here! When did he arrive?” He was increasingly agitated.
“Well, sir, he arrived just a couple of days…”
“WHY ISN’T HE REGISTERED.” He gruffly cut Rio off.
“Sir, he was planning to go to the police station just now. No one was there when he first arrived since he arrived so late in the evening once everyone went home the day!” Rio’s tone was controlled, but we could all tell that she was increasingly worried about the man on the phone.
“The rules say he can’t be here! You should know better! During these times NO ONE is allowed into any village!”
“Then where can he go, sir?” Rio knew the rules were not quite what the man said. We all knew by that point that villages were going rogue and walling themselves off from the outside world. The news said doing it was technically illegal, but it did not matter out in the mountainous countryside.
The mountains high, and the emperor is far away. I thought. My favorite Chinese expression slowly morphed into a source of dread.
The village chief was making his own rules, and Rio knew that posing logic to an angry, petty local bureaucrat would not get her anywhere.
“That’s not my damn problem! You get your friend OUT of town by the end of today, or I am sending the police to your house to remove him by force!”
Click. He abruptly hung up. We all stood in silence in the kitchen.
“Who was that?” I asked, half knowing the answer based on his previous knowledge of me.
“The village chief.” Rio gave me an apologetic look. “He wants you out in the next couple of hours or else he is sending the cops to kick you out.”
“Shit. It must’ve been that wedding party we drove through.” Dane sat down at the table, staring up at the cabinet where I had just finished placing the vegetables.
“Wouldn’t surprise me. Seemed like everyone in the village was there.” The burning sensation pierced my gut. “I don’t want to get you in trouble with the locals. Ugh.. all I had to do was NOT drive through that wedding party, and everything would be fine.”
“It’s not your fault.” Dane looked over at me, running his hand through his hair and wracking his brain to find a way out. “How were we supposed to know he was there?”
“I mean, the whole damn village was there…” I shrugged. In my head, it was dawning on me that the single, stupid, mundane decision to get in the van and drive to town to buy vegetables was turning into a pivot point that was going to change what happened to me over the next month, maybe even longer.
“But this is illegal! They can’t do this if you’re registered here!” Rio was indignant, even though she knew better than to fight the local village chief.
“Listen, I don’t want to cause trouble for you guys. I can be out of here after we eat.”
We moved our lunch out into the courtyard, sitting beneath noon winter sun. As I picked up my bowl and chopsticks, I looked around slowly, taking in all of the cracked roof tiles, old timber, and huge stone pavers that made up the old house. Houses like these were getting razed to the ground in Dali, getting replaced with big concrete boxes. I wondered if the courtyard would even still exist the next time I visited. I had a suspicion it would be years.
THUNK.
I slammed the van trunk shut with the last of my climbing gear. I turned around to face Dane, Rio, and Locky. “Well, who knows when we will see you next. Hopefully sooner than later?” I reached out to give Locky a hug. Dane looked around at the villagers milling about, some watching us as we said our goodbyes.
“Yeah, I hope this doesn’t go on forever.” Dane gave me a hug and stepped back. “Best thing we can all hope for is that this thing blows over in a few months.”
“You going to go back to Canada before the spring?” I asked.
“I hope I can wait it out here. Josh, Rio, Locky, and I… we’ve all got a house here. Seems worth it to stay, boulder a bunch, and wait.” He sighed. “Hopefully there won’t be any visa trouble.”
“Alright, then. Be safe y’all. Hope to see you soon!” I climbed into the car, started up the engine and drove off towards highway 214.
The road was busier than when we had gone out to look for food. I intentionally avoided getting on the highway, worried that the traffic police would try to turn me back to Dali, since that was where my license plate came from. I knew that cops were trying to prevent people from moving anywhere outside people’s place of residence.
I spent hours winding our way through the old mountain roads. Passing roadcuts of red clay and weaving my way through steep, forested hills that separated the valleys on the eastern edge of the Himalaya. In every town I passed through, big red banners were tacked onto the sides of buildings.
Fighting the virus is your civic duty. Each and every one of us is responsible to help defeat coronavirus.
Defeating coronavirus is a national struggle. Every citizen must do their part.
I half processed the Cultural Revolution-style messages as I passed beneath a green road sign.
Jianchuan. 5 kilometers.
I zipped past the sign.
“Well, here’s the first real test.” I muttered to myself and squinted in the afternoon sun and guided the van around the corner. A series of orange traffic police cones came into view out in the distance at the bottom of the hill. I could already see a dozen yellow reflective vests of the traffic police officers’ uniforms
I rummaged through a pile of stuff on the passenger seat and my household registration from Liming, a flimsy sheet of copy paper that looked like it would barely qualify as a legitimate hall pass in a middle school.
Half a dozen people were parked in the middle of the road, their car doors ajar. Each one of them was arguing with a different police officer. I flagged one of the unoccupied officers down.
“Excuse me, sir! I was told by officials in Dali I am not allowed to remain there. I need to return to where I registered.” I flashed the paper in front of him. He took it from my hand and gave it a once-over.
“Sorry, you’re not allowed in.” He said as he handed the paper back, almost immediately turning his attention away from me.
“What do you mean? I am just transiting Jianchuan on my way to Liming. I am not stopping anywhere here!”
He waved his white cotton-gloved hand in my face, shaking his head quickly.
“What’s the problem, officer? I can’t go back to where I came from, and the only way back to Liming is through here!” I tried to suppress the anger rising in my voice. Even though my Chinese was good and my appearance was Chinese enough to avoid most trouble in these situations, I knew I was walking right up to the line where I was going to be dismissed because I was foreign.
“Listen! This isn’t about just you!” He gestured over to the group of people arguing with the other police officers. “They’re not from here either. The government of Jianchuan city says no one from the outside is allowed within city limits. PERIOD.”
An awkward silence fell between us. “So, do you know if I can reach my destination via the highway?” I said, looking back towards the car and trying to salvage enough face to continue the conversation.
“I can’t tell you for sure. You’re just going to have to get on the highway and find out yourself.” He tilted his head, picking up on a conversation a different officer was having with another stranded driver. He walked off.
I swore loudly, banking on no one around me being able to understand what I was saying. I walked back to the car and slammed the door. The highway was literally the only route I had to get home to Liming. Otherwise, I was stuck on a country road on the road to nowhere.
I picked up my phone and texted Dane.
Nothing good. No one allowed in. I have to try the highway and see what happens.
…
Good luck, bud.
I backed out of the lot, turned around, and raced towards the on-ramp. I sat in silence as my car shot across the highway. My stereo blared the Black Keys’ Gotta Get Away. The van’s tiny engine whined and struggled to maintain speed on some of the long inclines of the mountain highway.
Shangrila. Exit 221.
Driving towards Shangrila to escape a pandemic? That’s a good one. I thought as I approached the toll gate. The place was nearly empty and the gates were up. I drove straight through. Luck intervened a bit. Maybe it was easier to get back to Liming than I thought.
I approached the crossroads for Shigu and Liming, the last major obstacle between me and home. The big concrete crossroads gate had been blocked off by police cars, with only one lane getting through to the other side. Cars were in clusters on the road, some making bad attempts to line up in the traffic cones the police had put in the road.
The van came to a stop in the mess of cars. Medical tents were set up on the side of the road with people in all white PPE coming in and out. Some held clipboards and others walked up to drivers with infrared thermometer guns to take people’s temperature. A young woman in a winter jacket and a holding a clipboard in her hands moved from car to car, briefly conversing with drivers before almost reaching my van. She inexplicably turned around and headed back towards the medical tents.
“Excuse me!” I called after her. “I need to get through to go home!” I knew that my non-Yunnan accent would betray me as an outsider almost instantly.
“Sorry. Who are you and where do you live?” She turned around to face me.
“I live in Liming. Here is my household registration.” I handed my flimsy piece of copy paper to her. She took one quick look at it and shrugged.
“Sorry. You are not allowed in. Locals only.” She turned around to walk away. I got more urgent.
“Ma’am, please. I was just forced to leave Dali. I was just turned away from Jianchuan. This IS where I live! You can see that I have been here for months!” I waved my passport and paper in the air in the space between us.
We continued arguing for another minute.
“You are not FROM here. I am sorry, but I cannot let you in. You have to be a local resident. That’s the rule.” She waved me away, just as the policeman had done a couple of hours earlier. My composure cracked.
“Listen! WHERE THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO GO.” My anger started to show through, and inside, I knew that I had to commit to the indignant reaction 110% or else no one would listen to my plea. I would lose face and the checkpoint staff would wall me off. Some of the workers in PPE looked towards us. I could tell the woman with the clipboard shot them a short, embarrassed glance.
“These are the rules, sir. I’m sorry.” She tried to wriggle out of the conversation by performing her robotically memorized, bureaucratic lines.
“I know you are supposed to follow the rules!” I yelled. “I have a LOCAL REGISTRATION right here! This is the rule!” I held up the piece of paper. “What do you want me to do? Stay here on the side of the road for weeks?” I motioned to the ditch running past the medical tents. “I’ve been kicked out of Dali, I have been refused from Jianchuan, and I can’t get into Lijiang! Where do you expect me to go?” I made a wild, barely controlled gesture towards the road I drove in on.
“You’re going to have to explain to your supervisor why someone who went through the trouble to get the correct paperwork to register here is sleeping in his car on the side of the road! Come on! You work for the government! You should know the rules that the government literally just gave you! I am following YOUR rules, and here you are still telling me no!” I motioned towards the clipboard she was holding, suddenly realizing I had no idea what was attached to it. “I…”
My resolve slipped, and my Mandarin brain lost its train of thought as I came down from my adrenaline high. My translated thoughts came to a screeching halt. I felt like I was character acting and I was returning from my character’s brain into my own. My eyes darted around as I desperately looked for something to latch on to in order to continue the conversation.
The woman with the clipboard stood silently, staring blankly at me. I had gone off her government-approved script, and she had no idea how to process my strange situation. She stared at me for a beat longer before blinking hard, as if she had been woken up from a nap. She motioned towards the medical tents.
“…just… go over there and get your temperature taken.” She averted her eyes to the ground. “If you pass… you need to talk to that guy seated at the table.” She motioned to a man with a thick winter jacket.
I hailed a nurse, and her eyes widened a bit, seemingly assuming I was going to try to converse with her in English.
“I just need my temperature checked.” I said in Chinese.
She half relaxed as she robotically lifted the thermometer gun to take my temperature. I weakly said “thank you” to the nurse and walked over to the man in at the table and registered.
I clambered back into the van and drove off into the late day shadows stretching across the narrow country road for Liming.
I returned home and bunkered down in Liming in a share house I was living in with my friends Mike Dobie, Ana Pautler, Raul Sauco, and Kat Xie. The house itself was a renovated courtyard house we lovingly dubbed the Coreshot House. The five of us had grown accustomed to a level of freedom and climbing that only seemed to exist in stories. Acres of unclimbed rock to develop and a tight-knit, family feel made it feel like we travelled in a time machine back to the days of the American Stone Masters in the 70s and 80s. But the freedom we had been so accustomed to was dwindling every time we looked at the news.
Days went by, then a week. What information of the outside world we got did not inspire any of us. Flights were getting more and more sparse. It felt like the world around our little house in the mountains, squeezed into a choke point in a mountain valley barely a half mile wide, was getting smaller and smaller. The feeling we were liabilities grew stronger by the day.
After an afternoon of climbing up in the highlands above the house at El Dorado Wall, we all came back into the courtyard, already dark since the winter sun disappeared from the narrow valley floor around 3pm. I could already see my breath as we walked in.
Raul and Kat dropped their packs by the stairs and walked up to their room.
Baozi, Mike and Ana’s dog, yelped and hollered as he excitedly sprinted across the yard to meet us. He leaped up onto Ana.
“Ooooh. Hi, baby boy! Did you miss us?” She laughed and ruffled his fur.
Almost as if he was waiting for us to arrive, our landlord, Mr. Feng, appeared from around the corner that linked our courtyard to his. He was a polite man, always civil, but he always made it known what his feeling were about our behavior climbing in a place that was not used to foreigners in the area. We were a novelty to him and the locals, but the overnight change in his life that he seemed to expect from climbers arriving in Liming was not coming as fast as he may have liked. Plus, he was always the first person in town to know if the neighbors were suspicious of climbers wandering around the base of the cliffs.
His Lisu-accented Mandarin greeted us as he strode across the courtyard.
“Ruide, Doubi, A-na.” He addressed me, Mike, and Ana by our Chinese names as he looked around at us. “I heard that you were up at the El Dorado Wall today?” He looked at Mike. Mike looked at me.
“Yessir. We were up at the wall today briefly. But we didn’t stay for long. We didn’t see anyone up there either.”
“Yes, I know. The neighbors up the valley already told me. Listen. You know that these are trying times, and some of the townspeople are concerned about your presence.”
I knew where this was headed. I sighed and translated to Mike and Ana, though they had already translated enough to make a guess.
“We don’t want to cause any trouble for you, Mr. Feng. But don’t the neighbors know that we live here? They know that we are the foreigners who rent your house and live here long-term?”
“Yes, yes. They do. But right now…” He sighed. “… it’s just not prudent for you or me to have the group of you wandering around the valley. You understand? Dealing with this coronavirus is scaring people. Most people aren’t even leaving their own homes now.”
“Are we still allowed to be out on the roads? The roads are public, and we would not be near anyone’s land.” I tried to pull an end-run around these new rules. Perhaps if we could have his blessing to be out on the road, we could at least try to scout some new walls to climb when the coronavirus crisis was over.
“Yes, of course the roads are public.” He said politely but firmly. I could tell he had an idea of where I was trying to go with my statement. “But even if you are not near people’s property, they will still be concerned if you are moving around out in the village.”
We all tried to be cordial, but Mike, Ana, and I knew the underlying message: we were foreigners. We were liabilities, especially to Mr. Feng, who was the Communist Party Secretary of our village. Neighbors would fear we might carry the virus. Even though the virus originated somewhere in Wuhan, the rumor that the virus was a secret American military plot was weaving its way through Chinese state-run news and easily getting into the minds of the public. It was simple math: an unknown virus, some frightening news reports, and some foreign faces were all many locals needed to know to draw a conclusion. We were dangerous, at least for the time being.
“Yes, we don’t want to cause any more trouble for you.” I forced down the disappointment from my voice. We had multiple projects and a pile of gear cached at the base of the cliff. “We won’t go to El Dorado anymore until it is safe to do so.”
“But!” His voice brightened a bit, trying to give us a bit of a consolation. “If you really need to climb, stick to the routes you opened on my land. That is OK. But otherwise, please don’t go anywhere else.” He nodded politely, turned, and walked off.
“Soooo… Sci-Fi Wall? That’s… it? ” Ana looked at me and Mike.
“I guess? Shit, that sucks.” Mike put his bag down on the porch.
“I guess? I mean, that is the only wall that is unequivocally on his land.” I turned my head and watched Mr. Feng as he rounded the corner and disappeared from view. Baozi ran after him as Mr. Feng opened and closed the gate.
“Baozi!” Ana ran after him.
We all slowly slunk up to our rooms, unsure about how small the world would shrink around us. Our world of endless climbing and first ascents had shrunk into an area smaller than a city block.
The next day, I went for a bike ride, hoping that staying strictly on a public road would arouse no suspicion.
I’m not going near anyone’s property, I thought.
About a kilometer up from the house I spotted a roadblock. Some locals had erected a railroad-style crossbuck in the road with some big pieces of dirty cardboard laid down on the ground in front of it. They had hauled an office desk to the curb, and four men milled about the checkpoint. One of them, a man wearing a military cap cocked sideways, sprayed the dirty pieces of cardboard on the ground with disinfectant mixed in a pressurized spray box on his back.
The checkpoint guards waved me down. I got off my bike.
“Only locals past this point.” One of them said.
My shoulders sank. I was done having this conversation.
“Sir, you know me. I buy things from your shop. I live in Mr. Feng’s house!” I motioned down the road to the part of our house that was still visible through the trees.
“You just can’t enter. ”
“I…” I was done. I did not have any more fight left in me to do the same thing dozens of times over.
I turned around in silence and coasted downhill back home.
By the end of January, I knew it was time to go.
“What flights are you seeing?” Ana approached me in the frigid courtyard one morning.
“These look like the last ones for a while.” I turned the computer around. “Lijiang… Kunming… Taiwan… then the US?” The rest seem REALLY convoluted and take twice as long.”
“Yeah, that’s about what I was seeing. Mike and I are thinking about going to Nepal for some trekking. See if that is long enough for this whole thing to get under control.”
“Now I have to figure out how the hell we are going to get… to an airport 400 miles away?” I laughed and opened my phone to Qunar, the Chinese version of Kayak.
“Aren’t the trains running?” She asked.
“Yeah, but we would have to find a driver to get us to the train station… two and a half hours away.” I opened my phone and began scrolling through the contacts list. Call after call for local drivers ended in getting nowhere. No one wanted to leave the village. No one knew any rules about who could leave and who would be allowed back in.
Finally, I scrolled down to the bottom of my drivers contact list: Zhang Jianghua, The Official Climbing Driver of Shigu and Liming. I chuckled at his self-appointed title. The man knew how to hustle. Jianghua lived nearly an hour and a half away in Shigu, the biggest crossroads town in the area. I knew I would have to give him the hard sell. I pressed the call button.
“Ruide!” Jianghua picked up almost instantly. “What’s up?” His Naxi-influenced Mandarin always had a little extra energy to it.
“Jianghua! Weird request. I need to be picked up in Liming to go to Lijiang. Do you think you can do it?”
“… ahhhh, well, I can give it a try. Word is that each village on the road between me and you has police stopping non-locals from passing through.”
“I wouldn’t call them cops… but…” I stopped and thought for a moment. “Wait, what do you mean? You ARE a local Jianghua! You still can’t get through?”
“I don’t know for sure. But it sounds like if a local town’s police don’t know you or you can’t show that your address is in a particular village, they’ll turn you around on the spot.”
“Jianghua, please. I have no other way out. Everyone in Liming is scared to leave!”
“Alright, I’ll try. 350 for the trip. I’ll call you tomorrow when I get close to your place. Mr. Feng’s place, right?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.” I found it funny that a local with knowledge of all the areas around me would still not be considered a local. The coronavirus was upending everyone’s sense of who belonged in a place.
The next morning, I sat out near the entrance of the courtyard, waiting for Jianghua. My phone buzzed.
“Ruide! I can’t get to you!”
“Wait, what are you talking about, Jianghua?”
“One of the villages after Zhongxing won’t let me through their checkpoint. I’m about 7 kilometers away from your house. You need to get to me out here if you want a ride out!”
I swore and tore the phone away from my face.
“I… hold on Jianghua, I’ll ask Raul if he can drive me.”
I ran upstairs, and found Raul, who quickly agreed to drive out to the checkpoint. We loaded everything into the car and drove off, passing the entrance of the national park. I knew this was a one-way ticket.
Raul popped out of the van and talked to the local Lisu villagers manning the checkpoint. A couple of them waved at him. He returned to the car.
“The locals are OK with you coming in and out?” I asked.
“Yeah! I know a couple of those guys from Mr. Feng’s big barbecues he does for his neighbors. Sometimes it pays to know more locals.”
“Yeah… It does…” I finally started feeling my transient roots catching up with me. While I made local friends in the Liming area, I had not settled there the way Raul and Kat did. They knew locals. The locals knew them. It was a symbiotic relationship that allowed them to stay in town with much less hassle as the lockdown grew tighter.
We reached the checkpoint a few kilometers later where Jianghua’s van was waiting. The “barrier” keeping him from getting to us was a series of old pieces of found plywood, crudely nailed together into a long bar that crossed the road. A few traffic cones the locals likely poached from the traffic police sat in the roadway. Beside the road sat a blue, military-style pop-up canvas tent with the characters “Emergency Medical Tent” emblazoned on the sides.
Around ten local men milled around the tent, but all quickly came to attention as our car approached. They all seemed to be surrounding the one man who was holding a clipboard. We got out of the car and began transferring gear between Raul’s van and Jianghua’s van. None of the local men offered to help move the gear. They all stood silently. Their heads moving in unison like a herd of sheep as we ran around their flimsy barrier, hurriedly loading luggage. Jianghua closed the last of the gear into the trunk.
“Well, Raul. I’ll see you when I see you?” We stood in the middle of the road and gave each other a hug, made awkward by the fact we were both wearing enormous puffies.
“Yeah! Hope it’s sooner rather than later. Come to Spain if that’s where Kat and I end up!” He jumped back into the driver’s seat, spun the car around and drove off, the ten men turning their heads in unison again from watching Raul’s car to Jianghua as he clambered into his car.
“Alright, let’s see what happens!” I joked weakly with Jianghua as we drove off, leaving the men and the tent behind in a cloud of dry-season dust.
We passed through Zhongxing, encountering what looked like three soldiers–or just three guys who liked wearing army colors– marching down the street. One in front was blaring patriotic tunes from a hip belt speaker as he waved an 8 foot-long flag across the road. The two men behind him sprayed the pavement with bleach.
We rounded the corner out of Zhongxing and emerged onto the road along the side of the Jinsha River, the river that flowed down through the Himalaya to the northwest and Tiger Leaping Gorge to the north. I rolled my window down , stuck my head out and sucked in as much of the mountain air as I could in 15 seconds, and I wondered how long my brain would retain memories of the smell. I watched the river water shine in the early morning light as Jianghua broke the local speed limit by a factor of three. My phone vibrated.
CHECK IN FOR YOUR FLIGHT TO TAIPEI AND SEATTLE
I put my phone down, stuck my head out the window one more time, and stared back across the river.
PS: On an interesting note, the village chief who evicted me from the village near Dali was arrested a couple of months after the incident. He was arrested on charges of price gouging for PPE, something the Chinese government had quickly made a crime in the early days of the pandemic lockdown. He was taken away by police and stripped of his position as village chief. We never found out what happened to him after that.