West of Chengdu, phantom pain

The New York Times reports today that all roads west of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in China, have been closed to nonmilitary vehicles. The area surrounding the temple of Wuhouci (woo-hoe-tsih) in Chengdu has experienced unrest -- fallout from the protests and crackdown in Tibet.

Dujiangyan -- the Duj, to foreigners -- is west of Chengdu.

Dujiangyan, where I spent my first year in China, where the school I taught at sits, where the Qingcheng mountain and the famous irrigation canals begin, is at the foot of what used to be the independent nation of Tibet. Many of my students -- some of my favorite students, like Andy and Tommy -- were Tibetan minority. They were taller and darker and proud of their culture, but they often kept it to themselves, like a secret.

Dujiangyan is the home of my Chinese heart, the geography of my Chinese childhood. It was in Dujiangyan that I learned to speak, first, where I gained the accented dialect of the Sichuanren. It was Dujiangyan's streets that I wandered day and night, where I walked home with grocery bags balanced on a sugarcane pole and ate tangcu bai cai, and Dujiangyan's markets where I bought fruit and spices and vegetables and haggled over mao per jin. Dujiangyan, the place I learned the ballad of the Tibetan lovers, is the only place I think of when I hear the sweet and desperate songs of laojia -- hometown.

Wuhouci, to me, means Catherine. She was not Dujiangyan people; I met her in Camp China in the south -- Nanning, Guangxi -- but she is not nanren, either. She is Heilongjiang people, from the bitter north, near Korea. She is big, for the south. She is pale and has freckles and straight black hair. She speaks a different Chinese.

I met Catherine when she was assigned to the Number 8 Middle School attached to Guangxi University for Nationalities in Nanning in 2001. She took an immediate liking to me, though I could not understand why. She made me uncomfortable at first, the way a person who knows you too well from the beginning, makes you uncomfortable.

She was and is different, Catherine. She was bolder, more outspoken. She challenged authority. She did not fit in, in the south. We talked, sometimes, and she said she wanted to improve her English -- her major at the university -- but we became friends on a warm, wet night, at a waterfight, where I snapped my towel at her until she ran from me, shrieking. We bent over, hands on our knees and grinned at each other, and became family.

Catherine's mother, who taught me to move to the side of the road on command, to not get run over by bicycles, is my Chinese mother. Her father is my benevolent, absent-minded professor Chinese father. On my last day in Nanning, Catherine and her father brought me the most beautiful present I've ever been given: a Chinese caligraphy scroll of a poem by Li Bai, about connections between far-apart friends. I could not find its equal in two years of searching even the most expensive scroll shops.

So when two years later, I had been in China a month, during October holiday, Catherine came to visit me in Dujiangyan. She knew all the places to go -- so many places are "very famous" in China -- and she brought her Aussie boyfriend, Ian. We visited the irrigation canals, the Qingcheng mountain, the people's square in Chengdu, and Wuhouci. Catherine had her picture taken at every place, in every famous spot, without smiling; this is the Chinese way.

I remember riding the bus with Catherine to the outskirts of Dujiangyan, listening to her explain to me how to ask the cost of something in local dialect; I remember her in bed next to me, at night, whispering questions I couldn't answer about her relationship with Ian; I remember her laughing.

Wuhouci was beautiful, and the people who went to light incense and pray for guidance were solemn and composed. The fish in the lotus pond were bright oranges, whites, yellows and blacks, and their fins and tails broke the surface when children threw crumbs into the water. The character-carved walls, and the stones, were unintelligible to me, but polished to mirrors and smooth to the touch. In my mind, my hand lingers over golden words set deep into black marble, dragging across them as though they can be gathered and saved.

I have trouble imagining this place spoiled, unrestful. Like the people of Tibet, it resonated peace; it was a sanctuary, even for tourists. And Dujiangyan, the small agrarian city of one million, was my home. Parts of me were born there. To have the city cut off, left with only the military to defend it -- not the free and healing ingress of warm, generous Sichuan people -- feels like a personal amputation.