The vast western hinterlands of China have always been an alluring mystery to me.
Out there, not quite high enough to be Tibetan steppes but still thousands of feet above sea level, those lands represent a picture of China I rarely see in Beijing. The people there worship different gods. They eat lamb on skewers, yak yogurt and thick noodles in a fermented vinegary sauce. They speak other languages, and many don’t look Han at all. Their way of life and value systems stand in contrast to the dominant Han culture. To what extent does the idea of an overarching Chinese identity include diverse peoples like them?
Parts of these lands aren’t especially open to foreigners, even though I look ethnically Chinese. In Xining, the capital of Qinghai province, I booked a hotel that I had purposely booked to be close to a bus station where I could buy a direct ticket to the little town of Chaka. When I rushed over early in the morning after picking on a modest breakfast of eggplant stir fry and fried noodles, I was told that foreigners weren’t allowed to take the “tourist bus.” I had to pry out of a woman at the ticket counter the information that I was supposed to buy tickets at another bus station. I took a 20-minute taxi ride to the next stop. There was no line, and one-way tickets were reasonably cheap, for 65 kuai. As I boarded the bus and showed my passport, a random man who wasn’t dressed in a security uniform walked up and berated me, “You’re a foreigner? A laowai? Where did you buy your ticket? You have to buy your ticket at the window because you’re a foreigner. Where did you buy your ticket?!” A woman security guard next to him said gently, “She bought it at the window, you can see her ticket here.”
I climbed on the bus and settled into a narrow window seat. Space was tight, and my thighs kept rubbing against the knees of the large man sitting next to me, which only made my seat hotter as the sun beat down. The air conditioning vent above merely shifted hot air around. We drove for five hours, passing sheep and yaks grazing on green slopes under gray clouds. In the distance, mountain peaks were capped with snow. At the first pit stop, a man and woman came aboard selling cobs of corn from bucket pails and hardboiled eggs from little plastic bags. At the second one, I went to the outhouse in the back, focused my eyes on the patch of concrete in front of me, squeezed my gluts and chanted in my head, do not fall into the hole.
As light rain drizzled down, the bus trundled into Chaka Town in the middle of nowhere. We stopped at a corner of the town’s one main traffic light. The skies were muddy colored. No one was on the streets except for a taxi or two. I walked to my hotel and checked into my room. I was the only guest checking in that afternoon, though I later heard through the thin walls doors sounds of slamming and voices of a few Chinese families. In my room, I peeked out the window and was startled to come face to face with a crew of construction workers. They were building the floor of another hotel on the same level as my room. That hotel will someday completely block my room’s panoramic view of Chaka Salt Lake. Was that out of spite? That second hotel was the only other structure around for miles of empty shrub lands, and it just had to be right in front of my room. A crane swung slowly above. This place looks overbuilt, I thought. I closed the curtains and tried to nap to the construction sounds of growth and development in China, a lullaby of metal clanging and banging.
