Little Emperors (11 page)

“Hello? Come in and lookie?”

“You like? You pay how muchie?”

“Hello? Take boat ride?”

The same chubby-cheeked old lady meets us at every corner, pushes her fruit basket in our faces, and drones, “Hello, bananaaa? Hello, orangie? Hellow, mangoow?” as she fondles each piece of fruit for our inspection. We see this woman's likeness painted on some T-shirts in one of the town's many T-shirt shops and realize she must be something of an institution here — the Hello Banana Lady.

As we continue walking, we find numerous cafés sprinkled throughout the town, confirming that Yangshuo is a major stop along Asia's “Banana Pancake Highway.” Sandwich boards outside each café advertise these banana pancakes, as well as apple pie, inner tube rentals, bike rentals, and a nightly bootlegged movie. The cafés have unbelievable names, too. Names that make me laugh, like Mickey Mao's and Minnie Mao's. Are the authorities in Beijing aware of such irreverence?

We choose a café close to our hostel and order Tibetan coffees, Mexican burritos, and American apple pie. Eventually, the food comes. The coffee is grainy and strong and gives me the caffeine hit I've been craving since I left Vancouver. The burrito, a mountain of spicy fried rice jacketed in a deep-fried pancake, is like nothing I ever ate in Mexico. As we try in vain to finish our dessert — huge, deep-fried dough pockets filled with half-cooked cubes of apple, like mutant apple pies escaped from a McDonald's test lab — a wicker basket thunks down on our table.

The sign for Mickey Mao's Café in Yangshuo, Guangxi Province, certainly wouldn't have pleased the Chairman
.

“Hello, banana?”

The next morning, we rent bikes and meet the woman, Xiu, we promised to meet. She leads us on a bike tour into the countryside, in the general direction of her village. Even though we three are riding nearly brand new mountain bikes, far more modern than Xiu's rusty-chained contraption, she is in far better shape and keeps having to stop and wait for us to catch up with her. She takes us along bumpy dirt roads that twist
around strange and beautiful mountains, past field workers crouched in the emerald squares of rice paddies.

We stop on a small bridge to take pictures of the famous scenery. Suddenly, as if emerging from the bridge's stone railing, little old ladies with dried apple faces corner us and try to sell us handmade wire bracelets. Sensing we won't be able to move further until we acquiesce, we each buy one.

We push away from the bridge and soon make it to our first destination — the foot of Moon Hill Mountain, so called because of the full moon–shaped hole near its crest. As we park our bikes with the bike attendant, a dozen eleven-year-old girls descend upon us, thrusting baskets full of bottled water and Coke cans at us, shouting, “Buy my water! Ice-cold Coca-Cola!”

I pull a water bottle from my bike basket and show it to them. “I have enough for now, thanks.”

This doesn't deter the girl in pink standing in front of me. “When you come down, you buy my water, okay?”

“Okay.”

She lifts her palm. “You promise?”

“I promise,” I say, slapping a high-five with her to seal the deal.

We start up the mountain, breathlessly following Xiu, who scampers well ahead of us. Two of the little water sellers follow us up the hill. With every stop to catch our breath or wipe the rivers of sweat from our faces, the girls perk up with, “Buy my water? Ice-cold Coca-Cola?”

“These country kids have more English than our students in Guangzhou,” I remark as we continue up the path.

“More motivation,” replies Amy.

We stop at a small clearing in the trees, and Xiu points to a cave in a hill nearby. “Village people hide there,” she explains. “Three years. Hide from Japanese in the war. Three years live there.”

As we pause to consider the insanity and brutality of war, a woman comes out from the bushes on the other side of the path. She is carrying a wicker basket. “You buy my water?” she asks.

We soon discover that every rest stop has its appointed salesperson — whether it be a woman sitting on a rock with a basket full of wire bangles or old men with blankets spread out in a clearing selling old Mao pins and English copies of Mao's Little Red Book. At every turn people appear from behind trees and rocks, asking, “Do you like? Do you want? You pay how much?”

We make it to the base of the moon-shaped hole. We walk up the path and through the hole as if following a brown thread through the eye of a giant needle. The path on the other side leads to the top of a small hillock where, under a big Pepsi umbrella, a woman has set up a small freezer filled with ice blocks. She, too, sells cold drinks.

I finally give in and buy water from one of the girls who has trailed us with dogged determination all the way up the hill. When the umbrella woman sees this, she shoots me a bitter look. “It not fair! Everyone buy from little girl,” she complains in English. “You are standing in
my
spot! You buy
my
water!”

Fearing that she might charge us for standing on her territory, we quickly take the requisite snapshots of the view and head back down the hill, running the gauntlet of water and pin sellers in reverse.

At the bottom, the rest of the young water sellers are crouched and waiting for our return. The girl in pink pounces on me and reminds me to buy the bottle of water I promised to buy. I do, and she charges me double what I paid the other girl on the mountain.

We bike some more, then Xiu takes us to her village. She invites us into the cool, dark kitchen of her sun-dried brick and thatched roof house. We sit on low wooden stools, just centimetres above the dirt floor, and crouch around a low wooden table. Xiu places heaping bowl after bowl of food in front of us — rice, fried eggplant, fried tomatoes with potatoes, crispy chicken, and glistening pork. We ask her simple questions about her husband and her family. Halfway through our lunch, her (two!) kids come running in, whining with hunger. They will get whatever food we leave, but only once we are gone, it seems. I finish my rice, stop myself from taking one more slice of eggplant, and place my chopsticks quietly across the top of my bowl.

We pay Xiu the tour fee. She asks us to write some friendly comments in her notebook, the same notebook she uses to entice newcomers on her tour, much like film reviews enticing people into the latest blockbuster: “Xiu is a fantastic tour guide!” “A great cook!” “We highly recommend her!” I write a short paragraph raving about her fried eggplant.

She accompanies us on the bumpy road back into town. As we say goodbye to Xiu and head up to our room to nurse our sunburns, she pedals off toward the bus station, the irrepressible businesswoman in search of new customers.

A farmhouse near the town of Yangshuo
.

We finish our banana pancakes and second cups of Yunnan coffee, then ask the waitress about renting inner tubes. She leads us to a dark hallway behind the restaurant. Half a dozen inner tubes are propped up against the wall next to a bathroom door with the words
NO POO
hand-painted on it. We choose the three most river-worthy of the tubes and head down the street toward the Li Jiang.

As we stumble over the paving stones, inner tubes hanging unsteadily from our shoulders, tour boat touts accost us with offers of rides back upriver from the village of Fuli, our tubing destination. We finally say yes to one relentless woman, agree on a price, and follow her to her boat at the south end of the dock. “It's better you jump in here,” she says.

We look at the lazy water flowing downriver from the dock. “Let's go above the dock,” Kerry suggests, peering over the side of the moored boat. “The water is faster there.”

“Okay.”

The three of us drag our inner tubes across the concrete platform to its north end. We climb down some stone steps and across sharp rocks to the river. Kerry is right. The water is faster here. It foams white in spots as it rushes past us. Aiming for the calmer waters in the middle of the river, Kerry sits back in her tube and pushes off from the rocks with her feet. Amy quickly follows her. As they float toward the middle of the river, I too sit back and push myself off the rocks.

I twist around to look and realize my tube isn't following them. It isn't floating toward the middle of the river. It is floating downstream. I haven't cleared the quick waters.

The current grabs my tube and thrusts it along the river's jagged edge. I try to redirect myself. I paddle backward in vain, my hands helpless, floundering fish. My tube bounces like a pinball off a large rock and shoots straight toward the docks, straight toward a moored tour boat. I can hear its engine running. A roar of white water rushes around the boat's sides and disappears under its long, flat bow.

Everything goes silent. I see horrified blond people standing on the bow of an adjacent boat, waving their arms and mouthing the word “No!” The bow of the boat looms above me. The sky disappears behind it.
This is it
, I think calmly.

I'm going to die
.

Suddenly, my foot springs up and braces itself against the flat bottom of the bow. My hands fly up and one, then two, Chinese men grab my arms. My sandals and tube get sucked under the boat. Sound returns. People are shouting. The river is roaring. The men try to pull me up, but the current has my legs. I can feel the men's grip sliding and quietly pray.

Please, please, please don't let go of me!

Then curse.

Damn, damn, damn this slippery waterproof sunblock!

A third man grabs the waist of one of the men, and together the three of them haul me on deck.

I bounce up immediately, my shorts and T-shirt soaking, put my hands together, bow, and say,
“Xie-xie”
over and over to the three men, wishing I knew more Mandarin so I could properly express my gratitude to them for saving my life. The men laugh nervously. They repeat my
xie-xie
back to me, as if to say, “We just saved your life, you stupid foreign girl, and all you can say is ‘thanks'?”

I step over the bow onto the neighbouring boat. An Australian woman grabs tightly onto my arm and asks, gravely, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah!” I giggle, my mind blank. “I was terrified there for a minute, but I'm okay now!”

I make my way, barefoot, dripping, and giggling like a madwoman, to the opposite end of the dock, back toward our boat woman. I pass the Hello Banana Lady. She is sitting on the edge of another boat and cackling as if she saw the whole incident and is laughing at me. I get to our tour
boat, and the woman beckons me to board quickly. She scolds me in Chinese as the engines sputter to life and her husband steers us away from the dock.

I stand on the bow as the boat putts out into the river. It stops to pick up Kerry and Amy, who have taken refuge on some rocks a little ways downstream. Kerry has rescued my inner tube. Amy is holding my plastic sandals.

“
Jesus Christ
, JoAnn! What happened?” Amy asks as she paddles her tube toward the boat. “All I saw was your tube pop up from under a boat and thought, ‘Oh, this is not good . . .' ”

I tell them what happened as they pull themselves onto the deck of the low boat. Kerry lifts her tube out of the water. “I knew you'd been rescued, so I wasn't worried.”

“Thanks a lot, Kerry! If I'd died, it would've been on your head!” I say, only partially joking. “That is absolutely the last time I listen to you!”

The boat woman and her husband take us to a calmer point in the river, far from any docks or tour boats, and let us off. I place my tube in the water, shaking slightly and hesitating a moment before jumping into the river. The boat pulls away, leaving us peacefully drifting downstream, but this time clutching each other's ankles for fear of being sucked dangerously off course yet again.

The river moves slowly, and I begin to relax as the adrenaline of my near death experience wears off. In fact, I begin to feel rather macho. “What would you guys have done,” I ask, “if I'd gone under and been chopped into fish food by that boat's propeller?”