Riding the Trains In Japan by Patrick Holland

Author:Patrick Holland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781921924378
Publisher: Transit Lounge

We started north early the next day. Golden light poured down our street and washed the buildings where shutters were being taken down and washed a man beating copper pots with a hammer and an old woman framed in yellow corn and washed a girl sweeping the cobblestones with a switch broom at the entrance to the town square.

We drove up into mountains that were rocky and ruddy-coloured. Our driver said they were better in spring. Wonderful. Carpeted in wildflowers. We drove through muddy and misty villages where the women carried bricks, wood and coal in baskets on their backs as you saw men do in poor Han Chinese towns. The Naxi were meant to be matriarchal, but driving through the villages it was hard to figure exactly how this played out to their advantage. The women seemed to shoulder the burden of the work entirely: the outdoor labour as well as domestic chores. And in every place we passed the men could be seen lolling around roadside pool tables, drinking beer and tea and smoking. I could only suppose that the women had decided, or the men had convinced them, that the male sex was really not much use for anything outside procreation, and so they had achieved something like the social position of aristocratic women in 18th and 19th Century Europe. They seemed so utterly idle I would not have been surprised to see one of them drag a harp out of his house and start plucking at it, else sit down to some decorative knitting; they did occasionally admire each other’s black hats, leather coats and bracelets and copper earbobs. Russian-born Frenchman Peter Goullart lived in Yunnan for nine years during the Communist revolution. His book The Forgotten Kingdom claims that Naxi women ‘utterly enslaved their men’. ‘To marry a Naxi woman,’ said Goullart, ‘was to acquire life insurance and the ability to be idle for the rest of one’s days.’

We drove high above a deep Yangtze River valley. Rice paddies cascaded thousands of feet down to a rich green floodplain sparsely inhabited by people and water buffalo and simple wooden huts abutting fast-flowing water. Paddy frogs croaked in the terraces that were ploughed by buffalo, and godwits plucked grubs around the buffalos’ feet and clouds drifted like water across the mountain tops. These Himalayan gorges are the deepest in the world.

The air up here was very cool and the children at the school we stopped at all wore mian’ao: the thick fleece-lined coat and pants Chinese peasants wear in cold climates. Most came to school by ox and wagon, others by mule, a few by bicycle, and the wealthier on the backs of their fathers’ motorbikes. Dropping the children off at school was the one job I saw up there that did seem to fall to the men. The school was poor but the setting heavenly. Clear streams cut the misty green country and water fell from rock ledges near and distant. We got back in the car before a small ragged man could drive a pair of yaks around us.

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