Edward Norton is my international stalker.

He has replaced Ice-T, who has stalked me for years, despite the fact that I am not black and not from the ‘hood—as his detective character chastized a not-getting-it honky on one episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

In 2002, as I was shopping for a vintage (AKA cheap and used) dress on the Lower East Side to wear to my year-and-half-late wedding reception, there Ice-T was waiting for me, his ruse a visit to a leather shop on Orchard Street. A week later in Brooklyn, as I headed down to Fort Greene Park, he stepped out of the driver’s seat of a gleamingly expensive car and strode up the stairs of a brownstone. He didn’t make eye contact, but I was onto him. It took him a year to track me down again, this time at a random corner in midtown Manhattan. He just avoided running me over as he squealed an SUV through a louie before the light turned red. I was relieved, because thwarted love can turn hostile.

I figured that once I was on the other side of the globe, I wouldn’t have to worry about such attention. In China, I have about as much sex appeal as a book on Victorian landscaping.

And then Edward Norton was suddenly, literally, on my trail.

Let me set the scene. I was in northwest Yunnan province, just beginning the 50-kilometer hike through Tiger Leaping Gorge. It had taken 11 hours of bus rides—stomach-twisting turns, secondhand cigarette smoke, wide-eyed gapes at the lone laowai (foreigner)—to reach the trailhead. The Yangzte River—here in gentler form as the Jinsha tributary—was a soft teal sprawl, like melted green tea ice cream.

Almost immediately, I screwed up, following one, then another, and then, goddamnit, a third misleading trail. The touts murmured at me from atop their mules. Annoyed, I ignored them. I had come 9,000 miles from home to check out the view, and I still couldn’t get five freaking minutes alone?

Yet it was the touts who saved me, pointing out the correct trail, which is called the “high road.” Ashamed, I thanked them.

After going up and up the mountainside, if all went well, by late the next day I would have worked my way back down to the narrow gorge. There I’d find the Tiger Leaping Stone the eponymous feline is supposed to have jumped from across the gorge to elude his hunter.

My stomach roiled from the bus-induced motion sickness. The altitude took my breath almost immediately but returned it just as fast. Once, to save time, I cut across a wheat-colored expanse of prickly brush. My knees bushwhacked the thorns. When I returned to the path, my first sight was a used hypodermic needle.

I’ll take the thorns, thanks.

Soon the ground became too steep for such off-trail adventuring, sloping with alarming sharpness down to the river and up to the snowy crags.

After a few hours, I caught up to the Edinburgh University students I had shared a minivan with from the Mama Naxi Guesthouse in Lijiang. On winter break from their Eastern Studies program at a university in northern China, they were four boys whose names started with J and a fifth who claimed another letter, as well as Kay, the lone girl in the group. She was clearly the “adult”—the one who made sure others had their stuff, watched their step, kept their heads.

The boys were a gaggle of puppy energy and good-natured self-satisfaction with their own cleverness. Three years into school, they were experiencing what, if you’re lucky, can be the most abiding lesson of college—the fun that can be had with your own brain. They reminded me of the exceptionally intelligent boys I went to school with, who notched their belts with philosophy courses, sexual ecscapades, slave-wage jobs, and psychedelic drugs. (Okay, I did too. But anyway.)

Like the boys I had known, these Mandarin-speaking kids from the British Isles had an opinion on everything. Nothing could be processed without being assessed: yay or nay, and then a full debate. Their opinions were not so much reflections of personal taste or experience but assertions of identity—flags planted in the ground that claimed territory and allegiance.

Many of those opinions were on American TV, which is apparently broadcast everywhere. Lost, CSI, Desperate Housewives, Prison Break, 24, and of course Law & Order—over and over, Chinese and foreign fans alike got perky about their favorite show.

I haven’t seen most of these shows myself. People have been a bit disappointed in me, as if when it comes to crosscultural bonding, I’ve failed to hold up my end of the bargain.

Where they’re getting these shows is hard to say. The Europeans watched them back home. In China, people are probably downloading, as Leo in Xi’an told me he does to get Lost, or buying DVDs. This is China, so there’s a good chance they’re bootleg.

If hotel-room satellite TV can be trusted, the shows aren’t broadcast in China. TV here seems to offer mostly shot-on-video costume dramas, some set in Japan; musical extravaganzas in which peacocks, Lycra, and/or cowboy hats figure prominently; or talk shows that might be about finding love and/or a really good washing machine.

When I’ve needed to understand more, and sometimes less, I turn on the English-language channel, which is dominated by cultural coverage and world news. Both subjects have been rendered anemic. In February, two news stories were in constant rotation. One was the 2008 budget proposal from George Bush to Congress. The budget was repeatedly described as including $141.7 billion for “his war in Iraq” and “less money for the poor.”

I’m convinced the Bush Administration is one of the most destructive US entities the world has ever seen, and even I found this a tad reductive.

The other big story was President Hu Jintao’s tour of eight African countries, a brokering of trade agreements and political handjobs. Each African country swore its support for the “One-China Principle”—no independence for Taiwan. I can’t say I know much about the situation between the Mainland and Taiwan, but I do know that if you need Namibia to do your smack-talking for you, perhaps you’re feeling a bit insecure.

All of this TV talk was not what I had in mind for the hike. I had hoped for some one-on-one time with the mountains and not much else – not even a comb.

Conversation mostly ended at The Bends. This is the toughest part of the hike, a series of nefariously twisting ascents. The number of actual elbows in the path is ambiguous—on the handdrawn maps you find in backpacker hostels, it’s variously totalled as 24, 25, 26, or 28. Most people are probably too busy wanting to die from exhaustion to make an accurate count. Or perhaps the number refers to the amount of hours it seems to take to finish. I was weighed down by two shoulder bags, which swung in front of me with the momentum like enormous pendulous breasts. I also didn’t have a walking stick, which would have been a third “leg” to put weight into. Adirondacks hikes have taught me how much energy they save you.

There were frequent pauses to catch our breath. There was always a good excuse for it, too—the view.

Eventually we made it to a guesthouse, where we ate and drank hot things under a Milky Way backbend. The students chatted in Mandarin with Chinese hikers from Shanghai. There weren’t many Chinese trekkers; most domestic tourists take tour buses along the low road, an asphault band thousands of feet down that is prone to becoming the finish line for landslides. However, those who do hike the high road have better equipment than any of the foreigners. Their well-made tents, ergonomic thermoses, and gleaming aluminum walking sticks reminded me of the gear I’ve seen Germans hauling on Adirondack trails in that cheerfully brisk Teutonic way.

The chat struck me for two reasons. The first was that the more Chinese tourists forgo the package tours and do their own thing, the better chances there are for environmental care in China. At least, this is what the foreign travelers tell each other in backpacker venues.

The second was a bit more perplexing. Here’s the strange thing about many of the expats I met in China: most don’t like China very much. Yet they stay. They complain about the dirt, the noise, the food, the manners, the spitting, the toilets – but they extend their teaching gigs and cram Mandarin lessons into their schedules. They are both compelled and appalled by China. And they stay.

Trapped by monolingualism, I wrapped myself in a blanket and went to gawk at the stars. (I recorded some thoughts, but the file isn’t uploading properly. I’m trying…)

Kay and I shared a room that night. It was a concrete square with two clean beds and no heat. The view from the window was casually astonishing. The boys had electric blankets to cut the cold, but we had no such luck. Someone brought us extra blankets. Kay filled up a plastic bottle with boiling water she got from the guesthouse kitchen and slipped it into my bed. I came back from the miserable squat toilet to find a delicious pool of warmth under the covers.

I slept so hard I turned soft. I awoke as muscle jelly, reduced human, blissful blob. But once I was out of bed, the cold made me solid again. My fingers and toes were like dead sticks as I hunched over a bowl of oatmeal with bananas while the dozen or so hikers at the guesthouse readied themselves to leave.

I wanted them all ahead. I would wait until the sun had risen; they would be long gone by then. Because the gorge is so deep, the sun doesn’t appear over the eastern peaks until 10 am—three hours after it first breaks on the hidden horizon beyond.

Once the sun came out, so did the laundry.

I packed my bags and left. I walked through a village of 10 houses, passing three old women hauling a live pig into a barn. Its frightened, knowing squeals—oh god, they’re going to kill me, oh god oh god oh god—ended in a sudden, ambiguous silence as I passed the last house.

There, I found a loose pile of tree branches, like oversize pick-up-sticks. I pulled a five-foot-long, slightly bowed limb from the pile. I put the blade of my swiss army knife against it, then stripped away a foot-long section of crackling bark and small knots to find sweet-smelling pine the color of honey. I closed my palm around it. And so I had the walking stick I had yearned for at The Bends the day before.

This minor act of transmutation was deeply pleasing somehow. As my side of the earth wheeled towards the sun, the handle got slicker in my palm. I walked faster.

The trail wasn’t built for visiting hikers. Actually, it’s a path that links several small Naxi villages, a few hours’ hike between each. After an hour or so a Naxi woman and three kids under 11 appeared behind me. I was in a photo frenzy, snapping gluttonously at the remarkable view—

—so they eventually caught up. When I said “Ni hao” to the three-year-old, he ran ahead shrieking in delighted terror. He ran so far I started to feel real fear—what if he fell? I looked back at the woman and pointed beyond me, where the path seemed to curve off the edge of the earth. She smiled in acknowledgement, but didn’t call the boy back. He bumbled those still-awkward feet along the path’s edge, where unreliable roots cling in devastating angles.

Like this.

If, as it has done at so many rivers before, China builds a dam to tap into the massive hydropower potential of Tiger Leaping Gorge, the footloose kid, his family, and their neighbors – about 80,000 people, mostly Naxi – will have to be relocated.

I’ve read that because the government will pay people relocation fees based on the size and quality of their property, people are busily developing their lots. I don’t know if that’s true, but I did notice a tremendous amount of construction. Logs, wood chips, and sawdust were sometimes foot hazards on the path. Felled trees were being turned into enormous A-frames in every village.

It’s also possible they are building guesthouses to cash in on the constant march of hikers, who are a captive market if there ever were one. In such an isolated place, the guesthouses offer more than food and shelter (though that’s clearly the foundation: I can imagine being so desperate in that harsh mountain environment that sleeping with four bored villagers in return for a horse-blanket bed and a meal of fried kittens would seem like a great deal). They also serve up re-contact with humanity, which, I was learning, becomes increasingly appealing the longer you walk with the knowledge that a minor slip can mean you’re dead. And not only will you be dead, but your death will have happened in a beautiful void. No one will have seen it. Your remains will probably never be found. You’ll probably just disappear.

That’s why the terrace at Halfway Guesthouse was so appealing – people and snacks, plus the view.

And guess what I found at Halfway Guesthouse? The Scenic Toilet View advertised on the trail. Here is what you see when you assume the proper position:

Tiger Leaping Gorge is not an untouched paradise. It has the beauty – sometimes a thing of such immensity that it seemed to buffet me from all sides. It was a wind knocking me around, a nonstop white stream in my chest, a laugh on my lips purpled with too-much.

Sometimes I just had to sit down.

But it is not untouched. The last dozen or so kilometers of the trail are chaperoned by electrical poles festooned with wires and fat water pipes like enormous sea slugs.

The people who live in the mountain villages want electric lights, reliable water, and satellite TV.

You may want to get lost, but they want to get Lost.

I kept imagining the guys who erected the poles, ran the wires, and laid the pipes. How on earth did the construction materials get up there? There are no roads. How on earth did did the guys stand, let alone drill or wire? The angles are so sharp, the heights so deadly. China isn’t exactly known for OSHA-approved industrial safety standards. Had anyone died?

The last of the high road trail passed a black patch of slash-and-burn farming on its way to the low road. It was another 45 minutes to what the trekkers call Walnut Garden. The village was situated in an area more like a walnut shell, or like cupped hands offering green to the verdigris mountains across the gorge.

I chose the last guesthouse in Walnut Garden, passing by Sean’s and Tibet House. A room at Woody’s with two twin beds, a private bathroom, and a hot shower cost 40 quai, or about $5.

But it was the terrace at Woody’s that really kept me there. It hung over the green cornfields cut in steppes down to the lip of the gorge.

It was at Woody’s that I finally realized what was so different about the mountains of Tiger Leaping Gorge. It’s that you look them directly in the face at every moment. Generally, if you’re this close to a mountain, you’re standing at the base of it, watching it slope upward, seemingly away from you. But here, you’re looking at it directly.

You find yourself respecting the mountain.

The stars began to stain the sky bleach-white on black. There was too much laughter from Brit expats and too much lascivious sneering from the Naxi teenagers. I wasn’t interested in others’ good times, or others at all, really.

I wandered off the terrace to the street. Up and down were village homes and guesthouses, yellow lights and it’s-getting-late murmurs from moms. There were no cars, so I sat in the road. The dog from Woody’s, a smelly, bad-eyed mutt who had befriended me despite my lack of Chinese cute talk, settled against my knee. He scanned the darkness around. I scanned it upward.

Dpwn the street was Sean’s. And that’s where Ed Norton was staying.

He had arrived a few short hours after I did. It’s amazing he hadn’t caught me on the trail, considering how I had dawdled to take pictures and notes, or how I had wept near a waterfall for a good half hour about how grateful I was to be weeping next to said waterfall, and who exactly I was grateful to. (Everyone I had ever met, pretty much, but mostly my husband and my parents.)

If Ed Norton had left Sean’s, he would have found me sitting in a dark patch on the street with a dirty but companionable dog. And I would have said, Ed, I traveled 9,000 miles from home to get some solo face time with the mountains and stars. So do you mind shoving off? Coming all this way shows real American stick-to-it-iveness, and you probably have rock-hard abs. But I really hated Fight Club. I thought it had a rotten, disingenuous soul. But more importantly, I’m just not that into humans right now. I’m happiest with the darkness and stars.

And Ed, despairing but respectful, would have gone back to Sean’s to have a Dali beer and make small talk with the other guests, who would have no idea that he was thinking about how glorious it would be to disappear into the vastness of the universe, so tolerant in its utter indifference.

If he knew who I was, of course.

The next day I would make it down to the Tiger Leaping Stone. I had exhausted my camera battery the day before, so I couldn’t take photos. It took me another five hours of hiking to get down to gushing rapids of green tea ice cream.

But this posting has been way too long and overdue. You’re just going to have to make it to Tiger Leaping Gorge yourself to find out what lies at the end of the 50-kilometer haul.

A sick bear had been in the facilities before I was. That was the only possible explanation. No human body could have survived such an evacuation intact.

I had just staggered out of a wooden building behind the Naxi Family Guesthouse, one of the several refuges for weary hikers along the Tiger Leaping Gorge high trail. The plates of vegetables and meat had been delicious and nourishing. The orange soda had boosted my low blood sugar. And the view! The eastern mountains were bolted to the sky, as fierce and immortal as forever.

But the toilet. Dear lord, the toilet.

It was a ten-foot-long, two-foot-deep tiled channel that had been cut into the side of an unforgiving mountain slope miles above anything that could be called a town. Each end of the channel sloped to a central catch over which squatted the wood wall that divided the men’s and women’s sides.

As with the sun, no sane person should look upon this catch. I hadn’t meant to. But my eyes fell there.

Oh, the horror. My soul wailed. My brain burned. I wanted to plead to some higher power, “Please, I didn’t mean to look! I’m sorry! Take it back! Take it back!”

As I recovered outside, Kay, one of the Edinburgh University college students I had hiked with for a couple of hours, neared. “Don’t use that one,” I warned her, pointed to the door on the left. “The other one must be better. It can’t be worse. Nothing could be worse. Someone—something—was near death in there. I’ve never—I mean, Christ…” I trailed off, abandoning words. Kay nodded solemnly and closed behind her the door on the right. Only then did I notice the hot-pink lips painted on the back of it. I looked at the door I had gone through. It had no icon at all, let alone a depiction of a grizzly clutching its tortured gut. I must have been in the men’s room.

In China, visitors come to know the effluence of the Chinese long before they know their hearts. Eventually it dawns that these things are connected.

First there is the spitting. At first the spitting seems tolerable; it’s not as bad as you’ve heard from other travelers, and if something gross is inside you, it makes sense to get it out, right?

But then you realize how pervasive it is. Even stylish women teetering in $400 heels will hock a loogie at your humbly shod feet without even a sideward glance.

Eventually, your eye will pinch shut at the sound of someone gearing up with that unmistakable hucchrrphgh sound, and though it is safer to find out where the load might land, you simply can’t bear to look anymore. You will start to suspect that every surface is glossed with a gelatinous layer of phlegm. And there will come one moment when it will seem that there has been a splat on the soft thing within you that tries to have compassion for the plight of suffering that is existence. And you will lose it.

“Jesus Christ, that is so fucking disgusting!”

Well, that’s what I did.

Beijing has started to fine people 50 yuan for spitting. As the official news agency Xinxua snarkily notes, 50 yuan—about $6.50—can buy a hundred packs of paper hankies.

And then there are the toilets. Americans have a reputation for being overly—even wastefully—attentive to personal hygiene. With my tendency to linger every morning in the hot shower until pruned, I’m no different. There are good reasons to care about public sanitation. People—usually poor people—get sick when it’s lacking.

Yet, if there were ever a time to be philosophical about such matters, it’s when you’re taking that step up to the squat toilet ubiquitious in China. There are holes in us, and there are holes in the ground. Everything is substance. Stuff goes in, and stuff goes out, ad infinitum. The evidence is all around you.

There is never paper, so bring your own.

Being philosophical is helpful for dealing with the shockingly intimate facts you learn about the person who visited before you, whose face you will never see. Be grateful for the small mercy of never having to look in her eyes and have her know that you know, and that both of you wish you didn’t.

The squat toilet is no more unsanitary than a public “Western-style” seated toilet—which few dare to actually sit on—and in the, er, end, I found myself heading for the squat variety. When clean, it’s neater and faster. When it’s not—think bears. Bears with dysentery. Bears with miscarriages. Bears in shame.

There is a scene in Martin Scorcese’s The Aviator that is worth recalling. Played by Leonardo DiCaprio, germaphobe Howard Hughes cannot bear to handle a restaurant’s bathroom door. He plasters himself to the wall adjacent and waits, sweating and tense, for someone to open the door so he can dodge through before it closes.

It’s not a bad idea, really.

When you have the same plumbing but not the same language, you’re bound to encounter the baseness of each other first. China reminds visitors that this essential part of existence can’t be overlooked or ignored.

This fact is instructive for travelers, who have ventured off to be touched by others, and by otherness, which is far scarier. In China, it can be a hard lesson. You are jostled and shoved and elbowed. People yell in your ear and cough in your face. They cut in front of you at the supermarket and take your seat on the bus. They put their chins on your shoulder to get a better look—particularly if there is someone to be laughed at—and jam their fingers into into your side.

When you are truly uncomfortable, you know you’re fitting right in.

And people will notice. It is then that people may begin to try to make you more comfortable. They may not excavate your ear canal of wax with any suitably probing object—a multigenerational grooming I witnessed everywhere—but give it some time. For now, someone will probably slide over companionably, crowding you with curious attention, and grab the book out of your hand. Maybe they’ll even buy you lunch because you were brave enough to venture into the noodle shop where no foreigners dare to enter. (It happened to me four times.)

Around will be women and girls—mothers and daughters, friends, co-workers in matching suitpant uniforms—holding hands or walking arm in arm. Men and boys—fathers and sons, friends, co-workers in overalls or pinstripes—will be companionably strolling with their arms around each other’s shoulders, or squeezing each other’s necks. There is much leaning and lounging on one another. Everybody uses everybody else as furniture.

You can’t get this fiercely affectionate—or make 1.3 billion people—without a pragmatic acceptance of all that is crotchy about life. Lesson # 1: Touching is inevitable.

Leo, my pal from Xi’an, told me a story about how how an American friend of his was deeply distressed one night when they were sharing a two-room flat. Each room had a door. The friend shut his. Leo left his open.

But the American knew Leo’s door was open. He found it impossible to handle. “Why don’t you shut your door?” he asked Leo.

Leo said, “I never shut the door. I don’t mind the door open.”

“But you’ll have privacy,” the American said.

“I like the door open,” Leo said.

“But anyone can see you,” the American insisted. “If you shut the door I won’t be able to see you.”

“I don’t mind if you see me. You can shut your door if you want to.”

“But if I open the door I’ll be able to see you,” the American complained.

Leo found this all very amusing. He and his parents had been living in just two rooms for his entire life. And he had never once shut the door.

My last day in China, I went for a massage with two people staying at my hostel in Kunming. Jaime was a Bolivian-German computer scientist working for six months at a university just outside of Hong Kong, and Bella was a Dane who had been sent to China by her boss to scout out a selection of tea for a new café he wanted to open in Copenhagen.

It took us three hours, but eventually we did track down a massage parlor with a reasonable price. (Ninety minutes for $7.) Fully clothed, we each lay on a twin-size bed, and then a giggling teenager in a long skirt attacked each one of us. For the next 90 minutes I was bent and squeezed and rubbed and eased. It was not gentle. But it was thoroughly meant.

Not surprisingly, it was a deeply practical rubdown. Any part of her body that was suitable for a tool she used. She kneeled her way up my spine, her hair tickling my neck. Standing on the bed, she lifted my leg in the air and thrust the arch of her foot into the back of my thigh. She stood on my butt and chatted with the other masseurs.

China’s tough love makes me understand all those mincing little steps of Chinese women in classic opera and film. It’s hard to be dainty in China. It is loud and dirty and noisy here. There is no halting the assault with, “Will you stop touching me?!” Such a desire is met with uncomprehending disbelief.

The door is always open in China—even when the only thing to look at is the sad residue of sick bears.

Chinglish often mutates perfectly functional Chinese into English with an extra chromosome. But that isn’t the case with “scenic toilet view,” which I saw advertized on a glossy boulder along the high trail through Tiger Leaping Gorge.

However huh?-inducing it may be, “scenic toilet view” is a grammatically correct phrase in English. But I can’t help but dwell on its individual components. Scenic. Toilet. View. A better summation of my experiences in China I’ve yet to encounter.

Let’s break this down in three installments. I’m tempted to start from the, er, bottom up, but maintaining order is key to building a harmonious society. So I’ll start with Scenic.

***

Spinning slowly at the northern tip of the Old Town, Lijiang’s waterwheel is in a scenic setting. The chipper throngs of Chinese tourists posing for photos in front of it certainly think so. After all, the slate roofs of the Old Town houses—many of which have been rebuilt since the town was shattered by an earthquake in 1996—undulate the eye east, west, and south to the mountains circling around.

To the north, Jade Dragon Mountain flaunts 18,000 feet of snowy crags garlanded in clouds. Orange carp and polka-dotted trout get fat in the slow-moving creeks bordering Lijiang’s UNESCO-certified cobblestone streets. The willows are just beginning their charming spring droop. And the wheel itself is a modern reconstruction of a medieval technological marvel which—wait for it—churns water. Behold its liquid-agitating majesty!

The tourists dutifully click their cameras.

All of Old Town Lijiang is scenic. To the north, the much larger New Town offers a collection of unremarkable modern buildings, branches of China Construction Bank, supermarkets, and KFC.

But there’s a problem with “scenic.” It’s the apologetic refuge of tourist agents, real-estate brokers, autodidacts of obscure historical facts, and hopeful highway authorities. From provincial charm (AKA small-town ignorance) to panoramic vista (side of the road, hill), what’s called scenic is often boring. Scenic is the beige of travel.

Nine hundred years ago, Lijiang was the capital of the matriarchal Naxi culture, one of two dozen ethnic minorities found in Yunnan province, which is home to half of all of those in a China that is more than 90 percent Han. Now it’s an EverBright Fun Zone for what seems like 7.9 million domestic—and perhaps 79 foreign—tourists. Those who don’t wear the cowboy hats for sale in the cloned shops wear identical baseball caps—often at a tragicomic ghetto angle—provided by their flag-waving tour guide. They are cheerful and loud and pushy.

They are in the distance in this photo.

The throngs can be worth the hassle for something as impressive as the Terracotta Army Warriors, for instance. But most of the time, what you’re encountering is the scenic. I’ve dodged the boredom in a perhaps unorthodox fashion: by not going. I’ve seen almost no scenic places at all.

There it is. Cat’s out of the bag. I am a lousy tourist.

I’ve visited only six locales in four weeks. I buy almost nothing beyond food and shelter. Fun facts about the political machinations by some Iago to undermine Emperor He-Had-It-Coming have only fleetingly passed through my brain. I’ve yet to step inside a temple; when it comes to getting my Marx on, I apparently fit right in.

However, I did capture this shot of incense outside a Buddhist temple in Yunnan with a very, um, scenic overlook.

Part of my lack of sightseeing has to do with the fact that China is, sensibly enough, for the Chinese. A lack of Mandarin and the travel infrastructure don’t make it easy for a lone Yingyua-speaking woman to venture too far off the beaten track—and I don’t like that track so much. Though 126 million foreigners visited China in 2006, travel is still overwhelmingly oriented to the package-tour domestic tourist. Foreigners aren’t above this, of course, frequently arranging themselves in likeminded clumps, whether they’re fanny-packing Britons with peeling shoulders staying at “four-star” hotels or twenty-something dredlocked Aussies in backpacker hostels who like to opine that air travel isn’t “real.”

I also need to get over my aversion to guides, which is based on pride, being a New Yorker, and Egypt.

But for the most part, I walk a lot. I take notes and notice and public transportation. On the way to the scenic I get lost in the view.

I can tell you a lot more about the bus drivers than the places they drive you to (men with bedhead and cigarettes who love pop music, coasting to the stoplight in neutral, and slamming into second gear with gleeful force). In public parks I watch men and women of a certain age walk small dogs and wonder if perhaps they have empty-nest syndrome. Grandfathers stoop for hours to help toddler toes get a feel for that walking thing.

These are the sorts of things I pay attention to. In Lijiang, I spent one afternoon studying the sun-soaking loll of the restaurant staff where I was eating chicken noodle soup. Entirely female, the staff lounged around in that almost animal luxury that can follow physical labor, which I remember so well from my restaurant days. They had their feet up. Their knees poked each other in the side. Their arms were slung across the backs of the chairs. One girl neatened the pony tail in another girl’s hair, and then gave her own a tightening yank. It took me 20 minutes to get the attention of my waiter, who was resting her the side of her face on the table in a cradle she had made of her hands. With half-closed eyes and a faint smile, she listened to the loud commentary of the chef, a middle-aged woman with strong shoulders and a sarcastic laugh. It was Friday night, and the dinner rush would begin shortly. There were still two days left to the New Year holiday.

I knew that nearby, in Sifang Square, old Naxi women were singing traditional songs. Old men were watching, the infants strapped to their backs taking in the crowds with that furrowed-brow baby skepticism.

Around the corner, young women were watching Chinese soaps as they waited for customers, wearing the traditional blue-and-white tops meant to indicate the cosmos, and jeans and sneakers. Around a different corner, young men were painting vaguely erotic tropical scenes on canvas and burning intricate bird designs into wood discs the size of commemorative plates.

As I waited for the check, lingering in the sun’s warmth, a tall Chinese man aimed a huge, snout-like zoom lens at me. Near him, a young woman in a traditional Naxi dress followed his focus. She seemed surprised to find me in it. I gave her a wry look—you must get this all the time—but she just stared back at me. I am a tourist attraction, too.

I’ve had some great contact with locals I met through Hospitality Club, a travelers’ networking site, but largely I remain on the outside. Chinese-speaking foreigners who live here tell me they feel the same way. I’d like to think I’m cultivating loneliness, but perhaps I’m just leaving some things unexplained because I prefer it that way. Imagination over anthropology. Fictive musings may not make for accurate reportage, at least not when it comes to the facts. But maybe sometimes I’ll get lucky and instead hit on the truth.

Here’s one last thing about scenic. It’s used by “nice” people who fear of expressing any negative sentiment about anything or anyone, no matter how vile or dastardly, for fear of offending or, worse, being wrong. These people have the beige of hearts. They’re holding something back—there’s something you don’t want to know. Here “scenic” is nice-person code for their abhorence of alien cultural practices they’re too sensitive to mention.

And that brings me to my next topic: Toilet.

Take attention. The tasty is coming.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been gathering written examples of Chinglish. And good thing, too, as Beijing is trying to eliminate the fun from its streets—here we go again with this phrase—in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics.

That’s a shame, because Chinglish is excellent. Like any number of mating languages that over time may result in a widely used patois and over a longer period of time an official language, Chlnglish reveals possibilities in my native tongue that have never occurred to me. Familiar words refracted by a different linguistic prism emerge tilted, angled, showing an unfamiliar face. It’s like learning the key to the psyche of someone you thought you knew intimately. It makes you reconsider your assumptions. It’s revelatory. It’s delightful. And sometimes, of course, it’s just hilarious.

Here’s a poem I wrote from Chinglish that I’ve found resonant for one reason or another. Aside from a few articles and one “you,” I haven’t added anything. I’ve just—assembled.

Conveniently, it’s free verse, so spare me any lectures about meter. But do let me know what you think. Title suggestions welcome!

***

Take attention
the tasty is coming!

Are you sniveling?
No smorking!

Beautiful white
beautiful armor
protects skin
sends the technical inspector
for general cuts
and high-level cuts
assuredly mixed.

“Overthrow the wealth!”
—the pamphlet start of our undertaking
the vicissitudes of dynasties.

The restroom is now suspended.

Disem-
bark
don’t stay!

Please
be ready for it

constant hot showers
sensation
in the everbright fun land
in the swingbar leisure zone

be for time.

You
—a person so reside—
—a stopcock—
—a beast face—
are my top-grade nutlet.

I just returned to Lijiang, in the northwest of China’s Yunnan province, after a 50-kilometer, three-day solo hike through—actually, mostly above—the deepest canyon in the world: Tiger Leaping Gorge.

This is one of the many mountainsides from which you can plummet to your demise at any moment. Who knew, but defying the icy scythe of death makes you grin.

The hike was, in a word, amazing. I ruminated over lots of Big Thoughts, was wowed by lots of Big Views, and was quieted by lots of Big Stars.

I’m still processing it. So in the meantime, here’s some fabulous filler: the all-animal edition of one-offs. In honor of the legendary tiger whose nimble jump gave the gorge its name, revel in the nonhuman cuteness. Feel free to anthropomorphize. I did.

Plus, at the end there’s a new feature—an audio file!

***

Near the Flower and Bird Market in Kunming, a major draw in Yunnan’s capital city, I came across a much less official animal shop, which I’m calling Puppy and Kitten Alley.

A collie mix, I think.

It took me an hour to walk 30 feet. I had to pet every creature, sticking my fingers through the cages to let little wet mouths nibble on my fingertips.

Not all of the animals were in cages. They seemed to be casually but not callously treated. But the kittens were too young to be separated from mom, and cried piteously for her. Or me. Or anyone to take them out of their mean little prisons.

With nowhere to go and nothing to do, some slept off the long wait for a new home.

Much freer was this duck in Kunming’s CuiHu, or Green Lake, about a mile north of the pet alley. It seemed pretty cheerful in the sunshine that emerged after a brief, mellow rain.

Six hours north, in Lijiang, I found this puppy already on the job, guarding some Naxi tchotchke shop. He has a serious countenance, but don’t let that fool you—his butt still got all happy-wriggly when I cooed at him and scratched him between the ears.

I did not pet this cow, which was one of the first sites I encountered when I began to hike the trail through Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Nor did I snuggle these high-altitude bees hungry for nectar some 3,000 meters above sea level.

Ditto on the goats, which were walking the trail sans herder.

Be glad this is a distant shot. Goats are cute from the front. They have nubbly little horns and horizontal pupils like minus signs made with a thick black marker. But from the back, goats are appalling. Whatever horrors your imagination can conjure up about the rear of this creature, double it and then gag a little.

Along the first part of the trail, touts wait with mules for tired trekkers to give up the hike and get hauled to the top.

Few hikers take the ride. Maybe that’s why this mule and his trio of chocolate-colored pals were, like the goats, walking the trail without any human tenders.

It was just them, the bells, and me. Here’s what it sounded like when I tried to pass them:

Mule Report

More from Tiger Leaping Gorge soon.