Westward Leading, Still Proceeding

Changsha, Hunan, China

I woke up to knocking on both sides of my body. To my right, a thin finger pecked incessantly on the frozen window, precipitating a headache for my head that rested on it. To my left, the taxi driver cautiously poked my shoulder as though ensuring I was still alive. "Wake up," he said hopefully.

I hadn't slept the night before, but I was still embarrassed to have nodded off in the taxi. More awkwardly still, I noted that I had fallen asleep cuddling my backpack. "It's because of the cold," I explained to the driver, showing him my broken zipper and paper-thin jacket. He smiled doubtfully and nodded toward the window. An old man was still tapping. I cautiously opened the door, hoping the old man would step out of the way. "Wait a minute," I moaned in groggy Mandarin, as I swung my backpack from my embrace and onto my back.

"Changde? Changde?" the old man said hopefully. "Are you going to Changde?"

"Yes, actually." I was surprised and relieved. I had been expecting a good ten minutes of aimless bus searching, sent ten different directions by as many people who didn't know where the Changde bus was, but didn't want to appear unhelpful to a foreigner. "Can you take me to Changde?" I asked.

"No," he said curtly, as though though that was the most ridiculous question he had heard in a good while. "Of course not. But I know someone who can. Seventy yuan."

That sounded about right. "Show me where he is," I said. He smiled and walked off down the road. I paid the taxi driver and followed.

It was Christmas Day, and the weather seemed about right for southern China. There was no snow, but it felt like there should be. The wind blew through my jacket as though through a broken screen, and I felt my ears pulsate from the cold. We passed several groups of travelers aggregated around street fires, warming their hands as they waited for their buses.

I noted that the man had moved a good way ahead of me, who seemed to avoid the nasty game of human Frogger by letting the cars honk and skid around him. My, does he walk fast, I thought to myself. Though he was not running, and was--by a generous estimate--a mere fraction of my height, I couldn't keep up with him. I had met only a few people who walked faster than I, and certainly no man of his age. I began to trot, folding my arms to protect myself from the wind.

It went on like that for a while, the small old man race-walking and I slowly trotting. The buses had fallen far behind, and I wondered if the man knew where he was going. "Excuse, me," I shouted ahead, "Where are you taking me?"

"It's a special bus," he said, not as an explanation, but as though it were common sense. "A special bus", I grumbled to myself, and thought of the street fires several roads back. Then I thought of the roads, and realized that they were gone. Instead we were rising, leaving the array of Changsha streets below us. Oh God, I thought to myself. He's taking me on the freeway. My ears had never felt so cold.

"Where are you going?" I called again. "The highway," he explained--which, in Mandarin, has the far more sinister name of "high speed big road." I mumbled to myself about the absurdity of anyone walking onto a freeway on-ramp, and it wasn't until the first car zipped by me that I realized I was the real idiot for following him. "It's about half a kilometer ahead," he said.

We hugged the side of the road, and I saw the frozen city below me to my right and confused cars whizzing by to my left. "Thank God the roads aren't icy," I muttered. I saw in the distance a group of people waiting where the highway diverged from the off-ramp. As we came nearer, their features became clearer, and I read in their expressions an annoyance at the cold, but no particular discomfort from huddling together on an onramp. When we finally arrived, I noted they were all staring at me. In Dayao I had grown rather used to the stares, but my exotic appearance usually garnered fewer stares in Changsha.

It was then I realized I was still wearing my Santa hat from the night before. You idiot, I thought to myself. But don't take it off now; it'll just make things more awkward. And no wonder your ears are so cold.

We stood together like that for an uncomfortable while. The old man seemed particularly proud of himself, as though he had just brought home a trout from a pond full of bass. There were so many of us that we spilled over into the right lane, but most cars moved over and didn't seem to care. I noted more than one driver's head crane, and though I imagined it was because there were people on the highway, that seemed normal enough to everyone else. The only thing strange was me. Damn this Santa hat, I said to myself.

The old man was moving among us, collecting seventy yuan. He took my money and told me the special bus would be there in about three minutes. He paused after counting my change. "So, you're from Xinjiang, right?" he asked.

"No," I said, for what what I estimated was the hundredth time. "I'm not Ughyur."

"Oh," he said. "Really?"

"Really."

"You look Ughyur," he said, more to himself than to me. He paused for a moment, ostensibly hoping I would explain myself.

"I'm American," I said.

"American!" the man shrilled. Like a true thespian, he threw back his hand onto his forehead in what I feared would be a swoon, nearing knocking his furry black hat to the ground. "He's American!" he shouted to the rest of our frozen group. A few people gave a perfunctory smile, but most ignored him. "I haven't met a foreigner in a very long time," he said smiling. His distant persona of the perturbed window-tapper and determined speed-racer instantly dissipated. The bus was approaching.

"A real American!" he said to himself smiling. The bus stopped beside us, blocking traffic in nearly every conceivable direction. The door opened and the ticket-taker stepped out reluctantly onto the road. "A real American," the old man repeated, pulling the ticket-taker over to me so that we could be properly introduced. "I want you to be sure this man has a seat on the bus. No standing for our foreign friends." The ticket-taker showed a mild interest in me (or, based on his gaze, in my Santa hat), and returned to the bus to greet the other passengers. One by one they entered the bus, but the old man was not ready to let me go. "Make sure he has a seat!" he yelled toward the bus. He then began to speak rapidly about a great many things I didn't entirely follow. Though he spoke Mandarin remarkably well for his generation, after a sentence or two his accent decayed, and a sentence or two after that he switched to the local dialect entirely, and I struggled to follow. I then realized that he was really speaking to himself, and that I was merely a sort of unwilling muse in a great many thoughts he needed to put words to. Everyone else was on the bus.

The ticket-master appeared at the door. "Are you going to Changde then?" he grumbled.

I walked toward the bus and stepped onto the ledge. The bus began to move before the door was closed. From the ledge I heard the old man's last cry, "Make sure he has a seat!" The door slammed shut and I looked over the seats, scanning for a gap in the sea of heads. "No seat, you were too slow," the ticket-taker said, with the air of a teacher chastising a student. He picked up an ice-cold pail from off the slippery ground. "You can sit wherever you like," he said.