The end of our collective gardening project, ’summer homestead,’ was bittersweet. Just as the tomatoes and peppers had started to ripen, it was time to break down the structure and give away the plants. On Saturday afternoon, Governors Island visitors descended upon our homestead: some timidly pointing to the plants they wanted, others savagely yanking bottles off the structure in a true New Yorker fashion.
a G.I. visitor brings some tomato and basil plants home on her bike
Upon breaking apart the structure’s panels, we discovered that thousands of earwigs had colonized the summer homestead. We were simultaneously touched by this and completely creeped out, as swarms of shiny beetle-like insects with large serrated pinchers poured out of small holes in the wood.
leftover plants
In the end, we were still left with more plants than we knew what to do with, not to mention an over-sized wooden structure. Thankfully, Paula, nuestras patrocinadora fantástica offered to keep the structure on her rooftop patio in Brooklyn, so that the summer homestead could continue. We brought the structure to her apartment on a truck last night and will help her put it back together later this week (photos coming soon).
some plants find a new home near my recently washed underwear
Pierre, Mary and I visited the Amityville Horror House on our way out to the demolition derby in Riverhead. I felt kind of like an asshole skulking around the house taking pictures. We ran into a guy from NJ and a dude from England who were also skulking around. They actually went up to the house and knocked on the door!
Pierre told me that the couple who claimed there was a supernatural disturbance in the house are both dead now, and that they retracted their story a few years ago. Were they really lying? You be the judge:
The demolition derby was preceeded by some pretty awesome stock car races. We stood right by the fence, which was kind of terrifying at first, and resulted in us being showered with tiny particles of burning rubber, but it was the best seat in the house!
Here’s a short video clip from our trip to Lubec, Maine earlier this month, to celebrate Pierre’s 36th birthday! Our adventures included getting lost in the woods after finding a mysterious birthday gift, sneaking into the bowels of an abandoned canning factory, listening to coyotes, eating blueberry flavored everything and fighting with a reptilian border patrol officer over the disheveled state of my passport.
(video includes music by Hasil Adkins)
Here are some highlights from a movie Pierre made with his middle school students at Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem (with special effects by yours truly.)
I got poison ivy all over my body after this little escapade with Pierre last September to Ft. Totten, the former headquarters of the NIKE missle project in New York City. Those terrifying insects on the ceiling are only cave crickets…completely harmless!
On a bike ride through the desert a few days ago, poor Pierre managed to sprain his nuts. A mild discomfort soon manifested in an inability to walk, and even more terrifying than the consequences of damaged genitals, was the prospect of checking into a grimy Western Chinese hospital. Luckily, with the help of some bed-rest and advice via email from my uncle who is a doctor, Pierre’s testicular trauma seems to have resolved itself. While it is heartening to see him walking around again, I’m disappointed that the leopard skin briefs I bought him for added support are no longer in his daily rotation. Sadly he seems violently opposed to any more bike rides, and is even less enthusiastic about horse and camel treks.
As Pierre lay incapacitated in Turpan, I walked in the blazing sun out to the Emin Ta, an Afghani-style mosque surrounded by vineyards and Uyghur families selling mounds of grapes on blankets. After being invited for samosas and tea with one friendly family, I was sent away with such an armload of grapes that I ended up forcefully donating half of them to some Chinese tourists at the mosque, who seemed perplexed and suspicious of my random act of kindness.
The next day after some intense bargaining (which included some yelling, flailing and me storming away and being called back three times), I hired a taxi to drive me out to the Jiaohe ruins – an ancient Han dynasty capital built on a plateau between two rivers, hat had been decimated by Ghengis Khan in the 13th century. To my delight, this site had not been afflicted by the building of a typical amusement-park style Chinese tourist trap that inevitably smothers every aspect of culture, history and authenticity in a place. The sprawling city ruins were left largely untouched, except for a few informational placards and signs forbidding climbing, drawing, spitting and defecating on the structures. As I was there during the hottest time of the day (it was 110 degrees and the sweat evaporated off my skin so fast that by the end of the day I was covered in a thin layer of salt), I had the pleasure of wandering through the ancient temples, homes and original city streets without another person in sight for nearly the entire time I was there. It was silent except for the incessant echo of a donkey braying from a vineyard nearby. In one area, in front of a giant pit, there was a placard telling of how the remains of over 200 infants had been found buried inside a government building, a discovery of which no one has ever been able to find and explanation.
Leaving Turpan we were unable to secure train tickets to our next destination, so we were diverted to the capital of Xinjiang Province, Urumqi. After being quoted ridiculous room prices at the train station hotel, we were led to a dirt-cheap flophouse by an old man. Our squalid room came replete with a large booger wall and a hot water thermos that smelled as if it had been refilled in the toilet.
The windows of the room opened onto the corridor, and as it was sweltering, we were forced to keep them open despite the parade of nosy hotel guests who stopped to gawk at us. The room next to the shared bathroom was occupied by a Western couple - the woman was about 8 months pregnant, and she and her shirtless boyfriend/husband were engaged in a slobbering heavy petting session in the hallway every time we passed by. Inside the bathroom the florescent light was on the fritz, bathing the room in an eerie green strobe. Naturally the room was also bathed in filth and there was about an inch of water on the floor in some places. During a late-night visit I heard mysterious sounds of something lurking in the toilet trough that ran under the stalls. I felt as if I’d wandered onto the set of a serial-killer movie, and I feverishly tried to finish my business and get away as fast as I could.
On the day we were to depart Urumqi we had about 10 hours to kill before our train, so we stowed our luggage at the station and walked around the city. We found ourselves in the city park, which was comprised of a pond, some benches, and several large stages on which animatronic Uyghurs on camels mechanically swayed. The Chinese government loves artificial displays of Uyghur happiness. Every major stop along the Silk Road has been marked with giant billboards of jubilant Uyghurs greeting Mao and Hu Jintao with open arms, gigantic statues of Mao in city centers, and in Hotan, a giant statue of Mao towering over a Uyghur man as they shake hands. The region of Xinjiang has been disputed for nearly 2000 years - the last 200 years have seen several attempted uprisings against the Chinese from the Uyghurs (most recently in the late 90’s), each brutally crushed. The resentment of the Han by the Uyghurs burns bright as more and more Han are transplanted to Xinjiang, and more traditional Uyghur cities are reborn in a mass of homogenized concrete and bathroom-tile. It is easy to see both the utter lack of integration between the Han and the Uyghurs, and the fact that Xinjiang is home to a culture that is utterly unique to the rest of China. Approaching the province one enters a realm where pork and beer turn to mutton and tea, Buddhism and Taoism become Islam, Mandarin becomes the Turkic-based Uyghur language, and the black hair and almond-eyes of the Han people disperses into a population of people that could pass for Irish, Italian, Turkish, Persian, Pakistani and Russian.
In Urumqi we were happy to find, for the first time in many weeks, an underground mini-mall selling thousands of dvd’s. I also picked up a pirated copy of the new Harry Potter book for $2.50, which except for occasional spelling mistakes and typos, is the real deal (unlike “Harry Potter and the Auspicious Dragon,” a popular knockoff that can be found in various Chinese bookstores).
As we waited in the station for our train from Urumqi to Kuche, the railroad attendants locked the gates to each seating section with chains, a scene reminiscent of a livestock market. It was a strange yet comforting sight, knowing that we would be able to safely enter our train car without being pushed and trampled. In China you are almost always assigned a seat, whether it’s on the train, bus, or even in a movie theater. Sadly this system does little to quell the mass hysteria that ensues when a clump of people all try to accomplish the task of getting to their seats simultaneously. Pierre and I have been forced to adapt to this system, and we have found that we are not above violently swinging our backpacks to knock the competition over when trying to navigate a crowd. I have also developed a new method for dealing with line-cutters. Quite often people will try to edge you out of the way when you are buying a train or bus ticket at the window, and finding that verbal protests are rarely of use, I’ve resorted to grabbing the line-cutter squarely by the chest and shoving them out of the way with both hands. The momentary look of shock on the culprit’s face is priceless, as they stagger backwards momentarily, only to turn around and try to cut in front of the person at the next window.
In Kuche, which is on the Northern pass of the silk road, we checked into a hotel near the bus station. Upon entering the room, it was only a matter of minutes before an audacious cockroach ran up the front of Pierre’s tee-shirt. This was ominous indeed, as we soon discovered that the entire room was crawling, not to mention the hallway, in which a frazzled hotel attendant tried to quickly stomp on the roaches and then quietly sweep up the carcasses before the patrons noticed. It was a futile task to say the least, and after being moved to a new room in which the roaches streamed steadily out from under a diseased looking carpet, we packed our bags and marched down to the front desk for a refund. In an act of unprecedented (at least in China) concern for the customer, the hotel manager showed us to a spotless newly-renovated room on he second floor, that she insisted had no roaches. To our surprise she was right. Sadly we were soon afflicted by vermin of a different kind, in the form of a fellow American teacher named Joel. Joel seemed delighted by our company, and as we are always happy to make new friends on the road, we invited him to share a taxi out to see some ruins the next day. This outing, unbeknown to us at the time, set a dangerous precedent of Joel attempting to be in our company every moment of every day, constantly changing his plans to get on the same trains as us, go to the same hotels, share the same dorm rooms, eat at the same restaurants and visit the same sites. His constant presence was underscored by his tendency for non-sequitur descriptions of his sex-life with his ex-girlfriend that were so repulsively illustrative that Pierre and I both wanted to gouge our eardrums out with chopsticks. Joel was an angry, sexually frustrated white man, who was trying to reinvent himself on the road, claiming expertise in professional photography (but he didn’t know what an f-stop was) and lecturing at length on everything from geology to break dancing and all things Chinese and related to Chinese travel. The harder we tried to get away from Joel, the more desperately he clung - he was impervious to hints and we were quickly approaching having to resort to the “get the hell away from us” talk. After he tried to ingratiate himself with some Muslim men by saying he and Pierre were off to the livestock market to sell me to camel traders, and then later calling a fellow traveler’s Chinese girlfriend a money-hungry prostitute, we decided to take action - waiting until he was committed to going on a horse-trek with a local so he couldn’t follow us, and then jumping in a truck full of old Kyrgyz men to double back to the previous town. Four days later, as we ate breakfast on a bench in a town hundreds of kilometers away, we heard a nauseatingly familiar voice behind us and turned to see Joel and an older European woman, to which he had undoubtedly attached his soul-sucking tentacles. Did I see a slightly desperate look in her eye? Regardless, we were off the hook and he was now headed in the opposite direction as us.
After practicing some of our newly learned Chinese profanity on some cheating cab drivers at the Kuche train station, we punched and kicked our way through the crowds to get on the early morning train to Kashgar - a famous trading outpost on the silk road, near the borders of Tajikistan and Afghanistan. En route we shared a compartment with two young Chinese university students who were on their way to work on a mining project in the desert. They spoke some English and seemed a little uptight, so just for fun we asked them what they thought of the Falun Gong (we have a friend here in China who is a practitioner and her life has been destroyed and some of her friends have been “disappeared). It was quite interesting to watch them randomly access the propaganda they’d been fed and spit it out verbatim- apparently the F.G. had attacked China’s equivalent to the White House (one said “how would you feel if someone attacked your white house?”), and China is not interested in religion and belief, only economy. When we pressed them for what they actually meant by “attacked,” and found out that the F.G. had sat outside and stopped traffic and held signs. When I told them that I had done the same thing in front of America’s white house many times, they looked uncomfortable and replied “This is China.” We could tell we had moved into dangerous territory. We steered the conversation toward a subject we knew would titillate and delight them, the 2008 Beijing Olympics. According to them, at present, the U.S.A. is #1 in all things in the world, but with the advent of the Olympics, China will be #1 and the whole country must pull together to strive for this top spot! Also, the country who controls Central Asia, controls the world (and apparently China was well on it’s way to doing just that). It’s understandable for people to be guarded and say the “safe” thing in a society such as this, but for the first time we felt as if we were talking to people who actually believed it (unlike the bored, robotic mantra of “we love our Chairman Mao” that I used to hear from my students.)
Kashgar is a 2000 year old city that has managed to retain it’s flavor despite the harsh concrete makeover that has afflicted all but a tiny part of the city. The Sunday market draws thousands of people - Uyghurs, Tajiks, Pakistanis, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz - all buying and selling everything you can imagine - from spices and fabric and silk to house wares, donkeys and fruit. Many of the women donned their best clothes, beautiful sequined hand-sewn dresses and colorful head scarves. The streets were frantic with honking motos, donkey cart traffic jams and even the occasional camel cart pulling an impossible load of goods.
Unlike many places where the people scream at you for taking photos, the people here seemed to demand it, following us around, curious to look through our lenses and see themselves on our digital cameras. We hopped on the back of a moto-cart and went to the livestock market - thousands of sheep and lambs - some being sheered for wool, others being squeezed and prodded and haggled over (one peed all over Pierre’s foot), and still others being beheaded and made into stew. Hundreds of bulls and cows were also lined up against the stables, while people anxiously traded wads of cash and then maneuvered the bulls onto flatbed trucks.
In Kashgar we ran into an Argentinean guy, Nicholas, who we had made friends with weeks before in the Tibetan region. Nicholas’ hot Latin temper had flared many times during his travels in China - he had been pushed so far by rude treatment that he had resorted to mooning a ticket agent at the bus station in one town, pouring water through the ticket window in another, and finally in Gansu Province, getting so angry with a ticket agent who was trying to cheat him that he savagely ripped the bars off the window. The police were called and they ended up siding with Nicholas, ordering the agent to refund his money. Although these episodes might seem symptomatic of a rude tourist with a rage disorder, Pierre and I completely understood his actions – our own experiences as tourists in this country have pushed us to the brink of violence on many occasions. As I’ve said before, personal interactions with people tend to be very positive in China, but as a tourist constantly undertaking the impersonal dealings of eating in restaurants, buying bus tickets, riding in taxis, checking into hotels etc., you are continually cheated, mocked, dismissed and ignored. As the two young students on the train told us, “In China we look at your personality and then we decide a price.”
After a few days in Kashgar, and a failed attempt to renew our visas, we got on a bus headed for Pakistan - sadly we were unable to make it all the way there because of complicated visa issues. The Sino-Pakistan Friendship highway winds through the Parmir mountains - a beautiful range that spans from arid cliffs to enormous snow-capped peaks. We got off the bus near Lake Karakul, a glacial lake beneath a 7500m mountain. Around the lake were several Kyrgyz yurts - we ended up staying with a family in their cozy circular abode - in which the husband had actually been born. These people were not allowed to return to Kyrghyzistan, because they ended up on the wrong side of the line when the borders were drawn. We spent the afternoon drinking tea and talking to the wife, Nusaroot, before setting out for a walk around the lake.
It was probably the most spectacular scenery I’ve ever seen - an ocean of snow caps with a crystal blue lake. Occasionally we passed grazing camels on the hills. As dusk fell, an unbelievable swarm of mosquitoes descended on us - hundreds of them, biting any flesh they could find, our cheeks, eyelids, fingers, even crawling up under my hat to bite my scalp. We frantically ran through the fields, swinging our arms until we finally made it up onto a road and out of the tall grass.
That night Nusaroot tucked us in, tickling Pierre’s feet and making bawdy comments about the hanky-panky that might ensue from everyone sleeping on the floor together. As we were back in high altitude (3600m), it was hard getting to sleep. Late at night everyone awoke to Pierre yelling and moaning - I tried to wake him up but he wouldn’t snap out of it. Finally he sat straight up in bed and awoke - he was having a horrific dream that a child’s hand had clamped onto his throat and wouldn’t let go. In the morning we were awoken again, this time by a shaggy goat with huge horns who had snuck into the yurt and was nosing around in the dishes. The goat soon realized it had been discovered and slinked out of the tent.
We had to double back to Kashgar to continue along the silk road, and after a day or two of rest, continued on to the small southern silk road of Yarkand. When we arrived, we were turned away by the bus station hotel, then another hotel, and another. Apparently only one hotel in town was allowed to take foreigners, and when we finally got there they were quoting ridiculous prices. Evidently some official had decided to make some money with one of the local hotels, barring foreigners from all but one establishment, and thus eliminating the competition. The snarky woman at the hotel desk refused to bargain, thinking we didn’t have much choice - Pierre and I made the split decision just to leave town, but not before Pierre said loudly to theclerk “Yarkand” and then grabbed his crotch. There were no buses out of Yarkand until the next day, so we haggled with a taxi for a while, walking away and pretending to start hitchhiking before finally settling on a price.
Now we are in Hotan, site of the most fascinating and lively market we’ve seen yet. If it’s possible, the livestock market is even more chaotic than the one in Kashgar - ill-tempered cows trying to kick people as they run away screaming, and donkey carts plowing through the crowd at warp speed. Sadly, the famous museum in Hotan has been closed down, the mysterious and ancient red-haired mummies that were found near here have now been sent away to Beijing (In fact, every museum of antiquity in Xinjiang that we’ve tried to visit has been closed down.)
Yesterday we embarked on the frustrating task of trying to get our visas renewed. When we were turned down in Kashgar, we were told that we definitely could get them renewed in Hotan. The official who told us this would not back this claim up officially, but we managed to copy her name and phone number down for future reference. When we showed up at the PSB yesterday, we were told to go away and come back at 4pm. When we returned, some people made some phone calls and said to come back tomorrow at 9 am. This morning at 9 am we were told to wait outside a locked office. Eventually a woman showed up and looked at our passports and filled out some forms. She then sent us to another PSB office - a dank, smelly concrete mass with wet drippy walls and no sunlight - when we found the right room, the official said that we still had five days left on our visa and had to wait to renew it. When we told her what was said in Kashgar and gave her the name of the official, she changed her mind and said “no, the computer’s broken - it’s been broken for seven days, come back in two days when it’s fixed.” We argued and told her we were headed off to a very remote part of Qinghai province where we couldn’t get it done. She chatted with her coworkers for a while, made some phone calls, sorted through some files and then left the room. About 20 minutes later, two Pakistani guys came in the room and told us to come back at 3pm. At 3pm we returned, only to find that the office was still closed for lunch and wouldn’t open for another hour and fifteen minutes. After sitting in the drippy, moldy lobby for a while, an official brought us to a new office where we explained our predicament once more to a new person, and were then directed by the new official to go wait in the first office we’d waited in. A while later, a woman approached us saying that we would have to prove we had enough money to travel in China, and wanted to see a bank statement. We pretended not to understand her at all, which was successful in frustrating her to the point of giving up. We then were sent to go and redo all the paperwork and Xeroxing we’d done before going to the first PSB office, and then waited a while longer while 3 PSB officers had an involved discussion about different stamps and visas in our passports. Late in the afternoon we were unceremoniously handed our visas!
okay, if you’re still reading this, Pierre and I will now backtrack along the silk road and then across Eastern China to Beijing, where hopefully we will be able to get on a plane and fly home!
We’ve been traveling for a few days outside of Chengdu, back up to the highlands of the Sichuan/Gansu provinces. We are now in the Tibetan/Hui Muslim town of Langmusi, and it was not without many hours of traumatic bus riding that we arrived here. From Chengdu we had to travel three days over land, and the first leg of the trip took us out of idyllic, pristine China and into the ecologically raped, hazy, and dam-riddled China that we hear so much about in the West. For ten hours we passed an endless chain of mountains on which every last tree had been cut down. The earth was eroded and scorched, and on the highway it was evident that landslides are extremely common, especially now during the rainy season. Of course the dingy wasteland along the highway was given a surreal touch - certain sections along the road were inhabited by carefully groomed gigantic white fluffy yaks covered in ornaments, on which tourists could sit and have their photo taken in front of a mudslide or a hydroelectric dam. As we sped by these curiosities, our bus driver honked his horn on the average of 250 times a minute. Pierre and I tried to steal bits of conversation between honks but it became exhausting. Ten hours later we arrived in Songpan, a Tibetan town surrounded by mountains (what Tibetan town isn’t?), that would have been quite peaceful were it not for huge exhaust belching buses speeding down the main street, leaning on their horns and nearly mowing down children, monks, sheep and yaks.
Feeling tired out and suffering from the same flu Pierre had in Litang, I went into a massage parlor that was lavishly covered in Tibetan decorations, but should have been adorned with whips and restraints. The little Tibetan woman who worked on me seemed to think that viciously punching me in the spine was the way to make me relax, and for several days after the massage I was completely out of wack.
The next morning, not so feverish, but semi-paralyzed, we boarded the bus for the Tibetan town of Zoige, another mandatory stop on the way to Langmusi (which was where we were ultimately trying to go.) Pierre couldn’t fit in the seats, but the shrimp sitting in the front of the bus refused to trade with him. An old man in a Mao suit and cap insisted on blowing smoke in my face for the entire ride. At first I pointed to the no smoking sign, and when that didn’t work, I asked him to kindly open a window, which he refused to do. Other people on the bus were getting upset with him, but no one would step forward and confront him (typical for china) My only recourse was to take out my video camera and make a little movie about him and his impolite smoking habits, which didn’t stop him from puffing but made him extremely uncomfortable, which of course made me feel much better. Outside, hundreds of yaks grazing on the plateau, and a few nomads whizzed by. I noticed that many of the nomadic tents had huge billiards tables outside them and wondered if they strapped the pool tables to the yaks when it was time to move.
We checked into a trucker’s motel in Zoige. The ceiling of our room seemed to be afflicted with leprosy and the communal toilets were constructed in such a way that no bowel movement would ever be lost or forgotten. Zoige was not a happy place - the town was comprised of new shiny Han style buildings, but the people appeared to be very, very poor. The abundant friendliness we experienced in Litang was scarce, and although we met a nice English-speaking Tibetan guy there, many of the locals looked at us skeptically as we passed them on the street.
In the morning we tried to wash up with some of the hot thermos water we’d been given for making tea. We then got back on the bus for the final 4 hour stretch to Langmusi. The road was entirely unpaved, and we flew over a foot out of our seats on a few occasions, as the driver gunned it over huge bumps. After a few hours the bus suddenly pulled onto a smooth new highway. After about three minutes of driving on pavement, the bus pulled over at the crossroads of two huge highways and the driver yelled “Langmusi.” We were unloaded on the side of the road, in a huge valley surrounded by enormous mountains with no town in sight. The driver gave a vague impression that the town was somewhere to the west, so we set off walking into the valley along the side of the highway, dragging our packs (we were also back up to an altitude of about 3100m). Luckily a bus full of Tibetans, watermelons and peaches drove by and rescued us, and drove us into the town.
Langmusi’s streets were scattered with crimson-robed monks, Hui Muslims, Tibetans in long fur-lined jackets, and small black pigs gleefully snorfling through the garbage. The buildings were unremarkable, but the surrounding grasslands erupted dramatically into rocky peaks and red jagged cliffs.
We hiked up a nearby hill to the monastery and met a young monk en route who showed us to the sky burial grounds. A tangle of prayer flags were strung at the base of a small hill, and in front of it a smoldering funeral pyre. To the left was a large rectangular area which is used to hack the bodies into smaller pieces for the vultures. The area was littered with large knives, rubber gloves and the discarded clothes of the deceased. There were also several large concave rocks on which skulls are smashed and the brains mixed with barley. The surrounding fields were scattered with tarps and baskets and bizarre trash including a plastic hospital toilet. At first the human remains were not so apparent. The ‘chopping’ area was scattered with bits of bone fragment and flesh, but nothing specifically recognizable. However, behind this area down the hill was a gigantic pile of skulls, ribs, spines, femurs, jawbones, pelvises, hair and even a set of false teeth.
Huge black flies swarmed about, but to our surprise the stench of death was not present - instead the air was filled with a pleasant pine scent. On the way back up the hill we came upon an entire body with the long flowing hair of a Tibetan woman, that was in the process of being picked clean by the vultures. We were struck by how un-macabre and un-horrifying it was to see such a mass of corpses and skeletons. The Tibetans see the feeding of their dead bodies to the vultures as a final act of kindness, and as the ground is usually too hard and rocky to dig up in these areas, the practice has a practical aspect as well. On the way back down the hill towards the monastery we noticed that human remains were scattered everywhere - teeth and bits of jawbone ground into the path probably dropped by vultures.
The next day we were supposed to do a horse trek into the mountains, but the horses we were to use were usurped by a snarky Scandinavian family, so we set off into the hills on our own. We followed the river through a grassland valley filled with beautiful wildflowers - tiny orchids, irises and daisies, and scores of varieties we’d never seen before.
We found our way into a nomadic encampment and asked some of the inhabitants the whereabouts of some Buddhist caves that were supposed to be nearby. They pointed into a nearby gorge and said that we could cut through their camp to get there. As we walked through the camp, an old Tibetan followed us with an utterly perplexed look on her face. We also noticed that two of the gigantic herding mastiffs had taken an offense to us, and were barking and growling. To our dismay, the dogs were unchained. Tibetan mastiffs are notoriously vicious, and are allowed to roam the grasslands at night, making conditions extremely unsafe. Tibetans traveling long distances through the grasslands carry long poles with large maces attached to the end to defend themselves against vicious dogs. The dogs followed us out of the camp into the gorge, snarling and growling. We began to hurl rocks at them, but they were undeterred and began to close in. When they were about 15 feet away from us, Pierre threw a big rock as hard as he could at one of them. It grazed the dog’s backside and it yelped and ran off, the other dog following. We climbed further into the gorge, but the caves were nowhere to be found. We looked up to see some shepherds on top of the mountain, motioning for us to join them.
After a frantic scramble, we joined them on top of the ridge and they gave us a rhubarb-like reed to eat that was so long and hard that it could simultaneously be used as a snack and a walking stick. We hiked back toward the town on the ridge, escorted by hundreds of goats. We snuck down the opposite side of the mountain from the camp to avoid the dogs, and began the long trek through the grasslands back to Langmusi. The entire hike was about 20k with lots of climbing, and we were so tired and hungry when we got back to town that we could barely speak.
The next day we headed to Xiahe, site of the Labrang Monastery (one of the most important outside Lhasa and home to 1200 monks and nuns) and where we thought w could get visa extensions. We went to the PSB (Public Security Bureau/immigratio police), but the foreign affairs office had been closed and the officer we talked to told us to go somewhere else. We were disappointed, as Xiahe was a fascinating town and we wanted to spend more time there. We got on the bus and had a rough trip to Xining in the Qinghai Province. The bus kept picking up more people, including a nomadic Tibetan lady lugging a gallon of yak’s milk who stood in the aisle and for some reason decided to clutch my head to her bosom for stability. She was all wet from the rain and emitted the strongest scent of rancid yak butter I’ve ever smelled (yak butter is used in candles and lamp fuel.)
Driving into Qinghai was like entering yet another country. The grasslands turned to red clay mountains, and the tents turned to red clay huts. The inhabitants were Hui Muslims (a group descended from Arab and Persian traders), the men all wearing white skullcaps and the women black velvet headscarves. We arrived in the capital, Xining, which is a not such a glittering example of Han-style communist architecture. Even the mosques were made out of concrete and bathroom tile. The city seemed to be covered in a gray varnish, and the river that flows through has become a poopy-cesspool of raw sewage.
It seemed like the kind of place where it would be easy to contract Cholera, but the people were nice enough. We had serious problems finding the PSB office, and after asking for directions at a local police station, were treated to an exciting ride in a police van to the right office. They were more than happy to give us an extension - it costs a whopping 400 yuan for Americans!
Now we’re in Lanzhou, a big city in Gansu province, trying to get north to the desert an into Xinjiang province. The sooner we get out of here the better, as the people we’ve ha to deal with, especially the women working the ticket counter at the bus station, have all been devil-spawn. Pierre has taken only one photo here in Lanzhou - a pile of human feces ato a mound of lettuce on the street. We feel that this photo is a perfect and complete representation of this place! Luckily, tonight we leave for more interesting and friendly places..
We have finally left Kunming and have now been on the road for about two weeks. Thanks to the “Guanxi” (connections) of a friend, we avoided having to return to Hanoi for our visas, and instead were awarded new ones from the immigration police for the small price of 160 yuan ($20)and a carton of Marlboro cigarettes. We began by heading north to Lijiang, an ancient town of canals and traditional architecture inhabited by the Naxi people.
The Naxi are a matriarchal society in which women control all of the finances, business, and do all of the hard labor. The men raise the children and contribute to the community’s arts and crafts. We stayed in a small Naxi guesthouse in a pleasantly quiet part of the old city. Sadly, much of Lijiang was in chaos when we were there, as the Chinese government had called and impromptu holiday in celebration of some economic summit being held in Kunming. This resulted in mobs of cowboy hat-wearing, bellowing Chinese tourists, armed with video cameras , stampeding through the narrow cobblestone streets in their matching tee-shirts. As usual we (Pierre) were a major attraction, and many people cackled and pointed at us and snapped pictures of us while we were eating. Our friend Daisy in Kunming taught us some Mandarin phrases that could be quite handy in these situations, including “fuck you and your ancestors backwards and forwards for 18 generations.” I felt that maybe this phrase was a bit too severe of a reaction, so I instead reciprocated the photo-frenzy and laughter, which proved to be effective. The collective mentality of the tourists we encountered in Lijiang seemed to be that of a spastic free-for-all in which they were purely spectators, on a different plane of existence than us. This is a common experience for us in China - in personal dealings we are treated with kindness and hospitality, but at large we might as well be flipper girl and bobo the dog faced boy.
After some aggressive bargaining, we took a minibus out to Baisha, which is a traditional Naxi village and former capital of the ancient Naxi kingdom. There we observed life as it has existed for centuries,save the few tourist stalls that have erupted in the town center. Not wanting to go through the bargaining process again, we decided to walk the 15km back to Lijiang, through a spectacular valley encircled by immense mountains. As we walked, we at first thought the valley was merely a grazing area comprised of old farm fields filled with strange looking craters. We later learned that the area was actually a gigantic airstrip used by the Flying Tigers during WWII.
Before we left Lijiang for Zhongdian, the people at the Naxi guesthouse we’d been staying at gave us bags of herbs to wear around our necks for health and good luck. Driving north into the upper Yunnan province away from Lijiang was like entering an entirely different country - the Naxi villages transformed into small Tibetan towns, surrounded by fields of yellow rapeseed and barley. Flustered Yaks trotted across the street in front of our bus, and torn prayer flags were strung from poles on every hilltop. Arriving in Zhongdian we were relieved to be in a place where the locals outnumbered the tourists, and were given our first glimpse into Tibetan life in China.
It is very yak-oriented; yak meat, yak cheese, and yak butter tea are served at meals on yak fur table cloths. The city is overlooked by a giant golden prayer wheel that takes the hard work of several people to spin. On the outskirts is a huge Tibetan Lamistry and temple complex with 780 monks in residence. We encountered a forceful 16-year-old monk in a temple who screamed at us “SIT DOWN!” He then aggressively questioned us on our age, nationality and height, and then commanded Pierre to help him drag a huge tank of water across the temple floor so he could change the water bowls on the alter.
Back in town we visited an old man who inhabited a 16th century traditional Tibetan home. He had been imprisoned and his home partially destroyed (ancient Buddhist murals scratched off by soldiers and replaced by political slogans) during the Cultural Revolution.
Somehow the man had managed to hide some priceless artifacts from the Lamistry in his home, saving them from certain destruction. He showed us all around the house, including the spectacular family alter, spouting his disapproval for the regime who had destroyed his home all the while. He was quite different from any other old men I’ve met in this country, as he seemed to have no reservations about kissing me all over my face and grabbed me on my butt. At night in the town square a giant celebration was held in which hundreds of people danced in a giant circle around a single flute player. A local told us that it was a covert celebration of the birthday of a certain exiled Tibetan religious leader, whom I won’t mention by name lest this email be mysteriously deleted. Zhongdian is at an elevation of 3200m, and the next day we tried to prepare ourselves for the long journey up onto the Tibetan Plateau.
The trip is done in two legs which adds up to about 17 hours of bus riding. The first leg, to Xiangcheng was on entirely unpaved mountain roads. Luckily our driver was cautious (an unusual quality here) and the trip took us by towering mountain peaks and through countless interesting Tibetan villages, and to a marijuana farm where we had lunch (but we didn’t get to eat any marijuana).
Xiangcheng, while surrounded by beautiful mountains, has mostly been converted to mud from 200 simultaneous construction projects, and the one road through town is in a perpetual horn-blaring traffic jam.. We stayed in a spectacularly ornate traditional Tibetan family home and watched a violent thunderstorm over the mountains (which incidentally knocked out all the electricity and made venturing down three flights of ladder-like stairs to the outhouse quite treacherous - Pierre ended up peeing in a bottle to avoid this trip.)
The next day, armed with altitude sickness medicine, but not being able to find anything to eat except crackers, we got on a Litang-bound bus and braced ourselves for the climb to nearly 4700m (almost 1000 m higher than Lhasa). The first leg of the trip took us around hairpin turns on guardrail-free roads that overlooked drops of several thousand feet. Slowly the ride became less frightening as we entered the other-worldly landscape of the Tibetan Plateau. Covered in glacial rocks and completely devoid of trees, only grass, tiny yellow flowers, yaks, marmots and nomadic Tibetan people exist here. At one point the air seemed so thin that the engine of the bus could no longer drive at normal speed, and we chugged along the winding roads, dizzy and confused. The bus overheated and we ended up having to siphon water out of a nearby stream to get it going again.
Litang is one of our favorite places that we’ve visited in Asia. The town has largely been reborn in a mass of bathroom tile clad communist blocks with Tibetan style roofs and murals. Many of the Tibetan men here are tall and intense, clad in yak skins and Tibetan cowboy hats with wide grills of gold teeth, dreadlocks and gigantic knives in their belts. The women all wear traditional wrap-around dresses called chupas, and have intricately braided hair and rosy cheeks. Curious crowds formed around us on the street and followed behind us as we explored the town.
People yelled “tashi dele” (hello in Tibetan) from nearly every doorway, and burgundy robed monks cruised by us on gigantic Harley Davidson style motorcycles covered in plastic flowers with ghetto blasters strapped to the backs. We shared a yak-noodle lunch with a group of Tibetan cowboys who went crazy playing with our digital and video cameras. we then all proceeded to watch a gory propaganda movie about “the war of Japanese aggression’ together.
The food in Litang is simple and good, although we were not always so lucky to have such charming companions at our meals. As we ate boiled eggs and tea for breakfast at an open-air restaurant one morning, a small boy squatted down directly in front of our table and proceeded to defecate right on the ground. Children doing “#2″ in public is not a completely uncommon sight in China, but never had I experienced such a graphic and technical demonstration. He completed his mission and stood up, while his mother dutifully jogged over to sweep it into a dustpan. To our dismay, what we had witnessed could not be so easily erased from our minds.
We were a little worried about our ascent to 4700m, as the altitude can quickly become a big problem. We met some travelers who had gotten so sick that they had to be evacuated to a lower altitude. Armed with some herbal medicine, we thought that our gradual ascent via Zhongdian and Xiangcheng would save us from serious problems. The first day and a half we felt relatively ok - out of breath, fatigued,
and awakening in the middle of the night gasping for air and with a splitting headache, but still able to function.
By the last day, Pierre was incapacitated in the bed with a high fever, and I barely able to make it to the pharmacy to buy him aspirin. We knew we had to leave , and at 6:00 am the following morning we dragged ourselves to a bus headed for the lowlands (2500m). As the bus rolled over the seemingly endless grasslands, we waited with great anticipation for the oxygen that would make us no longer feel like we were slowly dying. But instead of descending, the bus began to climb hundreds of meters into yet another set of high rolling hills. As we reached the top, the bus driver suddenly turned of the ignition and coasted to a stop in the middle of the road. Both the rear tires on one side were flat, and we could see the downward slope of the deserted road in front of us. It began to snow. One of the passengers lit a fire in the wheel well of the bus because two of the bolts had melted into the wheel and could not be removed (and he thought somehow this would help). A construction truck stopped to help us , but their giant wrench could not get the bolts off. The driver got back into the bus, shut the door, and stared off into the distance for a while, before deciding to make the best of the situation and pulling a giant ball of yak cheese and a knife out of his pocket. The only thing to do was wait for another bus to make the 4 hour trip from Litang and pick us up. Pierre and I pulled our bags off the bus and decided to take our chances on the road. It was freezing cold, there was no air to speak of, and a leaky water tank in the bus had soaked our shoes. Luckily two Tibetan guys drove by in a minibus and picked us up. From there we took an extremely roundabout trip, from tiny Tibetan village to village to pick up different people and cargo to bring to Kangding (our destination). During one stop, the entire village came out to the van, one by one, to check us out and make friendly sign language/broken Chinese conversation. In another town, I went to the market for a few minutes only to return and find that the men in the village had all decided to get together and lift Pierre to see how much he weighed. We’re now down off the Plateau in Chengdu, a huge city far more modern than Kunming, and we’re breathing normally. In a day or two we’ll head north, back into the Tibetan world, and then north to Xingjiang.
Well it’s Labor Day, (or May Day as they call it) in China and as a reward for all our diligent work, Pierre and I have been given a week’s vacation from school. We decided to explore the far western area of the Yunnan Province, so on Monday afternoon we boarded a Ruili-bound sleeper bus. Our estimated time of arrival was 24 hours from when we left. For long trips the bus has two drivers - one sleeps on a bed in the front while the other drives. Our first driver was fairly calm and careful, but as night fell the second bus driver took over. This chain-smoking madman reeked of feces and drove so fast that he managed to cut about 8 hours off of our travel time. In the early morning when his shift was over he still hadn’t had enough nicotine, so he proceeded to pull out a large bong made of bamboo and puff away for the remaining hours of the trip.
As for Ruili, which is China’s border town with Myanmar, I’m sad to inform you that the days of buying a pistol from a trench coat clad fellow in an alley, after drinking codeine-laced beers at the local bar and smoking opium mixed with banana leaves are over. Sure, there are still enough prostitutes milling around the streets at night that it’s frightening to imagine that the supply comes close to matching the demand, but the Chinese government has cracked down on the waves of guns and drugs flowing out of Burma…not to say that it’s not a good thing, but we were surprised by the relative tameness of Ruili’s atmosphere…yet where Ruili failed to deliver crime-related excitement, it surely succeeded in bestowing on us one of the more disturbing images that we’ve seen - that of a freshly slaughtered German Shepard being de-furred in a store front in some maniacal-looking machine. Although I understand that dog-eating in China was probably a matter of survival rvival during times of famine, there seems to be plenty of food in Ruili these days, and that dog definitely looked less appetizing than other freshly slaughtered animals that I’ve seen. I guess it’s an acquired taste.
We saw many interesting faces in Ruili - new hill tribes that we hadn’t seen before, and of course many Burmese people. Burmese women wear a mud-like make-up on their faces that protects them from the sun. It sounds ugly but it actually looks quite beautiful. Sadly, our excitement at seeing all the new types of people was unrequited. We seemed to be the only westerners in the whole city (except for one Israeli guy we saw at a nightclub who was receiving some unwanted attention on the dance floor from a very randy Chinese man), and when people weren’t laughing and screaming “haoolllo,” at us, they were giving us the cold shoulder.
We took the first bus in the morning out of Ruili and headed to Tengchong, which is a small rural city surrounded by volcanoes. As our bus left the city and headed into the mountains, the people became much friendlier. We bought hard-boiled duck eggs along the way from a smiley minority woman who’s teeth were painted with a black lacquer (it prevents decay and is considered beautiful.)
Tengchong has managed to preserve many of it’s traditional buildings, although we had a very typical Chinese travel experience when we first arrived - that of looking for the “Old Quarter” and discovering that it was torn down last week. We’re staying in a terrifying bathroom-tile covered Commie monstrosity. Every floor is in a state of unlivable disrepair except for the floor we’re staying on (the 4th floor, which like the 13th floor in America is considered unlucky and VERY unfavorable)…anyway, Pierre and I both have the runs from gorging ourselves at a Sichuanese dumpling house (that must have been questionable)…our western-style toilet in the hotel doesn’t have a toilet seat, but we’re trying to be good sports about it. Tomorrow we head back to Kunming to get ready for final exams, and then we’re off on our final 11 week trip to Sichuan Province, Tibet and Western China.
Pierre and I are slowly settling into the grind after returning from our big trip. Our homecoming was a bit rough, as we realized upon returning that we were being evicted from our apartment. This situation was complicated by the malaise, nausea, sewer-like burps and chemical weapons-grade farts that we were stricken with (especially Pierre) as a result of the gardiasis we contracted from drinking bad water at the “rat-hotel” in Laos. Luckily, our symptoms have subsided and we are both enjoying our new-found svelte-ness that has resulted from parasites sharing the burden of all the calories we consume. Also, we moved into a new, sunny, fully furnished apartment last week. It’s a bit more expensive (a whopping $150/month), but we have been reintroduced to the joys of bathing, as we now have a gas-heated hot water tank. However, we have no longer have the luxury of a western-style toilet. Our bathroom is the size of a closet, with a hole in the floor for a toilet and a shower head above. Bathing over the toilet is not as bad as it seems - at least we don’t feel guilty about peeing in the shower!!!
Speaking of showers, I am teaching four film classes for the English majors this semester, and naturally I thought starting the course off with a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” would be a perfect way to hone their appreciation of cinema (especially because the two most popular movies among the students seem to be “Braveheart” and “Titanic”….) None of the students had seen the film or even heard of Hitchcock, so I decided to show the movie with no introduction. My students’ mild amusement with Janet Leigh’s torpedo-like bosoms turned to shock and horror as she collapsed on the bathroom floor after being stabbed by “Mrs. Bates.” As the suspense in the film grew, I at one point looked up to see every single one of my students gaping at the screen with their hands clamped over their mouths. In the climax of the story when Mrs. Bates is revealed to be a corpse and Norman a homicidal cross-dresser, my students all seemed to short-circuit. Some screamed, others threw their heads down on the desk, hyperventilating and whimpering…one girl even tried to climb under her desk as if to escape a truth too brutal and disturbing for her to handle. When the film had ended, the class just stared at me as if I were the psycho. I did hear some giggling as they left at the end of class, so I think some of them might have enjoyed it.
Anyway, I think the movie was a useful learning tool for my students, as they are all now familiar with the words “transvestite, “matricide” and “taxidermy.”
If you want to be surrounded by badly sunburned white guys with cornrows, go to Bangkok. I’m happy to say that after a 13-hour overnight bus trip, we have put a few hundred kilometers between Thailand’s lovely capital and ourselves. I’m sure that with more than a day’s exploration, Bangkok would reveal many charms, but our 24 hours spent in the vicinity of the backpacker’s Mecca called “Khao San Road,” revealed only a ghastly parade of drunken Swedes, sweaty pedophiles and westerners swathed in tie dyed “MC Hammer” pants.
At the end of the road is a fence covered with hundreds of “Missing Persons” posters from the tsunami. Large portions of the posters were of small children, sometimes entire families. It was quite heart-wrenching and reminded me of the “Missing Persons” posters scattered across NYC after 9-11.
Cambodia also put forth its own share of heart-wrenching images, but this was offset by the charm and kindness of the Cambodian people. I must say that Cambodians are among the friendliest people I have ever met. As we rode our bikes through the countryside near Angkor Wat, all the children from the villages ran out onto the roads to greet us, screaming hello and forming curious crowds around us when we stopped.
Cambodian children speak excellent English and are always ready to bombard you with questions about your name, age, nationality and marital status. The adults are equally as friendly, and when common language was a problem, I found that comparing tattoos was an excellent ice-breaker. Many rural women have designs tattooed on their wrists, and many of the men have tattoos of magical symbols that are said to protect them from bullet and knife wounds, decorating their entire upper torsos. I met a young monk while I was waiting for Pierre who was proud to show me his brand new tattoo of a king cobra that spanned his entire arm. He then proceeded to study all 500 pages of my guidebook, asking me to read aloud and explain almost every photo caption. The monk was accompanied by his mentor, who looked on sternly at first but soon became friendly when he ascertained that no inappropriate behavior was occurring between his novice and me. The older monk then gave me his business card which had his name printed on one side and an image of his disembodied head omnisciently peering down over Ankgor Wat on the other.
Cambodia is by far the poorest place that we have visited in Asia - amputee beggars and naked children with distended bellies milling around the outer walls of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh is not an uncommon sight, but signs of recovery and new business are not uncommon either. The city has an undeniable spookiness about it.
In 1975 Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge emptied the city of all 2 million inhabitants within a mere 48 hours. The people were told that they were being evacuated to escape an impending attack by the Americans, but they were really being sent to work in the countryside as slaves or to be exterminated.
We visited S-21, which was a former high school that was turned into a prison by the Khmer Rouge. S-21 has been nicknamed “Auschwitz on the Mekong” and some of the images depicted there were even more graphic than any that I’ve seen at former Nazi concentration camps. The walls of the prison are covered with mug shots of the inmates, which included thousands of women and children. The inmates were either tortured to death by the guards or “reprogrammed” to become prison guards themselves. Among the most sadistic prison guards were the young children, who had been apparently normal upon first being incarcerated. In the mug shots from the early years of the Khmer Rouge, the inmates wore defiant expressions, but as the years dragged on, the expressions on the inmates faces became more and more deranged - they had been driven mad by the brutality they had been subjected to.
It was heartening to see that these days people wear expressions of friendliness and openness despite all the horrors they have been subjected to. Phnom Penh is actually a really fun city with a certain gritty, hard-edged charm. Sure, it’s really too dangerous to walk around anywhere at night, but those in charge of Cambodian tourism have cleverly set up a very pleasant backpacker haven on the lake. Unlike those of Saigon and Bangkok, the tourist area in Phnom Penh is a very laid-back and fun place to take refuge from the certain armed robbery that awaits the hapless and very stoned “permanent vacationers” that haunt the city.
Pierre and I also headed down to the Cambodian coast, and of course up to Siem Riep to see the Angkor Archaeological Site. The coast was undeveloped and relaxing. We had planned to explore an abandoned hotel that was supposed to be haunted and we were sure was now inhabited by a colony of demonic monkeys, but sadly the hotel had been renovated and is set to reopen next summer. We did however discover another group of friendly Cambodians when snorkeling out on a remote peninsula. They introduced us to the joys of Khmer wine, which is made from toads and claims to cure syphilis, the clap, and TB on the label. Pierre drank two bottles by himself and said it made him feel great.
Up in Siem Riep, the window of the room where we stayed overlooked a pit of 40 crocodiles. They made cute noises and we could hear them splashing around in their little pool at night. Angkor Wat and all the surrounding temples and structures was of course indescribably breathtaking and thus very frustrating to photograph. We spent 3 days riding bikes around what seemed to be endless ruins with towers filled with bats - many of the shrines and temples have yet to be uncovered, and lay hidden in the Forrest, shrouded by vegetation and surrounded by the occasional landmine.
So far Cambodia has been a major highlight in our trip and I really hope to make it back there again before leaving Asia. The people there don’t seem to resent America for killing thousands of Cambodian people or for supporting the Khmer Rouge who killed millions of Cambodian people. I hope American tourists continue to go there to enjoy the fascinating culture and to contemplate things that happened there in the past.
So…we’re now in Chaing Mai, which is a much nicer part of Thailand - we’ll soon be heading over the Mekong into Laos, then back up to China.
Our holiday season has been very busy here. The last two weeks before Christmas we worked diligently preparing and giving oral English exams to our 450 students as well as calculating all their grades. I also listened to some very sad stories from a few students about why they could not come to class this semester or study for the exam and why I should pass them anyway. One student’s excuse for screwing up in the class was simply “Rock and roll is my life.” My students had some interesting things to say during their exams as well. Two male students preformed a dialogue for me about two guys having an argument over a girl. At the end of the dialogue one guy said to the other “If you look at my girlfriend again, I will fuck you.”
drinking a beer with one of my students
Our Christmas party could have resulted in me losing and eye and pooping in my pants on stage, but didn’t. The whole affair was pretty confusing. First we thought we were planning an entire event for about twenty people, and then it turned out it was an event for 2000. After that we were told only 750 people were coming, but then the number went back up to 2000 again. Luckily, it turned out that we were only really responsible for planning some Christmas games - we chose “pin the tail on the reindeer”, “pass the orange under your chin” and “Santa piñatas.” The week before the party we toiled for many hours with papier mache and acrylic paint until we had five Santa heads, which were a bit lopsided and probably led the Chinese youngsters to believe that Santa has a birth defect or is perhaps half man - half dog. We filled them with glitter and a bag of suspicious looking “Meow” flavored candy that was bought for us.
A “party” at the University is not what we are used to in the West. Instead of people socializing, enjoying refreshments and taking part in activities, a “party” consists of a large amount of people sitting in an auditorium while a bizarre talent show takes place on stage.
Of course all the preparations were last minute and five minutes before the show started we were still trying to hang the piñatas amidst screaming fights between the stage crew, us, and the other performers who thought our piñatas would interfere with their performances. By the time the show started we had not received any oranges for “pass the orange under your chin” or any blindfolds for the “pin the tail” game. Additionally, in reaction to a bowl of fishy soup I’d had for lunch (that I now suspect contained some clams which I’m allergic to), a violent maelstrom of diarrhea was now brewing in my gut. Of course there were no bathrooms in the entire auditorium.
The first act was Christmas pageant put on by one of the Mormon missionary teachers and her class. Mormon-style religious plays usually have giant casts and have the distinct trait of pre-recorded dialogue that is blasted over a loudspeaker while the actors lip sync the words. The Chinese audience seemed to find the play hysterically funny. The student who played Gabriel the Angel had confused the meaning of “angel” and “fairy” and pranced about on stage with a magic wand. At the end of the play, without warning, the scene jumps from the manger to a modern-day home where Santa is climbing down the chimney to deliver presents - possibly leading the students to believe that Jesus actually grows up to be Santa Claus. Almost immediately following the pageant was a singing and dancing act preformed by three girls wearing leather hot pants, knee-high stripper boots and sequined bras. “Welcome to Moulin Rouge” one of the girls screamed in broken English as the three began to flap their thighs open and closed and clutch their private parts while singing “voulez- vous coucher avec moi”. The missionaries watched in horror from the front row. As for our games, “pass the orange” and “pin the tail” were riddled with unabashed cheating (much like the exams we gave). However, the piñatas, which ended the evening, were a huge success. Only in China can you get away with blindfolding youngsters standing on the edge of a high stage, giving them long bamboo poles and then letting them swing wildly at piñatas hung from a rickety lighting grid. Eventually the blindfolds were torn off and some of the Santa heads fell to the ground. Roars erupted from the crowd as Santa’s face was obliterated on the floor with the bamboo canes. The piñatas really looked beautiful as they exploded and all the glitter and candy spilled out. We felt our students had shown us the true spirit of Christmas - that of savage excitement.
There are so many fun little misunderstandings and culture clashes to be had here in China. It took me a while to get used to the fact that if you bump into someone, you don’t say “excuse me.” People just bounce off one another like molecules and continue on their way. Also, people will blatantly cut you in line, for example, when you are waiting for the bathroom. They’ll just push you out of the way and force their way into the stall. Having spent the last 5 years in NYC, I’ve picked up the habit of getting more than a little bent out of shape over this. Chinese teenage girls are the worst. The other day, a bunch of my students at the university started pushing me out of the way to cut me in line for the bathroom. I finally lost it and turned around and said “nice fucking try.” Then I braced my arms against the door frame and blocked it completely with my body so no one could get by me. It was pretty easy to hold them back; it was kind of like playing rugby with a pack of feral 9-year-olds. They were all staring at me in disbelief and speaking frantically and continuing to shove, but I held steady and then triumphantly stepped into my stall. The arm-bracing tactic also works quite well for people trying to shove in front of you getting on and off the bus. I am developing a grip of steel. Pierre and I just went to try and pay our phone bill today and were reminded that lines really do not exist in this country; there was just a mass of people all pushing to be the next at the counter. It’s funny because my experience in other communist countries was much different.
In Cuba people are so line-oriented, that when you get to the bus stop, you always call out to the other people to see who is the last in line, so you don’t get on the bus before your turn. I suppose in a country of 1.3 billion people you have to fight for your place. It’s easy to get very angry, especially when someone almost mows you down with their moped that they happen to be riding on the sidewalk. People seem very taken aback when you shoot them a murderous glare or scream at them when they have nearly ended your life, as if you shouldn’t take it personally. I suppose the only thing one can do is come to terms with the fact that in China you must get the hell out of the way or die.
In other news, our Christmas party plans seem to be going ok. They’ve weaned the guest list down to 700. One thing I’m very angry about though -I think my play about Santa Claus terrorizing a Chinese family (starring Pierre at Santa Claus and me as a cigarette smoking 8 year old who steals a switch out of Santa’s gift sack and whips her parents with it) is going to be bumped in favor of a play written by one of the missionaries about the birth of you-know-who. It’s sickening. Maybe instead of Santa and reindeer pinatas we can fashion one in the likeness of little baby Jesus.
Pierre and I had been packing for weeks. Five thousand record albums, 11 broken film projectors, two short-wave radios, the crusty pelt of a black bear shot by my grandfather, a broken sitar, all waiting to be crammed into our ailing Subaru and moved into storage. Liquor-store boxes and piles of furniture teetered precariously in every corner, as our three cats slinked around the living room, suspicious of what was happening. Packing up our belongings and moving all the furniture had uncovered $42.00 in change, as well as a dark underworld of crusty cat vomit and webs of debris-encrusted fur that now drifted across the floor. Emptying the kitchen yielded the most horrific discovery of all; from beneath a coffee can on the counter crawled a large albino cockroach, replete with pink eyes and milky-white feelers. I stared at it, unable to move or cry out, as it calmly scampered across the counter and disappeared behind the stove.
The cockroach, known thereafter as “El Diablo Blanco,” was another entry on a seemingly endless list of reasons why we were glad to be moving ten thousand miles away from New York City. Sure, adventure and experience topped the list, but perhaps even more important for us was the need to escape what had become the mildly desperate monotony of living in New York. Pierre was working at a talent agency that exclusively handled opera singers. The pay was horrible, and even worse, his manager, a failed opera singer from West Virginia, was afflicted with a borderline personality disorder and left gray residue on the toilet seat. I was suffering from career problems of my own. After a steady downward trajectory that resulted from the dot-com crash, I found myself working in the photo studios of Martha Stewart Living as a glorified janitor and prop-house worker. My manager in the prop-house was a self-proclaimed “bird pedophile.” I came home in tears after my first day on the job. I had been nitpicked into submission by my new boss . I’d made coffee and arranged muffins on a plate for a photo shoot, and then cleaned up the coffee and scrubbed down all the surfaces in the studio. Was this what my college education had gotten me? I felt ashamed of myself, especially in seeing people younger than me in creative and prestigious jobs at the company.
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Our initial decision to move to china was a quick one; we had originally planned to join the Peace Corps. One day Pierre randomly got in touch with an old friend who happened to be teaching English in Beijing. He sent us both an email, dissing the Peace Corps and praising the easy, fun-filled life teaching English in China. After reading it I immediately called Pierre at work.
“Fuck it, let’s fucking move to China,” I said.
It was now December, and as we would not be able to leave until the following August, the long waiting game began. I bought a Lonely Planet China book and carried it with me everywhere, staring longingly at the photos inside as I rode the subway to work, and when my boss wasn’t looking in the prop-house. I scoured the Internet for pictures and travel tips, and began to collect information on teaching English. It so happened that a family friend was living in Kunming, and he knew a British gal who taught at a University there. We contacted her and she put us in touch her boss in the English department of the University. Her boss sent us an email interview that contained questions like “How would you teach a class of 60 students who speak different levels of English” and “What teaching experience do you have and what teaching methods do you prefer?“ Neither Pierre not I had any experience teaching at all. Luckily, my Internet research had yielded a wealth of teaching plans and advice on teaching ESL classes. We altered our resumes to include a few fictitious ESL tutoring jobs and gave lengthy, detailed answers to Tai Li’s questions.
A week later we had the jobs.
We began to round up some of our belongings, several months before our departure. We cleaned out my parents hell-hole of a basement in Virginia so that we could store our stuff down there, and miraculously convinced them to baby sit all three of our cats for a year. As my parent’s basement had nowhere near enough room for all our stuff, we also convinced Pierre’s parents and his parent’s neighbors to let us use their basements as well. I kept my plans secret at work, fantasizing about my day of reckoning when I would announce that I was quitting and moving to China.
The week before our departure, I went to check our bank statement online and found that the IRS had frozen our bank account because Pierre owed them some money. The IRS must have been alerted that we had applied for foreign work visas and decided now was the time to get their money. After two days of crisis and hours on the phone, they released our account. The actual move proved to be traumatic as well. First we drove down to Virginia to drop off the cats. It was a rough, traffic-laden ride, during which Bling Bling pooped in her cage and Lulu started to froth at the mouth. We quickly bade farewell to my parents and the cats and then drove north again, to pack our stuff into the moving truck and take it to Massachusetts. The house was dusty and smelled like cat piss and we could barely breathe. In the morning a friend came over and helped us load everything into the truck. He followed us in our Subaru, which was also crammed full of crap. Twenty minutes into our trip, while driving through the Bronx, the back of our moving truck flew open, spewing some of our belongings out onto the highway. My fancy Martha Stewart umbrella that had been given to all the employees at the company meeting was now being mangled on the asphalt by a steady stream of 18-wheelers. We bought a small padlock to secure the back door of our truck, and then continued on our way. An hour or so later, we looked in the rearview mirror and notice that Mike was no longer following us in our car. We had shut off our cell phones, so we called his phone from a payphone at a rest stop. He was on the side of the road, about 40 miles back, with a flat tire. We got back onto the turnpike to drive towards him, and ended up driving up and down the highway for an hour and a half looking for him. On the way, we ran over a large can of orange paint, which exploded beneath the tires and sprayed all over the side of the truck. We had to buy spray paint to cover the damage.
Our last few days in New York were spent in slightly less cat-piss ridden conditions. My sister and her husband were going out of town, and we agreed to stay at their fancy Manhattan Co-op and take care of their cat until we left. We languished in the air-conditioned, cable-TV equipped paradise, spending our days buying last-minute supplies and rechecking our packed bags.
The day before we left, Pierre’s parents came to town to see us off. A feeling on unreality took hold, and as I awoke at sunrise on the day of our departure, I acutely felt that I in fact had no idea what we had gotten ourselves into. School was starting three days after our arrival in China, and we needed to find an apartment and somehow get over our jetlag beforehand.
We arrived at the airport about four hours early, and after eating some $20 dirty baloney sandwiches, spent our time staring wistfully out the window at the overcast New York sky.
On the plane, we flew over the North Pole and watched “As Good as it gets,” starring Jack Nicholson. I felt numb, partially because my special “circulation socks” that I was wearing to maintain blood circulation in my legs on the 14-hour ride, seemed to be performing the opposite of their duty.
After 14 hours and two greasy chopped suey meals, we arrived in Beijing and were met at the airport by Pierre’s friend Chris. We lugged our baggage to a taxi, and Chris directed the driver to his apartment in fluent Chinese.
Dusk was falling on Beijing, and the sky was illuminated in a sickly orange color.
“You guys are lucky,” Chris said. The pollution isn’t so bad today.
Beijing, like many Chinese cities, is laid out in a series of concentric circles. Elevated superhighways, and enormous tenement buildings, stretching high into the murky atmosphere, mark the outer rings of the city. The innermost rings encircle Tienamen Square, the final resting place of Mao Zedung, and the Forbidden City. The city layout can be seen as a physical manifestation of Chinese society – the inner rings include what is most dear, immediate family, friends, then neighbors and co-workers, strangers, fellow countrymen, and in the outermost ring, foreigners. It is no mistake that China’s capital city places Chairman Mao in the heart of the innermost ring, for it is he who still possesses the symbolic heart of China. Father, Leader, God, Mao once rose above all familial duties. Chinese people have adapted to the continuing exposure of his madness and misdeeds in recent years by adopting the 70-30 ratio (he was 70 percent correct and 30 percent incorrect).
Chris lived in the second ring, in a fancy apartment building with a doorman. As we entered the elevator, a willowy Chinese woman wearing stilettos and a pair of ass-cheek exposing hot pants exited past us. We asked him if she was a prostitute.
“No, she lives here in this building with her parents.”
Tai Li recognized us immediately, as we were the only non-Chinese people getting off the plane in Kunming. Smiling and waving at us through the glass, she waited patiently for the 30 minutes it took before our luggage appeared on the conveyor belt.
“We will drop off your luggage, have something to eat, and then go look for a flat,” she said reassuringly, after we introduced ourselves. We climbed into the school van and drove toward the city center, speeding by ultra-modern buildings, neon lights and quadruple-lane elevated highways, choked with construction vehicles and bicycles. Tai Li gave us our class schedules and the point system break-down for grading. She also procured a thin blue textbook entitled “Oral Reproduction Workshop.”
“This is your textbook,” she said. The students will have their textbooks when the semester starts.
We arrived at what looked like a typical college campus, (except that more than half the buildings were under construction and partially covered in blue plastic tarps and bamboo scaffolding) and were dropped off at the Yunnan Normal University guesthouse, a moldy building at the main entrance of the school. The desk attendant unenthusiastically showed us to our room, a dank carpeted box with two sunken beds and a window that overlooked the main campus walkway.
A bell rang, and the walkway was suddenly choked with students, many sporting in faux-Addidas track suits with the name of the University embroidered on the back. Amidst the swarm of students, a line of stern-looking soldiers in oversized uniforms marched in formation. Upon closer inspection, it appeared that the soldiers were not much older than the students, their taut faces mostly hidden under their large hats. The students descended upon the many food wagons that were parked along the walkway, buying plastic bags filled with soy milk and steamed buns, which they hurriedly stuffed into their mouths as they rushed to their next class. Periodically, large blue dump trucks pushed their way down the narrow walkway, honking their horns and temporarily scattering the pedestrians. Bicycles weaved precariously between the food carts, people and trucks, sometimes swerving onto the narrow strips of grass along the side of the road. Another bell rang, and as quickly as they appeared, the students vanished into the concrete and tile classroom buildings, leaving behind a scattered mass of plastic bags and half-eaten buns on the pavement. The street was silent for a moment before several street-sweepers appeared, wearing wide straw hats. Corralling the debris with brooms made from tree-branches, they scooped the garbage into wagons attached to their bicycles and rode away.
As I watched this scene, I heard a strange scampering sound outside the window, and poked my head out to see a large black rat, climbing straight toward me, up the concrete façade of the building. We decided to leave the windows shut while we went out for lunch, even though the room was stuffy and making us sneeze.
we saw this at the Traveler's hospital where we had to get a checkup before being issued work visas
Tai Li picked us up in her little white economy car in front of the guesthouse.
“We really like the school,” we told her, as we climbed into her car.
“Oh,” she said, looking mildly uncomfortable, “this isn’t the school you will be teaching at. You will be working at our new school, which is a little out of town.”
Tai Li took us to a nearby restaurant and ordered a large spread of spicy dishes. The wait staff seemed highly amused by us, and crowed in the corner to watch us as we ate. Tai Li was very impressed by our dexterous command of our chopsticks.
our University in Kunming
“Is this your first time using them?” she asked. She seemed shocked and fascinated when we told her that most people in America learn how to use chopsticks at a young age.
The meal was a little uncomfortable. Tai Li, who told us to call her Sandra, her English name, seemed to be straining to make conversation. She was about 35 years old, and looked very prim and proper with her wire spectacles and her long flowered dress.
“We like China a lot already,” I told her.
“China is ok,” she said. “It can be a good place, but it also has a very dark side,” she said.
When the meal was over, we had barely eaten half of what we’d ordered. We asked Tai Li if she wanted to take the food home with her. She seemed reluctant at first, but then gave in and seemed delighted. We learned later that taking food home from a restaurant when you are the host often causes one to lose face – the host always wants to give an impression that they are wealthy enough to let the food go to waste.
“How do I ask where the bathroom is,” I asked Tai Li, as we got up to leave. She looked embarrassed and just stared at me.
“Is it “fambien, fambien,” I asked, quoting a phrase Chris had taught us in Beijing.
“Uh, yes,” she said. “I think that would be ok.”
I repeated the phrase to two waitresses, who immediately burst into laughter and pointed me down the hall to the bathroom. I learned later that Chris was playing a joke on us, and “fambien, fambien” has the equivalent meaning of “I need to go potty.”
On the walk back to the car, Tai Li unfolded a large frilly parasol to shield her from the sun. Kunming’s relatively high altitude and arid climate result in an inordinate amount of blindingly sunny days. I noticed that most of the women walking down the street were cowering under parasols, some even wearing little white gloves to protect their hands. The women riding bicycles wore shaded plastic sun-visors that wrapped around the front of their faces, giving them the appearance of space invaders from the 1950’s. The men didn’t seem concerned by the sun at all, some teenagers sporting skimpy tank-tops, other more portly middle-aged men rolling the front of their shirts up to expose their ample bellies.
We took the first bus in the morning out of Ruili and headed to Tengchong, which is a small rural city surrounded by volcanoes. As our bus left the city and headed into the mountains, the people became much friendlier. We bought hard-boiled duck eggs along the way from a smiley minority woman who’s teeth were painted with a black lacquer (it prevents decay and is considered beautiful.)
