.

This is the first picture from the camera that I bought right before I left for China. That's the guidebook and accessories to the camera on the desk in my room at the Beijing Language and Culture University. Interessant, non?

Once I had established my studying habits I started taking in the city. I had a nice long stroll through some hutongs on one of those first days of exploring. Hutongs are narrow alleys weaving through closely-knit communities and past courtyard houses (some would say 'cramped' some would say 'close-knit'... depends on how you take it). It's an old style of living that until recently had been about the only way to live in Beijing. It's quite a contrast to the modern Western-style suburb where the intent is to be separate and to have your own little estate and where everything you need is a car ride away. Hutongs however are built on a human scale and the feeling is nice. I had been looking forward to this for a long time, curious to see this old style of living before it met with the bulldozer in Beijing's race to destroy everything that's distinctive about their city in the run-up to the Olympics.














People are starting to realize what a treasure in these hutongs is being bulldozed away in the eagerness to 'modernize' and 'westernize.' So some developers are now taking old courtyard homes and restoring them to their original beauty and in the process also installing the modern conveniences... or at least a private bathroom (and these modern conveniences are, as far as I can tell from speaking to Beijingers, the only thing that makes the high-rises that are spreading all over Beijing better than a hutong).

The beautiful old courtyard pictured below was in the process of being restored when I stumbled on it halfway through my hutong stroll. Nice timing, too, because it was time to eat. I stuck my head in and asked if I could take a picture. They said 'sure' and since lunch was about to arrive from the little shop across the alley they invited me to stick around. Lots of eating and toasting and declarations of friendship. A good time. The guy with his arm around me is the representative from the bank or whoever or whatever was putting up the big bucks for this. I think it's because he was there that day that we had such a good spread. After seeing something like this it's not hard to feel that restoring or maintaining the old courtyards is a better way to develop than what's generally going on now in Beijing but of course there aren't enough old courtyards to go around for the thousands of people flooding in from rural China.
















Studying in China was working out really well so that answered the question of whether or not I'd be coming back to China soon. So I left town to see more of the country because when I came back I was just going to be hunkering down in Beijing and studying.

I first went to Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan province in the central part of southern China. While I was there I saved a woman from being robbed. She and her family were so pleased about this that they insisted on treating me to dinner at a nice Tibetan restaurant with authentic food and authentic performers from that distant region (though 'authentic' should be in quotes here because what I saw was probably more like the government's propagandized Disney version of Tibetan culture than the reality. It uses this to support the myth that the minority peoples in the far-flung regions of China are happy to be part of China and are not resisting but just want to dance and sing. The Chinese government seems to be winning its struggle to keep these regions subdued but the price they're paying to do this is pretty steep and so life for these minorities is definitely improving in some important respects -- new modern roads provided by the government, better communications, better education [or indoctrination into the majority Chinese culture] -- but the rich culture of these minorities is disappearing).

The food and the company was good but the lighting was bad. I didn't think to pop open the flash so it's hard to make out much from these pictures. There was plenty of blessing going on, done by tossing a long white scarf around the person you were blessing. I still have the scarf that one of the singers used to bless me. He's in the picture with me and the woman I saved from being robbed.



Half the people there joined some of the performers in a big circle dance around the restaurant. It took me a while to catch on but I eventually got it. That white blob in the middle is me dancing. Some people were trying to get a picture of me, the only foreigner there, dancing the native dances, which made me understand even better why the locals at tourist sites don't like having their picture taken.

I also ate dog in Kunming. First time. Only time. Last time. I had just gotten a massage and my masseuse wanted to show me her city (there are many nice things about Kunming and one of the nicest is that you can get a very good massage there for $13 and if your masseuse likes you and you can speak some Chinese, she'll ask you to stick around for an extra hour so she can take you around Kunming when she gets off work -- but you'll have to sneak out quickly because the employees aren't allowed to fraternize with the clients). It was very late in this city which like most Chinese cities had very little street lighting, so the stalls where we went to eat (big tables of raw food under a bare bulb next to a grill) stood out like beacons in a dark sea, if you'll pardon the poesy. So I blindly followed her regarding direction and diet and I had the first bite from whatever she'd ordered for us almost in my mouth when she said "by the way, that's dog." I'm sorry to report that it tasted pretty good. The photo further down of a little 'quiky-mart' in LiJiang should give you a good idea of what it's like to come upon one of these late night food stalls in the middle of a long dark stretch of nothing.

Below is another massage joint (a street-side massage joint so it's probably even cheaper than the relatively up-scale place I went to), and a restaurant that let me pretend I was shooting a Wong Kar Wai movie.

I went from keeping the streets of Kunming safe to some well-deserved R&R at the two old towns, Lijiang and Dali, that help make Yunnan province famous. When the husband of the woman I saved from being robbed offered to help me reserve a plane ticket to LiJiang, I accepted, not knowing that he also intended to buy the ticket for me. When I found out about that it was too late and he insisted on it, refusing to let me pay him.

The first picture above is of some of the locals getting ready to serve the many tourists who crowd this old town. I'm sure these two gals were very happy to get back into their jeans and fashion-ready t-shirts as soon as they got off work.














Mainland China hasn't done much to preserve its history recently. Indeed, seemingly taking its lead from the Europeans who made themselves a little too welcome in China a couple centuries ago, China during the Cultural Revolution worked pretty hard at destroying as much of their culture and history as they could. They did a pretty good job too but with thousands of years of history to obliterate they were bound to miss some spots. Such as LiJiang. Now, like so many Americans who travel from their poorly-designed cities and visit places that were built generations ago on a more human scale, thus making them more inviting to, uh, humans, say, rather than to cars, Chinese people are visiting the 'old towns' in truckloads, now that some of these Chinese people have edged into the middle class and can afford to do so, having managed to catch a few of the droppings from the huge buckets of money that are being made by the raging development that is turning the places where they live into places to leave. As Walker Percy called Atlanta the Los Angelization of the South, I call this the Los Angelization of China. Welcome to LiJiang.


The picture above of small walkways over one of the little streams that ran through town was taken from the rear of the restaurant where I took the photo of the waitress walking in front of that sea of weeping willow tree branches. Good food, good scenery. The gargoyles (?) were part of a tall tower that overlooked the city. There's also a picture of the woods that I walked through as I took what I hoped would turn out to be a shortcut to the tower. It was.








Those lanterns pictured above called to me down a narrow sidestreet and happily turned out to be singing the praises of a little bank of internet access all tucked away in a tiny shop where the young shopowner lived and sold purses and scarves. And lanterns, too, I suppose. There were three computers, each with a little antenna on top, so the connection was slow but it worked. It was a strange thing to see popping up in the middle of this purposefully old town but I'd been needing me some internets so I didn't care. The smiling kids were friends I made when I went around the corner to get something to eat.

I took the next photo when I wandered way off the tourist path into where some of the locals lived. As in so many cities in China, there was not a lot of street lighting. While I was taking this picture a kid saw me and started shouting something like "Westerner taking pictures" which I think was a sort of warning to folks living there that another Westerner was gawking around invading their privacy (though privacy is a vague concept in China or not very well-established so who knows. It did seem to be a warning, though, rather than an invitation).

The city of LiJiang was feeling too Disneyfied and full of row upon row of shops selling trinkets so I pretty soon set about leaving (the outskirts of LiJiang have some mountains which are supposed to be amazing but I was trying to squeeze in a lot in a little and was focusing more on cities at the time). It would finally dawn on me months later while visiting yet another old town that most old towns in China are like this. And that's all right. Who can blame people looking to get by in China's shifting economy for trying to make a little money off of someone's search for the 'authentic', whatever that is. Though I do wish I could have made it to Dali or Lijiang ten years earlier. Or even just five years. People who've seen LiJiang both now and as recently as five years ago say the change is incredible. It really just used to be an old town doing nothing but being an old town. Now it's a Thing. But most of the excitement of China today isn't to be found in the little eddies and backwaters of history that have been embalmed and set aside for tourists. Though of course, if you look carefully there's some great stuff in these old cities. So that's why I pushed on to Dali.

At first, Dali seemed to be more of the same so by the morning of the second day I was ready to go and not ready to "look carefully". But I'd already missed the only quick way out of there that day. So I had an entire extra day forced on me in Dali. It was either that or spend eight hot hours on a bus with a driver who would be tooting the horn at least every fifteen seconds (that's not an exaggeration about the horns... It seems that the only thing you have to know about driving in order to get a license in China is how to toot the horn. They do it All The Time. And nobody anywhere ever pays any attention at all to anybody blowing a horn!). But it was a good day. I'm glad I got stuck.

I rented an old bike with bad flabby tires and worse brakes and rode it to the ferry that takes you across the lake. There was yet another old town on the other side of the lake and I thought I might find what I was looking for there. But I got a late start and I didn't have much time left before the last ferry back to Dali. So, I pedaled like crazy on my wonderfully crappy bike, almost getting blown off the road by construction trucks (a new highway going up there to serve the expected continued droves of tourists, I suppose) and flying down hills past kids driving herds of goats.

I was hustling and sweating and calculating and slowly realizing there was no way I was going to make it to the new old town when I saw this guy fishing on the lake. I dumped my bike right there and decided I wasn't going to the old town. I was going to get this picture.












It's a nice picture but don't romanticize this. These people were very poor. I passed the huts where these fishing people lived, huts made out of sticks and paper and huddled up against the mountain just a few feet from the busy highway. I think this picture captures some sense of their lives. I hope it does.

I made it back to the ferry just in time, sweating like a pig. And then back into town where I came across this shop selling Mao ZeDong memorabilia. After I asked the woman you see in this photo if I could take a picture of her shop she invited me to have dinner with her family that night. They were celebrating their daughter's sixth birthday. That's the daughter in the photo. They lived in a beautiful old courtyard house that you absolutely could romanticize, as I did.



























These are some more photos from the extra day I snatched in Dali.






There are the motorcycles parked outside a construction site and the women inside in helmets and aprons doing heavy construction. There were more than a few women on this construction site. I made myself welcome there and strolled around surprisingly undisturbed until an official-looking man came up to me and pointed proudly to his helmet which said "safety" something on it. I pretended I didn't know what it meant and told him he had a nice hat. There were some good pictures to be had there but I finally behaved like the good tourist and left.

Below are some photos from a shop that made vases. I stumbled across this just outside of town. You can see the rental bike that almost killed me lying in the entrance to the shop. Picked up a vase here for my mom. Later I saw a wall of these vases for sale at the airport in the capital city in Kunming. There they cost more than twice what I paid at the shop. Had fun bargaining with the clerk at the airport just for kicks. Or just for practice. I got pretty good at bargaining after a while, or at least never taking the first price that was offered, though I'm sure I still paid a portion of the unspoken "foreigner's tax."

[NOTE: Click once on "September 2007" under "Archives" at the top of this blog and to the left to see the rest of the 'travelogue' that follows below (the last entry is called "Class photo, last day").]



















[NOTE: Click once on "September 2007" under "Archives" at the top of this blog and to the left to see the rest of the 'travelogue' that follows below (the last entry is called "Class photo, last day").]

If you want a postcard picture of the Summer Palace, one of Beijing's main tourist sites and rightfully so, I don't have one for you but you should be able to google it. In the meantime, here's a shot I took from one of the high spots of this incredible spread that a Chinese Empress had built for herself a couple centuries ago with money squandered from the Navy. A misuse of public funds for sure and I'm not one to condone malfeasance but hey... it's a nice place to go to to get out of the city without getting out of the city. Clearly it's not summer in this photo. I had already been back and forth to the States at this point and was in the middle of my second trip to China. These folks were strolling on the ice of the big lake which is one of the central features of the palace. A sort of abstract photo for a my-trip-to-China travelogue, I'll admit, but it does capture the feel of the place, the vast etc. of it.

Okay, here's one that's a bit more like a postcard. The Great Wall. I was expecting a stroll but it was more than that. Quite a workout. The last stretch of wall we climbed was as vertical as climbing a ladder, but with nothing to hang onto. Those are my classmates in front of me. We were happy to be going downhill at this point.





Not really in chronological order here but since they're like postcards we've got some shots below from my 36 hours in Hong Kong. I organized my long stroll through Hong Kong around trying to find scenes from Wong Kar Wai's movie "Chungking Express". I didn't find much but I did go up that long escalator that Tony Leung's flight attendant goes up. Eh, maybe it's not for you but I had fun. A good way to organize a tour but I was hustling so I didn't pause to take too many pictures.








I'm also adding some pictures I took in Fenghuang, another old town that's attracting tourists now and inspiring postcardy pictures. Really beautiful old place, in spite of the tourist kitsch. Baifan, the producer of the documentary I worked on, took us to Fenghuang after we finished shooting. He took very good care of us throughout the shoot and this was a nice topper to the whole experience.

Everywhere in China you can find people playing badminton. With or without a net. Usually without. And wherever they happen to find themselves... outside work, home, in the park, on campus. It seems almost as ubiquitous as bikes are in China or at least as representative of China as bikes are to a non-badminton-playing non-bike-riding Westerner's eyes. This picture was taken on the campus of my university. The bulletin boards on either side are where the day's newspapers were posted, page by page. This used to be much more common in China but you still can see it here and there.

I'm not much of a student of Chinese history so I might not be quite accurate here but I'm pretty sure that had it not been for this tradition of newspaper posting then what is familiar to some western students of Chinese history as the "Democracy Wall" would never have happened. And without the "Democracy Wall" the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests would never have happened. The "Democracy Wall" preceded the Tiananman Square massacre (or "incident" to use the language of the Chinese government) by only a couple of years or even only a matter of months and can be viewed as a precursor to the Tiananmen Square protests. I don't know how familiar this is to students in China where information about this is suppressed, though not as much now as it used to be. Still, very few Chinese students are aware of the iconic photo that's so familiar to the rest of the world of that lone guy blocking a line of tanks moving through Tiananmen Square.

You could always see a handful of people reading the day's newspapers at this spot. This was in a bucolic little stretch of campus and I liked to study there with my tutors and language partners. On either side of the bulletin boards in this photo you can just barely see the benches where we used to sit and from which I'd sometimes zone out on a pair of feet moving methodically through the day's news as I struggled with some new (or old) aspect of the Chinese language.

If you can't quite make the badminton connection, the squirrely white thing trailing up is the birdie (shuttlecock, I believe, to the purists) and the other whooshes are the racquets swinging. I had just made a resolution to start carrying my camera around more so that I could be ready for anything when I saw these two women playing. Of course the resolution hadn't stuck and I had to race back to my apartment on my bike (which was at that time only days away from being stolen) and get the camera. When I came back they had just stopped playing but I asked them if they could play a bit longer which they did though they thought it was kind of strange.



It was also at this spot that I met Yan Yuqian. This happened in the middle of my third trip to China and it was a very lucky day.

That's Yuqian in the picture. She was camped out at BLCU, staying at the hotel on campus until she found a foreigner who could speak Chinese for the documentary she was working on. It was about education in China and this was one of her assignments. And if you need to find a foreigner who can speak Chinese in Beijing, BLCU is known as the place to go. I'd already been approached a couple times to be in TV shows that I passed on but what Yuqian described to me was something else... a month in a remote part of China that not many Westerners see, staying with the locals and teaching the children who lived there.

BLCU is also known as the place to go to find foreigners with money.

One night a girl who was about 19 or 20 stopped me and asked if she could use my cell phone. She was stranded far away from home with no money and needed to call home and ask her brother to come and get her. It didn't take long to figure out that this was not a scam. She had been doing farmwork in her hometown. She and her family and the region itself were very poor and she had come to Beijing to find work. But after about two weeks of trying she had spent all the money she had and had found that there is no work in Beijing for a woman from the country with no education. Later that night she told me that she had just dreamed that there would be work for her in Beijing and that's why she came.

Her brother couldn't come to get her for another two days but he was coming. She was very grateful when I gave her enough money to stay in some relatively safe place until then but when she saw how much I had given her she said 'the train ticket doesn't cost much more than this'. Well, long story short, before the night was over I'd paid for her train ticket, treated her to a meal at McDonalds (it was where she wanted to go... she was pretty excited about it. McDonalds is actually relatively expensive in China) and bought a sweater for her because it was kind of cold and she didn't have much to keep her warm in the small knapsack she was carrying. It sounds like a perfect sob story but it was true. I've been in touch with her many times since by text message. She keeps inviting me to visit her and her family in her hometown and I hope I can take her up on that someday. Her gratitude to me for the little thing I did for her is overwhelming. She will never forget me, she says.

Since she made it back home she's gotten engaged to the boy she left behind (she actually sort of ran away after a fight with her parents over that) and been flooded out of her home by the rains that swept through southern China near the end of the summer. And she's gone back to farming, and that's probably what she's going to do for the rest of her life. But she's able to say she's been to Beijing. Even though she was angry at her parents, she was going to get up early the next morning before the train left to make a pilgrimage to Tiananmen Square to buy a little something for them just to show that she'd been to Beijing, to Tiananmen Square, the heart of China.

If it feels like we're whipping through a lot of time with no pictures, the truth is I sort of stopped taking pictures. I think that's because after a while I was no longer a tourist but a resident and most residents don't carry cameras. And besides, if you're carrying a camera around all the time I feel that you're always one step removed from the event. My friend who painted the picture of our professor [see "Learning Chinese is Fun!"] carried his video camera and his late grandmother's chair around with him everywhere he went in China every day for six months. This was for a film he was shooting. I think the story behind it is that his grandmother had always wanted to go to China but never made it and this chair of hers which she used to sit in all the time was very connected to my friend's fond memories of her. So he took it all over China and got it into various settings and situations and shot video of it... He had a blind musician play cello while sitting on it on the Bund in Shanghai... He convinced workers to hang it from a towering crane and had it flown high over a construction site. I've only seen bits of the 40-min movie but it looks really good. If you're in Switzerland it's playing now at an installation there. Maybe I'll add a link later if he's got one or I'll at least add a shot of the rare Chinese stripper that he finally found to dance on the chair. But the point is, after six months of carrying a camera around he, like me, had no interest in carrying a camera any more. So I don't think I took any more pictures until I left for Hunan.