The Only Color in the World

September 30, 2007

I rode my bike across the Chinese countryside. The sky, like the earth, was a dull orange, and the village, behind a rise to the north, was still quiet this early morning. The roadside vendors I passed were still asleep, their still forms thickly bundled in grimy cotton quilts as they lay behind their wood-frame sheds along the roadside.

One old man was awake, his arms spread out and rotating slowly in his Tai Chi Chuan exercises. His face was without expression, and he did not in the slightest way acknowledge me as I wheeled past.

Near him, a woman tended a tiny coal stove, steam rising from a pot and a thin stream of yellow sulphur smoke trickling out of the stovepipe. “Zhao, ni hao,” I said in my best Chinese. She glanced up at me and said nothing, her face also without expression. I passed her by, my smile felt stretched thin.

Farther down the vendor’s row, others were stirring, each figure clothed thick with blue or green cotton-padded jackets and knitted caps, the condensation of their breaths wreathing their heads. Streams of coal smoke rose straight into the sky in the still air.

This is January in Henan Province, a poor place in a poor country. I had been teaching English in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital, for just four months, a young American freshly graduated from college. I had started taking these morning rides soon after my arrival in September, partly for the exercise, but mostly for the opportunity to get out of the city.

I was not having an easy time so far. The language was difficult and intimidating and the food did not always agree with me. Understanding and accommodating the culture was tiring and frustrating. Most of all, I was intensely lonely. Though many of my friends back in the States wrote to me faithfully, and my mother kept me supplied with tasty care packages, the letters and tastes of home couldn’t come fast enough to stave off the challenges of living and working in rural China.

Still, I had begun to see the beauty of the place. The landscape, tired though it was, dried out, used up and spent by six thousand years of human occupation, drew me somehow. And so did the people.

A few hundred meters past the roadside vendors, I turned off the paved road and on to a kind of cart track. It ran between open fields, now bare except for wheat stubble. I was alone now, I thought, and I rode slowly, my mind wandering. Suddenly, a figure appeared ahead of me, a young peasant woman crossing the field to the east.

As we drew near each other, she turned to look at me, her eyes widened with astonishment when she saw that I was a foreigner. I rolled slowly forward, unable to take my eyes off of her. She paused there in the silent field, and her blue headscarf, her green jacket, her perfect oval face seemed to be the only color and warmth in the whole world.

Then, with a tiny self-conscious smile, she brushed her cheek with the back of her hand, and she continued walking across the field, leaving me behind. I could do nothing but pedal, my bicycle clattering over the oxcart ruts, my mouth dry and my heart broken.

Eric Bosell lived in China for ten years before returning to the United States to pursue a much less interesting career in marketing communications and public relations.

The TSM Fall Travel Writing Contest has been organised in association with On The Beach Holidays