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“I think I’ll have the same.”

The culinary possibilities in China are endless. Why not yak? Or cat? Or swan? Or bullfrog? Or live squid? Why limit ourselves to pigs, lambs, and chickens? And why dine on cow but not their big, shaggy cousin, the yak? I’d been in China for a while and it seemed only natural to sample this new offering. In China, we eat everything with four legs except the table, and anything with two legs except a person. Splendid, I say, now pass the chopsticks.

We sat on a wooden terrace, idly enjoying our surroundings, watching the street life.

“So,” Jack said after a while, “have you ever wondered where the hippies went?”

This seemed like the ultimate non sequitur. I hadn’t wondered where the hippies went. I’d just assumed they’d rechanneled their narcissism and become yuppies, before evolving into the self-indulgent, squabbling baby boomers of today.

“No,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because,” he said, “they’ve all moved to Dali.”

Just then a pair of fetchingly bedraggled young Western women in dreadlocks wandered past. Shockingly, they were barefoot. I could not begin to imagine what kind of altered state I’d have to be in to wander around China barefoot. Considering the rivers of piss and phlegm that flowed down Chinese streets, these women were clearly insane. Or very, very high. And they were not alone. As I looked around, I saw that there were dozens, hundreds even, of Westerners in Dali who looked like they’d boarded the bus for Woodstock. What were they doing here? And what was it about Dali that had made it the go-to destination on the hippie trail?

“Ganja,” whispered a voice.

I turned to see an elderly woman with a deeply lined face standing beside me. She was in traditional Bai dress and carried a wooden basket with a baby on her back. With a beatific smile, she leaned forward and whispered again, “Ganja?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

“Ganja,” she repeated, bringing her fingers to her lips in an imaginary toke.

“Ganja?” I whispered.

“Ganja,” she nodded. “Smokee, smokee.”

“Er—awfully thoughtful of you, but I think I’m going to pass.” And then, feeling helpful, I told her, “We’re in China, you know. It’s a police state.”

“Ganja,” she said again. I shook my head and off she finally waddled, with the baby bouncing behind her.

We had arrived in a place where kindly elderly ladies gently inquired whether your stay might be enhanced with a little smokee of the ganja. I suddenly admired the Bai for their entrepreneurial pluck. There was no better way of luring a steady stream of backpackers than by offering them the prospect of readily available weed. And clearly, the dealers themselves were among the most genial and solicitous in the world. What’s not to like? We had solved the mystery of why the hippies had come to Dali.

Reefer Madness.

Jack looked at me, relieved. “Thanks for not buying a dime bag from grandma there. I don’t want the Chinese police after us. It would suck to end this trip in a gulag in Manchuria.”

I laughed. “You can relax. One thing I will not do is smoke weed in a country with mobile execution trucks.”

It is true: There are Death Vans in China. And lest you think that mobile execution trucks are just a trifle barbaric, the roving Death Vans are, in the words of its manufacturer, a sign that China “promotes human rights now.” Until 2004, all prisoners sentenced to death were shot, which can be messy and inefficient if the prisoner requires a coup de grâce. Now, for the lucky few, there are Death Vans that roam the country, going from town to town, efficiently and humanely—the Chinese really stress this—executing prisoners by lethal injection. No one knows for certain how many people are executed each year in China. Some say 2,000, others 15,000; the exact figure is a state secret. And the offenses can be something as simple as tax fraud. But the Chinese are also moving toward Death Vans because the government is involved in a profitable enterprise harvesting human organs from condemned