In Search of a Guide Never to Be Met

We planned to skip China, but Jenny Xu changed our minds.

We learned of the 26-year-old tour guide through Lynn Topf and Harald Husum, a couple we traveled with in Nepal and Thailand. When they came here last winter, Jenny took them on a bike ride, cooked them lunch in her home and charmed them with her humor. Lynn and Harald’s day with Jenny was one of the high points of their journey.

That made Andrea and me keen to visit China. Armed with the name Jenny Xu (pronounced shoo), we no longer thought the country so overwhelming and impersonal. We could not see it all, but we could venture here and let Jenny show us her corner of the world.

Yangshuo, about 300 miles northwest of Hong Kong, is one of those rare places that defies comparisons. This town of 283,000 on the Li River is surrounded for miles by towering limestone pinnacles blanketed in green. The lush landscape looked so otherworldly and prehistoric that I could picture dinosaurs craning their necks around the spiked rock formations.

We were greeted at the bus station by a crowd of freelance tour guides. We already have a guide, we told them.

Who? several asked, following us down the street.

Jenny Xu, we said. Our answer prompted a flurry of cryptic comments in broken English: “Jenny not here.” “Jenny gone.” “’Big water take Jenny Xu.” When we reached the Hotel Explorer, the receptionist confirmed what we had begun to fear: Jenny was dead.

Four days earlier, heavy rains had turned a small, gentle tributary of the Li into a giant, angry torrent. When the storm let up, Jenny was the only one to lead tourists on a bike ride through the country. Other guides told her to stay in town, that the dirt road along the stream would be flooded. No one said why she insisted on going, but the fact that her husband was jobless and the couple had a 4-year-old daughter to feed may have had something to do with it.

Jenny and her two clients pedaled past rice paddies that stretch out across the earth amid the scenic soaring spires. When they reached a point where water flowed over the road, Jenny said she would go first. She started to push her bike across the stream and was swept away by the current. A British tourist jumped in after her and nearly drowned before the current spit him out within reach of the bank. Jenny’s body was not found.

We wandered the flagstone streets of Yangshuo, trying to learn more from locals about the young woman who had brought us here. It seemed everybody knew and liked her. There was only one Jenny. (Like many here, she had adopted a Western name to make it easy for tourists.) Wherever she went, people waved and called to her. She liked to laugh and crack jokes. Most of all, they recalled that she adored her little girl, how Jenny was always riding the child around on her bike.

“We only spent a day with her, but the time was so special I feel like I have lost a good friend,” Lynn Topf e-mailed me after I told her of Jenny’s death. “The world works in such cruel ways. She just loved to talk about her daughter.”

Lynn added: “This is such a loss for Yangshuo. Jenny really brought a lot of happiness to people.”

In the lobby of our hotel, we met Li Li Mo, one of the guides who tried to talk Jenny out of working that last day. Li Li and Jenny were friends, both raised in the nearby village of Moon Hill. For 60 yuan (about $7.25), Li Li spent half a day taking us to all the places we had planned to see with Jenny.

We rode bikes along dirt lanes that meander through green fields beneath the unearthly peaks. The scenery I had found so stunning on the bus ride into town now made me sad. After a few miles, Li Li stopped pedaling. “There’s Jenny,” she said.

I did not understand her until I noticed we had stopped by a stream. The wild water that had claimed Jenny was still. A farmer tended the edge of an adjacent rice paddy, turning the soil with a hoe. We had nearly pedaled off before I saw the shrine.

A purple blouse--its corners tied to the tops of four reeds--fluttered in the wind. Incense sticks burned in the mud. Half-buried in the earth, a pair of women’s sneakers, their soles facing up.

Before we came to this country, I read that a famine in the late 1950s and early 1960s killed 30 million Chinese. The number is so immense that it is beyond my comprehension. It seems unreal. I don’t know what to call it. But one name, one life, one makeshift memorial on a riverbank--I know the word for that: tragic.

Goodbye, Jenny Xu. Sorry we never met.

NEXT WEEK: On to Yunnan.

Did you miss a Wander Year installment? The entire series since it began in January can be found on The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/travel/wander.