Hello! I’m heading out in a few minutes to go to Xiamen, a small but apparently very beautiful city a couple hundred miles south of Shanghai on the coast (it’s actually an island). You may have heard of Xiamen by its old name, Amoy. It was a treaty port, and still has a lot of European architecture and stuff. I’m excited. I’ll be there until Monday night (going with my CIEE teacher Huang Laoshi and the other gappers). I will definitely let you know how the trip goes!
Because of my imminent departure, I have to keep this update brief and to the point. This past week has been especially busy, with lots of fun happenings. Saturday evening we had our first gathering of all the host families and Americans…we wrapped dumplings and ate a lot of yummy food. It was fun to get to see everyone else’s host parents and siblings, and see how people interacted. I think I mentioned before that we eat dinner every night at this community center type place, where there are mah jiang rooms, a badminton court (aka squash court), and a couple function rooms. It turns out that we eat there because my family either owns the center, has a major stake in it, or is in charge of managing it, or all three (still not sure of the details). The fact that it took me more than a month to figure this out is pretty sad…gap year state of mind, I guess? But that community center was where the host family party was, and my host parents sort of played host, making sure everything was running smoothly. Judy is definitely the most adorable of the host siblings (it’s true…seriously), and this impression was reinforced when she walked into the room (she came late because she had English lessons) and every single host mother clustered around her, literally stroking her and asking her questions and stuff. It was hilarious (for me). The Chinese are sooo good at doting on children. They love children. I am so jealous of little Chinese kids (although life gets pretty stressful pretty quickly…these kids’ lives are absolutely DOMINATED by the exams they have to take to get into middle and high school. Even a 10 year old like Judy has a HUGE amount of pressure to do well).
Sunday I cooked dinner for my host family! I made mashed potatoes and marinated/sautéed chicken and spinach and served a baguette (they thought that was pretty weird. In Judy’s words: “It’s too long!”). They seemed to like the food, although they added hot peppers to the mashed potatoes (haha). It was fun, and a nice way for me to feel useful and like I could give them/do something for them that would show my appreciation for how well they’ve treated me.
Yesterday was a very eventful day. Last week, I ate in the cafeteria (the day after I wrote my last update saying I would do that! Yay sticking to goals?) and made the acquaintance of a very nice Chinese university student, Jenny (her English name). She told me about a party for foreign and Chinese students, where the Chinese students speak English and the foreign students speak Chinese. So that party was on Wednesday (yesterday) and it was super fun! There were Chinese snacks and games…it was a little crazy because there were so many people, but also fun because of that. We were sitting at tables and I was called on by the party MCs to introduce my table in Chinese. I think I acquitted myself well (Jenny afterwards said my Chinese was “fluent”…HAHAHA big joke. But it made me feel good anyway). So now I have Jenny as a Chinese friend (we’ve been chatting on Skype, me in Chinese, her in English…she’s very interesting). And I exchanged contact information with the girls at my table (the Chinese students at the party were almost all girls), so next week I’ll hopefully hang out with some of them! Very excited!
After the bilingual party, I headed into the city to go to a roundtable discussion led by/with Charlie McElwee, a major (if not the major) environmental lawyer in China. He is an expert on Chinese environmental law, and is also incredibly well-informed on the Copenhagen meeting this December. Elizabeth got me in; I was SO out of my league…this was a gathering of thinkers and do-ers in Shanghai, there to exchange ideas and thoughts about how China and the rest of the world, particularly the US, can collaborate on finding solutions to climate change. I could write pages and pages on this meeting, but suffice it to say that it was fascinating. The group was a mix of entrepreneurs, environmental consultants, and representatives of NGOs/activist groups (the discussion was convened by JUCCCE, the organization Elizabeth works for). If I had to pick a main idea for this meeting, it would be that Charlie doesn’t really think that Copenhagen will lead to much progress on the “numbers” side of things (ie finding specific targets/goals and a way to “force” countries to meet them), but he does think there’s still hope for the development of ideas and more abstract commitments. I’m going to write a whole post on Copenhagen/China and the US and the environment sometime in the next couple weeks because I have SO much to say.
Last night at about 10 pm, I had the most bizarre experience/moment of my time in China. My host dad came into my room and handed me a letter hand-written in Chinese and a slip of paper. The paper said “Uncle:…” followed by a telephone number. He then explained that when I got to Xiamen I should call the number and arrange to meet with “Uncle” and give him the letter. But make sure not to tell Uncle anything about myself, and just tell him I’m a friend of my host dad’s, a tourist passing through Xiamen, not that I’m living with them. Uncle apparently owes my host dad a lot of money (according to the letter, 170,000 yuan…so like $25,000!). And I was supposed to shake him down….? I was SO freaked out/confused/ tickled by this request. Is my host dad a secret Chinese gangster/master of the underworld? Was I about to embark on a life of crime? Would I meet my end in a dark alleyway in Xiamen? There were a couple hours of uncertainty there, as I tried to figure out how to tell my host dad that I couldn’t/wouldn’t be his debt collector, and as I pondered what the heck was going on. Luckily, when I woke up this morning my host dad took the letter and slip of paper back and said that he’d just send Uncle an email.
Let’s just absorb that last paragraph for a minute.
Yeah. That actually happened.
I have a lot to say about that little episode as well, and what I think it says about the difference between Chinese and American attitudes toward money/money matters, and what it says about lending in China. My teacher Huang Laoshi says it’s very common for family members/close friends to lend each other money because getting money from banks is really hard, and Uncle is probably either a distant family member or a close friend. Which is reassuring, but doesn’t explain why I couldn’t tell him who I was…and doesn’t explain why my host dad would send an 18 year old who doesn’t speak Chinese very well after someone who owes him so much money.
OK I’ve run out the clock. Feel free to comment/send me an email (Abigail.bok@gmail.com) if you have any specific questions/comments/thoughts. Love/peace.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Half Time
Today is October 20th, the half-way point of my time in China. WOAH. Time has flown by, and I know the next seven weeks will also go by before I know it. I am both sad that I’m halfway through this adventure, and satisfied that I’m here for an appropriate amount of time. When we arrived, as part of our orientation we reviewed and discussed the stages of common reactions to being immersed in a foreign culture. The first stage was the “honeymoon” stage, followed by a “crash” or “culture shock” stage where the full reality of being so far away from the familiar hits you with brutal force, followed by a slow climb up from that “low” towards a more balanced outlook where you see both the good and bad of a place. Our teachers told us that we could expect to experience any of these stages for really any amount of time, and even repeat this process multiple times while in China. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve traveled so much, or if the very act of discussing the stages sort of made me emotionally detached from/analytical of my own “culture shock process,” but I haven’t really gone through any extremes, and have sort of plodded along, experiencing the good and the bad and keeping a pretty balanced perspective the whole time. Or at least that’s how I’ve felt about it—I’ve been having a great time, but not because I’ve been blissfully entranced by China (I absolutely love the experience of being here, but I’ve definitely been aware of what I don’t like about China or what makes me uncomfortable), and I haven’t been miserable, or particularly homesick. I think any serious emotional issues have been kept in check by three forces:
1. My host family is really great. When I went to Spain for a month in 2007, it was infinitely harder, because my host family situation was less than ideal (a story for another day…). Having gone through that experience, every good thing about my Chinese host family has eclipsed anything bad, and they’ve been so welcoming (while also not being overbearing), that it’s been incredibly easy to live with them.
2. Compared to junior and senior year of high school, living in China is an emotional piece of cake. This might sound funny, but I am completely serious. I am so relaxed here. I loved Milton, especially as an upperclassman, but a day there was infinitely more busy, stressful, sleep-deprived, and caffeinated than any day has been here. I am simply less stressed; all of my stresses here are fleeting and situational (it’s raining out; the crowds get a bit overwhelming; I just barely miss a train on the subway and have to wait three extra minutes; I have an un-graded but mentally-daunting dictation in class…aren’t you jealous?).
3. I’m here for such a short amount of time. Itt really is not a very long time at all, in the grand scheme of things. Or even not in the grand scheme of things, just in the normal scheme of things; I’m here basically the length of a summer vacation. The time between Labor Day and Christmas, minus a few days. Not very long at all. You can endure anything for that long (re: senior fall). And in my very lucky case, it has not been a case of my having to endure anything, but rather getting to enjoy my time here. Yay. That short amount of time, however, also exerts its own pressures. Because it’s very easy to feel like you’re not making the most of it. Or it’s easy for me to feel that way. So, to keep me honest for the next half of my time in China, I would like to post a list of things I want to accomplish before I leave. Here we go.
1. Make Chinese friends.
This is embarrassing. Like, really really shamefully embarrassing. Like, so embarrassing, that if it shows up on the blog, it means that my better angels have won over my devils and I actually sucked it up and posted this shameful fact, and it was a close call, let me tell you. The truth: I have not made one Chinese friend while I’ve been here. Not one. I have my tutor, who is a Chinese graduate student. She is very nice, and we have a great time in our two sessions every week, and she does a great job. But she’s not a friend. And I have my host family. And once when I was studying at one of the outdoor tables at ECNU, a Chinese guy came and sat at the same table because they were all full, and he was reading Jane Eyre so I helped him with vocab and he helped me study my characters. The end. Part of this issue is situational; for having class at a Chinese university every day, and for living with a Chinese family, it might seem surprising, but I have no formal opportunities to meet or interact with Chinese students my own age. Let me stress formal. Because the rest of this sad situation is my own fault. Because, obviously, ECNU is crawling with Chinese students my own age. I just haven’t been brave enough to plop down next to a group of them in the cafeteria or at the outside tables or on the quad-like grassy area and make a Chinese friend. And it really should be that easy…most of the time, Chinese people are incredibly friendly (Except if you want to ask random passers-by for directions…they don’t stop. Ever. Like, if you were dying on the sidewalk, they probably wouldn’t stop. You can make eye contact, start to awkwardly ask your question, and they will just keep walking.). So yeah. Make 中国朋友 (Chinese friends). Truly my biggest priority. If you’re concerned about me and my cowardice, feel free to keep me honest and check in on my progress.
2. Explore more on my own.
On one hand, this means travel on my own at least once. For instance, I need to go for a weekend or even a day trip to one of the cities near Shanghai. I’m thinking day trip or a weekend overnight to Suzhou or Hangzhou, which are both very close to Shanghai by train. This goal also means get out into different parts of Shanghai more on my own. I do plenty of going out on my own (or, if not plenty, I make a significant effort). But I’ve stopped going to new places and have started becoming repetitive in my wandering habits. I need to just go to a random metro stop and just walk around and take it all in. I think this will be a project for this weekend, when I don’t have much scheduled.
3. Go an entire day without speaking English.
A difficult task, but I think I could do it. Maybe Sunday? I will choose a day and then write about my experiences. To prove that it actually happened.
4. Ask my host family more questions; engage with them on a deeper level.
We get along really, really well. But we also don’t talk about serious stuff. This is getting better (last night I had a really interesting discussion with my host dad about the Cultural Revolution), but I think I need to make a more conscious effort to reach out and ask questions.
OK that’s enough of a list for now. Maybe from these goals you can sort of see my odd but also enjoyable situation: no one is pushing me to do anything I don’t want to do. This makes this a very not-stressful situation in many ways. It also means that it’s very easy for me to fall back into my more timid/shy side (It exists! I swear! Especially when you don’t speak the language!). And it also means that I spend a great deal of mental energy thinking about and trying to justify my stressless state. Which in turn leads to, while not exactly stress, the closest substitute I can find on my gap year. A stress-like substance. The Nescafe/Coffee-mate of stress.
That’s all. Good night!
1. My host family is really great. When I went to Spain for a month in 2007, it was infinitely harder, because my host family situation was less than ideal (a story for another day…). Having gone through that experience, every good thing about my Chinese host family has eclipsed anything bad, and they’ve been so welcoming (while also not being overbearing), that it’s been incredibly easy to live with them.
2. Compared to junior and senior year of high school, living in China is an emotional piece of cake. This might sound funny, but I am completely serious. I am so relaxed here. I loved Milton, especially as an upperclassman, but a day there was infinitely more busy, stressful, sleep-deprived, and caffeinated than any day has been here. I am simply less stressed; all of my stresses here are fleeting and situational (it’s raining out; the crowds get a bit overwhelming; I just barely miss a train on the subway and have to wait three extra minutes; I have an un-graded but mentally-daunting dictation in class…aren’t you jealous?).
3. I’m here for such a short amount of time. Itt really is not a very long time at all, in the grand scheme of things. Or even not in the grand scheme of things, just in the normal scheme of things; I’m here basically the length of a summer vacation. The time between Labor Day and Christmas, minus a few days. Not very long at all. You can endure anything for that long (re: senior fall). And in my very lucky case, it has not been a case of my having to endure anything, but rather getting to enjoy my time here. Yay. That short amount of time, however, also exerts its own pressures. Because it’s very easy to feel like you’re not making the most of it. Or it’s easy for me to feel that way. So, to keep me honest for the next half of my time in China, I would like to post a list of things I want to accomplish before I leave. Here we go.
1. Make Chinese friends.
This is embarrassing. Like, really really shamefully embarrassing. Like, so embarrassing, that if it shows up on the blog, it means that my better angels have won over my devils and I actually sucked it up and posted this shameful fact, and it was a close call, let me tell you. The truth: I have not made one Chinese friend while I’ve been here. Not one. I have my tutor, who is a Chinese graduate student. She is very nice, and we have a great time in our two sessions every week, and she does a great job. But she’s not a friend. And I have my host family. And once when I was studying at one of the outdoor tables at ECNU, a Chinese guy came and sat at the same table because they were all full, and he was reading Jane Eyre so I helped him with vocab and he helped me study my characters. The end. Part of this issue is situational; for having class at a Chinese university every day, and for living with a Chinese family, it might seem surprising, but I have no formal opportunities to meet or interact with Chinese students my own age. Let me stress formal. Because the rest of this sad situation is my own fault. Because, obviously, ECNU is crawling with Chinese students my own age. I just haven’t been brave enough to plop down next to a group of them in the cafeteria or at the outside tables or on the quad-like grassy area and make a Chinese friend. And it really should be that easy…most of the time, Chinese people are incredibly friendly (Except if you want to ask random passers-by for directions…they don’t stop. Ever. Like, if you were dying on the sidewalk, they probably wouldn’t stop. You can make eye contact, start to awkwardly ask your question, and they will just keep walking.). So yeah. Make 中国朋友 (Chinese friends). Truly my biggest priority. If you’re concerned about me and my cowardice, feel free to keep me honest and check in on my progress.
2. Explore more on my own.
On one hand, this means travel on my own at least once. For instance, I need to go for a weekend or even a day trip to one of the cities near Shanghai. I’m thinking day trip or a weekend overnight to Suzhou or Hangzhou, which are both very close to Shanghai by train. This goal also means get out into different parts of Shanghai more on my own. I do plenty of going out on my own (or, if not plenty, I make a significant effort). But I’ve stopped going to new places and have started becoming repetitive in my wandering habits. I need to just go to a random metro stop and just walk around and take it all in. I think this will be a project for this weekend, when I don’t have much scheduled.
3. Go an entire day without speaking English.
A difficult task, but I think I could do it. Maybe Sunday? I will choose a day and then write about my experiences. To prove that it actually happened.
4. Ask my host family more questions; engage with them on a deeper level.
We get along really, really well. But we also don’t talk about serious stuff. This is getting better (last night I had a really interesting discussion with my host dad about the Cultural Revolution), but I think I need to make a more conscious effort to reach out and ask questions.
OK that’s enough of a list for now. Maybe from these goals you can sort of see my odd but also enjoyable situation: no one is pushing me to do anything I don’t want to do. This makes this a very not-stressful situation in many ways. It also means that it’s very easy for me to fall back into my more timid/shy side (It exists! I swear! Especially when you don’t speak the language!). And it also means that I spend a great deal of mental energy thinking about and trying to justify my stressless state. Which in turn leads to, while not exactly stress, the closest substitute I can find on my gap year. A stress-like substance. The Nescafe/Coffee-mate of stress.
That’s all. Good night!
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Beijing Part II
I’m back! And will try to keep this short (HA. NOT SHORT AT ALL. EPIC FAIL.) And vaguely interesting (fingers crossed).
By Wednesday, I had re-gained the trust of the group (after the somewhat disastrous Saturday forced march to Tiananmen…our Long March, but without the glory…) enough to be allowed to set an itinerary. I say this only half-jokingly. One of the issues of traveling with 7 people was that we only had two guidebooks, one of which was from 2005, which in Beijing made it very much out of date. So many of my fellow travelers either didn’t want to set the agenda or didn’t have/seek access to the information necessary to do so. This situation created a certain amount of friction, both on my and my friend Katherine’s side (we wanted to get up and out and do things from our books, and thus we became the “cruise directors”), as we resented it when people were unenthusiastic about what we wanted to do but had no suggestions of their own, and on the group’s side, because we were often less than perfect in our navigation and logistical skills (although, in my own defense, I would like to say that it was an especially difficult week to be trying to navigate Beijing, because of crowds, and random metro closures when they would shut all the stops around Tiananmen, leaving us to walk for miles through downtown Beijing searching for an open station). And who wants to be walking for miles through a city you don’t know, when you don’t know where you’re going or really why you’re going there? So my suggestion, if anyone ever follows in my footsteps, is to make sure everyone in your group has done some research and has some idea of what they want to do in the place you’re going, and knows why they’re going wherever they’re going. I hesitate to use the phrase “set goals,” but I think that a little structure within the potential madness of a gap year isn’t a bad thing. So I will say it: setting some goals (ie places you want to go, things you want to see, how intense or relaxed you want to be, etc) is not a bad idea. And I think that having lots of people with lots of ideas is probably better than having just a couple people setting the agenda. It’s healthier and more balanced. So yeah…there were a few moments when I felt like, in regards to my fellow gappers, they didn’t seem ready to make the most of Beijing. And I’m sure they found me thoroughly annoying and somewhat opaque and prone to forced marches. Let’s just say that I relish a long walk even when I don’t know where I’m going, and other people differ with me on that point. So yeah…a little glimpse for you into group politics. All that being said, I really truly do enjoy the group I’m with, and we had a great time. We just had our moments.
Back to Wednesday. Wednesday morning, we went to an ancient astronomical observatory that had operated continuously for 500 years, until 1929. It was pretty cool to see these beautiful wrought iron instruments set on top of a little tower, plopped down in the middle of modern Beijing. After that, we walked a short ways to a piece of Beijing’s old city wall, with a watch tower, that has been preserved and turned into a park. Like the observatory, it was very cool to see a piece of old Beijing in the midst of all the modernity. Since so much of old Beijing has been torn down over the decades since 1949 (and at an accelerated pace now), these rare preserved pieces, even if they are just dusty historical artifacts, feel strangely refreshing. That afternoon, after a long walk (re: the 2005 guidebook…it didn’t have a key metro line on its maps, because it hadn’t been built yet in 2005...and map scales are deceiving, that’s all I’ll say) we arrived at the Temple of Heaven, one of the top sights in Beijing and China. It’s an incredible sight…an intricately decorated and enormous three tiered round temple rising up into the sky on top of a huge tiered marble platform. Beijing is still a very low city (compared to Shanghai, at least), so looking at the Temple of Heaven, there are no buildings or signs of modernity behind it. It’s just the tower, and the sky (and hordes of tourists, but let’s forget about them for the moment). The park around it is very beautiful and very calm once you get away from the Temple (the whole complex has an admission fee, which helps with crowds I guess). Beijing has so much open space compared to Shanghai…its city center, after all, is dominated by the visual power of open space: the vast expanse of Tiananmen, mirroring the scale and spread of the Forbidden City, and then the huge openness of the Temple of Heaven park. And the hutong neighborhoods around these sights, while far from empty, are certainly low to the ground. So there is more breathing space in Beijing (even if you don’t want to breathe the air…although up until Wednesday, the sky was pure pure blue with hardly any clouds, thanks to the government).
Thursday we slept in again; that afternoon was all about exploring “normal” Beijing. Late morning I went on a short excursion to visit Beijing University (BeiDa), to see where Kenzie studied this summer (and where I will probably end up studying at some point), and to catch a glimpse of another famous Chinese university (probably the most famous) and compare it with my home university here, ECNU. It was pretty and bustling but not that interesting haha. We tried and failed to eat in the cafeteria, but you had to have these special cards, and we spent about 15 minutes trying to get up our courage to ask a random person if we could use their card to pay and pay them in cash, but we didn’t have enough gumption. Oh well. Thursday afternoon we went on a free tour of the hutong around our hostel. Some words about our hostel…it was PERFECT and AMAZING. It was in a preserved hutong house. The staff was friendly and accommodating, it felt safe, was clean, and had this beautiful little courtyard where I enjoyed sitting and drinking tea. It was cheap, convenient (right next to a new metro line that opened right before we arrived in Beijing), and interesting. One interesting part was the staff…they were almost all Chinese teenage/young 20s women, who lived in a bunk room in the back. One or the other of them was always around in the office, or in the kitchen making tea or putting out snacks, and it was they who brought us on the tour. They were all about our age, 18 or so, and they (or the two I talked to) were from Hebei, the (largely rural) province right outside Beijing. They’re not going to university, but they’ve found a place in urban China, and they seemed pretty happy. A very superficial judgment, but it’s the best I can do. The tour of the hutong was refreshing after all the touristy stuff we’d been doing…they took us to an open air market (mostly selling pets…it was at once cute and horrifying to see all these animals in their cages…animal rights means nothing in China…but all the Chinese were cooing over the kittens and bunnies in tiny tiny cages, while we were cringing at the sight of how small the cages were), and then to a covered produce market. The hutong was pretty run-down by our standards, but definitely not the slums that the Chinese government wants people to think they are so they can tear them down. And there was a surprising number of cars parked along the narrow streets. That night, we went to a night market…I had this amazing whole leg of lamb that I ate cavewoman style. One thing about being in China is that my table manners have depreciated considerably (or at least my worries about eating neatly)…now I worry more about showing my appreciation for the food and not pointing my chopsticks at people than I do about chewing with my mouth closed or about where to put my bones (and as for putting my napkin in my lap…I haven’t seen a real cloth napkin since I’ve arrived). It was fabulous.
Friday was Forbidden City (and departure) day. We saved the Forbidden City for Friday because it was technically the day when everyone had to go back to school and work, so we thought there would be fewer people. And we were right! Yay us. The Forbidden City, while crowded, was not the zoo I’m sure it was earlier in the week. I have a confession to make….I don’t really like the Forbidden City. It’s impressive and visually stunning, but beyond that I find it repetitive, unapproachable, detached, and symbolic of the destructive narcissism of the emperors. Like Versailles, actually, but without some of the fun trinkets and human touches of Versailles (I think because the emperors weren’t as into frivolous pursuits, other than having as many concubines as they could, as the French kings). I’m actually amazed that the Forbidden City made it through the Cultural Revolution, as it’s a pretty stunning reminder of China’s failures during the 18th and 19th centuries, and the attitude and outlook that brought down an ancient empire. The emperors were completely and utterly convinced that they were at the center of the world (not at all unique to China, but the attitude is uniquely clear when you’re standing in the Forbidden City), and felt utterly justified in cutting themselves off completely. It was its own little world, and I found it frustrating to think about how stultified and rigid it must have become, at exactly the wrong moment for China’s rulers to become so.
Friday night we boarded our train home…we wanted to explore the cheap and convenient option of China’s amazing train system, and we certainly got a glimpse at the convenience. Our train was comfortable and timely. It wasn’t cheap (I mean, it was cheap, but not as cheap as our cheap flight to Beijing, and not as cheap as we thought it would be). This turned out to be because we bought bullet train tickets, without knowing that the train we were taking only had one type of cabin, these relatively luxurious four person cabins. We wanted to take the second-class “hard sleeper” type of cabin (it’s not that the beds are harder than the “soft sleeper” class, it’s just a Communist thing of not wanting to have first class and second class…hard sleeper is 3 sets of bunk beds and a shared bathroom, while the soft sleep has only 2 sets of bunk beds, and each cabin has its own bathroom), which is what we thought we had (and were mystified as to why our tickets were so expensive), but when we showed up we realized that the train didn’t even have those. So basically it was a really comfortable night for me, I slept the whole way home and like a rock. BUT when I woke up, I awoke to the news that my friend Katherine was seriously ill. Cue Saturday’s drama…straight from the Shanghai train station, at 8 am, Katherine and I went to the hospital, sending our stuff home with everyone else. Katherine had been up puking since 5 AM, and she was a very sick puppy. I spent a full 12 hours at the hospital with her, as the doctors alternated between keeping us waiting and trying to figure out what was wrong (at one point they thought appendicitis and told Katherine she might have to spend a week in the hospital). Eventually, they figured out that it was a gastronomical infection, and she has been in the hospital for four days (she finally left this afternoon). Yuck. Poor Katherine. So that was my Saturday. The only upside of the whole experience was that I got to read! What did I read? I read two absolutely incredible books. One, I’m sure you’ve heard of – Three Cups of Tea. If you haven’t read it yet, read it now. It was SO GOOD. And Greg Mortensen should have won the Nobel Peace Prize, NOT President Obama. I love our President to pieces, but his winning the prize is an embarrassment and cheapens what should be one of the highest honors the world has to give. I am fuming. Hear me fume. OK. The second book I read (or finished reading) was an amazing amazing novel called Wolf Totem. It’s based on the author’s experiences in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, where he was sent as a university student to be re-educated. It’s about the old nomadic culture there, and the relationship between the humans, the wolves, and the grassland, and how the Chinese thoroughly screwed everything up, leading to massive desertification and the destruction of an ancient and noble lifestyle. Sound familiar? All of the parallels with the American West and our efforts to “reclaim” the grassland there hit me full in the face. Plus it’s beautifully written (it’s translated from Chinese, so it’s very simple but evocative writing). And it dovetails perfectly with all the stuff I find so interesting about why people and cultures relate to nature the way they do. And you learn a lot about wolves, pretty freaking cool animals. So READ IT! Seriously. So good.
Yesterday, I went to a CIEE-organized lecture about China’s economy and what could account for how (somewhat) protected it’s been from the world recession. The speaker was basically very optimistic about China (to a point), and it gave me a lot of food for thought. He emphasized the fact that China is actually productive (as in, China isn’t all cheap factories churning out T-shirts in order to keep people happy and employed…and it’s not as export reliant as the Western media likes to say it is), and it’s a productivity that is largely based in (and will be more and more based in in the future) its greatest asset: its relatively well-educated, healthy, and numerous workforce. Human capital. It’s not going to go away, and it’s a force that is going to drive China forward basically no matter what happens, environmentally, politically, domestically, internationally…more alarmingly, he also said that he thinks all the buzz about China starting to go green is just buzz, not substance, and China will actually accelerate the amount of coal it produces during the 21st century, because it has no other options. Uhoh. Bad news for the world. I asked him about water (I was drilling him with questions and felt a little bad about it but he was really really interesting) and I was NOT satisfied with his answer. He said that the West shouldn’t underestimate the ability of the Chinese people to live on less and less water. Well, that’s true, but only true up to a certain point. And with the Chinese government encouraging Northern China (indeed, they’re subsidizing electricity to make it easier to pump the water) to pump water from its already dwindling water table, I don’t really see how that can continue indefinitely, unless the Chinese are superhuman and don’t need water.
OK. This post has become a little manic in terms of my run-on sentences, and in terms of its length. So I’m ending it. Now. The End.
By Wednesday, I had re-gained the trust of the group (after the somewhat disastrous Saturday forced march to Tiananmen…our Long March, but without the glory…) enough to be allowed to set an itinerary. I say this only half-jokingly. One of the issues of traveling with 7 people was that we only had two guidebooks, one of which was from 2005, which in Beijing made it very much out of date. So many of my fellow travelers either didn’t want to set the agenda or didn’t have/seek access to the information necessary to do so. This situation created a certain amount of friction, both on my and my friend Katherine’s side (we wanted to get up and out and do things from our books, and thus we became the “cruise directors”), as we resented it when people were unenthusiastic about what we wanted to do but had no suggestions of their own, and on the group’s side, because we were often less than perfect in our navigation and logistical skills (although, in my own defense, I would like to say that it was an especially difficult week to be trying to navigate Beijing, because of crowds, and random metro closures when they would shut all the stops around Tiananmen, leaving us to walk for miles through downtown Beijing searching for an open station). And who wants to be walking for miles through a city you don’t know, when you don’t know where you’re going or really why you’re going there? So my suggestion, if anyone ever follows in my footsteps, is to make sure everyone in your group has done some research and has some idea of what they want to do in the place you’re going, and knows why they’re going wherever they’re going. I hesitate to use the phrase “set goals,” but I think that a little structure within the potential madness of a gap year isn’t a bad thing. So I will say it: setting some goals (ie places you want to go, things you want to see, how intense or relaxed you want to be, etc) is not a bad idea. And I think that having lots of people with lots of ideas is probably better than having just a couple people setting the agenda. It’s healthier and more balanced. So yeah…there were a few moments when I felt like, in regards to my fellow gappers, they didn’t seem ready to make the most of Beijing. And I’m sure they found me thoroughly annoying and somewhat opaque and prone to forced marches. Let’s just say that I relish a long walk even when I don’t know where I’m going, and other people differ with me on that point. So yeah…a little glimpse for you into group politics. All that being said, I really truly do enjoy the group I’m with, and we had a great time. We just had our moments.
Back to Wednesday. Wednesday morning, we went to an ancient astronomical observatory that had operated continuously for 500 years, until 1929. It was pretty cool to see these beautiful wrought iron instruments set on top of a little tower, plopped down in the middle of modern Beijing. After that, we walked a short ways to a piece of Beijing’s old city wall, with a watch tower, that has been preserved and turned into a park. Like the observatory, it was very cool to see a piece of old Beijing in the midst of all the modernity. Since so much of old Beijing has been torn down over the decades since 1949 (and at an accelerated pace now), these rare preserved pieces, even if they are just dusty historical artifacts, feel strangely refreshing. That afternoon, after a long walk (re: the 2005 guidebook…it didn’t have a key metro line on its maps, because it hadn’t been built yet in 2005...and map scales are deceiving, that’s all I’ll say) we arrived at the Temple of Heaven, one of the top sights in Beijing and China. It’s an incredible sight…an intricately decorated and enormous three tiered round temple rising up into the sky on top of a huge tiered marble platform. Beijing is still a very low city (compared to Shanghai, at least), so looking at the Temple of Heaven, there are no buildings or signs of modernity behind it. It’s just the tower, and the sky (and hordes of tourists, but let’s forget about them for the moment). The park around it is very beautiful and very calm once you get away from the Temple (the whole complex has an admission fee, which helps with crowds I guess). Beijing has so much open space compared to Shanghai…its city center, after all, is dominated by the visual power of open space: the vast expanse of Tiananmen, mirroring the scale and spread of the Forbidden City, and then the huge openness of the Temple of Heaven park. And the hutong neighborhoods around these sights, while far from empty, are certainly low to the ground. So there is more breathing space in Beijing (even if you don’t want to breathe the air…although up until Wednesday, the sky was pure pure blue with hardly any clouds, thanks to the government).
Thursday we slept in again; that afternoon was all about exploring “normal” Beijing. Late morning I went on a short excursion to visit Beijing University (BeiDa), to see where Kenzie studied this summer (and where I will probably end up studying at some point), and to catch a glimpse of another famous Chinese university (probably the most famous) and compare it with my home university here, ECNU. It was pretty and bustling but not that interesting haha. We tried and failed to eat in the cafeteria, but you had to have these special cards, and we spent about 15 minutes trying to get up our courage to ask a random person if we could use their card to pay and pay them in cash, but we didn’t have enough gumption. Oh well. Thursday afternoon we went on a free tour of the hutong around our hostel. Some words about our hostel…it was PERFECT and AMAZING. It was in a preserved hutong house. The staff was friendly and accommodating, it felt safe, was clean, and had this beautiful little courtyard where I enjoyed sitting and drinking tea. It was cheap, convenient (right next to a new metro line that opened right before we arrived in Beijing), and interesting. One interesting part was the staff…they were almost all Chinese teenage/young 20s women, who lived in a bunk room in the back. One or the other of them was always around in the office, or in the kitchen making tea or putting out snacks, and it was they who brought us on the tour. They were all about our age, 18 or so, and they (or the two I talked to) were from Hebei, the (largely rural) province right outside Beijing. They’re not going to university, but they’ve found a place in urban China, and they seemed pretty happy. A very superficial judgment, but it’s the best I can do. The tour of the hutong was refreshing after all the touristy stuff we’d been doing…they took us to an open air market (mostly selling pets…it was at once cute and horrifying to see all these animals in their cages…animal rights means nothing in China…but all the Chinese were cooing over the kittens and bunnies in tiny tiny cages, while we were cringing at the sight of how small the cages were), and then to a covered produce market. The hutong was pretty run-down by our standards, but definitely not the slums that the Chinese government wants people to think they are so they can tear them down. And there was a surprising number of cars parked along the narrow streets. That night, we went to a night market…I had this amazing whole leg of lamb that I ate cavewoman style. One thing about being in China is that my table manners have depreciated considerably (or at least my worries about eating neatly)…now I worry more about showing my appreciation for the food and not pointing my chopsticks at people than I do about chewing with my mouth closed or about where to put my bones (and as for putting my napkin in my lap…I haven’t seen a real cloth napkin since I’ve arrived). It was fabulous.
Friday was Forbidden City (and departure) day. We saved the Forbidden City for Friday because it was technically the day when everyone had to go back to school and work, so we thought there would be fewer people. And we were right! Yay us. The Forbidden City, while crowded, was not the zoo I’m sure it was earlier in the week. I have a confession to make….I don’t really like the Forbidden City. It’s impressive and visually stunning, but beyond that I find it repetitive, unapproachable, detached, and symbolic of the destructive narcissism of the emperors. Like Versailles, actually, but without some of the fun trinkets and human touches of Versailles (I think because the emperors weren’t as into frivolous pursuits, other than having as many concubines as they could, as the French kings). I’m actually amazed that the Forbidden City made it through the Cultural Revolution, as it’s a pretty stunning reminder of China’s failures during the 18th and 19th centuries, and the attitude and outlook that brought down an ancient empire. The emperors were completely and utterly convinced that they were at the center of the world (not at all unique to China, but the attitude is uniquely clear when you’re standing in the Forbidden City), and felt utterly justified in cutting themselves off completely. It was its own little world, and I found it frustrating to think about how stultified and rigid it must have become, at exactly the wrong moment for China’s rulers to become so.
Friday night we boarded our train home…we wanted to explore the cheap and convenient option of China’s amazing train system, and we certainly got a glimpse at the convenience. Our train was comfortable and timely. It wasn’t cheap (I mean, it was cheap, but not as cheap as our cheap flight to Beijing, and not as cheap as we thought it would be). This turned out to be because we bought bullet train tickets, without knowing that the train we were taking only had one type of cabin, these relatively luxurious four person cabins. We wanted to take the second-class “hard sleeper” type of cabin (it’s not that the beds are harder than the “soft sleeper” class, it’s just a Communist thing of not wanting to have first class and second class…hard sleeper is 3 sets of bunk beds and a shared bathroom, while the soft sleep has only 2 sets of bunk beds, and each cabin has its own bathroom), which is what we thought we had (and were mystified as to why our tickets were so expensive), but when we showed up we realized that the train didn’t even have those. So basically it was a really comfortable night for me, I slept the whole way home and like a rock. BUT when I woke up, I awoke to the news that my friend Katherine was seriously ill. Cue Saturday’s drama…straight from the Shanghai train station, at 8 am, Katherine and I went to the hospital, sending our stuff home with everyone else. Katherine had been up puking since 5 AM, and she was a very sick puppy. I spent a full 12 hours at the hospital with her, as the doctors alternated between keeping us waiting and trying to figure out what was wrong (at one point they thought appendicitis and told Katherine she might have to spend a week in the hospital). Eventually, they figured out that it was a gastronomical infection, and she has been in the hospital for four days (she finally left this afternoon). Yuck. Poor Katherine. So that was my Saturday. The only upside of the whole experience was that I got to read! What did I read? I read two absolutely incredible books. One, I’m sure you’ve heard of – Three Cups of Tea. If you haven’t read it yet, read it now. It was SO GOOD. And Greg Mortensen should have won the Nobel Peace Prize, NOT President Obama. I love our President to pieces, but his winning the prize is an embarrassment and cheapens what should be one of the highest honors the world has to give. I am fuming. Hear me fume. OK. The second book I read (or finished reading) was an amazing amazing novel called Wolf Totem. It’s based on the author’s experiences in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, where he was sent as a university student to be re-educated. It’s about the old nomadic culture there, and the relationship between the humans, the wolves, and the grassland, and how the Chinese thoroughly screwed everything up, leading to massive desertification and the destruction of an ancient and noble lifestyle. Sound familiar? All of the parallels with the American West and our efforts to “reclaim” the grassland there hit me full in the face. Plus it’s beautifully written (it’s translated from Chinese, so it’s very simple but evocative writing). And it dovetails perfectly with all the stuff I find so interesting about why people and cultures relate to nature the way they do. And you learn a lot about wolves, pretty freaking cool animals. So READ IT! Seriously. So good.
Yesterday, I went to a CIEE-organized lecture about China’s economy and what could account for how (somewhat) protected it’s been from the world recession. The speaker was basically very optimistic about China (to a point), and it gave me a lot of food for thought. He emphasized the fact that China is actually productive (as in, China isn’t all cheap factories churning out T-shirts in order to keep people happy and employed…and it’s not as export reliant as the Western media likes to say it is), and it’s a productivity that is largely based in (and will be more and more based in in the future) its greatest asset: its relatively well-educated, healthy, and numerous workforce. Human capital. It’s not going to go away, and it’s a force that is going to drive China forward basically no matter what happens, environmentally, politically, domestically, internationally…more alarmingly, he also said that he thinks all the buzz about China starting to go green is just buzz, not substance, and China will actually accelerate the amount of coal it produces during the 21st century, because it has no other options. Uhoh. Bad news for the world. I asked him about water (I was drilling him with questions and felt a little bad about it but he was really really interesting) and I was NOT satisfied with his answer. He said that the West shouldn’t underestimate the ability of the Chinese people to live on less and less water. Well, that’s true, but only true up to a certain point. And with the Chinese government encouraging Northern China (indeed, they’re subsidizing electricity to make it easier to pump the water) to pump water from its already dwindling water table, I don’t really see how that can continue indefinitely, unless the Chinese are superhuman and don’t need water.
OK. This post has become a little manic in terms of my run-on sentences, and in terms of its length. So I’m ending it. Now. The End.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Beijing! Part 1
Hello hello! I am back from my 8 days in Beijing and settling back into my Shanghai routine. Beijing was very fun, and it was quite refreshing to have complete freedom to set my own agenda. But coming back to Shanghai felt very much like coming home, and I’m happy to be back.
I have a lot of ground to cover, and I need to go to bed early tonight, so I’m setting myself a time limit and I’ll finish the rest tomorrow. OK….GO!
Thursday, October 1 was China’s National Day, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC. You might have heard about a small parade that happened in Beijing, it was a pretty humble affair, no big deal or anything. KIDDING. I watched it on TV (we left for Beijing that night, as we were basically told that foreigners were not welcome in Beijing while the parade was going on…) with my host family. It was visually stunning, an amazing feat of organization and coordination, a jaw-dropping display of nationalism and might and accomplishment. My host family’s reaction was interesting…they sang along to some of the songs, and my host mom and host sister watched the whole thing, but my host dad seemed pretty disinterested and even laughed at it a few times, and my host mom and sister spent a good portion cuddling and tickling on the couch. This was disconcerting but adorable…nukes and tanks parade across the screen, and my host sister is hitting her mother with a pillow. Another favorite moment was spotting the Taiwan float, the last of the floats for the Chinese provinces. I chuckled. China is very persistent in keeping up that particular appearance. While watching, I couldn’t help but think of the Tiananmen Square protests of 20 years ago as I watched thousands of college students dance in the parade, next to tanks and soldiers. In fact, I’ve been shocked for weeks by how China Daily refers to the parade and all the National Day festivities in Beijing as simply “Tiananmen”…as in, on the front page, there would be a box saying “Turn to Page 6 for pictures from Tiananmen!” or “Students Gather to Rehearse for Tiananmen.” Very startling for me, and perfectly intentional I’m sure for the much censored/ state-controlled China Daily (they also refer to any member of Taiwan’s government as the Taiwanese “President” or “Minister of Education”, using the quotation marks). I guess they want to reclaim the term “Tiananmen” as a reference to the protests. I also couldn’t help but think about how happy I am to be American, where people march through the streets for social causes or protests, or to see a President inaugurated, but not in highly orchestrated affairs. And we’d certainly never send soldiers marching through our streets. It’s a silly symbolic thing, I guess, but it felt symptomatic of some of the differences between the two countries. Also the fact that there were no spectators to the Chinese parade, just invited “guests.” How lame is that?
We arrived in Beijing late Thursday night. Friday we went to the Summer Palace, which was lovely. Bright bright sunshine, absolutely perfect weather. My favorite part was exploring the ruins at Yuanmingyuan, a park a few kilometers from the Summer Palace. The ruins are of a Greek/Roman style palace built for one of the last Chinese emperors by some Jesuit monks, destroyed by British and American forces during the Second Opium War. I could barely handle the irony, and the sight of these beautiful, forlorn ruins in a Chinese park, with the late afternoon sunshine dappling pillars and slabs of stone and Chinese tourists climbing all over and posing for pictures was incredibly memorable. It would also be a great place to perform Shakespeare…I’m going to make it happen, some day. Stay tuned for my 2030 production of “Midsummer” or “Romeo and Juliet”, staged in these ruins. It’s gonna be great. A fascinating moment at the ruins was when a Chinese man approached me and my friends and asked us if we knew the history of the place. I said that we did, and he asked how we felt about it. I said that it felt strange to see these ruins here, and it made the West look very bad, but that it was still very beautiful. He responded that, for him and his friends, the history was too heavy for it to be beautiful. An interesting comment to hear a day after watching the exuberant display in Tiananmen Square…despite what the Chinese government perhaps wants the world to think, history still lays heavily on China in some ways.
Saturday was a crazy day. We went on an ill-fated and ill-advised excursion into Tiananmen Square. The two metro stops in the square were closed, and the one we could finally get off at was SO INCREDIBLY PACKED I CAN’T EVEN DESCRIBE IT. AHHHHH. Imagine the scene getting off the subway at Fenway Park, multiplied by a million bajillion. Parents were carrying their children on their shoulders, I think so they wouldn’t get crushed. It was unbelievable. Then, a very disoriented Abby led her little band of friends on a long, circuitous route to Tiananmen because I didn’t really know where we were, but the book had a walking tour to the square from where we were, and it seemed like a good idea at the time…ha. After a long (and vaguely mutinous) walk, the Square was little better than the subway station in terms of how crowded it was. At least it was sunny and open and there was air….And then, in our next mistake, we decided to walk under the main gate in Tiananmen (the one with Mao’s picture), but they wouldn’t let us turn around for probably almost a mile, and then we had to walk back through this park….it was a mess. But entertaining, and such an experience to see all these Chinese on holiday enjoying their national space and their families and friends. When we finally got back to the Square, we checked out the floats from the parade, and then fled to the Olympic Stadium, which was much less crowded and crazy. That was pretty cool. We collapsed in the Water Cube for a while and took pictures of the scene of Michael Phelps’ glory.
Sunday was more low key. We slept in, went to the Wangfujing Snack Street for a fun lunch of noodles, scorpion (I only tried one), coconut milk, Chinese fried dough, and other yummy things. After lunch, we went to the zoo! To see pandas. News flash: they’re cute.
Monday was Great Wall day! We went to the Simatai portion, which is roughly 2.5 hours outside Beijing (as opposed to the more visited Badaling section, which is only an hour or so away). It’s a pretty tough hike in some places, and I definitely made some bad choices about what to bring in my backpack (like…Bananagrams, three books, a rain jacket on a cloudless day…), so I definitely got some exercise. I lagged behind the rest of my group, to take pictures, and because of back pack issues, and because I wanted a day on my own (traveling with 6 other people was really fun and we had a great time as a group, but it was really really nice to get some time on my own, and I made friends with the other people I met along the way). At the end of the long hike was a pretty lake, over which I rode a zipline. It was a really very lovely day. I don’t know, though, if the Great Wall is really that “Great”…I mean, is it really something China should be proud of? Sure, it’s a great feat of organization and engineering, and it’s super beautiful, but isn’t it also a symbol of a xenophobic, authoritarian, closed-off, myopic and ultimately failed government? I guess in Chinese it’s not called the Great Wall, it’s the Long Wall. But I was definitely thinking hard as I climbed, about what I want the relics of my society to be, and what I want them to say about us. In centuries to come, will tourists walk along our freeways, or through our malls, or along our airstrips, and wonder what the point was? What will be our Great Wall? What will be the monuments of our civilization, constructed, metaphorically or actually, over the bones of those who suffered while building them? Nuclear weapons? Felled forests? Dams? Irrigation systems in deserts of our own making?
It was getting pretty emo up on that wall. Me with my fancy camera… pondering…. staring at the mountains…oy vey.
Tuesday, I went off with my friend Katherine (everyone else wanted to sleep) to see the 798 modern art district, which was maybe my favorite part of Beijing. I can’t wait to go back someday for a more thorough visit. It’s an old industrial park/warehouse district that has been converted into a huge complex of art galleries, shops, and cafes. Sooo cool. The art was hit or miss (I’m also just not that in to modern art…). I think my favorite thing was an exhibit on “Neo-historicism” that tracked the ways a famous painting depicting the proclamation of the People’s Republic had been revised during the Cultural Revolution and as the founding Party members depicted in it fell in and out of favor. The painting was apparently a favorite of Mao’s and is very famous and well known in China. That afternoon, we went to the Lama Temple, the largest Tibetan Buddhist temple in Beijing. No trace of the Dalai Lama, of course, and it felt exactly the same as every other Buddhist temple I’ve been to in China, except there were some prayer flags fluttering (half-heartedly, it seemed) in the wind. It was beautiful and there was a giant Buddha statue, but I found it interesting mostly for what it wasn’t. Next stop was the Confucian Temple and imperial college for some peace and quiet, then a long walk through a hutong to the Bell and Drum Towers, which were closed. Undiscouraged, Katherine and I (we never managed to make our agenda work with the rest of the group that day) walked another long way to Hou Hai, a lake surrounded by bars and restaurants, where we rented a paddle boat for an hour as the sun set. Then we walked again until we found a cute “homestyle” Chinese restaurant where we had delicious noodles. So much walking that day, but it was totally worth it, I felt like I really got a feel for Beijing.
And with that, to bed I go. Tomorrow, I will write about the next three days, as well as the very interesting lecture I went to today and the amazing book I just read (get excited!). Until next time. Peace.
I have a lot of ground to cover, and I need to go to bed early tonight, so I’m setting myself a time limit and I’ll finish the rest tomorrow. OK….GO!
Thursday, October 1 was China’s National Day, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC. You might have heard about a small parade that happened in Beijing, it was a pretty humble affair, no big deal or anything. KIDDING. I watched it on TV (we left for Beijing that night, as we were basically told that foreigners were not welcome in Beijing while the parade was going on…) with my host family. It was visually stunning, an amazing feat of organization and coordination, a jaw-dropping display of nationalism and might and accomplishment. My host family’s reaction was interesting…they sang along to some of the songs, and my host mom and host sister watched the whole thing, but my host dad seemed pretty disinterested and even laughed at it a few times, and my host mom and sister spent a good portion cuddling and tickling on the couch. This was disconcerting but adorable…nukes and tanks parade across the screen, and my host sister is hitting her mother with a pillow. Another favorite moment was spotting the Taiwan float, the last of the floats for the Chinese provinces. I chuckled. China is very persistent in keeping up that particular appearance. While watching, I couldn’t help but think of the Tiananmen Square protests of 20 years ago as I watched thousands of college students dance in the parade, next to tanks and soldiers. In fact, I’ve been shocked for weeks by how China Daily refers to the parade and all the National Day festivities in Beijing as simply “Tiananmen”…as in, on the front page, there would be a box saying “Turn to Page 6 for pictures from Tiananmen!” or “Students Gather to Rehearse for Tiananmen.” Very startling for me, and perfectly intentional I’m sure for the much censored/ state-controlled China Daily (they also refer to any member of Taiwan’s government as the Taiwanese “President” or “Minister of Education”, using the quotation marks). I guess they want to reclaim the term “Tiananmen” as a reference to the protests. I also couldn’t help but think about how happy I am to be American, where people march through the streets for social causes or protests, or to see a President inaugurated, but not in highly orchestrated affairs. And we’d certainly never send soldiers marching through our streets. It’s a silly symbolic thing, I guess, but it felt symptomatic of some of the differences between the two countries. Also the fact that there were no spectators to the Chinese parade, just invited “guests.” How lame is that?
We arrived in Beijing late Thursday night. Friday we went to the Summer Palace, which was lovely. Bright bright sunshine, absolutely perfect weather. My favorite part was exploring the ruins at Yuanmingyuan, a park a few kilometers from the Summer Palace. The ruins are of a Greek/Roman style palace built for one of the last Chinese emperors by some Jesuit monks, destroyed by British and American forces during the Second Opium War. I could barely handle the irony, and the sight of these beautiful, forlorn ruins in a Chinese park, with the late afternoon sunshine dappling pillars and slabs of stone and Chinese tourists climbing all over and posing for pictures was incredibly memorable. It would also be a great place to perform Shakespeare…I’m going to make it happen, some day. Stay tuned for my 2030 production of “Midsummer” or “Romeo and Juliet”, staged in these ruins. It’s gonna be great. A fascinating moment at the ruins was when a Chinese man approached me and my friends and asked us if we knew the history of the place. I said that we did, and he asked how we felt about it. I said that it felt strange to see these ruins here, and it made the West look very bad, but that it was still very beautiful. He responded that, for him and his friends, the history was too heavy for it to be beautiful. An interesting comment to hear a day after watching the exuberant display in Tiananmen Square…despite what the Chinese government perhaps wants the world to think, history still lays heavily on China in some ways.
Saturday was a crazy day. We went on an ill-fated and ill-advised excursion into Tiananmen Square. The two metro stops in the square were closed, and the one we could finally get off at was SO INCREDIBLY PACKED I CAN’T EVEN DESCRIBE IT. AHHHHH. Imagine the scene getting off the subway at Fenway Park, multiplied by a million bajillion. Parents were carrying their children on their shoulders, I think so they wouldn’t get crushed. It was unbelievable. Then, a very disoriented Abby led her little band of friends on a long, circuitous route to Tiananmen because I didn’t really know where we were, but the book had a walking tour to the square from where we were, and it seemed like a good idea at the time…ha. After a long (and vaguely mutinous) walk, the Square was little better than the subway station in terms of how crowded it was. At least it was sunny and open and there was air….And then, in our next mistake, we decided to walk under the main gate in Tiananmen (the one with Mao’s picture), but they wouldn’t let us turn around for probably almost a mile, and then we had to walk back through this park….it was a mess. But entertaining, and such an experience to see all these Chinese on holiday enjoying their national space and their families and friends. When we finally got back to the Square, we checked out the floats from the parade, and then fled to the Olympic Stadium, which was much less crowded and crazy. That was pretty cool. We collapsed in the Water Cube for a while and took pictures of the scene of Michael Phelps’ glory.
Sunday was more low key. We slept in, went to the Wangfujing Snack Street for a fun lunch of noodles, scorpion (I only tried one), coconut milk, Chinese fried dough, and other yummy things. After lunch, we went to the zoo! To see pandas. News flash: they’re cute.
Monday was Great Wall day! We went to the Simatai portion, which is roughly 2.5 hours outside Beijing (as opposed to the more visited Badaling section, which is only an hour or so away). It’s a pretty tough hike in some places, and I definitely made some bad choices about what to bring in my backpack (like…Bananagrams, three books, a rain jacket on a cloudless day…), so I definitely got some exercise. I lagged behind the rest of my group, to take pictures, and because of back pack issues, and because I wanted a day on my own (traveling with 6 other people was really fun and we had a great time as a group, but it was really really nice to get some time on my own, and I made friends with the other people I met along the way). At the end of the long hike was a pretty lake, over which I rode a zipline. It was a really very lovely day. I don’t know, though, if the Great Wall is really that “Great”…I mean, is it really something China should be proud of? Sure, it’s a great feat of organization and engineering, and it’s super beautiful, but isn’t it also a symbol of a xenophobic, authoritarian, closed-off, myopic and ultimately failed government? I guess in Chinese it’s not called the Great Wall, it’s the Long Wall. But I was definitely thinking hard as I climbed, about what I want the relics of my society to be, and what I want them to say about us. In centuries to come, will tourists walk along our freeways, or through our malls, or along our airstrips, and wonder what the point was? What will be our Great Wall? What will be the monuments of our civilization, constructed, metaphorically or actually, over the bones of those who suffered while building them? Nuclear weapons? Felled forests? Dams? Irrigation systems in deserts of our own making?
It was getting pretty emo up on that wall. Me with my fancy camera… pondering…. staring at the mountains…oy vey.
Tuesday, I went off with my friend Katherine (everyone else wanted to sleep) to see the 798 modern art district, which was maybe my favorite part of Beijing. I can’t wait to go back someday for a more thorough visit. It’s an old industrial park/warehouse district that has been converted into a huge complex of art galleries, shops, and cafes. Sooo cool. The art was hit or miss (I’m also just not that in to modern art…). I think my favorite thing was an exhibit on “Neo-historicism” that tracked the ways a famous painting depicting the proclamation of the People’s Republic had been revised during the Cultural Revolution and as the founding Party members depicted in it fell in and out of favor. The painting was apparently a favorite of Mao’s and is very famous and well known in China. That afternoon, we went to the Lama Temple, the largest Tibetan Buddhist temple in Beijing. No trace of the Dalai Lama, of course, and it felt exactly the same as every other Buddhist temple I’ve been to in China, except there were some prayer flags fluttering (half-heartedly, it seemed) in the wind. It was beautiful and there was a giant Buddha statue, but I found it interesting mostly for what it wasn’t. Next stop was the Confucian Temple and imperial college for some peace and quiet, then a long walk through a hutong to the Bell and Drum Towers, which were closed. Undiscouraged, Katherine and I (we never managed to make our agenda work with the rest of the group that day) walked another long way to Hou Hai, a lake surrounded by bars and restaurants, where we rented a paddle boat for an hour as the sun set. Then we walked again until we found a cute “homestyle” Chinese restaurant where we had delicious noodles. So much walking that day, but it was totally worth it, I felt like I really got a feel for Beijing.
And with that, to bed I go. Tomorrow, I will write about the next three days, as well as the very interesting lecture I went to today and the amazing book I just read (get excited!). Until next time. Peace.
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