China’s talking on the cell phone, loves pandas, eats chicken feet. China squats, China stares, China spits. China is rudely courteous. Doesn’t need deodorant. Carries its own tissues. Indulges children. At night, people gather in large groups in public squares and parking lots to dance, they also love to hear themselves sing, are constantly hawking trying to clear their throats, smile and laugh more often than not. China eats pig snouts, thousand year-old eggs, duck tongues, deep-fried honeybees, cow stomach lining. A cuisine fashioned by famine. Chinese women favor Converse Hi-Tops. Chinese words look great lit up in red neon. China is severely myopic. Is a gathering tsunami. Are building the world's biggest yak dairy processing center. Write great headlines like: Mubarak in comma, but ‘not clinically died’. Consume 20% of the world’s beer. Use about 40% of the world's cement. Have grown peaches for over 3,000 years. Raise half a billion pigs a year. Smoke 50,000 cigarettes every second. Cinderella first appeared in a Chinese book written between 850 and 860 A.D. China is a bicycle kingdom and manufactures 60% of the world’s bicycles. I am forever trying to keep up. Follow through. Get swept away. Persevere. Maintain. Discover. Wish me luck . . . .
2 Comments
I’m always looking for the missing poem, the free city, sun vigor, the day-glo orange people. I want to go in deeper, let loose, to be caught up in what Thomas Wolfe called “the slow incense of the East,” to break out of the confines of the traveler’s state of competitive comparison and repetitive judgment, to boldly go where few laowai (foreigner) have gone before. And that’s one entirely plausible explanation of how I ended up with those marks on my back. Another is quite simple: I frequently let China have its way with me. When I first arrived here, I got some great advice from a teacher in Xian. She said, "to be effective as a teacher you need to do two things: Keep you energy up and get massages often." Now I had no problem with the energy (like a sponge I feed off the energy of my students), but the massage part proved to be problematic. You see, when a male foreigner asks a Chinese person where to get a massage, it is usually assumed they are using code to mean a massage with an 'extra something.' I got lots of meticulous directions to palm parlors, but none to legitimate massage places. Then I heard about the coolest thing. In 2006, the Chinese government began an initiative to train blind people to work as masseurs, and it has been a runaway success. It is estimated that there are 110,000 blind people working in this field, and the demand far exceeds the supply of qualified workers. Customers say blind people have a greater sensitivity and sense of touch, and their training is rigorous and extensive. Once I heard about it, I was there the very next night. The masseuse introduced himself but I couldn’t understand what he said, so I nicknamed him Kung-fu Panda (KFP). He mimed I should take off my shoes but leave my clothes on, and to lie down on the massage table, where he covered me with a sheet. Then, KFP proceeded to work me over, kneading, slapping, gouging in deep, using his hands, forearms, elbows, and karate chopping my body, lighting up places I forgot I had and rendering me a dazed, stuttering, agreeable blob of disjointed thoughts and conclusions. The whole thing lasted an hour. I immediately bought a card good for ten massages for 400 RMB. That works out to $6.35 per one-hour massage. The next time, he went in deeper, and I was snap-crackling-and-popping the whole hour but began to feel parts of my body reawakening. The third time, he was not there and another blind man whose name I also couldn’t understand took over, and if the other guy was Kung-fu Panda this guy was more like a Tai-chi Panda (TCP). He was smooth, and made me feel parts of my body I hadn’t felt since the Cold War, yet parts of my back still felt stiff. Through gestures, he asked if I would let him attach glass globes to my back. Now I had seen other people have this done, but it looked absolutely medieval, not to mention painful. (I learned later that it was called Cupping Therapy.) Yet, I trusted this guy and did not want to let my cowardice stand in the way of a good Coughing Dragon Diary post, so I took off my shirt and lay back down. He first oiled my back and I could hear his lighter clicking on and off as somehow he heated up the globes that he suctioned to my back, moving them along my meridians, then down to my waist, pulling them off with a pop, kind of like the sound children make by sticking a finger in their mouth then popping their cheeks. Next, I heard the lighter clicking furiously, and he began suctioning multiple globes on my back, until I counted 16, all of them adhering like remora fish attached to a shark, or big-mouthed groupers greedily trying to suck the life out of me. Yet, it wasn’t all that unpleasant. I could feel warmth being generated until my back was on fire. Not knowing how long it would last, I endured for the sake of science. Ten minutes later he removed them with a suffused pop. He went back to massage a part of my back that had previously been painful to me to show that now the area was pain free. It was truly remarkable. Then he wiped away the oil and had me sit up. The room was spinning and crackling, and he left me there to collect myself. It was then that every curiosity seeker found an opportunity to come to the doorway to see how the laowai was taking it, or to see me without a shirt, or to see if I had scales, or perhaps was covered with fur. I staggered out and into the evening feeling subdued but fine. I slept well and woke feeling really good, really loose. It was only after taking a shower that I realized I had angry-looking cupping hickeys all up and down my back. I immediately freaked, then went online and discovered this was common and that they should be gone in about a week. Practitioners are said to be able to read the hickeys and diagnose your health. Me, I had fun telling the unsuspecting that I went swimming in the Yellow River and was attacked by giant leeches. All in all I have been feeling pretty good and will allow KFP and TCP to continue to have their way with me. I will, however, draw the line at therapeutic bloodletting. Lanzhou is a city that sprawls in a valley severed by the Yellow River and ringed by sandy, terraced, scrub-brushed hills that everyone calls mountains. It is now a city of skyscrapers and towering apartment complexes but was once one of the five main Garrison Cities in support of the Great Wall. It guarded the Hexi Corridor and the Silk Road and before high-rises, pagodas and mosques were the most elaborate structures to rise from the dusty earth. It is a city of almost 4 million with a bad reputation. Somewhere along the line, somebody branded it the most polluted city in China and that comment has followed it into every review posted by online reviewers with an aversion to facts. Now I have been to some famous China cities and have compared notes with other travelers and to my mind Lanzhou’s air is actually clean by comparison. The bad air pollution rap has also inspired another blog writer—someone way more industrious than me, to actually collect the data to prove it, and it can be found at an informative website called Redefining Lanzhou. When I decided to come to China I had multiple offers in different places, but Lanzhou’s reputation actually was the deciding factor in me coming here. I figured this was a not going to be a touristy, Chinese Disney carnival ride, and probably was a place that could use some love and accurate reporting. So, I had my mission laid out before me, preplanned, and then I ran smack into the reality of Lanzhou, which was even better than I had hoped. It’s a crazy, vibrant, backwater relative to the new Chinese cities, overlooked and off the beaten path where everyone apologizes because it is so small. (Yikes, can you say 4 million people?) It is properly located in Gansu Province in China's so-called Wild West and the citizens are a vivid ancestral mix of travelers passing through the city whose first preserved records show it existed as early as 221 B.C. It’s a riot, a stew, a great brawl of contradictions, and a place where no sooner had I enthusiastically sung a litany of its praises to a skeptical resident, it registered its scorn by hurling an afternoon sandstorm at me. You have to love a place like that. So, in future diaries I will try to correct and update the inaccuracies and prejudices shown in previous reporting with inaccuracies and prejudices of my own, all verified by at least two of my multiple personalities. And, just in case you were wondering, the name of the city is pronounced ‘Lan—Joe.’ |
|