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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Today was an interesting day. It was drizzling and I put my raincoat on, grabbed the faux leopard skin umbrella I bought for $1.89 and wandered the streets.
Most days I am constantly stared at. Most days it doesn’t bother me; I revel in the commotion I cause just in the passing. Most days I smile and provoke shy giggles. Most days I have fun with it. I am a rare foreigner, an instant celebrity, a curiosity, monstrosity, grounded alien, albino white cloud, star child, blue-eyed devil, and everything their parents have ever warned them about. I catch everyone off guard by not living up to the billing, by being alluringly friendly, though totally nonthreatening, a smiling buffoon well aware that I am like a child, no wait—a child knows more than I do—I am more like a helpless idiot, and so I grin foolishly and in this way try to solicit their assistance and sympathy. It generally works as I have found that the Chinese people are good humored and helpful and gregarious, and it is only the preprogrammed xenophobic whispers I have to overcome, warning-caution-caution-caution, like a whistling psychic R2D2 robot smoking crack. So anyway, today I wandered about pulling down the umbrella so that I was anonymous, and that felt good, seeing only twenty or so feet in front of me, a world shrunk to approaching legs and feet on shiny wet sidewalks, reduced to puddles and thoughts, puddles and thoughts, when suddenly I felt a tapping on my umbrella. It was a smiling woman saying, “Why are you hiding? People want to see you. How to say—please to give us your face. We welcome it. Thank you so much.” And so my cover was blown, my moment of presumed anoniminity dissolving in the rain, her smile indulgent and encouraging at the same time as she said goodbye and walked on, with me again smiling foolishly as an old man came up and said, “Hello, how do you do? How do you do?” And not waiting for an answer he beamed at his own cleverness and walked off as the rain came down harder. Sufficiently chastened, instead of burying myself under my umbrella, I raised it up and smiled at all the approaching multitudes, including the scowling laowai (foreigner) haters and the occasional police who smiled back, automatically, without reservation, probably knowing my cheap umbrella would soon collapse and leave me soaked and sodden and clownishly exposed to the uproarious and tear-jerking merriment of the people. I live to serve under the buffoon moon. It is all so unlikely I am constantly delighted. I am Kwai Chang Caine. Kung Fu, do you remember? 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. |
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