Christmas War and a Battle with Foreign Sexes

Playing children do a creepy hunch.

In another life I was a camp person. Some know this to mean a lot and some to mean very little, but what is relevant from my time at camp, like a karmic echo from past incarnations, is that along the way I got to know teenagers. To know a teenager is to trap a river in a cage. Something so moving, so dynamic, cannot be fully contained, and even to dam the source brings with it inevitable consequences, if you consider its timeline long enough.

You can know one kid his whole life, and without realizing it develop assumptions about who he is, and the patterns he lives by. But to know kids as adolescents is to watch them defy those most fundamental traits. As fast as you may be able to reorganize your expectations, their behavior will shift in equal time. Perhaps it is because they can sense your assumptions, and evade them with unconscious effort. Or perhaps they take no notice of you at all and simply move in directions, always away from themselves.  In the end you find the most insignificant traits become dominant, and looking back, though you can track where this adult came from, you marvel at how unlikely their path was.

I bring this up because to live in China is to live equally in a state of redefinition. To expect something from China is to invite surprise or disappointment. Whatever happens when you walk out the door, it will be the one thing you did not predict.

And it is in this theme of dashed expectations that the last three days progressed, creating both the best and worst Christmas holiday of my life.

High elevation and low latitude create a spring-like climate most of the year in Dali. 
A woman waters her vegetable plot with Cang Shan Mountains in the background.

In five days I’d climbed the same mountain four times. The Buddhist temple there seemed to exist outside of any significant purpose. It was free to enter, while at the same time empty of monks. Candles lit at the feet of angry and peaceful deities burned all day, lit by unseen caretakers. The view of the city from this place could silence your mind as a hand touching a cymbal. I was climbing to get in better shape, and to give myself a daily pattern. I felt the urge to train for something like battle. I was growing myself from behind unreasonable vines that until this point I’d taken as my natural landscape.

On the second day, climbing with Tryg and some people who had joined us from the hostel, I met MaLan. Describing her is difficult because I had feelings for her almost the second I saw her. I assumed, based on the look of her face, that she was young, too young for me, and so shoved her off into that mental space reserved for things that aren't worth worrying about.  But she was keeping the same pace as us, just ahead.  A tin cup pinged softly in rhythm with her steps. She wore a baseball hat and heavy hiking boots. The cup seemed most important to me, speaking of simplicity, or adventure, or both. It was that, or perhaps the fact that I so rarely see Chinese people climbing mountains with quite this sense of discovery, that finally drove me to say hi to her.

She was climbing that day to go live at the temple. She was creating a retreat for herself where she could meditate for three days. Back on earth she was an artist and interior designer, as well as a skateboarder. She rented a tiny room on the edge of Dali with her older brother. She liked techno music. She was 24 years old. All this was conveyed in a clumsy mishmash of Chinese, English, and charades. Talking like this was intoxicating, easy, like drinking hard lemonade when you’re thirsty. I visited her every day after that, making the hour and a half hike up the mountain. Each day at the temple was calm and peaceful, and each time I saw her was simple and good. The last day I climbed was Christmas Eve, and together we came down the mountain.

Blooming cherry trees, warm sun, and stark blue skies—
not a bad combination for the shortest day of the year.

Walking beside her, I got the sense she was feeling the whole forest around us in some way that I could not. I was at the same time jealous and inspired. But just as important I could tell that she liked me as well. How wonderful it felt to be liked by someone who inspires you. We walked through Dali, through the market, and finally to the hostel, making plans to see each other the next day before going our separate ways. 

There was a Christmas Eve dinner at the hostel comprised of roasted pork, vegetables, red wine, and eaten in the company of the new friends we’ve been making here. The hostel is situated just across the street from Dali old town. And in some distant corner of that old town was a Christmas Eve party that we were going to after dinner. Between us and the party, though, was a war zone that we had not anticipated.

For days before, we’d seen spray cans for sale on the side of roads all over the city; fake snow, similar to silly string that you could shoot up into the air. It seemed kitschy and just right for China, but what we could not have realized was that on Christmas Eve these misguided interpretations of the Christmas season would become far more insidious.

Cars were backed up through the entire city, forming something like a nuclear winter parking lot, as gangs of teenagers, adults, and kids cruised up and down the crowded streets. No hand was without a spray can, and no person went uncovered by the fake snow. As we walked towards the party, Tryg and I were at first amused, but our moods quickly changed when the first spray can was aimed at our faces. The goal it seemed, was not to shower others in softly falling blue, pink, and white foam—rather it was to inject perfect strangers’ faces, eyes, and mouths with foam from point-blank range. This was not a whimsical holiday tradition—this was chemical warfare.

A victim of chemical warfare on Christmas Eve.  

Try to imagine how you might feel if a whole city of people were attempting to force unknown aerosol foam into your eyes without your consent. We were not simply annoyed. As the people became more and more aggressive, crossing the street to get a shot at the foreigners, Tryg and I made like a 1980s revenge flick and stopped playing nice. Angry shouting became angry grabbing. We ripped cans from the hands of little kids. Tryg grabbed one especially hostile pedestrian by the cuff and made to punch him before being pulled off the terrified man by his friends. We were running on adrenaline, inspired by China’s historic lackadaisical position on carcinogenic heavy metals. We wanted that stuff no where near us, and we would fight to keep back the hoards.

By the time we got to the party we were in a bad mood and didn’t enjoy ourselves much. We stayed till after midnight in order to avoid the crowds on the way home, but even then I found myself on high alert, feeling my heart start to pound every time I saw a shadowed figure emerge from an alleyway. By one AM I was in bed, already forgetting the chaos of that most un-peaceful Christmas Eve.

It was 4 pm Christmas Day before MaLan sent me a text saying she was off work. I hopped on a bus to a tiny town about 20 minutes away, on the edge of the big lake, where we were to meet. The town was far less touristy than Dali and had the sense of an old fishing village.  It was framed all around by green farmland. The stream that ran through the middle of the village was filled with farmers cleaning their vegetables.

The first inkling I had that this date would not go well for me was when MaLan showed up on her skateboard and told me we had to wait for her brother. I have regrets from the last time I was in a relationship with a Chinese girl, I was a lot younger then, 19, and looking back realize I was not the most sensitive to her culture. So I wanted to start out on the right foot this time around. For all I knew this was normal, perhaps her brother had insisted on coming to check me out, maybe she wanted his approval. It wasn’t ideal, but I figured I should just go with the flow, and let things work themselves out.

Things did not work themselves out. The entire day was spent with MaLan and her brother (who, if you’re wondering about the Chinese one-child policy, is not actually her brother but is her cousin who grew up with her as a brother). What this meant above all else was there was no time for the awkwardly worded sentence and charades that had felt so comfortable when I’d been alone with her on the mountain. Instead, the entire day was spent listening to them speak in a language I couldn’t understand. If they’d been speaking Mandarin I probably wouldn’t have known what they were saying. But they weren’t even doing me that small favor. Instead they the whole day speaking Hunan dialect, almost an entirely different language. I was the third wheel on my own date, hardly saying a word.

The three of us walked back to Dali through what would have been beautiful countryside if I wasn’t getting more and more frustrated by the minute. We wandered around the town a bit and ate some dinner. (Quick etiquette question: when you’re on a date should the man pay? Should the woman pay? Or should the woman's brother pay? I’ve always been a bit fuzzy on this one.) Finally, at the end of the night we came to a hotel that was owned by a friend of MaLan and her brother. Alone for the first time, we sat on a bench outside, and in our patchwork language I asked her, in a much more polite way, what the fuck was going on. 

Architectural textures of old town.

It’s kinda crazy how certain seemingly unlikely patterns can emerge in life. As kids, me and Tryg used to stand in the street, 30 yards apart, and hit tennis balls with rackets as hard as we could. We were always amazed at how often the ball would hit the power lines. They seemed insignificantly thin, and yet over and over the ball would set one of them vibrating like a giant guitar string. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine how often someone you get close with says they have a boyfriend who they are “going through a rough patch” with.

The conversation lasted a bit longer, both of us explaining what we weren’t willing to do, followed by a goodbye filled with abrupt finality. It was Christmas Day, and as I walked back to the hostel the Christmas troops were still out. I charged at a guy who raised his spray can at me and made a swing for his face, but he backed off quickly, looking confused.

A beer was in my hand the second I arrived at the hostel bar. I’ve made so many friends here already that when I walked in there were a lot of people to complain to. I told them the basics and they all patted me on the back, shared their own dating horror stories and commiserated, just they way they were supposed to. It felt like family, like a worthy adventure, like a piece of life. I got the sense it was normal to date, to be disappointed, to start again. We’d all been there before and would almost certainly be there again, and we were all stopping here for a drink before heading off to those daring, disappointing and wonderful events in the future.

A few beers deep, I left the bar and headed to my room on the third floor of the Jade Roo. There is a large balcony where people eat, smoke, talk, and look at the stars. It was midnight, and most people were in bed. I sat down at a table with a guy from Holland named Patrick. I told him about my night, and just as he started describing his most recent dating misadventure the door next to us bursts open.

“I heard you guys were talking about relationships and thought I’d come join you!”

George, I was soon to find out, is one of the most interesting guys I have ever met. An American from South Carolina, George once rode his bike across the US, East to West. Another time he hiked the whole Appalachian Trail to impress a girl he liked. Now, at the age of 24, he is living in China and teaching English.

But the thing you’d notice the instant he starts to talk with you is that George has Aspergers. The second thing you’d learn is that he loves to talk, and the more he talks the more excited he gets, clapping and rubbing his hands together, pounding his chest, and slapping the table uncontrollably. But what makes George so interesting, beyond the traveling and the adventures he goes on, is the fact that I’ve never met a better storyteller.

He told us the story of a recurring dream he had when he was little, about a floating cow head in his window, then sang us the song that went with it. Me, Tryg and the three other guys listening to him were practically falling out of our seats with laughter. When he told us the story of a summer fling he had when he was 15, singing us the song that he’d written about that event, it was so touching I wanted to cry. When George gets excited he has no volume control and eventually one of the staff members came to tell us we had to go to bed.  Whispering, George shared with us one last song he'd written, which perfectly imitated the style of Dr. Seuss. By the time I laid down in bed my day had been completely flipped around. I’ve never ended a Christmas Day so happy, and I owe it entirely to George.

Rooftop storytelling under clear skies.

Tryg and I are going to ask George if we can film him, and I’m hoping to find some high-quality audio recording equipment to capture his stories. I don’t think I’ll be able to share them with anyone online at all—it’s difficult to upload videos here because the internet is way too slow—but at the very least I want to keep a record, and to get to know George a lot better. I can’t help but think he’s got a lot of stories to share.

OK, since I didn’t get to have Christmas at home, tell me what it was like where you were. What’d you eat? Who’d you see? What traditions did you and your family keep?  Hope to hear from all of you soon. Merry Christmas! 

P.S. One last thing before I go. I have a Christmas request. If I did this correctly there should be a little red icon at the bottom of this post. This a “stumbled upon” badge and is something that can help me get more readers on the blog, so if you have read through to this point take a second, as a gift to me, and click on that icon, maybe write a little review, maybe just like the blog, etc.  The more people that click it the more my blog will be shared with strangers surfing the internet.  

Grandpa and granddaughter in Old Town, Dali. 
I have yet to met a parent, grandparent or family member that was not ecstatic to have their child photographed.

Back Home in Chengdu: the Same Old, Same Old

The girl in red.

Four years ago I was living in Jinan, the capital city of Shandong Province. I was going to school at the well-respected Shandong University studying Mandarin, and I was falling to pieces.  Coming to the end of my first term I was fully aware that I would be failing my classes. I had for the past four months tried to convince myself that this was the dream. Sure, I was in school, living in a dorm with a meal plan and a million resources at my disposal, but that was OK as long as I was in China wasn’t it?  Wasn’t being here the whole goal all along? 

My body has always taken over in the presence of self-deception, and soon I started getting sick constantly. Little by little each day I crumbled emotionally, going on long walks that would last all day, banging my head on the wall when I was alone in my dorm. The inner desires that I was denying for fear they were impossible or impractical itched to be let out and the more I held them in confinement the more they drove me mad. 

The truth was that I had not come half way across the world simply to go to school, simply to do the same things I’d always done. I had long dreamed of China as the place where I would make myself the person I wanted to be. When I was young this was the place where I planned to become a Buddhist monk and study martial arts. As I grew older the particulars had changed, but China still always represented that drive to create my own life in the face of huge odds. I was here searching for that heart of darkness that would go beyond even what I could imagine. I wanted to find my life as separate from the life that had been handed to me. I wanted a life I had earned.

When I told my mom that I thought I needed to leave school to travel aimlessly through the country she suggested that instead I just come home. This was the exact opposite of what every cell in my body was yearning for and I told her it wasn’t an option. 

Ian at night.

“Well maybe we’ll stop sending you money then!” she threatened, and in the back of my head I was thinking perfect, one more safety net gone, one step closer that chaotic real experience.  When that idea didn’t scare me at all, she dropped her bluff. 

While in my mind I was distressed because I was being held back from my life, in her mind she heard the emotional storm I was experiencing and assumed I was suicidal. “I was just days away from coming to China to get you!” she still says whenever we talk about that time. I can only imagine how I would have reacted had my mommy shown up to rescue me.

Finally when the salt on my back became too much to bare I crawled from my skin. I dropped out of school and moved west to Chengdu. I lived there for a few weeks with a local girl that I’d met online, before finding a series of places to stay in on my own. In that time I went on some of the greatest adventures of my life. I fell in love with the Chengdu girl named Rye. I felt independence for the first time, and accomplished something that, until that point, I never knew I could do—surviving in a foreign country without anything familiar around me for support. 

My body had known exactly what I needed and it didn’t give up the fight until I complied. It was through that sudden catapult west, and the years that followed—living through ego-smashing heartbreak and recovery—that I became in so many ways the person I am today. 

So it is fitting that I find myself back in Chengdu experiencing the same emotional turmoil that brought me here that first time.  I have not felt so clearly that I was doing the wrong thing in my life since those days punching walls and swearing at strangers on the streets in Jinan. This time though, the tables are turned. I find myself on an adventure traveling at will where ever I want and being utterly depressed. 

If you ask Tryg why he is going on this trip, he will say that he is trying to discover what he wants to do when he grows up. For him this is a journey of self-discovery. He is a year and a half out from one of those major breakups that change who you are. One of those moments where everything you thought was going to happen in your future is replaced by a big black mysterious void and you feel like you have to start reconstructing yourself from the very beginning.  For him this trip is, I think, as much about that as anything. It is a quest to find some steady orientation from which he can take the next step in his life.

The problem is I am not in the same place. What has become clear to me over the last month is that I no longer need to search. I have a strong sense of who I am. Not that who I am couldn’t use a little (or a lot) of work, and not that I will stay this way forever. People tend to go back and forth through their entire lives from periods of stability and periods of searching: when your kids move out, when your loved one dies, when you retire, when you lose your job. I’m sure I’ll come across plenty of times in my life where some inner itch will tell me it’s time to wander once again, but that time is not now. 

Not only do I know who I am right now, but I also know exactly what I want to do. The one thing that I am profoundly passionate about above all other passions is seeing other people develop and grow beyond what they thought they could be. 

Kung fu is practiced at a very young age.

I am going to become a psychotherapist. And the idea that I know that now, but I am not pursuing it, above all else, is what is causing me to so viscerally reject this trip in its current form. I’ve been trying to figure myself out for as long as I’ve been alive, and now that I know what I want I am compelled to get to work. 

With such a clear goal it makes the steps in the process easy to see. The very first thing to do is to make money. I refuse to go to graduate school until I can actually afford it. So many people I know are so deep in debt they have no agency in their own lives. I’m willing to delay gratification for a few years if that means that when I finally get a higher degree I will still retain my soul. 

The big question, then, is do I come home? That answer is easy at the moment—of course not. Work is hard to find in the US. While working at REI, I was lucky if I made $800 in a month. That's not enough to live on in Portland, let alone enough to save anything for the future. Another contingency is that I don’t move back in with my parents, which would be a big possibility if I were to come home now with out a job. In China it is much easier to find work, and usually a job teaching English will include a free apartment. This means that even if I’m making less money, I will still be able to save more here. If I find myself in a situation where I could be saving more money at home then that might effect my plans, but for the moment staying put and finding a job makes the most sense. 

Of course the other consideration is that I don’t want to abandon Tryg. He doesn’t speak the language and still depends on me a fair bit. Not that he couldn’t get by without me, but I’m trying to figure out the best way for us both to accomplish our goals. Also, traveling together we’ve been learning a lot about each other. There have been a few fights, but for the most part out relationship seems to be getting even stronger than it already was, which is quite a feat.

A goldsmith in one of the back alleys of Chengdu.

We are headed next to Yunnan Province, probably to Dali, though that’s not certain yet. I will start looking for work there. If I can’t find anything, then I’ll come back to Chengdu where I already have a job offer, though it would not pay that great. The plan is still developing though, and I still don't know what's going to happen next. I feel a great sense of relief at having admitted to myself what I need, and having identified the path I need to start walking. I’ve found my mission—not just for this trip, but for my life. This trip has done a great deal for me. I never would have been willing to say so loudly that I know what I want to do, and I never would have been so confident that I knew who I was unless I’d been here to experience my body’s revolt.  “You should not be conducting this ritual,”  it has told me.  “There is no magic left in it for you.” And that in itself has been the biggest revelation.

I've decided to respond to comments in the blog that follows them.  I really want to respond to the things you guys are posting, so here are my responses to the people who posted on last week’s blog.

Rich,

While we were there I met a guy from Holland who was writing an article on the major development going on in Chongqing. There is certainly a lot to consider and I of course was barely able to scratch the surface. Not that I really wanted to...

- - -

Patrick,

The three gorges dam is one of the biggest projects the Chinese have yet taken on and it will make a difference for years. It's not that different from the falls dam flooding Celilo Falls as far as natural and cultural tragedies. But at the same time it is a major player in developing China's future. Very complex stuff.

Thanksgiving sounds great. And maybe we'll have a real nice pram for next year eh?

- - -

Ryan,

Nope no topless ladies, that might have improved my opinion of the city a bit. We didn't see any monster fish in the water but one guy did catch a turtle with a huge net in a drainage pipe and I'm fairly certain it took it home to cook that night.

Congrats on the book release!

Father and son at the water jets. Central Square, Chengdu.

- - -

Dean,

OK, to be fair Chongqing is a pretty interesting place. If you have your own hotel, a guide, or a reason for being there, and if you don't get a stomach bug. You would enjoy it. Of course me and Tryg are traveling very cheap and generally couldn't afford the more pleasant tourist attractions.

Most travelers I meet in China had a point where everything crashed around them. China takes a while to adjust to. I don't think I'll ever go back to Chongqing. But if you went you'd likely have a totally different experience. Or maybe not then we commiserate about it later.

- - -

Karen,

That story sounds very familiar. Part of it of course was Chongqing but most of it was that we'd been traveling for weeks and were just starting to realize that there was no end in sight for the foreseeable future. This would be our reality and that's so scary. I think anyone who has traveled understands this on some level.

Kazakhstan sounds like a pretty amazing adventure. I'm always happy to hear other people's stories about stuff like that. 

Chongqing: Hate

Children playing after hours in the markets.

Chongqing is a huge city. So big in fact that it joins both Beijing and Shanghai as the three cities in China that are so large they are designated as provinces unto themselves. But unlike Shanghai and Beijing, this city is not here for high business or government. This is a working city, built on the banks of the Yangtze River, and the beneficiary of the Three Gorges Dam, China's latest and greatest controversial technological development. 

People in this city are strong. The hills and mountains in the city are so steep and jut so violently out of the earth that no one around here has bikes. Bikes would be useless on terrain that makes the hills of San Francisco look like sand dunes. This means that rather than transporting goods around the city on the back of peddle carts, as most things are in all other parts in China, here the people act as their own pack animals, carrying 80-pound loads on their backs up endless stairs and unforgiving hills with pure muscle. Even the women carry carts and wheelbarrows, leaving them with tight arm and hard bodies. It looks for all the world like millions of Chinese body-builders walking the streets, shirtless and ripped.

An angry meat vendor in one of the many underground food markets of Chongqing.

All this takes place as the city developing faster than any other city in a country that is developing faster than any other country in the world. There is construction going on everywhere. Bridges that span the whole city are built alongside high-rises that seem to grow five floors in a single day. People are working 24 hours a day. Sparks from welders rain down on the unprotected streets.   

After marveling at the amazing hills, the historic river, and the strength of the people, though, you are left with the one, ever-present, trait of the city: it is dirty. Not simply dusty or polluted, but so dripping in grease, human waste, and construction debris that your senses are assaulted at all times. This place is known as the Cloudy City because of the fog that never lifts, though now the fog is all a dingy brown color and is so thick on an average day you cannot see across to the other side of the Yangtze, a modestly large river the size of the Willamette River in Portland. 

Midnight fishing on the Yangtze River. Downtown Chongqing.

Every dark corner has been used as a bathroom so that at times there are smells so thick that it feels like you are walking through tear gas. Fumes get in your mouth and your clothes. You can still smell it even when you’re exhaling. Street lamps above the street-food carts have dripping, caked-on layers of grease as black and thick as the shit someone has taken on the sidewalk illuminated by faded yellow light. To put it bluntly, this is the worst place I've ever seen in China

A sunny day on the Yangtze River.

To be fair, a lot of things contributed to this opinion of mine besides the city itself. I could write them out as a story but I think instead I'll just make a list in the order that the events occurred. Be aware that it is a graphic list.

1. Spent three days on the train from Shanghai in a cramped little compartment.  Every time people walked by they’d look in and stare at us as if we were caged animals in the zoo. Tryg yelled at some teenage girls who were flashing a powerful LED light in our faces when everyone else on the train was trying to sleep. We arrived in Chongqing at 4 am.

2. On the train for those three days all I had to eat were instant noodles, which left me constipated. 

3. Having not pooped in days, Tryg, some Chinese people, and I went out for a night of fun and very heaving drinking of very light beer. The next morning I woke up with a hemorrhoid the size of a small planet, and a persistent cough. These two things lasted for days and worked very much against each other.

4. Tryg and I went to a dirty restaurant—the only kind we ever go to in China—and we both got food poisoning that lasted for a few days, thus ruining all Chinese food.

5. The people in the Chongqing stare at us constantly, more than in any other city I’ve ever been to in China, and they all shout “hello!” constantly—not in a fun friendly way, but as if they are poking us with sharp sticks from across the street to see what we’ll do.

6. The girls running the hostel are argumentative and unhelpful.

Ian, forced into multicultural photo op. Liberation Square, Chongqing.

7. People here are trying to take you for everything you’ve got. You have to fight day in and day out, even if you’re just buying an apple, or soap. There is no escape, and I start wanting to punch everyone.

All this culminated on the day when Tryg and I both had long sessions in the hostel bathroom, which had only one mostly-broken sit-down toilet, as opposed to the far more common squatter toilets that the Chinese usually use. 

This same day, at this precise time, all our friends and family back home were sitting down to eat Thanksgiving dinner with each other. We had no turkey, no cheese, and no bread. All we had was our one hundredth bowl of noodles and greasy vegetables. We hated China more that day than I’ve ever hated any place before. 

The hostel lobby was arranged using some kind of anti-fengshui. Despite numerous couches and chairs, there were absolutely no comfortable places to sit. We just started walking around talking about everything that we hated in this god-awful place. We reminisced about the things we missed back home—the food, the people; we wanted to do anything comforting because right now there was nothing comfortable in our lives. At times we would break into manic laughter, giddy with rage at how horrible everything we saw was. We swore openly at anyone who tried to sell us something, glared angrily at everyone who shouted “hello.”  China, we concluded, was fucked.

Chefs taking a smoke break in front their alleyway restaurant.

As all this happened, I got a call from the person we’d come to Chongqing to meet, an old friend of mine from the last time I was in China. Tina, for those who know the story, is Rye’s best friend. And though I’ve been racking my brain trying to describe what that might mean, I don’t really think there’s anything I have to say on the issue. 

We’d gone to lunch with Tina previously, and at that time she’d invited us to go to her friends’ wedding. We were excited to go at first, but now in our current state of mind we were not at all interested in being social. I told her we had decided not to go. I was not expecting to be so upset. It wasn’t long before I gave in to her disappointed pleas. Tryg, listening to the phone conversation and my crumbling resolve, mimed how unhappy he was. 

The wedding was very strange. I’d been to other Chinese weddings in the past, but I’d never been to a wedding in a Christian church. China, as a country, is loud. In everyday life people yell on the street, play their music without concern for others, and honk their horns constantly. But even I was surprised while sitting in the church when no one paid attention to the woman who came to the pulpit and began asking everyone who had gathered in the church to be quiet. In fact, they seemed to speak louder. As the bride and groom said their vows people shouted at each other across the aisle. One guy's cell phone rang, and he promptly answered it.  Luckily, the service was short, and even more luckily, the food was next.

If Tina had not been so insistent that we go to the wedding, then we never would have gone to the reception, and if we hadn’t gone to the reception it’s possible Tryg and I would have never felt good for the rest of our lives. It was held in the Chongqing opera house, where they had a huge buffet set up with every kind of food, and most importantly, Western food. There was cheesecake, pizza, pasta, snails and caviar. There was French food, Italian food, American BBQ; there was even blue cheese strong enough to make your ears ring. It felt like our Thanksgiving. 

Tina has her first experience with blue cheese.

It’s still China, though, and when I almost got sick at the fist sip of what I thought was a glass of Cabernet, I asked Tina to taste it. “Oh that's red wine mixed with Pepsi,” she said without batting an eye. Fuckin’ China, I said to myself for the umpteenth time that week. 

That meal didn’t instantly cure us of our bitter China hate though. We continued to marinate in anti-Chongqing bile right up until the morning that we left, when I (observing proper Chinese culture) shoved a number of old grandmas out of the way to squeeze through the bottleneck gate and get to our train first. Tryg simply jumped over the fence. 

Heading to Chengdu in the cheap crowded seats, the man across from me asked me what I was going to do in Sichuan. I pretended I couldn’t speak Chinese and went to sleep.

The serious kite fliers come out to the harbor to do their thing.

Before I go, I want to tell you all that if you’re still reading this, it’s awesome.  I know a lot of you have written comments. I am reading them. Even though I can’t get to the blog because of the internet blocks in China, when you leave a comment I get an e-mail telling me what you’ve written. I’m trying to figure out a way that I can respond to the things you are saying without putting anymore strain on Lupin, who is already doing a ton of work on this blog, editing and compiling everything even while she is in the midst of finals and her job.

The other thing that I want to ask now, as a favor, is that you tell your friends about this blog. I know it’s a bit specialized—maybe not everyone in the world would be interested in what is happening with me and Tryg on this trip—but I do want this thing to continue to grow. I wanted to wait to make this request till I’d already gotten a number of blog entries written and posted, so that you all could decide if it is in fact something that you enjoy, and then you can decide if you’d be willing to recommend it to a friend. So if you do like it, please spread it around. 

And one very last thing. What's up? I know most of you, and even if I don’t, I want to hear about life back home or wherever you are. Leave comments, and I’ll read them all no matter how long they are. What adventures are you having? What is changing in the little parts of the world that I might not be hearing about?

Halved carp await a buyer.

Catfish tank in the underground fish market.

Snippets from Shanghai

A little girl on the high-speed train from Beijing to Nanjing.

So what is interesting? Is it the idea that a person is wandering through a strange place that perhaps only a handful of people in the greater world community really understand? Or is it the metaphor that perhaps China represents the inner workings of my own mind that until now were trapped in the deluge of familiarity, too common to investigate but hiding some vital secret? After all, only kids who don’t know any better dig in their own backyard for treasure and truly think they’ll find something. In a place like this, everything inspires awe, and the map is marked with a thousand Xs.

So far, me and Tryg have not once called ahead to see if a hostel is available ahead of time. There is not a whole lot of forethought involved in this, nor a crazy thirst for adventure at the possibility that we will not have a place to stay. It is more just an unconscious trust that things will work out. This may change soon, though, as more and more travelers look at us like we’re crazy when we tell them that we’ve made no reservations anywhere.

The hostel that we find in Shanghai is as beautiful and perfect a place as I can imagine. There are two other Americans here who we will get to know in the back-alley porch, where many bottles of weak beer will be drunk, cheap cigarettes smoked, and tell long stories told. We are right on the river, across from which we will find the local street food.

But this first day, as we arrive haggard from a day of bus, train, and never-ending foot travel, cute friendly reception girls greet us, and we are happy to just sit for a moment. A group has gathered on the porch to go drink and sing in the KTV bar. We’re invited but we decline. It’s been a very long day, and we’re sick of each other and the world. It’s time to eat, shower, and sleep.

Nanjing train station.

Shanghai is one of the busiest cities in the world, and one of China's top commerce cities. The streets are packed with people selling, buying, and moving. They move like water in a well-worn riverbed, without inherent order, except for that afforded by the banks of the city. People move en masse into intersections. Crossing the street, one feels like a card in a deck that is being shuffled. No one has the right-of-way, the pedestrians do not yield to the semi-trucks nor vice versa—one simply moves and finds their way past a thousand other people in various vehicles also taking care of only themselves. This is the Chinese prerogative: take care of yourself, because no one else is going to. It’s interesting that Mao’s socialist ideal never died—it simply disappeared and was slowly replaced by this polar opposite. Most Americans would be troubled by the rampant capitalism here.

Chelsea is a white girl from Wisconsin, and Matt is a black guy from California. Meeting these other Americans has been a major release for me and Tryg. Of course, as we go we make do with the Europeans we meet, and can even feel relieved when out of the billion Chinese we meet someone from Africa or South America. You can relate to foreigners here like nowhere else. They allow you to step back and see all those crazy aspects of China that you start to take for granted on a daily basis. But to be surrounded by your fellow countrymen—people who talk like you, understand the same slang; people you don’t have to explain your culture to, who laugh at the same jokes and remember the same things (like cheese, and real beer)—it is a wonderful thing.

The Chinese cliché. Shanghai's skyline is photographed thousands of times a day.

In China, to be white can be a wonderful thing. People want to take you out, the want to talk with you, they want to get to know you. But at the same time, it can be entirely overwhelming. You get paranoid as a hundred stone-cold eyes follow you down the street every time you go outside. Vendors are constantly trying to take as much of your money as they possibly can. Everything is a hassle because everyone wants a piece of you.

Matt has it even worse, though, as Chinese people are often blatantly racist without pretense. The will tell you to your face that they like white people more than black people. In Chinese culture, to have dark skin usually means that you are a farmer working in the sun all day. That means that, for thousands of years, to have dark skin meant that you were poor and lower-class. And with no historical impetus for tolerance of those different from you, the Chinese never developed a wide sweeping cultural sensitivity.

A local tends his net from atop a 15-foot wall. Downtown Shanghai.

That disregard for farmers is something that I’ve never understood. China gets the vast majority of its food from its own farms. The entire country 1.5 billion people would starve to death (as in the past it has) if the farmers were not working as hard as they are for their horrifically-low wages. Farmers can’t afford to educate their children or buy clothes, so most middle-class Chinese look down on them and offer them no respect.

China is a place of hard-lined cultural classes, and all this is confounded by the new modern age hitting China hard between the eyes. In some ways it has become even harder for farmers, as the modern Chinese see them as a reminder of a past they’d like to forget. They want the world to forget their poor meager past. The farms, though, reflect that past, and so they are not simply shunned, but at times vilified by some of the “evolved” Chinese I’ve spoken with. But this opinion is not universal. Nothing is universal in China.



A day's catch on the Yangtze, bound for the dinner table.



I wish dearly that I could speak Mandarin better. I want to ask the old man who glares at me in the park if he still believes the vicious anti-Western propaganda that was ubiquitous when he was my age. Does he mourn the new Chinese obsession with Western cultures and see me, with my heavy pack resting on his bench, as a sign of Mao’s failed ideal society?

What is the old man on the train of the same generation thinking, the one who proudly brought our attention to the Italian leather “Leonardo da Vinci” shoes that he wore below his green plaid pants—the same man who had invited us to stay with him in Shanghai after knowing us for ten minutes? A crowd had gathered to watch us as we’d somehow been booked on an impromptu late-night talk show. This old man tried on my “cowboy” hat, asked endless questions about America, and gave us bags and bags of old-man food, like dried prunes and peanuts.

On the slow train between Nanjing and Shanghai.

There are no absolutes in China, no universal ways of describing the Chinese mentality. There are just a billion people discovering their own individual lives.

It’s raining in Shanghai, and the humidity is so high that clothes refuse to dry on the line. I’m talking with Chengdude in the hostel lobby. Chengdude is a guy from Chungdu, and one of the most unique Chinese people I’ve met in China so far. He came to Shanghai for a job, but now he’s just hanging out for a while. I suspect he’s sticking around primarily to flirt with the attractive girls working behind the counter at the hostel. But there’s no way of knowing for sure, and I’m pretty sure Chengdude himself doesn’t know why he’s here or what he’s doing, which makes him a perfect guy to chat with about life.

“My parents want me to work for the government like them. But I don’t want that—I mean, after that then I guess I’d meet a girl I didn’t love, get married, and have one kid. That’s my parents’ life, and it’s fucking tragedy. I don’t want to copy and paste their life onto mine. I want to do what makes me happy. I want to travel in Europe, learn about different cultures, and then I think I want to go live in India—maybe forever—and be surrounded by people who really believe in something. You know?”

Chengdude

I consider this shift between generations in China to be one of the most interesting phenomenons in the history of the world. I wonder about the troubles faced by a nation that holds the next generation up as the new hope for a modern Chinese society, while those young adults are developing within that environment a newfound sense of individual identity. They are confronted by existential questions that have never been a part of the mass Chinese culture. These questions developed in the West slowly over generations with the industrial revolution, but they have collided with these young adults all at once. The majority of those in the previous generation survived starvation, got their water from wells, and lived most of their early life without electricity, while these kids surf the internet and mourn the loss of Steve Jobs by writing Tang Dynasty poems that are published in the newspaper.

Screw the landlord. A ubiquitous Chinese street game.

Before now, the question was how to feed one’s family, and how to survive yourself, during times when survival was impossible for many. But as the question changes from “how can I live” to “how do I want to live,” what effect does that have on the expectations of the parent generation, a generation that cannot understand the spiritual necessity of discovering what makes one feel fulfilled?

After all, to be fulfilled in one’s life when food is scarce is itself a simple thing. When you are not sure if you will have food this winter, then each day that you live is a day earned through hard work. When you no longer need to earn your life, and so instead must discover what lives are good for, it can feel like there is no road map. Nowhere is this more true than in China, where the generation asking these questions cannot look to their ancestors for a model of what they should do.

I, of course, can relate to this aspect of Chinese culture, because I am facing a similar conflict, though on a vastly smaller scale. I feel I have passed though the survivalist period of my life. The year I spent in China, and all those years that followed, in my mind proved that I can live through anything. In surviving, I felt I had earned my life. The question is, now that I feel in possession of my life, what will I do with it? The question of how to live presses at every tearing seam.

I’ve found I am not a fan of leaving places. I don’t want to say goodbye to the people I’ve met in this little corner of China. My mom says I’m just a homebody, and I think that’s probably true. But I’ve long held the belief that if it’s painful, it’s probably good for you. Even though nothing particularly amazing happened here, I still feel like it was an important piece of the journey.

Then next step is a three-day train ride to Chongqing, the mountains, and the Yangtze River. Every couple days finds me once again stepping into unknown waters. I don’t understand how every step keeps bringing such amazing experiences. There is magic in travel.

Copper and other raw materials are in high demand.

Man on a Mission

It’s important to stand back from time to time and consider how you got to where you are. China has a tendency to regularly produce very unique experiences, so it’s easy to forget how surreal things are. 

I am at an art gallery in the trendy arts district of Beijing, listening to the ambassador of Finland give a nearly comatose speech about his experience as the subject of a documentary film. I’m sipping free champagne and pacing at the back of the well-dressed crowd, considering the things that come to mind when surrounded by other people’s art.

Stoli makes for a memorable night in Tiananmen Square.  Beijing parliament building in the background. 

Liisa seems nervous standing up on stage beside the stuffy dignitary, which is understandable considering she came down with a stomach flu the day before and was up most of the night vomiting. She’s under a lot of stress as the coordinator of this film festival, but she’s pulled together remarkably well for someone who hasn’t eaten anything all day.

Tryg is out of sight and feeling out of place somewhere in the crowded hall. He’s gotten comfortable with the people he finds while riding his borrowed bike around the undeveloped suburbs of Beijing—so being suddenly thrust into this mixed crowd of affluent foreigners, hipster Chinese students, and modern artists has him noticeably on edge.

A week ago, two days after the panic attack of the decade, I’d tagged along with Liisa to a piece of China I’d never experienced. This corner of Beijing, years ago, was forgotten in the mad dash to modernize the nation. It had been occupied, and then transformed, by artists drawn to the energy of the capital city. As the years went on, eventually the area was marked for demolition so as to construct more of the high-rise buildings that seem randomly placed on every horizon without obvious order or organization—a pattern of haphazard accomplishment that has become the common theme of Chinese modernization. By that time, though, the artists were well-established, and the local officials, excited at any opportunity to shift focus from China’s ancient accomplishments to its present ones, spared the area, leaving it as a strange bubble of relatively free expression in a country where art is often strictly regimented.

Not that there haven’t been conflicts.  



A Beijing taxi driver weaves through traffic with cigarette in hand.  Nevermind the seatbelt, they've been cut out.  

 I sat with Liisa in a little café that first day, along with 12 other volunteers she was working with on the film festival. She told me about an artist who was arrested after he’d constructed a massive art piece made from Sichuan peppercorns. The staple spice of western Chinese cooking was arranged in complex computer code. Local officials had taken a photo of the piece to an encryption specialist, and discovered that it spelled out all the words most censored by the Chinese government. They arrested the artist, and the exhibition shut down. There are apparently a number of stories like this. In this area, more than one person is under house arrest in the buildings surrounding the studios.

The little café we sat in was more akin to the Portland hipster scene than anything I would have expected to find in China. Goldfish swimming in wine glasses sat on the counter, old revolutionary kitsch was hanging from the walls, a distressed stand-up bass hung upside down from the wall behind the cash register. Despite this, the food was authentically Chinese, and some of the best I’d had yet in Beijing.

The volunteers around the table were all talking about the Nordox Film festival. The collection of young students switched easily between Chinese and English.  

“What does this word mean? ‘Nordox?’” one of the newer volunteers had asked Liisa.  

“Well it is a combination of two words—‘Nordic’ and ‘documentaries.’ They shorten the word ‘documentaries’ to ‘docs.’ Then to make it cool the replace the ‘cs’ with an ‘x’.”

“Oh I see, so an ‘x’ makes things cooler?”

Whatever I was feeling then, it is the opposite of the long night a few days prior. Surrounded by people in pursuit of a goal, I felt utterly invigorated. After lunch we all returned to the studio, where some people were designing the posters for the event, and others were translating subtitles for the films. That’s when I wrote my first blog entry. Usually I cannot write when there are people around me, but in the midst of creation I felt totally at home.

Back at the festival opening, the Finnish ambassador’s boring speech has ended and the thank-yous have been delivered. The crowd now funnels into the theater.

The first film, The Extraordinary Ordinary Life of Jose Gonzales, is a breathtaking portrait of the singer/songwriter.  

Have you ever dreamed that you were singing a song, and in the dream it is the most perfect song you have ever heard? And when you wake up you are excited because you think that melody alone could change the world…but of course the song fades away, and you are unable to recreate it in the waking world? Those are the kinds of songs that Jose Gonzales writes.

The film captures Jose, who is, by all appearances, an incredibly dull person living a boring repetitive life as a musician. But the simplicity is so perfectly juxtaposed with his incredibly moving songs and self-recorded thoughts on life and science that you are left feeling he is a person as yet undiscovered by this film. The emotion and the mystery I’m left with as the credits roll unleashes a sudden craving to write for hours, but I’ve forgotten my notebook so instead I try to jam a thousand ideas into my long-term memory.

I met Fredrik Egerstrand, the director of this film, days earlier. He was stopping in Beijing for a few hours on his way to a film festival in Taipei, and Liisa needed to get the hard-drive with his film on it for Nordox.  We sat down with Fredrik for coffee in the airport and talked about his movie, his past work, and the festival. I was enthralled.

I’m becoming very envious of artists. It’s never something I’ve wanted to be before—in fact, I’ve generally been a creative hermit, writing in the dark corners of the internet. But Fredrik was a man surrounded by stories. He’d created music videos, documentaries, and was in the midst of making his first feature film. He spoke so easily of the people and projects that each sounded amazing. 

I’m almost certain I was asking too many questions, considering he hadn't slept in over 24 hours—but, as had begun to happen regularly in the last few days, I found myself caught in a stream of thought with far too strong a current to resist. By the time Fredrik left to check his bag and get on his new flight, I was radiating energy like an atomic bomb, ready warm the world.

Despite all this excitement, the anxiety from that first night is still present, rises up from time to time, and the next day came out in force.



A rough brick wall being built in the Beijing 798 art district.  

 Tryg and I were having issues trying to get the images sent to Lupin so she could assemble the blog. The problem, at first, was that the images were so big that sending them in an email took a prohibitive amount of time.  This is where the conflict began between me and Tryg.

Tryg has very high standards for his pictures—so high in fact that out of the 250 pictures he’d taken he only felt that five of them were good enough to post on the blog for people to see. This also means that he insists on shooting his images in the largest, most detailed format possible—which makes a lot of sense if you really want to produce the best image. Tryg is a very good photographer, and I understand that someone creating his own art has the final say in how his work is represented and displayed. Tryg is trying to create an experience with his photos, which requires very high standards. It’s something I really appreciate about how he works. However, Tryg did not bring a computer, or any other equipment to deal with these very large images, making them very hard to send, slowing down the production of the blog significantly.

Suddenly confronted with all these complications, and the fact that I was only going to have five images to accompany what I’d written, I started getting very agitated and left to go on a walk. I was gone for a little over an hour of concentrated of brooding. I was pissed at Tryg, angry that he was insisting on being such a perfectionist. I felt like he was doing what he imagined a “real” photographer would do, rather than what was practical given our difficult situation. I was angry that he’d had the option to bring a computer, but had instead chosen to bring a bottle of beer. By the time I got back, I was near the boiling point, but Tryg was gone.

I resisted venting too much to Liisa, who was doing some work for the festival. I tried to rest and calm down on the futon that lay against the wall. When Tryg finally returned, I told him I wanted to use more than five of his pictures in the future for the blog. He said no, and we started to fight.

  

There is nothing like clashing vision, and we both quickly realized that the two of us had been conceiving of very different blogs. I wanted a blog that told simultaneous stories: my story in words, and Tryg’s story in photos. And while Tryg in theory wanted the same thing, his idea of a photo story was very different. He wanted a select few pictures that each in themselves told an entire story, while I wanted a montage capturing the broader visual environment of China, including more imperfect pictures that captured the day to day experiences we were having.

Like the tricked-out Jeep we found with a massive “Ron Paul 08” sticker covering the passenger side door.  Or the warning sign at the front of a restaurant that sounded like a 1950’s insult: “look out, knock head.” All these pictures Tryg had taken, but he did not want to show them to the people on the blog, because they were not photography, they were just pictures.

Of course neither of us were speaking so clearly or rationally, and eventually Tryg refused to continue the conversation, while I considered if kicking him in the face might help. Liisa continued working on the computer a few feet away.



Bricks.

 When we got back to Liisa’s apartment we restarted the conversation, again trapping Liisa with our relationship issues. This time we talked a lot longer, and managed to cover a lot of important topics. Most important of all, I let Tryg know that I still had no idea what I was doing here in China. That I didn’t have the passion I had for this place the last time I was here.

In the past, my idea of traveling always involved finding myself. Discovering who I am as a person. Once I know who I am and where I stand, then I can move from that position into the world. Once I have that stable foundation, I can create the person I want to be—that’s what I used to think. But in the midst of fighting with Tryg, I started to realize that I no longer had that craving for self-discovery, not like I used to. I began to realize that, for the most part, I was confident in the fact that I knew myself pretty well now, and that self-awareness had given me the tools I needed to move on. I had the desire to begin creating, making things, developing myself into the person I want to become.

The problem with all this is, of course, that it suddenly made me wonder why it is I’m traveling at all. I have been developing a very strong desire to stay put. And the place I want to stay is this community of artists in Beijing. Being around them was sparking a sense of fulfillment I hadn’t experienced in a long while. Without that feeling that I am actually creating something, and moving towards a future, I can’t see how I’ll last through a year of this.  

However, I am moving on, and what I am left with after that argument is a commitment to this blog. It may not be much, but I really want to see if it can become “something.”  I hope people read it, care about it, tell their friends about it. I can’t ignore the fact that there is a certain amount of arrogance to that, the desire to be important in other people’s lives.  But I do know that of all the things that have ever made me feel fulfilled, effecting people around me in a positive way has been by far the most potent. If I can use this blog in that way, it would be a wonderful thing.

The after-party for the festival opening is at a bar in the Hutongs. The Hutongs of Beijing are some of the oldest dwelling-places in the world, with people having lived in them continuously for nearly 1500 years. They are made of narrow walkways and stone walls that allow for foot traffic and maybe a bike or two, but make car passage very difficult (though not entirely impossible). This makes the Hutongs one of the quietest and most peaceful places in Beijing, despite existing at its very heart.

The bar we are in, however, is pounding with Western club music as a mix of young Chinese and foreigners hold mixed drinks and chat. I’m sitting with three good-looking (mostly blond) photographers from Sweden who are part of a Nordic photo exhibition running alongside the film festival. They are talking business with the main director of the event, so I sit back with my glass of wine and watch the people around me.  

I met the Swedes—Andrea, Chris, and Johan—the night before at a dinner held in their honor. We ate at a rather fancy Yunnan restaurant that served a very different style of Chinese food than we’ve become used to. Most notably, a plate of fried mealworms and bee larvae. They were still exhausted from their flight, but interested in the weird food and new people. I talked with them about their work a bit, and where they’d been, too.  



Pulled noodles 拉面  (la mian), a common offering in noodle restaurants of Northern China.

 Andrea’s exhibit in the show was a photo series on the small northern towns in Greenland. My favorite shot had been of the northern lights glowing at night over ghostly wooden buildings that looked hundreds of years old. Johan had a series that he’d taken of albino Africans in Tanzania. It was a very vivid series, with many graphic images of lives so painfully effected by the sun.

Again I found myself talking a lot, trying to dig up stories from these adventurous artists of the world who traveled to find their subjects in distant places. I felt as if I could identify with them, or at least, I really hoped I could.

“So what is your mission?” Andrea had asked, after we’d described our plan to travel across Asia for a year.

I found myself caught off-guard and babbling for a second. After all, this had been the trouble all along—I’d had no mission, from the several weeks before I left America, until that first night in Beijing when my anxious mind had taken control. It suddenly seemed absurd. After I couldn’t come up with anything useful to say, Andrea had answered for me.

“Well, maybe your mission is to find a mission then?”  

At the after-party, Tryg and Andrea are talking about nerdy camera stuff, so again I find myself only half-listening to the conversation. Tryg’s favorite picture of Andrea’s is one of a seal that is being butchered on a kitchen floor by one of the villagers. The woman in the shot is eating a portion of the raw meat looking down at the body of the animal. The red blood strikes out in contrast while at the same time blending in with the dingy kitchen.

“I haven’t had a chance to look at your blog yet!” she shouts over the loud music.

“Oh, that’s fine—it’s actually blocked in China so you won’t be able to see it till you get home!” I shout back “Besides, I didn’t really like the last entry so I’m hoping to get a new one up in a day or two.” 

            

“What was wrong with your last post?”

“I don’t know, it just wasn’t that interesting, I don’t really know what I’m writing about yet, I guess I’m still looking for a theme, I still need to find my mission!”

She smiles.

The rest of the night is short. I’m tired, and Liisa is still feeling sick, so we find Tryg and the three of us head home.



Oyster mushrooms in one of the many open air markets around Beijing.

 Tomorrow will be the last full day we are spending in Beijing. I’m still not sure how I feel about leaving. I loved the people I met here. It was amazing getting to know Liisa, who seemed to mesh really well with the crazy that me and Tryg can exude. I’m afraid of leaving all the creative people that I met in such a short time, not to mention that soon it’ll be just be me and Tryg, and I’m not sure if we’ll be able to stand each other too much longer.

I’m still hoping to get one new blog entry a week, but after this I won’t have regular access to a computer, and will no longer be able to get around the Great Firewall of China that keeps me from viewing Facebook or Blogspot. I’ll be flying completely blind, depending on Lupin and Gary to keep the blog afloat. There are so many unknowns coming in the next couple days, which would be fine if I had any idea what I was looking for in the void.

But I suppose I feel a little better. A mission to find a mission is better than no mission at all, and China has already proven it can still stir up some pretty crazy adventures when called upon to do so.

Next we are headed to Suzhou, in Jiangsu province. It’s far enough south, very near Shanghai, that the culture should be noticeably different.  I’ve never been anywhere near there before, so it’ll be a whole new experience.

Thanks to everyone who is reading along. Your comments have been awesome, and I’m still amazed at how many of you are showing up to read these posts.

Here's a link to Jose Gonzalez's song "Teardrop": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B-h1EEsKDA&noredirect=1