Autumn Moon Festival

I’m sitting on the roof of a boat staring out at the surreal conical spires that fan out for miles along the Li River, a pleasantly bizarre Dr Seuss-scape where the earth has been carved into tall shapes that defy common sense, mountains topped with pointy dunce caps, drooping cliffs with tufts of grass, triple-humped camels covered in moss, squat bales of hay with a bite taken out of them, wobbly ziggurats ready to heave over, hills with little pillbox hats, layer on layer and really high, the furthest ones visible through mist. Really strange.

If you ever wondered where those surreal Chinese landscape paintings come from, this is it; underwater for hundreds of millions of years, the porous karst has been grooved into shapes that don’t seem to belong on this earth. Nothing can mar their strange beauty, not the armada of double-decker tourist boats that chugs downstream every day, not the city of Guilin, a big bustling concrete town marooned along a bend in the Li, full of narrow alleyways and rickshaws and with twelve different bridges leading out to the mainland on all sides.

The Chinese imagine various animals and people in the shape of the hills, some of them easily recognizable, some not. The most obvious is at the edge of town, a riverfront gap in the rock forming the shape of an elephant with its trunk draining water from the Li; legend says it carried a god through the sky until alighting in Guilin and being stunned by the beauty and wanting to stay. In punishment the god turned it to stone and left it here for the locals to scramble over.

There are tea plantations in the hills and rice fields in the plains. The town is urban but charming, with a long crooked pedestrian walkway in the center that holds old fashioned tea shops for tastings, little sweet shops and plenty of restaurants, from grimy little wok shops to snazzy indoor hot pots. I almost wander into one that serves dog, but am stopped by a local named Ho who steers me somewhere better for a very spicy beef dish. He’s a disarmingly pleasant guy who teaches calligraphy at a famous art school here, and is fairly well known in his own right, having won multiple gold medals for his work at national competitions in Beijing. A great guy: engaging, unpretentious, warm. He takes me through the town at night to see the bridges lit up and the fishermen and their cormorants in the waterfront parks, the kitschy local restaurant with snakes and rats in cages (we don’t eat there) and the best local art galleries.

At one point he asks about my “wife” and so I have to go into the whole widower routine, which is tiresome, but he shares with me as well – his wife was once pregnant but they found serious brain problems and were forced to abort the fetus. She hasn’t been pregnant since and is very sad about it. Then she calls his cell as if she knows he’s talking about her, and when she hears he’s met an American she offers us two tickets to some special acrobatics and magic show they’re putting on in honor of the festival of the autumn moon, which starts tonight. The festival involves passing out little cakes with red bean paste in the center and launching hundreds of paper lanterns into the night sky, powered by a mere candle but cascading one after another over our heads like a little spirit world spit out by the Li.

The crowd for the show is strictly local, lots of families and little kids. We get there halfway through, just in time for an appearance by the monkey king and something called “the pig fairy”, who pull audience members onstage and perform magic tricks with them as dupes. Then we detour back to the art gallery where some of his work is for sale, and though he’s not hawking anything I dig out a piece of his calligraphy that’s especially impressive and purchase it. It’s a famous ancient poem by the great Li Po about another Chinese river, the Yangtze; the selection of the text is a very personal decision by the calligrapher. It goes something like this:

Brother, there is no easy path through this life.
You navigate this life through the endless jagged rapids and rocks
of the Yangtze in a bamboo raft.
That’s the way it is.
The hero is the one who doesn’t just sit on some sandbar watching his cargo rot.
Jaw set, he maneuvers the malicious current,
cognizant of dangers, empty of fear,
though the water’s tentacles grab
from all directions to pull him under.
And when the snow of the highlands settles in his hair
and he sees that awesome river finally open
into the sea,
he knows that his journey is done,
finally done.

We part afterwards and I head to my hotel. I have a “corner office” room on a high floor and can see several of the bridges lit red for the festival, a tall pagoda squat in the middle of the water, and the steady stream of paper lanterns unfurling over the river and getting sucked up by the night sky. The Chinese government outlaws them because of the fire risk, and you can see why; every once in awhile one of them craps out and goes toppling into the river. The potential for forest fire in this dry terrain is obvious. But everyone ignores the law and lets them fly. Impossible little puffs of paper telling the laws of physics to fuck off for a minute, like fireflies signalling in the vacuum of night.