The Long Road Home

I got a bus on Saturday evening the last bit to Chengdu. The good thing about buses is you can listen to your ipod, you are quite high up, your legs don’t get tired, and all technical issues eg breakdowns, finding the route etc, are someone else’s problem. The bad thing is that you can’t stop to look at things, they go on motorways so you don’t see much except hills and valleys flashing by, you can’t watch birds, you can’t hear anything eg water, wind, birds, people hoeing and calling to eachother etc, or smell anything eg pine trees, flowers, wet green things. Anyway, I can’t get to london in time without a few bus hops, so there you are.

The rivers were overflowing, sticks and weeds and things washed in were whirling along. The Yangtze was a brown blur at dusk out of the window. Finally the rain stopped and moon came out, rather effectively, over forests and water. Close to the city there were lots of flyovers and rubbishy waste lands.

Next day in Chengdu was bright sun. There wide streets with tricycles rickshaws with green awnings. There were tea houses with chairs and tables in deep shade under climbing plants on trellises. People were fishing, chatting, playing cards and mahjong, pushing toddlers in pedal cars. You could buy black sesame paste in bowls, waffle pancakes, chicken wings, sunflowers seeds, icecreams. A group of men sitting on the low walls of a wooden covered walkway were playing erhu violins and flutes.

I met some people from the Sichuan People’s Arts Company and got a ticket for their evening performance.  The show was called ‘The Thatched House’. The audience was lots of families, who ooohed and made ghost noises when the lights went down, and clapped everything, even the man at the beginning saying we should be quiet and turn off mobile phones.

The performance was a musical set in a village school in north China. The school children are in patched clothes with red scarves. According to the programme, it was about childhood and hope, but it was all awfully sad and everyone was brave but noone’s hopes seemed to turn out. The teacher’s lover sadly marries someone else. An old woman drowns saving the life of a mute girl in a storm on the river (so effectively done that the boy next to me dived under his seat and wouldn’t watch, and his mum was flapping his head). The old woman’s grandson becomes ill and has to leave to go and find a cure.. The performance ends with him saying farewell, giving his pencil case to the mute girl and his straw hat made by his grandmother to his best friend. He asks his school friends to be burn incense for his grandmother, "who’s gone to the moon". The children sang again the opening song about hope, and then the stage went dark and the story was over.  We were all wiping our eyes.

When the house lights came back on, the caste were all still there on stage, and they had a jolly time doing group photos, loafing around on stage chatting, with people from audience, whilst sweeping ladies swept up around the empty chairs.

I went back to the hotel on a tricycle rickshaw. I don’t think a huge number of foreign people go to Chengdu, but it seems a very nice place, and has been a lovely place to resting and relax before the next stage.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 3:35 pm and is filed under On the Road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.