The plane approaches Shanghai, drops through the mustard-yellow air and touches the tarmac. I’m thinking, “What in the world am I doing?”
I’m a grandmother with no Chinese language skills. I’m cautious, avoid rush-hour traffic and head home to roost by dusk. But periodically, it seems as though a full moon lines up with my passport and, ZAP, like the pull of the tides, I’m tugged off to an adventure.
This adventure starts by meeting Randolph, a stranger, at the Shanghai airport to join a group of eight more American strangers and head across China with backpacks on a plant-hunting trip. I consider Randolph the “Indiana Jones” of plant collecting. His worldwide trips yield botanical material for his nursery.
I enter the airport and spot my name on a cardboard sign held by Randolph. I imagined he’d look like Harrison Ford teaching at the university before leaving on his adventures. Instead, Randolph looks as though he’d been pursued through jungles by foes, then treed by a rhinoceros. He introduces Chan, his interpreter.
Our group begins collecting plant material in the lowlands, where the air feels hot and humid, like opening a dishwasher partway through the wash cycle and sticking one’s head inside. We travel on a workman’s boat on the Yangtze River. Then we hike beyond the Three Gorges Dam to a Taoist temple high in cone-shaped mountains, the view resembling a scene embroidered on a silk scarf. At night in the thin, cold air, I shiver even in my coat and down sleeping bag.
Finding water to disinfect for drinking becomes a challenge, never mind for bathing and washing clothes. I glance at myself.
At mom-and-pop eateries, we stick to noodles, rice and cooked vegetables. We encounter startled looks from farmers who have never seen foreigners. Then, two days before I’m to leave China, I realize I haven’t chosen a person to help.
My greatest surprise on these overseas forays has been the depth of poverty I’ve found. I can’t “heal all the hurts,” but the alternative is to do nothing. So I determine to help at least one person on each trip through money, services or labor. In China, I’ve been assuming I’ll find a young orphan girl to help.
Randolph locates a farmer rumored to be a “keeper of botanical knowledge” who leads us into remote hills. The farmer’s stiff black hair covers a small head on a scrawny body. Chan says he speaks a local dialect that’s hard to understand.
Alongside the trail, the agile farmer bounds into the underbrush like a fox after a meal. He reaches into a tangle of leaves and holds up a pod that resembles a Christmas bauble covered with red kernels like pomegranate seeds. “Snake bite cure,” translates Chan.
At nightfall, while we clean and label seeds by candlelight, Chan shares stories of this farmer. His mother came from a family of landowners and his father reportedly was a war hero. He suffered a head injury that left him “a little slow,” is now in some kind of disgrace and lives in a house with a leaky roof. He possesses 100 pages of his genealogy and family history, which includes tales of political intrigue and local family life. The papers are now rain-damaged.
Clear as tapped crystal, I know: I’ll help this farmer preserve his history. First, obtain dry copies. The village has no copy machines. I suggest the farmer bring his genealogy and join us on our bus ride to the city. I’ll pay for copies and a round-trip bus ticket. The next morning, the farmer shows up with his pockets bulging with papers.
When we reach the city, Chan keeps the farmer close to him. Some of us head to a hotel to get ready to fly to Shanghai the next morning and Chan guides others to the train station. The plan: after Chan gets his group on the train, he and the farmer will join me in locating a copier.
Hours later, they haven’t arrived. At dusk, Chan finally appears — without the farmer. He’d told him to sit on a bench until the travelers got off, but the farmer disappeared. Chan notifies the police, who search without success. The farmer is miles from home in an unfamiliar world.
“Oh no,” I think. “I’m a ‘do-gooder foreigner’ who’s made a situation worse. I’ve lost the farmer!”
The next day, as I board a plane, Chan assures me he’ll stay an extra day to continue his search.
A month later, Chan writes that he couldn’t locate the farmer. But two months later, he requests several hundred dollars’ reimbursement for making copies and returning to the farmer’s village, where Chan finally found him. The farmer had moved to better housing. Now he has a dry copy of his genealogy. Chan forwards a copy to me.
Fift pages covered with Chinese characters. I take them to native-born Chinese teachers at area universities. They report that the writings are ancient characters that they can’t translate.
I’m unsure whether the farmer got any money from Chan or from his genealogy. But I don’t regret choosing him as the one to help by providing dry copies of his papers. What value can a person place on one’s history?
Still weary from the arduous trip, I resolve never to travel again. At dusk, I go into the backyard and lounge in a lawn chair. A full moon rises above the hills.
Everybody has a Story welcomes nonfiction contributions, 1,000 words maximum, and relevant photographs. Email is the best way to send materials so we don’t have to retype your words or borrow original photos. Send to: neighbors@columbian.com or P.O. Box 180, Vancouver WA, 98666. Call “Everybody Has an Editor” Scott Hewitt, 360-735-4525, with questions.
