.

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.

Okay, I lied. One more little thing before we get on to the chronological portion. A little off topic here but I thought you might enjoy this. This was taken in New York, in between my first and second trips to China. Gong Li is a huge movie star in China. She stars in more than one of my favorite movies. She was in town promoting the new Zhang Yimou movie she was in, "Curse of the Golden Flower." A friend of mine who's a reporter was assigned to interview Ms. Li. She asked if I wanted to be her photographer. I said yes.

Working with limited equipment and light and skill, this is what I came up with. Gong Li, of course, recognized upon seeing me that I am more of a swordsman than a photographer and invited me to prove my skill. I'm not one to kiss and tell but let's just say my friend left without me whereupon I did much to reduce our trade deficit with China, if you will.



Here's Gong Li goofing off with me after the interview waiting for my friend to take the hint and leave us alone.



[NOTE: Everything in this travelogue is the god's honest truth, except for one little lie. If you can spot that one lie, you may be eligible for a prize.]

Okay, on to the chronologically organized remainder of this travelogue.

[ANOTHER NOTE: In order to see the entire travelblogue that follows, you'll eventually need to click on the "September 2007" button under "Archives" at the top of this blog and to the left. You can do it now or you can do it later (the final entry is called "Class photo, last day". If you don't see that you haven't seen the whole blog).]

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").]