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The Biggest Man in China

by

John Dalton


(excerpted from his novel Heaven Lake)

They were middle- to late-aged women, wide in the hips and shoulders, a crowd of fifty or more, their stout bodies shrouded in velvet skirts and winding red scarves.  They had broad, pale, Middle Eastern faces, their eyebrows sullied into thick oily slashes, their ears pierced and dangling jeweled rings.  They were bright-hued, vibrant in a way that made the Han Chinese women seem wispy-thin and bland in comparison.  Like Vincent these Uighur women had all purchased tickets to Urumchi and were clustered together under the shaded eaves of the Turpan bus station.  They spoke what was most likely Turkish, and during the time he waited with them, they drew close, examined his sagging travel bag, clucked their tongues at his short-sleeved T-shirt, the concern of matronly aunts whose casual brooding implied that he had not prepared for the climate or the coming journey, and it was their business, their nature, to worry for him.

As a whole they were not particularly annoyed with the bus's delay.  Instead they opened fat bags of linen and thread and began to sew, shrinking back with the waning shadows whenever strands of bright sunlight blanched their sandled feet.  An hour passed and then another.  In the interim, he sat humbly in their midst and accepted, more out of graciousness than real hunger, a slice of watermelon and a handful of crumbling rice cake.  Then a bell rang out, and all at once they clutched their bags and rushed in the direction of a dust-smeared diesel bus pulling into the farthest bay.  Vincent was swept along with them, out into the blistering heat, bullied inside a herd of lumbering women as they scrambled toward the bus's landing and narrow folding doors. 

Pressed together as they all were, tangled in a swaying mob, they could not enter the bus.  They could only surge against the landing until, one by one, women at the forefront broke free and scaled the metal steps.  Yet Vincent remained lodged in the center of the maelstrom, and by the time he lunged forward and cinched a hand to the railing, dozens of feistier women had already clamored aboard.  He drew himself up inside the narrow stairwell and pushed his way down the aisle.  In the rear of the bus he spotted what appeared to be bundles of linen pouring through open windows.  In fact these bundles were women, a bright-swaddled flow of leaner, more dexterous types, who had been vaulted up by accomplices outside the bus and were rolling headlong into the last rows of empty benches. 

He would not get a seat.  Midway down the aisle, he felt hands unclench his shirt and drop away.  The struggling ceased.  His ticket to Urumchi did not, as he thought, guarantee a journey, but was, more aptly, an invitation to join in the melee, a circus of inseverable wrangling in which the strong, the wily and dogged prevailed.  Normally he would have sulked away and grown despondent, but at present all he could muster was a mild, pointless resentment.  And calm wonderment too, because once the final seat had been occupied, the women all settled onto their benches, opened their bags of linen, and, while fishing for needle and thread, resumed their amiable chit-chat.  On his way out, a women perched aisle-side at the front of the bus waved a bag of rice cakes beneath his chin and urged him to take another handful. 

The station clerk, grim-browed and squinting through the bars of his dark cubicle, would not refund Vincent's ticket, though he did offer the following counsel.  "The women –they’re not even riders.  They’re only holding seats for the Uighur men of Turpan.  So come again tomorrow morning, but be ready.  Listen for the bell.  Run ahead of the women.  Because if they grab you, if they surround you." His hands fluttered up in violent pantomime.  "Like wild dogs," he whispered.

Vincent loitered in the station a while, mulling over this advice.  Moments later a stubby, skull-capped Uighur gentleman waved to him from across the station.  In an instant the man shuffled forth and seized Vincent by the elbow.  "To Urumchi," he said.  "To Urumchi.  To Urumchi you go."

"Yes," Vincent said.  "To Urumchi." He nodded at the packed bus.  "I wish I were going."

"To Urumchi," the man repeated.  He was uncommonly short and even his voice had an odd dwarfish timbre.  "To Urumchi.  On another bus."

"A today bus?" Vincent asked.

"A now bus," the man said, and led Vincent outside the station, sprinting ahead, then halting and pointing around the building's corner.  "A now bus," he said, gesturing emphatically at something out of sight, something concealed and waiting in a stone-gated alley just beyond the station's east wall.  And wouldn't it be absurdly appropriate, Vincent thought, after all the scuffling he’d been through, to discover another bus, clean-washed and idling and free of passengers, parked a mere hundred yards from the site of his defeat.  He rounded the corner and sucked in his breath, blinking at the skull-capped little man, who had taken up a rather boastful stance at the bow of what looked to be an oversized tricycle.  He raised a hand skyward and pointed vaguely toward some eastern quadrant of the oasis.  "Another bus...  A now bus," he said, and swiveled round to aim his finger at the rear of the tricycle which had been stretched back, elongated into a steel-railed bed.  In the center of the bed, perched sure-footed atop a mound of dingy hay, stood a small white-haired goat. 

"To Urumchi," the man shouted.  "To Urumchi you go." His enthusiasm had seized him like a fever.  He bounced onto the seat and then insisted that Vincent climb up over the railing and take a place behind him on the floor of the bed.  They rolled out of the ally, down one paved lane and then another.  The man teetered side to side with the thrust of each pedal.  Vincent gripped the rail and crouched down low causing his T-shirt to pull away from his jeans and leave a sliver of exposed skin for the desert sun to kindle.  Periodically, he felt a damp, rubbery sensation, a whiskered graze across the naked small of his back, but each time he glanced over his shoulder, he found that the goat had turned its shaggy head demurely away from him. 

They did not travel far, through a market of tents and up a sandy-shouldered incline.  Parked atop the rise was a long, dusty, camel-backed vehicle, which Vincent recognized as a bus once they’d drawn near.  Lashed to the roof were two steep mounds of cargo, mostly wood pallets and stacks of wire caging.  He stepped down from the tricycle and paced round from bumper to end.  Along the sides, gashed and dented panels had been patched over with sheets of corrugated tin.  The rear hatch, the emergency door, was missing, and the resulting hole, ugly and dust corroded, drew back inside the aisleway like a giant steel anus.

He boarded and took a seat halfway down the aisle.  There were fist-sized holes in the floorboard through which he could see the roadbed below. 

By two-thirty in the afternoon each empty seat had found its passenger, all of them Uighur men with trickling beards, their heads wrapped in white turbans or crowned in beaded skull caps.  The driver, a chronically alert young Chinese man, throttled the engine and turned the bus north and soon they had breached Turpan's gated ramparts and were through the nettled mouth of the oasis where long-stretched groves of silver poplar trees shielded the roadway on both sides.  The trees flickered and fell away and bronze foothills arose steepening over the course several kilometers into high, sun-crested bluffs. 
Passengers on the bus's left side hid from the sunlight by draping their heads in overcoats and unfurled turbans.  The shaded right side made the heat tolerable, and Vincent, who had chosen a right side seat, was struck by his own good fortune.  He craned his head around to grin at those behind him.  They were mostly stony-postured old men, a few of whom had rifled open copies of the Koran and were mouthing the words with cracked lips.  A sudden buckle or dip in the roadway below would send a quaking shudder along the spine of the vehicle.  The rear benches heaved.  Riders were vaulted aloft.  Even in mid-air, launched in unison toward the bus's domed ceiling, they held their bearing of austere, old-world solemnity. 

Vincent dozed from time to time, and when he grew thirsty he brought forth a small cantaloupe, punctured its skin, and let the cool juice trickle into his mouth.  He unzipped his bag, reached for his walkman, and listened to Bach, a perfect accompaniment because this sweet, tuneful elegance, this small astonishment of sound brought deeper nuances to the larger wonders reeling past outside his window.  A young Uighur man beside him leaned close, captivated, it seemed, by the tiny sprocketed wheels turning inside the cassette player.  Vincent paused the tape, lifted the headphones and placed them over the young man's bristly ears.  A thumb pressed to the play button and the young man broke into a gap-toothed, effusive grin.  He cupped both earphones with his sooty hands.  "It's good," he declared too loud and with a novice's amazement.  "It's very big, very deep.  I can hear it all around me."

Vincent felt lightened by his reaction, and when the walkman was passed across the aisle into other hands, he grinned and nodded permission, happy to share the magic, because, in a mawkish and transient sense, the journey had made them all brothers, all nomads.  He turned and gazed outside the bus where the land had yawed open wide into a vast basin of sand and pale earth.  Glinting heat caused his eyes to spasm and ache.  When he turned back, the walkman had disappeared.

He rose to his feet, still unsure as to whether or not he was being teased.  "Please give back the machine," he chided.  "Please give back the little music machine." He surveyed two long aisles of bowed, penitent heads.  "Give back the little music machine," he repeated, more insistently, until the bus lurched and he toppled back into his seat.  There he sulked, and for a long time tried unsuccessfully to compose a rebuttal.  Something about respect and honor among travelers, something about the hardships of travel, the tediousness, and how music could be a diversion, a salvation.  Then, stirred by righteousness, he stood again to leer at his fellow passengers, especially those cradling copies of the Koran, and shouted, "God hates a thief!"

*  *  *

            There were no real towns between Turpan and Urumchi, only scattered clusters of tiny clay houses and canvass-topped food stalls.  Homely earthen mosques sprang from flinty gardens of desolate scrub weed.  The highway turned from asphalt to bleached gravel and they passed through a mining site where the excavation had cast up great dust-clouds of gypsum powder.  The clouds whirred in lazy arcs and settled without distinction on mounds of hulking machinery and withered underbrush.  It fell in thick layers upon the backs of tethered donkeys, the same dust coating the skins of spent minors, the hair and faces of their equally wearied wives and children.  Vincent saw them tottering dazed along the rutted gravel fields where they appeared not ghost-like or candescent, but as gaunt heat-stupored infants blinking out at the world from beneath a veneer of chalk-white dust. 

Later, the driver pulled the bus to the roadside and threw open its doors.  They all hurried out to stretch their legs along the embankment or to relieve themselves among the knolls of rock and lumpish sand.  The call to reboard sparked a shoving match and the men thronged the doorway, wrangling with one another over rows of uncontested seats.  Vincent was the last to enter, and when he bounded up the stairs he smacked his forehead against a bulky and low-hanging sheet of tin metal.  Both sides of the aisleway erupted in laughter.  Bearded men clutched their sides and howled. 

“All right,” Vincent said.  “Enough.  Enough.” He raised a hand as an appeal for quiet.  The raucousness continued.  He rubbed his forehead and wondered if he should use their good cheer to his own advantage.  “Please,” he said.  “Give back the little music machine,” and they threw back their heads and laughed all the louder. 

*  *  *

Shortly before sunset there came, from the snub-nosed prow of the bus, a loud pop, queerly wooden in tone, like a pillow-sized cork jettisoned from an enormous bottle of champagne.  A cloud of steam shot up and fogged the windshield.  The bus rolled to a halt.  The driver seized up an armful of tools and in an instant swung open the doors and leapt into the desert.  They filed out after him and formed an awkward circle around the front bumper.  "Not to worry," the driver called out.  He had scrambled below and was probing the engine's hot underbelly.  "We'll make Urumchi by nightfall."

They huddled together dumbly and watched him work.  Now and then he crawled out with a fistful of clamps and bolts, a length of seared tubing, and gazed up into their skeptical faces.  "Urumchi by nightfall," he repeated and slipped back beneath the engine.  But increasingly, as the evening darkened and the parts he extracted grew bulkier and more intricate, they could hear him reciting "Urumchi" and "nightfall," less like a promise and more like a curse.  At last his head emerged beside the balding left tire.  "I can hardly see what I'm doing," he shouted.  “You can’t expect me to wire things together in the dark.”

As if on cue, those nearest the door raced inside and claimed sleeping berths by lunging onto empty benches.  Others scaled the rear of the bus and, over the driver's objections, began unlashing rolls of canvas and wood pallets.  In the process they discovered a dozen or so folding cots which were freed and dangled over the rooftop ledge.  In a stoke of luck, one of these cots was batted about, dropped and fell neatly into Vincent's outstretched arms.  He broke from the mob and trundled his gift a few yards up a sandy incline and planted it in the highway's soft shoulder.

Sometime later an army truck, a long-railed transport bearing rows of anonymous PLA soldiers, raced by in a flurry of road dust.  Then two diesel semis running nose to end thundered past and sped into the deepening twilight.  And with that, the highway emptied itself of wide lumbering vehicles.  In their place an occasional donkey cart would roll out of the shadows or clusters of strolling bodies, families, sometimes knots of Uighur men, though where in the murky expanse of desert they had come from Vincent could not tell. 

Meanwhile other stranded passengers had placed their cots in a half-circle along the bus's starboard side.  A roll of canvas was unfurled and draped across the earth.  Someone set a wood pallet ablaze, and spurred by the flicker and ribboned curl of flame the men eased down and removed their boots.  They spoke together in a surprisingly gentle mélange of Turkish.  At times their voices did harshen and escalate, though never, it seemed, into full-blown argument, just mild jeers or teasing mixed with bouts of adolescent jostling, all of which Vincent, ten paces removed from the cusp of their circle, found vaguely distracting. 

He lay flat on his back, shuttered between the cot's creaking rods, his travel bag a leaden, sagging pillow.  Beneath him the desert floor gave off a dry, muted heat.  He was neither hungry nor tired.  The day's journey seemed to have stifled the need for food and rest.  Overhead though, the Xinjiang sky was all icy stellar appetite.  He’d never seen the cosmos shine quite so vividly, the stars themselves sharp-edged and winking. 

From the bus came a sudden shriek of laughter and then a gravely swirl of footsteps.  A moment later he found his view of the night sky hindered by five broad-shouldered Uighur men.  They bent down and studied the length of him, from the crown of matted hair on his forehead to his sneakered feet jutting over the cot's far end.  Like the others, they were bearded and scull-capped, though he could not recall seeing any of them on the bus, certainly not the one closest, the one on his right whose thick neck and face were blighted with odd pouches of skin.  Or lobes, Vincent noticed, slightly larger and more spherule than earlobes, but hanging none-the-less from the scruff of his neck, from the woolly underside of his chin, and most prominently below the left eye, where a single bulbous teardrop of flesh dangled against the slope of his cheek.

They shifted about, muttering in Turkish, and the one closest --the one he could only think of as Mr.  Teardrop-- prodded Vincent's chest with a stubby finger and in gruff Mandarin said, "You there, say something to us in the common language."
He gazed up and took in the sight of their parched faces, their threadbare vests and black coats, and, clipped to the rim of their leather belts, the beaded hilts of their sheathed daggers.  "I'm very tired," he said.  "I'm resting now.  I'm waiting for the bus to be fixed."

"That's good," Mr.  Teardrop said.  "Good and fine.  Now get up.  You're coming with us.  We've got something to show you."

"No thank you, please.  I think I'd like to stay here and rest." Even as he spoke these words, he was being hoisted up onto his feet.  The men closed in around him and began slapping dust from his shirt in a way that seemed simultaneously charitable and angry.  They marched him away from the bus, away from the circle and fire and up the sandy incline toward a remote horizon ink-black and cavernous.  He tried turning, wheeling about and calling out to the other passengers, signaling to the Chinese driver in whom he still retained a sliver of confidence.  At once the men clasped his arms and corralled him onward.  Yet even this did not inspire panic, not yet.  Instead, what had happened to him –what was happening now—felt weirdly typical, another instance, maybe, of the usual clumsiness and social confusion he’d grown accustomed to during his long journey.

"You think you're very important," Mr.  Teardrop said.  "You think you're very big."

"I don't," Vincent said.  "I don't think that at all."

"Oh, but you do," he said, and the others began nudging him, first playfully with the open palms of their hands, then more ruthlessly with their shoulders and elbows so that he lurched back and forth inside their ring.  "You do," Mr.  Teardrop repeated.  "We can tell by looking at you."

And they continued jostling and shoving until Vincent raised an appeasing hand and said, "All right, maybe I do think that way, but only a little," and they stopped.  Then, he was overcome by a great, shuddering wave of panic.  Why such panic should fall upon him now, in the absence of their rough play rather than during it, he couldn’t begin to say.  Nevertheless, several dark possibilities hovered close enough so that it felt as if a gloved fist had fixed its thick fingers around his heart.  How stupid that his knees should buckle.  And how terrible to stumble along with this close mindfulness of violence and death --and something more horrible still, the understanding that he might have to endure the suffering and humiliations leading to death without Christ, without even the calming certainty of eternal love.

He stifled a deep, quaking breath, and, without any prompting, announced to the group, "I'm going to Urumchi to be married."

They walked a dozen mute paces up toward the crest of the rise.  At last, another man, a husky voice to Vincent's left, asked, "Marry who? A white women in Urumchi? Another foreigner?"

"A Russian?" Mr.  Teardrop guessed.  "A Chinese? Not a Uighur.  Don't tell me she's a Uighur bride."
"No, she's Chinese.  Her name is Kai-ling.  She's waiting for me in Urumchi."

"That's not good either," Mr.  Teardrop said.  "It's best to marry your own kind."

"I know," Vincent said.  "I know that.  But she's very beautiful.  I have a picture of her.  I'm carrying it with me in my bag." He reached for his absent travel bag, ready to produce the photograph should any of them ask.  But they didn't, and before long they had crested the top of the hill and were making a plodding descent down its opposite side.  In the distance, he could make out a village of huddled shacks, fifty or more, most of them tin-roofed and occupying an oval cleft of land between hillsides.  Wires stretched between the rooftops.  Deep within the oval, someone had strung together a garland of orange light bulbs.  The result was a blurry, ill-formed halo of jaundiced light.

The desert floor beneath their feet leveled to the width of a donkey cart.  Fifty yards from the village, they saw a frenzy of barking dogs, or rather sleek four-legged silhouettes, darting out between houses and racing toward them in a converging pack.  The men around him cursed and dropped to their knees.  They were not cowering, however; they were gathering stones.  Once the dogs had drawn close, the men sprang up and hurled these stones at the cluster of growling snouts.  The pack dissolved and the dogs drew close again, this time separately, with their paws splayed out, and their bellies pressed to the earth, inching forward to lower their muzzles and cringe before the men, to kiss their gritty boots.  The men waited patiently for the ritual to end.  Then they goaded Vincent on, while behind them the dogs rose and lapped eagerly at their heels. 
Mr.  Teardrop led them through a maze of dirt alleyways, the surrounding houses all mud-formed with irregular doors and windows.  Voices called to them from earthen doorways.  They stomped past tethered donkeys and caged chickens and even a small coral of goats, one of which was crippled and pulled its own deadened hindquarters along in the dirt, kept alive for kindness or cruelty’s sake. 

On they went, plodding along until the alleyway opened up into a shabby inner borough of sorts, and they halted before a small cubed home, its rust-scarred door a long sheet of dented tin.  Mr.  Teardrop gave the door several thudding pounds.  "Little Lao," he called out.  "Come outside, Little Lao.  We've got something to show you."

While they waited, other villagers, lured by the commotion, crept from their houses and pressed up behind them.  The did not all appear to be Uighur, though Vincent couldn’t name their race except to say that a few looked gypsy, others Mongolian, all of them tousled and lean and squeezed by poverty.  Several of the women had thick resinous eyebrows that stretched uninterrupted across the ridge of their foreheads.  Amidst the shadows and burnished orange light, he couldn’t decide if this was cosmetic enhancement or genetic anomaly.

"Little Lao! Little Lao!" other voices in the crowd sang out.  Children, clad only in ragged underwear, pushed to the fore of the gathering.

At last the door opened revealing a trinket-filled yet surprisingly tidy living room within.  A slight middle-aged woman in a molted gray housecoat stepped forward.  "Little Lao is sleeping," she said.  "He's tired." She squeezed her hair, which had been swept up in a spangled net, and said, "He's got a stiff back."

Behind her, beyond the living room and across a bare dirt floor, a burlap partition shook.  A groaning voice called out, "What's this about?"

Vincent heard a bed frame creak and spied, beneath the hem of the partition, two over-sized loaves of fur, not shoes exactly, but burly moccasins stitched together from animal hides.  The curtains parted and a huge, hunched over figure strode forward, head first, tunneling through the living room and out the open door.  Here he paused beside his wife and stretched to full height, a timid and painful straightening of the back, which, once completed, placed his head a foot higher than the roof of his own home.  He stood bare-chested, heavy-muscled, profoundly wide in the shoulders and arms, a stockiness that extended down to his legs where the sides of this pants had been spliced apart and filled in with extra strips of linen.  “It's all been settled,” he complained.  He had an enormous square jaw and two rather small and deeply set eyes which dwindled and quivered as focused in on the crowd.  “There’s nothing more to talk about.  Comrade Ahmeed knew the donkey was sick when I sold it to him.  I showed him the animal's bad teeth.  He knew it.  He only changed his story afterward!”

"Yes, I've heard," Mr.  Teardrop said.  "I've heard about that.  But this is something else."

"We've been to the council," Little Lao continued.  He wagged his head and his sleep-disheveled hair fanned out on both sides.  "Comrade Ahmeed was with me.  We talked it over before the section chief.  It's all been settled, you understand?"
“Of course it’s all been settled,” Mr.  Teardrop said.  “Here now, this is something different.” He laid a hand on Vincent's shoulder.  “It's the foreigner.  You see? He thinks he's very important.  He thinks he's very big."

Little Lao squinted and for the first time shifted his gaze and regarded Vincent.  “A foreigner?” he said.  “A Russian? No?” he said, and his broad face bloomed with comprehension “This again? All right then, all right.  Let’s be quick about it.” And with that, he turned and presented his naked back.

For a while yet Vincent could make no sense of it.  A back? --undeniably broad, hairless, bronze skinned.  It wasn’t until he was seized by Mr.  Teardrop and spun about that he understood.  What they wanted, what they had snatched him from his cot and marched him panic-stricken to their village to do, was to stand back-to-back with Little Lao.  He did precisely as they wished, stood tall, put his heels to Little Lao’s moccasins.  Their backs touched.  He felt hands being stacked atop his head. 
Mr.  Teardrop called out, "Little Lao is seven…no, eight hands bigger than the foreigner." Around them the crowd received the news with a rowdy cheer.

"You have brothers this big? Friends this big in your own country?" Mr.  Teardrop asked.

"No," Vincent said.  True enough.  By his estimate Little Lao was somewhere between six feet eleven inches and seven feet one inch tall.  He would, in any city of the world, have towered over the heads of ordinary men.  "No one as big as Little Lao," he announced.  Again the villagers cheered and beamed a desperate sort of joy.  Dogs barked and chased their own fluttering tails.  Children romped about in their ragged underwear. 

Then he was surrounded by Mr.  Teardrop and his four companions and marched through the alleyways and outside the village.  The dogs followed at their heels until some unseen border had been breached, and they barked and growled and considered the men enemies.  Vincent plodded along, giddy and dazed.  In time they climbed without speaking to the crest of the slope and down its other side where gradually they drew close and could see the bus and weakening fire. 

Twenty paces before the bus and circle of men they chanced upon Vincent’s travel bag which had been ransacked and tossed away like so much rubbish.  He peered inside and tallied the items stolen: his guidebook and Kai-ling’s photograph which had marked its pages, his camera, his pens, even his tangle of dirty undergarments.  Aside from a few scrawled notes and rolls of film, he’d been left with a sock and his Russian novel.

A stranger had crawled onto his cot, and Mr.  Teardrop and the men seized him as he slept, by the shoulders and ankles, and after two accelerating swings, flung him to the ground.  They guided Vincent down in his place.  Mr.  Teardrop grinned and bent low.  "Good and fine," he said.  "Go to Urumchi.  Tell your Chinese bride, tell her family and friends that you have walked to our village and stood beside the biggest man in China."