On their way to opening up the first authentic burger joint in Lanzhou, China, husband and wife team Josh and Mei Mei, learned a lot about trust.
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It’s the night of the Blue Moon in July. Heat wave. Hundred degrees (37.7 c) for seven days in a row. I’m melting, we are all melting. Today I forced myself to take a walk. Wearing shorts. In Costa Rica men don’t wear shorts unless they are going to the beach. I never did either, no matter how hot it got. But today, I am subjecting the good people of China to the sight of me wearing shorts. 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. The oldest engraving in cave 169 in the Bingling (Tibetan for 10,000 Buddhas) Grotto site dates back to 420 A.D. Ten years after Rome was sacked by the Visigoths and a few years before Attila the Hun began his wild sweep westward, Tibetan monks began carving statues and shrines in Jishi Hills. 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. 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.) Below the stars, the city lay frozen. People moved about briskly, cars waiting at traffic lights emitted a breathy exhaust like winter farm cows; ice scabs crusted the sidewalk in unexpected places. The domed sky absorbed all human wishes while threatening snow. It was a city suspended, stretching outward into nothing and everything, as if waiting for something to claim it. Ties to harmony unraveled, reformed. Secret music rose, carried by the wind across the river, to fall like invisible snowflakes or maybe prayer. It was a night you could hear people dreaming. People casting off chains, submitting resumes to the universe, awakening the next morning remembering nothing. Blue steel midnight. Ancient Chinese clocks ticking across forever. Zodiacal societies casting predictions no one ever checks a year later to see if they were right, the spiral path of the cosmos sweeping everything along, the knowledge of the entire forest in a single pine cone. More wishes, flung out like seeds, stardust, the ear, resembling an upside down, tucked in human embryo, listens to acupuncture needles play old stereo records, backwards. Twelve drunken tourists pass by in a slur. Aristotle said beauty is order, symmetry, and precision. Confucius said everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it. This night has a beauty that hardly anyone will see as well as order, symmetry, precision. The frigid air is as threatening and precise as a cold steel bullet. As if it were a pistol wanting to say, “Give me your wallet, chump.” Everything surrenders to it. Everyone measures it. Everyone is left wanting. Cold blue angels hover protectively over trashcans and alleys. Stutterers speak freely, in labyrinths of riddles. Order is on holiday in Goa, India, and for the moment, anything goes. Everyone wants understanding. Everyone wants time and a half. Everyone wants to blame it on someone else. Everyone wants to know what happens next. Everyone would like you to believe they’ve read War and Peace. Everyone surrenders to something. Not everyone admits to it. The wind blows down the cold pavement streets in a foreign language. Mount Everest lecturing. Gobi desert dry—heaves. When was the last time you thought you knew where you were going? When was the last time you felt truly relaxed? When was the last time you had faith in something? The old woman sells baked sweet potatoes on the corner. She overcharges. Nobody minds. She is still there at midnight. She doesn’t appear to question. Is that wisdom or stoicism? The country rises up westward from the ocean to the Tibetan Plateau. No one seems mindful of the terrible and wonderful geography. The pattern of the winds is perfect. The drainage of the rivers carries you along in some crazy booguloo of transcontinental sea yearning. The worn hills are ancient. The coal-heated cities are Dickensian. Everything is old and new at the same time. The new year beckons. The new year pleads. The new year wants recognition. And in the cold starlight, the new year doesn’t seem to care. Or does it? You will decide. Create the best year ever. “Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble.” – Leonardo da Vinci 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). 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. 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 . . . . 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.) |
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