Devil Monkey is on the bus.  I immediately notice him sitting towards the front when I board.  He is still wearing the same green camaflouge suit that he wore the night before when he passed me in the street with his three monkeys.  Said monkeys are nowhere to be seen.  They have disappeared.  It’s only him sitting on the bus.  He seems smaller and naked without them dragging behind him, like He-Man withouth his sword.  He has a friend sitting next to him–maybe another Devil Monkey.  I can’t be sure.  He recognizes me when I board the bus and raises his eyebrows in surprise.  I greet him with a smile.  Good Devil Monkey.  I sit in a seat in towards the back.

A couple of aesthetic changes take place within the bus itself during the course of the journey to Hai Yuan.  At the beginning of the ride, there are still plenty of empty seats on the bus.  It is about 3 quarters full, and I am comfortably seated next to the window with no one beside me.  As the bus proceeds towards its ultimate destination in Hai Yuan, a place I really know nothing about, more and more people board the bus, filling it well past its alloted capacity.  Every time the bus stops for new passengers, the driver opens the back of the bus for them to throw their bags.  At the same time he does this, Devil Monkey hurredly gets off the bus and runs to the back.  It’s at this moment that I realize where his monkeys are.  Fearing that they will escape or be crushed by the baggage, he rushes to the back to make sure they are ok.  The passengers who board the bus get on at random intervals and wave the bus down as if they are hailing a taxi cab in New York City.  At one point, a woman with a small baby boards the bus and has no place to sit.  The ticket-taker hands her a small stool with legs that are about 3 inches off the ground to stoop on.  I stand up and tell her to sit in my seat, which she does.  I stoop on the stool.  However, only a minute later the ticket-taker almost forcefully makes me stand up and take my seat back.  The woman with the baby sits back on the stool on the floor.  I feel like I have no choice.  I sit back in my seat, embarrassed.  By this time, the aisle is jam packed with standing passengers. 

Besides the increase in the number of humans on the bus, I also notice a change in the style of dress as well.  Because the members of the Hui minority are Muslim, the men wear a traditional skull cap on their head.  The cap is usually white, or has a few intricately hand woven designs.  The women also cover their heads with black or white scarves.  Some of the elderly men have long beards, something that I don’t often see amongst members of the Han ethnicity.  Many of the older men also wear extremely large, square-shaped sunglasses, much like the former Chairman Jiang Zemin^W wore.  The bus gradually makes its way towards more barren and arid landscape, and the interior of the bus gradually transforms from a predominantly Han group of passengers to a Hui majority of passengers.

The towns we pass through on the road are dusty and dry.  Some of the houses are made of Earth.  The number of mosques increases as well.  In each small town that we go through, the most spectacular building is sure to be the town’s mosque, always capped with the beautful emerald domes ending in mysterious golden crescent moons.  They contrast with the blue sky and make me think of an oasis.  At one stop, local women board the bus to hawk small plastic bags of local apricots.  No one buys any.  The Devil Monkey once again goes back to check on his brood. 

We ride through a land not yet desert, but clearly lacking in water resources.  The Earth is cracked and parched with dried sores.  It’s waiting to turn red.  Still, the fields are tilled and things manage somehow to grow here and there.  Ningxia’s speciality is the wolfberry, a small, cranberry like fruit that is supposedly very good for one’s health.  They grow on small  bushes and it’s easy to mistake them for small chili peppers from the window of a bus.  Sometimes people put them in their tea, other times they soak them in grain alcohol.  One can even eat them as is, directly from the bush.  Even the desert has its treasures.  The bus pulls us over small hills that aren’t quite yest mountains.  The Earth’s crust is like the skin of a potato now.  In less than an hour we’ll be there.

Arrival

I receive many stares at the bus station as I buy my return ticket for Zhongwei for the following morning.  I don’t want to return too late the next day.  Today will be my one and only day in Hai Yuan.  Tomorrow after taking the train to Zhongwei I’ll go to see the girl I met on the train to Yinchun, Amanda from Wuhai, Inner Mongolia.  I quickly buy a ticket and go to look for lunch.  Devil Monkey and his crew have already left.

As soon as I enter the nearest restaurant, heads turn in my direction.  There aren’t many heads to turn, however.  It’s still a little bit early for lunch, so there are few customers present.  I feel like the stranger who has blown into town in some B Western movie.  I wonder if I made the right decision in coming to Hai Yuan or not. 

I’m not sure what I should order here as I am unfamiliar with the food, so I go over to the table next to me and check out what the two guys at that table are eating.  They suggest I try a flat noodle dish.  Apparently in these parts, noodles are the staple food.  I should note that none of the dishes on the menu have any pork in them.  Because the majority of people in this town are Hui minority, almost none of the restaurants serve pork.  I take the advice of the locals and eat what they suggest.  One of them brings me a glass of tea with some herbs and wolfberries in it.  I comment on the wolfberries, asking if people all over the province eat these things, and the owner of the restaurant once again confirms the health benefits of this Ningxia specialty.  A couple of minutes later he goes out and comes back in with a small back of wolfberries which he graciously gives to me as an extra gift, free of charge.  Not bad.  The lunch is good and the people are friendly.  They talk with me a few minutes about Obama and how he got to be president.  One of the guys gives a thumbs up at the mention of Obama’s name.  I fill up and begin to feel like I definitely made the right choice in coming to Hai Yuan.

After paying for my meal I decide that I want to find a map of this place if at all possible.  I walk away from the bus station uphill in the direction of the town.  It feels small to me.  It feels empty here.  A lot of the buildings have their large doors open, and some of the windows looking inside display empty rooms with cement floors.  It’s not run down here, it’s just that there is no one here–the Wild West.  As I walk further up the hill, the number of people I pass increase.  The stares I get are intensely curious.  I can feel them staring at my back after I go by.  Up ahead is a school that is just getting out of class.  Oh great.  I decide to ask one of the kids who is walking in my direction towards the school if she can help me find a map.  She gawks at me at first as if I’m from another planet, then says that there is a bookstore up ahead.  Leading me to the bookstore, I see the other elementary students across the street begin to point at me with their mouths agape.  After I enter the book store I ask the owner about locating a map for Hai Yuan.

“A map?” she says. “Hmmmm…I don’t think there is a map for this place.  We have a map for Ningxia, though.  Here…where is that…?”  She goes to a shelf and locates the section where the maps are and pulls out a book that contains comprehensive maps of Ningxia, including a page for Hai Yuan County.  This is not what I want, however.  I just want a folding map of the city I am in.  They don’t have it.  I thank her and turn to leave the store, only to find that the doorway is currently blocked by about 20 young children staring at me.  There is no way to get out other than engaging them in conversation.

“Ooohh. You know if there was a fire, this wouldn’t be good,” I joke.  They laugh.  I feel they would have laughed at anything that comes out of my mouth.  I do my best impersonation of Moses and part the sea.  Across the street is another bookstore.  I search inside for a map, but to no avail.  Maybe they just don’t make them.  Lewis and Clark would have a field day.

The store owner in the second book store points me in the direction of the center of town.  That’s where I want to go.  I’m still in search of a map, and that’s probably the best place to find one.  It’s also probably the best place to find someone who will know how to sing hua er.  Finding this type of singing style is my main mission in coming to this town.  It’s the amorphous goal, the blob that brought me here.  Now that I’m hear, however, it doesn’t really matter to me if I find the song or not.  I’ll do my best to locate IT, but I can’t set my heart on this goal.  I just want to let what comes to me come to me and enjoy Hai Yuan while I am here.  There’s nothing that I HAVE to do.

After about 5 minutes of walking straight and never veering off the main street, I arrive near the town’s main square and suddenly decide that I want to locate a place to stay for the night so that I can put my bag down.  Locating a small in, I walk up four flights of stairs and am greeted by a family behind the check in desk.  There is a man with a moustache taking his midday rest, a young girl of about 20, and a younger girl who is about 4 years old.  This is the hotel where I will stay.  I don’t really care what the room will look like, and I know it’s not that expensive.  I just like the look of this family.  Still, I decide to play the “check-in” game and have a look at the room before giving my ultimate decision.

The proprietor of the hotel, Mr. Ma, is an amicable family man who shows me to a room at the end of the hallway.  There is a leaky public sink on the left side of the hall.  Wet, dirty hand towels hang on a wire above the sink.  The right side of the hallway is lined with windows that let in the white light reflected off the rooftops and walls outside.  Mr. Ma leads me to the room that is just after the public sinks and opens the door to a spacious room with a hard queen-sized bed.  I put on my best “scrutinizing face,” squinting my eyes, patting the bed, handling the curtains, checking the lights, etc.  Then it’s into the bathroom.  The light in their is extremely thin and there are a couple of discarded cigarettes on the floor.  The whole room is essentially one giant drain with the shower connected to the wall.  There is a plunger placed in the middle of the room, directly over the drainage hole.  This deliberate placement is to prevent the stink of the drainage from coming back up.

“Hot water?” I ask.

“Yes, just plug in the shower here, and you can bathe about 20 minutes later after it heats up,” he shows me where the plug to the water heater is at.  Afterwards he demonstrates how to use the shower.  The water dribbles out at a pitiful pace, but I tell him I’ll take the room anyway.  It’s just one night.

I toss my bag on the bed and head back to the front desk with him to fill out the registration.  First I pull out my passport.  Obviously, I have no Chinese identification card, so it’s all in English and impossible for Mr. Ma to understand.  I go through the registration form with him line by line.

“Name, ok.  S-C-H-W-A-B, J-E-F-F-R-E-Y.”  He writes in my name.

“Age, 29.  Male.”  No problem here.

“Uh? Identy number?”  I point to my passport number and he writes it down.  Then I show him the page with the visa number.  So far, so good.  I’ve done this plenty of times.  It’s a breeze.  Just as we are about to finish the check in process, we hit a snag that I’ve never met before in China.

“Ethnicity?” he asks.  I balk at the question.  Ethnicity?  He already knows I’m American.  I always balked at this question in the past whenever I took standardized tests.  There was that block of choices for the test taker to fill in what ethnic group he belonged to:

Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, Other

I usually left this blank or chose “other” when faced with this question, thinking to myself why do the people or machines who mark this test need to know my ethnic background?  I realize now that it was probably for statistic results, but still, it always rubbed me the wrong way.  Here I am, thousands of miles and years away from the SAT, and I’m being asked to file myself away in an ethnic group by Mr. Ma.

“Ethnicity?”  he asks again.

“I don’t have an ethnicity.  I’m an American,” I say.

He pauses and contemplates for a second, the pen in his right hand hovering over the registration form.

“Are you Han Chinese or Hui Minority?” he asks again, rephrasing the questions.  I’m clearly not getting out of this situation without providing an answer.

“Han or Hui?” he asks again.

The pen doesn’t budge.  The air is still.  Who am I?