Emerging from the environs of Everest is like clambering off of the moon and slowly swooping back in a long curve toward the atmosphere over the course of several days, like Chuang Tzu’s big philosophical bird. Our first night is spent in Tingri, a godforsaken little concrete outpost that is as middle of nowhere as it gets. Even in the desert a day outside Timbuktu I felt I hadn’t quite made it all the way because I still could have gone fifteen days further with the Tuareg by camel to see the salt mines hidden in the Sahara’s bowels, but everything beyond the bumfuck little town of Tingri is closer to, not further from, the familiar. The mountains around it are craggy and barren, the hotel is a broken-down dump torn from the set of a 1970s slasher movie, and the one-storey concrete block housing scattered about bespeaks the breakdown of liveability. The one thing to do is wander about and watch the villagers tend goats. At one point a woman goads a cow away from a precipice and leads it back into the yard. The stars are again magnificent at night, but we are warned not to wander the street (singular) because there are packs of wild dogs.
So we’re left to Google Sky Map it from the hotel stoop, and for the first time I see & identify all twelve astrology constellations, including my own Capricorn, which is disappointingly modest. Also seven or eight shooting stars, until I run out of wishes. The food at the hotel is good Chinese home cooking, but something makes me very ill and I spend the next day getting sick all over some of the most beautiful places on Earth. First there is the final mountain pass: 5500 meters high, clotted with rope lines of prayer flags at the top and with an unbeatable vista of a dozen different ice mountains. I spend 20 minutes searching for somewhere to go to the bathroom, but every bit of cover is a holy place of some sort and I’m not that much of a jerk; I’m captured in one bit of tourist video shambling off in the distance like some trailer park denizen’s amateur footage of Bigfoot.
Then we start the border descent – if you were to bike this route you would spend at least two days going downhill. Interspersed at regular intervals are stone medieval ruins of forts overrun in distant centuries by the Nepalese or English. After a couple of hours there are bushes that can spare enough energy to bother changing colors in autumn. Then there are trees, real trees! I’d forgotten them so thoroughly I didn’t know how much I missed them. And more and more trees, the mountains are still big but are covered with them now, great operatic cliffs draped with vines and wildflowers, and with waterfalls spilling over them at regular intervals, like the lush mountains of Sichuan. We’ve arrived at Paradise.
The Chinese government is busy improving the roads, which are perched perilously over the precipice of a massive canyon and were previously prone to deadly landslides. Unfortunately, this means they’ve closed off our little one-lane road at one point for the next six hours, until dusk. So we get out with our backpacks and hike through the remote, mountainous construction site (though I still feel like crap) with its blue tarp tents and its little canvas canteen, its waterfall-powered cement machine and its dozens of Nepalese laborers hacking the rocks apart above us, chopping up the road and carrying it off, and setting concrete blocks with steel supports to be laid later in the day, hardhat Chinese engineers talking through some technical quandary here in the middle of nowhere, and a couple of waterfalls thrumming above us and right onto the old road. Then further across the pristine canyon and down into the snaking, one-lane border town of Zhangmu, which follows the looping road for well over a kilometer and continues across the border on the Nepalese side with another name.
Zhangmu is a singular place, hugging the road along the side of a mountain like a ghetto Positano, with little more than storefront shops, ratty tourist hotels and the occasional brothel. It’s a bit Wild West, with Chinese, Tibetans and Nepalese rubbing shoulders along the many bends in the narrow road as it repeatedly doubles back & descends. The water here is from little rivers that flow down the side of the mountain, and it’s pretty unhygienic; water from one is used to power a small tsampa mill at one point, further down you see the same stream being peed in from a hut, someone’s washing clothes in it at the next bend and further below you see someone drinking from it. Our hotel is a notch better than Tingri, but that’s a low bar to set; one restaurant’s food is edible but the whole place reeks of yak grease and so do I afterward, even after showering. So why do I love Zhangmu so much? In a word, it is awesome.
Next morning the border opens and we’re off across the Friendship Bridge to Nepal. The Chinese border post is busy with Nepalese day-laborers going the opposite way, and though they do search our luggage they’re extremely polite. My temporary travel partner Rany Ng’s Tibet permit apparently expired the day before and so I prepare to call her parents and inform them she’s in prison, then call Google and tell them I’m happy to take her job and her equity, but thankfully the Chinese let her go and we’re free to continue. Our Tibetan guide, who so annoyed me throughout the journey, waves us a doleful goodbye as we cross into another country and I’m suddenly struck by how limiting his little forays from Lhasa to the border must be, and get some insight into why he seems so bored by it all. He blathered on in places of worship, incessantly hit on and at one point proposed marriage to Rany and I’m pretty sure spent every night of our journey in one brothel or another like a little Johnny Appleseed of VD, but he did take me out for a really good pub crawl in Shigatse, and for that I thank him, dumbass though he may be. And in Tibet you’re required to have a guide, so he did make this leg of the trip possible.
Paradise continues on the Nepal side but the vibe is different. The people look markedly different ethnically for one, and there are dozens of huge, colorful trucks parked along the road that you have to navigate around with your luggage. There is more chaos and yet somehow less stress, like you can breathe a bit more easily. Everybody’s chilled out and hanging by the side of the road all the way to Kathmandu. We acquire a Nepalese driver and start journeying south through an especially lush stretch of the Himalayas for an hour before all traffic stops. So we get out and wander past fifty or so trucks and see a bus that went off the road the night before, teetering on two wheels (one front and one back) with its ass up in the air blocking traffic and its front-end pointing perilously straight down into what can truly be called an abyss. You think of all those people you see riding on the top of every bus in Nepal and wonder if they all made it off alive or not. And look, there’s a suspension bridge that advertises bungee jumping just 100 meters further! We bless our luck – like a sign from God! – run over and get ready to bungee jump for the first time in our lives, but the operation has been closed because there are too many people milling about, and my faith in divine interventions that involve catastrophic bus accidents is shaken to its core.
As we wait for our car to carefully slide its way along one side of the cliff past the accident – which involves slowly driving UNDER part of the bus without hitting it and knocking it into the canyon – we meet an innocuous little Brahmin police officer who asks us for a ride home as he’s been at the site of the accident all night. A very sweet, mild guy, seems respected by his community, harmless really. You have a hard time imagining him swatting a mosquito much less forcibly taking down a perp. He’s a fine person but I start getting alarmed when he tells me he’s been selected for UN peacekeeping work to train the police force in Haiti and potentially the Sudan. He’s off to Haiti in a few weeks! Because, he says, they need training and Nepal wants to help.
Ladies and gentleman, from a UN system veteran, here we have a case study for why UN missions rarely work as well as they should. This little dude may be just fine in his home environment, but having experienced the Haitian police force in action I can authoritatively confirm that he’s dead meat the minute he hits Port-au-Prince. You can only laugh. He asks if they speak English there and I watch him grow bewildered and his eyes glass over in panic as I inform him they speak a sort of combo dialect of French and West African languages. The sad part is he’ll probably be over there talking softly and overly politely in his OK-but-not-exactly-stellar English to a translator who will “sort of” understand him and relay the general sense of his lecture to a bunch of quasi-reformed Haitian cops crammed into undersized school desks in a sweltering, windowless classroom, listening to him yammer all day about being more polite. He seems a bit worse for wear as a small glimmer of reality sets in, but he has a “gentle but stiff upper lip” vibe going and gives us a little goodbye wave without commenting further. I do hope he’s OK, he’s a remarkably sweet fellow, and may be in my beloved but troubled Haiti right now.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Across the Himalayas
Tibet’s been part of the People’s Republic of China for over fifty years, but it still feels like an armed occupation in Lhasa. There are military checkpoints at every intersection, patrols navigating the maze of alleys in between, and a phalanx of foot soldiers always marching the main square outside Lhasa’s monastery. Every few hours a patrol of three tanks trudges slowly through the streets with soldiers in black SWAT outfits keeping a wary eye out from the gun turrets. The sheer amount of firepower is hard to understand given the current peacefulness; apparently it’s a response to a series of large-scale protests and riots last year.
The soldiers look tense as they stand on patrol, you can smell how unappreciated their presence is, and they can smell it too. There’s a palpable and fierce unit loyalty that you can see in the terse nods they pass amongst each other; these guys have each other’s backs, someone to trust in this place, a family of sorts. And I can’t help thinking of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, how hated they must be there and how fiercely they must cling to each other in that distant place, the same tense look in their eyes. To me and other passing civilians these kids are polite when possible, but you don’t want to cross them. Accidentally take the wrong snapshot, for example, and you can have your passport revoked and your ass sent summarily back to wherever you came from.
Tibetans are a world away from the Han Chinese of the coast. They look more like Mongolians or Native Americans, with long, ornate hair braids, weather-beaten faces and peasant dress torn from some distant century. The culture is similar to Mongolia’s, reflecting longstanding cultural ties. It was the Tibetans and their llama form of Buddhism that was exported to Mongolia, and before that they shared a common shamanic religious system, which is called Bon here. There are the same prayer flags and prayer wheels for the auto-enlightenment of the illiterate (a lot of religious practice here is rote), Buddhist gift-wrapping to an animist system of thought. The similarities are so striking you get the sense of a people who once roamed over all of Central and Northeast Asia in prehistory and were pushed back to the most mountainous and least accessible parts of Asia over several millennia.
Overriding first impressions of Lhasa – aside from the military presence – are the flood of devout pilgrims from all rural points of Tibet making their way every day to the downtown monastery in their traditional woollen garments and their handheld little prayer wheels, and the warren of crook-backed little streets that pass all manner of little storefronts – the ones I remember most are the open-air dental shops with examples of metal fillings displayed on signboards out front – and markets selling great big chunks of yak butter and meat, and fresh vegetables. In front of every house is a fold-out, low-tech solar panel that heats the tea kettle in the morning. The streets are packed with cavernous sweet-tea shops where patrons sit together on long wooden benches and loudly throw down cards, play music on ancient string instruments or simply gossip. Also noodle shops with yak soup, snooker tables, taverns with house guitars that anyone can play, corner restaurants with spiced chicken wings and yak “sizzlers”, and one good espresso shop that I track down by smell on my first day.
You can see why popular culture has glommed onto Tibet as a center of otherworldly mystical experience, and why so many visitors come here expecting to encounter some manner of larger-than-life “enlightenment”. There are few things more intoxicating than watching hundreds of primeval peasants prostrating themselves on prayer mats before an ancient building, amid chanting and candles burning yak butter, with mushroom clouds of incense wafting everywhere and the intermittent tolling of the temple bells. The monastery temple has just re-opened after an eight-day closure during the 60th anniversary to prevent any outbreak of protest, and a long line snakes through the main square thronging with petitioners seeking favors from various manifestations of the Buddha: the demonic Protector who holds the entire wheel of life in his arms, the multi-headed, multi-armed Future Buddha who can shift the course of events through the distance of time, and dozens more, each with their own little shrine. It’s a cosmogony that’s complex enough to make it not worth learning in detail, and each manifestation is showered with large amounts of small-denomination Chinese currency by poverty-stricken local petitioners as they pass through.
Late afternoon you see the shorn, red-robed monks tallying the day’s take from their changing area in the center of the temple, which given the extreme poverty makes the whole thing seem more like an ancient, low-tech televangelist operation. Those little amounts of money showered over every section of the temple add up; all you have to do is wander several blocks to witness the Potala Palace at night to see that – the Dalai Llama’s winter home, a truly massive structure set high on a precipice in the center of town, probably the most impressive thing I’ve seen, excepting maybe Lalibela in northern Ethiopia. How do you describe something like that? Or fathom the wealth it took to build at a time when Tibet was composed entirely of illiterate herders and peasants scraping barley out of the moonscape? The llamas were living well before Communist China took over; each of their tombs in the palace are crammed with tons of solid gold and thousands of jewels. And though the current Dalai Llama seems like an excellent person, the old order looks ugly in its way as the current one.
The architecture and art at these religious sites is amazing. Our government-required guide, though, is a nightmare, blathering on loudly in places of worship, conveying little of interest but doing his best to destroy the ambience, trying to rush us from spot to spot without experiencing anything other than the nails-on-chalkboard grate of his monotonous cawing. This despite the fact that he spent several years studying to be a monk. I basically have to ditch him at every stop.
Lhasa is 3,500 meters altitude, we’re headed 5,400 meters high and beyond, driving across multiple mountain passes and through the heart of the Himalayas to Everest Base Camp, over the Nepali border and thence Kathmandu. The land on the Chinese side of the border is bleakly beautiful. As the Indian subcontinent bores into Asia these peaks have been muscled up from the bottom of the earth into the farthest, thinnest tip of the planet’s atmosphere. You can see deep scars on the sides of these monstrous rocks from where they’ve been forced up into the light of day, and ridgebacks of rock where the wind has wiped off whatever small margin of topsoil originally covered them.
Some mountains don’t seem to belong next to one another. Some have thick deposits of mud, others are sandy and enigmatic as pyramids. At times there are long red ridges out of the American Southwest that lay out the earth’s timeline in red-and-orange strata, and then there are these alien, jet-black behemoths that have had all the history smashed and melted out of them in the earth’s furnace, covered with little crystallized burrs like mineralized porcupine quills. All of them spat out at random from deep inside somewhere, and rising four more inches every year. But even at the highest points there are locals selling deep sea fossils from before the time of the dinosaurs, from when these highest rocks on Earth were embedded at the bottom of an ocean.
The place is majestic but it really doesn’t look meant for human habitation. Yet there are people everywhere in the narrow valleys. The tree line is far behind us, and the only plants that scrape out an existence here are nasty, hard-scrabble little minimalist weeds that cling fiercely to the side of the rock and crabbily say “fuck you, I’m gonna live.” But appear to take little pleasure in it.
The people live in pretty little traditional Tibetan villages but scrape out a tough existence sowing barley with yaks and threshing it by hand with sickles. They drive by packed onto the backs of tractors, or on bicycles carrying massive bales of hay. At one point we stop at a little millinery where they use the river as power for a primitive mill that grinds the barley into a traditional wheat called tsampa. The locals offer us “barley beer”, which is strong as hell and probably not very hygienic, as the man of the house writhes in pain from some growth in his belly for which there is scant available modern medical attention. At other stops locals clamber over to us in search of a bit of food, and we accommodate them as best as we can; god knows how they make it through the winters. The temples are pretty much done away with and instead you have these piles of stone arranged in the shape of a stupa so that you can see the evolution from Bon to high Mahayana architecture.
There is a lot of larger-than-life beauty out here; there are a couple of shockingly beautiful blue lakes that wend between the mountains and follow the trail of our road for several kilometres, and mostly dried out river beds with trickles of half-frozen water trilling through them.
All of this is a prelude to the brutal transcendence of staring up at Everest from base camp. The barren moonscape of so much of the range was unexpected because I anticipated those endless snowy Himalayan peaks that really only get going along the border with Nepal, though you see a spectacular one here and there along the road south. Getting to Everest is a slap in the face. My god, what a beast. After ascending the steep curving road to the first tent encampment, taking a bus and then hiking up to the actual base camp you’re in some of the most barren territory on earth, gasping a bit for some of the scarce oxygen and staring at a glacier-crusted monster that is the closest thing to a god that you'll ever see in this life. It’s head is an impossibly large piece of abstract Egyptian statuary, placed too far on the left shoulder. From it’s right arm issues a series of jagged rock peaks that seem themselves impossible to climb, on the left is a long ice cliff in a semi-circle that looks sharp as a knife’s edge along the top, with an amphitheatre of snow beneath the semi-circle that would be an apt setting for judgement day. The terrible wind is shearing off a thundercloud of snow from the peak as we gawp up at it.
If there’s anything remotely like a spiritual experience to be had in Tibet, it’s here, though it’s in no way comforting standing in the face of this inhuman force and its train of lesser ice-capped mountains trailing off in the distance, visibly shrugging us off as if we were gnats.
"for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us."
-- Rilke
The soldiers look tense as they stand on patrol, you can smell how unappreciated their presence is, and they can smell it too. There’s a palpable and fierce unit loyalty that you can see in the terse nods they pass amongst each other; these guys have each other’s backs, someone to trust in this place, a family of sorts. And I can’t help thinking of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, how hated they must be there and how fiercely they must cling to each other in that distant place, the same tense look in their eyes. To me and other passing civilians these kids are polite when possible, but you don’t want to cross them. Accidentally take the wrong snapshot, for example, and you can have your passport revoked and your ass sent summarily back to wherever you came from.
Tibetans are a world away from the Han Chinese of the coast. They look more like Mongolians or Native Americans, with long, ornate hair braids, weather-beaten faces and peasant dress torn from some distant century. The culture is similar to Mongolia’s, reflecting longstanding cultural ties. It was the Tibetans and their llama form of Buddhism that was exported to Mongolia, and before that they shared a common shamanic religious system, which is called Bon here. There are the same prayer flags and prayer wheels for the auto-enlightenment of the illiterate (a lot of religious practice here is rote), Buddhist gift-wrapping to an animist system of thought. The similarities are so striking you get the sense of a people who once roamed over all of Central and Northeast Asia in prehistory and were pushed back to the most mountainous and least accessible parts of Asia over several millennia.
Overriding first impressions of Lhasa – aside from the military presence – are the flood of devout pilgrims from all rural points of Tibet making their way every day to the downtown monastery in their traditional woollen garments and their handheld little prayer wheels, and the warren of crook-backed little streets that pass all manner of little storefronts – the ones I remember most are the open-air dental shops with examples of metal fillings displayed on signboards out front – and markets selling great big chunks of yak butter and meat, and fresh vegetables. In front of every house is a fold-out, low-tech solar panel that heats the tea kettle in the morning. The streets are packed with cavernous sweet-tea shops where patrons sit together on long wooden benches and loudly throw down cards, play music on ancient string instruments or simply gossip. Also noodle shops with yak soup, snooker tables, taverns with house guitars that anyone can play, corner restaurants with spiced chicken wings and yak “sizzlers”, and one good espresso shop that I track down by smell on my first day.
You can see why popular culture has glommed onto Tibet as a center of otherworldly mystical experience, and why so many visitors come here expecting to encounter some manner of larger-than-life “enlightenment”. There are few things more intoxicating than watching hundreds of primeval peasants prostrating themselves on prayer mats before an ancient building, amid chanting and candles burning yak butter, with mushroom clouds of incense wafting everywhere and the intermittent tolling of the temple bells. The monastery temple has just re-opened after an eight-day closure during the 60th anniversary to prevent any outbreak of protest, and a long line snakes through the main square thronging with petitioners seeking favors from various manifestations of the Buddha: the demonic Protector who holds the entire wheel of life in his arms, the multi-headed, multi-armed Future Buddha who can shift the course of events through the distance of time, and dozens more, each with their own little shrine. It’s a cosmogony that’s complex enough to make it not worth learning in detail, and each manifestation is showered with large amounts of small-denomination Chinese currency by poverty-stricken local petitioners as they pass through.
Late afternoon you see the shorn, red-robed monks tallying the day’s take from their changing area in the center of the temple, which given the extreme poverty makes the whole thing seem more like an ancient, low-tech televangelist operation. Those little amounts of money showered over every section of the temple add up; all you have to do is wander several blocks to witness the Potala Palace at night to see that – the Dalai Llama’s winter home, a truly massive structure set high on a precipice in the center of town, probably the most impressive thing I’ve seen, excepting maybe Lalibela in northern Ethiopia. How do you describe something like that? Or fathom the wealth it took to build at a time when Tibet was composed entirely of illiterate herders and peasants scraping barley out of the moonscape? The llamas were living well before Communist China took over; each of their tombs in the palace are crammed with tons of solid gold and thousands of jewels. And though the current Dalai Llama seems like an excellent person, the old order looks ugly in its way as the current one.
The architecture and art at these religious sites is amazing. Our government-required guide, though, is a nightmare, blathering on loudly in places of worship, conveying little of interest but doing his best to destroy the ambience, trying to rush us from spot to spot without experiencing anything other than the nails-on-chalkboard grate of his monotonous cawing. This despite the fact that he spent several years studying to be a monk. I basically have to ditch him at every stop.
Lhasa is 3,500 meters altitude, we’re headed 5,400 meters high and beyond, driving across multiple mountain passes and through the heart of the Himalayas to Everest Base Camp, over the Nepali border and thence Kathmandu. The land on the Chinese side of the border is bleakly beautiful. As the Indian subcontinent bores into Asia these peaks have been muscled up from the bottom of the earth into the farthest, thinnest tip of the planet’s atmosphere. You can see deep scars on the sides of these monstrous rocks from where they’ve been forced up into the light of day, and ridgebacks of rock where the wind has wiped off whatever small margin of topsoil originally covered them.
Some mountains don’t seem to belong next to one another. Some have thick deposits of mud, others are sandy and enigmatic as pyramids. At times there are long red ridges out of the American Southwest that lay out the earth’s timeline in red-and-orange strata, and then there are these alien, jet-black behemoths that have had all the history smashed and melted out of them in the earth’s furnace, covered with little crystallized burrs like mineralized porcupine quills. All of them spat out at random from deep inside somewhere, and rising four more inches every year. But even at the highest points there are locals selling deep sea fossils from before the time of the dinosaurs, from when these highest rocks on Earth were embedded at the bottom of an ocean.
The place is majestic but it really doesn’t look meant for human habitation. Yet there are people everywhere in the narrow valleys. The tree line is far behind us, and the only plants that scrape out an existence here are nasty, hard-scrabble little minimalist weeds that cling fiercely to the side of the rock and crabbily say “fuck you, I’m gonna live.” But appear to take little pleasure in it.
The people live in pretty little traditional Tibetan villages but scrape out a tough existence sowing barley with yaks and threshing it by hand with sickles. They drive by packed onto the backs of tractors, or on bicycles carrying massive bales of hay. At one point we stop at a little millinery where they use the river as power for a primitive mill that grinds the barley into a traditional wheat called tsampa. The locals offer us “barley beer”, which is strong as hell and probably not very hygienic, as the man of the house writhes in pain from some growth in his belly for which there is scant available modern medical attention. At other stops locals clamber over to us in search of a bit of food, and we accommodate them as best as we can; god knows how they make it through the winters. The temples are pretty much done away with and instead you have these piles of stone arranged in the shape of a stupa so that you can see the evolution from Bon to high Mahayana architecture.
There is a lot of larger-than-life beauty out here; there are a couple of shockingly beautiful blue lakes that wend between the mountains and follow the trail of our road for several kilometres, and mostly dried out river beds with trickles of half-frozen water trilling through them.
All of this is a prelude to the brutal transcendence of staring up at Everest from base camp. The barren moonscape of so much of the range was unexpected because I anticipated those endless snowy Himalayan peaks that really only get going along the border with Nepal, though you see a spectacular one here and there along the road south. Getting to Everest is a slap in the face. My god, what a beast. After ascending the steep curving road to the first tent encampment, taking a bus and then hiking up to the actual base camp you’re in some of the most barren territory on earth, gasping a bit for some of the scarce oxygen and staring at a glacier-crusted monster that is the closest thing to a god that you'll ever see in this life. It’s head is an impossibly large piece of abstract Egyptian statuary, placed too far on the left shoulder. From it’s right arm issues a series of jagged rock peaks that seem themselves impossible to climb, on the left is a long ice cliff in a semi-circle that looks sharp as a knife’s edge along the top, with an amphitheatre of snow beneath the semi-circle that would be an apt setting for judgement day. The terrible wind is shearing off a thundercloud of snow from the peak as we gawp up at it.
If there’s anything remotely like a spiritual experience to be had in Tibet, it’s here, though it’s in no way comforting standing in the face of this inhuman force and its train of lesser ice-capped mountains trailing off in the distance, visibly shrugging us off as if we were gnats.
"for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us."
-- Rilke
Monday, October 19, 2009
Autumn Moon Festival
I’m sitting on the roof of a boat staring out at the surreal conical spires that fan out for miles along the Li River, a pleasantly bizarre Dr Seuss-scape where the earth has been carved into tall shapes that defy common sense, mountains topped with pointy dunce caps, drooping cliffs with tufts of grass, triple-humped camels covered in moss, squat bales of hay with a bite taken out of them, wobbly ziggurats ready to heave over, hills with little pillbox hats, layer on layer and really high, the furthest ones visible through mist. Really strange.
If you ever wondered where those surreal Chinese landscape paintings come from, this is it; underwater for hundreds of millions of years, the porous karst has been grooved into shapes that don’t seem to belong on this earth. Nothing can mar their strange beauty, not the armada of double-decker tourist boats that chugs downstream every day, not the city of Guilin, a big bustling concrete town marooned along a bend in the Li, full of narrow alleyways and rickshaws and with twelve different bridges leading out to the mainland on all sides.
The Chinese imagine various animals and people in the shape of the hills, some of them easily recognizable, some not. The most obvious is at the edge of town, a riverfront gap in the rock forming the shape of an elephant with its trunk draining water from the Li; legend says it carried a god through the sky until alighting in Guilin and being stunned by the beauty and wanting to stay. In punishment the god turned it to stone and left it here for the locals to scramble over.
There are tea plantations in the hills and rice fields in the plains. The town is urban but charming, with a long crooked pedestrian walkway in the center that holds old fashioned tea shops for tastings, little sweet shops and plenty of restaurants, from grimy little wok shops to snazzy indoor hot pots. I almost wander into one that serves dog, but am stopped by a local named Ho who steers me somewhere better for a very spicy beef dish. He’s a disarmingly pleasant guy who teaches calligraphy at a famous art school here, and is fairly well known in his own right, having won multiple gold medals for his work at national competitions in Beijing. A great guy: engaging, unpretentious, warm. He takes me through the town at night to see the bridges lit up and the fishermen and their cormorants in the waterfront parks, the kitschy local restaurant with snakes and rats in cages (we don’t eat there) and the best local art galleries.
At one point he asks about my “wife” and so I have to go into the whole widower routine, which is tiresome, but he shares with me as well – his wife was once pregnant but they found serious brain problems and were forced to abort the fetus. She hasn’t been pregnant since and is very sad about it. Then she calls his cell as if she knows he’s talking about her, and when she hears he’s met an American she offers us two tickets to some special acrobatics and magic show they’re putting on in honor of the festival of the autumn moon, which starts tonight. The festival involves passing out little cakes with red bean paste in the center and launching hundreds of paper lanterns into the night sky, powered by a mere candle but cascading one after another over our heads like a little spirit world spit out by the Li.
The crowd for the show is strictly local, lots of families and little kids. We get there halfway through, just in time for an appearance by the monkey king and something called “the pig fairy”, who pull audience members onstage and perform magic tricks with them as dupes. Then we detour back to the art gallery where some of his work is for sale, and though he’s not hawking anything I dig out a piece of his calligraphy that’s especially impressive and purchase it. It’s a famous ancient poem by the great Li Po about another Chinese river, the Yangtze; the selection of the text is a very personal decision by the calligrapher. It goes something like this:
Brother, there is no easy path through this life.
You navigate this life through the endless jagged rapids and rocks
of the Yangtze in a bamboo raft.
That’s the way it is.
The hero is the one who doesn’t just sit on some sandbar watching his cargo rot.
Jaw set, he maneuvers the malicious current,
cognizant of dangers, empty of fear,
though the water’s tentacles grab
from all directions to pull him under.
And when the snow of the highlands settles in his hair
and he sees that awesome river finally open
into the sea,
he knows that his journey is done,
finally done.
We part afterwards and I head to my hotel. I have a “corner office” room on a high floor and can see several of the bridges lit red for the festival, a tall pagoda squat in the middle of the water, and the steady stream of paper lanterns unfurling over the river and getting sucked up by the night sky. The Chinese government outlaws them because of the fire risk, and you can see why; every once in awhile one of them craps out and goes toppling into the river. The potential for forest fire in this dry terrain is obvious. But everyone ignores the law and lets them fly. Impossible little puffs of paper telling the laws of physics to fuck off for a minute, like fireflies signalling in the vacuum of night.
If you ever wondered where those surreal Chinese landscape paintings come from, this is it; underwater for hundreds of millions of years, the porous karst has been grooved into shapes that don’t seem to belong on this earth. Nothing can mar their strange beauty, not the armada of double-decker tourist boats that chugs downstream every day, not the city of Guilin, a big bustling concrete town marooned along a bend in the Li, full of narrow alleyways and rickshaws and with twelve different bridges leading out to the mainland on all sides.
The Chinese imagine various animals and people in the shape of the hills, some of them easily recognizable, some not. The most obvious is at the edge of town, a riverfront gap in the rock forming the shape of an elephant with its trunk draining water from the Li; legend says it carried a god through the sky until alighting in Guilin and being stunned by the beauty and wanting to stay. In punishment the god turned it to stone and left it here for the locals to scramble over.
There are tea plantations in the hills and rice fields in the plains. The town is urban but charming, with a long crooked pedestrian walkway in the center that holds old fashioned tea shops for tastings, little sweet shops and plenty of restaurants, from grimy little wok shops to snazzy indoor hot pots. I almost wander into one that serves dog, but am stopped by a local named Ho who steers me somewhere better for a very spicy beef dish. He’s a disarmingly pleasant guy who teaches calligraphy at a famous art school here, and is fairly well known in his own right, having won multiple gold medals for his work at national competitions in Beijing. A great guy: engaging, unpretentious, warm. He takes me through the town at night to see the bridges lit up and the fishermen and their cormorants in the waterfront parks, the kitschy local restaurant with snakes and rats in cages (we don’t eat there) and the best local art galleries.
At one point he asks about my “wife” and so I have to go into the whole widower routine, which is tiresome, but he shares with me as well – his wife was once pregnant but they found serious brain problems and were forced to abort the fetus. She hasn’t been pregnant since and is very sad about it. Then she calls his cell as if she knows he’s talking about her, and when she hears he’s met an American she offers us two tickets to some special acrobatics and magic show they’re putting on in honor of the festival of the autumn moon, which starts tonight. The festival involves passing out little cakes with red bean paste in the center and launching hundreds of paper lanterns into the night sky, powered by a mere candle but cascading one after another over our heads like a little spirit world spit out by the Li.
The crowd for the show is strictly local, lots of families and little kids. We get there halfway through, just in time for an appearance by the monkey king and something called “the pig fairy”, who pull audience members onstage and perform magic tricks with them as dupes. Then we detour back to the art gallery where some of his work is for sale, and though he’s not hawking anything I dig out a piece of his calligraphy that’s especially impressive and purchase it. It’s a famous ancient poem by the great Li Po about another Chinese river, the Yangtze; the selection of the text is a very personal decision by the calligrapher. It goes something like this:
Brother, there is no easy path through this life.
You navigate this life through the endless jagged rapids and rocks
of the Yangtze in a bamboo raft.
That’s the way it is.
The hero is the one who doesn’t just sit on some sandbar watching his cargo rot.
Jaw set, he maneuvers the malicious current,
cognizant of dangers, empty of fear,
though the water’s tentacles grab
from all directions to pull him under.
And when the snow of the highlands settles in his hair
and he sees that awesome river finally open
into the sea,
he knows that his journey is done,
finally done.
We part afterwards and I head to my hotel. I have a “corner office” room on a high floor and can see several of the bridges lit red for the festival, a tall pagoda squat in the middle of the water, and the steady stream of paper lanterns unfurling over the river and getting sucked up by the night sky. The Chinese government outlaws them because of the fire risk, and you can see why; every once in awhile one of them craps out and goes toppling into the river. The potential for forest fire in this dry terrain is obvious. But everyone ignores the law and lets them fly. Impossible little puffs of paper telling the laws of physics to fuck off for a minute, like fireflies signalling in the vacuum of night.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
A Walk on the Wild Wall
In fifteenth century China during the Ming Dynasty, ordinary citizens were barred from viewing the procession of the emperor through the streets of Beijing from the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven, where he made animal sacrifices to the gods that were critical to the success of the following harvest. It was ordered they barricade their windows and remain home in silence lest they catch a glimpse of that most holy of rites, thereby upsetting the balance between heaven and earth.
It should probably then come as no surprise that the ordinary people of China are barred from attending or viewing the massive spectacle of the 60th anniversary parade that the Communist Party is throwing for itself today, for this ruling class is as exclusive in its way as the emperors of old. The entire downtown area is cordoned off by thousands of armed military, and tens of thousands of volunteers wearing red armbands, and those who live in the area aren’t allowed to leave their homes. Annoying.
The Chinese government says they’re responding to the threat of terrorism from Falun Gong and others, and there have indeed been two FG knife attacks in the capital over the last few days. The ordinary man on the street here expresses concern for “China’s 9/11” and doesn’t seem especially put out by the security measures. It’s all very Waiting for the Barbarians, and one wonders if FG didn’t exist whether they would have to create it, but this is probably unfair. Falun Gong is a bizarre and genuinely dangerous sect, run I am told by a friend in the State Dept by a blind man who lives in Queens of all places and claims God speaks to him through his television set. From all of us who live in Queens, my apologies to the Chinese people.
At least we have the benefit of watching the parade on TV, and it’s hard to miss the tight contingents of fighter jets swinging low through the city. On the tube you see phalanx after phalanx of high-tech military vehicles, tanks and radar trucks, anti-aircraft and nuclear missiles, bombers and helicopters, every piece of heavy equipment you can imagine trundling past Tiananmen Square and its iconic portrait of Mao, placidly smiling at the pomp. All this is followed by a series of floats celebrating the stunning recent advances in Chinese technology, medicine, agriculture, industry, space research, science and so forth – and let’s face it, China and the ruling party deserve to be proud of their accomplishments; it’s possible the rapid-fire advance of Chinese civilization over the past couple of decades – legacy of the great, visionary pragmatist Deng Xiaoping – will go down in history as the one important event of our time.
In the evening there is an interminable song and dance extravaganza on the imperial square with all of the dozens of ethnic groups that comprise China singing what are described as “folk songs” in their native tongues lauding things like “another five percent increase in the crop yield”, punctuated by massive firework displays. I get a few cheap laughs from this retro-social realist cheese, but it’s no more cheesy than your average televised Fourth of July celebration, just tuned to a different key and on a more spectacular scale. Witnessing even a bit of it from the periphery is still cool, and a highlight of my journey.
By far the most impressive thing is the weather. When I arrive in Beijing and make my way past the electronic fever detectors positioned to block the spread of swine flu (pretty intimidating), my first thought is “Oh My God. People Breathe This Stuff?!?!?” A thick layer of sickly dark yellow smog blots out anything more than a block or two away from you, and it seems laughable to read the pronouncements from the government that unspecified “eco-friendly chemical agents” will be released in the air above the capital that night to disperse all clouds and prevent rain during the festivities. Ha ha yeah whatever. An old fashioned rain dance. Good luck with that.
But sure enough the next morning the smog is GONE, as if it never existed, and there’s nary a cloud in the sky for the next four days.
Holy crap! The Chinese Communist Party controls the weather!
I’ve taken a break from the backpacking hostels to stay in a five-star hotel, the Shangri-la on the west side of town. It’s guests are a mix of well-fed, high-level apparatchiks from the provinces decked out in red sashes and drinking high-end cocktails, and professional tennis players competing in the China Open at the new Olympic Tennis Center. During my stay I see & share elevators with Novak Djokovic, Dinara Safina, James Blake, Caroline Wozniaki, “Dr Ivo” Karlovic, Elena Dementieva, Sveta Kuznetsova, Jelena Jankovic and a host of unranked qualifiers hoping to make it into the tournament. I love tennis, so this is awesome, and I end up seeing Serena Williams, Safina & Robby Ginepri play when the first round commences.
The next day of this 8-day celebration is for the ordinary people. We’re allowed into Tiananmen to view all the mega-floats up close, which is quite cool. The imperial pomp of the central square and the gargantu-scale Forbidden City is formidable and something I’m stunned and grateful to see, but the crowds for the holiday are massive and the scale of Beijing at this point starts leaving me cold, with its limitless skyscraper canyons and autocratic signs posted at regular intervals advising citizens to “work hard, be thrifty, avoid bad habits, respect the military and love civilians”. All commendable sentiments, but it seems downright odd. I’m hungry for a Whopper-size dose of democratic chaos, despite all the disabling nonsense it engenders, a little “grab a six-pack with a fake ID and hang out all night by the levee” kind of a feeling, and while the Chinese people are awesome – some of the nicest and smartest I’ve met in the world – I’m having a hard time penetrating the veneer of this great city and tasting much of anything.
That’s when I pay attention to the bicycles. I bike through the streets of New York every day, and it always helps me make sense of life at home. Why not the streets of Beijing? And so I scrabble through the side streets looking for a bike shop, find one not too far south of Tiananmen and leave a large deposit for a crappy rental one-speeder with faulty brakes, never to return (the deposit was worth more than the bike).
Like magic, big monolithic Beijing melts away and the city becomes lovable. First off Beijing is a great bike city, with dedicated lanes on every major street, even some of the highways – it’s far safer than New York. Second, you’re navigating around fellow bikers, mopeders, motorized wheelbarrowers, electronic wheelchairs, delivery bikes larded down with massive packages of goods or sky-high piles of recyclables, and a host of weird contraptions that locals have jury-rigged together; the one I remember most clearly is a lawnmower engine & handle attached to two truck wheels.
The best part of biking in Beijing is veering off into a hudong, the narrow, interconnected alleyways of Old Beijing – and discovering the honeycomb of old-school life that snakes through the city like an enormous termite infestation and give Beijing real character. You can twist through them for hours without getting bored, past open-air vegetable markets and little outdoor bars, single-floor dwellings that look about to flop over, all of them hosting a Chinese flag, one-table kitchens serving hot pot and barbecue, barber shops, cookware storefronts, concrete 1-yuan bathrooms, clothing shops with tatty western mannequins, laundry hanging everywhere and a thousand squalid wonders waiting to be uncovered. You can go down them for days without running out of cool things to see. So life still grows wild on the vine behind the solid wall of megaliths that front the major freeways. May the hudongs live forever.
On day three in Beijing I make the obligatory trek north to see the Great Wall, a spectacle if there ever was one. I go to one of the less visited sections that’s renovated for tourists, but again it’s all a bit manicured and Disneyland for my taste until I hike 2km, cross two consecutive “do not pass” dividers and discover an apparently endless stretch of “wild wall” that hasn’t been touched since the Ming Dynasty. The paving stones have cracked over centuries of winters, trees and grasses have sprung up all around, the guard towers are crumbling and sometimes look as if they’ve been blown up in an aerial bombardment.
I keep going kilometer after kilometer along the wild wall, can’t stop myself despite knowing I have to go back as far as I came. By far the best hike ever, just incredible. I’m posting pictures to Facebook soon so everyone can see for themselves. At some points it’s a bit dangerous as the only thing left clear of trees are the gate stones along the edge, and some are a bit loose & it’s a good 40-50 meters down if you fall. But hey I’m having a good time and you only live once. Then I think about it more and realize what a public laughingstock I would be back home:
“Hey what happened to Sean? I heard he died.”
“Yeah. He fell off the Great Wall of China.”
“Ba ha ha! How ridiculous.”
So I move off the edge and trundle over the trees in the center.
Another great example of wild Beijing: 798 Art District. This place is what Williamsburg wished it was back when it bothered to pretend being a serious avant garde art zone. It’s centered around a massive, Terry Gilliamesque factory from the 1950s bristling with comically huge insulated piping and tubes, steam-spitting spigots and smoke stacks tattooed with slogans from the Cultural Revolution (kept there on purpose by the artists who run the place). It’s now been refurbished and is used as a set of display spaces. The rest of the zone really looks nothing like Beijing, with spiffy little one-storey art supply shops, outdoor cafes and galleries hosting world-class exhibitions of big-name contemporary Chinese artists. It was a good chance to see what China is doing these days – a lot of figurative stuff, mostly painting, geared for the international art market. But there were plenty of sculptures outside, including a gigantic bird cage that passersby were invited to sit down in and become part of the art while they slurped a cherry ice. At night there are art book carts along the side streets and outdoor movies like you see on New York summer nights. The people wandering the streets here look cool but are not “beautiful people” per se; the vibe is more Fort Greene than Fashion Week.
There was a subversive note to some of the work, especially the outdoor graffiti, always masked in the vocabulary of the ruling party that it sought to subvert. One poster said “Life is Beautiful, Love More So, Freedom is Worth Losing Both”, followed by a quote from Mao preaching patience in the service of the cause. Another had a mischievous, smiling cartoon match and a bunch of iconic portraits of Che Guevara, quoting Che: “It only takes a spark to light the blaze!” Hard to take this too seriously as everyone looked pretty fat and content, it reminded me more of the empty acting-out of anti-Bush polemics that you’d see in artsy neighborhoods back home; the vibe I got was more of people whose temperament balks like mine at all the random autocratic nonsense, and wants to tweak someone’s nose. But the strategy of using ruling party sloganry against itself is interesting and dangerous in action; they could all be shut down at any moment, and they still skirt the edge. Another great example is a social realist poster of angry proletarians taking up arms above a giant Wal-Mart logo, and there were lots of ironic renditions of the big red buttons everyone was wearing for the anniversary.
Last night in Beijing I head out with a couple of open qualifiers who didn’t qualify to a big lake in the northwest of town by the Summer Palace, for some Peking duck and a few beers to drown their sorrows in. We circle the lake, stop at a few taverns and again see what a great, prosperous city this is. Boat rentals and lakefront bars with alternating guitar balladeers and karaoke machines, families and young couples out for a tree-lined evening stroll, little kids trying to skateboard and falling on their asses, old folks singing the old songs with the old instruments. Everyone looks happy; there’s a sense of opportunity that most never thought they would see, I think, and everyone I met without exception seems more than willing to put up their government’s sometimes overbearing presence to keep the good times rolling.
We did find an underground bar playing rock songs with lots of people from my generation, the Tiananmen Square massacre generation. They played some tunes in English (and there are English signs everywhere, and not just in Beijing, and 80% of the shirts here have English on them) and at least one ironically delivered rendition of a hymn of the Cultural Revolution that everyone smirked at and bobbed their heads to. The massacre seems largely forgotten in Beijing, at least on the surface. And I would expect zero near-term change in the low level of political freedom in China. Will the Chinese Communist Party ever have to choose between the open experimental pragmatism of Deng that has led to all this good fortune, and the blunt, dogmatic hubris of Mao, which mostly pisses people off? No matter how many health and safety secretaries you summarily execute for poisoning the baby formula, the lack of accountability will cause damage at some point. But twenty years later it seems like those kids really did die for nothing.
It should probably then come as no surprise that the ordinary people of China are barred from attending or viewing the massive spectacle of the 60th anniversary parade that the Communist Party is throwing for itself today, for this ruling class is as exclusive in its way as the emperors of old. The entire downtown area is cordoned off by thousands of armed military, and tens of thousands of volunteers wearing red armbands, and those who live in the area aren’t allowed to leave their homes. Annoying.
The Chinese government says they’re responding to the threat of terrorism from Falun Gong and others, and there have indeed been two FG knife attacks in the capital over the last few days. The ordinary man on the street here expresses concern for “China’s 9/11” and doesn’t seem especially put out by the security measures. It’s all very Waiting for the Barbarians, and one wonders if FG didn’t exist whether they would have to create it, but this is probably unfair. Falun Gong is a bizarre and genuinely dangerous sect, run I am told by a friend in the State Dept by a blind man who lives in Queens of all places and claims God speaks to him through his television set. From all of us who live in Queens, my apologies to the Chinese people.
At least we have the benefit of watching the parade on TV, and it’s hard to miss the tight contingents of fighter jets swinging low through the city. On the tube you see phalanx after phalanx of high-tech military vehicles, tanks and radar trucks, anti-aircraft and nuclear missiles, bombers and helicopters, every piece of heavy equipment you can imagine trundling past Tiananmen Square and its iconic portrait of Mao, placidly smiling at the pomp. All this is followed by a series of floats celebrating the stunning recent advances in Chinese technology, medicine, agriculture, industry, space research, science and so forth – and let’s face it, China and the ruling party deserve to be proud of their accomplishments; it’s possible the rapid-fire advance of Chinese civilization over the past couple of decades – legacy of the great, visionary pragmatist Deng Xiaoping – will go down in history as the one important event of our time.
In the evening there is an interminable song and dance extravaganza on the imperial square with all of the dozens of ethnic groups that comprise China singing what are described as “folk songs” in their native tongues lauding things like “another five percent increase in the crop yield”, punctuated by massive firework displays. I get a few cheap laughs from this retro-social realist cheese, but it’s no more cheesy than your average televised Fourth of July celebration, just tuned to a different key and on a more spectacular scale. Witnessing even a bit of it from the periphery is still cool, and a highlight of my journey.
By far the most impressive thing is the weather. When I arrive in Beijing and make my way past the electronic fever detectors positioned to block the spread of swine flu (pretty intimidating), my first thought is “Oh My God. People Breathe This Stuff?!?!?” A thick layer of sickly dark yellow smog blots out anything more than a block or two away from you, and it seems laughable to read the pronouncements from the government that unspecified “eco-friendly chemical agents” will be released in the air above the capital that night to disperse all clouds and prevent rain during the festivities. Ha ha yeah whatever. An old fashioned rain dance. Good luck with that.
But sure enough the next morning the smog is GONE, as if it never existed, and there’s nary a cloud in the sky for the next four days.
Holy crap! The Chinese Communist Party controls the weather!
I’ve taken a break from the backpacking hostels to stay in a five-star hotel, the Shangri-la on the west side of town. It’s guests are a mix of well-fed, high-level apparatchiks from the provinces decked out in red sashes and drinking high-end cocktails, and professional tennis players competing in the China Open at the new Olympic Tennis Center. During my stay I see & share elevators with Novak Djokovic, Dinara Safina, James Blake, Caroline Wozniaki, “Dr Ivo” Karlovic, Elena Dementieva, Sveta Kuznetsova, Jelena Jankovic and a host of unranked qualifiers hoping to make it into the tournament. I love tennis, so this is awesome, and I end up seeing Serena Williams, Safina & Robby Ginepri play when the first round commences.
The next day of this 8-day celebration is for the ordinary people. We’re allowed into Tiananmen to view all the mega-floats up close, which is quite cool. The imperial pomp of the central square and the gargantu-scale Forbidden City is formidable and something I’m stunned and grateful to see, but the crowds for the holiday are massive and the scale of Beijing at this point starts leaving me cold, with its limitless skyscraper canyons and autocratic signs posted at regular intervals advising citizens to “work hard, be thrifty, avoid bad habits, respect the military and love civilians”. All commendable sentiments, but it seems downright odd. I’m hungry for a Whopper-size dose of democratic chaos, despite all the disabling nonsense it engenders, a little “grab a six-pack with a fake ID and hang out all night by the levee” kind of a feeling, and while the Chinese people are awesome – some of the nicest and smartest I’ve met in the world – I’m having a hard time penetrating the veneer of this great city and tasting much of anything.
That’s when I pay attention to the bicycles. I bike through the streets of New York every day, and it always helps me make sense of life at home. Why not the streets of Beijing? And so I scrabble through the side streets looking for a bike shop, find one not too far south of Tiananmen and leave a large deposit for a crappy rental one-speeder with faulty brakes, never to return (the deposit was worth more than the bike).
Like magic, big monolithic Beijing melts away and the city becomes lovable. First off Beijing is a great bike city, with dedicated lanes on every major street, even some of the highways – it’s far safer than New York. Second, you’re navigating around fellow bikers, mopeders, motorized wheelbarrowers, electronic wheelchairs, delivery bikes larded down with massive packages of goods or sky-high piles of recyclables, and a host of weird contraptions that locals have jury-rigged together; the one I remember most clearly is a lawnmower engine & handle attached to two truck wheels.
The best part of biking in Beijing is veering off into a hudong, the narrow, interconnected alleyways of Old Beijing – and discovering the honeycomb of old-school life that snakes through the city like an enormous termite infestation and give Beijing real character. You can twist through them for hours without getting bored, past open-air vegetable markets and little outdoor bars, single-floor dwellings that look about to flop over, all of them hosting a Chinese flag, one-table kitchens serving hot pot and barbecue, barber shops, cookware storefronts, concrete 1-yuan bathrooms, clothing shops with tatty western mannequins, laundry hanging everywhere and a thousand squalid wonders waiting to be uncovered. You can go down them for days without running out of cool things to see. So life still grows wild on the vine behind the solid wall of megaliths that front the major freeways. May the hudongs live forever.
On day three in Beijing I make the obligatory trek north to see the Great Wall, a spectacle if there ever was one. I go to one of the less visited sections that’s renovated for tourists, but again it’s all a bit manicured and Disneyland for my taste until I hike 2km, cross two consecutive “do not pass” dividers and discover an apparently endless stretch of “wild wall” that hasn’t been touched since the Ming Dynasty. The paving stones have cracked over centuries of winters, trees and grasses have sprung up all around, the guard towers are crumbling and sometimes look as if they’ve been blown up in an aerial bombardment.
I keep going kilometer after kilometer along the wild wall, can’t stop myself despite knowing I have to go back as far as I came. By far the best hike ever, just incredible. I’m posting pictures to Facebook soon so everyone can see for themselves. At some points it’s a bit dangerous as the only thing left clear of trees are the gate stones along the edge, and some are a bit loose & it’s a good 40-50 meters down if you fall. But hey I’m having a good time and you only live once. Then I think about it more and realize what a public laughingstock I would be back home:
“Hey what happened to Sean? I heard he died.”
“Yeah. He fell off the Great Wall of China.”
“Ba ha ha! How ridiculous.”
So I move off the edge and trundle over the trees in the center.
Another great example of wild Beijing: 798 Art District. This place is what Williamsburg wished it was back when it bothered to pretend being a serious avant garde art zone. It’s centered around a massive, Terry Gilliamesque factory from the 1950s bristling with comically huge insulated piping and tubes, steam-spitting spigots and smoke stacks tattooed with slogans from the Cultural Revolution (kept there on purpose by the artists who run the place). It’s now been refurbished and is used as a set of display spaces. The rest of the zone really looks nothing like Beijing, with spiffy little one-storey art supply shops, outdoor cafes and galleries hosting world-class exhibitions of big-name contemporary Chinese artists. It was a good chance to see what China is doing these days – a lot of figurative stuff, mostly painting, geared for the international art market. But there were plenty of sculptures outside, including a gigantic bird cage that passersby were invited to sit down in and become part of the art while they slurped a cherry ice. At night there are art book carts along the side streets and outdoor movies like you see on New York summer nights. The people wandering the streets here look cool but are not “beautiful people” per se; the vibe is more Fort Greene than Fashion Week.
There was a subversive note to some of the work, especially the outdoor graffiti, always masked in the vocabulary of the ruling party that it sought to subvert. One poster said “Life is Beautiful, Love More So, Freedom is Worth Losing Both”, followed by a quote from Mao preaching patience in the service of the cause. Another had a mischievous, smiling cartoon match and a bunch of iconic portraits of Che Guevara, quoting Che: “It only takes a spark to light the blaze!” Hard to take this too seriously as everyone looked pretty fat and content, it reminded me more of the empty acting-out of anti-Bush polemics that you’d see in artsy neighborhoods back home; the vibe I got was more of people whose temperament balks like mine at all the random autocratic nonsense, and wants to tweak someone’s nose. But the strategy of using ruling party sloganry against itself is interesting and dangerous in action; they could all be shut down at any moment, and they still skirt the edge. Another great example is a social realist poster of angry proletarians taking up arms above a giant Wal-Mart logo, and there were lots of ironic renditions of the big red buttons everyone was wearing for the anniversary.
Last night in Beijing I head out with a couple of open qualifiers who didn’t qualify to a big lake in the northwest of town by the Summer Palace, for some Peking duck and a few beers to drown their sorrows in. We circle the lake, stop at a few taverns and again see what a great, prosperous city this is. Boat rentals and lakefront bars with alternating guitar balladeers and karaoke machines, families and young couples out for a tree-lined evening stroll, little kids trying to skateboard and falling on their asses, old folks singing the old songs with the old instruments. Everyone looks happy; there’s a sense of opportunity that most never thought they would see, I think, and everyone I met without exception seems more than willing to put up their government’s sometimes overbearing presence to keep the good times rolling.
We did find an underground bar playing rock songs with lots of people from my generation, the Tiananmen Square massacre generation. They played some tunes in English (and there are English signs everywhere, and not just in Beijing, and 80% of the shirts here have English on them) and at least one ironically delivered rendition of a hymn of the Cultural Revolution that everyone smirked at and bobbed their heads to. The massacre seems largely forgotten in Beijing, at least on the surface. And I would expect zero near-term change in the low level of political freedom in China. Will the Chinese Communist Party ever have to choose between the open experimental pragmatism of Deng that has led to all this good fortune, and the blunt, dogmatic hubris of Mao, which mostly pisses people off? No matter how many health and safety secretaries you summarily execute for poisoning the baby formula, the lack of accountability will cause damage at some point. But twenty years later it seems like those kids really did die for nothing.
Mongolia
It takes three hours in Mongolia for me to be knocking down vodka shots in a nomad’s ger tent. This kind of hospitality comes as a shock after so much time spent dealing with the stony reserve and “fuck you, you stupid foreigner” attitude of many Siberians when you first encounter them. But I manage to adjust. That’s how they roll in Mongolia.
Ulaan Baatar is a bit of an ugly duckling, but you quickly pass through its concrete blight and hit the limitless wilderness of the Mongolian steppes, impossibly vast stretches of prairie laid out between craggy, forested mountains that just go on and on and on. It looks like Big Sky country in Wyoming, peppered here and there with the gers of nomads and their cattle, oxen, yak, horses, sheep and the occasional two-humped camel.
All around, a breathtaking nothingness. I hiked 40 kilometres round-trip one day with Urna, a local guide, and we didn’t see a single other soul. In summer the nomads camp on the plain so the herds have plenty of grazing; in the winter they huddle under the side of some mountain to take cover from the wind, though even then in bad years they’re essentially sleeping in snow caves. Some tents have a solar panel stapled to them, a solitary nod to modernity. And you can see why after all this time the majority of Mongolians choose to live this way, despite sky-high literacy rates and a growing economy.
On the first day I stop at the ger in Terelj national park with the family I’m meant to stay and find out today is “Elders Day”, when senior citizens are thrown an old-style party that starts at noon and lasts until 2 or 3am. Soon you learn the standard MO: Mongolian barbecue, solidified heavy cream with berries, potato salad, everybody gathered on benches in the ger – a large circular tent with couches along the sides and a woodstove in the center – gussied up in some combination of traditional local dress plus berets & second-hand t-shirts straight out of Williamsburg. One bottle of vodka after another after another, and a lot of singing. Mongolia has the hardest partying old folks out there. Potential retirement spot for April Isaacs? Must alert her.
The first shot of every vodka bottle gets chucked out the window as an offering to the gods, the rest are distributed across the table one at a time and you have to make a toast and sing before kicking it back. My ukulele comes in handy, though they clap on 1 and 3 to my Muddy Waters blues as if it’s a Sousa march, and shout “Hey!” at the end like Zorba the Greek. They themselves sing soulful, jaunty old tunes like “Father was a Fine Horseman”, celebrating lovers, the motherland and the like. Great people, stunning landscape, high intoxication level.
“What do you think of Mongolian women?” says one sixty-year old herder in what even I can make out as a thick regional dialect.
“Very beautiful,” I reply, “and very drunk!”
“So that means we’re going home together!”
Much laughter and more vodka shots.
Mongolian hospitality is a pleasure, but you’re considered a mannerless hillbilly if you ever say “no” when it’s offered. At another ger I visited they had just slaughtered a sheep, were busy filling the organs with blood and about to boil them. I was handed a huge tray of intestines as if it were a holiday fruit basket. A small slice of boiled stomach to chew on is sufficient, but they would have been mortified if I didn’t take something. Another example is the booze; the local vodka is good, but sometimes you have to suffer through a bowl of fermented horse milk first, which tastes month-old and chunky; you know you’ve had too much when it doesn’t make your stomach sick to smell it.
The next morning you see everyone from the party back in their civvies directing the cattle with sticks, and since there’s no refrigeration the leftover food gets turned into slop for the animals. You spend a couple hours each day getting water from the nearest creek. Horse is the preferred mode of travel, though some have 4WDs, and when you’re seven or eight years old they stick you on a horse, send you off onto the plain and tell you not to come back until you know how to ride it. People help each other out here, too, as a matter of mutual survival. At one point when our car is stuck in the middle of a river we were trying to cross – with a herd of goats passing us on both sides and “baa”-ing at us in what I can’t help but construe as open mockery – a passing tractor from the Soviet era hooks a chain to us and drags us out without our asking.
There are no roads out here. You drive across the unspoiled, bumpy open plain, sometimes through near-impassable mud banks in low-lying areas. There are no permanent buildings either, just the torched remains of a monastery every 100 kilometers or so – destroyed during the purges of Stalin along with the monks, most of whom were mass murdered – and at one point an abandoned Russian military complex with all the windows blown out.
There are, though, more of the decorated poles, those ubiquitous sky god antennae, set atop a boulder pile and decorated in strips of cloth in four colors: blue for the sky god, green for the earth, red for the fire god and yellow for Buddhism. Mongolians have been Buddhists for centuries now and their shamanism is syncretized to it in the same way that African religion is to Christianity in Haiti and the Latin Caribbean. You find traces of shamanism in the culture today like a faint strain of Beethoven amid the street noise of Manhattan at rush hour. The only ones who practice full-on old-style shamanism are the Reindeer People up north – remote and awe-inspiring even to the average Mongolian nomad – whose villages are accessible by several days on horseback, and only before snows close off the mountain passes in September. The Reindeer People keep to themselves.
For everyone else the old culture shows up in little mannerisms. You circle the shaman pole clockwise three times to make a wish when you pass, and an offering of two cigarettes to it when traveling on a voyage. Don’t throw garbage into the fire because “fire is a god”. And when you take down your tent and move, you leave no trace of yourself on the land. There are also the usual hucksterish shamans running around offering the same stuff you’d find in a South Bronx botánica, prescriptions for ridding yourself of back luck or making someone fall in love with you, though the instructions are more exotic: “fill a sack with horse meat, douse it in vodka and dump it in the woods by a stream” is a standard recipe. But their primary function is to use the shaman poles to travel up to heaven and direct the recently dead to their new home.
Throat singing is the coolest extant aspect of shamanism. This is where western Mongolians and their neighbors the Tuvans eulogize the mountains they consider to be gods – everything is alive in this system, even the rocks – through a style that generates larynx-like vibrations and pitches in various parts of the body. The best can generate tones in two parts of the throat and within the bronchial tubes at the same time for three-pitch chords. My last night in Mongolia I went back to Ulaan Baatar to see them perform. It’s not a parlor trick, this is soulful singing with phrasing as moving as a great opera libretto or jazz ballad. I also ran into some backpacker mates from Baikal at the concert, and we went out after for a night on the town, which in Ulaan Baatar means weaving through the midnight bustle of Seoul Street and bar hopping its storefront restaurants and taverns as locals crowd into chicken buses outside (which serve as the local transit system), practically stacked on top of one another around the traffic circles.
On the train out via the Gobi Desert I get my first border guard bribe experience (my passport is beat up so the guard wants US$20 to let me leave the country, laughably small so I don’t argue) and then meet my new bunkmates, who turn out to be animists of a different stamp, Eva and Staas, a Dutch couple celebrating their graduation from a prestigious school of industrial design in Eindhoven by travelling around the world for a year. At first I think they should come work for Google, but then I realize they’re too smart for Google. They need to go find somewhere smarter to work, wherever that is. Staas is going to start his own advertising agency; he specializes in designing mechanisms with various levers and knobs for people to play with as they interact with a brand. Eva is more into research; her thesis is a large circular object “printed” from a “3D photocopier” that can create any plastic object that you pass it via computer blueprints.
Eva’s object is a little Hal from 2001-ish for my taste; it senses where you are in the room and follows you with blinking lights. Steeped in the theories of phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, who divide being from consciousness at the point of interaction, so that whenever you touch an object – a cement post as much as a person – it is also touching you and can be said to be “conscious” at that moment. It’s a world view ancient as the Reindeer People, and apparently it’s making a comeback.
Based on this Eva wants to make our environments responsive to us, sensing our moods and responding accordingly, perhaps even providing them with a personality of their own, so that they don’t always do what we want them to do, and convey their own “moods”. Examples of their prototypes abound, and they even have one that is being made commercially available next year.
These guys view robots as “anthropomorphic”, fodder for morons who just don’t get it, the same disdain we have today for myth-gods like Cupid and Thor. What they want instead is a magic polymer forest, where every aspect of our environment interacts with us, guesses our moods and responds, makes life engaging and has a life of its own. Some parts make more sense than others – and all of it might make more sense when you’re stoned – but they’re way out there on the bleeding edge, at the forefront of the intelligent homes and interactive animist environments that are probably our future, a world of objects as alive in their way as those sacred mountains of the primeval Mongolian steppe that we now leave behind.
Ulaan Baatar is a bit of an ugly duckling, but you quickly pass through its concrete blight and hit the limitless wilderness of the Mongolian steppes, impossibly vast stretches of prairie laid out between craggy, forested mountains that just go on and on and on. It looks like Big Sky country in Wyoming, peppered here and there with the gers of nomads and their cattle, oxen, yak, horses, sheep and the occasional two-humped camel.
All around, a breathtaking nothingness. I hiked 40 kilometres round-trip one day with Urna, a local guide, and we didn’t see a single other soul. In summer the nomads camp on the plain so the herds have plenty of grazing; in the winter they huddle under the side of some mountain to take cover from the wind, though even then in bad years they’re essentially sleeping in snow caves. Some tents have a solar panel stapled to them, a solitary nod to modernity. And you can see why after all this time the majority of Mongolians choose to live this way, despite sky-high literacy rates and a growing economy.
On the first day I stop at the ger in Terelj national park with the family I’m meant to stay and find out today is “Elders Day”, when senior citizens are thrown an old-style party that starts at noon and lasts until 2 or 3am. Soon you learn the standard MO: Mongolian barbecue, solidified heavy cream with berries, potato salad, everybody gathered on benches in the ger – a large circular tent with couches along the sides and a woodstove in the center – gussied up in some combination of traditional local dress plus berets & second-hand t-shirts straight out of Williamsburg. One bottle of vodka after another after another, and a lot of singing. Mongolia has the hardest partying old folks out there. Potential retirement spot for April Isaacs? Must alert her.
The first shot of every vodka bottle gets chucked out the window as an offering to the gods, the rest are distributed across the table one at a time and you have to make a toast and sing before kicking it back. My ukulele comes in handy, though they clap on 1 and 3 to my Muddy Waters blues as if it’s a Sousa march, and shout “Hey!” at the end like Zorba the Greek. They themselves sing soulful, jaunty old tunes like “Father was a Fine Horseman”, celebrating lovers, the motherland and the like. Great people, stunning landscape, high intoxication level.
“What do you think of Mongolian women?” says one sixty-year old herder in what even I can make out as a thick regional dialect.
“Very beautiful,” I reply, “and very drunk!”
“So that means we’re going home together!”
Much laughter and more vodka shots.
Mongolian hospitality is a pleasure, but you’re considered a mannerless hillbilly if you ever say “no” when it’s offered. At another ger I visited they had just slaughtered a sheep, were busy filling the organs with blood and about to boil them. I was handed a huge tray of intestines as if it were a holiday fruit basket. A small slice of boiled stomach to chew on is sufficient, but they would have been mortified if I didn’t take something. Another example is the booze; the local vodka is good, but sometimes you have to suffer through a bowl of fermented horse milk first, which tastes month-old and chunky; you know you’ve had too much when it doesn’t make your stomach sick to smell it.
The next morning you see everyone from the party back in their civvies directing the cattle with sticks, and since there’s no refrigeration the leftover food gets turned into slop for the animals. You spend a couple hours each day getting water from the nearest creek. Horse is the preferred mode of travel, though some have 4WDs, and when you’re seven or eight years old they stick you on a horse, send you off onto the plain and tell you not to come back until you know how to ride it. People help each other out here, too, as a matter of mutual survival. At one point when our car is stuck in the middle of a river we were trying to cross – with a herd of goats passing us on both sides and “baa”-ing at us in what I can’t help but construe as open mockery – a passing tractor from the Soviet era hooks a chain to us and drags us out without our asking.
There are no roads out here. You drive across the unspoiled, bumpy open plain, sometimes through near-impassable mud banks in low-lying areas. There are no permanent buildings either, just the torched remains of a monastery every 100 kilometers or so – destroyed during the purges of Stalin along with the monks, most of whom were mass murdered – and at one point an abandoned Russian military complex with all the windows blown out.
There are, though, more of the decorated poles, those ubiquitous sky god antennae, set atop a boulder pile and decorated in strips of cloth in four colors: blue for the sky god, green for the earth, red for the fire god and yellow for Buddhism. Mongolians have been Buddhists for centuries now and their shamanism is syncretized to it in the same way that African religion is to Christianity in Haiti and the Latin Caribbean. You find traces of shamanism in the culture today like a faint strain of Beethoven amid the street noise of Manhattan at rush hour. The only ones who practice full-on old-style shamanism are the Reindeer People up north – remote and awe-inspiring even to the average Mongolian nomad – whose villages are accessible by several days on horseback, and only before snows close off the mountain passes in September. The Reindeer People keep to themselves.
For everyone else the old culture shows up in little mannerisms. You circle the shaman pole clockwise three times to make a wish when you pass, and an offering of two cigarettes to it when traveling on a voyage. Don’t throw garbage into the fire because “fire is a god”. And when you take down your tent and move, you leave no trace of yourself on the land. There are also the usual hucksterish shamans running around offering the same stuff you’d find in a South Bronx botánica, prescriptions for ridding yourself of back luck or making someone fall in love with you, though the instructions are more exotic: “fill a sack with horse meat, douse it in vodka and dump it in the woods by a stream” is a standard recipe. But their primary function is to use the shaman poles to travel up to heaven and direct the recently dead to their new home.
Throat singing is the coolest extant aspect of shamanism. This is where western Mongolians and their neighbors the Tuvans eulogize the mountains they consider to be gods – everything is alive in this system, even the rocks – through a style that generates larynx-like vibrations and pitches in various parts of the body. The best can generate tones in two parts of the throat and within the bronchial tubes at the same time for three-pitch chords. My last night in Mongolia I went back to Ulaan Baatar to see them perform. It’s not a parlor trick, this is soulful singing with phrasing as moving as a great opera libretto or jazz ballad. I also ran into some backpacker mates from Baikal at the concert, and we went out after for a night on the town, which in Ulaan Baatar means weaving through the midnight bustle of Seoul Street and bar hopping its storefront restaurants and taverns as locals crowd into chicken buses outside (which serve as the local transit system), practically stacked on top of one another around the traffic circles.
On the train out via the Gobi Desert I get my first border guard bribe experience (my passport is beat up so the guard wants US$20 to let me leave the country, laughably small so I don’t argue) and then meet my new bunkmates, who turn out to be animists of a different stamp, Eva and Staas, a Dutch couple celebrating their graduation from a prestigious school of industrial design in Eindhoven by travelling around the world for a year. At first I think they should come work for Google, but then I realize they’re too smart for Google. They need to go find somewhere smarter to work, wherever that is. Staas is going to start his own advertising agency; he specializes in designing mechanisms with various levers and knobs for people to play with as they interact with a brand. Eva is more into research; her thesis is a large circular object “printed” from a “3D photocopier” that can create any plastic object that you pass it via computer blueprints.
Eva’s object is a little Hal from 2001-ish for my taste; it senses where you are in the room and follows you with blinking lights. Steeped in the theories of phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, who divide being from consciousness at the point of interaction, so that whenever you touch an object – a cement post as much as a person – it is also touching you and can be said to be “conscious” at that moment. It’s a world view ancient as the Reindeer People, and apparently it’s making a comeback.
Based on this Eva wants to make our environments responsive to us, sensing our moods and responding accordingly, perhaps even providing them with a personality of their own, so that they don’t always do what we want them to do, and convey their own “moods”. Examples of their prototypes abound, and they even have one that is being made commercially available next year.
These guys view robots as “anthropomorphic”, fodder for morons who just don’t get it, the same disdain we have today for myth-gods like Cupid and Thor. What they want instead is a magic polymer forest, where every aspect of our environment interacts with us, guesses our moods and responds, makes life engaging and has a life of its own. Some parts make more sense than others – and all of it might make more sense when you’re stoned – but they’re way out there on the bleeding edge, at the forefront of the intelligent homes and interactive animist environments that are probably our future, a world of objects as alive in their way as those sacred mountains of the primeval Mongolian steppe that we now leave behind.
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