So I went back for round two.
That summer was little different from the previous one. Same college, same long work hours, and most of the same old friends I had made the year before. At the end of the summer program, I even lived in the dorm with my friends for a couple weeks (I had originally been living in the college's hotel).
It was enjoyable staying in the suburbs of Beijing, away from the pollution and crowds of people, surrounded by fields and greenery. But the next semester of students was on the approach, and whoever's 3ft x 6ft space I was occupying might not be so happy to share it with me, so it was soon time to go.
But I didn't yet have anywhere else to go, since the powers that be at Berkeley decided I was only good enough for Spring admittance, and it's a good thing, too. Otherwise, all that follows on this page would have been replaced by normal old studying and me sitting in a classroom. How boring. (There's an especially cool Chinese saying I've always thought appropriate for explaining my desired method of learning: "To walk a 1,000 li road is better than reading 10,000 books." [讀萬卷書不如行千里路] Note: 1,000 li is a little over 300 miles. Actually, I've always liked to combine the two, and do a lot of reading while I walk.)
And thus began my years of roaming China.
I still remember quite clearly the anticipation with which I sought out the proper ticket counter at the Beijing train station, anticipation that ended with a relatively sleepless night sitting in a hard, vertical bench seat on the way to my first destination beyond Shanghai and Beijing. I liked the idea of spending only five dollars to travel eight hours to another city, but it was awefully difficult to get any rest while sitting in such discomfort. (Despite this, I still like the idea of spending very little money to get somewhere far away overnight (you also save on hotel costs!), and have been on much longer uncomfortable rides since, all for the sake of making my dollars go the extra mile...)
The next morning I arrived in Datong, a major coal center in China, and obviously so, as it's blanketed with dirt and coal dust. My only purpose there was to see the Yungang Grottoes, home to huge reliefs of Bhuddist deities carved into a cliff face. Interesting, yes, but I probably would have gotten more out of it had I gone after taking the course Bhuddism in Chinese. (Looks like school was good for something. That class was fun, thanks Prof. Riegel.)
The next stop was the capital of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot. The most interesting thing I did in town was visit the Inner Mongolia Museum, quite a cool museum, where I hung out with the employees for a couple days.
After that, I did something rather against my nature (and something I've only done once since then): I joined a tour group. (At least it did have its interesting moment, which I'll get to.) So our tiny bus of tourists putted across the grassy rolling hills, and met up with other tiny buses carrying tourists. We stayed in Mongolian tents [蒙古包] and ate meaty meals followed by alcohol (of which i did not partake, much to the dismay of my hosts. "But you are a young guy, you must like alcohol!"...). There was also some horse riding, or actually, horse walking, since the owner of each horse would simply lead a customer around the grassland for a fee. Riding a horse is nothing special, much less being led around by someone while you sit on it, so I passed, opting instead to roam through the hills among the sheep herders. Some locals eventually showed off some horse racing, where the horses actually moved faster than I could walk.
But the part that made the trip worthwhile was the Mongolian wrestling. Of course, they needed a volunteer, and, of course, the tour guide who brought me made me the volunteer. So I get ushered to the center of a growing number of tourists and locals, where I'm outfitted with the proper gear, high boots and a jacket, and met shortly by a Mongolian tree trunk of a guy little more than half as tall as me. Now this is what a visit to Mongolia should be like! We gripped each other's jackets and tried to make each other lose balance and fall down first, basically squatting while moving in circles. This continued for a very long time, as he was obviously trying not to hurt me; I just wasn't going to let him win without a good wrestle. Unfortunately, I couldn't learn quickly enough how to actually get this guy on the ground, it was as if he was already part of the ground, and all I could do was stop him from pulling me down. No one had briefed me on the rules, so I was unsure of exactly how much footwork is allowed, and I didn't want to start beating on the legs of some stranger, so I just let him tap my legs and swing me in circles 'til he managed to lay me down.
I need to find that dude again for a rematch.
After Hohhot was Yinchuan, capital of Ningxia Province. I don't remember much about this place, just spent my days doing the usual: covered 15% of the city on foot, hung out with some nice locals, then left.
Don't remember anything particularly interesting about my trip to Lanzhou, either, just a lot of walking and absorbing the culture. But from Lanzhou I took a side-trip to the small town of Xiahe.
It was my first visit, again the usual walk around, see stuff, and hang out with locals, but I've been back again since then, as it is a rather fun place and not far from the main path into western China, so you can read more details about Xiahe in Chapter VIII of Conquering China.
The next city, Baoji in Shaanxi, has no place on a normal list of tourist destinations, but I was visiting one of my students from the English summer program. She and her family were delighted to have me stay, although probably not quite as delighted when I started feeling rather light-headed the first evening, after which I was bedridden with a high fever for the next four days. No idea where that came from. Of course, the randomly unlucky can also be randomly lucky: her grandfather used to be a doctor and her grandmother a nurse. They took good care of me, and I was eventually on my way to see Xi'an.
As an ancient capital of China, Xi'an has its fair share of sites of historical and cultural significance. The most obvious being its city walls (since they do surround the city...). Lots of cities have city walls or remains thereof, but most don't even come close to the size and length of those around Xi'an. While traveling around China, I often imagined what one place or another must have been like in ages past (I like Chinese history), but when it comes to the walls of Xi'an, I didn't have to imagine much. They're right there.
But even after a few days of sightseeing in Xi'an, my insides were still not feeling right (apparently it wasn't just a simple fever, as all kinds of things hurt), I just couldn't at all enjoy the Teracotta Warriors. The sudden illness from Baoji and its residual pain had temporarily gutted me of my adventurous spirit. So I called Beijing and asked if they still needed teachers for the fall semester. They did.
This map is not quite accurate: in order to save space, I left out the trips to Guangzhou and Hong Kong.
The fall classes weren't intensive like summer, only a few days each week, leaving me with lots of extra time which, stupidly, I mostly spent playing video games at the company office. I justified this to myself by playing games in Chinese, dictionary at hand, which makes sense to some extent, but was something I didn't have to be in China to do. Nonetheless, there were still a number of experiences worth remembering about those few months...
The office, and university where the fall classes were held, are located in the same northwest district of Beijing where I had gone to school for a couple weeks in the summer of '97, and my return to living in that area even after only the passage of one year was my initial first-hand view of China's rapid change. An entire street of Korean stores and restaurants I used to pass on my frequent walks around the area, was now a stretch of rubble. When I inquired about the change, most said the stores were run by illegal immigrants which caused locals to start complaining about losing business to foreigners, others said that there was to be new development in the area, and everyone agreed it was a rather sudden and painful for the owners, who were told on very short notice to leave before everything was bulldozed. The entire truth of the matter would undoubtedly be hard to dig up, but it was probably a combination of factors, with development one of the higher concerns on the list. After all, even now the government is destroying hundreds of years of history by leveling acres of hutongs, also in the name of development (and the Olympics, which many see as one of the greatest things happening for China, but which is at the same time disastrous on fronts such as cultural heritage).
Back to less serious issues. I didn't live near the school, but actually with the boss of the company, who, as one of China's newly affluent, lived in one of the expensive western-style housing developments in Beijing's suburbs. It was extremely odd to see this kind of place in China. Nothing like it had existed just a few years before, and yet *poof*, there they were now, neatly arranged rows of cookie-cutter houses, with a front lawn, white siding, and garage.
I stayed with him and his wife and mother for a couple weeks, after which he eventually grew out of the novelty of having a foreigner live with him, and I was subsequently banished to live with the other employees in the company dorm-apartment. (At least I wouldn't have to commute by hot, sticky bus for about two hours each way through horrendous Beijing traffic any more.) My new home, a room in an apartment shared with three others, was a lot more realistic. Dirty little place with no hot water or kitchen, but I can take just about anything.
Then winter came. Beijing's winter is, like it is pretty much all across China, bone-chilling. Of course I hadn't planned very well for this, but neither was I willing to spend any money on the usual necessities like warm clothes, so I fought the Beijing winter with a single button-up shirt and my skin. I do have a fondness for cold, but I must admit, the prolonged months of freezing weather forced me to constantly strain my jaw muscles to keep my teeth from jittering, so that when I later returned home, it took a several weeks for the odd hearing impariment this induced to wear off.
The only more memorable event of that semi-wasted length of time teaching English was finding a pea-sized piece of concrete in my lunch at the Qinghua University cafeteria, a piece of concrete that has since sat in a pouch in my backpack all these years (mostly because I keep forgetting it's there, not to ward off other pieces of concrete). Luckily I had found it the easy way—with my eyes.
It's early December and it's snowing, and I can see my first semester of college approaching swiftly, so I quit my teaching job and took off to at least finish the travel route I didn't get to complete earlier.
What better place to start than right where I left off? The Terracotta Warriors were definitely better the second time around, since I wasn't hunched over in pain and could actually stand up straight for a change.
After Xi'an was Henan Province to the east, where I found that I apparently wasn't far enough south to beat the advancing front of snow, as I entered Luoyang just in time for the "first big snow" [第一場大雪]. Great. Nothing special to say about Luoyang.
Next up was the legendary origin of Chinese martial arts, the Shaolin Temple. Aside from it's normal Buddhist-templeness, it has a pretty cool "forest of stupas" worth a look. But I didn't see anyone practicing stone-crushingly cool martial arts like in the movies, and no one was storming the place like in the movies, except hordes of tourists, of course. In fact, I only saw one monk the entire time I was there. They could be hiding in the recesses of their inner temple, or, for all I know, have simply moved operations to some undisclosed location.
That wouldn't stop the various unrelated martial arts academies who have set up shop in this prime location. The path to Shaolin is lined by vast stretches of land worn bare by the feet (and hands?) of crowds of sparring kids; on any given day there are tons of 'em, spread out even onto the surrounding hills, trying to beat on each other. Probably not something you would see anywhere else in the world.
Through the transportation hub Zhengzhou, then on to Kaifeng, where my arrival was again met by a first big snow. I'm just so lucky that way. Nothing particularly memorable about Kaifeng (it has been over six years now, I've forgotten a lot because I didn't write anything down or take any pictures), so on to Nanjing, where the only thing out of the ordinary I can remember was being intercepted on the street by a couple of investor-entrepreneurs, who insisted on taking me to their office and explaining the details of their scheme (of which I can now recall approximately zero percent), after all, I'm a foreigner, and I must have either money, connections, or both. Obivously they couldn't have found a worse candidate, as I was merely a recent high school graudate, but it was an interesting encounter all the same.
Suzhou is famous for its gardens, so I went to Suzhou and saw gardens. It's also famous for beautiful women, but I only remember seeing one; I wasn't looking very hard though, so there may be more than one.
From there, a boat ride down a long canal found me in another of southern China's early important cultural centers, Hangzhou. There, a plethora of historical landmarks are located around the famous West Lake, inspiration for every Chinese poet who ever layed eyes on it (and even some who didn't). But nothing I can think of worth mentioning here.
Of the many times I've been to the boring city that is Shanghai, this one had to be the best. I was walking around the city minding my own business, when suddenly two girls appear before me and ask if I'd join them for tea. This already didn't sound right, but I was too curious, and being in a relatively boring place like Shanghai will only make you more curious when you do actually find something unusual. So I follow them to a shady, empty tea shop hidden away in a nearby building, where we chatted as they proceeded to order all kinds of snacks and fruit. I wasn't going to get into this mess, and didn't touch anything besides my cup of tea, simply taking advantage of the opportunity to practice Chinese while they continued to order things. I also took advantage of a break in the conversation to slip into the bathroom and take all the money from my wallet and hide it in the bottom of my shoe. Back at the table, it wasn't long before they said they had to go, hinting that I should get the bill, which, as expected, had some pretty exhorbitant prices on it (about 15-20 times what the items were worth). Of course my wallet was empty, and technically I hadn't had anything except a cup of tea, forcing them to dig through their purses for all the money they could find before barely coming up with the hefty sum. Ha, ha.
After they left, I payed for my not-so-cheap-but-worth-it cup of tea with money out of my shoe, and was on my way.
That night, the Japanese guy who was staying in the same hotel room as me told a rather suprising story: he had met some girls on the street, who took him to a high-class restaurant for an amazing dinner, ordering until the table was full of food that no one could even finish. At the end, they left suddenly, leaving him with the bill: something on the order of 500 dollars!
I've since discovered this is (or by now, "was," I hope) a common occurence. Shanghai. . . not only is it boring, it's corrupt, too.
That marks the end of what I can remember about that trip to China. I may have spent only a portion of the time traveling in favor of living in Beijing and teaching English, but I learned a hell of a lot of Chinese, and even made some money in the process. Unfortunately, that which I didn't spend on traveling, I promptly lost in the stock market. (Looks like I may as well have done more traveling.)
Returning to the U.S. after such a long time, I experienced a sort of "reverse culture shock," then was faced with the challenge of tackling school again (a difficult habit to pick up once left behind for some time); but getting over these obstacles made me yet better prepared for the next few years, where I would frequently take time away from college to explore more and more of China.
[30 may 05]
