Things You Should Know

Ah, the allure of fire.*

After the crazy traffic, food sanitation, and hospitals, a man swinging 
around a string of firecrackers doesn't even register as moderately dangerous.

Chinese New Year: It’s like Christmas, New Years, and the Fourth of July rolled into one, 
with really cheap fireworks (all of which are legal). The next morning there is literally 
a carpet of red paper covering the streets from the millions of firecrackers.

There is so much I wish I’d shared with you about this place. I’ve gone off on tangents about the nature of the Chinese mind, and I’ve been distracted by my adventures in the hospital, my terrible Christmas Day date, and my chance encounter with the Chinese film industry. But I’ve been negligent when it comes to explaining Dali. Maybe it’s because it’s so incredible and I know that anything I write will fail to capture exactly why Tryg and I have chosen to stay here so long. But there are things that I really need you to know before we leave.

I want you to know intimately that there is a moment that happens right at sunset, if the weather is just right, when there is a tiny gap of blue visible between the mountains and the clouds. If you watch as the sun descends unseen behind the overcast sky that small patch of blue will soften in color to deep purple, then to amber, and then bright orange, until suddenly the sun itself will appear in that minuscule window of space, and massive rays of light—as clear and real as if they are the tangible condensation of something sacred—will erupt across the valley. In that moment the snowy mountain peeks are set metallic, shining like polished brass in summer heat. In this moment of light, the ego melts in acceptance of temporal perfection, and draws the people watching together in communal love for the place that they are.

An unusually wintery day along Er Hai Lake.

Did you know in Yunnan marijuana grows like a weed all over the farmland where farmers produce fresh highly-inorganic vegetables all winter long? In Dali all the houses are white with murals neatly placed in the corners of the walls. The temple halfway up the mountain is the best place to get vegetarian fried noodles, while in town there is a Buddhist buffet where you can eat as much as you want for around 80 cents. But you have to eat everything on your plate or the nun will stand disapprovingly beside you, refusing to let you go till you’ve finished every single grain of rice. 

Unusual flora of rural Yunnan.

Sometimes on a clear calm day a gust of wind so strong you can stand sideways against it will rip down from the mountains and then disappear, leaving a clean street and crowds of people rubbing the dust out of their eyes. 

I want you to know the people here. In such a small town I never walk through the streets without running into friends. I know the juggling Italian clown that regularly drops his balls in the middle of otherwise impressive shows. I know the male Chilean modern dancer with long curly hair who moves to cello music on stage like a worm plumbing the earth for a beat. There is the Australian/Colombian couple who have been traveling the world for two years from South America on their way back down under, keeping a blog of their adventures. I know the English brewer at the Bad Monkey Bar who I play Monopoly with on Saturdays, along with Jane, the former co-owner of the Jade Emu hostel. There’s Steve the American tea tycoon, Simon the muscle-bound ex-British Air Force backpacker, Richard the out-of-work biologist, Lewis the anthropological filmmaker. For a while there was Jack the pot-smoking writer who was never found away from the sun that shone on the third floor, and Adrian the Scottish mother of two teenagers who could turn heads while sunbathing on the terrace. The whole city feels like our own private mansion, with all the people in it making up a strange churning family of comers and goers that seem destined to converge on this little village in southern China.

In Dali there are two alternate universes.  The western tourists arrive at the hostels with backpacks intending to climb the mountains, see the temples, experience the local culture and enjoy a relaxed artistic existence. The Chinese tourists check into their hotels and head off to take pictures with their point-and-shoot cameras while riding huge fifteen-seat tourist golf carts, or being herded through the city by tour guides dressed in outfits imitating the ethnic minorities of the area.

BAMFs by night.

An unexpected subject made for a much more interesting photo.

Tomorrow we are leaving China.  We will explore Southeast Asia starting with Laos, possibly continuing on to Thailand, Cambodia, or even Vietnam—but we will return to Dali when we get tired or run low on money. This is the place in Asia where we will always come home.

It’s been a while since I thanked everyone who reads this regularly, or irregularly. We love hearing from you guys when ever you make the time to write comments or emails and I love that people somewhere in the world care about what we are doing. I hope you all are making it through the winter OK as we head off to the tropics.

* Note: The first photo in this post, captioned “Ah, the allure of fire,” is not my photo. It was taken by our good friends Kris and Andreas, an Australian and a Colombian, who have been traveling and blogging for close to two years. Read about their adventures at 2sporks1cup.com

Women dancing in the Dragon Festival on Day Two of New Year.

Faux Military Manifesto

(This blog post was written while I lay in bed with a fever.  It's certainly a very different blog from the ones I usually write but I like it a lot, I got the ideas I write about here from all the books I've been reading since coming to china, school lectures from college, and conversations I've had while traveling.  Forgive the weird formatting as I had to upload the blog myself this week from a very crappy computer with an old server that couldn't really handle the blogger uploading program.)

Part 1

Liisa + tea + diffused window light + slingshot.  A still life. 

Nietzsche was a mild anti-Semite. Not your KKK extreme kind of racist, but the low-burn kind of bigot who would write letters about how much he loved those crazy Jews despite the fact that thousands of years ago they were responsible for the tainting of Western civilization with a flawed moral code.

Nietzsche said that before the Jews, the whole world worked basically on the same moral principle—that the strong will rule over the weak. The strong created the rules that most benefited themselves, and created a culture where the weak accepted, followed, and in fact upheld those rules. In this society what was valued was power, strength, and dominance over your enemies. You wanted to display your abilities and demanded that others respect you. These values became the values of the people so that even the slaves valued such traits because they benefited too from such a society.

Ian enjoys his military dress-up.

If you want an example of this moral system in modern times, consider the military. A general makes the rules,and the foot soldiers carry out their orders. To step out of line is not simply to incur the wrath of your commanding officer, but also every other soldier of any rank. Mutiny threatens the structure that, in battle, every single participant from strong to weak depends on to survive. And even in a successful mutiny, the structure of the military system is not changed—only the leader is removed. The most recent example of a society in western history that still employed such a social morality is the ancient Romans, who had a strong caste system where in superiors ruled over merchants and slaves and the merchants and slaves supported their masters as a rational act of self-preservation.

While Nietzsche did not like this “master morality,” he believed that what replaced it was much worse—the slave revolt, he called it. It was not a military revolt, like every empire has faced, only to be replaced with an identical form of morality exacted by new masters. Instead, the Jewish slave revolt was a philosophical one based on the tenant that strength was weakness, and humility was power.

It was a small revolt, quiet and ridiculous, so that none in power paid it much mind until that greatest of revolutionaries stood up and declared that “The meek shall inherit the earth!” and the meek listened, then the merchants listened, and the aristocrats and even eventually the emperor listened. After Jesus, the champion ofslave morality, came quiet chaos.  In time we came to believe one should be meek, yet strong. We believed we should be proud of our accomplishments, while Pride became a deadly sin. In us was born the conflict of ancient morality from the Romans and every society before them, mixing with the “irrational” morality of Jesus the king of the Jews.

As the Church rose in power and the Christian influence rivaled the states in which they existed, moral chaos battled in the hearts of society.  Eventually there came the idea that there may be no right answer to moral questions; there was ambiguity. But even more than that there was the recognition that within the state there were two powers: the government and the church. This meant that people would never again hold the belief that one person or political party should have universal power.

In 1215 the barons of England brought King John to (as I imagine it) a huge rolling green field. In the center of this moor was a table, a chair, and a piece of paper. Surrounded on all sides by the lords of his kingdom King John was forced to sign a document that would later become the Magna Carta—the first document that limited the power of a monarch to exact unlimited power against his subjects. This document is believed to be one of the most fundamental tenants of all English and Western laws that came afterwards.

Men and women carrying double loads of bamboo down 2,500 feet of mountain, every day, to make brooms.

Of course those Baron lords were simply trying to secure power for themselves, but they seized on a moral philosophy, rather than simply some new dictator, as a battle flag for their revolution, and that has made the difference in our society today.

What this all comes down to—the idea that I had today that flooded my head with these old lectures from school and the words of old books read long ago—is that in this chaos is the POSSIBILITY of greatness.

Nietzsche did not like the oppressive morality of the masters from ancient times—and even more, this son of a strict Lutheran pastor despised the irrational morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but even this staunch atheist seemed to believe that a societal conflict born of opposed morals was necessary for what might come next. He believed that a man of superior moral nature—who could in fact transcend morals and go beyond good and evil—could only develop through the chaos of  moral systems that regularly defeated each other.

Now to be honest I could never fully understand Nietzsche’s description of this moral superiority that he called the Ubermench. The Ubermech is not the next Jesus, and he is not the Buddha or some other religious figure. As best as I can tell, the Ubermench is a philosopher who thought hard enough that he was able to realize the flaws of all morality, and actualize that realization fully in his life.

If you ask some scholars, they think that Nietzsche believed himself to be this moral master. If you ask some Nietzsche fans, they will say that the fact he eventually went insane and spent that later part of his life starring out a window is proof that he really was this moral master. But really I don’t care much about what or who Nietzsche himself thought the Ubermench was, because I’m talking about societies here: Chinese society, and Western society.

Women working their vegetable plots in Cai Cun.  Monoculture planting has yet to catch on in rural China.  

I do believe in the inner conflict described by Nietzsche. I think every day or every moment we wake up and have to decide if we will be the general or the Buddha; Malcolm X or MLK. And I think this constant quiet question of what is right—and the fact that in some deep place we know that there may not be any right—means that each of us is, in some way, a confused philosopher.

We have this critical prospective because our society breeds conflict. The American revolutionaries didn’t envision a streamlined clockwork nation. They imagined a system of checks and balances with forums for competing opinions to not only be heard, but to be shouted, exclaimed, and screamed with anger and passion and love. The gears were made to grind loudly so that no one would forget to oil them.

And now we’ve finally gotten down to the main point. You see, as a result of all this chaos I have freedom. Not unlimited political freedom, as the powers that be will always try to limit political freedom for what they say is our own good. And I don’t have that much personal freedom anymore as our litigious society has sued our rights away little by little preventing us from so much as crossing the street against a flashing red hand. But I do have unlimited intellectual freedom to explore this uncomfortable chaos of mind. Freedom beyond what societies have ever been able to offer before. I am safe, I have food, and I have conflict on a daily basis. It’s painful, it’s scary, and not everyone wants to pursue this freedom of our free-minded society. But what’s more is that not everyone has access to it.

I think the way I think, know the things I know, am the person I am because I was born rich. Of course, rich is relative. In the US as a kid I was middle class. Not even upper-middle class, just middle-middle class—but even that gave me money, high standards for education, a belief that I was entitled to respect and good things from life. That meant I demanded those things from my teachers, doctors, and government when I knew they weren’t doing well enough. I got to go to college and to China because no one told me I couldn’t. I am lucky, and because of that good luck I get to sit down and wonder whether I am stronger when I punch someone, or when I don’t.

But this gift of moral dilemma has, until very recently, been mostly absent from China.

The Asian equivalent to Jesus was Siddhartha, the Buddha. The wealthy-born prince, trained from birth as a warrior, developed a philosophy in many ways identical to that of Judaism in its opposition to the classic master morality. It was an ideology of love, peace, and nonviolence.

In China, though, Buddhism did not have the same effect as Christianity had in the West. Though there were thousands of monks all over China, as there continue to be today, their teachings were largely confined to the monasteries, and Buddhism never accomplished anything near the level of political influence that Christianity had in Rome and beyond. The ideas never took hold in the greater populous, and there never developed the split of power. The idea that society should be anything other than a top-down streamlined system never formed except
in a few relatively ineffective spurts (such as the 1912 revolution and Sun Yat Sen).

The view from Dali University - looking East toward Er Hai lake.

In any revolution, the middle class manipulates the lower class to band against the upper class. The middle class generally promises things will be different when they come to power, but it almost never is, and it certainly never was in China. Even when the long-held dynasty system was abolished, and was followed by a series of different governments, including those of foreign invaders, the system of top-down rule was fully intact. So when the communists took over claiming to be a government of the people, it did not mean a democratic government where the people had a say in the direction of the government—it more accurately was exactly the same as what every revolutionary had said before in China: that now the government would really work to protect the people even though it was the same top-down dictatorship that China had always experienced historically.

In 1989 the Tiananmen protests were staged by students who wanted the right to have control over their government. But since the bloody conclusion of that protest there have never been anything but quiet whimpers for reforms of that kind. Instead, the call of the people has been for greater economic progress. The Chinese people generally do not desire or understand the value of a split government. Many would say they do not want to vote, or at the very least do not want everyone to vote, because to empower the uneducated rural Chinese would, in their minds, be a massive step backwards for their society. Control over your government is not a right, it is a privilege, and one that the Chinese seem content without, for the moment.

After all, there are people here who are happy simply to have food, and for the decline in poverty. People have disposable income that they are proud to flaunt because, while they have their own appearance of humility, it is not the same as ours, where we believe we should legitimately be ashamed of our strength or wealth. When complimented on their wealth, the Chinese make only a feeble attempt to deny the praise while internally beaming, and making no attempt to hide their affluence.

The friendliest man in Wa Se, a small market town on the west side of the lake.

The lower class during the Cultural Revolution, which happened only 60 years ago, were eating their children. I’m not being metaphorical. There was a small village in China where the local corrupt officials (as all officials in China tended to be then and continue to be now) were hording grain rations for themselves. The people reached such a profound level of starvation that a few families began killing and eating the daughters. When that wasn’t enough food, one man even began trapping and eating the children from neighboring towns.

When he was set before the firing squad for his crimes, the young men charged with his execution, who were themselves locals, could not fire when the man shouted “I could not help it, I was hungry!” These young men could empathize with him. Empathize! There are people alive in China today who still understand hunger so strong that it voids all your humanity and turns you into pure beast, leaving you with only a need to survive. And yet there are people from the West who can’t understand why these people with their full stomachs, new shoes, and the chance at an education don’t set fire to their “oppressive society” and demand political rights that have never been a part of their culture at any point in their history. Nothing is simple here. This is China.

Part 2

A few days before New Years, a woman named Jasmin came to Dali looking to stir up trouble.  She walked through the red metal double doors of the Emu bar and closed the distance between us quickly. A white face, it seemed, was all she was looking for. If I’d known better I might have smelled trouble on her lips as she offered cash for services rendered. In another life, I imagine she might have done the same job—looking for bad men in bars to do dangerous things—but tonight she was offering work as legitimate as you’re likely to find in the Chinese West. She needed soldiers for an old army and they had to look the part. 

“You wanna work?” I called drunkenly to Tryg, who was drunk at the bar. “Sure!” he said, and that was that. 

That night Jasmin picked up one other young man, a Colombian guy named Andres that I had not yet met. The next day would be long.

Ian, Simon and I prep for a scene of clapping in an indoor studio.  They claimed my neck was too white.

They dressed us in old oversized rags—a poor excuse for uniforms, but what can you expect from freedom fighters on a budget? We stood around in the sun waiting for our orders, but none seemed to come. We played cards and ran through our drills till we were hungry and tired. Jasmin had promised us food, and when none arrived, she tried to buy us off with slices of bread she pulled from the mess in her purse. Those old rations served us poorly, though, and by the time lunch arrived, we inhaled the rice and meat like it was our last salvation. 

War is hard, but pretending to be at war is just boring. Every once in a while there was a shout, a call to silence, so as not to ruin the audio take, ignoring the fact that this would all be dubbed over later. Tryg was the only one of us with lines to speak “Halt! This is a restricted area, sir! You may not enter, sir!” The rest of us were made simply to hold guns at attention, or to fiddle with fake radios in the background.

Jasmin’s job, it seemed, was to make promises, but not necessarily to follow through.  Dinner was assured and denied.  We were told we could go home, then told to redress in our uniforms to do one last shot that then got canceled.  She seemed to make arbitrary decisions on her own without consulting the director.  By the time the day was done, as we sat around a recreated Burmese town on a peninsula in the middle of the lake, we were done playing soldier.

The television show we were filming was set in WWII. The British, Americans, and the Chinese were apparently defending the border of Burma from the Japanese. If you see war epic on TV in China, you can be assured that the Japanese will be the villains, the British cold and merciless, and the Americans loud and arrogant.

We went again the next day for what was promised to be a much shorter shoot—this time to a film studio in the mountains above the city. I was promoted to general, while Tryg went AWOL from the British army in order to become a high-ranking American commander. Today our job was to clap. The entire scene was a Chinese general giving a speech to reporters. Our job was to clap for him, a task we did quite well for about three hours. Each different shot required us to stand at attention, with lights in our eyes, or at our backs, or to the side, with the camera zooming in or panning across, or staying still at the back of the room. Solemnly, we applauded a speech that we could in no way understand. 

In two days Tryg and I had made enough money to pay almost our full month’s rent at our hostel, the Jade Roo. The next day I climbed a mountain, and the day after that Tryg and I and a group of 15 or so other hostel people (along with Liisa, from Beijing, who visited us for a week) built a barbecue and cooked Mexican food. Tryg made the tortillas from scratch. After that we went on a bike ride along the lake. Somewhere in there I destroyed everyone in a Monopoly tournament, and at some point was destroyed by everyone in a pool tournament.

An average morning out my front door.  Steve and Bastian jamming on the guitars, Patrick listening with a faty, Adrianne and Lisa playing cards, Simon doing squats, and me creepin' with the camera.

People have been asking me what I do every day in Dali, and I honestly don’t know that I do anything every day. I rarely make plans, but have never been bored here, not for a second. There is community, activity, and adventure constantly, if you ever want, you should definitely come visit. 

Finally, check out the “People” page ’cause there’s a new profile up for Gary, the guy who’s helping us out with photo processing.

See ya later,
Ian