OUT OF EDEN WALK

We were crossing and recrossing the route of the Long March, the historic 1930s retreat undertaken by tens of thousands of Mao’s communists to escape destruction at the hands of the nationalists during the Chinese civil war. The fleeing communist army, which included immense columns of women and children, dwindled from about 100,000 to around 8,000 through hunger, disease, and military battles. Back then, refugees, ragtag militias, and bandits would have been walking the roads. Eventually, Mao regrouped of course.

Today, nobody walks the roads. It was just my colleague, a business entrepreneur from Shanghai named Becky Lin, and me.

We climbed Sichuan hills that were green as young bamboo sprouts, green as old brass. Quadrangular fields of chilies grew in the valleys. The village shops sold packaged junk food. The villages all looked identical because they’d been rebuilt a decade ago under the same economic programs. Boxy two-story brick houses painted white. Cell phone towers. Concrete roads unspooling everywhere. There wasn’t much remembering. Nobody spoke of the Long March anymore. And yet the sight of a work-dulled scythe, propped next to a shoulder basket made of hand-woven rattan, could transport you back to the Neolithic in a footstep.