Fairy Tales 🧚 Sichuan Province

The Waitresses of Chengdu

To Wonder Why

The morning after his dreamy encounter with Claudine, Baldric dreaded to open his eyes and see what the dormitory looked like in the harsh light of day. Lifting his head from the cotton sheets, he saw the bed next to his was already made. Her backpack, with its blue and white flag, was gone. As he feared, his dream about her meant nothing to her. His father was right: the French were a fickle lot. Bilingual today, French tomorrow! Unlike the tender, fun-loving, warm-hearted Anglos, the hearts of the French Canadians were as cold as the Saint Laurence in January!

Baldric was bitter, yet Ragor was astounded. Baldric had been granted a vision of Algotodo, and with it a profound vision of Time. Any blufluxer would give his eye teeth to see what Baldric saw, even if for only a fraction of a second. Yet who had granted Baldric this vision? And why had it been granted to such a dim-witted Canuck? Ragor remembered his mother’s mantra, ‘Tis not ours to wonder why. But why not? Where did not wondering why get Lord Cardigan and his light cavalry?

Maybe it didn’t really matter that Baldric didn’t wonder why. Did he really need to know the nature of his experience? Could he process it even if he knew? Perhaps it was better that his momentary vision of Algotodo on the platform wasn’t processed by a brain that would only reduce it in some manner. Of course, one might say the inverse about Ragor: that he was magnifying an illusion fabricated by a dreaming mind. Yet Ragor knew that Baldric’s vision was neither a stray fantasy nor a projection of a wish because of the simple fact that Baldric didn’t even understand what to wish for. Even after he’d seen it, all he saw in his mind was a caterpillar with a hooka. Understandably, he saw it as a memory from an illustrated version of Alice in Wonderland. What he didn’t know was that Lewis Carroll was in fact writing about Algotodo.  

Ragor had been introduced to the cult of Algotodoto (or Some Nothing) by Blugrass, his friend and editor in the Blue Continuum. Blugrass implored his doppioblu friend to continue his benevolent surveillance, so that the cult could gather more information about their beloved leader. The Blue Dreamer Directorate of Historical facts denied the existence of such an ancient and incredible figure, yet Blugrass saw that accounts of his elusive presence kept cropping up in the writings of the bluest of the Blue Dreamers. 

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The Old Tea-Horse Road

When Ragor checked in on Baldric later that day, he saw him on a bus heading north to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. Baldric was looking out the window and cursing his bad luck. He thought his strange dream had been a waste of time, but Ragor knew that the dream had given him something magical, something that he might not even recognize but that would give him meaning on his journey north. Perhaps he might even find the source of his visions, in a holy temple or on a sacred mountain. Even if he didn’t find Enlightenment on his narrow road to the far north, he might at least find solace in the beauty of the hills and bright paddy fields.

Ragor eagerly followed Baldric’s route, which itself followed the old Tea Horse Road, a network of roads and paths that in olden days was used to transport the tea of Yunnan and Sichuan north and west over the high passes to Tibet. Passing through the city of Ya’an, Baldric saw the old bridge across the Qingyi River:

At Ya’an, the Old Tea-Horse Road splintered west, yet the bus continued its journey north-eastward, onto the vast, misty plane in the centre of Sichuan Province. On the left, Baldric saw the outline of Mengding Mountain, where the first tea in the world was cultivated. From there, tea plantations spread far and wide, from Indonesia to Ceylon.

Baldric saw in his guidebook that Mengding Mountain had a Tea Museum, from where one could climb the Celestial Ladder to Heaven’s Temple. But the bus moved onward, and Baldric couldn’t waste his time on old-fashioned customs, foreign cultures, and outdated religions.

Nearing Sichuan’s capital, Baldric ignored the scenery and focused instead on his copy of The China Travel Service Guide (which he called The Book of Oracles) so that he might know everything of value about the city of Chengdu and the province of Sichuan. The Book of Oracles was full of all sorts of interesting facts. For instance, the province of Sichuan had over seventy million people — twice the population of Canada.

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The Crimson Chalkers

What Baldric didn’t read in his travel guide was that 37% of the province’s population was from the Crimson Stalk universe. Called Chalkers — a hybrid of Chinese and Stalker — they had run the province for six thousand years. They had helped the Natives with basic things like math, clocks, and astronomy. Yet writing was not something that came easily. Eventually, the Chalkers got so tired of not being able to send as much as a videofile that they resorted to planting scripts, ideograms, characters and other phono-semantic compounds in every temple and sweat lodge they could find. When these were ignored or mistaken for pretty abstract designs, the Chalkers stuck sharp rocks in their hands and showed them how to scratch pictographs onto dried-up oxen bones.

The characters the first Chalkers taught them had nothing to do with early human scripts: cuneiform, Old Persian, Brahmi, Devanagari, Phoenician, or Greek. As any third grader from Casastalk Prime could tell you, the characters were obviously from the Crimson Stalk. It was true that the script shared some similarities with Indus and Linear A scripts, but that was only because those were from rival planets in the Crimson Stalk — Harrana Prime and Alpha Hellena to be precise. The Chalkers made quick work of those cretins, and made sure that no humans ever connected the dots. The Baulians, who were scheduled to take over the planet soon, were also completely in the dark.

It was also the Chalkers who first cultivated the divine herb, sinensis sinensis, on the eastern slopes of the Great Mountains. It was here they built the original Celestial Ladder on the slopes of Mengding Shan. This powerful tea, so subtly invigorating to humans, was like heroin to at least half the aliens in the Kraslika. The Chalker tea, which they called Cosmic Tea-Horse Gallop, was sold all over the cosmos, from Fallar Prime to Vicino Prossimo.

Ragor found that the financial success of the Chalkers made them a bit arrogant, at least when judged by Blue Dreamer standards. Why didn’t the Chalkers just take over planets quietly, like the other civilized species? The Chalkers didn’t seem to understand the Prime Directive (agreed to over a hundred thousand years ago) which clearly stipulated that all interference must be as seamless, surreptitious, and invisible as possible.

Still, Ragor thought the Chalkers made wonderful blue ceramic vases.

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The Book of Oracles

An old man with a thin white beard was sitting across the aisle, and asked Baldric if he would like to sample his fine Yunnan pu-erh tea, a rival he said for the coveted distinction of being the oldest tea in the world. Baldric couldn’t stand the smell of steaming old rags and shoved the cup aside, in the process scalding the old man and crashing the Early Han cup on the floor. It was so irritating to be pestered by locals, Baldric thought, as he dug deeper into the history of China, about which he was starting to become quite an expert.

What Baldric read in The Book of Oracles was different from what his father had taught him about the history of China. For example, The Book of Oracles said that Chiang Kai Shek was a running dog, and that he had used the strongholds of Chengdu and Chongqing to oppress the Chinese people. His father, on the other hand, told him that Chiang Kai Shek was a great man, but that it was a greater shame he was such a crummy general. Antonio wept at the thought of Chiang Kai Shek being chased from the province of Sichuan onto the tiny island of Taiwan, which Lorenzo insisted was the real China. Looking at a map of mainland China and Taiwan, Baldric wondered how such a big chunk of land might possibly fit into such a small one.

Antonio’s interpretation of history also differed when it came to the colonial past. According to Antonio, the Europeans were right to sell opium to the masses, to burn down the vegetarian temples, to search out destitute peasants and terrified monks, and to bring the Chinese people into a God-fearing, market-oriented existence. The aim (or “burden” as Antonio called it) of all this European philanthropy wasn’t to make the Chinese wealthy. That would only corrupt their souls! Rather, the aim was to bring them spiritual fulfillment. The European preachers explained to the natives that it’s more difficult to thread a camel through the eye of the needle than for a Chinese man with gold dust in his pockets to enter the Calcutta Stock Exchange. The Europeans knew this, they said, from long experience.

Antonio’s account went like this: The White Man saw that Poverty and the Protestant Work Ethic came together harmoniously into a Grand Chain-like Scheme of Well Being. Because the Natives didn’t understand the subtleties of Medieval Christian theology, it was simplified on their account to the Chain of Being, which, if they didn’t believe in it, could be found clanking around their ankles. The Scheme worked like Nineteenth Century magic: the less the people earned, the more money there was to implement work projects run by the White Overlord Empire (which the Natives referred to by the acronym WOE). And the more desperately the people needed money to survive, the more willing they were to do any sort of work. Over time, Poverty became an economic necessity, like low interest rates. For this reason, the White Man did everything in his power to keep it from disappearing.

Strangely enough, the same deftness with figures was discovered among certain of the otherwise simple-minded Natives. An illumined few realized that they could also make good money from illiterate, unorganized dunderheads. Their only disadvantage was that they had started the game too late: White Poppy Seed Man, not Peking Man, possessed all the tools of progress: he had the strongest iron, the biggest barrels, the purest lead. It was therefore necessary to co-operate with him if they were to inherit a portion of the earth, let alone a hefty slice of the Middle Kingdom.

Antonio’s account of Chinese history up to the Communist Revolution of 1949 was more or less consistent with what Baldric read in The Book of Oracles. Yet whereas his father discoursed on this history with a sense of pride, the Oracle gave the impression that the Chinese had in some way been swindled. Baldric couldn’t understand how this could be, and therefore dismissed the trashy bestseller as a bunch of old wives’ tales and threw it out the window. Miraculously, it landed on the sunburnt head of a peasant, who was overjoyed that for the first time in 2500 years she had a hat to protect her sizzling head from the sun.

The side effect of Baldric’s hastiness was that he now had no book to read. This was particularly distressing in light of the fact that he was an avid reader, and his mind was open to all new theories and ideas. In an attempt to compensate for his loss, he looked everywhere for another book. His only stipulation was that the book must be written in a language close to his own. Failing this, it must have colour pictures of pretty girls and no dull two-dimensional characters in black and white. His only other stipulation was that the book should lead him unerringly in the direction of Truth. Or, at least, in the direction in which Truth was last sighted. He stood outside a temple in Chengdu, and stared at himself for five days in a mirror, until his image became one with his stream of consciousness, which was at once a mirror and a river, wending its way to some overwhelming question, although he didn’t dare to ask What is it?

With his mind thus opened by the light of ten million bodhisattvas, and his expectations thus raised by obscure allusions to Poetry, he traveled night and day through the villages and hamlets of Sichuan, discarding this and that book as so much rubbish and so much propaganda. He threw away the poems of Li Bai and Tu Fu (or was it tofu?—in any case, it wasn’t worth a pile of green beans). He looked down the broad avenues of Chengdu and saw nothing but regulations and traffic cops; he wandered around Tu Fu’s cottage on the outskirts of the city, but refused to go down another rabbit hole, albeit a horizontal one which probably held an answer to every question he ever had.

He tossed aside the sayings of Confucius, Mencius, Mao Zedong, Mahatma Gandhi, and everyone else who didn’t agree with him. Finally, fatigued and hungry, he decided to give up his search for Truth. Humbled and broken, he sought breakfast in the restaurant of the Red Horse Hotel in the centre of Chengdu.

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The Long Wait

He sat in the middle of a cavernous ballroom in which the round tables wore white evening dresses. It was here that he began his famous Long Wait, which he named after the fact that he waited and waited until he discovered that the words waiter and waitress were Latin for those who make one wait. To while away his time, he picked up the glass of cold black tea that was left from a Qing Dynasty customer, and took a swig. He snuck a peak at the bright red menu buried beneath a smeared napkin on a dirty plate. On the cover were a pair of neighing horses, and on the first page was a photo of a porter on the old Tea Horse Road:

On the next page Baldric found several facts about the Tea Horse Road and about the populations of Chengdu and Sichuan. Once again he found himself reading that Sichuan had a population of over seventy million people. He wondered what in the world was so important about that particular piece of information that he needed to read it twice.

He also wondered if this figure included the waitresses that stood like figurine goddesses along the walls of the restaurant. It was unlikely that they could be included in the census, for they were clearly heavenly beings of some sort. Although they were cannily dressed as waitresses, they stood in the background of life: distant, supreme, transcendent. They seemed to exist beyond time and space, to hover on a celestial plane in a gigantic dining hall located somewhere between the Yangtze and Paradise. Had they climbed the Celestial Ladder and were now one with the Sky-Gods of Tea?

Yet if they were deities and hence not to be counted in the official census, what on earth were they doing in a restaurant, dressed as waitresses? And why, if they were dressed as waitresses, were they doing their utmost to avoid waiting on the customers? Why were they just standing there, without so much as a graceful movement of the arms?

After taking several more swigs, the black tea began to speak to Baldric. The inner voices of the tea, swirling up like invisible steam, told him that it was the bright red menu that had made him understand the angelic nature of the waitresses. It told him that the goddesses were now soothing the souls of the workers who had toiled and got nothing in their lives but blisters and early death. It told him that the Crimson Stalk angels were there to solace all those who had been abused by the human systems of avarice.

Baldric could only conclude that the menu was The Book that he had been searching for, the one that would lead him to Truth. How ironic, he thought, to have given up on Truth, and yet to find It right under his nose. Thus inspired by Irony, he plunged himself deep into studies of esoteric haute cuisine varieties, delving far below the introductory pages which only rambled on about horses and angels. A mist covered his eyes and he soon had little time for the transient things of this world. In a flash, he understood the symbology of daily specials and the prophetic wisdom of à la carte fragments. It was all there in the obscure meaning of the poetry etched on the inner pages, beneath their plastic covers. Yet no matter how hard he strained his powers of intuition, there was still no portent of a meal to come.

Although he could see no hope of lunch, he saw many other things inside the cluttered pages of the menu. Leaving the English translation aside (that was for simple-minded clunks, not Orientalist scholars like himself), he deciphered the Chinese characters one by one: this one looked like an egg, that one looked like three pieces of bacon twisted together, the third looked like Mao Zedong, and the fourth like Fu Manchu. Uncovering the deeper meanings of the weird shapes, he realized the sinister plotting of the Oriental Mind, and how it would be necessary for a Saviour like James Bond or Richard Nixon to set things straight.

Once the wave of sinensis sinensis had galloped though his mind, and was now grazing on some low-lying tea bushes on the slopes of Mount Mengding, Baldric realized that he had been hallucinating. Scrutinizing the characters more closely, Baldric saw that they were in fact written in a language he couldn’t read, and they were hence inscrutable and unreal. Clearly there was no use trying to make sense of them. Or, they were pictures, and as such were meant to be looked at like works of art and comic books. They were springboards to the ablutionary waters of Truth, rather than the currents and swells of Truth itself.

But then he looked at the tea pot on the white table-cloth. It had a graceful image of Guanyin on it, the smooth lines of her form surrounded by wisps of ether. This was the goddess of compassion who had come back down to this world of illusion to enlighten dolts like him.

Guanyin winked at him, but Baldric wasn’t interested in porcelain or fine china. Wasn’t he already in China, with a capital C? He was more interested in the contents of the pot. He lifted it and swung it from side to side, like a censor in a church.

At the bottom of the pot there was still a mix of tea-leaves and liquid, which had been fermenting for decades, perhaps centuries by now. He poured himself a full cup, drank half of it in several gulps, and then gripped the sides of the table for support. The evening dresses slid as he gripped it, as he pulled all the things on the table toward him, the menu, the plates, the goddess still winking, the chopsticks talking to the napkins, everything entering his soul as the contents of the cup permeated his brain.

The menu had opened all its pages as it slid into his mind, and he saw from within its greasy plastic-covered pages as if through a crystal ball. He saw himself rising from the Plane of Waiting Goddesses, and wandering through the streets of Chengdu. He walked between rows of contiguous two story houses that were brown and grey, yet to Baldric were on fire and about to burst with red lanterns under a green sky:

He saw the wide, scrutinizing eyes of Chinese children as he floated by, up and over the Anshunlang Bridge, which was likewise burning, but this time beneath a baby-blue sky:

The bridge reminded Baldric of the old bridge in Ya’an. This made him wonder if the two bridges weren’t relay posts for the celestial horses that gathered up the tea from Western China and sold it to the aliens that in his brain were trading tea stocks on a planet called Kollarum.

Baldric drifted into a tea house, and listened to the sound of men spitting on the floor. This had the effect of making his body lighter than air.

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The Horsemen of Xi’an

Next he saw himself four hundred miles to the north, in the city of Xian. It was seven in the morning and he was boarding a bus to the famous 2000 year-old terra-cotta soldiers. A dozen young men elbowed, shoved and kicked each other in the shins to secure the window seats. The children, old men, and women raced to the back, to be pushed into whatever seats they could find. He was amazed at the mean struggle, but couldn’t stop himself from kicking a knot-elbowed stick of a man with a wispy beard. This man was in fact a poet-scholar from Mount Hai-Flung, and had just written a short poem about the vicissitudes of Fate: The elbows of the hawthorn bend in the wind. / It’s ancient body is ringed with age, / Yet it offers its red berries to the passing stranger, / Welcoming him to The Garden of Old Friends. The scholar-poet was bringing this poem to his dying grandchild to comfort him in his last days on this earth. Yet a foreigner with yellow hair knocked it from his hand, and the poem went fluttering into the air tinkling with the magic of bicycle bells, and was ground beneath the passing tires.

At this point Baldric wasn’t sure if he was gazing into the greasy translucent pages of the Menu or looking through the dirt-smeared windows of a bus en route to the famous terra-cotta soldiers of Xian. It seemed, however, that he was on the bus, for the dense cigarette smoke exhaled by every male over thirteen had turned it into a flying hooka. Looking at the next page, Dumplings & Noodles, he was surprised to see the magnitude of the terra-cotta display: thousands of half-buried statues crowded into a building the size of a hockey arena! Walking on elevated planks of wood, he saw below him hundreds of armoured clay soldiers and horsemen rise from the dust of time. He read in a pamphlet that these terra-cotta figures were sculpted for Shih Huang-ti, the first emperor to rule over a unified China at the end of the third century B.C. He also read that they were only part of a larger funeral complex for the same man, much of which had not yet been excavated. He could only imagine how much time and money had been devoted to the memory of this one man. He then multiplied this figure by three hundred thousand (the population of China at the time, estimated by the sage Dzo Dzi) to arrive at the size of Emperor Shih Huang-ti’s ego.

Baldric had been curious to see these terra-cotta soldiers ever since he saw a picture of them in a magazine as he was sitting in a tea house in Kunming.

The picture in question was of Ronald Reagan standing next to the excavated horses of Xian, back in 1985. Baldric felt proud that a fellow North American could be so old and yet cut such a striking figure. In his mind was the headline: Old Man of the West in Archeological Groove. On this second cup of tea, the picture nudged its way from between the columns of print. Shocked by this, Baldric spilled his tea onto the front page. This only added to the transmogrifying effect: the black ink turned smudged, and then turned into the form of neighing steeds. The horses started into life!

Poked from behind by Nancy, the President mounted one of these animated clay beasts. He then rode three or four times around the makeshift racetrack of Xian, and rallied the horses into an ideological stampede. His hypnotic, grandfatherly voice acted as a centripetal force, bringing the tired, poor, gullible sheep of the world into his fold. Perched on his shoulder was a balding industrialist eagle with a thin vial of hair dye in its beak. Its beady eyes, like those of its trainer, were focused on three beasts roaming in the economic wilderness: the black bear of the Tartarean Wild, the lazy panda of the Szechuan hills, and the scruffy cow of the Gangetic Plain. With a piercing gaze, the Eagle surveyed the Long March ahead to unity. He spied the luxury apartments of left-wing radicals and Party members, and he saw with great acuity the contracts, kickbacks, Sony Trinitrons and Ford pick-up trucks that would win them over. If these incentives failed, he could always whistle for the C.I.A, recently so helpful in Chile and Nicaragua. Yet surely this wouldn’t be necessary. He felt confident that he could make the leaders see that they too could get rich quick and live off the fat of the land.

As in a dream come true, the great leader saw idealistic Gandhian yuppies pour into the stock market of Bombay. Then he saw these blessed yuppies hop to it in an ecstatic Krishna dance, leading by the nose a Soviet bear, who in turn dragged a panda chewing on a sugarcane stick imported from the Philippines. Above them all hovered the Eagle, who dropped bags of fertilizer and tins of sliced Dole pineapples. The juicy yellow circles of fruit tasted sweet, and the billboards claimed success already. They read: Inalienable Rights For All!  Soviet Autonomous Republics! Boxer-Free Special Economic Zones! Kashmiri Sweaters! Personal Computers For The Tibetans! Manifest Destiny!

Yet this wasn’t all. Baldric ordered another cup of tea, and deliberately threw it onto the front page of the photo to see if he could create another visual, hypnotic effect. It worked!  On the page below him, he saw Ronnie lead the world into an urban sunset of plastic mushroom suns and microchips. He saw the world being led by the nose once again out onto the brink of a cloud on which was placed a two-dimensional Free Trade Statue of Liberty Goddess. Under a purple and azure sky, the ancient leader shook the folds of his great neck, and addressed the multitude with words of Whitmanesque beauty.

The aged Captain spoke to them thus: Comrades, fellows in arms, listen to my story, and hear my sweet speech of hard work and retribution!  For I wasn’t born a millionaire; I too was once a common man, a moocher, a scum. I too once spat, used my fingers as a handkerchief, and elbowed my way to the front of the bus. Not alone have you slipped and held your noses from the scent of the communal toilets. I too have traveled the route of the great backpackers and have bickered with deaf hotel receptionists to pay in local black market currency. And I too amidst the din of the terra-cotta waitresses have awaited the visitation of breakfast.

The words of the President echoed in Baldric’s ears, as he realized that what he was seeing in the Menu was true: all around him stood figures as deaf as clay, as hard and impenetrable as the horses of Emperor Shih Huang-ti. He wondered if it was within his grasp to break the hard spell of time. Was it possible to make them move, stampede, serve? 

It seemed that in China there was always a roundabout way to do things, a way that foreigners can’t be expected (and are not supposed) to know. Perhaps these roundabout ways were just part of a larger, highly sophisticated system of Tourist Damage Control, the deciphering of which was to be found in the I Ching or some other mysterious text. Perhaps science and logic were of no use in the Middle Kingdom. Perhaps mysticism and the occult were the true governors of human existence. He looked down into the small amount of tea that sloshed at the bottom of his cup. He threw the liquid contents into the air, and let the dark brown liquid splash where it may.

Yet there were no clues, no instructions, no fantastic visions that suggested to him the course he should take. All he saw on the white tablecloth were tea stains and bacon grease: remnants of nutrition, the broken promise of a Western breakfast. So he gave up this geomancy of tea, and began to focus all his powers of concentration directly on the waitress. He felt confident that if he could overlap his thoughts onto hers, then through the sheer force of willpower toast and eggs would appear on his plate.

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Next: ⭐️ Antiny & the Wizard Ship of Albinon

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