Page 2 of 2: carla_king_china2

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.