Harvest Season

1

A gust of cold air announced their arrival. It was harvest season and the ganja was coming down off the mountain slopes in baskets. At that time of year the warmth of the days gave way to frigid cold with nightfall and a chill seeped into the bar every time the door swung open. He had pale, watery blue eyes and a punch-drunk nose; he entered the bar as if he owned it, dressed in a hoodie and faded jeans. She glided in behind him with a faraway gaze.

I'd been in town for perhaps a year, glad to still be in China and yet far from the China that had once granted me a living – far from the drab gray skies, photochemical haze, traffic-clogged boulevards and all the other touchstones of modern life most Chinese called progress. I'd left all that behind and come to Shuangshan, a place I'd nurtured and coveted in my memories for many years. Shuangshan was rarefied air and brilliant blue skies, an enclave of crumbling courtyard houses encircled by four ancient walls. It was snow-capped peaks, white cotton bedding and the best sleep of my life. In Shuangshan everything was different, as if its very existence was proof of the truth of an oft-quoted Chinese saying: "The mountains are high, the emperor is far away." It gave me hope for the rest of the China. There was an air of possibility that made it possible to believe that something might happen – that something might prevail over the fake modernity and push-and-shove politics that in the past had so often made me want to take the next flight out of Shanghai or Beijing. I'd taken an old courtyard house inside the town walls and had done a half-hearted job of transforming it into a home – perhaps unable to admit I'd been seized by a malaise peculiar to Shuangshan, I called it "a work in progress." I'd arrived with a crate of books I'd been planning to read for years; most of them were still in the crate. I'd had projects I'd planned to busy myself with; I worked on few of them for longer than a day or two. In the beginning, I'd got out of town on a regular basis. I hiked in the mountains, cycled to far-flung Wu minority villages. But, even if I couldn't see it as such then, I can look back now and see that, as the days dripped by, Shuangshan was sapping me of something. It had lulled me into a kind of sleep.

"Evening, sir," said Mike with mock formality, addressing Alex and sizing the two of them up from behind the bar with shrewd eyes. "What can I do for you?"

Mike was co-owner, with Chris, of the Lizard, an organic growth of a bar – an accumulation of party posters, cigarette-scarred furniture, a battered bar-top fashioned from scavenged wood, candle-holders and lampshades brought from Katmandu, India and Bangkok by repeat-visit travelers. Wooden ashtrays, hand-painted in Rasta tricolors, littered the bar.

Alex said: "I'll have a Jameson's, if that's alright with you." He turned to A-hong, and asked her in heavily accented Chinese what she was drinking. She replied in English: "A Bailey's with ice."

"Been in town long, then?" asked Mike.

"A couple of months," said Alex.

"Haven't seen you around."

"Been busy, up the hill. Building a guesthouse near the pagoda."

"I heard something about that," said Chris. "You remember, Mike? Lao Duan said something about some foreigner doing something up by the pagoda." He said to Alex. "You're doing it with Lao Lai, right?"

"Yeah, that's right," said Alex. "The Cormorant Lodge, that's what it's going to be called."

"The cormorants, mate, are all down in the lake," said Mike. "Catching fish for the tourists."

"Yeah, I know. But, you know, Shuangshan ... cormorants, we thought it kind of worked, and because it's up by the pagoda, overlooking the town and the lake, it had this kind of soaring thing going on." He put the Jameson's back like a shot, and ordered another. "And, anyway, we couldn't think of anything else. At least it's not the Paradise Lodge, or the Happy Guesthouse, one of those places you find on Khao San Road."

He was establishing his credentials as a traveler, and as a man who meant business, and it struck me that he was a different breed from the types who usually came into town and stayed. I wasn't even sure exactly what it was: something, perhaps, about his self-assured cockiness. He had a plan. Hardly anyone in Shuangshan, with the exception of Wu locals looking to cash-in on the growing crowds of Chinese tourists, planned anything. Businesses tended to happen, driven by the wills of visitors who couldn't bring themselves to leave, and either flounder or thrive – usually the former.

"What makes you think it's a good idea to open a guesthouse?" I said. "This place has more rooms than it can fill already."

"I'm not worried about that," said Alex. "We're doing something completely different. For a start, we're building bungalows, and we'll be charging premium prices for those. For sure, we're going to have dorm beds too – a lot of them – but we'll make money off those through the bar and food. They're staying up on the mountain. Yeah, they'll come down into town sometimes, have some drinks here at your place or wherever, but most of the time they're going to stay up at the Cormorant, smoke their spliffs, whatever, chill in the garden, and enjoy the views. The other thing we're going to be doing is promotion. I know the Thailand scene, Koh Pha'ngan] , Koh Tao, Pai, you fucking name it. We're going to bring people here that would never come otherwise, and we're going to throw parties like Shuangshan has never seen before, bring in musicians, jugglers, fire dancers, the whole fucking circus."

He knocked back his second Jameson's and glanced at A-hong. She stood behind him, absently sipping on her Bailey's. "A-hong here's a fire dancer supremo. We met on Koh Pha'ngan." He made the statement with the air of a man who had made a discovery.

She poked her tongue in our general direction. It was a mischievous assertion of her sexuality, or at least a gesture that aimed to let us know she was aware of its power. It occurred to me that, whatever Alex might think, she made her own discoveries.

"Nice to meet you A-hong," said Mike, and then to Alex: "Sorry, didn't catch your name."

He told us.

"You're Australian?"

"Yeah, from Sydney."

Kev, who had been sitting next to me and morosely sipping on Tsingtaos all evening said he had to be getting home. Alex and A-hong took seats at the bar, A-hong next to me.

I nodded at Alex. "You think Shuangshan's ready for that crowd? I mean, it's a chilled out scene here. I'm not sure everyone here's going to thank you for leading a party invasion."

Alex arched his eyebrows: "Of course it's ready. The amazing thing is that nobody did it sooner. Look at the place. It's fucking beautiful, the dope grows wild, the cops don't give a shit, and hardly anyone knows about the place. They're all getting busted in Thailand and queuing for fucking rooms in Lao."

"Maybe," I said, "the cops don't give a shit because there's hardly anyone here. If the Thailand party scene starts turning up, they might start to think differently."

"It's going to change anyway," Alex said. "If I don't do it, somebody else will."

He was greeted by silence. Chris gazed into the distance, his face deadpan in a neutral expression that said to me he was filing the information away. A-hong rolled a spliff with an obsessive intensity – methodically, her fingers slow but busy, as if nothing existed but the tobacco and the hash and the OCB, her brow wrinkled and her eyes thoughtful and distant. I wanted to lean in and whisper in her ear: "You're beautiful," and I remembered, for the first time in years, that you could fall in love at first sight, and for reasons that you didn't understand, or only vaguely, perhaps because she reminded you of someone you'd loved in another place and time.

"So, when's this place of yours going to open then?" said Mike.

"Within a month, if everything goes to plan, and if I'm behind something it goes to plan. I've organized parties and gigs anywhere you can name. I was running the whole show in a club in Chengdu, bringing foreigners up from the Thailand party scene on day rates to perform for the Chinese – one-thousand kuai a day, all expenses paid."

He scanned the bar, making eye contact with each of us, daring us to challenge him. Mike wished him luck with barely concealed reluctance. I half raised my beer in his direction. I had a premonition it was all going to come to no good, and said to A-hong: "You're from Chengdu?"

She looked up from rolling the spliff and then returned to it with a serene smile. "Yes," she said. "How do you know?"

"Alex just said he was up there before. It was a good guess."

She glanced at me with a look of private amusement, her eyes sparkling. "It was a smart guess." She ran her tongue along the length of the spliff.

"No, it wasn't particularly smart. Anyone could have done that."

I sensed confusion in her eyes, and wondered if I was speaking too quickly. "Would you prefer to speak in English or in Chinese?" I asked.

"Per-lee-fer?" she murmured.

I said in Chinese: "Let's speak Chinese. I used to be a translator. It's the only foreign language I speak decently."

She tilted her head and pursed her lips. "Your Chinese is good, but your accent ...?"

"I didn't study in Beijing, like most foreigners do nowadays," I said. "Back before all of this started to happen – before you could actually really think of China being a place you could live in – most of us learnt Chinese in Taipei. I speak southern Mandarin."

"Yes, I can hear it now. You speak Chinese like a Taiwanese. Like somebody who lived with somebody Taiwanese for quite some time."

"Yes."

She stared in the direction of the bar and then returned, as if from somewhere remote, with a sharp look into my eyes. "What happened?"

"What happened? I wasn't around as much as I should have been. I was traveling a lot in those days." I saw a pair of accusing eyes framed in a doorway. I thrust the vision aside and said: "So, you're from Chengdu?"

"Yes, but my mother's from Beijing. She's an artist."

"And your father?"

"He was an editor. He's dead now."

"I'm sorry," I said.

She frowned, shrugged, and then looked with affected shyness at her Bailey's. It was nearly empty.

"Do you want another one?"

"My boyfriend will get it for me," she said.

She was too young for me anyway, and I sensed something troubled, remote, and dangerous. I was fascinated all the same, and it wasn't just her looks, which were unique in such a way that, if any one imperfection was exaggerated, even ever so slightly, she might look too unusual to be called beautiful at all. An intuition nibbled at me – a distant, smoldering kernel that hinted at both creativity and abandon, and I wondered whether they were qualities she'd cultivated giving the impression of, or whether they were a source of power she was herself yet to understand. I didn't want to believe it was the latter, though I suspected it was. She was awkward in a way that made it difficult to understand the reasons why people were attracted to her. This made her suspicious of them. A thought came to me from nowhere, and I immediately sensed it to be true: She was not very good at relationships. It was a dangerous thought, because I would abandon anything that came too easily to me.

I said: "You'll be helping Alex run the guesthouse, then?"

"No, I'm going to run a shop here in town."

"On Renmin Jie?" It was the street we all lived on, drank on, ran our break-even businesses on. It translated as the "People's Street".

She nodded, with the hint of an expression that seemed to say it was a victory of sorts, and it pleased her. "I've found a place already. I'm renovating it now."

I pictured yet another outlet for second-hand clothes and handmade jewelry, of the variety that already littered the street and barely brought in enough coin to justify the rent.

"But why won't you be working with Alex?"

She held her empty Bailey's in his direction. His eyes were narrowed and his head tilted to one side as if he was taking something in, and I realized he and Mike were discussing Lao Lai. He was a recently returned Shuangshan local. I knew nothing about him, other than he had land and property up on the hills above town. Alex nodded at A-hong's empty Bailey's and ordered another. She put the empty glass on the bar top and leaned in close to me.

"I don't want to work in a guesthouse," she said, and I sensed it was something that she and Alex had battled over, and she'd won. "I want to do something of my own. I've always wanted to have a shop." Her drink arrived and she took it and sipped at it, with the air of someone marshalling an unruly riot of emotion. "It's difficult for me with him sometimes. He doesn't understand me. We fight. It's better we have our own things to do."

"Maybe you're difficult to understand for a lot of people," I said. I wanted to provoke her, to force further disclosure.

"No," she said. I touched her shoulder and she tilted her head my way with an expression that suggested she regretted giving so much away so soon after we'd met. "Maybe I am difficult for a lot of people, but not for the people who understand me."

"But there aren't so many of them," I said, and I realized we'd been talking in whispers.

"Maybe," she said. "It's true. But if someone understands me, I give everything."

She said it in such a way it made me wonder whether it was something she imagined to be true of herself and had yet to happen, or whether it was something she'd experienced and the emptiness of what had followed its failure had drained her and left her with nothing but the vehemence of unfulfilled conviction.

Alex said: "I see A-hong and Matt are deep in conversation." His tone betrayed nothing, but his expression told me he knew our conversation had taken a personal turn.

"It's cool," I said. "We were just chatting." As a peace offering, I added: "What are you drinking?"

He took another Jameson's. I ordered one too. We clinked glasses. I felt uneasy. I wanted to continue talking to A-hong, but that was now impossible. The conversation had parked a prickling tension between her and Alex, and I would oscillate in its field for as long as I stayed.

"Okay, guys," I said. "I'm out of here. I'm going down to the Hummingbird, hang for a bit, and then head home."

"The Hummingbird?" said Alex.

"Ah, you don't want to go there, mate," said Mike. "Just a bunch of hipster tossers from Beijing who fancy themselves as artists. It's the Lizard you want to be in when you're in town."

"Don't look at me," I said to Alex, and shrugged apologetically at Mike and Chris.

Alex pulled at A-hong's shoulder. She shrank away. He said: "What do you think? You want to try somewhere else?"

"Why not?" she said with a shrug.

"Mind if we come along, Matt?" he said. I felt put upon. I didn't think the Hummingbird was their kind of place. Alex, I suspected, would expect to be treated as somebody because he was a foreigner who spoke some Chinese, but nobody would give it to him there. A-hong, I sensed, was always going to be more exotic to foreigners than she ever would be to her own people. She was, for them, simply another kind of foreigner – cut from a different die than the mainstream of Chinese society: the crowds that commuted the subways of Beijing and crammed the buses of second-tier cities on journeys to forms that needed stamping and export quotas that needed filling. None of the émigré Chinese in Shuangshan belonged to that other China either. But A-hong, I sensed, was alone in her uniqueness. I wanted to gather her in my arms and say, "Don't worry, I'll take care of you."

~~~

It was past eleven and Renmin Jie was almost deserted. The folding metal doors of the restaurants had all been locked fast for at least an hour. A few customers waited for skewers of meat at the barbecue stands on the corner of Yuxi Lu. I took in the stars, as I had every night for the past year, if only to remind myself why I was in Shuangshan and not in any of the many starless places I'd lived before. A chill breeze blew up from the lake, gusting occasionally, as it did this time of year, so that you had to squint against the dust, which eddied up and down the street throughout the brittle months of winter. I heard A-hong murmur to Alex that she was cold.

"Is it far?" he said.

"It's here," I said. A small, glowing sign with an oil-painted outline of a tiny bird in flight marked the entrance. We entered via five stone steps that led into a hallway through a swinging, metal side-door that opened into the bar.

Qing and Zhang Han, both artists from Beijing who'd come to Shuangshan eight years ago, had knocked out most of the interior of the main building. It was the ancestral home of a Wu family that had once made a modest fortune from the tea trade before the revolution. They'd renovated the rooms in the outbuildings, turning them into an invite-only guesthouse for friends from Beijing, Shanghai and sometimes Chengdu, and these formed a square around the outer courtyard.

In the hallway I said to Alex: "It's difficult to believe you've been here two months, and you haven't been to any of these places."

"Too busy, too much to do," he said, and then, backing off from his bravado, perhaps because in some way he felt he was my guest, he added: "I'd heard about the Lizard and I think maybe the Hummingbird too, and I just forgot about it. My partner, an Irish guy, told me about the Shuangshan scene when we were in Thailand, in the South. But as soon as I arrived, he bailed. It's been chaos up there ever since. We've just been bringing in beers from the local shop and drinking them in what's basically a construction site."

We entered the bar, A-hong trailing us by a few steps. I stopped to let her catch up, and Alex halted with me. A handful of drinkers stood in a loose huddle around the pool table, watching a game and waiting their turns. A few more sat at the bar. I spotted Wang – we shared a courtyard house; he was my friend – sitting in a corner with a stranger. We joined them and Wang called for three more glasses and a couple of Tsingtaos. He poured us drinks, before returning to rolling a joint in his lap.

Wang's friend was called Gong. I assumed it was his surname. He owned a bar in Chengdu. He wore a button-down shirt and had a salon haircut. He tilted his head slightly to one side, with a knowing smile that seemed to say: "I've got your mark." He and Alex were not going to hit it off. I hoped Wang would be a steadying presence. He was from somewhere far in the North. He lived in a room on the other side of my courtyard. There was nothing in it but a change of clothes and a few well-thumbed paperback copies of the Taoist classics. He practiced calligraphy in the afternoons, drank beer and smoked spliffs in the evenings. Occasionally he disappeared to sell some weed, or make some money as a fixer for foreign television productions. He'd reduced his life to a minimum. I'd heard it rumored that once he'd taught philosophy at a university. I never asked him about that because I sensed he wouldn't care to give me an answer.

"Alex's opening a guesthouse up by the pagoda," I said in Chinese as Wang poured drinks. "A-hong's opening a shop on Renmin Jie."

"Really?" he said, looking up from the half-rolled joint in his hand at A-hong. "Where are you from?"

"Chengdu," she said, and she flipped a dreadlock away from her cheek in a tiny, nervous gesture, before leaning back in her chair as if waiting for the next question. It occurred to me that Alex was not her first foreign boyfriend, and she'd already decided that Chinese men were not for her.

Gong leaned forward with undisguised curiosity. "Chengdu? That's my hometown. Where in Chengdu?"

Alex lit a cigarette with an air of not giving a shit. The conversation would soon slip into Chengdu dialect, which was close enough to standard Chinese to allow me perhaps to follow perhaps half of it, but likely unintelligible to him. He wouldn't like that either. I felt nervous about the possessiveness that Chinese men feel about Chinese women around foreign men. Wang wouldn't be a problem, but I wasn't sure about Gong. Alex's expression was simultaneously attentive and baffled.

"They're speaking Chengdu dialect," I said.

"Yeah, I know. I told you up the road, I lived there for a bit before I came here, but I never got my head around the local lingo. Do you understand any of it?"

"A little. It's like listening to Chinese with all the tones wrong, and spoken with a Glaswegian accent or something. If they go off on anything deep, I get lost really quickly."

Gong hunched forward in his seat, his elbows anchored on his knees. A-hong retreated backward into her seat, with the air of being interviewed for a job she didn't care to get. Alex appeared affronted, but was clearly making an effort to look composed. He said: "Well, she's free to talk to whoever she wants."

"Let's have a meeting," said Wang in Chinese. It was Shuangshan slang for, "Let's go outside and smoke a joint."

"Wang and I are going to smoke a spliff." I said to Alex.

"I'll stay here with A-hong," he said.

In the courtyard, Wang lit up and said: "Who's this Alex guy?"

"I don't really know. We only just met. I was up at the Lizard, and he was with that girl, A-hong, and when I said I was leaving to come here, he asked if they could come along."

"Uh-huh."

"Do you think it's a good idea to leave them alone in there? I don't think Alex and that friend of yours are going to get on, especially with her there."

"He's not really a friend," Wang said, and his eyes drifted into the middle distance as he took a toke on the joint. "I think both those guys can look after themselves."

"Yeah, I'm sure they can," I said. "I guess I was just thinking about her."

"What's she to you? You said you only just met them tonight."

"I don't know, really," I said. "I was talking to her up at the Lizard, and, well, there was something, I can't even say what, some kind of connection."

Wang raised his eyebrows, as if he doubted I should trust intuitions like that. "How long did you talk to her?"

"Yeah, okay, I know," I said. "I'm probably reading too much into it. It was only, like, ten minutes or something, but it was one of those encounters you have every now and again, when you're suddenly in some kind of very personal place, and it gets to you and you don't want it to stop."

"Okay," said Wang. "I can see that happening. She's got something mysterious going on about her, but she's probably trouble. And she likes men who are trouble, which means she might be attracted to you." He considered what he'd said with a look of satisfaction, as if he told me something I needed to know. He passed me the spliff.

"Wang," I said. "In what way am I trouble?"

"You make everything your business," he said. "The guy she's with now – what's his name, Alex? He's definitely trouble."

"Okay," I said, and I knew the answer before I asked the question. "In what way is he trouble?"

"You know. He's got a power trip going on, and he wants a revolution."

The spine-tingling, eerie screech of a cat and the crashing of a brief but furious scuffle somewhere overhead broke the silence. Wang and I both scanned the darkness as if the clamor was about to manifest as something of significance. A light snapped on in one of the courtyard rooms.

"What about this guy, Gong?" I said.

"He's just a guy. Just a guy with a bar in Chengdu. It's not the big deal he makes out it is, but he wants to buy some drinks, and he needs somebody to drink them with. You know what it's like with guys like that in China. If you say, no, it's an insult."

"Yeah, I know," I said. Hospitality was all too often something you had to endure, because in China friendship was something that was bought with drinks and meals and small favors. Wang didn't play by the rules, but he understood the meaning of "jiu, rou pengyou" – "wine and meat friends".

I said: "Maybe we should go back inside and take a look."

Wang shrugged a casual assent.

Alex had moved his chair closer to A-hong's. His arm was draped around her shoulder. She looked uncomfortable, defensive. Gong leaned back in his chair, glaring at the two of them. Wang went and sat with Gong. I sat next to Alex.

"Everything okay?" I asked Alex.

"I guess that depends on matey here, doesn't it?"

"Come on," I said. "We've all had a lot to drink. Let's just get out of here."

A-hong sat up, shrugging out of Alex's embrace, as if she'd made a decision. She gestured at the door with a tilt of her chin. I heard Gong muttering with Wang, but the only word I could catch – it was on repeat – was "laowai", "laowai" – "foreigner".

Alex stood up. "Laowai shenne ?" He switched into English: "What about the fucking foreigner, you cunt?"

"He shouldn't drink whisky," A-hong said in an urgent whisper, and I put a hand on her shoulder.

"It's okay, Wang and I'll handle it."

Gong had snatched an empty Tsingtao from the table and he brandished it eyelevel in his right hand. Alex grabbed bottle of his own and emptied what was left of it onto the floor with a grin that said: "Bring it on." He growled: "I'll fucking bottle you too, you cunt." The corners of Gong's mouth twitched in a sneer.

A-hong shrank close to my side. I said to Wang: "Get her out of here. I'll deal with Alex."

Wang grabbed A-hong and bundled her in the direction of the door. I lunged at Alex, but somebody had hold of me, and I was in the corridor, and then I was on the street. I landed on all fours. Alex was on his side several feet away. I picked myself up, and felt around for any damage. I'd grazed my hand in the fall. Alex seemed to leap to his feet, before flinging his arms skywards and launching into a jig. He let loose a scream, part abandon, part glee, and continued the jig, shouting at the top of his voice: "Fuck you, you cunts!"

A-hong stood close by with Wang. She stifled a sob. I took a few steps and placed a hand on her shoulder. "You okay?" I said. Wang backed off. She shook her head and, wiping at her eyes with delicate hands, said quietly in Chinese: "Sometimes I wish somebody would just take me away from all this." She shook her head again, but now she looked resolute. She took off at a stiff pace up the street. I had to resist the urge to go after her, and, as if he knew it, Wang gripped my shoulder, and whispered: "Let it go."