The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [104]
Man, you have some vocabulary for a guy who didn’t speak English just a day ago. And don’t call me bourgeois. Where I grew up, the bourgeoisie was anybody less than two months behind on the rent.
“Sure. What would you like me to learn?”
“What it means to labor for your food.”
You never worked for Joe Graham, pal.
“Do you know, Mr. Peng, what it means to labor for your food?”
“Both my parents were peasants. And yours?”
Wu jumped in. “Have you noticed the mulberry trees, Mr. Frazier? The silkworms feed—”
“I suppose your parents were intellectuals,” Peng said, pronouncing intellectuals as if the word had a bad smell.
“Sure. My mother graduated Summa Cum Stoned from Needle U., and my old man was an overnight success.”
“You are very rude, Mr. Carey.”
“Frazier. The name is Frazier.”
Peng hit him with one of those laser looks, the kind meant to burn right through you. Neal was discovering that people in China were either very calm or very angry, without a lot of middle range. He intended to push Mr. Peng into the very-angry zone. Very angry people make very stupid mistakes.
“Thank you for correcting me,” Peng said, “Mr. Frazier.”
“Don’t mention it. I just don’t want to get fucked up again by someone being careless.”
Wu started to do little hops in the front seat. He was trying to think of something to say to change the subject, but nothing very clever was coming to him.
“Pretty country,” Neal said as he turned his back on Peng and looked out the window.
The terrain was flat for a mile or so on each side of the narrow road. Low dikes, with tall, spindly mulberry trees, divided rice paddies into neat geometric patterns. In the background a range of hills rose from the plain. Their neat rows of terraces made them look almost like Central American pyramids overgrown with vegetation.
“Tea,” Wu explained. “Some of the very best tea in the world comes from the hills. Have you heard of Oolong tea?”
“I think so.”
“It is grown there.”
“Is that some of the stuff we used to trade you dope for?”
Neal watched Peng squirm a little.
“‘Dope’?” Wu asked.
“Opium.”
“Ah, yes.”
“You guys had quite a little jones—addiction—going there, didn’t you?”
Peng stared straight ahead as he said, “The problem of opium addiction—created by foreign imperialists—has been eradicated in the People’s Republic of China.”
“Yeah, well, if you just shoot them instead of shooting them up . . .”
“We treated them in much the same manner as we treated you after you had acquired the disease of addiction in the capitalist enclave of Hong Kong.”
“I didn’t think you had that many hotel rooms.”
“Oolong tea is exported all over the world,” Wu said.
The landscape was dotted with oval ponds about the size of large swimming pools.
“Fishponds,” Wu said. “An excellent source of protein.”
“No space can be wasted,” Peng elaborated.
This is certainly true, thought Neal. As far as he could see, every bit of ground was being used in some way. Most of the flat land was flooded for rice cultivation, and the hills were terraced to the very tops. Every hollow seemed to hold a fishpond, and vegetable patches clung to the ground in between.
“China has four times the population of the United States, but only one-third the arable land,” Wu said. “Much of China is desert or mountain. So we must make the best use of all the arable land. Sichuan Province is often called the Rice Bowl of China, because it is a fertile plain surrounded by high mountains. You are now in the middle of the Rice Bowl.”
“It’s beautiful,” Neal said, addressing himself specifically to Wu.
“Yes, it is,” Wu answered happily.
It was so beautiful that Neal forgot his skirmishing with Peng for a while and just took in the scenery. He hadn’t seen such open spaces since his days on the Yorkshire moor, days that seemed like a distant memory now. And while the moor was vast and lonely, the Sichuan Plain was vast and peopled. It wasn’t crowded, but it was definitely occupied. Lines of people moved slowly across