Eugene’s Favorite Pastime

Yesterday afternoon was fun. I took an amazing 4 hour motorcycle ride up an absolutely horrible ‘sand and rock’ road through some of the smallest and most forgotten villages in China.

If it were not for the motorized Chinese tractors, the sporadic passing motorcycle, and the very occasional sight of a Chinese super-mini-minivan taxi, you could pretend that you were still living in the Middle Ages or even at the time of Christ. Badly graded dirt roads, homes crafted of mud, stick, and straw, coal-burning stoves, and farmers weeding and tilling their fields by hand or with oxen; these are just a few things that haven’t changed here for centuries.

After arriving in the village of Jinggou, my original destination for the day, I stopped for a bowl of noodles before looking for another way down off the mountain. The road up was such a pain that I was willing to go anywhere on any road just so I didn’t have to go down the same way I came up. Luckily, some locals informed me of a second road that headed down the mountain going the other direction.

I finished my noodles and then bought a Sprite (how Sprite gets to Jinggou I am really not sure!) to try and kill the taste of some awful condiment they had placed in my food. China has several of these ‘killer condiments’. Its not pepper or salt or anything like that… it actually makes the mouth go numb in a way that is very difficult to describe. Not a fun experience at all. The Sprite helped and I was on my way.

The road down turned out to be about the same quality as the road up, but it was a little closer I think. I had to go up one hill, then down and around a ridge with some houses on top, down another hill towards a huge hilltop mosque, then snake down the final ridge with about a 1,000 ft. drop to the valley floor. All was well until I got about halfway down the final descent. My engine started acting really funny, as only a Chinese motorcycle engine can do. It would act as if it was going to die and I would give it some more gas to try and help her out, only to have the accelerator suddenly ‘let loose’ and send me careening forward at speeds too fast for comfort.

I have to admit that I like to talk out loud to myself when riding a motorcycle in China. I don’t know if I do it for my own comfort or just to pass the time, but I am constantly saying to my motorcycle or to the road,

‘Who made this road anyways?’

‘Who has laid piles of baseball sized rocks right in the middle of the stupid road?!’

‘How come a Chinese highway can NEVER be flat!?’

‘Why won’t you just be a normal motorcycle?’

Yesterday, as I was riding down the mountain with my motorcycle going back and forth between ‘my engine is dying’ and ‘let’s see if we can throw Eugene off the mountain’, I decided to give it a name: the ‘Schizocycle’. It was a perfect fit, and the bike just kept right on as happily as ever.

So, I finally managed to manhandle the Schizocycle to the bottom of the mountain and to the main highway in this region. As I pull up to stop for a rest at the intersection, the bike does finally ‘give up the ghost’ and die. I called my wife on my cell phone and told her that I might be a while, then tried kickstarting the bike. Nothing. Not even an acknowledgement that I was there. I walked the bike up the highway to the right about 75 yards to the first motorcycle repair shop I could find, and explained that the ‘fadongji’ (motor) wouldn’t start. He started checking things here and there, changed out a few little gadgets having to do with the fuel injection and starter (i don’t know the technical terms), then started the bike once to show me that it was fixed. Great! I thought.

As he put everything back together and went to start it one last time, all of a sudden the Schizocycle was at it again. This time, nothing. Not even a peep. Back into hibernation. The guy went back at it, looking and tweaking and trying to find the problem. Finally, a friend of his turned a switch next the fuel tank that is supposed to drain the gas tank, if there is any gas. Nothing. Dry as the Gobi Desert.

Now, let me explain something to you about Chinese motorcycles and their gas tanks. First, there is no ‘gas gauge’ as we know it in the West. The best gauge I have discovered is to shake the bike from side to side and listen for the sound of gas swishing around the tank. The louder the sound of swishing, the more gas. Not a bad technique. I had done this just two days earlier and it seemed that there was plenty of gas in the tank. Well, evidently I was wrong, or the steep road up the mountain had drained the Schizocycle dry.

So, we aren’t sure if the Schizocycle had other problems or if it was just a lack of gas all along that was causing the bike and me so many problems. At any rate, after walking the bike about a quarter-mile farther up the road to the closest gas station and filling her up, she was back in working condition.

This is, let’s see, only the 5th or 6th time I have run out of gas on a Chinese motorcycle. Not bad for not having a gas gauge! If you know them, you can ask Lee, Ishmael, Tauna, or my father Laban about my other running out of gas experiences.

The praise report is that somehow the bike made it down this mountain and only ran out when I made it to the main highway, the repair shop, and the gas station. I could have had a long walk down the mountain with an empty gas tank.

On a much more serious note, I don’t know how we are going to reach the people in all these Chinese Muslim villages. The villages are so numerous, and the people so scattered with houses in every ravine, valley, and on every ridge or hillside, that it seems a nearly impossible task to be able to share with each person and see real, sustainable churches planted among these people. So few of us even speak enough Chinese to be able to share the Gospel. I can speak really good Chinese, but the accents and local dialects are so thick in these backwoods places that at times even I feel like a foreigner ‘fresh off the boat’. I can’t understand them and neither do they understand me. And I speak Chinese!!!

So, please pray for more laborers, both Chinese and foreign. And pray that God would reveal the strategy that will allow all of these people to hear the Gospel and for His Church to be firmly planted in these rugged Chinese hills.