Go West

By Peter Hessler/ The New Yorker

he first thing I learned while living abroad is that if you’re lost you have to ask for directions. The last thing I learned is that it’s possible to ship a hundred and forty-three boxes from Beijing across the Pacific Ocean without a final destination. I’ve never been good at planning ahead, and this quality became worse after years in China, where everybody seems to live in the moment. And in a country like that it’s easy to find a moving agent who’s willing to improvise. He went by the English name Wayne, and he wore his hair long, the way Chinese artists often do. When we arranged the contract, Wayne asked my wife, Leslie, if she had any idea where we were going. “It will be a small town, probably in Colorado,” she said. “But we haven’t decided which one.”

“Can you decide within the next few weeks?”

“I think so.”

Wayne explained that the shipping container would be on the ocean for much of a month, and there the address wouldn’t matter. But after it arrived in the U.S. the American partner would need to know where to deliver it by truck. That was Wayne’s deadline: we had to find a home in less than five weeks.

Wayne spent two days in our Beijing apartment, managing the moving crew. It consisted of a dozen men, all dressed in clean blue uniforms and carrying metal box cutters. For each piece of furniture, they sliced big squares of cardboard into a size that custom-fit the object. They’d cut off a piece, fold it neatly around the front legs of a chair, and then do the same for the back and the sides. After the cardboard was all taped together, the result looked like a chair-shaped box. They created boxes around tables, desks, shelves, stools, and couches. They made something that looked like a giant cardboard bed. An antique three-tiered opium table was perfectly enclosed, layer by layer. It was like watching a team of sculptors work backward, until every object we owned had been converted into a larger, rougher version of itself.

A couple of times, I tried to engage the workers in conversation, but their responses were brief and uninviting. They did not allow us to help. If I picked up an object, somebody immediately grabbed it away, smiling and thanking me profusely. “It’s better if they do it themselves,” Wayne said, and he was right. They packed the shipping container as tight as a jigsaw puzzle, and a truck carted it off into the night. Suddenly I felt wonderful: all our possessions were gone; we could live anywhere we wished. Later that month, Leslie and I set off to find a new home.

Neither of us had much experience as adults in the United States. I had left after college, to attend graduate school in England, and then I travelled to China; before I knew it I had been gone for a decade and a half. I had never held an American job, or owned an American house, or even rented an American apartment. The last time I bought a car, I filled it with leaded gas. My parents still lived in the Missouri town where I grew up, but otherwise nothing tied me to any particular part of the country. Leslie had even fewer American roots: she had been born and brought up in New York, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and she had made her career as a writer in Shanghai and Beijing.

But during my years in China I had spent a lot of time thinking about the United States. Most Chinese were intensely curious about foreign life, and they liked to ask certain questions. What time is it there? How many children are you allowed to have? How much is a plane ticket back? People tended to have extreme views of the U.S., both positive and negative, and they became fixated on fantastic details that they had heard. Are American farmers so rich that they use airplanes to plant their crops? Is it true that when elderly parents eat with their adult children the kids give them a bill for the meal, because they aren’t as close as Chinese families? When I taught at a college, a student named Sean wrote in an essay:

I know that persons in America can possess guns from some books and films. I don’t know whether it is true. . . . I know that beggars must have bulletproof vest from a book. Is it true? There is a saying about America. If you want to go to heaven, go to America; if you want to go to hell, go to America.

It was hard to respond to such combinations of truth and exaggeration. In the early years, it frustrated me, because without any context I couldn’t convey a more nuanced perspective. But eventually I realized that the conversations weren’t strictly about me, or even about my home country. In China, I came to think of the United States as essentially imaginary: it was always being created in people’s minds, and in that sense it was more personal for them than it was for me. The questions reflected Chinese interests, dreams, and fears—even when people discussed America, the conversation was partly about their home.

The longer I stayed overseas, the more I felt something similar. China became my frame of reference; I tended to think of the U.S. mostly in contrast to what I knew in Asia. And my conception of American life became increasingly open-ended. It was hard to envision myself in any particular place, but that also meant that I could live pretty much anywhere. When Leslie and I decided to leave Beijing, both of us had finished researching books, so our work was portable. We didn’t have jobs or children, and we didn’t need a long-term home; eventually, we’d probably end up overseas again. And, after years of standing out as a foreigner in urban China, I liked the idea of rural solitude and anonymity. A small town in the Rocky Mountains where nobody knew us—that was our own Chinese version of the American Dream.

We bought a used Toyota, put a cooler in the back, and followed two-lane highways around Colorado. It was late March and the snow was still deep in the mountains; some of the high passes were closed. At night, we stayed in cheap hotels, and during the day we talked to real-estate agents, who rarely had much to show us. We hadn’t realized that middle-class Americans almost never rent their houses; this was before the subprime-mortgage crash and it was easy to buy. In the town of Leadville, an old silver-mining community with a population of less than three thousand, I asked an agent if she had anything for rent. “Do you qualify for HUD?” she asked. I said I was pretty sure we didn’t; she suggested a mobile home. The only house we saw for rent was a white prefab situated about twenty feet from Highway 24. It was occupied by a pack of molybdenum miners, but the real-estate agent assured us that the men would be moving out soon; she could put us on a waiting list. Leadville was preparing to open up some mines again, largely because of demand from China. We took a glance at the house and kept driving.

I liked the big bright landscapes, the way the mountains caught the alpenglow in late afternoon, and I liked the heavy-named towns that sat in the valleys: Granite, Bedrock, Sawpit, Crested Butte. In southwestern Colorado, we followed the Uncompahgre River for miles; just seeing that name on a sign made me happy. Not far from the river, a man showed us a brand-new house that sat on an alkali flat. The white soil was as dazzling as broken glass; the thought of writing a book there gave me a headache. Whenever we did find houses for rent, they were usually misfits, with design flaws or poor locations. Sometimes I sensed that we had arrived in the wake of a disaster. Divorces, deaths, bankruptcies—I imagined that was why big houses skidded onto the rental market in small towns.

In a place called Ridgway, we phoned a real-estate agency and happened to talk with a young office manager who had just broken up with her boyfriend. He had left her with the lease on a brand-new house; she hoped to move to Denver and start over. The place was beautiful: high on a mesa, a thousand feet above the Uncompahgre River. From the back, we couldn’t see any other houses; the view ran clear across a piñon forest to the fluted walls of the Cimarron Range. Ridgway isn’t far from the borders with Utah and New Mexico, and it’s home to a little more than seven hundred people. There’s only one stoplight in the county. It was hard to imagine anyplace more different from Beijing, and we agreed on the spot to a one-year lease.

We bought a futon and some lawn furniture, and camped out on the floor to wait for our shipping container. One afternoon, we drove into the town of Montrose, where we found a couple of wooden bookshelves at an antique market. The dealer agreed to split the delivery fee: we’d pay the first ten dollars and she’d cover the rest. She telephoned her son, who owned a pickup truck. “Twenty-five?” I heard her say. “That’s too much. How about twenty?” My Chinese students would have appreciated that detail—less than a month back in the States and already I’d witnessed an elderly parent negotiating with her adult child about money.

In the empty house, I signed up for telephone service. When I asked for an unlisted number, the phone-company representative said that there would be an extra fee of two dollars per month. For a moment, I weighed my cheapness against the desire for anonymity. “Put it under my wife’s name, instead,” I said. “Her name is Leslie Chang.”

I figured that hers was a relatively common name, but I hadn’t thought about how the phone-book listing would appear, with me attached: “Chang Peter and Leslie.” Immediately the mail began to arrive:

Dear Mr. Peter Chang,

You love saving money. Better yet, you love saving money and getting better service. So why haven’t you switched phone companies?

Leslie and I almost never got anything. Peter Chang was the one, and in the early months he received much of our mail. Credit-card and phone companies sent flyers, as did car dealerships. Peter Chang received advertisements in Korean Hangul and in traditional Chinese characters. People called at night speaking exotic languages. The Koreans hung up as soon as they realized we didn’t understand, but we always tried to keep Chinese telemarketers on the line, to figure out where they were calling from. Who trolled through rural-Colorado phone listings in search of Asian names?

For the most part, the callers seemed to be lonely individuals selling long-distance phone cards. But every once in a while a Chinese telemarketer offered something different, and one evening Leslie answered the phone and heard a woman give a pitch for a vacation spot in Wai Er Ming. I listened in, although at first neither of us could make sense of the name. “Wai Er Ming?” Leslie said. “Where is that?”

The caller explained that Wai Er Ming is in the American West, land of cowboys and mountains; the air is fresh and clean. It was like staring at a puzzle for a few seconds until a pattern suddenly becomes obvious, and you can’t believe you ever missed it: Wy O Ming.

“Where are you calling from?” Leslie asked. “Are you from the mainland?”

There was a pause. “Our company is from Hong Kong. But we do tours in Wai Er Ming.”

“I don’t believe you’re a Hong Kong company,” Leslie said. “A Hong Kong company wouldn’t call random people like this. Also, you don’t sound like somebody from Hong Kong. Where on the mainland are you from?”

The woman’s voice, on the phone, became very small. “I’m supposed to say we’re from Hong Kong,” she said. “I can’t tell you anything else.” Afterward, I sometimes found myself repeating the word, just to hear the sound. It had a certain magic, half strange and half familiar: Wai Er Ming, Wai Er Ming, Wai Er Ming.

The shipping container arrived late. The Denver movers had scheduled delivery for noon on a Tuesday, but their truck got stuck in snow on Monarch Pass, and then they suffered a mechanical failure. In our driveway, they backed into a piñon tree and knocked off a few limbs. When the driver realized that he didn’t have the key to the container’s Chinese-customs lock, he grabbed a heavy decoupling tool. He grinned and said, “Give a redneck something to hit with and he’ll get it done.”

American friends who had moved back from Beijing had warned us about the feeling you get when your possessions arrive. It’s similar to taking a new baby home from the hospital: all at once you’re on your own. In Ridgway, Wayne’s dozen Chinese movers became two Americans named James and Greg. They did not wear uniforms, and they did not move efficiently. They did not protest when Leslie and I offered to help. After James successfully smashed the customs lock, both of them stood in awed silence before the open container.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” James said finally. “I’ll have to tell people about this.”

During the rest of the afternoon, while we hauled boxes inside, James and Greg periodically examined the Chinese handiwork. At one point, I found both of them crouched in the driveway, studying a table that was completely enclosed in cardboard. “They put us to shame,” James said, shaking his head. “This is amazing.”

Each box had a number and a label, and James called them out as he went, so that Leslie could check off everything on a list. Between boxes, he carried on a running commentary about his Louisiana upbringing, the seven children he and his wife were homeschooling, and the things he had learned in his former life as a long-distance trucker. He said that he spent thousands of dollars every year on books, and he told stories about all kinds of topics: trucker fuelling strategies, tree nurseries, chicken farms. “They got them on so many drugs nowadays,” he said. “I had a friend who worked at a chicken plant, and from the time they’re born to the time they’re processed it takes eighteen days. Eighteen days! It used to take months. There was one woman who worked there injecting the chickens, and she’d prick herself occasionally by mistake. She got lupus and there was hair growing out of her face. That’s why I don’t eat chickens anymore. This is box No. 94—office files.”

The last thing to be unpacked was our bed, which Leslie had found years ago in a Shanghai antique market. It had a canopy that consisted of eighteen separate pieces, all carved from elm wood, with intricate scrollwork depicting flowers, human figures, and Buddhist icons. The canopy had no screws, no bolts—only wooden notches and fittings. It had to be assembled in a specific order. We began with one post and worked our way clockwise, with each person supporting a side until the whole thing balanced perfectly. Night had fallen, and the darkness gave the scene a certain intimacy: Leslie and me, James and Greg, all of us together on an early-Republican-era canopy bed, surrounded by carved lotus flowers and bodhisattvas and interlocking infinity symbols. After the canopy stood erect in all its glory, James spent a minute studying the fittings. “It’s so well designed!” he said. They had six hours of mountain driving back to Denver, but James was cheerful to the end. He shook my hand and wished me good luck; he seemed happy to have another story for the road.

It wasn’t until I moved back to the States that I realized how much I had missed the way Americans talk, especially in small towns. I liked the pacing of their stories, and I liked being able to pick up the nuances of the language. Once when I visited my parents in Missouri, I took a shuttle bus from the airport, and the driver was a South Carolinian with a huge white beard that tumbled across his chest like a snowdrift. I told him I had been in China until recently.

“Do you speak mandolin?” he asked.

My accent doesn’t sound that nice, but I said yes anyway.

“I read a statistic somewhere,” he said. “I don’t know where, but it said the Chinese could march four abreast into the ocean for all eternity.”

The driver talked non-stop for a hundred and twenty miles. He told stories about his ex-wife, and he described his studies of Biblical Hebrew; he had strong opinions about the Book of Daniel. Nowadays, he lived in a trailer court, but during the nineteen-sixties he had travelled to France, Spain, Greece, and Turkey. “I had a rich uncle who took me there.”

“Wow, that must have been nice,” I said. “What did your uncle do?”

“That was Uncle Sam.”

People in China never talked like that. They didn’t like to be the center of attention, and they took little pleasure in narrative. They rarely lingered on interesting details. It wasn’t an issue of wanting to be quiet; in fact, most Chinese could talk your ear off about things like food and money and weather, and they loved to ask foreigners questions. But they avoided personal topics, and as a writer I learned that it could take months before an interview subject opened up. Probably it was natural in a culture where people live in such close contact, and where everything revolves around the family or some other group.

And a Chinese person with options would never choose to live in a place like southwestern Colorado. The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there’s no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal. When I had DirecTV installed, a technician came over to drill a hole in the side of the house. He commented that he had just moved to a town called Delta, and I asked him what it was like.

“Quiet,” he said. “Not much going on in Delta.”

“Why did you move there?”

He looked up from the drill. He was a skinny man in his twenties, with blue-line tattoos that ran along his arms like wayward veins. “I had a two-month-old son who died,” he said slowly. “That was in Denver, and I just had to get out. So I moved to Delta.”

It took me a moment to respond. “I’m really sorry about that,” I said. “It sounds awful.”

I didn’t know what else to say; in the States, I often had trouble responding to personal stories. But soon I realized that it didn’t make much difference what I said. Many Americans were great talkers, but they didn’t like to listen. If I told somebody in a small town that I had lived overseas for fifteen years, the initial response was invariably the same: “Were you in the military?” After that, people had few questions. Leslie and I learned that the most effective way to kill our end of a conversation was to say that we were writers who had lived in China for more than a decade.

At times, the lack of curiosity depressed me. I remembered all those questions in China, where even uneducated people wanted to hear something about the outside world, and I wondered why Americans weren’t the same. But it was also true that many Chinese had impressed me as virtually uninterested in themselves or their communities. That was one of the main contrasts with Americans, who constantly created stories about themselves and the places where they lived. In a small town, people asked very little of an outsider—really, all you had to do was listen.

Sometimes that role made me feel like a foreigner or an impostor, but there was something comforting about the sense of narrative. It had defined my culture since childhood: even if I was no longer part of the local story, I still understood the way people told it. I liked listening, and I found myself drawn to community events where I could sit in the crowd and watch. Leslie and I went to rodeos and quarter-horse races, where local ranchers competed along with professionals. In the autumn, we attended football games at nearby high schools. We followed tiny Olathe High through a state-championship season, and we went to the victory parade that was held on Olathe’s main street. The players rode atop fire trucks to the end of the road, where they did a U-turn and came back, so everybody in town had a chance to cheer twice.

One weekend in June, we attended a religious rally called “Cowboy Up for Christ.” It was held at the start of rodeo season, and the organizers gave out free copies of “The Way for Cowboys,” which featured Christian-themed tales from competitive rodeo riders. One speaker was a country musician named Morris Mott, who talked about growing up in a dysfunctional family. “When I was sixteen, my personal history met up with His story, the story of Jesus Christ,” he said. He explained how he had created a different life for himself, and he said that his faith had helped him cope with the near-death of his child. Mott had a slow, confident way of talking, and the crowd of two hundred fell silent. “An individual with a story is on a higher ground than an individual with an argument,” Mott said. “Your story is a powerful weapon you can use, not only against your enemies but also to bring other people into the light.”

In a span of six months I lost thirty pounds. Many years earlier, I had been a competitive long-distance runner, but in Beijing, where the air is badly polluted, I let the hobby go. I picked it up again in Ridgway, where my home was at an elevation of eight thousand feet, with trails heading off in all directions across the mesa. On runs, I looked for deer and elk and turkeys; twice I saw mountain lions. I was surprised to find that I could still run eight or nine miles at a stretch, and soon a lightness returned to my legs.

I came to think of this as Peter Chang’s healthy period. By now, his mail was dominated by glossy Chinese flyers for ginseng products—Prince Gold Heart Formula, Pure American Ginseng Powder—all of them coming from a company called Prince of Peace Enterprises, in Wausau, Wisconsin. Peter Chang also got regular mailings from Korean Air. A company called Hellman Motors sent a check for two thousand and seventy-eight dollars, along with a letter:

Attention Peter Chang:

This Official Notice confirms that you have been selected as a GUARANTEED WINNER in a marketing test for the major automobile companies. This is NOT a joke, prank or gimmick.

I liked it when people pleaded with Peter Chang to accept their money. I imagined him as a lone wolf, a figure of international mystery, and I enjoyed taking his calls. One evening, the phone rang just as Leslie and I were returning from dinner in town.

“It’s for Peter Chang,” Leslie said, after she answered it. “It’s a woman. I think she says she’s from the National Light Bulb Association.”

“What the hell is the National Light Bulb Association?”

“How should I know? Should I just hang up?”

But I decided to hear this one out. The connection was poor, and the woman said something about a one-question poll that would follow a recorded message from Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the association. The message began with an angry voice, and I thought, Man, this French guy seems awfully worked up about light bulbs. Then it dawned on me that we had confused the words “light bulb” with “rifle.” The N.R.A. was doing a push poll, working the wilds of southwestern Colorado by phone.

LaPierre explained that the United Nations was trying to pass the strictest gun-control treaty in history. Third World dictators were urging the law forward; it was also supported by liberal American officials and the media élite. After the message, a man got on the phone.

“Mr. Chang,” he said, “what’s your opinion about these Third World dictators and Hillary Clinton trying to ban firearms in the United States?”

“I’m in favor of it.”

“You’re in favor of what?”

“I’m in favor of them banning guns,” I said. “You have to understand, I’m from one of those Third World dictatorships. I’m from China. I don’t think people should have too much freedom.”

There was a long pause. “Well,” he said, “I appreciate your honesty.”

“What did you think I was going to say? If you call anybody named Chang, he’s going to say the same thing. We all feel the same way about this. We’re all coming from China, and we don’t want guns.”

“O.K.,” he said. “I understand what you’re saying.”

“We want a more powerful government, like we have in China.”

“Well,” he said politely, “thanks for answering.” He lingered on the line; he didn’t seem to know how to disengage himself. At last, I said goodbye and hung up, and Peter Chang took the rest of the night off.

After nearly nine months in the United States, Leslie and I took a road trip to Las Vegas. It seemed like the final act of our homecoming, and we arrived in time for the city’s combined marathon and half marathon. Having attended so many rodeos and football games, I decided to make my own return to athletic competition, so I signed up for the half marathon.

The race began before dawn, in front of the Mandalay Bay resort, and the mob of seventeen thousand runners headed straight up the Las Vegas Strip. In a rush, we passed the neon-lit Luxor, the Tropicana, and the MGM Grand, and some of the all-night gamblers came outside to cheer. After a couple of miles, I slipped into a faster rhythm; it felt easy, because I had been training at altitude. Soon the race thinned out, and by mile six I led a pack of a few runners, with the next group about fifty yards ahead.

There were professionals in the marathon, Africans and Europeans chasing a forty-five-thousand-dollar prize, and they had gone out fast. I knew that somewhere around six miles the half marathoners were supposed to turn off, but I couldn’t see anybody up ahead making the break. Finally, I shouted at a bystander in a race-volunteer shirt, “Where are we supposed to turn for the half?”

“Right here,” he said.

I skidded to a stop. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re supposed to go up that street.”

The volunteer hadn’t been paying attention; he was simply watching the runners go by. But I followed his directions, and not far ahead of me a policeman pulled away from the curb and rolled his lights. And that was when I realized it was the pace car, and I was the leader, and there were more than eight thousand runners following me.

Even when I was young, I had never been good enough to lead a big race. Occasionally, I had won events whose entrants numbered in the hundreds, but anything larger was guaranteed to have athletes who were much better than me. And I knew that today the faster runners were still out there; they had simply missed the turn. If they figured it out quickly, and got back to the course, they’d chase me down without any problem. I promised myself not to look back until mile ten.

In China, I had often dreamed of silence and solitude, but there’s nothing quite like the loneliness of leading a race. Usually, the sport feels visual; you pick out landmarks and athletes up ahead, using them as goals. But when you’re in front it’s all about sound: your breathing becomes distinct, and so does the rhythm of your stride. You listen for footsteps behind you. When a bystander cheers and then goes silent, you count the seconds until his voice sounds for the next runner.

And I had never imagined how quiet Las Vegas could be. The race continued a few blocks west of the Strip, where the bright lights disappeared and the neighborhood became seedy; I ran by the Las Vegas Community Corrections Center and the Erotic Heritage Museum. I saw a homeless man pushing a shopping cart. He grinned, and shouted, “Hey, dude, you’re winning!” Rock bands had set up stages along the course, and the musicians were still tuning their instruments. Often, they didn’t notice me until I was almost past, and they’d try to play something quickly for my benefit. I’d hear the music behind me, growing fainter, until once again I was alone with my footsteps and my breathing.

At the ten-mile mark, I looked back and saw nobody. Soon I was on Frank Sinatra Boulevard, running past the service entrances of the big casinos, and then I reached the finish line, in front of the Mandalay Bay. A crowd cheered as I broke the tape; the race director shook my hand. Fifteen minutes later, a Las Vegas television station conducted a live interview with me, along with the winner of the women’s race and the first Elvis to finish—a hundred and fifty competitors had entered the race dressed as Elvis. The fastest one stood proudly with me on TV, dressed in a white Lycra bodysuit with paste-on sideburns, sweating like the King in concert.

Leslie and I were ushered inside a special V.I.P. tent, where we helped ourselves to the breakfast buffet while waiting for the professionals to finish the marathon. One by one, they limped in, mostly Kenyans and Ethiopians with big thighs and whippet-thin calves. They had the haunted look that comes at the end of a long race: gaunt cheeks, empty stares. In the buffet line, a Russian runner looked at me quizzically. “Did you run the race?” she said.

I told her I had won the half marathon.

“You don’t look very tired,” she said. “You don’t look like you ran at all.”

She was right—I obviously didn’t belong with these athletes. Mine was by far the slowest winning time in the fourteen-year history of the race, and I learned that the lost leaders hadn’t realized their mistake until they were already miles off course. (In true Vegas style, a limo took them to the finish line.) The race director assured me that there would be an awards ceremony, but, as the morning dragged on, I felt more and more like an impostor sitting in the V.I.P. tent. Finally, Leslie and I grabbed a couple of croissants for the road and slipped out.

I never received an award for the race. I suppose it was in the spirit of Peter Chang—he walked away from prizes, and he also knew, like any foreigner, that you have to ask directions if you get lost. In any case, the experience was what mattered most. I had run alone down Frank Sinatra Boulevard, and I had appeared on Las Vegas television. I had shaken the sweaty hand of Elvis himself. Finally I was home, and I had a story to tell; in America that was all you’d ever need.