Ecuador (4)
Quito is divided into the Old Town and the New Town. The Old Town is filled with old buildings left over from the colonial period, and has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Gilded Gothic churches, exquisite statues of the Virgin Mary everywhere you look, colorful vintage cars, and exaggerated artistic graffiti on the walls of houses. Walking through the streets and alleys, you get the illusion of traveling through history, as though you were standing on a Spanish street in the eighteenth century.
It is like a mirror of Europe, reflecting the long history of change across the ocean.
There were many tourists in the city on the weekend. The streets were very narrow, and because it was a mountain city, they were often winding, going uphill and downhill, twisting this way and that. Before long, they arrived at a local open-air market run by the indigenous people. A rich rush of color and vibrant life came toward them, full of the warmth and bustle of everyday human life.
Everyday goods, jewelry, musical instruments, all kinds of merchandise were on sale.
They happened upon a spice stall. Tan Guhong stopped, interested. The owner was a slightly plump middle-aged auntie, who patiently explained the various colorful spices to her: which ones were used for rituals, which were used to make tea, and which were used for cooking. In the end, Tan Guhong felt a little embarrassed and bought a small bag of smoked beans that gave off the fragrance of toffee and vanilla. As she was leaving, the enthusiastic shopkeeper even gave her a small purple flower as a keepsake.
Ahead was the handicrafts section. Tan Guhong said to Luo Jingming, “Ecuadorian handicrafts are all very distinctive. If you want to buy souvenirs, tell me. I can help you bargain.”
“You’re good at it?”
She curled her fingers into a fist beside her lips and coughed twice, her tone modest. “I’m all right. Getting it down to half price is usually no problem.”
A smile appeared in Luo Jingming’s eyes. “Then let’s walk around and have a look.”
South American handicrafts came in an endless variety of forms, all delicately made. There were Panama hats, wooden carvings and pottery, alpaca-fur dolls and ornaments, brightly colored woven blankets, earrings and necklaces strung from all kinds of plant seeds, and preserved flowers.
Ecuadorian roses were bright and beautiful, famous throughout the world. After undergoing a complicated series of processes including dehydration, bleaching, drying, and dyeing, they retained the appearance of being in full bloom, unchanged for years.
The flower vendor was a thin young man. In broken, simple English, he tried to sell them to Luo Jingming.
“Your girlfriend is beautiful. Buy her some flowers.”
As he spoke, he gestured for the two of them to look at the sign standing in front of his stall. It read: Roses that never wither, for love that never withers.
Tan Guhong rolled the somewhat dehydrated purple flower in her fingers and said thoughtfully, “So a living rose withers in an instant, while a dead flower is the one that becomes eternal?”
Luo Jingming lowered his eyes to look at her. “If it were you, would you choose a moment, or eternity?”
“Actually, they don’t contradict each other. Like a preserved flower, a moment can become eternity too. But as for me, I’m not particularly interested in either.”
Whether it was fresh flowers or love.
She shrugged and turned to leave.
The two of them wandered around, and in the end they did not buy any particularly worthwhile souvenirs. Instead, they spent a large amount of dollars in the nearby farmers’ market. Large, plump cherries, yellow-skinned dragon fruit, all kinds of fresh mangoes and pineapples, cut into pieces or squeezed into juice, their vivid colors and sweet fragrances enticing. Fresh crabs and white shrimp needed hardly any seasoning. Boiled in salted water, they were already delicious enough.
They had dinner at a small open-air stall by the roadside. The local specialty was various kinds of grilled meat, served with potatoes and onions, along with a pitcher of ice-cold freshly squeezed fruit juice. It was cheap and filling.
There was no English on the menu. Tan Guhong ordered everything. Once the dishes were brought out, Luo Jingming looked at the plates of grilled meat, which were not particularly appetizing in appearance, and could not help asking:
“What kind of meat is this?”
“Roast pork. The skin is really crispy. Try it. It tastes a lot like Cantonese roast pork.”
“And this one?” He pointed to another suspicious-looking dish beside it.
“Roast rabbit.”
He silently looked at her. She innocently looked back at him.
Three seconds later, she gave in and burst out laughing. “All right, all right, I won’t lie to you anymore. It’s actually roasted guinea pig. It’s a local specialty in Ecuador. It sounds a little scary, but it tastes great.”
When she had first arrived in Ecuador, she had also been unable to accept this food, which was enjoyed by both young and old locals.
But she simply could not resist the temptation of its aroma. After closing her eyes and taking a bite, she overcame the psychological barrier and accepted it completely. The meat was tender, juicy, and pleasantly chewy, somewhere between chicken and pork. Charred on the outside and tender within, it was served with sauce and vegetables and went wonderfully with rice.
After she persuaded him for a while, he finally picked up his fork and tried a small piece of the blackened, grotesque-looking meat. Once it entered his mouth, it was not nearly as frightening as he had imagined.
“It actually tastes pretty good.”
“I told you! It’s a pity it’s not in season right now. Otherwise, for fifteen dollars, you could eat a whole big lobster right on the street, and pick it up and gnaw on it like a lamb leg.”
He smiled and took a sip of fruit juice. “Do you normally eat local food?”
“Not really. Ecuadorian food is generally rather rough and rustic, leaning toward Western cuisine. Eating it once in a while is fine. But after eating it day after day for a long time, I really can’t get used to it. Luckily, we have a Chinese cook at our camp. Otherwise, I definitely wouldn’t have been able to stand it this past year.”
Although her personality was not particularly traditional, her stomach was very much a traditional Chinese stomach.
“I grew up eating Chinese food too.”
“No wonder.”
“No wonder what?” he asked.
She smiled. “No wonder I felt that you don’t really seem Chinese American.”
The way he spoke and carried himself was unlike the other Chinese Americans she knew. Instead, he seemed more like an elegant young gentleman who had grown up in a cultured Chinese family, refined and courteous, restrained and well-mannered, so much so that she would often forget his identity.
He smiled too. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it does. Dietary patterns affect personality, and besides, eating habits are also part of a people’s culture. Especially for Chinese people, they’re an important part of it.”
Warmth, gentleness, respect, frugality, humility; benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trust. They were all hidden within the three meals of a Chinese person’s day.
He recalled the past for a moment. “Both my parents were descendants of immigrant families, and my mother is mixed-race. So she’s a little more Westernized, but my father is still very conservative at heart, and even holds some traditional ideas from the old days. When I was young, I was raised with a very Chinese-style education.”
“How so?”
“During the day, I studied the curriculum at a Western school. At night, we hired a private tutor to teach me traditional Chinese culture.”
She rubbed her chin. “The qin, chess, calligraphy, and painting? The Four Books and Five Classics?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Not quite that exaggerated, but more or less. Quite often, when I couldn’t memorize ancient poems and classical texts, I was made to kneel until midnight. My father said that when my grandparents’ generation first crossed the ocean, they did it to make a living. But we descendants can’t forget our roots.”
Tan Guhong paused and let out a soft sigh. “Uncle was very far-sighted.”
A sense of identification with one’s heritage does not lie in genes. To a great extent, it comes from cultural identification. Once a divide arises in culture, the ties of blood will also be severed.
The last stop of the day was El Panecillo. It lies at the boundary between Quito’s Old Town and the modern city. At its summit stands a towering statue of the Virgin, wings on her back and a ferocious beast beneath her feet. In silence, she gazes down upon the countless people below. She is the embodiment of justice, the protector of Quito.
At night, when they climbed to the summit and looked down over the thousands of lights of the city, all the rich, vivid colors of the day, all the layers upon layers of buildings, were shrouded beneath the darkness, covered by lights that flickered at different heights, rising and falling with the contours of the mountain. The houses of the Old Town in the south were low but orderly, while the buildings of the New Town in the north rose high but were disorderly. Old and new intertwined, dreamlike and unreal.
That night, they stayed at an inn at the foot of El Panecillo. It was a low, two-story building, its exterior walls painted a delicate pale pink. Inside the rooms, however, large swaths of deep crimson dominated, with wrought-iron railings and brown wooden floors. Potted plants could be seen everywhere, growing lush tropical greenery. The vivid contrasts of color were almost jarring to the eye, rough yet filled with an exotic charm.
The night was utterly quiet. All the bustle and liveliness of the day had receded like a tide, and the evening breeze drifted gently past their ears.
Tan Guhong sat at a round table in the inn’s square courtyard, one hand resting casually on the back of the chair beside her. Her gaze was distant as she looked at the bunch of nameless yellow flowers in the water bottle on the table. This country was evergreen all year round, she thought, greenery and fragrance everywhere.
“Not going to sleep?”
She looked at the person approaching and raised the cup in her hand, giving it a little shake.
“After I finish this.”
Luo Jingming lowered his eyes to glance at it and could not help laughing.
It was neither red wine nor coffee, but a cup of hot cocoa.
He sat down at the table as well, took something resembling a piece of candy wrapped in transparent plastic from his pocket, unhurriedly tore open the wrapper, and put it into his mouth.
Tan Guhong glanced over curiously. He smiled. With something between his lips and teeth, his voice was slightly muffled.
“Mint candy. Want to try one?”
“No, thank you.”
Tan Guhong had not expected a grown man like him to suddenly start eating candy in the middle of the night, but everyone had their own preferences, so she did not ask further.
One orange lamp after another had been lit along the second-floor corridor. A pair of moths chased each other beneath the lights, while a pair of lovers hid in a corner, clinging intimately to each other.
The two of them sat facing each other, one drinking hot cocoa and the other eating mint candy. The atmosphere was slightly awkward, in a subtle sort of way.
After giving a light cough to clear the cloyingly sweet taste from her throat, Tan Guhong broke the silence.
“Have you been to South America before?”
“I’ve been a few times for work, but I never really had the chance to tour around, and I’d never been to Ecuador,” he said. “What about you?”
“When I was doing my master’s, I spent half a year on exchange in Argentina. The year before last I was in Africa, and I only came to South America last year. But I guess I’ll probably be stationed in these South American countries quite often from now on.”
What could she do? She had studied Spanish. It all came down to the Spanish people who had sailed around the world several centuries ago.
He caught the subtle emotion in her voice and asked, “You don’t like South America?”
The culture and customs here were rich and diverse, with a distinctive history and human culture. From her expression while they were sightseeing during the day, it was obvious that she had been enjoying herself.
“I do like it. As an outsider, a bystander, who wouldn’t like the charm created by the collision and interweaving of such exotic cultures? But whenever I think about the bloody conflicts between the colonizers and indigenous peoples during the colonial era, I can’t help feeling that the history behind all this was truly cruel for the people who actually lived through it.”
She sighed. “Back then, the indigenous Inca civilization of South America had achieved a very high level of accomplishment in astronomy, calendars, and science. Then the Spanish came. They didn’t have such a brilliant, far-reaching civilization, but they had guns and gunpowder. Doesn’t that storyline sound familiar?”
Luo Jingming sighed softly. “Perhaps the spread and evolution of civilization can never avoid this kind of cruelty and bloodshed.”
Just like the pain of childbirth.
“Perhaps that was true in the past. Perhaps that was how Westerners operated. But times have changed now.”
“You mean China’s overseas construction projects?”
“Development is the fundamental way to solve all problems,” Tan Guhong said calmly. “This solves the problem of excess production capacity at home while also providing these less-developed countries and regions with capital and technology. It’s a win-win situation. To leave the mark of ‘Made in China’ on the infrastructure of so many countries, that is a merit that will endure for generations. Some Western media with ulterior motives call it ‘neo-colonialism.’ They’re simply judging others by their own standards. As for what the future holds, we’ll wait and see.”
After she finished speaking, she paused and gave a somewhat self-mocking smile. “I’ve said too much. Don’t mind me.”
“I won’t.” He looked at her and said seriously, “You’re absolutely right.”
She was a graduate of a prestigious university, highly educated, and from a good family. Being an overseas translator was not the worst path she could have taken, but it was not the best either.
He knew that she could no longer continue pursuing the dream she had held in her youth, to join the military and defend her country. So to travel across the ocean in this way and continue devoting herself to her homeland was, in its own way, an expression of love.
“Thank you.”
She nodded, drained the rest of the hot cocoa in one go, and said to him, “Then good night. Get some rest early. We have a new itinerary tomorrow.”
“Good night.”
Luo Jingming watched Tan Guhong’s back as she walked away, but he did not immediately return to his room.
Sitting alone at the table, the familiar restlessness inside him gradually welled up. He restrained the urge to smoke and ate another piece of mint candy.
He slowly folded the mint candy’s plastic wrapper in his hand, folding it smaller and smaller until it was tiny, then unfolded it again, repeating the process countless times.
He suddenly remembered that earlier that day, beneath the Equator Monument, he had turned around and seen her standing not far behind him, her hands clasped behind her back, her head slightly raised, her gaze passing over him as she looked up at the towering monument before them.
She was wearing a white shirt, jeans, and canvas shoes, clean and fresh, looking just like a student on campus. After years of exposure to the wind and rain at the equator, her face was still fair and delicate, and despite all the rises and falls she had experienced over the years, her gaze was still as clear as water, just as it had been back then.
Ten years in the human world were enough to turn seas into mulberry fields, but the moment he first saw her, he knew that she had not changed over all these years. She still possessed that youthful idealism, still carried an unwavering, innocent heart.
He had never met anyone like her. Not in all the years before, nor in all the years to come.
✦
Today’s Film Recommendation:
The Motorcycle Diaries (2004, Argentina)
Location: South America
Synopsis: The film is adapted from The Motorcycle Diaries, written by Che Guevara himself, and tells the story of how a journey through South America inspired an entirely new worldview in Che Guevara, causing the seeds of revolutionary fervor to begin taking root and growing within him.
Recommendation: Che Guevara, a name known throughout the world, was born in Argentina. He was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, writer, guerrilla commander, military theorist, international political figure, and one of the central figures of the Cuban Revolution. Throughout his life, he traveled extensively in support of independence movements in Cuba and other Third World countries resisting imperialist colonialism. He was captured and killed in Bolivia in 1967. He was an idol of young people around the world in the last century, a widespread symbol of counterculture, an icon of global popular culture, as well as a hero of the Third World communist revolutionary movement and a symbol of the Western left-wing movement.
You may not know much about him, but you have definitely seen his iconic portrait, which has been printed on T-shirts countless times over the years (pretend there’s a photo here. Everyone can search for it online themselves, or you can also go have a look at my Weibo).
The film only captures a small part of his youth, when he traveled around South America by motorcycle. This experience allowed him to see with his own eyes the hardships endured by ordinary people in Latin America under the oppression of Western colonialism. It ignited his revolutionary convictions and changed the course of his life from then on. Sometimes we have to go looking for the meaning of life on the road. We have to be on the road, again and again, always on the road!
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