TONGREN, China - You expect a place like Tongren, four hours on a narrow road from the nearest city, to be hopelessly remote, to have an end of the earth feeling. But Tongren isn't a place that feels forlorn. On the town's wide streets, Tibetans, Han and the Tu, distant relatives of the Mongolians go about daily life in surprisingly mundane ways.
Here people buy apples, bananas and oranges in open-air markets, buy pirated copies of American action movies and waste time in the town's admirably art-deco main square. It's hard to rectify the scene with legends about Qinghai Province, a desolate stretch of territory associated with the Chinese gulags (laogai) and nuclear testing sites.
The surprises in Tongren come in unexpected cosmopolitan touches. On one side of the food market, a Tibetan operates a small clothes shop called "Your Style." Outside is a large picture of Michael Jackson from the "Thriller" video, with half of his face replaced with a skelton.
"I made it right here," the owner says in clear English, the best I've heard spoken all trip.
We switch back to Mandarin, and he asks me if I've ever been to India. I haven't, been am planning a trip for the summer. The man studied there for five years, learning English. Why he came back to his hometown in Qinghai province to sell clothes that are more fashionable that what most people wear back in Beijing, I'm not sure. I felt strange questioning his life path, although I flirted with buying a red and white spring coat for 85 RMB.
I opted instead for a green jacket from the army surplus store down the street. It cost just 30 RMB. The owner of that shop asked me how long I had been in the American military. I smiled, and joked that I wouldn't be fit for either the American or the People's Liberation Army.
The one place in town where it does seem as if I've travelled to the end of the Earth is our hotel room. I have again checked into a Chinese guesthouse, this time paying just 10 RMB for a bed run by a local Muslim woman and her extreme old mother. The room has just small dim light bulb, and the bed frame appears to be from the Qing Dyansty. But even here, the modern world intervenes. The guestroom's ancient squatter toilet right above the town's abortion clinic.
