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.
1 Comment
Deep in summer, the long-dead winter moans for its lost soul, the earth grows fat and sleepy, peach-skinned sunset skies turn into hot nights, drowsy appeals, fan squeaks, then dawn, a brief coolness, and the lava air flows again. All up and down the streets, flatbed trucks are parked on sidewalks, selling watermelons. The owners just cover up with plastic tarps and sleep in them, a seasonally repetitive party, light and dark green spheres of cooling delight, all for 1 Yuan (approx. $.20 USD) a pound. In the unfolding summer, life has burst out of every crevice and crack, covering limbs and twigs, plump and green, bright flower trumpets and saxophones blowing out color, seeding, singing, drooping, awakening to the sound of thunder, cascades of rain frolic, evaporation, summer glee madness, exploding . . . exploding. Pungent smells of life and rot, summer is a season on steroids. I put on my finest green, painted two shamrocks on my cheeks and went out in public. As usual, everyone stared, but at the supermarket I was a Leprechaun trickster, moving into their space as if to say boo, thrusting my face into theirs, backing them up, then laughing and leaving them to their bewilderment. Back out on the streets, to the occasional Chinese who like to hawk loudly and spit on the ground whenever a foreigner passes, I stopped, looked them square in the eyes, hawked and spit back. This spooked them but other onlookers liked it and actually smiled at me, enjoying this small drama, a St. Patrick’s victory of sorts. And on this day I will take every victory I can get. You see, ever since I was young, I have always felt my Irishness. An ache for a land I have inhabited in my mind even before I was conscious enough to know that ideas can reside in the deepest part of the unconscious and will themselves into being, because, even before I could understand it, I was Irish Proud and distrustful of overlords I’d never even been under the yoke of yet, and Irish creative like the great James Joyce, riffing off on imaginary soliloquies, bouncing this word off that word, and that word off this word, in my head you see, making up all sorts of imaginary universes, that by the way, all resisted the British. But it was more than that, it was a kind of sword to the sky defiance, mixed with a moss covered peacefulness, the peace of valleys not yet invaded, and a deep down, born-in melancholy that could make all the leprechauns cry, because I inherited the idea of a sad, lonely, unjust world, yet still, I was a wild Irish lad in the best sense, curious, innately tender, wily, stubborn, willing to take on all comers and then cry by myself because I had beaten them, confused by the terror of my inborn ferocity, snapping and snarling and leaping out at the first sign of oppression, doing battle with Don Quixote windmills I would later become well acquainted with, a ferocity I still saw in the faces of booze-beaten men who stalked about looking for something worth the fighting of the good fight, but settled instead for turning on those who most dearly loved them, creating the age-old Irish sadness that sings its sad dirge to this day from Limerick to Londonderry, from Boston to Nova Scotia. Yet, the world owes so much to the Irish. Its words and phrases have entered the vocabulary. Its music was absorbed and co-opted, birthing new musical movements. True Irish charm launched legions of imitators, and sadly, most of them are politicians, the Kennedy’s included, and so on and so on. Scratch against the skin of diverse nationalities and you will discover some Irish moss in all of them. 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. 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. Just like Carl Sandburg’s fog coming in on little cat feet, the one-year anniversary of the Elvis English Diaries came and went this month, celebrated by an army of one exploding red strings of fireworks on the sidewalk, burning fistfuls of incense in an out of the way hillside temple, practicing Chinese language characters in the sand along the Yellow River, bowing in thanks in front of an ancient statue of a stone dragon, buying fish balls and dropping them into the river off the Zhongshan Bridge, and teaching strangers in the park to pump their fists and say Woo-Hoo! along with me, and even though they had no clue as to what I was saying or doing, did it with the usual Chinese enthusiasm. If I could I would buy everyone who’s ever read a word on this site a drink, a balloon, a face painting, a hotpot dinner, a pair of flip-flops, a round trip ticket on a Chinese train, silk pajamas, steamed buns, a massage, a night at a KTV (China’s version of karaoke), some big panda love, and a big, bright, beautiful bow to wrap around your head to let everyone know you are very much appreciated by me. If you would like to leave a gift, please leave a comment. They drive me, move me, let me know someone is out there reading. I love to be acknowledged; it may be my only weakness (if you believe that I would like to show you some perfectly undervalued 'Best Buy' store shares I could let you have at a very good price). I’ve loved the year I’ve had writing this. Woo-Hoo! to you. And thanks for checking in. If there is a parallel universe, I think most expats would agree it is most definitely China. When you first arrive, everything seems so very strange, so strikingly out of the ordinary, getting stranger and stranger until you become immune to it, following everyday trails blazed by habit, then one day as you’re surfing another wave of everyday life, you face a very scary moment when you wake up and look around and realize everything is beginning to appear normal. 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.) “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.” –John F. Kennedy 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) 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. I’m always looking for the missing poem, the free city, sun vigor, the day-glo orange people. I want to go in deeper, let loose, to be caught up in what Thomas Wolfe called “the slow incense of the East,” to break out of the confines of the traveler’s state of competitive comparison and repetitive judgment, to boldly go where few laowai (foreigner) have gone before. And that’s one entirely plausible explanation of how I ended up with those marks on my back. Another is quite simple: I frequently let China have its way with me. When I first arrived here, I got some great advice from a teacher in Xian. She said, "to be effective as a teacher you need to do two things: Keep you energy up and get massages often." Now I had no problem with the energy (like a sponge I feed off the energy of my students), but the massage part proved to be problematic. You see, when a male foreigner asks a Chinese person where to get a massage, it is usually assumed they are using code to mean a massage with an 'extra something.' I got lots of meticulous directions to palm parlors, but none to legitimate massage places. Then I heard about the coolest thing. In 2006, the Chinese government began an initiative to train blind people to work as masseurs, and it has been a runaway success. It is estimated that there are 110,000 blind people working in this field, and the demand far exceeds the supply of qualified workers. Customers say blind people have a greater sensitivity and sense of touch, and their training is rigorous and extensive. Once I heard about it, I was there the very next night. The masseuse introduced himself but I couldn’t understand what he said, so I nicknamed him Kung-fu Panda (KFP). He mimed I should take off my shoes but leave my clothes on, and to lie down on the massage table, where he covered me with a sheet. Then, KFP proceeded to work me over, kneading, slapping, gouging in deep, using his hands, forearms, elbows, and karate chopping my body, lighting up places I forgot I had and rendering me a dazed, stuttering, agreeable blob of disjointed thoughts and conclusions. The whole thing lasted an hour. I immediately bought a card good for ten massages for 400 RMB. That works out to $6.35 per one-hour massage. The next time, he went in deeper, and I was snap-crackling-and-popping the whole hour but began to feel parts of my body reawakening. The third time, he was not there and another blind man whose name I also couldn’t understand took over, and if the other guy was Kung-fu Panda this guy was more like a Tai-chi Panda (TCP). He was smooth, and made me feel parts of my body I hadn’t felt since the Cold War, yet parts of my back still felt stiff. Through gestures, he asked if I would let him attach glass globes to my back. Now I had seen other people have this done, but it looked absolutely medieval, not to mention painful. (I learned later that it was called Cupping Therapy.) Yet, I trusted this guy and did not want to let my cowardice stand in the way of a good Coughing Dragon Diary post, so I took off my shirt and lay back down. He first oiled my back and I could hear his lighter clicking on and off as somehow he heated up the globes that he suctioned to my back, moving them along my meridians, then down to my waist, pulling them off with a pop, kind of like the sound children make by sticking a finger in their mouth then popping their cheeks. Next, I heard the lighter clicking furiously, and he began suctioning multiple globes on my back, until I counted 16, all of them adhering like remora fish attached to a shark, or big-mouthed groupers greedily trying to suck the life out of me. Yet, it wasn’t all that unpleasant. I could feel warmth being generated until my back was on fire. Not knowing how long it would last, I endured for the sake of science. Ten minutes later he removed them with a suffused pop. He went back to massage a part of my back that had previously been painful to me to show that now the area was pain free. It was truly remarkable. Then he wiped away the oil and had me sit up. The room was spinning and crackling, and he left me there to collect myself. It was then that every curiosity seeker found an opportunity to come to the doorway to see how the laowai was taking it, or to see me without a shirt, or to see if I had scales, or perhaps was covered with fur. I staggered out and into the evening feeling subdued but fine. I slept well and woke feeling really good, really loose. It was only after taking a shower that I realized I had angry-looking cupping hickeys all up and down my back. I immediately freaked, then went online and discovered this was common and that they should be gone in about a week. Practitioners are said to be able to read the hickeys and diagnose your health. Me, I had fun telling the unsuspecting that I went swimming in the Yellow River and was attacked by giant leeches. All in all I have been feeling pretty good and will allow KFP and TCP to continue to have their way with me. I will, however, draw the line at therapeutic bloodletting. 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.) China rocks, China rolls, China is always moving . . . a purposeful tidal wave on bicycles bearing an impossible load of ears of corn, pots and pans, bargefuls of fruit, acrobatic China on two wheels holding up an impatient, beeping Mercedes, old and new China merging, taking no prisoners, street sweepers still use homemade brooms, and pick and shovel brigades dig up the streets and pound old buildings into bits of rubble, constantly.
Coal fumes and dank dust, the coughing dragon hawking, everybody smokes, everybody stares, everybody is not your buddy, though kindness arises in spontaneous gusts that leave you smiling stupidly, the unmistakable gestures aimed at easing your burden, lightening your load, a mother and a newborn, she's waving the tiny hand, saying hello, heloo, hello, the shopkeepers totaling up purchases on a calculator so I can read the price, from the merely courteous to the seemingly lifesaving, and so on, and so on. Then there are are the constant parents/grandparents dragging a shy child toward you, pushing them forward, prompting them to say,"Hello, how are you?" I say I am fine and the parent or grandparent beams at the cleverness of their child and waddles away, and once again I turn back into the swarm, having blissfully learned the lesson of how to be alone among all these people, a truly amazing Chinese trait I learned from a man sitting so regally on a crowded train, so deep into his solitude he was untouchable, and just to show me he knew I was there, he came out briefly, made eye contact, then disappeared again. As I weave my way through crowds, like a ship, I always leave a staring wake marking my progress. But China really comes alive at night. Night markets are an explosion of food and goods and shop till you drop, Chinese style, offering up yak butter, fake silk, fake Calvin Klein's, genuine spicy beef noodles, Muslims in white round hats serving up lamb and round flatbread and goat's skulls for soup leering from ragged booths, potatoes, tomatoes, no tofu curfew, and later, overwhelmed, I feed bread I bought at the improbably named 'Auspicious Bakery' to the cranes on the banks of the Yellow River that's not really yellow but as brown as mocha coffee, brown as a winter without snow, as brown as Brown Sugar sung by the Stones, as I stagger wide-eyed, how-to-say, how-to-say, how-to-say, oh my god i really am here, bring on the giant Buddha's, the Gobi Desert warriors, the wind off the Tibetan Plateau, the decaying remnants of the Great Wall in the Hexi Corridor. I will follow the prostate pilgrims crawling toward the Forbidden City, ride a reluctant camel up barren dunes, spin prayer wheels till my fingers go numb, teach my students well, climb the pagoda'd mountains, eat dragonfruit, be accupuntured, consume unidentifiable things, drink strange concoctions, poke and probe and blunder about. I will be your errant reporter, brave, dutiful, deliberate, though not always timely and lackadaisical at best. It is China after all. Happy Year of the Dragon and drink deeply from the self-illuminating cup. Every day I revisit how little I know. Yet everyday beckons me, waving me to follow, promising more somehow, and baby, it always delivers. |
|