MENGLA, China - What's black and white and fat all over?
Me, trying to model Chinese clothes.
"It's very fashionable," I said to the fuyuan minding the stall. "But it's just a little small."
Then I spent five minutes trying to worm my way out of the black clubbing shirt with small white designs on the right shoulder. I could imagine myself wearing this to a nice club in Beijing or Hong Kong, after I lost 40 pounds.
As I struggled with the top buttons, more fuyuans gathered. Soon I had nearly observers, making sure I didn't fall down and crack my head open. I started asking questions. To the woman hlding a baby I wondered how the old child was. Problem is I said "How many years does this child have?"
The assembled crowd laughed, and the mother replied. "None. He's only been here for eight months." That surprised me because this baobao - a wonderful word that can mean baby or package - had a full head of hair looked twice as old.
I moved onto the person trying to find a shirt large enough for me. Was she from Mengla?
No, she arrived not long ago, two months on September 4. She came from Hubei Province, nearly a thousand miles away. She lived with friends from home, and came here for the job. Things in Mengla so far are going fine, but I could tell by the tone of her answer that she hadn't been here long enough to decide whether her journey across the country had been smart or irrational.
And they had questions for me. Where did I learn Chinese? Did I dye my hair?
Then it came to drink. A little deeper in Mengla's market catacombs I asked a woman what she was barbecquing and less than a minute later was sitting on a small yellow stool drinking a Yunnan liquor that tasted just like paint thinner. I tried to stop my host - a local farmer seeing a couple friends after a day's work - after one glass. I said "no" 37 times, but when I turned my head a bit he snuck a bit more in there.
With an appertif in me, it came time for food. A bought a banana for five cents, and then kept wandered through the stalls. After I finished I asked someone where the nearest train I could put my peel in was located. "Wherever you want," she replied, and smiled when I dropped the peel immediately.
At a restaurant next to my hotel I attempted to order dinner, only to be stopped by three middle-aged men. "Come, sit with us," they said, and I enjoyed a dinner of fish soup, a spinach-like vegetable in vinegar, stir-fried egg and tomato and buckets of rice. The three were all here for business, one from Hubei, one from Guangdong and another from Sichuan. I asked if any had been to Laos, two hours south of town.
"It's not a good place," the man from Sichuan said, looking down at his rice. He'd been there, found it poor, and came back quickly. Now he reguarly comes to this Sichuanese restaurant and holds no regular job. I wondered why he came to Yunnan in the first place.
"Because I heard an American would be here!" And the whole table burst out laughing, myself included.
Approaching the Chinese border from the Lao town of Muang Nam Tha this morning I felt dread bubbling up in my stomach, that I didn't want to leave behind the colorful worlds of South and Southeast Asia for the monochrome Sino existence. But walking around today proved to be a refreshing reminder that a country with 1.4 billion people can't be a total drag, especially if you're blessed with a little Chinese to communicate with them.
