PLANT HUNTING IN CHINA

Laura Lu asked, “Frank, do you want some water?” Frank did not want any water and Laura Lu said, “Frank, you don’t want no water; y’all back there want some water?” We all back in the bus did not want any water, and Laura Lu said, “Y’all don’t want any water, I guess I’ll just drink all this water here all by myself. Y‘all see that bird out there, that pretty little thing,” but the bus was moving much too fast and so we did not see the bird, and Laura Lu said, “Y’all missed seeing that pretty little bird, I am telling you that was the prettiest little bird I ever see. This all so pretty, I’m so glad I came on this trip. When Frank came back last time he told me how beautiful this place was and he was right, it’s so beautiful, it’s so beautiful.” Pierre said, “You would think they would …” and he made some scathing but perfectly accurate observation about the inefficient or unsanitary way the people outside our bus were conducting their lives; John said, “Come on, come on, let’s go, everybody, let’s get going here.” John had a voice that was not pleasing to anybody I knew, and on top of that, he used it to excess. Dan sat in a corner at the back of the bus and made jokes and cleaned the seeds he had just collected with a not-ordinary intensity; Dan was afraid of the dangerous driving on the dangerous roads in Yunnan Province, China, and he contained his fears in this way—cleaning his seeds. George, a Swiss man who works for the German seed company Jelito, had big teeth which could be seen when he made his big smile, he had a big smile. Hans, who works for a nursery in the Midwest specializing in plants that grow particularly well in the shade, was tall and thin and pale and had big teeth but not a mouth as big as George’s, and laughed often but not inappropriately. Grace, a woman, the owner of a nursery in Oregon, was silent or did not speak so much; but when John had left our group to go off and join another group, who were going to walk all over Nepal, Grace said to me, “Well, now that John has gone, who do you think is the leading candidate for asshole?” Grace laughed, I laughed, I said, “Me,” and Grace laughed again and turned away. I did not laugh again, I stayed still. A few days before he left, John had called me a bitch, though what he really said was that I was always bitchin’, but I decided that what he really meant was that I was a bitch, because bitchin’ can’t be done by someone who isn’t a bitch, or so it seems to me. On the bus I sat way in the back between Ozzie and Dan. Ozzie cleaned his seeds in a way that was exactly the opposite of Dan’s: slowly, almost tortoise-like, and this made Ozzie seem thoughtful. Once, when we had gone into a restaurant to have our delicious dinner of pork, pork, pork, no fish, yak, vegetables, rice, and beer, we met a woman singing. Her voice was not familiar to us and we all shrank from it, hoping we would be seated in a part of the restaurant far away from her. John said, “Isn’t her voice horrible, doesn’t the sound of it just drive you crazy?” And Ozzie said, very quietly, certainly not loud enough for anyone in particular to hear, “Little does he know, his voice has a similar effect.” Paul, our group leader, a botanist and gardener with the Sarah Duke Gardens in North Carolina, a fervent Christian, wore a small gold cross on the tip of the collar of his shirt at all times. When I thought of the trouble he had to go through remembering to remove the cross from his dirty shirts and then to putting it back on his clean shirts, I became frightened of him; I am not a Christian, but I know all the same how fierce Christians can be toward people who do not feel the way they do; I never told Paul that I was afraid of him, and as far as I can remember, he never did anything, apart from wearing the cross on his shirt collar, to confirm my fear.

A journey like this, for someone like me, begins in so many ways: in a book by the plant hunter Frank Kingdon-Ward, Plant Hunting on the Edge of the World, an account of his travels looking for plants in China; a book by Ernest Wilson, Plant Hunter’s Paradise, an account of his travels looking for plants in China; a book by Patrick Synge, Mountains of the Moon, an account of his travels looking for plants in Africa; a book by Reginald Farrer, Among the Hills, an account of his travels in the Alps looking for alpine plants; a repeated reading of the Heronswood catalogue from a nursery owned by the American plants-men Dan Hinkley and Robert Jones; the journal that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark kept, an account of their travels to all that unmapped and unclaimed (by Europeans) land west of the Mississippi (they brought back all sorts of plant specimens to Thomas Jefferson); walking out into my garden to deliberately feel and feel again the underside of the leaves of my Rhododendron smirnawii (it is native to the Caucasus)—alt this is only a small part of how a journey like this, for someone like me, begins.

And what did I leave behind? Two children—a boy who is ten, a girl who is fourteen—a husband, a garden full of autumn color (hibiscus, aconitum, anemone, cimicifuga, crocus, maples, cercidiphyllum, franklinia, clematis, Heptacodium miconioides). And this was in front of me: Paul Jones (a director of the Sarah Duke Gardens in North Carolina), Frank and Laura Lu (two lawyers from North Carolina, married to each other), Ozzie Johnson (a landscape gardener and horticulturist from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens), George Ueberhart (a horticulturist with the Jelito seed company in Germany), Pierre Bunnerup (from Sunny Borders Nursery in Connecticut), Hans Hensen (from Shady Gardens in Missouri), John (just John), Guan Kaiyun (the director of Kunming Botanical Gardens in Kunming, China—he was our host and guide), Grace Dinsdale (the owner of Blooming Nurseries in Oregon, one of a very small number of women in America to own a nursery), Daniel J. Hinkley (Heronswood Nursery in Kingston, Washington), and an unknown landscape (unknown except for those books and the people who wrote them) of mountains and valleys and meadows full of plants (in seed) that I would like to grow in my garden, the garden I was leaving behind and which really needed my care. Everything I cared about needed me to care about it, but I went off anyway.

One morning I drove my children to the schoolbus stop, I got on an airplane that took me to Chicago, I took another airplane to Hong Kong, I took another airplane to Kunming, China. That first night (a Sunday) I experienced the first of many doubts that the life I had left behind, life in a small village in Vermont, really existed, really was there and continued to be there in my absence. We were having a delicious dinner of Chinese food (though in China it is not Chinese food, it is only food) in a restaurant, and I went to the bathroom; it was not far away at all, it was right next to the kitchen, and on a table that was jammed up against a wall that separated kitchen and bathroom was a cauldron in which tea was brewed. As we were leaving the restaurant, I saw a large family having a wonderful time as they ate their dinner; it was so heartening it made me homesick, and I wanted to join them; but the baby of the family was having a bowel movement on the floor right then; it was all very comfortable for them, but I had come to China to collect seeds, not to be comfortable with what Chinese people did.

Dan (that is, Daniel Hinkley) and I were rooming together; I had requested it because he is my friend, the only person I knew on this expedition, and I felt very safe (he would like me no matter what) with him. This arrangement, of Dan and me, a man and a woman who were not married to each other, caused a small wave of disapproval; but Dan and I are both married—to other people, he to someone named Robert and I to someone named Allen, and we both had in common that we think of our marriages like breathing: ultimately fragile, so nothing must be done to compromise it. Looking back now, I can see what a pleasant, almost ideal couple we were: we never quarreled, we never caused each other any displeasure, we never longed to be rid of each other’s presence. When I told my husband about Dan and me and how happy we were together and our lack of expressed irritation toward each other, he told me of that day’s Ann Landers column: a woman had written to say that her husband was most attentive, giving her candy, bringing her flowers, considerate in every way you could imagine, but he had no interest in making love to her; what did it mean, she wanted to know. After Ann Landers printed this letter, she received over two hundred letters from other women requesting the name and address of this man.

The next day, a Monday, we were given a tour of Kunming Botanical Gardens by Guan (he had immediately become Guan to us, he wanted it that way), and it was my first time seeing the real botanists, as opposed to the nurserymen and -woman, in the grip of their passion. Ozzie, Paul, George, and Frank disappeared and Dan would have too, but I kept close to him. He was desperate to find seeds from the Magnolia davidii, but it had flowered many months ago and its fruit, which held the seeds, had long since fallen to the ground and rotted. He was much disappointed, but he pointed out to me things I had never even heard of: Michelia maudii, Liriodendron sinensis (I have planted and have thriving in my garden Liriodendron tulipifera, the species native to North America) and an evergreen witch hazel. The botanists were restless and frustrated by this little tour; none of them lived in the same zone as the Kunming Botanical Gardens, the plants growing there were not compelling to them.

That next day was really when the thing we had in mind began: collecting seeds. We were to go to Zhongdian and to stay for two days in Zhongdian collecting seeds from Hongshan Mountain; getting to Zhongdian would take two days and we would have to spend a night in the small city of Dali. It took a whole day in our minibus just to get there, and that first day the pattern of how we would spend the next four weeks was established; it was on that first day, too, that our personalities began to emerge, and by the time we got to the Red Camellia Hotel in Dali, we were all quite fixed. The botanists, all men, said the meanest things to each other in the nicest way, or the nicest things in the meanest way, and it was very funny, everybody laughed, and if I don’t repeat them now, it’s because when I told my husband what was said (and I told him what was said much later, after I had returned and everything was in the past), he looked puzzled and I could see that it all had the quality of you-had-to-be-there. As they (the botanists) said these things to each other (mean and nice, nice and mean, all of it side-splittingly funny), their eyes were focused outside the bus, not so as to enjoy the scenery, which was increasingly beautiful in a way that I had never seen or imagined landscape to be, but to see if there were any places where they thought they might find something for their garden. They demanded a stop on what was a busy highway, they wanted to look around, but I suspect the truth was that, to them, sitting anywhere (a bus, a couch, a veranda) and looking at vegetation that might be in fruit was unbearable. The botanists and nurserymen and -woman all went off looking for things. They found nothing much on the way to Dali. I found a small flowering datura, unlike anything I had ever seen anywhere (in cultivation, or naturalized); it had small, perfect, trumpet-shaped white flowers and no fragrance (but it was the middle of the day and we were still in a tropical latitude). It was in fruit: fat pods with gently forbidding thorns. I gathered them, they are native to Mexico; how they made their way to China, I do not know.

On that first day we ate the food we would always eat. We stopped at a little restaurant for a delicious lunch of pork, pork, and pork (steamed, fried, congealed, and then sliced thinly), sautéed green leaves, sautéed bamboo, boiled rice, and beer. We got back on the bus and the botanists began their funny back-and-forth chatter, but their eyes were always glued to the landscape. After two and a half hours of sitting and looking, they demanded that a stop be made. They had seen an intriguing gulch in the side of a mountain; we were at a much higher elevation than Kunming, we were in an American zone 8, no longer in the tropics. They grabbed their collecting vests, their backpacks, their cameras, and rushed out of the bus. I followed Dan, not because I wished to collect anything (I live in an American zone 5) but because I wanted to get the feel of it, going up and down in this unfamiliar brush, looking and looking for some vegetable treasure with fruit on it; but I could not keep up with Dan; he bounded up the mountain like a four-footed furry mammal (a bear) and disappeared. I only knew how to follow him by seeing the trembly branches and flattened undergrowth that were left in his wake. I came upon a cow, which looked at me; I came upon a dog, which barked crossly at me. This surprised me; I had not expected to find a cross dog in China.

We got back to Dali and found the streets full of non-Chinese people, and I don’t know if we looked as strange and out of place as they looked to me. We went out for a delicious dinner of pork, pork, pork, chicken, yak, sautéed vegetables, and beer, then went back to our rooms, slept, and the next morning, after a breakfast of rice noodles and instant coffee, got on the bus and started toward Zhongdian. We were climbing up now, higher and higher into the mountains, hairpin turn after hairpin turn, avoiding oncoming traffic as it avoided us; there were choruses of sharp intakes of breath, there were individual ahhhs; and the reason we were aware of each almost disastrous end is that we were looking out on an amazing landscape of hills, mountains, valleys, and terraces carved out of the mountains, cultivated, planted with corn—mostly corn, the rice grew in the valleys where we saw many people harvesting it—and as we drove through the villages that were in the mountains and the hills and the valleys, there was that strange, rotting, fetid, unpleasant smell of other people, their shit; human feces is such a valuable commodity in China, it is why all the vegetables were so vigorous-looking in cultivation, it is why people were so able to feed themselves. In all the time I was in China (four weeks spent in only two of its provinces) the thing I noticed people doing most frequently was growing food and eating food.

The botanists could take only so much sitting (three hours of driving); they demanded a stop. We had not reached the Yangtze, we were still among eucalyptus forests and bamboo, zone 8 or 7, but in the hills the botanists saw something. They collected seeds from arisaema, rhododendron (species not readily identifiable and so it became temporarily, until it bloomed, Rhododendron sp. or spa, as they jokingly pronounced it), hypericum, clematis, and other things which were new to me, but I could hear them speaking to each other in excitement about seeds from plants I had never seen or heard of in an American (or other) garden. I followed Dan, and this is how he got rid of me: he pointed to a cluster of red berries attached to a limp brown stem lying on the ground and said, “Here is your first ariseama.” I was directed to my first real collection, my first distinguished collection, but after I had gathered the cluster of fruits, placing them in a Ziploc plastic bag (just the way Dan had instructed me), when I looked up again Dan was not there, he was way up above me, I could tell because he kept calling kindly to ask if I was all right. I was almost on the edge of the world (the world as I understood and do still understand it) and I was not all right; I wondered if Annie was all right, I wondered if Harold was all right; I took for granted that Allen was all right and loved me in the way he already loved me.

We drove along for miles and miles of seeing mountains and hills in front of mountains, and then the former mountains becoming mere hills and terraces carved out of the side of the hills (or mountains) planted with corn (or something else from that family), and then the road ran parallel to the Yangtze River and we could see places where the river had overflowed its normal barrier and destroyed crops of food and may have caused deaths. The Yangtze moved swift and furious, not like any river I had ever seen before (Mississippi, Missouri) but more like the sea, concentrated, boiled down, reduced. We drove over a bridge, crossing the Yangtze, and the botanists grew restless again; it had been four hours since the last stop; they had been seeing nothing but villages and the cultivation of plant life that goes with them (people settled, needing and tending a constant source of food); the Yangtze turned west or north (I know it turned away from us or we turned away from it), and we traveled along a road that paralleled one of its tributaries. For a very long time (or so it seemed to the botanists and to me, too—I was beginning to see things only from their point of view, I was beginning to see, even more pointedly, the landscape only from Dan’s point of view), we saw nothing of interest, one-story building attached to rubber-coated wires (it was not the other way around), scrub and scrub and scrub (scrub as an entity holding nothing that the botanists thought of as garden-worthy, and that whole idea, “garden-worthy,” will eventually have its own enemies, its own friends and passionate supporters), and then suddenly, meadow upon meadow of euphorbia growing wildly everywhere, starting at the road, going all the way up to a farmhouse, going beyond the farm to the foot of hills; turn after turn in the road would reveal this scene, meadows of euphorbia, the farmhouse, the euphorbia coming to a stop at the foot of hills; and then the landscape changed again, narrowing, and the mountains towered above us, and the sides of the mountains were covered with things even I could recognize: rodgersia (pinnata, it turned out), viburnum (betulifolium, it turned out), ligularia, astilbe (chinensis, it turned out), Rosa (sericea pteracantha, it turned out), impatiens, an evergreen dogwood (Dendrobenthamia capitata), Clematis akebioidies, a single climbing aconitum (volubile, it turned out); and all this just in a day’s travel, from Dali to Zhongdian. It was dark when we arrived in Zhongdian; we washed, had a delicious dinner of pork, pork, pork, chicken, vegetables, no fish, rice, and beer, went back to our rooms to de-hiss and clean the seeds collected that day, went to bed just before midnight.

We all by then knew each other so well that it would not have been a surprise if some people had decided to spend the rest of a long life with one another, and it would not have been a surprise if some people never wanted to see one another again, even for a day. Laura Lu had the habit (charming sometimes, not charming sometimes) of asking you a question, repeating your answer, and then adding her response. It went like this: “Frank, you want some water? Frank, you don’t want no water. I guess I’ll just drink all this water myself.” But it was consideration and affection for others that made her do this; when I was thirsty, I drank the bottled water we had with us and never asked anybody else if they wanted some. John (who shall have no other name, he is only John) had a voice that was not pleasant to the ears and he used it to excess. Hans, a very young plantsman, admired the older botanists, especially Dan. George, from Switzerland, was a plantsman with the German seed company Jelito. Grace, married for the second time, but only for three months, was missing her second husband. Pierre, a nurseryman for many years now, had the most interesting stories to tell, which were wonderful to hear each time he told them again and again. When observing groups of Chinese people do some perfectly monotonous thing that made the idea of work seem a curse and not an opportunity to explore the meaning of existence (and observing this chore being performed would make anyone understand the reason for automatization), Pierre would say, “Look at that, you would think they would have …” All his observations and statements were quite accurate, only he did not take note of the fact that our Chinese guides spoke English and may have thought his observations were criticisms. Ozzie was mostly quiet, tortoise-like looking at the landscape and tortoise-like gathering seeds from it, and often gathering the most desirable things. And Frank was married to Laura Lu.

I had by then had many of my nervous breakdowns (this is how I characterize my monumentally rude and truly insulting behavior—a temporary lapse in sanity). I found sitting down to a meal an experience filled with pleasure, the raised surface of my tongue swelling, shrinking, twisting, eventually simply surrendering (to xanthocarpom, which turned up frequently; in the weeks after I returned from China, I cooked Chinese food obsessively and could not find xanthocarpom and was not sorry); I found going to the lavatory so fraught with anxiety that I would not do it at all, except in cases where I had so cruelly controlled my natural bodily functions that they rebelled and forced me to do the necessary.

A week passed by after I left my family and I missed them and I missed my surroundings in Vermont; I was almost on the edge of the world (the world as I have come to know it); I could still speak to them directly through a telephone, but I was beginning to think that everything I had known, everyone I had known, was very far away and I might not be able to get back to them. One day later than a week, I felt sad, I felt sick, I stayed in bed, Dan said it was altitude sickness (we were in Zhongdian, a city miles and miles above sea level, enough to induce altitude sickness) and that may have been so, but I was, on the other hand, just about to have my menstrual period; I always take to my bed at that exact time. On the day I stayed in bed, the nursery people—Grace, Pierre, George, and Hans—went off to an alpine region while the botanists—Dan, Ozzie, Paul, and Frank—went off to another part of the mountain above Zhongdian. The nursery people got lost, the vehicle taking them up and then down collapsed on the way down, they had to walk for miles (which didn’t bother Grace at all), they were very irritated that night at dinner. The botanists, on the other hand, had found many things they wanted, especially the Meconopsis horridula (which I had never even heard of, other meconopsis yes, but horridula, no), and they were so pleased with themselves, pleased with their success; the botanists did utter some oh-ohs and ah-ahs of sympathy for the disappointment of the nursery people, but I was not at all convinced that they were sincere.

In Zhongdian, though, I noticed this about the botanists: wherever they found themselves, they looked forward to the next place: the place to come held the thing that was most desired, the place to come contained the satisfaction they longed for, the longing (for blooms, and blooms that were not normal to us), the emptiness (of blooms, blooms that were not in our normal surroundings), would be filled in the place to come. And so we went from Zhongdian to Deqen, but Deqen was not our real destination, Deqen was only a place to stay for three nights; it took two days on the bus to arrive at Deqen. On the way to Deqen we collected seeds of Paeonia delavayi, Aconitum pendulicarpum, philadelphus, thalictrum, and a maple (Acer something; Dan was not sure) on the side of a mountain just above Napa Hai. We were going to spend a night in a place called Benzilan. The botanists had been to Benzilan two years earlier and they had not liked it; they kept saying to me, each time I rudely whined about something (the toilet!), Just wait until you get to Benzilan. When we got to Benzilan both Grace (who never complained or said anything disagreeable) and I, without speaking to each other, immediately went to a store and bought aluminum pails in which to piss during the night. They were such handsome buckets; they cost about twenty-five cents each and I wished to bring them home even at the same time that I knew I never wanted to see them in any other situation besides the countryside of China again. That night after dinner (pork, pork, pork, no fish, the flesh of something that was a mammal other than pig, vegetables, rice, and beer) we sat on a balcony and drank beer and Scotch and watched a planet (Venus) come up and then stay still a little way above the ridge of mountains. We went to bed and awoke the next morning to the sounds of an animal being murdered for our breakfast and trucks taking on fuel and water. Benzilan was a town far from anywhere; it is a place where you stay on your way to somewhere else. I deeply loved Benzilan just for that, and in my mind all places of transition should be called that: Benzilan.

I was by then getting closer and closer to the edge of my world, that is to say, if the world as I had imagined it had a horizon beyond which I would fall and no longer know myself, I was then, in Benzilan, approaching it; after Benzilan I did not know myself, I could not speak to my family, I slept in a room with Dan (in separate beds), I saw Paul and Ozzie and Laura Lu and Hans and Frank and George and Pierre and Grace for breakfast and then again for dinner. When we got to Deqen, the evening of the morning after we left Benzilan, I came down with the monthly calamity that is my menstrual period and took to my bed for all of the following day. And so I began feeling the loss of my family and the comforts of every kind that I associate with them.

One morning (again, one morning!) coming down the stairs of the Duo-wen Hotel in Benzilan, I fell and sprained my ankle. Two days later, when collecting the seeds of a clematis not far from the Beimashan Pass, in excitement I turned too quickly and twisted the very same ankle. I fell, I cried out, no one answered me; I then followed the path along a fiercely rushing stream; I unexpectedly came upon Dan and Ozzie lying on their stomachs adoring a begonia they had longed to see in the wild and were now seeing in its natural habitat. On that same day (the day of respraining my ankle) Dan was certain that he had come upon Rheum davidii (a rhubarb with leaves the size of a half dollar), and he collected seeds from it and was happy for an hour or so, before deciding that he had not collected Rheum davidii at all but only a pesty polygonatum; he was much depressed by this, even though he already had this same rhubarb davidii growing in his garden; it had been given to him by that great gardener in Ireland Helen Dillon.

And after three days we left Deqen to go to Weixi, meaning to take a road that ran along the Mekong River and of course stopping along the way to collect seeds. Dan’s friend Daryl, a specialist in epimedium, had told Dan of areas along this road where different species of this plant, epimedium, would be abundant; but one hour out of the city of Deqen, the road had collapsed (some of the mountain above had just rolled down onto the road), and so we had to retrace our path, going back to Deqen, back to Beimashan, back to Benzilan, back to Zhongdian. We went back the way we had come as if we had never seen it before, with enthusiasm, with happiness; we collected again, things we already had and things we had missed; we ate a delicious lunch of pork, pork, pork, pork, vegetables, rice, and beer in Benzilan, in a restaurant right next to the Duo-wen Hotel. We got back to Zhongdian way before dark, and Dan took a taxi to a place out of town so he could collect the seeds of a special birch; he had meant to collect it when we were first in Zhongdian, had forgotten then, and was very glad to have the chance to do it again; he had already collected and grown this plant in his nursery, but by mistake he had sold them all and had not kept any for his own garden.

We got to Weixi after a whole day of sitting on the bus, stopping only for lunch, delicious as usual and in just the way we had come to expect, and one stop for collecting (I collected a particularly large flowering St. Johns wort); in Weixi we bathed in the kind of bathrooms we were accustomed to (the kind of bathrooms I had become accustomed to), ate a delicious dinner of pork, pork, pork, pork, noodles, beef, vegetables, rice, and beer; I walked back to my room with my arm linked through Paul’s; I saw a rat, screamed, and Paul did not make fun of me. My twice-sprained ankle had begun to look like an unusual garden implement: from my ankle to my toes was such a huge swelling that my calf looked unusually thin, as if it were the handle of the tool that was the rest of my foot. I bound it up with a bandage I had bought at Wal-Mart in Vermont, stamped Made in China, but I could not find any bandages like it in any of the stores I frequented in that part of China.

In Weixi I stayed in bed nursing my ankle, went to lunch with Pierre, walked around and met a woman selling coins that had been in circulation in Indochina in 1918; I bought one for about twenty-five American cents, I did not know if it was authentic and I did not really care. By that time in Weixi I had become used to walking around among ordinary Chinese people and causing a sensation; they had never seen a person with my complexion before; mothers and fathers would draw my presence to their children’s attention and they were not discreet about it; I did not mind, I was in their country. I did not forget my own family then, but I did not miss them, nothing I saw reminded me of them, not the children, not the husbands, not the wives, not the houses, which do not have sloping roofs, not the market where I could buy a chicken whose neck had been just partially cut or an aphrodisiac made from the ground-up penis of a mammal. In the mountains near Weixi, Dan found a climbing Solomon’s seal and some other plants, but everyone was very excited about the climbing Solomon’s seal, and he immediately agreed to share his collection of its seeds.

That morning, just as we were getting on the bus to leave Weixi (it might have been a Wednesday, it might have been a Thursday, it might have been a Friday, none of us knew the names of the days anymore, only that it was day and then it was night), there was a huge commotion in the courtyard near the kitchen; something (mammal) was screaming in agony, the pathetic, last, hopeless appeal that mammals make before they die (and they know it well, for so much of the time they are the cause of it). Among us there were many oh Gods and oh Christs and oh shits; but Hans and I went to see what or who was making such a cry. This is what we saw: a very big pig, its two front legs tied together, its two back legs tied together, surrounded by four people; one of them held the pig’s head, another one was plunging a knife into its neck; the pig’s cries grew louder and then softer, blood spurted out of its neck, and someone held a large basin in place to catch the blood; the basin quickly filled up with blood, it was too small to hold all the pig’s blood. Hans and I joined the rest of our group on the bus. This incident was never mentioned again. For lunch we ate our delicious meal of pig, pig, pig, pig, pig, no fish, many vegetables cooked in fat rendered from pig, rice, and beer; that evening in Judian, we ate our delicious dinner of pork, pork, pork, pork, pork, no fish, many vegetables sautéed in fat rendered from the flesh of a pig, rice, and beer.

It was in Judian that I had my most serious nervous breakdown. I went to our Chinese guide and said this: “The rooms are the filthiest rooms I have ever been in; there is blood on the walls, there is shit on the walls, there are the remains of vomit on the walls.” Judian was the place where our guide had been born and grew up; but I did not know this when I spoke those words, I only knew because Paul gave me a lecture on other people’s reality, on other people’s feelings, and though he did not mention that dreaded word “acceptance” he implied that I should accept the things I was faced with. I did not think, What a Christian! then, I only wished I had thought it then, so I could regret my prejudice now. And it was John who said to me that our experience was more authentic the closer we came to the Chinese, and by that he meant the major and minor stooping situation that I had been complaining about; he said that the whole experience of the unsanitariness of everything, the preparation of our food, the places in which we ate and slept (all this according to my feelings, not my scientific evidence, I have no scientific evidence, I don’t even believe in such a thing as scientific evidence), that all of this made our experience in China more authentic. And I thought to myself, Well, the last time I had such an intimate experience with anybody was with my children, changing their diapers, cleaning up their vomit when they had a flu, cooking their food, and worrying about where it, their food, came from (strawberries from Chile or California), and I do not think all of that makes our relationship more authentic, I could have done without all of it, the vomit, the blood, the shit; I only said all this to myself, I did not say any of this to anybody, not to John; I did not say to John, I like the Chinese, I like the way they grow food (I would then be thinking of how those terraces and terraces were cultivated), I like the way they eat food, it is the things they do in between growing and eating I don’t like, the things they do after eating the food, I don’t understand that; all the things I thought, everything I thought, I did not say one word of to John. I only looked at him (John); he caressed his beard (he had a beard), he stroked his nose between his thumb and his forefinger as if to refine it (his nose); and all this about John—caressing his beard, stroking his nose, the sound of his voice, his opinions on authenticity or inauthenticity—made me sorry for the people who would be on a hike with him in Nepal (this was to come), made me sorry for people who would not or could not speak freely (to him, a simple man, or to something more complicated than a simple man); but just as I was having feelings of sympathy for John and all who would meet or could meet John, it was then that he said (John did) I was always bitchin’ and bitchin’, and it was then that I transformed him saying this (“bitchin’ and bitchin’”) into him actually calling me a bitch, and at that moment he was ashamed of himself for using those words (“bitchin’ and bitchin’”) and I was suddenly glad that I had bitched and bitched. If a person who stroked his beard and caressed his nose was against bitching, then most certainly a person like me must be a bitch. When John said that I had been “bitchin’ and bitchin’” and I had then turned this phrase into a badge of honor for myself, he had not expected that, he was cowed, he was quiet after that, we parted with heartfelt kisses, and only time will tell if those heartfelt kisses were forever. If I were to see him again I would be so pleased, especially if he did go off to build those houses for Habitat for Humanity; he talked a great deal about that during the time I felt him to be unendurable, and that and that alone mitigated my desire to slice his head off his body. Even now (especially now), I am glad an impulse for good (building homes for people who had none) intervened between my desire for something bad and my desire for something that was not bad. I did not like John; I did not hate John, I only did not like him, and when he was gone (off to walk on a trail that ran among the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains, and I was very envious of that, even though I had never imagined such a thing until John mentioned it) I missed him.

And by that time again, I was so far away from everything that had come to have meaning for me (my children, my husband, the home in which I lived, the other people I saw every day), that the world I knew only through the telephone or through some other form of communication receded and receded and I could barely remember it, and was uncertain that I would see it again. Driving along the Yangtze River as it went one way, and then driving along the Yangtze as it went in an opposite direction, taking a dramatic (to me, at any rate) turn; driving toward the Mekong and then the road disappearing; driving along a road that had been cut out in the middle of a formidable ridge (a mountain), the whole thing reduced to something a child would construct out of sand on a beach, if a child was granted such a luxury. The botanists, their eyes searching the sides of the mountains for areas beyond which they could just sense lay a rich collection of plants that had set seed, would demand a stop, and then another; they were so voracious, but only for plants that had set fruit; they did not eat an enormous amount of food, they all lost much of their evidence of American physical prosperity (fat) after three weeks; they stopped and stopped and collected and collected; once we had to stop because two vehicles going in opposite directions had collided while going around a blind bend; no one was hurt, but it took a while to clear the road; it was there one botanist collected Iris colettii, a species of iris I had never heard of before.

To see Dali again was reassuring and all those strange people (natives of Denmark, France, England, the Netherlands); their presence no longer annoyed me, I was only curious about them, my curiosity did not need to be satisfied. At that time there was a big moon in the sky, a full moon; and to see such a thing as that moon, so familiar, and those people (from Denmark, France, England, the Netherlands), so familiar, made me feel confident, made me feel as if the world would be mine again, I could dismiss the things I did not like (the certainty of the people from Denmark, France, England, the Netherlands); and so when I saw a funeral, someone being buried in a city in China, I was curious, I wondered what that was like, to miss someone forever in a place like that, Dali, China. Some of the mourners had wrapped their heads in white cloth, some of the mourners carried an old framed picture of the dead person, some of the mourners wept, some of the mourners held the weepers in their arms, some of the mourners took turns carrying the coffin, some of the mourners banged on drums and some played tunes on a reed instrument. The coffin was painted red and was shiny, as if freshly lacquered; I was sorry, just at that moment, that I did not know the person inside it, and I was glad, just then, I did not know the person inside it; to be sorry, gladness should come first, but when sorrow comes, I can never remember that I had once been glad. It went through Dali, the entire procession, some weeping (the people walking behind the coffin), some laughing (the people who took turns carrying the coffin), and when they got to a part in their travels that separated Dali from the burial grounds, the people carrying the coffin ran away from the rest of the mourners; the rest of the mourners seemed devastated, the rest of the mourners pretended to be devastated (this is how it seemed to me), and then there was the loud noise of firecrackers and the smell of things burning (but not seriously burning), and then the mourners carrying the coffin proceeded up a long, steep hill; the other mourners, the ones left behind, looked longingly at the disappearing people carrying the coffin.

But it was the familiarity of Dali (the funeral reminding me of death, the bars where I could buy whiskey and rum and vodka, the restaurants where I could buy coffee or something resembling coffee, a hamburger, a toilet where my bodily remains disappeared when I pressed a lever, people who took a tip as a reward for their satisfactory service) that made me miss my husband, my children, my home, my garden with everything in it dying, going dormant. The botanists and their companions (the nursery people) went off to a place called Huadianba, to search for something that would make the American garden (a luxury) even more beautiful, but my ankle (which looked more than ever like a serviceable implement in the history of the American garden) hindered me from joining them. They came back in a rush, they came back excited, they came back with tales of not enough beer, too much solitude, not enough seeds from plants they expected to find in seed; they came back saying how wonderful everything had been, they came back looking forward to going to Emeishan. Between Dali and Emeishan we stopped in Kunming (again) and Chengdu. Kunming and then Dali seemed like Paris (the capital of France, not the plant the botanist had been seeking); and then, long after, Kunming and Chengdu seemed like themselves, not like anything I had known before, not like anything I wanted to know again, like places (cities) in my imagination, like places (cities) I had heard or read about. In Kunming we ate pork, pork, pork, beef (not yak), fish, vegetables, rice, and beer; we sent by special post to North America all the seeds we had collected in Yunnan Province. John left for his trek in the Himalayas, a woman named Elsa replaced him; it was then, when John had left, that Grace asked me who would take his place as asshole and I said that I would, though I was not happy to take his place. Elsa and Grace were assigned to room with each other. Grace liked Elsa very much, we all liked Elsa very much, Elsa was so very nice, we all missed John so very much, we had come to like John very much.

We flew to Chengdu (the capital of Szechwan Province), and then took a bus to the foothills of Emeishan, a mountain holy to people of the Buddhist faith. There are places on this earth to which you are drawn because they promise to make you forget where you are from, and there are other places, existing all by themselves, and they make you forget where you are from and where you were just the other day. Emeishan was such a place. It had a history: a holy mountain, one of the most holy mountains to Buddhism; it was so holy that hundreds of years ago steps were built that led from its base to its summit, so that people could walk up (to see Nirvana, the place, or just simply the state of mind) or down (at which point they perhaps might come to the realization that Nirvana is neither a place nor a state of mind).

At the base of Emeishan, the botanists collected the seeds of a begonia, a hepatica, an epimedium with leaves twice the size of my palm and shiny as if they had been polished by a very industrious person. It takes three days or so for a devoted pilgrim to walk up to the summit of Emeishan; it took us a day to walk almost three-quarters of this same path down the mountain. Walking down, I collected the seeds of Astilbe grandis, Viburnum nervosa, Buddleia forrestii, and Aconitum volubile (a climbing monkshood); and when walking down those stairs, I once again wondered where I was, where I really was, and if I would find my way home again, if I would ever see the things that were most familiar, the things that I most loved, again: my children, my husband, my friends, the garden; the garden I have made and loved was in back of me, the garden I hoped to have and so hoped to love was in front of me, at my feet, on the slopes of this mountain that was holy to some people, not to me. It was on this mountain that we came across bands of monkeys, native to that part of the world, native to that mountain, and they were very unpleasant, reminding me of myself, my relatives, people I might actually know: they were beautiful, they were demanding, they were greedy, they were ill-mannered, they were violent; they jumped on the back of a woman from France and ripped her knapsack apart in a flash, they tore off a pocket on someone else’s jacket; when I saw a band of them approaching me, hissing and baring their teeth, I screamed and pushed in front of me a young woman named Jen, a young woman half as old as I. She only realized I was serious about using her as a shield when she found my fingernails burrowing into the soft flesh of her arm. Jen staved the monkeys off for me and Hans, too, and after that I walked down the stairs confidently, because I asked everyone I met coming up if there were any monkeys below, and they always said no; and I believed them, even though I wasn’t sure they understood me, for they were all Chinese, and they remained so, stubbornly … Chinese. I walked and walked all day, stopping only for a delicious lunch of pork, pork, pork, noodles, eggs, tomatoes, and rice at a wayside restaurant; I ate that meal with Dan and Ozzie and Hans and Laura Lu and Frank; near the end of the day, with my destination not more than a quarter of a mile away (I could even see the end of the walk, a sharp drop of stairs below me), I could not walk anymore. I could not feel my own legs, they would not do what I commanded them to do, and I started to cry. Dan came upon me going down the stairs on my bottom, like a baby just learning the mechanics of walking, and he tried to carry me in his arms, but to take his mind off what a burden I was to him, he told jokes and made me laugh so much that I became more of a burden laughing than I had been when I was crying. I then paid two men three hundred yuan to carry me to the end of the trail; they had charged me sixty, but I was so grateful to them for carrying me one quarter of a mile or so that I would have given them more than was required.

When coming down Emeishan, Grace wandered off the path to get a better view and she almost fell off a ridge into nothing for hundreds of feet before the nothing changed into naked rocks; when she told us of this experience, we were all shaken, and the next day she went off to Shanghai to make contact with people who propagate tree peonies, and after she left we all would say to each other, from time to time, “I wonder how Grace is doing,” for Grace had left us and took her spontaneity, her impetuosity, all amounting to a kind of loneliness; we never heard from her again and I missed her, especially at the last meal we all ate together; the botanists and I wanted to have our serving of rice at the same time we had our delicious servings of pork, pork, pork, pork, yak, vegetables sautéed in pork renderings, chicken, and no fish, not after; we gestured, we spoke loudly, we gestured, we spoke loudly, but nothing we said or did conveyed any meaning to our waitress. Ozzie then got up and went into the kitchen and showed the waitress the pot of rice, and that was how we got to eat rice at the same time as our other food. It was then Pierre said, “Isn’t this funny? We want rice, the place is full of rice, but we don’t know how to ask for rice; you would think by now we could have figured out how to say ‘rice’ in Chinese.” It was then I missed Grace, and that was also the last time I missed Grace.

We said goodbye to each other in Hong Kong. I had collected the seeds of 130 different flowering plants. I would send them to Andrew and to Jack, two men who grow many things from seed for me. I got on a plane early one morning and I flew through that morning and a night, and then arrived in Chicago on the very same morning that I left Hong Kong. All that I left behind was real enough: the days on the bus in the company of the same people, wearing the same clothes (I loved their smells); the same food—pork, pork, pork, rice, vegetables, yak, fish every once in a while, I never grew sick of it; Benzilan, where the moon looked strange in the sky and the sky itself looked not real, or not like the sky I had gotten to know; the glacier I could see at Beimashan Pass, a glacier in a place that on the map is at the same latitude as Cuba; the toilets that did not work—the toilets will never work, they have a different idea altogether about hygiene; my grumpiness, my bitchiness, my nervous breakdowns; the wet meadows of primulas; the gulleys filled with columbine and meadow rue and sanguisorba chewed to the ground by grazing yaks; the grazing yaks themselves; walking hurriedly to meet the bus and coming upon a large colony of Primula capitata in seed; the rhododendrons and the rhododendrons and the rhododendrons again—so many different species would have to bloom before even Dan could say with certainty what they are; all those people who stared at me, all those people I would have stared at if I had seen just one of them in my small village in Vermont. I slipped back into my life of mom, sweetie, and the garden; I was given much help by buying a fashion magazine that had on its cover a picture of that all-powerful and keenly discerning literary critic Oprah Winfrey.