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.
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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. Dunhuang, whose name means to flourish and prosper, was established as a military garrison city in 111 BC at an oasis where the two Silk Road routes traversing the Taklamakan Desert to the west, merged. It anchored the Hexi Corridor, running southeast to Lanzhou and protected the merchants, monks, imperial envoys and camel traders carrying China’s precious silk and spices eastward. Located in Gansu Province—China’s most ethnically diverse—like all of Gansu, it retains the crossroads flavor, the intermingled lineage broadcast in faces, as well as the friendliness of a longstanding oasis town. Yet, all of the friendliness—the constant smiles, hellos and helpful gestures—were about to be outdone by a considerate act so unusual and from such an unexpected source that nothing like it had ever happened to me before anywhere in the world. Climbing up to the White Pagoda high above Lanzhou stirred something within me, or maybe released something, and similar to the way a good movie will stay with you for days, so did the climb stay with me. I replayed it over and over again, remembering new details each time I replayed it. 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. Whenever I see the winter crescent moon appear horizontally in the west shortly after sunset, looking like a Cheshire cat smile, I always take heart because spring cannot be far off. It’s not as if winter here was cruel, in fact it was nice getting reacquainted with it. It was Gobi Desert dry with frequent urgent dispatches from the Himalayan Mountains. The only snow so far amounted to whimsical flurries creating brief Rorschach inkblots open to interpretation. The Yellow River is unfrozen and sweeping ever downward. The willow trees have not cast off all their leaves and from the limbs droop brown, withered notes of submission. Decorative shrubbery, once free to feel the wind, has been enclosed in manmade cocoons of plastic, dreaming secret dreams and biding their time. Right now, the sun rises around 8 am and sets around 6:30. This creates long winter shadows in the afternoon, unexpected crisscrossing giraffe necks, abstract arteries, veins, dark pools of seasonal longing and surrender, spiders of worry, zones of regret. Winter is the time for brooding, a time for planning, and closing one’s self off for introspection and repair. Yet the parks are never empty and the streets are never still. China does not retreat indoors during winter. People laugh, people move, people take care of business. There’s always something to sell, money to be made, friends to greet, gossip to be shared. In the afternoons in my neighborhood, people gather on the wide steps of the bank on the corner and sit and soak up the sun, smiling, talking for hours, and I always stop and enjoy the sight of it because I couldn’t imagine this ever happening in the States; I’m sure there’s a law that prohibits it. Today it was 32 degrees Fahrenheit, so I sat down with them, turned my face to the sun and just suspended myself in time, like a bee drunk on pollen, like a lit up brick alley wall, like a Chinese sun poem, a hat in the Easter parade, a seed awakening in the rich dark earth, a pink flamingo doing a mating dance. Participation makes all the difference. "I have become too much a friend to rules . . . " — James Somers "Respect involves accepting people for what they are without revising or marginalizing or objectifying them — or even elevating them." – James Lee Burke “Crede quod habes, et habes.” (Believe that you have it, and you do.) There are times, especially at night, when I feel as if I am living in a computer chip. The odd black skyline shapes, the blinking, bending streams of smooth neon light, the roaring electric density, the unexpected quiet of the squat residential apartment blocks with their dark, narrow, maze-like private streets, protected by guarded gates, the square Lanzhou street grids broken up by random angular byways, all fold into a William Gibson dream of a computer city plexus of pulsating, artificially lit intensity. This is not necessarily a bad feeling, in fact it’s often energizing, occasionally alienating, always interesting. Whenever I feel the need to bring it back down to a more personal level, day or night, I hit the streets and wander about like a demented monk. The streets always reconnect me, revive me, engage me. So, I thought I would take you along with me on a walk through my neighborhood. I leave my 3rd floor apartment, walk down the clean swept but dingy concrete stairs and out into a courtyard surrounded by the buildings that make up my apartment complex, with parking spaces for the cars my neighbors own and a small playground where residents practice a tai chi-sword dance most mornings, where groups of school children play in the evenings, and over which, sometimes, the moon playfully hangs. I turn left, right, left, walk along a brown wall covered with climbing vines turned reddish autumn, unlock the gate by the guard shack with a small, blue plastic disk, hold the door for whomever is waiting, pass the shop with the boiling metal cauldron out front where you select delicacies from the refrigerated case, pre-skewered on long wooden sticks, the offerings include meat, mushrooms, seaweed, veggies and tofu in various shapes, then hand it to the cooker who drops in into the steaming pot, select your noodles, then wait a few minutes, after which it is whisked into a bowl and wham-bam the cooker scoops spices into the mixture, with broth, cilantro, and things I can’t name and serves it with a flourish, charging approximately 13 RMB (US $2.05). 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) “Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.” – George Eliot It’s been years since I’ve seen a proper fall. I caught the end of one last year in New England, but an early snow took the green leaves by surprise and shocked them into withered brown chaos. Before that, I had spent years in Costa Rica, a riot of a thousand shades of green during the rainy season that runs from mid-April to mid-November, and before that, in Alaska where it’s more a surrender than a season. I came to Lanzhou in the spring, watched summer take hold, bake the dazed and delighted earth, sprout watermelons and corn and sunflowers and onion stalks that ended up being sold out of flatbed trucks parked everywhere along the willow-shaded boulevards. Now, as the Mid-Autumn mooncakes have all been given out, on my walks through the city I see the first leaves turning yellow, and thorny climbing bushes turning slowly scarlet, to the slow motion beat of sad autumn earth music, I am basically ecstatic. Walking along I saw an advertisement for some product, and the tag line was written in English and read, “Being Compressed Happiness.” I felt like compact happiness and walked along wishing everyone happiness in return. Some smiled back, others looked vaguely resentful, others suspicious. Too much happiness makes people nervous. Autumn, Spring I want to stop the forward progress of these diaries and hit rewind, back to spring, to when the brown tree limbs were blurred by new Cezanne-green growth, that eventually elongated into spear point leaf blades—not in a burst as they do in Alaska during its brief but explosive summer, but gradually, drawn out like a well told tale, drooping from the predominant willow trees that line the boulevards in Lanzhou, blocking out the chalk dusty Soviet era six to eight storey apartment blocks in their dizzying redundancy. Back to spring when I wandered the along the banks of the Yellow River, when the anchored riverboats serving as floating taverns/restaurants were opening for business, work crews sweeping and cleaning and painting away the last remnants of winter, and I sat drinking hot tea or lukewarm beer (China does not like cold beer) as the river swept by carrying my spontaneous haiku downstream where they would bother no one. I loved these riverboats, and had my favorites, where I mildly flirted with the waitresses (to the extent that I could actually communicate flirtation), ate new mostly unidentifiable things, watched the night lights turn the mocha Yellow River into blazing multicolored streaks of purple, yellow, blue, and red neon, met new people, learned Chinese drinking games, sang songs to the river, sank my wishes and prayers like rocks, and opened myself enough to let the river flow through me.
Though it didn’t rain much in Lanzhou, it did everywhere else in Asia, and the Yellow River rose as a result, and swelled its banks, till soon it flooded the walkways and stairways and approaches to the riverboats, and stayed that way for most of the summer, coating everything with a thick, silty brown mud. Tennis courts and playgrounds and public exercise machines were buried and the only thing that dried up was the riverboat merriment. A birthday trip into the land of dreams It’s not every year there’s a blue moon in your birthday month, and not every year you get to celebrate it in China, the coursing bends of time disappear when you believe your spirit is ageless, that time is entirely relative, yet I like to reflect on the period between birthdays as if they were mileposts marking my own personal growth. And so I wanted to do something special this year, find some sacred, holy ground, offer up gratitude and give thanks, but what I didn’t count on was surviving a NASCAR taxi ride across Lanzhou and ending up in a parallel universe. I was going to Gannon, Shambala, a nine-color lucky world of mountains and grasslands, a pristine garden of Tibetan culture, where I could contemplate the rhythm of my life in a place called the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, on the northeast edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Trains don’t go there and so I had to get to the South Bus Station, a traffic-clogged trip running laterally alongside the railroad tracks, and ending up in a third-world dead-zone of rip off cab driver-bus station hustlers, who will try to grab and pull and fight over you for the privilege of ripping you off. I flagged down a cab and snagged the first one, a good omen. He read my destination, written in Chinese, looked straight ahead for a moment, as if steeling himself for the rigors of the drive, pulled down the strange China cabbie meter, and took off. Right away, I knew this was not going to be an ordinary cab ride. At the first sign of blockage, he went up on the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians, then veering back into the roadway, provoking horn blasts and a wake of Chinese cursing. Then he blew through a fully red traffic light, veered right and almost took out a fruit vendor, and continued on, driving in the middle of the road between lanes of traffic. I could have had him stop and let me out, but I had to admit it was exhilarating, so I stopped grimacing, stopped thrusting my palms out to grab the dashboard, stopped doing my phantom brake pedal dance, looked over at him, decided he was not suicidal, and put my life firmly in his hands. It was like a chase scene, except we weren’t being chased, nor were we chasing anyone. As traffic thickened, he drove in the bike/scooter lane, swerved back in, cutting a bus off by inches, cut across lanes, zip-zap-zip, back and forth, braking suddenly and hurling my lungs, my stomach, and my spleen against the barrier of my skin, dodged right, dodged left, then squeezing through openings with a Fig Newton's clearance on either side, never touching the horn and never changing expression. I was delighting in the looks other drivers were giving him. After another swerve in front of a bus, with centimeters to spare, I watched the bus driver throw up his hands in surrender, then re-grab the wheel and actually growl. Shock flew like chicken feathers upward then dwindled back down after his passing. It was zoom-zoom-zoom, screech, whoa, yes! . . . watchit—oh god, getoutoftheway—there’s no way he can stop—he did stop, pause for a light, then, bang-bang-bang, off like a bullet. There was a Muslim man riding a scooter, the kind with the attached truck-bed, who just missed crashing into us by luck alone, who grabbed his round white cap and flung it at us in frustration. I was beyond fear at that point and completely rolling with it. When I had thought I had seen it all, he swerved right, went down an alley, rumbled across a dirt drive, shot over a curb and hit an intersection just as the light turned green. After which we hit a truly impassable traffic jam, and I thought he was going to explode, but he just sat back calmly, and as soon as an opportunity presented itself, BAM, he took off again. We arrived at the station and he screeched to a halt. I sat for a moment, collecting myself. I said, “Wow, that was amazing, you are, most definitely, a professional. Hats off to you, lad.” And though he didn’t understand the words, the intent was clear, and he allowed himself one small smile, stashed the fare in a crude wooden box, and took off back into traffic. I bought a ticket, had lunch in a great Muslim café, found my bus without any problem—the staff at the station were great, boarded the bus and sat in air-conditioned comfort as the bus idled, waiting for departure time. Then, out the window, a great, rabbleous horde appeared. There were about 20 of them, male and female, carrying all their worldly possessions in bed sheets, rice bags, appliance boxes and sad duffle bags. The driver, a nicely dressed man who had been polishing the bus as we waited to depart, absolutely freaked. I could tell he was worried about the schedule and departing on time, and where the hell was he going to fit all this extra crap? I watched out the window in delight as this drama unfolded. Tick-tock-tick-tock—an orderly attempt was made to try to fit in all this extra stuff, the driver walking back and forth in disgust, the rabble growing increasingly belligerent, the loader trying hard to appease. Then, departure time approaching fast, it became shove it all in as best you can, shoo the rabble aboard, close the doors and take off. I was very pleased with the new passengers. They were boisterous, happy, excited, unashamed, with a baby permanently attached to her mother’s breast, carrying food baskets and water thermoses and glasses for tea and merriment to spare. One of them sat next to me, eying me warily (who can figure out laowai) until I offered some of my road provisions, which he accepted daintily, almost reluctantly, still, a bus bond was formed, as we set off for my intended destination, Xiahe, a completely distinct and parallel universe. Xiahe, Journey into the Golden Labyrinth, Part 2 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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