Back Home in Chengdu: the Same Old, Same Old

The girl in red.

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

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

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

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

Ian at night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kung fu is practiced at a very young age.

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

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

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

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

A goldsmith in one of the back alleys of Chengdu.

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

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

Rich,

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

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Patrick,

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

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

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Ryan,

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

Congrats on the book release!

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

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Dean,

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

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

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Karen,

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

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

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