April 25 - May 25 2005 / China: The New, The Old
The Yangtze, Beijing, Xian--and the Far, Far West
Part 2 - In Which We “Do” Beijing
On the drive from the airport into the city we made an arrangement with our new CITS person, whose working name is Tom, and the driver, to take us to see the Great Wall at Simatai, a much less developed part of it, and the part I had wanted to see instead of the one everybody else goes to. This all seemed to go well although I thought the price was pretty steep. Anyhow, that got settled.
And our hotel turns out to be one of those over-the-top places (I mean, a rose petal in the toilet?), far too elegant for the likes of us, but it's already paid for, and the location is excellent, so there you are.
We went out to explore and to find our way to Tian An Men Square, just down the impressive boulevard --the same one the tanks rolled along in June of 1989, and I take a surreptitious picture of the markings on the road that appear in the inspiring picture of the young man, his bag in his hand, standing in front of those tanks.
In the Square we are with a large number of others, for it is the start of the week-long May Day holiday, and we have all come to see the lowering of the national flag at sunset. It’s funny—I would have expected a playing of national music, or ranks of soldiers, but except for a few who seem to be there to keep order, it’s just the people, who wait patiently, and watch as the flag slides down promptly at the moment of sunset (a time which I had found online back home, so we’d be sure to be here for it—ain’t technology amazing?!).
After the flag goes down we find our way back to the hotel, and have dinner. I’m feeling pretty good about having gotten us here and having done what I’d planned for this day. Beijing is nothing like what I’d expected. The air seems clean, it’s not dreary gray, and people seem lively and cosmopolitan. All sorts of families are here for May Day, and things feel festive.
At breakfast we manage to spirit away four slices of bread, and I make peanut butter sandwiches to carry for lunch, and off we go for The Forbidden City.
Along with about a million Chinese.
I guess the main thing we got from the day is that even when they are in these truly staggeringly-large groups, people for the most part give each other some space. Several times people actually helped us in crowds, one woman pulling me by my sleeve as I inched my way towards a quick view inside a building. Another time a man gave me his place at a ticket window.
Everywhere are families, little kids never complaining or whining. Young people in the latest fashion, eyes on each other. Older people walking slowly.
The spaces are so large--as if the early architects knew there would someday be these millions and millions of people to fill them. The forms and colors are elegant and arresting, especially the wonderful red, a kind of deep crimson.
I especially like it how people just make use of the whole space, this space where only a few generations ago their like would have been utterly forbidden to go. It's quite delicious to see some little kid having his picture taken in front of the inner court buildings which used to hold the eunuchs and concubines of the supreme ruler. A family from the country having their picnic lunch on the steps of some palace or other. The outbuildings selling Coke and snacks and souvenirs. I love it.
After we finally find our way out of the Forbidden City, through the wonderful imperial garden with its fine ancient gnarled cedar trees and inlaid paths, we cross to a lovely park, and halfway up its central hill, stop by the walkway in the trees to eat our lunch.
At the top of the hill are some temples, one with a Buddha draped in yellow silk, and I am surprised to see many people buying bundles of incense and being observant, bowing in front of the statue, their hands together, and carefully placing and lighting the incense.
We are beginning to tire now, it's hard being a tourist, and also I don't like being something that others take a picture of because I'm a foreigner. Once I realized a man was trying to take a picture of his little boy who was standing next to me, and I hastily took myself out of the way, trying to be polite. The man’s face fell and he gestured me back next to the kid. Ugh. We walk through a gauntlet of hawkers and on to some lakes, but I am getting tired, and it's a long walk back to the hotel.
So after a rest alongside the lake with everybody else, we wend our way back to the Grand Beijing Hotel with the crowds. Everybody's just in a festive mood, though, and things feel good. We stop in and buy a Coke for me at a little shop. On the wall nearby is a condom vending machine! I can tell from the red AIDS ribbon on the sign that that’s what it is.
We have our evening drinks in the bar on the roof, the tenth floor, overlooking the No-Longer-Forbidden City, and in the distance see the crowds watching the flag come down.
I am not sure why, or quite what the nature of it is, but I feel at home here.
We slept well last night, well, we should, the beds are fantastic. Bravely we took a cab to Tian Tan Park, where the Temple of Heaven is. We saw that marvelous building along with crowds but not as many as yesterday.
But the best things we saw in the park were how people enjoy themselves, and take care of themselves. Here was a heart-wrenching small group of ballroom dancers, gravely dancing to a cassette of some old pop music. An old man standing by himself next to us carefully danced a few steps. Two women danced together.
A large group are doing tai chi, with an instructor. The best ones wear white satin suits. The instructor demonstrates, and then they all move together. So slowly, so elegantly.
Farther down the way, after the badminton players, is a large group doing a line dance to old disco music. They all know exactly what to do. They stand quite far from each other, moving as a group yet also as individuals. This seems significant. Some of the watchers move to a few steps, trying it out. There are men and women, mostly middle-aged.
Then in the distance we hear singing. A large group, some with thick song books, is led by a conductress with a baton. Everyone sings, and many don't need the songbooks. The pitch is suitable for anyone.
I love this! I wish I had a place to go to where I could do these things, together but separate. There seems a metaphor here. Yesterday, going slowly in the huge crowds, I passed a German man, and we exchanged a few words about how orderly it all really was, and he pointed out that these people are used their whole lives to moving in large crowds, and know how to do it right.
We come home early in the afternoon, and tuck in for a rest. Tonight we are gong to see an acrobatics show, and tomorrow to the Great Wall all day.
I have a lot of pictures, and I love my pictures. I don't think these words are worth much. It takes a huge amount of energy to do this each day, especially when I don't have much to say. But I will keep trying.
Later. The acrobatics show was wonderful, a happy noisy audience mostly of foreigners but not all, and marvelous feats of derring-do and agility and challenge of gravity. At intermission we were treated to western music--Christmas carols, interspersed with Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech.
And we even managed to snag a taxi afterwards, although the first cab we tried, when we showed the driver the card with the name of our hotel printed on it in Chinese, and a map, he looked at it closely for a minute, and then shook his head slightly. Could he not read it? Later I learned that the Chinese do not know how to read maps, as the information on maps is considered top-secret... But the second cab we tried turned out to have a driver who talked our ears off so as to practice his English. We learned how he likes Americans, doesn't like the south Chinese, and about all the famous people who have stayed in different hotels. He was quite determined and I appreciated his effort.
Tired! Just finished packing up to move to the airport hotel tomorrow, where we will--ta da--meet The Group. We have got used to being on our own here, and I am not entirely looking forward to being in a group.
Anyhow, I am tired, in a really good way, because we spent the whole day driving to and from the Great Wall at Simatai, and hiking up and down it. Our CITS young man, "Tom," (looking totally American in his jeans, t-shirt and wraparound shades) and his driver, met us at 8 this morning an off we went. Horrendous traffic for miles on the outskirts of Beijing.
For many miles the countryside looked quite spiffy--clean, orderly, well-tended. There are huge apartment complexes; Tom said these were for Beijingers with lots of money to come and spend the weekend, although the scene is somewhat bleak in this dry season. There were "holiday resorts," and we stopped at one for a bathroom break and were let in the door by a man wearing a horribly garish red and yellow outfit with a gleaming yellow top hat. Once through the door we were directed by a woman dressed in blue with gauzy stiff wings, yes, wings--all so disneyesque in a tacky sort of way. Perhaps this is what the nouveau riche want to experience.
After a long way the essentially "developing country" aspect of China appeared--people sitting by the side of the road, or pedaling their bicycles slowly alongside the raging traffic, bits of dwellings and miscellaneous buildings held together with patches of flotsam.
Tom asked me what I thought of China’s “one-child policy.” I said, Well, I can see why your government thinks it is a good idea, since there are so many people in your country and its resources must be spread so thin. But, I said, in our country the government would not be allowed to establish a policy about such a personal thing as the size of one’s family.
The Great Wall at Simatai is the least developed stretch of it anywhere near Beijing, and sure enough, just as described in my sources, there was a cable car one could take up, the one I had read was none too safe—though there it was with no one to warn one away.
When we first saw the stretch we were to climb, our little hearts sank, as it seemed a long way and incredibly steep. There were warnings about how people who were “horrifying of highness” should not attempt it. But it turned out to be no problem for us hardy hikers with our trusty sticks. We did just fine, along with lots of other people and Tom.
We went to the 9th garrison, or small outlook room, out of 12 that are a part of the Wall here, and had our lunch up there where the soldiers had once stayed, overlooking the same valley.
I loved it. I was accompanied most of the way by an older lady who wanted to sell me a book, but mostly ended up just hovering in case I needed help. When we stopped, J took a picture of me and she is in the picture. Tom said she told him she was a farmer. I gave her a gift of some money.
From our lunch place, we could see the Wall going away over the mountain tops on the other side of the valley. It never did keep out the invaders.
On the way home, I asked Tom about the Cultural Revolution, and his explanation was one I have heard before, an apologists’ view, that the young kids who did the worst of it all took Mao's pronouncements farther than he intended. And yet, it went on for ten years. He could have stopped it if he'd wanted to. Tom said it was "a mistake."
Then he astonished me by bring up June 1989 himself. Touchingly, movingly, he wanted to know if I knew how many were killed. I said I did not know, because his government had never said, but that all I had read suggested anywhere from several hundred to a thousand. He asked me several times, and I told him several times. It is sad, because what this meant was that he knew that I was able to know and that he was not able to know.
In spite of all the good things the government seems to be doing here, to allow the people to be themselves, still they cannot let them be free, have free access to information. I think it was on our flight over, or some other flight recently, I had been talking to someone about coming here to China, and she told me of a conversation she had had with an overseas Chinese, who had just been “home” to visit family. This woman told my informant, “Nothing is as it appears to be.” A chilling comment, and one I take much to heart.
I wonder a lot about the people in the park yesterday, doing things as a group but also independently. I think the government is right to be afraid of what would happen if the people were allowed to be themselves. It would not be long before those individuals would arise. For the entire lifetime of this country, its long lifetime, they have been made to do the bidding of some powerful person. And yet, and yet, just give them an opening and they strain toward selfhood.
We began today well, by calling home. What a joy it was to me to hear the voices of home!
It was raining and windy this morning, but we went on the hutong tour anyway. The hutongs are the courtyard houses in which nearly everyone in Beijing used to live--not exactly communal, but small communities, I would say--and now, of course, deemed slums (hard to electrify, et cetera), and because of the Olympics coming to Beijing in 2008, the government has decreed that most of them shall be razed, and the people housed instead in huge high-rises, most of which are located on the outskirts of town. However, a few people have defended them as living history, and promoted them as tourist destinations. Tours have been arranged, and that is what we are going on.
We were picked up promptly--everything in tourism here works like clockwork, a bit ominous actually.
The pedicabs turned out to be very comfortable, our driver was cheery and able, and we were pedaled along a back street in the wet, seeing people go about their daily business. I had been afraid that people would stare in at us, but really nobody paid attention; most of the good-natured catcalls were for our bikeman, as the line of red-topped cabs wheeled along and their bikemen called to each other and friends on the street. All quite cheery and fun.
We made first a stop at the Bell Tower, where we climbed up high to the great bronze bell, rung only on the New Year; it was very windy up there, and our guide gave us a good talk, explaining about the hutongs we could see from our vantage point. These tours were started by a photographer who saw the destruction of this way of living as a sad thing, and really I guess single-handedly has made the government leave at least some districts untouched, and preserved.
Then we went to visit the hutong home of a very rich man. He and his wife and their little boy greeted us. We sat in his elegant living room facing the pleasant courtyard, and told him about ourselves, and learned about his home--the ritzy bathroom with its corner hot tub, the little kitchen with its counters and appliances just right for a short person, the kid's tv viewing room (filled with the cigarette smoke of his father), the SECOND bathroom, and the spare room for the babysitter. The parents' bedroom. John pointed out later that there was very little actually in the home--no books, some art objects, a small computer, an ostentatious old-fashioned telephone.
A large light-colored cat trotted across the tile roof, away from our little crowd, too fast for me to take its picture. Our only Chinese cat, as it turned out.
Then we were pedaled to a royal palace and walked in the fabulous grounds, beautiful but all artifice, with specially-aged limestone rocks, and carefully planted gardens. John pointed out later that the view of nature here is all about aesthetics and philosophy. That's why no one cares about the entire ecosystems being destroyed by the dams.
We were taken into a teahouse, where six of us at a table were given a lovely, elegant show of the tea ceremony. Our teacher made an island of meditation in the noisy room. We appreciated the fragrance of the teas, and their different exquisite tastes. The tiny cups, one for inhaling the fragrance, one for tasting.
So many small vignettes to remember.
This afternoon we went to the "Friendship Store," where I bought paper cutouts for gifts, and a string of cranes for me, and a string of the Chinese zodiacal animals for our daughter.
On the way home we walked for many blocks through a section in which most of the signs were in Russian, and there were Russian goods, and Russian-speaking people, all over. All leftovers from the “friendship” times.
And then in an extraordinary mall, we had a McDonald's cheeseburger and fries, and some Hagen-Dazs ice cream. The mall was jumping, with all kinds of upscale and mid-scale shops, and lots of people shopping.
Yes, it's a world culture. The people here are trying their hardest to see just how they can find their place in it, and what that place might be. I don't think I have ever had as strong a sense of the meaning of "world culture" as I have here. Everybody knows about everybody else, everywhere else.
When Tom came to take us to our new hotel at the airport, we spent most of the time looking at the dozens of country patches on my pack, and talking about the different places they are from. He is a very unusual young man, eager to know things, thoughtful and quick. I guess he majored in some kind of engineering, but he is really a humanist. I agreed to email him about American history. He was very complimentary about me--my hands, he said, he couldn't believe I was the age I am, and how I just hiked up the Great Wall. This all pleased me very much, and I could see his feelings in his eyes.
Half way across the small earth. The precious tiny earth, our island home, and we all passengers on it, all of us together, on the good ship Earth.