High on the northern Tibetan Plateau, an ancient slab of land that eventually rises up into the attic of the planet, you can get winded just pulling on your socks in the morning. I had traveled to Xining in the Qinghai Province, doormat to the Himalayas with an average elevation of 10,000 feet, a gaping, empty wilderness whose entire population is only five and a half million—most Chinese cities considered small have at least that, yet at 721,000 square kilometers it’s bigger than France and Belgium combined, has been fought over for centuries, lured pioneers and prospectors, and, because of its isolation, became the eventual dumping ground for criminals and political prisoners when the communists set up reeducation camps here.
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It was summer in China and the masses were moving about, traveling with their schools or with their coworkers or their families or friends, but no one, and I mean absolutely no one travels alone, so the fact that I do, by itself, makes me a curiosity. Additionally, if you are a foreigner (laowai) in China, everyone automatically stares at you. Even the people not staring at you are staring at you. So if you like being the center of attention, move to China and it will be a dream come true. 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. March is my two-year anniversary in China and I as I crossed the busy road on which I first entered the city, it all came spiraling back to me like a lost vision, and before it escapes again, I would like to share with you all. 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. 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. A reliable, tried and true way to get to know yourself as well as your culture is to move to another country. The more different the country is, the deeper the experience. The deeper the experience, the deeper the insight. But no matter where you go, no matter how far you go, your country’s stereotype will always be waiting there to greet you. 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 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. When you travel, what you see is who you are. What enters you depends on how much you are willing to allow in. How safe you need to be. What you are willing to part with. What you are willing to condone. Still, you are always left with more than you came with.
While I was waiting for my own trip to begin I watched the city empty out. Traffic unsnarled. Strange apparitions usually hidden behind the veil of commerce revealed themselves. Shops I liked to patronize retreated behind roll-down accordion metal doors. Firework stores appeared overnight and the sound of their wares exploded constantly, making it seem as if we all were under attack. Under attack by the Year of the Snake. The city buses that travel major roads during rush hour are usually so crowded they would evoke a sardine’s pity were half full. Red lanterns were strung everywhere. Relatives, returning to visit my neighbors, were unused to me, and stared and pointed—laowai.
I asked a friend what she thought of the empty city and her only comment was that there was less spit on the sidewalk. And so there was. 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). |
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