By Evan
When last I left off, we had just parted from the Daoist funeral and had to pass up the offer of some female Buddhist monks to stay in their temple due to its unaccommodating location atop a mountain. We rolled on again until around 4:30 to the town of Gaoqiao (高桥镇), where we realized there wasn’t enough sunlight left to continue. The only hotel in town, much to our dismay, had no vacancies, and we scrambled to ask locals where we could stay, half-way hoping one might invite us in. “If you have your own sleeping bags, you could sleep in the government center,” said one man selling raw pork in the central market. Well well well, a government center! That’s just ridiculous enough an idea to make for a good story, I thought. I was not to be disappointed.
Gaoqiao Town Government Center, our home for a night. Photo by Alexis
We proceeded to roll through the complex’s gate and in front of the five-story-tall government center — which possessed all the charms of a Soviet bomb shelter — we began incredulously asking if there was indeed room at the… inn. A Mr. Zhu, office director of the county government (镇政府办公室主任), looked with pity upon our plight and offered the center’s fourth floor spare room to us free of charge. To boot, once we had moved into the room with much fanfare from the other employees, Mr. Zhu, a terse, middle-aged man given to speaking in staccato bursts, took us to the employee cafeteria (员工食堂) for a bowl of rice with some cabbage, eggs, and pork strips — on the house. This world is just full of surprises! Afterward two dopey cops showed up to register us, and after telling us to “cooperate (你们配合一下),” Mr. Zhu left us with them for over 45 minutes as they clumsily took notes and filled in forms on nearly every detail of our lives, down to our religion (we were tempted to answer Communism but resisted) and our addresses in our home countries (were they going to send our moms letters if we misbehaved?). After they left, and just after I had climbed into my sleeping bag on top of one of the short bamboo planks in the free, broken-windowed room, an energetic man in his late 40s sporting a disheveled head of greasy hair, Mr. Wang (汪), burst into the room. (more…)
