The days went on, for time presses on despite whatever attempts we do to stop it. It was depressing knowing that every moment was our last. We stood before the terminal like a prisoner sentenced to death. We knew that it would never be this way again. Everything we ever enjoyed was gone. The airplanes to take us away from the friends we had grown close to over the past nine months drew nearer. For some reason we were all smiling though. It was as if we tried to push away the fact that we were leaving by being happy or at least feigning it. But then I realized something. We weren’t crying. I had expected myself to cry as we entered the Beijing airport for the last time as SYA students, but all the fond memories I had of everything made it so not even a semblance of a tear could form in my eyes. Our last hoorah. And though the pain in my chest made me want to cry… the tears just couldn’t fight through the memories. Gavin, Ba, Ma and Peter parted with us at security. And now there was Warren, Chris, Karina and I, (among others.) One of my best friends gone. It began to feel like how I left for China, as I watched friend after friend disappear on the day before my departure to China. Now on my way back it was, again, like that. The plane ride I sat next to Warren… just like on the way over to China. This time though, I didn’t have stories about back home to tell him about. We had stories to share, about wedding crashing, mountain climbing, sparring, girls, etc. etc. Karina was sitting alone with an open seat next to her and I moved over during turbulence across six people to reach her. We signed each other’s yearbooks and leaned on each other, as if we were completely oblivious to an end. I didn’t know if ignoring the problem was the best idea, but it made me forget the pain of thinking about leaving someone that was so incredible. I realized that on this trip I found people that I cared about more than I cared about myself. It was an incredible feeling and I began to feel indebted to China for introducing me to such a profound emotion. The plane ride went too fast for my liking. Eleven hours went by in the blink of an eye. We passed customs and Karina’s, Stephanie’s and my gate were apart from everyone else’s. We began to walk off in different directions, Karina and Stephanie had already gone ahead, and as I walked to catch up with them, I felt a lump of tears fall to my throat, trying to shatter but having something stopping that. I felt like I was choking and just wished they would get out. I had just left Warren and Chris. Two more best friends gone… With each “China” friend leaving I felt like I was slowly reverting back to who I was before I left for China. It was beginning to scare me. I caught up with Karina and Stephanie who were having trouble getting their new tickets. I joked about them being able to navigate through Beijing but this E-Check in was over their heads. Luckily the three of our flight’s gates were right next to each other so we sat next to each other as we waited to head back to what we could only assume would be a life of normalcy. Across from me was a bagel shop and I went there, craving this delicacy that I hadn’t had for nine months. The people behind the counter were Chinese and we began talking in Chinese and they were impressed. We told them about what we’d done, and it eased the pain of returning home, knowing that some places will have people that we’ll be able to use this skill with. Three hours passed and our eyes were glazed in that watery state before the tears parade down. Karina’s plane got in first and we hugged in the busy San Francisco airport as she waited for her rows to be called. The people avoided giving us stares and parted around us like we were Moses in the Red Sea. Her row was called and she kissed me. It was one of those passionate, albeit a tad wet from our combined tears, kisses that I used to dream and write about when I was younger. She handed the stewardess her ticket, looking back over her shoulder at me, before turning towards the doorway and walking through it. I yelled out, “I love you,” in Chinese, and slowly walked back to where Stephanie had been watching my stuff. My chair was gone and I stood in the middle of one of the rows, head bowed before me while I tried sobbing out the answers to Stephanie’s questions. I didn’t care how ridiculous the whole scene looked to onlookers. If they judged me then so what? I only remember saying, “It’s going to rain today,” before the last tear dropped and fell onto my shirt, emblazoned with a giant panda fighting an army that Karina had given me while in Chengdu. We boarded the plane to Cleveland and I slept the whole way, tired with the exhaustion that comes from crying. I woke up to the pilot saying it was storming in Cleveland and that we might have to land in Detroit. The plane landed in Cleveland with no problems except for Stephanie misplaced her passport, so I waited around and helped her try and find it on the plane, dreading the fact that an outdated life lied outside of these terminal gates. Hopefully it wasn’t too outdated… The last two SYA-er’s boldly marched slowly forward to a life seemingly given up, but really it was just revamped and changed for the better. I walked out of the gates and saw the people waiting for me. I was back.
But was I home?
Monday, June 1, 2009
Friday, May 8, 2009
There and Back Again: An Exchange Student's Tale
I couldn’t wait to get out of Beijing. Mainly because I had a girlfriend now and adventures lied on the horizon. But I also wanted to leave because Beijing was snowing. No, it wasn’t cold. It was in the 80’s, but Beijing’s spring is when all the trees open up and let their pollen loose. Ten years ago, Beijing’s government tried to cut back on the pollution and clean things up by planting fast growing trees, though they lacked the foresight to see that every spring, the trees would start blooming and the little white floating puff balls would blot out the sun in a blizzard of fantastic snow. On the street I saw tornados of the white fluff tearing harmlessly through the traffic. I am apparently allergic to that white fluff. My allergies came back from a four year absence with a vengeance. So to sum up why I was happy to leave in a sentence, I was escaping my allergies with my girlfriend. Bam. Simple as that. We boarded the buses and got on the trains to Kaili, a city in Guizhou. On the train ride we learned a lot about Guizhou from our reader. An excerpt taken directly from the China guidebook said, “Mention any of China’s southwestern provinces and fellow travelers will pelt you with tips, advice or looks of envy. Tell them you’re going to Guizhou, however, and you’ll most likely receive a blank look and the question, ‘Why?’” That happens to be the first sentence on Guizhou in the China guidebook. Next up on getting our expectations up through reading was Guizhou’s history section which said, “Historically, no-one has wanted to have much to do with Guizhou.” Yes, this is where we were going to spend the next eight days of our lives. On the train ride, Karina and I ended up watching over our English teacher’s nine year old daughter, Talia. We played cards and let each other sleep while the other entertained Talia. She followed us to dinner, back to the bunks, everywhere. Occasionally we would get Chris to take care of her for a bit, but she’d come back to us. Bed was a welcome retreat and I fell asleep to the rocking of the train cars, and the occasional thunk of what I imagined were cows being run over. It wasn’t a cow of course.
I woke up early on the train and had train food for breakfast. The train was exactly the same as the one we took to Fujian, the only difference being instead of the kuai train, we were on the tekuai train. Karina and I met up at the breakfast table and went back and babysat for a bit before claiming we were both going to take naps, but really went to relax together. After ten more hours on the train making a total of 26 hours spent on the train, we arrived in Kaili. It was late and we briefly explored Kaili, before heading back to the hotel room.
A view of the Gulou in Dalidong
Our host house in Dalidong
The next day we had an eight hour bus ride to Dalidong, that place that was featured in National Geographic. Talia sat on Karina’s and my lap for four hours, when Gavin came, like a godsend, and preoccupied Talia with some stories. We arrived in Dalidong. Gavin and I took a hike through some fields and came back to the house to eat dinner. The food was set up on a bench and we sat down on stools that could probably fit inside a dollhouse. Our host pulled out a kerosene container and poured three cups out. Two for Gavin and me, and one for himself. The moment the liquid hit the cups, a foul odor cut through the air. It smelled something along the lines of really strong alcohol, I mean rubbing alcohol, some oil, and a tinge of urine. So this is the infamous Mijiu… “You’re our guests, have a drink, then we can start dinner.” “No, no, we don’t drink.” “You’re not eating until you have a sip.” “Really… we can’t.” After that our host got handsy and we just picked up the drink. A fly flew over my cup and its wings failed. It fell to the ground dead. Gavin and I looked at each other. Even flies won’t go near this stuff. He took a small sip, and started coughing and his eyes started tearing up. He turned to me and said dramatically, as if he were dying, “I don’t think you should drink anything you could clean a house with… my throat feels like it’s burning…” Our host then gave him a bowl and allowed him to eat. I looked at it and groaned. Gavin’s performance didn’t make it any easier. If Gavin thinks it’s bad… I lifted the cup to my lips and my lungs burned with the odor. I took the smallest sip of anything I’ve ever taken in my life and put the cup down. It felt there were thousands of holes on my tongue and the Mijiu was finding them and forcefully making them bigger. I swallowed, and just sat there silently as it burned all the way down, and just rested at lung level burning for 10 minutes after. I have never had anything so awful in my life. I then began eating their food, which was amazing. They had liver that tasted like filet mignon. Now that I look back on that dinner, it was the first sip of alcohol I’ve ever had and it was Guizhou moonshine. We went to the gulou, (not drum tower,) and had a bonfire under its pavilion. Karina and I ended up watching Talia again, and then they had performances. The people sang their traditional song, and we then had to perform. So as SYA normally does, they turned to The Song Dynasty. It was our last gig. We sung Build me up Buttercup and Across the Sea. Across the Sea is a song Gavin wrote and is sung to the tune of the little mermaid’s Under the Sea. Here’s the chorus courtesy of Gavin Cook and his wonderful imagination:
Across the sea
Across the sea
Comrade, it's better
Here where it's redder
Take it from me
In the West they work all day
In classrooms they slave away
While we get to play
And sometimes Tingxie
Across the sea!
I went back to the house and had a spooky incident in my room, with division and all sorts of horror inducing insects.
Gavin and I woke up too late, and ended up missing going farming with all the farmers and SYA. So we wandered the town before heading into the wilderness. We were crossing a river, when we ran into our host mother at this village. She called us back over the river and we climbed a mountain with her. When we got there, there were two danzi’s, or the poles with the baskets to carry stuff on your back with. We were on a narrow field, tiered 50 some feet above another and began to use a sickle and cut vegetables. We loaded them into the basket, and when we filled up the baskets, our host mother picked one up, and we both picked up the ones that were already there. It weighed about 60-70 pounds, and it all was pressing down into one spot on my shoulder.
Me still figuring out how to carry my danzi right
It was a bit nerve-wrecking because the path down was an almost vertical path and we had these huge sticks on our shoulders now. We made it down barely and began the 45 minute hike back into the village. I figured out a good way to carry the pole across both my shoulders and then I was back in 30 minutes. Gavin and our guide were truly surprised by my speed. There was no lunch that day at our host house, so we went up and had an interview with the mayor… but he was too drunk to speak so we had the village spokesperson tell us about the city. Talia was under the care of Karina and me again. People were beginning to call her our child. And it was starting to feel that way a bit too. When the meeting ended, we took Talia on a hike to a small spring and had a nice “family” moment. Dating for not even a week and we already had a nine year old kid. It sure helps you get to know your significant other pretty quickly.
Karina, Talia and Me at the Spring
We returned our child to her rightful parent as the sun began to set, and took a stroll out into the fields. There is no twilight here, there was light and then dark, thanks to the mountains. We completed half the phoenix dance, before a mysterious light came from the mountain and shone on us, scaring us out of the rice paddies. The light turned out to be a car coming to the village down the mountain. If a village person catches you and someone else “plowing some fields” if you will, SYA sends you back to Beijing, after you watch the ceremony to cleanse the spot. This ceremony involves hiring a shaman to slaughter a dog on the spot by slitting its throat, shaking it by its hind legs and using the blood that spills from it to wash away the evil. We were not caught, so somewhere in Dalidong, is a half evil field. My bad.
We had an eight hour bus ride the next day. Before leaving Dalidong, I looked out over one of the wind bridges and saw some peasants skinning and cleaning up 20-some chickens. Right down stream of that was a woman washing her clothes. The water gules and I still can’t believe that chicken blood is a good detergent. As we were leaving Dalidong, the Dong people sang their traditional good bye song. They then encouraged us to sing one of ours. We all looked at each other, and Bi Laoshi was like, Row Row Row Your Boat in three part harmony. Go. When we finished the Dong people clapped and asked what it meant. Bi Laoshi turned to them and said, “It means how much we’re going to miss you but we really have to be going… on a boat.” They all nodded and accepted his explanation and allowed us to leave the village. We got on the bus and Karina and I were watching Talia again. She sat on our laps for the entire eight hour bus ride. Karina’s legs fell asleep. The bus ride took longer than expected because there were landslides on the road. We waited for a construction crew to clear the landslide on the only road to or from the village. Luckily we weren’t under the rockslide when it happened. We arrived in the town of Leishan and Karina and I walked through a park and danced with old ladies in the park before heading back to the hotel room. We both went to my room, fell onto the bed next to each other, and I said, “Being a parent is tiresome,” before we fell asleep next to each other… only for Gavin to wake us up before curfew.
Gaoyan, Population: 900. Alcoholics:900
We woke up to get on a bus the next day, still caring for our “kid” before we began a three hour hike to Gaoyan. The opening ceremony there, welcoming us to the village consisted of making us drink Mijiu. This Mijiu was one thousand times stronger than the Mijiu at Dalidong and we could smell it from fifty feet away. I avoided the people pouring bowls of Mijiu down people’s throat. Throughout the whole village, everyone was trying to get us as hammered as we possibly could be. I didn’t drink any. I was living with Gavin, Erick and Jamie at this new village. Our host mother took us down the mountain and made us rotate a crop. Well it was starting to rotate a crop because she made us stop and send us back with the bits of vegetables that were left un-harvested.
Field work for the win
On the way up, the teachers stopped us and told us we had to go pick bracken with them. So we climbed the mountain behind the village and started picking this weedy vegetable from the path. A small dog we called “xiao fei” came along. We walked along cliff faces and all the way to the foot of another mountain on top of the mountain we had just climbed. Warren, Jamie, Erick and I decided to ditch the group and have a race to the top of the mountain. It was terraced, so Warren, Erick and I took one path and Jamie took another.
Racing to the top
We jumped and climbed up the 8 foot tall steps that were the terraces and made it to the top of the mountain. We waved at the teachers who had taken the four of us to go pick Bracken with them. We turned around on the top of this mountain and saw… another mountain. We decided to climb this one too. There was a path so we ran up to the top fairly quickly. Mr. Bissell gave us a call saying that it was going to get dark soon, so we should head back. Jamie and Erick wanted to go down the path that lead right to a road, and Warren and I wanted to jump down the 8 foot tall terraces down the mountain. So from the top of a mountain, we set off in two different directions. But Warren and I got tired of racing, especially after stumbling upon a mountaintop graveyard. We walked through and it admired the graves. Warren wanted to let Jamie and Erick win. Instead we were going to wait for the storm that was coming in over the mountain, as well as the fog that was nearing us, to reach us so we could race those back to the village. Much more adventuresome. So we sat on top of the mountain, already in the clouds. We wandered further into the graveyard when we found a giant stone tomb/mausoleum looking thing. Spider webs covered the entrance, and Warren and I picked up sticks and pretended we were warriors as we bashed the webs and spiders away. The entrance was open so we walked in, using our phones as flashlights. There was shattered pottery everywhere in there and in the very back of the tomb, were vents, with cold air coming through them and a low moaning noise coming from the other side. Warren got down on his hands and knees and started throwing away the smashed pottery and rocks and bones to try and find a way to get into the back of that tomb. We didn’t find anything, and walked out defeated, only to see the fog was rolling down the mountain side at a frightening pace. We began jumping down the terraces, going down eight feet every jump. We descended half the mountain in three minutes. The fog was coming at us like an avalanche of clouds, but we out ran it barely. We turned a corner and stepped into the last rays of sunlight. The fog couldn’t follow us here. We leisurely strolled down the rest of the mountain. Warren tossed his stick sword onto the road below, and we went to go retrieve it. When we were almost at his “weapon,” a car came from nowhere and was about to run it over when Warren ran and kicked the stick out of the way. I saw what was in the car though. It was full of people, their faces were smeared wine red, a woman looked dead in the car window, and they were driving towards the village. I was a bit creeped out by this but ignored it while we walked back to the village. When Warren and I arrived in the village, in the town center, the van was parked, the “dead” woman’s head lolled like a ragdolls from the window, red streaks running down her face and onto the white van. It was eerily like wine and blood mixed together. The wine faced men stumbled around the center like zombies. Warren and I were legitimately scared. Had we disturbed an ancient tomb and this was the punishment that was to be wrought upon us? It turns out… that the wine faced people are part of a tradition. When someone in the village wants to get married, the husband’s family kidnaps the wife and gets her super-trashed a few days before the wedding. We ran back to our host house, had an awful dinner and then danced with villagers in another town center. Afterwards I went to bed, sharing a bed with Jamie.
"Tomb" Warren and I found. Turns out to be a Giant Kiln
We got up to go farm in the fields but it was raining. Everything was glazed with a thin layer of water. We walked out to the town center overlooking the foot of the mountain, and a few other villages on the opposite mountain. We were told that we had the whole day to ourselves in the shittiest place on the planet. There is really no other word to describe that place. So Warren and I planned to have another adventure today, but we gathered a party of eight people including ourselves. Karina, Hannah, Annie, Claire, Erick, Chris, Warren and I decided to go down the mountain. We wanted to get to the crevasse between the mountains on either side of the river down there. So I led the group down the path I had gone down to farm, then further down and further still. Karina, Erick, Warren and I got split up from the others and went down the path first. We saw an incredible bridge down there. It looked like a giant arch, like something out of Lord of the Rings. We saw it and now had a plan to go and see it up close. The four of us reached the river and waded across the river and got to a small island in the middle of it, leaving most of our belongings and clothes on the other side of the bank. We chilled there and relaxed from the hike down as we waited for the others to catch up with us.
Relaxing the way I like to relax
We skipped stones and told stories at the bottom of two mountains. We were about to head back when we saw that the rains had made the river a bit more ferocious. The water level was up to our hips, and whirlpools had started forming. The river flowed into a giant cliff face and then turned left. We saw the water ramming against the cliff and then being sucked under it with a fairly decent sounding whooshing sound. There were caves that we could be sucked away into, that were under the mountain and we’d never be found. It made fording the river a bit more nerve-wrecking this time. If we slipped we were gone. Hannah became frightened and I had to drag her across. She slipped and fumbled over the smooth rocks that made up the riverbed. The lot of us made it across safely, no worries. I’m a lifeguard… wait expiration date passed. I was a lifeguard. We started walking along a small path next to the river that also ran alongside some fields. There were peasants working the fields and they said to us, “Turn back, the way you came won’t be usable if you wait too long.” We abandoned our hopes of finding the bridge and ran back to the path up the mountain, back to Gaoyan. The path that once was, was a giant mudslick, flowing down the mountain and making it impossible for us to go back up this way. We were now stuck at the bottom of the mountain with no known means to get back to the top. We walked back past the peasants and kept walking along the path between the river and terraced fields. We stopped at one point and looked at the dead end path before us. I looked up and saw there was a path along a cliff face 200 feet up. We walked back through the fields and asked the peasants how to get to the bridge. They pointed over the terraced fields, but there was no means to get up there, so Warren and I scouted and climbed over the fields trying to discover the path that leads to the bridge. I ran up, looking for the cliff path and found it. I jumped down and called the rest of the party over to the path. I scouted a bit further ahead. The path turned a corner and in front of us was a waterfall falling from the top of the mountain, partially hidden in the clouds, down to the river below. The river we had just come from. Warren got there first and scouted ahead while I waited for the rest of the group to reach the magnificent scene. The cliff path that I had scouted out and that Warren was currently scouting out was 200 feet over the river. It was shoulder width wide and slowly descended down to the river over a kilometer. I ran ahead to make sure Warren was alright. Karina and I picked up our pace and found him sitting on a rock in the middle of the river. I decided I was going to go wait on the rock with him for the rest of the people to join us. I put one foot on a stepping stone, then moved to the next one, and then to one more, when my foot started slipping. I had reached a small stone island, so I threw my other foot out to catch myself, but when it landed it started slipping too. I was about to do the splits on a small island in the middle of a river. Now what you don’t see is a giant arrowhead shaped rock between my spread eagling legs. For the sake of future generations of Weiser’s, I threw my right hand down between my legs and cushioned the blow with a sickening crack, and smashed my fingers along the sharp edge of the rock. Karina watched from the shore, and Warren carefully walked over to me and showed me where to step to get back to the shore. Once there I put my now baseball sized right hand in the ice-cold mountain river water and cringed as the pain shot through my bones. I pretended that nothing was wrong and once everyone else had caught up, we continued on.
If you see Warren, that's where my hand got smashed
We turned a corner and saw it. We saw the bridge; we began a mad dash along the narrow path until we stood before our destination. It was a giant slab of concrete. There was nothing special about it like we had seen from the path 2000 feet up. You couldn’t even get on the bridge. It was just an arch in the river. So Karina and Annie decided to wade across the ankle deep part of the river and ask the villagers on the other side of the river how to get back to Gaoyan. Karina and Annie had left the party. We saw it three mountaintops over. We had hiked quite the distance. They came back from the other side of the river with a distressed look on their face. This was Gaoyan. We had never left the village. A six hour hike down a mountain, up the side of one, sidling across cliff faces, wading rivers and we had not left the village. We sat down on the bank of the river and pulled out our lunch of bread. Chris and Karina noticed my hand and told me to put my hand back in the river, and then finished a water bottle and filled it with the cold river water as a makeshift icepack. I could barely hold the bottle, but I didn’t tell them. No need to worry them more. A farmer crossed the river from where Karina and Annie had just come from and we asked him if he could take us to Gaoyan. Coincidentally, he was going there himself, so we tagged along as he took the well-beaten path that we had overlooked. An hour and a half of hiking with him we were back in the main portion of Gaoyan.
The disappointing bridge
The party and our guide
We paid our guide 200 kuai, and only later on did we learn that the average yearly income of a Gaoyan resident is 250 kuai. That’s just over 35 US Dollars. And it’s not possible to farm their land any other way because you can’t get machinery down the mountain. You have to carry everything up and down the mountain each time you go to farm. The village is practically self-sufficient. Having nothing else to do in the village and being completely exhausted, I went and got a splint before heading back to the house and chilling with Jamie, Erick and Gavin. We were so bored that we made our own “Base” system. It’s perfect. But really there’s nothing to do in that village. No wonder everyone drinks themselves into a drunken stupor. Our host father walked in at dinner and looked at how little of the food we had eaten. It was just not delicious, or appealing to look at. He yelled at us, mixing together his local dialect with Mandarin, Japanese and a bit of Cantonese. “If you don’t eat your stinky chicken, you’ll never get tall… *hiccup*… well you guys are already tall, so how’d you do that? Your American parents spoil you. How can you not eat food, it’s unheard of. My son’s kids here eat all their stinky chicken yet they’re still small. This isn’t fair. *burp some vomit onto the floor* You folks are American Liushoushi right?” Now to take a moment aside, liushoushi has no meaning to any of us, nor does it mean anything to Chinese people. What he was trying to say was liuxuesheng, or exchange students. Liushoushi is something Gavin recognized from his background in Japanese… somehow. I really don’t know how. But I digress, we left the pot of chicken intestines and lungs and livers practically untouched. Lungs just aren’t that tasty. It was probably just how he prepared it though. I’ll have to try them again somewhere else. We just wanted to get out of that place. Gaoyan was miserable. Jamie and I went to bed to try and wake up a bit closer to leaving.
It thunder stormed the whole night long. Our door to our room flung open and closed itself multiple times in the middle of the night. We woke up to find out the path out that we were going to take was impossible for 56 people to maneuver. Another path out of the town was completely flooded, so the only one left was the road for cars… an 18 kilometer trek through mountains. They weren’t really roads, more of just one giant dirt path. I speed walked out of the place and it was brutal. Karina and I walked together until Gavin, Erick and I passed them and left Karina with Sophie and Julia. I had a reason for leaving them behind. I had to take a dump that I had saved for too long. Our host’s toilet had a hole for use that was the size of my fist. I don’t have that kind of accuracy when it comes to number two. So we found a nook and I grabbed some of Erick’s toilet paper and went down and went out in the great outdoors. Unfortunately, I planted myself on top of a jumping spiders nest. Not pretty. I wore my gym shorts that were serving as boxers for the rest of the hike through. It was ridiculously hot. Karina and I finished up the hike in 2 hours and 20 minutes exactly. We waited for 2 hours plus for the others to get to the buses. We took the bus back to Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou, and spent the night in a hotel there.
Getting the Hell out of Gaoyan
It was not a good night. I was up with diarrhea the whole night and was completely exhausted the next day. My stomach felt like I had swallowed a box of daggers. Realizing that I never wanted to come back to Guizhou, I wanted to see as much of Guiyang as I could, I fought off the pain in my stomach and went out with Karina, Chris and Claire to see the city. There wasn’t much. We wandered around and I tried to find a comfortable position to walk in but with little success. I had taken an Imodium the night before, but it was starting to wear off by the time we had gotten to the train station. We were finally leaving Guizhou and SYA was happy… I was too, just not to be on a train in my current condition. We were walking to the waiting area, when I felt my stomach roar in protest and I bolted down an aisle and kneeled down next to a small green trash can. I dry heaved, and all of SYA now knew I was sick. I got a bottom bunk on the train for the safety of the other 5 people in the bunk area. What I’ve learned to hate about trains is the fact that the only time the train isn’t moving is when it’s in the station, but that’s the only time the bathrooms are locked to the passengers. I really wonder who said let’s make it an adventure every time a passenger needs to use our squatty potty’s. It’s probably for security reasons, but to a sick student where every second on the run to the bathroom counts, it seems utterly ridiculous. Karina sat on my bed and took care of me, while Chris sat on the bottom bunk across from me and gave me his blanket to try and make me sweat it out. They brought back food for me, and I got other get well soon’s from people I least expected it from. Talia even stopped by for a bit to check in on her foster father. I fell asleep on the train after taking 12 or more trips to the worst experience in a bathroom I’ve ever had.
I woke up the next morning on the train feeling a thousand times better, partially because I was feeling better and mainly because I was way the hell away from Guizhou. Unfortunately whatever I had had spread. Now some people in the other car had it, and were ended up carted to a hospital. The rest of us were carted off to a cooking school where they taught us how to make Gongbao Jiding, or Kungpao Chicken, as well as a lima bean dish that was just so bad I forgot it. I was making the Gongbao Jiding pepper sauce and scratched my face. A pepper got in my eye and nose. Imagine the spiciest thing you’ve ever eaten. Now imagine that instead of that being on your tongue it was in your eye, and the heat from it rolled out over the rest of your face and burned your nose. Yes. That’s what it felt like. How do you get it out? I had to hold my eyelids open and let the fires burn until my eyes started tearing up and streaming down my face. I waited for ten minutes in sheer agony while the rest of my cooking team, (Warren, Maegan and Mike,) prepared our ingredients. Talia was with Karina during this cooking excursion. Chris, Claire, Karina and I went to Jingli Jie and explored the tourist-y part of Chengdu. It was the Houhai of Chengdu. We headed back to the hotel and chilled. I was still recovering from the sickness.
Sharing a smile at the cooking school
We went back to the cooking school the next day and made Yuxiang Rousi and Mapo Doufu. Both were delicious and afterwards we went and learned how to carve vegetables into things. Our skills were severely lacking. Erick, Chris, Claire, Karina and I went for Thai food for dinner. There was a Polynesian singing group that came to our table and pulled us up and made us dance while they sang. It was fun. Curfew came and we headed back to the hotel.
We went to the Black Bear Rescue Center the next day. This was where all the black bears rescued from bear farms went. Bear farms are places where Chinese bear farmers extract bile from bear’s gall bladders so the bile could be used in medicine. They try and save the bears and give them a relaxing life, after castrating the males. We wandered around the place, and then headed back to the hotel. On the bus ride back, Talia sat on our laps again. We said Mr. Morrison don’t you want to see your kid sometime on the trip? To which he responded, (jokingly I hope,) her real parents are the one’s she more emotionally attached to. Have fun, mom and dad. We told her that we were exhausted and let her follow her real father. After an unsuccessful nap, Karina and I went out to dinner with Ian and Warren. The four of us went back to Jingli Jie and Warren got a number or two before we went back to the hotel.
Our last day of the trip, Hannah, Erick, Chris, Claire, Karina and I all went out for breakfast before splitting up. Chris, Erick and I had guy time and they had girl time. We wandered and went into toy stores and electronics stores. They went to get a foot massage. We all met back up at the hotel and got on the bus and then the plane back to Beijing. It was nice to be going back home. It’s nice to get away… just not to Guizhou. When we got back, the fantastic snow was gone, and everything was green. We had a month and five days left… time to make the most of the time left.
I woke up early on the train and had train food for breakfast. The train was exactly the same as the one we took to Fujian, the only difference being instead of the kuai train, we were on the tekuai train. Karina and I met up at the breakfast table and went back and babysat for a bit before claiming we were both going to take naps, but really went to relax together. After ten more hours on the train making a total of 26 hours spent on the train, we arrived in Kaili. It was late and we briefly explored Kaili, before heading back to the hotel room.
A view of the Gulou in Dalidong
Our host house in Dalidong
The next day we had an eight hour bus ride to Dalidong, that place that was featured in National Geographic. Talia sat on Karina’s and my lap for four hours, when Gavin came, like a godsend, and preoccupied Talia with some stories. We arrived in Dalidong. Gavin and I took a hike through some fields and came back to the house to eat dinner. The food was set up on a bench and we sat down on stools that could probably fit inside a dollhouse. Our host pulled out a kerosene container and poured three cups out. Two for Gavin and me, and one for himself. The moment the liquid hit the cups, a foul odor cut through the air. It smelled something along the lines of really strong alcohol, I mean rubbing alcohol, some oil, and a tinge of urine. So this is the infamous Mijiu… “You’re our guests, have a drink, then we can start dinner.” “No, no, we don’t drink.” “You’re not eating until you have a sip.” “Really… we can’t.” After that our host got handsy and we just picked up the drink. A fly flew over my cup and its wings failed. It fell to the ground dead. Gavin and I looked at each other. Even flies won’t go near this stuff. He took a small sip, and started coughing and his eyes started tearing up. He turned to me and said dramatically, as if he were dying, “I don’t think you should drink anything you could clean a house with… my throat feels like it’s burning…” Our host then gave him a bowl and allowed him to eat. I looked at it and groaned. Gavin’s performance didn’t make it any easier. If Gavin thinks it’s bad… I lifted the cup to my lips and my lungs burned with the odor. I took the smallest sip of anything I’ve ever taken in my life and put the cup down. It felt there were thousands of holes on my tongue and the Mijiu was finding them and forcefully making them bigger. I swallowed, and just sat there silently as it burned all the way down, and just rested at lung level burning for 10 minutes after. I have never had anything so awful in my life. I then began eating their food, which was amazing. They had liver that tasted like filet mignon. Now that I look back on that dinner, it was the first sip of alcohol I’ve ever had and it was Guizhou moonshine. We went to the gulou, (not drum tower,) and had a bonfire under its pavilion. Karina and I ended up watching Talia again, and then they had performances. The people sang their traditional song, and we then had to perform. So as SYA normally does, they turned to The Song Dynasty. It was our last gig. We sung Build me up Buttercup and Across the Sea. Across the Sea is a song Gavin wrote and is sung to the tune of the little mermaid’s Under the Sea. Here’s the chorus courtesy of Gavin Cook and his wonderful imagination:
Across the sea
Across the sea
Comrade, it's better
Here where it's redder
Take it from me
In the West they work all day
In classrooms they slave away
While we get to play
And sometimes Tingxie
Across the sea!
I went back to the house and had a spooky incident in my room, with division and all sorts of horror inducing insects.
Gavin and I woke up too late, and ended up missing going farming with all the farmers and SYA. So we wandered the town before heading into the wilderness. We were crossing a river, when we ran into our host mother at this village. She called us back over the river and we climbed a mountain with her. When we got there, there were two danzi’s, or the poles with the baskets to carry stuff on your back with. We were on a narrow field, tiered 50 some feet above another and began to use a sickle and cut vegetables. We loaded them into the basket, and when we filled up the baskets, our host mother picked one up, and we both picked up the ones that were already there. It weighed about 60-70 pounds, and it all was pressing down into one spot on my shoulder.
Me still figuring out how to carry my danzi right
It was a bit nerve-wrecking because the path down was an almost vertical path and we had these huge sticks on our shoulders now. We made it down barely and began the 45 minute hike back into the village. I figured out a good way to carry the pole across both my shoulders and then I was back in 30 minutes. Gavin and our guide were truly surprised by my speed. There was no lunch that day at our host house, so we went up and had an interview with the mayor… but he was too drunk to speak so we had the village spokesperson tell us about the city. Talia was under the care of Karina and me again. People were beginning to call her our child. And it was starting to feel that way a bit too. When the meeting ended, we took Talia on a hike to a small spring and had a nice “family” moment. Dating for not even a week and we already had a nine year old kid. It sure helps you get to know your significant other pretty quickly.
Karina, Talia and Me at the Spring
We returned our child to her rightful parent as the sun began to set, and took a stroll out into the fields. There is no twilight here, there was light and then dark, thanks to the mountains. We completed half the phoenix dance, before a mysterious light came from the mountain and shone on us, scaring us out of the rice paddies. The light turned out to be a car coming to the village down the mountain. If a village person catches you and someone else “plowing some fields” if you will, SYA sends you back to Beijing, after you watch the ceremony to cleanse the spot. This ceremony involves hiring a shaman to slaughter a dog on the spot by slitting its throat, shaking it by its hind legs and using the blood that spills from it to wash away the evil. We were not caught, so somewhere in Dalidong, is a half evil field. My bad.
We had an eight hour bus ride the next day. Before leaving Dalidong, I looked out over one of the wind bridges and saw some peasants skinning and cleaning up 20-some chickens. Right down stream of that was a woman washing her clothes. The water gules and I still can’t believe that chicken blood is a good detergent. As we were leaving Dalidong, the Dong people sang their traditional good bye song. They then encouraged us to sing one of ours. We all looked at each other, and Bi Laoshi was like, Row Row Row Your Boat in three part harmony. Go. When we finished the Dong people clapped and asked what it meant. Bi Laoshi turned to them and said, “It means how much we’re going to miss you but we really have to be going… on a boat.” They all nodded and accepted his explanation and allowed us to leave the village. We got on the bus and Karina and I were watching Talia again. She sat on our laps for the entire eight hour bus ride. Karina’s legs fell asleep. The bus ride took longer than expected because there were landslides on the road. We waited for a construction crew to clear the landslide on the only road to or from the village. Luckily we weren’t under the rockslide when it happened. We arrived in the town of Leishan and Karina and I walked through a park and danced with old ladies in the park before heading back to the hotel room. We both went to my room, fell onto the bed next to each other, and I said, “Being a parent is tiresome,” before we fell asleep next to each other… only for Gavin to wake us up before curfew.
Gaoyan, Population: 900. Alcoholics:900
We woke up to get on a bus the next day, still caring for our “kid” before we began a three hour hike to Gaoyan. The opening ceremony there, welcoming us to the village consisted of making us drink Mijiu. This Mijiu was one thousand times stronger than the Mijiu at Dalidong and we could smell it from fifty feet away. I avoided the people pouring bowls of Mijiu down people’s throat. Throughout the whole village, everyone was trying to get us as hammered as we possibly could be. I didn’t drink any. I was living with Gavin, Erick and Jamie at this new village. Our host mother took us down the mountain and made us rotate a crop. Well it was starting to rotate a crop because she made us stop and send us back with the bits of vegetables that were left un-harvested.
Field work for the win
On the way up, the teachers stopped us and told us we had to go pick bracken with them. So we climbed the mountain behind the village and started picking this weedy vegetable from the path. A small dog we called “xiao fei” came along. We walked along cliff faces and all the way to the foot of another mountain on top of the mountain we had just climbed. Warren, Jamie, Erick and I decided to ditch the group and have a race to the top of the mountain. It was terraced, so Warren, Erick and I took one path and Jamie took another.
Racing to the top
We jumped and climbed up the 8 foot tall steps that were the terraces and made it to the top of the mountain. We waved at the teachers who had taken the four of us to go pick Bracken with them. We turned around on the top of this mountain and saw… another mountain. We decided to climb this one too. There was a path so we ran up to the top fairly quickly. Mr. Bissell gave us a call saying that it was going to get dark soon, so we should head back. Jamie and Erick wanted to go down the path that lead right to a road, and Warren and I wanted to jump down the 8 foot tall terraces down the mountain. So from the top of a mountain, we set off in two different directions. But Warren and I got tired of racing, especially after stumbling upon a mountaintop graveyard. We walked through and it admired the graves. Warren wanted to let Jamie and Erick win. Instead we were going to wait for the storm that was coming in over the mountain, as well as the fog that was nearing us, to reach us so we could race those back to the village. Much more adventuresome. So we sat on top of the mountain, already in the clouds. We wandered further into the graveyard when we found a giant stone tomb/mausoleum looking thing. Spider webs covered the entrance, and Warren and I picked up sticks and pretended we were warriors as we bashed the webs and spiders away. The entrance was open so we walked in, using our phones as flashlights. There was shattered pottery everywhere in there and in the very back of the tomb, were vents, with cold air coming through them and a low moaning noise coming from the other side. Warren got down on his hands and knees and started throwing away the smashed pottery and rocks and bones to try and find a way to get into the back of that tomb. We didn’t find anything, and walked out defeated, only to see the fog was rolling down the mountain side at a frightening pace. We began jumping down the terraces, going down eight feet every jump. We descended half the mountain in three minutes. The fog was coming at us like an avalanche of clouds, but we out ran it barely. We turned a corner and stepped into the last rays of sunlight. The fog couldn’t follow us here. We leisurely strolled down the rest of the mountain. Warren tossed his stick sword onto the road below, and we went to go retrieve it. When we were almost at his “weapon,” a car came from nowhere and was about to run it over when Warren ran and kicked the stick out of the way. I saw what was in the car though. It was full of people, their faces were smeared wine red, a woman looked dead in the car window, and they were driving towards the village. I was a bit creeped out by this but ignored it while we walked back to the village. When Warren and I arrived in the village, in the town center, the van was parked, the “dead” woman’s head lolled like a ragdolls from the window, red streaks running down her face and onto the white van. It was eerily like wine and blood mixed together. The wine faced men stumbled around the center like zombies. Warren and I were legitimately scared. Had we disturbed an ancient tomb and this was the punishment that was to be wrought upon us? It turns out… that the wine faced people are part of a tradition. When someone in the village wants to get married, the husband’s family kidnaps the wife and gets her super-trashed a few days before the wedding. We ran back to our host house, had an awful dinner and then danced with villagers in another town center. Afterwards I went to bed, sharing a bed with Jamie.
"Tomb" Warren and I found. Turns out to be a Giant Kiln
We got up to go farm in the fields but it was raining. Everything was glazed with a thin layer of water. We walked out to the town center overlooking the foot of the mountain, and a few other villages on the opposite mountain. We were told that we had the whole day to ourselves in the shittiest place on the planet. There is really no other word to describe that place. So Warren and I planned to have another adventure today, but we gathered a party of eight people including ourselves. Karina, Hannah, Annie, Claire, Erick, Chris, Warren and I decided to go down the mountain. We wanted to get to the crevasse between the mountains on either side of the river down there. So I led the group down the path I had gone down to farm, then further down and further still. Karina, Erick, Warren and I got split up from the others and went down the path first. We saw an incredible bridge down there. It looked like a giant arch, like something out of Lord of the Rings. We saw it and now had a plan to go and see it up close. The four of us reached the river and waded across the river and got to a small island in the middle of it, leaving most of our belongings and clothes on the other side of the bank. We chilled there and relaxed from the hike down as we waited for the others to catch up with us.
Relaxing the way I like to relax
We skipped stones and told stories at the bottom of two mountains. We were about to head back when we saw that the rains had made the river a bit more ferocious. The water level was up to our hips, and whirlpools had started forming. The river flowed into a giant cliff face and then turned left. We saw the water ramming against the cliff and then being sucked under it with a fairly decent sounding whooshing sound. There were caves that we could be sucked away into, that were under the mountain and we’d never be found. It made fording the river a bit more nerve-wrecking this time. If we slipped we were gone. Hannah became frightened and I had to drag her across. She slipped and fumbled over the smooth rocks that made up the riverbed. The lot of us made it across safely, no worries. I’m a lifeguard… wait expiration date passed. I was a lifeguard. We started walking along a small path next to the river that also ran alongside some fields. There were peasants working the fields and they said to us, “Turn back, the way you came won’t be usable if you wait too long.” We abandoned our hopes of finding the bridge and ran back to the path up the mountain, back to Gaoyan. The path that once was, was a giant mudslick, flowing down the mountain and making it impossible for us to go back up this way. We were now stuck at the bottom of the mountain with no known means to get back to the top. We walked back past the peasants and kept walking along the path between the river and terraced fields. We stopped at one point and looked at the dead end path before us. I looked up and saw there was a path along a cliff face 200 feet up. We walked back through the fields and asked the peasants how to get to the bridge. They pointed over the terraced fields, but there was no means to get up there, so Warren and I scouted and climbed over the fields trying to discover the path that leads to the bridge. I ran up, looking for the cliff path and found it. I jumped down and called the rest of the party over to the path. I scouted a bit further ahead. The path turned a corner and in front of us was a waterfall falling from the top of the mountain, partially hidden in the clouds, down to the river below. The river we had just come from. Warren got there first and scouted ahead while I waited for the rest of the group to reach the magnificent scene. The cliff path that I had scouted out and that Warren was currently scouting out was 200 feet over the river. It was shoulder width wide and slowly descended down to the river over a kilometer. I ran ahead to make sure Warren was alright. Karina and I picked up our pace and found him sitting on a rock in the middle of the river. I decided I was going to go wait on the rock with him for the rest of the people to join us. I put one foot on a stepping stone, then moved to the next one, and then to one more, when my foot started slipping. I had reached a small stone island, so I threw my other foot out to catch myself, but when it landed it started slipping too. I was about to do the splits on a small island in the middle of a river. Now what you don’t see is a giant arrowhead shaped rock between my spread eagling legs. For the sake of future generations of Weiser’s, I threw my right hand down between my legs and cushioned the blow with a sickening crack, and smashed my fingers along the sharp edge of the rock. Karina watched from the shore, and Warren carefully walked over to me and showed me where to step to get back to the shore. Once there I put my now baseball sized right hand in the ice-cold mountain river water and cringed as the pain shot through my bones. I pretended that nothing was wrong and once everyone else had caught up, we continued on.
If you see Warren, that's where my hand got smashed
We turned a corner and saw it. We saw the bridge; we began a mad dash along the narrow path until we stood before our destination. It was a giant slab of concrete. There was nothing special about it like we had seen from the path 2000 feet up. You couldn’t even get on the bridge. It was just an arch in the river. So Karina and Annie decided to wade across the ankle deep part of the river and ask the villagers on the other side of the river how to get back to Gaoyan. Karina and Annie had left the party. We saw it three mountaintops over. We had hiked quite the distance. They came back from the other side of the river with a distressed look on their face. This was Gaoyan. We had never left the village. A six hour hike down a mountain, up the side of one, sidling across cliff faces, wading rivers and we had not left the village. We sat down on the bank of the river and pulled out our lunch of bread. Chris and Karina noticed my hand and told me to put my hand back in the river, and then finished a water bottle and filled it with the cold river water as a makeshift icepack. I could barely hold the bottle, but I didn’t tell them. No need to worry them more. A farmer crossed the river from where Karina and Annie had just come from and we asked him if he could take us to Gaoyan. Coincidentally, he was going there himself, so we tagged along as he took the well-beaten path that we had overlooked. An hour and a half of hiking with him we were back in the main portion of Gaoyan.
The disappointing bridge
The party and our guide
We paid our guide 200 kuai, and only later on did we learn that the average yearly income of a Gaoyan resident is 250 kuai. That’s just over 35 US Dollars. And it’s not possible to farm their land any other way because you can’t get machinery down the mountain. You have to carry everything up and down the mountain each time you go to farm. The village is practically self-sufficient. Having nothing else to do in the village and being completely exhausted, I went and got a splint before heading back to the house and chilling with Jamie, Erick and Gavin. We were so bored that we made our own “Base” system. It’s perfect. But really there’s nothing to do in that village. No wonder everyone drinks themselves into a drunken stupor. Our host father walked in at dinner and looked at how little of the food we had eaten. It was just not delicious, or appealing to look at. He yelled at us, mixing together his local dialect with Mandarin, Japanese and a bit of Cantonese. “If you don’t eat your stinky chicken, you’ll never get tall… *hiccup*… well you guys are already tall, so how’d you do that? Your American parents spoil you. How can you not eat food, it’s unheard of. My son’s kids here eat all their stinky chicken yet they’re still small. This isn’t fair. *burp some vomit onto the floor* You folks are American Liushoushi right?” Now to take a moment aside, liushoushi has no meaning to any of us, nor does it mean anything to Chinese people. What he was trying to say was liuxuesheng, or exchange students. Liushoushi is something Gavin recognized from his background in Japanese… somehow. I really don’t know how. But I digress, we left the pot of chicken intestines and lungs and livers practically untouched. Lungs just aren’t that tasty. It was probably just how he prepared it though. I’ll have to try them again somewhere else. We just wanted to get out of that place. Gaoyan was miserable. Jamie and I went to bed to try and wake up a bit closer to leaving.
It thunder stormed the whole night long. Our door to our room flung open and closed itself multiple times in the middle of the night. We woke up to find out the path out that we were going to take was impossible for 56 people to maneuver. Another path out of the town was completely flooded, so the only one left was the road for cars… an 18 kilometer trek through mountains. They weren’t really roads, more of just one giant dirt path. I speed walked out of the place and it was brutal. Karina and I walked together until Gavin, Erick and I passed them and left Karina with Sophie and Julia. I had a reason for leaving them behind. I had to take a dump that I had saved for too long. Our host’s toilet had a hole for use that was the size of my fist. I don’t have that kind of accuracy when it comes to number two. So we found a nook and I grabbed some of Erick’s toilet paper and went down and went out in the great outdoors. Unfortunately, I planted myself on top of a jumping spiders nest. Not pretty. I wore my gym shorts that were serving as boxers for the rest of the hike through. It was ridiculously hot. Karina and I finished up the hike in 2 hours and 20 minutes exactly. We waited for 2 hours plus for the others to get to the buses. We took the bus back to Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou, and spent the night in a hotel there.
Getting the Hell out of Gaoyan
It was not a good night. I was up with diarrhea the whole night and was completely exhausted the next day. My stomach felt like I had swallowed a box of daggers. Realizing that I never wanted to come back to Guizhou, I wanted to see as much of Guiyang as I could, I fought off the pain in my stomach and went out with Karina, Chris and Claire to see the city. There wasn’t much. We wandered around and I tried to find a comfortable position to walk in but with little success. I had taken an Imodium the night before, but it was starting to wear off by the time we had gotten to the train station. We were finally leaving Guizhou and SYA was happy… I was too, just not to be on a train in my current condition. We were walking to the waiting area, when I felt my stomach roar in protest and I bolted down an aisle and kneeled down next to a small green trash can. I dry heaved, and all of SYA now knew I was sick. I got a bottom bunk on the train for the safety of the other 5 people in the bunk area. What I’ve learned to hate about trains is the fact that the only time the train isn’t moving is when it’s in the station, but that’s the only time the bathrooms are locked to the passengers. I really wonder who said let’s make it an adventure every time a passenger needs to use our squatty potty’s. It’s probably for security reasons, but to a sick student where every second on the run to the bathroom counts, it seems utterly ridiculous. Karina sat on my bed and took care of me, while Chris sat on the bottom bunk across from me and gave me his blanket to try and make me sweat it out. They brought back food for me, and I got other get well soon’s from people I least expected it from. Talia even stopped by for a bit to check in on her foster father. I fell asleep on the train after taking 12 or more trips to the worst experience in a bathroom I’ve ever had.
I woke up the next morning on the train feeling a thousand times better, partially because I was feeling better and mainly because I was way the hell away from Guizhou. Unfortunately whatever I had had spread. Now some people in the other car had it, and were ended up carted to a hospital. The rest of us were carted off to a cooking school where they taught us how to make Gongbao Jiding, or Kungpao Chicken, as well as a lima bean dish that was just so bad I forgot it. I was making the Gongbao Jiding pepper sauce and scratched my face. A pepper got in my eye and nose. Imagine the spiciest thing you’ve ever eaten. Now imagine that instead of that being on your tongue it was in your eye, and the heat from it rolled out over the rest of your face and burned your nose. Yes. That’s what it felt like. How do you get it out? I had to hold my eyelids open and let the fires burn until my eyes started tearing up and streaming down my face. I waited for ten minutes in sheer agony while the rest of my cooking team, (Warren, Maegan and Mike,) prepared our ingredients. Talia was with Karina during this cooking excursion. Chris, Claire, Karina and I went to Jingli Jie and explored the tourist-y part of Chengdu. It was the Houhai of Chengdu. We headed back to the hotel and chilled. I was still recovering from the sickness.
Sharing a smile at the cooking school
We went back to the cooking school the next day and made Yuxiang Rousi and Mapo Doufu. Both were delicious and afterwards we went and learned how to carve vegetables into things. Our skills were severely lacking. Erick, Chris, Claire, Karina and I went for Thai food for dinner. There was a Polynesian singing group that came to our table and pulled us up and made us dance while they sang. It was fun. Curfew came and we headed back to the hotel.
We went to the Black Bear Rescue Center the next day. This was where all the black bears rescued from bear farms went. Bear farms are places where Chinese bear farmers extract bile from bear’s gall bladders so the bile could be used in medicine. They try and save the bears and give them a relaxing life, after castrating the males. We wandered around the place, and then headed back to the hotel. On the bus ride back, Talia sat on our laps again. We said Mr. Morrison don’t you want to see your kid sometime on the trip? To which he responded, (jokingly I hope,) her real parents are the one’s she more emotionally attached to. Have fun, mom and dad. We told her that we were exhausted and let her follow her real father. After an unsuccessful nap, Karina and I went out to dinner with Ian and Warren. The four of us went back to Jingli Jie and Warren got a number or two before we went back to the hotel.
Our last day of the trip, Hannah, Erick, Chris, Claire, Karina and I all went out for breakfast before splitting up. Chris, Erick and I had guy time and they had girl time. We wandered and went into toy stores and electronics stores. They went to get a foot massage. We all met back up at the hotel and got on the bus and then the plane back to Beijing. It was nice to be going back home. It’s nice to get away… just not to Guizhou. When we got back, the fantastic snow was gone, and everything was green. We had a month and five days left… time to make the most of the time left.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
My Speech Festival Speech (and it's translation)
爱是什么？我常常跟我自己讨论这个问题。为什么这个抽象的概念对大部分的人有意义？大部分的人包括我，可是我还不太明白这个概念。我感觉我只要有爱情，我就会是一个开心的人。我真的不知道那个感觉从哪儿来，因为不是父母对孩子的爱，是一种让我要跟一个人共度一生的感情。有的时候我觉得我生活的目的是我得找到这个人。我得找到这个我爱的人。可是我的问题是如果没有一个很容易解释的定义，你怎么知道那种感情是爱？我搜索了很想找一个清楚的定义，可是找不到。只找到了很多人不同的看法。也许没有一个清楚的定义，是个人有个的解释。可是我觉得我自己的问题是我开始把中国和美国的对爱的看法混起来。现在我真的糊涂了。我还听了我的以前的女朋友对爱的定义。我想一想他们的话让我更糊涂了。任贤齐曾经说原来每个女孩都不简单。我完全同意。。。
自从我来中国以后，我发现了中国人和美国人对爱情的想法是大同小异。他们都有一个比较浪漫的角度。他们都希望一个完美的人要成为他们的伴侣。和我讨论爱的中国人说爱和工作差不多一样。如果你和谁结婚，一个爱人死的时候才是那个婚姻的结束。离婚是一个不能说的事情。你得坚持，反而美国人怕这个。他们怕失去他们的独立或者选一个不太好的爱人。美国人常常把欲望成为爱所以他们怕他们的爱不是真爱。我在中国的时候我也怕这个。可是我觉得我解决了我的问题。我要跟着我的心去做。我还不知道爱的真的定义，可是没办法。我要先找到爱情，然后给爱他的定义。可能已经发生了。
爱真奇怪。
(Note: this is really corny)
What is Love? I often contemplate the question with myself. Why does this abstract concept have meaning to the majority of people? Well... the majority of People includes me, but I still don't understand this concept. I feel that as long as I have love, I can be a happy person. I don't know where this feeling comes from, because it's not like parents towards their children, that type of love. It's a type of feeling that makes me want to spend my whole life with someone. Sometimes I feel that the purpose of my life is I have to find this person. I have to find this person I love. But I have one small problem, if "love" doesn't have an easy to explain definition, how do you know that feeling you're feeling is love? I searched intent on finding a clear definition, but I failed. All I found were different people's differing viewpoints. Perhaps "love" doesn't have a clear definition, maybe every person has their own explanation of this word, but I feel my problem is that I began to mix Chinese and American notions of love together. Now I'm really confused. I also have listened to previous girlfriends viewpoints on love. Their words made me even more confused. Richie Ren once said, "As it turns out, women aren't all that simple." I completely agree...
Since coming to China, I have discovered that Chinese people and Americans viewpoint on love is largely similar with small differences. They both have a relatively romantic point of view. They both wish a perfect person will become their companion or partner. Chinese people that have discussed "love" with me have said that love and work are more or less the same. If you get married to someone, the only way out is when someone dies. Divorce is something you can't talk about. You have to carry on, on the contrary though, Americans fear this. They fear carrying on, because they don't want to lose their independence or choose a not so good lover. Americans often take lust and think of it as love, so they're afraid that their love isn't really genuine love. When I came to China I was also this way, I feared this, but I feel like I've solved my problem. I'll follow my heart where it takes me and do what it tells me to. I still don't know the meaning of love, or how to define it, but it doesn't really matter. I plan on giving love it's definition after I've already found it. Who knows, maybe I've already found it.
Love is really strange.
自从我来中国以后，我发现了中国人和美国人对爱情的想法是大同小异。他们都有一个比较浪漫的角度。他们都希望一个完美的人要成为他们的伴侣。和我讨论爱的中国人说爱和工作差不多一样。如果你和谁结婚，一个爱人死的时候才是那个婚姻的结束。离婚是一个不能说的事情。你得坚持，反而美国人怕这个。他们怕失去他们的独立或者选一个不太好的爱人。美国人常常把欲望成为爱所以他们怕他们的爱不是真爱。我在中国的时候我也怕这个。可是我觉得我解决了我的问题。我要跟着我的心去做。我还不知道爱的真的定义，可是没办法。我要先找到爱情，然后给爱他的定义。可能已经发生了。
爱真奇怪。
(Note: this is really corny)
What is Love? I often contemplate the question with myself. Why does this abstract concept have meaning to the majority of people? Well... the majority of People includes me, but I still don't understand this concept. I feel that as long as I have love, I can be a happy person. I don't know where this feeling comes from, because it's not like parents towards their children, that type of love. It's a type of feeling that makes me want to spend my whole life with someone. Sometimes I feel that the purpose of my life is I have to find this person. I have to find this person I love. But I have one small problem, if "love" doesn't have an easy to explain definition, how do you know that feeling you're feeling is love? I searched intent on finding a clear definition, but I failed. All I found were different people's differing viewpoints. Perhaps "love" doesn't have a clear definition, maybe every person has their own explanation of this word, but I feel my problem is that I began to mix Chinese and American notions of love together. Now I'm really confused. I also have listened to previous girlfriends viewpoints on love. Their words made me even more confused. Richie Ren once said, "As it turns out, women aren't all that simple." I completely agree...
Since coming to China, I have discovered that Chinese people and Americans viewpoint on love is largely similar with small differences. They both have a relatively romantic point of view. They both wish a perfect person will become their companion or partner. Chinese people that have discussed "love" with me have said that love and work are more or less the same. If you get married to someone, the only way out is when someone dies. Divorce is something you can't talk about. You have to carry on, on the contrary though, Americans fear this. They fear carrying on, because they don't want to lose their independence or choose a not so good lover. Americans often take lust and think of it as love, so they're afraid that their love isn't really genuine love. When I came to China I was also this way, I feared this, but I feel like I've solved my problem. I'll follow my heart where it takes me and do what it tells me to. I still don't know the meaning of love, or how to define it, but it doesn't really matter. I plan on giving love it's definition after I've already found it. Who knows, maybe I've already found it.
Love is really strange.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Answers to Hanna
Well I was just recently asked some questions that apparently have been overlooked in my blog and I feel the need to answer some of them, just so you can get a better sense of what's going on back here. If you send me questions, I'll try and answer them, but for most you'll have to wait back home to hear responses on. Anyways, here goes answers to "Questions from Hanna."
What's your day like?
Everyday I wake up at 6:24, one minute before my alarm goes off, get up, and get ready for school, (which i assume was what you meant by my day like.) I get to school at 6:45 and study and or goof off until 8 when the teachers come into the classes and collect our homework before heading out again and coming back at 8:10 to start our first chinese class. This, for me, is with Li Laoshi. At 9 we have a ten minute break before continuing on with my favorite teachers class, Shen Laoshi. This is the second Chinese class of the day and at 10 it ends before we head out for a 25 minute break before starting our other classes. These classes include English, Free, History and Calculus. Mondays and Thursdays my free is a tutoring session with one of my Chinese teachers. I gossip with Shen Laoshi in Chinese for the whole time, while he teaches me the words I need to know to gossip correctly. Li Laoshi makes me read newspapers and blogs... with great difficulty. Chinese History Class is occasionally in Chinese, and it's an awesome course. We discuss every aspect of the history. We started fairly late on though, just because Chinese history is so vast. So far we've done from the Qing dynasty to now. English is a junior level english course so I zone out more often than I should, and Calculus is always fun. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, we have Chinese Society and Culture with Mr. Bissell (Bi Laoshi) and discuss the issues in China as well as other going ons. After his class on thursday I have Wushu, (martial arts,) where we've studied hand to hand combat, spears and swords. I'm becoming a regular martial artist... in my dreams. Weekends vary from week to week. Lately though, I've been spending a lot of time with Karina, though I always make time for one guys night out with Chris, Warren or Gavin. Answering this particular question has been particularly nostalgic, mainly because today marks the last day of classes... I'm on the verge of tears. I don't want it to end.
Do people treat you differently than they did at the beginning of the year?
Chinese people I assume? Yes. They are like wow your Chinese is good! and then we have a conversation, like people, instead of like an adult with a baby, me being the baby. In school? Yes, Shen Laoshi and I have become good friends, (we went to lunch together today,) and practically everyone in the school gets along with everyone else. It's like having one giant family that's endured and persevered through some of the most amazing experiences together.
Is cafeteria food just as sucky as it is here?
Yes... if not more so. Occasionally it's good, but I grow weary of the cafeteria food. So I go out 4 out of the 5 school days a week, either to Chengdu Meishi or Taiping Jiaozi Guanr.
What will I miss? Not miss?
What will I miss? I had to repeat that for emphasis... I will miss everything. There isn't one thing that I would change about this year. It has been perfect. It was the best experience of my life.
Anyways, I hope that clarified some of the things that I might've overlooked. If you have other questions just ask away.
Sterling
What's your day like?
Everyday I wake up at 6:24, one minute before my alarm goes off, get up, and get ready for school, (which i assume was what you meant by my day like.) I get to school at 6:45 and study and or goof off until 8 when the teachers come into the classes and collect our homework before heading out again and coming back at 8:10 to start our first chinese class. This, for me, is with Li Laoshi. At 9 we have a ten minute break before continuing on with my favorite teachers class, Shen Laoshi. This is the second Chinese class of the day and at 10 it ends before we head out for a 25 minute break before starting our other classes. These classes include English, Free, History and Calculus. Mondays and Thursdays my free is a tutoring session with one of my Chinese teachers. I gossip with Shen Laoshi in Chinese for the whole time, while he teaches me the words I need to know to gossip correctly. Li Laoshi makes me read newspapers and blogs... with great difficulty. Chinese History Class is occasionally in Chinese, and it's an awesome course. We discuss every aspect of the history. We started fairly late on though, just because Chinese history is so vast. So far we've done from the Qing dynasty to now. English is a junior level english course so I zone out more often than I should, and Calculus is always fun. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, we have Chinese Society and Culture with Mr. Bissell (Bi Laoshi) and discuss the issues in China as well as other going ons. After his class on thursday I have Wushu, (martial arts,) where we've studied hand to hand combat, spears and swords. I'm becoming a regular martial artist... in my dreams. Weekends vary from week to week. Lately though, I've been spending a lot of time with Karina, though I always make time for one guys night out with Chris, Warren or Gavin. Answering this particular question has been particularly nostalgic, mainly because today marks the last day of classes... I'm on the verge of tears. I don't want it to end.
Do people treat you differently than they did at the beginning of the year?
Chinese people I assume? Yes. They are like wow your Chinese is good! and then we have a conversation, like people, instead of like an adult with a baby, me being the baby. In school? Yes, Shen Laoshi and I have become good friends, (we went to lunch together today,) and practically everyone in the school gets along with everyone else. It's like having one giant family that's endured and persevered through some of the most amazing experiences together.
Is cafeteria food just as sucky as it is here?
Yes... if not more so. Occasionally it's good, but I grow weary of the cafeteria food. So I go out 4 out of the 5 school days a week, either to Chengdu Meishi or Taiping Jiaozi Guanr.
What will I miss? Not miss?
What will I miss? I had to repeat that for emphasis... I will miss everything. There isn't one thing that I would change about this year. It has been perfect. It was the best experience of my life.
Anyways, I hope that clarified some of the things that I might've overlooked. If you have other questions just ask away.
Sterling
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
5 Day Immersion (rough draft)
Shi Laoshi, Sam, Annie and I boarded the bus from Deshengmen to Yanqing. There was hardly any space left, and we got the last four seats in the very back corner. The bus roared to life and an incessant, high pitched humming sound came from behind my head, and then we began to go. Our immersion had officially begun. The English we had forsaken earlier that day was just getting us ready for the tremendous journey ahead. I finished my English homework reading and began to read 神奇宝贝, which is Pokemon in Chinese. The landscape changed drastically over the hour and a half we rode, from a cityscape to the great wall winding its way over treacherous mountains, to our destination, surrounded on all sides by mountains. The biggest one looked like a knife stabbed at an angle into the ground. The lot of us got off the bus and hailed a cab to take us to the school, arriving at 3. It was a large building on the outside of the gates, and as we pulled up, every window in the main building was filled with students waving at us and shouting, 哈罗. “HAAA-LUOOOOO!” We waved back at them and felt their overflowing warmth as we walked into the campus and our jaws dropped. The campus was enormous. It had buildings as far as the eye could see, with sports courts jumbled between them, hallways under stadium seating for the track field and bikes parked neatly in corners. We dropped off our stuff in the dormitories before they split us up and put us in our separate classes. I was gaoyi shiyi ban. I walked in and they made me introduce myself before picking a lottery number, number 7, and kicking out the corresponding person from her desk. I was now sitting in the very front right of the class room. Classes continued from when I entered at 3:30 all the way until 5, when we got out for an hour and a half dinner break. One of the kids pulled my arms and said, “Run.” I didn’t ask questions, I just hopped over my desk and ran out the door after him. We bolted down the flight of stairs and out the side door of the school building when he led me through a shortcut in the track fields. While we were running, we saw some other people coming up quickly behind us and through the gates that surround the field, we saw people running wildly, like an entire army of undead were at their heels. A minute and a half of a flat out sprint later we arrived at the cafeteria, with hardly any line for the food. My new friend, Li Yan, bought me my lunch and we sat down in the back of the cafeteria. His friends soon followed. The food was pretty decent, and the kids all asked me questions, that look like a blur when I think back on them. We finished up our meal and then they took me to play ping pong. I wasn’t too good and they all demolished me. Sam came over to another table and played, though unlike me, he’s good, and held his own against the Chinese kids. We all returned to class at 7:30 and then they had to do a self study until nine. I was beat by the end of it and when the bell rang, three of my classmates said they were my roommates and we went back to the dorm. It was cold in there. I chatted with them and then went to bed.
The alarms went off at 5:47, and I remained huddled under the blankets, as cold as the frigid air outside. It was nothing like the warm weather of Beijing I had just left. I got out of bed and threw on my uniform jacket, which was the only thing that I took off. It just served as a protective layer against dirt. Three of my 5 roommates got up and went to have lunch in the cafeteria again. We ate baozi and soup, both of which warmed me up. The soup felt like drinking liquid vitality. We went back to the dorm and woke up the other two before heading to the classroom across campus and sitting down in our seats to start class at 7. The classes varied and my comprehension of the topics did too. At 10 the bell rang and we all went outside to line up, we then ran in lines, in perfect unison, each step matched every other classmates step, until we got to our designated place in the field. We started the calisthenics by massaging ourselves. First our ears, then our temples, then our head and last our neck. They believe that doing this makes their heads clearer and that will help them test better. We then moved onto a dancing routine, and while we danced we heard the shouts of the gaoers from a different stadium and I could only imagine what they were doing behind those walls. Afterwards, most of the classes returned to their classrooms except mine and a couple others. We were having gym class and I went and played basketball with the kids. I actually did something and people wanted to have me on their team. Classes dragged on after gym class repeating the routine above, with a lunch break scheduled in from 12 to 1ish. I played ping pong again during the dinner break and I felt that I was getting better. Self study went on for a while and I felt extremely cold. We went back to the dorm and even the blanket was cold.
I woke up on my third day of the immersion feeling like I would rather die than get out of bed, but I didn’t want to waste my precious time immersed in the school system. So I went to class, head throbbing, mind fuzzy and for some reason understanding everything that the teachers were saying. But I didn’t care what they were saying, I was cold. It was unlike any cold I’ve ever felt in my life. I clawed for warmth within the threads of my clothes, hunching over and answering when called on. We had morning exercises and with each step I took, my head felt like exploding. My body ached and at the end of the exercises they made us run back to the school. We got in and sat back down in our seats when the loudspeakers blared, “You didn’t run perfectly enough, do it again.” We went back outside and did the whole thing over again, but stopped in front of the school where they made us stand in the sun, for which I was grateful, and gave us a speech. We went back to the classroom again, and had chemistry. The teacher put chalk against the warped inward, green chalkboard and asked me if I remembered any of it. I shook my head and eagerly awaited the lunch bell to go and get something warm to drink. I wasn’t even hungry. I drank two hot chocolates when I went to lunch. Each sip felt like warmth was flowing through my veins. It was the best hot chocolate I have ever had. I drank it and I didn’t feel as bad as I did before and some of the kids took me to a museum, the Yanqing Museum. I asked my friend Yali how he felt about Mao and he said he was 80% good 20% bad. That was a bit of a deviation from the norm. Yanqing had felt the wrath of the War of Resistance against the Japanese back in the day, and there were many exhibits about it. I suddenly lost my second wind from the hot chocolate and went back to the classroom where I passed out on my desk and slept until someone woke me saying English was starting. The teacher had me read a passage aloud, but my voice was in pain. And I should’ve known something was up for my voice had surpassed the deepness of James Earl Jones. When I finished the page long passage, the entire class stood up and applauded. My sick voice was music to their ears, and music class was next. I was getting ready to go to class when one of my classmates pulled me aside and said, you’re going to the nurse. I just stumbled to the office with him and they took my temperature. It was 39 degrees. And I began to wonder if that was high or not. Apparently that is very high. They wanted to take me to the hospital, but a call to Bi Laoshi convinced them that I should just go to the dormitory and rest. They gave me lots of bitter Chinese medicine, and I went to my bunk and slept. The person in charge of Judelou dormitory came in and covered me up with more blankets and brought hot water, and a canteen filled with hot water. He told me to drink it, but I just put it under the blankets and let the heat radiate out and get trapped under them. I went to sleep. Darkness, then I’d open my eyes and I’d see the same guy walk in and say, drink more hot water, before fading back into darkness. I came to again and the room was completely in twilight. I shuffled to the restroom and back, which was one of the most painful walks of my life. My entire body ached. Every single part. I went back to sleep and my roommates came back looking at me, and caring for me, tucking me in and making me more of the Chinese medicine. I told them I could do it, but they wouldn’t let me. I went back to sleep with my whole body in pain, dreaming of what comes with banana milkshakes.
I had gotten nearly 15 hours of sleep when I awoke on Saturday morning, ready to head back to the classrooms for a half day of classes. Luckily my class only had self study and I could relax and take it easy from the day before. I had brought a copy of Brisingr with me and started reading that to kill the time until we had to leave. By the time the clock struck 11 I was willing to go and destroy Montana for ever having encouraged this man to write such a waste of my time. Yali took me back to his village. We got on a bus and rode until we were in the middle of nowhere. The only thing was this road and in both directions you could see nothing. This was where we got off and began walking through the fields on the side. Barren apricot trees were planted as far as the eye could see. No tree donned even a single leaf. We kept walking until we hit a bunch of new looking houses with an ancient looking one here and there. I was welcomed into the village of 东红寺.We went to his house where I met his mother. They lived in a courtyard house and it was completely barren on the inside. They had a guard dog chained up in the garden in the center. He barked at us and I felt bad for the emaciated shepherd. We walked around the village and talked with his grandparents on both sides. They told me haunting stories of the War of Resistance against Japan. They told me how the bombs had rained down from the sky and killed their friends and destroyed their houses, they told how they ran into the fields and hid among those very same apricot trees I had walked through to get here, and how the Japanese invaded a nearby village and many of their friends were raped and murdered brutally. This is why there were some ancient buildings littered among the newer ones. Those were all that had survived. The Japanese didn’t even bother coming into the village, according to Yali’s mom’s side grandma, because it was already gone. Laolao, was upset and the memories brought tears to her eyes, and even the man imitating a dolphin on the TV couldn’t lift her spirits. I don’t do her stories justice; I can’t possibly with how little time I spent with her. There were other villagers, but I didn’t ask them about the war, they were only interested in me. We saw the water tower, which used pressure to push all the water into the pipes, before walking to the ruins of a temple and played ping pong outside of it. We headed back to his house and his dog, huzi, barked excitedly at us before we started playing Chinese computer games, and he told me the problem with school text books only being used once. The inside of his house was the exact same temperature as the outside of the house so I went to bed in everything I had. It was a meager 10 degrees outside.
I woke up the next morning to a draft from the window and the wind beating against the window pane. I looked outside and it was snowing. We hung out indoors for the whole time, and I watched huzi outside, shivering in the snow. He was trying to huddle in the lone blanket that he had, but it was already frozen stiff and against the ground. He took shelter under a piece of firewood hanging out from over the pile. We walked back to the bus station. The snow covering Yali’s black hair, and made him look as if he aged thirty years. I felt the snow, whipping around wildly, get stuck in my 5 day beard. There was already an inch and a half and it hadn’t been snowing for long. We walked back through the apricot trees, and I imagined what it must have been like, running through these trees away from everything you ever had or knew as well as away from death. We waited at the bus stop for about ten minutes. It felt odd, two others came up too, a deaf, mute married Chinese couple. What an odd lot as the bus pulled up, two Chinese adults signing to each other, one white person wearing a Chinese high school uniform and a high school student. We got on the bus and were off. The way back looked completely different covered in snow. The buildings wavy roofs now looked as if the waves were breaking. The snow kept falling and it felt like a blizzard. We got out at the bus stop and headed to the school, where they showed me where they were raising deadly scorpions in their dorm, and then a friend’s house. We chilled there, in the warmth of his apartment, before he gave me a gift that was a Scrabble-like Chinese game. It is a blast, and soon after we departed for lunch and then met up at the Bus station with Sam. We had not been able to get a hold of Annie so the two of us hopped on the direct bus back to Beijing and talked about our adventures, before getting sucked into some homework that we had put off. The bus went back through the change in landscape, from snowy mountains, to mountains, to cityscape. Beijing was still cold, but there was no snow. Chris was waiting at school for me, and when I got there, I ended my language pledge and spoke English for the first time in 5 days. I had a lot to say.
The alarms went off at 5:47, and I remained huddled under the blankets, as cold as the frigid air outside. It was nothing like the warm weather of Beijing I had just left. I got out of bed and threw on my uniform jacket, which was the only thing that I took off. It just served as a protective layer against dirt. Three of my 5 roommates got up and went to have lunch in the cafeteria again. We ate baozi and soup, both of which warmed me up. The soup felt like drinking liquid vitality. We went back to the dorm and woke up the other two before heading to the classroom across campus and sitting down in our seats to start class at 7. The classes varied and my comprehension of the topics did too. At 10 the bell rang and we all went outside to line up, we then ran in lines, in perfect unison, each step matched every other classmates step, until we got to our designated place in the field. We started the calisthenics by massaging ourselves. First our ears, then our temples, then our head and last our neck. They believe that doing this makes their heads clearer and that will help them test better. We then moved onto a dancing routine, and while we danced we heard the shouts of the gaoers from a different stadium and I could only imagine what they were doing behind those walls. Afterwards, most of the classes returned to their classrooms except mine and a couple others. We were having gym class and I went and played basketball with the kids. I actually did something and people wanted to have me on their team. Classes dragged on after gym class repeating the routine above, with a lunch break scheduled in from 12 to 1ish. I played ping pong again during the dinner break and I felt that I was getting better. Self study went on for a while and I felt extremely cold. We went back to the dorm and even the blanket was cold.
I woke up on my third day of the immersion feeling like I would rather die than get out of bed, but I didn’t want to waste my precious time immersed in the school system. So I went to class, head throbbing, mind fuzzy and for some reason understanding everything that the teachers were saying. But I didn’t care what they were saying, I was cold. It was unlike any cold I’ve ever felt in my life. I clawed for warmth within the threads of my clothes, hunching over and answering when called on. We had morning exercises and with each step I took, my head felt like exploding. My body ached and at the end of the exercises they made us run back to the school. We got in and sat back down in our seats when the loudspeakers blared, “You didn’t run perfectly enough, do it again.” We went back outside and did the whole thing over again, but stopped in front of the school where they made us stand in the sun, for which I was grateful, and gave us a speech. We went back to the classroom again, and had chemistry. The teacher put chalk against the warped inward, green chalkboard and asked me if I remembered any of it. I shook my head and eagerly awaited the lunch bell to go and get something warm to drink. I wasn’t even hungry. I drank two hot chocolates when I went to lunch. Each sip felt like warmth was flowing through my veins. It was the best hot chocolate I have ever had. I drank it and I didn’t feel as bad as I did before and some of the kids took me to a museum, the Yanqing Museum. I asked my friend Yali how he felt about Mao and he said he was 80% good 20% bad. That was a bit of a deviation from the norm. Yanqing had felt the wrath of the War of Resistance against the Japanese back in the day, and there were many exhibits about it. I suddenly lost my second wind from the hot chocolate and went back to the classroom where I passed out on my desk and slept until someone woke me saying English was starting. The teacher had me read a passage aloud, but my voice was in pain. And I should’ve known something was up for my voice had surpassed the deepness of James Earl Jones. When I finished the page long passage, the entire class stood up and applauded. My sick voice was music to their ears, and music class was next. I was getting ready to go to class when one of my classmates pulled me aside and said, you’re going to the nurse. I just stumbled to the office with him and they took my temperature. It was 39 degrees. And I began to wonder if that was high or not. Apparently that is very high. They wanted to take me to the hospital, but a call to Bi Laoshi convinced them that I should just go to the dormitory and rest. They gave me lots of bitter Chinese medicine, and I went to my bunk and slept. The person in charge of Judelou dormitory came in and covered me up with more blankets and brought hot water, and a canteen filled with hot water. He told me to drink it, but I just put it under the blankets and let the heat radiate out and get trapped under them. I went to sleep. Darkness, then I’d open my eyes and I’d see the same guy walk in and say, drink more hot water, before fading back into darkness. I came to again and the room was completely in twilight. I shuffled to the restroom and back, which was one of the most painful walks of my life. My entire body ached. Every single part. I went back to sleep and my roommates came back looking at me, and caring for me, tucking me in and making me more of the Chinese medicine. I told them I could do it, but they wouldn’t let me. I went back to sleep with my whole body in pain, dreaming of what comes with banana milkshakes.
I had gotten nearly 15 hours of sleep when I awoke on Saturday morning, ready to head back to the classrooms for a half day of classes. Luckily my class only had self study and I could relax and take it easy from the day before. I had brought a copy of Brisingr with me and started reading that to kill the time until we had to leave. By the time the clock struck 11 I was willing to go and destroy Montana for ever having encouraged this man to write such a waste of my time. Yali took me back to his village. We got on a bus and rode until we were in the middle of nowhere. The only thing was this road and in both directions you could see nothing. This was where we got off and began walking through the fields on the side. Barren apricot trees were planted as far as the eye could see. No tree donned even a single leaf. We kept walking until we hit a bunch of new looking houses with an ancient looking one here and there. I was welcomed into the village of 东红寺.We went to his house where I met his mother. They lived in a courtyard house and it was completely barren on the inside. They had a guard dog chained up in the garden in the center. He barked at us and I felt bad for the emaciated shepherd. We walked around the village and talked with his grandparents on both sides. They told me haunting stories of the War of Resistance against Japan. They told me how the bombs had rained down from the sky and killed their friends and destroyed their houses, they told how they ran into the fields and hid among those very same apricot trees I had walked through to get here, and how the Japanese invaded a nearby village and many of their friends were raped and murdered brutally. This is why there were some ancient buildings littered among the newer ones. Those were all that had survived. The Japanese didn’t even bother coming into the village, according to Yali’s mom’s side grandma, because it was already gone. Laolao, was upset and the memories brought tears to her eyes, and even the man imitating a dolphin on the TV couldn’t lift her spirits. I don’t do her stories justice; I can’t possibly with how little time I spent with her. There were other villagers, but I didn’t ask them about the war, they were only interested in me. We saw the water tower, which used pressure to push all the water into the pipes, before walking to the ruins of a temple and played ping pong outside of it. We headed back to his house and his dog, huzi, barked excitedly at us before we started playing Chinese computer games, and he told me the problem with school text books only being used once. The inside of his house was the exact same temperature as the outside of the house so I went to bed in everything I had. It was a meager 10 degrees outside.
I woke up the next morning to a draft from the window and the wind beating against the window pane. I looked outside and it was snowing. We hung out indoors for the whole time, and I watched huzi outside, shivering in the snow. He was trying to huddle in the lone blanket that he had, but it was already frozen stiff and against the ground. He took shelter under a piece of firewood hanging out from over the pile. We walked back to the bus station. The snow covering Yali’s black hair, and made him look as if he aged thirty years. I felt the snow, whipping around wildly, get stuck in my 5 day beard. There was already an inch and a half and it hadn’t been snowing for long. We walked back through the apricot trees, and I imagined what it must have been like, running through these trees away from everything you ever had or knew as well as away from death. We waited at the bus stop for about ten minutes. It felt odd, two others came up too, a deaf, mute married Chinese couple. What an odd lot as the bus pulled up, two Chinese adults signing to each other, one white person wearing a Chinese high school uniform and a high school student. We got on the bus and were off. The way back looked completely different covered in snow. The buildings wavy roofs now looked as if the waves were breaking. The snow kept falling and it felt like a blizzard. We got out at the bus stop and headed to the school, where they showed me where they were raising deadly scorpions in their dorm, and then a friend’s house. We chilled there, in the warmth of his apartment, before he gave me a gift that was a Scrabble-like Chinese game. It is a blast, and soon after we departed for lunch and then met up at the Bus station with Sam. We had not been able to get a hold of Annie so the two of us hopped on the direct bus back to Beijing and talked about our adventures, before getting sucked into some homework that we had put off. The bus went back through the change in landscape, from snowy mountains, to mountains, to cityscape. Beijing was still cold, but there was no snow. Chris was waiting at school for me, and when I got there, I ended my language pledge and spoke English for the first time in 5 days. I had a lot to say.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Update: Bye for a week
As you probably didn’t know, I applied to the 五日浸泡, or the five day immersion program, on the last possible day I could, (mainly because I’m too lazy for my own good.) I just received my response and it said, “Congratulations! The faculty has reviewed your application for 五日浸泡 and agreed that you would be an excellent representative of SYA at the Yanging Number One High School.
You will be participating in this activity on the following dates:
Wed, March 25-Sun, March 29
Details will follow.”
At first I was extremely happy, still am, but I soon realized that I have no time to celebrate my birthday. I’ll be gone the whole weekend before and after. No worries though, I just consider the immersion my birthday gift. Well that and going out for banana milkshakes afterschool on Tuesday. Homemade ice cream and hand crushed bananas in one glass. Best beverage on the face of the planet in everyone’s opinion who has tried it. Anyways, that will be my excuse for my lack of returning e-mails for the next week. There’s more to come on my immersion in the near future, seven days to be exact. I used to joke about having to make time for people in my schedule and look at all the stuff written on the back of my hand then say, I’m free. Now I legitimately don’t have time with a clock ticking until I 恋恋不舍地离开中国.
The wrong guy, the wrong situation, the right time to roll to me.
You will be participating in this activity on the following dates:
Wed, March 25-Sun, March 29
Details will follow.”
At first I was extremely happy, still am, but I soon realized that I have no time to celebrate my birthday. I’ll be gone the whole weekend before and after. No worries though, I just consider the immersion my birthday gift. Well that and going out for banana milkshakes afterschool on Tuesday. Homemade ice cream and hand crushed bananas in one glass. Best beverage on the face of the planet in everyone’s opinion who has tried it. Anyways, that will be my excuse for my lack of returning e-mails for the next week. There’s more to come on my immersion in the near future, seven days to be exact. I used to joke about having to make time for people in my schedule and look at all the stuff written on the back of my hand then say, I’m free. Now I legitimately don’t have time with a clock ticking until I 恋恋不舍地离开中国.
The wrong guy, the wrong situation, the right time to roll to me.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
So... when did you do homework?
Three trips to Qianmen, one to Xiushui Jie, one five hour bike ride, one visit from old teachers and classmates, one rescheduling, one breakup, two cheer up session, one scolding, one presentation, one count of trying to use a hotels pool, one awkward escape, one victorious round of milkshakes, one trip to a temple, one account of a temple being a house, another count of said house of having extremely friendly residents, two tests, three quizzes, one time sitting out in the middle of Beihai lake on a paddle boat, just the two of us, one time at a Xinjiang restaurant, one showing of Pulp Fiction and one day of rest wasted on homework. That was my week.
Ok… I think that might be the back cover to a short story. Unfortunately, this is nowhere near as interesting… to you. So I’ll only address a few of the things mentioned above.
I walked into school and checked my email, finding one from my school’s tour guide; they were inviting me to go with them to the Gugong… in twenty minutes. I politely declined and went on with my day. I scheduled a dinner date over working on the Yearbook with Lauren for Tuesday, so we could work, talk and spend time with each other before she went on the five day immersion into a high school on the outskirts of Beijing. I was in high spirits despite the Chinese test and got home when my phone received a text in the kind of English that when you see, you know isn’t from an American. It was inviting me to go to Tiananmen tomorrow and then dinner. I responded in Chinese that I couldn’t go to Tiananmen. The response back was extremely happy that she could now use Chinese, and invited me to dinner. As if some sort of suppressed loyalty arose from the depths of my soul, I said yes. My heart was torn now between my school and my “interest.” I cursed the timing of the whole situation as my pendulous brain swung back and forth between Lauren and school, school and Lauren, but there was nothing to do but to forsake dinner. I went to sleep upset. We had a quiz and then I bolted early during a free period to go and meet my teachers and classmates at Qianmen. They told me to go to Tiananmen riding bus 22 but I rode the subway and got off at Tiananmen and they were actually at Qianmen which was a bit aggravating because I could’ve just rode to Qianmen, but I digress, I got lost and found my way eventually. Ran into Matt, Kevin, Mrs. Weelinberg, (sorry if I butchered that,) and Mr. Costello, and they asked me questions and such and I had an answer for everything. It felt like I hadn’t really learned as much as I could have before talking with them and then I realized that living here has been like a stream of knowledge flowing to my brain without me knowing it. They weren’t taking me to dinner right away and we went to Xiushui Jie, Silk Street and the guide taught the kids how to bargain. I didn’t mean to scoff at the advice but I had my own methods. I walked through there with Matt and bargained for him, and talked in general with the people in the stalls. I ran into one that remembered me from the last time and wanted to say hi to my dad. According to Matt I sounded fluent, but I felt nowhere near it. There’s so much more to the language. Afterwards we went to dinner and I talked some more. I felt bad for not letting others talk as much and I saw some of the girls on the trip look at me like they hated me. Of course I probably looked at them like they were babied princesses. But I digress, I left at eight with one hour left before curfew. I got up to leave and so did everyone else. I was a bit quicker getting out the door than everyone else and I was in a cab and on my way home as they all exited. I imagined it like a movie, sort of like how batman disappears on a moment’s notice. I went home, beaming at the improvement of my Chinese… comparatively.
The next day was even more of a sauna than before. Gavin began spreading his own secret around. I’ve promised him I won’t tell anyone. I said goodbye to Lauren and Jamie as they went to immerse themselves and then went with Ian and Annie to go finish our project on Qianmen. We rode our bikes from school to Qianmen. It was simply suffocating. Not only have I not visited a gym in about 3 months, my bike doesn’t go very fast. It hits its top speed at the time where everyone else is just casually gliding along. We arrived and went into the Hutong’s and found places forgotten by the map. An ancient 5-star Brewery, old famous musicians houses, the China Club Beijing, as well as finding places being torn down and rebuilt, both of which I went over and helped do. From shoveling torn down bricks for a 60 year old migrant worker and almost using the saw for rebuilding the ancient style hutongs, I did it all. We talked with them about how they felt about tearing down the history and they said as long as they get paid it doesn’t matter. Most of the migrant workers were from Hebei province. I went into a courtyard home with Ian and talked with the lady there. She was 83 years old, originally from Hebei, but couldn't lose her accent over the forty years she's lived in her house. She also had bound feet that she tried to hide in shoes that were too big for her. She was extremely nice and enjoyed talking with us, inviting us back whenever we wanted to drop by.
Ian got pulled into an art gallery and we ended up going with the owner to find an apartment to rent for his parents. The place was not suitable for parents and we left. I threw together the PowerPoint and went to sleep after being on the road biking for five hours.
Our presentation apparently went well and a bit too long. Had another quiz. I went home with no plans for the first time all week, and ended up talking with Chris about girls. He was not sure about what to do with his relationship issue. It felt like it was slowly dying, and that wasn’t good for him. So we came to the conclusion it should end. For both their sakes. That only took two hours of discussion. Tomorrow looked like it was going to be a tad messy.
I had another test, and was officially done with my Chinese midterms. Also had a math quiz. After school Chris did it. Breaking up is never pleasant. She walked away before he had a chance to explain why and he walked over to me and looked a tad upset saying I’m single. I told him we’re not going to let his mind dwell on the breakup and try and get his mind off of it, so Ian, Warren and I were going to take him out. We were about to head out when Dan walked up the stairs asking Chris if everything was alright because he saw Sophie crying. So far we were off to a bad start. But we went back to Chris’ place and made videos to cheer him up, and then Ian decided we were going to go swimming… at the Hyatt… in Wangfujing. The pool was amazing according to him. So we got all our stuff, our suits, towels and shoved them into our bags as we walked out of the house into the unfathomable haze of Beijing. We stood there feeling like this could be the start of a movie and or TV show. Oceans 4 or maybe 3 ½ Honkies. But we got in a cab and arrived in Wangfujing. We wandered around trying to find the hotel and we did. It was high class. The four of us walked in, single file carrying our bags over our shoulders and descended to the mall underneath the hotel to plan out our mission. The whole place was marbled with fountains and it began to make me feel a bit nervous. We found a deserted elevator landing and hit the down button to get to “the oasis.” We stepped out of the elevator and saw a counter manned by two clerks and we tried walking into the pool when they stopped us. “What is your room number?” Ian spat out 713, and they started checking it while Chris and I snuck back to the elevators and hit the up button and watched the numbers go down slowly, like a will o’ the wisp leading us to our death as the clerks began to question Ian. They began to get suspicious when the doors opened and Chris and I bolted in, the doors closed and we were about to head up when the elevator stopped and the doors opened on the same floor. Our hearts were in our throats. It was only Ian and Warren being pissed off at us for bolting at the first sign of trouble. The guards at the doors we came in were looking at us and talking on a walkie talkie so we went out a different exit into the crowds of Wangfujing. We ended up going to the giant bookstore and buying some books. Warren left and the remaining three of us went to Grandma’s Kitchen and got milkshakes and lemonade… which don’t mix too well, but were both delicious. We left the restaurant at 10:20 and realized that we had forty minutes to get home before curfew. We ran back to the populated section of Wangfujing and tried to hail a cab, but none of them would stop. We ran to the regent hotel and I asked if they could help me get a cab, but the employees told me that they all went home. So it was now 10:40 and we began to run home, when we found the mysterious line 5 subway line, hopped on, got off at Jishuitan and hired a xiao che with five minutes left. We told him to stop in front of the school because he was driving too slowly. We got out and ran with one minute to spare home. We ran into our compound and split, running up separate staircases making it home as the clock turned 11. This was our second time we almost didn’t make curfew by a minute.
Saturday had finally rolled around and I invited Karina to go out. We had plans to go to Beihai. We hopped on a bus and rode to Qianmen. We walked through Tiananmen and through the western exterior of Tiananmen along the lakes and through some hutongs. We saw an interesting looking temple and went inside. It was beautiful, then we heard the sound of voices chattering and it turned out it was a house. We talked with them about the place, their past, how it was turned from the temple of thunder into a house after liberation, etc. Some Taiwanese people came in who were exploring the neighborhood and explained to us that they were looking for all the eight temples around Tiananmen and that this was one of them. We had stumbled into the ancient thunder temple. Our hosts invited us inside their designated room and we talked and sat and it was just incredible. Try and find an ancient thunder temple in Cleveland. Good luck. This is why I love China. We exited after they invited us to come back another time. Karina and I continued to wander around until we got to Beihai. We walked into the park and saw a man doing water calligraphy on the ground. I asked him if I could give it a shot and I wrote my name in water on the ground. It turned out pretty well and drew a crowd. The two of us left after impressing them with our Chinese and went to rent a boat. We got on our little paddle boat and began to pedal away into the middle of Beihai. The two of us just enjoyed ourselves as we sat in the middle of the lake in the Forbidden City. These are the kinds of things that I wish I could do back home. Chinese people stared at us but we’d just address them and ask them how their day was, and they’d just smile and row away. We tried heading back to the dock, but our boat was broken and no matter how fast we pedaled, it wouldn’t go any faster. All the drifting we did made us pedal forever to get back. Her legs got tired and I trudged away at it for ages. The two of us walked out of the boat barely able to walk. Chris texted and the two of us agreed we should try and cheer him up, (just in case he was feeling down,) so we invited him to come to dinner with us at a Xinjiang restaurant. We feasted on an assortment of foods, all delicious. When we finished up, we walked to a subway that was at least a mile away and chatted the whole time. “It’s days like these that make me want to stay here forever,” were the parting words from Karina as we went our separate ways that evening. I went home and watched Pulp Fiction, and tried to console Sophie over the whole ordeal. They’re both my friends. I went to sleep to wake up in front of a mound of homework.
Chris and I went for a walk the next day and discussed girls, and the problems that are going to arise among our friends from this weekend.
I was nothing but a lonely boy, looking for something new…
Ok… I think that might be the back cover to a short story. Unfortunately, this is nowhere near as interesting… to you. So I’ll only address a few of the things mentioned above.
I walked into school and checked my email, finding one from my school’s tour guide; they were inviting me to go with them to the Gugong… in twenty minutes. I politely declined and went on with my day. I scheduled a dinner date over working on the Yearbook with Lauren for Tuesday, so we could work, talk and spend time with each other before she went on the five day immersion into a high school on the outskirts of Beijing. I was in high spirits despite the Chinese test and got home when my phone received a text in the kind of English that when you see, you know isn’t from an American. It was inviting me to go to Tiananmen tomorrow and then dinner. I responded in Chinese that I couldn’t go to Tiananmen. The response back was extremely happy that she could now use Chinese, and invited me to dinner. As if some sort of suppressed loyalty arose from the depths of my soul, I said yes. My heart was torn now between my school and my “interest.” I cursed the timing of the whole situation as my pendulous brain swung back and forth between Lauren and school, school and Lauren, but there was nothing to do but to forsake dinner. I went to sleep upset. We had a quiz and then I bolted early during a free period to go and meet my teachers and classmates at Qianmen. They told me to go to Tiananmen riding bus 22 but I rode the subway and got off at Tiananmen and they were actually at Qianmen which was a bit aggravating because I could’ve just rode to Qianmen, but I digress, I got lost and found my way eventually. Ran into Matt, Kevin, Mrs. Weelinberg, (sorry if I butchered that,) and Mr. Costello, and they asked me questions and such and I had an answer for everything. It felt like I hadn’t really learned as much as I could have before talking with them and then I realized that living here has been like a stream of knowledge flowing to my brain without me knowing it. They weren’t taking me to dinner right away and we went to Xiushui Jie, Silk Street and the guide taught the kids how to bargain. I didn’t mean to scoff at the advice but I had my own methods. I walked through there with Matt and bargained for him, and talked in general with the people in the stalls. I ran into one that remembered me from the last time and wanted to say hi to my dad. According to Matt I sounded fluent, but I felt nowhere near it. There’s so much more to the language. Afterwards we went to dinner and I talked some more. I felt bad for not letting others talk as much and I saw some of the girls on the trip look at me like they hated me. Of course I probably looked at them like they were babied princesses. But I digress, I left at eight with one hour left before curfew. I got up to leave and so did everyone else. I was a bit quicker getting out the door than everyone else and I was in a cab and on my way home as they all exited. I imagined it like a movie, sort of like how batman disappears on a moment’s notice. I went home, beaming at the improvement of my Chinese… comparatively.
The next day was even more of a sauna than before. Gavin began spreading his own secret around. I’ve promised him I won’t tell anyone. I said goodbye to Lauren and Jamie as they went to immerse themselves and then went with Ian and Annie to go finish our project on Qianmen. We rode our bikes from school to Qianmen. It was simply suffocating. Not only have I not visited a gym in about 3 months, my bike doesn’t go very fast. It hits its top speed at the time where everyone else is just casually gliding along. We arrived and went into the Hutong’s and found places forgotten by the map. An ancient 5-star Brewery, old famous musicians houses, the China Club Beijing, as well as finding places being torn down and rebuilt, both of which I went over and helped do. From shoveling torn down bricks for a 60 year old migrant worker and almost using the saw for rebuilding the ancient style hutongs, I did it all. We talked with them about how they felt about tearing down the history and they said as long as they get paid it doesn’t matter. Most of the migrant workers were from Hebei province. I went into a courtyard home with Ian and talked with the lady there. She was 83 years old, originally from Hebei, but couldn't lose her accent over the forty years she's lived in her house. She also had bound feet that she tried to hide in shoes that were too big for her. She was extremely nice and enjoyed talking with us, inviting us back whenever we wanted to drop by.
Ian got pulled into an art gallery and we ended up going with the owner to find an apartment to rent for his parents. The place was not suitable for parents and we left. I threw together the PowerPoint and went to sleep after being on the road biking for five hours.
Our presentation apparently went well and a bit too long. Had another quiz. I went home with no plans for the first time all week, and ended up talking with Chris about girls. He was not sure about what to do with his relationship issue. It felt like it was slowly dying, and that wasn’t good for him. So we came to the conclusion it should end. For both their sakes. That only took two hours of discussion. Tomorrow looked like it was going to be a tad messy.
I had another test, and was officially done with my Chinese midterms. Also had a math quiz. After school Chris did it. Breaking up is never pleasant. She walked away before he had a chance to explain why and he walked over to me and looked a tad upset saying I’m single. I told him we’re not going to let his mind dwell on the breakup and try and get his mind off of it, so Ian, Warren and I were going to take him out. We were about to head out when Dan walked up the stairs asking Chris if everything was alright because he saw Sophie crying. So far we were off to a bad start. But we went back to Chris’ place and made videos to cheer him up, and then Ian decided we were going to go swimming… at the Hyatt… in Wangfujing. The pool was amazing according to him. So we got all our stuff, our suits, towels and shoved them into our bags as we walked out of the house into the unfathomable haze of Beijing. We stood there feeling like this could be the start of a movie and or TV show. Oceans 4 or maybe 3 ½ Honkies. But we got in a cab and arrived in Wangfujing. We wandered around trying to find the hotel and we did. It was high class. The four of us walked in, single file carrying our bags over our shoulders and descended to the mall underneath the hotel to plan out our mission. The whole place was marbled with fountains and it began to make me feel a bit nervous. We found a deserted elevator landing and hit the down button to get to “the oasis.” We stepped out of the elevator and saw a counter manned by two clerks and we tried walking into the pool when they stopped us. “What is your room number?” Ian spat out 713, and they started checking it while Chris and I snuck back to the elevators and hit the up button and watched the numbers go down slowly, like a will o’ the wisp leading us to our death as the clerks began to question Ian. They began to get suspicious when the doors opened and Chris and I bolted in, the doors closed and we were about to head up when the elevator stopped and the doors opened on the same floor. Our hearts were in our throats. It was only Ian and Warren being pissed off at us for bolting at the first sign of trouble. The guards at the doors we came in were looking at us and talking on a walkie talkie so we went out a different exit into the crowds of Wangfujing. We ended up going to the giant bookstore and buying some books. Warren left and the remaining three of us went to Grandma’s Kitchen and got milkshakes and lemonade… which don’t mix too well, but were both delicious. We left the restaurant at 10:20 and realized that we had forty minutes to get home before curfew. We ran back to the populated section of Wangfujing and tried to hail a cab, but none of them would stop. We ran to the regent hotel and I asked if they could help me get a cab, but the employees told me that they all went home. So it was now 10:40 and we began to run home, when we found the mysterious line 5 subway line, hopped on, got off at Jishuitan and hired a xiao che with five minutes left. We told him to stop in front of the school because he was driving too slowly. We got out and ran with one minute to spare home. We ran into our compound and split, running up separate staircases making it home as the clock turned 11. This was our second time we almost didn’t make curfew by a minute.
Saturday had finally rolled around and I invited Karina to go out. We had plans to go to Beihai. We hopped on a bus and rode to Qianmen. We walked through Tiananmen and through the western exterior of Tiananmen along the lakes and through some hutongs. We saw an interesting looking temple and went inside. It was beautiful, then we heard the sound of voices chattering and it turned out it was a house. We talked with them about the place, their past, how it was turned from the temple of thunder into a house after liberation, etc. Some Taiwanese people came in who were exploring the neighborhood and explained to us that they were looking for all the eight temples around Tiananmen and that this was one of them. We had stumbled into the ancient thunder temple. Our hosts invited us inside their designated room and we talked and sat and it was just incredible. Try and find an ancient thunder temple in Cleveland. Good luck. This is why I love China. We exited after they invited us to come back another time. Karina and I continued to wander around until we got to Beihai. We walked into the park and saw a man doing water calligraphy on the ground. I asked him if I could give it a shot and I wrote my name in water on the ground. It turned out pretty well and drew a crowd. The two of us left after impressing them with our Chinese and went to rent a boat. We got on our little paddle boat and began to pedal away into the middle of Beihai. The two of us just enjoyed ourselves as we sat in the middle of the lake in the Forbidden City. These are the kinds of things that I wish I could do back home. Chinese people stared at us but we’d just address them and ask them how their day was, and they’d just smile and row away. We tried heading back to the dock, but our boat was broken and no matter how fast we pedaled, it wouldn’t go any faster. All the drifting we did made us pedal forever to get back. Her legs got tired and I trudged away at it for ages. The two of us walked out of the boat barely able to walk. Chris texted and the two of us agreed we should try and cheer him up, (just in case he was feeling down,) so we invited him to come to dinner with us at a Xinjiang restaurant. We feasted on an assortment of foods, all delicious. When we finished up, we walked to a subway that was at least a mile away and chatted the whole time. “It’s days like these that make me want to stay here forever,” were the parting words from Karina as we went our separate ways that evening. I went home and watched Pulp Fiction, and tried to console Sophie over the whole ordeal. They’re both my friends. I went to sleep to wake up in front of a mound of homework.
Chris and I went for a walk the next day and discussed girls, and the problems that are going to arise among our friends from this weekend.
I was nothing but a lonely boy, looking for something new…
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Bland News from a Passive Agressive Observer
I walked up the white stairs, marked up with the black skid marks that shoes and bike tires leave, smelling an aroma that made my mouth water. It had just rained and the sky was clearer than I had seen it since the last time it rained in Beijing… which was my third day in Beijing. The sky was blue, the air felt clean and redolent with fallen rain, mixing with the smells of every apartment cooking food. It all smelled delicious. I walked up the stairs to my house, slowly for once, instead of bounding up the five flights of stairs. My teachers told me that this was the start of spring. The temperatures were going to rise after this rain they said, and the temperatures did. From 20 degrees up to 50’s and 60’s. The weather is getting gradually better.
I had a history paper due recently. It was a travel writing piece of at least seven pages long and had to have at least three sources. So I looked up Yunnan Gaokao on Google… and found my blog. It was a bit of a surprise to say the least. I guess I have to thank you all for making me so popular. Of course I didn’t use myself as a source, but one of my friends did. Bai Laoshi probably won’t like that.
Homesickness sucks, for lack of a better word. Ever since my parents gave Ba, Peter and me a tour of the house via Skype I became a bit nostalgic as I normally do. I used sheer willpower to overcome it. “You stop being homesick right now. Heeeeey… HEY! NO! Alright? Good, go back to work.” I’ve found it a lot easier to ignore mental unrest for some reason. Maybe because I don’t want to end up wasting the precious little time I have left here by being miserable. That’s a good attitude for life in general in my opinion.
Lately a restaurant I frequent has begun to recognize me. I come in and sit down and the cute Sichuan waitress asks me, “The usual?” which is something I only thought happened in movies, plays and the fifties. But it makes me feel a part of a community. Bi Laoshi, (Mr. Bissell,) says that today’s China reminds him of when he was growing up in America. To which I said the 80’s? And my classmates said you have brown on your nose. But if I had to describe what Beijing’s like in a sentence, it’d be, “It’s like living in the TV shows and movies about the fifties and sixties.” Of course I never lived then, but it always felt like an ideal time in my mind because everyone was friendly. I don’t know how else to explain it.
Chris, Warren and I have started a game to test a theory I’ve heard from both my dad and Rand. If you ask ten girls out, at least one of them will say yes. So far the game’s going well though. Also, a side note to that, do not ask for girl’s numbers at McDonalds… it’s kinda tasteless. Long story… Not the time for it, but let’s just say it made the three of us reconsider speaking English openly.
Shen Laoshi has kicked up the pace on our studies. We’ve had 45+ words a night for the past week just from his Chinese class. Li Laoshi has only been giving us 25ish and we’re ever so thankful for her leniency. But I love that we’re moving at this pace, it feels like we’re making the most of the time we have left, plus all the grammar we’re learning has been filling in the empty voids in conversations I’ve had in the past, and I slowly am understanding what people said months ago. I feel a bit like Jason Bourne in that respect.
I just felt like updating you all with a little lighthearted news from around here in a sort of… non-sequitor format.
You’ve got no time to lose. You are young men, you must be living.
I had a history paper due recently. It was a travel writing piece of at least seven pages long and had to have at least three sources. So I looked up Yunnan Gaokao on Google… and found my blog. It was a bit of a surprise to say the least. I guess I have to thank you all for making me so popular. Of course I didn’t use myself as a source, but one of my friends did. Bai Laoshi probably won’t like that.
Homesickness sucks, for lack of a better word. Ever since my parents gave Ba, Peter and me a tour of the house via Skype I became a bit nostalgic as I normally do. I used sheer willpower to overcome it. “You stop being homesick right now. Heeeeey… HEY! NO! Alright? Good, go back to work.” I’ve found it a lot easier to ignore mental unrest for some reason. Maybe because I don’t want to end up wasting the precious little time I have left here by being miserable. That’s a good attitude for life in general in my opinion.
Lately a restaurant I frequent has begun to recognize me. I come in and sit down and the cute Sichuan waitress asks me, “The usual?” which is something I only thought happened in movies, plays and the fifties. But it makes me feel a part of a community. Bi Laoshi, (Mr. Bissell,) says that today’s China reminds him of when he was growing up in America. To which I said the 80’s? And my classmates said you have brown on your nose. But if I had to describe what Beijing’s like in a sentence, it’d be, “It’s like living in the TV shows and movies about the fifties and sixties.” Of course I never lived then, but it always felt like an ideal time in my mind because everyone was friendly. I don’t know how else to explain it.
Chris, Warren and I have started a game to test a theory I’ve heard from both my dad and Rand. If you ask ten girls out, at least one of them will say yes. So far the game’s going well though. Also, a side note to that, do not ask for girl’s numbers at McDonalds… it’s kinda tasteless. Long story… Not the time for it, but let’s just say it made the three of us reconsider speaking English openly.
Shen Laoshi has kicked up the pace on our studies. We’ve had 45+ words a night for the past week just from his Chinese class. Li Laoshi has only been giving us 25ish and we’re ever so thankful for her leniency. But I love that we’re moving at this pace, it feels like we’re making the most of the time we have left, plus all the grammar we’re learning has been filling in the empty voids in conversations I’ve had in the past, and I slowly am understanding what people said months ago. I feel a bit like Jason Bourne in that respect.
I just felt like updating you all with a little lighthearted news from around here in a sort of… non-sequitor format.
You’ve got no time to lose. You are young men, you must be living.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Dinner Pains and Some News
There was no taste. There was even a delay before it hit me, then there just was fire. My whole body was in pain from what I just ate. It was flames running up and down my whole body, in my veins, in my face, burning my tongue, tensing up my chest to the point of almost pain. It was the most incredible wasabi rush I’ve ever had in my life… and it wasn’t even wasabi. Tears were rolling down my cheeks and I reached for another bite. It was a good pain. Dinner was nice.
Life has been good around here lately. Nothing exceptional, really. Everything here feels almost exactly the same as before except for one thing. It was off and until now I didn’t realize what it was. Cabs. They’re everywhere. China has been experiencing a recession. For two straight quarters their growth rate has been around six percent, down from the ten to twelve percent it’s been at for the past so many years, which is nowhere near where it has to be to sustain a comfortable life style. Many people have taken to the cabs to make a buck. I was able to hail a cab on the outskirts of Beijing at 10:43 at night without waiting. That means the yearbook meetings can continue to run late. The pressure of that’s beginning to get to me… *sigh* but it’s on its way. With the start of a recession on the horizon in China, China is extremely tense, but to make for a more… stressful political atmosphere, this year is the anniversary of many important events within the past one hundred years. There’s the first year anniversary of last year’s Tibetan protests about the Olympics. There’s the twenty year anniversary of 六四, or the Tiananmen Square incident. There’s the fifty year anniversary of the Dalai Lama fleeing to India and starting his government in exile. And lastly there’s the ninety year anniversary of 五四，more commonly known as the May 4th movement, which was an iconoclastic movement to get rid of the old way of thought and replace it with a newer one. The intellectuals of China were upset with the Treaty of Versailles giving western colonies to Japan. But anyways, with all these anniversaries lining up on the same year, the Chinese government is very rigid, ready to crackdown if necessary. But don’t worry, the trip to Xizang, (Tibet,) has been changed. Foreigners aren’t even allowed into Tibet at the moment. Consideration for entry starts April 1st. So Gansu is looking more and more likely for the April trip.
Just some news for you this time.
Clinging to not getting sentimental
Life has been good around here lately. Nothing exceptional, really. Everything here feels almost exactly the same as before except for one thing. It was off and until now I didn’t realize what it was. Cabs. They’re everywhere. China has been experiencing a recession. For two straight quarters their growth rate has been around six percent, down from the ten to twelve percent it’s been at for the past so many years, which is nowhere near where it has to be to sustain a comfortable life style. Many people have taken to the cabs to make a buck. I was able to hail a cab on the outskirts of Beijing at 10:43 at night without waiting. That means the yearbook meetings can continue to run late. The pressure of that’s beginning to get to me… *sigh* but it’s on its way. With the start of a recession on the horizon in China, China is extremely tense, but to make for a more… stressful political atmosphere, this year is the anniversary of many important events within the past one hundred years. There’s the first year anniversary of last year’s Tibetan protests about the Olympics. There’s the twenty year anniversary of 六四, or the Tiananmen Square incident. There’s the fifty year anniversary of the Dalai Lama fleeing to India and starting his government in exile. And lastly there’s the ninety year anniversary of 五四，more commonly known as the May 4th movement, which was an iconoclastic movement to get rid of the old way of thought and replace it with a newer one. The intellectuals of China were upset with the Treaty of Versailles giving western colonies to Japan. But anyways, with all these anniversaries lining up on the same year, the Chinese government is very rigid, ready to crackdown if necessary. But don’t worry, the trip to Xizang, (Tibet,) has been changed. Foreigners aren’t even allowed into Tibet at the moment. Consideration for entry starts April 1st. So Gansu is looking more and more likely for the April trip.
Just some news for you this time.
Clinging to not getting sentimental
Saturday, February 21, 2009
From My Seat in the Sky Overlooking Southwestern China
I never imagined that I would see it as such a luxury. I guess I always knew it was, but this time I flew on a plane it was incredible. I had a seat, I had room, and that seemed like I had it all. The three hour flight flew by, and soon we arrived in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. Coming from -5 degrees Fahrenheit in Liaoning to mid-eighties in Yunnan felt wonderful, and to top it off the entire city was incredibly modern. It reminded me of a Beijing that had no pollution, had palm trees, and was not a hassle to walk around. Warren, Gavin and I walked around the city the first night, exploring the darkened allies, trying to find some street food, but instead found a couple walking a Great Pyrenees. Definitely the largest dog I’ve seen in all of China. It reminded me of home, and I played with the dog, getting a bout of temporary nostalgia, before walking on, out of that ally and wandering into a chain restaurant, serving one of the specialties of the south, mi xian, or rice lines, a kind of noodle. My bowl ended up having pig ear’s, baby octopi, uncooked eggs, solidified pig’s blood and other, unidentifiable objects. Warren, Gavin and my bowl all smelled different, mine smelled like wet dog, and tasted that way too, but for some reason was delicious. And pig ears are actually pretty good, but not good for your hearing like some people claimed. We walked back to the hotel and the city was alive with lights. It was beautiful. And we’d only been in the town for three hours.
Our first assignment was a scavenger hunt in the city. The goal was to go to a scenery spot and interview a person about the spot. Warren, Gavin and I went out again, with no intention of using public transportation. We walked out of the hotel and used the small map that was in our books, but ended up trying to walk through the side roads to find places. We stumbled across a Buddhist temple and went in. It was built in the center of a man made pond. There was construction going on inside the temple to refurbish the place. I decided to get my interview out of the way and stopped an old man, spinning his prayer beads through his hands. He told me about the renovations that were going on in the temple. They had just added a whole grove of trees; they were renovating places that had fallen into disarray as well as repainting the place to make it new again. The old man took an interest in me for being able to speak to him, but quickly reverted back to praying and I walked out of the temple and we walked on, trying to find more and more scenery spots, so we could take the whole city in on our last day in Kunming. We wandered through parks, went to the zoo, ran into friends at the zoo, stopped by a local amusement park and went window shopping. We ended up walking off the map of the city. Warren and Gavin ended up leaving and I went out with Chris and Sophie for not local food. I had my fill of it the night before. I have to say, that was the best pizza I’ve had in ages. It’s no Geraci’s, but still. I loaned Gavin my cell phone and room key, so when we got back to the hotel, I had no means of getting in. I wandered out to a park outside of the hotel and sat and looked up at the stars, wearing shorts, and feeling as if this was the beginning of a great trip.
I was awoken in the middle of the night, 1:30, by a call on my phone. My body was so tired from having walked the whole day, and I answered it yawning, not quite awake, “Wei?”
“Your father’s in the hospital! Your father’s in the hospital! He’s having a quadruple by-pass!”
My mind was awake now. I jolted off the pillow, and threw my legs off the bed and into the cold to get me up. “Wha…? Mom?” I gave him a call because he wasn’t having it yet, and I don’t know what I’d do without him. He told me not to worry, and when it the call ended, I just laid awake the whole night, staring at the white ceiling, thinking faster than I’ve ever thought before about what to do, but with nothing I could do. I rolled out of the bed with heavy eyelids and got on the bus for six hours before arriving in Mushan. No, it’s not the one from Mulan. It’s a small village in the middle of their fields. The roads are uneven cobblestones; the houses look like they’re adobe or something along that style. The entire population is 933 people. Most of these people have just started practicing Mandarin, so the older people don’t know it. We got off the bus to be greeted by two lines of women dragon dancing, which is a traditional dance of the Yi people. In China, there are 56 different minorities, other than the Han people, and Yunnan is the most ethnically diverse place in China with upwards of 40 different minorities living there. But back to the dragon dance, the Yi women wore traditional garb and carried sticks attached to a dragon. They waved it back and forth so that the puppet looked like it was alive, and then the lot of us walked between the two rows as the ladies began their high pitched singing. We went to the basketball courts in front of the town square and were divvied up into our host houses. The mayor of the town called a meeting together and we all went. The village is in an autonomous prefecture that allows the people to keep their culture without being forced to assimilate. Another benefit of the autonomous prefecture is that if you’re a farmer, then you don’t have to pay taxes. In the whole town, only three to six people go to college a year. One year there was seven and they were extremely proud of that. But if you go to college, then the town, their home, has nothing to offer them anymore and they don’t return. I played catch with some of the kids in the village, and they began to like me and a couple others, whereas one kid lit a ball of paper on fire and threw it at Ben. We had a basketball game with some of the kids, and I was able to dunk on the hoops. I felt like a superstar, even if I was still really bad. When the evening came around, we had a performance of dragon dancing and singing. It was nearly two and a half hours long, but they let us go up and participate in their ancestral rituals. I danced with the women in front of the whole town. And then in the middle of the performance, the announcer said, “Now it’s time for a song from our American friends.” Apparently Bi Laoshi signed us up to sing, and by us, I mean the Song Dynasty. Chris looked horrified, I was surprised and Gavin was rearing and ready to go. We got up on the stage, and officially went on tour. Beijing, Mushan, where next? We were awful, but the people in the village loved it. They cried for an encore, but we were saving our repertoire for more events. The night got cold and I wasn’t wearing enough, so I went back to the house cold, where our host poured Gavin and me boiling water to stick our feet in. He was a coal department worker in Hunan, but I didn’t retain much of our meeting because my brain was running overtime and I went to sleep.
We said good bye to our host family, had a breakfast of untoasted toast and got on the bus to eat at a Muslim restaurant, before moving on to Tuanshan, a well preserved village, and we wandered around there for a while. Nothing happened, except for a crazy lady, tried to feed us and hug us. It was a bit sad. She crushed an orange slice on Li Laoshi’s cheek before he ran off and she chased him. We got on the bus and arrived in Jianshui. It was a small big city. I could walk everywhere within ten to twenty minutes. Palm trees lined the roads, and traditional Chinese architecture was scattered throughout the rising modern parts of the city. We didn’t have much time to explore because of the time we arrived there, so I went to bed early to prepare for the next scavenger hunt.
Today was one of the best days of the trip, perhaps in my life. I got with my scavenger hunt group and headed out early. Ian, Maegan, Annie and I were out to find everything. We started off at the Confucian Temple where we interviewed old, middle aged, and young people to see how they felt Confucianism affects their lives today. Most of the people spoke with such an accent, that it was barely intelligible, but we managed. They all had the same views, but the older they got, the more in-depth they got with their point. Confucianism played a role in instilling manners in the people and getting rid of the chaos that comes without the basic foundations of the belief. The belief resides in everyone according to the interviewed people. But we soon left the temple and I realized how beautiful the town is. The climate makes it feel like the city moved into the jungle. The scavenger hunt ended and I went and sunbathed out at the park in front of the Confucius temple. Around three in the afternoon, I got more invitations to go have dinner, than ever before. From SYA kids, to random people off the street saying I was a shaui ge. But I had promised Warren to go to dinner with him and a family he befriended. We walked to the train tracks and met the family, a twenty something year old man, an extremely large headed kid, the man’s girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s brother. They walked us back to the main road and we got in a taxi. The taxi stopped in front of a restaurant and Warren and I started heading in when our host grabbed our arms and pointed to an enormous building across the way. There were stairs going up to the entrance, and people lining the sides of the stairs. At the top were a bride and a groom. Warren and I looked at each other dumbstruck. They were taking us to a wedding… We walked up the stairs and wished the couple a happy marriage, before we were led into a room that had one thousand plus people in it; I was the only white person in there. Well, I was more red from getting burnt, but people began to notice. Our host sat us down at a table and we ate. We feasted. There was a performance going on at the front. I watched and ate with Warren. One of our hosts left, but we kept eating. Then from the stage in front of the thousand people, the announcer said, “And now a speech from our American friends.” Warren and I looked around to try and find the other Americans. How come we hadn’t noticed them before? And then came the sinking feeling in my gut… we were their American friends. My host came and dragged us to the stage. And there we stood, next to the bride and groom and in front of 1000 faces all looking intently at the people in front of them. My mind was blank, what should I do? Warren looked at me like you’re Chinese is better. And I thought of something. Wedding Crashers. It was worth a shot. The people then tried to make us sing a song. We then wished them a happy marriage and hugged the bride and groom. We walked off the stage and everyone left. We were the closing ceremony on their wedding. My heart was beating harder and faster than ever, everything felt like it was slowed down. Our hosts led us out and wanted to continue partying with us, so they hailed a cab and drove us to a KTV. Karaoke sounds like it’d be fun. Our host invited his friends over and then tried to match us with a girl from his friend group. They rented a room at the KTV and then placed a box of beer in front of us. The girls got excited and wanted us to sing an American song while they got more and more wasted. Unfortunately this KTV only had Britney Spears songs and Puff the Magic Dragon sung by an Asian man in a cowboy hat. Warren and I sung Puff the Magic Dragon and then sat down, each of us sandwiched by two girls, who were getting more and more handsy with every glass. I endured terrible singing, while they started a drinking game and tried to get us to play. I told them that our beliefs didn’t permit us to drink. We were Muslim. They tried to tell us that our mosque, was all the way in America and we were all the way in Yunnan, China. I somehow got one of the girls fawning over me to take the hits for me and Warren did the same for him. Zhang Lian was taking the hits for me and laughing and getting progressively closer to me; her hand moving slowly up my thigh, and then my phone rang. “Wei?”
“Hi, it’s mom.” I stood up and left the room. Zhang Lian pouted, lost and took another shot.
“How’s dad?”
“He’s fine.” My mind was put at ease and we talked briefly before I went back to the room. One person had started smoking and blew his smoke carelessly. I sat down trying to avoid it but to no avail. Zhang Lian smiled upon my return, and the girl on my other side spilled her drink on me and now I reeked of alcohol and cigarettes. If the teachers smelled this at the meeting tonight they’d be quite pissed. We went back to the game, until we had to get back to the hotel so we could get rid of the smell before the meeting. We managed to get it off and the meeting went off without a hitch, but remember kids, don’t drink and smoke. Bed was a treat after such a long day.
I woke up early and Warren dragged me back to see the family at the train tracks. We sat around their house, they had a German Sheppard on their roof that barked at us as we walked the through their courtyard. We sat around and discussed meaningless things with the family, until they dragged us to go get our pictures taken in front of one of the city gates. There were old people playing chess, some taking a stroll with their caged birds, (遛鸟,) others practiced Taijiquan and more just watched the whole scene. It was an ordeal to get the pictures taken, and we got back to the hotel in time to board the bus for a five hour long bus ride on winding roads overlooking thousand feet drops on a poorly paved road. It felt like the bus could roll off the side any second and we’d tumble to our deaths. I fell asleep, and awoke to a bump that threw me off of sleeping on Warren. The driver liked to pass people on the road that was barely two lanes and you couldn’t see more than 100 feet in front of you because of the curves. It was only a bit nerve wrecking. But the whole ordeal made me wonder who would make a road through this part of China. We got to the town on the top of a mountain, Yuanyang, which is the county seat. And here we stood on top of a mountain, in a town in the middle of what seemed like nowhere, overlooking the start of terraced rice fields. But there was absolutely nothing to do in the town so Warren, Jamie, Gavin, Chris, Nick and I went to a computer bar and played Chinese video games, or games in Chinese. But for some reason the games didn’t do it for me, not even Resident Evil 4 and I left early and went to bed.
I woke up to a world shrouded in mist. This was a mist unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. You couldn’t see anything past ten feet in front of you. And then we boarded a bus to drive us to the start of our hike to Shengcun. We began our hike through the terraced fields and we couldn’t even see the terraced fields. They were all in fog. The hike was mainly white, with trees around the path, and occasionally a break in the fog that showed the fields below, and it looked like Minas Tierith from Lord of the Rings. We stopped for lunch around noon and then the fog blew away. But it didn’t dissipate, it just moved. It was a white wall that just blew around and obscured certain parts of the mountains. And I got my first view of the terraced fields. It was incredible. The people fill each tier with water so that the mud walls don’t break, and all the water acted as a mirror that made the whole world look like sky below us and sky above us, with clouds swirling around us. The wind changed and the white wall of fog came back and enveloped us, but passed again. It did this for a while before we finished lunch and continued on the hike. We walked through small villages situated between the fields. One of them had a wailing man’s voice erupt from everywhere. I asked a person what the reason for the wailing was. They said a person had died and the mourning family had hired him to wail for days. The hike dragged on and the sun beat down hard. I walked on carrying the medicine bag for SYA and my shirts, all three that I had put on that morning. The tops of the mountains gave views unlike anything I’ve ever seen. We finally arrived in Shengcun and waited till the next day to see the market.
The room I was sleeping in was on the top floor of the hotel. The sixth floor had an open roof, so the hallway was actually the roof, which made it easy to stargaze at night, but even easier for the fog to get into the rooms. I wandered the market with Warren and saw a butchered dog. I never felt guiltier for liking something. Dog is delicious. The market was interesting, quite the array of people. But we soon left to hike to a perfect position to watch one of the most beautiful sunsets ever. We hiked through mountains, and whenever I get out in the middle of the wilderness, I feel so in touch with myself. We got to the place we were hiking to as the sun was making its descent across the sky. The places name was Laohuzui, or the Tiger’s Mouth. It was along a road and tripods had claimed all the spots along the edge except one. I got to it and shared it with Lauren. The sun fell from behind the clouds, I began hearing Here Comes the Sun, playing in my head and the sunset had begun. Below us were thousands upon thousands of these terraced fields that reflected the sunlight back up at us, slowly becoming the colors of a perfect sunset. There were practically two sunsets, one from the ground and one from the sky. The ground one looked like a puzzle though, because of the lines from the terraces. It fell behind the mountains and it was beautiful. It looked like a god was dying. I can’t think of any other way to say it than that. The very end of the sunset was anti-climactic, as was anything that happened with Lauren that night. We got to the town of Laomeng in darkness. Guys were in one hotel and girls were in the other. The guy’s hotel turned out to be a sex hotel. I’d feel bad if it was hourly. The walls were stained with who knows what, the floor was sticky, the wall had a naked poster on it, and in the drawers were anquantao’s at five kuai a pop, if you catch my drift. The back of the door had a sign in Chinese saying, “Practice Safe Sex, Don’t Catch Aids. Enjoy Your Stay.” I went to Warren’s room and Ian, Warren’s roommate, had a black light for some reason. After that, I decided this was going to be the first night in four years not to do my push-ups. I went to bed, trying to make as little contact with the bed as possible.
I got up early and explored the town’s market. The market’s we’ve visited and were going to visit happen every so often, according to the lunar calendar. We were lucky that they were all occurring when they did, so that we could see all of them. Back to the market. The people were dressed in their minorities’ traditional garb. I didn’t buy anything, but as I was walking back to the hotel I saw an accident. A child wandered in front of a motorcycle and the motorcycle toppled on top of the kid as the driver tried to avoid her. Before I could go over to help, an entire crowd of people swarmed the scene and was helping the scene. I couldn’t even get close. The child was alright, just scraped up, and bruised. The scene left me stunned. We were ushered onto a bus shortly after and drove for thirteen hours to our destination of Yuanjiang. I was beginning to get a bit sick and went to sleep right away.
We drove for six more hours the next day before arriving in Jinghong. Jinghong is the capital of the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, which is in the extreme southwest corner of Yunnan, sharing a border with Myanmar and Laos. The Mekong River runs through Xishuangbanna and is used as a means to trade with the south. But I find the most interesting thing about the place is the battle for its name. It outbid other places to call itself Shangri-La. I have been to Shangri-La and it was perfect. The climate is mid eighties to nineties all the time. Warren and I went and walked around. Li Laoshi told us that the Dai people, one of the many minorities of China, are extremely beautiful. We agreed with him. The two of us ate at a Thai restaurant before going out and continuing our exploration of the city.
The next day we got on rafts and started down the Mekong River. Our rafts looked like two long cylindrical balloons strapped together with an engine behind it. We began to go down the river; our driver looked like an ex-Vietcong member who turned to helping tourists raft down the river. He had a big straw hat on his head, dressed in a loose vest and had a lit cigarette that I wondered how it stayed lit the whole time. While we were cruising down, one guy going the opposite direction used a bowl and splashed me with water. Our driver smiled, missing a few teeth, and handed me a bowl. Get the next guy. This was my mission. I drenched another boat with SYA kids. Thus the battle of the Mekong began. The drivers, steered wherever I pointed and I would scream out lines from war movies and fighting movies, before the driver would T-Bone another raft and we’d use the bowls on ours to make everyone soaking wet. The other boats had bowls too, and the battle raged on. The teachers made us dock on a deserted beach and give them all the bowls. Bi Laoshi then started a competition for skipping stones. He was incredible at it, and so were a few other kids in SYA. They could get thirty plus skips. I got fifteen once, but that was a complete fluke. You could only get in the competition if you could get ten plus skips whenever you wanted. I went back to the rafts and let the sun warm me up. I took off my shirt and we got back on the rafts, as we headed into periodic patches of white water. The driver then motioned to us and grinned as he pulled out more bowls. Not anymore. We were dry. We landed at a small patch of dirt and headed off to a small village called Manling, famous for producing all of China’s most beautiful women. All the buildings were built on stilts. The under portion of the houses were meant to keep the livestock tied up, and the house part above was for the sleeping and living quarters. It was surreal. We went out and watched the basketball game between SYA and the boys of Manling. It was funny, the Manling team was all wearing New Orleans jerseys, but during the breaks they didn’t meet with their coach like the SYA kids did, they smoked. Got to get that adrenaline pumping. Our team was demolished by twenty points. We went back to the house and had dinner while the basketball court was transformed into a stage for the night’s performances. Apparently the Song Dynasty was scheduled to sing again, but I was getting sicker and sicker, and my voice was reaching deepness approaching James Earl Jones level. Of course everyone knows the limit of one’s voice’s deepness as it approaches terminal sickness is James Earl Jones. I guess I was more on the Batman level. I managed to get the Song Dynasty out of performing, but was instead forced to go and perform in more cultural dances with some of the most attractive Chinese females in China. What a shame. The performances dragged on, switching between those of SYA and those of the village and at the end, we lit rice paper hot air balloons and sent them to space. They looked like stars. We headed back to the host house on stilts and got ready for bed. Chris, Jamie, Erick, Gavin, James and I all had to share one long mat. Gavin went outside to meditate so we decided to play a trick on him. And then subsequently play steamroller. It felt like we were all little kids again.
The next day came after a scary night. In the middle of the night, we heard the sound of a pig being slaughtered beneath us, as it squealed its last breaths away, while an ancient grandfather clock rang out ancient moans from its spot on the precipice it stood on. The noises of the night were unsettling, but we made it through alive. We said goodbye to our hosts and headed back to Jinghong. George, Nick, Gavin and I got Hot Pot and then headed to get Xiangjiao Bing. That’s something I’m going to have to make when I get back to America. Just remind me to get skimmed milk with coconut sauce… I digress. I headed back to the hotel and ran into Karina and Annie. The three of us went out to the Hotel’s pool and sunbathed. I jumped in the pool, thinking I had clothes to change into, but forgot that laundry was still being done and ended up waiting for them to dry the hard way. I hung out with friends in their hotel rooms and then decided I would go clothes shopping with Karina so that I could try and find some dry clothes to wear. On our way to find clothes we ran into an arcade and ended up Easy 2 Dancer-ing and playing Chinese Time Crisis II. Claire came and found us and we headed off to dinner. My clothes had dried somehow. We met up with Annie, Hannah and Josie-Dee at yet another Thai restaurant and had a delicious meal. We went for dessert and an American café and I split a Chocolate and Apple pie with Josie-Dee, as well as Brownies with the other girls. I went back to the hotel and watched TV with a friend in her hotel room till curfew.
We left Jinghong to start a three day trip through villages. We arrived at a market and I wandered it until we headed off to the village we were going to stay at. The village’s name was Manlai. The houses here were also built on stilts. We had a basketball game here with the locals, and I found my way to the roof of a building overlooking the court and announced for the game. “Nicoloff passes the ball to Reddy… who was apparently not ready for that pass.” Just stuff like that. But I wandered off with Tsechi and Warren during it and headed to a water reservoir in the middle of the forest off to the side of the village. There were dead trees reaching out of the water as if they were grasping to the very last bits of air before dying. It was nice; it was completely surrounded by trees and large hills. We just enjoyed the view there before heading back to the host houses to have dinner. My host dad had two kids, because the first was a girl, but he said that some minorities are allowed to have up to three kids, the Bulang people for example. It surprised me that there was this kind of leniency on such a topic. Dinner finished and Erick, Gavin, Warren and I headed back to the secluded reservoir in the shadows of a descending sun. We sat around it and the light disappeared. We just sat out there looking at the water in the darkness, reflecting the one and only star visible from our point of view. A cold breeze rolled off the water and I realized that Valentine’s Day was coming up. *shudder*We walked through the forest using my flashlight to try and find the way back to the village. It became like a Horror movie, Blair Witch Project if I’d guess anything. But we got back and found some SYA kids at the basketball court. We chilled there, and I briefly lay down and looked at the stars with Claire and Karina. There were just so many. Erick and I returned back to the house and watched the family play with their many kids. The girls sang communist party songs and the family just laughed and laughed while their two year old son danced and danced and danced. Erick got a call from his Family in America and talked in Spanish. I haven’t lost my listening comprehension, just speaking ability. Oh well. Went to sleep dreading.
Chi chi chi pa pa pa. Chi chi chi pa pa pa. Friday the 13th. Our host family gave us a thread bracelet to wish us a safe journey wherever we might go. We hiked for eight hours before arriving in Man’gang. Our host was an interesting fellow. At dinner he began to drink. Seven cups of baijiu later he was completely hammered and didn’t even realize he was hosting people and began to try and throw us out of his house after trying to force alcohol down our throats. To no avail. Baijiu is 55% alcohol, just as a reference point. But when he was drunk he said some interesting things, like he could have more children if he wanted to because he was a minority, but he didn’t want to deal with the paperwork, or if America and China got together the world would be ours. And then he’d laugh afterwards, with intermittent vomiting between his wasted giggles. I learned a lot about drinking customs in China. I used Xue bi, (sprite,) and pretended to be in on the festivities. The night ended very late… I’ll just leave it at that. It was a pretty bad Friday the 13th for some.
Well, Valentine’s Day finally arrived. I had no valentine. We left the village and hiked for four hours to get to Manzhao. Manzhao was a fairly developed little village. The houses all looked like condos and outside some of them people were making paper. On top of the mountain-like hill at the side of the village was a monastery for Theravada Buddhism. Warren and I explored the place in order to see the whole town. We went up to the monastery and found a secret path that led to a cliff that overlooked what was either a lake, or rice paddies completely submerged in water. It looked more like a lake. We jumped down the cliff and were wondering where all the pretty girls were in the village when we stumbled across a cache of them. We walked into it and sat down. Warren got a call from a girl in Jinghong and left, leaving me with the girl he had his eye on, but she left, and so did I. I had my eye on someone else. It had been on someone else for a while now. I wandered the streets when the girl Warren was after came up to me and brought me to her house. Warren saw me walking with her and flipped a lid. He wasn’t used to being turned down in China. But I saw his distressed look and continued wingman-ing for him, which ended up with her inviting the both of us into her house, then her bedroom. She told us to lie down on her bed, but Warren and I just looked at each other and I said, “This could be the start to a very bad, gay porno.” To which Warren said, “When is there ever a good, gay porno.” Touché. We decided we were going to stand, and she got on the bed and went to turn the TV on when the fan next to the TV started blowing her hair wildly, like what model’s hair looks like, as she bent over to turn the TV on. It was a bit too… clichéd. Too… movie-esque. I tried to leave them and I did eventually, which earned me Warren’s eternal thanks and ridicule from my other guy friends. But I didn’t care; I was making someone else my valentine. We had dinner with my host family that didn’t speak any mandarin whatsoever and only parroted what we said, before heading up to the Monastery to watch the monk’s performance of their prayers. In the village, all the boys go into the Monastery to study the ways of the monk for three years. After those three years are up then they can go back to school, or continue in the ways of the monk. They chanted for nearly thirty minutes, wearing their orange garb, and then the ceremony was over. I went and talked with the monks for a bit, before deciding that it was too late, and that this Valentine’s Day was a complete waste, like so many before. I walked to the front gate of the Monastery and ran into “Lo” as I shall refer to her here. She was standing there and I started talking with her, when I somehow brought up the secret path that Warren and I had found earlier that day. We began to walk out to the path in the darkness, the only lights were the stars… and boy how the stars looked. I’ve never seen so many in my entire life. We got to the cliff overlooking the terraced lakes and sat down. The stars were reflected in the water. It made us feel like we were sitting on a peak amidst the heavens, among the stars. We stargazed and talked, our arms around each other when a shooting star flashed across the sky. We both saw it and looked at each other, when I said, “Will you be my Valentine?” Clichéd? Yes. Effective? Yes. She said yes and asked what I wished for. I told her it already came true. Sometimes I find the most romantic things are what we don’t say... We walked back into the Monastery, realizing that we were on holy grounds. Blaspheming never felt so uplifting. We ran into Li Laoshi and some SYA students and hung out with them and laughed until curfew. Got a hug from Lo, and then had to walk Li Laoshi home because he was lost. I went to bed with a content heart.
We finished up our three day trip, and returned to Jinghong, after visiting one last market. Chris Sophie and I went and got a blind massage and cupping done. The massage was my first one ever and it was kind of painful. The cupping didn’t hurt for me or Chris, but it sent Sophie into a mini-shock like state. It’s supposed to draw all the toxins out of your body, but it only made me really sore the next day. The way they leave marks on your back is they take alcohol and put it in a cup, light it aflame, and then turn it over onto your back and let it give you the biggest hickey of your life, over and over again.
The cups didn’t let me sleep well during the night, and today was the first day of school at Jinghong Shi Yi Zhong. We were put in the senior’s class who were preparing for the Gaokao. I listened to the whole thing. I was bored out of my mind and I only caught words like Chromosome in Biology Class, nothing in Physics, but Math is universal, so I could follow that to an extent. I started talking with some people at the school about stuff and issues in the world. I asked one kid how he felt about Obama, and his response was, “That’s the really good basketball player, right?” I befriended Li Xinhua because he sat behind me in class. He got a room in the girls’ dorm in the center of the campus because he plays the music that wakes everyone up from the afternoon break. His room has all the sound equipment in it and he showed me what he does, sitting in front of the block of a machine and starting up a trumpet call to arms that boomed across the campus. They take the break in the middle of the day to avoid the hottest hours of the day. His roommate is Ai Dou Wei, or Jack or Jake, he responds to both, and prefers them over his Chinese name. Jake is a monk. But I met more of him the next day. School went back in session, and we had English class, which was in Chinese. School let out at 5:30 and I had dinner before going to bed.
School classes became interesting on the second day, just because I had gotten the flow of how they worked. The students stay in the same classroom the whole day and the teachers come to them. As I said earlier math is universal… the sciences are not. This day I befriended my monk friend Jake. He mouthed off in the back of my classroom the whole time, just making jokes and getting the whole class to crack up. His orange robes separate him from the rest of the class, with their school uniforms. I went to Li Xinhua’s dorm room and Jake said that he had to change, so we went outside and waited for him to change so we could go have fun during the break. He came out exactly the same, orange robes and everything, except he was now wearing sandals instead of tennis shoes. The three of us headed to the Mekong River and began to skip stones with some other students that went there to do that as well. Jake pulled up his robes and knotted them at mid thigh level and then waded into the water. I took my shoes off and went in and we found the perfect skipping stones that had been smoothed and flattened by time and proceeded to waste them with our lack of skills. We headed back to the Guys’ dorm rooms which were a concrete block with four bunk beds for a total of eight people in one room with the laundry hanging from a line going across the middle of the room. We chilled in there for a while when Jake came back in the room, reeking of cigarette smoke and threw the stub over the balcony and into the bushes. The kids pulled out a Budweiser bottle from behind a potted plant and threw it conspicuously in the public trash can outside. Cards were pulled out and played with. It was some crazy variation of Poker. The guys got down to just a tank top and shorts to endure through the midday heat. It was brutal. I went and left them to their games and went and had lunch with Lauren to let my mind recoup from the constant use of Chinese. Li Xinhua went and played the wake up music and classes resumed. Jake skipped English class. He simply didn’t show up. The teacher engaged us in this class, and it became a lot of fun. They were surprised that we spoke Chinese much better than their English abilities, and became instantly attracted to us. The English teacher made us sing the National Anthem, America’s that is, and it was embarrassing… we forgot some of the lines. Then the Chinese students all sung the Chinese one, and it sounded ferocious. It was all in harmony, and it was powerful, not just the melody but the words. Then the English teacher told us that every minority has its own song in its own dialect. So she asked people to stand up and sing theirs. People that didn’t even sit next to each other, never once talked to each other during the breaks, stood up and sang in unison, in such a way that it just made me say wow. That’s all I could think. Jake came back after English class ended and passed notes to people until he fell asleep on his desk. A fellow classmate pointed at him and mouthed to me, “Shui Jiao.” The fact that I could understand Chinese being mouthed across the room made me really happy, and gave me a second wind that got me through class. Li Xinhua introduced me to a girl they called xiao bai tu, or little white rabbit, like the candy. I said nice to meet you, I hope you don’t have melamine in you like the candy. They were a little taken aback at first and then laughed. I was told that Jake was able to smoke and do all the stuff he does, plus more, because he’s a Theravada monk. After class I realized that the class type I was in was the science track. They have the literature track and the science track, science focuses mainly on what it says, whereas the literature course covers history as well. I went back to the hotel and slept. I needed the break to sleep.
The last day of our schooling before a five day break for the seniors. School was long and brutal, and afterwards, Nick and I were invited to go hang out with what we thought was just two Chinese girls, but ended up being nine. The other SYA kids that came with us left and so Nick and I had nine Chinese girls all to ourselves for the entire evening. We walked along the bank of the Mekong until we hit a park that Warren and Ian and I had discovered the night before and dubbed make out point. We all sat down there and they wanted to play truth or dare. I can’t think of a game that can fry your brain faster than playing truth or dare with Chinese teenage girls, speaking only Chinese. Ma Yayun was the ringleader of it, and Nick and I just watched and were questioned occasionally, and questioned other times. They would ask tough questions, like which one of us do you think is the prettiest and why? That’s hard to answer in English! “Well I like cute, humorous and spirited girls.” There were nods all around, “Understandable.” Some of them had already slept with someone before they met us. They bid us goodbye that night and told us they would miss us forever. Nick and I went back to the hotel feeling accomplished.
Our last day of the trip, there was no plans and I had no means of reaching anyone. I had no money left and no money on my phone. I left the room and ran into Ian. We went out and had an early lunch at 10:00 of hamburgers. We wanted to go visit the largest temple in Jinghong and a cab driver drove us out to the middle of nowhere, where we saw a gorgeous temple. He tried to charge us twenty kuai for the ride and we were upset that he was cheating us so. Cab rides everywhere were only five kuai. But he waited outside as we tried to go buy a ticket and then realized that they were 120 kuai each. We turned around and asked him to take us to the nearest free temple. He did, pointed us in and we wandered around until some Chinese people told us that the park wasn’t free and kicked us out because we had no money. We walked back to the hotel and then Ian and I split up, I ran into Nick and we wandered down a market street, where we ran into Ma Laoshi. We all sat around and drank tea when Chris and Sophie ran into us. They had tea with us and then Nick, Sophie and Chris went to hang out with some Chinese friends for dinner at a place that I’d eaten at too many times. But when they left me, I ran into Josie-Dee, Lauren and Hannah, as well as some of their Chinese friends. I went clothes shopping with them down the street. I’d like to say that I have some fashion sense when it comes to fashion. But the clothes they were looking at were traditional Chinese stuff, and I had no idea. Is it supposed to look like that? That’s an interesting look… but would you wear that outside? Aren’t pant legs supposed to be… closed? But it was fun nonetheless. I went home and rested because my brain had been completely fried over the past few days. I went to a barbeque later that night with Jang, James, Lindsay, Natalie and Mary. It was in a sketchy shack on the outskirts of town. I went home early then too, due to me feeling sick. I spent the whole night cradling the porcelain throne so that it’d cool me down. It was awful. Coming out both ends. Sleep didn’t come easy.
We had an early morning so we could get to the airport. We flew to Kunming, and then back to Beijing. I walked the once familiar stretch of road that led to my house with Chris and Nick, but somehow it felt different. Somehow, I had changed.
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