I was caught in the ache of late fall. Shortening days, the bite of the wind, crimson memories colliding, the haunting of pumpkin ghosts, but mostly I missed the autumn moon. As a city dweller, the moon appears briefly between buildings, washed out by light, a dull, ice popsicle compared to the real thing. There was a full Hunter's moon coming, and I was going to escape the city and the skyscrapers and the artificially-lit skyline, to soak in it, to moon-bathe in it, to cleanse the soul and ease the ache, out in the Martian desert terrain around Zhangye. So, after a lovely hi-speed train ride described in Part 1, I was there in the center of the city gathered around the Drum Tower.
2 Comments
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. Like all cities in western China, Shandan is covered with Gobi Desert dust. It gets on your clothes, gets in your hair, makes it a challenge to wear contact lenses, which I foolishly tried. Local women cover their heads with long scarves and hide behind big masks as if they were performing surgery. Still, the dust gets in and covers you with fine grit as if it were trying to rub you out or bury you. The day I spent walking along the wall I like to think I was covered with Great Wall dust. An ancient grit of ruin, particles released that attached to me, sharing collective wind stories of the greatest testament to xenophobia that ever existed, melting now in sad dry puddles back into the desert from which it sprang. There is no escaping the melancholy the corpse of the Great Wall incites. It clings to the wind-carved humps, vibrates in the pockmarked shadows, swells like a timeworn sonnet, cradles you gently like the famous lullaby baby in the treetops just before the bough broke, entering you like—yes, like a poem, a panoptic poem of inclusion and exclusion. I walked the line: was I being kept in or kept out? Even now at its diminished height, the wall is a formidable barrier, but you wonder, what exactly was it keeping out? What was it protecting its people from? Ideas? Change? Racial purity? Ever since I witnessed aboard a high-speed train sections of the Great Wall crumbling in the Chinese desert, I resolved to go and see this mystery up close and personal. What the wall provokes in me it might not provoke in you, still, it is an ancient wonder, an Ozymandian bedevilment, a gesture of epic proportion meant to close the door on the rest of the world, now eroding quietly except for the well-recognized, carefully preserved portions. How this could even be contemplated and engineered raises all kinds of questions, the least of which is: Why? To answer that question and so many others I boarded an overnight bus to Shandan—an area in which Marco Polo spent a year of his time in China, to try to absorb the residue of the why and the what and the how. An overnight bus is truly a trip. Brand new and gleaming, it had three rows of double-decked sleeper berths, separated by narrow aisles, providing passengers with bedding, a compact mattress, with the head part raised to a 45-degree angle. Surprisingly, it was super-comfortable. Mogao CavesOn any trip to Dunhuang, the Mogao Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a must see. The carved out caves feature one of the largest collections of Buddhist paintings and sculptures at a site established in 332 AD that has survived not only the withering effects of time but the actual torching of the caves by nonbelievers, looting by invaders, serving as refugee housing in 1921 for Russian soldiers fleeing the revolution along with the rampant plundering by legions of foreign, allegedly well-meaning, archeologists from Britain, France, Hungary, Japan, among others and a untold years of tourist marauders.
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. Ancient legends say the area containing the Mingsha or Singing Sand Dunes just south of Dunhuang used to be flat. One day a fierce battle raged there and an army was annihilated, leaving the ground littered with bodies. A Goddess scattered incense ashes over them and from the ground rose up a giant sand mountain to bury the warriors, while the tears of the dead soldiers’ loved ones pooled to form Crescent Lake. Even now, it is said, when the wind comes from a certain direction, military drums rumble, the dunes echo the sounds of battle, the sand blows out sad laments for the fallen and mournful vapors of ghosts, drift. But this day, there was no wind, no battle cries, just sunlight and temperatures in the high 50’s and Xuxiangdong (whose name I shortened to Xu) beckoning me to follow. He led me to the camel ranch and pulled out money to pay for both of us, but I stopped him and paid my own way. I have found this is typical of Chinese generosity. If you are invited, the inviter expects to pay for everything. I guess he thought he had invited me by saying, “follow me, follow me,” and that became the tagline of the day, uttered in an amusing way as one would usher along a clueless child, along with repeating, “good friend, good friend.” I suddenly realized this was the extent of his English. No matter, we were on the same wavelength, everything was making us laugh, everything was blowing us away and we communicated our wonder with double thumbs up, shrieks and whoops of surprise and delight. We were joined by another Chinese tourist straggler and lined up for the camels. 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. 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. 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) Surrounded by a desolate, Martian-red expanse of bulging desert, a gleaming new Jiayuguan City has arisen on ancient ground that has been continually inhabited since around 1375, 120 years before Christopher Columbus bumped into the Americas on his way to India. Everything looks brand new. Civic auditoriums, government buildings, parks, stadium and sports center, statues, row after row of lofty apartment complexes, office towers, shopping districts, the broad boulevards lined with shade trees and lit at night with graceful light fixtures I’ve never seen anywhere except in urban design catalogs. Workers were everywhere, staining wood trim, laying paving tile, pouring cement for curbs and sidewalks, planting flowers and trees, all as if getting everything ready for buyers impatient to move in, but when I was there, the city looked hardly lived in yet. I’m used to scuffed up, bruised and bluesy cities; I really don’t know how to act in a brand new one. It was the old ground that I was interested in. I rode the magic green #4 bus out to the fort built at the narrowest part of the Hexi Corridor at Jiayuguan Pass (guan in Chinese means pass, so writing pass is redundant, it should be written Jiayu Guan . . . thanks Wikipedia!), bought a combo ticket (which allows you to visit the fort and some additional historic sites) for 130 RMB and walked up the hill as lazy fockers passed me riding the 10 RMB shuttle. I was glad I did, as I was able to capture the photograph below of some workers grooming the landscaped grounds. 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 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. |
|