The light that shines on travelers is a special kind of light, bestowing upon those living their everyday lives a simple yet powerful kind of evaporating magic. At least this is so in western China where a foreigner can still cause passersby to gape in open-mouthed stupefaction. I was gaped at, gawked at, grinned at, cursed at, welcomed, worshiped, and hello-ed repeatedly, and at least twice on every major street someone would shyly point to their phone requesting to take a photo with me. Those who know me know how much I dislike having my picture taken, but I endured it gracefully, sort of, seeing as how I enjoy taking pictures, I realze have to submit to pictures as well Besides, some teenagers were so happy with their photos they almost exploded with joy and that was nice to witness.
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I was caught in the ache of late fall. Shortening days, the bite of the wind, crimson memories colliding, the haunting of pumpkin ghosts, but mostly I missed the autumn moon. As a city dweller, the moon appears briefly between buildings, washed out by light, a dull, ice popsicle compared to the real thing. There was a full Hunter's moon coming, and I was going to escape the city and the skyscrapers and the artificially-lit skyline, to soak in it, to moon-bathe in it, to cleanse the soul and ease the ache, out in the Martian desert terrain around Zhangye. So, after a lovely hi-speed train ride described in Part 1, I was there in the center of the city gathered around the Drum Tower. Dazzled by being blasted out of the last of a long series of dark tunnels, the first snowfall was blinding on the late autumn hills as the sleek new bullet train whispered westward past stuttering images of sheep feeding on the frayed edges of summer. Golden Van Gogh cornstalks, gathered and tied in straining bundles, were stacked like muskets taken from surrendering soldiers. Other stalks stood defiant, still rooted to the earth but October-bleached and faded down-down-down into the color of weak tea. Stillness and motion, the high-speed train and the silence of the fields: yellow ochre, raw sienna, burnt umber, Mars orange, viridian, Van Dyke brown . . . gray-metal . . . skies. Over 2,400 years ago, before Aristotle wrote that a tyrant rises to power by first demonstrating that he is a man of the people, before the French learned how to make wine from the Italians, before the first socks were knitted to prevent sandal chafing, before Homer had an odyssey and Pythagoras had a theory, river men in China were regularly ferrying people and goods across the wild Yellow River on inflatable, sheepskin rafts. In modern China, with its bridges and dams and water reclamation projects, this tradition still exists among a handful of rafters still practicing the age-old ballad of curing sheepskins to float on water, and from May to October in Lanzhou, you can hire them to take you back in time. On a lazy, swollen, sun kissed August day, I did just that. Attached like fire escape stairs to the sides of a red brick tenement, the way up the cliff-face Maiji Mountain Grottoes rose up, threatening, impossibly high for someone like me who is deathly afraid of heights. From Wikipedia, “Acrophobia (from the Greek: ἄκρον, ákron , meaning ‘peak, summit, edge’ and φόβος, phóbos, ‘fear’) is an extreme or irrational fear of heights, especially when one is not particularly high up.” For me, unfortunately, anything above the height of a one-story roof was high up. As with anywhere in the world, in China, the trip you have is the one you make. Travel here can be unfathomable, shockingly rude, indifferent, overwhelming, but it can also be generous, enlightening and extraordinarily kind. I found all of these and more on a recent summer trip to Tianshui. Like all cities in western China, Shandan is covered with Gobi Desert dust. It gets on your clothes, gets in your hair, makes it a challenge to wear contact lenses, which I foolishly tried. Local women cover their heads with long scarves and hide behind big masks as if they were performing surgery. Still, the dust gets in and covers you with fine grit as if it were trying to rub you out or bury you. The day I spent walking along the wall I like to think I was covered with Great Wall dust. An ancient grit of ruin, particles released that attached to me, sharing collective wind stories of the greatest testament to xenophobia that ever existed, melting now in sad dry puddles back into the desert from which it sprang. There is no escaping the melancholy the corpse of the Great Wall incites. It clings to the wind-carved humps, vibrates in the pockmarked shadows, swells like a timeworn sonnet, cradles you gently like the famous lullaby baby in the treetops just before the bough broke, entering you like—yes, like a poem, a panoptic poem of inclusion and exclusion. I walked the line: was I being kept in or kept out? Even now at its diminished height, the wall is a formidable barrier, but you wonder, what exactly was it keeping out? What was it protecting its people from? Ideas? Change? Racial purity? Mogao CavesOn any trip to Dunhuang, the Mogao Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a must see. The carved out caves feature one of the largest collections of Buddhist paintings and sculptures at a site established in 332 AD that has survived not only the withering effects of time but the actual torching of the caves by nonbelievers, looting by invaders, serving as refugee housing in 1921 for Russian soldiers fleeing the revolution along with the rampant plundering by legions of foreign, allegedly well-meaning, archeologists from Britain, France, Hungary, Japan, among others and a untold years of tourist marauders.
Ancient legends say the area containing the Mingsha or Singing Sand Dunes just south of Dunhuang used to be flat. One day a fierce battle raged there and an army was annihilated, leaving the ground littered with bodies. A Goddess scattered incense ashes over them and from the ground rose up a giant sand mountain to bury the warriors, while the tears of the dead soldiers’ loved ones pooled to form Crescent Lake. Even now, it is said, when the wind comes from a certain direction, military drums rumble, the dunes echo the sounds of battle, the sand blows out sad laments for the fallen and mournful vapors of ghosts, drift. But this day, there was no wind, no battle cries, just sunlight and temperatures in the high 50’s and Xuxiangdong (whose name I shortened to Xu) beckoning me to follow. He led me to the camel ranch and pulled out money to pay for both of us, but I stopped him and paid my own way. I have found this is typical of Chinese generosity. If you are invited, the inviter expects to pay for everything. I guess he thought he had invited me by saying, “follow me, follow me,” and that became the tagline of the day, uttered in an amusing way as one would usher along a clueless child, along with repeating, “good friend, good friend.” I suddenly realized this was the extent of his English. No matter, we were on the same wavelength, everything was making us laugh, everything was blowing us away and we communicated our wonder with double thumbs up, shrieks and whoops of surprise and delight. We were joined by another Chinese tourist straggler and lined up for the camels. The legendary singing sand dunes outside of Dunhuang, China were not singing for me but they were not entirely silent, either. They say the desert sings of lost Silk Road traveler’s ghosts whose lives were taken by bandits or thirst or starvation, though it was mostly by the desert windstorms that rose like waves and extinguished all life that wasn’t smart enough to ride it out, yet all I heard were my own thoughts, desert dry, blooming, beckoning onward over the dunes and into what’s next. Our captain eased us into the dock in Big Harbor on the lake at Liujiaxia Gorge, while ferry workers were securing red trucks loaded with pipe under gray uncertain skies. I snapped a quick pic and climbed into the front seat of the car that would bring us back to town. The woman who rode out with me climbed in the back and I was just happy to be away from all my boat mates, away from the arguing, but most of all I was grateful to be rid of the young, nervy, arrogant couple. Cut off from the rest of the world when engineers dammed the Yellow River and flooded Liujiaxia Gorge, the ‘Ten Thousand Buddha Cave Grotto’ can only be reached by boat and even then only during certain times of the year. In winter, there is ice and low water. In the spring, the Tibetan Plateau snowmelt raises the water level and allows boats to access the site during the summer and fall. No roads go there. The boat that brings you in also brings you back out. So, without any other options, I waited in the boat besieged by vendors, who eventually lost interest due to the steady rain. While waiting, I thought about the process of waiting and how it was a test of ‘Being Bingling Grotto.’ Why does it perturb us so much? For instance, while watching television, we are waiting but distracted from the fact that we are doing so. In that case, it doesn’t bother us. Waiting while staring at pictures that move is okay. But waiting for others to do something—even though the world is always moving, is not okay. Why? I looked around and realized fear was in there somewhere—fear that I would be left behind, fear that others wouldn’t do what I wanted them to do, fear that I would be uncomfortable, fear that reality wouldn’t live up to the vision I had already preprogrammed into my mind. The rain, rejoicing as it reconnected with the waters of the lake whispered, “Expectations are almost as troublesome as fear.” An hour passed as I pondered waiting. I was wet, but relatively comfortable, engaged in trying to decipher the riddle of waiting, only wishing that I hadn’t given away my potato chips. Time passed in an earthly way in this soggy but ethereal place. The oldest engraving in cave 169 in the Bingling (Tibetan for 10,000 Buddhas) Grotto site dates back to 420 A.D. Ten years after Rome was sacked by the Visigoths and a few years before Attila the Hun began his wild sweep westward, Tibetan monks began carving statues and shrines in Jishi Hills. The trip to the Bingling Temple Buddha Caves in Gansu Province began at the West Bus Station in Lanzhou where the woman who sold me a ticket waved me toward a ticket taker with laugh lines so deep they looked as if they were etched in with an eyebrow pencil. Let me tell you about the legend of the White Pagoda in the city of Lanzhou. It was built to honor a famous Tibetan Lama who was on his way to Mongolia to meet with Genghis Khan, but the traveling killed him somewhere in the vicinity Lanzhou. The autumn wind enters through the window,
The gauze curtain starts to flutter and fly. I raise my head and look at the bright moon, And send my feelings a thousand miles in its light. –Listed as anonymous Yue Fu (乐府, folk songs) Deeper into the heart of the labyrinth Dawn. No wind. Lavender-rose light spread like butter on distant peaks. Monks and mystics, the faithful and the temporarily faithless, opened like satellite dishes on a sacred hillside above the Labrang Monastery. Slow motion clouds moving to the natural music of the Tibetan Plateau. Everything is Ice Age still for a moment as the stunned earth awakens. The birds first, calling forth the slanted light, dousing sleeper’s dreams, silhouetting the breath of stirring farm animals, glinting off riffles in the Daxia River, driving off the last stubborn traces of the monochrome night, evaporating shadows and turning up color. A low wordless chanting arises from the hillside, lifts and circles like a flock of red-crowned cranes. Smoke rises from sacred spruce fires. Farmer’s motorcycle trucks wind along the road below, moving to the open markets of Xiahe. Life stirs, puts on its boots and pisses in the alley. Breakfast is yak yogurt, Tsampa—dough made with roasted barley flour and yak butter, buckwheat porridge, Momo—Tibetan dumplings, Thenthuk—Tibetan noodles and yak tongue. Boiling hot black tea—filtered and decanted into a churn, then fresh milk and sugar are added. The wind gusts, carving new lines in faces, stealing hats, billowing robes, herding dust, pock-marking buildings, scattering anything not tied down and causing pedestrians to lean into it. Moving clockwise, streams of worshippers walk the Kora, a three kilometer route around the monastery through prayer vapors left by previous pilgrims, spinning the colorful prayer wheels, muttering chants, along a route created for moving, meditative reflection, interspersed with scarlet monks, the old, the young, the tourists, and the devout who flatten themselves on the ground, stand up, then throw themselves back on the ground, and in this way move around the entire circuit. I walked the Kora three times. Each time was different, each time was special. It’s a very active and unique form of prayer. You get exercise—by walking and spinning the prayer wheels, get to mingle with the friendly fellow Kora-walkers, get to spend time in a setting meant for reflection, say anything you want out loud, as people are mumbling in all kinds of dialects, dress however you want—some worshippers dress in the most outlandish costumes, on a plateau high above the rest of the world, surrounded by mountains. Then I rented a bike, and escaped into the Sangke Grasslands, home for thousands of years to Tibetan Nomads. The bike was old and heavy and clunky, but I was not to be stopped, grunting and huffing and puffing my way up the gradual incline, coming to the distinct conclusion that cars hate bikes. Here I was, enjoying the quiet, and though traffic was sporadic, every idiot driver that passed me felt it necessary to honk their horn in warning, as if I couldn’t hear them approaching from a half-mile away. While some cut a wide berth around me, others flew by like meteorites, and it felt as though they were trying to blast me senseless in the swirl of their passing. Still, the grasslands were miraculous. They swept away toward the horizon in fields of wildflowers, clouds, mountains and sky. I passed a lake so still I named it Narcissus Lake and spent some peaceful moments lakeside recovering from the climb up on my ridiculous bike. In which the birthday boy runs smack into Tibet Sometimes it takes a jet to carry you somewhere over the rainbow, or maybe a train, a boat, a fast car or a powerful wish, but in my case all it took was three and a half hours of patience and a bus filled with happy-go-lucky passengers. We climbed upward, past amazing, terraced hills, planted with produce, the sheer ability to farm the precipitous heights was astonishing, and at one point I saw a farmer pruning his crops by means of a rope attached around his waist, dropping down, then down, and down---we blasted by too fast to know how he managed to get back up. Then we leveled out and entered a biblical zone of fertile valleys with mosques everywhere. Their signature globes and towers rose above the landscape, more plentiful than church steeples in New England. But what was odd to me was that I equated mosques with desert terrain—these rose above green fields bright with a summer’s growth. I stopped counting them after I reached a hundred and one. After passing through Linxia City, which has long been called the “Little Mecca of China” featuring 1,700 mosques and an important stop along the Silk Road, we started climbing up, up, up, then leveled off in earnest, the terrain changing, growing more austere, though still summer green, with stuttering Van Gogh fields absent of crows, then angling almost imperceptivity downward and eventually arriving in Xiahe. Surrounded by a desolate, Martian-red expanse of bulging desert, a gleaming new Jiayuguan City has arisen on ancient ground that has been continually inhabited since around 1375, 120 years before Christopher Columbus bumped into the Americas on his way to India. Everything looks brand new. Civic auditoriums, government buildings, parks, stadium and sports center, statues, row after row of lofty apartment complexes, office towers, shopping districts, the broad boulevards lined with shade trees and lit at night with graceful light fixtures I’ve never seen anywhere except in urban design catalogs. Workers were everywhere, staining wood trim, laying paving tile, pouring cement for curbs and sidewalks, planting flowers and trees, all as if getting everything ready for buyers impatient to move in, but when I was there, the city looked hardly lived in yet. I’m used to scuffed up, bruised and bluesy cities; I really don’t know how to act in a brand new one. It was the old ground that I was interested in. I rode the magic green #4 bus out to the fort built at the narrowest part of the Hexi Corridor at Jiayuguan Pass (guan in Chinese means pass, so writing pass is redundant, it should be written Jiayu Guan . . . thanks Wikipedia!), bought a combo ticket (which allows you to visit the fort and some additional historic sites) for 130 RMB and walked up the hill as lazy fockers passed me riding the 10 RMB shuttle. I was glad I did, as I was able to capture the photograph below of some workers grooming the landscaped grounds. In most parts of the world, weary travelers only have to find a hotel, choose a room, agree on a price, and settle in. In China, it’s not that simple. A little known fact is that hotels often turn away foreigners, without explanation, or at least one you can understand, and in my case the shy desk clerk called someone, and a woman with a shellacked helmet of hair came barreling out, stamped her foot and said, “No stay here.” With martial stiffness, she pointed out the door, and away, and up the street. I said, “Umm, what?” She went to the door, and again, pointed up the street. “But, umm, you see—” “No stay here, no stay here.” I blinked, looked around. What could I do except bow and say, “Won’t stay here, no no no, no like-ee here,” and walked out the door and into the hot evening. Some people say hotels have to have a permit for foreigners to stay, others say it’s because they are running an illegal operation (casino, card room, etc.) and don’t want the attention a foreigner can bring, still others are convinced it’s xenophobic panic, while others claim it’s because foreigners smell bad. Me, I think I smell pretty good. I wandered around thinking I should have learned a lot more than how to order a cold beer in Chinese, when a man rushed up to me and said, “Halloo, halloo,” smiling and pointing and waving, as if to say—come along, come along. He was leading me towards the doors of a hotel. I grinned and followed and when we were in the lobby, I successfully mimed sleep, after which it all got complicated. I was quoted three different prices, which, by the way, were reasonable, but then completely stumped them all by trying to explain that I wanted to see a room first. They called in more people. Pretty soon, it appeared to me as if every member of the family was present in the lobby, along with all the workers of the adjoining business, who, each in turn would boldly advance on me saying, “Sleep” and I nodded, but when I repeated my request to see a room, their face froze and they looked from one to another, till the next brave soul tried, failed, retreated. After each one, I would again pick up my bag and head for the door, only to be stopped in my tracks by a vigorous chorus of “NO-NO-NO-NO.” This went on for some time. Then another desert angel appeared. He said, “Hello, what can I do for you?” And I swear, it felt as if everyone in the lobby wanted to burst into a clapping cheer like they do at the end of all the Hollywood movies made in the last three decades, but, being Chinese, they refrained. His name was Martin and he solved all my immediate problems. Arranged to show me the rooms, got me a price that was lower than what I was quoted, told me he would guide me to a great place for dinner, all the while advising me about local prices. He had gone to college in Arizona and his English was very, very good. After I cleaned the road dust off me, I met him outside the hotel and he introduced me to his brother and his friend and we made a short walk to a long plaza lined with restaurants, both indoors and outside, sheltered by bright green sun umbrellas. These three were a merry band and we sat outside as the sun went down and the moon came up, eating the most amazing food, drinking beer, swapping mostly true tales and measuring the distance separating our two cultures. Martin’s brother, whose English was limited, kept saying the things that mattered most, like, “beautiful food, beautiful life,” while encouraging me to try new things like barbecued sheep stomach and lamb kidneys, which I happily did. At one point, I snapped a photo of the trio, and before I put the camera away, I turned, framed and snapped one of my favorite photos. I can speak volumes about this pic but I will suppress the urge. After dinner, they took me on a walk by a manmade lake fringed with a green eco zone and a monolithic dolphin statue, lit up in vibrating, changing, colored lights, and we talked and laughed and ate ice cream, all with the ease of long time friends. I live for moments like this. And China is full of them. |
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