Guarding The Peace on Guana Island
Paula Van Lare

It's 90 degrees in the shade on a rugged hillside on a tiny Caribbean island and a distinguished ornithologist is smiling at me as he sings in Chinese. It's a song he made up about sitting on one of his favorite rocks in this forest - "I think it is like a paradise there" - and wishing his wife could enjoy it with him. In the two hours I've known him, his accent has become familiar to me, so the high, wavering tones of a Chinese melody come almost as a shock, a reminder of how "foreign" he is, and how far he has come to be on this island.
We had asked Dr. Liao to take us to the bat caves. Not quite halfway up the highest hill on Guana Island, the caves have been hollowed out of an enormous bare rock - at least 40 feet tall and 15 feet across - that juts out beyond the trees and scrub and can be easily seen from a mile away.
"Get Liao to take you," was the resort manager's advice when my husband, Mark, and I asked how to get there. "He's our head gardener. He knows a lot about the island and it would be interesting for you if he's not busy. He's an amazing guy." These soon proved to be understatements.
We could never have made it on our own. "I'll take you up a new trail," Dr. Liao says when we met him after lunch. "Not even marked yet. Just finished last weekend. You will be first guests on this trail."
We set off: two pale desk jockeys clad head to foot in high - tech sun - protective clothing behind a small, wiry, nut - brown scientist - gardener wearing a Guana Island baseball cap, a frayed, stained, red and white striped short - sleeved shirt, dark pants held up with what had once been a dress belt, and dark green sneakers. His watch dangles from thick twine tied to a belt loop. We talk as we stride across the flats behind White Bay Beach, around past the salt pond where the rare flamingoes wade, and past the pasture of the donkey, Jill.
"I think the donkey can help me in my work, to carry things. It does nothing now: not good. I work it out with the hotel." Dr. Liao works every daylight hour and has no intention of slowing down and taking it easy in his "golden years." It is a lifelong habit.
He was born 70 years ago in extreme poverty in a rural village on Hainan Island, in the South China Sea. When he was a boy of eight, the villagers called him "Dung Beetle Boy" because he collected cow dung for fertilizer. At 13 he was a janitor at a small hotel.
It was WWII. One day he saw Japanese soldiers douse a neighboring village with gasoline, light it, and machine - gun people fleeing the flames. During the Chinese Revolution, he was assaulted by Nationalist soldiers for not opening the hotel door quickly enough when they pounded on it in the middle of the night.
In 1945, the teenager changed his name to Wei - ping (pronounced "wee - PING"), which means "safeguard for peace." He had seen too much of human cruelty and destructiveness. "Human beings must live in harmony and friendship," he says now, urgently. It is a passionate idealism built not on naivete, but on horrible experience.
He quit work at the hotel after the incident with the Nationalist soldiers and went to work at a factory that made towels on old shuttle looms. He worked there for two years. "But I am not happy. I say to myself: what can I do here? I not work in factory for rest of my life. I am fifteen, sixteen, years old and I never go to school. I am always asking questions, trying to learn. At the hotel, I ask everybody, try to learn what I can. But it is not enough."
So Liao Wei - ping went to middle school as a janitor. He watched the classes while he swept the hallways. That small but crucial distance between him and the students pained him.
"I ask: why they have money to go to school and I not? Why they have enough to eat and I not? My parents very poor: I work all the time. I have nothing. So I go to principal and I say, 'I want to be your student.' He say, 'What? You crazy! This is middle school, you not go to primary school. You cannot be student here.' I say, 'Please, I want to be your student.' He say, 'How will you eat?' I say, 'I find another job, somehow.' 'No,' he say. But I go back. 'Please, I want to be your student.' 'No.' But I keep asking. Then I get all the teachers with me and they say, 'He wants to learn. Why can he not be student?' Finally, we make deal. I take classes during the day. I guard school at night. After one year, I take test. If I pass test, I stay in school. If I not pass test, I go back to old job."
Wei - ping was not the class favorite. "We sit two students at desk. I sit next to girl - her family sends money from Malaysia for her to go to school. She smell nice, wear nice clothes. I have only one set of clothes. I wash them once a week. I wash them in the river, under the bridge and dry on bushes. I wait under the bridge for them to dry. Once a week. So she say, 'I don't want to sit with him.' But teachers say, 'He is here to learn. We move him to another desk, then to another - it does not make sense. He stays at this desk.'"
Being socially ostracized was the least of his worries. He was constantly exhausted from working all night. "We way out in country and think people try to rob us. So all night I walk around school: boom, boom, boom, on the doors so anyone think: better not rob this place." He kept falling asleep in class. He tried biting his arm and sticking his head under the cold water faucet to keep himself awake, but it did no good. At the end of the year, he failed the test.
But Wei - ping's teachers would not let him fail. He had come too far and worked too hard. They let him take the test again and gave him many of the answers in advance. They agree they would each give him a score of 60: barely passing.
The next year he earned the second highest score in his class. He went on to high school and became president of the student union. He got a scholarship to one of China's most prestigious universities.
He became an ornithologist, a biologist specializing in the study of birds, and a professor at the Guandong Institute of Entomology and at the South China Institute of Endangered Animals. He married and started a family. He led scientific expeditions all over China and became a leading authority on the ecologies of Guandong Province and Hainan Island. He learned Russian and five Chinese dialects. And he grew more and more concerned about the steady disappearance of birds and trees from Hainan.
China was in constant crisis during these years. Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward of 1958 - 1960 attempted to revolutionize both agriculture and industry but instead caused mass starvation. In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. Its real purpose was to eliminate threats to Mao's power from the inner circle of the Communist Party. Its stated purpose was to restore the Party's purity as a mass movement by "re - educating" those who were considered politically unreliable: intellectuals, professionals, and anyone who had ties outside China.
Frenzied teenage Red Guards marched through the streets waving Mao's Little Red Book, pulling people from their homes and jobs for public beatings and humiliation. Some where sent to be re - educated by hard labor in the countryside. Hospitals were emptied of doctors and teachers were driven from schools. The Red Guard replaced them with uneducated proletarians and political zealots.
Professor Liao was spared from abuse, probably because of his impeccably proletarian background. Sitting in his office in Guanzhou City, he carefully propped up the Little Red Book on his desk in front of him. Underneath it was an English dictionary and grammar book that he would study when he was certain he was not being watched. He was teaching himself English.
This quiet defiance was more than a reaction against the assault on science and learning; it sprang from deep anger and grief. His third child, a boy, had just been born in a hospital without doctors. A birth injury had left the baby crippled for life.
He continued his work, publishing papers and writing a book on the relationship between trees, birds, and local climate. Both birds and trees kept disappearing on Hainan.
In 1983, a group of American scientists arrived in Guanzhou. The delegation included Dr. James Lazell, who had recently conducted the first biological survey of Guana Island and concluded that Guana had "the richest fauna [wildlife diversity] of an island of its size in the West Indies - and probably in the world." Talking to Dr. Lazell, Dr. Liao realized that Guana and Hainan were at the same latitude and had many plant and animal species in common. Could there be other similarities as well?
Dr. Lazell suggested he go to Guana and see for himself. He would need a visa, a plane ticket, and permission from the owners of Guana Island, Henry and Gloria Jarecki.
The Jareckis had bought Guana in 1974 from the Bigelows, another American couple who had built a few sturdy cottages and a main dining and meeting house on the northwest ridge above White Bay Beach. The Bigelows established the Guana Island Club: rustic, beautiful, and classy. Members returned year after year. One old - timer said, "We had neither electricity nor running water, but we always dressed for dinner."
The Jareckis brought both electricity and running water to the cottages and made Guana into a public resort but they also were committed to sustaining, preserving, and restoring Guana's ecosystem. They limited guests to a maximum of 30 at one time and kept the guest rooms simple: no TVs, radios, clocks, air conditioning, or Jacuzzis.
In 1984, Dr. Liao arrived in Guana for the first time. It was a busy year on the island. Responding to Dr. Lazell's work, the Jareckis began turning their obscure tropical paradise into a laboratory for regional environmental restoration. They decided that Guana was the best place to begin re - introducing the roseate flamingo, a bird native to the Caribbean that had been almost wiped out in the Virgin Islands. They also released a few breading pairs of the great Iguana pinguis - - known on Guana simply as the 'guana - - a lizard that can grow six feet long and is rarer than the iguanas of Galapagos.
Dr. Liao came to Guana to try to save Guandong and Hainan. He knew there was a symbiotic relationship between certain bird and tree species that influenced the temperature of the ground, which in turn influenced local rainfall. Could the way this relationship worked on Guana help China?
Trees were the crucial link. Trees anchor topsoil and lower the temperature around them. When clouds passed over these cooler areas, their moisture condenses enough to fall as rain. If large numbers of trees die off or are cut, the topsoil around them washes away into streams - or in the case of a small island like Guana - the ocean. Scrub and bushes soon replace the trees, but they do not hold soil or lower local temperatures nearly as well as trees. Rainfall decreases, and when it comes, it washes away more soil. The forest ecosystem - including the birds who nest in the trees and spread the trees' seeds - vanishes and is replaced by a hotter, drier local climate and an eroded landscape. The process often ends when the land becomes a desert.
The theory about how forests can become scrub and eventually desert was well known by the time Dr. Liao arrived on Guana. Dr Liao hoped that Guana would show him precisely which species of birds and trees could be used to reverse the cycle and bring back the forests of Guandong and Hainan. Over the next ten years he would make five trips to Guana staying up to eight months at a time.
After several years of study, Dr. Liao developed a plan to combat erosion in Guandong Province by establishing a network of protected forests. The Chinese government adopted the plan in 1993: "The most important thing I have done with my life," Dr. Liao says. Dr. Liao found that Guana was also eroding, as are many of the Virgin Islands, so he developed a comprehensive plan to increase forest bird and plant species there.
But Hainan troubled him most. Long ignored by the Chinese government and seriously eroded, it was still the place he considered home.
Then he was invited to a conference in Beijing on the state of the environment on Hainan Island. The governor of the island was there, along with Hainan's ministers of agriculture and forestry and a large assembly of officials from the central government of China. He was given half an hour to speak.
"I think, this is my one chance. Never before do I get to talk to these people and probably never after. This is my one chance for my whole life. So I say to them 'You give me thirty minutes to speak. But I cannot say all that needs to be said in thirty minutes. I was born on Hainan Island, raised on Hainan Island, educated on Hainan Island. I study Hainan Island my whole life. I know Hainan Island better, I think, than anyone here. And you cannot stop me talking about how to save Hainan Island.'" Professor Liao lectured the ministers and officials for over two hours.
It was not a politically popular speech. The chairman of his department at the university and his wife told him he was crazy. "I have many troubles after that," Dr. Liao says. "So Henry Jarecki says, come back to Guana."
Dr. Liao continued to shuttle back and forth between China and Guana. He planted hundreds of trees, created trails, and started an organic orchard. He continued to track the health of Guana, along with other scientists the Jareckis invited to the island every October.
The Jareckis paid for his travel and gave him room and board while he was on Guana. But legally they could not pay him. They slipped him $40 a month in spending money. "One day a guest find out and he say 'What? You working so hard for $40 a month? Are you stupid or are you crazy?' I think, this is a good question! Am I stupid or am I crazy? So I go sit on my rock and ask myself, 'Liao, are you stupid or are you crazy?' Finally, I say, 'No, I am not stupid and I am not crazy. Mr. Jarecki is very kind to me. I do important work.'" But his position was becoming too difficult for him and for his family.
In the end, the Jareckis sponsored Dr. Liao as he became an American citizen. On the day he took the oath of citizenship, Dr. Liao received a letter of congratulations from Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a long - time friend of the Jareckis who admires Dr. Liao and commended him on the floor of the Senate in 1994.
"I make a lot more than $40 a month now," Dr. Liao says. "I tell my assistant, work hard every day and in the end it will be good for you, too."
"My life very hard. I have many difficulties. But I enjoy my life."
At first our trail to the bat caves looks like a trail, then it becomes more of a wormhole through the scrub, over rocks and roots, and seemingly straight up sliding dirt. Dr. Liao watches us intently, showing us where the hand - and foot - holds were. He has thought out every step on this path: it has just enough support to get an inexperienced but careful hiker up the hill. This is his backyard - "I know every corner of this island, I think" - and he is utterly at home.
I cannot see this backyard. I see only my husband's feet ahead of mine. My world is reduced to my next step, my next handhold, always up. I become conscious of the way my arms and legs work together, with a kind of automatic skill I haven't used since childhood, when I rambled through the woods near my house. Hot and sweaty I might be now, but as I gain confidence, I begin to feel almost buoyant and absurdly proud of myself - for almost keeping up with a man 30 years older than I am.
We are panting openly as we approach the rock. With a deep sigh, Mark sheds his backpack at the top of the trail. It contains all our snorkeling gear. The beach is our next destination, and somehow taking all that stuff up and down the hill had seemed like a good idea when we began. We catch our breath as Dr. Liao explains the layout.
The bat caves in the rock resemble floors in an apartment building. They are shallow horizontal shelters, one on top of the other, that have been eroded out of the porous rock. There is a rocky gap between the hillside and the lower lip of a cave halfway up the "building." "You will be the first guests to step on this rock," says Dr. Liao, pointing to a strategically - place flat rock. "We just put this here last weekend."
He helps us across, and we practically tiptoe to the edge of the cave. The big rock is reddish - gold from a distance, but the cave is dusty black inside. The ceiling is about six and a half feet high and slopes to the floor only about six feet from the opening. The floor looks like plain dirt. I can't see or smell any bat guano, which strikes me as strange. I'm not sure I see any bats, either.
"Is that it?" Mark and I puzzle over what I first took to be a blotch of soot on the ceiling.
"Yeah. It looks like there's only one." It's a bit anticlimactic. I thought they were supposed to come in swarms of hundreds.
"Do you see any?" Dr. Liao asks.
"Just one," Mark answers in a stage whisper.
"Come. I take you to another cave."
We walk back and follow him farther up the side of the rock to a larger, darker cave. This one is better shaded and seems much deeper, although the ceiling is just as low. Confident that we now know what we are looking for, we step to the edge of the opening. And there they are, almost a dozen, hanging from the dusky stone.
Each bat is about the size of a cigarette pack, dark and soft and utterly defenseless. They cluster together, lined up folded wing to folded wing. There is something tidy about them.
"Go in," Dr. Liao urges. "If they fly out, they will come back. But this time we are struck with the hushed wonder we feel on meeting a friend's newborn baby. We advance slowly, quietly, and not very far.
The bats know we are there. One stirs, swinging back and forth. Suddenly, two seem to explode. A huge black flapping circles above us. Then, just as suddenly, they reappear on the roof, neatly folded and silent, as if sucked back into place. We watch them a few moments longer and then back out quietly.
We decide not to attempt the largest and deepest bat cave. "I am mountaineer," Dr. Liao said. "I go all over China for my work. I go many times to the cave. But hotel says please do not take guests. You go, Liao, but please do not take guests. Better to be safe."
He steps nimbly across the tumbled rocks that lead to another shelf and the entrance to the big cave. There are no handholds and no convenient flat footholds. His eyes beg us to beg him to go to the cave. He is having a great time, like a kid showing off the cool stuff in his backyard.
We look at each other doubtfully. We are prudent, pushing middle age, and we know our limits. To go would be to risk a badly twisted ankle or a worse fall on the rocks below.
"We'd better not," Mark says. "We've seen our bat caves."
"Yes, better to be safe," Dr. Liao agrees, almost primly. He is a little disappointed in us, but not showing it - much. He is a liability lawyer's nightmare, I think, but that is a world away.
"Would you like to go to the top of the rock?"
"Oh, yes!"
When we reach the back of the top of the rock, I see that it is slightly arched: sloped toward its sheer sides with a few scattered depressions about twice the size of a human foot. It rises into a deep, hot, blue sky.
I remind myself that I am not afraid of heights. I concentrate on a few hard inclusions on the smooth surface: hardened lava that got incorporated into the volcanic ash 70 million years ago, when this hillside was formed. I wonder how big the rock was before 70 million years of erosion.
Dr. Liao strolls toward the edge, looking over the valley. Carefully keeping to the flat places, I follow. In front of us half a mile of ocean breeze separates us from the lodge where we started on the opposite hillside. Below stretches the coral sand of the beach, a blinding white line between the aqua - violet Caribbean and the green line of coconut palms and sea grapes. Across the bay, the island of Tortola looks close enough to touch.
"Once I take guests up here and on top is an iguana," says Dr. Liao.
"A big one?"
"Yes."
"Cool!" We're getting younger by the minute.
We each pose for pictures with Dr. Liao. We admire the view and think how good the water will feel. The snorkel gear awaits.
On the way down, Dr. Liao says, "I have something else to show you, a tree. Would you like to see it?" More cool stuff. Of course!
He leads us back down to the base of the rock and around to the other side. On the way he points out a quail dove, one of the rare birds that he is helping to become less rare.
"The tree is like a - - ," he searches for the English word. "Animal with long neckÉ"
"Giraffe!"
We see it now, a clucia tree with a single tall trunk that branches into multiple trunks about five feet off the ground, like an elevated root system. One of these stretches horizontally for several feet behind the main trunk. It looks exactly like a giraffe with its head hidden in leaves and bark instead of spots.
Dr. Liao quickly shimmies up the space between the tree and the base of the bat rock and straddles the back of the giraffe. He looks like he's about to shout "High ho, Silver!" but he doesn't. He just grins at us, swinging his legs.
"I send a picture of myself on this tree to my wife," he says, "and she says, 'You're 70 years old and you're still a little boy!'" He laughs, delighted.
When Liao Wei - ping was a little boy, he was hungry, dirty, and desperately poor. A lifetime later and half a planet away, he is thriving: a vital part of Guana now, no less crucial its continuing recovery than the birds and the trees.
"I enjoy my life," he says.
His special place is not far from here. "It is very peaceful," he says. "I go sit there and I think it is like a paradise. And I am sorry my wife is not here with me." His wife and two children live in San Jose. She came to Guana once, for three days.
"I am poet," he goes on. "They make me dinner at the hotel, so I don't have to do anything at night. I go home and write poetry. And sometimes I make music for my poems, make songs."
"Would you sing me one of your songs?" I ask.
He smiles and begins to sing. I don't understand a word, of course, but there's more to my reaction than that. My ears hardly know how to hear anything so unselfconscious, such a simple sharing of goodwill and friendship and trust. When he is done, we thank him. He seems pleased.
We cut back a different way to retrieve the snorkeling gear. Dr. Liao warns us that there is a spider web across the trail ahead, and sure enough, there it is: a big sturdy web with a big black and yellow spider in the middle. There doesn't seem to be an easy way around it. Dr. Liao picks up a stick and approaches.
"We are sorry to disturb your home," he apologizes to the creature. With a practiced wave of the stick, he wraps up the left end of the web and lays it on a branch to the right of the path. Then he motions us through.
We retreat down the hill to the orchard. He warns us that it is not in good shape right now because there had been less rain this spring than usual. He shows us a withered leaf on a papaya tree. A new fresh water system is being built, but meanwhile, his trees suffer. Watching them, Dr. Liao suffers, too.
"I work until I die," he says, partly to support his crippled son, still back in China, and partly because much remains to be done. Partly, also, because he is Liao Wei - ping.
It is time to go. Dr. Liao is looking around him, at the all work that needs to be done, work that is evident to his eyes if not to ours. We thank him profusely. He turns to his afternoon chores. We head to the beach, exhausted.
We see Dr. Liao again the next evening, at cocktails. This time he is wearing a beautifully embroidered white tunic, white pants, and leather sandals. He has come to give us a copy of two of his poems, written in Chinese and English.
"My English is not very good," he says, apologizing for the translations.
I scan the page over Mark's shoulder. "Not at all," I say, "this is good English." And it is.
"This one," - he points to the second poem - "is about my path. Not my path in the forest, my path in life." He examines our faces, not sure if we understand.
"Yes," we say, almost in unison. "I understand."
"My path in life," he repeats, somewhat reassured.
We left two days later. Dr. Liao came to say goodbye. We shook hands; said we'd stay in touch. Then we got in the Jeep that took us to the boat to the airport on Tortola, to San Juan, and then to home, a suddenly strange place.
Back on Guana Island, Liao Wei - ping watches for rain and guards the peace.

- next -