The other day I found myself in Jiangcheng (江城) again. (Where is Jiangcheng?). Jiangcheng is a border town in the south of Yunnan. Its shops and restaurants display their names in Chinese, Laotian and Vietnamese. Jiangcheng feels south-east Asian through and through, with palm trees, soft humidity and warmth, and brown-skinned Dai minority folks. It has also a basic, but very clean hotel that features only suites with giant beds, a generous rain shower and a separate room with a Majiang table.

“You’ve told us about a town that has a great massage place,” one of my Swiss customers asked.

“This isn’t it, but I have seen a foot massage place near the hotel before. I can check it out for you, if you like,” I replied.

“That would be great!”
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In 2007, when I drove this bright-eyed yellow sports car

21,000km through China, from the Yangtze’s mouth in China’s glitziest city, Shanghai, to its source in the Tibetan highlands where all that I encountered was a Yak, practically everyone whom I met asked me 3 questions: How fast? How much? What do you do when it rains? Even though very few people I met in China had ever seen a convertible and no one I met had ever seen a Caterham in the flesh, one thing was clear: they all aspired to have a car. That much was obvious from their longing looks and, on occasion, gentle caresses of the car’s body.

Earlier this year the news came that China had overtaken the U.S. as the world’s largest automobile market. China really has arrived, I thought to myself, and its ascendency has been as smooth a ride as that in a Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham. Will China’s ride continue to be as smooth, I wondered.
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In late 2009 I learned about a remarkable story. It is the story of a couple who lived in Shandong province, told by their son Jian Bo, a renowned photographer, who works at China’s State Council News Office where he heads the Art Photo Library. In 1974 he began to record with his camera the life of his parents. In December 1998, a collection of these photos became the subject of an exhibition at the China National Art Gallery. His parents were there to cut the ceremonial ribbon whereby the exhibition was declared open. The exhibition was celebrated by the media as one that “moved the capital and stirred the entire nation”. That year, Jian Bo’s collection of photos was awarded the grand prize in an international competition of photos documenting traditional folk life and customs.

In the spirit of these pages — to tell my cnounters with and the stories of ordinary Chinese people — I’ve decided to publish this story here. I’ve attempted to contact Jian Bo to ask for permission to do so, but have not received a reply. I hope that when he finds out he won’t object to my sharing his story with all of you.

To view the original Chinese version, please follow this link. Jian Bo’s blog site is here. (为了看看原中文版的故事，请点击这个链接.)

And now, here is the story of Jian Bo’s parents….
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If I were a cloud,
I would stop flying high in the sky,
Instead, I would choose to change into rain drops that alight on the world of men.
If you ask me why,
Please look upon the verdant lands of life,
And that would be my answer.

If I were a river,
I would stop rushing toward the ocean,
Instead, I would choose to irrigate the dry wheat fields of Shaan’Xi [province].
If you ask me why,
Please listen to the joyous laughter of my uncles, the farmers,
And that would be my answer.
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Shan Qiong Shui Jin Yi Wu Lu, Liu An Hua Ming You Yi Cun (山穷水尽已无路，柳暗花明又一村). Thus goes a Chinese saying: “The mountains are steep and forbidding, the rivers deep and ferocious, will I ever get out of here? Suddenly, there are calm willows swaying in the breeze and myriad flowers blooming in fine fields. And look!, there is after all another village.”

And so I felt when I arrived, late on Tuesday afternoon in Kongdang, a hamlet by the Dulong River. Driving for nine hours west in the direction of Burma on a ninety six kilometre long dirt road from Gongshan, a small town in the upper reaches of the Nu River valley, I was wondering all along whether and what kind of dwellings I would find at the other end. Kongdang, the seat of the Dulong River Township government, proved to be not as enchanting as the Chinese poem suggests: there are no forests of peaceful willows and no fields of blooming flowers, only a few sleepy houses, one dilapidated hotel, a police barrack and a handful of ruggedly clad farmers milling about in the village’s only street. But seeing the crystal clear, rapidly flowing waters of the Dulong River that are a kaleidoscope of blue, green and frothy white, and recalling as well the day’s memories of utter remoteness and untouched nature, I was not only delighted to have arrived, but enchanted by the loveliness of this remote corner of China.
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A recent driving trip of mine to Tibet ended in Yunnan’s Shangri-la.   From there I returned to Hong Kong by plane.  My flight from Shangri-La to Kunming was scheduled to depart at 8:55am. The driver of the taxi that took me to the airport was a burly Tibetan fellow with a comfortable smile and an infectious laugh. The ride from my hotel to the airport was to take all but 10 minutes.

At the south-end of Shangri-La town there sits a large stupa at the centre of an expansive round-about. As we approached it, I expected the driver to turn right and whirl around it counter-clockwise (as is the custom in right-hand-side driving countries). Instead, he turned left and swung around it clockwise. Even though there was no traffic coming at us, I cried out in alarm, “What are you doing? Aren’t you supposed to go the other way round?

“No, in the mornings we’ve got to go around it this way,” he assured me with his warm smile.

As he said it, I recalled that Tibetans circle all holy things, including stupas, clockwise. “From when to when is this rule in effect?” I asked him incredulously.

“No ‘from’. Just before 10am,” he explained.

“And what if an infidel should come the other way round?” I couldn’t resist pursuing the argument to its inevitable conclusion.

“There might be a crash,” he said with a dead-pan face.

“Alright, let’s go and find a place for lunch. But let’s make it a quick one. We don’t wanna end up way behind in the queue,” I conclude after having considered for thirty minutes or more Jo’s suggestion that a meal would be a good thing by now.

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We had arrived in Gang Tuo at 9:15 in the morning. (Where is Gang Tuo?). Now it is 12:30. And no one has as yet any idea as to when we will be able to get going again. We had set out from Dege in northwest Sichuan. (Where is Dege?) at 7am on our way to Changdu, our first overnight stop in Tibet. (Where is Changdu?). We had reached the border between Sichuan and Tibet at 8:15 after crossing the Yangtze, already wide and deep here in its upper reaches.

Leading to the border, the valley was wide and the road excellently paved. A few hundred meters after crossing into Tibet, the situation changed dramatically, however.
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My friend couldn’t contain his giggles as he sat down to have dinner with me in a Hong Kong restaurant. “I just bought the funniest of books,” he declared and proceeded to pull it out of his bag. The book is called “More Chinglish: Speaking in Tongues” and is a collection of poor English translations of Chinese words and sentences. Even though my friend was born and raised in Hong Kong and therefore must have seen countless such examples, he couldn’t help guffawing over the gems in the book he had just acquired. Here is a particularly funny one:

(You must know that traditionally Chinese was and still is, as in this example, written right to left.)
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Yesterday, when I was on my way to a China Mobile shop in Chengdu, I saw an Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) branch that was emblazoned with the lovely green logo that identifies this countryside bank. As the taxi drove by, my head swivelled around because I have fond memories of ABC.

It was a good two-and-a-half years ago that I spent many months in Beijing preparing for my epic driving journey through China in Miss Daisy (see www.ontheroadinchina.com/nokiadiscoverchina). One of the myriad preparatory tasks was to open a bank account since it would not have been wise to carry tens and tens of thousands of Yuan in cash with me. If it had been overseas, an international credit card would have been the obvious choice, but in China that would not have gotten me very far, certainly not in the country side. The question then was: which bank? China has many banks, some small, some medium sized and a few large ones such as Bank of China and China Construction Bank. The mother of them all is Agricultural Bank of China. It had, when I checked last, 400,000 employees (that’s after having been trimmed down substantially in the past ten years) and branches nearly everywhere, even in the remotest corners of the country. ABC’s smart green logo brightens up even the dimmest of places. ABC was to be my bank.
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We – Olimpia, Luo Sang, Gary, Anne, Lei and I – prepare to leave the Yading Nature Reserve [Where is the Yading Nature Reserve?]. A man approaches Gary’s car. Gary rolls down the window. They talk. I see Gary shaking his head. I wonder what the man wants. Does he want to collect a parking fee? He comes over to my car. I roll down my window. When he sees me he says “But you’re not the driver…” I reply, “Yes, I am. What’s up?” He says he’s to tell me that “you have a severe case of altitude sickness”. In less than a heart-beat, my body floods with adrenaline and I know who he’s talking about: Angie is mortally ill. My eyes fill with mist. I jump out of the car and run as fast as my legs will carry me over to Gary’s car. I yell, “Angie is suffering severely from altitude sickness, I must go ahead first. Don’t try to follow. Please drive safely. The drops are steep.” I dash back to my car, apologise to Olimpia and Luo Sang that this will be a rough ride, but that they needn’t worry. My lungs heave. I breathe in fear and breathe out urgency. I talk to myself, “I must get to Angie. I must get there now.” And then “Don’t drive too fast, you have other lives in your hands.”
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