The Ghost at the Crossroads

6:00 AM. Winter in rural China. I wake up in darkness, alone, in an unheated dormitory room, boil water for tea in my contraband kettle. Throw on my heavy winter coat, scarf, gloves, two pairs of pants, two pairs of socks. Stumble downstairs to the dining room, where watery rice porridge and boiled eggs steam from their bowls. I steal an extra egg (only one per person allowed), I eat standing up, leaning against the window. A red sunrise is quickly overtaken by fog, as it had been every day this winter. I toss out my eggshells, and head outside where the dogs huddle in their houses.

I’m not sure when I started to suspect communal living might not be for me, but once my closest friends and the man I had fallen in love with, C, left, it was pretty clear. My only friend left? Zoey, the half-whippit half-german shepherd that C had been given, and had raised here. She was a happy dog, just like her daddy, and loved running around in the fields surrounding this school more than anything—and I, not wanting anything to do with the people here, found solace in taking her out for an hour, twice. or sometimes three times, a day.

Zoey is a bit of a wild dog, raised to be a hunter and therefore a brilliant little killing machine, but because she doesn’t look like a typical hunting dog in the Chinese mind, she was never employed thus. Her high energy was misunderstood, so her days were spent chained up unless a student took her out. Often harassed by the children of the owner—or the mother of the owner—or even, sometimes, one of the masters—Zoey had a complicated relationship with humans. C worked hard to develop trust between me and Zoey, as I’m not very experienced with dogs—when he left, she became my responsibility.

And of course, I welcomed this, not only because all my friends had left in one fell swoop with the Chinese New Year, but because she’s wonderful, and I treasured our time together: her unabashed joy as she leapt through the tall dead grasses chasing birds, her presence.

And maybe I felt a little like she must have, too—trapped, isolated, harassed by aggressive personalities, immature people driven by ego. Perhaps I should have expected all of this, coming to a Shaolin school, but I was never into martial arts for ego. Maybe it was naive of me, to want more from the people I was living and training with. To want connection and understanding. Well, Zoey and I had connection and understanding.

There were several interconnecting dirt roads around the school, so there were many paths we could choose on our daily walks—but we quickly fell into the habit of one path in particular. It winded along farm plots and family garbage dumps, the occasional bramble patch where Zoey could nose out magpies, and eventually reached away from the school until we arrived at a tree-lined crossroads.

And while everything that winter was surrounded by fog and cold, and all the fields were fallow and dead, there was something at the crossroads that was living. A wind that kicked up and swelled in the bare branches of those tall trees. A clear crossroads, a place to make a choice: North, South, East, West. The school was back southwest, just out of sight over the distant hills. At the crossroads itself, a large cinder block lay to one side, and a ditch followed the path north, dry and caked with dead leaves.

Here, Zoey and I could be truly alone, away from the students, the masters—even the farmers in the surrounding lands didn’t seem to come here.

The path west led back to the school, but to the north laid a rivulet, and a stone bridge, and eventually, a paved road that led to a pagoda, and beyond that, a town. To the east, a long stretch of farms and then a small lake with a dam, where we could venture out onto the frozen surface.

To the south, the tree-lined path ended abruptly in a copse surrounding a forgotten burial mound. I recognized the character for “mountain,” but otherwise didn’t understand the inscription. I took a picture once, to show to the translator, but felt strange about it, and deleted the picture.

Most days, the fog would last all day—but sometimes the sun peaked through and lit up all the dead grass in a soft gold. These were the best days for watching Zoey run around and explore, because the fog just couldn’t mirror her happiness. She would zoom up and down the paths and fields, running in squares, hopping through grasses like a bunny on steroids. She would roll in anything that stank, so I’d have to steer her away from the garbage that the farmers dumped on the side of the road, especially if they threw away a dead chicken or cat. And if she found a real chase and bolted, it might take me twenty minutes to catch up with her. But we were happy, and could set our cares aside awhile.

But at the crossroads, I couldn’t look away from what my life was becoming. It was a wordless thought, a feeling that hung there with the fog, unsettled like the wind, and always drawing me back to it. The crossroads and I were restless.

Zoey and I would meander for a while, this way or that, but we’d always end up at the crossroads. She’d wander sniffing a little ways down one path or another, sniffing around brambles or the ditch, and I’d sit on the cinder block and face the center of the crossroads, listening.

Something waited for me there. I could hear it, in the wind in the trees. And so I waited there, too, for it to reveal itself.

One day, we wandered south, to the burial mound and the cluster of trees. Something felt wrong, like a devil was wandering around. Then I found it—a dead young pig, recently dead, no sign of decay or cause of death. Eyes white over. Dead animals were common on the side of the road, at least the more traversed roads—but they were usually chickens that had been mangled by something. This pig looked like it had been vibrantly alive but an hour ago. Even Zoey, who normally loved to roll around in dead things, sniffed hesitantly at it, unsure what to do. Then we came on another—and another. A slender orange cat, another pig. Three brown birds. I called Zoey to me and we walked calmly away, with no answers.

That night, a particularly manipulative fellow student accosted me, cornered me, threatened me, and said evil words that preyed upon my weaknesses and cut me to the bone. I had no way to bring that student to justice, I had no safety.

I realized my world had become small—my world had been reduced to those walks with the one kind soul around—my world had been reduced to that crossroads, and the ghost there trying to tell me something.

In the morning, I bought the next ticket out of China.

Funny how you can start committed to a thing, an idea, a goal, an ideal that you want to reflect who you are and what’s important to you. Funny how, over time, in your commitment, you can lose sight of your happiness.

My whole goal in traveling, in adventuring, in living a life abroad was to expand my world, not to shrink it to the point where I was at the whim of manipulators. My goal in training full time in martial arts was to attain self-mastery, not be mastered by petty others.

Funny, the circumstances we normalize.

At every crossroads lies a decision. Don’t get stuck there.