Chapter 36 Haunted Building

It was either do nothing or go without delay, so I spent the next day planning my trip to Golmud.

I had never been to that area before, so I had to ask my friend who worked at a travel agency how to get there. My friend told me that there weren’t any direct flights to Golmud, so I’d have to fly to Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport first and then transfer. I asked him to help me get the plane tickets and book me a room at one of the local hotels. But I couldn’t just up and leave without any notice, so I had him book the flight for two days later.

This time, instead of going grave robbing, I was just planning to visit Golmud’s downtown area and walk around. I figured it wouldn’t take long, so I only packed a few pairs of underwear and some cash in a small backpack.

Fatty returned to Beijing the next day, but I didn’t tell him about my plans—since I decided not to tell anyone, Fatty was no exception.

During these two days, I called Wang Meng and asked him to handle things at the shop for me. I also called my family and gave them some vague explanation that my trip was business related.

Two days later, I got on the plane.

I slept the whole way, arriving in Chengdu feeling well rested. I spent the next few hours on the flight to Golmud thinking about everything. At around eight o’clock that evening, I arrived in the city and headed for the hotel my friend had booked for me, which was known as the “Plateau Inn”.

Golmud was a legendary city. The word golmud in Tibetan meant “the place where rivers densely flow”.⁽¹⁾ Although we flew over the Gobi Desert the whole way, it was easy to imagine what the city had looked like when it was first named. The information I read on the plane said that this city was founded in the very spot where General Mu Shengzhong, the “father of the Qinghai-Tibet Highway”, ordered the Qinghai-Tibet Highway construction troops to pitch their tents.⁽²⁾ The city was only a little more than fifty years old, and was very prosperous in its early years, but it was built in an inconvenient location. As a result, its importance gradually declined and Lhasa took its place.

After getting off the plane, altitude sickness hit me and I passed out for a few seconds by the airport exit, which was very embarrassing. Rather than the exhaustion and weakness I felt when I was in the Qinling Mountains, it was more of a feeling like the world was very far away from me—everything around me started to go black and then I fell.⁽³⁾ Fortunately, I woke up after two or three seconds, and found myself already lying on the ground. But what was even more humiliating was that when I went to buy some medicine, I realized that I was now on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. I wasn’t very familiar with China’s geography, so I didn’t even know that Golmud was on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau! The medicine seller thought that I had gotten on the wrong plane.

I found a Tibetan tea stall by the side of the road, bought a cup of Tibetan tea, took the medicine, and then headed to the hotel my friend had booked for me. After getting settled in, I decided to ignore my headache and went back out to the street to hail a taxi. I showed the driver the address and asked him to take me there.

But after looking at the address, the driver immediately shook his head and said that the place was a small alley that cars couldn’t fit through. The area was full of old houses and the roads were very narrow, so all he could do was drop me off nearby. After that, I’d have to walk around and see if the locals could point me in the right direction.

I quickly agreed, and we set off, soon reaching the old part of the city.

The driver told me that Golmud was a newly-built city, and the roads were generally very wide. The old part of the city had been expanded countless times, but there were many places that were in inconvenient locations, so the roads there remained narrow. Most of the houses were built in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and there were illegal structures everywhere. The address I was headed to was in one of those narrow alleys.

When I got out of the car, it was dark, but I could still see a small sliver of the setting sun on the horizon. I raised my head and looked at the shadowy silhouette of a long row of black, tile-roofed houses, all of which were built in the typical corridor-style of the ‘60s and ‘70s. At that moment, I thought that the old buildings looked especially mysterious.

I entered the area and looked around, immediately realizing that this place couldn’t actually be called a district—it only consisted of a few old streets that survived the numerous expansions the city had gone through. These buildings had no cultural value, and hadn’t been regularly maintained. They all looked like they might crumble away, which made me think they probably wouldn’t be around for much longer. I noticed there weren’t many people here in the old part of the city, only a few hair salons stuck between the houses. The combination of the old wires running between the old houses, the surrounding darkness, and the colorful lights of the hair salons created a strange atmosphere.

I walked around for about two hours, circling the same area enough that the ladies in the hair salons thought that I was up to no good but not brave enough to do anything. At one point, they even opened the salon doors and watched me with amused smiles on their faces. But as the taxi driver said, the layout here was too confusing—many alleys were separated by illegal structures, and there were no street signs. Asking people for directions didn’t help either—several migrant workers passing by all smiled and shook their heads good-naturedly when I asked, probably meaning that they didn’t know where this place was.

I had an address, but I couldn’t find the place. This was the first time I had ever encountered such a thing. I smiled bitterly as I walked, thinking about how ephemeral things in this world were. But just as I was starting to really get confused and disoriented, a pedicab with a yellow top came up behind me, and the driver asked if I wanted a ride. I was tired from all the aimless walking, so I got on and let him show me around.

The driver was a Han Chinese, who came here from the south when he was younger. As soon as he heard my southern accent, he immediately started talking up a storm. He told me that he was from northern Jiangsu, both his first and last names were Yang so people called him Double Yang, and he had been a pedicab driver here for twelve years. Then he asked me where I wanted to go—he knew all the high- and low-end establishments around here with a selection of girls ranging from Han, Tibetan, and Uyghur. If I got the full service package, he offered to give me a twenty percent discount, but if I wasn’t interested in that, he could drive me around instead. There weren’t any interesting places in Golmud itself, but the Gobi Desert surrounding the city had amazing scenery that he was very familiar with.

I silently laughed to myself, thinking that if he wanted a three-character name, he could change his name to Heng Yuanxiang.⁽⁴⁾ But when I heard what he said about knowing the area, I felt my heart thump—if he had been living around here for so many years, and was familiar with most of the streets, then why not ask him if he knew where the address was?

So, I showed him the address and asked if he knew the place.

I didn’t have much hope at first, but as soon as I finished speaking, “Heng Yuanxiang” nodded, said that he knew where it was, and then started peddling. After a few minutes, he brought me to a very remote street.

There were old houses lining both sides of the road, and not a single pedestrian to be seen under the dim street lights. When he pulled the pedicab to a stop, I really started to panic, thinking that he was going to kidnap me. He smiled when he saw the look on my face, and then said that we had arrived at the place I was looking for.

I glanced up and saw that we had stopped in front of a three-story building with a courtyard in front. Under the street lights, only the outer walls could be seen. The whole building itself was dark, as if no one was inside. It kind of looked like it was haunted.

I sat there speechless for a moment before asking the driver what this place was. “This was a sanatorium for the People’s Liberation Army back in the ‘60s,” he said. “It’s been abandoned for a long time.”

<Chapter 35><Table of Contents><Chapter 37>

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TN Notes:

(1) So I googled around and everything indicates that it actually means that in Mongolian, not Tibetan.

(2) Not really finding anything on Mu Shengzhong (1910-1994) in English but here’s the Chinese wiki page. The Qinghai-Tibet Highway was constructed in 1950 and opened to the public in 1954. It starts from Xining in Qinghai Province and ends at Lhasa, Tibet. It’s the highest and longest asphalt road in the world (1,937 km long). More info here.

(3) Homeboy basically got tunnel vision and passed out. Happened to me at a football game a few years ago when it was ungodly hot. I can attest to how embarrassing it is lol. Took out some kid’s giant $20 bucket of popcorn when I went down, woke up surrounded by people, and then got questioned by a cop (they thought I was drunk 😅) before being carted off to the medical room. Moral of the story: stay hydrated and take care of yourselves.  

(4) Gonna defer to the Russian DMBJ translation for this one: The characters 恒源祥 (héng yuán xiáng), can be broken down like so: heng—permanent/unchanging/eternal; yuan—source; xiang—lucky/auspicious/happiness. So, after the driver suggested places where Wu Xie could get laid, Wu Xie decided to give him the name “Eternal Source of Happiness” *wink wink*