we are joined by his cousin and someone he calls his older brother but i later learn is actually the son of his dad’s older brother, and a man married to his older sister who is also the village party secretary. we meet him at the small but stylish party headquarters for the village, and after introducing us, mr. huo informs him that i’m from the US, i have no idea what village secretary means. i don’t tell him i’m not that familiar with the bureaucratic structure of my local governing body in the US either.
we go to a place for 农家饭 — a farmer family’s restaurant. there’s salted pork hanging from the rafters outside. the dishware comes wrapped in plastic. they try to make me order but i decline. they try to figure out if i eat spicy or sweet, i say salty is just fine. his cousin and the party secretary start smoking. the secretary offers me a smoke, looking vaguely surprised when i refuse. they order a couple sodas, his cousin gets a beer. they order chicken soup, raw veggies with soybean dipping sauce, cucumbers with garlic and peanut sauce, egg custard steamed with tofu and chicken soup, cold braised pork with a soy and garlic dipping sauce. some fried tofu dish i can’t place. purple rice.
they talk mostly about things i don’t understand, something to do with expanding property and investing money and how to discuss problems with so-and-so. sometimes there’s a bit of tension, other times nostalgia. they talk about how good rice used to taste before artificial fertilizer took over, how good tofu skins used to taste. they tell me to eat more, men put meat on my plate chomping on raw veggies themselves, drinking soup straight from the communal pot with their spoons. mr. huo pays. after we finish and pack up the leftover chicken soup we move out into the main room. the men smoke a bit more and eat a couple slices of watermelon before heading out. ash trays doubling as a place to spit seeds.
it’s too hot to go into the mountains, mr. huo says. come, you can see what a village house is like. we pull into a row of small white one-story houses, lined up closely, painted with bright colors and depictions of trees and flowers. craggy ancient mountains speckled with greenery in the distance. earlier his cousin told me that before the mountains were all bare, their greenery used for kindling.
we walk into his home, which is also spotlessly white on the inside, brightly decorated with flowers and family portraits. there’s plants and a fish tank. a bird chirping outside in a cage. i tell him his place is lovely. he says his wife does most of it, though he’s pulled out a swiffer within a couple minutes of us getting in the house. (his wife and son are currently staying in chengde, the city. his son is 16. he’s 39). his cousin brings in a birds nest. apparently an old farmer had found it fallen off a tree after some strong winds earlier in the week and given it to them. the baby birds, no more than a couple weeks old, had been with us in the car all along. mr. huo fed the five small black bids some whole-grain mustard looking substance from a little ceramic jar with a small wooden spoon.
i was tired, both from not sleeping well the night before and from fronting like i knew what was happening for half of a very hot day. i pull out my computer to do a little work. mr. huo brings out cherries, a yogurt drink i didn’t finish. soon i fell asleep on the couch. he kept very quiet, whispering his voice messages, feeding the birds. i slept for two hours, surprisingly soundly.
when i woke up, the day had cooled. it was about 4. come, he said, let’s go into the mountains. i’ll show you a live dragon. we pass by the farm and i dawdle by the pigs again. i tell him i’ll come back and sit a whole day in the pen one day. write the best parts of my dissertation. sure, he says.
we drive up further up the mountain to an observation deck. along the road we bump into all sorts of townspeople, and every time he rolls down his window, makes a little conversation. i think it’s nice. i tell him i barely knew my neighbors. he says he has make conversation or else they’ll start gossiping about how arrogant he’s become. he says frequently how he doesn’t like to leave his house much anymore. even so, it seems to me the whole town is constantly blowing up his phone.
we walk up to the observation deck. originally it was supposed to be built so one could walk to the top from his house but they ran out of money. they did, however, include a QR code virtual reality installation where one could scan it, point a smartphone at the mountains, and see a golden dragon swirling around. kangxi or qianlong once heard tell of someone seeing a dragon here, he told me. i think.
we look out at the peaks in the distance, covered by a thicket of greenery. mr. huo tells me they are so well-guarded for fire protection reasons it’s hard to walk into the forests anymore. when he was a kid they would run up into the mountains collecting medicinal herbs and scorpions to sell for ice cream money.
we head back down the mountain. he’s been on his phone this entire time, taking calls, returning voice messages. our conversations are splintered into little bits as he pauses between his comms to tell me this or that little fact. i’m happy to have less silence to fill anyhow, this late in the day of continuous conversation with someone i’d never met. as we walk down the mountain a young fella with a girl in the passenger’s seat and a dog in her lap pulls up our slope. oh he really came, mr. huo said. they roll down the window, the dog yapping and sniffing at mr. huo. they offer us apricots picked from the trees down the mountain. mr. huo has been telling me about these apricots all day, saying how he’s going to send me home with a bag. they are delicious.
we all go down the mountain a bit and an older shirtless man with a fanny pack, evidently the caretaker of this small apricot orchard, watches as mr. huo tells the kid to pick some apricots. nobody has a bag for them. mr. huo pulls out a brown paper bag full of beef jerky. he feeds it to the dog. the kid says what a waste! you eat it then, mr. huo says. it’s too tough for my teeth.
he gives the bag to the kid who scrambles up into a tree and begins picking apricots. you should get a QR code for these trees, mr. huo quips to the orchard watcher. i’ll just come and pick up two pig skins from you, the orchard watcher says. just two?? mr. huo says, incredulous. save a little face for me won’t you? the riffing continues, swerves into a conversation about what’s “black.” the gist is he’s trying to say the guy should take more than two pig skins. this isn’t about money, this is about 情, he says. there’s no white or black here. it’s about feeling.
he’s used this term with me before, to describe the feeling amongst people in his town. not the feeling between husband and wife, he clarified at the time. the feeling amongst kinfolk. everyone has the same family name here, he said as a matter of explanation.
on our way back to the city we pass a line of ladies selling fruits and eggs by the street. seeing us slow they immediately began swarming the car holding up their cucumbers, salted duck eggs, apricots, plums. he bought me a bag of each. except for the apricots. i kept saying i couldn’t take this all home with me. he said it’s not a problem you’re just getting on the train. after stopping for a dinner of 烧烤 — grilled peppers, eggplants, raw oysters, lamb skewers, 小龙虾 (little dragon shrimp?), more i can’t remember through the haze of meat and beer — he gets a young kid (代驾）to drop us off at the station, driving like a maniac on a mission to try to get me on time. i still miss my train (or technically not the train itself but the cutoff for checking tickets), partially because one of the thin plastic bags full of fruits and eggs ripped apart at security check. anyways, i changed my ticket to the next train departing half an hour later, lugging the fruit home. and indeed the fruit tasted much better — sweeter, juicier, more like themselves — than all the extravagantly priced fruits i had ever bought in beijing, less than an hour’s train ride away.
hog maw 