A fine yellow dust covered the small city, and the crumbling hills above town were pockmarked by the oval mouths of caves. People still lived in caves in the suburbs of Yan’an, and many of the troglodytes were making a good show of it. There were caves with televisions, refrigerators, karaoke machines. North of Yan’an were villages whose school buildings and government offices had been carved into the dry loess hillsides. It was, in a land of blazing summers and cold winters, a sensible way to live. The countryside in this part of northern China was forbidding and desolate, but it was also eerily beautiful. And it was exactly what I needed after a year in Sichuan; nothing could be more different from Fuling’s green rice terraces and misty rivers. The air in Yan’an was dry and there was a hard blue sky above the dusty hills. I was free that summer. The Peace Corps was going to fund my Chinese study for a month in Xi’an, but that wouldn’t start for two weeks and now I was wandering into northern Shaanxi province.
