That week I choose West. Mai Lin packed candy and quail eggs in her backpack, and we were out the door by noon. We steered our bikes through the city, down streets that seemed like caves of sycamores. Salesmen stood near heaps of melons on canvas, and vendors clacked bamboos while they sang about their herbs and tonics. Eventually the crowds and the carts thinned out, and suddenly we were in the countryside. Above the roads stood walls of tall poplars, and we could see stacks of brick in the distance, hazy as a painting.

This was the Central China Plain. Here a grid of black water splashed through miles and miles of wheat, or glades of lotus. "Look," I said ; I saw a stack of hay, all tossed andsorted by hand. I insisted that we stop.

People with wooden rakes were working in the field.  They had bronze and open faces, and their cuffs were wrapped tight to their calves. One of them agreed to take our picture. Mai Lin laughed in nervous delight, and in the photo, her hat would frame her face like a sun. Then I saw a canal.

The water was dark and shiny, like polished wood. Lotus leaves stood like parasols above it, and trembled as fish wiggled through the stalks. The flowers were white and luminous as teacups. I pulled one and handed it to Mai Lin. "Here, " I said, " A flower for a flower!" and I asked her to hold it by her face. I expected her to smile like a girl on a plate. Instead she drooped the blossom across her shoulder like a kitten, and her eyes went wide and  apologetic, almost sad. That puzzled me, and for weeks I would wonder about it. Finally, another person told me that the lotus represents 'purity'. Apparently, Mai Lin was ashamed to make that claim, because I was her second...

Mai Lin led us through a maze of blacktop until we reached the highway. The concrete stretched like the horizon.  A white line ran down the center, and a few ragweeds peeped through the cracks. Mai Lin seemed taken aback, and like many Chinese, even a little embarrassed, so she said "China always poor--"

"Hardly", I said, "This road looks just like America," and I meant it. The white concrete, streaked by cars, reminded me of the roads on which Americans spend so much of our waking lives; again, it was quite a contrast to the dust and bricks of central China, where everything looks like it was made by hand. I felt an ache which was odd, but small. I had been in China for quite a while.

Soon we left the concrete and turned onto another asphalt road.  We glided under walls of boxwoods. After a few hundred yards we reached the kind of pylon we have on battlefields back home. With quiet dignity, Mai Lin showed me what we had come to find.