Cali drove, and his mother Isabel rode shotgun, stiff-backed and silent - maybe because her son’s CD of thumping, electronic Latin dance music was vibrating the compact car around her.

“This music doesn’t bother your mother?” I asked Mireya, who sat with me in back.

“No, my mom doesn’t mind at all.”

“It would drive mine up the wall,” I said. I didn’t mention that it was doing that to me. It was nice of Cali to drive, and I thought it would seem ungrateful to complain. I tried to tune out the music.

The Chihuahua desert was as stark as I’ve described it in the novel I’m writing.

Studying the scenery didn’t help. The Chihuahua desert was as stark as I’ve described it in the novel I’m writing: creosote, sand, mesquite, sand, yucca, and sand… miles of prickly drab, topped by cirrostratus-whipped sky. The distant hills struggled to look mountainous, as if the desert wanted to rise to more than it was: a place not to get caught on foot without water.

I’m sending my fictional Lopez family across this forbidding terrain as they flee the Mexican Revolution. The repetitive landscape might tempt anyone to revolution, even if it would change nothing. Death might seem change enough.

I had feared meeting robbers on the highway.

I had feared meeting robbers on the highway. But they would die of boredom waiting for an American like me to come along with payoff-money in her backpack. Even Mexicans were scarce on that lonely road.

We stopped at a short lineup of faded businesses – the only notable crossroads between Juarez and Ascensión – to eat at an unremarkable café. During the previous day’s long drive to her daughter Teresa’s house, Isabel had sighed, “I’m bored.” So now, as we unfolded from the car, I asked her, “Are you bored?”

“Yes.” She laughed.

Inside, we ordered burritos. Mine tasted too salty.

“How is it?” Cali asked.

“Pretty good,” I lied.

He looked skeptical. “It’s a little too salty,” he said.

The frankness of Cali and his mother made me wonder whether all these years that I’ve thought of my Mexican grandmother as a complainer, I might have been misinterpreting a culture gap. Dare I suggest that the desert might breed a culture of complaint?

After lunch, we drove to the nearby military checkpoint, where half a dozen young men in khakis manned a small shack. Such checkpoints have been around since long before Mexico’s drug war. I wondered if there were soldiers posted at this very spot during the Revolution, which had officially started the next day 101 years ago. A soldado asked Cali to open the trunk, but didn’t look inside our bags. Maybe a baby-faced driver, rocky-faced grandmother, and two petite middle-aged women signaled little threat. I imagined a dangerous but lucrative life as an angel-faced arms smuggler.

We passed fields of twiggy bushes dotted with sloppy tufts of cotton.

A couple of hours later, we passed fields of twiggy bushes dotted with sloppy tufts of cotton. A truck passed, cotton bolls pressed against its wood slats, trying to escape. We’d reached Ascensión, the farming town I’ve adopted for a scene in my novel where one character gets beaten and nearly shot. The real Ascensión grabbed my attention in 2010, when hundreds of village vigilantes attacked and killed two teens suspected in a rash of kidnappings. But when we arrived, the town looked too drowsy to kill anyone.

The real Ascensión looked too drowsy to kill anyone.

In the plaza, whitewashed trees rose from just enough trampled grass to keep the dirt from flying away. Men leaned over shoeshine kits and candied apples. Aging cowboys tended to Saturday’s hard work of sitting silent or muttering. A barber in an apron leaned against his shop, waiting for customers or nothing. The silence traveled out to the fields and across the desert, where there was no one to hear it.

The labyrinth of adobe ruins gave the nearby city its name: Casas Grandes, or “Big Houses.”

Another hour of driving took us through the city of Casas Grandes, and onward to the labyrinth of adobe ruins for which the city was named: Casas Grandes means “Great Houses.” Its Indian name is Paquimé, a settlement that thrived from about the tenth century to the fourteenth century. It was one of several large communities built by Anasazi-type people, the “Ancient Ones” usually associated with the American Southwest.

Paquimé may once have formed part of a symbolic circuit. I’ve been to Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly, and Chaco Culture, the major Anasazi ruins of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico: North, West, and East. Paquimé lies to the South. On maps, the four ruins form a cross, perhaps marking the four directions so important to ancient farmers. I felt as if I were completing the last leg of a quest.

Paquimé’s ruins looked melted instead of toppled.

The main difference at this fourth site was that the buildings were made with poured adobe, while those at the other sites were made of stacked rock. So Paquimé’s ruins looked melted instead of toppled. It’s apartment complexes undulated in waves of pale, rose-tinted clay flowing against the warm blue afternoon. They rose higher in the center than at the edges. This earth goddess was returning home: head high, shoulders defeated, hands crawling back into her mother.

“They probably were tiny.” Mireya didn’t laugh - maybe because she’s four-foot-eleven.

Some of the rooms had eroded down to just three feet high. “I picture teeny tiny people living here,” I joked.

“They probably were tiny.” Mireya didn’t laugh – maybe because she’s four-foot-eleven.

In the burial chamber, dividers delineated even smaller compartments where bodies were bundled into fetal positions for their return to the earth.

In the burial chamber, bodies were bundled into fetal positions for their return to the earth.

The Paquimé people might have descended from nomadic tribes who originally traveled across the Bering Sea Land Bridge from Asia during the last ice age. Yet they weren’t nomads themselves, but farmers who lived off the same land for generations. Their ghost town was quieter than Ascensión. Still, I imagined a bustling community: children playing, women hauling water, men working the fields, elders and priests arguing about politics and religion, athletes playing ancient soccer on the rectangular field — a symbolic game of life versus death.

We couldn’t see the river, just its strip of cottonwoods and other trees turning gold-green with the slow turning of desert seasons.

The ruins stood near the Rio Casas Grandes, the river my fictional family follows on their journey. As they prepare to cross the water, they see soldiers at Paquimé. We couldn’t see the river, just its strip of cottonwoods and other trees turning gold-green with the slow turning of desert seasons.

Isabel sat on the Mound of Heroes, where revolutionary forces buried their dead after the Battle of Casas Grandes in 1911.

The Revolution left its mark at Paquimé, on a pile of earth called the Mound of the Heroes. That’s where revolutionary forces buried their dead after the Battle of Casas Grandes in 1911. Isabel sat on the steps to rest, even though it wasn’t allowed. When I saw her coppery Indian face atop the mound, I felt that maybe she was a descendant and had a right to be there.

The dead were still there, lying beneath her, their complaints silenced long ago.

Around noon, an aging sedan rolled up. A skinny, baby-eyed, girl-woman got out, stepped up to the courtyard gate, and gave me a puzzled smile through the bars. She had long, metallic-red hair, mod side-bangs, and fluffy white ankle boots.

“Teresa?” I asked.

She widened her eyes, as if shocked at the very thought. “Yvette.”

“Un momento.” I rushed toward the house to find someone to unlock the gate.

Yvette is Teresa’s daughter, a twenty-year-old psychology student at the University of Ciudad Juárez.

Yvette is Teresa’s daughter, a twenty-year-old psychology student at the University of Ciudad Juárez. She had arrived to take her aunt Mireya, grandmother Isabel, and me to her mom’s house, a forty-minute drive through the gauntlet of Juárez.

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I woke to the safe sounds of a gas burner igniting, a pan shifting, an egg sizzling. It was only then that a rooster started crowing somewhere in Colonia del Carmen. Perhaps he sets his clock by Isabel. I lingered in bed, until I heard Isabel and her daughter Mireya muttering in Spanish and figured it must be time to come out of hiding. I had no clear idea of the hour. My cell phone is my usual watch and I hadn’t brought it, unwilling to pay roaming charges in Mexico, or risk having it stolen on the desperate streets of Juárez.

Every day Isabel washes dozens of towels and smocks for her son Noeh’s hairdressing shop.

When I emerged it was 7:30, and Isabel was hanging laundry in the chilly morning shadows of the courtyard. Every day she washes dozens of towels and smocks for her son Noeh’s hairdressing shop. She then made us a delicious herbal tea from canela (cinnamon) and flor de azahar (orange blossom).

“Good for calming the nerves,” she said, “para la tranquilidad.”

“I need that,” I teased. “I have an energetic personality.”

She smiled and offered her sincere hope that her tea would help.

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As Mireya and Cali had promised, their mother didn’t live far across the river from El Paso, Texas. After Cali drove through downtown Juárez, he spent five minutes winding through dark neighborhoods before turning into Isabel’s driveway. He unlocked a padlocked gate to pull into the courtyard. The gate had been there before Mexico’s drug war. Juárez has long known big-city, border-town dangers.

The inside looked bigger than the outside suggested. In the new addition, an old-fashioned wood stove warmed and cheered the room.

The house wasn’t small, though it might seem poor by American standards: a graying, peeling sprawl of cinderblock, brick, and adobe. “It’s too bad they can’t fix up the outside, isn’t it?” Mireya said. “No one wants anyone to know that they have anything and attract attention.” Juárez sees plenty of robberies these days.

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I woke in terror and opened my eyes to green tubular objects floating toward me — string beans, or slow-motion bullets. I yelled, startling my husband. When I snapped out of it I reassured Dale, “It’s only what always happens.” Meaning: “It’s only because night terrors are my thing, not because I’m traveling to Juárez,” although that was precisely the problem. I closed my eyes and pictured my breasts exploding. I wondered what Dale would do if I were shot. It was too much to contemplate. I asked God to keep me safe, and fell back to sleep.

We took a bus to El Paso’s old-fashioned, brick-and-mortar downtown.

I woke a short time later to catch a flight to El Paso with my neighbor Mireya. Before I left the house, I removed my engagement ring. Mireya, who used to live in Juárez, said, “I’m glad you left your ring at home.” No point attracting robbers with a diamond, especially one with sentimental value. I still wore my wedding band, an instinct from younger days when traveling solo meant constant sexual harassment.

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This Thursday, I’m traveling to a place that should have yellow caution tape around it. According to the news, according to family and friends, according to the U.S. State Department, if I’m looking for danger: non-essential travel to Chihuahua, Mexico is the way to go, especially Ciudad Juárez. When I told my grandfather I was going to Mexico to do research for my historical novel, he shouted a bit, then insisted, “OK, next subject.” But hey, sometimes Grampa shouts when he and Dad are deciding where to grab breakfast on Sunday, so I didn’t take it personally.

According to the U.S. State Department, if I’m looking for danger: non-essential travel to Chihuahua, Mexico is the way to go, especially Ciudad Juárez.

I’ll only be in Juárez for a day and a half of my five-day round-trip from El Paso to Casas Grandes. Don’t tell my husband, but I’m more scared about the twelve hours I’ll be on a Mexican highway. I plan to hide a couple hundred bucks in my shoe, in case I need to pay off highway robbers. Remember when our parents used to say, “That’s highway robbery!” and we thought it was just an expression?

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If you’ve been following my series, Tracing China’s Past, the following is a look at the final day of my first South China research trip for my novel. Tortillas from The Canton Café will be loosely based on the history of my Mexican-Chinese grandmother.

I learned “The Hong Kong Story” at the Hong Kong Museum of History. The elaborate, enormous exhibits included an actual fishing junk.

April 14, 2008 – Hong Kong

Yesterday, on my last full day in China, my translator Zhu Zhu and I learned “The Hong Kong Story” at the Hong Kong Museum of History. Our jaws really did drop in reaction to the elaborate, enormous exhibits, which included: an actual fishing junk, a recreation of a Punti ancestral hall, a bridal sedan chair, an entire Hong Kong store that was in business from the late 19th to late 20th century, and a recreation of a traditional Cantonese teahouse of the sort that would have been popular when my great-grandfather Ma Bing Sum was a young man preparing to leave China for America.

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I believe one way to turn travel into a more fulfilling adventure is to embark on a mission. I met Coloradan Lynette Collins at a book event, where she read an inspiring email she’d written about her recent mission to Honduras. She and her dentist husband had joined the East Chapel Hill Rotary Club of North Carolina for a medical/dental mission. Lynette kindly agreed to let me share her email here. The written content is unaltered, with the exception of a few words of clarification:

One way to turn travel into a more fulfilling adventure is to embark on a mission. A medical/dental mission to Honduras is just one of many possibilities.

LYNETTE’S EMAIL

Hi everyone!

I wanted to let you know that we returned early this morning and we are well… no malaria yet like George Clooney contracted in Sudan! Bozo. He should have taken pills and received his shots like we did!

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On every journey, I pick new things up and leave old things behind: belongings, attitudes, friendships. I love Alaska so much that it wasn’t until after my talk in Bellingham, Washington that I realized something had dislodged inside me on my last visit to the Last Frontier.

I had fun talking with the small but enthusiastic group at Village Books.

I had fun talking with the small but enthusiastic group at Village Books, yet my insides felt chaotic. I wondered why. Part of it was due to something I normally wouldn’t talk about here, but then, I suppose this is the perfect place to talk about it…

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This story ends at the Seattle talk show New Day Northwest, where I appeared right after musician Lukas Nelson, son of Willie Nelson, and a unique talent in his own right. I’d never heard him before and I was impressed:

Lukas Nelson is the son of Willie Nelson, and a unique talent in his own right.

How did I get here?

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