Western Peace

Picking a topic to post about is usually what keeps me from writing them more often. Do I go on and on about the welcome surprise of Nanjing, the southern capital? Should I compare the Nanjing Massacre Memorial to other war and atrocity memorials that I have seen? Would it be better to accurately describe the wrangles of using China's public transportation system that is simultaneously hopelessly inadequate but so much better than private transport? What about getting scammed by tourists, stared and pointed as a foreigner, or Chinese cuisine that has almost no relation to the American variety? Everything deserves to be told in its own way, but when I sit down and start filtering through my own memories, I get lost in trying to comprehend everything that has happened in such a small amount of time.

That said, Xi'an gets the prize this time. If Xi'an rings a bell, that's because it is home to one of China's most famous tourist attractions and one of the world's great archaeological finds, the Army of Terracotta Warriors. Other attractions include the old city walls, the elegant and preserved bell and drum towers (Chinese cities have bell and drum towers like old European cities have churches or cathedrals), another ancient imperial tomb, and over seven million people running everything. Taken from a more historical aspect, Xi'an is much more important than other cities most could name in China long Hong Kong or Beijing. It's name, by the way, means 'western peace', a tribute to its long, long history as a capital city.

While the Terracotta Warriors were truly a spectacle, as were the better designed tombs whose name I cannot remember, what I found best about Xi'an is its ancient Muslim quarter. In the center of Xi'an, itself in the center of China, lives a healthy and vibrant community of Chinese Muslims, as opposed to either non-religion or Buddhism in the rest of the country. Islam made its way to Xi'an hundreds of years ago via one of the world's most famous trade routes, the Silk Road. As a road that's thousands of miles long and thousands of years old, it's strange to give it a starting point as definite as Xi'an, but so it is. Silk manufactured throughout southeast Asia would make its slow way to Xi'an where other traders would buy it and make their way west to the Roman, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires. Other traders would head to Xi'an to sell their wares and of course brought their culture and religion along with them.

What is left there today is incredible given the recent struggles of the Cultural Revolution and the relative homogeneity of Chinese culture despite whatever they say about the 56 protected minorities. The streets are full, like most streets are, but here it is different. Huge piles of halal meat are gathered, kebabed, and barbecued on the street. Hundreds of people gather around any of the stalls or restaurants to eat a few dozen sticks of lamb or beef. Other vendors spin sugar to make something very much like cotton candy, or there are little steaming tins filled with personally designed cookies. The air is full of scents and smoke and it feels organic. Few places in China are lacking crowded places, but here it is easier to stand back and watch it happen. Out of all the places I visited during spring break, here I got the least attention because of my foreigner status.

Also, if you should ever go there yourself, make sure to pay a visit to the mosque. To get there, take a left down a small alley way filled with tourist vendors. These people will sell you anything and everything and cry over every RMB (the Chinese currency) you bargain down. Lots of the trinkets look interesting, most are fake, some are not, but not every piece of tin came from the Qin dynasty. I'll believe that a lot of pieces of tin were pounded out then, but I will doubt that they all managed to make their way to this one small street. As you walk, you will doubt that your are headed anywhere. Keep going. Eventually, another alley will open to your left with a long, nondescript wall running its length.

Embedded within this wall is a small woman who will happily sell you a ticket and direct you to the wooden door that opens up to the other side of this wall. Inside you will find a haven that is not entirely Chinese but a far cry from Arabic. This is the mosque of the Chinese, quiet, gardened, tranquil and wholly separated from the city beyond it. Despite its status as a tourist sight, the mosque was still very solemn and the most religious places off limits to non-Muslims. I can respect that. The Buddhist temples that abound Asia are also tourist sights, but they are so overrun with people and function so differently that is hard to the reverence surrounding the Buddha. I spent an hour, maybe two, resting and strolling. Leaving was hard to do, not only because the mosque itself was beautiful with temples and residences of tiled and decorated roofs characteristic of ancient China, but outside was the rest of this big, busy world. I welcome, and need, such respites.

One of Ten

China is a place that likes numbers, statistics, and rankings at least as much as the United States, maybe more. This comes from a place where bureaucracy is king and nothing can be done with a form or dozen. The bureaucracy of China should be a subject for its own post trying to elucidate the hazy intricacies of the Chinese government. There is the state and the Party, central and provincial, and the rule of law versus the rule of man. A lot of our class time and readings try to do just that because, as it is more and more apparent, no one really knows what is going on over here.

We are currently on our own spring break. During Carleton's actual spring break, we were flying over the Pacific and starting our wanderings of Asia in Thailand. China is a huge, huge place and within the hour after our last class, many of us were boarding planes and trains (but, hopefully, no automobiles) for distant destinations. My trek set off with a 21 hour train ride south to Anhui province. Southern Anhui is home to Huang Shan or Yellow Mountain, which is one of China's ten most beautiful landscapes. I am not certain what the other nine are, but when speaking with other Chinese tourists, they are usually certain that Huang Shan is very beautiful but only so beautiful. The rivers around Yunnan, for example, are obviously even more beautiful than Huang Shan, 'the most beautiful mountain in China.'

The mountains are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and rightly so. They have drawn tourists, poets, immortals, and enlightened ones to their peaks for two-thousand years. In a stark and wonderful contrast to Beijing, Huang Shan is covered in pine trees and even bamboo at lower elevations. The air is clear, the sky is blue, and it is actually possible to feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. Vendors sell locally grown tea on shaded, breezy streets. All of these feelings combined gave me a real sense of relaxation that I had not yet truly had in China. Huang Shan's greatest downfall is its relative expensive services based on the huge numbers of native and international tourists that come every year.

After spending so much time in place that seems to have forsaken its environment, it was astounding to see such a successful example of eco-tourism. Once inside the gates that surround the area, there are no roads as far I could tell, only staircases that lead a few thousand feet up one peak and then down the next. At the top of four or five of the most scenic peaks are hotels catering to hikers wishing to spend the night and morning there. In order to move supplies up and down the mountain, scores of porters with huge calves and strong abs carry down loads of trash and waste in bags balanced on bamboo shoulder supports. I never saw a porter going up the mountain, and I assume that most supplies are brought up via one of the three cable cars. Every few meters or so, a cleverly disguised trashbin has been installed, and the stairs and lush forests surrounding them are wonderfully clean. The park has even banned smoking in outside areas which, for a country that has more smokers than the U.S. has population, is a big deal.

We spent an extraordinarily pleasant day ascending the peaks in time to reach the summit by night fall. A rather common thing to do at the peak is wake in the early morning and stake out a claim on a peak to watch the sunrise. We did just that and found our place near atop some boulders and trees. Huang Shan in at predawn is covered in rolling clouds, split at intervals by thin majestic cliffs. After spending a magical hour watching the sun wake up the top of the world and clouds melt away, we continued our hike to tallest of the peaks. From there it was easy to see valleys, rivers, and boulders that had been moved by glaciers some few million years ago. I could wax on and on about the steep staircases and incredible vistas, but I find myself in Xi'an now and exhausted by attempting to travel during China's May 1st holidays.

P.S. Don't be afraid to e-mail.

Down to Shanxi

Fenyang is a small town by Chinese standards, that is 300,000 people or so, located deep within the Shanxi province, population 30,000,000. There are an estimated 800 foreigners in Shanxi, zero of them in Fenyang. Truth be told, Fenyang is still a 'closed city' as opposed to open cities. If a city is closed, it requires special permission and permits to get in, and there is a whole department devoted to watching foreign activity within the city. A man, some director with a fancy title, hangs around and observes or directs the foreigners to certain areas. Although in Fenyang, finding out where us visitors were was no real effort, simply look for the crowds of people or maybe the stopped traffic.

Carleton has a deep connection with this particular city. During the late 1800's, the first real OCS program sent young Carls to China that culminated in the creation of a school in 1906. Dr. Watson, for whom Watson Hall is named, established a hospital while in residence. Both the school and hospital still exist, but all official contacts between Carleton and Fenyang ended during the Communist Revolution when all non-Chinese were forced to leave China. That is, until 40 Carleton students showed up to this dusty thoroughfare. We were the first official delegation sent by the school and were received with no small amount of celebration. The school and the city held banquets in our honor, people danced and sang, and everyone managed to find some reason to hang out near our hotel the week we were in residence.

Chinese banquets are as unique a ceremony here as dragon dances and Chinese opera. Everyone sits at a large round table, students mixed with various city and school officials. The first person to give a toast is the host. The second, third, and fourth toasts are also given by members of the hosting group. Subsequent toasts are given by the guests, thanking the hosts for the banquet. The eating can then commence while groups of people wander from table to table, toasting and (in our case) posing for pictures. Fenyang has an official drink of something called Fenjiu (fun-joe) distilled from rice and 90 proof. It's clear, thin, and vile. Any real toast should be toasted with Fenjiu and usually one shouts 'Gambei', a terrible phrase that calls for the entire glass to be emptied... then refilled for the next toast. In short order, the plan for any Chinese banquet, is to drink a lot or get others to drink a lot. Our first banquet, with Fenyang Senior Middle School (high school by American standards) was jovial, sort of nice, and left most people in a mild state of drunkenness. The second banquet, hosted by the city government, was run by professionals who, somewhat maliciously, drank with a purpose: plaster these students.

Eating adventures aside, Fenyang was filled with curious people who made us into celebrities. Walking down the street attracted an enormous amount of attention with people shouting long 'Hello!'s or whispers of 'liaowai' or 'waiguoren', phrases used to indicate foreigners. For many people in town, we were the first non-Han person they had ever set their eyes on. The feeling of being the first foreigner anyone ever sees is a strange one. It was easy for me to catch the whispers and pointed fingers, but most remarkable to see were the facial expressions of someone consciously registering a different face, skin, eyes, hair. Where had I come from? Why was I here? Did I have American money? How did I get so tall? What's the world like from those eyes? Americans must be a great people to be so creative and have so much money. Are we all rich?

Some questions were easy to answer, others less so, but the differences were greater than cultural. The most difficult part of Fenyang to accept were its environmental aspects. Gray and black are the predominant colors of the city. Gray sky without sunrise or sunset, just a particulated diffusion that covered with world in grit and dust. Black dirt and black roads and black coal lining the street in great mounds. Seeing vendors sell fruit on the side of the road was confusing. Where was this fruit growing? Fenyang, at least, had no green. The grass had long ago died, as had all the insect and bird life. Fields were bumby and brown, plain dirt for the most part, but where was the vegetation invading the cracks in the concrete? Smothered, I should guess, long ago. As I say this, a few things should be kept in mind. Beijing is similar, gray of sky and horizon. That said, the air quality is hundreds of times better than a decade or two ago.

For my part, I became devastatingly ill. At first I thought little of it, headaches and body aches. Before too long this became a fever and confined me to bed in the hotel. At lunch on the third day, I passed out. Nearly the entirety of the next few days were spent in bed at the hotel which I grew to despise. Across the street was an open air dance arena that started playing music at 6:00 a.m. for the pre-work-ballroom-dancer-crowd. The music played all day, broken only at times by the pounding of construction somewhere else in the hotel. Those days were dark and dim, defined not by sleep and rest but simple misery. I am well now and back in Beijing, clean and vibrant by comparison. Home sweet home.

Peking Fowl

I am in Beijing alive and well-enough, all things considered. Compared to places like Bangkok, Hanoi, or the floating villages deep within Halong Bay, Beijing seems a lot less Asian. This comes as a surprise to me. As the capital of China, the country that immediately calls to mind Asia and the Far East, one would think that it would reflect similar ideas and lifestyles. That is, I suppose, just another stereotype. Beijing is in the midsts of modernization which has led to a great many cars, buses, and other automobiles crowding the streets, but it is by no means complete. Bicycles are still widely used and so are motorized-cyclos that would be illegal several times over on any U.S. road, but if it moves from point A to point B, no one here is too picky.

Of course, not being able to read or even begin to decipher a character based language (a different topic entirely), ordering food has become my largest adventure. About half the menus in the city have pictures that accompany them which is of great help. None of the pictures are all that large or detailed, but I can usually tell if I'm pointing at a plate of food or a bowl of noodles, sometimes if it's a meat or a vegetable. Whatever group of people I'm with will huddle around the menu and point to various orange or brown colored dishes, deciding what to eat. Most Chinese cuisine is served from a large, communal dish and taken in small portions with chopsticks or moved onto very small personal plates the size of a tea saucer. Hotpots are my favorite kind of dishes to order. The food comes out, literally, on a hot pot with some oil-based flame keeping it warm for the duration.

A lot of the food is very good, all of it interesting. Lamb is popular here, especially within ethnic restaurants. A much more authentic version of sweet and sour pork is to be found almost everywhere, pan fried mushrooms, broiled fish, other assorted meats. For the most part, this all goes down without complaint, but more than once I have totally failed at dinner. There are all sorts of hotpots, but I invariably manage to order the wrong each time. Instead of some sauteed vegetables, spices, and meat, I'm presented with a thick, bubbling broth adorned with a boiled, vaguely gray, chicken head staring back at me. The dish is made, I think, by simply chopping up a whole chicken and putting it in the dish. What you get is a lot of bone, legs, some meat, but most importantly, a large chicken head with puckered skin on top of what you thought was going to be a good meal.

Maybe I'm just coming at this with my own epicurial prejudices, but I've had some strange foods in my day. I simply don't want to add chicken brains and eyeballs to the mix. Were I in a country with less scary hype about bad bird-borne diseases, perhaps I would. The dog I had in Vietnam didn't give me (m)any qualms and wasn't that bad in the end. But how do I even begin to eat this? How much of it is edible? I can't imagine the bones get that soft after being boiled, or am I supposed to suck on the head in the same manner as crawdads and shrimp? I dunno, but whatever the case, I don't buy it. After getting a few to many of these for dinner and needing to find substitutes, I haven't ordered any hotpots in almost a week. Having realized this, I'll change that soon, but please... wish me luck.

Emerald waters

Vietnam surprised me. My expectations were not all that clear to begin with, but I do know what I did not expect to see. I did not expect to see poured concrete houses with decorative French facades, rising a dozen stories above the street level. I did not expect the spring's perpetually gray sky or lusciously green rice fields. I did not expect the scores of motorbikes dashing between each other on every street amid honking for every pedestrian and fellow biker. Nor did I expect to see small Thai women selling baguettes on every street corner, nor have lunch with a general of the Vietnamese People's Army. But I did see all these things and more.

The real highlight of the trip was Halong Bay. The Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage site, consists of hundreds and hundreds of small islands, rising almost vertically out of the water. The walls are sheer and forboding, their tops verdant and tree-covered. We took a boat through the whole long formation to one of the largest islands, Catba, which has a tourist settlement there that looks like, or so I heard at least, Brighton Beach. It's a touristy destination and not one I would have otherwise mentioned were it not for the incredible beauty of the place and everything that people like me aren't really meant to see.

A group of us decided to wake up early and rent kayaks to really explore part of the Bay. The itinerary called for hanging around the city or hiking in the hills, but that's not why Halong Bay is a well-known place. People travel there for what's out on the water. I shared a kayak with Will Cole and we all set off onto the cool emerald water. A significant number of the locals live on floating shacks behind the island, attached with only to some boards standing on blue plastic barrels. As we paddled around and into small lagoons and open water, we spied a cave opening in one of the islands. What better to do than explore it?

We managed to tie our kayaks to the barnacles and make our precarious way up to the cave opening. It was a hollow taller than it was deep and it didn't seem to have been visited in handful of years. Graffiti lined the walls, scrawled in by Vietnamese during the war. The only dates were from '67 to '76. Then we all noticed a small hole in the far side of the cave. No one had a flash light but we did have a camera. The eight of us followed one another down this dark, warm tunnel, led only by the occasional too-bright flash. Fortunately enough none of us knocked ourselves out or got stuck crawling from one space to the other. We realized, in the absolute dark at the end of crawl space, that the world was a different place now than when so many people had last occupied that space.

Onward, out into the light and water of the bay. My favorite part of being in a kayak was feeling close to the water, like I was in the Bay itself, exploring and cruising along. After another hour or two of this, we found an island with a beach and disembarked there. The sand was full of shells and coral. Simply bending down yielded heaping handfuls of colorful shells and faded white sea creatures. The black rocks were worn smooth in some places, barnacled in others, and all over there was peace and solitude. The sea never ceases but in a different way than the incessant noise of the city. It's calm out there...

Adieu, Halong Bay. Ni hao, China...

Thaksin, not Taxi

A guy named Thaksin is the current prime minister of Thailand. A few weeks ago, he authorized the sale of a huge Thai mobile phone company to competitors in Singapore. This was not only unpopular because Thailand lost a large company and all the jobs and money that went with it, but the one person who benefited the most from it was Thaksin himself, who pocketed a clean $2 billion from the deal. He was, even before this happened, the richest man in Thailand. This started a large movement protesting the Prime Minister, telling him to step down from his position and, ideally, having the beloved king name a replacement. The night before we left Thailand for Vietnam, I convinced a tuk-tuk driver to take me and some others to the protests. It took a while to find a willing driver. Most just scoffed at the idea of going out there and drove off without us, but the one I did find was plenty insane. He insisted on doing wheelies with a three-wheeled doom machine on crowded highway streets, but it did get us there, so I'm not complaining. That night was the largest the protests had been yet, some 100,000 plus. As a handful of Westerners, we stood out. Heads would turn in our direction, people would shout out. No one was rude, and most were just curious to see what we were doing there. An upper level employee from Eton PLC (a large Thai power company) nabbed us and gave us flags and head bands to wear. He told us his take on everything, and as we were speaking with him, dozens of people stopped around us to take pictures of our conversation. I was becoming slightly self-conscious with all this undue attention and decided to move on. A block or so down we ran into a gentleman signing autographs at a table. Will Cole was wearing a Carleton shirt, and this man recognized it. "Carleton College?" he asked. Wow. Who knows about Carleton in Thailand? From what I could hear over the din, he used to teach at the University of Chicago and was known as Dr. Woody P(something or other... there is more after the P, but I couldn't tell you what it was). His Thai name was longer than I could hope to remember, but he served as the intellectual behind the movement and was a fascinating character to run into. He took all our headbands, autographed them, and talked to us for a while about the protests, Carleton, and our program. This was incredible. The line of people waiting for him to finish the conversation wasn't all too pleased, but they were probably assumed we were far more important than we were and could be allowed such attention. We continued on. Some guys with video cameras showed up and had us shout "Thaksin get out!" a few times. It was time to get back, so we turned around. The street we needed to find was towards the front of the protests where there was some speaker ranting about this or that. Before too long we ended up picking our way across the front line of this mass of people. Flags were heaving to and fro, people were up and shouting and dancing, there was power, energy, dramatik. As we kept moving through, there was a mass of people tracking us behind the fence near the stage. I turned and looked and was dazed by a dozen flashes. The press had found us and was taking pictures of everything we did. Embarassed and fascinated, we made our way through as quickly as possible. A day later, as we were getting off the bus to our hotel in Vietnam, Roy told us he got an e-mail from our guide, Frank (his name is actually Manop, but if you've ever Father of the Bride, this guy was Frank through and through). Frank had been watching the evening and saw a curious site during the feature on the protests. Some Americans had shown up, wearing Carleton shirts, sure enough. Well, it couldn't have been anyone else, but I wish I had seen it nonetheless. Not that I ever thought I'd be in Thailand, Asia for that matter, but even then, who'd have thought I would make the evening news?

Elephants and Roosters

Chiang Mai, the second largest city in Thailand, is located in the north, nestled at the foot of the hills that eventually lead to Burma and Laos. Every night, at about 6:00 p.m. or so, the Night Market starts to collect itself and open up for the evening. The shops are run mostly by families who have stationed themselves on the sidewalk, street, or parking lot for the evening. There is, as far as I can tell, very little organization to the 3000 estimated shops sprawling through a dozen different streets. Everyone can be found strolling around, Westerners and Thais alike. With enough searching, some incredible antiques and oddities can be found, but lying in between it all is cheaply manufactured tourist goods imported from China. Don't worry, though, because whenever you walk by, someone will assure you that the Rolex is real.

The morning after the night market (which was itself a day after the night train to Chiang Mai--none of the workers on the train spoke English but would periodically force drinks on people playing cards or take drinks from people not drinking enough), half of us headed north on a bus through winding, treacherous roads. Four hours and a few bags of vomit later (not me--W.C. gets motion sickness) we loaded onto some long-tailed speed boats to go up river. The boats left us at a completely tourist oriented village where our elephants were waiting. My elephant in particular was pushy and demanded to be in front of the herd which meant taking some remarkably steep short cuts.

Some time later we arrived at an Ahka village that had decided, at best, to tolerate our presence. I felt unwelcome and colonial and a little dirty of conscience on this well-manicured adventure. Village roosters started crowing and cawing around 4:00 a.m., and we left after breakfast, hiking north, deeper into the hills. It would not be hard for all of these hills to be a dense thicket of vegetation, a jungle once inhabited by elephants, but people have lived here for generations and they are terraced, cleared, and had just finished being burned for the next season's crops. The hike itself was needed and welcome with a short break underneath a waterfall around noon.

The next village we came to was similar to the first in construction. All the houses were bamboo huts with tatched rooftops, dusty trails leading from one to the other. This village spoke a different dialect and shared a different culture than the previous night's. It was also much friendlier, and two dozen kids came out to see us when we showed up. They demanded that I put them on my shoulders, stomp around, swing them, carry them, tickle and play. I was more than happy to oblige and got covered in little kids and little kid dust. One of them even gave me the braclet he was wearing. It's on my wrist now, slowly cutting off circulation to my hand because, well, he was a bit smaller than I was, being a five-year-old. We sung songs, Happy Birthday and Jingle Bells they already knew. I played dead and they jumped on my back and screamed in my ear. Little kids, though, have a limitless energy and I was ready for bed far before they were ready to let me be. I fell asleep anyway, exhausted.

Although they asked if we could stay for two more nights, we couldn't, and headed out the next morning. I should note that a lot of the women in the village tried to sell us things--the same things that came from China found in the Night Market, and in the first village, and along the river, and in every gas station. They all sell the same thing, and I'm sure not a person selling them did anything but them him/herself. The trip back to Chiang Mai was spent mostly on a bus rank with an ill-timed deposit in the bathroom. One more night in Bangkok, the night of the largest protests against the prime minister yet.

Tomorrow, Vietnam.