Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

Seven people die on the roads of China‘s Henan Province every day. When I was teaching there, this led to a lot of jokes about checking the local news to see if the quota had been met before heading into the city. (It took forty minutes to get into rail-hub Zhengzhou from dirty little Dragon Lake.) I wrote Henan Highway Stretch, now up at foam:e 6, after returning from a trip to a hot spring resort about an hour away.

Two images stuck with me from the ride there: one was of mannequins with skin of a plush maroon material in the dusty window of a village store. The other was of a narrow bridge that had arches placed on either end to keep the larger and heavier trucks off. Rather than find alternative routes, however, any truck that could conceivably make it would inch through, even if it meant scraping off the inevitably blue paint or, as in one case, temporarily removing half the load of watermelons.

Henan Highway Stretch is part of my unpublished manuscript, Who Escapes the Yellow River, a partial exploration of present-day China which takes the central provinces, once the seat of power but now largely impoverished, as its starting point.

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Every time I leave Longhu to head into the city of Zhengzhou, there’s an element of risk I did not expect before I arrived here. Cars, buses, and various smaller vehicles swerve within inches of each other with only the slow speed necessitated by the disordered crush of traffic providing any sense of safety.

Today, however, was extraordinary. Trucks with their usual insecure loads of bricks, cardboard, and pigs clogged the freeway with buses and taxis trapped between them. On the way into Zhengzhou, the bus driver had to get out with several passengers and move a concrete barrier in order to proceed along the other side of the road. On the way back, he took the tollway, which thanks to the cost, was virtually empty.

Today was the official date of the dragon boat festival and, along with the other teams that survived yesterday’s heats, we returned to Dragon Lake at nine this morning. After we signed in, however, we spent several hours waiting around while monks and nuns sang and released animals including fish, birds, and snakes. The students who accompanied us told us they were praying for the people affected by the Sichuan earthquake (indeed, some survivors of the earthquake, accompanied by nurses from a local hospital were in attendance) and the Olympics rather for the poet, Qu Yuan, the holiday is supposed to memorialize.

By the time the religious pomp was over, it was already noon, so after some trouble ascertaining the precise start time of our race, we went back to the same hotel where we ate yesterday for lunch (which an event organizer ended up paying for). Finally, at 2 PM, the races began. We competed in the third heat against one professional team and one team of bulked out athletes.

We managed to take five second off our time from yesterday, but in the end it was not enough. We finished third by a matter of inches and were eliminated from competition. The fourth place team was boat lengths behind.

Not bad for our third time in one of these boats, especially given that, despite racing in a lake, we started out completely at sea.

(image by Amy, who did not join us in the boat; more pictures here)

Last year, a few of my students took me to watch the annual races on Dragon Lake here in Longhu. This year was different, however, as the Shengda College Foreign Affairs Office arranged for a dragon boat team consisting entirely of foreign teachers: one drummer, one helmsman, and eight paddlers (including myself). We arrived lakeside around 10:30 AM, where we received our team sign, which declared us “Foreign Friends” (and which naturally lead to various comments about wanting to be Foreign Fiends, Devils, or Enemies instead).

After lunch, we had the opportunity for a few practice rounds in the boat before the official races began. By the time we got out of the water, things did not look good. However, after watching the first few heats, we figured out the standard way to coordinate the drum rhythm with our paddling, and we practiced at a leisurely pace on our way out to the starting line. Soon, we’d lined our blue boat up against the other three in our heat, knowing that only the top two would continue on to the semifinals tomorrow.

The gun went off, and the paddling began. During the race, I could only focus on the beat and the pace of the paddlers around me, trying to keep in sync. After we crossed the finish line and glided to the dock, I turned around to see the first of the other three boats complete the course.

Sixteen teams will return for tomorrow’s two-round competition.