BUT FIRST, TWO STORIES, the details of neither having been exaggerated.Friday evening, February the 4th. Our train was due to leave Beijing West at 6:37pm, beginning its meandering forty-four hour journey to Kunming in China’s far South. At 5:30, I exit the story, jumping in a cab - the 1 kuai 6 per kilometer cab, of course, faulty heating and all. The short journey to the train station required fighting Chunjie traffic for thirty minutes. The trip of three friends along the same route, however, deserves repeating.
5:50pm. After waiting twenty minutes for an empty cab, Luke, hardly inconspicuous in China as a six foot white guy with bright blonde hair, is standing in the middle of the six lane Xizhimenwai, forcing cabs to stop and banging on the windows of any that pass. Luke, Tikso (who, again, was hardly inconspicious due to her Nigerian ancestry) and a Chinese friend finally jumped in a cab with already occupied by one understanding local. After fighting off the other desperate pedestrians begging for a cab - OK, Luke screamed at the poor old Chinese guys who’d been waiting an hour for a taxi - the real journey began.
Beijing’s gaofeng, rush hour, is notorious even when its not Spring Festival. But this rush hour isn’t the sit-around-and-wait type, but instead the swerve-back-and-forth type; there’s a reason Beijing leads the world (I’m serious) in traffic deaths per vehicle. Nonetheless, this particular cab driver broke with tradition. He was the sit-around-and-wait type.
6:15pm. Throwing cash at the cab driver, Luke and the two others jumped out the cab at the sight of a subway station. Time was short, however - subway tokens were neglected, and Luke led the Charge of the Late Brigade straight through the turnstile for a free ride. Begging the subway passengers for help, by arrival at Beijing Xi station an escape route had been hatched. At the exit of the subway station were a number of pedicabs; one-person covered seats attached to the back of a bicycle. Luke dove headfirst into the pedicab, promised the driver extra money if he pedaled full out, and they were off. The train station entrance had a long, circular car ramp before the front gate, then filled with traffic. Tikso and Luke did the reasonable thing - they paid the pedicab drivers to jump off the bike, and help run up the ramp carrying baggage on each arm.
A quick review: Four are running up to the entrance, two pedicab drivers and two crazy Americans, with massive bags in tow. The Chinese friend? Let’s just say that jumping headfirst into rickshaws isn’t the Chinese way. Later reconstructions have the third member of the party standing on the sidewalk half in tears.
6:30pm. At the entrance of the station is a security gate, with an airport-style baggage scanner, and a pair of lazy looking police officers. Time at this point really was quite short, so Luke shoved the gate out of the way and barreled full speed into the station, with Tikso running behind yelling apologies. At this stage, Luke and Tikso are both wearing those massive hiker backpacks. I have on good authority that Luke, as it turns out a quite vicious fly-half on his college rugby squad, knocked over at least a dozen Chinese on his mad dash toward Gate 11.
6:37pm. Tikso and Luke arrive at the Gate. The train can be seen below pulling out at that very moment. We met the three in the South two days later, the next time they were able to catch a train.
The theatrics of the second story are less reminiscent of a Jackie Chan film, but the feelings I can recall with more certainty as this story is full my own. I rented a mountain bike in Dali, a small town in Western Yunnan province that was once the capital of the Nanzhao kingdom (before it was felled by Kublai Khan himself) and now is a Western hippie retreat nestled between the towering Jade Green Mountains and the crystal-blue Erhai Lake. 15 miles north of Dali is a small village, Xizhou, which was supposedly known for its wealth of historic Chinese architecture. I headed out along the main road North - the Yunnan-Tibet Highway.
The story is not complete without a description of this highway. One lane in each direction was reserved for cars, flying by at speeds quite a bit beyond what would be considered safe. On the sides of the highway were 6-foot wide walking paths, and then the road simply dropped a sheer eight feet into cropland; there were no guardrails of any kind. To the left (if one is heading toward Xizhou) are the Jade Green Mountains, and a massive gale was whipping down into the valley the day I rode. The bike, on two occasions, was nearly whipped out from underneath me. To the right, Erhai Lake was only about two miles, with cropland and small villages running from the main road all the way down. I turned right down a dusty farm path.
Should you take this route, everyone will tell you there is no road through. If you’re the type who requires luxuries like “pavement” and “signs” to consider a path a road, you will find this to be true. However, I rode about 25km north (overshooting Xizhou by a couple miles) along a series of town pathways and crop paths. Along the village pathways, all the kids who I passed yelled “Helloooo” at the crazy foreigner while the adults, I think, tried to figure out first, how I got to the village and second, where I was going as nothing but cropland lay ahead. The route in between the villages was the most interesting - I had to carry the bike often as the raised crop path thinned to one or two feet wide, and at one point I had to shove a stubborn cow blocked the path completely. After looping back to Xizhou and grabbing a drink, I headed back to Dali. It was about 5pm, so I decided to head back by the main road in order to get back before sunset. I was also pretty tired - 25km as the bird flies, and realistically more like 40km considering all the backtracking that had to be done through the crop paths, is tiring anywhere, and especially so since Dali lies 6000 feet above sea level.
Two miles down the road, my left pedal flat out snapped off the bike, the nut having fell off sometime in the last few hours.
This was a bit of a problem. I was still 20km from Dali, the sky was darkening, and, worst of all, that night was Chinese New Year. Every shop was closed and taxis along the road were almost nonexistant. I started walking.
By 7pm, the sun has set, and it was getting tough to see. By 8pm, I was still 8km from Dali, and it was pitch black. The main Yunnan-Tibet Highway, it turns out, doesn’t have streetlights. Now remember, traffic is flying by on my left with little concern for safety, and to my right the road simply drops off 8 feet into crops. The lines separating walkway from traffic and walkway from tragedy are now, as far as I’m concerned, invisible. Let me tell you, it was scary as hell.
At 9:45, I finally got back to Dali, broken bike in tow. From sunset until then, I’d been singing songs along the side of the road in order to keep from getting too angry. What the Chinese thought of the dude carrying a bike down a highway at night while singing rap songs with the hook “Breathe in, Breathe out, Let the air hit your nostrils and the back of your mouth”, I have no idea.
I finished an exhausing semester on Feb. 4 - a whole month with basically no English. It actually got pretty bad - I talked to my parents after finals, and I couldn’t help the Chinglish. At least five times I said a Chinese word instead of the English (mostly the simple things, like “Right (Dui)”, “Sorry (Duibuqi)”, “So (Suoyi)”). That day 7 of us left frozen Beijing and headed down the nice tropical South. We first hung around in a beautiful big city called Kunming, with a wonderful park (Cuihu Gongyuan) and a great, Western-style college campus (Yunnan Daxue). Cuihu Gongyuan has a giant lake filled with paddleboats, old folks playing mahjohng and singing songs, benches in hidden-away pagodas and, best of all, a ton of seagulls who loop around the ring of the lake catching bread that people throw in. These birds are nuts, too - they literally are flying full speed no more than two feet away from your head (Download a short movie that I took (1.6MB, .avi), it’s crazy).
After Kunming, we went to the Dali, the hippie hangout where I had my bike incident, then up to Lijiang, a restored old Chinese town with a lot of charm but also a ton of Chinese tourists. Four of us headed up to Hutiaoxia, Tiger Leaping Gorge, and hike for two days. Hutiaoxia is near the source of the Yangtze River, and the river passes into a gorge 2000 feet deep with towering mountains above (a bunch of the new pics I put up are from here). These aren’t little girl mountains either - one, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, is the biggest I’ve seen in my life at 18000 feet. I’m pretty sure Mt. Logan is the biggest in the continental US at 16000-something. The scenery was amazing, and the hike was brutally tough (about 20 miles over two days, going up from 5000 ft. at the start to 8200 ft. at the highest. I also had some great hiking partners, two girls who were pretty pumped about the whole thing and never once complained about being tired, and a guy who runs cross country down at Vanderbilt. Good stuff.
I left Hutiaoxia for myself because I wanted to do some traveling alone. I had five days to get back to Beijing for class, so I first swung overnight on a sleeper bus to Kunming (Incidentally, I have never heard anyone say their Chinese sleeper bus was anything better than awful, mine included - you do not want to ride these). I spent two days in Kunming hanging out in the park and playing b-ball at Yunnan Daxue. I swear, no matter how good a shooter a Chinese guy is, he always feels the need to try and take the (comparatively) tall white dude inside. If I might steal a line from Shaq: Blocking Chinese kids inside is like taking your kids to the zoo. It’s nothing to be happy about, because it’s what I’m supposed to do when I’m their Dad. I also found an excellent Western food restaurant near Yunnan Daxue called the French Cafe - they served a mean quiche (I’ll risk heresy by saying it was as good as my Mom’s) and some great fries. Every other Western restaurant (that was a chain like McD’s) I’ve been to in China has been terrible - ordering a burrito here is not recommended.
From Kunming, I had three and a half days to somehow find tickets to get back to Beijing. I first swung south to Nanning, which was warm but rainy. The real reason I went there was because Nanning is south of 23.5 degrees Latitude, which puts it in the Tropics. That night, I managed to catch the Super Bowl on repeat (in Chinese), so now I know how to say “Fumble” and “First down” and “Patriots” in Chinese. I also got so many calls from woman asking if I wanted a “massage” (yeah, the late-night massage call in China means the same as it does in the US) that I had to unplug the phone. Apparently, it’s customary here for two and three star hotels to give the room numbers of men travelling alone to hookers; this is considered a nice benefit. Crazy. From Nanning, I managed to get train tickets Hard Seat up to Wuhan, which is halfway to Beijing. Hard Seat is basically “peasant class” - on my train, there were people spitting like camels everywhere, a sorta nasty stench, and a couple with a baby right across the way. In China, it seems, diapers are not yet common, so the babies simply use the train floor as their bathroom. It was gross.
In Wuhan, I had a policeman help me out and get me a ticket on the “sold out” train to Beijing (China is so corrupt - if you have the right guanxi, or relationship, nothing is sold out or impossible to make happen). The only seat, however, was Wuzuo, or “No Seat”, the class right below Hard Seat. Wuzuo means you’re sitting on the ground inbetween train compartments surrounded by chainsmoking theives and impoverished migrant workers. In any case, mission number one after boarding was to upgrade the ticket. I ran into a saleswoman from Wuhan who also wanted to upgrade, and we ended up getting Ruanwo or First Class (soft sleeper). We waited in the plush dining car for a couple hours knocking down some food, then headed to our room which had wood paneling, LCDs in front of each bed, cotton mattresses and security guards at either end of the berth to keep the riffraff out. Seriously, Chinese are the worst communists ever - what kind of communists have LCD-laden first class train cabins with security guards keeping the peasants sitting on the floor one train down? Let me tell you about the saleswoman: Both her and her 24-year-old friend were bomb. The whole ride, I’m chilling on my bed, they’re bringing in cooked noodles, peeled oranges, banana chips, the works. You can’t beat that, no doubt. And not once did they spit on the floor.
The time here has really helped my Chinese alot. When I first arrived, it had been almost a year since I’d looked at any Chinese. We took a placement test (including a conversation with two teachers) and I struggled, no doubt. We retook that test today (only BU does both the first and the second term, so about half the kids from the January term left and a new group of kids, mostly from UNC, arrived yesterday) and it was so, so much easier, especially the conversation. Nonetheless, there are still a lot of things about China that drive me nuts: the constant spitting, cutting in lines, dirty air, mental insularity, shoving on the street (I’ve never heard anyone say the Chinese word for “Excuse Me”, laojia). It also bugs me somewhat that so many of my classmates here don’t understand why I eat so much Western food or want to work my internship at a Western country. I came to China mainly because I’m going to learn things that are useful in my life, not because I love the country. I think China’s government is stupidly paranoid, violent and repressive, Chinese people are often rude, and Chinese food is not the be-all-end-all of cuisine, but nonetheless understanding Chinese business and politics is an important part of being a well-rounded 21st century individual. Is that so hard to understand?
OK, I should go hit the sack. I’m psyched because I have an interview with JP Morgan in two days for a summer job, but I have no idea how I’m going to do it since I’m on the other side of the globe, you know? This job (in NY) and one at Intel (in Arizona) are the two jobs I want the most next summer, so here’s hoping it goes well. I tossed up a bunch of new pics to the right as well, lemme know what you think.
