at the bottom of china

Soon we'll leave this country and take away our pictures and our trinkets and tales. a month and a half along i'm used to china's foulest toilets and the long bus rides, the packed train cars, crossing the street boldly in front of oncoming traffic.

China's been good to us and hasn't thrown us over the cliffs, given us tapeworms or poisoned us in any way. We see the unfortunates dragging themselves down the streets, laying in puddles begging for change with their deformities exposed and shivering. We see the people scrounging up a living out of sticks and trash bins and the muddy grass by the rivers.

We see them, but China hasn't brought us low, she hasn't made us kowtow, we've lived with coffee and sugar every day and we've eaten on cloth covered tables high above the intersections with a window view.

But what about that little girl putting the sock-covered iron bar in her mouth, biting down and pushing up one leg, then another, straight in the air, grabbing her ankles and spinning, spinning fast as those cheap neon tops they whip in the square?

It seemed like no one was watching. They all hurried by before the downpour. It was thundering in a light cold rain.

She was there in the morning too, when I'd gone by hours before, and I wondered why she was alone there under the eaves of the Kentucky Fried Chicken. She was so small and it looked like she was playing, but no, her face was serious and her wide brown eyes were set. She was working out some problem, setting up some contraption.

What about that little girl? Where will she go? She'll stay here with the flies and the shoeshine men. She'll spin for the crowds who pass by pretending she's not moving. Sometimes old men will throw her a quarter. And in the winter that's coming will she do the same?

Lijiang is not what I expected. It's old, yes, and made of big stones and canals. And yes, Naxi people live here and sell handcrafted jewelry, paintings, carved doors and windows, yak horn pipes, and bricks of fermented tea. But they'd rather speak Chinese, one waitress told us, although she still speaks Naxi at home. She wants to learn English.

When they dress Naxi the young women wear red velvet vests and the old ones wear blue, with a sheepskin cape attached with white straps to prevent their baskets from hurting them as they walk loaded down with produce or firewood.

Almost no one reads their pictographs anymore, like the ones that are written on all four walls of the temple of the Dragon King where a huge bronze dragon sits and roars and people leave incense offerings and tobacco and fruits.

Here in the Naxi city the Chinese military parades every morning doing drills while the school children make their way to school. The Chinese people come by the busload, led by people carrying triangle flags, and they walk from shop to shop in tight groups, and they snap photos of themselves at famous places and of foreigners from the West eating noodles and pork cubes, and they spit and smile and get the lowest low price for all their yak meat and jade.

People flood into the old town of Lijiang and the Naxi girls wear their traditional clothes to serve in the bars and they sing pretty songs to get people inside, opening their wallets and dumping out yuan in puddles here, whirlpools there.

Strangers come to Lijiang for a few days and they don't know what's left behind in their wake; where little acrobats go to sleep at night, what the Naxi people talk about in their old Tibetan language, what real life is running its parallel course through these same stone streets.

What is Lijiang, really? I don't know, but it's not just this bustle and spectacle of wood work and red lanterns. They say it's 800 years old and the Himalayas begin just at the edge of town; that 200,000 Naxi live here and always have.

But there's another story behind this story and it has to do with street kids and coal mines and shirtless men with water buffalo. It has to do with dams and receding forests, with teenage girls wanting to speak English. It has to do with the Chinese army marching every morning in the square, and buses and dances for tourists and mostly it has to do with winter, with what happens in the winter.

Where does Lijiang go when it's still and quiet with snow? And when it dreams in the dark womb of December, does it still dance for the Dragon King, or does it dance for Chairman Mao's 100 yuan bill?