A long trip was in the works, but not to China. With the school term in Thailand at an end, and a month spent training at a Thai massage school over, I had hoped to island hop through Indonesia for six weeks. Fellow travelers had scoffed at my first idea of going to India—“You need at least six months there, otherwise don’t bother.” But my father made clear there would be no thousand dollars for either of these countries, much as he loved The Year of Living Dangerously and A Passage to India. If I wanted the money, it would have to be China—and bring back that spittoon.
I, too, had seen The Last Emperor. But I chose as my inspiration a little book called From Heaven Lake, by Vikram Seth, the author of the massive novel A Suitable Boy. After studying at Nanjing University in the early eighties, Seth had traveled overland across China, through Tibet, and back home to New Delhi and then written a backpacking travelogue about his adventures. It would be fun to follow him, or at least to trace his path along the Chinese portion of the Silk Road. With the bonus from my dad, if I budgeted carefully, I could last six weeks on fifteen dollars a day.
Throughout my year in Thailand, I had discovered the pleasures of reading about the places where you actually were; before living in Asia, I’d tended to read about the faraway—even when I was far away, perversely reading about Iowa, for example, while in France. Only now did I realize that if you read about where you were physically, you might get more out of it. I discovered a whole number of travelogues—not only Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia, but also Redmond O’Hanlon’s Into the Heart of Borneo, Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu, Alexander Frater’s Chasing the Monsoon—whose authors’ daring filled me with awe and determination. I could never do what they’d done (once again my solitary female status counted against me), but I desperately wanted to and I was certainly going to try. This trip to China would be my chance.
It began inauspiciously in ürümqi. An ethnic Chinese outpost on the Silk Road stretch between Kashgar and Xi’an, ürümqi is the capital of the western Uighur Autonomous Region, sprawling and industrial and unappealing. The Uighur Autonomous Region is so despised by the Han Chinese, it had served as a place of exile during the more punishing years of Communist rule, and was still populated primarily by Uighurs and Kazakhs, nomadic goatherds of Siberian origin: Muslim, Turkic-language speaking, yurt dwelling. Whenever I looked especially lost in ürümqi, someone asked if I was Pakistani.
As soon as I disembarked from my first Chinese domestic carrier (not safe, by the way), I realized I’d made a serious miscalculation. Where was the vaporizing heat? From Heaven Lake’s opening chapter, “Turfan: July in the Desert,” noted, “The only way to remain even tolerably cool in Turfan is to pour cold water on your head and let your hair dry in the air.” This, Seth wrote, “happens in minutes and the process can then be repeated.”
This was not true, however, in nearby ürümqi in April, when I arrived from the sweltering summer season of Thailand. Somehow, my brain had processed summer in Thailand as summer everywhere. Though my first moments standing on the austere and gusty tarmac in my cotton fisherman’s pants were jarring, I stuck with the plan and booked a tour to the magnificent-sounding Heaven Lake. Vikram Seth had described it as “an area of such natural beauty that I could live here, content, for a year.” According to my guidebook, it was as if a sliver of Canada had been plunked down in the barren depression of the Taksim desert. It may be slightly cooler there, I reasoned, donning a windbreaker and tucking an extra pair of socks into a knapsack before stowing the rest of my luggage in a locker.
Heaven Lake certainly seemed like a popular destination. Though there were few tourists at the airport, a throng of guides competed to sign us up for various packages. My little expedition included a Korean football player and a towering former East German border guard. Our guide was a Kazakh dressed in heavy-metal black; he looked about sixteen. The German stared me down and proceeded to interrogate me like a disapproving Stasi officer. “You go on yurt trip as one? Girl alone?”
“Yup, you?” I blinked back. “All by yourself, I take it?” No one in my group really spoke English, but the three others each knew some Mandarin and carried on a stilted conversation among themselves. I wouldn’t have minded had there been something else to do. But shortly after we arrived at Heaven Lake, the sky dulled into a desolate gray. The horseback ride component of the vacation package ended early, our numb hands unable to manipulate the reins.
By two o’clock in the afternoon it had grown weirdly dark, especially weird because although it is geographically about four time zones away from Beijing, ürümqi runs on centralized Beijing time, which meant it was really approximately ten in the morning. The Korean football player squinted at the menacing sky and muttered something in Mandarin; the others nodded solemnly. We lumbered back to the yurt. Feeling betrayed by Vikram Seth, I switched allegiances and picked up the only other book I’d brought with me, Jung Chang’s memoir Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. I sped through the last chapters in the fading light.
Unfortunately, I went too fast and was left with nothing else to read. My other books were in storage back in ürümqi because I assumed I wouldn’t have time to read with all the frolicking at Heaven Lake, which at this point was spiked by piercing cold winds. Now I was trapped in the yurt with no reading material, no one to talk to, and I was hungry. A Kazakh woman cooked our promised meals in a suspect chunk of gray lard, animal origin unknown; sluggish bubbles of fat coagulated in the cauldron of water she used to make tea. No Nescafé for me in the morning, thank you! We were each given a hunk of Kazakh bread that, like a teething biscuit, was malleable enough to be chipped off and swallowed only after a protracted suckle and gnaw.
The others were having fun. The Kazakh rocker whipped out a flask of medicinal-smelling whiskey, and he, the German, and the Korean passed it around, chattering merrily at one another in basic Mandarin, looking askance at me like an intrusive item that had accidentally blown in through the yurt flap. They finally offered some whiskey, but I declined, retreating under a musty pile of ancient blankets. After several hours of repressing my bladder to avoid exploring the outdoor “facilities,” I fell asleep, conquered by the ennui.