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| Part 2 -- Beijing lost, Hao found |
Disclaimers: If you've made it onto this distribution list, it's because I thought you might enjoy hearing about my Asia trip from time to time. Because I'm being charged by the hour to use this computer, I'm rushing to write this letter, so please forgive any spelling errors or other imperfections. Also, not everyone may understand my references since I know you all from different walks of life. I apologize for this as well. If you rather not continue to receive these letters, please let me know--I won't be insulted--and I will happily remove you from the list. I'm really not that arrogant to think that the whole world is interested in reading of my travels and travails. If you've recently given me a change of address or a new address, I'm not sure whether I was able to successfully enter them into my address book. If you write me back, it will probably take me a very, very long while to reply. Please don't be impatient with me. I'm not sure how often I'll be able to find one of these Internet centers and whether the connections will be decent.
I'm going to try and deliver a second installment today, but I'm not sure how far I'll get on this jalopy at China Telecom. I've had a lot of trouble loading Netscape's e-mail service, and Chinese people at other workstations keep asking me where I'm from.
I'm a long way from Beijing now, and a lot has happened since I last wrote. I've been cooling my jets here in Lanzhou, waiting for my digestive tract to settle down before embarking on a nine-hour bus ride through the mountains to Xiahe, a tiny town with an important monastery. No way do I want to go all the way to Tibet to see Tibetan Bhuddism at work, so I'm cheating by going to Xiahe, which is considered China's "second Tibet."
Lanzhou is an industrial city of about a million (just guessing) in Gansu Province in north-central China. The city has a feel of a frontier town since it's the last major outpost before hitting the mountains and deserts of western China, which are sparsely inhabited. There's very little to see in Lanzhou except for the Yellow River--which should be called the Fleshtone River since it's the color of liquid face makeup--rushing by at great speed.
I was deposited in Lanzhou by Hao, his sister Yi Yi and his friend Nick, who continued by rail to Xining, further west. In my last installment I wrote that I was considering hooking up with these three to accompany them to Xi'An. After the high of my first three days in Beijing, I had a run of bad luck. The Visa card for my primary bank account was rejected repeatedly by the Bank of China ATM. A second watch that I purchased at a sleazy market near the Temple of Heaven was stolen off my wrist (and it was a cheapie--only US$5). I came down with some kind of gastrointestinal bug, causing me alternating bouts of diarrhea and constipation (you said you wanted details, folks). And during a hotel shuffle, I lost track of Hao.
I was saved by my Chinese tutor Lucy. (Perhaps the only other Lucy in China.) I had hooked up with Lucy and her roommate Cindy at the Beijing Language and Cultural University. They were giving me a four-day crash course in Chinese. Lucy and Cindy very patiently answered all my questions about life in China, made phone calls for me, and attempted to teach this lughead proper Chinese pronunciation. They took me to the student cafeteria where I ate rice and more rice to try and settle my stomach. Lucy called the hotel where Hao was supposed to be staying and got Reception to give her the room numbers of every room that contained any Americans. Then, we kept calling rooms until we found Hao and his entourage.
In some ways, I felt relieved when I lost track of Hao. On one hand, I relished the idea of touring Xi'An with someone as knowledgeable and competent (and bilingual!) as him. On the other hand, I wasn't quite ready to leave Beijing after only eight days, four of which were spent mostly in the northwest suburbs where the university was located. Once we found him, though, fate dictated that I go west to Xi'An.
In my last afternoon and evening in Beijing, I crammed in a visit to the Forbidden City and a second Beijing opera performance. The Forbidden City was blazing hot--about 95 degrees F--and a ghost town. Granted, there were plenty of tourists (very few Westerners), but the place seemed like it had been hit by a neutron bomb. Most of the buildings were closed or sparsely or shabbily decorated. One could only imagine what the imperial city would have been like back in the 1800s (and before) when it was filled with royalty and other dignitaries who lived there in opulence.
One of my favorite places in Beijing was the Summer Palace. This is a large park alongside a lake where the royal family would retreat during the summer. The park was filled with many fine buildings, gardens and walkways. The emperors and empresses would get there via boat along the canals that led from the Forbidden City northwest to the Summer Palace. In the middle of the lake was a small island. Empress Dowager Cixi was the last powerful ruler of China (1836-1908). She would alight at this island and stop at the Temple of the Dragon King to pray for rain. After burning incense in the temple, she would continue by boat to the Hall of Joyful Longevity to her residential chambers.
I often think about Empress Dowager Cixi. She has a bad reputation in China for being a tyrannical and ineffective ruler, ignoring the threat of such foreign powers as England, France and Japan (who made off with Burma, Indochina and Taiwan during her reign). Supposedly, she started out as a concubine. In the pack of postcards I bought at the Summer Palace, one of the cards is a portrait of her. She's a rat-faced, mean-looking woman. She doesn't fit my stereotype of a concubine. I wonder what she was really like.
I imagine her sitting in the Garden of Harmonious Interests taking tea. Thanks to the revolution, now the garden is full of ordinary Chinese people relaxing by the lily pond, drinking tea from thermoses and jam jars, spitting watermelon seeds onto the tables and floor, smoking and arguing. The faded paintings in the overarching eaves only hint at what royal life was like there. Had there been no revolution, I would be denied admission to the gardens as well, unless I had been born into nobility. Cixi turns up again later in Xi'An. She fled there at one point to escape the revolutionaries. [Please forgive any errors in my Chinese history--I really don't know squat.] I feel like I'm following her around China like a lapdog.
My last night in Beijing was devoted to the opera. Beijing opera is my newfound passion and vastly underappreciated by Beijingers (like jazz is underappreciated by people in the U.S.). The artform is a combination of theater, orchestral music, song, dance, martial arts, acrobatics, pageantry and drag. Part of the appeal is its supreme artificiality. It's ultra-stylized, down to the slightest finger movements. The two performances I saw had erratic English subtitling that only added to the allure of the storyline: "Princess Li scatters flowers." "Drunken demon monkey steals peaches from the orchard." "The view of the mountain is lovely and the air is fresh, I sit here all day and embroider."
The HuGuang Guild Hall, where I saw the second opera, was very old and beautifully painted. The backdrop was a bright yellow silk tapestry with elaborate designs. When the performance ended, my heart was breaking. I longed to go backstage and sign up with the company. I didn't want to be separated from that world--I wanted the opera to go on and on, with me as one of the players.
Walking back to the subway from the Guild Hall, the evening air was warm and the moon was full. The narrow sidewalks were full of people hanging out on stoops. Men with their shirts off were slouching on low stools, smoking cigarettes. It was disconcerting walking so close by their glistening bodies. I smelled jasmine, clove, beer, urine, everything.
The next morning I was to meet Hao and his friends at the train station. Stupidly, I accept a free ride to the station from this guy at the hotel who had helped me the day before secure a train ticket. I know I've made a mistake when after he pulls away from the hotel he turns to me and says, "I playboy." Great. Nothing's ever for free. He knows about three other words of English: cars, beer and sex. He asks me if I like them. I say no. In Chinese-English he says he's a man, so he has to like sex. We make it to the station, with me fighting off his groping hands. No harm done. This time.
On the overnight train to Xi'An, we had a very comfortable soft sleeper that accommodated the four of us, with a door that locked. I learned about Hao's life in China and in the States, where he's lived for the past nine years, for the past three working for IBM in Stamford, CT. I learned about Nick's life in Manhattan. He's a doorman there. Yi Yi is a school teacher in Virginia.
In the middle of the night, I got up with bad cramps and nausea and found myself doubled over in the toilet. The toilets on Chinese trains are notoriously foul. Usually, you squat over an open hole that leads to the track below. This one wasn't the worst in China, but it wasn't the best either. Mercifully, it had a Western-style seat--a cracked wooden one, but a seat nonetheless. I have never before had severe diarrhea and vomiting in the same episode, never mind over a toilet that doesn't flush. When the train reached a station, the attendant banged on the door and made me come out. I sat crumpled up on a seat waiting for the train to start again so she would let me back into the toilet.
When we got to Xi'An at 5 am, Hao's childhood friend, Mr. Zhong, was there to pick us up. We were taken by two cabs to Mr. Zhong's apartment block, where I carried my pack up six flights of stairs. I think it was the hip belt on the pack that kept my intestines in place. The hallway up to the apartment was covered in a century's worth of dirt and was pitch black. There were light fixtures with burned-out bulbs on every level, but no one saw fit to replace the bulbs. One of the largest street markets in China (we were told) occupied the narrow lanes leading up to the building. It was unbelievably filthy and chaotic and fit my picture of what markets in India must be like. When we got up to the apartment, Mr. and Mrs. Zhong graciously fed Hao, Nick and Yi Yi breakfast and me Chinese medicine. The apartment was a modest one, and small, like a New York City apartment, with a huge television. I slept in the guest bedroom for a couple hours.
Mr. Zhong had wrangled a driver (his uncle) and the use of a van for the day. We were to be driven to see the Terra Cotta Army, which is located about a half-hour outside the city. Over the course of three days in Xi'An, we fit in much more sightseeing than I had accomplished on my own in Beijing. The Terra Cotta Army, a bronze chariot, imperial hot springs, a history museum with ceramics from various dynasties, a few temples, a few pagodas. In the history museum, I saw a little sculpture of a man from the Han Dynasty (circa 200 AD) who spoke to me. He had a simple, sweet expression and seemed much more lifelike than the other figures crafted during that time period and later ones. I pointed him out to Nick and Hao, but sadly he didn't speak to them.
The Terra Cotta Army is a group of 6,000 clay soldiers, built 2000 years ago to guard the tomb of a Qin-dynasty emperor. They were discovered in 1974 by a farmer digging a well (who was on hand at the museum shop to sign autographs). The soldiers are about 6 feet tall, and each has a differently sculpted face. They were smashed by invading armies, but several hundred (?) have been reconstructed. It's surreal seeing row upon row of frozen soldiers and broken pieces of soldiers. You're not permitted to see them at eye level. You stand overlooking them and many others still covered up with dirt from a walkway above. I was reminded of the last sequence in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" when the ark was forklifted into in a massive warehouse with hundreds of other relics.
Touring Xi'An with Hao and his friends was like floating along on a pink, puffy cloud. It was a relief not to have to figure anything out--to let him make all the arrangements, all the decisions, while I took in the sights. It was a luxury to ask questions in English and have them answered in English. To know what kind of food would arrive on your plate when you ordered it. Plus, Hao, Nick and Yi Yi were excellent company.
Goodbyes were made at the station in Lanzhou. I felt as if all the emotional toughening that I had built up during my first week in China was sloughed off while I was under their care. I felt tender and vulnerable again. Fortunately, Lanzhou has been relatively easy to navigate. Until today.
I was trying to get to the bus station to buy a ticket for tomorrow's bus to Xiahe. I took a cab, which pulled into an alley. I didn't see any bus station. I tried to ask the driver where the station was and didn't understand the answer. A man with yellow and brown rotting teeth shoved his head into my window and said "Xiahe, Xiahe." I told him no, no, I'll buy the ticket myself, but then as I got out the door, people all around me were shouting at me "Li xia, li xia." I told them I wasn't Lisa.
This woman who turned out to be a minibus attendant was talking to my cab driver who seemed to be agreeing with her. A group of people shepherded me towards the woman's minibus still saying what sounded like, "Lisa, Lisa." I said "qi che zhan, qi che zhan," which means bus station, bus station, but people kept waving me onto the minibus. I had no idea what was going on, but everyone seemed so hell-bent on getting me onto the bus, I got on. I continued saying "qi che zhan," and this muslim with a long beard, yellow teeth and white hat kept nodding at me. The minibus took off. I showed the woman attendant my map and where I thought the station was plus the Chinese characters in Lonely Planet (the guidebook) for the bus station. Everyone kept nodding at me. I had no idea why the cab driver dropped me off at a minibus shuttle station instead of the bus station.
A few minutes later the city of Lanzhou seemed to be ebbing away, as the smell of manure filled the air. I continued showing the city map to people, who all kept nodding. I knew I was in trouble when I saw someone pull out a 100 yuan (US$12) note to pay the woman. A minibus in the city costs about 2 yuan (US 24 cents). Then I started making more noise about my going the wrong way, and before I knew it we were out on the open highway. I stood up and told them they had to let me off. The minibus lady showed me a metal plate showing the name of the city (in Chinese) that the bus was headed for. I said "No, no, qi che zhan Lanzhou!"
Finally she understood. She had the driver pull over to the side of the highway. She crossed me over to the other side and waited there until a minibus came from the opposite direction going back towards town. She explained something to the attendant--who knows what. I hop on. The attendant is a young girl, about 12 years old, who speaks a couple words of English. She understands me when I tell her where I'm trying to go.
When we get back into town, she gets off the minibus and insists on taking me to another bus to go the one stop to the bus station. I blow her a kiss, as I scramble onto this next bus. The bus attendant motions me to get off at the next stop and points to the bus station. When I get off there, I am back in the alley where the cab driver had initially let me off, which now, I learn, is just to the side of the bus station. I go inside, buy my ticket, while a group of five Chinese men crowd me, look over my shoulder and laugh. And laugh they should.
I'm scared about leaving the city. Being an urban girl, I feel much safer around subways and taxicabs. The mountains are not my friends.
----------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright Wonderlandİ 1999