The New Year brought Elvis English nothing but Internet problems. If you had been wondering where I'd gone, the answer is nowhere; I've been here all the while, trying to connect to my site. And trying, and trying. Below is a post written over a month ago. Beneath the worn circus of everyday life, beneath the hyperreality of the relentless advertising media, where the bright clowns and smiling idiots try to render you senseless enough to buy their products, and just under the thick veil of the constant shaming culture--always seeking to scold you back into line, is the real China, a daily surprise, a guise, a mirror, disfigured and wretched and delightful, stark, stubborn, ancient and wise, a smiling calligraphic mystery that feels so close to grasping yet is forever floating away as if you were awakening from the blurred fog of yet another, dissolving morning dream.
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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. 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. I had hit Beijing wrong. Like astronauts upon reentry, if their trajectory is wrong they bounce off the atmosphere and go screaming and spinning off into space. In my mind I felt that I did just that and set about to make it right. 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. Somewhere long ago, in the ribboning ebbs and bends of time, the first cavemen met on neutral ground for trade, and ever since then we’ve been confusing each other with language. When I first arrived in China, so completely and absurdly alone, stunned into a linguistic stupor, grasping for an aural kernel of meaning, searching—frantic for a gesture to convey—well, everything, retreating behind a dumb smile, chastened, humbled, depending solely upon luck to once again pull me through, but later, reviewing what happened made me realize how thoughts could form words, intentions, communicate needs, and convey them in a quantum language that everyone subliminally understands and responds to, although I’ve yet to become fluent in it. For me it’s similar to how bees perform instructional nectar location dances to give the rest of the hive a fix on the locale of newly discovered flowers, or schools of fish communicating the need to turn collectively—in an instant, over and over again, or birds stopping automatically in the exact same trees on their migrations, generation after generation, or how dogs learn to distinguish and respond to human words like, “Walkies,” By the way, I’d like to share my new favorite quote concerning dogs: “Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that is how dogs spend their lives.” – Sue Murphy Anyway, I figured where there was a will, there was a way to communicate, and China was the perfect place to field-test some of my wackier theories. I combined the belief that thoughts are actions with the accepted theory that language was originally developed by our hairy ancestors mimicking sounds animals made. 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). “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) I am forever searching for the passage to India—the one of the mind, constantly probing the rivers and streams, sifting through estuaries, channels, harbors, inlets, becalmed, stormed tossed, triumphant, sailing misty, porpoise leaping, purple-dark interior seas, looking for wisdom, knowledge, connection, mystery. My mythic quest leads me out and into the world everyday, trying to connect the dots, uncover a truth, reverse-engineer logic, to gawk, to gaze, to gape, to penetrate my cognitive bias in order to relearn once again how to see. I wander far and wide storing up impressions as a camel stores water for some dry day ahead. I can lose myself in the way the sun transforms dirty sidewalk tiles into a thing of beauty, get spooked at my sudden appearance in a surprise bit of mirrored glass, stop dead in my tracks to watch an unfolding photograph. I startle easily, and always give a laugh to those who take delight in intentionally rattling foreigners. Most of the people in my Lanzhou neighborhood have gotten used to me—and my strange ways, and treat me like a harmless and well-meaning barbarian. The shopkeepers now dote and fuss over me, after having gotten over their initial shock of seeing a laowai stumbling into their place of business. They are kind and treat me honestly, and I am indebted to them. Yet, I have seen and still see the pained, smiling grimace on the faces of employees of stores and restaurants whenever I walk into a new place, a stunned look of suppressed horror, usually covered up with nervous giggles, and it took me a while to understand why. They are basically terrified. Their experience in dealing with foreigners is nonexistent and usually goes something like this: they can’t understand what you are saying, they won’t be able to give you what you want, you will be persistent and try to explain with sad mimes or pen and pad srcribblings, yet this will only compound their confusion, they will giggle even more because they are uncomfortable and don't know how to respond, you will get annoyed thinking they are laughing at you, maybe even raise your voice, swear, walk out in a huff, people will notice, face will be lost, their boss maybe will yell at them, their coworkers will tease them, and even if everything goes well, they will be constantly on guard for any change in your attitude, pretending nonchalance but energetically watching in stereo and under great stress all the while you are in their establishment. For this reason, for some, it’s better that you didn’t come in at all. “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. Deeper into the heart of the labyrinth Dawn. No wind. Lavender-rose light spread like butter on distant peaks. Monks and mystics, the faithful and the temporarily faithless, opened like satellite dishes on a sacred hillside above the Labrang Monastery. Slow motion clouds moving to the natural music of the Tibetan Plateau. Everything is Ice Age still for a moment as the stunned earth awakens. The birds first, calling forth the slanted light, dousing sleeper’s dreams, silhouetting the breath of stirring farm animals, glinting off riffles in the Daxia River, driving off the last stubborn traces of the monochrome night, evaporating shadows and turning up color. A low wordless chanting arises from the hillside, lifts and circles like a flock of red-crowned cranes. Smoke rises from sacred spruce fires. Farmer’s motorcycle trucks wind along the road below, moving to the open markets of Xiahe. Life stirs, puts on its boots and pisses in the alley. Breakfast is yak yogurt, Tsampa—dough made with roasted barley flour and yak butter, buckwheat porridge, Momo—Tibetan dumplings, Thenthuk—Tibetan noodles and yak tongue. Boiling hot black tea—filtered and decanted into a churn, then fresh milk and sugar are added. The wind gusts, carving new lines in faces, stealing hats, billowing robes, herding dust, pock-marking buildings, scattering anything not tied down and causing pedestrians to lean into it. Moving clockwise, streams of worshippers walk the Kora, a three kilometer route around the monastery through prayer vapors left by previous pilgrims, spinning the colorful prayer wheels, muttering chants, along a route created for moving, meditative reflection, interspersed with scarlet monks, the old, the young, the tourists, and the devout who flatten themselves on the ground, stand up, then throw themselves back on the ground, and in this way move around the entire circuit. I walked the Kora three times. Each time was different, each time was special. It’s a very active and unique form of prayer. You get exercise—by walking and spinning the prayer wheels, get to mingle with the friendly fellow Kora-walkers, get to spend time in a setting meant for reflection, say anything you want out loud, as people are mumbling in all kinds of dialects, dress however you want—some worshippers dress in the most outlandish costumes, on a plateau high above the rest of the world, surrounded by mountains. Then I rented a bike, and escaped into the Sangke Grasslands, home for thousands of years to Tibetan Nomads. The bike was old and heavy and clunky, but I was not to be stopped, grunting and huffing and puffing my way up the gradual incline, coming to the distinct conclusion that cars hate bikes. Here I was, enjoying the quiet, and though traffic was sporadic, every idiot driver that passed me felt it necessary to honk their horn in warning, as if I couldn’t hear them approaching from a half-mile away. While some cut a wide berth around me, others flew by like meteorites, and it felt as though they were trying to blast me senseless in the swirl of their passing. Still, the grasslands were miraculous. They swept away toward the horizon in fields of wildflowers, clouds, mountains and sky. I passed a lake so still I named it Narcissus Lake and spent some peaceful moments lakeside recovering from the climb up on my ridiculous bike. In which the birthday boy runs smack into Tibet Sometimes it takes a jet to carry you somewhere over the rainbow, or maybe a train, a boat, a fast car or a powerful wish, but in my case all it took was three and a half hours of patience and a bus filled with happy-go-lucky passengers. We climbed upward, past amazing, terraced hills, planted with produce, the sheer ability to farm the precipitous heights was astonishing, and at one point I saw a farmer pruning his crops by means of a rope attached around his waist, dropping down, then down, and down---we blasted by too fast to know how he managed to get back up. Then we leveled out and entered a biblical zone of fertile valleys with mosques everywhere. Their signature globes and towers rose above the landscape, more plentiful than church steeples in New England. But what was odd to me was that I equated mosques with desert terrain—these rose above green fields bright with a summer’s growth. I stopped counting them after I reached a hundred and one. After passing through Linxia City, which has long been called the “Little Mecca of China” featuring 1,700 mosques and an important stop along the Silk Road, we started climbing up, up, up, then leveled off in earnest, the terrain changing, growing more austere, though still summer green, with stuttering Van Gogh fields absent of crows, then angling almost imperceptivity downward and eventually arriving in Xiahe. China’s talking on the cell phone, loves pandas, eats chicken feet. China squats, China stares, China spits. China is rudely courteous. Doesn’t need deodorant. Carries its own tissues. Indulges children. At night, people gather in large groups in public squares and parking lots to dance, they also love to hear themselves sing, are constantly hawking trying to clear their throats, smile and laugh more often than not. China eats pig snouts, thousand year-old eggs, duck tongues, deep-fried honeybees, cow stomach lining. A cuisine fashioned by famine. Chinese women favor Converse Hi-Tops. Chinese words look great lit up in red neon. China is severely myopic. Is a gathering tsunami. Are building the world's biggest yak dairy processing center. Write great headlines like: Mubarak in comma, but ‘not clinically died’. Consume 20% of the world’s beer. Use about 40% of the world's cement. Have grown peaches for over 3,000 years. Raise half a billion pigs a year. Smoke 50,000 cigarettes every second. Cinderella first appeared in a Chinese book written between 850 and 860 A.D. China is a bicycle kingdom and manufactures 60% of the world’s bicycles. I am forever trying to keep up. Follow through. Get swept away. Persevere. Maintain. Discover. Wish me luck . . . . 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.’ 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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