I drained the last of the bad KFC coffee boarding the 7:40 a.m. train and scoped out the seats laid out two across, then aisle, then two more, realizing I had a 50/50 chance of scoring a window seat. I was going to Jiayuguan, 7 hours and 770 km away, and had paid 160 RMB (approx. $25) for a first class seat but it didn’t come with the guarantee of a window. Everyone knows ADHD redheads need windows, especially when they are traveling. Car 17, seat 57 . . . c’mon, c’mon . . . oh . . . aisle. I hesitated for a moment and sat at the window anyway. Then, “excuse me”—clear as day. I turned and a woman was showing me her ticket, pointing to the window. I must have sighed—I’m sure I sighed, then moved to a vacant window seat. Less than 10 minutes later, the train stopped in West Lanzhou and the car filled up. I went back and sat in my aisle seat before I was rousted, humiliated, revealed as a shameful laowai seat shifter. Shortly thereafter, a man was standing beside me, motioning me to take the now vacant window seat. In my surprise, I blurted out, “you sure,” as if he could understand me, but he just smiled and kept motioning with his hands toward the window. As I got up to move, I saw the woman now sitting behind me with her husband? Brother? Secret lover? Then it hit me—while I was gone they had gotten together and moved their seats around so that I could have a window seat. These kinds of courtesies happen to me all the time in China. I stood up to bow, hands clasped in front of me, and I could see them smiling, knowing I had indeed figured it out, then they looked away quickly as if to forget the whole thing. Now, we were on our way through a long green valley, up into adobe-green hills cut with lots of tunnels. It was---------tunnel, Jonah dark, light--free-free-free, JonahJonahJonah, free, JonahJonah, free for a second, then more Jonah, a smear of crusty cut banks, a hallucination of a manmade lake with dam, then a long Jonah, and free at last, rolling now through flat farmland of sectioned cornfields bordered by swaths of sunflowers, and every now and then bent over workers gathering cut hay into golden mats they could roll up and carry by hand. Eventually the landscape dried out, and I recognized it, familiar yet foreign. Where have I seen those same broad, flat plains, the occasional tree lined windbreaks, distant dry hills, hovering snowcapped peaks, the brief green patch of irrigated field, then the return to brown dirt, when the synaptic oracle lit up and suddenly spoke; it said: Praise be and welcome to . . . Utah! Yes indeed, I was unstuck in time and Balling the Jack through the Beehive State. As I was sitting back and noting the similarities, I saw a very un-Utah-like thing: a herd of wild camels. Then some more. And even more. I got out my camera and stood up, poised to get a wild camel pic. I waited and waited but all I got was a blurry, boulder-stained rubble of a photograph with absolutely no camels present. They were there, I swear. Really. All that camel hunting made me hungry, so I got up and staggered through the train cars looking for a dining car. A helpful passenger said something in English that was either, “Straighten up and fly right,” or maybe, “This damn train has no fried rice.” There was no way I could be certain. I returned to my seat and when the snack cart came by, I scrutinized its offerings. Mostly plastic containers of tea and brightly colored bottles of sugary drinks, with an assortment of vacuum-packed unidentifiable things I’d seen people eat and live to tell about it. I chose a too red package containing what appeared to be a chicken leg that looked like those imitation crab legs made in Korea by robots. I held it in my hand for a long time gathering the courage to open it. Hunger won. Although a little bit slimy from being encased in its vacuum package, it smelled real, and tasted real, but it will always be one of those things I will forever wonder about. Like: from an evolutionary standpoint, why is a panda colored black and white? It is certainly not for camouflage, they stick out like a sore thumb in bamboo groves. Maybe—is it to let you know they are there, so you can avoid them? . . . And why do pigeons, out of all the diverse creatures on this planet, have the greatest ability to detect colors? Is that what drove them to cities? Just then, something flashed by and it wasn’t a camel, and this time I managed to snap off a photo. I had scrutinized enough photographs of the remnants of the Great Wall in Gansu to recognize this bit of crumbling adobe brick. Without warning, more sections appeared, (Gansu Great Wall) and I wanted to shout out, “Stop the train, I want to get off,” but of course I didn’t know how to say that in Chinese, and even so, it wouldn’t have happened. Instead, I stood up and steadied my camera against the window, snapping off photo after photo, saying, “Oh my god, look at that, right there, the Great Wall!” The other passengers, alerted by my manic frenzy looked out, saw nothing, and shook their heads as if to say ‘there is just no understanding foreigners.’ But there it was, crumbling, eroding, and I wanted it to be fenced off, preserved somehow, protected, I wanted to shout out, “Take a look at one of the greatest engineering projects ever undertaken on this planet, or at least acknowledge its magnificence, ‘ooh’ and ‘aaah’ at its proximity just outside the window, or at least note its decay as a symbol of China’s opening, but just don’t sit there and not see anything.” For the rest of the trip, my face was glued to the window, and I saw the Great Wall in every aberration of the landscape, every knoll, rise, bump or arroyo, though mostly they were false alarms. Still, the train was following the ancient Silk Road route through the Hexi Corridor and I was absorbing the vibrations of countless travelers. When I gathered my things to get off the train, a woman spoke to me in English, telling me there was one more stop to go, and everyone around nodded their head in reassurance. And while there may not be any understanding of foreigners, they at least wouldn’t let one get off at the wrong stop. I smiled in my innocent idiocy and rode the train to the last stop on the line: Jiayuguan City. Jiayuguan: Beyond Lay the Barbarian Lands, Part 2
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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.’ I get all tangled up in this bridge. I cross it compulsively. I’ve researched its history. Photographed it in all light and conditions. Dream about it sometimes. Stare at it as if I’m expecting it to move. It’s even worse than all that. When I was researching coming to Lanzhou, I saw a photo of the bridge and said, “I could live in a city that had a bridge like that.” I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it did to me. So when I arrived, the first thing I wanted to see was the bridge; it didn’t disappoint. It was built in 1909, the first iron bridge to span the Yellow River and the first successful joint project between China and the West. The bridge is officially regarded these days as a symbol of China opening its doors to the world. It survived the warlord era, Japanese imperialism between 1931 and 1945, civil war between the Western-backed Kuomintang and Mao Tse-tung’s armies, and the Cultural Revolution. A German engineering firm designed and agreed to build the bridge and the first prefabricated sections arrived in the port of Tientsin in June of 1907, and were transported on a 19 month-long journey of 1100 miles, hauled over steep mountains by horse, mule and camel, through blizzards and hail storms and equipment failure and the deaths of untold transport animals and men. When the building of the bridge finally began in 1908, the lead engineer in charge was a young man in his twenties named McLeod Mamboben from the United States who eventually won the respect of the Chinese overseers through his hard work and grit, and who stayed on in Lanzhou till the end of his life maintaining the bridge. In his day he was famous for crawling on his knees, begging a warlord who had threatened to destroy the bridge, but who relented due to McLeod's urgent pleas to save the bridge from a swift and certain destruction. His last words on Earth were, “Please bury me at the end of the bridge.” Now I didn’t know until recently any of this history, but the bridge has always resonated with me and the countless others who come to wander across the Yellow River. It’s as if lives were forged in the metal and inhabit the graceful arcs of the bridge, and every time I cross, I pay my respects, offer up some token tribute, write: thanks! with a spit moistened finger, and continue my unrelenting photographic interrogation. (The author is indebted to The First Bridge Over The Yellow River written by Bing Chen.) |
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