Fairy Tales 🧚 China

At the Pangolin Gardens

Baldric came to Pangolin Gardens early, so that the bones people threw over their shoulders wouldn’t reach his knee caps before dessert. In this way he wouldn’t be forced to use a machete to hack his way through the scapula and carcasses back to the street. There was, however, more to fear in Pangolin Gardens than bone piles or slippery floors. The food itself was incendiary. The Yunnan People’s Stir Fry and the Garlic Commune Hot Pot induced such a fiery riot in his stomach that it reminded him of a proletarian pandemonia. It only took two or three mouthfuls of stir-fried vegetable fire or roaring fractured chicken thighs for him to feel that one billion little communists with animal faces and chili-dipped pitchforks were jumping up and down in his mouth.

He could feel them traipsing to the sound of Medieval instruments (a lyre, a harpsichord, and a four-stringed lute) from the wide chaos of his stomach, through the muted explosions of his duodenum, twisting and turning through the labyrinth of his intestines, and finally blasting toward his rectum during the small hours of the morning. 

In his sleep he was frightened by the mad frolicking and jousting and by the hungry looks on their hyena-faces. The whole hellish intestinal parade reminded him of a scene from a Russian Last Judgment.

Yet every cloud has a silver lining: the bonfire of his gluttony warmed up his bed, which was so cold and hard that he suspected it was hewn from a glacier in the nearby Hengduan Mountains.

Baldric suspected that the fire in his stomach was a revenge against the foreign backpackers who were just starting to veer from the beaten paths of Guilin and Beijing, now that Yunnan and Xinjiang were open for business. Perhaps the old guard revolutionaries were setting fires in the stomachs of the white devils to punish them for their galleons and guns, their opium wars and compulsory free trade, their gay rights and lesbian pornography, and their roast turkey propaganda with its ballot-box stuffing. These ideas swam around Baldric’s brain till he could no longer tell if the blood-splattered cook from the restaurant was chopping the legs of chickens or the heads of Thomas Cook tour guides. 

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From his safe bed on the seventeenth floor of the Kunming Hotel Baldric shuddered to think how close he came to disaster in the Pangolin Gardens. He remembered watching as the cook was joined by two other hench-ladies, who fanned out across the restaurant and kicked any stool or backpacker that got in their way. Finding little sport in the tourists, they fell upon an old heavy-eyed rat who was making a grab at the noodle bin in an attempt to recapture the daring folly of his youth. 

Baldric had seen enough violence for one dinner. He tossed thirty yuan onto the table and walked quickly away from the battlefield and into the cold starry night. As he made his way through the unlit, uneven streets, he squeaked out warnings to the worried citizens of Rodentland. He urged them to act with moral restraint in everything they did, and to beware of that infernal slaughterhouse that nevertheless served the tastiest dishes south of Chengdu.  

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Perhaps Baldric had saved their bristly little skins after all, for they looked awfully similar to the ones nibbling through the backpacks of tourists on the seventeenth floor of the Kunming Hotel. But how did they get from Dali to Kunming? Were they stowaways on the harrowing eleven hour mini-bus ride, The Rally to Dali? And why had they climbed up to the seventeenth floor? Had they, like the other tourists, heard rumours of a discotheque? It seemed they had, for they danced madly whenever they heard the strains of a sing-song voice. But apparently they had not heard (or not completely understood) that the disco had been converted into a huge co-ed dormitory with over fifty beds. He couldn’t help noticing that each bed was so close to the next that the possibility of the pretty backpacker next to him slipping her foot into his bed was almost inevitable. 

Much of the spirit of that defunct disco had survived, for each morning at six o’clock the staff waltzed into the room and begin sweeping rhythmically in order to wake up the snoring tourists. Around six-thirty a noisy gang of backpackers arrived on the early morning train. The backpackers provided competition to the sweepers, who took the opportunity to raise their voices and exact revenge on those who were still dozing. The sweepers considered it a bourgeois swindle that people with foreign passports got to sleep in to all hours while the workers had to get up early and clean up after them. This was hardly the way to run a Revolution! The dancing of the sweepers became more violent as they smacked their mops into the iron legs of the beds and as they twirled their brooms like sawed-off pool cues at a concert in Altamont.

Despite the commotion, Baldric continued to reflect on the week he just spent among the townsfolk of Dali, whose clothing was more colourful than a Guatemalan rug, and whose history went back thirteen centuries to the Nanzhao Empire. Yet to Baldric none of this could possibly be of any relevance whatsoever, for he was a deeply cultured Canadian, whose father taught him that the other races had nothing to contribute to Modern culture. His mother’s influence was equally unhelpful in preparing him to understand the things he saw around him: she taught him that the study of Culture should move the mind from the false world of forms and objects that didn’t float to the real world of spiritual energy patterns that did.

Baldric was struck by the charm of the little town of Dali, especially the tea garden restaurant he found nestled in the backstreets. It was a simple place, run by an old couple and one other cook.

The only objects of note were rustic wooden tables, cement seats, a white wall with red Chinese characters on it, and a large peach-tree giving shade to the entire courtyard. Behind a worn gingham cloth was a steaming cauldron, into which the cook dropped mysterious ingredients culled from the wilds of Yunnan Province. The tea had been steeping for days, and reached its most potent state of psychokinesis just at the moment an aged hand dipped a delicate ceramic cup two inches into its murky depth. When she set the cup before him it looked more like a pint of steaming Guinness than any black tea he’d ever seen.

Baldric looked again at the bright red Chinese characters painted on the wall. When he first sat down he dismissed these characters, seeing them as crude and no doubt recent attempts to write in a civilized script. He didn’t see that these characters were as complex as the aged couple who served tasty dishes of potatoes, tomatoes and green beans, and who laced their tea with herbs and spices so esoteric that even alchemists and magicians had never heard of them. Nor did he at first discern the history that lay behind their leathery faces, which had developed lines as a hill develops crevices, until the surface no longer masked the depth. 

After three more sips of the magic black tea, Baldric saw into their memories of Mao and the Red Guards and the Long March. He then saw into the memories of their parents and the parents before them: he saw the smoky tails of the British fighter planes that flew from Mandalay to Chungking, and he saw the dark wakes of the opium boats that would teach the Chinese a lesson or two about the writings of Jonathan Swift. His Adam’s apple clunked as he swallowed and he saw even further back to Tang poets with wispy beards, to long thin branches that stuck into the mountain air, to armies of clay soldiers, to Shang Dynasty tortoise shells with divination inscriptions, to a raptor emerging from 70 million years of sleep, and to the abyss of Time itself.

The steam from the black tea spiralled up from the depths of his clay mug. After his ninth sip, his mind became numb and he saw a rabbit in a smoking-jacket burrow out of the wall, race around the peach-tree and dart into the kitchen. A swirling nimbus-cloud of steam (in which he could discern the outline of a blue genie) obscured his view of the rabbit, yet he was reasonably sure of what he’d seen. The only complicating factor was that his parents had read Alice in Wonderland to him exactly 1001 times. He couldn’t so much as play a game of gin rummy without fearing the wrath of the Queen of Hearts.

Baldric often dreamed that the Cheshire Cat floated above him, asking questions about who he was, why evil existed, and would he live forever. In fact, his father had installed a life-size, glow-in-the-dark model of the enigmatic Cat in the ceiling panels above Baldric’s bed. When Baldric turned off the lights, Antonio flung open the panels and the iridescent doll flew downward toward the boy, who dove beneath the covers. 

Antonio was also a fan of the nervous rabbit and his spunky English girlfriend. He admired the way Alice broke out of her conformist, rule-bound Victorian world, and the way she descended into the fathomless pit without so much as a shriek. If only his son had half the guts!

When Baldric saw the rabbit materialize from the wall of the teahouse he didn’t wonder if he’d lost his mind. Instead, he reasoned that since the rabbit had emerged from the wall and had raced off without any explanation, a polite and slightly confused English girl would soon emerge from the same wall. Moving ever closer to its surface, he inspected each crack and chip. He wondered from what small aperture she would appear in this upside-down country on the other side of the world.

And he wondered how Alice got to the centre of the earth in the first place. Perhaps she followed the scholarly advice of Arne Saknussemm: “Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the jokul of Sneffels, which the shadow of Scartaris touches before the kalends of July, and you will attain the centre of the earth.” Would the force of her fall downward equal the force of her rise upward? Baldric cursed himself for not having paid attention to his math teacher when he talked about vectors. He also cursed his English teacher for drawing literary (rather than mathematical) conclusions from the geological survey conducted by Professor Liedenbrock.

The ancient black tea, soaked for decades in pungent oils, had reached the peak of its hallucinatory powers. The red Chinese characters on the wall became bright red toe-nails and bright red fingernails, scratching his eyes with enigmatic designs, as if a neurotic crow stepped in red dye and danced all over his retina. A face hovered above him, saying “Rise up my son, drink this tea and say hello to my good friend Alice!” 

Baldric sat up in what felt like his old bed in Black Diamond, and saw two figures: one sported a magician’s hat with a red band, while the other wore a Quaker bonnet and clucked a frosty poem about snowfall and two paths that diverged in a wood. The red stitching on Mother Goose’s bonnet started to unravel: loose filaments spiralled down into the steaming cup she handed to her son, the liquid air of her lost Prince Charming following the stitching into the depths of the potent brew. Drinking the spirit of his mother’s angelic dimension increased the red in Baldric’s cheeks and brought a fiery calm to his heart.

Baldric’s head hit the dirt floor of the courtyard. When he awoke several minutes later all he could see were five red communist shooting stars plastered against the white wall. He lifted himself from the dirt floor and dragged himself onto a stone bench. His head was so shaken that he didn’t even notice the blonde traveller walking between him and the wall he was staring at. He did, however, glimpse the red roses on her dress as they swept by him. Alicia de Mirales brushed aside a worn gingham divider, and disappeared from view. 

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Next: 🎲 The Nature of the Game

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