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

8:00 am November 2

Riding the MAX train to the airport I can’t help but feel like there’s something else I should be doing. Tryg spent all of last night tying flies and now has fallen asleep against his backpack on the seat across from me. There are a number of people with suitcases and baggage, but Tryg and I are the only ones wearing heavy packs stuffed to their limits—40 pounds apiece. I feel every bit the superior traveler. But the sinking feeling persists, digging into my gut and rattling around my head with every bump and turn of the train. It’s not the fear that I’ve forgotten something—I’m sure I locked the door, positive the stove is off, and that my mother’s cats are fed. This feeling is larger, all-encompassing.

If you’ve talked to me in the last few weeks before I left and asked if I was excited I probably said “Yes, and very scared,” and you might have laughed as if I were kidding.  But as the date came closer the excitement waned while the fear increased. By the last few days my blood pressure was on a constant high, and my dreams rarely calm. Now, as the MAX pulls up to its final destination, I am still aware of that feeling. Isn’t there something else I should be doing? I repeat in my head a few times while kicking Tryg awake. 

“We’re here,” I say as Tryg looks around, confused. 



The happiest recipient of a photo so far, Northern Beijing.


The bags are heavy, and my legs are tired. We decided to walk to the train that morning.  What better way than on foot to start such an incredible adventure? we’d thought as we had left my parents’ house—a place where I had been ashamed of living for a long time.  A 25-year-old shouldn’t still live with his parents, at least that’s what I felt, even if it’s not what I necessarily believed. I believe you do what you have to do to get by, but it was never something to be proud of. 

“Did you know that in the beginning of On The Road Jack Kerouac is living with his mother? That’s where he starts off, from his mom’s house,” I mention as we walk out the door.

“Hmm,” Tryg responds. He is a good guy to have around if you want to talk to yourself.

The plane ride is very short to Seattle and then very long to Beijing. All told, travel time is 17 hours. Neither of us has slept more than five hours in the last two days, but when we arrive in Beijing, we’re placed into action mode. The local time is 5:30 but the sun has already gone down, and the smog is thick enough to dim the street lights.



Wood and wire vs. 50 story highrise.
 A land of dichotomies.  

 We are to meet an old friend of mine from the last time I was in China, a Finnish girl named Liisa. But before we can find her, we have to figure out the public transportation. Liisa has emailed me instructions, but my Chinese is bad, and Beijing is not proving to be a friendly city. Makes me think of New York—people are busy and they don’t want to help you even if it’s their job to help. We hop a bus that one attendant says will take us to the first stop in Liisa’s directions. I ask every person waiting in line if this bus does in fact go to SanYuanQiao. They all assure me that is does, but I still find my self un-assured. 

On the bus we find another white man—he’s from Finland. As a white person in China you start to feel like a dog sniffing out other white people in your vicinity. It turns out Jaakko (pronounced yakkoh) is a businessman, though he looks more like a California surfer.  He owns three businesses and is in Beijing to source products. Unfortunately, while talking with Jaakko I start to get the uneasy feeling that we’ve missed our stop. 

With my large pack bumping into everyone, I make my way to the bus driver.

    

“Hey, shirfu, ni qu sanyuanqiao ma?”  I ask. 

“SANYUANQIAO?!” the old man shouts, surprised and irritated as he quickly pulls the bus over to the side of the road. 

We say goodbye to Jaakko and jump from the bus. We walk back to the stop that we’d missed by three blocks and read the next step in the directions. We are supposed to wait for Bus 10. But after waiting for 15 minutes or so, we start to wonder if Bus 10 is ever going to come. At about that time I notice an old man wearing an old blue uniform standing next to us.  

“Ni hao,” I say tentatively as he stares me and Tryg down with a funny little smile. 

“Ni Hao! Nimen shi na guo ren?” 

“We’re Americans,” I respond in Chinese.  I’m surprised at how well I can talk with him and as the conversation continues I become proud of how well I can communicate, even if I’m only catching every 4th or 5th word.

Eventually he figures out where we’re trying to go, and tells us that we can’t get there from this bus station. “Let’s go!” he says in Chinese with a heavy Beijing accent, and he starts walking.  

With our heavy packs we find it hard to keep up as he barrels through crowds to take us who knows where. I’m cautious, because you never know if a person you meet on the street in China is trying to help you, or help themselves. 

We get to a different bus station, but this one has no sign for the number 10 bus. We have another conversation, but this one is very confusing to me. I can’t figure out what he’s saying, but it seems to be important. Finally, I put the words he’s saying together with the motions he’s making and I realize that the bus is not a bus—it is, in fact, a subway. 



Replacing a brake disk for one of the many 3 wheeled carts.

 “The 10 is underground!” That’s what he’s been shouting the whole time. 

He’s off again, and we are lagging behind. My legs are aching from sudden heavy use, after hours of stagnation in a cramped 747.

We find the station and head down a long series of stairs. The old man shows us the ticket booth, tells us how to buy a ticket, how to ride the train, and what to do when we arrive. We say goodbye and thank him. I don’t know what we would have done if that old man hadn't come along, but I’m not surprised he showed up either. I’ve never had a problem arise in China that wasn’t some how solved by China, even though no one expects this to be a land of miracles. 

We make the last few stops on the train easily, and in no time I’m hugging Liisa hello. I haven’t seen her in nearly five years. Liisa was one of a collection of people that I used to hang out with from the university in Jinan in 2006. When you’re the only foreigners in a dull city you tend to glom together. 



A business mogul surveys construction in a fast growing Northern Beijing suburb.

 But believe it or not, at 19 I was rather socially inept. Even now I tend to hang back in groups. I’m quiet, and I don’t share my opinions unless I trust the people around me. So back then Liisa and I did not become good friends. In fact, we hardly knew each other. A couple years after I left China, though, we reconnected on Facebook. We didn’t talk often, but by the time I was starting to plan this trip I had formed a friendship with her and so now have a place to stay for a week in Beijing, a soft landing in a crazy country. 

My first meal in China is wonderful. There are so many incredible flavors that you just can’t recreate in the US. Noodles, soup, mushrooms. I can’t tell you how long I’ve missed it all. Tryg is practicing some Chinese vocabulary as Liisa is telling stories about our year in Jinan. My stomach is starting to hurt. 

Most people get stomachaches when they eat too much, but for me stomachaches mean something more. For almost my entire life, stomachaches have meant that I’m losing control, and panic is setting in. 

We finish the meal, and head back to Liisa’s apartment—a one-bedroom flat with hardwood floors, a washing machine (but not a dryer), sit-down toilet, and a kitchen. Back home, with all the drafts, cracks, and broken tiles, this would be considered a major “fixer-upper,” but here it’s practically a luxury apartment. I head to the bathroom. 



High speed internet, modern skyscrapers and 10% growth rate, but
clothes dryers have yet to find their way to China.

 That night as I try to sleep, the question that has been repeating itself in the background all day blasts into the quiet dark room. 

Why am I here again?! I’ve already been to China, I’ve already had this adventure. Why am I back again, what good will come from it? Shouldn't I be working now? I could be saving money for grad school, or getting an apartment. I could be working towards my future and doing something productive. So why have I offered this year up on a stone table to something I can’t identify? Do I really believe that what I do this year will matter? I keep telling myself that “something” will happen, but now that seems absurd. It seems crazy to believe that this year will lead anywhere. What if all this is just a massive waste of time and effort? 

My stomach roars like a hurricane all night. I shut my eyes for maybe three hours. The sleep deprivation is mounting. 

(To fully appreciate Tryg's images, click on them where they appear in the blog.)