By Nathaniel Murray
Silver Solas Award-winner in the Funny Travel category
It overlooks a lush, green borderland, giving watchmen a panoramic view of the Central Asian steppes, allowing enough time to warn villagers whenever a Xiongnu raiding party approaches.At least it did, two thousand years ago.
Now, the watchtower is just a blocky mound of clay overlooking a scorched desert, whose corn fields struggle to produce anything out of the gravel. The gravel itself comes from all over Asia, having flowed in for centuries before the rivers finally dried up.
Looking now at the watchtower’s former glory, I can feel the landscape’s timelessness. The earth, which saw the rise and fall of many dynasties, is chock-full of ores and minerals now being churned out by the refineries that surround this area. Refineries which power China’s Belt-and-Road expansion into Central Asia and around the world. The wind, whose sandstorms toughened the armies of Genghis Khan, now powers hundreds of turbines across the wrinkled mountains ranges nearby. The sun, which for centuries baked those mountains to a crisp and forced the Xiongnu to adopt their nomadic lifestyle, now heats many fields of solar panels that give the mirage of a lake in the Gobi Desert.
Most remarkably, the county had almost none of this industry just a few decades ago. Local state-owned mining corporations have built up the patchwork of industrial parks and cinderblock towns that surround me now. At night, neon lights bathe those towns in a halogen glow. But it is not the airbrushed glow of Shanghai or Hong Kong. It is a gritty glow, shrouded in dust kicked up by cargo trucks and the occasional army convoy.
Ancient social customs are also enshrined in this place. The day I arrived, my host Jason and his Uncle Liu toasted my welcome with a shotglass of baijiu. Then another. And another. Until I explained that I was not comfortable drinking so much hard liquor. To which Uncle Liu simply placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “We want to make you comfortable.”
Was he not listening? I was starting to feel uncomfortable. But their hospitality did not work that way. When you entered someone’s home, they had to ply you with food and drink, otherwise they lost face as bad hosts. No one in this township would let me leave their home until my stomach was full to their satisfaction—which was not always to mine. At least my stomach was never empty. And maybe that was the point.
Rank and ritual must also be respected here. The day after my arrival, Jason drove me to a remote school where he worked as a teacher. A school constructed by the mining corporations, to serve children in the farthest-flung villages. He wanted me to spend the week there, giving those children some exposure to a foreigner.
Sure, no problem. I would just sleep in the teacher’s dorm with the other faculty, right? No, said Jason, I was too high-ranking a guest for that. I must have the privilege of sleeping in a teacher’s lounge next to the office of the school’s Communist Party Secretary. Staying in the dorms would be disrespectful to their hospitality. Also, I would have to meet the Party Secretary in the morning, so that he could give me his formal welcome to spend the week there.
Breakfast was a delicious serving of pork buns and soymilk. Only, we had exactly half an hour to eat it before the kitchen closed. As a slow eater, I could only finish half before getting rushed off to meet the Party Secretary. His first words to me: “I’m sorry you did not like our breakfast.”
No, no, no, I rushed to explain. He seemed to let it slide, though I made sure to wolf down every meal after that. Next came his ceremonial welcome. How valuable it was for the students to interact with a foreigner. That it was essential for cross-cultural communication and friendship between countries. A shake of the hand—thankfully without baijiu—and I was free to spend the week visiting classrooms.
In fact, Jason now calls me away from the watchtower remnant, saying we have another classroom visit that afternoon. A cohort of ninth-graders.
Don’t talk politics, he reminds me.
Their first question: Who do you think would win a US-China war?
Answer: We would all lose.
Second question: What do you think of the People’s Liberation Army?
Answer: Your army protects you, my army protects me, and we all get along.
Third: Why do you have a notebook in your pocket?
I look at my cargo pants and realize that the hand-sized sketchbook I always carry on my travels is highly visible, making the students suspicious.
Answer: It’s just the sketchbook I take when I travel.
I thought that Chinese students avoided talking politics, I later tell Jason. He explains that rural children develop an especially strong political consciousness, given how visibly the government and its state-owned enterprises build the schools and factories which give their families a fighting chance to improve their livelihoods, as well as the airports and land ports which might one day take their families’ foodstuffs across Asia. Jason’s family benefitted from this, and he now wants to give back by serving in this local school for several years.
The desert also has more military bases, with patriotic billboards to match. That patriotism pervades throughout the school, from wall posters combining quotes by Marx and Confucius, to the mid-morning stretches set to military marches and classical Chinese drumrolls.
At first it feels stifling. But as I acclimate over the week, it starts to make sense. I begin to appreciate the school’s loudspeakers occasionally walking students through a traditional Chinese acupuncture massage on their necks and heads during study break. The tree-planting orchard in a corner of the school compound, meant to plant the seeds of social consciousness. Even the yard sweeping that the whole student body performs each morning before breakfast. I can also appreciate that this student body has already shrunk by three quarters in the past few years, with many families able to move away to larger cities.
The children who remain here face an increasingly uphill battle, with standardized tests becoming less of a path and more of a barrier. When they graduate from ninth grade, the final year of compulsory education, they might spend their lives just a few miles from here, farming those gravel-strewn corn fields near the watchtower. Or perhaps, says Jason, working in one of the farmer’s associations down the street, where that corn sits to dry on the sidewalk. Some of them might continue living in their family compounds made of faded clay brick, whose wooden stoves and backyard sheep pens might have once been status symbols in their grandparents’ day.
At least the students talk less politics as they get younger. The fourth-graders do not ask pointed questions, though when they learn that I used to draw cartoons, they want me to draw some tanks and fighter jets. By the time I get to first grade, they’re asking about food and Disney World.
Many of them ask about the best ways to learn English. As an English teacher, I normally have many prepared answers. But in this environment, those answers feel increasingly hollow. Find opportunities to meet English speakers? There are none around. Practice making conversation using words and phrases from Friends? Not if they have to spend the weekends helping their parents with farmwork or livestock—if they are even interested in Friends. Write plays and short stories using words from their textbooks? Where will they find the time for that, when those who do not spend their weekends in the fields, might spend it behind the cash registers of their parents’ machine tool shops? Or more likely, their grandparents, if the parents are absent from the home, seeking work in other provinces.
The truth is that they do not really need me, or my English teaching advice. They will get by just fine with the help of their own government and state-owned enterprises. In my short week here, I can only give them a positive impression of foreigners, for whatever that might be worth.
On Friday afternoon, the Party Secretary gives me his thanks. Outside, the children board buses back to their villages, a service provided by the school. As Jason drives us out, we pass again through those gravel fields. I think of the watchtower. Will it ever be bulldozed to make way for an industrial park? Will the surrounding land be reforested? If left untouched, the watchtower will probably endure, whatever changes might occur around it.
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Nate Murray is a writing instructor, outdoor enthusiast, and occasional cartoonist. He lived in China for eight years, and has also been spotted in Europe and the Dominican Republic