Mulberry and Peach by Hualing Nieh

in a snow storm for six months by Donner Lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains. With her letter she encloses the notebook Mulberry kept in Peking in 1949 when the city was under siege by the Communists.
    THE MAN FROM THE IMMIGRATION SERVICE.
    Â 
    Dear Sir:
    I’m heading west on Interstate 80, just leaving Wyoming’s Little America. I found a ride in a camper going to Donner Lake when I was in the gas station diner. The owner of the camper, Mr Smith, just got back from Vietnam. As soon as he got back, he got married. The newlyweds are going to Donner Lake for their honeymoon.
    This is the newest model camper trailer. It’s a moveable house: living room, bedroom, kitchen. It has every kind of electrical appliance imaginable: refrigerator, stove, air conditioner, heater, TV, radio, stereo, vacuum cleaner. The camper is full of second-hand store antiques: Victorian armchairs with torn satin covers, cracked Chinese vases (made in the reign of the Ch’ien-lung Emperor in the Ch’ing Dynasty), filthy sheepskin wine bags from Spain, fuzzily engraved silver platters from Iran, rusty Turkish swords, chipped Indian powder horns. A picture of a naked woman wearing a man’s tophat is painted
on the outside of the camper. She is kneeling with her back turned, head to one side looking over her shoulder, smiling. Her body is mapped in different coloured sections, labelled like a butcher’s chart: ribs, loin, rump, soup, bone, chuck, shank.

    Here I am, Peach, sitting in this honeymoon trailer writing you a letter. Mr Dark, you can see this trailer from far away. I’m sending you a map, too, to show you where I’ve been and where I’m going. If you want to chase me, then come on.
    There are too many roads to explore. There are too many interesting things to tell you: changing scenery, changing climate, different animals (Wyoming’s mountain goats, Utah’s deer, wolves on the plains, foxes, jack rabbits ...), so many different people. The further west you go, the friendlier the people get. In the East, not even little children will pay attention to you, but in the West, even policemen wave! (Mulberry, who is scared to death of the police, would faint at that!) In New York, you’re only another worn-out foreigner, like thousands of others.
    I’ve found out that I’m not the only hitchhiker. All along the highway, many lonely people are standing by the roadside, trying to thumb a ride. Some cars stop for you, some keep right on going. If you catch a driver’s eye, he’ll wave (they always wave at miniskirted girls on motorcycles, or bored children in backseats about to fall asleep), lightly lifting his hand from the steering wheel, waving, then lowering his hand; drivers always wave that way: solemn and self-assured.
    Of course, it’s dangerous. Someone in Colorado said to me, ‘A woman hitchhiking alone! Didn’t you see the newspaper yesterday? Several girls hitchhiking were killed; the murderer cut out their hearts and ate them, and then threw their bodies over a cliff. And then there was the male hitchhiker who disappeared; they found his clothes floating in the river, but they never found his body. There were some young people hitchhiking and . . .’ I’ve heard a lot of those stories.
    I just got a ride in Rock Springs, Wyoming during a blizzard with a very strange man. After I got in the car, he couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Aren’t you afraid of me, uh, Little Woman? Ha, ha, ha!’ (He was even shorter than I am!) When he wasn’t laughing, he was making strange noises: ‘Wu-wu-wu-’, like a yelping coyote. Then he would slide next to me and say, ‘Do you know how porcupines have sex? Uh, Little Woman? Do you know how porcupines have sex? Wu-wu-.’ The only time he stopped laughing was when the road got icy. Then he concentrated on driving. Waves of swirling snow billowed in front of us. His expression became serious.