An International Affair

Dear China,

It's over.

I'm leaving you.  I'm getting back with America.  It's not you, it's me.  I don't know I guess I just sometimes feel like we're speaking totally different languages.  I mean, we've had some great times together for sure:

I'll always remember the vacant, expressionless old men with whom I engaged in staring contests bordering on Parkinson's, and the chess games where I would be dominated by such old men.  And the type A personalities that inevitably became the crossing guards.  What they lacked in authority they made up for with whistling their loud, red, whistles.

I'll soon miss the men in black suits, white socks, and brown shoes, with a belt matching anything but those three colors, holding their dirtied pants at anything but the right height; the many, many girls in tights and shorts, all of them in heels and none of them aware of how to walk.  My eyes will search in vain for the men holding purses - it isn't girly if all of you are doing it, right?

I'll miss the bones in my food, not for how they flavored meat with that gritty texture, but how they flavored life with asphyxiation.  I'll miss the convenience store where there was always 10 attendants with only one open register.  I guess the rest of you were petting the cat that belonged to no one and everyone at the same time.  I'll miss the isles and isles of fish flavored dried food and your green tea Oreos.

And who could forget Kingsley, the majestic and mysterious dog that bid us adieu and welcomed us home every day.  I'll miss you Russian, the German Shepherd.  You barked at us anytime we passed and with such ferocity that you alone could have mauled an entire middle school on your worst day.  I know it's because you cared.

I hope we meet again, Chengdu cleanup crew.  Who cares if there is trash all over the place?  You recognize that occasional leaf on the sidewalk for what it is - a threat; a top priority, to be swept away at once.  I'll miss the overnight construction projects.  Your building code may have been written on a single sheet of toilet paper but it's not about fatalities - it's about results.

I'll miss the bikers, the mopeds, the taxis and drivers.  Not one of you knows what you're doing but you all got a license for trying and that's what counts.  I'll miss the land where rite-of-way is all about guts - either they'll get you where you need to go or splatter all over the pavement.  But with enough confidence and a little luck, you might just beat that high score on Frogger.

You see?  It's not that things weren't great with us.  They were wonderful.  It's just, America understands me.  America gives me the freedoms I need.  She doesn't care what I say or what my religion is and right now, that's what matters to me.  She lets me use the internet without monitoring what sites I go to - she trusts me.  You on the other hand, just don't have that kind of faith in me.  You can be really closed-minded.  You aren't very creative, and to be honest, you smell.

But I still think you are amazing.  I know there is someone out there for you and I wish you all the best.  Maybe sometime in the future we might get together again, but I just need a break from all this for now.  I hope we can still be friends.

Sincerely,
Jake

The Epicenter

Last Friday our program went to Beichuan, the epicenter of the Earthquake that rocked the Sichuan Province in China, 2008.  I was about to type something to the effect of, "It seems like natural disasters are becoming more and more prevalent," when in reality it's probably that we have just become more aware of them in the last couple decades due to the internet.  After all, if not for the internet, I wouldn't be typing this now, would I?  But all that being said, we have seen some pretty catastrophic natural disasters in the last few years.  I'm thinking the earthquake in Haiti, the BP Oil Spill (at least as far as its environmental implications are concerned), the recent earthquake in Japan and I'll go ahead and rehash hurricane Katrina.  These aren't in order and their causes aren't all similar but the effects are unanimously negative: economies blown apart, governments shaken, cities crumbled, families displaced and many people dead or wounded.  Long story short, nobody's happy.

A ceiling

So when we were told that we were going to the museum of the ruble that was Beichuan, I couldn't help but wonder if we were treading where we weren't welcome; if people were rolling in their graves as we unwittingly walked on top of them.  This was my first experience in the scene that is the aftermath of a natural disaster and was less than inspiring.  We got off the bus and for the first time, a group of white people wasn't the thing worth taking pictures of.  All over the place were Chinese people staring at the buildings, at the debris.  Many of the structures were being supported by multiple, thick, metal beams to keep them from falling upon onlookers.  The major sites were dotted with small informative, posts to tell you initial estimates of casualties compared with actual number, as well as a little information regarding what the building was used for, and what it originally looked like.

Before

The buildings were in varying states of disrepair.  All were cracked, some with warped window and door frames.  Broken glass everywhere.  Some buildings were tilted at angles as if a giant game of dominoes had been put on hold and others had just fallen over completely.  We walked on a bridge that took us through the middle of one - to our left we could look at the floor of one story and to our right we could see the ceiling of the next. The path weaved in and out of destruction and the sidewalk had become stair-steps in some places, in light of the event.  The major highway that tunneled through a hill to connect Beichuan to ten other cities has since become a waterfall.

Finally, we got to the housing district.  You could see mattresses displaced and a desk knocked over.  Markers had collected in one corner of a house where they had rolled to.  It's one thing when you see a broken window or a door hanging off its hinges but when you can look into a bathroom and realize someone lived there... that's when it all becomes real.

I guess at first, I was a little appauled at the idea of making this city-gone-cemetery into a museum.  That it was disrespectful of the Chinese government to do such a thing.  But then I thought about the alternatives.  Obviously no one could live there.  The materials couldn't be reused because just collecting them would pose too much danger.  So maybe the best thing really was to make a museum, not to make money off misfortune, but to honor the bereaved.  At the end we saw a large memorial, honoring the departed, covered with rocks spelling out "5.12," the date of the event.

Further away was the new city, at a better location.  The original city was by many beautiful mountains, likely as a defensible position in earlier years, but the new city is by a river which will help boost it's economy.  The buildings there are comparatively well built and are painted in matching color schemes which is something that other cities in China can't stand up to.  It has some lawns and young trees - in all reality, it reminds me of a western city.  No one can deny that the earthquake was a disaster but it has allowed Beichuan to rebuild, to emerge as a newer and more sophisticated city, at least in appearance.  Hopefully other cities won't need such nature-related coercion but if China is smart, they can key in on this silver lining and look into developing their other cities in ways fitting for a developed country.

And They Shall Call Me "Captain Cross Walk"

I have a confession, America.  I am a superhero.  Shocker, I know – it was news to me too, but only by coming to China, have I uncovered my superhuman ability to jaywalk and dodge bicycles.  If you’ve seen any pictures of Chinese streets, you’ve probably noticed a sea of bikers, maybe with a few cars.  Well these days, it’s pretty much the same (the bikes have become mopeds and scooters) but there are just as many bikes with ten times as many cars.  The streets are simply unsafe and sidewalks are merely temporarily vacant parking lots.

A certain stereotype says that Chinese drivers are awful, and I’m here to sponsor that idea wholeheartedly.  I’ve witnessed several wrecks, and I myself, have partaken in a bus wreck.  When we heard the vehicles coming to jerking halt and the grinding of metal upon metal, a massive groan rang throughout the bus in such a startling synchronization that we couldn’t help but look at each other with a little bit of pride and a telepathic tossing around of the idea of starting a K-Pop boy band.  But this was not a groan of fear or bewilderment.  It was one of simple frustration; this was just some nuisance that was to be expected.  No one was surprised by a bus wreck – we were just annoyed.

But that’s just the way the roads work.  You don’t really wait your turn, or for the car in front of you to go, or even for the lights to change, in some cases.  You just go whenever you can.  It’s a dog-eat-dog world and apparently China’s the alpha and leading the pack.  I guess this comes as a shock to me because I always pinned collectivist cultures as a mutual understanding of putting the group before the self.  But when the group is in line at the supermarket, the self can get to the front if he’s quick enough and who cares if you hit that old grandma with your cart?  She’s just going to spit on you in the street tomorrow, anyways…

The difference between collectivism and individualism isn’t the goal of each particular person.  It’s how you obtain it.  In America, while we might road rage pretty heavily, we hold open doors for people, we pick up something dropped for someone with their hands full – in general, if it’s not too inconvenient we’ll help somebody.  Maybe this stems from trying to prop ourselves up as caring individuals, to begin relationships on a positive note, make good impressions, etc., but in China, it’s all about what I want, and when I want it, almost as if everyone has come to the same conclusion that there are just too many people to hold open every door, too many people to go out of your way for small acts of kindness. People disregard others not out of selfishness, but because it’s literally too exhausting to apologize for every toe stepped on and every shoulder bumped into. My first week in China saw me saying “Sorry,” more times than I can count.  And the reactions I got were the weirdest looks that I’ve received in all my experience here. So you stop trying and you let the next person catch the door; someone else can clean up your litter.  The problem is that this turns into (not so) controlled chaos in any public setting.

My favorite instance of such chaos is the immovable object-unstoppable force conundrum: just because I’m going down a one-way street and you’re going up that same one-way street, doesn’t mean either one of us should have to back up to let the other through - why would we do that when we can just honk at each other?

Perhaps I’m being unfair.  Perhaps I just don’t fully understand the rules of China.  I should probably keep an open mind, right?  Then again, an open mind isn’t the Chinese way. 

Thanks for reading. 

P.S. Dr. Seus knows his stuff:

You Are What You Eat

Hungry?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, hopefully this blog will make up for lost time.  I'm going to attempt to create for you the eating experience of China.  The adventure begins on the street.  Since most restaurants lack the capacity to hold onto raw ingredients for more than a day or so - either due to less-than-hygienic standards for keeping food, or more likely the lack of space in the establishment itself - raw food is delivered daily or purchased in markets.  Many times, they give cooks the pleasure of killing your own, so frequently you'll see a chicken on your way to school and come back to find a substantially less living, naked thing in its place.

Dan Dan Noodles

Our regular restaurant

Very quickly, you find that every dish is prepared differently in different restaurants but you learn what places do what dishes and which way you like them.  One such staple is 担担面 known in the states as Dan Dan Noodles.  It's a peanut-based dish with plenty of numbing pepper, the source of Sichuan's notorious spice.
 

The origin of takeout

The place above also is good for Gai Fan, which basically means meat and vegetables on rice.  There are lots of different varieties of it, but the picture to the right shows my favorite - twice-cooked pork with onion.  It also demonstrates takeout at it's simplest: a disposable bowl in a plastic bag.  Another big hitter cuisine-wise in this province is what we in America have come to know as Kong Pao Chicken, that delicious chicken with chunks of cucumber, peanuts and (naturally) more numbing pepper.  Now while Dan Dan Noodles and Gai Fan are individual dishes, Kong Pao Chicken and most other dishes like it are served "family-style."

Beef w/ Peppers

 

Potato Straws; KP Chicken; Onion Beef

That is to say, everybody grabs some chopsticks and digs in, throwing a few pieces from the main plate into your own bowl.  Between the mainly oil-based dishes and all the MSG, it doesn't sound healthy, does it?  To give you some more glimpses of what we're eating here are some other dishes.

Street food

Now there are more restaurants than we could count and rather than learn each place's name, we elect to refer to them by defining features such as, "The red curtains," or, "The place outside of the west gate," or my personal favorite, "the one with the waiter so-and-so has a crush on."  But these restaurants tend to close early and to address this problem, there is street food.  Street Food is any and all meals coming from a tricycle stand or cart.  These can be miniature fried peanut butter and jelly pancakes, Korean BBQ, dough-based omelets, as well as sweet potatoes or pineapple skewers.  To the right is a sort of pork burger with lettuce and egg, delicious and cheap.


Now while I've given particular notice to the meat and the carbs, there are other food groups that need to be represented.  Tomato and Egg make the base for many soups and noodle dishes, sometimes served just by itself - not a big hit for me but a popular entre during family-style.  China has also introduced me to eggplant in fish sauce, a new favorite vegetable of mine.  And while the fish sauce is delicious, you'll notice very few pictures involving fish itself.  It isn't a lack of fish in the area, it's that fish come fully boned with tiny strands as difficult to swallow as to pluck out.

Family-style: a roaring success

Eggplant

Tomato w/ Egg

Lastly, I want to introduce you to my new favorite dish, my personal creation, 宫爆鸡蛋炒饭.  After much urging, I convinced a restaurant to make Kong Pao Chicken on Egg Fried Rice - a phenomenal mixture, (likely with double the MSG) that despite their initial doubts and weird looks, has brought the restaurant a few extra patrons - both, American and Chinese.  In the future, I'll hopefully have more to show you along the lines of food as well as some of the new discoveries that I'm making each meal.  Until then, thanks for reading.

Don't joke the monkeys.

I have to apologize, dear blog, for the lack of correspondence between us as of late.  As I type this, I have a cold and feel that out of laziness, I will use that as an excuse to sum up the entirety of my absence.  In reality, it's been exhaustion, day trips and an overall increase in my diligence towards studying(!).  Since I last wrote you, I have had a few more adventures in China.  Following the wedding and car show that I partook in, I used the money to purchase a saxophone.  Hopefully I'll be using this to play some gigs in the future but I've come to the conclusion that it's souvenir enough to make me content just to take it home and look at it, remembering the absurdity of the way I got it - and of the instrument itself.  To sum it into a single word, I'd call it "gaudy."  Caution, the below picture is not for the faint of heart.

That's right.  It's pink.  In China, the more different you appear, the more exotic and high class you MUST be.  And a pink saxophone is pretty... or rather, pretty different.

But there were, in fact, other contributing factors.  This was one of the cheaper horns which is good since it's not impossible that it gets trashed on the flight home, even as a carry on.  Who knows?  Maybe someday, I'll have some daughter cherish this pink panther sax.

However, this endeavor reawakened the business major in me that had been quiet for nearly a semester.  So in order to help fund my new saxophone, I have begun to tutor a 6 year old on Sundays.  As an American, you might think that 6 is a little early to start tutoring sessions, but don't worry - it's only for an hour.  After that it's back to ping pong practice which he has three days a week, piano which he has once a week, and calligraphy class.  He has other activities, his mother assures me, but either due to translation problems or memory, they currently escape me.

So last Sunday was our first meeting and this coming Sunday will be our official tutoring sessions.  (Consisting of playing with cars and pretending to shoot each others' car till they explode - oddly enough explosions sound the same in every language.)  However during this past week, I've gone on an overnight class trip to Emei Shan, a gorgeous mountain.  There are many amazing things about Emei Shan - you can get to a certain peak that, at sunrise casts your shadow with a halo around you for a couple minutes about 70 times a year; it has some spectacular waterfalls and some pretty cool temples.  However, something it is notorious for though, is its monkeys.

"Caution the aggressive monkeys here. don't joke the monkeys.

A couple days ago, the idea of a monkey to me, was an adorable, slender creature - round eyes, kind and hilarious in any given situation.  There will be no such monkeys in this blog.  These monkeys, were fat.  They were ugly, grotesque.  They had tumors large enough to contain multiple types of cancer.  But don't think that my feelings for them stem from looks alone.  I'd show you pictures, but I didn't have time to take any.  (That and I was warned of their tendency towards theft of personal property.)  These monkeys assaulted us.  Emei Staff were situated every 5 meters or so to threaten and in some cases, hit monkeys with bamboo sticks when they - not "should they," but when they - jumped onto your head.  Tears were shed, blood was spilled.  It is said that animals sense fear;  well apparently, they also sense your desire to not have their teeth inside your body.  That doesn't dissuade them, however, and I've officially witnessed one too comrades fall victim to a hostile, monkey engagement. They came out with bites and scratches to say the least.  Those will fade with time, but one thing will reign supreme in my mind with regard to that day.  Never go up to a monkey, with a stick, yelling, "Come at me, Bro, come at me!"

My Chinese Wedding

Due to some serious desire to gain face, wealthy Chinese will hire you pretty much for the color of your skin.  It's nothing like slavery ... except for the racism.  You're supposed to have some sort of talent - in our case, musical ability. That's right, I just got home from two piano gigs - one at a wedding, another at an Audi Car Show.  Those of you who know me fairly well might say, "But Jake, you don't play the piano." And you would be correct.  That's pretty much the extent of that conversation.  No "however," no "but."  The last time I played piano was around the age of 8 or 9.

I can't remember my piano teacher's name, much less how to play both a chord and melodic line simultaneously.  My nine years of saxophone did pull through for me.  I could keep a rhythm and play the tonic of any given chord, maybe the 5th and occasionally a 3rd.  (For the musically illiterate among us, this about the skill of a beginner pianist after 2 or 3 months.)  So my performance was to subsist of 50% skill and 50% dramatic presentation.  That's right, they want White Musicians, and they want them to act like Jack Black in School of Rock.

The Judgmental Orchestra next to my keyboard

Gig number 1 was the wedding and while I set up my keyboard, the Chinese girls in the orchestra next to us laughed at the stickers I had put on the keyboard, indicating each note.  The band leader had told me to hide it from the boss who had hired us - it had to do with something about losing credibility as an apparently aspiring pianist.  However my masking-tape-sticker, cheat-sheet couldn't save me from the total absence of power going to the keyboard.  My performance plummeted to 0% skill and 100% dramatic presentation.

Random enthusiastic vocalist.

So I sat there waiting for some groomsman to finish a speech and thought WWJBD - What would Jack Black do?  I looked to my band mates who were aware of my precarious situation.  And in the words of Jack Black, we proceeded to "rock their face off."  I've never known someone to play piano as intensely as I did today, but there's a good chance you might if you turn the power off.

The second gig was a little more eccentric.  There was a professional foreign artist, drawing cartoon characters of children that were patient enough to sit for him, until a hilarious man from Israel, dressed as a clown, would scare everything right with them, right out of them, until they fled to the young model who had missed one meal too many but was happy to have pictures taken of her with whatever Audi on display.

From Left: Me, Pete on Bass, Chris on Guitar.

For our part, we were to play 5 songs, with a "piano-focus."  We chose:

John Denver's "Take Me Home Country Roads"
The Beatles' "Hard Day's Night"
"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"
Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower"
Bob Marley's "I Shot The Sheriff"

This experience was a little smoother however the soundboard staff managed to change any volume we had settled on.  Chinese people like their music White, and they like it Loud.  1400 Kuai ($200 USD) and some delicious, delicious Eggplant later and we were back home.  We each made half a month's wages in about 9 hours, primarily off the color of our skin.  If that isn't reverse discrimination, I don't know what is.

The China Factor

It's been some time since my last post and I apologize for that.  It seems like I'm finally getting settled into the apartment.  You might think this would be easy, having little more than a suitcase and a backpack, however when you toss in the China factor into it all, everything changes.

The China factor is the floors that are dusty and dirtied regardless of however many attempts at cleaning.  It's the heater never being on no matter how cold your restaurant is.  It's the grime you find on your fingertips if you touch the leaves of a tree or bush.  If you come to China and find that a certain smell seems to permeate the air no matter where you are, my roommate will eloquently point out to you as he does to me, "It's China."  Those few syllables are the cure-all for any symptom that ails us, any question that comes to mind.  So when I tell you that I've been a little busy with carving out my home, I mean it.

My first interaction with the China factor came in the form of a city block-wide power outage.  This came upon us at around 8 or 9pm immediately upon my plugging in a desk lamp.  My light shined for but a second before my window instantly lost its light pollution glow.  I looked out and could see nothing but the lights of cars - their horns had grown louder with the darkness.  I admit I felt quite guilty until our fuse box blew out three times on separate instances.

Some rewiring later and we haven't had any power troubles since.  (Neither has our city block - just sayin'.)  The bathroom on the other hand, had meanwhile maintained a steady downpour from the elevated platform where the shower resides to the step down where the second of two drains work whenever I showered.  One might think that the first drain, placed directly under the shower head would have a slight advantage in its draining capabilities.  But this is not so.  Two visits from the plumber later and we no longer have a lukewarm kiddie pool, but a fully-functioning drainage system (never mind water temperature and pressure).

The most recent home-repair related endeavor stemmed from a misplaced key.  Due to some error in communication, we arrived at our apartment for the first time with 2 keys between the 3 of us, roommates.  After jumping through hoops and tracking some people down, we finally located the last key in the set.  This key however, apparently had a knack for the disappearing act and quickly it was lost to us.  Ultimately we resorted to a locksmith.  The locksmith forged a copy from my key for my buddy Spencer and from there he insisted that he come to the apartment to test it - something about fitting the right end cap on it.  Despite my suspicion of his trying to find our home so he could later rob us, we showed him.  After he did in fact confirm the right end cap, we were to taxi back to his shop by the school.  Spencer, for whatever reason decided he needed to change and caused us to wait before taking the taxi.  So there I stood, with my limited knowledge of Chinese, entertaining a Chinese locksmith in the living room of our apartment.  He told me my apartment was big and I attempted to explain we were fortunate to have such a nice place to live.  I didn't know how to say that so I settled for, "Thank you."

But as the seconds turned into minutes and Spencer took his own sweet time with changing, the pressure mounted.  My thoughts raced, "How do you host someone in a different culture when you don't speak their language?"  I looked around, grasping for anything to make an easy topic of conversation.  I had nothing.  Finally, I saw one of our third roommate's beer.  It was a long shot but I offered him a beer and more surprisingly, he took it.  Later, after my friend, my locksmith, and I taxied back to his shop, I wondered about the cultural implications of my actions - if it had any alternative meanings about me or what it meant about me as a host.  But in the end, I shrugged my shoulders and thought, "eh, that's China."

The Piano Boy

Today in language class, our topic of dating-related vocabulary digressed into a discussion of the differences in Chinese and American courtship.  My classmates and I explained to our Chinese teacher the concept of chivalry in it’s more or less entirety – holding open doors, paying for meals, seating dates: the works.  In China it’s not as standard for the man to pay for the woman at all times.  I imagine this stems from the desire to promote gender equality – as if a trickle down dating system could really take effect.  (In actuality, it probably can in China as their Confucian-inspired academic curriculum cultivates following orders at the price of creativity.)

But while they won’t hold open doors for ladies, or always pay the bill, one thing is beyond prevalent in Chinese society: guys carry purses.

A guy carrying a purse equivocates to his having a girlfriend or wife, and the less manly the purse, the cuter the girl.  Walking on the street, you’ll see men from adolescence to almost old age swinging their pink pouches back and forth with a big grin.  My teacher tells us that this practice originally acted as a preventive against thieves stealing the girl’s purse since the girl is dainty and apparently defenseless.  She then went on to say that the man is expected to hold the purse in whatever way the woman would – therefore if she would have a cute bag hugged to her side on top of her shoulder, so would he; a messenger bag should be as a proud sash draped across his man bosom.

I’m not quite sure when the dating age comes into play but from what we’ve been told, the Chinese stereotypes regarding study, study, study, are apparently accurate.  Kids go to school in some cases for upwards of 12 hours until they graduate high school.  They go back home to study, do homework and in some cases help out with the family business.  I can’t fathom them having time to have hormones.

The only child I have spoken to in China, I met in a coffee shop-style Western restaurant, complete with library.  He was playing the piano when I walked in – a true champion of the instrument and a boy after Beethoven’s own heart.  After he played a few tunes, he made his rounds to each party to introduce himself.  Being three Americans, our couch was of special interest because he could practice his school-mandated English.  At 8 years of age he was far better at piano than I am at anything in life and his comprehension of English is years ahead of my understanding of Mandarin.  (We can tell ourselves that it’s not our fault – children naturally learn language faster than adults but personally that makes me feel about as much better as a pat on the head and a pinch on the cheek.)  As we hammered out our ages in belabored Chinese and explained that we were studying at University.  This was followed by exchanging names, which is a favorite in Chinese-to-American introductions.  This is because anyone Chinese studying English adopts an English name and vice versa to avoid confusion – not unlike in middle school where my Spanish teacher would awkwardly dub each student with a new name like, “Pablo,” or “Margarita,” as if we were at a group knighting ceremony for prepubescents. 

My Chinese name, which I give out sparingly should I find I want to change it, is 节课 pronounced “Jie kuh,” similar to, “Jake.”  Clever, right?  But literally it means “a class,” which is sort of boring.  However in Chinese, the same exact pronunciation can have several different meanings, so it’s possible the pianist thought it was some different, cooler meaning. But I know.  I know it’s lame.  So when he asked our names, we told him, and when he asked for our Chinese names, we told him.  He told us his Chinese name, which was semi-indecipherable.  And then he told us his English name and I can safely say, I now no longer am self-conscious about being called, “a class.”  The little boy, this master of piano at the age of 8’s English name … was “Elephants.” 

Rare are the times when I smile so wide that it hurts, but this was the first time that I had met someone whose name was both an animal and plural.  I began to think of what this Elephants’ life would look like.  He was on his way to becoming fairly bilingual, and a piano rock star.  Before I left, I took one good look at him because I knew it wouldn’t be the last time I saw him.  Elephants was on his way to glory, to riches, to fame; he was going to be on the cover of magazines and you know what?  Even if that falls through, one thing is certain: Elephants will be able to hold any purse he wants.

If You Build It, They Will Come

So here I am in China for a semester.  A friend and I had the foolish belief that maybe we could pick up one of the more complicated languages of the world in a matter of months.  Two stamped visas and more money than I’d like to admit later, and we were there in the thick of it – walking the streets of Chengdu, Shanghai, and Beijing; staring and being stared at; dodging the defecating 3 year-olds only to get hit by a careening taxi or bike.  The language revealed itself to be more of a challenge than Rosetta Stone and it’s respective salesmen might have let on.  Amidst our dismayed attempts at acquiring the Mandarin dialect, we recalled that we were, in fact, in China.  For the less informed among us, China is home to a variety of foods – most of which you don’t want to eat, and the rest you definitely ought not to – as well as attractions such as the Forbidden City, the Three Gorges Dam and of course the Great Wall.  

           

So in our attempts to fully utilize our visa and pricey plane ticket, Spencer and I recently found ourselves busing to the outskirts of Beijing where we might see the Great Wall.  The guidebook seemed to skimp out on the details of how exactly to get there and as we soon found out - for good reason.  Our bus stopped 45 minutes into the trip where a strange man boarded the bus, shouting “Huairo! Huairo!” as many times as the driver would allow.  Spencer and I looked to each other, noticing that Huairo was the name of the city where we were to get off.  But it couldn’t possibly be our stop as the bus ride was supposed to take two hours before we arrived.  After much convincing with unintelligible mutters and grunts, in addition to the glares from our Chinese bus-mates for dillydallying, we made our exit onto a glorified patch of dirt where three men lay in waiting.  An old man with a camera had followed us – a fellow tourist.

           

The next twenty minutes were cold and complicated.  The men were trying to explain to us that to get to the Great Wall, they were our only means of transportation.  Between their broken English, and our comparatively decrepit Chinese, we managed to understand that this was a black taxi and that we practically had to take them up on their deal lest we be cast astray into a backwoods hamlet in northern China.  The service was agreed upon, and after debating the fare, we got into the car along with the tourist and one of the Chinese drivers.  To assure us of his legitimacy as a cab driver, he flexed his coat, as if we could read what it said, or be convinced by it’s authenticity.  The next hour of driving was awkward and at all times, uncomfortably fast.  The streets were winding and sloped up the sides of mountains; iced in most places. But our driver was true to his coat – he was always in control and knew when to go fast and when to go exceedingly fast.

           

Horseshoes and hand grenades (and English)

During the trip, we began to chat with our fellow tourist who apparently also spoke broken English.  He was from the Czech Republic and had two grandchildren.  We asked him what brought him to China and he in turn answered proudly, that his camera was 15 years old.  The car stopped in an even less inhabited village.  The Czech, my friend and I exchanged looks as if we were each an animal, so accepting of our demise that we awaited it almost eagerly.  We waited for him to pull out the handgun with the slender silencer we saw in movies.  After nothing happened, I cautiously asked the driver where we were going next.  Spencer conveniently recalled the 40-minute hike up to the wall that the book had spoken of and the driver pointed to a path impatiently.  We were not going to die.  I pointed to the sign above it which read in big letters, “WALL CLOSEO FOR RECONSTRUCTION.”  We were not going to die yet.  The driver shook his head with confidence, which incidentally looks the same in all languages.  

           

120 RMB later and we were on our way.  The trip up the mountain was fairly uneventful.  The Czech twice offered to take my bag whenever I was lagging behind.  I declined.  We found the Wall.  This was my only experience with the Great Wall but I expect that were I to go to a non-prohibited portion of it, there might be some sort of ramp or ladder for ascending it.  Our method of getting atop it consisted of climbing over the collapsed portions of it, testing rocks and bricks for security in their placement.  Occasionally I would find a lighter brick and throw it off to the side so as to later be able to brag that I had helped destroy something as mighty as the Great Wall of China. 

The Czech leaving me in his dust

Otherwise, it was pretty much that: a wall and a great one at that.  Interestingly enough, we had two options once we were on it – left and right.  Left was slightly dangerous but was a decline so it would start at a nice easy pace.  Right was downright perilous – an eroded stone ladder of sorts that quickly shifted from a sharp incline to a 90 degree, vertical climb.  Once I was outvoted, we proceeded right.  Most intimidated and subsequently complaint-inclined, I went last.  Hand over hand and leg over leg, I slowly made progress.  Spencer, at the front of the group, shouted words of encouragement and I reciprocated equally choice words back at him.  The Czech again offered to take my bag – that son of a Czech.

We arrived at the top of some evidently God-forsaken tower of old where soldiers might have teetered between life and death at the hands of invading armies from the north.  We commemorated it with granola and knock-off Pringles.   Deeming the climb back down too dangerous, all three of us agreed that the only option was to continue forward.  The next climb up was similar except instead of protruding bricks, it had sharp, jagged rocks, like small, untrustworthy daggers, hungry for your hand.  On this second summit, my friend asked if I suffered from acrophobia - a fear of heights.  I answered no, I subscribe instead to a very rational fear of heights – the fear that falling from them means I will painfully die.  A fear of stickers is irrational, a fear of pickles is equally absurd – but a fear of heights?  That is incredibly rational, more so than a lack of a fear of heights.  Rather, I told him, I have a fear of people who irrationally lack a fear of heights.

The next leg of our journey was more of a descent.  Going up is always the hardest part until you realize you have to go down.  Going up means you can’t look down, lest you become scared.  Going down lacks such niceties – you are required to look down to find your footing.  But becoming scared on the way down means one of two things: you fall off – either to your death or safely and painfully onto your back – or you tense up.  Tensing up is the worst, because then the fear compounds with time.  However undesirable the end result might be, falling down is still tempting in its degree to which you find yourself committed – you make one a quick decision and gravity takes care of the rest.  The simple solution is to fail to look down.  When it comes to finding your footing, you hope for the best and in the end, I continued in the monotony of descent in such a manner that would make Finding Nemo’s Dory beam.  

In addition to the adrenaline rush I was to receive should I drop a thousand feet or more – time enough for several lives to flash before my eyes, let alone my own – I had been operating on a time limit.  The three of us were to meet our driver at the base of the mountain where he allegedly would return at 2:30.  As the cowardly lion of our ridiculous trio, I was the last to clamber down and despite their best attempts to throw supportive lines of encouragement my way, it was vastly too far down for the words to hold meaning.  My foot slipped and the first identifiable word in ages was a curse from Spencer who would have to drag my mangled corpse back to America.  And Customs frowns upon cadaver-related contraband.

Spencer wasn’t about to do that.  There would be too much explaining to do in a language he didn’t know well enough.  And since he didn’t know my PIN number, even if he could recover my ATM card, he would still have to pay for my travel-related expenses himself.  He could only get reimbursed upon finally delivering my – by then – rigor mortis-ridden body back to my parents.  And asking someone for a reimbursement check for various travel-related expenses of their deceased loved one during the mourning period is untimely at best, and insensitive at worst.  No, I couldn’t do that to him – too much pressure.  And besides, what about the Czech?  People die in random climbing accidents all the time; but in China, on a forbidden section of the Great Wall, with a Czech you’ve known for three hours?  No, nobody does that, and I wasn’t about to be the first.   

I’d like to think it was adrenaline that got me down the Great Wall that day.  It’d be even cooler to think it was a random surge of divine strength or a joule of energy I’d been saving for a rainy day.  But to say that, would be kidding myself – I just wasn’t about to let that Czech’s grandkids ask him about that stupid American he saw fall off the Wall.

Into the Fray

Through some culmination of laziness, apathy and intensely awkward wording, I have decided to skip a long introduction for my first blog post.  Maybe this makes me original or more likely, it makes me sound pretentious.  Regardless, here we are.  My name is Jake and I will be spending the next few months in China, attempting to navigate this labyrinth they call a language.

Welcome to the Court,
The Jester