Authors: Eden Collinsworth
“One last question,” he said with professional calm.
“Are you mad?”
“No, I am not mad,” I said in a deliberately level voice.
We stared at each other. Silence took on implication, and I thought it best to say something else, something that would make me sound self-aware but not overly defensive.
“Under the circumstances, I suppose denying it might be reason enough to believe I am.”
It was a fair statement, all things being equal. His furrowed expression relaxed. “Well, at least protect yourself from the sun.… Jesus, look at your skin. You’ll burn up,” he warned as
he swabbed my arm for a final inoculation. “And whatever you do, don’t go anywhere near the lakes.”
“WHAT ABOUT YOUR hair?”
It seemed a strange reaction when I informed my direct report at Hearst where I was going for the two weeks I planned to be out of the office.
“He made my hair sound hazardous,” I told my brother while we packed our supplies.
“I don’t think it’s your hair per se,” suggested my brother as he rolled his sleeping bag into an airless tube. “It’s more about the consequences of your hair.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Well … you have to admit you have a lot of it. And then there’s the color: it might be the first time the locals have seen a redhead. Your hair could be a magnet for unforeseen trouble.”
“Don’t be absurd,” I said dismissively.
From London, we flew to Dar es Salaam, where, in the late hours of night, we connected with another flight—an antiquated twin-engine plane—to Arusha, also in Tanzania. As soon as I stepped off the plane’s rickety stairs into pitch dark, something happened. Something unforeseen.
Hurling itself kamikaze-style from out of nowhere, a gigantic bat dove straight into my hair, which had been piled loosely into a bun. The impact of its plunge produced such a head-snapping jolt that I lost my balance and fell backward. It took two people on the tarmac—one holding me down, the other disengaging the bat from its snarled confusion—to rescue me from what would be the first in a series of unexpected encounters my hair would have with African nature.
Crossing Tanzania by jeep the next day was anything but comfortable. By the time we put up the tent that night, I was numb with exhaustion; after maneuvering myself into my sleeping bag, I let out enough of a sigh for my brother to ask if I was already regretting the trip.
Not at all, I said. Granted, the prehistoric-size bat intent
on nesting in my hair wasn’t a particularly welcoming greeting. Still, I was very much looking forward to the following day and our drive across the Maswa Game Reserve.
“We’re leaving early,” said my brother. “We should get some sleep.”
“Can you shut off the light,” I asked.
The request produced a benign chuckle from my tentmate.
“What’s so funny?”
“That’s the moon, city girl.”
When I woke the next day, dirty from the previous, the guide informed us there was water enough to drink, but not to bathe.
I had a choice: I could remain in a state of suspended panic, or I could brush my teeth with the single swig of water allotted to me that morning and get on with the day.
You’re not the point
, echoed the vastness beyond where I stood, and it occurred to me that to insist remote Africa should comply with my urban version of convenience was not only futile but showed an inexcusable prudishness on my part.
Gorillas forage in the upper regions of Rwanda’s Virunga Mountains. By the time we got to the mountains’ base, it had been three days and nights since my clothes had been dry, ten days since I had bathed, and eleven days since my digestive system had cooperated. Continuing on foot, we hiked up a misted area known for its seventy-two inches of annual rainfall. During our eight-thousand-foot ascent, the temperature dropped in cold, wet degrees.
Our guide explained what to do and—more important—what not to do in the company of gorillas. He instructed us to remain sitting on the ground and not to, under any circumstances, stand upright. He warned us that direct eye contact is considered a threat by the silverback, the dominant male identified by his mammoth size and silver-colored back. We were told that if the silverback approached, we were to bow our heads as a gesture of supplication. Lastly, the guide advised us that if the silverback charged, we were not to run away.
“That’s the most idiotic thing I’ve heard,” was my reaction to the guide’s instructions. “Of course you run. What’s
the alternative? To stand your ground against four hundred pounds of charging gorilla? Another thing, I’m not wild about the idea of bowing my head.”
“You need to understand something,” my brother made clear. “I won’t be throwing myself between you and an outraged silverback, so if you have a problem bowing your head for a gorilla, you better come to terms with it now.”
“Okay, all right … I’ll bow my head,” I shot back. “But I want you to keep this to yourself. I mean it. If anyone I work with hears this, my credibility goes out the window.”
After we’d threaded our way through choking vegetation for two hours, the guide suddenly motioned to us to sit. We sat perfectly still while curiosity overcame the gorillas’ wariness of us. Eventually, they approached separately. The younger males first, then several mothers with babies on their backs. All congregated within a few feet.
All but one.
In an unchallenged position on a fallen tree trunk a few yards away was the majestically massive silverback. His penetrating black eyes monitored our slightest twitch. In deference to him—demonstrating a concept that is the mainspring of Confucian belief—I bowed my head and cast my eyes to the ground. Deciding that I was of no consequence, he began to lumber off in the opposite direction. He stopped, turned around, and checked us one last time, presumably to make sure our eyes were still averted.
The hike down the mountain was followed by a cramped jeep ride to Lake Victoria. I was grateful to run on its beach. When I stopped to scan the shoreline, my focus gradually moved from the coast to the gleaming water, transparent down to the lake’s smooth, sandy bottom.
It was forbidden.
I knew that.
Hadn’t my brother given me the gruesome details? And the doctor … hadn’t he warned that African lakes were lethal?
Schistosomiasis was a veritable flash card for an unforgettably awful disease.
I am a reasonable person. And so I had a moment of reason, a moment of saying to myself,
Let’s not do this
.
I am a reasonable person. But if one takes away those moments of unreason, one has taken away a great many of life’s joys.
It might have been because I was on an endless beach without anyone in sight. Perhaps it was the rhythmic sound of lapping waves, or my overwhelming desire to float. Regardless of the reason, I knew exactly what I was doing as I stripped off my clothes and calmly walked into the lake. I submerged myself for as long as breath allowed, then propelled myself to the water’s surface and floated in something as close to nirvana as I will ever get.
To eliminate the evidence of my swim, I walked back to the tent at deliberate leisure so my hair was given its chance to dry. Along the way, I found a keepsake from Africa: a shell the moss-green color of its mountains.
By the time we checked into the hotel in Kilimanjaro, the idea of a warm bath had acquired a certain magnitude. Before easing myself into the tub, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. Scratched arms and bruised legs testified to what I had put myself through, and a bleak diet had resulted in weight loss I couldn’t afford. What was left was a battered wreck.
W
hen I returned from Africa, my mother told me I needed my head examined.
She was phoning from a mental institution.
“You should have known better,” she repeated after I admitted that the altitude sickness I suffered in Rwanda had mutated into pleurisy by the time I saw a doctor in New York.
My European mother was from a different era. She believed men should be managed in a way that prevented them from feeling anything other than taken care of. But she also expected them to assume a leadership role when the situation required. Apparently, this had been one of those times.
“What possessed your brother to allow you to climb an extinct volcano?” was the rhetorical question she posed before asking a personal one.
“Do you realize how difficult you’re becoming to marry off?”
Shengnu
, or “leftover woman,” is a term China’s Ministry of Education has added to its official lexicon. It describes an urban professional woman over the age of twenty-seven. For those slow in understanding the implications, the prefix
sheng
is the same as in the word
shengcai
, or “leftover food.”
Setting its own action-oriented time line that delineates exactly when women become stale, the Communist Party provides instruction by age groups. At twenty-five, women must
“fight” and “hunt” for a partner. If not married by twenty-eight, women are pressured to “triumph against the odds.” Between thirty-one and thirty-four, still-unmarried women are referred to as “advanced leftovers,” and by thirty-five, a single woman is the “ultimate” leftover, spiritually flawed in thinking she is higher than the mandate of marriage. That being the case, Li Ping, a young woman I came to admire in Beijing, was spiritually flawed.
Ping was a decent, well-educated, hardworking woman who had made a fortune launching a portfolio of magazines. She had proved herself an astute businesswoman and, by all Western accounts, a great success, but during a revealing conversation in the backseat of her chauffeur-driven Mercedes, Ping told me that her younger sister was more successful in the “important way.”
“Why would you think that?” I asked.
“It’s not what I think, it’s what I know. My sister is married, and I am not. I am shaming my parents.”
Ping’s punishing words spoke of the worst kind of self-judgment, and, at the time, it was difficult for me to understand the irrational degree to which she was holding her self-esteem in abeyance until she was married.
Fifty years after committing to advance gender equality in China, the Communist Party continues to underestimate the resistance from its nation’s culture, a culture that remains rooted in a traditionally Confucian society of male superiority. Only after living in China did I understand how women there struggle to break through the encased male-dominated work environment, not just in circumstantial ways but in the far more complex ways that have to do with self-belief. Very few possess the emotional and financial resources required to brave the tide of political, social, and parental waves pushing them toward marriage.
Ping’s plight was not without claims on my sympathy. At one time, I, too, would have been an “advanced leftover.” To the surprise of many—myself included—I did marry. Not because my shelf life was just about to expire, but because a man I met (I shall name him W. in this book) was the irresistible
contraband the Fates brought on board: charmingly out of order, provocatively incorrect, someone who, from the very beginning, was such good fun it would have been a sin not to have joined him for the rest of my life.
The Chinese character for the word “etiquette” is the same as for the word “custom.” It is customary for the groom’s family to hire a matchmaker to broker a proposal to the bride’s family. If the selected girl and her parents find the proposal acceptable, research is required before the wedding date can be set. Auspicious days for a wedding are subject to interpretation by fortune-tellers, who consult the Chinese almanac—sold at the beginning of the Lunar New Year by street vendors and in bookstores—and perform an analysis based on the bride’s and groom’s birth dates and hours. Even-numbered months and dates are desirable; the seventh lunar month—the month of the Hungry Ghosts—is avoided. At the time of the betrothal, the groom’s family presents the bride’s family with gifts that symbolize prosperity, and the bride’s parents bestow a dowry on her. Unlike in the West, the Chinese do not exchange wedding vows; rather, they pay their respect to deceased ancestors and the elders in both families. Wedding gifts are in the form of monetary contributions presented in red envelopes.
My own trip down the aisle was not as formulaic.
I was introduced to W. in New York, and our first date was in Paris. Three days later, while I was in Berlin, he phoned from London to propose another chance to see one another when we returned to New York. Our engagement would span ten peripatetic months before we were married in Peru by the captain of a small supply boat carrying us down the Amazon River.
W. spoke Spanish and Portuguese; both came into play during our simple wedding ceremony on the foredeck. That I didn’t understand a word in either language seemed inconsequential to everyone but me.
“I haven’t a clue what I’m putting my name to,” I said, adding my signature to the bottom of the handwritten marriage document.
Signing an agreement in a language I couldn’t read was a cavalier conclusion to a day that already had raised questions.
That afternoon, we had taken a walk along the riverbank and met a man who invited us to his nearby hut. Constructed with woven reeds and resting on stilts to accommodate the river’s high tide, it consisted of a single room with a roof but no walls.
In spite of what others might consider a privacy issue, the hut was home to the man, his wife, and his daughter, along with his mother and mother-in-law. The household also included a female guinea fowl that, at low water, patrolled the small area under the hut with the territorial aggression of a pit bull. I noticed several pigs; I gathered that they, too, shared the hut when the river rose.
W. conversed with the man, who was obviously delighted to have the male company.
“I think it’s safe to say that, in this part of the world, marriage is weighted in favor of the husband,” said mine-to-be as we returned to the docked boat.
“What did you two talk about?”
“First of all, the young girl is not his daughter—she’s another wife.”