White Devil's Long March

We had landed in my nightmare. Yichuan was a perpetual public works project, as if people just kept breaking ground as needed until an uncommitted city appeared. It was the final stop on Mao's Long March and had the eerie sense of being the “Made in China” China my conscience had dreaded. Neverending factories, once built to showcase China's pride in it's communist self-sufficiency now drove capitalism. It was often overcast and when it wasn't, the sun shone with indifference. In Yunnan the sun loved you. In Shaanxi, it stared at you.

We had checked into weirdly opulent rooms in a kafka-esque hotel in the lap of some back alley. A mean looking place that would have been more comfortable rubbing shoulders with a mental ward. And at that moment I realized that in this remaining bastion of true Chinese communism, opulence must be hidden in a shack.

Outside the people stared at the white devil. Most were trying to figure out exactly what sort of creature I was. A pack of three young men had already formed a semi circle, keeping a fairly respectful distance but staring at me in a way that made me wonder if I had clothes on.

Take a right turn from just about anywhere into any dark alley and you wind up in the market. Markets are a good place to hide from determined suitors and I lost my entourage in a casserole of vegetables and hanging meats, candy and random fish bits but continued to collect more of them in my desperate attempt to maintain my anonymity. For a foreigner, Yichuan was a landscape of coma dreams. A world where you exert a sort of strange significance to the slightly sinister denizens. Where it really is All About You because you are an alien. This was racism at it's most heinously pleasant.

Eventually we returned to Beijing, to being casual oddities. I was able to order a coffee in my now broken-Mandarin. There was no violent admiration. Just a gentle curve of the mouth that said "Welcome to my establishment, Alien Friend. Sit anywhere you want"