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?
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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. 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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