A
He stepped off the plane and onto the yellow earth. Yellow
was the colour of the East. Yellow was the colour of dragons, who passed it
down to emperors, their representatives on earth, who only wore gold. Now
though it was the colour of an unnatural fog, heavy with industrial pollutants
that mixed together and was added to year after year. A yellow ochre veil hung
over the lowering sun, dragging it west down its long descent.
This could have been a cowboy story. Our hero is a young American
in his early twenties. He comes from the Midwest, where the big country was wide
and empty, and there was nothing in the way of riding hard and fast all the way
to the horizon. Our hero is adventurous:
being a mixture of Irish and Jewish descent (with even some Arabic genes in the family tree). He loved languages and had spent time in France and a
kibbutz; he had boundless hunger for the new. More than that he was possessed by
a demon he didn’t know who could paint a door in a blank wall and make it open.
But our hero had stepped into the East, and so the story shatters
into different possibilities; incandescent, all but one of them would burn out
and disappear. China, newly re-emerging, was by far his most exotic adventure
and he was drawn to its improbable transformation. But this big country was dense
with not just people but history - a back story that had already carved tiny paths,
walls and hidden valleys into every inch of ground; China’s newness was
deceptive. And then everything is not as it seems with our hero, either. With
his thick blond, almost red, beard and dressed, always, in a neat buttoned down
shirt and pants, he seemed much older than his years. His eyes, which remained still
and cool even when the rest of him was animated, were the only part of him that
looked tired.
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