I Have Been to the Mountaintop, I Have Seen the... Buddha?

I had just begun to grow weary of Hong Kong. I wasn’t even really sure if I wanted to leave the hotel and head back out to the crowded streets, crowded with both people and buildings. The buildings clawed their way towards the sky to try and escape all the people below. Every day here has been like looking through frosted glass, not like Beijing on a bad day, but it was suffocating me somehow. At night the buildings across the strait lit up with Santa decorations and displayed messages on others. It felt hokey. And to top things off Mandarin is not spoken in Hong Kong. Exhibit A of this: Hong Kong is not how you say Hong Kong in Mandarin. It’s Cantonese. The Mandarin is Xiang Gang, meaning Fragrant Port. America and the rest of the world started going by the Cantonese ways of saying names and places when Jiang Jieshi fled to Taiwan with the rest of the Guomindang (the Cantonese is Kuomintang). He was originally from Canton, so when the world recognized Taiwan and not China as the true government of China, they picked up on the names that Jiang Jieshi used. You’ve probably heard of Jiang Jieshi’s Cantonese name, Jiang Kai-shek. So because I couldn’t communicate with the people around me, I felt completely and utterly useless. In Beijing, I could show my parents around and my favorite places to go, such as little niche restaurants that Chris and Gavin and I frequent, or underground shopping malls where the only entrance is a drink stand on the street. But here I didn't know about any places or restaurants, so not only did I feel completely and utterly useless, but my Chinese felt like it was getting worse with each passing day. But today was my last day in Hong Kong and the last day of the year 2008 and I still had one more thing to do on my list of things to do. I had to go visit the big Buddha. My parents hadn’t heard of it and I only knew of it by asking a friend back in America of places to go in Hong Kong. Gave me a sense of usefulness. But I’m beginning to ramble. We rode the subway through Hong Kong. There was no stares sent our direction on the subway, we were just another bunch of foreigners, like the other dozens that were on the subway. For the first time in four months, I wasn’t something that deserved a glance at. It didn't feel good. We arrived at the last station and got on the trams. They never stopped moving, so we jumped into the moving trams while they slowed around the curve to go back the way they came. Nine people crammed into the vehicle and then with a slight increase in speed we were off. We hung over the ocean, hopping from island to island from the giant webs of metal that had been spun within the past decade. The trams were at least two hundred feet over the tops of the mountains at times, and the wind shaking it back and forth only made it a little more nerve wrecking. We had been in it for fifteen minutes when we came over a forested peak and in the distance saw a slightly irregular mountain. As the minutes rolled by and slid closer to the mysterious mountain, it became obvious that it was, in fact, a giant statue of Buddha on the peak of a mountain. It was awe-inspiring. I looked at it and remembered the Buddha carved out of the cliff at the Longmen Grotto and began to wonder about the faith of the other religions. People believed in this particular one so much that they got a giant bronze Buddha statue out to the top of a mountain, and carved another one into a cliff face. You don’t see things like that in Europe. The tram never stopped, but we got off of it anyway at the station on the other side of the expanse. We were now in a quaint village, built around the Buddha. Or maybe the Buddha was built around it; I never did my research on the place. But I digress. The place had typical architecture like you would see in a cartoon, except with franchise names on the signs. A 7 Eleven on the left, a Starbucks on the right, etc. We walked up to the foot of the mountain Buddha was perched on and looked up at the stairs. I jogged up to the top, being the only one there wearing a blazer, with the wind blowing my coats tail around on the ascent. In my defense, I wanted to wear my Christmas/Holiday gift. I really appreciated it, though my parents called it a happy-to-see-me gift. The place was gorgeous, the railings were carved nicely and all around the giant Buddha were little statues, in kneeling positions, each holding a different offering. I wandered around and admired the view from the top. I have been to the mountaintop. The buildings around looked like they were thrown onto the mountains in front of Buddha in no particular order, and to Buddha’s back there were cliffs and more mountains. It made me wonder even more how it got here. The statue had such details in it too, like the fabric on his clothes looked like they had been sewn, not just molded. I wandered back down and took pictures with my parents. About three hours of admiring the area later, we were wandering back to the tram and on our way back home. I was happy with this excursion. It made the whole trip to Hong Kong worth it. We got on the tram and headed back to the hotel over mountainscapes and calm ocean views.

The Curious Incident of the Bass, the Lake and the Night Time

Saturday night. I was sitting in the hotel room studying when I heard a knock at the door. I walked to the hotel room door and answered it. It was Gavin. He insisted that this was the only night that we would be able to go clubbing in Beijing without breaking the rules. We were under our parents watch now. So we researched a bit and were on our way through the frigid nights of Beijing in search of a club. We pulled up after stopping at 3 other clubs and arrived at something called Club Banana. The outside was next to a hotel, lit up for Christmas, but the lack of snow made it feel nothing like Christmas. At the front door of the club was a humiliated Chinese man wearing a Santa outfit and we went in. I walked through the door and I felt my heart shaking. Not out of anxiety or fear but because of the bass. The dance floor was on the second floor and they made us check our coats on the first floor. We walked up the stairs amidst odd hairdo’s and fashion statements into a line so that we could get frisked. The bass was intense. I got frisked and then Gavin and I walked in. It was dark and foggy. Multi tiered levels overlooked the dance floor. Everyone was doing the same dance move and I felt like I would fit right in with my limited skills at dancing. The walls were pock marks of changing color and tables at 400 kuai a seat were everywhere around the place. Flashing lights came from above the DJ’s raised throne and four honeycomb screens showed silhouettes of women dancing on a red background. Lights and lasers flashed down, and an occasional onslaught of fog showed the path of each beam. I had finally found the mysterious absence of Nightlife in Beijing. I doubt that this is where everyone goes after 9:30 in the evening, but there were a good deal of people. Thousands of deserted streets and one packed club. Gavin and I stepped out onto the dance floor and we realized why the base was as intense as it was. The entire dance floor was a subwoofer. The floor moved up and down and shook me and made everyone on the dance floor actually vibrate. I pushed my way into the mess of the crowd and eventually had a group of people that were interested in the foreigners on their dance floor. I saw two fine-o-mite girls dancing with each other and started making a move, when every other Chinese male went and surrounded them. Am I sensing a bit of xenophobia? No? It was still ok; we still had our circle of dancers. We took a break and wandered the club, thinking we could practice our Chinese with some pretty women. Here’s how most of the conversations went.
Us: Hey
Girls: What?
Us: We said hey!
Girls: I can’t hear you!
Us: What?
Girls: We can’t hear you!
Us: Forget it, we can’t hear you!
Of course we did talk with some, but that example was more than half of the conversations. We left shortly after, body shaking still from the tremendous bass. Gavin had no intention of going home, so we went to Houhai, the lake behind the Forbidden City. Nobody was there but peddlers of beer and cheap women… or was it women and cheap beer? I digress; we had no intention to indulge on any of that. We just wanted to go on the lake. It was completely frozen over. We wandered around the entire lake looking for a place to walk down. Men would grab our arms and tell us we should go to their bar. We pretended we were German and didn’t understand English. One guy followed us for a while, trying to sell us on something. But we just said no, until Gavin said, “We don’t want it, are you deaf? Oh wait, I’m sorry, I was saying the tones wrong. We DON’T want it? Now do you understand?” The man walked away fast, but kept glancing back as if he wanted to kill us. He was huddling in his light jacket to fight the not so light cold. We wandered around until we found a path to the lake. So we went down the ice skating path and slid out onto the lake. The lake was surrounded by countless lights from bars and small stops, but we wandered into the center of the lake, walking further into the void of darkness in Houhai. It was stunning. We skated onto the island in the center, and Gavin wanted to meditate there and then pee on the ice. I was just happy to be in the center of the expanse of ice around us. There were a few streaks of colored lights reflected on the surface from the buildings far off, but the ice was mostly scuffed from eight hours of ice skating. I looked out from the small pier on the island and saw an encroaching dome of fog enveloping the city. We slid back to the shore and hailed a cab home, slinking into the hotel as the hotel staff slept. It was an interesting night.

Chopsticks and Manners

I look back at the meals I’ve had at Chinese restaurants and how classy they pretended to be, or actually were. People dressed in jeans, khakis, suits even, fumbling with chopsticks as they sat in a western fashion around the table. The waiters would bring plates of food and it’d be family style serving to their individual plates. There was just an air about it, as of someone swaggering, except sitting. I look back at it and laugh, especially at the chopsticks and the baffled expression of an erudite trying to figure out the polite way to use them. There is none. I see them as an extension of my fingers to place each piece of food in my mouth and then use them like a shovel to get the last bits of food out of the bottom of the bowl. I came to China, raised on manners, but being too lazy to use them on an everyday basis, and tried to show how polite I was to my host family by using these ideas instilled in me as a kid. They wondered what was wrong with their food. Why wasn’t I enjoying it? They didn’t believe me when I said it was delicious, (it was really just hao chi at best.) Why though? Why didn’t they believe me? Because I hadn’t tried eating it like I was hungry, I hadn’t slurped the noodles, I hadn’t burped at the end of the meal. Apparently Emily Post doesn’t quite fit in with Chinese customs. Ba had lifted his bowl to his mouth and pushed the food towards him with the chopsticks, Peter was slurping noodles noisily from the bowl to his mouth and Ma was picking small fish bones out of her mouth and putting them on a napkin on the table. I was absolutely horrified by this my first day, but somewhere deep down, I loved it. I never really understood why you had to eat like you weren’t hungry if you were starving. In China, if you’re hungry, go to town on that meal. Of course this is just from my experiences in the normal middle class dinner setting, but still I felt instantly connected to this way of eating and fell even more in love with China.

I don’t know what really made me think about this… maybe my parents being on their way to China?

Rules for Bargaining

I’ve always been a somewhat passive person. But if you go to the Hong Qiao Shichang, (Pearl market,) being a passive person will get you ripped off. Sophie, Chris and I hired a mo-ped rickshaw from Wangfujing to the Pearl Market. The only problem was that this was a two seater. So Sophie sat on Chris’ lap, I had all the bags on mine and we were off. Our ride was having trouble moving and was tilting towards the side with Sophie and Chris. At stop lights it stalled and taxis almost rear ended us. They would honk at us, but we would wave at the driver and passengers and they’d just laugh. I looked out the window on my side and I saw people looking out their car windows at the three waiguoren cramped in that small cage of metal on the back of that old Chinese man’s mo-ped. I was enjoying the ride until our driver turned left from the far right lane across eight lanes of busy traffic. That’s something I don’t even think my dad would do. I had submitted myself to death and thought I had a good life. I closed my eyes, but there was no crash, no screams, no explosion of blood, no implosion of cheap metal. We had safely navigated the way across the intersection and had wound up at the market. We paid and walked towards one of the entrances. It was a shoebox of a building, and I wasn’t expecting much of it from the plain exterior. Then I walked in. It was more like a flea market than a pearl market. There were stands everywhere and it reminded me of a flea market in Florida, except there were multiple floors. Chris and I walked by the electronics section, selling iPhones for 600 kuai, Nintendo DS’ for 1500 kuai and the like, and went to the second floor for the clothes. I was on a mission for some Christmas gifts. The first rule of bargaining I learned was this.
1) The less the person knows about you the better.
I said I was shopping for Christmas gifts and she tried selling me a Santa tie. It was yellow and thin and just something I wouldn’t see anyone wearing. I told her I was Jewish and then she became confused. Why was I buying Christmas gifts? No matter, I didn’t want ties, I wanted that Beijing shirt. It started off at 100 kuai. I said “That’s simply too expensive, my friend bought his for 20.”
The clerk was offended. “20 kuai?! I’ll go poor that way!” So I started walking away. “50 kuai!”
I stopped. She was starting to break. “50? You’re pulling my leg? 20.”
“30.”
“20.”
“35.” I was baffled by the sudden increase and started walking away. Where did she learn to bargain? “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to the store that sells it for 20. Why should I pay more?”
“Fine… fine,” I handed her the 20 kuai, and she gave me the shirt. Rule number 2 of bargaining,
2) You are the Customer, you have the power.
I thanked her and walked over to Chris who was trying on sweaters. The sweaters were decent, but they were all too small. Chris tried to tell the clerk that he wasn’t interested in the sweaters anymore but the woman was persistent. She grabbed his arm and pulled him back, refusing to let this catch get away. This leads to rule number 3 of bargaining.
3) If it gets too intense, walk away.
The lady kept pushing the sweater on him, but we just left and tried blending into the crowds of the market. We couldn’t really blend in, being a full head taller than almost everyone there, but it showed her. We stopped at a new stand and the clerk’s starting price was 20 for the shirt I had just bought. So I bought a Mao T-shirt for 20 and was on my way. One lady stopped us and tried to sell us a jacket. “I have quality brand name jackets. Do you want Peak or Canadian Goose. I also have North Face.” Sophie was cold so Chris gave her his jacket and he was going to get himself a new one. The clerk pulled out a Peak jacket and she showed it to us. “You like? It’s real.”
Chris asked, “How much?” The girl typed 380 onto her calculator and I let out a quick Aiyooo.
“Aiyo?! Why do you say that?”
“It’s too expensive. I’m only willing to pay 100,” Chris said.
“100?! I could buy five shirts for that? Do you really think that this jacket is worth five shirts? No.” She motioned to the wall of jackets behind her, thrown on the wall in a miraculously organized manner. “These jackets are all worth more than that!”
“100.”
“350.”
“120.”
Chris and the clerk went on like this for ten minutes, until they came to the price of 200 kuai for the jacket. The clerk looked pleased, as she got the two 100 kuai bills and Chris and I walked off down another aisle. A lady ran out to us and said, “Look here, only 100 kuai!” She pointed to the exact jacket that Chris had paid double for. We turned around and went back to the lady Chris had bargained with. “You’re a liar! We just went to a stand that was selling the exact jacket for 100 kuai.”
“NO!” the small woman yelled, “She’s the liar! That jacket is a fake!”
“You come with us and we’ll show you that jacket.” The woman glanced down and paused. We waited for what she was going to do next, then she bolted into a crowd and we lost her. We stood dumbfounded by what had happened and couldn’t help but laugh a little. While we were standing there Lauren and Claire bumped into us and we hung out for a little, but they were also shopping for gifts, so we went our separate ways. Rule 4 of bargaining.
4) You can find cheaper.
Chris and I had found what we wanted, so we were wandering the aisles having fun. One woman pulled us inside her stall and tried to sell us woman’s clothing. “You can give them to your girlfriend,” the woman tried to rationalize.
“I don’t have one,” Chris lied.
“Well then, give it to your mother,” the woman said, sensing this would make the sale.
“My mother died,” and Chris went silent.
“You liar,” the lady said and wandered to me who was waiting in the aisle way, “Did your friend’s mother really die?”
“Wha…” I saw Chris nodding behind the woman, “Yes, she just died last week.”
“Liar, buy her some clothes.”
I gasped and walked over to Chris, “Don’t cry, she’s just trying to make a living.” Chris began sniffling and I turned to the woman and hissed, “How could you? Why would we joke about something like that?”
The lady looked absolutely mortified. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…” but we were already walking down the aisle. She looked at us and the other clerks were laughing at her. Right before turning the corner, still patting Chris’ back saying “don’t cry,” I looked back at her, gave her the evil eye and shook my head. Her young face was shaken. And then she fell out of view and Chris and I started laughing. We couldn’t control it. This comes to the most important rule of bargaining.
5) Have fun doing it, it’ll lead to some great stories.
We ran into Lauren and Claire again and started talking next to a stand, when a woman came up to us and wanted us to buy something. She said in English, “Get your friends some underwear.” Following rule number one, we cocked our heads to the side and pretended we didn’t speak English. I’m sorry we’re from Spain. Chris and I then convinced her that we were students at Qinghua University and hilarity ensued. Sophie found us again, Lauren and Claire left and we wandered around the market for a little while longer, going up to the fourth floor of the market. We didn’t want to spend any more money, so we headed out. I felt that I had changed a bit after my time at the Pearl market. I walked out of there and looked back at the shoebox of a building and we left on our way to dinner.

A Birthday with Chinese Characteristics

Chris is turning 18 soon. On the 23rd of December to be exact, so his host family decided to throw him a birthday party before everyone got busy with studying for “Midterms” and families start to arrive in Beijing. School let out and I did a bit of homework before changing into something a bit dressier than a track suit. I went to his house at 4:45 and his host family greeted me at the door. They told me he was upstairs so I went up and dropped off my things and started chatting until Sophie got there. We then went down and I began helping his host aunt prepare jiaozi for dinner. I’m awful at making them. The ones that she were making were perfect, like a piece of art, crescent moon shaped and everything that makes jiaozi, jiaozi. Mine on the other hand were like very small burritos. Warren showed up soon after I was told to stop making jiaozi for the sake of the dinner, and then the whole bunch was there. Chris’ grandmother mailed him some balloons for his birthday. We began blowing those up which created a balloon war. There was only the Kitchen which transformed into the dining room/living room, so there wasn’t much space. We ran around and I watched Chris play with his host family as if they were his real family. They joked; the whole scene was heartwarming, if you will. I joined in and it was a blast. Sophie was frosting the cake Chris’ grandmother also had mailed to him, but finished with half a jar of frosting left. So we had yet another game. Chris’ Jiejie, who was supposed to be his Ma, but instead Nainai was Ma…, joined in too. She’s a tall, thin Chinese woman who is a flight attendant. She stole a whole bunch of Air China plastic cups and chopsticks so we could use them for dinner tonight. But I digress; we began smearing frosting on each other’s faces. And it got interesting fast. A game of tag where you know if you’ve been tagged by the white streaks of pure deliciousness left on your shirt. Jiejie ran up and wiped the frosting that Chris had smeared across her on me and I would then wipe it off on Chris creating a vicious cycle. Chris’ other host sister, the 4 year old one, shrieked in the background along with the television that had its volume on too loud. Chris calls her “Xiao Mafan,” or Little Trouble, and even his host family has begun to call her that. Xiao Mafan has a bowl haircut, bad teeth and is slightly spoiled, but says the cutest things like, “I don’t like you,” or, “I’m going to kill you.” How adorable! Chris’ Ma stood in the kitchen making the little circular wraps for the jiaozi. She barely came up to my shoulder and had grey hair. She rolled dough and then pressed it out, over and over again, like a machine. The relationships between his host family is quite confusing. I still don’t know how everyone is related, but it doesn’t matter. There was Ma, Ayi, Ba, Xiao Mafan, Jiejie, and Kara’s sister. They set up a table they pulled from the closet and dinner was under way. They put a huge bowl of jiaozi in front of us and we devoured it. But the jiaozi kept coming. We finished five bowls of it before we were starting to feel slightly full. While we ate, we put on Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. I tried to tell them that E.T. was in the movie but they didn’t believe me. So when the senate came up I stood up and pointed him out. How could they not know that E.T. was actually trying to phone home to cast his vote of no confidence for the current chancellor? The cake was amazing, we got candles and sang happy birthday to him. We finished that cake and his host family pulled out another one. It was a Pikachu shaped cake. Xiao Mafan wanted to have Pikachu’s left eye and electricity pouch. We humored her, and left Pikachu horribly disfigured. We sat around and talked at the dinner table about nothing in particular, until we went upstairs to watch the movie Sophie had given him as a gift. Art of War II. Never. Ever. Watch it. It was so bad, that we actually laughed ourselves to tears. Chris’ Ba walked by us and began to do the laundry and hang it on the balcony. He had salt and peppery hair. According to Chris, Ba and Ma had been Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, but they looked and acted like normal people. I never would’ve guessed that. The movie finished and we went home, thanking the family for dinner and wishing Chris yet another happy birthday. It certainly was an interesting party. I can’t wait to see what my birthday brings.

The Speech Festival: Professor Weiser or How I Learned to Loathe the Bomb

I prepared myself for the speech festival. I had written it and memorized it four days earlier, but for some reason the flow was off. I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom and preformed it over and over again. All three minutes or so of it, but I couldn’t figure out the problem, when Ma called me to eat dinner. I sat at the dinner table across from Ma, hearing the faint sound of the music I forgot to turn off in the background. There were some scrambled eggs in front of me and a pork and cabbage soup that looked like the trash compactor scene from Star Wars: A New Hope. She placed a white puff of bread, called man tou, in my bowl and we began talking. We got to the topic of weddings and divorces. She said that it’s not seen as acceptable for woman to divorce as often as they occur in America. Before 1927, there were no divorces. They started when Mao was sent to Hunan and made the peasants rise up, as it goes in Marxist theory to get to communism. Women worked in the fields so they had more power than women in the cities, thus creating gender equality… more or less. Divorces were originally seen as a fad and there were a lot of them, but died down and marriage became a thing about commitment. But nowadays, they’re still frowned down upon. If a divorced woman was to get remarried, she’d lose some face. Dinner rolled on and I prepared for my speech even more. It was as good as it was going to get. Time for a good night’s sleep.
I rolled into school earlier than normal. I tend to do that when I’m slightly nervous. The walk to school was almost completely black except for an occasional orange glow flying towards me, only for it to rise up and I would realize it was a biker smoking. I paced the empty halls of the school reciting the lines for my speech. “Lai zhongguo yi qian…” I wanted to fix that because it seemed that almost every single person’s speech from the day before started that way, but it was too late. It was branded into my brain. I passed by the grey lockers countless times, muttering to myself until we met up at the small auditorium. The speeches started up. Jamie gave a good speech. Everybody was giving good speeches. I was starting to get that feeling in your stomach where it feels like something is pressing everything in your torso together. Shi Xiao Ning, or Tsechi, gave her speech and then they called my name. “Shi Hualin from Class four is now going to give his speech.” I walked up to the stage and realized I shouldn’t have listened to the speeches and instead focused on mine. I got up to the podium and looked out at the faces in the crowd. I saw my friends, my teachers, my host mother, but I wasn’t focusing on how many people there were. I began to focus on the empty seats. The places where there weren’t people. I began my speech and shifted from one empty spot to the next so it made it seem like I was looking at people. I had started planning hand motions so that the people wouldn’t see my leg shaking violently. I knew it would, it always has. From my Bar Mitzvah all the way down to my presentation on La Alhambra in Spanish class, it shakes. I got to one line, “And my students were especially loud,” and I couldn’t remember what was next. So I let out a long, soft, “Aiiiyoooooooooooooooooooooooo,” to let my mind think. My mind went back to the hallways from an hour earlier. I was walking right behind myself in this dream, listening to what I was saying. “So I had no choice but to teach them the alphabet…” I waited nervously, still on the tenth or eleventh “o” of aiyo and staring out to a crowd of waiting faces, while walking the halls of the school in my mind. “I found a teacher and asked her to help me.” I was back on topic and finished it up shortly after with, “So my story’s moral, [if you will,] is you should respect your teachers.” I whipped off my glasses and said a few Xie Xie’s and pretended to shoot them off to some of the audience members and tried to walk back to my seat as smoothly as possible. It’s hard when your legs are just beginning to recuperate from being Jell-O, but I managed. We had a ten minute break and I went over to congratulate Nick S. on his speech; it had been funny. He gave me one in return saying my speech had been like poetry to listen to. He had thought my brief relapse into my mind had been me acting on the stage. That worked out a bit better than I hoped. I guess being a recidivist to my thoughts, as I tend to be, made it seem normal. But no matter, I was still on the “finished-with-the-speech high.” We returned to our seats and listened to the rest of the speeches in Chinese. Sam had an interesting speech and soon the festival was over. They dismissed us and we were off to our classes. I had prepared for two days and it was all over in less than four minutes. But it felt good, even if my content lacked… content.

The Mundane Adventures of the Eskimo and the Ninja: All I Want for Christmas is You… And a Better Bootleg Copy of Quantum of Solace

In the morning, Ba, Peter and I had an intense conversation about Alexander the Great and Moses. We sat there and debated over the wooden table, the bowls nearing empty as the debate roared on. If I didn’t know a word, Ba would take an orange peel and leave streaks of citrus on the table to make the character. Ba sat cross legged, leaning over two chairs, and put his hands on the tops of the chairs, as if there were people there to put an arm around. Peter sat hunched over his metal bowl, slurping loudly as he occasionally threw a tidbit into the argument. I sat leaning in the corner, feeling completely at ease, even though the conversation sounded like they were yelling at each other and me. I’ve gotten used to how harsh the language sounds sometimes. The Alexander the Great argument was based on the fact that the Chinese translation is Alexander the Big Emperor. They assaulted me with questions to why there was a translation mistake, and I ended up offering up the lie that maybe it was translated from Greek to English wrong. Ba seemed content with that answer and slowly moved onto the origins of Judaism, which I had to explain, were not in Egypt, but actually the reason why radical Muslims don’t tend to get along with Jews. He only cared about the crossing of the Red Sea though. I offered a theory to explain the crossing of the Red Sea, but quickly followed it up with, “It’s just a story.” My host family laughed at that. Quite the lunch I’d say. I then wandered over to my cha lou to apply to colleges. After a long day of applying to colleges in the smoky tea house and having to bear with an annoying Chinese man watching Semi-Pro at the table across from mine, I left and headed for a quick meal at McDonalds before curfew. I walked in and Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bells and the like were playing overhead. The music finally put me in the holiday mood. I don’t know why the eight story tall Christmas tree at Jianguomen, or the decorations at Xidan didn’t make me oh so ho-ho-ho jolly, but what did was the music at McDonalds. Odd how my mind works. I looked at the crowd that visits McDonalds at 10:30 at night. There were a few business men, a lone girl, head hung over her coffee, but most surprising of all was the young couple at a table, stroking each other and… OH MY GOD… Turning away. I never thought of McDonalds as a place to get festive. I returned home and went to sleep, humming I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.

I don’t want a lot for Christmas. There is just one thing I need. I don’t care about the presents underneath the Christmas tree… It’s that time of the year.

I woke up to the obnoxious ringtone I picked for my ancient cell phone. I jolted up and grabbed it, answering, “Wei?” It was Chris. “Hey you wanna grab some lunch?” I looked at the watch I never wear anymore and it was ten ‘till twelve. Yes, yes I did want some lunch, so I threw on my warm Eskimo jacket and met Chris downstairs. We were off to find a new place to eat. We started discussing some of the problems that we were finding in Beijing as we walked the crowded street of Xinjiekouwai. Our biggest problem was the fact that we have to go out to do something, we can’t just invite people over and relax on a couch and watch movies. But the conversation quickly ended as we walked by a woman carrying a baby in a very odd curly bear suit. Chris and I both looked at each other and then looked back at the kind of woman that would dress her child like that AND THEN take it out in public. The child had magically transformed into a poodle. We both started laughing like madmen, attracting even more attention than we were as the Eskimo and the Ninja. Really though, who carries their poodle like a baby?! We wandered into Beishida University and found a restaurant that Warren recommended to us. We sat down at a table and they brought us half a roast duck and some Jing Jiang Rou Si. We chatted about various things such as school, the upcoming speech festival, my newly donned single status, etc. as people came in and sat down around us, giving us a three table berth. The duck was greasy and I couldn’t believe that my mind had been rewired so that I could eat this type of food. For example, I had eaten a bowl of fat as a meal in Chuxi. People in China, on average, eat 20 to 30 percent more calories per meal than the average American but are skinnier and healthier. I’m slightly baffled how that works out, but no matter. The Chinese sure know how to make the most unappetizing things tasty. We left and didn’t want to go back to our houses and thusly homework, so we decided we were going to buy a movie and watch it. We didn’t care that there was still homework to do and it was Sunday. We were going to indulge in some American activities. In the movie store, a woman was arguing over the incredibly “high” price of seven kuai for a movie while her pug sat next to her in a bumblebee outfit. People around town have started dressing their pets up in sweaters and other clothes. I’ve seen more emasculated men avert their gaze from me as I see them walking their white Pomeranians wearing a turtleneck down the street. But back to the movie store, we found Quantum of Solace, shelled out our seven kuai and were on our way to Chris’ house to watch our bootleg copy of the movie. I enjoyed it, up until the part where they were falling out of the plane and then landed in some sinkhole and the movie credits went up. Wait? Did Bond die? Nope, bootlegger was lazy. We went back to the store and exchanged it for a new one, which didn’t even get to the plane ride. So we just listened to Christmas music and talked in Chris’ room. It was nice. Going out is fun, but every now and then I need a break. Apparently so do other people.

Oh my, it’s almost Christmas and I can’t get All I Want for Christmas is You, the My Chemical Romance version, out of my head. And when is Hanukah? Just so I don’t feel like a bad Jew when I’m asked again.

The Cold

I looked outside and saw a blue sky, the sun shining brightly, leafless trees with no wind bullying them around. I walked out and it felt like I’d been punched by the air. I wouldn’t call it brisk, I’d call it a dry cold, one that burns the inside of your nose the longer you stay in it. I quickly fumbled for my headband and wished I’d brought my ski mask. I started the walk to school, my bones creaking like the sound of water on ice. My breath hung lifelessly, like a ghost, in the air next to countless other ghosts left by other people. By the time I walked into the school building, my fingers felt like they were blistering from the cold, but the warmth of the building permeated my skin and they started tingling without fully regaining the ability to feel. The cold has arrived and it doesn’t even look like it. It feels like summer if you don’t see the trees.
***
School ended and Gavin and I were off to work on the English scavenger hunt to find the dying parts of Beijing, such as the hutongs, trees, parks and all the wonderful places that represent the disappearing past of China. The ultimate goal was to meet up with the people who are fighting against the construction, showing a public voice emerging from the depths of a socialist country. An opinion. That’s what I was searching for. Ok, that is a bold faced lie. I was searching for a warm coat. I couldn’t take the cold anymore. We were really off to Xidan to buy a coat, the one with the furry hood that makes you look like an Eskimo. It’s all the rage in Beijing. We strolled down to the Jishuitan subway station with the wind. I was still wearing my six layers of clothes so I was warm, but it was too troublesome, tai mafan le, to actually wear that much. And to actually do the scavenger hunt, we needed to move quickly and comfortably. We arrived in Xidan and wandered through the underground mall, searching for bargains, but to no avail. Everything was quickly out of our price range, so we wandered to the streets and found a stand and bargained two jackets for the price of 2/3 the price of one. Oh how I love the power of bargaining. I put it on and I felt odd. Maybe it was the feeling of numbness and cold leaving my body, or maybe I felt even more like a part of the city. Gavin and I both felt it, we both felt we had undergone some ridiculous quest that made us part of a larger group. It felt good. Now we had our coats so it was time for the scavenger hunt… or yet another distraction. The cold only bit at my fingers now. My headband was no longer necessary; the fur just hugged my head and was so comfortable and warm. Gavin got a call back for that internship he applied for at a company to help teach Chinese to people. We got in a cab and went to the 15th floor of the building, and they invited us both into the meeting, even though I wasn’t there for the job. They talked in Chinese and I understood but couldn’t respond. Not that I would anyway, it was Gavin’s job. It felt like a big company thing, sitting around an oval table, the business people were all dressed in their work clothes and we were dressed in jeans and our newly purchased coats. It was a funny sight, but we composed ourselves with dignity. I walked out for the personal interview and soon enough Gavin was out with an internship. We went back out to the cold and wandered back to the underground mall. It was time for the arcade to celebrate. We found a Dance Dance Revolution machine and Gavin went to town on it. He’s as good on that as I am on Pump it Up. We danced with some Chinese kid and drew quite the crowd. Not just teenagers, but adults and kids too. People dragged their dates away from what they were doing to watch us dance. Why don’t people in America do such romantic things with their dates? The building was hot, and I decided to finally take off my coat and stop looking like a moron dancing in the Eskimo coat. By the time we finished there was a semi circle of people around the machine, all staring blankly, until one of us would say to a person, “Bu hao yi se,” or how embarrassing and then they’d smile. We left and headed back to the subway station, fighting the cold with our coats that blended into the crowds and went our separate ways in the subway. The walk home was into the wind, and it ripped and tore at my fingers. The cold gets fierce at night. Wait… there was a scavenger hunt. Whoops.

Thanksgiving on a Saturday

We had missed Thanksgiving, so we were going to have our own. Julia made reservations at Grandma’s Kitchen to have a taste of some American food to celebrate the holiday. She just had one request of us and that was to dress nicely. Get snazzy if you will. So I got in my blazer and khaki’s with a button down and met up with Chris and Sophie at the front of the school. Chris was in a suit with a red shirt and I was feeling underdressed, but no matter. This was Thanksgiving and coming together was all that really mattered. So the three of us walked to the subway station in our finest apparel, ignoring the stares from passerby’s, when I realized that I felt older all of a sudden. I wasn’t having Thanksgiving with my family or around the Kirtz’s dinner table. I had made a group of friends, like family, and planned to spend my holiday with them. It felt like something my parents would do. We got on the subway car and received even more stares. Three foreigners, one in a suit, one in a blazer and one in a dress holding onto the middle pole in the subway car and watching the cars in front of us through the doors connecting them. The other cars were bouncing around all over the place from our perspective. I only did this to try and ignore the subtle attempts by the Chinese to take pictures of us on their phones and cameras. They tried to be subtle, but failed miserably. They would take a picture of a trashcan, then of a window, then twenty or so of us. The three of us huddled around the pole and it looked as if we were praying the way our heads were tilted downward. I know I was thanking Superman for this opportunity to celebrate this holiday dedicated to gluttony. We got off at Jianguomen and it ended up we went to the wrong Grandma’s Kitchen, so I hailed a cab to the right one. We walked into the room and I felt like it was a scene from a TV show, like a reunion of some sort, where the time slows down and you see everyone’s expression clearly. They were all dressed the same as Chris, Sophie and I. Erick was also in a suit, so was Jamie, Julia was in a dress and Stephanie was dressed up too. The lot of us expatriates were sitting around this average American restaurant, but it felt comfortable and close and so tackily American that we felt back in America… if only briefly. The table cloth was red and white plaid like the picnic ones. The chairs were wooden and bent so they were 19th century looking. The prices were normal American prices which meant it was fairly expensive but it didn’t matter. We were going to feast tonight. Spare no expense; we were going to walk out of there holding our stomachs. They had no real Thanksgiving type foods, but American food was going to suffice. I pulled out a picture of my parents and put it on the table, propped against the napkin holder. Now I was eating with them too. I had friends and family. I got a turkey sandwich, a banana milkshake and apple pie. Dinner conversation was nice. We pretended that we were all family anyway. Chris and Sophie were one married couple, Jamie and Julia were another and Julia was Sophie’s sister, connecting them in that way. I was the godfather of Chris and Sophie’s imaginary child who also happened to be me, Stephanie was a close family friend and Erick was the uncle from Chile and Peru that no one knows how he got in the family but still love anyway. We laughed the whole dinner through. I walked out of there, never happier to be hurting and the happiest I’d been all week. We walked around the area, ending up in Wangfujing to let the food digest, but eventually ended up on the subway. Chris and Sophie ended up on the car in front of us so Erick, Stephanie and I had to wait for another one. I continued to ignore the stares from the other people looking at the best dressed people in the entire subway. Stephanie and Erick got off a stop before me. When they left I struck up a conversation with one of the fellow passengers. I looked at him and said, “Ni qu nar?” Where are you going? And he said, “I’m from Melbourne.” Oh… that was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. He actually spoke Chinese so we talked in Chinese and English and it was good fun. He was a very nice guy and shook my hand violently as I left to walk from Jishuitan to my house down the nigh near empty sidewalks of Beijing at 10:30. The fog obscured the night sky, and if you looked up through the half bare branches of the trees, the dead leaves of the trees on the boulevard melded into one and made the trees seem live again. I walked the whole way home with a smile on my face.

Turkey and Tribulations

My body aches from martial arts, my leg feels like it’s about to fall off and I look up at the five flights of stairs that sit in front of me leading to my house. The sky is grey and getting darker. Half the trees are bare, but all the ones around the house are completely empty. A family of birds has set up their nest in the dead vines on the fence. I limp up the stairs. My leg isn’t used to bending that way from Martial Arts. I go up and look at Ma, making the usual array of food, a meat of some sort, lettuce, black fungus, and some soup of some kind. I walk in and sigh. “Hui Lai le.” “Hui…” I never really understood how to respond to that. And then I said, “Gan’an Jie Kuai le.” Happy Thanksgiving. There was no turkey, no mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, gravy, cranberries or pumpkin pie. Just the usual Chinese food and everyone knows that’s what’s for Christmas. Something was missing. I called Chris and wished him a happy Thanksgiving, and he did the same to me, but we were both feeling… sad, for lack of a better word. It was unexplainable why we were both sad. We just were. Maybe it was the lack of friends and family around us, that tradition has made into an instinct around this time of year. Maybe it was I just needed turkey. I don’t know. It’s probably the latter. I wrote a poem about how I missed turkey. Yes, I know. I asked everyone, teachers, cab drivers, pedestrians, where I could go to get turkey, but all of them just recommended roast duck. But duck doesn’t give you the overdose of tryptophan that casts a sleep spell over the dinner table that turkey does. It’s just not the same. In years past SYA has had Thanksgiving dinners at various teachers houses, but that was before Beijing became more of a global city, rather than a Chinese one. Plus that would completely be counterproductive to why we came to China. We came to get away from America and experience China. So this year I’ll go without a Thanksgiving; I won’t celebrate the beginning of the end of the Native Americans, I won’t celebrate two Thanksgiving day Football games, I won’t celebrate a five day break from school. Instead the fourth Thursday of November will just be another Thursday, the busiest day of my week.

I never thought that turkey would be my comfort food.

Leaving

I got on the bus with the other people I barely knew, but was about to get to know very well, and just looked back briefly at my parents once as the bus pulled out. I turned and stared forward and imagined how they saw me just then. Their son looking forward, having already moved on, forgotten them; not even waving goodbye. In my defense I had prepared for that moment the whole summer. I was finally on my own and I’d never been more scared and alive. It was thrilling, all the possibility that lay before me. I guess I’m just bad at goodbyes. There’s just something about them that makes me uncomfortable, especially when I know it really means “See you later.” For my parents it was four months later. So why fuss over a “see you later”?

I just missed the chance to say an actual “Goodbye.”

I didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that a friend was leaving. Doing so would only lead to me thinking about my own departure. And it did just that. The idea of leaving always makes me feel odd, I always imagine the tears shed and the long goodbyes but from all my travels that’s never the way it works out. I just had my first thought of leaving and returning to America and I felt as if my chest was being stretched out. It wasn’t my heart, it was slightly below there. I felt chained here, but was being dragged home. I have become too attached to China to want to go back. I tried to think of the people that would greet me at the airport and how happy they’d be to see me, but that thought was overshadowed by the fact that I will have to say goodbye and leave the people here that I’m beginning to care about. I look back at all the times we’ve had and how many more we’re going to have and how leaving renders the whole experience negatively, in shades of black and grey. And then I think a bit more and I realize leaving makes each experience sweeter, full of color, because we only have so little time together. And had I known how little time there was, I would’ve treasured the moments more. It doesn’t really seem like it’s been almost 3 months here in Beijing, but it has. I still feel like I just got off the plane. My views have changed slightly, my proficiency in Chinese has skyrocketed and I’ve had many once in a lifetime experiences. If the rest of the year keeps going along at this pace I’ll be home before I realize it’s been nine months.

I came to school that morning and the sky was dark grey, there were clouds hanging unnaturally everywhere, the trees leaves had all disappeared over night, and there was smoke rising from the top of the school. I walked into school that morning and said to Chris, “Something bad is going to happen today.” Unfortunately I was right. Before then I didn’t acknowledge that she was leaving. I thought we could keep being friends for the remaining time she had left in the city, but she just up and left unexpectedly. Chris, Gavin and I got a text from Bridget. “I’ll miss you.” That was our goodbye. A text as the plane was taking off for America. Clichéd, right? Where’s the originality? If only life were actually like a movie, we’d have the long goodbyes, or a sequel where she comes back to China and realizes this is where her heart is, or maybe a montage with She Doesn’t Get It or possibly the Benny Hill music playing in the background. Instead I’m left with the image of her running into the fishbowl, grabbing her bag and dashing out the door, hair flitting the goodbye she forgot to give. Four hours later she was gone. This wasn’t a “see you later.” It was goodbye. There’s a void here in my friends now that I don’t quite look forward to filling, but if she’s happier home, then who am I to complain. I feel at home here. Which will make it all the harder leaving this place.

And I never did acknowledge the fact that she was leaving. I wish I wasn’t so bad at saying goodbyes. Since I didn’t have the guts to say it directly to Bridget, I guess this will have to do.

Goodbye.

Routine and Change

Every week there’s a routine. My alarm goes off and I lay in bed debating whether I should put on my school clothes now or later for 15 minutes before I actually throw off the comforter and face the cold. Sweat pants, then pants, then undershirt, then shirt, then sweatshirt, then jacket, then windbreaker and lastly socks if I can reach my feet. I brush my teeth, smack my forehead, take off my shirts and put on deodorant, put my shirts back on and head out the door. I open the large metal door slowly and quietly but it only closes if you slam it, defeating the purpose of opening it silently. Walking outside into the crisp, somewhat tangible air of Beijing I throw on my hat and gloves. Everyone on the street ignores me, they don’t stare anymore; they’re used to seeing me walking to school at 6:55 every day. I see the same people, the same people on bikes, in cars, at their windows and everywhere else. The one girl who has a basket on her bike for her backpack, the man in the suit and leather shoes biking to work and spitting right in front of the same sewer cover, the same old woman with a crinkled face and tattered black clothes who I say, “Zao,” to every morning. There’s the old man with his white gloves and hat that looks like the Skipper’s from Gilligan’s Island doing his Taijiquan on the sidewalk. There’s the store clerk cleaning his stool, a fuwuyuanr putting the jiaozi and baozi steamers outside to attract customers, and there’s the bike repairman opening his cabinet that resides on the side of the road. There’s the magazine stand men putting magazines in order on the shelves, the same students walking to school and then there are the six flights of stairs to the classrooms. Those 168 stairs took the longest to get used to, but I’ve come to terms with the panting that follows the climb. I am carrying forty pounds of bags up them to boot. I walk to my class and place my bags in the third seat from the door and return to the fishbowl to hear stories from the previous day. There’s always one. And it usually is mine. Every student comes in at the exact time as the day before, and the day before that. Eight o’clock and we are all in our classrooms, the teachers take our homework and then ten minutes later class begins. Tingxie first thing, books at the ready. Two straight Chinese classes merit a twenty-five minute break and enough time to run down the stairs to the street and the local jian bing stand. The chef uses a ladle to drop a creamy liquid, one that looks like cake batter, onto a circular skillet, and spreads it into a circle. Taking an egg from seemingly nowhere, she cracks it and smears it all over the cooking crepe, then uses two spatulas to flip it over and smear a red sauce, a spicy sauce and some cilantro and onions on the cooked side. Then lastly, the chef takes a crispy sheet of bread and places it in the middle, folds the jian bing and puts it in a small plastic bag. I give her my three kuai and she gives me a taste of heaven. Plus it’s warm, and my hands feel like they’re melting the moment I touch it. It’s gone before I get back to the stairs to continue my day. School ends and I return home, watching the people as they do their jobs now. The only person that’s still in the same place is the old woman. I wave and continue to walk home, and begin my homework. I finish around seven and relax until nine when I strike up a conversation with the host family until eleven-ish. I shower, practice some martial arts, do my pushup regimen and then go to sleep, with the occasional banging of a bed board against a wall coming from the apartment above, to start it all over again.
But the routine changes occasionally. It’s not what I do that’s different, but what’s around me. I woke up one day and walked to school when the newsstand had been completely transformed from an old shabby looking thing into a modern web of metal, open and inviting. There was no sign that the previous newsstand had ever existed. A more startling example was when Chris and I were walking home from school one day and I stood there, mouth agape. “Chris do you see that?” “What?” I pointed to a building and his jaw dropped too. The entire building was lime green. “WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN STERLING?! THAT BUILDING WAS NOT GREEN WHEN WE WENT TO SCHOOL THIS MORNING!” And it wasn’t. It was made of bricks and just fine without the paint. An entire building had been turned green in a mere 7 hours. Another change that startled us was one night a grocery store was the same color as the rest of the buildings, and the next morning it was that same ugly lime green color. Chris and I stood in the middle of the street just staring at it and fumbling on words to express our amazement. The day I bought my bike there was a bunch of supplies next to the bike lot, but I didn’t take much notice till I came back four hours later from testing the bike out and there was an entirely new building, already selling sweet potato chips and the like. There was a lot cleared before I left for the Fujian and Jiangsu trip and when I came back there was a skyscraper four stories tall and growing. A crane is now placed on the top of a different skyscraper and an entire bus stop moved 50 feet left in an hour, (which scared the hell out of Gavin when it happened,) but people don’t break their routine as the world changes around them. An entire skyscraper was completed in the two and half months that I’ve been here. It’s taken a lot of getting used to but the changes have become part of my routine too.

0 to School in 4 Minutes

I woke up, the sun was shining through my window and I quickly grabbed my phone/alarm. 7:59… I tore off my pajama pants, put on my uniform pants, threw on my uniform jacket over my pajama shirt and dashed out of my room, not even wondering why my alarm hadn’t gone off. Ba was crouching in the middle of the living room watching TV, still in his pajamas. I dashed by him to the bathroom, and he said, “You’re in a hurry. Why?” I only managed one word before I had Listerine in my mouth, “School.” Ba looked at his watch and said, “You better run fast.” And I was out the door, running down the 5 flights of stairs, sliding around each corner like a cartoon character. Ba was getting a stern talking to later. I burst out the front door and spit my Listerine all over the pavement and ran the quarter mile to school into a headwind. The Chinese people scoffed and laughed at the white guy wearing a Chinese high school uniform with his bed-head and the awkward gait of someone trying to run with a backpack on, but I didn’t care. School was resuming after the break and I didn’t want to leave a bad impression on the teachers. I dashed into the campus and up the 6 flights of floors to SYA’s floor, apologizing to Bi Laoshi before walking into the classroom and the early start of a Monday. In China, every minute of class time is utilized; teachers don’t even give out homework until the 5 minute break between classes because it’s considered a waste of time otherwise. All the chairs close to the door were taken, so I walked across the room and through the stares of every single one of my classmates. I sat down and looked at the clock. 8:03… I panted and joined the conversation about the trip to Fujian and Jiangsu. My stomach grumbled and I knew it was going to be a long day. What had I missed in that hour that I normally have before school? I missed talking with my parents and friends back home. I missed the chance to study up on some Chinese words before a tingxie. I missed the chance to try and convince a friend from leaving for good in 5 weeks. My parents miss me, my tingxie suffered and now my friend’s practically gone. An hour makes all the difference. Ba, you’re going to get an extra stern talking to.

Pictures from Fujian

Tulous, Silk, Canals, Dogs and an Election

The cold nipped at our heels as we boarded the train. 32 hours long, that’s what we’re told when we asked how long this ride will last, and in our minds that’s just a number. That’s nothing. Then we boarded; there are bunks on the right side and a small hallway with Murphy bed style chairs on the left. It’s cramped. The hallway is barely wide enough for us to walk down it comfortably. Each bunk has three beds, awful decorations. I’m still wondering who chose the puke green bed coverings with tiny embroideries of flowers and vines. The windows are clothed with white curtains that a local brothel probably turned down, because who really wants belly dancers poorly sewn into their curtains? I climbed to the top bunk and threw my bag in the overhead rack. I laid down, almost banging my head on the ceiling and realized how long 32 hours was going to be. We hadn’t even left the station yet. I took a nap in the top bunk, in the shadows above the window. 3 hours later I woke up, and we still had more than a day stuck on this train, the kuai train or the fast train as the translation says. But that’s not really what it means. Kuai here means the absolute slowest way to get there. It will stop to let other trains pass it at the stations. It will stop at the stations to let people off. The steady rhythm of the train moving was soothing; it lurched around corners and rocked back and forth. If you look out the window while the train is turning, you could see the train stretching endlessly into the distance. Meals seemed to be separated by eternities; they’re a break in the monotony of the train, huffing into the distance. The rhythm seemed to have become one with my own breathing. But the dining car is different. It’s tackily furnished, like something out of a 1950’s diner. Its walls were pink, they still had the awful curtains, red tables, booths, a kitchen in the back and Chinese people who were very interested in the waiguoren that were sitting at all the tables but four. The only thing that set this restaurant apart from the rest of the diners was the scenery. It was an ever changing landscape; foggy mountains, to rundown cities, to bustling cities, streets cloaked in night, with car lights piercing the darkness, to rushing rivers. Dew and rain rolled down the windows, clouding our window to the world. I returned to our train car and tried playing cards with people, and killing time other ways, but our arrival still felt as far off as it did when we first started. I went back to my bed, hitting my head on the ceiling this time, and feeling like I was suffocating. The bed was barely three feet wide, and my feet hung off into the hallway, over everyone’s heads. My ears popped and I knew that it was going to be the beginning of an extremely long night and tried to fall asleep. I woke up early, which depressed me, still 13 hours to go. More card games, then the train was delayed. 14 more hours now. It now felt like I had spent my whole life on this train. There was nothing but the train. There had never been anything but the train. The train attendants would occasionally push a food cart past or try and sell some ridiculous pair of socks. The other Chinese on the train didn’t react as bad to the train as we did. American’s are used to having their own space, but the train definitely taught me how to deal with people for long periods of time. And then the sun began to set again and the lights of Xiamen appeared in the distance. The train was nearing our destination. It was here. We were here. We stepped off the train and a burst of warm air didn’t just greet us, but embraced us. It was the start of our adventure. We were finally in Fujian. The stale air of the train and the smoggy air of Beijing were behind us. We were in Xiamen, where the air was cleaner… at least in comparison. We all felt dirty. We wore our sweat and grime and stains and smells just like we wore our clothes and craved a shower to get it off of us. The hotel was nice, with some very sketchy staircases, but it was still quality and I only cared about the shower. Tomorrow was going to start the real adventure.
Our first stop was the Coca-Cola plant. We saw the machines, and watched the beginning of capitalism sneak its way into the country through corny commercials. I bought myself a coke thinking that right from the plant, coke would be fresh, and delicious, but I was wrong. I guess coke gets better with age. The plant was interesting. It was placed in one of China’s special economic zones, where foreign companies could set up shop and work. These special economic zones are one of the reasons that China’s annual economic growth has been 10% for the past 30 years. China has made conditions favorable for the development of business in these zones. But that was behind me soon enough as we got on the bus and started driving through Xiamen to get to the tulous. Xiamen looked like a futuristic city. There were unique monuments, and bridges built exclusively for the buses above the city. Each building was clean and brilliantly lit. We drove further and further out and the landscape changed. Less port, more mountains. Every mountain had been shaped over time by the peasants and the farmers into Mayan temple look-a-likes so that they could be used for farming. Generations of people shaped the land, just as the land had shaped the people into who they were. The mountains were multi-tiered now, except for an occasional grave dug into the side of the mountain, extending upwards like an arch built into the mountain. Fruit trees stretched up and down the mountains. The road got less and less paved. I finally figured out what the date was after having the train mess up my sense of time. November 4th. We were getting a new president today. This brought on discussions about each other’s views on the election. There were plenty of different views. But our discussion was cut short by the bus driver driving into a ditch on the winding roads up the mountain. The whole bus lurched forward and he started going in reverse, fast, to get out. The tail end of the bus hung over a cliff, but I wasn’t scared. I put my faith in the bus driver, just like I do when I drive with other people in China. It’s a little trick I learned from riding with my dad… kidding. I swear dad. I am. Sort of… but we got out of it fairly unscathed and arrived at the tulous 4 hours after our departure from the coke factory. The way to the tulous that we were going to stay at had been littered with other tulous that sold out and let tourists stay there. They paved the roads, because convenience breeds tourists. But the richer experiences are always the ones that were hard to get to. Unfortunately Chuxi, or the name of the village we stayed at, will probably do the same within the next decade, if not sooner. The bus pulled up to one side of a ravine. We got off the bus and I saw the inspiration for practically every single movie, video game, book and whatever else that takes place in the jungle. The trees were all palms, or persimmon trees. At the bottom of the ravine was a river and a small waterfall, with stepping stones at the top of the waterfall to cross the river. Across the ravine raised high on the cliffs, above the trees, were round buildings, built from the yellowish earth around them. Tulou breaks down into earth building when you translate it. The tulous rose over the trees like a halo above a pure, untouched part of China. My tulou was enormous, yellow and square. It’s yellow because the Hakka, or Kejia in mandarin, people moved down south to escape political turmoil, but they weren’t welcome in the south either. So to protect themselves, they built villages all in one building, surrounded by earth to protect themselves from those who didn’t want them in their land. They placed their windows high on the wall to help defend themselves. I walked inside my tulou and the sun had already set behind its walls, despite the fact that it was still light most everywhere else in the village. The smell of cooking meat and other foods, dirt, animals and a tinge of urine assaulted me. I wished that I hadn’t gotten sick on the train, and could smell all of the tulou, but I could still see, so that sufficed. The roof was open, a small village in the center on the first floor, animals under overturned laundry baskets and other baskets, waiting their turn to die, old rickety buildings in the middle, and along the first floor overhang were little rooms; one had a TV where a little kid was watching cartoons. 10 of us were ushered into one small room where we ate a small feast. We talked about the election in America some more. The polls were now officially open on the east coast now. We’ll have to wait until November 5th to find out the results. It was kind of surreal that people are choosing the fate of the country I’m going home to, while I’m sitting in the middle of rural southeastern China. But it was dark after dinner, and I was getting my room in the tulou. Bi Laoshi led us to a staircase completely in shadows. I couldn’t even see the steps. Chris, Kyle C. and I were the first to go up into the blackness of the steps to our rooms. The wooden boards on the inside of the tulou were slightly shifted from their original position. Kyle and my rooms were on the top floor of the tulou, four stories up. My room was stark naked. There was an antique bed, discolored earthen walls that felt like concrete. There was a broken TV with no plug to plug it in, but still glowed eerily in the middle of the night, there were nails, 8 of them, nailed into my wall half sticking out, and their shadows danced from the wind blowing the lone light bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a wood ceiling that would put wooden floors back home to shame and a wooden floor that was disgusting, dirty, stained, and plain out gross. I can’t describe it in words. I left my stuff in my room and went out to explore the city, armed only with my trusty flashlight. It was now pitch black outside. The village was basically lots of tulous with stores defining streets between them. Gavin and I met up and explored the allies ‘till we found a shop. Its clerk was an older woman holding a baby. We were talking with her when a puppy came up and started playing with me. I asked the older woman what its name was and she said, “Gou,” or “Dog” in English. This naming was a trend throughout the town, that and “Xiao Bao,” which I still have no idea what it means. I blame the accent. Gavin and I found Chris and the three of us went into a shop where the older couple inside sat us down at their table and served us tea. We talked with them for a while. There weren’t any parent aged people around town, or older teenagers for that matter, and the reason was that once they’re old enough, they leave the village to go work in the cities so they can bring money back to the village. This is what the couple in the shop told us, as well as everyone else, in the village. Gavin did most of the talking here, he figured out the accent a lot faster than I did. I was still getting used to it. We walked out thanking them for the generous amounts of tea, and Gavin and I went out on our own again. We went to a different tulou, and walked right into a person’s house. There was a small girl practicing her characters and an older woman and an ancient looking woman. They greeted us and served us more tea. It was delicious. It was fresh. And Gavin started talking with them, and I’d chip in something every now and then, but we got to the topic of America and politics in general. I was still getting a hang for the accent, but when I saw my chance I used my stock market line. I don’t know why, but after I said that, everything they were saying made sense, “sh” was now an “s” sound, etc. etc. Confidence, it helps. We got onto the topic of Mao, because of the poster of him over the table. Our host loved Mao dearly. If you were a peasant, then you probably would. He redistributed the land, giving land to those who had practically nothing. But we kept on talking with our hosts, while they kept refilling our thimble sized teacups with their cup sized kettles. I liked the tea, but they wouldn’t stop refilling, even when I told them to. We left eventually, wishing them long life. Gavin and I then went up a path leading into the mountains, but more importantly the bathroom. After a disturbing experience in the place that they called bathrooms, we continued up the path, shining our light in front of us, to watch the trail. It was precariously perched over another ravine and a tributary to the bigger river. On the other side of the trail were ancient buildings, not quite tulous, but not stores either, with small allies coming to the trail we were on from every angle. It was nice; we could see the stars and the moon, something that I missed dearly in Beijing. We kept walking up the path when three black dogs jumped out from an ally raised above the trail. They turned and looked at us. And I froze. These dogs looked like wolves. All of them in Chuxi look the same. Their faces were just as surprised as ours were, and then they trotted down the path. We kept walking and we saw a newborn puppy. It was sleeping and we shined our flashlight on it. It was absolutely adorable. We were staring when its mom came from the ocean of darkness around the island of light on the pup. Her hair was standing straight up, and its eyes cut a hole in the night. We walked away warily and took a picture in the night when I heard footsteps behind us. I shone my flashlight back and there were the back of that mother dog’s eyes, hanging just outside the reach of the flashlight. Its head was cocked curiously. We started walking forward and the eyes were just out of the reach of the flashlights. We began to run; the experience was getting a bit on the unnatural realm of the spectrum. The dog began to chase us and we crossed the tributary on a small bridge, dashing into people’s gardens to get away. The eyes were gone now. The earth beneath us was soft, and the palm trees leaves were swaying in the warm breeze of the south. We looked for the dog and it was back on the path, walking back to its pup… or waiting for us. We warily returned and a doctor pulled us into his house to serve us tea. He began talking to us of Nixon and the good he did China, and I told him today was America’s Election Day. He nodded, but didn’t really seem to care. He heated up more water with his electric teapot and poured us more tea. Everyone was so generous. I went my separate ways from Gavin after that and walked into another person’s house. We talked; her son was off working in a big city. We got to the topic of the election and she had no idea there was one. I told her I heard Obama was winning, and she didn’t even know who he was. She zoned out and stopped caring about what I was saying. I walked out before she made tea and returned to my tulou. I told ghost stories to creep Chris out but only ended up creeping myself out. I sprayed my room with 100% DEET and went to bed thinking happy thoughts. Ha-ha…
Now here is where I’ll apologize in advance for my language. Damn rooster. It woke me up at 4 in the morning and I couldn’t get back to sleep because it wouldn’t stop. I walked out to the plaza at sunrise to meet the other students who were woken up by the rooster too. The bustle of morning life is very relaxing. Four or five people are lining the streets with rose petals for tea, chickens and dogs wander the streets. The dogs aren’t even scary in the daytime. One lied patiently in front of a table set up on the main bridge, where a man was cutting up meat. Flies buzzed around, as he took the cleaver and cut slices for the next meal. In the daylight I saw that there were hardly 100 people on the street. Someone said that in the whole village there were only 700 people, but I have a hard time believing there were that many. Breakfast was a rehash of dinner, except fresher. We then crossed the stepping stones and climbed back up to the bus landing and were off to visit a middle school. The children all stared at us, in a slightly mocking, slightly awed manner. Some said, “Haaaa-loooooooooo,” which is a phrase I’m starting to hate. We were split up into groups and I was put in the 7th grade P.E. class first. We started off jogging 100 meters in a line; everyone had to stay in the line and couldn’t cut. So I was walk/jogging to keep myself from stepping on the heels of the people in front of me. We ran around half of a dirt track, because the other P.E. class was using the other half, cutting across the middle to finish the lap. Stretches followed and then a game, like tag. It was intense, Nick S. fell and scraped himself up really bad, and Ian was just awful and kept getting tagged by all the 7th graders. Next up was a relay race, run to the end of the basketball court and back, but Ian, Trace, Mike and I were put in the girls division. Just by luck, I swear. We demolished when our turn came about, but there was no satisfaction in the victory. I told them to run “Kuai Dianr” and then everyone began chanting it, without the Beijing accent of course. The girls lost. We then did push-ups and finished with leap frog. Right as the teacher dismissed the class, the bell rang. There was no clock, no watch on his wrist and I couldn’t believe that he was able to do that. It was insane. Chinese education is guaranteed for 9 years to every child, but in Fujian, because so many nationalists fled to Taiwan from Fujian, the school systems receive money from the people who fled because they want to have an impact on the future. This makes the education here a higher quality than other parts of the country. But I digress, English class was next. I got the book they were using and I read a dialogue aloud with Warren. It was a girl and her granny, the granny was sick because of the bad quality of the air due to the new factories releasing bad gases and chemicals into the air, but she wasn’t going to go see a doctor, she was going to inform the newspapers instead. It was just too unbelievable. The class started with skits. The teacher then started a lesson on the differences between American and British English. Or as he would say, “Engrish.” He couldn’t say “L’s.” He would then ask a question and follow it up with “Yesno.” “American English is pronounced the same as British English, yesno?” except he would say it very fast and harsh. It was hard to understand. We returned to the Tulous and Nick S. and I climbed a mountain, to a pagoda overlooking the village. One of the most beautiful views I’ve ever seen. I stood looking out over the mountain when others came up. The American election had been decided. Obama had won the popular vote. 4 in the afternoon in China, 4 in the morning in America, I was standing at the top of a mountain overlooking one of the most incredible views I’ve ever seen, and news of Obama’s victory reached me. It was incredible. I climbed down the mountain and had dinner, which was the same as the other meals, and walked out to the plaza. I met up with Maryanne and Bridget and crossed the waterfall, and laid in a grove of palms, overlooking the river and mountainous land. The sky was black despite the fact that it was 6 and the stars were out. More stars than I’d ever seen before. We laid down there in that grove, and stargazed, when a meteor shower flickered across the sky, leaving streaks of light in the night. We laid there watching for what seemed like hours, when Chris, Sophie and Warren came out to join us for a game of flashlight tag. We headed back to the tulous when Bridget and Maryanne realized they lost their key. I went with them and retraced our steps to find it. It was right where we were lying while we were stargazing. But I got a call from Chris saying he also lost his key. We searched the whole city and jungle around it for the key, but there wasn’t a sign of it anywhere. So I was getting pumped to have a roommate in my creepy room. My iPod died so I couldn’t listen to music to calm myself down at night. But as we were going up to my room, he saw his room. The door was wide open. The key was right in the lock. He had forgotten to take it with him. I visited Gavin’s room and it was even creepier than mine. There were old pictures from a wedding long past, the light bulb was burnt out, there was a breakfront with a desk and broken oil lamps and sodium chloride injections and notes on old paper, crinkled and worn. I’m glad I didn’t have to sleep there. A rooster went off, and I looked at my watch. 9:30 at night. Damn roosters. Back to my room.
I tried falling asleep to the sounds of cicadas and crashing waterfalls, but dogs barked and howled in the night and a mosquito buzzed around me, but 100% DEET kept him there. I sweat from the heat, and was chilled by the breezes that came through my window on the top floor that couldn’t close because it had no glass panes. And the most annoying fact about my lack of sleep that night was the fact that I forgot my razor for the whole trip, and my invisible beard kept pricking my neck and jolting me awake. I got out of bed at 6:30 and climbed the mountain with the pagoda again to watch the sun rise over the mountains. I already missed the first rays of daylight, but the sun wasn’t over the mountains yet. I sat up there with other students who had the same idea as me and watched the village, fade from black and glow in the rays of a new day. I was happy to be away from the damn roosters. It was peaceful. Jang and I then went and started climbing the tiered mountains to pick persimmons. Not to my liking, they leave a dry taste in your mouth afterwards, but Jang liked them, and I liked picking them. We returned to the village, and I saw an old woman carrying a stick with buckets on either end of it over her shoulder. She had a sundried face, tan and wrinkled, wearing old clothes and a pair of bright purple children’s boots. The image just stuck in my head, as I had breakfast and we left the village. Her struggling up the slopes in the village stuck in my mind. This was goodbye to Chuxi. If and when I return, it won’t be the same place, just another tourist trap like the rest. But I really hope not.
We took the 4 hour bus ride back to Xiamen and took a 4 minute ferry to Gulangyu, a small island that the Portuguese had up until 1949 when they were forced out and the mansions and everything was given back to the people. The architecture is a mix between Iberian Peninsula and Chinese styles with some other influences from Europe. It is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I showered upon arriving at the hotel. 2 days of grime, gone and it felt incredible. I then went out to the giant statue of Koxinga overlooking the bay. Gavin and I went off on our own and walked around the entirety of the island. Darkness comes quickly here, and it was dark before we started our walk around. While we were walking around the island, we saw an abandoned mansion. And after staying in Chuxi for so long, Gavin and I were inclined to walk in and check it out. It had a high stone wall around its premises, big, heavy iron gates and looking through those gates I realized that the mansion looked eerily similar to the Resident Evil mansion. I was beginning to have second thoughts about entering, but Gavin pushed open the gates and was like it’s not that bad, go in. And so I walked in, standing in the entrance for a bit, taking the atmosphere in, when the sound of clanking, like metal, fell from the roof, and I jumped back, startled, but what startled me more, was when it got up and ran across the garden. “Gavin, I’m getting bad vibes from here, let’s go.” “Naw, that was nothing, let’s keep going.” So we keep going, walking up stone steps into the next portion of the garden, shrubberies on both sides of the path, the moon casting a tree’s shadow on the path and it waved and clawed at us. From the shrubberies came glowing eyes, the back of cats eyes… I hope they were cats, and they followed us through the garden. I walked faster to the door of the mansion. It wasn’t so much a door, as it was a metal gate, the kind that makes diamond shapes, and is just to keep people out. But it was partially open, and Gavin pushed it all the way open. Inviting, eh? I looked in and there was only one light bulb, hanging in the center of a four way intersection hallway. One direction was where we were coming from, the one across from us was a rickety staircase, old, like an old cottage’s staircase that fell into disrepair, the walls followed suit. We walked into the island of light. To the left was a hallway that extended to darkness, with only the light that a static-y TV makes coming from one of the open doors. To our right was a hall that had a door that had fallen driftwood in front of it. “This is the most scared I’ve ever been,” he says, but how could I believe that with that goofy smile on his face. I put my hand in my pocket and started running my pocket knife through my hands. Gavin wanted a picture of the door with the driftwood. He whipped out his camera and the flash went off. From the darkness, down on the other side of the hallway, came this bloodcurdling scream. My blood curdled. I finally understand that expression. I turned around; Gavin and I were afraid, legitimately afraid. Emerging from the darkness was a short, old Chinese woman, graying hair and arms flailing, running like a demon at us. She started yelling in the dialect, not even Chinese, and we tried to justify ourselves. “Women yiwei zhe shi yi ge gong yuan. Duibuqi mafan ni!” but she wouldn’t listen to any of it. She just waved her hands in our faces, when from the staircase came a man, wearing a red shirt. He just floated down the steps and said, “Ni yinggai zou ba.” He didn’t have to tell me twice, I was heading for the door, Gavin was still trying to justify ourselves, but I dragged him out. The old lady pushed me as I pushed Gavin out the door, and then grabbed the door/gate. With a creak and then a clank it was closed. I looked back into the mansion, through the diamonds, and they faded into the darkness, walking backwards as they looked at us. It wasn’t a normal fade either. They were there, and then they weren’t. We got out of there and continued our walk around the island, slightly shaken up. When the communists took over they took the Portuguese land and gave it to the people, as I’ve already mentioned. So the mansions then became communal houses, and apartments, but some were left alone and fell into disrepair. Apparently this one still had people in it. Dinner was at a small restaurant, and they treated Gavin and me like kings. They gave us their best looking waitress, and she talked with us, ignoring the other customers. After the meal, she invited us to the back room, which we politely… accepted. We left after just talking for a bit, and continued the trek around the island. We went to a bunch of beaches. And then we stumbled across another mansion. Gavin wanted to go in, and I told him no, and walked off. Not again. So I ended up going to the beach and wrote my Chinese name in the sand next to a couple that was proposing to each other in the sand. After they left, I looked at the sand. It was beautifully written in English, like calligraphy. The one thing in the message that would’ve killed my mood was, “Will yu marry me?” YOU… But I digress. I ran into Warren and we climbed the mountain that Koxinga was perched on, and goofed off climbing. I went back to the hotel to rest, the days are really busy. I was finally getting used to having a patchy beard. I couldn’t wait to get a razor. I woke up and went with Warren, Chris, Gavin and Kyle C., to McDonalds. I had pancakes. PANCAKES! I don’t think I’m getting my point across here… 3 months with no American food and pancakes… with a chocolate milkshake. It was like… I can’t even say. It was just too good. But afterwards Kyle and Gavin and I wandered the island, where we stumbled across the mansion that Gavin wanted to go in when I left him the previous night. He didn’t go in because the gate was locked, but he asked around and nobody was there or had been there for a long time. The three of us hopped the 8 foot tall fence and fell into the courtyard. This side had no way to get back over, no footholds or anything. We were stuck inside now. So we walked up a staircase to the second floor. The metal gate was just like the night before, except it was rusted shut. So, I put my backpack on the ground and slid through the small opening with the others. The inside was a mess. Shutters, doors, glass, porcelain, all lay broken on the wooden floors. The walls were stone and were beautiful, but vines and other foliage clung to them. We went further into the mansion, and there was an enormous garden, forced between a cliff face and the mansion. The garden was untamed, crawling up the walls that contained them. We went down to the basement, and found a bamboo ladder. Our ticket out. The basement was dark, even though it was 9:30 in the morning and there were a couple windows for light to get in. There were shattered vases holding up some of the stairs. We walked back up to the top floor. The place had obviously been looted. The only room that hadn’t been was a room that was boarded shut. There was a mattress and a chair there. The sun shone in the windows and showed the motes of dust hanging in the air. We kept walking through when we hit one other room that hadn’t been completely looted. There was a closet with something rustling in it, and random stuff thrown everywhere. Windows, sofa cushions, broken items, papers, and in the middle of all the mess was a nice table with a marble surface and wooden legs. On top of it was a portrait of an old man, sketched in pencil and it looked as if it was aging right before me. A golden frame around it, and the face followed me. A small thing of burnt incense sat in front of it. Its ashes recently fresh. It was like the Portrait of Dorian Gray, or maybe I should say the Portrait of Dorian Lee. It was the scariest picture I’ve ever seen. We left, bamboo ladder in hand, and right at the entrance where we came in, were now bottles of metallic yellow dust, submerged in liquid. They weren’t there before. I squeezed through the gate, set up the ladder and escaped. I could not have imagined doing that in the night. It was creepy enough already. The rest of the gang was waiting back at the hotel.
We took the ferry back to Xiamen and were dropped in the botanical gardens. Warren and I were intent on getting lost. We had four hours in an enormous park. Our only goal was to get to the temple on the other side before the four hours were up. So Warren and I got lost. We wandered through the Flower Galaxy, ran up and down hills and found lost amphitheaters. But we looked at our watch and we hadn’t even reached half way, with 2 hours left. So we decided enough goofing around. We were told that a peak called Wulaofen was next to the temple at the end. So we began climbing a mountain, following signs pointing to other signs, so we could find one that had this name on it. We got to the peak of this mountain. Our line of sight was over the skyscrapers in Xiamen. We were really high up. We were on the peak of a mountain, and we couldn’t find anything to point us in any direction. We searched the ground for people that looked white but there was no one. So Warren decided he was going to climb down the mountain, not follow the path back down. He stuck out his hands and legs so it made an “X” and he started shifting down the mountain in this vertical crack extending to the bottom. I watched him, when all of a sudden he started spouting profanities, as he began slipping down fast. He jumped out and landed on a small ledge seventeen or so feet above the path below. I looked down there and couldn’t just leave him, so I did the same thing. Knowing where he slipped I was more careful, but now I looked at where he was and I was not going to jump. And I tried, but couldn’t go back up. And he couldn’t jump back up to go up either. So I had two options. Fall, or jump to his ledge and wait. He put his hand out and told me he’d pull me out of my fall. So I let go, and began sliding down, jumped, grabbed his hand and he pulled me to his perch. Sliding down tore up my pants, the aesthetic parts of my camera and my arm, but I was fine. And we sat there for about 2 minutes when Warren looked at me and said with his Kentucky accent, “Sterling, I’m going to teach you how to fall.” He gave me the basics and expected me to do that if I were to fall. He then began running down the face of the mountain, and jumped right before the bottom into a standing position. I followed suit, and we were down. We were alive, but now situated in the valley of the cactuses. We wandered through there for a while until we saw our bus driver and he pointed us to the peak. It was really nearby and we still had an hour and a half, so we went down the other path, passing through a secret garden, taking a secret staircase in the secret garden, up to a secret path where a modernistic building was being built. It was all white, and very boxy with lots of windows. So if two cases of breaking and entering weren’t bad enough already, Warren and I went in. Of course the door was wide open. The only thing in there was a staircase. We walked up it and started looking out the windows. On the right side of the building was a pond. We went to the other side. There was a cliff that had a bigger drop; the top of the cliff was only 6 feet from the window. If you could jump the gap then there was another path. So Warren and I both got in separate windows, and jumped. We made it with plenty of room to spare, and then continued walking down the path, which abruptly stopped. So we blazed our own path. We actually ran into a homeless man sleeping in the woods, who had made a wall, from barbed wire he hung over clothes lines. Very sketchy. There was a sign in the middle of nowhere. As we slowly read the characters we both slipped and fell. The sign said, “Watch your Step.” Well thanks. We found the main path and started climbing up the mountain. People started looking at us, covered in dirt and our own blood. We asked them if this was Wulaofen and they said yes, so we dashed to the top and asked which way to the temple. They pointed the way we had just run up. We slouched as we started down the way we had just come. Somehow we had circumnavigated the whole mountain. We blazed new paths down the mountain, running down the rocks and jumping over gaps. The temple was just like every other temple in China so we waited to get on the buses to the train station.
Upon arriving at the train station we went through the joke that is Chinese Train Security. During Shiyi in October, I carried a three foot blade through the metal detector and it didn’t go off. But I digress; the train people looked at the group and pushed us through the line at the very front of the terminal. We had nowhere to go and it was their mistake for putting 54 waiguoren and their teachers into a gated off area where the whole terminal can see they’ve been cut. They all stood up and looked at us angrily. Over 1000 people were in the terminal waiting to get on the train and now they were furious. I tried to talk with one of the people on the other side of the gate, but they wouldn’t listen to the explanation. 1000 faces all merged into one. There was a small metal gate separating us from the mob. If looks could kill, the lot of us wouldn’t be recognizable. But what aggravated me was that when they opened the doors for us to go to the landing to board the train most of the people didn’t act honorable and respectable as if it were a mistake, but ran, talking loudly to their train. And I walked to the car, watching them make fools of me, as the mob looked on having just watched my fellow classmates confirm that we had wronged them by running. Bi Laoshi was furious, and I was too. But I have no authority to the rest of the group so I stayed quiet. We got on the train and I rested, it was a long day.
I woke up in Wuyishan, famous for its tea. We rode a bus to Dabu a small town that relies on tea and rice for its economy. It was raining when we arrived and I imagined the streets were going to be flowing with tea. They weren’t. The houses in the town were made of mud and the streets were full of uneven cobblestones. I was rooming with Robbin. When we opened the door to our room, there was only one bed. It was in the host family’s bike garage. The baby had a small Naruto bike. I tried talking with my host family but I couldn’t understand the accent. The reason that China has different accents is because there is no alphabet that tells people how each word should sound. If someone says “shi” as “si” and that’s how people begin to say it, then that’s what the word is going to be. It’s one of the downsides of having a logogram alphabet. We began a hike to kill some time. Through slopes, muddy because of the recent end to the 5 day rain, through mountains, through rice paddies, up waterfalls, through the jungle; we hiked all over the place. And by the end Kyle H., Chris and I were the only ones that came out clean-ish. The hike seemed to last forever. We had a talk about what makes good teas. Tea leaves that grow in mountains that are foggy are the best, that’s why Wuyishan tea is known throughout China. We returned to the village, but I didn’t want to do anything so I stayed in the house and tried asking the baby some questions, but he was afraid of me. Apparently I’m scary. Or maybe it was just my awful beard, I don’t know. I looked at my watch. It was the 8th. Happy 3 month anniversary Jessica!
I woke up the next morning, cold. Robbin stole the blanket in the night, so he was warm and I was cold. We were off to a different town to pick our own tea leaves and make our own tea. The town was right by a river, and they had built most of their town in between the river and a stream, making a very scenic environment. We walked up a hill through trees and one pitfall to the tea patch. Our tea harvest was about to begin. Gavin and I started competing with Bridget, Maryanne and Warren, but we lost. To everyone. Apparently we’re not good tea leaf pickers. Our basket was quarter full, and the wicker basket was small in comparison to everyone else’s baskets. We walked by where the process began and saw the cutest little puppies. They couldn’t be older than 3 months. They were wandering around in a courtyard of sorts, but we walked by them to continue making tea. Basically to make tea, the leaves have to become as dry as you can possibly make them. Viola, you now have tea. But the process is a long one that takes about a day. They now have machines to do it, so picking is the only real hard part. By the end of the process our tea was bitter and awful, mainly because we skipped a lot of steps to see all of them. But then they gave us some of their tea. They poured water into a cup of tea leaves, then steeped it and poured all of us a thimble sized cup of golden liquid. It was bitter at first, but then it left a sweet, dry taste and was really good. They served us lunch, and then gave us a tea tasting session. The tea pourers were careless with my tea, and always spilled the boiling water on my pants and hands. I wouldn’t say the pain was worth it, but I can now tell the difference between good tea and bad tea. I don’t know why one is good and the other is bad, but that’s what they told me, so I’ll believe them. We began to play with the puppies and they were adorable. They were doing that puppy strut of barely being able to walk. And they all were so sleepy and fell asleep in peoples laps. Gavin, Maryanne, Bridget and I went to go grab some snacks for the bus ride, giving each other fake tattoos that came with the junk food. We returned to the courtyard to see people in a panic. Cliff walked by saying that one of the Chinese kids around the place had tortured one of the puppies. I walked over to the puppy and Catherine was standing there, looking over the puppy she had just saved. The pup was shivering and crying in pain. Catherine told me, a glossy look to her eyes, the kind that holding back tears give, that two Chinese boys about 8 years old took the dog and held it under the water of the nearby river for extended periods of time and pulled it out by one leg, only to swing it around until they slapped it back into the water. Catherine saw the kids doing this and ran at them telling them to stop, but they ran, still holding the puppy by the leg, but couldn’t run fast enough, so they threw the dog into the woods. By the end of the story, her eyes were red and her voice quivered with anger. I couldn’t believe that two kids would do this. One of our Chinese guides, age 14 but looked 10, was angry too, but the rest of the Chinese walking about the small tea picking village didn’t seem to care that much. The Chinese teachers with us tried to show they cared, but walked away and seemed to pretend that nothing had happened. Bi Laoshi mentioned that dogs don’t really have much use in China, trying to show their point of view. They only bark and keep things away from the house, other than that, nothing. Chinese are very pragmatic and dogs aren’t. But it still didn’t keep me from getting angry. The dog was covered in another student’s jacket to warm it up. It wasn’t getting any better. Her shivering was becoming visible. We gently pet it, trying to make it not hate all humans. Its cute little puppy face was in pain. It moved a bit and we all let out a sigh of relief. But it tried standing and it couldn’t. It wasn’t going to make it. We made a small circle of people that cared if it lived or died and waited out its last hours. Every breath it took was characterized by a sharp, high pitched puppy scream. But as if by a miracle, it rose and stumbled away, alive. It was going to make it after all. The kids that did it came back, but were chased off by our young guide. They ran away. I went to the river and skipped stones to let the anger out. We headed off to the train station and got on a train to Suzhou. Train rides were starting to become a reprieve from the restless days.
Chris and I and a few others got a train all to ourselves, separate from the rest of SYA, surrounded by countless other Chinese people, on the same style of hard sleeper car as every time before. We arrived in Suzhou, famous for its silk. We learned how silk was made. They take the cocoons that silk worms make around themselves to become moths and boil the worm alive to get the silk out. It was an interesting process, but I saw it all too quickly, and ended up wandering the silk store with Warren for a long time, looking at all the things I don’t need to buy. We were given 110 kuai for the next three night’s worth of food, and were told to go wander the city to eat. Gavin and I ended up going to a Xinjiang restaurant. It was amazing. We had to go to a concert afterwards, so Nick S., Chris and I rode next to each other on the bus, and laughed ourselves to tears. It’s one of those funny things that are only funny when you’re incredibly fatigued and you go back and tell someone about it and they’re like, “That’s not funny.” We were all beginning to get a bit tired. But it definitely got us in a good mood, we couldn’t stop smiling throughout the whole performance of Suzhou traditional music called Pingtan. But at the end of it, Karina became really ill. She ended up having to be carted to a hospital to have an emergency appendectomy. Pretty lucky we weren’t still in Chuxi. We went back to the hotel and rested.
I woke up at 9 trying to catch up on some sleep because we had a later start this morning, only to go down to breakfast and find out it was over. Only in China, will breakfast only last 2 hours, but no matter, I still got some bread. We hopped on another bus and were driving off to Zhouzhuang, or as I called it, “The Venice of China.” It’s a city of canals. It’s absolutely wonderful. But right as we got there, I got in that funk of mine. It happens every so often, where I just get angry really easily, and I know I can, and it makes me sad. So I wandered the town a bit by myself. And it was beautiful. The buildings were old, but kept up well, the bridges were nice. There were boats in the canals, not quite gondolas, but not quite rafts either. They were a mix of the two with more colors. Gavin and I ended up walking around the town, exploring everything. He tried to cheer me up and succeeded. We were riding a seesaw when a small crowd of Chinese people started filming us. Gavin was like, “Is there a problem?” “No.” “Oh well do you know who I am?” “No, who are you?” “I’m… a YAN’GUIZI!” And they all burst out laughing as he put his fingers up against his head, pretending they were horns. They loved it. Everybody loves it when foreigners depreciate themselves. They feel guilty after they laugh though and give ridiculous compliments to make it up to you. Gavin and I then went around pretending that we were college students and they believed it. I think it was because of the massive amount of facial hair I have. Well in comparison it’s a massive amount. I really couldn’t wait to get back to my razor. We had dinner along the canals. When the sun dipped beyond the horizon and the light disappeared, every single Chinese lantern hung in the trees along the bank went on. They reflected the shops in the water and it was as if a carnival had erupted from the water. Later that night, Gavin, Kyle, Maryanne, Bridget and I went for a raft ride. Gavin invited a pair of Chinese women in the boat too. They took awful pictures. The moon was full and there were a few stars in the sky. All of this could be seen in the canals. It was absolutely beautiful. If only… The air was cold, it was nipply, and Bridget and Maryanne’s room was so warm, as it soon became the headquarters for Charades. Afterwards I went back to my room and slept.
Chris and I had planned to take a walk and discuss the deeper meaning of life and other things, so we woke up early and walked the canals edges and bridges. It was a good talk. We were then swept away from Zhouzhuang, which I loved, but was beginning to grow tired of, and were taken to a vocational school. There were 1600 aspiring elementary school teachers, and only 3 of them were guys. Gavin and I got a picture with two of them at the same time. That’s like finding a shiny Pokémon in Pokémon. They were VERY happy there. They then held a party for us and I watched the games. Out of the blue, (no pun intended,) a girl came up and gave me a gift. It was calligraphy she had written. It was very nice. We talked and exchanged compliments. Her name was Blue. Someone gave me a blue flower and I gave it to her saying, “Gen nide mingzi yiyang.” She blushed and all the other girls couldn’t stop talking about it. Shi Laoshi told me I was very charming. We left shortly afterwards. We had another night wandering around Suzhou. There was another round of Charades in Bridget and Maryanne’s room that night too, with more people this time. Too many people in my opinion, so I left early to get some rest. The trip was tiring me out. Just one more day after this.
The last day was a blur. We visited a company, an orphanage, a factory, but it all blended together. We got on the train and we were on our way home. It was the actual fast train, not just the kuai train. There were no stops. Only an 11 hour ride to Beijing over night. We were only going to be awake for three of these hours. Gavin and I were talking about how good it was to be going home. Not back to Beijing. Home. Other people were counting down the days to winter break, but I was happy getting back to the place where I felt I belong. I went to brush my teeth on the train and when I finished and looked in the mirror, I didn’t see myself. It was scary. I didn’t see Sterling Weiser. I saw 史华林. I woke up the next morning and got off the train with everyone else in Beijing. Getting off the train, I felt that something big was going to happen. I got back into the routine, back to the cold nipping at our heels and walked home.