China Road 2 - So Far Away

8/9/2019 China Road 2 - So Far Away

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This is a draft of my second story from the upcoming nonfiction travelogue The ChinaRoad Motorcycle Diaries.

The China Road Motorcycle DiariesSo Far Away

Carla King

The China Road Motorcycle Diaries 1 Carla King
http://carlaking.com/http://carlaking.com/


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2

So Far Away

A man pushes his way through the girls and speaks in sharp tones that makes them stop

giggling and stand aside. He is very young and so thin that his brown wool pinstriped suit

hangs on him in folds like on a coat hanger. His hair is carefully clipped and gelled into a

stiff American fifties-style flat-top, with one lock left long to hang rakishly in his face.

He tosses his head back to fling the lock out of his eye, and says something to me that

makes the girls laugh nervously and flutter a little farther away.

I greet him with a Chinese hello and a look straight in the eye, and the girls giggle again,

their hands flying up to cover their mouths. Sighing, he beckons me to his office, a lit

doorway just in front of us, and takes me by the arm to guide me inside. Surprisingly, he

is a few inches taller than I, perhaps 5 feet 10 inches tall..

The girls follow us in but after few sharp words from the boss they recede into the

darkness and we are left alone in the office: a square concrete box with a steel desk and a

ratty Naugahyde couch bursting at the seams. I fish through the pockets of my black

leather motorcycle jacket and hand him 20 yuan, the amount the woman at the gas station

had quoted. He laughs and pushes it back to me. I am too tired to go through an extended

haggling process, and too tired to remember that I am desperate for sleep. After riding all

day in the heat, after the stress of being lost, the uncertainty of the motorcycle, finding

gasoline, night falling unmercifully black and those tiny villages with fires and stray pigs

and white-trunked trees, I am exhausted, and I could strangle him for what he is doing,

opening drawers to find a pencil so that he can write the digits 200 on a piece of paper,ten times price the woman at the gas station had quoted.

I hold the paper and we stand silently together on the stained burgundy carpet. It is as thin

as denim, and glued badly onto the concrete floor. The walls are covered in crackling

stucco, and the sagging ceiling is stained with water. The black and white television set is



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turned on full volume, the sound horribly distorted. Two attractive anchorpeople, a man

and a woman, report the news. Their announcements are a combination of guttural and

singsong nasal whining. Footage of a public execution flits across the screen: two

kneeling men, blindfolded with hands bound behind their backs, a mass of enraged or

excited people. Would they be shot or beheaded or hanged? Then they show blond

Russian children digging through a vast garbage dump for scraps of food, followed by

stills of President Clinton who is due to visit in a few months. Id seen the same footage

in Beijing, over and over and over again. It is 1998, the year that China would remove

borders and other barriers to sharing in first world wealth.

I study the piece of paper. I could counter with thirty, and he would insist upon 100, and I

would write down thirty five, and he would then write fifty, and then I would hand him

forty. He would take it, and I really should do all that except that the woman at the gas

station already gave me the price of twenty yuan and in my exhausted state Im not

thinking about all the trouble I will cause here with paperwork and lack of language and

writing skills and my need for hot water. I shove the paper back at him and explain in

succinct English that the owner told me it was twenty yuan and twenty yuan was all I was

damn well going to pay and hadnt he heard that the days of Foreigner price were over. I

wave the twenty toward the gas station and tell him that if he thinks Im going to pay two

hundred for a dump like this he was crazy and I push it into his hand. He takes it with a

little shrug and a smile that means, Well, I had to try, and I stomp back to the

motorcycle but its not there any more. Stunned, I look around and see, with no little

relief, that it had only been pushed away into the crook of the L-shaped compound near

the wooden gates. I feel the manager watching me as I stomp across to it. I jerk my

suitcase out of the sidecar, unlock and open the trunk to get my computer case and

camera, and two of the girls suddenly appear to escort me to my room.

The hallway is glassed in, and we step up two shallow stairs onto the same thin, wrinkled

burgundy carpet that was in the managers office, and even more blotched. Standing by

each door is a little yellow pot decorated delicately with pink fleur-de-lis, a quarter full of

water. As I puzzle over the purpose of these, moths bash themselves to death on the bare



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light bulbs in front of each door, falling in the collected heap in front of each threshold.

Every tiny impact creates a tinging sound that is just audible over the sound of a river.

The room is a concrete box. One of the girls pushes by me to rush in and turn on the

television set at full volume. The other girl walks in behind me bearing a thermos of hot

water and a small, thin towel. I walk into the bathroomit built into the corner of the

room like an afterthought, with walls that fall short of the ceiling by a foot. The hot water

tap runs cold, as does the cold water tap. I request more thermoses of hot water, and she

returns shortly with three more.

I put my suitcase on the double bed and the girls come closer as I unzip it. I packed very

little but carefully; a Gortex rain suit, a fine-gauge, bicycle-weight wool sweater, long

silk underwear, thick hiking socks and boots, sports-bras and tights, quick-dry shirts and

a toiletries kit with neat little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, moisturizer and

sunscreen and a clear plastic bag full of bottles of medicines I might need.

I wonder how to get the girls out of my room so I can have some privacy, and then the

manager strides in, barking at the girls, who wander out reluctantly. Alone again, he

looks at me and sighs, then hands me a form, knowing that this is going to be an ordeal

for its in Chinese and Im illiterate. We settle ourselves down at the fake walnut desk at

the foot of the bed and study the form and my passport, attempting to figure out which

information goes in which box. After studying each others documents, we look up at each

other, shrug, and begin.

I ought to have asked a clerk in a Beijing tourist hotel to give me a form that was printed

in both English and Chinese, as a reference, but I didnt, and so with a combination of my

phrasebook, sign-language, grimaces, and some laughter, we manage to fill out about a

third of the boxes when he abruptly pulls the paper away, indicating thats all thats

required. Now that we were done I wished that I had given him more money. He was

really just a very young man trying to be a big deal, and I had already been a lot of

trouble because of the form and demands for many thermoses of hot water. Maybe Id



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give him twenty more, anyway, in the morning. That was tourist price anyway, even

though China had officially revoked the two-price policy.

I put my passport away and we walk outside, parting ways as he returns to the office and

I go to cover and lock the motorcycle. Suddenly, a large blue truck roars in at an alarming

speed, just at the place where Id first parked the motorcycle. No wonder theyd moved it

it would have been run over. Two girls in peach polyester pyjamas run to the door as it

opens. One literally catches the driver as he falls from the high truck cab waving a

nearly-empty bottle in his hand like a prize. It drops to the ground, empty and unbroken,

and the girls help him, stumbling, to a room next to the managers office. The door

remains open for a moment, and I hear the sound of retching. Two different girls break

the passenger fall out of the truck and drag him to a different room.

So fabulous, this is who Im sharing the road with. Id been warned that these big blue

trucks were piloted by drivers fueled by amphetamines and alcohol. Theyd would be my

most frequent companions on the road, though that was changing, fast. Even though

private cars have been allowed for many years, most Chinese havent been able to afford

them, and so trucks and official vehicles make up ninety percent of the traffic out here in

the country.

I lock and cover the bike to discourage theft and to hide the attention-getting black

Beijing plates, go back to my room, the door of which, I now notice, doesnt have a lock.

But Id brought a solution for thatan alarm that worked by sliding into the doorjamb. If

the door opened, a piercing alarm would sound.

I pour the hot water from the thermoses into a red plastic basin on the bathroom floor and

took a sponge bath. Brushing my teeth, I peer out from between the tattered curtains to

catch the action in the compound. Apparently I had arrived just ahead of rush hour. Blue

truck after blue truck roar in, their drivers and passengers falling out like the first ones,

spilling empty bottles of high-octane liquor. From the courtyard the sound of broken

glass and giggling penetrates my walls. The same scene occurs again and again, the girls



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in orange pajamas dragging drunken truckers to their rooms. I am forgotten.

I settle into bed and try to sleep, but my mind turns over and over on the problems of my

trip. I am traveling without a license, nor permissions of any sort from the Chinese

government or mine, and risk arrest at any moment. In addition, the first day into the

countryside I found that I couldnt rely on road signs or local people to tell me the way.

Since I just generally wanted to head west, that didnt matter so much. I had no particular

place to be at any certain time. But it is also now obvious that hotels are difficult to find.

Although I still doubt my trip is dangerous, since I felt perfectly safe even in this brothel,

I wonder if I'm not taking too much of a risk this time. Tomorrow will be the time to turn

back if I'm going to, only one days ride from Beijing.

I miss Beijing. In Beijing people interacted with me. Foreigners are not rare, and they

laugh good-naturedly when I practice my traveler's Mandarin. They willingly look at

maps and point me in the right direction. I miss hanging out with Teresa, the agricultural

attach at the US Embassy. We rode motorcycles together through the countryside before

I left, and the farmers were astonished at us, the motorcycles, and at her fluent Mandarin.

She talked endlessly with them about the state of the crops, the weather, and whether the

government had paid them in cash or pink IOU slips. Tonight, at the brothel, I long for

Beijing.


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China Road 2 - So Far Away