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This is a picture of one of the professors I had in Beijing.

[NOTE: I've removed the picture of my Chinese teacher that was originally in this spot. She was looking very sexy and sassy in some cool shades that my friend put on her. It's a cute, fun picture but I didn't want her getting into any difficulties with her school. It's a very tame picture and the odds of any trouble coming to her because of it are slim but I didn't want to take a chance.]

You probably have your own notions of what learning Chinese must be like, if you've thought of it at all since you found out I've been doing that. This image might change your notions a little bit but, you know, change is good.

The great thing about this picture is that she was so very much not like this in class. It wasn't until much later in the semester when I was off teaching kids in a poor remote region of China that my friend from Switzerland found himself alone in class with her one day and started to discover that she not only was a lot of fun to kid around with and had a great laugh but, as some of us had gradually begun to suspect, she was kinda hot, as the kids say.

This was in distinct contrast to what little we knew of her at first. She wore remarkably unflattering glasses and kept her hair tied up tightly. She was very strict, much more strict than our other two teachers. If you were just a few minutes late she would curtly tell you to "hurry up" without even looking at you.

My friend and she slowly slowly started down the road to romance, slowly as you only could with a traditional Chinese woman, even a slightly non-traditional Chinese woman. He is an artist and told her that he wanted to paint her. He asked if he could use my camera to take pictures of her as he was trying to discover how he'd paint her and that's how I came to have this photo to share with you.

To look at that photo above might inspire a strained allegorical stretch to illustrate at one stroke What China Is All About Now... the rapid changes and the confusing clash of the modern and traditional that those changes have created in China, etc. Or... it might not, especially if it weren't for this half-baked little photo caption of mine encouraging you to do so. But if you look at it along with the next photo, a photo of the painting that my friend finally made -- one that was painted with love, he said -- you might make that stretch all on your own.



And my friend would hit me on the head with a shovel if he knew I was painting such a sentimental picture of him here. Anyway, this is one of the last pictures from my stay in China. The travelogue of my three trips to China in the past year follows below in chronological order from October '06 to August '07 (sort of a backwards blog) but I start with this picture because it seemed right and, more importantly, because I lost the cable that hooks my camera to my computer and only just added this last photo.

There's a lot of information below, of an amount that only a mother could read. Indeed, one of the reasons I started this thing is because Uncle Paul didn't have time to put on a slide show the last time he visited the family. It's gotten a little out of hand since then, so if you want a guide for skipping maybe skip down to "on the long road to a small village." There is more of a narrative flow to that section, maybe, and less editorializing. Maybe. Either way, this whole thing could use some serious editing that I hope to get to later.

But not before I give you one more chunk of blather in a disclaimer kinda way:

I was returning from that remote region of China with the documentary crew that had been filming me teaching and living there. We were exhausted and relieved to have finished a month of hard work and just wanted to get on the train back to where we came from. I waited with the cameraman and the rest of the crew by the equipment and luggage in the vast square in front of the railway station while two others went to get the tickets. But they didn’t head to the ticket window as I'd expected but waded off into the sea of people wandering around the square. As Wang Wei, the Chinese cameraman, explained it to me, all the tickets for our destination had long ago been bought up at the window by scalpers who would resell them to people who actually wanted to get on the train. Every ticket to be had was to be had like that. That’s just the way it ‘worked.’ Hmm… And so, after months of marveling at the wonder of living in this complex and wildly interesting new world and after months of living intimately amongst Chinese who love their country (though their government is another issue) and after months of couching any negative comments I had about China in terms that wouldn’t alienate my wonderful Chinese friends, in my exhaustion and relief at that moment I just let it be said without any varnish at all, “Man, China is screwed up” (though I didn't speak quite so elegantly as that). Wang Wei didn’t miss a beat. He just laughed and said “Yes, it is.”

Yes, China is screwed up in some special ways, and the bit with the train tickets is just a minor instance though maybe indicative of the larger problems. But that is far from being the whole story. The history of the place, the language, the culture, the fascinating and immense changes it's going through right now, all make it a wonderful and incredible place to be. And the people are great. I won't bother touching on the government right now but I loved the people (and I apologize to my Chinese friends for any misrepresentations or flat-out stupidity regarding China contained herein). I wish good things for China. It’s had a twisted history for the past two centuries and has a long road ahead of it, but for its people and for the world, I wish good things for it. True, there are things about a successful China that might not be in our (U.S.) national interest. But those are things we know how to deal with. We’ve dealt with them before and we can deal with them again. But, if China were to fail, it would fail in ways and on a scale that we’ve never seen before that would not only be bad for China but bad, even catastrophic, for the rest of the world.

Pardon the hyperbole. Just trying to keep things interesting... I know it’s been a while since the last photo. All this is just to say that there is what might appear to be a negative tone running throughout this travelblogue, a frequent pointing out and appraisal of the things that are “wrong” with China. This is mainly the result, I think, of China’s recent history, its mad dash through what could rightfully be more than a thousand year's worth of history squeezed into the short span of two centuries, never mind the unprecedented scale of change that the past two decades have witnessed. And bad news always makes for a better story than good news and the Devil always has more interesting lines than God. But I will have given you the wrong impression of my experience in China if you come away with a negative feeling. It was an incredible time and I'm a lucky guy to have been there. I want to go back.

So, on to China.