There and Back Again: An Exchange Student's Tale

I couldn’t wait to get out of Beijing. Mainly because I had a girlfriend now and adventures lied on the horizon. But I also wanted to leave because Beijing was snowing. No, it wasn’t cold. It was in the 80’s, but Beijing’s spring is when all the trees open up and let their pollen loose. Ten years ago, Beijing’s government tried to cut back on the pollution and clean things up by planting fast growing trees, though they lacked the foresight to see that every spring, the trees would start blooming and the little white floating puff balls would blot out the sun in a blizzard of fantastic snow. On the street I saw tornados of the white fluff tearing harmlessly through the traffic. I am apparently allergic to that white fluff. My allergies came back from a four year absence with a vengeance. So to sum up why I was happy to leave in a sentence, I was escaping my allergies with my girlfriend. Bam. Simple as that. We boarded the buses and got on the trains to Kaili, a city in Guizhou. On the train ride we learned a lot about Guizhou from our reader. An excerpt taken directly from the China guidebook said, “Mention any of China’s southwestern provinces and fellow travelers will pelt you with tips, advice or looks of envy. Tell them you’re going to Guizhou, however, and you’ll most likely receive a blank look and the question, ‘Why?’” That happens to be the first sentence on Guizhou in the China guidebook. Next up on getting our expectations up through reading was Guizhou’s history section which said, “Historically, no-one has wanted to have much to do with Guizhou.” Yes, this is where we were going to spend the next eight days of our lives. On the train ride, Karina and I ended up watching over our English teacher’s nine year old daughter, Talia. We played cards and let each other sleep while the other entertained Talia. She followed us to dinner, back to the bunks, everywhere. Occasionally we would get Chris to take care of her for a bit, but she’d come back to us. Bed was a welcome retreat and I fell asleep to the rocking of the train cars, and the occasional thunk of what I imagined were cows being run over. It wasn’t a cow of course.
I woke up early on the train and had train food for breakfast. The train was exactly the same as the one we took to Fujian, the only difference being instead of the kuai train, we were on the tekuai train. Karina and I met up at the breakfast table and went back and babysat for a bit before claiming we were both going to take naps, but really went to relax together. After ten more hours on the train making a total of 26 hours spent on the train, we arrived in Kaili. It was late and we briefly explored Kaili, before heading back to the hotel room.


A view of the Gulou in Dalidong


Our host house in Dalidong


The next day we had an eight hour bus ride to Dalidong, that place that was featured in National Geographic. Talia sat on Karina’s and my lap for four hours, when Gavin came, like a godsend, and preoccupied Talia with some stories. We arrived in Dalidong. Gavin and I took a hike through some fields and came back to the house to eat dinner. The food was set up on a bench and we sat down on stools that could probably fit inside a dollhouse. Our host pulled out a kerosene container and poured three cups out. Two for Gavin and me, and one for himself. The moment the liquid hit the cups, a foul odor cut through the air. It smelled something along the lines of really strong alcohol, I mean rubbing alcohol, some oil, and a tinge of urine. So this is the infamous Mijiu… “You’re our guests, have a drink, then we can start dinner.” “No, no, we don’t drink.” “You’re not eating until you have a sip.” “Really… we can’t.” After that our host got handsy and we just picked up the drink. A fly flew over my cup and its wings failed. It fell to the ground dead. Gavin and I looked at each other. Even flies won’t go near this stuff. He took a small sip, and started coughing and his eyes started tearing up. He turned to me and said dramatically, as if he were dying, “I don’t think you should drink anything you could clean a house with… my throat feels like it’s burning…” Our host then gave him a bowl and allowed him to eat. I looked at it and groaned. Gavin’s performance didn’t make it any easier. If Gavin thinks it’s bad… I lifted the cup to my lips and my lungs burned with the odor. I took the smallest sip of anything I’ve ever taken in my life and put the cup down. It felt there were thousands of holes on my tongue and the Mijiu was finding them and forcefully making them bigger. I swallowed, and just sat there silently as it burned all the way down, and just rested at lung level burning for 10 minutes after. I have never had anything so awful in my life. I then began eating their food, which was amazing. They had liver that tasted like filet mignon. Now that I look back on that dinner, it was the first sip of alcohol I’ve ever had and it was Guizhou moonshine. We went to the gulou, (not drum tower,) and had a bonfire under its pavilion. Karina and I ended up watching Talia again, and then they had performances. The people sang their traditional song, and we then had to perform. So as SYA normally does, they turned to The Song Dynasty. It was our last gig. We sung Build me up Buttercup and Across the Sea. Across the Sea is a song Gavin wrote and is sung to the tune of the little mermaid’s Under the Sea. Here’s the chorus courtesy of Gavin Cook and his wonderful imagination:
Across the sea
Across the sea
Comrade, it's better
Here where it's redder
Take it from me
In the West they work all day
In classrooms they slave away
While we get to play
And sometimes Tingxie
Across the sea!
I went back to the house and had a spooky incident in my room, with division and all sorts of horror inducing insects.
Gavin and I woke up too late, and ended up missing going farming with all the farmers and SYA. So we wandered the town before heading into the wilderness. We were crossing a river, when we ran into our host mother at this village. She called us back over the river and we climbed a mountain with her. When we got there, there were two danzi’s, or the poles with the baskets to carry stuff on your back with. We were on a narrow field, tiered 50 some feet above another and began to use a sickle and cut vegetables. We loaded them into the basket, and when we filled up the baskets, our host mother picked one up, and we both picked up the ones that were already there. It weighed about 60-70 pounds, and it all was pressing down into one spot on my shoulder.


Me still figuring out how to carry my danzi right

It was a bit nerve-wrecking because the path down was an almost vertical path and we had these huge sticks on our shoulders now. We made it down barely and began the 45 minute hike back into the village. I figured out a good way to carry the pole across both my shoulders and then I was back in 30 minutes. Gavin and our guide were truly surprised by my speed. There was no lunch that day at our host house, so we went up and had an interview with the mayor… but he was too drunk to speak so we had the village spokesperson tell us about the city. Talia was under the care of Karina and me again. People were beginning to call her our child. And it was starting to feel that way a bit too. When the meeting ended, we took Talia on a hike to a small spring and had a nice “family” moment. Dating for not even a week and we already had a nine year old kid. It sure helps you get to know your significant other pretty quickly.


Karina, Talia and Me at the Spring

We returned our child to her rightful parent as the sun began to set, and took a stroll out into the fields. There is no twilight here, there was light and then dark, thanks to the mountains. We completed half the phoenix dance, before a mysterious light came from the mountain and shone on us, scaring us out of the rice paddies. The light turned out to be a car coming to the village down the mountain. If a village person catches you and someone else “plowing some fields” if you will, SYA sends you back to Beijing, after you watch the ceremony to cleanse the spot. This ceremony involves hiring a shaman to slaughter a dog on the spot by slitting its throat, shaking it by its hind legs and using the blood that spills from it to wash away the evil. We were not caught, so somewhere in Dalidong, is a half evil field. My bad.
We had an eight hour bus ride the next day. Before leaving Dalidong, I looked out over one of the wind bridges and saw some peasants skinning and cleaning up 20-some chickens. Right down stream of that was a woman washing her clothes. The water gules and I still can’t believe that chicken blood is a good detergent. As we were leaving Dalidong, the Dong people sang their traditional good bye song. They then encouraged us to sing one of ours. We all looked at each other, and Bi Laoshi was like, Row Row Row Your Boat in three part harmony. Go. When we finished the Dong people clapped and asked what it meant. Bi Laoshi turned to them and said, “It means how much we’re going to miss you but we really have to be going… on a boat.” They all nodded and accepted his explanation and allowed us to leave the village. We got on the bus and Karina and I were watching Talia again. She sat on our laps for the entire eight hour bus ride. Karina’s legs fell asleep. The bus ride took longer than expected because there were landslides on the road. We waited for a construction crew to clear the landslide on the only road to or from the village. Luckily we weren’t under the rockslide when it happened. We arrived in the town of Leishan and Karina and I walked through a park and danced with old ladies in the park before heading back to the hotel room. We both went to my room, fell onto the bed next to each other, and I said, “Being a parent is tiresome,” before we fell asleep next to each other… only for Gavin to wake us up before curfew.


Gaoyan, Population: 900. Alcoholics:900

We woke up to get on a bus the next day, still caring for our “kid” before we began a three hour hike to Gaoyan. The opening ceremony there, welcoming us to the village consisted of making us drink Mijiu. This Mijiu was one thousand times stronger than the Mijiu at Dalidong and we could smell it from fifty feet away. I avoided the people pouring bowls of Mijiu down people’s throat. Throughout the whole village, everyone was trying to get us as hammered as we possibly could be. I didn’t drink any. I was living with Gavin, Erick and Jamie at this new village. Our host mother took us down the mountain and made us rotate a crop. Well it was starting to rotate a crop because she made us stop and send us back with the bits of vegetables that were left un-harvested.


Field work for the win

On the way up, the teachers stopped us and told us we had to go pick bracken with them. So we climbed the mountain behind the village and started picking this weedy vegetable from the path. A small dog we called “xiao fei” came along. We walked along cliff faces and all the way to the foot of another mountain on top of the mountain we had just climbed. Warren, Jamie, Erick and I decided to ditch the group and have a race to the top of the mountain. It was terraced, so Warren, Erick and I took one path and Jamie took another.


Racing to the top

We jumped and climbed up the 8 foot tall steps that were the terraces and made it to the top of the mountain. We waved at the teachers who had taken the four of us to go pick Bracken with them. We turned around on the top of this mountain and saw… another mountain. We decided to climb this one too. There was a path so we ran up to the top fairly quickly. Mr. Bissell gave us a call saying that it was going to get dark soon, so we should head back. Jamie and Erick wanted to go down the path that lead right to a road, and Warren and I wanted to jump down the 8 foot tall terraces down the mountain. So from the top of a mountain, we set off in two different directions. But Warren and I got tired of racing, especially after stumbling upon a mountaintop graveyard. We walked through and it admired the graves. Warren wanted to let Jamie and Erick win. Instead we were going to wait for the storm that was coming in over the mountain, as well as the fog that was nearing us, to reach us so we could race those back to the village. Much more adventuresome. So we sat on top of the mountain, already in the clouds. We wandered further into the graveyard when we found a giant stone tomb/mausoleum looking thing. Spider webs covered the entrance, and Warren and I picked up sticks and pretended we were warriors as we bashed the webs and spiders away. The entrance was open so we walked in, using our phones as flashlights. There was shattered pottery everywhere in there and in the very back of the tomb, were vents, with cold air coming through them and a low moaning noise coming from the other side. Warren got down on his hands and knees and started throwing away the smashed pottery and rocks and bones to try and find a way to get into the back of that tomb. We didn’t find anything, and walked out defeated, only to see the fog was rolling down the mountain side at a frightening pace. We began jumping down the terraces, going down eight feet every jump. We descended half the mountain in three minutes. The fog was coming at us like an avalanche of clouds, but we out ran it barely. We turned a corner and stepped into the last rays of sunlight. The fog couldn’t follow us here. We leisurely strolled down the rest of the mountain. Warren tossed his stick sword onto the road below, and we went to go retrieve it. When we were almost at his “weapon,” a car came from nowhere and was about to run it over when Warren ran and kicked the stick out of the way. I saw what was in the car though. It was full of people, their faces were smeared wine red, a woman looked dead in the car window, and they were driving towards the village. I was a bit creeped out by this but ignored it while we walked back to the village. When Warren and I arrived in the village, in the town center, the van was parked, the “dead” woman’s head lolled like a ragdolls from the window, red streaks running down her face and onto the white van. It was eerily like wine and blood mixed together. The wine faced men stumbled around the center like zombies. Warren and I were legitimately scared. Had we disturbed an ancient tomb and this was the punishment that was to be wrought upon us? It turns out… that the wine faced people are part of a tradition. When someone in the village wants to get married, the husband’s family kidnaps the wife and gets her super-trashed a few days before the wedding. We ran back to our host house, had an awful dinner and then danced with villagers in another town center. Afterwards I went to bed, sharing a bed with Jamie.


"Tomb" Warren and I found. Turns out to be a Giant Kiln

We got up to go farm in the fields but it was raining. Everything was glazed with a thin layer of water. We walked out to the town center overlooking the foot of the mountain, and a few other villages on the opposite mountain. We were told that we had the whole day to ourselves in the shittiest place on the planet. There is really no other word to describe that place. So Warren and I planned to have another adventure today, but we gathered a party of eight people including ourselves. Karina, Hannah, Annie, Claire, Erick, Chris, Warren and I decided to go down the mountain. We wanted to get to the crevasse between the mountains on either side of the river down there. So I led the group down the path I had gone down to farm, then further down and further still. Karina, Erick, Warren and I got split up from the others and went down the path first. We saw an incredible bridge down there. It looked like a giant arch, like something out of Lord of the Rings. We saw it and now had a plan to go and see it up close. The four of us reached the river and waded across the river and got to a small island in the middle of it, leaving most of our belongings and clothes on the other side of the bank. We chilled there and relaxed from the hike down as we waited for the others to catch up with us.


Relaxing the way I like to relax

We skipped stones and told stories at the bottom of two mountains. We were about to head back when we saw that the rains had made the river a bit more ferocious. The water level was up to our hips, and whirlpools had started forming. The river flowed into a giant cliff face and then turned left. We saw the water ramming against the cliff and then being sucked under it with a fairly decent sounding whooshing sound. There were caves that we could be sucked away into, that were under the mountain and we’d never be found. It made fording the river a bit more nerve-wrecking this time. If we slipped we were gone. Hannah became frightened and I had to drag her across. She slipped and fumbled over the smooth rocks that made up the riverbed. The lot of us made it across safely, no worries. I’m a lifeguard… wait expiration date passed. I was a lifeguard. We started walking along a small path next to the river that also ran alongside some fields. There were peasants working the fields and they said to us, “Turn back, the way you came won’t be usable if you wait too long.” We abandoned our hopes of finding the bridge and ran back to the path up the mountain, back to Gaoyan. The path that once was, was a giant mudslick, flowing down the mountain and making it impossible for us to go back up this way. We were now stuck at the bottom of the mountain with no known means to get back to the top. We walked back past the peasants and kept walking along the path between the river and terraced fields. We stopped at one point and looked at the dead end path before us. I looked up and saw there was a path along a cliff face 200 feet up. We walked back through the fields and asked the peasants how to get to the bridge. They pointed over the terraced fields, but there was no means to get up there, so Warren and I scouted and climbed over the fields trying to discover the path that leads to the bridge. I ran up, looking for the cliff path and found it. I jumped down and called the rest of the party over to the path. I scouted a bit further ahead. The path turned a corner and in front of us was a waterfall falling from the top of the mountain, partially hidden in the clouds, down to the river below. The river we had just come from. Warren got there first and scouted ahead while I waited for the rest of the group to reach the magnificent scene. The cliff path that I had scouted out and that Warren was currently scouting out was 200 feet over the river. It was shoulder width wide and slowly descended down to the river over a kilometer. I ran ahead to make sure Warren was alright. Karina and I picked up our pace and found him sitting on a rock in the middle of the river. I decided I was going to go wait on the rock with him for the rest of the people to join us. I put one foot on a stepping stone, then moved to the next one, and then to one more, when my foot started slipping. I had reached a small stone island, so I threw my other foot out to catch myself, but when it landed it started slipping too. I was about to do the splits on a small island in the middle of a river. Now what you don’t see is a giant arrowhead shaped rock between my spread eagling legs. For the sake of future generations of Weiser’s, I threw my right hand down between my legs and cushioned the blow with a sickening crack, and smashed my fingers along the sharp edge of the rock. Karina watched from the shore, and Warren carefully walked over to me and showed me where to step to get back to the shore. Once there I put my now baseball sized right hand in the ice-cold mountain river water and cringed as the pain shot through my bones. I pretended that nothing was wrong and once everyone else had caught up, we continued on.


If you see Warren, that's where my hand got smashed

We turned a corner and saw it. We saw the bridge; we began a mad dash along the narrow path until we stood before our destination. It was a giant slab of concrete. There was nothing special about it like we had seen from the path 2000 feet up. You couldn’t even get on the bridge. It was just an arch in the river. So Karina and Annie decided to wade across the ankle deep part of the river and ask the villagers on the other side of the river how to get back to Gaoyan. Karina and Annie had left the party. We saw it three mountaintops over. We had hiked quite the distance. They came back from the other side of the river with a distressed look on their face. This was Gaoyan. We had never left the village. A six hour hike down a mountain, up the side of one, sidling across cliff faces, wading rivers and we had not left the village. We sat down on the bank of the river and pulled out our lunch of bread. Chris and Karina noticed my hand and told me to put my hand back in the river, and then finished a water bottle and filled it with the cold river water as a makeshift icepack. I could barely hold the bottle, but I didn’t tell them. No need to worry them more. A farmer crossed the river from where Karina and Annie had just come from and we asked him if he could take us to Gaoyan. Coincidentally, he was going there himself, so we tagged along as he took the well-beaten path that we had overlooked. An hour and a half of hiking with him we were back in the main portion of Gaoyan.


The disappointing bridge


The party and our guide

We paid our guide 200 kuai, and only later on did we learn that the average yearly income of a Gaoyan resident is 250 kuai. That’s just over 35 US Dollars. And it’s not possible to farm their land any other way because you can’t get machinery down the mountain. You have to carry everything up and down the mountain each time you go to farm. The village is practically self-sufficient. Having nothing else to do in the village and being completely exhausted, I went and got a splint before heading back to the house and chilling with Jamie, Erick and Gavin. We were so bored that we made our own “Base” system. It’s perfect. But really there’s nothing to do in that village. No wonder everyone drinks themselves into a drunken stupor. Our host father walked in at dinner and looked at how little of the food we had eaten. It was just not delicious, or appealing to look at. He yelled at us, mixing together his local dialect with Mandarin, Japanese and a bit of Cantonese. “If you don’t eat your stinky chicken, you’ll never get tall… *hiccup*… well you guys are already tall, so how’d you do that? Your American parents spoil you. How can you not eat food, it’s unheard of. My son’s kids here eat all their stinky chicken yet they’re still small. This isn’t fair. *burp some vomit onto the floor* You folks are American Liushoushi right?” Now to take a moment aside, liushoushi has no meaning to any of us, nor does it mean anything to Chinese people. What he was trying to say was liuxuesheng, or exchange students. Liushoushi is something Gavin recognized from his background in Japanese… somehow. I really don’t know how. But I digress, we left the pot of chicken intestines and lungs and livers practically untouched. Lungs just aren’t that tasty. It was probably just how he prepared it though. I’ll have to try them again somewhere else. We just wanted to get out of that place. Gaoyan was miserable. Jamie and I went to bed to try and wake up a bit closer to leaving.
It thunder stormed the whole night long. Our door to our room flung open and closed itself multiple times in the middle of the night. We woke up to find out the path out that we were going to take was impossible for 56 people to maneuver. Another path out of the town was completely flooded, so the only one left was the road for cars… an 18 kilometer trek through mountains. They weren’t really roads, more of just one giant dirt path. I speed walked out of the place and it was brutal. Karina and I walked together until Gavin, Erick and I passed them and left Karina with Sophie and Julia. I had a reason for leaving them behind. I had to take a dump that I had saved for too long. Our host’s toilet had a hole for use that was the size of my fist. I don’t have that kind of accuracy when it comes to number two. So we found a nook and I grabbed some of Erick’s toilet paper and went down and went out in the great outdoors. Unfortunately, I planted myself on top of a jumping spiders nest. Not pretty. I wore my gym shorts that were serving as boxers for the rest of the hike through. It was ridiculously hot. Karina and I finished up the hike in 2 hours and 20 minutes exactly. We waited for 2 hours plus for the others to get to the buses. We took the bus back to Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou, and spent the night in a hotel there.


Getting the Hell out of Gaoyan

It was not a good night. I was up with diarrhea the whole night and was completely exhausted the next day. My stomach felt like I had swallowed a box of daggers. Realizing that I never wanted to come back to Guizhou, I wanted to see as much of Guiyang as I could, I fought off the pain in my stomach and went out with Karina, Chris and Claire to see the city. There wasn’t much. We wandered around and I tried to find a comfortable position to walk in but with little success. I had taken an Imodium the night before, but it was starting to wear off by the time we had gotten to the train station. We were finally leaving Guizhou and SYA was happy… I was too, just not to be on a train in my current condition. We were walking to the waiting area, when I felt my stomach roar in protest and I bolted down an aisle and kneeled down next to a small green trash can. I dry heaved, and all of SYA now knew I was sick. I got a bottom bunk on the train for the safety of the other 5 people in the bunk area. What I’ve learned to hate about trains is the fact that the only time the train isn’t moving is when it’s in the station, but that’s the only time the bathrooms are locked to the passengers. I really wonder who said let’s make it an adventure every time a passenger needs to use our squatty potty’s. It’s probably for security reasons, but to a sick student where every second on the run to the bathroom counts, it seems utterly ridiculous. Karina sat on my bed and took care of me, while Chris sat on the bottom bunk across from me and gave me his blanket to try and make me sweat it out. They brought back food for me, and I got other get well soon’s from people I least expected it from. Talia even stopped by for a bit to check in on her foster father. I fell asleep on the train after taking 12 or more trips to the worst experience in a bathroom I’ve ever had.
I woke up the next morning on the train feeling a thousand times better, partially because I was feeling better and mainly because I was way the hell away from Guizhou. Unfortunately whatever I had had spread. Now some people in the other car had it, and were ended up carted to a hospital. The rest of us were carted off to a cooking school where they taught us how to make Gongbao Jiding, or Kungpao Chicken, as well as a lima bean dish that was just so bad I forgot it. I was making the Gongbao Jiding pepper sauce and scratched my face. A pepper got in my eye and nose. Imagine the spiciest thing you’ve ever eaten. Now imagine that instead of that being on your tongue it was in your eye, and the heat from it rolled out over the rest of your face and burned your nose. Yes. That’s what it felt like. How do you get it out? I had to hold my eyelids open and let the fires burn until my eyes started tearing up and streaming down my face. I waited for ten minutes in sheer agony while the rest of my cooking team, (Warren, Maegan and Mike,) prepared our ingredients. Talia was with Karina during this cooking excursion. Chris, Claire, Karina and I went to Jingli Jie and explored the tourist-y part of Chengdu. It was the Houhai of Chengdu. We headed back to the hotel and chilled. I was still recovering from the sickness.


Sharing a smile at the cooking school

We went back to the cooking school the next day and made Yuxiang Rousi and Mapo Doufu. Both were delicious and afterwards we went and learned how to carve vegetables into things. Our skills were severely lacking. Erick, Chris, Claire, Karina and I went for Thai food for dinner. There was a Polynesian singing group that came to our table and pulled us up and made us dance while they sang. It was fun. Curfew came and we headed back to the hotel.
We went to the Black Bear Rescue Center the next day. This was where all the black bears rescued from bear farms went. Bear farms are places where Chinese bear farmers extract bile from bear’s gall bladders so the bile could be used in medicine. They try and save the bears and give them a relaxing life, after castrating the males. We wandered around the place, and then headed back to the hotel. On the bus ride back, Talia sat on our laps again. We said Mr. Morrison don’t you want to see your kid sometime on the trip? To which he responded, (jokingly I hope,) her real parents are the one’s she more emotionally attached to. Have fun, mom and dad. We told her that we were exhausted and let her follow her real father. After an unsuccessful nap, Karina and I went out to dinner with Ian and Warren. The four of us went back to Jingli Jie and Warren got a number or two before we went back to the hotel.
Our last day of the trip, Hannah, Erick, Chris, Claire, Karina and I all went out for breakfast before splitting up. Chris, Erick and I had guy time and they had girl time. We wandered and went into toy stores and electronics stores. They went to get a foot massage. We all met back up at the hotel and got on the bus and then the plane back to Beijing. It was nice to be going back home. It’s nice to get away… just not to Guizhou. When we got back, the fantastic snow was gone, and everything was green. We had a month and five days left… time to make the most of the time left.