Northern China is eerily unpopulated this far west on the Yellow River. I have still not come across a village and am once again doing what I had sworn not to do, which is to ride in the dark, and now oil is pouring out of the right side of the engine onto my boot. Miraculously, a building appears. I cut the engine and glide into the empty parking lot where I stomp around in the dark, kicking the bike and cursing. At the height of my temper tantrum the lights come on and a young couple walks out of the building. I show them the puddle of oil and my boot and they beckon me inside. It is their home, and a motorcycle dealership. I am seated on a long couch in a living room lined with candy-colored 125cc motorcycles. After a steaming cup of green tea we go outside to fill my crankcase with oil. The man hops on a moped and leads me about a half-mile into town. My bike leaks oil all the way to the luguan, a trucker dorm, where I’ll sleep, and asks someone to fetch the mechanic.

The mechanic is an astonishingly handsome young man with long slicked-back hair and almond eyes of brown verging on gold. I think there is no way a beautiful man like this could be a mechanic, but here he is. Explaining my problem to him is frustrating. He doesn’t really seem to be listening. I open my motorcycle manual to the exploded view of the engine and circle the piston, drawing lightning bolts and X-marks through it with my pencil, but he looks at me with more fascination than understanding, and so I give up.

There’s a public shower where I spend a lot of time rinsing the day away, by now used to an audience of tittering women curious about the foreigner. Back at the lugan I spread my sleeping bag liner on top of the dirty sheets in the women’s dormitory and sink into the sagging mattress, sleeping deeply until the screeching PA system wakes me blaring nasal Chinese ballads on blown-out speakers. It’s six in the morning.

Breakfast is, as usual, salty pork noodle soup and heavily-sugared green tea, which does little to relieve my caffeine withdrawal headache. I ran out of coffee weeks ago and nobody’s even heard of Nescafe. Four cups of tea and an hour later the mechanic shows up dressed in a crisp white shirt and meticulously pressed pants. He introduces himself as Frank, a formality forgotten the previous evening, or maybe he just created his new American name today. His nails are clean and his hair is oiled and swept back artfully, and the front has been teased into some sort of fluffy bouffant. Ridiculous though it is, he is still handsome, even more handsome, if possible, in the daylight. But I don’t like him. His two assistants are very young, maybe 15 or 16 years old. They wear grimy blue pants and jackets and hang back like kicked dogs.

Frank unlocks the garage doors and we roll out the Chang Jiang. Then, he dilly-dallies. I attempt to begin, showing him diagrams and pointing to the place on the engine that’s broken but he shushes me. Finally, a young woman, a local reporter, shows up with a camera. Ah-ha. Irritated and helpless, I pose for photographs with Frank, vow not to take any myself, and then, finally, we get started.

Frank shouts at his assistants who scramble to follow orders but they fumble, making things worse. After a while I figure what the problem is—I am helping—which makes Frank think they’re not working fast enough. He thinks the boys should stay ahead of me, to get to tasks before I can interfere. Too bad. I want to see what the problem is for myself. Eventually Frank gives up, letting me work at my own pace while the two mechanics assist.

The boys finally calm down, but they don’t work neatly. I organize the screws, nuts, bolts, washers, in separate containers. I replace each tool when I’m finished with it. Their tools are piled in a shallow metal box and scattered everywhere on the packed dirt floor. My tools were neatly arranged in a proper toolbox, and my wrenches were organized in sleeves from smallest to largest, but they quickly become mixed in with their tools. It is not malicious; they simply lack the concept of neatness. I spend a lot of time segregating tools and sifting through the dust for screws, washers, nuts, and bolts.

Eventually my exaggerated attempts to keep things neat have an effect, and they actually start putting things back. When they can’t find the right tools for some tasks, I hand them over like a surgical nurse. Frank still barks instructions, but his voice is softer.

We pull the piston out to see what I expected; the oil ring is cracked through and the piston is scored. Again. Because this is a repeat of last week’s drama I think maybe the entire right side is slightly warped, though the head gasket looks okay, and there is no crack in the metal.

Frank pokes around at the dismembered engine—delicately, using a paper towel—and says it’s time to go into town for parts. I wash my hands in a dirty basin of water and we get on a bus to Linhe, the nearest large town. As we ride away I see that this town consists of just a small main street with a few stores and, across a field toward the river, about fifty single-family homes made of mud and straw. Beyond that is a large building, maybe a school.

Twenty minutes later we arrive at the edge of town and walk into the motorcycle shop, which is huge, stocked beyond my wildest dreams with cables hanging thickly from the ceilings and glass counters stacked so high with boxes that we have to peek through them to talk with the woman behind the counter.

Frank talks and talks for an unnecessarily long time. The woman becomes very uncomfortable, saying little and glancing at me nervously. He turns to me and explains that she won’t sell the right side of the engine, that I will have to buy the left side too. It’s so obviously a lie, but whatever he has said to her has made her too agitated to dispute him. When I look at her she blushes and turns away.

I’d seen another CJ in Frank’s garage that morning and so now I guess I’ll be funding parts for that repair as well. It’s ridiculous, but he doesn’t know how generous I was prepared to be. I’m so rich here that I would happily pay for parts for his bike and more but he’s undermining all that. I want to take him by the shoulders and shake him, tell him that it’s okay, that we can be friends, that this is a mutually beneficial situation. While at home I am considered rather poor, here I am rich, and can afford to be magnanimous, flamboyantly generous.

But then I look at him, so handsome and so hardened. I wonder what it’s like to be graced with such beauty in this limited environment. Someone who looked like him in America would be on a bus to Hollywood right after high school. But this guy has never been allowed to cross into the next province and he’s getting older and meaner because he’s stuck here. And now I’m stuck here with him… trying to be compassionate but also trying to take care of myself.

The woman ignores us though Frank never stops talking and I’m becoming worried. I need these parts. But when I try to get her attention Frank actually steps in front of me. “Stop it!” I shout, and she turns. Frank looks at me and talks and then looks at her. Ah. Now he’s making it look like he is negotiating for me.

So what, I finally sigh. I say okay and Frank is triumphant. The woman rummages around in piles of parts wrapped in brown paper and somehow finds the left side, and then the right. They come in separate packages, clearly meant to be sold separately. As the woman totals the bill on the abacus I try to make Frank meet my gaze but he won’t. The bill for two new pistons, rings, heads, and other parts is about sixty dollars.

We ride back in silence, Frank studying his immaculate fingernails, me gazing out the window beyond the stares of the people in the bus, over beyond the alluvial plain to the mountains so small from here, to the mud huts and the people working in the fields, wondering what it would like to be one of them.

That building in the distance was a school—an agricultural college—and the English teacher comes by to talk. I’m grateful when she helps me communicate with Frank, for there is a list of additional tasks I’d like him to do: Set the timing, change the spark plugs, and whatever else he sees is necessary for a successful journey of 4,000 or more kilometers. Frank nods. He is almost humble. Or is it shame. I lie and say I’ll be coming back this way. By then, I say, the engine will be broken in, and so he can give it a check-up. Jin Zhi has some trouble understanding the mechanical terms, but otherwise, her English is excellent.

In the end, even though I don’t like Frank, I develop a respect for his mechanical abilities. Though he hardly touched the engine he directed his assistants and he did a good job. He is a perfectionist. I should have already seen that by his dress, hair and nails. Maybe he isn’t a bad guy after all, maybe he is just like everyone else, stuck, and angry, especially now, after I come loping into town, a woman, a foreigner, doing whatever the hell she pleases when he can’t. Riding in with my leather jacket and cowboy boots on this big expensive Chang Jiang 750 with a special license plate that lets me cross provincial lines through the entire country. And I do, crossing line after line after line into Inner Mongolia and Ningxia, Gansu and Qinghai, Saanxi and Henan, buzzing along comfortably on my rebuilt engine, daily more grateful to be free.