Dirt, Grease, and Neon Lights

Crowds pack Hong Kong sidewalks and streets late into the night.

If you wanted to, at ten at night you could go shoe shopping, buy a camera, or

pick out designer jewelry. Photo by Maia.

Note: It's me, Maia, writing. I visited Ian and Tryg in China from March 20 through April 6. There's so much to write about from the time I was there that I can't contain it in one post--so this one covers our few days in Hong Kong, and my next post will cover our time in Dali, a town in Yunnan Province. I've noted in the captions which photos are mine and which Tryg took.

An HSBC advertisement in the Hong Kong airport hallway pictured Eiffel Tower souvenir keychains labeled with Made in China stickers. Captions in English and Chinese explained how this image—which looked to me like a photographic political cartoon—represented exciting business opportunities; HSBC didn’t have a sense of irony. That was my first indication that I was in a foreign country.

As I searched for the nearest restroom, I wondered if I was sick—my head throbbed, my stomach twisted, and my mouth was dry—but I remembered all the times the flight attendants had woken me up with their prowls down the aisles asking who wanted a drink…and how almost every time during the thirteen-hour flight I’d fallen back asleep instead of accepting a ginger ale or a cranberry juice. I was dehydrated.

From a quick glance in the restroom mirror, I was also disheveled, sweaty, messy-haired, and groggy. As soon as I spotted Ian and Tryg in the arrivals hall, I realized I was in good company. Even from afar I could tell that like me they’d slept in their clothes. Tryg was the first to give me a smelly but enthusiastic hug—followed by Ian, a bit bug-eyed, as if part of him couldn’t believe we were actually hugging after so many months communicating only via the occasional email.  

“The airport seems so clean,” I said. “Everything is so white and polished.”

“It’s the only thing in China that is clean,” Ian said.

“Oh man, I wish you could’ve seen Chongqing!” Tryg laughed.

I rushed to the airport 7-11, where Tryg bought me a giant bottle of water—because I hadn’t gotten any Hong Kong cash before I left America—and then Ian explained my options for getting a Chinese visa—because that was another very important thing I had left home without.

I could get a Chinese visa in Hong Kong the cheap way: for about thirty bucks (US dollars), we would get up at six the next morning and get on buses and trains to get to the bureaucratic office where they issue visas, where we would stand in line for several hours, until we got to the front of the line, where I would fill out a bunch of paperwork…and the visa would be ready four-ish days later. Or, for two hundred bucks, I could go to the kiosk at the airport, where they’d get me my visa twenty-four hours later, and deliver it to our hostel. That was worth two hundred dollars to me. The women in the kiosk snapped photos of me that are still stapled in the back of my passport: greasy hair, pasty-white skin, bra straps poking from an off-kilter tank top, glassy red-veined eyes that look more gray than blue between the fluorescent lights and the camera flash.

“The red double-decker buses remind me of London,” I said. We were waiting outside the airport for the bus that would get us to our hostel. Massive hills loomed behind the high-rises in the distance, craggy patchworks of rock and vegetation. I hadn’t expected any part of Hong Kong to be that green. The air was sticky, heavy, and hot enough I wished I was wearing shorts; I had come from slushy late-March sleet in Portland the day before I left home. “Nothing else reminds me of London though,” I added. “Or of anywhere else I’ve been.” When the bus came, we sat on the upper floor at the front of the double-decker, chatting and gulping from our water bottles, resting our feet on the window in front of us—Tryg and I accidentally matching in Chacos and rolled-up khaki-colored jeans.

A wild tropical plant clings to a wall with roots gnarled and twisted like

something from a fairy tale. The walls it climbs belong to an expensive

Western designer jewelry shop. Photo by Maia.

We got to our hostel by cramming into an elevator that brought us up the seventh floor of a high-rise that was made up mostly of other hostels, each located on a different floor.

“There’s no shower!” I said, peeking into the bathroom in our hostel room. While on that thirteen-hour plane ride, the only thing I was looking forward to as much as seeing my friends was taking a shower.

“Yeah there is,” Ian said. “Look again.”

“No there isn’t—I’m telling you—it’s…oh…” This explained the mist of water droplets all over the toilet seat and the toilet paper dispenser, and the puddles on the floor. The shower spigot resided a few feet above the toilet tank. Ian assured me that this was normal. “Wait till you use your first squatter toilet,” Ian said. “At least at this hostel they have Western toilets.” I was put off enough by the idea of showering with a toilet that I left a shower for later—washed my face and hands, twisted my hair up to disguise the grease, and, after changing into shorts, was ready to explore the city.

When I’d gotten my bearings enough to be fully aware of my surroundings, the first thing I noticed about Hong Kong was the smells: bloody meat, hot deep-frying oil, car exhaust, dust, sewage, spices I couldn’t name, body odor, expensive cologne, chemicals harsh enough to make me cough, and fruit so ripe as to be almost spoiled. Delicious intertwined with revolting in such a tight knot that I couldn’t separate one from the other.

In the street immediately outside our high-rise hostel, people crowded around an open-air stall that impaled various meats, seafood, tofu chunks, and vegetables on sticks and then dunked into bubbling oil and doused them in handfuls of spices. Ordinarily, no food gets me more excited than spicy things on sticks deep-fried (except maybe spicy things on sticks grilled over charcoal or over a campfire). But my stomach was still turning as it recovered from dehydration and a long flight. When Tryg told me to try the skewered squid, I hesitated, but said no. “Where can we get some fruit?” I asked.

Live frogs are easy to find in China, sold on the street alongside tanks of fish or heaps of raw meat.

We saw images like this in Hong Kong and in Yunnan. Photo by Tryg.

Outdoor markets were easy to find. In the States, or at least where I’m from, an outdoor market sells either expensive artisan crafts (Portland Saturday Market style), or it sells fresh local produce. In Hong Kong we found none of the former and some of the latter. But in addition to the fruit and vegetables (which really can’t be local since Hong Kong imports virtually all of its food), we could buy bras, knockoff designer handbags, broken-English joke bumper stickers, dildos, vibrators, porn, fake antique coins, fake antique communist propaganda, anything with Mao’s face on it, every kind of mobile phone (mostly fakes), lingerie, and neckties with images of farm animals having sex. Posters of President Obama were displayed next to posters of Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Osama bin Ladin, Angry Birds, and Chairman Mao.

Ian, Tryg and I wander through one of many outdoor markets. I never could take

a photo that captured anywhere near the color, vibrancy, diversity, and chaos of

these markets. Here it looks pretty mellow, but believe me it’s not. Photo by Maia.

It was in one of the outdoor markets that I tried my first mangosteen—a fruit the size of a small orange and the color of an eggplant. Peel it and it reveals slimy white flesh divided into segments like a head of garlic. But don’t judge mangosteens by their looks. Those cloves of slimy white flesh taste like the juiciest fresh peach.

Next I tried a dragonfruit. I have encountered no fruit more awesome-looking: a pear-ish-shaped fruit with bright red scaly skin streaked with green, a little bigger than a grapefruit. Sliced open, the flesh is bright-white and the texture of a kiwi, but studded with so many tiny black seeds that it looks like the fruit gods added poppy seeds to their recipe when they created dragonfruit. Sadly, its taste didn’t live up to its looks—nicely popping seeds, but not much flavor. Ian told me they’d had way better in Bangkok.

That night, Tryg fell asleep clutching his bottle of Hop Stoopid to his chest like a teddy bear. I’d brought Ian and Tryg two bottles of Pacific Northwest beer, some Tillamook cheddar, dill Havarti, olives, Olympic Provisions chorizo salami, and a loaf of seeded New Seasons whole wheat bread as tastes of home. In bed, right before he turned off the light, Tryg asked me if I’d give him his beer. I dug around my backpack till I found it, wrapped in plastic grocery bags in case it leaked on the flight. “I don’t want to drink it,” Tryg said. “I just want to hold it.” We ended up not breaking into any of the food or drinks I’d brought until a few days later on the train, but the Hop Stoopid rested on Tryg’s bed both of our nights in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong held two of the best meals either of us have ever tasted—at two different Japanese restaurants, both at a mall. When we went out to eat the next day, Ian explained that in China only the wealthy could shop in malls, so that’s where we’d find some super nice restaurants. He couldn’t have been more right.

At the Japanese place at lunch, each table was equipped with its own gas grill. Of the six or so dishes we got there to grill over the flames, all were jaw-droppingly good, but one stood out so much I salivate when I think about it: thin slices of beef so intricately marbled with fat that as they cooked they coated themselves in their own fatty juices without any marinade to help them along. The only sensible thing to call it is “butter beef.” No butter was involved (dairy is pretty rare in China), but there’s nothing in the world that melts on your tongue like that beef did. Ian and Tryg swooned over the daydream of a steak made out of that beef.

After a long day of treks exploring the city’s alleyways and outdoor markets, we returned to the same mall, but a different Japanese restaurant, for dinner. This one perched on the top floor of the mall, overlooking Hong Kong’s harbor. Tryg had to convince Ian and me. We balked and backed away after one glance at the menu’s prices. None of us had ever ordered any meal approaching that expense. Yet once Tryg had us convinced, we figured we’d go all the way—as a group, we chose the three-person multi-course meal, and we sat on stools at the grill so we could watch every step of the process like theatre.

They started us with a green salad in a forgettable dressing but topped with smoked salmon so tender it might have been gravlax or lox. Next, sashimi slices. While eating every new course, we ogled the chef in front of us, wondering if the next dish he sent sizzling onto the griddle would be something else for us. I don’t remember the order of things after that, but at some point there were fried oysters topped with chunks of sautéed onion and bacon. Tempura was perfectly crispy on the outside, with shrimp so succulent on the inside that to be was almost custardy. The butter beef from earlier that day got competition from thin slices of grilled beef that were wrapped around a filling of green onions and bacon.

I savor every bit of those perfect sushi rolls. Tryg was laughing while he took this picture. 
Ian’s in the background. Photo by Tryg.   

Oh, but nothing compared to the sushi rolls! Salmon, salmon skin, avocado, big popping fish eggs in the middle, sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds and a green powder that at first we thought was seaweed, but its taste was too subtle for that—maybe a type of green tea? I let every flavor seep all over my mouth until it all melted into a wasabi-tinged puddle of salmon and ocean. Later they served us ordinary fried rice and miso soup, but we were in too much of a sushi-roll-induced blissful stupor to be disappointed.

Wandering around the harbor after dinner, Ian and Tryg complained light-heartedly about the cold just as they had the night before. “I swear it’s like this close to snowing!” Tryg said. As usual, I couldn’t tell if he was joking. My understanding of sarcasm is that of a second-grade child. “No it’s not,” I said. I still wore my tank top and shorts while Tryg and Ian—recovering from the hundred-degree intensity of Bangkok—dressed in jeans and jackets. “It is, it is,” Tryg insisted, “I bet it’s like thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit.” “No, it’s more like sixty-five,” I said. “If the wind picks up I might put on my flannel shirt.”

Buildings across the water winked their changing patterns of colored neon—geometric shapes of glass and electricity that belonged more to a Star Wars prequel than to a city in this world. Smog and lights teamed up to ensure that this city saw neither true darkness nor stars. Too soon, we’d be leaving this place for two full days eating instant noodles on narrow sleeper trains and pissing in squatter toilets.

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.

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

Prologue

It's June, 2007. The hotel room I'm in, on the 9^th floor of a building in the city of Chengdu is a disaster. Everything I own can fit into one suitcase and yet I've managed to spread it out effectively to every corner of this substantial sized room so that it looks like there is enough junk to fill 50 large trucks. This loaves and fishes style miracle has me partially wishing someone would come by and be impressed.

The Boat Building

Outside my room is a balcony, with a view of the city. Directly across the way is a large 6 story building shaped to look exactly like a massive cruise liner. It contains a number of stores and clubs that I've never been to. Beyond the ship is the market where I make my once daily excursion in search of the most basic sustenance. You see, at the moment, I'm starving. 

Steamed bread, called Manto

I ran out of money when I lost my debit card, the sole connection I had to the money stored in the credit union back in Portland. Before I realized that I'd lost my card, I'd spent most of the money I had on this hotel room and a plane ticket to Beijing where I will be meeting my parents for the first time in almost a year. I have 20 dollars to survive on for the month I have left so, I am starving. Each day I buy exactly 8 steamed white bread rolls, purely to fill my stomach. I also by a package of small processed sausages that equate about 3 hot dogs worth of meat.  This is for protein. Then I buy a bottle of Gatorade, for electrolytes. I've been eating this every day for 2 weeks and am 25 pounds under weight.

bland sausages with corn shrink
wrapped in plastic, Yum

Of course this is not the only reason for my weight loss.  When I get home a month from now, after I have spend a week in Beijing, and a week in Tibet, and after spending days on bumpy trains with very, very poor bathrooms, I will be told that I have had a parasite living in my intestines for approximately four months. At the moment though, despite the fact that I never stay out of running distance from a toilet, I am in complete denial that I might be sick. I tell myself that it is just the spicy food I've been eating, or that it might be that old social anxiety that used to give me daily stomach aches every day before school. Later I will look back and realize I'd had no choice, this was my only way of staying sane. I refuse to go to the doctor because of my uncomfortable experience with the Chinese medical establishment when I'd torn all the tendons in my left middle finger during a martial arts demonstration. Not to mention the time my girlfriend's grandfather had gone for a regular checkup and they had injected him with the wrong medication. He died on the way home in a taxi cab.

So believing that not believing in something makes it not exist, I have been bravely spending day in and day out in my hotel room crumbling as a human being. Just moments ago, I was looking out at the big shipbuilding, at the market beyond, and the smog enshrined setting sun. I'd been suddenly overwhelmed with how much I loved all of it. And in a instant I'd flopped to my bed where I find myself now sobbing at everything I'm about to lose. It's only a couple days till I go to Beijing to meet my parents. I'll still be in China for another couple weeks but my time on my own is over, it's time to say good by to my own private adventure.

Fried scorpion on a stick

The adventure that has seen me fall in love with a girl at the top of a holy Buddhist mountain under a softly snowing sky. The adventure that had cast me as the star in a Chinese commercial. I'd learned martial arts in a kungfu boarding school, eaten the most bizarre foods including rabbits' heads and steamed tortoise. And now I'm starving, sick, exhausted and all I can think is that I can't imagine living any other way.

As I stop crying I even miss that, I want to mourn longer, but I don't have that many tears to shed. I try to write about it, to send a China Journal on this emotion that seems so important, but I can't figure out what I'm actually feeling. I won't write another journal after this moment. I won't tell about Tibet, by far the most amazing leg of my journey. You won't read about the great wall, or the difficult transition returning to a western continent.

Much later, I start to understand what is happening now. This is the moment where my heart is breaking into two even pieces.

This is not the absolute crushing pain that I will feel in a few months, when the girl I was imagining the rest of my life with leaves me to live in Australia with a man she met online. A pain that will last for years and never truly go away. No, this tearing heart, is the tearing of my world into it's opposite poles. I feel a connection and a love for China like no other place in the world. To feel comfortable and confident in a culture that is not your own, to know how to survive in a formidable place, all by yourself. I have made China my home. At the same time I recognize finally what it means to be an American, and I know that too is my home, a place I have pride in and miss deeply. I feel like home is split between far distant places and I cannot figure out how to bring them together. I think I will forever be homesick.

Tryg eating cricket tacos in Mexico

Now it is 2011, and I'm going back to China for the first time in 4 years. This time I'm going with my best friend and brother, Tryg. I'm not going on my parents dime, and I have very little money. I really am afraid, wondering if I can really do this. That person who survived, who did so many incredible things, he seems like someone else, a person from a story I read once. I'm just some guy who's been living in his parent's house for the past 4 years. I've been dormant for so long I don't really know what I'm capable of anymore. 

It took me years to digest the experiences I had in China, for them to express themselves in who I was, and to learn the lessons that I had to learn. Now as I go back, older, as a completely different person, to what might now be a completely different country. I have no idea what might happen. Last time was full of things that I could have never predicted, on a scale I still cannot fully comprehend. All I expect now is something amazing. Something that I'll talk about for years, for a lifetime even. 

We leave November 2^nd. We have one way tickets. We don't know how long we'll be gone, where exactly we're going, or how we're going to get there.  Everything is changing soon.  We're standing on the edge of a cliff, knowing the time until we jump is finite.