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By Root 1212 0

it works,” he said. “Lawyer Zhang is doing pretty well. He’s a partner. He’s making some money. He buys a Mercedes, a very expensive car in China—more than twice what you’d pay for it in the U.S. The judge notices Lawyer Zhang’s shiny new car, so he says, ‘Lawyer Zhang, you must be very rich to afford such a car. I would like to borrow it.’ So what does Lawyer Zhang do? He turns over the keys. He doesn’t see his car again. But he wins his cases before the judge. That’s how law works in China.”

And it has become pernicious, this gotta-get-mine, screw-you, get-out-of-my-way kind of thinking. The toxic brown sludge that the Chinese call air is only the most visible manifestation of this abandonment of rules designed to foster the common good. But it goes beyond the unregulated air and soupy rivers: Thousands of miners in China die each year in illegal mines. Almost every hotel has a brothel. A sidewalk stroll can quickly become a walk of misery; from the abandoned old to the criminally abused young, one can’t wander twenty yards without needy hands thrusting out tin cups. The wonder I felt nightclubbing in Beijing or idling among the gilded skyscrapers of Pudong was increasingly supplanted by something far different. I was, in fact, appalled by much of what I was seeing in contemporary China. And I was beginning to feel like a bad host. I felt responsible for Jack.

“So what did you think of Guangzhou?” I asked him as our taxi sped toward the airport.

“Sing it with me: I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free…”

Few songs irritate me more. Somewhere in my formative years, I had heard something about scoundrels and patriotism. And that song in particular, with its love-it-or-leave-it pomposity, conjured up images of professional wrestlers, Playboy bunnies, and American Idol finalists leading the cheer as fighter jets swooped through the sky on their way to bomb some country few could find on a map. But that’s the thing about China. Suddenly, the good ole U. S. of A. starts to look, well, pretty darn good. But surely there were parts of China where one didn’t need a gas mask to breathe, where a China of quiet pagodas and babbling brooks could be found, a place where the country didn’t seem quite so cruel. I’d decided to look for that China in Yunnan Province, in the far southwest of China, where steamy rain forests meet the soaring pinnacles of the Himalayas.

We flew to Kunming, the largest city in Yunnan, on China Southern Airlines. Kunming had recently begun to call itself China’s most relaxed city. The competition for that title, of course, was not particularly stiff. But not even such an alluring moniker was enough to keep me in urban China for a moment longer than I had to be. From Kunming, we would fly farther west to Dali, which had come highly recommended by a well-traveled friend. Ordinarily, I would have taken the train, stopping for a few days in Guilin and Yangshuo to admire the karst formations, the jagged limestone cliffs that are featured on every Chinese postcard. But Jack was pressed for time and I was eager to start acclimatizing to the lofty heights of the Himalayas. Besides, the travel agent I had spoken to in Guangzhou had described Guilin as very touristy, and I did not want touristy. Okay, maybe a little touristy, touristy enough for picture menus. That would be good.

“You know, it’s okay to let go of the armrests now and then,” Jack said as we took off.

“We haven’t flown together, have we?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’m not a really strong flyer.”

“I see. And yet your work takes you to faraway places?”

“It does.”

“Places that you have to fly to?”

“Yes.”

“I think, maybe, you just might be in the wrong profession.”

“Very possibly.”

In Kunming, we transferred airplanes. This was the first airport I’d seen that hadn’t yet been renovated into something glassy and shiny, and strangely this seemed good, to wander around a dingy airport. It suggested distance from booming coastal China. I noticed nursing rooms for mothers, which seemed like an unexpectedly thoughtful touch.