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.