Earth and everywhere on it

A 10 AM walk through the farmland of rural hamlet Xingping in southern China was the last stop of my 6 weeks through Hainan, Yunnan, and Guilin before I returned to my school in Zhejiang. The walk was supposed to yield interesting visual fodder for my blog, like the one-legged goose by the side of the road and the fields enclosed by gloomy limestone reapers hovering in the distance.

There was only one road outside of the town, so I thought little of the two young men following behind me. I paused to let the boys pass and take a picture of delicate purple flowers I’d never seen. I continued on. Around the bend next to a stacked stone aqueduct, I suddenly found my arms pinned behind me by one man and the other sticking a knife in my chest. My big China trip was not supposed to end with me dying in a hushed farm field.

A farmer with a pole across his shoulders stood nearby and watched. The men pushed me to the ground and searched my pockets, took my camera, and my bag. I got up and ran.

Blurring past the flowers and the one-legged bird, I felt a thumping against my leg; they had not taken my mobile.

Despite my bleeding chest, no one I encountered in the road was willing to tell emergency assistance where I was. After I pleaded with a group of women washing clothes in the river, a man nearby reluctantly took my phone and told the police where to collect me.

The rural, eroding hospital did not ease my psyche. Xingping is a town a half-mile long, where IVs were administered in the street. Repairing my chest seemed precarious. As the doctors administered anesthesia to my right breast, the police looked on. The police took pictures with my wound against a ruler; I stared at the bug on the ceiling.

But the adventure is not that I was robbed and stabbed. The adventure is that instead of returning to the US, I continued living in China for a year and a half longer. I traveled to more places in China and to Korea, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam. My travel adventure is that I continue having adventures despite knowing the world's wonders are still the real world.