The Shop Below the Mountain

Baitao sits on the Wujiang like a hundred other river towns, tile and concrete and pollarded trees, except that this one was built for a secret. When Project 816 began inside the mountain next door, the town grew to serve tens of thousands of builders who could not say what they built. The factory never opened. The town, being a town, carried on.

I bought water and biscuits in a shop dense with festival stock, gift boxes stacked to the ceiling, red pennants over the aisles, the shopkeeper watching her programme behind the counter. Ordinary as bread. And ordinariness is the finding: the children of the sixty thousand run shops and drive taxis and sell tickets, now, to the very mountain their parents were forbidden to describe.

I photographed myself in the aisle with my basket like any customer, because that is what the visit is on the surface. Under the surface, one street away, is a portal with a red star over it. Tomorrow morning I walk through it. I have been walking toward it, honestly, since Beijing.